To beat Word... you have to create something better than Word... not just a mimmickry.
I'm sorry you weren't successful selling Linux products. But nowhere in the Constitution does it say you should be protected even when you make bad business decisions like trying to sell something customers don't want.
Conforming to world view most certainly is the issue.
The latest example that I've seen has been with wording bullshit. Republicans have been complaining endlessly whenever some journalist would write an article which referred to Bush's social security plan as "Privatization". They've been claiming the word is inserting innuendo.
But Bush has been calling it Privatization since the 2000 campaign himself. What's really happened here, is the Republicans went to the pollsters and found out Privatization didn't poll well, so they want to change the word used to explain it, as if rebranding is going to make people like their product more.
Same thing has been going on with "Nuclear option", which was a phrase coined by Trent Lott and used by numerous Republicans until they realized that didn't poll well either, and they wanted to rebrand it to the "Constitutional Option" which was a bunch of mumbo jumbo... so now they want to call it something else.
A journalist who wanted to insert innuendo would have called it the "crybaby option". But despite my pleas, I haven't found anybody with the guts to use that one.
But, that doesn't matter. I know nothing about the O'Gara thing, having not seen the articles. All I do know is that slashbots here frequently follow the same pattern of decrying any journalist who posts a piece which points out something uncomfortable about their preconceived beliefs.
My point was, everybody does it. Let's not pretend that it's about journalistic ethics, when it's really just about not agreeing with the facts presented.
Microsoft had no difficulty taking marketshare away from WordPerfect, despite the fact that the WP5.0 files were the industry standard.
You can make excuses until your blue in the face, but the fact remains that should you come up with a better solution than Office for creating documents... it will sell.
That's what competition is about.
Frankly I think right now the Office tools are not long for this world. The computing world has been moving away from that paradigm for several years now. If you recognized this, and had a better idea... But I've yet to see that better idea. Instead you just get crap like OpenOffice which mimmicks.
Dvorak's taking a fringe minority of the Linux community and presenting them as the larger group.
Yet, isn't that what you just did to Journalists? Using Dan Rather or Jayson Blair to paint the whole.
I've been seeing a lot of shouting and yelling and screaming lately from people, accusing Journalists of anything and everything because they don't publish articles that 100% conform to your world view. It used to be bad, but it's getting really bad lately.
The Dan Rather and Newsweek examples are good ones. These are obviously politically driven attacks not designed to get the truth out, but to discredit the news agencies. Why?
It's interesting to look at the history of news in this country. It started out as partisan rant sheets. The SoandSo Democrat, the suchandsuch Republican newspapers. You've seen the names, ever wonder why? Go look at the history page of the Christian Science Monitor website.
The NY Times came along in the late 19th century as something different. To try to stand above this partisanship and just report the news. Now people are attacking these papers, claiming that by being even handed in their news, they are undermining their ability to publish their point of view. So now we're seeing a movement to push papers back towards the incredibly partisan rant pages of the 19th century.
I don't understand what positive purpose this serves, or how it's good for the Nation to move back progress. But that is what is happening. And even though you are obviously rightwing biased, you should know that the leftwing in America thinks the NYTimes is rightwing biased and they have reporters like Judith Miller to display as proof.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how you played along with this game, possibly without even knowing it yourself.
This issue is larger and broader than journalists. Something is going on which is allowing these beliefs to sink in with aspects of the public.
Yet MS seems to be announcing future features that are already in OSX and KDE. Probably because that's all they have in the bootom of their box. As you say they haven't thought up anything that hasn't already been done.
Microsoft announced features that they wanted to put into Longhorn well in advance of it's release.
and MacOSX and KDE mimmicked them. Not quite to the same caliber, i.e. Microsoft usually builds features that are useful to other developers as well as endusers. But close enough that to the endusers anyway, the basic concept was there.
I guess it depends on how you define innovation. Thinking up the idea, or shipping with it?
After a while, yes. Let's play Devil's Advocate, though - I'm Microsoft and I can't get Longhorn out the door and Linux is catching up too fast.
The thing is...
The only people who actually think Linux is still a threat to Windows, also believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Few of which are taken seriously on Wall Street.
Linux died as a threat when they started pulling it from the endcap display shelves at Best Buy.
The biggest problem Microsoft has with Longhorn is figuring out what kind of features people would find compelling enough to get them to upgrade from Windows XP. It's gotta be something revolutionary, not evolutionary. They won't find the answer to that by looking at Linux or even MacOSX.
