Have you seen how scared a typical user is of using their computer? Windows is so popular because it is preinstalled, have the most software and is the only thing most people know about. But people would still rather never try anything new with it, because of it's complexity.
One problem with Windows is massive complexity at the lower level which Microsoft tries to mask by introducing "wizards" etc.
If they simply fixed the lower level to be more user friendly (like Apple), users would be better off.
There is a use for Wizards, but adding a wizard everytime your UI design is braindead is not the answer.
If a Linux desktop can offer something that is substantially easier to use and more intuitive than Windows (not that hard imo), it might provide an incentive for people and OEMs to switch.
In my opinion, GNOME is on the verge of doing this, while KDE is catering for the more geeky crowd that likes to tweak their system. Nothing wrong with that.
1) No, everyone do NOT know what they mean, because their meaning is fully dependent on the text in the dialog. It means the user will have to actually read the full dialog before they answer. How many users do YOU know who actually reads dialogs. I'm fairly sure there are studies confirming this. Ok and cancel do not mean the same thing for every dialog so these arbitrary words are actually quite useless.
2) Making it easy for the developer, rather than the user, is not a good excuse.
3) Again, making it easy for the translator, rather than the user, is not a good excuse.
4) Verb pairs are actually non-controversial, even KDE is switching almost everything to verb pairs, because their benefits are large. Verb pairs are a seperate issue to button placement.
Which one is easier to get?
Install Security Updates? Windows have found that your system is in the need of updating. Leaving your system without the necessary security updates leaves your computer at risk of viruses and malicious attacks. The security update might require a reboot.
[Ok] [Cancel]
Or:
Install Security Updates? Windows have found that your system is in the need of updating. Leaving your system without the necessary security updates leaves your computer at risk of viruses and malicious attacks. The security update might require a reboot.
[Install Security Updates] [Do Nothing]
In the second one, the user won't even have to read the dialog text to know which option to take.
"In everyday speech we answer questions with yes and no all the time. We all do it and we're all used to it."
Computer dialogs is like talking to someone really boring. At the end of a long rant, they give you a "yes" or "no" question. Which one should you take?
If however, they ask you the questions: "so do you like..." or "don't you like...." you wouldn't have to listen to their full rant before deciding.
Blaming everything one Havoc, just because he stuck his head out is just ridiculous and a semi-malicious way of trying to suggest it is "one man's opinion against the world". There was actually a fairly large consensus to switch to the way GNOME operates these days.
The reason Apple does this, is that Apple is the company currently involved in UI development that have done the most research on user interfaces of all the bigger companies anyway.
Not true. For almost every dialog, there is one choice that will be taken most of the time, a choice which most users would want to take. This choice should be highlighted in the best possible way.
In most cases, users want to save their documents, and they want to go through with whatever action they get the confirmation dialog for.
Keeping this choice in the same place every time in every dialog is part of the reason why [Don't Save] [Save file] / [Do Nothing] [Install Updates] is such a good idea.
If you read the original post I think the poster knows how to switch it off.
The point is that it is an typical geeky "unbreak me" option. There really is no point in having underscored file names, so having an option to turn it off, rather than just removing it alltogether is just silly.
A little notification can easily be missed, and is thus not intuitive, even if it might be more practical.
The popup asking you what to do can't be missed and is fairly obvious, making it intuitive, but maybe a little annoying.
There is sometimes a trade-off between practical and intuitive. It is normally better to annoy some power-users a little bit rather than baffle newbies.
I live in the UK too and I would say, possibly, but to a smaller extent. You see a lot of the same legislation being suggested in the UK but it rarely seems to actually get through, except in minor castrated versions.
Yesterday a possible 3 month detainment without charge (as opposed to 14 days currently) was suggested by the police in order to combat terrorism. The media immediately attacked it, and it will have a hard time getting through the system.
As much as I detest the house of lords, they have actually strongly opposed laws that go to far with removing civil rights.
