I think this maybe proves a point about why it's a bad idea to use generic words as your product names (ahem... "word", "office", "windows", et cetera...)
Bad idea from whose perspective? It's very intentional, I am sure, that MS uses these kinds of names. They want their products to be ubiquitous, to equate in the public's minds with the generic. In other words, the possible confusion between the specific and the generic is very intentional.
It also helps if you can achieve a legally-protected trademark on a generic term, preventing competitors from accurately identifying their software. Just try to make a new product -- let's say a window manager for Gnome called ``Gwindows'' -- and watch the fun.
I never was able to get WordPerfect to run under Linux, so I'm not too sad to see it go...
I do wonder, however, what the status of the WP filters for OpenOffice is, 'cause I've got a whole lot of papers in WP format from my undergrad days. Anyone know?
For that matter, what's the likelihood that a WP-like mode might ever appear in OOo? Given OOo's native format is XML-based, a WP-style `reveal codes' might be possible to implement. I mostly use Vim/LaTeX these days, but when I have to do WYSIWYG word processing, I miss WP.
So if the Soviet Union had nuked the US over the U2 incident, and wiped out the human race, the US would have been the cause of the problem? Or would Wilbur and Orville Wright have been, because they caused the airplane to exist?
With all the attention companies like Clear Channel have gotten for owning such a high percentage of the nation's radio stations could soon result in regulation.
I would that that were so, but not until we get some Regime Change (tm) at home. Don't expect to see any regulations benefitting consumers for a long time.
It seems like Bush wants to be remembered for something more than just Iraq.
We've forgotten about Afghanistan already?
I guess we have forgotten about Enron etc., huh? And Haliburton? And the Florida election fiasco? And the Kyoto agreement? Oh, well; I guess that was the point, wasn't it?
Right, that would be why Democrats opposed the Patriot Act, DMCA, export restrictions, and Clipper chip. Come on. Republicans aren't great on civil liberties, but Democrats have been just as bad or worse in recent years.
There's a (perhaps subtle, but nonetheless real) difference between cowardice in the face of evil and the active propagation of evil.
some interesting spam with full screen ads for XP home edition and numerous 'informational' mailings from Microsoft concerning various products.
(Sort of related) I keep getting spammed for Symantec/Norton products. I assume (maybe erroneously) that Symantec isn't actually behind it. MS might not be behind your XP spam either. Anyone know what the deal is with the Norton spam?
He is probably right. I really could have use of a grammar checker.:-P
Your grammar was not perfect, no. As a native speaker of English, though, I am grateful that it is the international language of communication now, and I don't feel it is appropriate to ridicule people for whom it is a second or third language. If I had to post to/. in French, for example, I would regularly make an ass of myself.
But how did you know I was from Finland anyway?-) My journal? My nick?
Your journal mentions a Helsinki newspaper, and one of your `friends' is `anttijaakkola', which can only be Finnish (double-A, double-T, and double-K all in one name <grin>). And your nick (to my untrained ear) could be Finnish, too, so all the signs pointed Suomi-ward.
Sorry to disappoint you but Works does come with Word and Word obviously "talks" to the.doc format.
I'm not sure when that changed (I never used Works [not MS, not Claris] myself), but it didn't use to be the case. In the mid-1990s we had lots of trouble with students bringing in Works docs which MS Office couldn't open.
Why couldn't you before? I use text email in Outlook just fine. It even highlights URLs for me in text mode which I find nice . Maybe you don't?
I had the same problem. (I was forced to use O2k/Exchange at my last job.) It was like having a horrible skin disease -- I was afraid to show myself on any respectable mailing list. It didn't matter how you fiddled the settings, it still sent HTML. It would appear to you that you were sending plain text, but what it would actually send was HTML. The difference, of course, was that the HTML message was formatted to look like plain text -- fixed pitch font, etc. Truly, truly evil.
Even if they have fixed this evilness I won't go back to it. I just hope that someone comes out with OSS that can talk to an Exchange server, because I may not always be able to avoid those.
