To be able to say that something is impossible, you need absolute evidence of the fact otherwise someone with more vision will make a fool of you in the future. Saying for example that FTL is impossible just because nothing in nature does it is a fallacy. There are plenty of things humans do that are 'unnatural', how many other creatures on this planet deliberately take drugs, cook their food, kill other animals for any other reason than food or pack dominance. The whole history of humankind sees ingenious people going against the accepted wisdom and coming up with new ideas. It would be better to say something's "impossible with our current technology" than to say "it can't be done".
Musical instrument shops here in the UK have to pay a surcharge to the music labels in case someone plays a recognisable tune on an instrument before they buy it which would count as a "public performance". And people say record labels don't deserve to be ripped off.
My right eye has actually got progressively less short-sighted over the past two or three years whilst my left eye has remained more or less the same. Think your well-known 'fact' is a widely-held misconception to be honest.
Lack of availability of Macs is not true here in the UK where they sit proudly next to the PCs in a large display of their own in all the main electronic shops and a quick look at the classifieds shows plenty for sale (although not as many as PCs obviously). KDE is no harder to use than Windows, you still have to do random arcane things on Windows to get it to work right; a good example would be the network problems I had with WMP refusing to play streaming video and just telling me very unhelpfully that it was a problem with my network. Except it wasn't; I needed to remove UDP from the list of protocols. The help files were useless, the error message was useless and I only stumbled over it by accident. Very user-friendly I don't think.
no need to buy and switch SIM cards and phone numbers if I visit a place 3000KM away
Only if that place is in the US. Why do so many Yanks act like Yurp is just one country, it isn't it's a couple of dozen with separate histories, languages, and yes cell-phone companies. Try going to Mexico or Canada and see if the above statement is true.
No I'm not particularly interested in your homepage. I don't find KDE hard, and nor does anyone else I've introduced to it. Windows isn't easier, merely more familiar. Macs working on a different architecture has nothing to do with the lack of apps and device drivers and I'm a bit confused why you brought that up. It's ease of use we're discussing and as I already said, if ease of use was remotely a factor your grandma would be using one of those.
Your grandma is one person. Your contempt for Linux is blinding you to the other part of my argument. If it's usability that's the problem why aren't all grandmas using Macs?
Is there away for a non-privileged user to receive notifications of new updates. I only knew about this one because it was so widely publicised. I know I can just log on as super-user first when I start my machine but I'd prefer to just have the notification before I have to log on to the super-user account.
Because linux doesn't have the breadth of apps and device drivers that Windows has. Same reason we don't see many grandmas using Macs either. Next silly question please.
One user. KDE is a transition environment for those who are just moving away from Windows. Doesn't mean that it's the only window manager out there. Not sure how an MS defender has the gall to call anyone else a rip-off merchant in any case.
I agree somewhat, however that will require a fair bit of conversion work for companies that use VBA extensively. There is also a place for automating certain things. For example where I work quite a few of the people we type documents for don't trust automatic numbering so you have to type it in manually. As you can imagine that numbering can then very easily get out of sync. I wrote a very simple macro to renumber. That makes perfect sense as a macro and zero sense as an external script. On the other hand there are times when doing something more complex that I could just run the document through an XML parser rather than having to load Word and the document just to extract data from it.
If the unthinkable happens and MS do embrace open formats and standards I doubt it would make a huge dent in their sales. They have the software brand and a lot of buyers would still buy from them because of that factor. I have no problem with Microsoft being hugely successful, but a bit of competition would make them improve software quality which is still sadly lacking because they still have little to no incentive to do anything about it.
Ah I see where you're coming from now and I agree there probably isn't any good reason for embedding macros into documents, I thought you were saying that that applied to all Office apps. I reckon we're pretty close to being of the same opinion when it comes to Word. I've got most of the stupid stuff switched off and some of the bugs are shocking. The worst I've seen is working on a document that's on a network share and the network goes down. The document gets corrupted. I mean what the hell is that all about? Last time that happened it took me over an hour to go round and calm down panicking typists and do the best I could to recreate proper documents from the mess.
There are times that the macro needs to be embedded though. In my job for example we have an Excel spreadsheet where the user fills in start and finish times and all the work they do. At the end of the week they click a button that fires off a macro which generates a weekly timesheet to be sent to the agency they work for. Now I'm sure you'll tell me that I should write an Excel extension or have that macro in a global template, but I'm not in IT and IT are way to busy to work on trivia like that and are totally unwilling to let a mere office clerk have the access or install VB.NET. The only alternative to what I've done is for the users to fill in two separate sheets which sorta defeats the object of having computers to automate tasks. I work with people now who do use the more advanced features of Word and I have learned a great deal about it from them since I've worked there. My dad is no computer guru but he can do stuff with Excel that I have no idea about. To say that the advanced features of Office are never used is simply not true. Not everyone needs them it's true but there are plenty of people that use the more advanced Office features.
Hahaha you compared me to Islamic fundamentalists, what's next? Why not go the whole hog and call me a new Adolf Hitler. You have every right to be an idiot, and are proving that you are brilliantly with this post, but nobody but you should have to pay for it in terms of taxes, sitting in traffic jams or grieving relatives. Now how about you stop being a wanker and realise that putting a seatbelt on isn't exactly comparable to all the other things you listed and isn't even much of an imposition at all.
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To be able to say that something is impossible, you need absolute evidence of the fact otherwise someone with more vision will make a fool of you in the future. Saying for example that FTL is impossible just because nothing in nature does it is a fallacy. There are plenty of things humans do that are 'unnatural', how many other creatures on this planet deliberately take drugs, cook their food, kill other animals for any other reason than food or pack dominance. The whole history of humankind sees ingenious people going against the accepted wisdom and coming up with new ideas. It would be better to say something's "impossible with our current technology" than to say "it can't be done".
