I doubt it. Reed Hastings seems to be a pretty smart guy. I think he's just hedging his bets against a technology improvement that would make his business model obsolete.
Technology improvements, actually. First there's the fact that even DSL bandwidth is too little for a real movie.
Second is the fact that the market for watching a movie on a computer screen is really, really small. People want to watch TV in their home theater, not their office. Even movies-on-laptops is, in my experience, a thing to stave off boredom on long trips, not a major way of viewing films. Perhaps he's expecting there to be some sort of household entertainment bridge, like the MP3 receivers currently on the market.
Netflix real improvement in life came from offering subscription-based movie access, which made the whole thing convenient. It depended on a technological improvement: DVDs. You couldn't really do Netflix with VHS; they're too big and fragile. It's nice that Netflix postage is prepaid, which is one fewer thing to fiddle with when you receive movies.
That was pretty clever, and it wasn't the first thing Hastings thought of. He had tried plain rentals first, but it didn't work. Maybe he's looking for something clever in VOD, too. We'll see.
I once heard the hosts of a Canadian radio program refer to somebody as African-Canadian. I don't meet enough Canadians to know if that's really live usage or if they just made it up on the spot.
Google is more than just a huge database of sites. It's also a ranking scheme. Your history is often large enough that a simple keyword search would do only so much good.
Actually, I think that Trailblazer can also do a keyword search, which would do a lot of good. After all, the pagerank would be less important given that all of the web sites you've visited have at least some importance to you.
Unless, of course, you're using IE, in which case you've probably been sent to all sorts of web pages that you don't want to go.
I'm not sure I follow your definitions. One of the definitions at m-w is "to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share". By this definition, I don't have to take from you (that is, reduce what you have) in order for my having it to be stealing.
Calling it "infringement" seems to dramatically decrease the force of the term over "stealing". You have something that doesn't belong to you. (Minus the general slashdot "bits are always free" notion, which is a separate argument.)
"Piracy" is certainly loaded the other way. "Piracy" connotes violence, which is certainly not the case.
You can, but it sounds like bad business to me. The point of getting.com is that it's easy for people to find you. If you can't get foo.co.uk, then people looking for you are going to go to foo.co.uk, not foo.uk.com. You'll lose a lot of mail and a lot of customers.
Same logic applies to obscure TLDs, actually. I get business cards all the time with.ws, which screams, "I wanted to be , but it was taken, and I couldn't come up with another name." Those are usually the business cards that obviously came out of somebody's inkjet printer.
Yeah, I know. It just kinda ticked me off because it doesn't seem that anybody else bothers researching the prior art. Or that their patent reviewers don't read it. Mine sure did. He must have gotten a hell of an education on a stultifyingly obscure subject.
They list only two patents that have actually been granted, "Method,apparatus and system for directing access to content on a computer network" (which seems to cover cross-linking between web sites where there's some sort of traffic-exchange system in place, such as ad banners) and "Method and apparatus for gaming" (guaranteeing a minimum payout for gambling.)
The article doesn't say what patent the letter refers to, if indeed it references an actual patent at all. They have an _application_ for a patent on Method and apparatus for conducting domain name service, whose idea seems to be that ICANN doesn't control subdomains, so you can sell your subdomains yourself as long as you manage it.
That is, if you own foo.com, you can't really sell "bar.foo.com" to somebody else, at least not using the standard domain registries, because they just don't do that. The solution (running your own domain name server and providing a web site to control it, basically acting like your own TLD) is pretty damn obvious, but not a whole lot more obvious than lots of other patents that have been granted.
But the thing is, at least as far as I can tell, they don't have a patent yet. They only have an application. Suing people is WAY jumping the gun. It might even be illegal, but IANAL. That patent is over two and a half years old, so it's about time the thing got approved. Maybe it is approved and the USPTO hasn't updated its web site, and ideaflood is being quick off the mark.
As far as I can tell, the usual advice seems to apply: it's a pointless patent with lots of prior art, so don't cave in and don't send these idiots a penny.
They also look at the references you provide. I know; I got hammered because I provided lots of references, and had to spend months explaining how my work was novel over the referenced documents. If I'd just skipped doing the prior art myself, I would have saved myself a lot of time and legal fees.
Ah, but what exactly will those costs be? At least some consumers, who will get only two or three channels, will pay less. Those who really do watch all 395 channels will pay more. Funny that more government regulation should play out like free-market capitalism.
