Hehehe, wait 3-4 months. Not only will there be a few more games out but there will likely be plenty of Wiis to go around.
In the advent that there aren't, the market for games will shrivel up and you'll count yourself lucky not investing in it.... Not that I think the Wii will fail in the short term. Just saying there is a bonus to waiting.
Yeah, LOL LINUX IS TEH SUX! I'M COOL CUZ I have half an opinion about something...
Like I've said before. There are those who mock, and then the rest of us who just use it, look at your comment and ask "wtf drugs is he on?" Surprise surprise, lots of people derive value from OSS tools. Even more shockingly many use them for gain and profit from not having to shell out license fees
In your mind Linux [and I'll just venture a guess, OSS] is "teh sux, LOL" which is fine with me, you can keep paying the lazy-tax.
Here's a random idea, if device manufacturers didn't wander down the "windows compatible" (only) route oh say 12 years ago (OMG ADVENT OF WIN95!!!) Linux wouldn't have "sucked" so bad because hardware wouldn't be windows only.
I should point out that when Win3.11 came out it barely had networking. Forget about SMP or even multi users. Win95 didn't have USB or networking, etc... So let's not think that MSFT was half-way any better back then to.
Trumpet Winsock to the rescue. (and I used the "bloated netscape" in windows before IE became mainstream).
You can't be suggested freedom. you have to seek it out. If your parents aren't looking for freedom, no sales person can "force" it on them. Choosing OSS is not just about the cost, or sticking it to Bill. It's about being free to use technology as you see fit (or as close to that as reality permits). At some point, people, individually, have to be responsible for their freedom.
It boils down to people sacrifice what is right for what is easy (hey thanks Sopranos advert that I've seen 3 million times on A&E). For your parents windows may be the right choice, but I suspect that most likely a FL/OSS operating system [and set of software] is probably not only an adequate fit but more useful down the road.
I hate how people wait till the last possible second to do what's actually in the customers best interest. And almost always only after their business has gone down the shitter.
FSF ain't exactly new. If companies embraced it 10 years ago like they fucking should have, we'd be better fucking off, instead of using half-baked shitastic OSes like Vista nowadays. See, look what your greed and apathy got you.
Don't wait for your corporate masters to decide when libre software is right for you. Make up your own damn minds.
Essentially, it's libel if you caused to be published something you don't reasonably know to be true...
that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published.
So, yes, you can talk smack about people. It just has to be true and in the best interest of the audience. For example, if you commited a petty offence, say shop lifting, 10 years ago. And I go around your book signing tour [say you wrote a book on gardening or something] writing reviews that revealed this fact and caused you harm. That could be considered libelous, since while true, is not in the best interest of the public (e.g. who cares) and it causes you harm (section 298).
Bingo. That's basically a symptom of a larger problem. When not resource constrained people don't know how to be conservative. Give them a 3GHz processor and they'll fill it with everything and anything. Who cares if 15% of the time is spent doing [say] virtual translations [C++ overrides] or whatever. It's a 3GHz processor!!!
Look at some of the games for the N64, that was a platform. And in the end, after people spent a lot of time figuring it out, they were able to make the graphics and AI very advanced [for the day]. Nintendo was smart with the Wii. Since most of the hardware [and probably GFX engine/etc] are based on the Gamecube developers won't have to invest as much to port to it. That the Wii has faster processors than the Gamecube gives them even more room to maneuver, but the developers will still have to smart about what they are doing.
I think it would be a good idea if new comp.sci students only wrote programs for seriously constrained devices at first. Learn what it is to fit a program in a 4KB block of memory on an 8051. When you can master that, here's 64KB of ram and an ARM, etc. We sit kids down, who have never programmed for anything less than their parents desktop with 1GB of ram running at multiple GHz, of course they don't know better.
