Seriously- think of what some liberals might do to their kids: scan their heads for anything religious, racist, or unenvironmental (and punish them accordingly). What a nightmare.
Fits just as well, huh? Really people, grow up and realize these kinds of flaws exist across the political, social and religious spectrum.
This reminds me of when the SNPP is fined for safety violations and Mr. Burns pays the $3 million out of his pocket. "And I'll take that statue of Justice out front too."
Just the price of doing business as a latter-day robber baron. This might affect MS's bottom-line in a non-trivial way, but it won't affect their anti-competitive behavior or ill-gained market dominance. The saddest thing is that MS is clearly afraid to compete on merit. I guess they don't believe their products are superior either.
11 figures in the bank, you'd think they could afford to make decent products, but I keep forgetting: Making decent products is no longer part of their business plan.
I recall a UI design book I read about 10 years ago... don't recall the author... but his favorite source of examples was Adobe software.
I love Paint Shop Pro, but still use version 9 since Corel acquired it and systematically ruined the product. It's really disappointing too because I was an avid user since version 2. Too bad version 9 couldn't be open-sourced. I hope Krita continues to improve and of course I'll keep an eye on the GIMP (how it needs a new name!) because it's a decent tool.
And WoW's been around for how many years? Today you can virtualize a whole machine that runs perfectly well. I keep a Windows 2000 VM that I run under Linux for those few Windows apps that I can't live without. There are possibly better ways to do that, although the apps in question do not work under Wine, nevertheless it's a great way to run legacy software, and the older OS is light enough to run on a small fraction of your computer's resources. When I finally replaced my laptop, I was unimpressed at the performance of Vista. When I replaced my wife's laptop with something low-end, but still substantially better than the 6-year-old machine she was running XP on, the performance under Vista was appalling. I switched her to Linux and she's completely happy, and her low-end lappy works as well as my mid-range lappy for browsing, e-mail, and other basic tasks she uses it for. Vista took like 3 minutes just to boot and was so slow and unresponsive that the vendor (Gateway) was insane to ship it on hardware that wasn't close to being able to support (especially when XP would have worked fine), and Microsoft, of course, is insane to have released such a turd.
BTW, I tried installing XP on her Gateway, but it couldn't even identify the ethernet adapter or the video adapter. I was surprised and disappointed, but didn't want to waste half a day figuring all that out. I had Ubuntu up and running with all her apps in about an hour.
Wait. I thought _I_ created the Internet. After all, it's all on _my_ computer.
As to Microsoft, I find it amusing that they are taking the credit for the Internet's huge growth by saying that they laid the groundwork for Google. Wasn't it Microsoft that deliberately ignored the Internet for a couple years as a passing fad, and then had to play catch-up by patching their OS with hooks to allow anyone to compromise a Windows computer connected to the Internet. Didn't Bill Gates have to amend his "The Road Ahead" when it became apparent that he had no idea what the trends were (which is still true). Oh, yeah, and they made Clippy too.
You're completely missing the point. I shouldn't have to know that much to make reasonably simple documents with simple tables or autonumbering.
I'm perfectly aware of what styles are about. I don't care. I'm just trying to make a document. The problem with Word is you need to be an expert to do anything non-trivial. THAT'S what this is all about. I use dozens or hundreds of other apps that don't require you to conform to the designers' way of thinking in order to use it. That's the biggest problem with Word. It's a standard, but is completely inappropriate for 95% of the people who use it (including everything I've ever had to do with it), but because of Microsoft's monopoly and the business world's complacency we are saddled with it. But Microsoft has to keep making it more and more elephantine to artificially drive upgrades, since Word pretty much was capable of doing anything it would reasonably need to do a decade ago. Perhaps usability is being improved, I couldn't say since I haven't seen that last couple versions, all I can say is that I was able to get what I wanted with Open Office and markup-based tools with far less effort and hair-pulling.
Leaving aside the fact that I've never met a DTP person who liked Word (not that I've met many), Word is like using an F-15. Fine if you are flying hundreds of miles and fighting MIGs, but most people are using it to go to grocery store to go food shopping. If you just needed milk, bread and eggs, you could use WordPad, but for a familiy of 6 for the week, that won't work. So I have two choices, the F-15 or a scooter with a basket. I maintain my claim that Word wholly fails as a tool for the semi-casual user, and even if everything you say is correct, and I have every reason to believe it is, the last time I used Word, it crashed and couldn't recover my document. In the software development world, that's called a "show-stopper", but in the world of Microsoft for a mature product that's been around for 20 years, I guess it's just not that bad. I suppose that's acceptable losses for a Microsoft product because they largely don't have to worry about competition. It's ironic, because short of occasional hardware and/or hardware driver problems, I don't think I've never seen XP crash (I have seen Vista lock up and crash out of the blue though), so I guess MS just doesn't care that much.
