Pricing and cost analysis is a rather complex topic that there's a lot of academic theory for, but in my experience many / most companies rely on a combination of very basic analysis, "gut feel" and "look what the other guy is doing" to figure out. I worked for 6 years as a product manager for various kinds of service providers, so I've had direct experience with it. BTW: service providers often use the terms "product" and "service" interchangeably for what the outside world would call a service, so my apologies if I switch back and forth. It goes something like this.
Let's look at cost first. Typically, service providers think of costs as some percentage of the dollars coming in for a given service. They break these down into several categories. Although each company is different, here's a simple example:
Cost of goods sold: These are dollars that the companies spends to provide the specific service. More on this later.
"SG&A": Sales, General and Administrative. Otherwise known as "overhead" -- cost associated with running the company that aren't tied specifically to a service (management salaries, office space, etc...). Sometimes sales salaries and marketing are broken out from this on a per-service basis, other times they are lumped into the general company overhead costs.
Margin: This is the money left over after the company's costs are taken care of. If the company sells everything directly at retail price, this is equal to profit. However, if a company has resellers or other types of "sales channels", they will be paid a certain percentage of the margin for selling the product. Discounts also come out of this chunk.
Very rough rule of thumb: cost of goods sold should *never* exceed 50% of "retail" (undiscounted) revenue in the telecom / service provider space. Of course, if a company is desperate for business they may give away very large portions of the margin percentage in the form of discounts, etc...
The "cost of goods sold" for a typical hosted dedicated server generally break down into several major categories, that may or may not be broken out as different "services":
Hardware cost & software licensing: This is the fixed purchase cost of the dedicated server itself, and any associated software licenses. This is typically paid directly by the customer up-front, or broken down into lease-like payments and buried in a flat monthly fee.
Data center: These are costs of having the server sitting in the data center, including lease cost of the space, supporting rack and LAN infrastructure, electricity, cooling, security, etc... Typically these costs are figured based on averages per square ft. of server room space or by rack space.
Operations / management: These are the costs of management services provided for the server: NOC staffing, management / monitoring system cost, tape backup costs, etc... In the case of colocation, this may be minimal or non-existant, while it's very significant for dedicated / managed services, since you're paying for system administrators to upgrade your OS, apply patches, etc...
Customer service / support: Costs for the right to call someone on the phone and get help with your service. This primarily includes call center infrastructure & support staff salaries. Again, may vary widely depending on the level of service selected.
Bandwidth: At a minimum, this is the cost of the routing infrastructure, the cost of the WAN part of the NOC staff and systems, and the monthly costs paid to the upstream providers for big dedicated pipes. Your average hosting company is not running their own fiber or even buying dedicated circuits: they are buying IP transport from a large ISP, and pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Usually, they'll lay in a very large fiber pipe to the ISP's local POP, and then activate additional bandwidth as needed. I can't break down the long-haul ISP's costs for providing that bandwidth, but presumably it breaks down similarly.
Now, a few words about pricing, and specifically bandwidth pricing, since the poster was interested in that. Aside from bandwidth, the costs above are reasonably predictable from customer to customer and month to month. The more predictable a cost is, the more likely a service provider is to lump it in with a bunch of other costs and charge a flat fee. The less predictable a cost is, the more likely it's going to be metered and broken out.
In general, customers demand / want flat, fixed, predictable prices. This is why ISPs charge $19.95/month for dialup rather than $.05 / hr. Of course, at some level the ISPs price for dialup is proportional to actual use, but they've figured out that, on average, they can make money at a $19.95 flat fee, and customers are willing to pay it. Of course, customers who use less are subsidizing the service of customers who use more. But as long as the *average* cost remains low enough that the low-usage customers feel they are paying a fair price, it works out.
Server bandwidth is a case where it doesn't work out. The amount of bandwidth that a single static web server is capable of consuming is quite stunning, and goes up along with Moore's law. Many hosting customers choose a dedicated server not because they need gallons of bandwidth, but because they have some sort of custom app or want full administrative control of their system. These folks aren't willing to pay a price that would cover the "average" cost of bandwidth across all an ISPs customers, which may include large streaming media systems or pr0n hosters. So the ISP meters / measures the bandwidth and charges each customer appropriately.
However, it's a bit more complicated than that. You'll notice that, if a customer buys a lot of bandwidth, they pay a lot less per GB than a small customer. The smallest customers may pay ridiculous prices for bandwidth if they exceed their plan (case in point the Farked "boobies" page that racked up $400 in bandwidth charges in two days). It's obvious that SPs are charging much more than their "costs" for the bandwidth in these cases, and you'll notice that the same thing is true for cell phone plans, etc... What's going on?
The answer is that it's all about predictability. A service provider must maintain adequate capacity for providing service. If they don't have enough upstream bandwidth, service quality for their entire user population goes down the toilet. It takes a long time to add additional capacity- new fiber needs to be run, new equipment purchased, etc... As a result, service providers are always buying new capacity in advance of demand, and to do this accurately they must be able to forecast demand. This boils down to getting accurate forecasts from their customers, which is impossible to do directly. Instead, as capitalists, they put economic incentives in place to motivate customers to predict their maximum demand accurately by pricing in tiers, or packages. Buy buying a particular bandwidth package (say, 20GB/month) you are effectively telling the provider that's how much you are planning to use, and they plan their capacity accordingly. Deviating from their master capacity plan is very, very costly for the service provider, and accordingly, the "right" to deviate from your plan as a customer is proportionally more expensive.
Another way to look at it. Customers who buy the smallest bandwidth package are the least "valuable" to the company because they are making no revenue commitments. They are also the most easily able to double, triple, or quadruple their demand from month to month because their servers are capable of consuming so much more bandwidth than they are buying. On the other hand, a large, multi-server customer is a more valuable customer, and is likely to be using a larger portion of the available capacity of their servers, and thus less likely to have wild changes in the amount of bandwidth they consume. The small customer thus pays much more per GB of bandwidth than the large customer, especially if they exceed their plan. In a lot of ways it's like the airline industry or any other industry where buying additional capacity is expensive and/or time consuming: you pay a premium for being able to use that capacity on short-notice.
Well, that's more than you probably ever wanted to know. Hope it's been educational.
There are a few papers available for download from their website, but you have to register. Basically, traditional voice recognition parses the audio stream into some meta-form, usually representing phonemes (the low-level "atomic" sounds that your speech consists of). These phonemes are then matched against a dictionary of known words (and the phonemes they consist of) and text is produced.
Because phoneme recognition is not particularly accurate (for example, it's hard to tell the difference between "hard d" as in "Dan" and "hard b" as in "Ban" over a noisy phone line), traditional speech to text systems use several approaches to improve accuracy. One is to improve the accuracy of the basic phoneme recognition by "training" it for a specific voice. Another is to use all sorts of hairy-language-specific grammar / syntax algorithms.
