That may not work -- few people have noticed it yet, but Gmail doesn't let you send or receive Windows executable attachments, according to them not even whe zipped!
I've gotten not one but two messages to my Blogger-acquired Gmail account claiming to be astoundingly well-spoken, prodigy, under-15 "kids" who also claim to be starting web businesses. One of them says he's starting a web hosting business, and says he would be "honored" to have a Gmail account.
I'm not kidding!
Why the hell is everyone so hyped up to get one? Are these people who honestly want a cool web mail service earlt? Is it a status symbol? Are these people mostly spammers trying to get accounts in order to run experiments on their filters, so as to better be able to defeat them later? Are they spammers trying to get as many accounts as possible so they can automate the process of marking spam as not-junk to try to break Google's distributed Bayesian filter system?
That was the show from the NES era where an annoying kid dubbed "Johnny Arcade" gave obvious hints to last year's NES games to the worst MTV-style editing. Between segments they had a cartoon in which Max Force (Player One from NARC), some basketball player from Arch Rivals, Kuros from Wizards and Warriors (!) and Kwick the Tomato (!!) all in one cartoon, all trying to do something involving someone that I can't possibly bring myself to remember. All the characters were from Acclaim's NES and Gameboy product lines, but originated outside the company, making me wonder how they got the rights to them: NARC was a Williams arcade game, Arch Rivals was by Midway, Kwick was produced by some Japanese company and W&W was produced by Rare. Anyway, the show was exactly as bad as it sounds.
In its second incarnation the show turned into a gameshow, ala Starcade with one-fourth part Double Dare. Improved it greatly, well for what it was, but still forgettable.
But what about Captain N, and the various Super Mario Bros. shows? And Saturday Supercade, and the Saturday Morning Dragon's Lair and Pole Position cartoons, you ask?
I respond, you don't want to know. You know not of which you ask! Greater men than I have cracked under the pressure! You can't handle the truth!
Hmmm... interesting comparasion, you might be right on that. However, Diablo 2's minions are a bit more complicated than the basic pet model, aren't they? (Not having played it, I can't say.)
You can get Diablo 2 companions resurrected endlessly and easily, correct? Compare that to Nethack's pets, who are usually dead forever once they snuff it. That at least brings an element of risk into it, which better aids the player in grow ing attacked to the little ASCII character.
(Well, they're dead forever unless you have a wand of undead turning....)
But pet ownership has been tacked on to SO many games. That's the important element here, tacked on to.
However, I'd largely agree with your joking argument concerning FPS games and follow-the-leader RTS games. Not that they're a fad mind you, because sadly they're probably not.
This is a highly-overused play mechanic these days. At least Nintendo keeps adding weird-ass features to Pokemon, like secret hideouts and real-time clocks.
The whole rasing-a-pet mechanic is overdone. It might still be made to work if the player were given a significant chance of killing the pixelbeast in question, and if he could somehow become attached to it, but often it just results in another set of numbers to max out.
Which is also a problem with RPGs in general these days.
All I ever used my X-Box's hard drive for was holding my music collection and save files -- some of which were much larger than they had any right being. Most developers don't use it to speed up game loading, memory cards are 8MB for PS2 (and are about to be for GC) and can hold lots of saves, user-defined information is potentially slick but rarely used, downloadable content doesn't seem to be used much at all, and while custom soundtracks can be cool, I wouldn't call them a gameplay feature.
A hard drive could be hot stuff if used correctly. But few developers really know what to do with it. To me, the coolest thing about the hard drive is if you can put Linux on it.
I've never used Live, and probably would never. But I recognize that that could just be me.
That is technology that the Xbox has- that developers can use to create great games.
(ahem) Game quality, when compared to the PS2 and Gamecube, is the X-Box's biggest weakness. Even if they get a boatload of exclusive first person shooters, that won't convince me to own one again. I think that FPS games are the new Sports genre: the same game over and over again.
Most of the people that play down the importance of things like on-line gaming (Live) are the ones that have never used it. For the rest of the people that do use it, it becomes very, very important.
I've was there, did it, got bored with it, and fell off that wagon almost ten years ago. The only online games I'm interested in are Neverwinter Nights (solely because of the module creation features, which is really slick for a networked game) and -- get this! -- Sims Online, which I wish I could find a retail copy of now.
