The problem is, when those small projects become big projects, they usually need to be completely rewritten from scratch because the small projects were not written with maintainability in mind.
This is the primary problem with languages like PHP. There is *NO* structure to them, no type strictness, no standard practices. ASP (original) suffered from the same problems.
JSP and ASP.NET have a lot better structure to them, and standard practices, not to mention tools that follow them.
Just because Word can do some page layout related functions doesn't make it a page layout program.
Just because you can save data in rows similar to a database doesn't make Excel a database application either.
I also don't see how any of the functions you mention are strictly page layout oriented. Tables certainly aren't, since tabular data is useful in a word processor. Clipart is also useful in a lot of ways that aren't strictly page layout oriented. Image wrapping? Now you're just being stupid. A word processor can't image wrap? That's news to me.
Headers and footers? hell, even Word Perfect and Word for Dos had those.
As for HTML export, don't make me laugh. Word's HTML export is worse than it's page layout capabilities.
Just because you CAN use a screwdriver as a hammer doesn't mean you SHOULD, unless you have no other tool.
That's not exactly true. There are differences between the needs of business users and home users. Also, it's good security practice to only have the software you need installed.
Home users don't need domains, for instance. You might have a domain at home for business reasons (say you're a network consultant), but then you need business level software, not home level software.
Home users don't need Distributed Transaction Coordinators. Home users don't need Messenger services (Not to be confused with Instant messanger services). Home users don't need Volume Shadow Copy services, etc.. etc.. etc..
You can make the software cheaper, by not including those features, and you make the software more secure because there aren't unneeded services running.
The problem comes in when you have the situation like MS does, where even though they package a "home" version, they still include crap they shouldn't, and have too much stuff turned on. *IF* Microsoft actually did it right, it would be much more secure and valuable.
The fact of the matter is, Everyone wants everything for nothing. So complaining that there's no "technical" reason for things is just whining. If MS can sell their product for less by turning off some features, and people don't need them, I'm all for it.
Hmm.. I don't know why thy don't simply offer the extra features as feature packs. Well, ok, I do know. People are much more likely to buy "the best" version of anything they buy, and a lot less likely to buy "add-ons".
It's strange, they'll ask themselves "Why do I need that?" for an add-on, but will think "What won't I get if I buy the lower level edition?" of the main product.
Microsoft must have a whole team of psychologists out there.
Well, actually, it's interesting that you bring this up. Pages has the benefit of hindsight and is more of a hybrid program. Word is a legacy application who's peers were "Mac Write" and Ami Pro and such.
In reality, there's no reason why there should be dedicated programs for Word Processing, Page Layout, and Presentation (other than making 3x the money for basically the same features). All three are really the same thing, with differing forms of layout. They could easily be combined into a single application with different view modes.
You could have a "fluid" mode for word processing, a "fixed" mode for page layout, and a "slideshow" mode for presentation. Granted each function has different semantics, but that should be easily accounted for.
My point was, really, that Word was not designed to be a page layout program. Not that it couldn't be designed to do that, but that's not what it does. it's like complaining that Excel isn't a good database, or that Access isn't a good spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, that's a problem with training really. Most people really don't know how to use tabs, and styles, and adjust margins, etc.. They use spaces to line up content, or they use returns at the end of a line (rather than a paragraph).
It would be great if users didn't need training, but I don't see any way to avoid it. A word processor is not an electronic typewriter, which is what most people seem to use it as.
Re:even worse are misleading options
on
Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 1
It looks like a mockup to me. Which means you can't believe everything you read on it.
Actually, MS says to use the standard dialogs so that that you're consistent with the OS. The thing is, Office is usually a prototype for the next OS dialog, so whatever goes into office eventually goes into the OS too, and if you're using the standard dialog, you get that when the OS does as well.
Re:Hole With No Bottom
on
Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Because Acrobat is designed to solve a different problem than Word is. Word wasn't designed as an electonic means of distributing documents. It was designed to be a word processor, not a page layout program.
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM.
It's designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
A simple example is the difference between legal paper and 8x11. Please don't tell me you expect Word to print on Legal paper the same way Acrobat would for a document designed on 8x11.
Yes, it should print exactly as it is on your screen, and it does. What it doesn't do is print exactly as you see on your screen on someone elses printer, because it will often look different on THEIR screen.
If you are printing on legal paper instead of 8x11, you don't want it to stretch the text of an 8x11 page to fit on legal. Nor do you want it to stop printing when it gets to the bottom of the 11" page. You want it to change its pagination based on the document you are printing to, and to fit the margins of the printing device. That's what word does, and that's what its designed to do. it would be broken otherwise.