The problem is not me, the problem is Word. If the company that is requiring me to use it (which my current employer does not) is willing to spring for a few days of training that don't come out of _my_ schedule, that would be fine, but they expect you to learn this Soviet-bureaucracy-style software through osmosis or something, and it's not like the documentation helps. I'm sorry, Homie don't play that game, I got code to write. I can knock out perfectly nice looking documents in a small fraction of the time with markup or even OOo and get back to work, and generate any format they would want. In fact, that's what I ended up doing and that was a big win. ReStructured Text is so simple a 7-year-old could use it to do things he or she could never do with Word. But as you say, I guess that's the 7-year-old's fault, not Microsoft's.
If Word simply had a mode like Word Perfect used to have where you could see the "codes", that would probably fix the problem as well since you understand what Word is doing, since it's not keen on letting you know. GUIs are for drawing, not writing, IMO, and perhaps that's why text-based tools are an order of magnitude more flexible and easy to use, despite having been abandoned by everyone but programming types. The real problem is that Word Process is not Desktop Publishing, but everyone seems to have forgotten that. WYSIWYG can be veyr harmful in that regard, since you spend all your time trying to make the document look right rather than worrying about the actual content. Now it may be the case that the templates I was given were not well-made, but that doesn't explain why things like autonumbering are a complete nightmare (and well-documented by critics).
This is Windows. Try 10's of millions of lines. And I agree, that it is rocket science (rhetorically), but Microsoft has still completely screwed it up for decades. The problem isn't (IMO) the software engineeers. Those guys tend to be very smart and competent, but as is the case, management totally ruins their efforts. I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server and the guy was top-notch. I often teased him, and asked him why "such-and-such" was so bad, and his response was usually that "MS didn't put the good people on that"
For instance "Internet Connection Sharing" (this was about 6 years ago). He said all the competent people worked on NAT, so ICS suffered. But how much of Vista is grotesquely overcomplicated compared to XP due to DRM and other nonsense that doesn't serve any customer?
I agree. Clarke is one of the last of the great science fiction writers who got started in the Golden Age of SF from mid-20th century. If he doesn't want to boast, we can boast for him. The guy's done good in his career and we geeks are lucky to have him.
It affects the game play if you can't get the game to work, and from what I've heard, it not only does that sometimes, but also can cause problems with the OS. That is crucially important.
I played System Shock and System Shock 2 and they are among my favorite games ever. I will not buy Bioshock for this reason. Whether that's a "me problem" or not, it is a lost sale.
More importantly, while you have the Constitutional right to Free Speech, you don't, in fact, have the Constitutional right to Be Heard. I think a lot of people forget this.
Of course, speech is meant to be heard, and I can (and do) rant on my blog till the cows come home, which is free available to anyone on the planet with a computer and an Internet connection. However, no one is required to look at it, for that I must rely on any merit of what I happen to say to attract readers.
Ultimately, the miracle and the curse of the Internet is that there, essentially, an infinite number of Hyde Park Speaker's Corners and I would take a further stance that the biggest GII's are mostly actively interested in distorting the truth and manipulating perceptions to further their own agendas. This was always true, to some extent, but in the past couple of years many of them have stopped even pretending it isn't.
Yeah, Word sucks, but lack of education on your part doesn't help. You'd have the same problems in OO, btw.
Not really true. I couldn't make tables in Word to save my life, but they were easy and intuitive in Open Office Write.
Maybe they just think more like me.
The problem I have is that I shouldn't need a freakin' PhD to be a casual business user, especially when I have 20+ years of software development experience (much of it involving GUIs and end-user applications). I consider myself on the bottom end of "expert" in terms of UI design, but Word is completely baffling to me in a way that I found Open Office not to be. The problem is that Word tries to be smarter than it could ever possibly be... typical of MS GUI's in that it makes your job very easy for a very narrow domain of problems that involve thinking and working exactly the way they want you to. It is a huge conceit of UI developers, especially for something like Word, which is probably used by 90% of Windows users (at least in business) whether they have any reason to (IMO, WordPad accomplishes 95% of what 95% of the users need) or not. Using Word for most people is like trying to take an F-15 down the corner 7-Eleven. It's the wrong tool for most of what everyone does... and talking to professional publishers, etc, they hate it even more.