I have to disagree about the sheer number of things on the islands. Although I wish there were a bit more variety to them -- there are only so many times you can get excited about finding 200 Rupees. Heart Pieces are nice, but I would have like more equipment, like Majora's Mask's masks.
On the other hand, to me this is the Zelda that finally fixed the problem, dating back to Link to the Past, of your wallet filling up too quickly. 5,000 rupees is a lot, and having to pay Tingle for those maps actually gives the player a use for such an extravagant sum of cash.
But while I found Wind Waker an absolute blast to explore (the discovery factor was much higher than Ocarina of Time), it will be cool to have a land-based overworld again.
1. Microsoft and Yahoo might actually try and compete with Google. Until recently, Yahoo was hampered by an old directory model and Microsoft's (outsourced) search was so bad that it attracted the attention of the FTC for being misleading.
Yahoo's directory is still not bad for what it does (which is *not* search - the Yahoo directory is still the core of the site). But I will probably still use Google even if they fall to #2 or 3, because I'm sure they won't cook the search for cash.
2. The rapidly declining cost of technology, computers, storage, and bandwidth (Moore's Law), will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens or even hundreds of new competitors. In a few years, any two graduate students may be able to start a search engine from their dorm room without venture capital.
But Google's employee project program, absurd number of highly educated workers, and the fact that no one rides Moore's law as hard as Google (what do they have, like a hundred thousand servers?!), means they'll likely be the first to come up with, and implement, astounding new technologies.
(By the way, make sure you read that link above: it's really, really, really cool.)
3. Any competitor can outsource software deployment to India, Russia or China, which will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens of new competitors. Google can also reduce software costs by outsourcing, but the fact remains that with lower costs of entry, there will be more competitors.
Of course outsourcing is always a good idea. I discovered that when I tried contacting Sony for support on my VAIO desktop and had to hurdle a language barrier. Briefly, cost is not the only thing that makes a worker desirable.
4. Remember AltaVista.com. Like Altavista.com, Google's "customers" are not locked into Google and may quickly abandon Google.
Someone posted earlier that GMail is a lock-in technique, though I doubt it -- I wouldn't consider any webmail service to be sufficently locked in, as there's no proprietary aspect to the protocol.
But again, the fact that they are trying not to be evil (and the details of their IPO prove this is still a great concern) is good enough for me. I think in the future, when other companies finally decide to follow Google's lead, this may become one of the biggest selling points a company can have. It would be a unique, unexpected triumph of capitalism if this happened. (HINT: Someone feel free to debate me on this -- I'm not sure that this will occur at all.)
5. Google's revenue source, contextual Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), is causing a race to the bottom as the most expensive/profitable products outbid less expensive products for the limited PPC positions. Consumers may eventually learn that they are paying for the high PPC costs and look elsewhere for more affordable products.
Except that Joe's Jam Emporium will pursue a much different search space than Mercedes-Benz. I think Google even has rules that the AdWord purchased must have something to do with your business.
6. Google's revenue source, Pay Per Click advertising, may be blocked by ad blocking software. While Google's ads are not intrusive as pop-up ads, given a choice, people may decide to block Google's ads or replace Google's ads with more useful third party content. Just as Google's toolbar blocks (competitor's) popup ads, other products block Google's ads - especially those that "block ALL ads."
This is one of the most egregious flaws in the article. People don't block ads because they're ads, they block them because they're bloody annoying. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there who hate the very notion they're being advertised at, but I think most people who hate ads do so because of their ubiquity. Google's don't pop on top of, or under, your web pages, they don't consume lot
Yeah, I loved Wind Waker too. Boat travel felt epic. And say what you want about the time it took to go places. Here's the secret: The Great Sea is much less monotonous than Hyrule Field..
It's true. Wind Waker's overworld has more monsters, more places to visit, more secrets (including at least one significant treasure in every sector), and nifty little mini-games to do like hit barrels for rupees, feeding the fish to get your map filled in, and just checking out each sector's island.
Hyrule field is smaller, but there's much less happening in it. It's probably Ocarina of Time's biggest flaw, unless you're in Young Link's time at night the monsters are barely worth discussing. Peahats can be scary opponents if you only have three hearts, unless you just stay the hell away from them that is. And say what you want about Ganondorf -- he cleared the Peahats and Stalchildren out of Hyrule Field. The Evil part of his alignment is regrettable, but the Lawful part has its advantages.
I'm not at a machine equipped with Word at the moment, but I think that's the command to show paragraph marks. WordPerfect's Reveal Codes feature opens up a subwindow that shows every tiny little formatting element, and allows them to be edited directly.
