I wonder why it is that all movie reviews on SlashDot rapidly degenerate into subjective flames typically sparse of any real information to argue to the contrary of their target. I grant you your right not to like Katz, but does posting flames that don't even give any indication as to why you think he is wrong make you feel good about yourself somehow?
I think the thing I find most annoying about these posts is the way that they exaggerate everything out of proportion, and then get modded up. Have you actually read any of the reviews properly? Have you seen the movies? If you have, why are you saying that Katz "hated" them? I agree that he often seems a little off-base and perhaps expects too much of movies, but he is normally quite coherent in his explanations as to why he didn't like them, and generally will amend his opinions with comments on why they are subjective and could be disagreed with.
I don't mean to flame, honestly, but it occurs to me that, while I agree Tucker is rather lame in most respects, perhaps he is a genuinely likeable person in real life. Certainly Chan seems to be, and if they do enjoy working together, who are we to say that Chan should sacrifice the fun of making the movie for the minimal ratings boost and less enjoyable production that a better actor would bring? Besides, I think, even though Tucker does suck a bit, it would have completely spoiled the second movie if he had not appeared in it.
Of course, you seem to just dislike the Rush Hour franchise in general so I don't suppose anything I say will particularly mollify you.
BlackICE is generally regarded by internet security experts, to the best of my knowledge, as a very poor firewall solution. Many intruder reports are not genuine, and many genuine intrusions are not reported. In addition to this, it does not use any kind of encryption to ascertain whether an application authorised to access certain ports is really what it pretends to be. For example, a Trojan named IExplore.exe will slip right by BlackICE because the firewall doesn't check it for authenticity. On the other hand, programs like ZoneAlarm, and Tiny Personal Firewall do perform these authentications, and are excellent at blocking intrusions as well. ZoneAlarm tends to be a little unstable and I have personally had some trouble with it, but I still highly recommend it for average Windows users. I find Tiny stable, secure, and it tells you exactly what is happening. I have tested it on Win2k and WinME and it runs perfectly on both.
In addition, you might be interested to know that BlackICE completely blocks all network traffic when lanning, and is very troublesome, while Tiny is not. BlackICE, in my experience, also does not actually uninstall properly and continues to run after you have theoretically removed it. This struck me as very strange, and could be a random incident. However, I have had my computer frozen solid with BlackICE running, on Windows 2000, and my opinion of it, like that of Steve Gibson is somewhat low. And yeah, some of you might laugh at Steve Gibson, but I'm not just going by what he says, bear that in mind.
To be honest, when I read that BlackICE was used widely inside Microsoft, I laughed my arse off.
Repeated attempts failed to load this page completely.
Do you think that enough of us emailed them, Opera would consider revising that error message to This site is slashdotted. Please try again in a couple of days?
You're forgetting that with a 32-bit address bus, your CPU will only be able to use a maximum of 4 GB (4096 MB) of RAM, and I haven't personally seen any mobos that can manage that (although I know you can get them.) Of course, I presume that you are thinking of setting up some kind of specialised expansion board (that could even use a normal IDE connector) that you could stick your dimms in, but I expect that just the board would cost you a fair tad. A nice idea though...just thought I'd mention the RAM limit thing.
Let's draw an anology here: replace "Microsoft" with "AI", replace "open source" with "human beings", replace "EULA" with "Agent Smith":
Microsoft
"...I say your civilisation because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilisation, which is, of course, what this is all about...the future is our world...the future is our time."
"...it came to me when I tried to classify your [software]...[open source] is a disease...a cancer of this [manopoly]...and we...are the cure..."
Funny, the site is a blank page. I would have thought that if I was going to register a name like that, I'd at least do something with it. Frankly, you probably should have gone for slashdotsucks.org, rather than using the one with a.com TLD; seems more consistent is all. It's either slashdotted or bogged right now, but it definitely exists. Probably another poster further down the thread mentioned it already;)
I don't think that you could spin these facts any other way. It's pretty much "Microsoft has lied about not using open source code on Hotmail any more", end of story. WSJ might be on Microsoft's side, but they can't really put this in a better light than they have. They weren't exactly damning Microsoft; in fact, I think they were working their butts off to make the article sound as neutral as humanly possible.
