For the most part, people are in no position to "give em hell" when "em" is MS.
Wouldn't an e-mail reader be "just plain better" if it could read Outlook-ified emails? It's a feature. It's good. It would improve the product. It wouldn't have to send out crap e-mails, or compromise how it read non-Outlook email. This is possible. And not that hard.
Would making this work mean that open source has compromised its standards? No, it would demonstrate that open source can provide the best, most productive platform.
Instead, people look at open source and say "These people value a vague ideal over interoperability, over ease of use, and over my time - cause I _must_ read this kind of email to do my job".
MS isn't going to change - but open source can. Open source could provide a product that _just works with everything_.
In the end, the excuse really doesn't matter to most people. They see this: "Outlook is better because it can read this other Outlook email". And open source COULD take that advantage away.
But stupid people with attitudes like yours just don't get it.
Your attitude (which is shared by many) is a significant barrier to businesses looking to move towards open source (you'd fare GREAT in my business - clients love being told they're wrong). Businesses know that they can't treat their clients like you treat people, and they think that's their only option if they move to open source.
It isn't. You can win by sending documents in RTF or PDF, and _asking_ them to do the same - and explain yourself. If they don't, then convert the documents and open them in StarOffice and get on with your life.
Also, you can get a free Word viewer - assuming you have access to a MS platform (and since you suggest buying Word as a possibility I assume you have access to one) - but shouldn't StarOffice be able to convert them decently anyways?
Outlook email isn't that incomprehensible of a format. Why the hell can't every e-mail reader understand it?
And don't tell me "But it doesn't go along with standards..." because that doesn't help the problem. Fixing the problem would fix the problem, and it wouldn't be that hard. I've looked out how Outlook encodes e-mails with attachments/html emails and it isn't all that special or difficult to read.
Somehow we've got to avoid the philosophy of "Why doesn't everyone do it right?" and go to "We'll make ours work right, but it'll still work with yours".
It's a good thing for MS that these problems get whined about so much.
-Dave Campbell
I think this review had value...
on
Review: Kung Pow
·
· Score: 2
I enjoy a stupid funny movie now and again, and I'm guessing Katz does too (he's gone to see this and Orange County in the last while). While I'm not much of a Katz fan, he gives enough information for me to know that this wasn't another "Dumb and Dumber" kind of movie - and that's all we needed to know.
I think most people see the web as nothing but [insert whatever you look at]. Most of the pages I see are tech news, sports, and humor.
That doesn't mean that that's all there is, it just means that's all I find. Your browser history is a good look at your own personality, not the content of the web.
I didn't realize this was by Katz till I read the flamers at -1... If Katz really believes the web to be as boring as he suggests it is here, what's up with every other post he has ever made?
Perhaps he could help me reconcile his position here with his position everywhere else?
Don't tell people this! What the heck you trying to do?
Really though, I think programmer jobs will change. The world will need less and less highly skilled programmers, and more and more "tech helpers" - people to walk their manager through making a presentation or sharing data with a client.
There will be sophisticated, easy to use tools to do these sort of tasks. Thankfully, many will still be too stupid to use them. Logical thinking combined with technical competence will always be a commodity.
The wording of your question makes it very easy to think of you as a troll, though you're probably not.
A good example of a company rushing software is Funcom's Anarchy Online. It was released in spite of huge, unresolved problems with the beta tests. However, they felt they had to go to market ahead of competitors.
Other products are simply doomed by diminishing returns. An alpha of a new MS OS might have tens of thousands of bugs. Internal testing will get a lot at first, but the bug finding rate will wind down quickly as time goes on. After a certain point, it's more economical to let the public find the bugs than it is to hire more testers.
There will always be some equilibrium here, though I'm guessing MS will likely try to do more testing in future releases - as the talk of insecurity is actually starting to get through to the general public.
Lots of people at my work don't actually know how to save. When they want to save, they close the window and say "Yes".
You're certainly correct that most people get by with very little functionality. But it only takes one lost feature to turn a user off of a new software package.
Why can't I "blither"? In Word I could "blither"! Even if "blathering" is an acceptable substitute, it had darn well better work the same way.
Have they narrowed down the cause yet? It's a suspicious sort of target - kind of like a fire at an abortion clinic...
And if they lost important strains it's their own dang fault. Who doesn't have a backup location for storage of something so valuable? I know - this could be their way of cashing in on research that wasn't going anywhere (assuming adequate insurance).
Don't complain - paranoia is par for the course here.
I've got an external "386" device (I paid like 1000 dollars for it) that I'd sell. It connects via the parallel port, or ethernet with the right drivers. As a bonus, it has 40 MEGABYTES of its own "hard disk" space and is a combo 3 1/2, 5 1/4, CD Drive.
And this would happen without anyone batting an eyelash, I'm sure. DOJ would be happy with it.