Some anti-terror laws will get through, but not the worst ones.
It is not as easy as you make it out to be. This guy was an exec, not a regular worker. As such he could have access to Microsofts business plans, marketing strategies, secrets, etc. Secrets that can be very valuable to your competitors.
When you are an exec, you get paid a lot of money, and in return it is reasonable to expect you to be bound by other things than just mere workers. You get paid so much, you should have no worries about not working for a year after a few years in the job.
Having non compete clauses for executives is very^H^H^H^H extremely common and I'm 99.99% sure Google has those kinds of contracts themselves.
Now, IANAL, but these contracts are very often also enforcable. If I read this correctly, Microsoft had a standard one year non-compete clause with him, which he should have honored, and if he didn't, Microsoft have every right to sue.
It would be a different thing if he was a regular worker being paid regular salaries. But if he was on a very high premium wage, he should expect some more clauses, as he was being compensated handsomely to sign away a few rights.
It seems to me from reading the article that the image/jpeg problem is only there when transfering videos from a digital camera, not when downloading films from the Internet.
I can only assume that the application expects a still picure camera to feed it still pictures and have some glitches in support for the limited video features of these cameras.
"It's your responsibility to get one-way glass if you don't want people to be able to look through your front windows"
You are making the typical geek mistake of assuming that anything is alright as long as it is legal and possible.
This is not the case. There are many things in society that is NOT consider alright even if it is legal. Knowing which things and obeying them is a big part of what we consider "social skills".
Staring inside someones window is one of those things. Just because it is a) possible and b) legal does not make it alright.
The usual way we stop this kind of behaviour, is to a) ask people politely to stop, b) yell at them for being assholes.
The police and lawmakers have sometimes gone too far in stopping this behaviour by using little loopholes to take you away. There are so many laws that you are bound to break one of them. If they feel you are being sufficiently big of an asshole, they will use one of those laws to get you.
I don't condone this, but neither do I condone people breaking the unwritten rules of social conduct. Just because they aren't written down, doesn't mean they are not there.
"the 'X' button on a maximized window isn't completely flush with the corner of the screen, but this is just graphically"
The same goes for the Start-button when using the "Classic" theme. It literally snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by making it LOOK like it is not infinite in size.
I would be surprised if someone actually stopped outside my window and stood there watching. I would consider it to be asshole behaviour and an invasion of privacy, even if it possibly isn't illegal. Maybe I was having the blinds open to get a bit of natural light, that doesn't give anyone the right to snoop through my window.
My heart bleeds for you because you can't just rip of other people's work.
I'm sorry, but you have no divine right to use any of other people's work other than what they give you. The GPL give you much more rights than commercial software do, but it does require a bit of decency on your behalf.
If you do not have that decency, you deserve nothing but the contempt the OSS community gave you.
I've always liked AMD processors, because of better performance/price ratios. My last one was an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ or something like that.
Still I think it is a good idea to reserve judgement until all facts are on the table. I would not slam AMD for going to the courts, and I wouldn't slam Intel until we know if AMD's allegations are actually true.
However, know that AMD is NOT a small company. It is in fact a massive multinational company. This is not a David vs. Goliath, it is a giant against an even bigger giant.
"wouldn't have thought it'd be much because the retailer/game producers/distributers/etc would want their cut first."
You are making it sound like Sony is begging for scraps from game producers.
In fact, Sony requires a fairly hefty license (and royaltees) from game developers for them to be able to make games for the Playstation platform.
The game developers are basically buying a target market from Sony. This was the way Sony made shitloads of money from PS1 and PS2.
It all depends on who wins the console wars. Most likely only one of Microsoft or Sony will earn any money on their next-gen consoles, while Nintendo might earn enough from their little niché.
Interesting anyway. Microsoft went for good specs that they could release early. Sony went for great specs that will come out late.