Damn, Red Sea scrolls?? I can't believe I typed that, and previewed three times, and still didn't catch it. And it's barely gone midnight. Dead Dead Dead Dead. I think I need the practise.
I don't understand. I see your point, don't get me wrong, but I am fairly certain that your arguments are effectively moot, for two reasons:
1. you're talking about multimedia, and comparing it to papyrus scrolls. I didn't realise that the Red Sea Scrolls were animated, but I'll check again. You're trying to mix apples and oranges (of course, I still see your overall point)
2. I may be wrong, but I think the original post was referring to text. Not multimedia at all.
And, as long as text exists on computers in a basic format (ascii, html (html can easily have text extracted from it, and it wouldn't take a genius to work out what the tags do)) and those computers are connected to other computers (ie, the internet), there is no need to store the text on some kind of disk like a CD or DVD or floppy (God forbid) for 2000 years. Provided the text is on a computer with the software to read it, it can be shared with a newer computer with newer software. That computer then updates the text into the new format, and by the time 2000 years has scrolled by it's as good as new, through the wonder of file sharing. No one is suggesting storing files completely alone on any media (I hope?); of course it will become archaic. But, by the same merit that technology is changing so fast that storing data on something like a CD is a bad idea if you want to read it in 50 years, it also provides the solution by allowing us to update it constantly through sharing and updating.
I think the fundamental flaw here is that everyone is trying to draw direct comparisons between paper and digitally-encoded text. That's just silly. No one can run their eyes over the surface of a CD, and nod wisely and say, "Yes, good book." But even though archaism can be a problem with technology, technology solves its own problem by being able to duplicate the same text countless times. Short of photocopying, or scanning, papyrus scrolls are damn lucky to still be around.
So, in 2000 years, track me down and we'll see if we can still find a hardcopy version of The Great Escape, and then we'll see if I can download it from the trillions of yottabytes of information stored on the interstellar information network still known as the internet. Bet I can.
Oh, one last thing; storing text electronically also makes it easier to store more; virtually no physical space is required, so you can keep all those useless NY Times articles that you just didn't have space for in your personal library (with real bookshelves, wow!) Accessing (more) information is quicker, and generally just helps things along. Just a bit of superfluous burble for you to go (Duh!) at.
I think the point being made was that even many modern mobos use ISA, and all new computers have serial ports and floppy controllers. I have no idea why either, but it seems that someone knows something we don't...
Disregarding the fact that the parent of the parent of the parent (I think) forgot that floppy disks didn't stop at 1.44 MB, but got all the way up to around 250 MB, let's clarify the measurements of the previous posts, for those of you still hindered by the Imperial System. 1/10 cm == 1 mm. 1 mm == 1/1000 m. 1 m == 3.3 ft.
So if we want a more accurate answer to what resolutions the human eye can see, just a quick realisation that I can see the pixels on my monitor indicates that it is at least as fine as 0.27 mm (the dot pitch of a horrible Philips 107S). Now that's pretty small, but I think if I look real close and screw my peepers up and squint like hell I could probably see something maybe even as small as 0.1 mm (no promises though). So maybe the final comparison should be something more like "5000 times smaller"?
Please mod the parent up; I'm not trying to be a Usian basher, but this does deserve +2: insightful, at least.
The only potential problem...
on
PS2 As PC
·
· Score: 1
...is that, regardless of the fact that the PS2 would be running Linux, the hardware is still proprietary. If one observes trends in the development of standard PC hardware, and compares them to the development of, for example, Apple hardware, it is clear that the only things that became popular and thus mainstream were those that were not proprietary, and could be cloned by other companies. A good example of this is IBM's ISA and microchannel bus architecture; ISA was not proprietary and became very popular, however when IBM tried to introduce microchannel as a proprietary product, regardless that it was much more advanced and supported things like plug and play, no one wanted to use it. Looking at Apple, because they produced entirely their own hardware, they became relegated to a much smaller area of the computer industry (not that their stuff isn't good).
That is not to say that sticking Linux on the PS2 is not a good idea -- I think it's a great idea because the more public exposure Linux can get the better. However, if this did become popular, you are going to find that you now have one proprietary piece of hardware running all these systems, with no real competition unless someone can come up with something similar enough to make it work, without getting sued, and that could eventually lead either to a nasty manopoly (unlikely) or a slow decline due to the fact that the sharing of hardware development for the platform is very limited. In fact, it seems rather ironic to run an open source operating system like Linux on a completely closed-source system like the PS2.