IMO, Word fails in every way, but people have become so inured to suffering with Word and tools like it that we assume that's just the way it is and always will be despite promises to the contrary from the industry for the last 20+ years. I feel the same about Access, BTW, but I like Excel a lot. I've never had much need for it, but having used 1-2-3 back in the day, I find Excel simple and intuitive, and I always make it do what I want and look how I want with little or no trouble. I don't unconditionally hate Microsoft products, but some things they have done and continue to do merit hate. (Recall I also said I like XP overall. Er, maybe that was in a different thread.)
So basically, M$ is going to screw customers. This should be fun to watch. Just another reason for linux.
It used to be that bugs would occur because of improbable things happening in the software at run-time or when it was written, but Microsoft is perfecting the art of doing everything it can to make sure improbable things do happen. Most of the new functionality in Vista is, in essence, to make things _not_ work, at least under certain circumstances.
Memo to Microsoft: You can't make things work when you're trying to make things work. What makes you think you're going to make things that work when you make them ten times as complicated by making them not work except in some rare circumstance?
Most people, when something gets too big, bloated and complicated, eventually decide to tear it down and start over with a cleaner, simpler design. Microsoft tears it down and starts over with something even bigger, more bloated and hugely more complex. Let's face it folks, you can only conclude they _want_ bloat. They want software that looks and works like the U.S. tax code. They spent 5 years with their heads down, working furiously to make something that makes XP look lean, mean and streamlined. My only conclusion is that MS management is insane or actively hates users. Occam's Razor says (in a way) we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but with Vista, stupidity just isn't the simplest and most likely answer any more. Windows 95 suffered from extreme stupidity. XP was pretty decent, but had problems, largely due to stupidity. Vista's deficiencies show way too much intent to be the product of mere stupidity. I can seriously conclude that Vista is the result of a deliberate attempt to render computers less useful.
But at least Excel is a decent product, at least in my experience. Word is horrible, and my last experience with Word was on a Mac, where it was worse than horrible. In my opinion, Word has destroyed word processing. It is a complete drain of productivity, buggy beyond anything I could imagine for a product that has been around for something like 20 years. On the Mac, it managed to crash _and_ lose my document. Yes, it corrupted the file on disk and couldn't restore it. I hadn't seen anything that ludicrous in something like 20 years, and this was in 2006, fer cryin' out loud.
I finally decided to ignore the company standard, wrote the document using ReStructured Text and delivered a really sharp-looking PDF in a tiny fraction of the time it took to attempt to do the same thing in that steaming pile of crap from MS. No one really cares, and I could have generated RTF or something to convert to a Word doc if they did. I really started with an open mind since I hadn't used Word recently, but after about the 10th time it would randomly change fonts or styles or mess up the auto-numbering, I was getting violently angry at it. I've never seen a piece of software do so many wrong things for no obvious reason. It was like anti-DWIM... some kind of perverse AI that was smarter than HAL 9000, but evil.
I also wrote some non-trivial documentation in OpenOffice about a year and a half ago, and while it was somewhat buggy as well, it was far easier to use than Word. This was 2.0, IIRC, and I found it overall to be nice to use. I was able to get done what I needed to get done, make it look how I wanted and didn't suffer from constant alterations for no apparent reason. The difference was, at least to me, that while both programs were buggy, OOo was buggy because, well, it has bugs. Word seemed buggy more because it is so grotesquely overcomplicated you could never predict what it was supposed to do, leave alone whether it did it, and when it didn't do what I wanted, I could never figure out why it did what it did, and in many cases why it would even make sense to do what it did. For instance, I quickly learned that the only way to change the font of a particular piece of text was to select the text, change the font, at which point Word would change the font for the entire document, and then choose undo, at which point the entire document would revert to the original font except what I had originally selected. This behaviour was very consistent, so I had to conclude that was probably how it was supposed to work. Either the developers of Word should be shot for having such a huge and obvious bug, or shot for thinking that kind of behavior doesn't violate practically every principle of UI from the last 30 years. Similarly, I found that Word supported exporting a document to HTML, which was useful for the work I was doing, but any time I would use that function, there was a fair chance that the resulting HTML would contain completely random color or style changes that weren't in the original. It was like using IBM software from the 80's, except the IBM software, while being the pinnacle of user hostile, was at least logical.