Is the same kind of support for XML planned in OpenOffice??
Actually, OpenOffice's native and default format is XML (for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and vector graphics). OOo is way ahead of MS on this one (if not in some other features).
I'd argue this collateral damage has destroyed the usefulness of email even more than spam has. It's simply an unreliable medium these days -- you never know if your mail got there or not, because it could have been silently dropped with no bounce message sent.
There's another, more insidious effect. I have caught myself almost deleting important, legitimate e-mails because subject lines looked ``spammy'' on first glance. Something like 80% of the e-mail in my inbox is spam, so I delete more than I read. Eventually, something important is going to get deleted instead of read; heck, it may have happened already and I just don't know it yet.
Consequently, I never assume e-mail to be totally reliable.
USA, One nation under God - UK, One nation under USA
Elsewhere:
You're either with us or against us.
All right, you've truly confused me. If you're not happy about the UK being the 51st state (as your sig implies you're not), why bash the French for not queueing up to be the 52d?
It's also by far and away the easiest Linux distro to set up and use that I've tried...
My experience seems to be counter to the norm here. I had a very painful experience with Mandrake (version 8 IIRC). The installer kept crashing, HardDrake did some very unpleasant things to my a couple of partitions, etc. In contrast, when I installed Debian on the same boxes, things Just Worked. I didn't come back to Mandrake after that, so I'm working from a very small sample, but I'd be reluctant to try it again.
And PackageDrake (or whatever it's called), never worked properly. They only way I ever got anything to work was by downloading RPMs and running rpm manually.
I'd hate to see them go, though. I'd like to think that things have improved since I tried it, and that they're giving others positive Linux experiences.
Now what we really need is a -5 Unamerican moderation.
Y'know, I was wishing for a mod point so I could mod this ``+1 Funny.'' Then I realized you might be serious, and it all seemed not very funny suddenly.
I did not know that Hern was still around. it has been years since I last played.
Not only is it still around, but the third edition rules were just released last month. Check out Hârn Forum if you want to see what's new in HârnWorld.
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit butt-rock camaro:
Funny, in my head it's not QVC but the guy who does the car-stereo commercials on rock radio... Kinda fits with your nick, in fact ;)
scripsit Kadagan AU:
I forgot about Lindows... (Does some googling...) It looks like the Lindows case still isn't settled. But MS sure did go after them.
scripsit Spudley:
Bad idea from whose perspective? It's very intentional, I am sure, that MS uses these kinds of names. They want their products to be ubiquitous, to equate in the public's minds with the generic. In other words, the possible confusion between the specific and the generic is very intentional.
It also helps if you can achieve a legally-protected trademark on a generic term, preventing competitors from accurately identifying their software. Just try to make a new product -- let's say a window manager for Gnome called ``Gwindows'' -- and watch the fun.
I never was able to get WordPerfect to run under Linux, so I'm not too sad to see it go...
I do wonder, however, what the status of the WP filters for OpenOffice is, 'cause I've got a whole lot of papers in WP format from my undergrad days. Anyone know?
For that matter, what's the likelihood that a WP-like mode might ever appear in OOo? Given OOo's native format is XML-based, a WP-style `reveal codes' might be possible to implement. I mostly use Vim/LaTeX these days, but when I have to do WYSIWYG word processing, I miss WP.
scripsit dvdeug:
Nah, it was Eve.
scripsit NeoSkandranon:
I'm still trying to figure out why someone would pay $5 a month for his bash binary.
scripsit thundercatzlair:
I would that that were so, but not until we get some Regime Change (tm) at home. Don't expect to see any regulations benefitting consumers for a long time.
scripsit Phroggy:
I guess we have forgotten about Enron etc., huh? And Haliburton? And the Florida election fiasco? And the Kyoto agreement? Oh, well; I guess that was the point, wasn't it?
scripsit bnenning:
There's a (perhaps subtle, but nonetheless real) difference between cowardice in the face of evil and the active propagation of evil.
scripsit PotatoHead:
I can't say I read it too closely, but I assume it was from a reseller.
scripsit KDan:
That is, the verb which means ``to find on the Internet by means of the Google search engine.''
