You're absolutely right. However, if you added up the number of people who watched "Survivor" or "Who Wants to Look Even Stupider than Regis Philbin is Annoying?" I bet every game published in the last year doesn't come close to that number. And let's not forget the Bush/Gore Celebrity Death Match in Florida. This was Real History (TM) happening.
Also, while computer games are very pervasive, even my Mom plays FreeCell, there's a big difference between the casual gamers (like my Mom) and the hardcore people who had a reason to coin the term "Evercrack".
Here are some aspects of popular culture that are and probably will always be more popular than computer gaming:
Going to church
Watching Sports
Playing Sports
Listening to the radio
Reading newspapers/magazines (even if they are online)
Reading popular fiction (ditto)
Politics
Complaining about politics
Watching TV (OK, this one will probably go down over time)
Also, I do frequent stores like Wal-Mart, etc, and the book sections are always bigger than the game sections, and the local bookstores generally have about 10 times as much space devoted to such esoteric subjects as history, popular fiction, science or any of a number of other subjects than they do about gaming.
I'm not bashing gaming. I love it. I encourage my kids to play computer games (but not to excess, my wife will reel us in when necessary) and have a number of games for Christmas presents for them. Even my two-year-old is an avid computer user (her favorites are "Thomas the Tank Engine" and "Fisher-Price Toddler", but she loves to watch her older brothers play things like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Lode Runner.) So don't get me wrong, but any view that gaming is the (or even a) predominant element of culture is just a little skewed.
I bought it from a place called the "Daytron Superstore" and was able to download it directly, including 50-some megs of PDF documentation.
Unfortunately, the store is now gone. I just looked and the my order information is still intact and I could re-download it if I needed to, but the store itself is gone.
I bet if you looked around, though, someone would be bound to have it for sale.
> The PC Data survey greatly underscores the idea that gaming has become a mainstream form of culture, if not the single most pervasive form of culture, in America.
Jon, I don't know what your idea of culture is, but you have GOT to get out and see RealLife (TM, Pat. Pend.) just a little bit more.
You've got this bizarre idea that the whole world revolves around computer gaming and the Internet. Believe it or not, some people still watch TV, read books (gasp!) or even go outside and take a walk.
You've got to stop gauging the experience of 270,000,000 Americans on the poorly-spelled comments of a few pimply-faced geeks and those stupid PlayStation 2 commercials.
I am an avid gamer and Internet user, but I still spend more time reading books or playing with my kids than doing either. I'm even so radical as to have conversations with my wife. I guess I'm just a cultural throwback mired in the low-tech past.
A little hunting will get you downloadable versions of almost every Infocom game ever made for about $20-$25 total. Activision has several bundles available, both small (5-6 games) and big (about 33). I purchased them the last time a big Infocom story was on Slashdot because I enjoyed many of them in the 80's too.
I think the most fascinating one I ever played was "A Mind Forever Voyaging", in which I got completely stuck about 15 years ago. I've started it again and hope to eventually win it.
That sounds better, still, you can accomplish the same thing with Proxomitron.
I don't really see Netscape and Microsoft going out of their way to make it easy to avoid advertising, so I think consumers are on their own on this one.
However, as long as the Web still runs using a simple ASCII-based and easily hackable protocol (HTTP), there's nothing they can't do that we can't break.
Rick, running Proxomitron and filtering about 9000 ad server domains...
Hey, guys, we all know there are plenty of tools for filtering out ads and popup windows, etc. Most of us probably use them, too.
Let's just continue to use them and let the advertisers happily spam all the non-nerd users while we slide through the system with less visual clutter, not being tracked or bombarded with images of products we'll never buy anyway.
Sounds like a win-win situation. Advertisers maintain the status quo and those of us in the know get to avoid all the stupid advertising.
Sounds obnoxious? It is. But the alternative is to pay for useful sites or see more ads. I'd prefer the former if it comes down to that.
"Always ask before opening a pop-up"? So you want to replace all pop-ups with pop-ups?
Sounds like a plan...
Here's a better one. Get the Proxomitron. The browser makers aren't going make the advertisers angry, but there are plenty of other ways to avoid them.
OK, You've got a point. But on the other hand, language skills in general are still pathetic. I can hardly turn on the news or read a newpaper and not see/hear glaring grammatical errors, or gross mistatements based on a fundamental lack of arithmetic skills (e.g., confusing millions and billions), and don't get me started on the use of statistics. The writings from my fellows in the software world are generally awful, even from people who are highly intelligent and experienced.