Word is the most horrible piece of commercial software I've ever used that wasn't written by some 11th grader in Visual Basic 3 as a piece of $29 shareware. Oh wait, I have to add "or wasn't written by Rational". Gotta be fair, now.
"Microsoft has just turned on Reduced Functionality mode"
I thought they did that when they released Vista. I've used MS software for 25 years, and developed software for it for almost 20. I always had a mixed attitude towards MS. They did some things well, and many things poorly, but Windows NT/2000/XP were pretty decent overall, and I enjoyed (and still enjoy) using them. I replaced two laptops this year, which of course meant I got that total turd of a product, Vista. Having experienced Vista, I have fully swung over to hating Microsoft. I promised my wife that the cheapest laptop I could buy would blow her 6-year-old lappy out of the water (plus there were other reasons it needed to be replaced). However, despite the fact that the new machine had a 40% faster processor and 3x as much memory (1.5GB because I bought extra memory), it was substantially slower than the creaky old Toshiba running XP. Putting Vista on this low-end Gateway was criminal, and the fact that Microsoft would let a company saddle their hardware with this bloat, and the fact that Gateway would cripple an otherwise decent little machine is insane. It would be like selling a car with half the cylinders broken, dirty plugs, and broken springs sticking out of the seats.
Microsoft needs to die. They are now completely useless, and now completely evil). Until I experienced Vista I would have never said that, but with this release, they have reduced functionality, performance, and managed to spend 5 years building an OS that nobody could ever want with new features that no one would ever choose (except for maybe the shiny UI, which isn't as stomach-churningly ugly as the XP Playskool theme, but it's not great). I tried installing XP on the poor little Gateway, but it couldn't even find a driver for the network adapter (I was as surprised as I was disappointed, plus it couldn't ID the wireless adapter, the video card and a number of other devices). Rather than struggle for hours trying to identify the network adapter, copy drivers from another machine via a USB stick, I installed Kubuntu and had the little lady up and running in about an hour... and I can't tell the difference between her bottom-of-the-line Gateway and my middle-of-the-line HP (also running Linux) when it comes to browsing and e-mailing, which is most of what she does. To me, this is the year of Linux, and Vista is a total abortion that will hopefully prove to be another nail in the coffin of a company that clearly has nothing to offer other than to feed its fat, bloated and decaying corpse with everything it can wring out of its monopolistic actions from the last 20 years. Microsoft is not irrelevant yet, but we have seen, years ago, the last of anything positive they have to offer to the world of operating systems.
Well, given that Congress only has two priorities (1. Appearing to do something, and 2. Turning tricks for their corporate pimps), I'd guess that the best we can hope for is that it doesn't make things worse.
Perhaps. I'll have to go back and watch them again. Now I can understand that having non-human Borg could be a budget issue... I'm always willing to cut Star Trek slack in those terms*, and there are possible reasons that the Borg cubes are manned primarily with males, but I think it would have been a very effective dramatic tool to see women and even children among the assimilated Borg. Of course, there's also the TV standards, since they were in combat... so many obstacles in the way of proper science fiction.
* Especially in the scene from "First Contact" where the Borg are working in space. It would have made a lot more sense to me if the drones were equipped with some kind of spacesuits or helmets, but that would have required a whole new set of very complicated costumes. It seems implausible that even a Borg could operate in the vacuum of space without additional hardware.
The character of Lilly in "First Contact" put it best when she called them "bionic zombies". The Borg were an excellent, if not particularly original, creation, but by about 4th time they were used, it got old. The character of the Borg Queen was interesting, but it just pointed out the absurdity that 99% of the Borg were male humans. The only non-male Borg were 7 of 9 and one or two of the assimilated crew of the Enterprise from the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I fixed your typos:
Seriously- think of what some liberals might do to their kids: scan their heads for anything religious, racist, or unenvironmental (and punish them accordingly). What a nightmare.
Fits just as well, huh? Really people, grow up and realize these kinds of flaws exist across the political, social and religious spectrum.
This reminds me of when the SNPP is fined for safety violations and Mr. Burns pays the $3 million out of his pocket. "And I'll take that statue of Justice out front too."