I don't think so. And even if the situation came to pass:
A: It would be easy to remedy this situation, and it would be remedied via antitrust action (though perhaps some group would need to be formed to validate and sign OS booters from open source vendors).
B: The market would supply a vendor who produced equipment to run other OS's.
This is the problem with the "slippery slope" style of arguing. You don't try to evaluate the problems with some projection, you just view it as some inevitable consequence of something reasonable. Everything gets bent into some crazy, hypothetical world where nothing is as it is now.
Here's a projection: Linux will overcome MS by providing a better product for free. Seems a lot more likely than Jamie's scenario.
Why can't this be the topic of our anti-MS conversation: What can we do to make Linux better?
Right, like how their word processor has a standard file format that is backwards compatible. Oh, wait...
What does their lack of backwards compatibility have to do with anything?
Is it a ploy to make money? Of course it is.
Does it really matter? No, you can set Word to save to Word 95 format and you won't lose anything important. You can even download a free 2000 viewer if you want, and cut and paste into Word 95.
Would MS provide these things if they were a crazy, unrestricted monopoly that would do anything to grab cash? No, they'd encrypt.xls files to ensure noone could read without paying. And they'd charge $900 for Windows.
MS is like some inkblot where everyone can project their own little "gotta stand up to the man", "slippery slope" fantasy world view.
Want to fight MS? Help make Linux good. Quit whining.
People are always assuming MS is going to pull some crazy crap using its monopoly power.
It does of course, but nothing like what Jamie is thinking. Whenever it does try something bizarre, like making MSN only work with IE, people call them on it. And they stop.
And if they pulled something like this, they'd have to. The DOJ isn't going to sign off its case without some sort of oversight.
And I think the oversight committee might have a problem with
"Proposal 1A: Drop support for any PC that's capable of booting a non-MS OS."
These stupid ideas only serve to make the real ones look silly.
Why should Jamie get to post moderation free, Katzian garbage like this? Put it in a comment like everyone else.
Lots of people suggest that there's tons of features that "no one ever uses" - what they really mean is features "I never use".
Our office prepares a lot of fairly technical documents - and there's some features that our people never use. And some that I'm sure we use that you don't. And, and, and...
Here's some things that I've noticed render inconsistently in RTF:
1. A page which is partly in columns, partly not
2. Footers/headers
3. Bullets (especially numbered)
4. Dot leaders on tabs, decimal tabbing.
Someone will say: "It works fine when I do it..." Well, it doesn't when I do it. And these are all features we need.
Most of our secretarial force now has only an HTML based Word Processor.
Biggest problem: there's no good way to handle tabbing (tables are fine but inconvenient, anything more fancy like auto-resizing spans screw up). Secretaries like being able to quickly due dot-lead tabs and such to make quick columns. HTML as implemented in IE (which we have to support so clients can view documents), doesn't have good enough tabs.
The other problem (no good concept of page, which makes documents for printing hard to edit), we've been able to solve (well enough for us) in our custom editor.
This sort of "Let's have some Linux deployment stories" story comes up quite often (in fact, it gets sort of boring). Each time it gets some good answers, but I'm sure it would be nice for those looking for justification if they had all the business cases together... And sortable.
People could say, "I've found hundreds of stories about companies our size. In fact, Joe Company down the road did it, and so did..."
-
It is too a robot war...
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
..in that, like the B-movie of the same name, I'm not seeing much cool footage of robots duking it out.
And the Taliban ran out of robots fairly quick. I don't count Mr. Walker as a robot.
My point is not that you couldn't have arrived at a VB style IDE from a generalized one, but that you probably wouldn't.
I agree that dumping code in the.frm file isn't a good idea - but the intuitiveness of doing so (double click on a button to add some code) appeals to a lot of programmers - it's just the sort of feature that plays to VB's strengths.
But it's not the sort of feature that would likely be in a plugin for a generic IDE. Why corrupt a perfectly good form editor by having it spew code into some linked module? The very idea of having code in a.frm would just not fit in with the paradigm of a good generic language tool.
Anywho, doesn't much matter. And I too hope that they come up with a good project.
Who hunts a post like this down when it's already at 0 and puts it to -1? Who reads at 0? And the worst thing they see while reading at 0 is a stupid post about karma that's clearly marked OT? Someone explain?
I'm glad I'm distracting idiot moderators from damaging actual conversations. Who knows, maybe this comment will absorb some more soon-to-be-misspent mod points. I'll leave it at 2 for just that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
For the most part, people are in no position to "give em hell" when "em" is MS.
Wouldn't an e-mail reader be "just plain better" if it could read Outlook-ified emails? It's a feature. It's good. It would improve the product. It wouldn't have to send out crap e-mails, or compromise how it read non-Outlook email. This is possible. And not that hard.