The 360 and PS3 aren't not setting a good trend. Like Intel of yesteryear they want to convince you that larger numbers == better. So you should run that 400W/h console. I mean, it's just oh so much better. Along those lines the 360 version 2 will consume twice as much power, because, afterall, billions of pixels in super duper HD is all that matters.
Tom
Re:News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformis
on
Spore Dev Down On the Wii
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Um rehashes? Like Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3? Like the 7 versions of Ghost Recon? What about GTA?...
Nintendo is hardly the only developer with rehashes.
And besides, sales of the DS are um, a bit higher than that of the PSP.
If Nintendo decided the DS2 [or whatever] would basically be the DS + faster cpu + more ram and say motion sensors:-), I think I'd go for it. "faster" doesn't mean 3GHz PPC, currently [iirc] it has a 66 and 33 MHz ARM processors. Bump those to 133 and 66, give it 16MB of ram instead of 4MB and it will have plenty of room to grow.
Look at the DS compared to PSP. Comparably "underpowered" yet while I own both, only one sits in a box, unplayed for months (hint: the PSP). Graphics are not the be-all for most people. Only lame undersexed gamers think they need a billion polygons/sec to make a "game fun."
As to his comment about the CPU not being fast enough for AI I guess we'll have to wait and see. Maybe he's used to bloatware or being inefficient. I'm sure Wii developers will figure it out.
Besides, I think the Wii has already proven it's not in the same track as the 360 and PS3. The games for the Wii will be much different in that they actually promote you to get into the game and not be all sloth-like on your couch with a remote...
That's sucktastic, sorry to hear about your bad luck. Though keep in mind working for big companies does suck. When I was at AMD about the biggest perk was flying around in coach and the occasional free gear. Working for a small company now and it's much better. Less "office space" type feel to it, and my input is actually valued from time to time [as opposed to NEVER].
People wanting to work for the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, AMD, Intel, etc... should think twice. If you have any sort of character you'll learn that a decent salary (and in my case AMD was paying decent bank) isn't the be-all of existence, and that self-respect is worth a lot more. Let the indians run MSFT if they want. They'll sort out that they're getting H1B jobs not because of talent but because they're not likely to demand pay. The shit software they produce will get side-stepped by the OSS world and problem solved. If companies like MSFT don't want to hire based on merit [e.g. someone who can showcase their talents] that's their own prerogative.
As a side note, one good way of landing quality jobs is to have a nice OSS portfolio. Bonus points for getting your software used everywhere. In my case, I lucked out, a crypto firm was using my libraries for a while, then noticed I lived in the area (6km away from their office) and that I was just grad'ing from college. So they offered me a job (while I was in Rennes, France on other business:-) ).
Use OSS tools. They're free, cost you poor poor students nothing.
Besides academic papers should be done in TeX unless you're one of them polysci wannabe students, then just muddle your way through with notepad because you don't have anything useful to say anyways:-)
Honestly, I hate comments like yours. OMG what can we do as poor students, oh thank you MSFT for saving us... bullshit. Fedora Core + OpenOffice == free. Or Gentoo + whatever or *BSD + whatever or...There are ways of getting most [if not all] the tools you'll need for free and libre from an OSS distribution. Just takes effort.
Most window managers that would work on an 8MB box would be things like icewm or WM. Not exactly user friendly. And windows 3.11 didn't need 4MB of ram, but it wasn't a bad idea as it allowed you to have a nice smartdrv cache:-) And I didn't mean that the 1980s word processor took 80MB, I meant it could fit with room to spare on an 80MB drive. As in, drives of the day were ~80MB or so.
I still remember the QNX demo that had a full featured kernel, web browser, etc, fitting on a single 1.44MB disk. To be fair though, the current Linux kernel does a bit more in terms of standards compliance, module support, etc than QNX ever did.
The point of my rant was to remind the younger readers that there was a time when the same applications they take for granted today were consuming far less resources in the past. Back when software developers had to really think about the code they designed because of the resource limitations.