The US intelligence community was built up in the post-WWII era, and had one target and one target only... The Soviet Union.
Remember the Shah being deposed in Iran? Our intelligence community didn't see that coming either. The US intelligence community kept asking the Shah how things were going, and when he said "Great!" they didn't dig any deeper because they didn't want to offend him.
Yeah, we got intelligence problems but I haven't seen a single person yet who has proposed a way to fix them.
If Bush said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating clean hydrogen powered cars." People would jump all over him...and at least in that case he earmarked some $6 billion over a period of a several years.
No, actually most Democrats would probably complain about the fact that while Bush said he had earmarked some $6 billion for a project... He never actually spent the money.
Which is actually interesting, and it's a creative government PR tactic. You announce... "I am going to earmark $400 billion to solve the problem of world hunger!" But then you don't actually budget or spend the money, so really you haven't done anything other than give a speech and you don't have to actually figure out how to come up with the money, but you get to call yourself the World Hunger President.
Which is basically what Bush has done on education, AIDS, energy, and several other initiatives. He tried to do it with Iraq, but after our soldiers kept getting shot at he realized he probably better buy them some bullets and armor.
Of course now the problem Democrats have is that they're whining about not spending money which people are frankly tired of hearing so nobody listens to their complaints.
And the voters... Well after hearing Bush tell us he caught a fish ---> this big --- so many times, they stopped listening to him as well and don't think he's doing anything at all useful.
No, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999.
Not that it matters. Republicans have an inherent predisposition against admitting they are wrong. So rather than ever resolving this issue, it just turns into a childish game of "Naa naa naa, I can't hear you."
I did this once with my brother when I was 8 years old. It was quite fun then, but now I'm 37.
I hear ya, but oddly enough, even with newegg's shipping... the stuff still comes out cheaper very often.
I think that's because they have really low product prices, and the S&H is their profit margin. So it's actually competitive, especially if you are ordering multiples of one part, cause it says $5 to ship... and it's $5 to ship even if you are buying six of them.
I always compare several websites. mwave.com, zipzoomfly.com, buy.com, newegg.com and then run out to pricewatch.com and even google.com and see what other sites I can find. I don't always buy from newegg, but very often I do and it really surprises me at times after seeing those shipping charges.
What's actually killed Amazon for me is their cross linking into all kinds of other vendors in order to offer everything. So I go searching for a calculator on google, and amazon.com claims to have it... but really it's nothing more than a link to office depot. I'm finding this more and more as I visit amazon and it increasingly becomes "What's the point?" to me.
similarly speaking, what I really like is if brick & mortar stores show me what they sell and if they have it in stock. Circuit City does this, so does Compusa and now Best Buy. Target is starting to build a nice website, but you go looking for things, and they're showing you everything Amazon.com sells. Well what's the damn point of that?
Very frustrating, and I honestly don't think it's helpful. I don't need Amazon.com to be my shopping portal. I'm perfectly capable of going to Target or Office Depot myself even if it is online.
You should keep a more open mind... Science is all about theories, and we're not completely certain that oil comes from fossils...
It may, in fact be created by Intelligent Design. Well, that or some complex process of pressure turning carbon into oil, sort of like how diamonds come from pressurized carbon but yet completely different.:-)
How come people always complain about Michael Moore, but I never see them call out the right-wing fruitcakes like Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, James Dobson, Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson and the list goes on and on and on...
If you aren't going to call them out and demand they stop... then why do you expect anybody else to stop?
Should we spend some time talking about Ann coulter. Is it that you agree with her version of hate that makes it ok? Why is that in and of itself ok?
Even Clinton told the anti-War nuts to shut up and get with the program, and America.
except, back in 1998, the anti-war nuts were Republicans... by the names of Tom DeLay, Trent Lott and Denny Hastert. Oh yeah, they were against it cause it distracted from Penis-Gate and their Russian contracts for Oil. Bleh.
Seriously, it's a nice fantasy world you live in but we're already seeing where it ends up. The basic problem is you've built a strawman to define Democrats. I don't know very many who live in this Utopian Star Trek dream of yours.