I second that comment. The spelling was as bad as most of the AC posts. Furthermore, it was obviously not typos but real spelling errors.
It made the article really jarring to read. Hey, guys, can we at least have marginal grade-school spelling standards in the posted articles?!
Reading/. frightens me sometimes, knowing that people who don't even have basic spelling or grammar skills are the technology leaders of tomorrow (or even today!)
Actually, I think Cate Blanchett is an excellent choice. And don't forget Sir Ian McKellan as Gandalf. I can't wait to see him.
Remember, LOTR is about 1200 dense pages long. Even done as 3 movies, there will have to be _major_ elements of the story glossed over or left out entirely... it's a limitation of the medium. Also, people have been reading these books for about 50 years, we've seen extensive artwork depicting the characters and places (I consider the Hildebrandt's work to be definitive myself), we all have mental images that the movie will contradict, perhaps gratingly, but I still think it's going to be worth the wait.
I'd have to say that "Spawn" was the worst movie I ever saw in the theater. Yes, even worse than "Short Circuit". The only reason I didn't leave was because I thought my friend wanted to stay. The only reason he didn't leave was because he thought _I_ wanted to stay.
I haven't seen the movie, nor do I intend to. I'd only have the tiniest of interest anyway since Hollywood takes fairly esoteric or old franchises and completely ruins them on a regular basis.
But after seeing the trailers, I _really_ don't want to see it. I could smell the wooden acting a mile away, as well as what I strongly suspect is a lot of lame attempts at humor.
A friend commented that it looks like "Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure". I disagreed because:
a. Bill and Ted was supposed to be stupid
b. It was actually very clever.
Anyhow, let's hope that the LOTR movie lives up toour expectations. I suspect that a few people in Hollywood are actually beginning to catch on about actually making movies based on something that the fans of that something would actually want to see. The X-Men was very good, but I think they've got a long way to go in general. After all, unless it would be an adaptation of one of the modules or novels (and the only one of those I ever read was so much of a rip-off of Tolkien than I never finished it), that would mean that a Hollywood person would have to actually write a plot, and we all know that there more creative writing talent in the average kindergarten class than in all of Hollywood.
You're correct. Here's the relevant quote from the L.A. Times since a lot of people seem to have missed it:
FCC officials contend that 10-digit dialing would create tens of millions of new local phone numbers beginning with the digit "1" or "0." Currently, ones and zeros can't be used at the beginning of a seven-digit local number because they signal that the caller is making a long-distance or operator-assisted call.
Actually, I wouldn't use it for that. I think there's plenty of other good uses that could be put to.
And as far as ad banners not working, that's old news. I'm amazed that anyone can convince investors that they are a viable revenue source to base a business on. It's enough to make this computer nerd interested in economics.
$x/month for xMB of disk space and xMb/s bandwidth on a server with a good connection.
Provide a simple and secure access UI on the Web as well as support for ftp and streaming of data at a specific bandwidth.
The data is encrypted. You use it how you see fit. No questions asked.
I know there are services that do some of this (like MP3.com), but do any of them provide everything I describe?
Also, is this idea even feasible in a business sense (I'm sure the FBI would have kittens, but they hate everything)? It seems to simple and useful to actually happen.
But the point is, even with this service, you'd STILL have to carry your CD's around with you in case it suddenly decides you need to verify.
Let's face it, if the this draconian mess is the best that the RIAA can come up with than people will still just continue to pirate ad infinitum.
Anyone who ever succeeds in the business of providing a service knows that customers hate hassle. I think the whole idea is a crock and refuse to engage in any service that treats me like a crook and forces me to "prove" I am not on its terms.
In any event, I carry a laptop and about 300 hours of MP3's of music I own legitimate (i.e., paid-for CD's) copies of in my bag, so anything like MP3.com is not worth my trouble even if it were free.
Yes, after reading Katz it's _clearly_ not easy... and I write all the time, thank you very much.
Just because writing is hard doesn't mean it's not okay to level legitimate criticism against an exmaple of it. I enjoy reading Katz's little phillipics even though I think he's usually full of it. On the other hand, he _always_ generates a good disucssion, and that's exactly what he's trying to do!
I'm sorry... Wagner's music is far sexier than anything to come out of the modern corporate gruel factories and he didn't have to pose in his underwear to be famous.