The losers may not be the consumers, but the low-end stations that are being subsidized right now. If the cable company drops 78 of those 395 channels because nobody's watching, there aren't any costs to pass on to the consumer (but I'm sure they won't be dropping prices, either). It sure sucks if you work for one of those 78 channels, and they pay the costs, but we can save money by exporting those jobs to India...wait, wrong discussion.
The consumer will also lose out on those 78 channels of original programming, but such is life in a free-market economy: if not enough people want it, you can't get it.
The AC above is joking, but there's a very real difference between "mostly dead" and "all dead". If there's any sort of life on Mars at all, it's an incalculable resource. It would be utterly irresponsible to destroy it in the name of... well, I actually have yet to figure out what terraforming Mars would buy us.
Even if Mars is totally dead, it's a fascinating scientific tool: a different planet, with different geology/meteorology, but formed at the same time as ours. The next Mars-ish planet is a REALLY long way away. So far we haven't the vaguest idea where it is; we only know it would take hundreds of years to get there even if we knew where.
If we'd like to use Mars to help fix Earth ecology, I'd like to start with a few hundred years studying it in its present, equilibrium state, before we start altering it. Ecological experiments take decades or centuries, or longer, to play out. Let's just watch the thing up close before we decide we're bored.
Is it just me, or are these guys using obscene amounts of public money to try to quelch public's doubts about the Biological Evolution Theory?
Uh, yeah, pretty much. Thing is, if they wanted to lie, they could do it a lot more cheaply. The great thing about fake evidence is that you don't actually have to go all the way to Mars to get it.
They have a lot of other motives, actually. They learn a lot about how things might work on Earth, from geology to biology to meteorology, for which we have few controls on earth. I can't say how many of them have explicitly in mind the disproof of creation theory, but the way science works is that if they uncover new evidence for evolution, it bolsters their theory. And if they uncover evidence against it, it puts the theory in serious jeopardy.
Every scientific theory is provisional: if evidence comes up against it, then the theory must be amended or discarded. If the theory couldn't be disproved by evidence, it's not a very useful theory. A theory is useful only because it makes predictions. When the predictions come up against reality, the theory loses. If there isn't any way to disprove the theory, that means that there are no predictions being made, so the theory is pointless.
The theory of evolution is a difficult one to test, because it's difficult to establish controls. There isn't any alternate-earth to poke at. About the best you can do is to say, "The theory predicts that life could evolve elsewhere", and hope you find it relatively quickly.
(There are many other tests that can be done. The theory of evolution gots another nice boost from DNA, in that evolution claims you can trace ancestry through genetic similirities. But I digress.)
What the trip to Mars might do is to help disprove a competing theory, the creation theory, at least those variants which claim that only Earth could ever have life. (Other versions don't rely on that assumption.) As long as the evolution theory holds, and other theories fail, we maintain it as provisionally true. Theories for which we see much evidence, such as the theory of gravity, we tend to speak of as simply "true" rather than "provisionally true", but the fact is that if an apple ever falls up we could chuck the theory of gravity, too.
I'm an actor, I've used the dialect tapes. I find them rather difficult to learn from, because it's hard for you to hear the subtle differences between what you're saying and what you're hearing.
I teach juggling, too, and it's much the same way. Both really require an expert eye/ear to tell you what you're doing wrong. Some people are gifted and can pick it up without help, but most of what I hear from people using dialect tapes comes across as bad parody.
Nope. You do have to pursue your patent rights, not just trademarks. It's called the doctrine of laches.
The courts have been somewhat mixed on their interpretation of laches, and it's all made more difficult by the fact that overturning a patent on laches is expensive, so most companies would rather settle than fight. But "submarine patents" have not had a very good history in the courts, if they make it that far.
One song. I'm not a big music listener, but I wanted one particular song that I liked. I think I paid a buck for it.
The experience was OK. Yeah, all the usual incompatibilities made the process less fun than it might have been. I had to upgrade to a version of Windows Media Player that I'd been deliberately avoiding. But that's one-time pain.
So I bought my song, and listened to it a half-dozen times, and got my buck's worth. And didn't go back. Next time I needed a song, they didn't have it (it was somewhat more obscure). I went to iTunes instead and have bought another, oh, three or four songs from it.
I bring this up because I suspect that while I fall at one end of the spectrum, it shows that music services need to be prepared for the fact that many users don't buy twelve albums a year. You can advertise like crazy, but even if you do manage to acquire a customer, it's still not going to rain profits down on you. Selling popular music will remain a difficult business in which only very large players will be able to compete.