Just the price of doing business as a latter-day robber baron. This might affect MS's bottom-line in a non-trivial way, but it won't affect their anti-competitive behavior or ill-gained market dominance. The saddest thing is that MS is clearly afraid to compete on merit. I guess they don't believe their products are superior either.
11 figures in the bank, you'd think they could afford to make decent products, but I keep forgetting: Making decent products is no longer part of their business plan.
Oops. His favorite source of examples of BAD UI design was Adobe. I forget to include that little detail.
I've used Photoshop Elements, and found its UI to be decent, but I still prefer Paint Shop Pro 9.
I recall a UI design book I read about 10 years ago... don't recall the author... but his favorite source of examples was Adobe software.
I love Paint Shop Pro, but still use version 9 since Corel acquired it and systematically ruined the product. It's really disappointing too because I was an avid user since version 2. Too bad version 9 couldn't be open-sourced. I hope Krita continues to improve and of course I'll keep an eye on the GIMP (how it needs a new name!) because it's a decent tool.
That would be true for "virii" only if the singular were "virius".
And WoW's been around for how many years? Today you can virtualize a whole machine that runs perfectly well. I keep a Windows 2000 VM that I run under Linux for those few Windows apps that I can't live without. There are possibly better ways to do that, although the apps in question do not work under Wine, nevertheless it's a great way to run legacy software, and the older OS is light enough to run on a small fraction of your computer's resources. When I finally replaced my laptop, I was unimpressed at the performance of Vista. When I replaced my wife's laptop with something low-end, but still substantially better than the 6-year-old machine she was running XP on, the performance under Vista was appalling. I switched her to Linux and she's completely happy, and her low-end lappy works as well as my mid-range lappy for browsing, e-mail, and other basic tasks she uses it for. Vista took like 3 minutes just to boot and was so slow and unresponsive that the vendor (Gateway) was insane to ship it on hardware that wasn't close to being able to support (especially when XP would have worked fine), and Microsoft, of course, is insane to have released such a turd.
BTW, I tried installing XP on her Gateway, but it couldn't even identify the ethernet adapter or the video adapter. I was surprised and disappointed, but didn't want to waste half a day figuring all that out. I had Ubuntu up and running with all her apps in about an hour.
I would think so. The most popular image manipulation program is probably Microsoft Paint. ;-)
Wait. I thought _I_ created the Internet. After all, it's all on _my_ computer.
As to Microsoft, I find it amusing that they are taking the credit for the Internet's huge growth by saying that they laid the groundwork for Google. Wasn't it Microsoft that deliberately ignored the Internet for a couple years as a passing fad, and then had to play catch-up by patching their OS with hooks to allow anyone to compromise a Windows computer connected to the Internet. Didn't Bill Gates have to amend his "The Road Ahead" when it became apparent that he had no idea what the trends were (which is still true). Oh, yeah, and they made Clippy too.
Just turn the A/C up. Yeesh, people don't know anything.
Mmmm... McNuggets...
You're completely missing the point. I shouldn't have to know that much to make reasonably simple documents with simple tables or autonumbering.
I'm perfectly aware of what styles are about. I don't care. I'm just trying to make a document. The problem with Word is you need to be an expert to do anything non-trivial. THAT'S what this is all about. I use dozens or hundreds of other apps that don't require you to conform to the designers' way of thinking in order to use it. That's the biggest problem with Word. It's a standard, but is completely inappropriate for 95% of the people who use it (including everything I've ever had to do with it), but because of Microsoft's monopoly and the business world's complacency we are saddled with it. But Microsoft has to keep making it more and more elephantine to artificially drive upgrades, since Word pretty much was capable of doing anything it would reasonably need to do a decade ago. Perhaps usability is being improved, I couldn't say since I haven't seen that last couple versions, all I can say is that I was able to get what I wanted with Open Office and markup-based tools with far less effort and hair-pulling.
Leaving aside the fact that I've never met a DTP person who liked Word (not that I've met many), Word is like using an F-15. Fine if you are flying hundreds of miles and fighting MIGs, but most people are using it to go to grocery store to go food shopping. If you just needed milk, bread and eggs, you could use WordPad, but for a familiy of 6 for the week, that won't work. So I have two choices, the F-15 or a scooter with a basket. I maintain my claim that Word wholly fails as a tool for the semi-casual user, and even if everything you say is correct, and I have every reason to believe it is, the last time I used Word, it crashed and couldn't recover my document. In the software development world, that's called a "show-stopper", but in the world of Microsoft for a mature product that's been around for 20 years, I guess it's just not that bad. I suppose that's acceptable losses for a Microsoft product because they largely don't have to worry about competition. It's ironic, because short of occasional hardware and/or hardware driver problems, I don't think I've never seen XP crash (I have seen Vista lock up and crash out of the blue though), so I guess MS just doesn't care that much.