As an ex-South African and current New Zealander, I find it strikingly ironic that the Maori are attempting to establish an apartheid system in the name of political correctness. I feel inclined to wonder what sort of response they would give us if we told them that they were no longer allowed to use any European culture, or an off-shoot thereof. If one makes direct parallels, that includes any form of European-based art; literature; history; most forms of technology, such as weapons and boats; pets; beds; running water and God knows what else.
It also seems extremely odd (at least to my apparently extremely skewed mind) that the Maori complain constantly about "cultural segregation" and "discrimination" toting the ever-brandished ideal of combining the European-New Zealand and Maori-New Zealand cultures, and then pull stunts like this. No, no double standard here...move right along.
PS, I am not a pakeha. "Pakeha" means "dirty white pig". I am a white. If any Maoris want to call me a pakeha, I presume they will have no objections to me calling them niggers.
<ul><i>If you really are a novelist name one "feature" that you actually need...Auto spell checking? seems useless when you can save time by running it once at the end.</i></ul>
<p>
So, this reply is a little late to change anything unless you personally are checking your user page every now and then, but I needed to reply anyway.
<p>
Okay, regarding auto-spellchecking, I don't mean to sound insulting, but please, unless you've written 500k words of novel don't even presume to suggest that this is not the most <i>incredibly</i> useful feature a writer could ask for. Not only does it save you a lot of time when writing, since you can instantly notice an error and fix it on the run, but to suggest that spell- and grammar-checking a 133-thousand word document once you've finished is it a viable method of doing things is not simply ignorant, it's even a little foolish. It is possible that <i>you</i> do not benefit from auto-spellchecking since you may not touchtype, but for someone who has his eyes on the screen 98% of the time it is nearly the most useful feature of Word I can think of. In addition to this, and expanding my scope to all novelists, some writers are running slow systems. Now, on my Athlon I don't really find spellchecking a huge document slow in terms of checking for errors (manually parsing each suggested error is a different matter), but my old 486 took literally minutes to check even 50 pages, let alone 132.
<p>
Another function the usefulness of which I cannot emphasise enough is auto-correct, which tends to go hand in glove with auto-spellcheck. To have your word processor automatically convert "adn" into "and", "hte" into "the" and things like "noi dea" into "no idea" <i>dramatically</i> increases your typerate because even a small number of errors like that under normal circumstances would mean multiple taps of the backspace key, followed by keying in the correct words, followed by rewriting the word or words that you typed afterwards. This is not the only usefulness however; typerate can be further increased by customising auto-correct. For example, to type a difficult name like Mendelssohn I can simply tell Word to convert "Mn" into "Mendelssohn" and forget about checking the name twice.
<p>
Once again I extol the virtues of blue background and white text for keeping me both sane and relatively headache free after eight hours of typing a day. Notice I said <i>blue</i> background. Not black, as another poster suggested. Blue. It's blue for a reason, trust me on that. Black doesn't work; the contrast between the letters and the background is too high. In fact, I will generally change the text to light grey because even white is too bright after a while (admittedly I do have very photosensitive eyes though).
<p>
Then you mention standards. The only standard for a publisher is that you present your manuscripts double-spaced, left-justified and in a serif font. Generally size twelve. Word happens to do this very well, and it also happens to convert my normal 10-point Garamond, fully justified, into the above-mentioned format at the drop of a hat. I am not debating other standards, or how a decent markup language may be better for the <i>publishing</i> end of the pipeline. That isn't the point. The point is that Word allows <i>me</i> to type documents so they look as I want them to look onscreen, and provides me with a front-end to my book that doesn't give me a headache. The publisher isn't writing my book; neither do I have a secretary whose old files I need to go through. I can change the formatting of my documents at the touch of a widget for when I print; I can save in about twenty different formats, including what is debatably a form of HTML.
<p>
As for saying that headings etc are cannot be predefined and standardised, you evidently haven't used Word. You can customise any type of formatting and turn it into a user-defined setting, changing chapter headings to "Ravaj heading 1" etc. You can jump between them in a document, setting them to match each other and follow a specific layout. I won't argue that it might be more limited than a good markup language, but once again it isn't really necessary to be better. I don't need it, and if a publisher needs it he will use it and that's fine by me.