The majority of software cost occurs in the maintenance stage- fixing bugs, adding features, etc
Until management learn this basic fact, IT will always suck as a job.
In the UK Kandoo is a kind of toilet paper for kids.
Damn I wish I still had mod points :)
Musical instrument shops here in the UK have to pay a surcharge to the music labels in case someone plays a recognisable tune on an instrument before they buy it which would count as a "public performance". And people say record labels don't deserve to be ripped off.
Then why do it? Grammar and spelling nazis are pimples on the face of the internet and should be squeezed.
My right eye has actually got progressively less short-sighted over the past two or three years whilst my left eye has remained more or less the same. Think your well-known 'fact' is a widely-held misconception to be honest.
Lack of availability of Macs is not true here in the UK where they sit proudly next to the PCs in a large display of their own in all the main electronic shops and a quick look at the classifieds shows plenty for sale (although not as many as PCs obviously).
KDE is no harder to use than Windows, you still have to do random arcane things on Windows to get it to work right; a good example would be the network problems I had with WMP refusing to play streaming video and just telling me very unhelpfully that it was a problem with my network. Except it wasn't; I needed to remove UDP from the list of protocols. The help files were useless, the error message was useless and I only stumbled over it by accident. Very user-friendly I don't think.
no need to buy and switch SIM cards and phone numbers if I visit a place 3000KM away
Only if that place is in the US. Why do so many Yanks act like Yurp is just one country, it isn't it's a couple of dozen with separate histories, languages, and yes cell-phone companies. Try going to Mexico or Canada and see if the above statement is true.
No I'm not particularly interested in your homepage. I don't find KDE hard, and nor does anyone else I've introduced to it. Windows isn't easier, merely more familiar. Macs working on a different architecture has nothing to do with the lack of apps and device drivers and I'm a bit confused why you brought that up. It's ease of use we're discussing and as I already said, if ease of use was remotely a factor your grandma would be using one of those.
Your grandma is one person. Your contempt for Linux is blinding you to the other part of my argument. If it's usability that's the problem why aren't all grandmas using Macs?
Is there away for a non-privileged user to receive notifications of new updates. I only knew about this one because it was so widely publicised. I know I can just log on as super-user first when I start my machine but I'd prefer to just have the notification before I have to log on to the super-user account.
It doesn't work just fine, it has a huge honking great security hole in it.
Why don't we see many grandmas using linux?
Because linux doesn't have the breadth of apps and device drivers that Windows has. Same reason we don't see many grandmas using Macs either. Next silly question please.
One user. KDE is a transition environment for those who are just moving away from Windows. Doesn't mean that it's the only window manager out there. Not sure how an MS defender has the gall to call anyone else a rip-off merchant in any case.
Much like Orrin, he himself is first on the priority list.
Sounds like all politicians and a very large proportion of human beings to me.
I agree somewhat, however that will require a fair bit of conversion work for companies that use VBA extensively. There is also a place for automating certain things. For example where I work quite a few of the people we type documents for don't trust automatic numbering so you have to type it in manually. As you can imagine that numbering can then very easily get out of sync. I wrote a very simple macro to renumber. That makes perfect sense as a macro and zero sense as an external script.
On the other hand there are times when doing something more complex that I could just run the document through an XML parser rather than having to load Word and the document just to extract data from it.
The grammar checker, at least in Word 2002, is pretty crap. I rarely trust its judgement, since it's often wrong.
If the unthinkable happens and MS do embrace open formats and standards I doubt it would make a huge dent in their sales. They have the software brand and a lot of buyers would still buy from them because of that factor. I have no problem with Microsoft being hugely successful, but a bit of competition would make them improve software quality which is still sadly lacking because they still have little to no incentive to do anything about it.
Either that or you have no idea what a WMF is
It stands for weapon of mass fubaring.
Ah I see where you're coming from now and I agree there probably isn't any good reason for embedding macros into documents, I thought you were saying that that applied to all Office apps. I reckon we're pretty close to being of the same opinion when it comes to Word.
I've got most of the stupid stuff switched off and some of the bugs are shocking. The worst I've seen is working on a document that's on a network share and the network goes down. The document gets corrupted. I mean what the hell is that all about? Last time that happened it took me over an hour to go round and calm down panicking typists and do the best I could to recreate proper documents from the mess.
There are times that the macro needs to be embedded though. In my job for example we have an Excel spreadsheet where the user fills in start and finish times and all the work they do. At the end of the week they click a button that fires off a macro which generates a weekly timesheet to be sent to the agency they work for. Now I'm sure you'll tell me that I should write an Excel extension or have that macro in a global template, but I'm not in IT and IT are way to busy to work on trivia like that and are totally unwilling to let a mere office clerk have the access or install VB.NET.
The only alternative to what I've done is for the users to fill in two separate sheets which sorta defeats the object of having computers to automate tasks.
I work with people now who do use the more advanced features of Word and I have learned a great deal about it from them since I've worked there. My dad is no computer guru but he can do stuff with Excel that I have no idea about. To say that the advanced features of Office are never used is simply not true. Not everyone needs them it's true but there are plenty of people that use the more advanced Office features.
Except that VBA is incredibly bloody useful and I would hate to have to use Word or Excel without it.
In the words of a million spotty Counterstrike players: "ha ha pwned" :)
Hahaha you compared me to Islamic fundamentalists, what's next? Why not go the whole hog and call me a new Adolf Hitler. You have every right to be an idiot, and are proving that you are brilliantly with this post, but nobody but you should have to pay for it in terms of taxes, sitting in traffic jams or grieving relatives. Now how about you stop being a wanker and realise that putting a seatbelt on isn't exactly comparable to all the other things you listed and isn't even much of an imposition at all.