Personally I'm waiting until the pricewar starts before deciding, but if Microsoft get a bigger install base, then they will most likely get the best games.
The reason they can do this is that the Playstation is not a useful product by itself, it becomes a useful product when combined with the games for the platform. Thus Sony is selling one part of it at a loss, and recuperating the rest on games.
This is not uncommon, nor illegal (IANAL). It is used for mobile phone services and digital cable boxes (giving away the hardware and earning money on the subscription), or razors (think Gillette).
It is also extensively used by others in the Game console industry. For example Microsoft used it heavily for the Xbox.
Dumping is normally done by using income from one part of the world to subsidise the sale in other parts in order to drive away local competitors. See for instance Microsofts prices in parts of the world compared to the US. Sony sells consoles at a loss everywhere.
Besides, Sony does not have a monopoly on game consoles. Microsoft and Nintendo are both in it.
"Game Designers who consistently design good games deserve the same name recognition and the same selling power as the equivalent Hollywood celebrities, Robert Deniro, Kevin Spacey, etc. with their name Right There on the Box in the same way that Hollywood movies are marketed"
There are some that get their name on the box, like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Monkey Island), however I do get your point.
This is why the actors protest was so badly received by the games developers, because in a Game, the developers get f*ck all credit compared to the movie industry, and starting to push for a bigger emphasis on the actors rather than the developers, would be the wrong end to start at.
While I do recognize that good voice acting is important in some titles, good acting carries a film much more than it carries a game. A crappy game can never be made tolerable by great actors. A crappy film can be made tolerable by great actors.
"For numbers, just use voice recognition: Having a recognizer just for digits works fantastically already"
Problems: 1. Text messaging is a basic feature of phones today. Almost nobody will buy a phone without it. 2. You don't always want to shout out phone numbers or messages aloud.
Unless you get a really brilliant and fast way of putting in text with just a scroll wheel, a keypad is still necessary.
1. Complain that there is no more basic phones 2. Get moderated +4 Insightful 3. Profit!
Come on, this is the same thing every bleeding time a new phone is announced. Get over it already.
The fact is that it is cheaper for the manufacturers to make a limited selection of models at the same time.
Features sell phones, so the minimum number of features will always go up.
For every 1 user that only needs a phone book and voicemail, there is probably 20 that also wants polyphonic ringtones, 10 that wants a colour display and a 100 users that also need text messaging.
It does not make sense to make every single combination of these phones, so you will either have a phone that is underfeatured or overfeatured.
If it is underfeatured you will have lost most of your customers. If it is overfeatured the people that need less will still buy it.
It is mostly moderated funny, but it is actually a very interesting feature idea. I would love it if I could avoid the horrible pan pipe music normally infesting my ears when calling any big company.
"And I'm a raving space exploration nut and think the US should withdraw from the Space Treaty and claim half of the Moon and offer homestead rights to private citizens and companies."
So you suggest just talking half of it because you are strong enough to do it? Do you have any idea of provoking this idea would be towards the rest of the world?
This kind of action often leads to war and a war over something that is currently not quite worth it.
1) Saudi Arabia: 7.92 million bbl/day 2) Russia: 6.11 milllion bbl/day 3) Norway: ~ 3 million bbl/day. 2001: 3.466 million in 2001.
Iraq will probably be in here now or soon (1.49 million bbl/day in 2004).
In fairly stark contrast to the other two, the third one is a benign, friendly and stable ally giving you very little, or no trouble other than the occational complaint about US executions and disregard for human rights.
I'm pretty sure the US and the UK would use a little bit of tact and friendlyness when dealing with Norway. They have no reason not to.
"though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform."
For some uses maybe, but certainly not for all. Excel is notorious among statisticians and scientists for awful accuracy and calculation bugs that have gone unfixed for several versions (1). For statistical analysis the answers Excel give are sometimes wrong by orders of magnitude. We're talking about completely ridiculous answers rather than simply inaccurate ones.
