BTW, what idiot modded you flamebait? I'da called it interesting or informative. Geesh.
Slashdot, land of the underdog, where it's politically correct to bash Microsoft, but somehow not PC to bash Word -- nooooo, it's much more PC to bash WP, because after all they were once a market leader, and ALL market leaders past or present are to be bashed, lest thy karma rise up and smite thee.
That's interesting, and given that, I hope Novell wins.
At the time, the statement from WPCorp boiled down to "Windows is a flash in the pan and we hate it anyway, so we're not doing it". But one does have to wonder how much of that was sour grapes.
And it certainly does explain why early WPWin versions were pretty poor and not real stable -- they were literally groping in the dark.
But WP's demise started before Windows became ubiquitous and long before Word ever got a market foothold -- it began when WPCorp ceased offering free tech support to one and all, back in early 1994. They'd previously even supported pirated copies, and had a large steady market of upgraders from that (happy pirates frequently *buy* the next version, and WP's support made 'em deleriously happy).
Of course, with the state of tech support now, it kinda looks like WPCorp was precocious:/
The money is like the legendary Christmas Fruitcake -- in reality there is only one; it just gets redistributed every year. Similarly, there is only one lump of money in all the M$/Novell/SCO/Sun/Whoever world; it just changes custody occasionally.
One does have to wonder how much more money each of these companies would have if they hadn't spent it suing and paying off one another. That, and the lawyers' cut-per-suit, would make an interesting chart indeed.
It serves you correctly. (I still use WP5.1 every day.) And for those who couldn't remember the keystrokes, there was always the mouse-enabled menu (see my other post upstream in this thread).
WPDOS5.x had a mouse-enabled menu; no need to use the F-keys. The problem was that later builds of WP5.1 shipped with the menu disabled by default, so a lot of people never knew it existed. It was enabled by default in WPDOS6.
I've generally had concurrent versions of of both Word and WP (in both their DOS and Wincarnations), installed side by side. Word is easier for very simple documents, but if you need anything more complex than an office memo, Word rapidly falls behind WP; conversely WP can handle anything up through real typesetting jobs. But WP isn't really designed for novice users. (Which I'd think would make it MORE attractive to a linux-oriented crowd, not less.;)
And "monopoly" would imply *lack* of choice. People used WP by choice back then even more than now -- in WP's heyday, WP had direct competition from Wordstar, MultiMate, and numerous other word processors of varying capability. WP cornered what was then a very competitive market because of several factors:
1) support for every printer known to man 2) features that users wanted (notably, features for lawyers, which no other product bothered to include) 3) excellent free tech support for one and all (legal user or not) 4) Reveal Codes (the ultimate timesaver for complex documents)
WP only lost the market lead by being slow and lame to the Windows bandwagon, and I think more critical, by radically reducing their free tech support.
Until WPWin8, where WP got its Windows act back together, WinWord was prettier to look at, but Word has *never* been superior in any way, and as you say about file formats -- lordy!!
BTW, tho I have (and use, and collect) most WP versions, I still use WP5.1 as my everyday workhorse, and I lurk on the WP OO.o mailing list.:)
That's very interesting, because historically Novell has had zero interest in small shops and individual sales -- they'd rather sell a single 1000 license pack than a million single seats. There's a big SOHO market out there that can't buy 10-packs, but sure would buy single seats as they grow, but Novell has historically ignored this market. Hopefully your experience does indeed mean that they are now looking at these small but steady markets.
It's also exactly what the average home user needs. The average user doesn't need every server and every compiler known to man, and shouldn't have to decide whether to install stuff they have no knowledge of and aren't likely to ever care about. And it's that much less stuff to worry about securing against the big bad outside world.
When and if these home users DO care, they can always switch to a full-featured disty.
And hopefully this will make it a bit more average-hardware friendly. TCO goes out the window if your existing and otherwise perfectly-good equipment has to be replaced to run it.
I get this picture of employees being squeezed until they fit in a smaller box....
Oddly enough, the scruffy old Walmart here (one of four locally) has better customer service than most other retailers; you can't turn around without tripping over an employee, and the ones that have been there a long time show it -- they're more than average-helpful. Which doubtless is part of why it's the highest-grossing Walmart in the country, even tho the facility has about had it (and is about to be rebuilt).