Computationally, it's the matching of the phonemes against the dictionary that's the most difficult, and the larger the dictionary, the less accurate and more CPU-chomping it becomes. In addition, searching the resulting text for specific matches grows less accurate as the search string increases in length, due to the likelihood of a transcription errors.
The cool thing that Fast Talk has done is to store and index the phoneme meta-data, rather than complete the recognition to text. When you enter search words, they break the search string into phonemes and look for matches that way. This has several positive benefits:
1. Computational resources are dramatically lessened, since the "phoneme recognition algorithms" are fast and there's no dictionary matching. 2. The matching doesn't depend on having the right words in the dictionary at input time. It works just as well for unusual proper names and technical jargon as it does for common words, since they're all formed from the same basic phonemes. 3. The longer the search string, the greater probability of an accurate match. 4. No need for accurate search string spelling. It doesn't matter if you know how to spell a word, as long as you can write it down phonetically.
In theory, the system should work for any language, but reality is that different languages do have different sets of phonemes, and I think Fast Talk has only really worked on English. So languages like Spanish that are fairly similar phonetically to English would probably work pretty well, but tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese or those with non-vocal sounds like the clicks and pops of the African Bushmen would require a rework of the phoneme recognition code.
The main downside of their system is that it doesn't actually produce text... which means that you'd need another speech-to-text system if you wanted transcripts, or want the data to be searchable with whatever standard text-based search engine you are using on your intranet. But they appear to be aiming at applications where that's not necessary. One of my favorite ideas is integrating it with a video editing suite and being able to jump to different cues in your video clip library simply by stating the dialogue that's found there.
Of course, one of the most obvious applications is for intelligence and security. So far it doesn't appear that the company is pushing too hard in that direction -- it was founded by an academic group that originally developed the technology for a library project at Georgia Tech. However, I'm betting that's where the real money is, and it's only a matter of time before their ideas are found in your favorite national department of big-brotherhood.
I'm guessing you won't get much flack because a lot of folks aren't even aware of E.E. "Doc" Smith in the first place. For those of you who weren't reading serials back in the 40's, E.E. "Doc" Smith is the inventor of the classic space opera. Yeah, he's the one who pretty much started the whole "spaceships shooting at each other thing". His best-known works are the "Lensman" and "Skylark" series, which were mostly published originally in serial form starting in *1928* with "Skylark of Space". Although most of his books are out of print today, "Old Earth Books" has reissued the Lensman series, and my experience is that you can find at least one Smith paperback in any used book store worth it's salt.
The good: even today, I think Doc's books count as some of the most imaginative Sci-Fi printed from a "universe" and "technology" perspective, especially when you consider that even the basic forms of the genre hadn't been established when he started writing. His science is very internally consistent, and has some wonderful ideas in it that make for great story. The action sequences are first-rate, and there is a sheer exhileration in the way that the scale and the power of the technology and the story grows from book to book- the Skylark series starts primarily as a conflict between two men, and ends up as galaxy vs. galaxy.
The bad: Nobody will claim that Smith writes good literature. The characters are completely flat, and are unambiguously good or bad (with a couple notable exceptions). By good, I mean Boy Scout, and by bad, I mean Adolf Hitler. Dialogue is cheesy and unrealistic, and the plots, while somewhat innovative at the time, are terribly repetitious. Modern readers will also have a hard time with the jurassic gender roles, and perhaps with the fact that many stories end with the genocidal slaughter of the bad guy's entire race (who, of course are all unsalvagably evil).
But to get hung up on the "bad" is to completely miss the point. You may start reading E.E. "Doc" Smith because of the high ironic enjoyment value (they'd make excellent MST3K fodder), but you'll keep reading it because of the exuberance, creativity and vastness of Doc's vision will pull you in.
If you want to start out somewhere, I'd suggest "Skylark 3" or "Galactic Patrol". Although neither of them are the first in their respective series (although "Galactic Patrol" was the first Lensman book *written*) they are great intros to what E.E. "Doc" Smith is all about, and are a must-read for any hard-core sci-fi fan.
Keep in mind that so-called "standalone Tivos" are *analog* recording devices- they work with all systems because they support the ubiquitous analog inputs and do all the digital encoding and compression on-board. But to do HDTV cost-effectively, you'll have to capture the streams *prior* to decompression, since components capable of compressing a full HDTV source in real-time probably aren't going to be cheap enough to use in mass-market consumer devices for quite a while.
It's like the DirectTivo, which stores the encrypted, compressed satellite feed on the disk directly, and only decompresses / decodes when you watch. This requires custom, DirecTV-specific hardware. For DRM reasons, I doubt that any satellite or cable operator is going to let you grab unencrypted, but still compressed HDTV data from their set-top box and make it available in form to an external "standalone" PVR.
Of course, traditional VHF/UHF broadcast is a different matter, but keep in mind that, unlike a standalone Tivo, a PVR that supports broadcast *won't* automatically work with a cable or satellite system for the reasons described above.
Since so many people seem to be missing (or willfully ignoring) the point:
1. Obesity is bad. Everyone agrees on this. 2. Reducing the number of calories you eat or increasing the number of calories you burn is the only way to lose weight, short of liposuction. Everyone agrees on this. 3. High protein/fat foods have a higher satiety value, and eating a diet consisting largely of them is an effective way of reducing caloric intake for many people. This is the point of the Atkins diet, and even it's critics agree that it works in this fashion.
OK, here's where things start to differ.
1. There are numerous studies showing that a high fat diet is bad for you. Here's the part most people are skipping over: THIS IS NOT RELATED TO OBESITY. Fat has negative effects on other parts of your body than your waistline. So you can be skinny on Atkins, but that doesn't mean you will be healthy in the long term. Studies on the effect of eating a diet high in animal protein and fat are well-established.
2. The "obesity epidemic" in America does not automatically mean that there is some basic flaw in the science behind the diet that has been promoted in the past 30 years. What it points out is that the food pyramid and other education techniques in use have not been effective in helping people eat healthy, balanced diets. While yes, it's good to reduce fats, fat has been demonized to the point that people think avoiding fat is all they have to do. BZZZZT. Yes, carbohydrates should be the basis of a healthy, balanced diet, but that doesn't mean you can eat them with abandon.
So not only have we been harmed by too-simple explanations of how to eat a healthy diet, the food industry has actively exploited this to sell us lots of very profitable food that has the patina of health ("Now with less fat!") but is in fact still junk food that will make you fat if you eat too much of it.
This is all about psychology, marketing, and capitalism. It's not about biology. It's very likely that it's harder to limit calories under a high-carb diet. But that doesn't change the fact that it's better for you- remember, being skinny isn't the only goal.