Plotting colourful graphs are cute enough, but getting the numbers right should be the first priority of any spreadsheet.
Gnumeric on the other hand has deservedly (2) developed a very good reputation for accuracy over the last years.
I quote from 2: "(...) persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution. We note that persons who use the spreadsheet Gnumeric need not exercise such caution."
And: "One could argue that it is acceptable to use Excel for summary statistics, one-way ANOVA, linear regression, and some of the statistical distributions, but we are extremely concerned about Microsoft's cavalier attitude toward accuracy."
About Gnumeric: "It is interesting to observe that the open source Excel-clone called "Gnumeric" was such a good clone that it even had errors similar to Excel. However, the developers of Gnumeric, who are part-time volunteers with no R&D budget, chose to deal with these errors in a different way: by implementing correct fixes. See McCullough (2004a) for a discussion."
Since a couple of the other answers are simply "yes" (wrong) and "no" (correct), I thought I'd post a response as well.
Just because you abandon a product does NOT mean you give up any of your copyright to the code.
Unless explicitly released under a non-commercial license after abandonment, you have NO RIGHTS to distribute it. Yes folks, it means abandonware is illegal, and no, there is no excuse for thinking it is legal. All computer games is afaik new enough that copyright has not expired.
The whole notion of abandonware being legal is just wishful thinking, nothing else.
However, just because it is illegal, doesn't mean that distributing it morally wrong, or that anyone will go after it.
Personally I think it is perfectly morally acceptable and distributing it is just a risk assessment everyone should do, about whether you will be held accountable for it or not.
Just remember: Just because something feels morally acceptable does not mean it is legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen how scared a typical user is of using their computer? Windows is so popular because it is preinstalled, have the most software and is the only thing most people know about. But people would still rather never try anything new with it, because of it's complexity.
One problem with Windows is massive complexity at the lower level which Microsoft tries to mask by introducing "wizards" etc.
If they simply fixed the lower level to be more user friendly (like Apple), users would be better off.
There is a use for Wizards, but adding a wizard everytime your UI design is braindead is not the answer.
If a Linux desktop can offer something that is substantially easier to use and more intuitive than Windows (not that hard imo), it might provide an incentive for people and OEMs to switch.
In my opinion, GNOME is on the verge of doing this, while KDE is catering for the more geeky crowd that likes to tweak their system. Nothing wrong with that.
1) No, everyone do NOT know what they mean, because their meaning is fully dependent on the text in the dialog. It means the user will have to actually read the full dialog before they answer. How many users do YOU know who actually reads dialogs. I'm fairly sure there are studies confirming this. Ok and cancel do not mean the same thing for every dialog so these arbitrary words are actually quite useless.
..." or "don't you like ...." you wouldn't have to listen to their full rant before deciding.
2) Making it easy for the developer, rather than the user, is not a good excuse.
3) Again, making it easy for the translator, rather than the user, is not a good excuse.
4) Verb pairs are actually non-controversial, even KDE is switching almost everything to verb pairs, because their benefits are large. Verb pairs are a seperate issue to button placement.
Which one is easier to get?
Install Security Updates?
Windows have found that your system is in the need of updating. Leaving your system without the necessary security updates leaves your computer at risk of viruses and malicious attacks. The security update might require a reboot.
[Ok] [Cancel]
Or:
Install Security Updates?
Windows have found that your system is in the need of updating. Leaving your system without the necessary security updates leaves your computer at risk of viruses and malicious attacks. The security update might require a reboot.
[Install Security Updates] [Do Nothing]
In the second one, the user won't even have to read the dialog text to know which option to take.
"In everyday speech we answer questions with yes and no all the time. We all do it and we're all used to it."
Computer dialogs is like talking to someone really boring. At the end of a long rant, they give you a "yes" or "no" question. Which one should you take?