Re:Hole With No Bottom
on
Office 12 Exposed
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· Score: 2, Informative
Duh!
Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. Though it does provide page layout features, it's not Word's primary focus.
It always bugs me when people confuse the basic purpose of programs. If you want page layout, use Publisher, or PageMaker, or InDesign.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer. Honestly, that's what Microsoft makes Publisher for, because Word isn't designed to do that.
I'm not sure I understand why you think it's difficult for a socially engineered virus to spread.
Here's the scenario. Virus is sent to Joe Macboy, it says save this.dmg file or sitx file and launch it to see a plea for help from Katrina Hurricane victims. Joe does this, since he's a bleeding heart mac liberal who wants to save the world, and believes he's immune to viruses and trojans.
The program immediately opens up his Address Book data file, scans the Safari cache for email addresses, and plug some stuff into spotlight to get as many email addresses as it can, then it emails itself to all it finds. How does it email them? Any number of ways. Already many viruses include their own SMTP servers to bypass any settings you might have on your computer.
It's that simple, really. Of course it's not going to spread as quickly as a Windows virus, since 85% of the people in your address book are likely Windows users, but still. You're naive if you think it's "impossible" for a virus to replicate itself on the mac. It's very simple.
(and for the record, the "bleeding heart" comment above was a joke. I'm a liberal myself).
I really don't know where you shop, or eat, or get gas, but it's nowhere around where I live.
All gas stations around here authoize (at most) $10 on your card (usually it's $1, just to see if the account is active or not). The problem is, since these authorizations stick around for 5-7 days, you are denied access to your money if everyone over-authorizes your account. And with check cards being so common (and most places no longer accept checks, so check cards are a requirement) that would be bad news.
Hell, I have so many $3-7 charges on my card that i'd only be able to use half (or less) of my paycheck if this were the case.
Further, if a restaurant authorized 50% (or even 20%) on top of my bill without asking me, i'd never go there again. I've never seen that happen and I eat out almost every day.
A schema defines what elements are allowed in a given collection. For example, there are a number of elements. These can be contained in other elements as defined by the schema.
You can't add a msstyle:xxx element to that style: list because it won't validate against the schema. Thus you can't add a new style element. And you can't change parameters needed by existing styles. An example i gave in another message was style:text-blinking has no way to control the blink rate. If you want to add that, you break the schema.
All this would be done without changing the the elements defined by the standard, but the restrictiveness of the document prevents it anyways.
The point is, there isn't any way to extend functionality without breaking the standard. The standard is flawed, in my opinion, because of that.
I was making a point about the extensibility of the OpenDocument format, and why I dislike it. Not why Office's format rules or anything as stupid as that.
Yes it would. That is the point of XML, hence the X for eXtensible. You CAN add random new things to it, through the use of your own namespaces. There are standard ways to do this.
Unfortunately, the OpenDocument standard effectively disallows doing this in a number of ways. First, it doesn't require foreign elements to be preserved, thus if someone extends it, no other implementation has to retain any of that data and can silently discard it.
Second, the standard has a fixed schema for various elements, such as style, that you can't extend with namespaces or you break the schema and it won't validate.
namespaces only work if you're adding entirely new elements, not if you want to change existing ones.
Unfortunately, what appears to have happened was that instead of developing a truly extensible format that can support new features in the future, they instead created a "common denonmintor" format that provides common set of functionality of all the participating vendors products.
This was very short sighted of them, honestly. They built in *ZERO* facility for extending the format in a usable way, and in fact made it all but impossible by not requiring implementations to maintain foreign elements.
Simple ways you might want to extend the format include new styles, new parameters to styles, totally new elements, etc...
A standard is fine as long as it covers a finite set of functionality, but any standard that is intended to cover something as broad as "office documents" has to be extensible, which OpenDocument is not, at least not in any realistiic way.
OO.org can put just about anything you want in a document -- text, audio, video, spreadsheed, OLE object, etc. Functionally, it is in no way different than what MS Office can do.
The key there may be the word "just about". Just a random example off the top of my head of something you might want to do but can't with OpenDocument:
OpenDocument supports the style text-blinking (which is horrible for a word document, but good for presentations in some cases). What if I want to control the speed of the blink? There's no facility in the format to do this, and you can't add it without violating the standard, and since the standard doesn't require foreign elements to be retained, if it's modified in any other app it will likely get thrown away.