(Unpopular music, the kind many Slashdotters claim to prefer, which always seems to be the first thing people check for on a new music service, will always be something of a money-losing proposition.)
Minor point: most of those who wish us to worry about "values" would prefer to diminish the separation of church and state. They argue that we've interpreted the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") rather more broadly than is warranted. It is rather a leap from the actual text to a complete separation of church and state, at all levels (rather than just Congress).
I agree with your point: I much prefer a strong separation of church from state, a point made well by others in this thread. I just wanted to point out that the irony comes from different people believing different things, rather than one person believing inconsistently.
Conservatives have forced liberals to talk about religious values more than they'd like for the simple reason that one would rather not appear immoral to the electorate. Building your moral base on something other than religion, is a difficult thing to explain to voters. It puts liberal politicians in rather a bind, since most of them are themselves religious but would rather not push their religion onto others, risking appearing immoral. Stupid, I know, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Yeah, it's a lot like Self, mixed with Python syntax. Self had a lot of interesting ideas. It never really got out of the starting blocks, but some of its most important ideas in dynamic compilation went on to be included in the Java hotspot compiler.
Personally, I prefer a bit more bondage-and-discipline in my languages. That's because I like having the compiler tell me what I'm doing wrong as much as possible. It's a side effect of the environments in which I tend to work, with multiple people working on the same code. Strong typing is an important contract in such an environment. But it has a lot of downsides, as every perl and python programmer knows.
Oh, and dude, if you're going to submit your own damn web site to Slashdot, try getting a sturdier web server first.
I'm not an expert on sound formats, but isn't there a way to convert Ogg to MP3 or AAC? If so, what do you care what format it is stored in on the iPod? For all you know everything is converted into Real format or WMV by the time it hits the hard disk.
I know that there are artifacts that come from the conversion, but I'm insufficiently well-trained to hear the difference. Especially since the iPod is an on-the-go device, where you've got ambient sound swallowing up whatever differences there are.
Is it that Ogg takes up less space than AAC so you can cram more onto the iPod's hard disk?
If you want real layout you have to use something like Pagemaker or Framemaker or Quark XPress, which are designed for it. Word tries, and OOo does pretty much what Word does.
But I don't think Word tries hard enough. The layout has been pretty much the same for as long as I can remember, which is a pretty damn long time. Meanwhile they're busily adding blinking text (for the blinking toner in my laser printer). For all OOo's faults, at least it hasn't had those faults for years running.
I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to get the 3D cylinder drawing to give me a fairly simple cylinder, to attach to a flow chart. No dice. Eventually, I found an extension (which was not easy to install) that provided some of the flowcharting symbols I need. (No, I'm not doing flow charts. I'm doing architecture diagrams and the flowchart cylinder to represent a database was exactly what I needed.) Office provides such things by default.
I did, however, finally figure out how to get Snap To Object working (it was hidden under a bunch of other menus) and that may tip the balance. That's a really nice feature.
The lists are lengthy. I can add my complaints to the lists, but it's actually best for me if somebody else has already complained. I've added my votes to the things I consider important. If I'm the first guy to complain, as a relative latecomer, then the problem probably isn't really all that important.
A Real Hacker would get in there and fix the problems himself, of course.
I just bought a new computer and chose to skip getting MS Office on it, so I have been experimenting with OO.
My results so far: in general, I prefer MS Office. Perhaps it's just because I'm more familiar with its eccentricities, but I find many things about OO annoying.
I can't map functions to ALT keys, and the relatively simply "switch to style X" involves setting up a macro before I can bind it to a key.
It took me a long time to get section numbering right. Eventually it did work, but the vast array of options confused me and tweaking them introduced subtle problems of their own.
OO doesn't have book-style figure layout. (Neither does MSO.) Drawing is not easy, and not well integrated.
This is not an evaluation; this is just the list of things I wanted to do on day one that pissed me off. MS Office has its own problems, and many of those persist for version after version. But the devil I know is better than the devil I don't when all I want to do is get some work done.
I assume OO.o will get better, and I'm going to keep using OO.o to see what happens as I get more familiar with it. I sure can't beat the price.
Please, no animations. I already have blinking gifs turned off, and flash-click-to-view installed.
Besides, the most useful thing to me on a Mapquest map is the ability to print it. Almost by definition, that page is something whose greatest utility to me is when I'm driving and away from my computer. So until they get blinking toner, it's probably best to leave them as static maps.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. Reed Hastings seems to be a pretty smart guy. I think he's just hedging his bets against a technology improvement that would make his business model obsolete.