The problem I have is the sub-culture that follows the MSFT style businesses don't really have a need for true science. I mean god, look at thedailywtf.com for examples of how "programmers" just don't get what the hell they are doing. Quick, dirty, and with a lot of buttons. That's the sort of software people come to expect, with absolutely no focus on what goes on behind the scenes.
We have a business culture where most of the people who program [or claim to design software] for a living couldn't explain, say, how a merge sort works. Worse yet, they couldn't easily find a description, learn it, and explain it. The net result being applications which fail in the field (hint: bugs in any other engineer discipline == killing people), consume far too many resources, and don't meet all of the user requirements to start with.
Take a good hard look at things like Vista, or heck even OpenOffice (for a good OSS target). Bloatware to the extreme, the result of rampant divergent design processes without care to optimization or proper resource management.
Why could I point and click applications with Win 3.11 and 4MB of ram, but now Vista requires a min of 1GB of ram, and a processor that is 200 times faster? Heck, you can run a decently tuned BSD or Linux distro with only 128MB of ram easily (with X, Gnome, etc). Why did a full featured word processor with spell/grammar checking fit nicely on an 80MB HD in the 80s and now Word takes a half gigabyte? etc...
As a whole, most end user applications are just not engineered to be engineered. They're quickly assembled and shoved out the door. Which pretty much annoys the fuck out of any true blue software engineer [who wants to take pride in what they are doing]. Net result, only uneducated non-engineers will want to work on the software because they don't know better [and/or don't care]. It'd be like running an art school where you only showcase musical performances that are off beat and out of tune. No serious musician would want to study there.
I don't think comp.sci is dying, I just think most hardcore scientists are not really caring to work for the likes of MSFT, they'd rather work for smaller companies where their input is actually valued and their contributions while commercial, are not solely aesthetic.
Yeah, kinda sad that people will spend all this time establishing their "virtual me". You want some to decorate? Move out of your parents house, get an apartment, then go straight to the mall and get fabrics/furniture/etc. Congrats.
I like the Wii approach. Takes all of 2 mins to make a Mii then you're done off playing games.
Most folk who insist on using MS Office, haven't the first fucking clue what they're doing. I'm not saying there aren't people that use Office well, because there are. I'm just saying most are lazy, and learning where "find/replace" is in that new Wordprocessor is beyond them (but running a fortune 500 isn't... go figure).
I'm just glad I work in a relatively small company capable of just saying "use whatever gets the job done properly."
Hahahaha that's cute. First off, the process (as in CMOS process) back in the 80s was NOT better than it is now. The reason your 386 didn't need a fan (some did have heat sinks though, or at least needed them) was that they only had 300K transistors [or whatever it was]. A modern processor has in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of transistors. Most new processors have more cache than systems had memory, etc.
What you should concern yourself with is the overall MIPS/watt ratio. Which is definitely in favour of things like the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD64 designs than the 80386.
OpenOffice can take a while to open, but it will open none the less. Compare that to gmail for instance, oh wait, it says come back in 30 seconds... for the last 3 hours... oh shoot there goes my work day. gmail isn't down often, but it does slow down often. And that's just mail. Wait till google is parsing multi-megabyte documents with embedded crap and etc.
I don't get your complaint against AbiWord. It works just fine for editing documents. Sure it doesn't import.doc super well, but if you're not using Word who cares? AbiWord loads almost instantly, is fairly smooth, and as a word processor is fairly feature rich. Has less doo-dahs and whatnots then Word, but honestly I question how much of that is actually used.
OpenOffice is not the only OSS office tool out there. AbiWord and Gnumeric spring to mind (both open way faster than OpenOffice).
And while you may think you're delegating responsibility you're still ultimately responsible. If I give company ABC my CC info to buy a product from them, then they choose to pass it off to someone else that I didn't authorize to process the payment, and eventually I learn that they did something fraudulent with it. You can be damn sure I'll hold ABC responsible, if not legally, than at least consumerably [as in I won't shop at ABC anymore].