<p>
I didn't mean to go on so much, and I don't want to sound like I'm ranting. You <i>do</i> make some valid and interesting points, and in some ways you even rebut my points well. It's just that you seem to be working from preconceptions, some ill-founded, some ignorant, and some very reasonable. Unfortunately, the average Joe Luzer still only needs a word processor/office package, not a markup language and, personally, I can't foresee that changing at any point in the immediate future. So Microsoft Office, being the best and most comprehensive office package out there, is still going to dominate the market until someone realises that markup languages are great sometimes, but office products are great other times. Hopefully that will be soon, and I can switch entirely to open source software.
"I admit though that I dont know why the second bomb was dropped."
I don't mean to propogate a slightly off-topic discussion, and I won't comment on whether it was right to drop those bombs or not, but there was a reason for multiple bombs:
There were actually more than two planes carrying nuclear weapons headed for Japan that day; this was because the US knew that several of them were unlikely to get all the way to their targets without being shot down. So they sent six, iirc, fairly sure that one would get through. In fact, once again iirc, they only expected one to get through, but they were, um, lucky I guess.
I think I'm a fairly standard, run-of-the-mill computer nerd, pro ope-source blah blah woof woof. But be that as it may, I have never seriously used Linux. I have used Windows 95 and Windows 2000 on my home systems, but I have never installed and kept a Linux distro. Why?
Well, I wanted to, because I wanted to support an operating system that I believe deserves to be supported. I also didn't want to support Microsoft, even if it was only an implied support by using their product, since heaven forbid I pay for anything made by them. However, each time I investigated options that would give me the same sort of applications etc in Linux that I use in Windows, I came up a little short. It wasn't that there were no applications out there; it was that these applications weren't of the same standard as Microsoft ones. No, I am not trying to troll. I am no fan of Microsoft, believe me.
I am not saying that the applications I tried were less stable than the M$ equivalents. But basically, because I am a writer, I need three things: a good word processor that won't die, a good browser, and a good music program. Okay, when I'm screwing around with other stuff then I want some more, but that's what I basically require of my system. Linux gave me a system that was friendly enough, and the music program was...oki. But there are no word processors out there that can compete with Microsoft Word. Sure, Word has crashed on me a couple of times. Yes, I've even lost a couple of pages of novel a few times. But StarOffice et al do not have the same feature set that Word has, and the features they do have are not packaged as neatly. I might have been tempted to use StarOffice for word processing if only it could use a blue background and white text, because I really like the way that it combines everything into one package, whereas M$ Office is a whole bunch of separate applications.
But the simple fact of the matter is that, when it comes to an operating system that is very stable and a word processor that is very functional and wonderful to use, Microsoft is sadly still on top with Windows and Word 2000. Word XP is even better, despite the fact that the interface looks like a webpage. For anything else...I would have to go third party, and could probably find something equally good in Linux. But the problem is that, especially for luzers, the things I have mentioned here are the things that are used the most. So until some really neet applications are released that can threaten the Office suite, Microsoft will always be either a manopoly or a huge market leader.
The Washington Schools Information Processing Cooperative, an alliance designed to help schools afford technology, is investing about $20 million in a system made by Skyward Inc., of Stevens Point, Wis. All of the cooperative's schools should have access to the program within five years.
I'm no American, so I can't be sure, but how much money does the Information Processing Cooperative spend actively upgrading computer systems that can actually benefit students? I am not saying that this new tech is inherently bad, but it seems like just one more step down the already very slippery path towards a corporate-owned and run country by creating tame citizens in the earliest stages of their development. Accessing detention records is one thing, but who wants their parents knowing what they had for lunch? Isn't school supposed to be about having fun as well as learning? Or are the two now mutually exclusive?
Slashdot Mirror
Sunnyvale? Isn't that sitting directly on top of a fat hunking Hellmouth...?
I think the thing I find most annoying about these posts is the way that they exaggerate everything out of proportion, and then get modded up. Have you actually read any of the reviews properly? Have you seen the movies? If you have, why are you saying that Katz "hated" them? I agree that he often seems a little off-base and perhaps expects too much of movies, but he is normally quite coherent in his explanations as to why he didn't like them, and generally will amend his opinions with comments on why they are subjective and could be disagreed with.