The problem is not me, the problem is Word. If the company that is requiring me to use it (which my current employer does not) is willing to spring for a few days of training that don't come out of _my_ schedule, that would be fine, but they expect you to learn this Soviet-bureaucracy-style software through osmosis or something, and it's not like the documentation helps. I'm sorry, Homie don't play that game, I got code to write. I can knock out perfectly nice looking documents in a small fraction of the time with markup or even OOo and get back to work, and generate any format they would want. In fact, that's what I ended up doing and that was a big win. ReStructured Text is so simple a 7-year-old could use it to do things he or she could never do with Word. But as you say, I guess that's the 7-year-old's fault, not Microsoft's.
If Word simply had a mode like Word Perfect used to have where you could see the "codes", that would probably fix the problem as well since you understand what Word is doing, since it's not keen on letting you know. GUIs are for drawing, not writing, IMO, and perhaps that's why text-based tools are an order of magnitude more flexible and easy to use, despite having been abandoned by everyone but programming types. The real problem is that Word Process is not Desktop Publishing, but everyone seems to have forgotten that. WYSIWYG can be veyr harmful in that regard, since you spend all your time trying to make the document look right rather than worrying about the actual content. Now it may be the case that the templates I was given were not well-made, but that doesn't explain why things like autonumbering are a complete nightmare (and well-documented by critics).
"three foot long feet"?
Depending on where you put the hyphen, Napoleon might have had 15 toes.
10's of thousands of lines?
This is Windows. Try 10's of millions of lines. And I agree, that it is rocket science (rhetorically), but Microsoft has still completely screwed it up for decades. The problem isn't (IMO) the software engineeers. Those guys tend to be very smart and competent, but as is the case, management totally ruins their efforts. I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server and the guy was top-notch. I often teased him, and asked him why "such-and-such" was so bad, and his response was usually that "MS didn't put the good people on that"
For instance "Internet Connection Sharing" (this was about 6 years ago). He said all the competent people worked on NAT, so ICS suffered. But how much of Vista is grotesquely overcomplicated compared to XP due to DRM and other nonsense that doesn't serve any customer?
I agree. Clarke is one of the last of the great science fiction writers who got started in the Golden Age of SF from mid-20th century. If he doesn't want to boast, we can boast for him. The guy's done good in his career and we geeks are lucky to have him.
But the code is using signed integers.
Of course, I agree with you that the -1 version is suboptimal from a clarity point of view.
Thank you for reminding me why I love programming in C(++): Because you always know exactly what will happen, and its potential effects.
It affects the game play if you can't get the game to work, and from what I've heard, it not only does that sometimes, but also can cause problems with the OS. That is crucially important.
I played System Shock and System Shock 2 and they are among my favorite games ever. I will not buy Bioshock for this reason. Whether that's a "me problem" or not, it is a lost sale.
More importantly, while you have the Constitutional right to Free Speech, you don't, in fact, have the Constitutional right to Be Heard. I think a lot of people forget this.
Of course, speech is meant to be heard, and I can (and do) rant on my blog till the cows come home, which is free available to anyone on the planet with a computer and an Internet connection. However, no one is required to look at it, for that I must rely on any merit of what I happen to say to attract readers.
Ultimately, the miracle and the curse of the Internet is that there, essentially, an infinite number of Hyde Park Speaker's Corners and I would take a further stance that the biggest GII's are mostly actively interested in distorting the truth and manipulating perceptions to further their own agendas. This was always true, to some extent, but in the past couple of years many of them have stopped even pretending it isn't.
Yeah, Word sucks, but lack of education on your part doesn't help. You'd have the same problems in OO, btw.
Not really true. I couldn't make tables in Word to save my life, but they were easy and intuitive in Open Office Write.
Maybe they just think more like me.