Technology improvements, actually. First there's the fact that even DSL bandwidth is too little for a real movie.
Second is the fact that the market for watching a movie on a computer screen is really, really small. People want to watch TV in their home theater, not their office. Even movies-on-laptops is, in my experience, a thing to stave off boredom on long trips, not a major way of viewing films. Perhaps he's expecting there to be some sort of household entertainment bridge, like the MP3 receivers currently on the market.
Netflix real improvement in life came from offering subscription-based movie access, which made the whole thing convenient. It depended on a technological improvement: DVDs. You couldn't really do Netflix with VHS; they're too big and fragile. It's nice that Netflix postage is prepaid, which is one fewer thing to fiddle with when you receive movies.
That was pretty clever, and it wasn't the first thing Hastings thought of. He had tried plain rentals first, but it didn't work. Maybe he's looking for something clever in VOD, too. We'll see.
I once heard the hosts of a Canadian radio program refer to somebody as African-Canadian. I don't meet enough Canadians to know if that's really live usage or if they just made it up on the spot.
I've read on other, non-AFing sites about the commentaries. I've heard these and they sound just about right. So yeah, it's real. Go slashdot it.
Google is more than just a huge database of sites. It's also a ranking scheme. Your history is often large enough that a simple keyword search would do only so much good.
Actually, I think that Trailblazer can also do a keyword search, which would do a lot of good. After all, the pagerank would be less important given that all of the web sites you've visited have at least some importance to you.
Unless, of course, you're using IE, in which case you've probably been sent to all sorts of web pages that you don't want to go.
I'm not sure I follow your definitions. One of the definitions at m-w is "to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share". By this definition, I don't have to take from you (that is, reduce what you have) in order for my having it to be stealing.
Calling it "infringement" seems to dramatically decrease the force of the term over "stealing". You have something that doesn't belong to you. (Minus the general slashdot "bits are always free" notion, which is a separate argument.)
"Piracy" is certainly loaded the other way. "Piracy" connotes violence, which is certainly not the case.
You can, but it sounds like bad business to me. The point of getting .com is that it's easy for people to find you. If you can't get foo.co.uk, then people looking for you are going to go to foo.co.uk, not foo.uk.com. You'll lose a lot of mail and a lot of customers.
.ws, which screams, "I wanted to be , but it was taken, and I couldn't come up with another name." Those are usually the business cards that obviously came out of somebody's inkjet printer.
Same logic applies to obscure TLDs, actually. I get business cards all the time with
Yeah, I know. It just kinda ticked me off because it doesn't seem that anybody else bothers researching the prior art. Or that their patent reviewers don't read it. Mine sure did. He must have gotten a hell of an education on a stultifyingly obscure subject.
They list only two patents that have actually been granted, "Method,apparatus and system for directing access to content on a computer network" (which seems to cover cross-linking between web sites where there's some sort of traffic-exchange system in place, such as ad banners) and "Method and apparatus for gaming" (guaranteeing a minimum payout for gambling.)
The article doesn't say what patent the letter refers to, if indeed it references an actual patent at all. They have an _application_ for a patent on Method and apparatus for conducting domain name service, whose idea seems to be that ICANN doesn't control subdomains, so you can sell your subdomains yourself as long as you manage it.
That is, if you own foo.com, you can't really sell "bar.foo.com" to somebody else, at least not using the standard domain registries, because they just don't do that. The solution (running your own domain name server and providing a web site to control it, basically acting like your own TLD) is pretty damn obvious, but not a whole lot more obvious than lots of other patents that have been granted.
But the thing is, at least as far as I can tell, they don't have a patent yet. They only have an application. Suing people is WAY jumping the gun. It might even be illegal, but IANAL. That patent is over two and a half years old, so it's about time the thing got approved. Maybe it is approved and the USPTO hasn't updated its web site, and ideaflood is being quick off the mark.
As far as I can tell, the usual advice seems to apply: it's a pointless patent with lots of prior art, so don't cave in and don't send these idiots a penny.
They also look at the references you provide. I know; I got hammered because I provided lots of references, and had to spend months explaining how my work was novel over the referenced documents. If I'd just skipped doing the prior art myself, I would have saved myself a lot of time and legal fees.
Ah, but what exactly will those costs be? At least some consumers, who will get only two or three channels, will pay less. Those who really do watch all 395 channels will pay more. Funny that more government regulation should play out like free-market capitalism.