Of course, you seem to just dislike the Rush Hour franchise in general so I don't suppose anything I say will particularly mollify you.
In addition, you might be interested to know that BlackICE completely blocks all network traffic when lanning, and is very troublesome, while Tiny is not. BlackICE, in my experience, also does not actually uninstall properly and continues to run after you have theoretically removed it. This struck me as very strange, and could be a random incident. However, I have had my computer frozen solid with BlackICE running, on Windows 2000, and my opinion of it, like that of Steve Gibson is somewhat low. And yeah, some of you might laugh at Steve Gibson, but I'm not just going by what he says, bear that in mind.
To be honest, when I read that BlackICE was used widely inside Microsoft, I laughed my arse off.
Do you think that enough of us emailed them, Opera would consider revising that error message to This site is slashdotted. Please try again in a couple of days?
You're forgetting that with a 32-bit address bus, your CPU will only be able to use a maximum of 4 GB (4096 MB) of RAM, and I haven't personally seen any mobos that can manage that (although I know you can get them.) Of course, I presume that you are thinking of setting up some kind of specialised expansion board (that could even use a normal IDE connector) that you could stick your dimms in, but I expect that just the board would cost you a fair tad. A nice idea though...just thought I'd mention the RAM limit thing.
Microsoft
"...I say your civilisation because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilisation, which is, of course, what this is all about...the future is our world...the future is our time."
"...it came to me when I tried to classify your [software]...[open source] is a disease...a cancer of this [manopoly]...and we...are the cure..."
Open Source
"What do [we] need?"
"Guns. Lots of guns." (No paraphrasing required.)
But I'm curious about one thing. Who's the One?
Funny, the site is a blank page. I would have thought that if I was going to register a name like that, I'd at least do something with it. Frankly, you probably should have gone for slashdotsucks.org, rather than using the one with a .com TLD; seems more consistent is all. It's either slashdotted or bogged right now, but it definitely exists. Probably another poster further down the thread mentioned it already ;)
Except then people could laugh at how you can't even spell "you're", and your great domain name would become a bit silly wouldn't it?
I don't think that you could spin these facts any other way. It's pretty much "Microsoft has lied about not using open source code on Hotmail any more", end of story. WSJ might be on Microsoft's side, but they can't really put this in a better light than they have. They weren't exactly damning Microsoft; in fact, I think they were working their butts off to make the article sound as neutral as humanly possible.
Damn, Red Sea scrolls?? I can't believe I typed that, and previewed three times, and still didn't catch it. And it's barely gone midnight. Dead Dead Dead Dead. I think I need the practise.
2. I may be wrong, but I think the original post was referring to text. Not multimedia at all.
And, as long as text exists on computers in a basic format (ascii, html (html can easily have text extracted from it, and it wouldn't take a genius to work out what the tags do)) and those computers are connected to other computers (ie, the internet), there is no need to store the text on some kind of disk like a CD or DVD or floppy (God forbid) for 2000 years. Provided the text is on a computer with the software to read it, it can be shared with a newer computer with newer software. That computer then updates the text into the new format, and by the time 2000 years has scrolled by it's as good as new, through the wonder of file sharing. No one is suggesting storing files completely alone on any media (I hope?); of course it will become archaic. But, by the same merit that technology is changing so fast that storing data on something like a CD is a bad idea if you want to read it in 50 years, it also provides the solution by allowing us to update it constantly through sharing and updating.
I think the fundamental flaw here is that everyone is trying to draw direct comparisons between paper and digitally-encoded text. That's just silly. No one can run their eyes over the surface of a CD, and nod wisely and say, "Yes, good book." But even though archaism can be a problem with technology, technology solves its own problem by being able to duplicate the same text countless times. Short of photocopying, or scanning, papyrus scrolls are damn lucky to still be around.
So, in 2000 years, track me down and we'll see if we can still find a hardcopy version of The Great Escape, and then we'll see if I can download it from the trillions of yottabytes of information stored on the interstellar information network still known as the internet. Bet I can.