I've personally heard two well-known authors rant that libraries are theft. (One runs around suing ebook downloaders already; that should give away his identity.:)
As to the entire **AA anti-downloading stance, as I and others have pointed out many times, it has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with *controlling the distribution channel*. If the only way to distribute a song or movie is thru the big cartel, the big cartel takes a cut of the profit (or in Real Life, MOST if not ALL of the profit). If people can offer their songs and films for download, those songs and movies are removed from the cartels' revenue stream. Scare average joes into believing ALL downloads are theft that results in draconian penalties, and you've killed that competition before it can mature enough to start *really* taking your revenue.
As to the interview, I'd like to know how downloaders have anything to do with illicit DVDs being sold on street corners??
Aside from the usual embedded applications, such a unit might be useful for schools, for a sort of specialized mini-PC that can be checked out to students, and isn't the end of the world if a few get lost or aren't turned in at the end of the year. As you say, if the order is large enough, I'm sure they'd be willing to customize the unit, as it looks like they're very experienced at it. I see they also offer devtools etc.
Actually, I have a regular local supplier who will indeed swap back RAM that doesn't get along with some particular motherboard (or that ever dies, tho I've never had to invoke that warranty), no questions asked. My point wasn't "Crucial bad" as you seemed to think; it was that Micron chips are probably the most common of all RAM chips in the "random RAM of any or no brand" market, and seem to have a good survival rate, given that they are extremely common in salvaged RAM. However, I have not found it necessary to pay double the going rate just to get Crucial-branded sticks. Of course, I have that local dealer; much of the country has to make do with mail order.
Timing issues are nothing new. I've got a P90 in The Closet that won't boot up unless all four sticks are exactly the same brand and model and even production batch (it doesn't care *what* brand etc, so long as they match). Just being the same type and/or chips doesn't cut it -- the damned thing wants them all to be an *exact* match, due to some overtight-timing issue.
[Personally, my first choices are Tyan for motherboard, Matrox for video, Intel for CPU and chipset, but I go with whatever RAM my memory dealer is recommending at the time, since they handle more RAM than any system builder will ever see, and I trust them to know what's currently giving people problems, or what's currently quirking-out some systems. Which does change from time to time, ya know.]
BTW a lot of "RAM issues" go away if you stick with motherboards that have an even number of RAM slots. Those with 3 slots are far more likely to be cranky about type/size/what you can mix, etc.
I have an old 286 that has one bad bank of RAM -- or the problem might be that one row of chip *sockets* is bad, I never actually checked for that. Anyway, its lowly 1 meg of RAM passed every memory tester in the kit; nonetheless it would frequently crash with a parity error, which is typically an indicator of bad RAM.
I happened to notice that the crash could nearly always be triggered by changing fonts in WordPerfect 5.1, and then someone told me that WP uses the far end of free memory, preferably EMS, for font caching. There's a memory manager setting that lets you lock out a specific range of RAM, and on a hunch I tried locking out the "top" 256k worth. The ol' 286 suddenly was 100% stable (only two reboots in the next 5 years).
I still have the machine.. man, the things we resorted to back in the bad old days of $$$$ hardware!!
IIRC, Crucial is just Micron under a "better" brand name. Most of what I've got in the parts box have Micron chips on no-name sticks, but didn't cost anywhere near as much. (Also have lots of Hitachi, Panasonic, and other brands of chips, but Micron seem to be the most common, especially in salvaged sticks.)
For all the griping I've heard about bad RAM over the years, only once have I ever encountered any, and that was over 10 years ago -- and I've got mostly no-name RAM here. I do wonder to what degree the problem is cheap motherboards with timing issues.
I read most of the forum argument about Hotbar vs AdAware, and occurs to me that I may be best off to stick with an old version of AdAware, at least for detecting some of the old established spywares. Because it's clear that the current version has no intention of doing its job.:(
Welcome, and don't be discouraged (or get pushy) if it doesn't seem to "take" or he's not interested at first. Some kids' interest just doesn't run that way, and you can't force it. But it's worth a try, and can't hurt as part of the parenting process anyway.:)
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BTW, what idiot modded you flamebait? I'da called it interesting or informative. Geesh.
Slashdot, land of the underdog, where it's politically correct to bash Microsoft, but somehow not PC to bash Word -- nooooo, it's much more PC to bash WP, because after all they were once a market leader, and ALL market leaders past or present are to be bashed, lest thy karma rise up and smite thee.