My problem with the OpenDocument format is that it's not extensible enough. Yes, it's XML, but the way the format is structured and the requirements of the standard make it less extensible than it should be.
Another example, say you want to add a new style, such as style:bezier-underline (you want a bezier curved underline for stylistic reasons.. say to create a squigly line kind of underline). Because of the strict way the format defines it's pre-defined styles, there's no way to add a new style, because it will violate the schema.
My guess is that Microsoft sees the same problem with OpenDocument. And, while it's possible for them to write a converter for it, it probably isn't going to support every feature that office has. I'm sure a converter will get written eventually anyways.. both formats are publicly documented, it should be pretty easy.
That's was my point really. They *SHOULD* be the same thing. The charge is tied to the authorization via a reference number. If the charge is different from the authorization (or more importantly, MORE than the authorization) then there's no way to know if that's a valid transaction. Sure, there's the signed slip, but they're not going to even bother requesting them for the amounts you see in a restaurant.
From what I understnd, Merchant Fraud (either by the Merchant itself, or it's employees) is one of the largest sources of fraud out there. You can make a ton of money by simply adding a small amount to each transaction, and most people will *NEVER* notice.
Paypal, being owned by Ebay is MUCH more in tune to fraud, and it simply would not surprise me if they would deny any transaction that is larger than the authorized amount.
Note: I'm not saying this *IS* the case, just that it makes sense if it is the case.
Well, this is actually somewhat understandable (somewhat). What likely happened is that the restaurant authorized a payment of $x.xx and then when you added on the tip, it came out to a different value that was authorized. PayPal likely saw this as either an attempt to fraudulently overcharge the account, or they simply had a policy of only paying transactions as they were authorized.
This has actually become a problem for banks. It's really easy for unscrupulous merchants to add on charges after the fact, and most people really don't keep track of their receipts so they don't notice.
I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.
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The problem is, when those small projects become big projects, they usually need to be completely rewritten from scratch because the small projects were not written with maintainability in mind.
This is the primary problem with languages like PHP. There is *NO* structure to them, no type strictness, no standard practices. ASP (original) suffered from the same problems.
JSP and ASP.NET have a lot better structure to them, and standard practices, not to mention tools that follow them.
Just because Word can do some page layout related functions doesn't make it a page layout program.
Just because you can save data in rows similar to a database doesn't make Excel a database application either.
I also don't see how any of the functions you mention are strictly page layout oriented. Tables certainly aren't, since tabular data is useful in a word processor. Clipart is also useful in a lot of ways that aren't strictly page layout oriented. Image wrapping? Now you're just being stupid. A word processor can't image wrap? That's news to me.
Headers and footers? hell, even Word Perfect and Word for Dos had those.
As for HTML export, don't make me laugh. Word's HTML export is worse than it's page layout capabilities.
Just because you CAN use a screwdriver as a hammer doesn't mean you SHOULD, unless you have no other tool.
That's not exactly true. There are differences between the needs of business users and home users. Also, it's good security practice to only have the software you need installed.
Home users don't need domains, for instance. You might have a domain at home for business reasons (say you're a network consultant), but then you need business level software, not home level software.
Home users don't need Distributed Transaction Coordinators. Home users don't need Messenger services (Not to be confused with Instant messanger services). Home users don't need Volume Shadow Copy services, etc.. etc.. etc..
You can make the software cheaper, by not including those features, and you make the software more secure because there aren't unneeded services running.
The problem comes in when you have the situation like MS does, where even though they package a "home" version, they still include crap they shouldn't, and have too much stuff turned on. *IF* Microsoft actually did it right, it would be much more secure and valuable.
The fact of the matter is, Everyone wants everything for nothing. So complaining that there's no "technical" reason for things is just whining. If MS can sell their product for less by turning off some features, and people don't need them, I'm all for it.
Hmm.. I don't know why thy don't simply offer the extra features as feature packs. Well, ok, I do know. People are much more likely to buy "the best" version of anything they buy, and a lot less likely to buy "add-ons".
It's strange, they'll ask themselves "Why do I need that?" for an add-on, but will think "What won't I get if I buy the lower level edition?" of the main product.
Microsoft must have a whole team of psychologists out there.
And people use screwdrivers to pound nails too.
I agree with you that clearly the need is there for a hybrid program, but I doubt Word will ever be that program. It just wasn't designed for it.