Actually, I'm referring to The Write Stuff, written by R. Eric Lee, produced by Busy Bee Software. It had a very low-key distribution it seems, but it's rather nifty. It also has a 80-column preview, and all sorts of weird features you wouldn't expect from a 64kb system, like mail merge and multiple columns. There's even a version with speech synthesis, which Microsoft Word itself only picked up out of the box in 2003.
It can tell us real things about the world instead of the recycled Weekend Special stuff most RPGs shovel. It challenges expectations instead of slavishly following genre. And it aims to produce works that will transcend their age, instead of being almost forgotten in five years.
And art makes fundamentalists mad. Hooray!
Re:Final Fantasy VII comes to mind ....
on
Videogames as Art
·
· Score: 1
Oy, FF VII left me cold. But I've already written that too many times -- I think you're only allowed to say the same thing three times on the internet, aren't you? Unless you're Stallman?
Final Fantasy games are basically space opera, without the space part, but also not quite opera (scene in VI notwithstanding). And when you factor out the travel and all the fighting, there's actually not a whole lot of story there, either. Dragon Quest/Warrior games have a lot more text in them.
Don't keep it a secret, man! I'd really, really, really, really like to know. It'd save me a lot of Word headaches, and I imagine, other people as well.
But I'm not going to ask Clippy. We haven't spoken in years. Let's just say I'm under a restraining order....
Reveal Codes. I still can't believe Word doesn't have it. My old Commodore 64 word processor can (and, in fact, must) show codes directly on the screen, but Word can't.
If OpenOffice had reveal codes I'd never need to use another word processor except for document conversion (and OpenOffice already does that rather well).
Actually (and I'm going by memory too), a Guard Impact is the only way out of some unblockables. There are a few that can't be GI'd, I think, but they're a minority.
SC and SC2 are interesting examples, because they contain an anti-cheese technique, the Guard Impact, or GI.
The idea is, if a player uses the same move over and over and over again, their timing will become regularized. If his opponent takes notice of this, he can attempt to press towards and Guard at the same time to perform a GI, parrying the attack. This leaves the attacker wide open for a heart-stopping half-second, and the defender can then launch a counter-attack the only defense to which is performing another Guard Impact.
It's a little more complicated than this (low hits must be GI'd low, and there's also a feint version that uses back+Guard), but that's generally how it works. Even some unblockable moves can be GI'd, as can throws. And throws have their own escape move as well.
SC 2 had easier GI timing than SC 1, while still making it difficult to pull off. However, most casual players don't know they exist, and even some people who play the game a lot are either ignorant of them or think they're unimportant. In fact, they can seriously rule. One GI can be enough for a sharp player to go from being behind to winning.
Advanced Excel problems are less bad for a small company, since they'll probably have less complicated spreadsheet programming. If any at all! No huge payrolls, no huge matrix of competitors, and no fleet of accountants who all have to be retrained. If the company's young there's also less likely to have spreadsheets to port or rewrite.
Support options have already been covered extensively in earlier comments. In short, MS' support sucks, you have to pay extra to get it anyway, and you can pay for OOo support from Sun if you need it, getting StarOffice in the process.
And actually, large Word documents in OOo taking ten seconds to open is nothing. Once it's open, it's open, no more wastage for that document. If you plan on opening it more than once then just save it in OOo native.
Oh, and feel free to mod me into oblivion for taking a controversial (for/.'ers) stance.
Now that's a statement the likes of which I've see na lot on Slashdot. Suspeciously often. Especially since I've seen a good number of highly-modded, controversial (to a hypothetical Slashdot-stereotype) opinions here all the same....
So what you're saying is, that earlier point someone made about Microsoft software having someone on the phone you can talk to, that was promptly discredited by a half-dozen other posters saying irately "Have you tried calling them?", is doubly wrong because if you do pay, and less than for MS Office, you can get support anyway?
But the thing about "computer literacy," is that it's mostly arbitrary knowledge, you training yourself to use a system that other people, on a fundamental level, pulled out their asses.
Of course you'll have problems using a system coming from a different ass.
Slashdot Mirror
That may not work -- few people have noticed it yet, but Gmail doesn't let you send or receive Windows executable attachments, according to them not even whe zipped!