We need to chuck the food pyramid and teach people the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, and get a more balanced message out there about fats. The health education community should be taken to task for promoting such a simpleminded, extreme approach to diet. Brody won't make that leap because she's one of the architects of that message. The key is to throw away the bad message, not the science.
Take a look at this site. There are over 300 movies up (including the ones mentioned in the story). Most interesting, they offer a $9.95 / month "all you can eat" option, which is a much more interesting proposition than $4 / movie / day.
Of course, 90% of they movies they are offering are total crap, "Backyard Fight Clubs 2", you have to have Windows Media Player, and picture quality is pretty poor. The free movie I checked out had a piss-poor transfer as well as bandwidth issues.
But $9.95 for all the movies I could watch on-demand would be an interesting proposition if the catalog were any good... even with DRM.
The good folks at Cook's Illustrated did some research into this when they did their basic pasta recipe. The end result is that they found that there were no detectable taste differences between pasta cooked in water coming from the hot water or cold water taps. The hot water does cut a few minutes off the boiling time (like 3-4), so they actually recommended it as a technique. They didn't mention the lead issue discussed in some other posts, but I have a hard time believing that this would be a problem in a house with a reasonably modern plumbing system and water heater.
BTW- like Good Eats, Cook's Illustrated (the magazine, the website and their cookbooks) is an *excellent* geek cooking resource. They employ the scientific method in trying to develop the "Best Recipe" (the title of their main cookbook) for each dish they make. When they attack a recipe, they will research many cookbooks to learn about how something generally is made, and then will experiment with different ingredients, techniques and measurements to find the best outcome, based on the feedback of their tasting lab. Where there is interesting food science to explain, they'll do so, much like Alton. Of course, it's not entertaining like Good Eats is, but you will learn a *lot*, and everything I've made from their recipes has tasted great and been relatively foolproof.
Read my original post: I never said that Mozilla was insecure. But the undeniable fact is that it is a substantially less mature and tested product than IE. IE is currently in use by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, and has been for years. Given how long it took to get out the door, Mozilla certainly has had more use than a lot of 1.0 programs, but it is an infant compared to IE if you measure "user hours".
I was calling the original poster on the fact that there is little or no evidence that Mozilla is more or less secure than IE. There are more vulnerabilities posted for IE, but it's a much more widely used and tested program. There's a much bigger incentive to find security problems in IE, since so many people use it. How can anyone say that one is more secure than the other?
There's no proof that open source development approaches inherently result in inherently more secure software... as has been shown recently, the number of general Linux vulnerabilities discovered has been keeping pace with those in Windows. That's not to say that it can't, but the evidence is thin for arguing either side.
I'm sitting at home *right now* rolling around naked in my Microsoft share certificates! Mmmmm... feel those dirty corporate ethics! Bill, *please* issue some more stock options in your pyramid scheme so we can take down the economy!
Get a grip. I was using "open source" software when you were still in grade school, sonny. Ever compiled a gopher server? And the whole "Bill Parish" thing is so 1999... MS has actually come out publicly in favor of taxing on stock option compensation.
Talk about huge generalizations! Closed source software is not "inherently sloppy". Perhaps you've been burned by bad management, but many commercial software development teams have a strong culture of mutual accountability, and if you screw up, you're going to have to face up to it in front of people you work and eat lunch with every day. That's peer pressure, and pride can be just as effectively served back to you in a professional peer group as it can off-hours.
I'm not saying that all commercial software is great... at lot of it sucks. And you can say exactly the same thing about open source projects. It all boils down to the culture of the development team and the skill of the leadership.
You might intelligently argue many points in favor of open source development culture, but slamming all closed-source projects, "for the most part", is "inherently sloppy".
IE has had more than it's share of security problems, but who says Mozilla won't? Despite being closed source, IE's had a lot more eyes on it, for a lot longer. This may change over time, but Mozilla is a "1.0" release, and from a security perspective, it's usually better to go with a more mature application. As the continual release of vulnerabilities against both open source and closed source software demonstrates, being O.S. is no security panacea.
Plus, has it occured to anyone that the rash of security "problems" from MS might be due to the fact that they really are getting serious about security over there.? Seems like a catch-22 to me... if they are doing the "right thing" as is defined by the/. community, the number of reported security bugs is going to go up as they find, fix and disclose the problems. Everybody laughs and points at all the holes, but the result is better software.
Who in their right mind would by a machine with an *integrated* 17" LCD display? I'm sorry, but in my experience monitors and displays routinely have a longer useful life than the machines they come with. I'm still productively using a 17" trinitron monitor I bought with a new PII 350 a few years ago. Having such a relatively expensive monitor incorporated into a machine that can't be upgraded at all seems like a dumb idea.
On the other hand, I'm sure Apple has done their research and perhaps their target market isn't concerned about such things. But then again, look at how "well" the cube sold...
Much is made of the fact that X is fundamentally remotable. However, WinXP editions other than "Home" support running remote GUI applications using terminal services technology. The machine is still fundamentally single user (you either "take over" the main console session or that session is suspended for the duration of the remote session), but I've found for home use it gets the job done nicely.
I used this capability routinely while traveling on business, proxying the terminal services session over SSH running on my OpenBSD gateway. It actually performed usably when dialed up to an ISP from a hotel room halfway across the country. And by usable, I don't mean "it could be used if you're a masochist". I mean, I used it to send / receive home e-mail and do Quicken regularly. Although X has it's strengths, working well over high-lag, low-bandwidth connections is not one of them.
Sure, you *can* get 25-30 people per dual-CPU server. But if you have any apps that use any CPU at all, costs start to go up fast because you get a lot less bang per buck CPU-wise out of the kind of reliable servers you need to delivey the availability a Citrix / thin approach requires on the server side.
Keep in mind that modern versions of Office fall into that "apps that use CPU" category. With the numbers you have, you should be able to get a VAR to cough up some eval equipement- run a beta test before you buy to get some real-life experience with what your users need to run.
If you just read the headline above and the linked *clipping* of a story, you'd think Intel is dropping RAMBUS completely. That is not the case. Here's the original story that the clipping came from. Intel is dropping *exclusive* support for RDRAM. Here's a relevant quote:
Also, although not new products, the next iterations of its 850 and 860 chipsets, supporting a 533MHz front-side, will support RDRAM when they arrive, probably in the second half of this year.
This ties in perfectly with Tom's Hardware review of a new, pre-release 533MHz RDRAM chipset and the Anandtech review of the new Intel DDR-based chipset linked to by/. earlier this week.
For better or for worse, this doesn't sound like a battlebots-style "destroy the competition" demolition derby. Rather, it's a massive obstacle course (details to be disclosed), although the vehicle is supposed to be able to survive small collisions. The idea is not to build a massively destructive machine, but rather one that is as versatile as possible with respect to handling terrain, towing things, etc...