For the most part Democrats simply see that it's generally safer to have more friends in the world, not fewer, and as such we try to get a bit of group involvement. UN? Piss on them. They're fucking unreliable and I don't know anybody who would say rely upon them. When we wanted to bomb Milosevic out of Kosovo do you think we relied on the UN? Nope, they wouldn't respond because Russia was against our action on the security council. So we went to NATO, because they are our friends. 19 countries came together, and we got Milosevic out of Kosovo and emboldened Democratic reformists in the country to oust him as their President.
So it's a nice fantasy world you live in, and Bush did an awesome job at defining Democrats as this in 2004... and that fucking popsicle stick John Kerry didn't learn how to respond.
But in the end what do we get? A society less safe today than when Bush came into office in 2001... We'll be lucky to not get hit by a nuclear weapon in the next 4 years at the rate he's promoting nuclear proliferation with Iran and North Korea. What lesson do you think these guys learned from Iraq? They might be crazy, but they ain't idiots.
Whoa... I didn't get to the part where you blame the UN for every one of the United States failures.
How is it that we've gone from Ronald "Personal Responsibility" Reagan to George "Not my fault" Bush in only 20 years? It's like reading a bad Family Circus cartoon.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. By pointing out that Republicans promote cronyism, that isn't defining the opposition in a negative way rather it is explaining my disgust with their policies.
I guess this is just another example of the hypocrisy of the right. They can dish out insults, but they can't take criticism in return.
If the current party is corrupt, and given that the current party has no interest in throwing it's own bums out... the only choice we have is to place the other party in power.
It most certainly is productive, because it's the only way to address corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing the point.
To beat Word... you have to create something better than Word... not just a mimmickry.
I'm sorry you weren't successful selling Linux products. But nowhere in the Constitution does it say you should be protected even when you make bad business decisions like trying to sell something customers don't want.
Conforming to world view most certainly is the issue.
The latest example that I've seen has been with wording bullshit. Republicans have been complaining endlessly whenever some journalist would write an article which referred to Bush's social security plan as "Privatization". They've been claiming the word is inserting innuendo.
But Bush has been calling it Privatization since the 2000 campaign himself. What's really happened here, is the Republicans went to the pollsters and found out Privatization didn't poll well, so they want to change the word used to explain it, as if rebranding is going to make people like their product more.
Same thing has been going on with "Nuclear option", which was a phrase coined by Trent Lott and used by numerous Republicans until they realized that didn't poll well either, and they wanted to rebrand it to the "Constitutional Option" which was a bunch of mumbo jumbo... so now they want to call it something else.
A journalist who wanted to insert innuendo would have called it the "crybaby option". But despite my pleas, I haven't found anybody with the guts to use that one.
But, that doesn't matter. I know nothing about the O'Gara thing, having not seen the articles. All I do know is that slashbots here frequently follow the same pattern of decrying any journalist who posts a piece which points out something uncomfortable about their preconceived beliefs.
My point was, everybody does it. Let's not pretend that it's about journalistic ethics, when it's really just about not agreeing with the facts presented.
Microsoft had no difficulty taking marketshare away from WordPerfect, despite the fact that the WP5.0 files were the industry standard.
You can make excuses until your blue in the face, but the fact remains that should you come up with a better solution than Office for creating documents... it will sell.
That's what competition is about.
Frankly I think right now the Office tools are not long for this world. The computing world has been moving away from that paradigm for several years now. If you recognized this, and had a better idea... But I've yet to see that better idea. Instead you just get crap like OpenOffice which mimmicks.
Dvorak's taking a fringe minority of the Linux community and presenting them as the larger group.
Yet, isn't that what you just did to Journalists? Using Dan Rather or Jayson Blair to paint the whole.
I've been seeing a lot of shouting and yelling and screaming lately from people, accusing Journalists of anything and everything because they don't publish articles that 100% conform to your world view. It used to be bad, but it's getting really bad lately.
The Dan Rather and Newsweek examples are good ones. These are obviously politically driven attacks not designed to get the truth out, but to discredit the news agencies. Why?
It's interesting to look at the history of news in this country. It started out as partisan rant sheets. The SoandSo Democrat, the suchandsuch Republican newspapers. You've seen the names, ever wonder why? Go look at the history page of the Christian Science Monitor website.
The NY Times came along in the late 19th century as something different. To try to stand above this partisanship and just report the news. Now people are attacking these papers, claiming that by being even handed in their news, they are undermining their ability to publish their point of view. So now we're seeing a movement to push papers back towards the incredibly partisan rant pages of the 19th century.