The losers may not be the consumers, but the low-end stations that are being subsidized right now. If the cable company drops 78 of those 395 channels because nobody's watching, there aren't any costs to pass on to the consumer (but I'm sure they won't be dropping prices, either). It sure sucks if you work for one of those 78 channels, and they pay the costs, but we can save money by exporting those jobs to India...wait, wrong discussion.
The consumer will also lose out on those 78 channels of original programming, but such is life in a free-market economy: if not enough people want it, you can't get it.
The AC above is joking, but there's a very real difference between "mostly dead" and "all dead". If there's any sort of life on Mars at all, it's an incalculable resource. It would be utterly irresponsible to destroy it in the name of... well, I actually have yet to figure out what terraforming Mars would buy us.
Even if Mars is totally dead, it's a fascinating scientific tool: a different planet, with different geology/meteorology, but formed at the same time as ours. The next Mars-ish planet is a REALLY long way away. So far we haven't the vaguest idea where it is; we only know it would take hundreds of years to get there even if we knew where.
If we'd like to use Mars to help fix Earth ecology, I'd like to start with a few hundred years studying it in its present, equilibrium state, before we start altering it. Ecological experiments take decades or centuries, or longer, to play out. Let's just watch the thing up close before we decide we're bored.
Is it just me, or are these guys using obscene amounts of public money to try to quelch public's doubts about the Biological Evolution Theory?
Uh, yeah, pretty much. Thing is, if they wanted to lie, they could do it a lot more cheaply. The great thing about fake evidence is that you don't actually have to go all the way to Mars to get it.
They have a lot of other motives, actually. They learn a lot about how things might work on Earth, from geology to biology to meteorology, for which we have few controls on earth. I can't say how many of them have explicitly in mind the disproof of creation theory, but the way science works is that if they uncover new evidence for evolution, it bolsters their theory. And if they uncover evidence against it, it puts the theory in serious jeopardy.
Every scientific theory is provisional: if evidence comes up against it, then the theory must be amended or discarded. If the theory couldn't be disproved by evidence, it's not a very useful theory. A theory is useful only because it makes predictions. When the predictions come up against reality, the theory loses. If there isn't any way to disprove the theory, that means that there are no predictions being made, so the theory is pointless.
The theory of evolution is a difficult one to test, because it's difficult to establish controls. There isn't any alternate-earth to poke at. About the best you can do is to say, "The theory predicts that life could evolve elsewhere", and hope you find it relatively quickly.
(There are many other tests that can be done. The theory of evolution gots another nice boost from DNA, in that evolution claims you can trace ancestry through genetic similirities. But I digress.)
What the trip to Mars might do is to help disprove a competing theory, the creation theory, at least those variants which claim that only Earth could ever have life. (Other versions don't rely on that assumption.) As long as the evolution theory holds, and other theories fail, we maintain it as provisionally true. Theories for which we see much evidence, such as the theory of gravity, we tend to speak of as simply "true" rather than "provisionally true", but the fact is that if an apple ever falls up we could chuck the theory of gravity, too.
I'm an actor, I've used the dialect tapes. I find them rather difficult to learn from, because it's hard for you to hear the subtle differences between what you're saying and what you're hearing.
I teach juggling, too, and it's much the same way. Both really require an expert eye/ear to tell you what you're doing wrong. Some people are gifted and can pick it up without help, but most of what I hear from people using dialect tapes comes across as bad parody.
Nope. You do have to pursue your patent rights, not just trademarks. It's called the doctrine of laches.
The courts have been somewhat mixed on their interpretation of laches, and it's all made more difficult by the fact that overturning a patent on laches is expensive, so most companies would rather settle than fight. But "submarine patents" have not had a very good history in the courts, if they make it that far.
One song. I'm not a big music listener, but I wanted one particular song that I liked. I think I paid a buck for it.
The experience was OK. Yeah, all the usual incompatibilities made the process less fun than it might have been. I had to upgrade to a version of Windows Media Player that I'd been deliberately avoiding. But that's one-time pain.
So I bought my song, and listened to it a half-dozen times, and got my buck's worth. And didn't go back. Next time I needed a song, they didn't have it (it was somewhat more obscure). I went to iTunes instead and have bought another, oh, three or four songs from it.
I bring this up because I suspect that while I fall at one end of the spectrum, it shows that music services need to be prepared for the fact that many users don't buy twelve albums a year. You can advertise like crazy, but even if you do manage to acquire a customer, it's still not going to rain profits down on you. Selling popular music will remain a difficult business in which only very large players will be able to compete.
(Unpopular music, the kind many Slashdotters claim to prefer, which always seems to be the first thing people check for on a new music service, will always be something of a money-losing proposition.)