The technology behind a PVR isn't that complicated- a hard drive, a tuner, and MPEG encoder / decoder, video out, channel listings, etc... But getting one that really works well for the user requires quite a bit of subtle work -- if you've ever used a Tivo, you can appreciate the amount of thought and work that went into the software in the unit.
Fact is, a lot of "convergence" vendors are going to be coming out with these boxes (like the MoxieMedia Center) that not only are a PVR but are going to try to do a bunch of things. I'm not bashing Moxie in particular (I've never used one) but I have a hard time believing that a company without MS's resources is going to be able to spend much time getting the user experience right for each of the functions.
I hope Tivo and / or SonicBlue are smart and licensing their software technologies all over the place, because otherwise, we're going to be subjected to a bunch of exciting sounding boxes that really disappoint when you turn them on and try to use them.
Linux is definitely much more of a "do it yourself" system than Windows is. That's viewed as a liability by most corporations in the US, but it's an advantage where skilled labor is cheap.
There's a parallel in the construction industry. In US, labor is more expensive in comparison to construction materials than in, say, Mexico. In the US, construction uses as many prefabricated, pre-assembled components as possible in order to minimize on-site labor. It's cost effective to manufacture, stock and transport a large variety of pre-fab parts to minimize on-site assembly. In contrast, where labor is cheap in comparison to materials, you find that it's more common to bring raw-materials on-site and create what you need from them, since it's cheaper to pay a skilled laborer to do it as-needed rather.
The same thing applies to software. It does suprise me that countries like Korea and China like Linux where having skilled on-site talent is more cost-effective than paying large license fees to MS.
MS has always been successful in the enterprise space by focusing on developers and putting together a platform that creates compelling value for business software developers. While it's true that MS is rarely best at anything, it's one of a small number of companies that provides a complete, supported server product line (OS, DB, app server, web server, message queueing, transaction coordination, etc...) and a development environment that is reasonably integrated across it. Enterprises see this as an advantage.
IIS is perceived to be "good enough" by many companies and organizations. The effort to find, learn, integrate, and get support for another slightly-better alternative just isn't worth it to them.
However, MS is taking a huge beating on the security issues, and if they loose that "good enough" image, there will be a crack for Apache to squeeze through. Don't count on it being there for long...
Well sonny, if you want to start an experience-based pissing contest, I'm happy to. I've had experience with Windows going back to 2.x. I used Word prior to it's Windows-based releases. In terms of doc tools, I've make substantive use of nroff / troff, LaTeX, FrameMaker, PageMaker, WordPerfect, AppleWorks, WriteNow for the NeXT, ed, vi, emacs, DOS edit, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the conversation, but so there!:-P
I think you're a bit disingenuous claiming that outline mode and styles are "obscure". Sure, you're not *forced* to learn them if you just sit down and start typing a way... clearly, MS is optimizing for a minimal initial learning curve. If he'd rather use an application that forces use of structure-based layout, that's a personal preference, and I'm certainly not going to say that's wrong. But claiming that Word doesn't do it (and do it pretty easily) is wrong.
If you had read to the end of my post, you would have read the part where I make it clear I'm not defending Word across the board. It has a huge, rich set of problems to choose from if you want to bash it. But the original poster picked stupid things to complain about.
You've got some good points. Too bad the original poster didn't pick things like this to harp on... I was in no way making a general defense of Word, just pointing out that these particular issues aren't entirely valid. I sure wouldn't do my dissertation in it...
How many English, Art History, or History PhD candidates do you think use LaTeX? I bet you're right about engineering PhDs...
Re: presentation first
Can't disagree there. That's definitely the out of box defaults, but one of the reasons it's bloated is that it's the kitchen sink and you can use it a bunch of different ways if you bother to learn.
Re: Long docs
I'm not a writer, but I have worked quite a bit with documents pushing 60-70 pages. There are definitely issues (though I haven't experienced quite what it sounds like you have).
I'm not sure I would recommend Word as the right tool for a multi-hundred page doc. I never said Word was the end-all be-all... there's a lot to complain about, and it just isn't suited for certain things. I've used a lot of different tools, from general business / consumer stuff like AppleWorks, WordPerfect and Word to more technical / specialized tools like FrameMaker, LaTeX and PageMaker. The right tool depends on personal preference and purpose. I once did my resume in troff because I wanted a single source to generate good-looking output both in ASCII and postscript.
There is certainly a lot to complain about with Word, my main beef is that this guy picked the wrong ones.
I use Word almost every day, and while many of your comments are true for default behavior, you clearly have not attempted to actually learn the program. To take the issues in the order you cite them:
1. Word actually doesn't force you to deal with presentation issues at all times. Are you familiar with outline mode? I usually do my first drafts in outline mode, which allows you to focus entirely on content and structure independent of formatting. Outline mode works with styles to specify formatting globally for a given level in the outline. So if the top level in your outline applies to chapters, you can easily define a chapter heading style that will be automatically applied to all the top-level items. It really works well.
2. It's been said already, but it's worth repeating: Real-time spelling and grammar correction are really easy to turn off. Really easy.
3. Lists & indentations. You should learn how to use styles. This is exactly what they are for. For example, my default template has a "bullet list" style. If I want something to be a bullet list, I apply this style to it. The "tags" aren't visible, but they effectively are there. If I ever decide that a bullet list needs to be indented differently, or have square instead of round bullets, I can make the change once for the style. Once you've set up your default doc template with a reasonable set of styles, you never have to worry about presentation during early stages.
4. I don't understand what you say about tables.
5. "Word documents seem to be written to Jr. High level at most"? What the hell? This is broad generalization at it's worst. I bet more doctoral dissertations are written in Word than anything else. Although I did get a good laugh thinking about what the average grade level of a/. post would be...
Now, I'm not saying Word is the end-all be-all. I'm just saying that you're an idiot because of the 10000 things wrong with it, you've picked issues that are almost univerally untrue, and simply reflect that you haven't learned to use it.
Lots of businesses have a mismatch between their pricing and cost structures. Think about airlines- the big $$$ are the airplane leases, fuel, etc... which exists no matter how many seats are filled on the plane. Hotels. Restaurants. Satellite TV. The mapping between cost and pricing can be very indirect, and managing that well compared to the competition is ultimately what makes these companies succeed or fail.
It's always better for the company to have a pricing model that maps directly to the costs- the reduces the management challenge, and reduces risk. It's in many cases bad for the customers- they get nickel and dimed. Where there is competition, simpler, more consumer-friendly pricing models tend to win. But telcos culturally still think and behave like regulated monopolies (which many of them effectively still are -- I've only got one high-speed access option at my address), and they exercise their power over the customer to price in a way that is most favorable for them.
Theoretically, "pay for what you use" can be more fair for the majority of users who don't use much. But do you really think that cable or DSL companies are going to lower their base rates if and when they figure out how to put the screws on the high-bandwidth users? That seems pretty unlikely to me.