Popular music as a culture actually has little to do with music... how could it? It's all the same. When's the last time you saw a popular female singer who didn't have professional model-looks? There are a small number. I might be dating myself but in the 70's every one was gaga over Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac who's voice was OK in the early years, but eventually she sounded like a cigaretty grandma? Her bandmate Christine McVie was fairly plain-looking, but far more talented in singing and songwriting, but she was never as popular. Coincidence?
Would the Spice Girls have been as popular if they weren't deluging the world with images of buoyant breasts and clockwork choreography, as well as the incredible marketing power of their puppetmasters in the industry? I have to wonder.
The popular music sections have to have soft-porn decorations to make up for the fact that there's no substance there. Do adults listen to the same music as they did when they were teenagers, or do they look back at that music as silly bubblegum stuff. I do, but I'm an exception as I had a musical background, but my much younger brother went through a rap phase and an alternative phase and a classic rock phase and now listens to blues and bluegrass. Quite an evolution, I'd say.
>Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
And how is this different from the 60's? or when Mark Twain made the famous quote about his father not knowing anything when he was 14? or when Socrates complained about the "youth today"?
Children have always in some ways advanced beyond their parents... that's called advancement of society. However, that does not mean that the accumulated wisdom of adults is irrelevant or meaningless. The fact of the matter is, all this technology which we so happily embrace (me too!) only outmodes a limited part of life and thinking. Morals do not change (the popular mores of society might). Truth does not change although our understanding of it does. If you take this article to its logical conclusion, we have nothing to learn from the past. Clearly this is not true.
Futhermore, while the pace of technology is surely accelerating, I think Katz has a very limited view of the world. Most people are not immersed in the computer world the way we/. types are.
Gaming is changing popular culture? Sure.
Are book publishing, opera, classical music, dance, endangered? Hardly.
You want a good modern opera? Try Dream Theater's latest album "Metropolis part 2"? Classical music? I'd offer up the recent huge explosion of progressive-oriented rock and jazz music mostly created by people with a strong classical background. There's a rich world of complex, sophisticated and rich music out there to be found, just don't try to find it on the radio or MTV. Dance? Seems to me dancing is as popular as ever, even as a performance art. Consider something like Cirque du Soleil... These forms of culture are changing as all do, but they aren't going away any time soon or this will be a boring, sad old world indeed.
Ummm... if that were the case it would have to orbiting the Sun inside Earth's orbit.
The value 74 AU's, OTOH, corresponds roughly to the 7 billion miles (not light years, people) number that's been quoted elsewhere.
Why would it only be a few 10's of millions of miles away after 35 years, when Galileo reached Jupiter (c. 500 million miles from the Sun) in just a couple of years?
Absolutely not, and it was a big controversy at the time. There was absolutely no reason for it other than Microsoft screwing with customers. Not only that but they also slightly altered the OLE Automation interface, so code to operate Office 95 apps wouldn't work on Office 97.
Again, they did this for no other reason than to force some people to upgrade.
> Dont accept documents made in Office. Dont work with partners who use Office documents. Dont take customers who use Office.
And how long would you work for a company if you took that kind of attitude? I was referring to a business environment where being uncooperative is usually frowned upon. I'm not a consultant who can afford to piss off customers, nor the CEO of a company who can dictate the standards. So I use what I need.
For me personally at home, I use the Word viewer, etc, and that works just fine.
But my original point was that Microsoft was arrogant enough to make OFfice 97 documents break Office 95 documents... I wouldn't put it past them to do something like that again, especially when the subscription model becomes a lot more common.
>"I'm happy with my Office 2000 and don't feel inclined ever again up pay to upgrade".
That is until everyone you work with starts giving you Office 2002 documents which your software won't load. That was the _only_ reason I stopped using Office 95.
Face it, in a business setting, if you use Microsoft you'll have to upgrade as soon as anyone you work with upgrades.
Personally, I've never had a use for anything more sophisticated than WordPad (actually I do everything in Multi-edit), and any time I've tried any non-trivial use of Word, I end up giving up in frustration. The only Office app I've ever had any use for is Access, and it is a total piece of crap, and occasionally Excel, which actually seems like a usable product.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. However, if you added up the number of people who watched "Survivor" or "Who Wants to Look Even Stupider than Regis Philbin is Annoying?" I bet every game published in the last year doesn't come close to that number. And let's not forget the Bush/Gore Celebrity Death Match in Florida. This was Real History (TM) happening.