If however, they ask you the questions: "so do you like
Blaming everything one Havoc, just because he stuck his head out is just ridiculous and a semi-malicious way of trying to suggest it is "one man's opinion against the world". There was actually a fairly large consensus to switch to the way GNOME operates these days.
The reason Apple does this, is that Apple is the company currently involved in UI development that have done the most research on user interfaces of all the bigger companies anyway.
Not true. For almost every dialog, there is one choice that will be taken most of the time, a choice which most users would want to take. This choice should be highlighted in the best possible way.
In most cases, users want to save their documents, and they want to go through with whatever action they get the confirmation dialog for.
Keeping this choice in the same place every time in every dialog is part of the reason why [Don't Save] [Save file] / [Do Nothing] [Install Updates] is such a good idea.
If you read the original post I think the poster knows how to switch it off.
The point is that it is an typical geeky "unbreak me" option. There really is no point in having underscored file names, so having an option to turn it off, rather than just removing it alltogether is just silly.
"untuitive"
Assuming you meant "intuitive", I do not think it means what you think it means.
It means "obvious" and "natural", something discovered through intuition rather than reasoning. It does not mean "practical".
A little notification can easily be missed, and is thus not intuitive, even if it might be more practical.
The popup asking you what to do can't be missed and is fairly obvious, making it intuitive, but maybe a little annoying.
There is sometimes a trade-off between practical and intuitive. It is normally better to annoy some power-users a little bit rather than baffle newbies.
I live in the UK too and I would say, possibly, but to a smaller extent. You see a lot of the same legislation being suggested in the UK but it rarely seems to actually get through, except in minor castrated versions.
Yesterday a possible 3 month detainment without charge (as opposed to 14 days currently) was suggested by the police in order to combat terrorism. The media immediately attacked it, and it will have a hard time getting through the system.
As much as I detest the house of lords, they have actually strongly opposed laws that go to far with removing civil rights.
Some anti-terror laws will get through, but not the worst ones.
It is not as easy as you make it out to be. This guy was an exec, not a regular worker. As such he could have access to Microsofts business plans, marketing strategies, secrets, etc. Secrets that can be very valuable to your competitors.
When you are an exec, you get paid a lot of money, and in return it is reasonable to expect you to be bound by other things than just mere workers. You get paid so much, you should have no worries about not working for a year after a few years in the job.
Having non compete clauses for executives is very^H^H^H^H extremely common and I'm 99.99% sure Google has those kinds of contracts themselves.
Now, IANAL, but these contracts are very often also enforcable.
If I read this correctly, Microsoft had a standard one year non-compete clause with him, which he should have honored, and if he didn't, Microsoft have every right to sue.
It would be a different thing if he was a regular worker being paid regular salaries. But if he was on a very high premium wage, he should expect some more clauses, as he was being compensated handsomely to sign away a few rights.
1. Make silly Star Wars / Star Trek gadget.
2. Put it up on eBay
3. Notify Slashdot
4. Profit!
It seems to me from reading the article that the image/jpeg problem is only there when transfering videos from a digital camera, not when downloading films from the Internet.
I can only assume that the application expects a still picure camera to feed it still pictures and have some glitches in support for the limited video features of these cameras.
This makes the glich a little less important.
"It's your responsibility to get one-way glass if you don't want people to be able to look through your front windows"
You are making the typical geek mistake of assuming that anything is alright as long as it is legal and possible.
This is not the case. There are many things in society that is NOT consider alright even if it is legal. Knowing which things and obeying them is a big part of what we consider "social skills".
Staring inside someones window is one of those things. Just because it is a) possible and b) legal does not make it alright.
The usual way we stop this kind of behaviour, is to a) ask people politely to stop, b) yell at them for being assholes.
The police and lawmakers have sometimes gone too far in stopping this behaviour by using little loopholes to take you away. There are so many laws that you are bound to break one of them. If they feel you are being sufficiently big of an asshole, they will use one of those laws to get you.