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Let's look at cost first. Typically, service providers think of costs as some percentage of the dollars coming in for a given service. They break these down into several categories. Although each company is different, here's a simple example:
- Cost of goods sold: These are dollars that the companies spends to provide the specific service. More on this later.
- "SG&A": Sales, General and Administrative. Otherwise known as "overhead" -- cost associated with running the company that aren't tied specifically to a service (management salaries, office space, etc...). Sometimes sales salaries and marketing are broken out from this on a per-service basis, other times they are lumped into the general company overhead costs.
- Margin: This is the money left over after the company's costs are taken care of. If the company sells everything directly at retail price, this is equal to profit. However, if a company has resellers or other types of "sales channels", they will be paid a certain percentage of the margin for selling the product. Discounts also come out of this chunk.
Very rough rule of thumb: cost of goods sold should *never* exceed 50% of "retail" (undiscounted) revenue in the telecom / service provider space. Of course, if a company is desperate for business they may give away very large portions of the margin percentage in the form of discounts, etc...The "cost of goods sold" for a typical hosted dedicated server generally break down into several major categories, that may or may not be broken out as different "services":
- Hardware cost & software licensing: This is the fixed purchase cost of the dedicated server itself, and any associated software licenses. This is typically paid directly by the customer up-front, or broken down into lease-like payments and buried in a flat monthly fee.
- Data center: These are costs of having the server sitting in the data center, including lease cost of the space, supporting rack and LAN infrastructure, electricity, cooling, security, etc... Typically these costs are figured based on averages per square ft. of server room space or by rack space.
- Operations / management: These are the costs of management services provided for the server: NOC staffing, management / monitoring system cost, tape backup costs, etc... In the case of colocation, this may be minimal or non-existant, while it's very significant for dedicated / managed services, since you're paying for system administrators to upgrade your OS, apply patches, etc...
- Customer service / support: Costs for the right to call someone on the phone and get help with your service. This primarily includes call center infrastructure & support staff salaries. Again, may vary widely depending on the level of service selected.
- Bandwidth: At a minimum, this is the cost of the routing infrastructure, the cost of the WAN part of the NOC staff and systems, and the monthly costs paid to the upstream providers for big dedicated pipes. Your average hosting company is not running their own fiber or even buying dedicated circuits: they are buying IP transport from a large ISP, and pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. Usually, they'll lay in a very large fiber pipe to the ISP's local POP, and then activate additional bandwidth as needed. I can't break down the long-haul ISP's costs for providing that bandwidth, but presumably it breaks down similarly.
Now, a few words about pricing, and specifically bandwidth pricing, since the poster was interested in that. Aside from bandwidth, the costs above are reasonably predictable from customer to customer and month to month. The more predictable a cost is, the more likely a service provider is to lump it in with a bunch of other costs and charge a flat fee. The less predictable a cost is, the more likely it's going to be metered and broken out.In general, customers demand / want flat, fixed, predictable prices. This is why ISPs charge $19.95/month for dialup rather than $.05 / hr. Of course, at some level the ISPs price for dialup is proportional to actual use, but they've figured out that, on average, they can make money at a $19.95 flat fee, and customers are willing to pay it. Of course, customers who use less are subsidizing the service of customers who use more. But as long as the *average* cost remains low enough that the low-usage customers feel they are paying a fair price, it works out.
Server bandwidth is a case where it doesn't work out. The amount of bandwidth that a single static web server is capable of consuming is quite stunning, and goes up along with Moore's law. Many hosting customers choose a dedicated server not because they need gallons of bandwidth, but because they have some sort of custom app or want full administrative control of their system. These folks aren't willing to pay a price that would cover the "average" cost of bandwidth across all an ISPs customers, which may include large streaming media systems or pr0n hosters. So the ISP meters / measures the bandwidth and charges each customer appropriately.
However, it's a bit more complicated than that. You'll notice that, if a customer buys a lot of bandwidth, they pay a lot less per GB than a small customer. The smallest customers may pay ridiculous prices for bandwidth if they exceed their plan (case in point the Farked "boobies" page that racked up $400 in bandwidth charges in two days). It's obvious that SPs are charging much more than their "costs" for the bandwidth in these cases, and you'll notice that the same thing is true for cell phone plans, etc... What's going on?
The answer is that it's all about predictability. A service provider must maintain adequate capacity for providing service. If they don't have enough upstream bandwidth, service quality for their entire user population goes down the toilet. It takes a long time to add additional capacity- new fiber needs to be run, new equipment purchased, etc... As a result, service providers are always buying new capacity in advance of demand, and to do this accurately they must be able to forecast demand. This boils down to getting accurate forecasts from their customers, which is impossible to do directly. Instead, as capitalists, they put economic incentives in place to motivate customers to predict their maximum demand accurately by pricing in tiers, or packages. Buy buying a particular bandwidth package (say, 20GB/month) you are effectively telling the provider that's how much you are planning to use, and they plan their capacity accordingly. Deviating from their master capacity plan is very, very costly for the service provider, and accordingly, the "right" to deviate from your plan as a customer is proportionally more expensive.
Another way to look at it. Customers who buy the smallest bandwidth package are the least "valuable" to the company because they are making no revenue commitments. They are also the most easily able to double, triple, or quadruple their demand from month to month because their servers are capable of consuming so much more bandwidth than they are buying. On the other hand, a large, multi-server customer is a more valuable customer, and is likely to be using a larger portion of the available capacity of their servers, and thus less likely to have wild changes in the amount of bandwidth they consume. The small customer thus pays much more per GB of bandwidth than the large customer, especially if they exceed their plan. In a lot of ways it's like the airline industry or any other industry where buying additional capacity is expensive and/or time consuming: you pay a premium for being able to use that capacity on short-notice.
Well, that's more than you probably ever wanted to know. Hope it's been educational.
-R
There are a few papers available for download from their website, but you have to register. Basically, traditional voice recognition parses the audio stream into some meta-form, usually representing phonemes (the low-level "atomic" sounds that your speech consists of). These phonemes are then matched against a dictionary of known words (and the phonemes they consist of) and text is produced.
Because phoneme recognition is not particularly accurate (for example, it's hard to tell the difference between "hard d" as in "Dan" and "hard b" as in "Ban" over a noisy phone line), traditional speech to text systems use several approaches to improve accuracy. One is to improve the accuracy of the basic phoneme recognition by "training" it for a specific voice. Another is to use all sorts of hairy-language-specific grammar / syntax algorithms.
Computationally, it's the matching of the phonemes against the dictionary that's the most difficult, and the larger the dictionary, the less accurate and more CPU-chomping it becomes. In addition, searching the resulting text for specific matches grows less accurate as the search string increases in length, due to the likelihood of a transcription errors.