Also, while computer games are very pervasive, even my Mom plays FreeCell, there's a big difference between the casual gamers (like my Mom) and the hardcore people who had a reason to coin the term "Evercrack".
Here are some aspects of popular culture that are and probably will always be more popular than computer gaming:
Going to church
Watching Sports
Playing Sports
Listening to the radio
Reading newspapers/magazines (even if they are online)
Reading popular fiction (ditto)
Politics
Complaining about politics
Watching TV (OK, this one will probably go down over time)
Also, I do frequent stores like Wal-Mart, etc, and the book sections are always bigger than the game sections, and the local bookstores generally have about 10 times as much space devoted to such esoteric subjects as history, popular fiction, science or any of a number of other subjects than they do about gaming.
I'm not bashing gaming. I love it. I encourage my kids to play computer games (but not to excess, my wife will reel us in when necessary) and have a number of games for Christmas presents for them. Even my two-year-old is an avid computer user (her favorites are "Thomas the Tank Engine" and "Fisher-Price Toddler", but she loves to watch her older brothers play things like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Lode Runner.) So don't get me wrong, but any view that gaming is the (or even a) predominant element of culture is just a little skewed.
I bought it from a place called the "Daytron Superstore" and was able to download it directly, including 50-some megs of PDF documentation.
Unfortunately, the store is now gone. I just looked and the my order information is still intact and I could re-download it if I needed to, but the store itself is gone.
I bet if you looked around, though, someone would be bound to have it for sale.
Sorry, I couldn't be more help.
Rick
> The PC Data survey greatly underscores the idea that gaming has become a mainstream form of culture, if not the single most pervasive form of culture, in America.
Jon, I don't know what your idea of culture is, but you have GOT to get out and see RealLife (TM, Pat. Pend.) just a little bit more.
You've got this bizarre idea that the whole world revolves around computer gaming and the Internet. Believe it or not, some people still watch TV, read books (gasp!) or even go outside and take a walk.
You've got to stop gauging the experience of 270,000,000 Americans on the poorly-spelled comments of a few pimply-faced geeks and those stupid PlayStation 2 commercials.
I am an avid gamer and Internet user, but I still spend more time reading books or playing with my kids than doing either. I'm even so radical as to have conversations with my wife. I guess I'm just a cultural throwback mired in the low-tech past.
Rick
A little hunting will get you downloadable versions of almost every Infocom game ever made for about $20-$25 total. Activision has several bundles available, both small (5-6 games) and big (about 33). I purchased them the last time a big Infocom story was on Slashdot because I enjoyed many of them in the 80's too.
I think the most fascinating one I ever played was "A Mind Forever Voyaging", in which I got completely stuck about 15 years ago. I've started it again and hope to eventually win it.
That sounds better, still, you can accomplish the same thing with Proxomitron.
I don't really see Netscape and Microsoft going out of their way to make it easy to avoid advertising, so I think consumers are on their own on this one.
However, as long as the Web still runs using a simple ASCII-based and easily hackable protocol (HTTP), there's nothing they can't do that we can't break.
Rick, running Proxomitron and filtering about 9000 ad server domains...
Hey, guys, we all know there are plenty of tools for filtering out ads and popup windows, etc. Most of us probably use them, too.
Let's just continue to use them and let the advertisers happily spam all the non-nerd users while we slide through the system with less visual clutter, not being tracked or bombarded with images of products we'll never buy anyway.
Sounds like a win-win situation. Advertisers maintain the status quo and those of us in the know get to avoid all the stupid advertising.
Sounds obnoxious? It is. But the alternative is to pay for useful sites or see more ads. I'd prefer the former if it comes down to that.
Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone what we are up to.
Rick
"Always ask before opening a pop-up"? So you want to replace all pop-ups with pop-ups?
Sounds like a plan...
Here's a better one. Get the Proxomitron. The browser makers aren't going make the advertisers angry, but there are plenty of other ways to avoid them.
OK, You've got a point. But on the other hand, language skills in general are still pathetic. I can hardly turn on the news or read a newpaper and not see/hear glaring grammatical errors, or gross mistatements based on a fundamental lack of arithmetic skills (e.g., confusing millions and billions), and don't get me started on the use of statistics. The writings from my fellows in the software world are generally awful, even from people who are highly intelligent and experienced.