Likewise, if they start hosting their customer data through AJAX on a Google server and it gets leaked, I won't do business with them either. The simplest way not to leak a secret is to NOT SEND IT TO OTHER PEOPLE. Even over TLS the data is stored somewhere at google, where one mishap can destroy any privacy I may or may not have had.
I use things like gmail because my personal emails are not private. i don't care if the entire world knows that I'm going to a Wii party this weekend [or whatever]. It doesn't matter.
But you can be damn sure that my private matters, technology, ideas, source code, etc, are not being hosted on free/near free web services just because it's nice and tidy.
So they ditch msft and shovel the money to Google instead? Doesn't make sense. If they truly wanted to cut costs they'd use OSS office tools instead. To me this sounds like someone gave a *wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* to someone in charge.
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure] any more than you can outsource responsibility. Why isn't this guy simply looking at Open Office, or hell the other free tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.
Ah, to be ignorant of technology, but rife with enough buzzwords to be dangerous.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it) and very likely insecure in the end (hint: gmail has already had a few goofs). I'm all for ditching Windows, but using online office tools is just short sighted. Within a year or two of the switch they'll be climbing back into bed with MS Office [no doubt].
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
Slashdot Mirror
Hehehe, wait 3-4 months. Not only will there be a few more games out but there will likely be plenty of Wiis to go around.
... Not that I think the Wii will fail in the short term. Just saying there is a bonus to waiting.
In the advent that there aren't, the market for games will shrivel up and you'll count yourself lucky not investing in it.
comic I wub ROOO!
Try one of the other sports? Boxing is fairly intense. Or play some smoothmoves.
Dunno, I've only played with the Wii for one day. Was playing quite a bit of Tennis [even though my backhand sucks badly].
Wiiiiiiiii
Tom
Yeah, LOL LINUX IS TEH SUX! I'M COOL CUZ I have half an opinion about something...
Like I've said before. There are those who mock, and then the rest of us who just use it, look at your comment and ask "wtf drugs is he on?" Surprise surprise, lots of people derive value from OSS tools. Even more shockingly many use them for gain and profit from not having to shell out license fees
In your mind Linux [and I'll just venture a guess, OSS] is "teh sux, LOL" which is fine with me, you can keep paying the lazy-tax.
Tom
Here's a random idea, if device manufacturers didn't wander down the "windows compatible" (only) route oh say 12 years ago (OMG ADVENT OF WIN95!!!) Linux wouldn't have "sucked" so bad because hardware wouldn't be windows only.
I should point out that when Win3.11 came out it barely had networking. Forget about SMP or even multi users. Win95 didn't have USB or networking, etc... So let's not think that MSFT was half-way any better back then to.
Trumpet Winsock to the rescue. (and I used the "bloated netscape" in windows before IE became mainstream).
You can't be suggested freedom. you have to seek it out. If your parents aren't looking for freedom, no sales person can "force" it on them. Choosing OSS is not just about the cost, or sticking it to Bill. It's about being free to use technology as you see fit (or as close to that as reality permits). At some point, people, individually, have to be responsible for their freedom.
It boils down to people sacrifice what is right for what is easy (hey thanks Sopranos advert that I've seen 3 million times on A&E). For your parents windows may be the right choice, but I suspect that most likely a FL/OSS operating system [and set of software] is probably not only an adequate fit but more useful down the road.
Tom
I hate how people wait till the last possible second to do what's actually in the customers best interest. And almost always only after their business has gone down the shitter.
FSF ain't exactly new. If companies embraced it 10 years ago like they fucking should have, we'd be better fucking off, instead of using half-baked shitastic OSes like Vista nowadays. See, look what your greed and apathy got you.
Don't wait for your corporate masters to decide when libre software is right for you. Make up your own damn minds.