The cool thing that Fast Talk has done is to store and index the phoneme meta-data, rather than complete the recognition to text. When you enter search words, they break the search string into phonemes and look for matches that way. This has several positive benefits:
1. Computational resources are dramatically lessened, since the "phoneme recognition algorithms" are fast and there's no dictionary matching.
2. The matching doesn't depend on having the right words in the dictionary at input time. It works just as well for unusual proper names and technical jargon as it does for common words, since they're all formed from the same basic phonemes.
3. The longer the search string, the greater probability of an accurate match.
4. No need for accurate search string spelling. It doesn't matter if you know how to spell a word, as long as you can write it down phonetically.
In theory, the system should work for any language, but reality is that different languages do have different sets of phonemes, and I think Fast Talk has only really worked on English. So languages like Spanish that are fairly similar phonetically to English would probably work pretty well, but tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese or those with non-vocal sounds like the clicks and pops of the African Bushmen would require a rework of the phoneme recognition code.
The main downside of their system is that it doesn't actually produce text... which means that you'd need another speech-to-text system if you wanted transcripts, or want the data to be searchable with whatever standard text-based search engine you are using on your intranet. But they appear to be aiming at applications where that's not necessary. One of my favorite ideas is integrating it with a video editing suite and being able to jump to different cues in your video clip library simply by stating the dialogue that's found there.
Of course, one of the most obvious applications is for intelligence and security. So far it doesn't appear that the company is pushing too hard in that direction -- it was founded by an academic group that originally developed the technology for a library project at Georgia Tech. However, I'm betting that's where the real money is, and it's only a matter of time before their ideas are found in your favorite national department of big-brotherhood.
-R
I'm guessing you won't get much flack because a lot of folks aren't even aware of E.E. "Doc" Smith in the first place. For those of you who weren't reading serials back in the 40's, E.E. "Doc" Smith is the inventor of the classic space opera. Yeah, he's the one who pretty much started the whole "spaceships shooting at each other thing". His best-known works are the "Lensman" and "Skylark" series, which were mostly published originally in serial form starting in *1928* with "Skylark of Space". Although most of his books are out of print today, "Old Earth Books" has reissued the Lensman series, and my experience is that you can find at least one Smith paperback in any used book store worth it's salt.
The good: even today, I think Doc's books count as some of the most imaginative Sci-Fi printed from a "universe" and "technology" perspective, especially when you consider that even the basic forms of the genre hadn't been established when he started writing. His science is very internally consistent, and has some wonderful ideas in it that make for great story. The action sequences are first-rate, and there is a sheer exhileration in the way that the scale and the power of the technology and the story grows from book to book- the Skylark series starts primarily as a conflict between two men, and ends up as galaxy vs. galaxy.
The bad: Nobody will claim that Smith writes good literature. The characters are completely flat, and are unambiguously good or bad (with a couple notable exceptions). By good, I mean Boy Scout, and by bad, I mean Adolf Hitler. Dialogue is cheesy and unrealistic, and the plots, while somewhat innovative at the time, are terribly repetitious. Modern readers will also have a hard time with the jurassic gender roles, and perhaps with the fact that many stories end with the genocidal slaughter of the bad guy's entire race (who, of course are all unsalvagably evil).
But to get hung up on the "bad" is to completely miss the point. You may start reading E.E. "Doc" Smith because of the high ironic enjoyment value (they'd make excellent MST3K fodder), but you'll keep reading it because of the exuberance, creativity and vastness of Doc's vision will pull you in.
If you want to start out somewhere, I'd suggest "Skylark 3" or "Galactic Patrol". Although neither of them are the first in their respective series (although "Galactic Patrol" was the first Lensman book *written*) they are great intros to what E.E. "Doc" Smith is all about, and are a must-read for any hard-core sci-fi fan.
Up at 4:00 to see the show, and it's overcast. But when was the last time you found all the NASA TV streaming sites /.'ed at this hour?
Keep in mind that so-called "standalone Tivos" are *analog* recording devices- they work with all systems because they support the ubiquitous analog inputs and do all the digital encoding and compression on-board. But to do HDTV cost-effectively, you'll have to capture the streams *prior* to decompression, since components capable of compressing a full HDTV source in real-time probably aren't going to be cheap enough to use in mass-market consumer devices for quite a while.
It's like the DirectTivo, which stores the encrypted, compressed satellite feed on the disk directly, and only decompresses / decodes when you watch. This requires custom, DirecTV-specific hardware. For DRM reasons, I doubt that any satellite or cable operator is going to let you grab unencrypted, but still compressed HDTV data from their set-top box and make it available in form to an external "standalone" PVR.
Of course, traditional VHF/UHF broadcast is a different matter, but keep in mind that, unlike a standalone Tivo, a PVR that supports broadcast *won't* automatically work with a cable or satellite system for the reasons described above.
Since so many people seem to be missing (or willfully ignoring) the point:
1. Obesity is bad. Everyone agrees on this.
2. Reducing the number of calories you eat or increasing the number of calories you burn is the only way to lose weight, short of liposuction. Everyone agrees on this.
3. High protein/fat foods have a higher satiety value, and eating a diet consisting largely of them is an effective way of reducing caloric intake for many people. This is the point of the Atkins diet, and even it's critics agree that it works in this fashion.
OK, here's where things start to differ.
1. There are numerous studies showing that a high fat diet is bad for you. Here's the part most people are skipping over: THIS IS NOT RELATED TO OBESITY. Fat has negative effects on other parts of your body than your waistline. So you can be skinny on Atkins, but that doesn't mean you will be healthy in the long term. Studies on the effect of eating a diet high in animal protein and fat are well-established.
2. The "obesity epidemic" in America does not automatically mean that there is some basic flaw in the science behind the diet that has been promoted in the past 30 years. What it points out is that the food pyramid and other education techniques in use have not been effective in helping people eat healthy, balanced diets. While yes, it's good to reduce fats, fat has been demonized to the point that people think avoiding fat is all they have to do. BZZZZT. Yes, carbohydrates should be the basis of a healthy, balanced diet, but that doesn't mean you can eat them with abandon.
So not only have we been harmed by too-simple explanations of how to eat a healthy diet, the food industry has actively exploited this to sell us lots of very profitable food that has the patina of health ("Now with less fat!") but is in fact still junk food that will make you fat if you eat too much of it.
This is all about psychology, marketing, and capitalism. It's not about biology. It's very likely that it's harder to limit calories under a high-carb diet. But that doesn't change the fact that it's better for you- remember, being skinny isn't the only goal.
We need to chuck the food pyramid and teach people the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, and get a more balanced message out there about fats. The health education community should be taken to task for promoting such a simpleminded, extreme approach to diet. Brody won't make that leap because she's one of the architects of that message. The key is to throw away the bad message, not the science.