The problem I have is that I shouldn't need a freakin' PhD to be a casual business user, especially when I have 20+ years of software development experience (much of it involving GUIs and end-user applications). I consider myself on the bottom end of "expert" in terms of UI design, but Word is completely baffling to me in a way that I found Open Office not to be. The problem is that Word tries to be smarter than it could ever possibly be... typical of MS GUI's in that it makes your job very easy for a very narrow domain of problems that involve thinking and working exactly the way they want you to. It is a huge conceit of UI developers, especially for something like Word, which is probably used by 90% of Windows users (at least in business) whether they have any reason to (IMO, WordPad accomplishes 95% of what 95% of the users need) or not. Using Word for most people is like trying to take an F-15 down the corner 7-Eleven. It's the wrong tool for most of what everyone does... and talking to professional publishers, etc, they hate it even more.
IMO, Word fails in every way, but people have become so inured to suffering with Word and tools like it that we assume that's just the way it is and always will be despite promises to the contrary from the industry for the last 20+ years. I feel the same about Access, BTW, but I like Excel a lot. I've never had much need for it, but having used 1-2-3 back in the day, I find Excel simple and intuitive, and I always make it do what I want and look how I want with little or no trouble. I don't unconditionally hate Microsoft products, but some things they have done and continue to do merit hate. (Recall I also said I like XP overall. Er, maybe that was in a different thread.)
I fixed your typos.
So basically, M$ is going to screw customers. This should be fun to watch. Just another reason for linux.
It used to be that bugs would occur because of improbable things happening in the software at run-time or when it was written, but Microsoft is perfecting the art of doing everything it can to make sure improbable things do happen. Most of the new functionality in Vista is, in essence, to make things _not_ work, at least under certain circumstances.
Memo to Microsoft: You can't make things work when you're trying to make things work. What makes you think you're going to make things that work when you make them ten times as complicated by making them not work except in some rare circumstance?
Most people, when something gets too big, bloated and complicated, eventually decide to tear it down and start over with a cleaner, simpler design. Microsoft tears it down and starts over with something even bigger, more bloated and hugely more complex. Let's face it folks, you can only conclude they _want_ bloat. They want software that looks and works like the U.S. tax code. They spent 5 years with their heads down, working furiously to make something that makes XP look lean, mean and streamlined. My only conclusion is that MS management is insane or actively hates users. Occam's Razor says (in a way) we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but with Vista, stupidity just isn't the simplest and most likely answer any more. Windows 95 suffered from extreme stupidity. XP was pretty decent, but had problems, largely due to stupidity. Vista's deficiencies show way too much intent to be the product of mere stupidity. I can seriously conclude that Vista is the result of a deliberate attempt to render computers less useful.
But at least Excel is a decent product, at least in my experience. Word is horrible, and my last experience with Word was on a Mac, where it was worse than horrible. In my opinion, Word has destroyed word processing. It is a complete drain of productivity, buggy beyond anything I could imagine for a product that has been around for something like 20 years. On the Mac, it managed to crash _and_ lose my document. Yes, it corrupted the file on disk and couldn't restore it. I hadn't seen anything that ludicrous in something like 20 years, and this was in 2006, fer cryin' out loud.
I finally decided to ignore the company standard, wrote the document using ReStructured Text and delivered a really sharp-looking PDF in a tiny fraction of the time it took to attempt to do the same thing in that steaming pile of crap from MS. No one really cares, and I could have generated RTF or something to convert to a Word doc if they did. I really started with an open mind since I hadn't used Word recently, but after about the 10th time it would randomly change fonts or styles or mess up the auto-numbering, I was getting violently angry at it. I've never seen a piece of software do so many wrong things for no obvious reason. It was like anti-DWIM... some kind of perverse AI that was smarter than HAL 9000, but evil.
I also wrote some non-trivial documentation in OpenOffice about a year and a half ago, and while it was somewhat buggy as well, it was far easier to use than Word. This was 2.0, IIRC, and I found it overall to be nice to use. I was able to get done what I needed to get done, make it look how I wanted and didn't suffer from constant alterations for no apparent reason. The difference was, at least to me, that while both programs were buggy, OOo was buggy because, well, it has bugs. Word seemed buggy more because it is so grotesquely overcomplicated you could never predict what it was supposed to do, leave alone whether it did it, and when it didn't do what I wanted, I could never figure out why it did what it did, and in many cases why it would even make sense to do what it did. For instance, I quickly learned that the only way to change the font of a particular piece of text was to select the text, change the font, at which point Word would change the font for the entire document, and then choose undo, at which point the entire document would revert to the original font except what I had originally selected. This behaviour was very consistent, so I had to conclude that was probably how it was supposed to work. Either the developers of Word should be shot for having such a huge and obvious bug, or shot for thinking that kind of behavior doesn't violate practically every principle of UI from the last 30 years. Similarly, I found that Word supported exporting a document to HTML, which was useful for the work I was doing, but any time I would use that function, there was a fair chance that the resulting HTML would contain completely random color or style changes that weren't in the original. It was like using IBM software from the 80's, except the IBM software, while being the pinnacle of user hostile, was at least logical.