Tom
It's actually a bit more complex than that. See for example: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-46/bo-ga :l_VIII-gb:s_296//en#anchorbo-ga:l_VIII-gb:s_296"> these sections from the CCC.
...
Essentially, it's libel if you caused to be published something you don't reasonably know to be true
that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published.
So, yes, you can talk smack about people. It just has to be true and in the best interest of the audience. For example, if you commited a petty offence, say shop lifting, 10 years ago. And I go around your book signing tour [say you wrote a book on gardening or something] writing reviews that revealed this fact and caused you harm. That could be considered libelous, since while true, is not in the best interest of the public (e.g. who cares) and it causes you harm (section 298).
Tom
Bingo. That's basically a symptom of a larger problem. When not resource constrained people don't know how to be conservative. Give them a 3GHz processor and they'll fill it with everything and anything. Who cares if 15% of the time is spent doing [say] virtual translations [C++ overrides] or whatever. It's a 3GHz processor!!!
Look at some of the games for the N64, that was a platform. And in the end, after people spent a lot of time figuring it out, they were able to make the graphics and AI very advanced [for the day]. Nintendo was smart with the Wii. Since most of the hardware [and probably GFX engine/etc] are based on the Gamecube developers won't have to invest as much to port to it. That the Wii has faster processors than the Gamecube gives them even more room to maneuver, but the developers will still have to smart about what they are doing.
I think it would be a good idea if new comp.sci students only wrote programs for seriously constrained devices at first. Learn what it is to fit a program in a 4KB block of memory on an 8051. When you can master that, here's 64KB of ram and an ARM, etc. We sit kids down, who have never programmed for anything less than their parents desktop with 1GB of ram running at multiple GHz, of course they don't know better.
The 360 and PS3 aren't not setting a good trend. Like Intel of yesteryear they want to convince you that larger numbers == better. So you should run that 400W/h console. I mean, it's just oh so much better. Along those lines the 360 version 2 will consume twice as much power, because, afterall, billions of pixels in super duper HD is all that matters.
Tom
Um rehashes? Like Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3? Like the 7 versions of Ghost Recon? What about GTA? ...
:-), I think I'd go for it. "faster" doesn't mean 3GHz PPC, currently [iirc] it has a 66 and 33 MHz ARM processors. Bump those to 133 and 66, give it 16MB of ram instead of 4MB and it will have plenty of room to grow.
Nintendo is hardly the only developer with rehashes.
And besides, sales of the DS are um, a bit higher than that of the PSP.
If Nintendo decided the DS2 [or whatever] would basically be the DS + faster cpu + more ram and say motion sensors
Tom
Look at the DS compared to PSP. Comparably "underpowered" yet while I own both, only one sits in a box, unplayed for months (hint: the PSP). Graphics are not the be-all for most people. Only lame undersexed gamers think they need a billion polygons/sec to make a "game fun."
As to his comment about the CPU not being fast enough for AI I guess we'll have to wait and see. Maybe he's used to bloatware or being inefficient. I'm sure Wii developers will figure it out.
Besides, I think the Wii has already proven it's not in the same track as the 360 and PS3. The games for the Wii will be much different in that they actually promote you to get into the game and not be all sloth-like on your couch with a remote...
Tom
That's sucktastic, sorry to hear about your bad luck. Though keep in mind working for big companies does suck. When I was at AMD about the biggest perk was flying around in coach and the occasional free gear. Working for a small company now and it's much better. Less "office space" type feel to it, and my input is actually valued from time to time [as opposed to NEVER].
:-) ).
People wanting to work for the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, AMD, Intel, etc... should think twice. If you have any sort of character you'll learn that a decent salary (and in my case AMD was paying decent bank) isn't the be-all of existence, and that self-respect is worth a lot more. Let the indians run MSFT if they want. They'll sort out that they're getting H1B jobs not because of talent but because they're not likely to demand pay. The shit software they produce will get side-stepped by the OSS world and problem solved. If companies like MSFT don't want to hire based on merit [e.g. someone who can showcase their talents] that's their own prerogative.