Take a look at this site. There are over 300 movies up (including the ones mentioned in the story). Most interesting, they offer a $9.95 / month "all you can eat" option, which is a much more interesting proposition than $4 / movie / day.
Of course, 90% of they movies they are offering are total crap, "Backyard Fight Clubs 2", you have to have Windows Media Player, and picture quality is pretty poor. The free movie I checked out had a piss-poor transfer as well as bandwidth issues.
But $9.95 for all the movies I could watch on-demand would be an interesting proposition if the catalog were any good... even with DRM.
The good folks at Cook's Illustrated did some research into this when they did their basic pasta recipe. The end result is that they found that there were no detectable taste differences between pasta cooked in water coming from the hot water or cold water taps. The hot water does cut a few minutes off the boiling time (like 3-4), so they actually recommended it as a technique. They didn't mention the lead issue discussed in some other posts, but I have a hard time believing that this would be a problem in a house with a reasonably modern plumbing system and water heater.
BTW- like Good Eats, Cook's Illustrated (the magazine, the website and their cookbooks) is an *excellent* geek cooking resource. They employ the scientific method in trying to develop the "Best Recipe" (the title of their main cookbook) for each dish they make. When they attack a recipe, they will research many cookbooks to learn about how something generally is made, and then will experiment with different ingredients, techniques and measurements to find the best outcome, based on the feedback of their tasting lab. Where there is interesting food science to explain, they'll do so, much like Alton. Of course, it's not entertaining like Good Eats is, but you will learn a *lot*, and everything I've made from their recipes has tasted great and been relatively foolproof.
Read my original post: I never said that Mozilla was insecure. But the undeniable fact is that it is a substantially less mature and tested product than IE. IE is currently in use by tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people, and has been for years. Given how long it took to get out the door, Mozilla certainly has had more use than a lot of 1.0 programs, but it is an infant compared to IE if you measure "user hours".
I was calling the original poster on the fact that there is little or no evidence that Mozilla is more or less secure than IE. There are more vulnerabilities posted for IE, but it's a much more widely used and tested program. There's a much bigger incentive to find security problems in IE, since so many people use it. How can anyone say that one is more secure than the other?
There's no proof that open source development approaches inherently result in inherently more secure software... as has been shown recently, the number of general Linux vulnerabilities discovered has been keeping pace with those in Windows. That's not to say that it can't, but the evidence is thin for arguing either side.
I'm sitting at home *right now* rolling around naked in my Microsoft share certificates! Mmmmm... feel those dirty corporate ethics! Bill, *please* issue some more stock options in your pyramid scheme so we can take down the economy!
Get a grip. I was using "open source" software when you were still in grade school, sonny. Ever compiled a gopher server? And the whole "Bill Parish" thing is so 1999... MS has actually come out publicly in favor of taxing on stock option compensation.
Talk about huge generalizations! Closed source software is not "inherently sloppy". Perhaps you've been burned by bad management, but many commercial software development teams have a strong culture of mutual accountability, and if you screw up, you're going to have to face up to it in front of people you work and eat lunch with every day. That's peer pressure, and pride can be just as effectively served back to you in a professional peer group as it can off-hours.
I'm not saying that all commercial software is great... at lot of it sucks. And you can say exactly the same thing about open source projects. It all boils down to the culture of the development team and the skill of the leadership.
You might intelligently argue many points in favor of open source development culture, but slamming all closed-source projects, "for the most part", is "inherently sloppy".
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this...
/. community, the number of reported security bugs is going to go up as they find, fix and disclose the problems. Everybody laughs and points at all the holes, but the result is better software.
IE has had more than it's share of security problems, but who says Mozilla won't? Despite being closed source, IE's had a lot more eyes on it, for a lot longer. This may change over time, but Mozilla is a "1.0" release, and from a security perspective, it's usually better to go with a more mature application. As the continual release of vulnerabilities against both open source and closed source software demonstrates, being O.S. is no security panacea.
Plus, has it occured to anyone that the rash of security "problems" from MS might be due to the fact that they really are getting serious about security over there.? Seems like a catch-22 to me... if they are doing the "right thing" as is defined by the
Assuming this is true...
Who in their right mind would by a machine with an *integrated* 17" LCD display? I'm sorry, but in my experience monitors and displays routinely have a longer useful life than the machines they come with. I'm still productively using a 17" trinitron monitor I bought with a new PII 350 a few years ago. Having such a relatively expensive monitor incorporated into a machine that can't be upgraded at all seems like a dumb idea.
On the other hand, I'm sure Apple has done their research and perhaps their target market isn't concerned about such things. But then again, look at how "well" the cube sold...
Much is made of the fact that X is fundamentally remotable. However, WinXP editions other than "Home" support running remote GUI applications using terminal services technology. The machine is still fundamentally single user (you either "take over" the main console session or that session is suspended for the duration of the remote session), but I've found for home use it gets the job done nicely.
I used this capability routinely while traveling on business, proxying the terminal services session over SSH running on my OpenBSD gateway. It actually performed usably when dialed up to an ISP from a hotel room halfway across the country. And by usable, I don't mean "it could be used if you're a masochist". I mean, I used it to send / receive home e-mail and do Quicken regularly. Although X has it's strengths, working well over high-lag, low-bandwidth connections is not one of them.
Sure, you *can* get 25-30 people per dual-CPU server. But if you have any apps that use any CPU at all, costs start to go up fast because you get a lot less bang per buck CPU-wise out of the kind of reliable servers you need to delivey the availability a Citrix / thin approach requires on the server side.
Keep in mind that modern versions of Office fall into that "apps that use CPU" category. With the numbers you have, you should be able to get a VAR to cough up some eval equipement- run a beta test before you buy to get some real-life experience with what your users need to run.
If you just read the headline above and the linked *clipping* of a story, you'd think Intel is dropping RAMBUS completely. That is not the case. Here's the original story that the clipping came from. Intel is dropping *exclusive* support for RDRAM. Here's a relevant quote:
/. earlier this week.
Also, although not new products, the next iterations of its 850 and 860 chipsets, supporting a 533MHz front-side, will support RDRAM when they arrive, probably in the second half of this year.
This ties in perfectly with Tom's Hardware review of a new, pre-release 533MHz RDRAM chipset and the Anandtech review of the new Intel DDR-based chipset linked to by
For better or for worse, this doesn't sound like a battlebots-style "destroy the competition" demolition derby. Rather, it's a massive obstacle course (details to be disclosed), although the vehicle is supposed to be able to survive small collisions. The idea is not to build a massively destructive machine, but rather one that is as versatile as possible with respect to handling terrain, towing things, etc...
The technology behind a PVR isn't that complicated- a hard drive, a tuner, and MPEG encoder / decoder, video out, channel listings, etc... But getting one that really works well for the user requires quite a bit of subtle work -- if you've ever used a Tivo, you can appreciate the amount of thought and work that went into the software in the unit.