Oh, one last thing; storing text electronically also makes it easier to store more; virtually no physical space is required, so you can keep all those useless NY Times articles that you just didn't have space for in your personal library (with real bookshelves, wow!) Accessing (more) information is quicker, and generally just helps things along. Just a bit of superfluous burble for you to go (Duh!) at.
I'm shaking all over at what I'm about to do, but...his name isn't Clippy. It's Clippit.
...sinus wave? Can you teach that to me too?
Or maybe they're just stupid.
Damn, if I'd just scrolled down and read this I wouldn't have had to post above.
So if we want a more accurate answer to what resolutions the human eye can see, just a quick realisation that I can see the pixels on my monitor indicates that it is at least as fine as 0.27 mm (the dot pitch of a horrible Philips 107S). Now that's pretty small, but I think if I look real close and screw my peepers up and squint like hell I could probably see something maybe even as small as 0.1 mm (no promises though). So maybe the final comparison should be something more like "5000 times smaller"?
Please mod the parent up; I'm not trying to be a Usian basher, but this does deserve +2: insightful, at least.
That is not to say that sticking Linux on the PS2 is not a good idea -- I think it's a great idea because the more public exposure Linux can get the better. However, if this did become popular, you are going to find that you now have one proprietary piece of hardware running all these systems, with no real competition unless someone can come up with something similar enough to make it work, without getting sued, and that could eventually lead either to a nasty manopoly (unlikely) or a slow decline due to the fact that the sharing of hardware development for the platform is very limited. In fact, it seems rather ironic to run an open source operating system like Linux on a completely closed-source system like the PS2.
Dood, can you spell "Darwin Awards"?
It also seems extremely odd (at least to my apparently extremely skewed mind) that the Maori complain constantly about "cultural segregation" and "discrimination" toting the ever-brandished ideal of combining the European-New Zealand and Maori-New Zealand cultures, and then pull stunts like this. No, no double standard here...move right along.
PS, I am not a pakeha. "Pakeha" means "dirty white pig". I am a white. If any Maoris want to call me a pakeha, I presume they will have no objections to me calling them niggers.
<ul><i>If you really are a novelist name one "feature" that you actually need...Auto spell checking? seems useless when you can save time by running it once at the end.</i></ul>
<p>
So, this reply is a little late to change anything unless you personally are checking your user page every now and then, but I needed to reply anyway.
<p>
Okay, regarding auto-spellchecking, I don't mean to sound insulting, but please, unless you've written 500k words of novel don't even presume to suggest that this is not the most <i>incredibly</i> useful feature a writer could ask for. Not only does it save you a lot of time when writing, since you can instantly notice an error and fix it on the run, but to suggest that spell- and grammar-checking a 133-thousand word document once you've finished is it a viable method of doing things is not simply ignorant, it's even a little foolish. It is possible that <i>you</i> do not benefit from auto-spellchecking since you may not touchtype, but for someone who has his eyes on the screen 98% of the time it is nearly the most useful feature of Word I can think of. In addition to this, and expanding my scope to all novelists, some writers are running slow systems. Now, on my Athlon I don't really find spellchecking a huge document slow in terms of checking for errors (manually parsing each suggested error is a different matter), but my old 486 took literally minutes to check even 50 pages, let alone 132.
<p>
Another function the usefulness of which I cannot emphasise enough is auto-correct, which tends to go hand in glove with auto-spellcheck. To have your word processor automatically convert "adn" into "and", "hte" into "the" and things like "noi dea" into "no idea" <i>dramatically</i> increases your typerate because even a small number of errors like that under normal circumstances would mean multiple taps of the backspace key, followed by keying in the correct words, followed by rewriting the word or words that you typed afterwards. This is not the only usefulness however; typerate can be further increased by customising auto-correct. For example, to type a difficult name like Mendelssohn I can simply tell Word to convert "Mn" into "Mendelssohn" and forget about checking the name twice.
<p>
Once again I extol the virtues of blue background and white text for keeping me both sane and relatively headache free after eight hours of typing a day. Notice I said <i>blue</i> background. Not black, as another poster suggested. Blue. It's blue for a reason, trust me on that. Black doesn't work; the contrast between the letters and the background is too high. In fact, I will generally change the text to light grey because even white is too bright after a while (admittedly I do have very photosensitive eyes though).