- John Harris
I've gotten not one but two messages to my Blogger-acquired Gmail account claiming to be astoundingly well-spoken, prodigy, under-15 "kids" who also claim to be starting web businesses. One of them says he's starting a web hosting business, and says he would be "honored" to have a Gmail account.
I'm not kidding!
Why the hell is everyone so hyped up to get one? Are these people who honestly want a cool web mail service earlt? Is it a status symbol? Are these people mostly spammers trying to get accounts in order to run experiments on their filters, so as to better be able to defeat them later? Are they spammers trying to get as many accounts as possible so they can automate the process of marking spam as not-junk to try to break Google's distributed Bayesian filter system?
That was the show from the NES era where an annoying kid dubbed "Johnny Arcade" gave obvious hints to last year's NES games to the worst MTV-style editing. Between segments they had a cartoon in which Max Force (Player One from NARC), some basketball player from Arch Rivals, Kuros from Wizards and Warriors (!) and Kwick the Tomato (!!) all in one cartoon, all trying to do something involving someone that I can't possibly bring myself to remember. All the characters were from Acclaim's NES and Gameboy product lines, but originated outside the company, making me wonder how they got the rights to them: NARC was a Williams arcade game, Arch Rivals was by Midway, Kwick was produced by some Japanese company and W&W was produced by Rare. Anyway, the show was exactly as bad as it sounds.
In its second incarnation the show turned into a gameshow, ala Starcade with one-fourth part Double Dare. Improved it greatly, well for what it was, but still forgettable.
But what about Captain N, and the various Super Mario Bros. shows? And Saturday Supercade, and the Saturday Morning Dragon's Lair and Pole Position cartoons, you ask?
I respond, you don't want to know. You know not of which you ask! Greater men than I have cracked under the pressure! You can't handle the truth!
Hmmm... interesting comparasion, you might be right on that. However, Diablo 2's minions are a bit more complicated than the basic pet model, aren't they? (Not having played it, I can't say.)
You can get Diablo 2 companions resurrected endlessly and easily, correct? Compare that to Nethack's pets, who are usually dead forever once they snuff it. That at least brings an element of risk into it, which better aids the player in grow ing attacked to the little ASCII character.
(Well, they're dead forever unless you have a wand of undead turning....)
But pet ownership has been tacked on to SO many games. That's the important element here, tacked on to.
However, I'd largely agree with your joking argument concerning FPS games and follow-the-leader RTS games. Not that they're a fad mind you, because sadly they're probably not.
This is a highly-overused play mechanic these days. At least Nintendo keeps adding weird-ass features to Pokemon, like secret hideouts and real-time clocks.
The whole rasing-a-pet mechanic is overdone. It might still be made to work if the player were given a significant chance of killing the pixelbeast in question, and if he could somehow become attached to it, but often it just results in another set of numbers to max out.
Which is also a problem with RPGs in general these days.
All I ever used my X-Box's hard drive for was holding my music collection and save files -- some of which were much larger than they had any right being. Most developers don't use it to speed up game loading, memory cards are 8MB for PS2 (and are about to be for GC) and can hold lots of saves, user-defined information is potentially slick but rarely used, downloadable content doesn't seem to be used much at all, and while custom soundtracks can be cool, I wouldn't call them a gameplay feature.
A hard drive could be hot stuff if used correctly. But few developers really know what to do with it. To me, the coolest thing about the hard drive is if you can put Linux on it.
I've never used Live, and probably would never. But I recognize that that could just be me.
That is technology that the Xbox has- that developers can use to create great games.
(ahem) Game quality, when compared to the PS2 and Gamecube, is the X-Box's biggest weakness. Even if they get a boatload of exclusive first person shooters, that won't convince me to own one again. I think that FPS games are the new Sports genre: the same game over and over again.
Most of the people that play down the importance of things like on-line gaming (Live) are the ones that have never used it. For the rest of the people that do use it, it becomes very, very important.
I've was there, did it, got bored with it, and fell off that wagon almost ten years ago. The only online games I'm interested in are Neverwinter Nights (solely because of the module creation features, which is really slick for a networked game) and -- get this! -- Sims Online, which I wish I could find a retail copy of now.
I have to disagree about the sheer number of things on the islands. Although I wish there were a bit more variety to them -- there are only so many times you can get excited about finding 200 Rupees. Heart Pieces are nice, but I would have like more equipment, like Majora's Mask's masks.