Well, actually, it's interesting that you bring this up. Pages has the benefit of hindsight and is more of a hybrid program. Word is a legacy application who's peers were "Mac Write" and Ami Pro and such.
In reality, there's no reason why there should be dedicated programs for Word Processing, Page Layout, and Presentation (other than making 3x the money for basically the same features). All three are really the same thing, with differing forms of layout. They could easily be combined into a single application with different view modes.
You could have a "fluid" mode for word processing, a "fixed" mode for page layout, and a "slideshow" mode for presentation. Granted each function has different semantics, but that should be easily accounted for.
My point was, really, that Word was not designed to be a page layout program. Not that it couldn't be designed to do that, but that's not what it does. it's like complaining that Excel isn't a good database, or that Access isn't a good spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, that's a problem with training really. Most people really don't know how to use tabs, and styles, and adjust margins, etc.. They use spaces to line up content, or they use returns at the end of a line (rather than a paragraph).
It would be great if users didn't need training, but I don't see any way to avoid it. A word processor is not an electronic typewriter, which is what most people seem to use it as.
It looks like a mockup to me. Which means you can't believe everything you read on it.
Who says they do? The fancy graphics are easier to develop than usability, as such they get done faster and are the first to be shown.
Actually, MS says to use the standard dialogs so that that you're consistent with the OS. The thing is, Office is usually a prototype for the next OS dialog, so whatever goes into office eventually goes into the OS too, and if you're using the standard dialog, you get that when the OS does as well.
Because Acrobat is designed to solve a different problem than Word is. Word wasn't designed as an electonic means of distributing documents. It was designed to be a word processor, not a page layout program.
I'll probably be market redundant for saying this so many times, but WORD IS NOT A PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM.
It's designed to make your content look as good as it can on the device you're printing to, not to make the content layout as designed on the printer you're printing to.
A simple example is the difference between legal paper and 8x11. Please don't tell me you expect Word to print on Legal paper the same way Acrobat would for a document designed on 8x11.
That would be stupid.
Yes, it should print exactly as it is on your screen, and it does. What it doesn't do is print exactly as you see on your screen on someone elses printer, because it will often look different on THEIR screen.
If you are printing on legal paper instead of 8x11, you don't want it to stretch the text of an 8x11 page to fit on legal. Nor do you want it to stop printing when it gets to the bottom of the 11" page. You want it to change its pagination based on the document you are printing to, and to fit the margins of the printing device. That's what word does, and that's what its designed to do. it would be broken otherwise.
Duh!
Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. Though it does provide page layout features, it's not Word's primary focus.
It always bugs me when people confuse the basic purpose of programs. If you want page layout, use Publisher, or PageMaker, or InDesign.
Word is designed to make content look good on the printer you're using, not fit a design into the limiations of your printer. Honestly, that's what Microsoft makes Publisher for, because Word isn't designed to do that.
I'm not sure I understand why you think it's difficult for a socially engineered virus to spread.
.dmg file or sitx file and launch it to see a plea for help from Katrina Hurricane victims. Joe does this, since he's a bleeding heart mac liberal who wants to save the world, and believes he's immune to viruses and trojans.
Here's the scenario. Virus is sent to Joe Macboy, it says save this
The program immediately opens up his Address Book data file, scans the Safari cache for email addresses, and plug some stuff into spotlight to get as many email addresses as it can, then it emails itself to all it finds. How does it email them? Any number of ways. Already many viruses include their own SMTP servers to bypass any settings you might have on your computer.
It's that simple, really. Of course it's not going to spread as quickly as a Windows virus, since 85% of the people in your address book are likely Windows users, but still. You're naive if you think it's "impossible" for a virus to replicate itself on the mac. It's very simple.
(and for the record, the "bleeding heart" comment above was a joke. I'm a liberal myself).
I really don't know where you shop, or eat, or get gas, but it's nowhere around where I live.
All gas stations around here authoize (at most) $10 on your card (usually it's $1, just to see if the account is active or not). The problem is, since these authorizations stick around for 5-7 days, you are denied access to your money if everyone over-authorizes your account. And with check cards being so common (and most places no longer accept checks, so check cards are a requirement) that would be bad news.
Hell, I have so many $3-7 charges on my card that i'd only be able to use half (or less) of my paycheck if this were the case.
Further, if a restaurant authorized 50% (or even 20%) on top of my bill without asking me, i'd never go there again. I've never seen that happen and I eat out almost every day.
No, you misunderstand.
A schema defines what elements are allowed in a given collection. For example, there are a number of elements. These can be contained in other elements as defined by the schema.