Would making this work mean that open source has compromised its standards? No, it would demonstrate that open source can provide the best, most productive platform.
Instead, people look at open source and say "These people value a vague ideal over interoperability, over ease of use, and over my time - cause I _must_ read this kind of email to do my job".
MS isn't going to change - but open source can. Open source could provide a product that _just works with everything_.
In the end, the excuse really doesn't matter to most people. They see this: "Outlook is better because it can read this other Outlook email". And open source COULD take that advantage away.
But stupid people with attitudes like yours just don't get it.
Your attitude (which is shared by many) is a significant barrier to businesses looking to move towards open source (you'd fare GREAT in my business - clients love being told they're wrong). Businesses know that they can't treat their clients like you treat people, and they think that's their only option if they move to open source.
It isn't. You can win by sending documents in RTF or PDF, and _asking_ them to do the same - and explain yourself. If they don't, then convert the documents and open them in StarOffice and get on with your life.
Also, you can get a free Word viewer - assuming you have access to a MS platform (and since you suggest buying Word as a possibility I assume you have access to one) - but shouldn't StarOffice be able to convert them decently anyways?
Outlook email isn't that incomprehensible of a format. Why the hell can't every e-mail reader understand it?
And don't tell me "But it doesn't go along with standards..." because that doesn't help the problem. Fixing the problem would fix the problem, and it wouldn't be that hard. I've looked out how Outlook encodes e-mails with attachments/html emails and it isn't all that special or difficult to read.
Somehow we've got to avoid the philosophy of "Why doesn't everyone do it right?" and go to "We'll make ours work right, but it'll still work with yours".
It's a good thing for MS that these problems get whined about so much.
-Dave Campbell
I enjoy a stupid funny movie now and again, and I'm guessing Katz does too (he's gone to see this and Orange County in the last while). While I'm not much of a Katz fan, he gives enough information for me to know that this wasn't another "Dumb and Dumber" kind of movie - and that's all we needed to know.
Better than an article on the evils of McDonalds.
Backwards compatibility sells MS products. Losing it will open the floodgates. MS won't do it.
Apple is a very different animal. They can sell anything. Just not to everybody.
In any case, "going back and rewriting everything" always sounds like a good idea, but seldom is.
"Going back and rewriting the worst stuff" is probably a much better idea.
I think most people see the web as nothing but [insert whatever you look at]. Most of the pages I see are tech news, sports, and humor.
That doesn't mean that that's all there is, it just means that's all I find. Your browser history is a good look at your own personality, not the content of the web.
I didn't realize this was by Katz till I read the flamers at -1... If Katz really believes the web to be as boring as he suggests it is here, what's up with every other post he has ever made?
Perhaps he could help me reconcile his position here with his position everywhere else?
I had Wolf for Linear Algebra. Great guy.
The problem took me 10 minute 30 to solve...
-Dave
Don't tell people this! What the heck you trying to do?
Really though, I think programmer jobs will change. The world will need less and less highly skilled programmers, and more and more "tech helpers" - people to walk their manager through making a presentation or sharing data with a client.
There will be sophisticated, easy to use tools to do these sort of tasks. Thankfully, many will still be too stupid to use them. Logical thinking combined with technical competence will always be a commodity.
.
In a way I wish I was in their target market so I could complain.
.
The wording of your question makes it very easy to think of you as a troll, though you're probably not.
A good example of a company rushing software is Funcom's Anarchy Online. It was released in spite of huge, unresolved problems with the beta tests. However, they felt they had to go to market ahead of competitors.
Other products are simply doomed by diminishing returns. An alpha of a new MS OS might have tens of thousands of bugs. Internal testing will get a lot at first, but the bug finding rate will wind down quickly as time goes on. After a certain point, it's more economical to let the public find the bugs than it is to hire more testers.
There will always be some equilibrium here, though I'm guessing MS will likely try to do more testing in future releases - as the talk of insecurity is actually starting to get through to the general public.
Lots of people at my work don't actually know how to save. When they want to save, they close the window and say "Yes".
You're certainly correct that most people get by with very little functionality. But it only takes one lost feature to turn a user off of a new software package.
Why can't I "blither"? In Word I could "blither"! Even if "blathering" is an acceptable substitute, it had darn well better work the same way.
-
Have they narrowed down the cause yet? It's a suspicious sort of target - kind of like a fire at an abortion clinic...
And if they lost important strains it's their own dang fault. Who doesn't have a backup location for storage of something so valuable? I know - this could be their way of cashing in on research that wasn't going anywhere (assuming adequate insurance).
Don't complain - paranoia is par for the course here.
.
I've got an external "386" device (I paid like 1000 dollars for it) that I'd sell. It connects via the parallel port, or ethernet with the right drivers. As a bonus, it has 40 MEGABYTES of its own "hard disk" space and is a combo 3 1/2, 5 1/4, CD Drive.