That's interesting, and given that, I hope Novell wins.
:/
At the time, the statement from WPCorp boiled down to "Windows is a flash in the pan and we hate it anyway, so we're not doing it". But one does have to wonder how much of that was sour grapes.
And it certainly does explain why early WPWin versions were pretty poor and not real stable -- they were literally groping in the dark.
But WP's demise started before Windows became ubiquitous and long before Word ever got a market foothold -- it began when WPCorp ceased offering free tech support to one and all, back in early 1994. They'd previously even supported pirated copies, and had a large steady market of upgraders from that (happy pirates frequently *buy* the next version, and WP's support made 'em deleriously happy).
Of course, with the state of tech support now, it kinda looks like WPCorp was precocious
The money is like the legendary Christmas Fruitcake -- in reality there is only one; it just gets redistributed every year. Similarly, there is only one lump of money in all the M$/Novell/SCO/Sun/Whoever world; it just changes custody occasionally.
One does have to wonder how much more money each of these companies would have if they hadn't spent it suing and paying off one another. That, and the lawyers' cut-per-suit, would make an interesting chart indeed.
It serves you correctly. (I still use WP5.1 every day.) And for those who couldn't remember the keystrokes, there was always the mouse-enabled menu (see my other post upstream in this thread).
LOL!! Bring him on -- maybe that'll get me donations of hard-to-find early editions :)
WPDOS5.x had a mouse-enabled menu; no need to use the F-keys. The problem was that later builds of WP5.1 shipped with the menu disabled by default, so a lot of people never knew it existed. It was enabled by default in WPDOS6.
;)
I've generally had concurrent versions of of both Word and WP (in both their DOS and Wincarnations), installed side by side. Word is easier for very simple documents, but if you need anything more complex than an office memo, Word rapidly falls behind WP; conversely WP can handle anything up through real typesetting jobs. But WP isn't really designed for novice users. (Which I'd think would make it MORE attractive to a linux-oriented crowd, not less.
And "monopoly" would imply *lack* of choice. People used WP by choice back then even more than now -- in WP's heyday, WP had direct competition from Wordstar, MultiMate, and numerous other word processors of varying capability. WP cornered what was then a very competitive market because of several factors:
:)
1) support for every printer known to man
2) features that users wanted (notably, features for lawyers, which no other product bothered to include)
3) excellent free tech support for one and all (legal user or not)
4) Reveal Codes (the ultimate timesaver for complex documents)
WP only lost the market lead by being slow and lame to the Windows bandwagon, and I think more critical, by radically reducing their free tech support.
Until WPWin8, where WP got its Windows act back together, WinWord was prettier to look at, but Word has *never* been superior in any way, and as you say about file formats -- lordy!!
BTW, tho I have (and use, and collect) most WP versions, I still use WP5.1 as my everyday workhorse, and I lurk on the WP OO.o mailing list.
That's very interesting, because historically Novell has had zero interest in small shops and individual sales -- they'd rather sell a single 1000 license pack than a million single seats. There's a big SOHO market out there that can't buy 10-packs, but sure would buy single seats as they grow, but Novell has historically ignored this market. Hopefully your experience does indeed mean that they are now looking at these small but steady markets.
It's also exactly what the average home user needs. The average user doesn't need every server and every compiler known to man, and shouldn't have to decide whether to install stuff they have no knowledge of and aren't likely to ever care about. And it's that much less stuff to worry about securing against the big bad outside world.
When and if these home users DO care, they can always switch to a full-featured disty.
And hopefully this will make it a bit more average-hardware friendly. TCO goes out the window if your existing and otherwise perfectly-good equipment has to be replaced to run it.
I get this picture of employees being squeezed until they fit in a smaller box....
Oddly enough, the scruffy old Walmart here (one of four locally) has better customer service than most other retailers; you can't turn around without tripping over an employee, and the ones that have been there a long time show it -- they're more than average-helpful. Which doubtless is part of why it's the highest-grossing Walmart in the country, even tho the facility has about had it (and is about to be rebuilt).
Yeah, but they really don't want you telling the entire world WHY you no longer shop there....
How is this not fraud on the part of Best Buy??
Wasn't that what Waste was supposed to do?