On the other hand, to me this is the Zelda that finally fixed the problem, dating back to Link to the Past, of your wallet filling up too quickly. 5,000 rupees is a lot, and having to pay Tingle for those maps actually gives the player a use for such an extravagant sum of cash.
But while I found Wind Waker an absolute blast to explore (the discovery factor was much higher than Ocarina of Time), it will be cool to have a land-based overworld again.
One at a time:
1. Microsoft and Yahoo might actually try and compete with Google. Until recently, Yahoo was hampered by an old directory model and Microsoft's (outsourced) search was so bad that it attracted the attention of the FTC for being misleading.
Yahoo's directory is still not bad for what it does (which is *not* search - the Yahoo directory is still the core of the site). But I will probably still use Google even if they fall to #2 or 3, because I'm sure they won't cook the search for cash.
2. The rapidly declining cost of technology, computers, storage, and bandwidth (Moore's Law), will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens or even hundreds of new competitors. In a few years, any two graduate students may be able to start a search engine from their dorm room without venture capital.
But Google's employee project program, absurd number of highly educated workers, and the fact that no one rides Moore's law as hard as Google (what do they have, like a hundred thousand servers ?!), means they'll likely be the first to come up with, and implement, astounding new technologies.
(By the way, make sure you read that link above: it's really, really, really cool.)
3. Any competitor can outsource software deployment to India, Russia or China, which will reduce the cost of entry for competitors enabling dozens of new competitors. Google can also reduce software costs by outsourcing, but the fact remains that with lower costs of entry, there will be more competitors.
Of course outsourcing is always a good idea. I discovered that when I tried contacting Sony for support on my VAIO desktop and had to hurdle a language barrier. Briefly, cost is not the only thing that makes a worker desirable.
4. Remember AltaVista.com. Like Altavista.com, Google's "customers" are not locked into Google and may quickly abandon Google.
Someone posted earlier that GMail is a lock-in technique, though I doubt it -- I wouldn't consider any webmail service to be sufficently locked in, as there's no proprietary aspect to the protocol.
But again, the fact that they are trying not to be evil (and the details of their IPO prove this is still a great concern) is good enough for me. I think in the future, when other companies finally decide to follow Google's lead, this may become one of the biggest selling points a company can have. It would be a unique, unexpected triumph of capitalism if this happened. (HINT: Someone feel free to debate me on this -- I'm not sure that this will occur at all.)
5. Google's revenue source, contextual Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), is causing a race to the bottom as the most expensive/profitable products outbid less expensive products for the limited PPC positions. Consumers may eventually learn that they are paying for the high PPC costs and look elsewhere for more affordable products.
Except that Joe's Jam Emporium will pursue a much different search space than Mercedes-Benz. I think Google even has rules that the AdWord purchased must have something to do with your business.
6. Google's revenue source, Pay Per Click advertising, may be blocked by ad blocking software. While Google's ads are not intrusive as pop-up ads, given a choice, people may decide to block Google's ads or replace Google's ads with more useful third party content. Just as Google's toolbar blocks (competitor's) popup ads, other products block Google's ads - especially those that "block ALL ads."
This is one of the most egregious flaws in the article. People don't block ads because they're ads, they block them because they're bloody annoying. Of course, I'm sure there are people out there who hate the very notion they're being advertised at, but I think most people who hate ads do so because of their ubiquity. Google's don't pop on top of, or under, your web pages, they don't consume lot
Yeah, I loved Wind Waker too. Boat travel felt epic. And say what you want about the time it took to go places. Here's the secret: The Great Sea is much less monotonous than Hyrule Field..
It's true. Wind Waker's overworld has more monsters, more places to visit, more secrets (including at least one significant treasure in every sector), and nifty little mini-games to do like hit barrels for rupees, feeding the fish to get your map filled in, and just checking out each sector's island.
Hyrule field is smaller, but there's much less happening in it. It's probably Ocarina of Time's biggest flaw, unless you're in Young Link's time at night the monsters are barely worth discussing. Peahats can be scary opponents if you only have three hearts, unless you just stay the hell away from them that is. And say what you want about Ganondorf -- he cleared the Peahats and Stalchildren out of Hyrule Field. The Evil part of his alignment is regrettable, but the Lawful part has its advantages.
Hey, you're right! Well, actually SimCity is a sandbox and it's done okay over there.
But I have my own opinion as to why first-person shooters only do well in the west, and it's not a kind one.
Since "Piss Christ."