I don't understand what positive purpose this serves, or how it's good for the Nation to move back progress. But that is what is happening. And even though you are obviously rightwing biased, you should know that the leftwing in America thinks the NYTimes is rightwing biased and they have reporters like Judith Miller to display as proof.
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how you played along with this game, possibly without even knowing it yourself.
This issue is larger and broader than journalists. Something is going on which is allowing these beliefs to sink in with aspects of the public.
Nobody does.
/. back in '98 thought the answer was to knee cap microsoft instead of promoting competition.
Competition is good. It's the whole basis of free market capitalism.
And the fucking idiots at
Sheesh.
Linux advocacy is like butt torpers.
:-)
It's ineffective, but every n00b thinks it's a great idea.
You should know better.
Yet MS seems to be announcing future features that are already in OSX and KDE. Probably because that's all they have in the bootom of their box. As you say they haven't thought up anything that hasn't already been done.
Microsoft announced features that they wanted to put into Longhorn well in advance of it's release.
and MacOSX and KDE mimmicked them. Not quite to the same caliber, i.e. Microsoft usually builds features that are useful to other developers as well as endusers. But close enough that to the endusers anyway, the basic concept was there.
I guess it depends on how you define innovation. Thinking up the idea, or shipping with it?
After a while, yes. Let's play Devil's Advocate, though - I'm Microsoft and I can't get Longhorn out the door and Linux is catching up too fast.
The thing is...
The only people who actually think Linux is still a threat to Windows, also believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Few of which are taken seriously on Wall Street.
Linux died as a threat when they started pulling it from the endcap display shelves at Best Buy.
The biggest problem Microsoft has with Longhorn is figuring out what kind of features people would find compelling enough to get them to upgrade from Windows XP. It's gotta be something revolutionary, not evolutionary. They won't find the answer to that by looking at Linux or even MacOSX.
The US intelligence community was built up in the post-WWII era, and had one target and one target only... The Soviet Union.
Remember the Shah being deposed in Iran? Our intelligence community didn't see that coming either. The US intelligence community kept asking the Shah how things were going, and when he said "Great!" they didn't dig any deeper because they didn't want to offend him.
Yeah, we got intelligence problems but I haven't seen a single person yet who has proposed a way to fix them.
Usually when I want to "test" a car, I call Enterprise.
Just make sure you get the insurance.
If Bush said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating clean hydrogen powered cars." People would jump all over him...and at least in that case he earmarked some $6 billion over a period of a several years.
No, actually most Democrats would probably complain about the fact that while Bush said he had earmarked some $6 billion for a project... He never actually spent the money.
Which is actually interesting, and it's a creative government PR tactic. You announce... "I am going to earmark $400 billion to solve the problem of world hunger!" But then you don't actually budget or spend the money, so really you haven't done anything other than give a speech and you don't have to actually figure out how to come up with the money, but you get to call yourself the World Hunger President.
Which is basically what Bush has done on education, AIDS, energy, and several other initiatives. He tried to do it with Iraq, but after our soldiers kept getting shot at he realized he probably better buy them some bullets and armor.
Of course now the problem Democrats have is that they're whining about not spending money which people are frankly tired of hearing so nobody listens to their complaints.
And the voters... Well after hearing Bush tell us he caught a fish ---> this big --- so many times, they stopped listening to him as well and don't think he's doing anything at all useful.
How does snopes not agree with him?
They say the claim is false, and then explain...
No,
Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999.
Not that it matters. Republicans have an inherent predisposition against admitting they are wrong. So rather than ever resolving this issue, it just turns into a childish game of "Naa naa naa, I can't hear you."
I did this once with my brother when I was 8 years old. It was quite fun then, but now I'm 37.
Ok, so we have another difference between Liberals and Conservatives.
:-)
Liberals are far less careful when your choice involves whether or not to read something.
Conservatives are far less careful when your choice involves whether or not you die.
Happy now?
Taking initiative in the Senate means going into a commitee and introducing a bill to do something.
So he meant exactly what he said. The problem is that it isn't understandable outside of the Senate and he should have known better.
Write your new EDI standard in Esperanto.
It's the universal language. Soon everybody will be speaking it!
I hear ya, but oddly enough, even with newegg's shipping... the stuff still comes out cheaper very often.