I've personally heard two well-known authors rant that libraries are theft. (One runs around suing ebook downloaders already; that should give away his identity. :)
As to the entire **AA anti-downloading stance, as I and others have pointed out many times, it has nothing to do with piracy. It has to do with *controlling the distribution channel*. If the only way to distribute a song or movie is thru the big cartel, the big cartel takes a cut of the profit (or in Real Life, MOST if not ALL of the profit). If people can offer their songs and films for download, those songs and movies are removed from the cartels' revenue stream. Scare average joes into believing ALL downloads are theft that results in draconian penalties, and you've killed that competition before it can mature enough to start *really* taking your revenue.
As to the interview, I'd like to know how downloaders have anything to do with illicit DVDs being sold on street corners??
Aside from the usual embedded applications, such a unit might be useful for schools, for a sort of specialized mini-PC that can be checked out to students, and isn't the end of the world if a few get lost or aren't turned in at the end of the year. As you say, if the order is large enough, I'm sure they'd be willing to customize the unit, as it looks like they're very experienced at it. I see they also offer devtools etc.
Actually, I have a regular local supplier who will indeed swap back RAM that doesn't get along with some particular motherboard (or that ever dies, tho I've never had to invoke that warranty), no questions asked. My point wasn't "Crucial bad" as you seemed to think; it was that Micron chips are probably the most common of all RAM chips in the "random RAM of any or no brand" market, and seem to have a good survival rate, given that they are extremely common in salvaged RAM. However, I have not found it necessary to pay double the going rate just to get Crucial-branded sticks. Of course, I have that local dealer; much of the country has to make do with mail order.
Timing issues are nothing new. I've got a P90 in The Closet that won't boot up unless all four sticks are exactly the same brand and model and even production batch (it doesn't care *what* brand etc, so long as they match). Just being the same type and/or chips doesn't cut it -- the damned thing wants them all to be an *exact* match, due to some overtight-timing issue.
[Personally, my first choices are Tyan for motherboard, Matrox for video, Intel for CPU and chipset, but I go with whatever RAM my memory dealer is recommending at the time, since they handle more RAM than any system builder will ever see, and I trust them to know what's currently giving people problems, or what's currently quirking-out some systems. Which does change from time to time, ya know.]
BTW a lot of "RAM issues" go away if you stick with motherboards that have an even number of RAM slots. Those with 3 slots are far more likely to be cranky about type/size/what you can mix, etc.
I have an old 286 that has one bad bank of RAM -- or the problem might be that one row of chip *sockets* is bad, I never actually checked for that. Anyway, its lowly 1 meg of RAM passed every memory tester in the kit; nonetheless it would frequently crash with a parity error, which is typically an indicator of bad RAM.
I happened to notice that the crash could nearly always be triggered by changing fonts in WordPerfect 5.1, and then someone told me that WP uses the far end of free memory, preferably EMS, for font caching. There's a memory manager setting that lets you lock out a specific range of RAM, and on a hunch I tried locking out the "top" 256k worth. The ol' 286 suddenly was 100% stable (only two reboots in the next 5 years).
I still have the machine.. man, the things we resorted to back in the bad old days of $$$$ hardware!!
IIRC, Crucial is just Micron under a "better" brand name. Most of what I've got in the parts box have Micron chips on no-name sticks, but didn't cost anywhere near as much. (Also have lots of Hitachi, Panasonic, and other brands of chips, but Micron seem to be the most common, especially in salvaged sticks.)
For all the griping I've heard about bad RAM over the years, only once have I ever encountered any, and that was over 10 years ago -- and I've got mostly no-name RAM here. I do wonder to what degree the problem is cheap motherboards with timing issues.
Mmmm, nail soup for the techno age :)
Hmm. Very well... So, how does one boil humour??
Be sure to ROT-13 the original bits first, to ensure the file encryption restores properly!
I read most of the forum argument about Hotbar vs AdAware, and occurs to me that I may be best off to stick with an old version of AdAware, at least for detecting some of the old established spywares. Because it's clear that the current version has no intention of doing its job. :(
Bit hard to be sure of your causation/correlation factors when it's not exactly kosher to isolate a bunch of infants for testing, tho, eh??
Yeah, being a baby is a continuous series of "D'oh!!" moments :)
Welcome, and don't be discouraged (or get pushy) if it doesn't seem to "take" or he's not interested at first. Some kids' interest just doesn't run that way, and you can't force it. But it's worth a try, and can't hurt as part of the parenting process anyway. :)