I don't condone this, but neither do I condone people breaking the unwritten rules of social conduct. Just because they aren't written down, doesn't mean they are not there.
"the 'X' button on a maximized window isn't completely flush with the corner of the screen, but this is just graphically"
The same goes for the Start-button when using the "Classic" theme. It literally snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by making it LOOK like it is not infinite in size.
I would be surprised if someone actually stopped outside my window and stood there watching. I would consider it to be asshole behaviour and an invasion of privacy, even if it possibly isn't illegal. Maybe I was having the blinds open to get a bit of natural light, that doesn't give anyone the right to snoop through my window.
My heart bleeds for you because you can't just rip of other people's work.
I'm sorry, but you have no divine right to use any of other people's work other than what they give you. The GPL give you much more rights than commercial software do, but it does require a bit of decency on your behalf.
If you do not have that decency, you deserve nothing but the contempt the OSS community gave you.
I've always liked AMD processors, because of better performance/price ratios. My last one was an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ or something like that.
Still I think it is a good idea to reserve judgement until all facts are on the table. I would not slam AMD for going to the courts, and I wouldn't slam Intel until we know if AMD's allegations are actually true.
However, know that AMD is NOT a small company. It is in fact a massive multinational company. This is not a David vs. Goliath, it is a giant against an even bigger giant.
"wouldn't have thought it'd be much because the retailer/game producers/distributers/etc would want their cut first."
You are making it sound like Sony is begging for scraps from game producers.
In fact, Sony requires a fairly hefty license (and royaltees) from game developers for them to be able to make games for the Playstation platform.
The game developers are basically buying a target market from Sony. This was the way Sony made shitloads of money from PS1 and PS2.
It all depends on who wins the console wars. Most likely only one of Microsoft or Sony will earn any money on their next-gen consoles, while Nintendo might earn enough from their little niché.
Interesting anyway. Microsoft went for good specs that they could release early. Sony went for great specs that will come out late.
Personally I'm waiting until the pricewar starts before deciding, but if Microsoft get a bigger install base, then they will most likely get the best games.
The reason they can do this is that the Playstation is not a useful product by itself, it becomes a useful product when combined with the games for the platform. Thus Sony is selling one part of it at a loss, and recuperating the rest on games.
This is not uncommon, nor illegal (IANAL). It is used for mobile phone services and digital cable boxes (giving away the hardware and earning money on the subscription), or razors (think Gillette).
It is also extensively used by others in the Game console industry. For example Microsoft used it heavily for the Xbox.
Dumping is normally done by using income from one part of the world to subsidise the sale in other parts in order to drive away local competitors. See for instance Microsofts prices in parts of the world compared to the US. Sony sells consoles at a loss everywhere.
Besides, Sony does not have a monopoly on game consoles. Microsoft and Nintendo are both in it.
"Game Designers who consistently design good games deserve the same name recognition and the same selling power as the equivalent Hollywood celebrities, Robert Deniro, Kevin Spacey, etc. with their name Right There on the Box in the same way that Hollywood movies are marketed"
There are some that get their name on the box, like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Monkey Island), however I do get your point.
This is why the actors protest was so badly received by the games developers, because in a Game, the developers get f*ck all credit compared to the movie industry, and starting to push for a bigger emphasis on the actors rather than the developers, would be the wrong end to start at.
While I do recognize that good voice acting is important in some titles, good acting carries a film much more than it carries a game. A crappy game can never be made tolerable by great actors. A crappy film can be made tolerable by great actors.
"For numbers, just use voice recognition: Having a recognizer just for digits works fantastically already"
Problems:
1. Text messaging is a basic feature of phones today. Almost nobody will buy a phone without it.
2. You don't always want to shout out phone numbers or messages aloud.
Unless you get a really brilliant and fast way of putting in text with just a scroll wheel, a keypad is still necessary.