Fact is, a lot of "convergence" vendors are going to be coming out with these boxes (like the MoxieMedia Center) that not only are a PVR but are going to try to do a bunch of things. I'm not bashing Moxie in particular (I've never used one) but I have a hard time believing that a company without MS's resources is going to be able to spend much time getting the user experience right for each of the functions.
I hope Tivo and / or SonicBlue are smart and licensing their software technologies all over the place, because otherwise, we're going to be subjected to a bunch of exciting sounding boxes that really disappoint when you turn them on and try to use them.
Linux is definitely much more of a "do it yourself" system than Windows is. That's viewed as a liability by most corporations in the US, but it's an advantage where skilled labor is cheap.
There's a parallel in the construction industry. In US, labor is more expensive in comparison to construction materials than in, say, Mexico. In the US, construction uses as many prefabricated, pre-assembled components as possible in order to minimize on-site labor. It's cost effective to manufacture, stock and transport a large variety of pre-fab parts to minimize on-site assembly. In contrast, where labor is cheap in comparison to materials, you find that it's more common to bring raw-materials on-site and create what you need from them, since it's cheaper to pay a skilled laborer to do it as-needed rather.
The same thing applies to software. It does suprise me that countries like Korea and China like Linux where having skilled on-site talent is more cost-effective than paying large license fees to MS.
MS has always been successful in the enterprise space by focusing on developers and putting together a platform that creates compelling value for business software developers. While it's true that MS is rarely best at anything, it's one of a small number of companies that provides a complete, supported server product line (OS, DB, app server, web server, message queueing, transaction coordination, etc...) and a development environment that is reasonably integrated across it. Enterprises see this as an advantage.
IIS is perceived to be "good enough" by many companies and organizations. The effort to find, learn, integrate, and get support for another slightly-better alternative just isn't worth it to them.
However, MS is taking a huge beating on the security issues, and if they loose that "good enough" image, there will be a crack for Apache to squeeze through. Don't count on it being there for long...
Well sonny, if you want to start an experience-based pissing contest, I'm happy to. I've had experience with Windows going back to 2.x. I used Word prior to it's Windows-based releases. In terms of doc tools, I've make substantive use of nroff / troff, LaTeX, FrameMaker, PageMaker, WordPerfect, AppleWorks, WriteNow for the NeXT, ed, vi, emacs, DOS edit, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the conversation, but so there! :-P
I think you're a bit disingenuous claiming that outline mode and styles are "obscure". Sure, you're not *forced* to learn them if you just sit down and start typing a way... clearly, MS is optimizing for a minimal initial learning curve. If he'd rather use an application that forces use of structure-based layout, that's a personal preference, and I'm certainly not going to say that's wrong. But claiming that Word doesn't do it (and do it pretty easily) is wrong.
If you had read to the end of my post, you would have read the part where I make it clear I'm not defending Word across the board. It has a huge, rich set of problems to choose from if you want to bash it. But the original poster picked stupid things to complain about.
You've got some good points. Too bad the original poster didn't pick things like this to harp on... I was in no way making a general defense of Word, just pointing out that these particular issues aren't entirely valid. I sure wouldn't do my dissertation in it...
Re: The dissertation issue:
How many English, Art History, or History PhD candidates do you think use LaTeX? I bet you're right about engineering PhDs...
Re: presentation first
Can't disagree there. That's definitely the out of box defaults, but one of the reasons it's bloated is that it's the kitchen sink and you can use it a bunch of different ways if you bother to learn.
Re: Long docs
I'm not a writer, but I have worked quite a bit with documents pushing 60-70 pages. There are definitely issues (though I haven't experienced quite what it sounds like you have).
I'm not sure I would recommend Word as the right tool for a multi-hundred page doc. I never said Word was the end-all be-all... there's a lot to complain about, and it just isn't suited for certain things. I've used a lot of different tools, from general business / consumer stuff like AppleWorks, WordPerfect and Word to more technical / specialized tools like FrameMaker, LaTeX and PageMaker. The right tool depends on personal preference and purpose. I once did my resume in troff because I wanted a single source to generate good-looking output both in ASCII and postscript.
There is certainly a lot to complain about with Word, my main beef is that this guy picked the wrong ones.
I use Word almost every day, and while many of your comments are true for default behavior, you clearly have not attempted to actually learn the program. To take the issues in the order you cite them:
/. post would be...
1. Word actually doesn't force you to deal with presentation issues at all times. Are you familiar with outline mode? I usually do my first drafts in outline mode, which allows you to focus entirely on content and structure independent of formatting. Outline mode works with styles to specify formatting globally for a given level in the outline. So if the top level in your outline applies to chapters, you can easily define a chapter heading style that will be automatically applied to all the top-level items. It really works well.
2. It's been said already, but it's worth repeating: Real-time spelling and grammar correction are really easy to turn off. Really easy.
3. Lists & indentations. You should learn how to use styles. This is exactly what they are for. For example, my default template has a "bullet list" style. If I want something to be a bullet list, I apply this style to it. The "tags" aren't visible, but they effectively are there. If I ever decide that a bullet list needs to be indented differently, or have square instead of round bullets, I can make the change once for the style. Once you've set up your default doc template with a reasonable set of styles, you never have to worry about presentation during early stages.
4. I don't understand what you say about tables.
5. "Word documents seem to be written to Jr. High level at most"? What the hell? This is broad generalization at it's worst. I bet more doctoral dissertations are written in Word than anything else. Although I did get a good laugh thinking about what the average grade level of a
Now, I'm not saying Word is the end-all be-all. I'm just saying that you're an idiot because of the 10000 things wrong with it, you've picked issues that are almost univerally untrue, and simply reflect that you haven't learned to use it.
Lots of businesses have a mismatch between their pricing and cost structures. Think about airlines- the big $$$ are the airplane leases, fuel, etc... which exists no matter how many seats are filled on the plane. Hotels. Restaurants. Satellite TV. The mapping between cost and pricing can be very indirect, and managing that well compared to the competition is ultimately what makes these companies succeed or fail.
It's always better for the company to have a pricing model that maps directly to the costs- the reduces the management challenge, and reduces risk. It's in many cases bad for the customers- they get nickel and dimed. Where there is competition, simpler, more consumer-friendly pricing models tend to win. But telcos culturally still think and behave like regulated monopolies (which many of them effectively still are -- I've only got one high-speed access option at my address), and they exercise their power over the customer to price in a way that is most favorable for them.
Theoretically, "pay for what you use" can be more fair for the majority of users who don't use much. But do you really think that cable or DSL companies are going to lower their base rates if and when they figure out how to put the screws on the high-bandwidth users? That seems pretty unlikely to me.