I second that comment. The spelling was as bad as most of the AC posts. Furthermore, it was obviously not typos but real spelling errors.
/. frightens me sometimes, knowing that people who don't even have basic spelling or grammar skills are the technology leaders of tomorrow (or even today!)
It made the article really jarring to read. Hey, guys, can we at least have marginal grade-school spelling standards in the posted articles?!
Reading
Get a clue, guys, read some books for a change!
Rick
BTW, it's "Teri Hatcher".
Actually, I think Cate Blanchett is an excellent choice. And don't forget Sir Ian McKellan as Gandalf. I can't wait to see him.
Remember, LOTR is about 1200 dense pages long. Even done as 3 movies, there will have to be _major_ elements of the story glossed over or left out entirely... it's a limitation of the medium. Also, people have been reading these books for about 50 years, we've seen extensive artwork depicting the characters and places (I consider the Hildebrandt's work to be definitive myself), we all have mental images that the movie will contradict, perhaps gratingly, but I still think it's going to be worth the wait.
I'd have to say that "Spawn" was the worst movie I ever saw in the theater. Yes, even worse than "Short Circuit". The only reason I didn't leave was because I thought my friend wanted to stay. The only reason he didn't leave was because he thought _I_ wanted to stay.
I haven't seen the movie, nor do I intend to. I'd only have the tiniest of interest anyway since Hollywood takes fairly esoteric or old franchises and completely ruins them on a regular basis.
But after seeing the trailers, I _really_ don't want to see it. I could smell the wooden acting a mile away, as well as what I strongly suspect is a lot of lame attempts at humor.
A friend commented that it looks like "Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure". I disagreed because:
a. Bill and Ted was supposed to be stupid
b. It was actually very clever.
Anyhow, let's hope that the LOTR movie lives up toour expectations. I suspect that a few people in Hollywood are actually beginning to catch on about actually making movies based on something that the fans of that something would actually want to see. The X-Men was very good, but I think they've got a long way to go in general. After all, unless it would be an adaptation of one of the modules or novels (and the only one of those I ever read was so much of a rip-off of Tolkien than I never finished it), that would mean that a Hollywood person would have to actually write a plot, and we all know that there more creative writing talent in the average kindergarten class than in all of Hollywood.
You're correct. Here's the relevant quote from the L.A. Times since a lot of people seem to have missed it:
FCC officials contend that 10-digit dialing would create tens of millions of new local phone numbers beginning with the digit "1" or "0." Currently, ones and zeros can't be used at the beginning of a seven-digit local number because they signal that the caller is making a long-distance or operator-assisted call.
Actually, I wouldn't use it for that. I think there's plenty of other good uses that could be put to.
And as far as ad banners not working, that's old news. I'm amazed that anyone can convince investors that they are a viable revenue source to base a business on. It's enough to make this computer nerd interested in economics.
$x/month for xMB of disk space and xMb/s bandwidth on a server with a good connection.
Provide a simple and secure access UI on the Web as well as support for ftp and streaming of data at a specific bandwidth.
The data is encrypted. You use it how you see fit. No questions asked.
I know there are services that do some of this (like MP3.com), but do any of them provide everything I describe?
Also, is this idea even feasible in a business sense (I'm sure the FBI would have kittens, but they hate everything)? It seems to simple and useful to actually happen.
But the point is, even with this service, you'd STILL have to carry your CD's around with you in case it suddenly decides you need to verify.
Let's face it, if the this draconian mess is the best that the RIAA can come up with than people will still just continue to pirate ad infinitum.
Anyone who ever succeeds in the business of providing a service knows that customers hate hassle. I think the whole idea is a crock and refuse to engage in any service that treats me like a crook and forces me to "prove" I am not on its terms.
In any event, I carry a laptop and about 300 hours of MP3's of music I own legitimate (i.e., paid-for CD's) copies of in my bag, so anything like MP3.com is not worth my trouble even if it were free.
Thanks for the clue. I really should read up on my space probes... :)
Rick
Yes, after reading Katz it's _clearly_ not easy... and I write all the time, thank you very much.
Just because writing is hard doesn't mean it's not okay to level legitimate criticism against an exmaple of it. I enjoy reading Katz's little phillipics even though I think he's usually full of it. On the other hand, he _always_ generates a good disucssion, and that's exactly what he's trying to do!
I'm sorry... Wagner's music is far sexier than anything to come out of the modern corporate gruel factories and he didn't have to pose in his underwear to be famous.