For every news story about a new mobile phone:
1. Complain that there is no more basic phones
2. Get moderated +4 Insightful
3. Profit!
Come on, this is the same thing every bleeding time a new phone is announced. Get over it already.
The fact is that it is cheaper for the manufacturers to make a limited selection of models at the same time.
Features sell phones, so the minimum number of features will always go up.
For every 1 user that only needs a phone book and voicemail, there is probably 20 that also wants polyphonic ringtones, 10 that wants a colour display and a 100 users that also need text messaging.
It does not make sense to make every single combination of these phones, so you will either have a phone that is underfeatured or overfeatured.
If it is underfeatured you will have lost most of your customers. If it is overfeatured the people that need less will still buy it.
It is mostly moderated funny, but it is actually a very interesting feature idea. I would love it if I could avoid the horrible pan pipe music normally infesting my ears when calling any big company.
"And I'm a raving space exploration nut and think the US should withdraw from the Space Treaty and claim half of the Moon and offer homestead rights to private citizens and companies."
So you suggest just talking half of it because you are strong enough to do it? Do you have any idea of provoking this idea would be towards the rest of the world?
This kind of action often leads to war and a war over something that is currently not quite worth it.
Johanson AFAIK always got too much credit for these cracks. He was just the frontman for a larger group of crackers.
Just to emphasise one important point.
Oil exports (2004 estimates):
1) Saudi Arabia: 7.92 million bbl/day
2) Russia: 6.11 milllion bbl/day
3) Norway: ~ 3 million bbl/day. 2001: 3.466 million in 2001.
Iraq will probably be in here now or soon (1.49 million bbl/day in 2004).
In fairly stark contrast to the other two, the third one is a benign, friendly and stable ally giving you very little, or no trouble other than the occational complaint about US executions and disregard for human rights.
I'm pretty sure the US and the UK would use a little bit of tact and friendlyness when dealing with Norway. They have no reason not to.
"though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform."
3 009.pdf / statproc.pdf
For some uses maybe, but certainly not for all. Excel is notorious among statisticians and scientists for awful accuracy and calculation bugs that have gone unfixed for several versions (1). For statistical analysis the answers Excel give are sometimes wrong by orders of magnitude. We're talking about completely ridiculous answers rather than simply inaccurate ones.
Plotting colourful graphs are cute enough, but getting the numbers right should be the first priority of any spreadsheet.
Gnumeric on the other hand has deservedly (2) developed a very good reputation for accuracy over the last years.
1. http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g
2. http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel
I quote from 2:
"(...) persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution.
We note that persons who use the spreadsheet Gnumeric need not exercise such
caution."
And:
"One could argue that it is acceptable to use Excel for summary statistics, one-way ANOVA, linear regression, and some of the statistical distributions, but we are extremely
concerned about Microsoft's cavalier attitude toward accuracy."
About Gnumeric:
"It is interesting to observe that the open source Excel-clone called "Gnumeric" was such a good clone that it even had errors
similar to Excel. However, the developers of Gnumeric, who are part-time volunteers with no R&D budget, chose to deal with these errors in a different way: by implementing correct
fixes. See McCullough (2004a) for a discussion."
Since a couple of the other answers are simply "yes" (wrong) and "no" (correct), I thought I'd post a response as well.
Just because you abandon a product does NOT mean you give up any of your copyright to the code.
Unless explicitly released under a non-commercial license after abandonment, you have NO RIGHTS to distribute it. Yes folks, it means abandonware is illegal, and no, there is no excuse for thinking it is legal. All computer games is afaik new enough that copyright has not expired.
The whole notion of abandonware being legal is just wishful thinking, nothing else.
However, just because it is illegal, doesn't mean that distributing it morally wrong, or that anyone will go after it.
Personally I think it is perfectly morally acceptable and distributing it is just a risk assessment everyone should do, about whether you will be held accountable for it or not.
Just remember:
Just because something feels morally acceptable does not mean it is legal.