As a side note, one good way of landing quality jobs is to have a nice OSS portfolio. Bonus points for getting your software used everywhere. In my case, I lucked out, a crypto firm was using my libraries for a while, then noticed I lived in the area (6km away from their office) and that I was just grad'ing from college. So they offered me a job (while I was in Rennes, France on other business
Tom
us poor university students...
:-)
... bullshit. Fedora Core + OpenOffice == free. Or Gentoo + whatever or *BSD + whatever or ...There are ways of getting most [if not all] the tools you'll need for free and libre from an OSS distribution. Just takes effort.
Use OSS tools. They're free, cost you poor poor students nothing.
Besides academic papers should be done in TeX unless you're one of them polysci wannabe students, then just muddle your way through with notepad because you don't have anything useful to say anyways
Honestly, I hate comments like yours. OMG what can we do as poor students, oh thank you MSFT for saving us
Tom
Most window managers that would work on an 8MB box would be things like icewm or WM. Not exactly user friendly. And windows 3.11 didn't need 4MB of ram, but it wasn't a bad idea as it allowed you to have a nice smartdrv cache :-) And I didn't mean that the 1980s word processor took 80MB, I meant it could fit with room to spare on an 80MB drive. As in, drives of the day were ~80MB or so.
I still remember the QNX demo that had a full featured kernel, web browser, etc, fitting on a single 1.44MB disk. To be fair though, the current Linux kernel does a bit more in terms of standards compliance, module support, etc than QNX ever did.
The point of my rant was to remind the younger readers that there was a time when the same applications they take for granted today were consuming far less resources in the past. Back when software developers had to really think about the code they designed because of the resource limitations.
Tom
The problem I have is the sub-culture that follows the MSFT style businesses don't really have a need for true science. I mean god, look at thedailywtf.com for examples of how "programmers" just don't get what the hell they are doing. Quick, dirty, and with a lot of buttons. That's the sort of software people come to expect, with absolutely no focus on what goes on behind the scenes.
We have a business culture where most of the people who program [or claim to design software] for a living couldn't explain, say, how a merge sort works. Worse yet, they couldn't easily find a description, learn it, and explain it. The net result being applications which fail in the field (hint: bugs in any other engineer discipline == killing people), consume far too many resources, and don't meet all of the user requirements to start with.
Take a good hard look at things like Vista, or heck even OpenOffice (for a good OSS target). Bloatware to the extreme, the result of rampant divergent design processes without care to optimization or proper resource management.
Why could I point and click applications with Win 3.11 and 4MB of ram, but now Vista requires a min of 1GB of ram, and a processor that is 200 times faster? Heck, you can run a decently tuned BSD or Linux distro with only 128MB of ram easily (with X, Gnome, etc). Why did a full featured word processor with spell/grammar checking fit nicely on an 80MB HD in the 80s and now Word takes a half gigabyte? etc...
As a whole, most end user applications are just not engineered to be engineered. They're quickly assembled and shoved out the door. Which pretty much annoys the fuck out of any true blue software engineer [who wants to take pride in what they are doing]. Net result, only uneducated non-engineers will want to work on the software because they don't know better [and/or don't care]. It'd be like running an art school where you only showcase musical performances that are off beat and out of tune. No serious musician would want to study there.
I don't think comp.sci is dying, I just think most hardcore scientists are not really caring to work for the likes of MSFT, they'd rather work for smaller companies where their input is actually valued and their contributions while commercial, are not solely aesthetic.
Tom
That may be sarcasm, but tennis [and bowling] are actually fun. Throw in a friend + smooth moves and it's crazy.
Yeah not a lot of games out, heck not a lot of consoles either. Give it a few months already.