I'm not at a machine equipped with Word at the moment, but I think that's the command to show paragraph marks. WordPerfect's Reveal Codes feature opens up a subwindow that shows every tiny little formatting element, and allows them to be edited directly.
I'll check when I get back to the apartment.
Actually, I'm referring to The Write Stuff, written by R. Eric Lee, produced by Busy Bee Software. It had a very low-key distribution it seems, but it's rather nifty. It also has a 80-column preview, and all sorts of weird features you wouldn't expect from a 64kb system, like mail merge and multiple columns. There's even a version with speech synthesis, which Microsoft Word itself only picked up out of the box in 2003.
Because most games are about as relevant to real art as Spy Kids is.
Because art is cool.
It can tell us real things about the world instead of the recycled Weekend Special stuff most RPGs shovel. It challenges expectations instead of slavishly following genre. And it aims to produce works that will transcend their age, instead of being almost forgotten in five years.
And art makes fundamentalists mad. Hooray!
Oy, FF VII left me cold. But I've already written that too many times -- I think you're only allowed to say the same thing three times on the internet, aren't you? Unless you're Stallman?
Final Fantasy games are basically space opera, without the space part, but also not quite opera (scene in VI notwithstanding). And when you factor out the travel and all the fighting, there's actually not a whole lot of story there, either. Dragon Quest/Warrior games have a lot more text in them.
Infocom games predate Ninja Gaiden by years, and they have infinitely better stories....
Well then...
Don't keep it a secret, man! I'd really, really, really, really like to know. It'd save me a lot of Word headaches, and I imagine, other people as well.
But I'm not going to ask Clippy. We haven't spoken in years. Let's just say I'm under a restraining order....
Yeah! Tell it from the mountain, brother!
Reveal Codes. I still can't believe Word doesn't have it. My old Commodore 64 word processor can (and, in fact, must) show codes directly on the screen, but Word can't.
If OpenOffice had reveal codes I'd never need to use another word processor except for document conversion (and OpenOffice already does that rather well).
Actually (and I'm going by memory too), a Guard Impact is the only way out of some unblockables. There are a few that can't be GI'd, I think, but they're a minority.
SC and SC2 are interesting examples, because they contain an anti-cheese technique, the Guard Impact, or GI.
The idea is, if a player uses the same move over and over and over again, their timing will become regularized. If his opponent takes notice of this, he can attempt to press towards and Guard at the same time to perform a GI, parrying the attack. This leaves the attacker wide open for a heart-stopping half-second, and the defender can then launch a counter-attack the only defense to which is performing another Guard Impact.
It's a little more complicated than this (low hits must be GI'd low, and there's also a feint version that uses back+Guard), but that's generally how it works. Even some unblockable moves can be GI'd, as can throws. And throws have their own escape move as well.
SC 2 had easier GI timing than SC 1, while still making it difficult to pull off. However, most casual players don't know they exist, and even some people who play the game a lot are either ignorant of them or think they're unimportant. In fact, they can seriously rule. One GI can be enough for a sharp player to go from being behind to winning.
Advanced Excel problems are less bad for a small company, since they'll probably have less complicated spreadsheet programming. If any at all! No huge payrolls, no huge matrix of competitors, and no fleet of accountants who all have to be retrained. If the company's young there's also less likely to have spreadsheets to port or rewrite.
Support options have already been covered extensively in earlier comments. In short, MS' support sucks, you have to pay extra to get it anyway, and you can pay for OOo support from Sun if you need it, getting StarOffice in the process.
And actually, large Word documents in OOo taking ten seconds to open is nothing. Once it's open, it's open, no more wastage for that document. If you plan on opening it more than once then just save it in OOo native.
Oh, and feel free to mod me into oblivion for taking a controversial (for /.'ers) stance.
Now that's a statement the likes of which I've see na lot on Slashdot. Suspeciously often. Especially since I've seen a good number of highly-modded, controversial (to a hypothetical Slashdot-stereotype) opinions here all the same....
So what you're saying is, that earlier point someone made about Microsoft software having someone on the phone you can talk to, that was promptly discredited by a half-dozen other posters saying irately "Have you tried calling them?", is doubly wrong because if you do pay, and less than for MS Office, you can get support anyway?
Cool.
But the thing about "computer literacy," is that it's mostly arbitrary knowledge, you training yourself to use a system that other people, on a fundamental level, pulled out their asses.
Of course you'll have problems using a system coming from a different ass.