<p>
Then you mention standards. The only standard for a publisher is that you present your manuscripts double-spaced, left-justified and in a serif font. Generally size twelve. Word happens to do this very well, and it also happens to convert my normal 10-point Garamond, fully justified, into the above-mentioned format at the drop of a hat. I am not debating other standards, or how a decent markup language may be better for the <i>publishing</i> end of the pipeline. That isn't the point. The point is that Word allows <i>me</i> to type documents so they look as I want them to look onscreen, and provides me with a front-end to my book that doesn't give me a headache. The publisher isn't writing my book; neither do I have a secretary whose old files I need to go through. I can change the formatting of my documents at the touch of a widget for when I print; I can save in about twenty different formats, including what is debatably a form of HTML.
<p>
As for saying that headings etc are cannot be predefined and standardised, you evidently haven't used Word. You can customise any type of formatting and turn it into a user-defined setting, changing chapter headings to "Ravaj heading 1" etc. You can jump between them in a document, setting them to match each other and follow a specific layout. I won't argue that it might be more limited than a good markup language, but once again it isn't really necessary to be better. I don't need it, and if a publisher needs it he will use it and that's fine by me.
<p>
I didn't mean to go on so much, and I don't want to sound like I'm ranting. You <i>do</i> make some valid and interesting points, and in some ways you even rebut my points well. It's just that you seem to be working from preconceptions, some ill-founded, some ignorant, and some very reasonable. Unfortunately, the average Joe Luzer still only needs a word processor/office package, not a markup language and, personally, I can't foresee that changing at any point in the immediate future. So Microsoft Office, being the best and most comprehensive office package out there, is still going to dominate the market until someone realises that markup languages are great sometimes, but office products are great other times. Hopefully that will be soon, and I can switch entirely to open source software.
I don't mean to propogate a slightly off-topic discussion, and I won't comment on whether it was right to drop those bombs or not, but there was a reason for multiple bombs:
There were actually more than two planes carrying nuclear weapons headed for Japan that day; this was because the US knew that several of them were unlikely to get all the way to their targets without being shot down. So they sent six, iirc, fairly sure that one would get through. In fact, once again iirc, they only expected one to get through, but they were, um, lucky I guess.
Well, I wanted to, because I wanted to support an operating system that I believe deserves to be supported. I also didn't want to support Microsoft, even if it was only an implied support by using their product, since heaven forbid I pay for anything made by them. However, each time I investigated options that would give me the same sort of applications etc in Linux that I use in Windows, I came up a little short. It wasn't that there were no applications out there; it was that these applications weren't of the same standard as Microsoft ones. No, I am not trying to troll. I am no fan of Microsoft, believe me.
I am not saying that the applications I tried were less stable than the M$ equivalents. But basically, because I am a writer, I need three things: a good word processor that won't die, a good browser, and a good music program. Okay, when I'm screwing around with other stuff then I want some more, but that's what I basically require of my system. Linux gave me a system that was friendly enough, and the music program was...oki. But there are no word processors out there that can compete with Microsoft Word. Sure, Word has crashed on me a couple of times. Yes, I've even lost a couple of pages of novel a few times. But StarOffice et al do not have the same feature set that Word has, and the features they do have are not packaged as neatly. I might have been tempted to use StarOffice for word processing if only it could use a blue background and white text, because I really like the way that it combines everything into one package, whereas M$ Office is a whole bunch of separate applications.
But the simple fact of the matter is that, when it comes to an operating system that is very stable and a word processor that is very functional and wonderful to use, Microsoft is sadly still on top with Windows and Word 2000. Word XP is even better, despite the fact that the interface looks like a webpage. For anything else...I would have to go third party, and could probably find something equally good in Linux. But the problem is that, especially for luzers, the things I have mentioned here are the things that are used the most. So until some really neet applications are released that can threaten the Office suite, Microsoft will always be either a manopoly or a huge market leader.
I'm no American, so I can't be sure, but how much money does the Information Processing Cooperative spend actively upgrading computer systems that can actually benefit students? I am not saying that this new tech is inherently bad, but it seems like just one more step down the already very slippery path towards a corporate-owned and run country by creating tame citizens in the earliest stages of their development. Accessing detention records is one thing, but who wants their parents knowing what they had for lunch? Isn't school supposed to be about having fun as well as learning? Or are the two now mutually exclusive?