Word is the most horrible piece of commercial software I've ever used that wasn't written by some 11th grader in Visual Basic 3 as a piece of $29 shareware. Oh wait, I have to add "or wasn't written by Rational". Gotta be fair, now.
"Microsoft has just turned on Reduced Functionality mode"
I thought they did that when they released Vista. I've used MS software for 25 years, and developed software for it for almost 20. I always had a mixed attitude towards MS. They did some things well, and many things poorly, but Windows NT/2000/XP were pretty decent overall, and I enjoyed (and still enjoy) using them. I replaced two laptops this year, which of course meant I got that total turd of a product, Vista. Having experienced Vista, I have fully swung over to hating Microsoft. I promised my wife that the cheapest laptop I could buy would blow her 6-year-old lappy out of the water (plus there were other reasons it needed to be replaced). However, despite the fact that the new machine had a 40% faster processor and 3x as much memory (1.5GB because I bought extra memory), it was substantially slower than the creaky old Toshiba running XP. Putting Vista on this low-end Gateway was criminal, and the fact that Microsoft would let a company saddle their hardware with this bloat, and the fact that Gateway would cripple an otherwise decent little machine is insane. It would be like selling a car with half the cylinders broken, dirty plugs, and broken springs sticking out of the seats.
Microsoft needs to die. They are now completely useless, and now completely evil). Until I experienced Vista I would have never said that, but with this release, they have reduced functionality, performance, and managed to spend 5 years building an OS that nobody could ever want with new features that no one would ever choose (except for maybe the shiny UI, which isn't as stomach-churningly ugly as the XP Playskool theme, but it's not great). I tried installing XP on the poor little Gateway, but it couldn't even find a driver for the network adapter (I was as surprised as I was disappointed, plus it couldn't ID the wireless adapter, the video card and a number of other devices). Rather than struggle for hours trying to identify the network adapter, copy drivers from another machine via a USB stick, I installed Kubuntu and had the little lady up and running in about an hour... and I can't tell the difference between her bottom-of-the-line Gateway and my middle-of-the-line HP (also running Linux) when it comes to browsing and e-mailing, which is most of what she does. To me, this is the year of Linux, and Vista is a total abortion that will hopefully prove to be another nail in the coffin of a company that clearly has nothing to offer other than to feed its fat, bloated and decaying corpse with everything it can wring out of its monopolistic actions from the last 20 years. Microsoft is not irrelevant yet, but we have seen, years ago, the last of anything positive they have to offer to the world of operating systems.
Well, given that Congress only has two priorities (1. Appearing to do something, and 2. Turning tricks for their corporate pimps), I'd guess that the best we can hope for is that it doesn't make things worse.
Plus, you can write your release notes in Wingdings.
At the risk of being called an anti-Semite...
Perhaps. I'll have to go back and watch them again. Now I can understand that having non-human Borg could be a budget issue... I'm always willing to cut Star Trek slack in those terms*, and there are possible reasons that the Borg cubes are manned primarily with males, but I think it would have been a very effective dramatic tool to see women and even children among the assimilated Borg. Of course, there's also the TV standards, since they were in combat... so many obstacles in the way of proper science fiction.
* Especially in the scene from "First Contact" where the Borg are working in space. It would have made a lot more sense to me if the drones were equipped with some kind of spacesuits or helmets, but that would have required a whole new set of very complicated costumes. It seems implausible that even a Borg could operate in the vacuum of space without additional hardware.
The character of Lilly in "First Contact" put it best when she called them "bionic zombies". The Borg were an excellent, if not particularly original, creation, but by about 4th time they were used, it got old. The character of the Borg Queen was interesting, but it just pointed out the absurdity that 99% of the Borg were male humans. The only non-male Borg were 7 of 9 and one or two of the assimilated crew of the Enterprise from the movie.
Why would they want to support their cards on a processor type they don't produce?
Because they aren't evil, vindictive bastards like, say, Microsoft?