-Dave
And this would happen without anyone batting an eyelash, I'm sure. DOJ would be happy with it.
I don't think so. And even if the situation came to pass:
A: It would be easy to remedy this situation, and it would be remedied via antitrust action (though perhaps some group would need to be formed to validate and sign OS booters from open source vendors).
B: The market would supply a vendor who produced equipment to run other OS's.
This is the problem with the "slippery slope" style of arguing. You don't try to evaluate the problems with some projection, you just view it as some inevitable consequence of something reasonable. Everything gets bent into some crazy, hypothetical world where nothing is as it is now.
Here's a projection: Linux will overcome MS by providing a better product for free. Seems a lot more likely than Jamie's scenario.
Why can't this be the topic of our anti-MS conversation: What can we do to make Linux better?
...
What does their lack of backwards compatibility have to do with anything?
Is it a ploy to make money? Of course it is.
Does it really matter? No, you can set Word to save to Word 95 format and you won't lose anything important. You can even download a free 2000 viewer if you want, and cut and paste into Word 95.
Would MS provide these things if they were a crazy, unrestricted monopoly that would do anything to grab cash? No, they'd encrypt
MS is like some inkblot where everyone can project their own little "gotta stand up to the man", "slippery slope" fantasy world view.
Want to fight MS? Help make Linux good. Quit whining.
.
People are always assuming MS is going to pull some crazy crap using its monopoly power.
It does of course, but nothing like what Jamie is thinking. Whenever it does try something bizarre, like making MSN only work with IE, people call them on it. And they stop.
And if they pulled something like this, they'd have to. The DOJ isn't going to sign off its case without some sort of oversight.
And I think the oversight committee might have a problem with
"Proposal 1A: Drop support for any PC that's capable of booting a non-MS OS."
These stupid ideas only serve to make the real ones look silly.
Why should Jamie get to post moderation free, Katzian garbage like this? Put it in a comment like everyone else.
.
Lots of people suggest that there's tons of features that "no one ever uses" - what they really mean is features "I never use".
Our office prepares a lot of fairly technical documents - and there's some features that our people never use. And some that I'm sure we use that you don't. And, and, and...
Here's some things that I've noticed render inconsistently in RTF:
1. A page which is partly in columns, partly not
2. Footers/headers
3. Bullets (especially numbered)
4. Dot leaders on tabs, decimal tabbing.
Someone will say: "It works fine when I do it..." Well, it doesn't when I do it. And these are all features we need.
Most of our secretarial force now has only an HTML based Word Processor.
Biggest problem: there's no good way to handle tabbing (tables are fine but inconvenient, anything more fancy like auto-resizing spans screw up). Secretaries like being able to quickly due dot-lead tabs and such to make quick columns. HTML as implemented in IE (which we have to support so clients can view documents), doesn't have good enough tabs.
The other problem (no good concept of page, which makes documents for printing hard to edit), we've been able to solve (well enough for us) in our custom editor.
This sort of "Let's have some Linux deployment stories" story comes up quite often (in fact, it gets sort of boring). Each time it gets some good answers, but I'm sure it would be nice for those looking for justification if they had all the business cases together... And sortable.
People could say, "I've found hundreds of stories about companies our size. In fact, Joe Company down the road did it, and so did..."
-
..in that, like the B-movie of the same name, I'm not seeing much cool footage of robots duking it out.
And the Taliban ran out of robots fairly quick. I don't count Mr. Walker as a robot.
My point is not that you couldn't have arrived at a VB style IDE from a generalized one, but that you probably wouldn't.
.frm file isn't a good idea - but the intuitiveness of doing so (double click on a button to add some code) appeals to a lot of programmers - it's just the sort of feature that plays to VB's strengths.
.frm would just not fit in with the paradigm of a good generic language tool.
I agree that dumping code in the
But it's not the sort of feature that would likely be in a plugin for a generic IDE. Why corrupt a perfectly good form editor by having it spew code into some linked module? The very idea of having code in a
Anywho, doesn't much matter. And I too hope that they come up with a good project.
Who hunts a post like this down when it's already at 0 and puts it to -1? Who reads at 0? And the worst thing they see while reading at 0 is a stupid post about karma that's clearly marked OT? Someone explain?
I'm glad I'm distracting idiot moderators from damaging actual conversations. Who knows, maybe this comment will absorb some more soon-to-be-misspent mod points. I'll leave it at 2 for just that reason.
.
AAACcch! I've been torn from the karma kap for the first time. The shame!
If only it would have been marked as overrated before it got modded up!
I agree. But I also understand MS. Why make things compatible? So that your competitors can compete better?
You can get most of the same benefits of following standards by pretending to follow standards. And it's easier.
If Word actually runs on a new OS, that'd be just the thing (and quite the miracle).
.