You can't add a msstyle:xxx element to that style: list because it won't validate against the schema. Thus you can't add a new style element. And you can't change parameters needed by existing styles. An example i gave in another message was style:text-blinking has no way to control the blink rate. If you want to add that, you break the schema.
All this would be done without changing the the elements defined by the standard, but the restrictiveness of the document prevents it anyways.
The point is, there isn't any way to extend functionality without breaking the standard. The standard is flawed, in my opinion, because of that.
Where did I say you could?
I was making a point about the extensibility of the OpenDocument format, and why I dislike it. Not why Office's format rules or anything as stupid as that.
Yes it would. That is the point of XML, hence the X for eXtensible. You CAN add random new things to it, through the use of your own namespaces. There are standard ways to do this.
Unfortunately, the OpenDocument standard effectively disallows doing this in a number of ways. First, it doesn't require foreign elements to be preserved, thus if someone extends it, no other implementation has to retain any of that data and can silently discard it.
Second, the standard has a fixed schema for various elements, such as style, that you can't extend with namespaces or you break the schema and it won't validate.
namespaces only work if you're adding entirely new elements, not if you want to change existing ones.
Unfortunately, what appears to have happened was that instead of developing a truly extensible format that can support new features in the future, they instead created a "common denonmintor" format that provides common set of functionality of all the participating vendors products.
This was very short sighted of them, honestly. They built in *ZERO* facility for extending the format in a usable way, and in fact made it all but impossible by not requiring implementations to maintain foreign elements.
Simple ways you might want to extend the format include new styles, new parameters to styles, totally new elements, etc...
A standard is fine as long as it covers a finite set of functionality, but any standard that is intended to cover something as broad as "office documents" has to be extensible, which OpenDocument is not, at least not in any realistiic way.
OO.org can put just about anything you want in a document -- text, audio, video, spreadsheed, OLE object, etc. Functionally, it is in no way different than what MS Office can do.
The key there may be the word "just about". Just a random example off the top of my head of something you might want to do but can't with OpenDocument:
OpenDocument supports the style text-blinking (which is horrible for a word document, but good for presentations in some cases). What if I want to control the speed of the blink? There's no facility in the format to do this, and you can't add it without violating the standard, and since the standard doesn't require foreign elements to be retained, if it's modified in any other app it will likely get thrown away.
My problem with the OpenDocument format is that it's not extensible enough. Yes, it's XML, but the way the format is structured and the requirements of the standard make it less extensible than it should be.
Another example, say you want to add a new style, such as style:bezier-underline (you want a bezier curved underline for stylistic reasons.. say to create a squigly line kind of underline). Because of the strict way the format defines it's pre-defined styles, there's no way to add a new style, because it will violate the schema.
My guess is that Microsoft sees the same problem with OpenDocument. And, while it's possible for them to write a converter for it, it probably isn't going to support every feature that office has. I'm sure a converter will get written eventually anyways.. both formats are publicly documented, it should be pretty easy.
That's was my point really. They *SHOULD* be the same thing. The charge is tied to the authorization via a reference number. If the charge is different from the authorization (or more importantly, MORE than the authorization) then there's no way to know if that's a valid transaction. Sure, there's the signed slip, but they're not going to even bother requesting them for the amounts you see in a restaurant.
From what I understnd, Merchant Fraud (either by the Merchant itself, or it's employees) is one of the largest sources of fraud out there. You can make a ton of money by simply adding a small amount to each transaction, and most people will *NEVER* notice.
Paypal, being owned by Ebay is MUCH more in tune to fraud, and it simply would not surprise me if they would deny any transaction that is larger than the authorized amount.
Note: I'm not saying this *IS* the case, just that it makes sense if it is the case.
Well, you can also MSI2XML
http://msi2xml.sourceforge.net/
I didn't say Winrar. I sais Rar. It runs on many platforms.
Yes, you can. MSI packages are extractable with lots of programs. I can open them up in Rar and Winzip, not sure about gzip though.
Well, this is actually somewhat understandable (somewhat). What likely happened is that the restaurant authorized a payment of $x.xx and then when you added on the tip, it came out to a different value that was authorized. PayPal likely saw this as either an attempt to fraudulently overcharge the account, or they simply had a policy of only paying transactions as they were authorized.
This has actually become a problem for banks. It's really easy for unscrupulous merchants to add on charges after the fact, and most people really don't keep track of their receipts so they don't notice.
I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.