Popular music as a culture actually has little to do with music... how could it? It's all the same. When's the last time you saw a popular female singer who didn't have professional model-looks? There are a small number. I might be dating myself but in the 70's every one was gaga over Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac who's voice was OK in the early years, but eventually she sounded like a cigaretty grandma? Her bandmate Christine McVie was fairly plain-looking, but far more talented in singing and songwriting, but she was never as popular. Coincidence?
Would the Spice Girls have been as popular if they weren't deluging the world with images of buoyant breasts and clockwork choreography, as well as the incredible marketing power of their puppetmasters in the industry? I have to wonder.
The popular music sections have to have soft-porn decorations to make up for the fact that there's no substance there. Do adults listen to the same music as they did when they were teenagers, or do they look back at that music as silly bubblegum stuff. I do, but I'm an exception as I had a musical background, but my much younger brother went through a rap phase and an alternative phase and a classic rock phase and now listens to blues and bluegrass. Quite an evolution, I'd say.
>Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
/. types are.
And how is this different from the 60's? or when Mark Twain made the famous quote about his father not knowing anything when he was 14? or when Socrates complained about the "youth today"?
Children have always in some ways advanced beyond their parents... that's called advancement of society. However, that does not mean that the accumulated wisdom of adults is irrelevant or meaningless. The fact of the matter is, all this technology which we so happily embrace (me too!) only outmodes a limited part of life and thinking. Morals do not change (the popular mores of society might). Truth does not change although our understanding of it does. If you take this article to its logical conclusion, we have nothing to learn from the past. Clearly this is not true.
Futhermore, while the pace of technology is surely accelerating, I think Katz has a very limited view of the world. Most people are not immersed in the computer world the way we
Gaming is changing popular culture? Sure.
Are book publishing, opera, classical music, dance, endangered? Hardly.
You want a good modern opera? Try Dream Theater's latest album "Metropolis part 2"? Classical music? I'd offer up the recent huge explosion of progressive-oriented rock and jazz music mostly created by people with a strong classical background. There's a rich world of complex, sophisticated and rich music out there to be found, just don't try to find it on the radio or MTV. Dance? Seems to me dancing is as popular as ever, even as a performance art. Consider something like Cirque du Soleil... These forms of culture are changing as all do, but they aren't going away any time soon or this will be a boring, sad old world indeed.
Ummm... if that were the case it would have to orbiting the Sun inside Earth's orbit.
The value 74 AU's, OTOH, corresponds roughly to the 7 billion miles (not light years, people) number that's been quoted elsewhere.
Why would it only be a few 10's of millions of miles away after 35 years, when Galileo reached Jupiter (c. 500 million miles from the Sun) in just a couple of years?
I can't happen until Martin Landau is on the moon....
Rick
Absolutely not, and it was a big controversy at the time. There was absolutely no reason for it other than Microsoft screwing with customers. Not only that but they also slightly altered the OLE Automation interface, so code to operate Office 95 apps wouldn't work on Office 97.
Again, they did this for no other reason than to force some people to upgrade.
She was 2.1 until the, er, blessed event.
Seriously, congrats to Linus! I have four kids and they are truly a blessing.
> Dont accept documents made in Office. Dont work with partners who use Office documents. Dont take customers who use Office.
And how long would you work for a company if you took that kind of attitude? I was referring to a business environment where being uncooperative is usually frowned upon. I'm not a consultant who can afford to piss off customers, nor the CEO of a company who can dictate the standards. So I use what I need.
For me personally at home, I use the Word viewer, etc, and that works just fine.
But my original point was that Microsoft was arrogant enough to make OFfice 97 documents break Office 95 documents... I wouldn't put it past them to do something like that again, especially when the subscription model becomes a lot more common.
>"I'm happy with my Office 2000 and don't feel inclined ever again up pay to upgrade".
That is until everyone you work with starts giving you Office 2002 documents which your software won't load. That was the _only_ reason I stopped using Office 95.
Face it, in a business setting, if you use Microsoft you'll have to upgrade as soon as anyone you work with upgrades.
Personally, I've never had a use for anything more sophisticated than WordPad (actually I do everything in Multi-edit), and any time I've tried any non-trivial use of Word, I end up giving up in frustration. The only Office app I've ever had any use for is Access, and it is a total piece of crap, and occasionally Excel, which actually seems like a usable product.