I think that's because they have really low product prices, and the S&H is their profit margin. So it's actually competitive, especially if you are ordering multiples of one part, cause it says $5 to ship... and it's $5 to ship even if you are buying six of them.
I always compare several websites. mwave.com, zipzoomfly.com, buy.com, newegg.com and then run out to pricewatch.com and even google.com and see what other sites I can find. I don't always buy from newegg, but very often I do and it really surprises me at times after seeing those shipping charges.
Yet I hardly ever buy anything from Amazon.
What's actually killed Amazon for me is their cross linking into all kinds of other vendors in order to offer everything. So I go searching for a calculator on google, and amazon.com claims to have it... but really it's nothing more than a link to office depot. I'm finding this more and more as I visit amazon and it increasingly becomes "What's the point?" to me.
similarly speaking, what I really like is if brick & mortar stores show me what they sell and if they have it in stock. Circuit City does this, so does Compusa and now Best Buy. Target is starting to build a nice website, but you go looking for things, and they're showing you everything Amazon.com sells. Well what's the damn point of that?
Very frustrating, and I honestly don't think it's helpful. I don't need Amazon.com to be my shopping portal. I'm perfectly capable of going to Target or Office Depot myself even if it is online.
http://carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_ 040913.html
:-)
You should keep a more open mind... Science is all about theories, and we're not completely certain that oil comes from fossils...
It may, in fact be created by Intelligent Design. Well, that or some complex process of pressure turning carbon into oil, sort of like how diamonds come from pressurized carbon but yet completely different.
How come people always complain about Michael Moore, but I never see them call out the right-wing fruitcakes like Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, James Dobson, Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson and the list goes on and on and on...
If you aren't going to call them out and demand they stop... then why do you expect anybody else to stop?
Should we spend some time talking about Ann coulter. Is it that you agree with her version of hate that makes it ok? Why is that in and of itself ok?
Even Clinton told the anti-War nuts to shut up and get with the program, and America.
except, back in 1998, the anti-war nuts were Republicans... by the names of Tom DeLay, Trent Lott and Denny Hastert. Oh yeah, they were against it cause it distracted from Penis-Gate and their Russian contracts for Oil. Bleh.
Seriously, it's a nice fantasy world you live in but we're already seeing where it ends up. The basic problem is you've built a strawman to define Democrats. I don't know very many who live in this Utopian Star Trek dream of yours.
For the most part Democrats simply see that it's generally safer to have more friends in the world, not fewer, and as such we try to get a bit of group involvement. UN? Piss on them. They're fucking unreliable and I don't know anybody who would say rely upon them. When we wanted to bomb Milosevic out of Kosovo do you think we relied on the UN? Nope, they wouldn't respond because Russia was against our action on the security council. So we went to NATO, because they are our friends. 19 countries came together, and we got Milosevic out of Kosovo and emboldened Democratic reformists in the country to oust him as their President.
So it's a nice fantasy world you live in, and Bush did an awesome job at defining Democrats as this in 2004... and that fucking popsicle stick John Kerry didn't learn how to respond.
But in the end what do we get? A society less safe today than when Bush came into office in 2001... We'll be lucky to not get hit by a nuclear weapon in the next 4 years at the rate he's promoting nuclear proliferation with Iran and North Korea. What lesson do you think these guys learned from Iraq? They might be crazy, but they ain't idiots.
Whoa... I didn't get to the part where you blame the UN for every one of the United States failures.
How is it that we've gone from Ronald "Personal Responsibility" Reagan to George "Not my fault" Bush in only 20 years? It's like reading a bad Family Circus cartoon.
George Bush Pardoned that Orlando Bosch guy back in 1992.
That was before terrorism existed as a campaign issue.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. By pointing out that Republicans promote cronyism, that isn't defining the opposition in a negative way rather it is explaining my disgust with their policies.
I guess this is just another example of the hypocrisy of the right. They can dish out insults, but they can't take criticism in return.
Of course wiretaps went up..
;-)
It was an election year, after all.
The nature of politics is to Throw the Bum Out.
If the current party is corrupt, and given that the current party has no interest in throwing it's own bums out... the only choice we have is to place the other party in power.
It most certainly is productive, because it's the only way to address corruption.
Oh yes... The *hypocrisy* of the left.
Because I disagree with cronyism, I'm suddenly not just a socialist but also a hypocrite.
Perhaps you should advance past the name calling phase and actually start addressing policy differences.