Nobody says ``google for it'' when they mean ``go to AltaVista and search for it.''
scripsit PotatoHead:
(Sort of related) I keep getting spammed for Symantec/Norton products. I assume (maybe erroneously) that Symantec isn't actually behind it. MS might not be behind your XP spam either. Anyone know what the deal is with the Norton spam?
scripsit Fulkkari:
Your grammar was not perfect, no. As a native speaker of English, though, I am grateful that it is the international language of communication now, and I don't feel it is appropriate to ridicule people for whom it is a second or third language. If I had to post to /. in French, for example, I would regularly make an ass of myself.
Your journal mentions a Helsinki newspaper, and one of your `friends' is `anttijaakkola', which can only be Finnish (double-A, double-T, and double-K all in one name <grin>). And your nick (to my untrained ear) could be Finnish, too, so all the signs pointed Suomi-ward.
scripsit Speed Racer:
I'm not sure when that changed (I never used Works [not MS, not Claris] myself), but it didn't use to be the case. In the mid-1990s we had lots of trouble with students bringing in Works docs which MS Office couldn't open.
scripsit thebatlab:
I had the same problem. (I was forced to use O2k/Exchange at my last job.) It was like having a horrible skin disease -- I was afraid to show myself on any respectable mailing list. It didn't matter how you fiddled the settings, it still sent HTML. It would appear to you that you were sending plain text, but what it would actually send was HTML. The difference, of course, was that the HTML message was formatted to look like plain text -- fixed pitch font, etc. Truly, truly evil.
Even if they have fixed this evilness I won't go back to it. I just hope that someone comes out with OSS that can talk to an Exchange server, because I may not always be able to avoid those.
scripsit jacoplane:
Actually, OpenOffice's native and default format is XML (for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and vector graphics). OOo is way ahead of MS on this one (if not in some other features).
scripsit yatest5 in re Fulkkari's post:
Dude, what you need is a life. AFAICT Fulkkari is from Finland. You may bitch about his English when your Finnish is beyond reproach.
scripsit Noryungi:
I do. Now, going after their pets, though, that's just wrong.
;)
scripsit Trepidity:
There's another, more insidious effect. I have caught myself almost deleting important, legitimate e-mails because subject lines looked ``spammy'' on first glance. Something like 80% of the e-mail in my inbox is spam, so I delete more than I read. Eventually, something important is going to get deleted instead of read; heck, it may have happened already and I just don't know it yet.
Consequently, I never assume e-mail to be totally reliable.
scripsit CausticWindow:
Elsewhere:
All right, you've truly confused me. If you're not happy about the UK being the 51st state (as your sig implies you're not), why bash the French for not queueing up to be the 52d?
scripsit Big Mark:
My experience seems to be counter to the norm here. I had a very painful experience with Mandrake (version 8 IIRC). The installer kept crashing, HardDrake did some very unpleasant things to my a couple of partitions, etc. In contrast, when I installed Debian on the same boxes, things Just Worked. I didn't come back to Mandrake after that, so I'm working from a very small sample, but I'd be reluctant to try it again. And PackageDrake (or whatever it's called), never worked properly. They only way I ever got anything to work was by downloading RPMs and running rpm manually.
I'd hate to see them go, though. I'd like to think that things have improved since I tried it, and that they're giving others positive Linux experiences.
scripsit Alex:
s/women with hairy armpits/Laetitia Casta/
scripsit CausticWidow:
Y'know, I was wishing for a mod point so I could mod this ``+1 Funny.'' Then I realized you might be serious, and it all seemed not very funny suddenly.
scripsit MyHair:
Mmmmmmmmm. Fries.
Um, frites (=``French fries'') are Belgian, not French.
scripsit amber_lux:
Not only is it still around, but the third edition rules were just released last month. Check out Hârn Forum if you want to see what's new in HârnWorld.