Tom
Yeah, kinda sad that people will spend all this time establishing their "virtual me". You want some to decorate? Move out of your parents house, get an apartment, then go straight to the mall and get fabrics/furniture/etc. Congrats.
I like the Wii approach. Takes all of 2 mins to make a Mii then you're done off playing games.
Tom
NUMBER FIVE is ALIVE! hehehehe loved that movie. 2nd one sucked.
Most folk who insist on using MS Office, haven't the first fucking clue what they're doing. I'm not saying there aren't people that use Office well, because there are. I'm just saying most are lazy, and learning where "find/replace" is in that new Wordprocessor is beyond them (but running a fortune 500 isn't... go figure).
I'm just glad I work in a relatively small company capable of just saying "use whatever gets the job done properly."
Tom
Hahahaha that's cute. First off, the process (as in CMOS process) back in the 80s was NOT better than it is now. The reason your 386 didn't need a fan (some did have heat sinks though, or at least needed them) was that they only had 300K transistors [or whatever it was]. A modern processor has in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of transistors. Most new processors have more cache than systems had memory, etc.
What you should concern yourself with is the overall MIPS/watt ratio. Which is definitely in favour of things like the Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD64 designs than the 80386.
Tom
OpenOffice can take a while to open, but it will open none the less. Compare that to gmail for instance, oh wait, it says come back in 30 seconds ... for the last 3 hours ... oh shoot there goes my work day. gmail isn't down often, but it does slow down often. And that's just mail. Wait till google is parsing multi-megabyte documents with embedded crap and etc.
.doc super well, but if you're not using Word who cares? AbiWord loads almost instantly, is fairly smooth, and as a word processor is fairly feature rich. Has less doo-dahs and whatnots then Word, but honestly I question how much of that is actually used.
I don't get your complaint against AbiWord. It works just fine for editing documents. Sure it doesn't import
Tom
Maybe I missed a joke cuz I'm all mature and what not. But what is perverted about playing with a Nintendo Wii?
Tom
OpenOffice is not the only OSS office tool out there. AbiWord and Gnumeric spring to mind (both open way faster than OpenOffice).
And while you may think you're delegating responsibility you're still ultimately responsible. If I give company ABC my CC info to buy a product from them, then they choose to pass it off to someone else that I didn't authorize to process the payment, and eventually I learn that they did something fraudulent with it. You can be damn sure I'll hold ABC responsible, if not legally, than at least consumerably [as in I won't shop at ABC anymore].
Likewise, if they start hosting their customer data through AJAX on a Google server and it gets leaked, I won't do business with them either. The simplest way not to leak a secret is to NOT SEND IT TO OTHER PEOPLE. Even over TLS the data is stored somewhere at google, where one mishap can destroy any privacy I may or may not have had.
I use things like gmail because my personal emails are not private. i don't care if the entire world knows that I'm going to a Wii party this weekend [or whatever]. It doesn't matter.
But you can be damn sure that my private matters, technology, ideas, source code, etc, are not being hosted on free/near free web services just because it's nice and tidy.
Tom
So they ditch msft and shovel the money to Google instead? Doesn't make sense. If they truly wanted to cut costs they'd use OSS office tools instead. To me this sounds like someone gave a *wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* to someone in charge.
Tom
You can't outsource security [e.g. oh look google is so much better at keeping our documents secure] any more than you can outsource responsibility. Why isn't this guy simply looking at Open Office, or hell the other free tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.
Ah, to be ignorant of technology, but rife with enough buzzwords to be dangerous.
Not only are the google versions of the tools not nearly feature complete, but they're over the internet. Thus guaranteed to be sucktastically slow (especially when a lot of people use it) and very likely insecure in the end (hint: gmail has already had a few goofs). I'm all for ditching Windows, but using online office tools is just short sighted. Within a year or two of the switch they'll be climbing back into bed with MS Office [no doubt].
Also, if you're just going to use AJAX based web tools, what does it matter what OS you run?
Tom