Minor point: most of those who wish us to worry about "values" would prefer to diminish the separation of church and state. They argue that we've interpreted the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") rather more broadly than is warranted. It is rather a leap from the actual text to a complete separation of church and state, at all levels (rather than just Congress).
I agree with your point: I much prefer a strong separation of church from state, a point made well by others in this thread. I just wanted to point out that the irony comes from different people believing different things, rather than one person believing inconsistently.
Conservatives have forced liberals to talk about religious values more than they'd like for the simple reason that one would rather not appear immoral to the electorate. Building your moral base on something other than religion, is a difficult thing to explain to voters. It puts liberal politicians in rather a bind, since most of them are themselves religious but would rather not push their religion onto others, risking appearing immoral. Stupid, I know, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
I stand corrected. I amend: I prefer strong static typing.
Yeah, it's a lot like Self, mixed with Python syntax. Self had a lot of interesting ideas. It never really got out of the starting blocks, but some of its most important ideas in dynamic compilation went on to be included in the Java hotspot compiler.
Personally, I prefer a bit more bondage-and-discipline in my languages. That's because I like having the compiler tell me what I'm doing wrong as much as possible. It's a side effect of the environments in which I tend to work, with multiple people working on the same code. Strong typing is an important contract in such an environment. But it has a lot of downsides, as every perl and python programmer knows.
Oh, and dude, if you're going to submit your own damn web site to Slashdot, try getting a sturdier web server first.
So it doesn't store Ogg files at all? I'd think that when it's serving as a hard drive it would accept the files but refuse to play them.
I'm not an expert on sound formats, but isn't there a way to convert Ogg to MP3 or AAC? If so, what do you care what format it is stored in on the iPod? For all you know everything is converted into Real format or WMV by the time it hits the hard disk.
I know that there are artifacts that come from the conversion, but I'm insufficiently well-trained to hear the difference. Especially since the iPod is an on-the-go device, where you've got ambient sound swallowing up whatever differences there are.
Is it that Ogg takes up less space than AAC so you can cram more onto the iPod's hard disk?
If you want real layout you have to use something like Pagemaker or Framemaker or Quark XPress, which are designed for it. Word tries, and OOo does pretty much what Word does.
But I don't think Word tries hard enough. The layout has been pretty much the same for as long as I can remember, which is a pretty damn long time. Meanwhile they're busily adding blinking text (for the blinking toner in my laser printer). For all OOo's faults, at least it hasn't had those faults for years running.
I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to get the 3D cylinder drawing to give me a fairly simple cylinder, to attach to a flow chart. No dice. Eventually, I found an extension (which was not easy to install) that provided some of the flowcharting symbols I need. (No, I'm not doing flow charts. I'm doing architecture diagrams and the flowchart cylinder to represent a database was exactly what I needed.) Office provides such things by default.
I did, however, finally figure out how to get Snap To Object working (it was hidden under a bunch of other menus) and that may tip the balance. That's a really nice feature.
The lists are lengthy. I can add my complaints to the lists, but it's actually best for me if somebody else has already complained. I've added my votes to the things I consider important. If I'm the first guy to complain, as a relative latecomer, then the problem probably isn't really all that important.
A Real Hacker would get in there and fix the problems himself, of course.
I just bought a new computer and chose to skip getting MS Office on it, so I have been experimenting with OO.
My results so far: in general, I prefer MS Office. Perhaps it's just because I'm more familiar with its eccentricities, but I find many things about OO annoying.
I can't map functions to ALT keys, and the relatively simply "switch to style X" involves setting up a macro before I can bind it to a key.
It took me a long time to get section numbering right. Eventually it did work, but the vast array of options confused me and tweaking them introduced subtle problems of their own.
OO doesn't have book-style figure layout. (Neither does MSO.) Drawing is not easy, and not well integrated.
This is not an evaluation; this is just the list of things I wanted to do on day one that pissed me off. MS Office has its own problems, and many of those persist for version after version. But the devil I know is better than the devil I don't when all I want to do is get some work done.
I assume OO.o will get better, and I'm going to keep using OO.o to see what happens as I get more familiar with it. I sure can't beat the price.
Please, no animations. I already have blinking gifs turned off, and flash-click-to-view installed.
Besides, the most useful thing to me on a Mapquest map is the ability to print it. Almost by definition, that page is something whose greatest utility to me is when I'm driving and away from my computer. So until they get blinking toner, it's probably best to leave them as static maps.