Which is unfortunate for the hunter, but more fortunate for women who don't like being burned at the stake. I know which group I'd prefer my society to support.
But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method
Luckily for us, there's an organisation dedicated to reviewing the best data that scientific studies have to offer, with contributions from thousands of practising scientists all over the world collected over more than 25 years. Let's see what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say:
Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
...
Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (see [data citations]). This evidence for human influence has grown since [the previous IPCC Assessment Report]. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
...
Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
— IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
Just to be clear, those quotations are directly from the highlighted key points in the sections about attributing the detected changes in the climate and what will happen in the future. The emphasis was retained from the original publication.
I'll leave you with one more quote, from a slightly less heavyweight source but no less valid:
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
1984: A cautionary tale about the power of the state and the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance.
2014: A real life documentary in which everyone carries around a mobile phone, everyone's car includes trackers with automatic remote location capabilities, major population centres are observed by numerous cameras logging to central databases under government control and backed by technology doing everything from facial recognition to gait analysis, even the privacy of your own home isn't private because there are literally cameras tucked away on your TV, and lots of people are OK with this as long as the pizza is still hot when it gets delivered and arrives in time for tonight's reality TV show.
Or just don't buy a TV that comes right out of 1984 with a camera and mic included. If you want to Skype, get separate (probably better...) inputs, and connect them up via a system you control and trust.
I'm rapidly coming around to the view that it should be legally required for anything you buy to declare all sensors it includes (camera, mic, GPS, WiFi receiver, etc.) and all networking capabilities (wired or wireless) prominently on the packaging, and to provide a hardwired switch to disable these facilities when they aren't (or shouldn't be) in use. It's crazy how many people are buying things that have all kinds of surveillance capabilities that have already been shown to be vulnerable and don't realise it because they just assume they can trust a TV from a big name brand like Samsung.
there is no expectation of privacy in a public place what so ever.
People keep saying that, but it's obviously nonsense.
If you walked around obviously looking up women's skirts in a park, I imagine they would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.
If you followed someone around with a video camera (or Google Glass or whatever) recording their every move, I imagine they too would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.
If you walked down the street peering into everyone's front window through a 2in gap in the curtains at night, do you really think most people would consider that normal, acceptable behaviour?
Try explaining to a police officer why you were hanging around with a video camera filming people entering their PINs at a cash machine, and see how far an argument that there is no expectation of privacy in a public place gets you. Or, you know, don't, because it's obvious that people do expect privacy under those conditions and that someone violating that privacy is unwelcome.
The "no privacy in a public place" mantra needs to die. It's an absurd proposition even today, as readily demonstrated by everyday examples like the above. Moreover, the origins of any laws that might (arguably) support the position from a legal rather than ethical perspective today are found in times where the risks to privacy posed by being seen in public were on a completely different (and much lower) level than they are today. Changes in those laws to reflect the capabilities and risks posed by modern technology are long overdue.
In terms of if the police enter a private place like your home the police can probably just declare they are constantly recording at all times before they enter and most of the public would not have a problem with it.
There is a difference between having a problem with some behaviour and being willing to do something dramatic enough to get that behaviour changed. It is unfortunate that such things are left to laws that are readily amended by the administration of the day for political reasons, almost invariably after some high profile but statistically outlying event that turns public sentiment enough for at least a brief period that the changes can be pushed through. This makes such illiberal measures borderline voter-proof, and IMHO that sort of situation is one of the most dangerous threats to civil liberties in modern politics.
The mere existence of footage that invades someone's privacy is reason enough for concern. Whether it has been leaked (yet) or not is at best a secondary issue.
It's not as if large government departments have a great track record on security and protecting privacy. And it's certainly not as if data originally gathered for one stated purpose has never subsequently been reused for other, very different purposes.
It's safer for everyone to have them always on - more to record what the officer's doing than anything else.
But these things won't just be recording what the officers are doing. If they're always on, they'll be recording everything else as well, and contributing to the same surveillance state that things like CCTV and ANPR do. The evidence seems to suggest that using cameras at times where some sort of confrontation or disagreement is likely is beneficial for all concerned, but that doesn't necessarily make running them full time (or keeping the footage they record if you do) a good idea.
Exactly. Only on a forum like Slashdot would "Have you filed a bug report?" be considered a credible (or at least +5, Insightful) reaction to reporting a wide-ranging problem that should never have existed, in the middle of a debate about why in the real world a lot of people still consider MS software to have a lower TCO than FOSS.
Yet they still managed to subject everyone to Ribbon and Metro and sent a lot of long time users running for the hills.
Ribbon was driven directly by monitoring how actual users were using the software. There's a fascinating series of blog posts about where it came from and how it developed. And although my initial reaction as a "power user" was similarly sceptical, the fact for me is that most people I know who've tried it came around to preferring it after a short time.
Metro is clearly a mess, but let's not pretend that was driven by the usability guys rather than the marketing/management types who thought everything had to be touch-friendly for no logical reason.
This idea that "payment translates into quality" is certainly bogus for Microsoft. They haven't had to "sing for their dinner" for a very long time.
Then why are they still dominant? It's not as if the FOSS community lacks the resources to create a rival office suite or consumer operating system of a similar scale. They've done both, multiple times.
Although more likely than not, any such "flagship brand" inspires the same mindless loyalty you're showing here.
There's no need for pointless ad hominem attacks, and loyalty has nothing to do with my views anyway. I choose which tools to use based on what gets the job done best at the time, and as someone who has on several occasions in recent years had to contrast MS Office and Open/LibreOffice, it hasn't even been close on any of those occasions.
In business terms, the cost of even a full price MS Office licence is usually negligible compared to the ongoing support costs and and efficiency savings/losses for either product, and the ongoing costs and inefficiencies for Open/LibreOffice are much higher than for MS Office. You can complain about why they're higher and how if everyone just switched to open file formats or didn't get brought up with Microsoft products it wouldn't matter, but the fact is that those things do matter, so unless you can convince most of the people that these businesses work with to agree with you and make the switch, your argument is not a strong one.
I don't think it's a big secret that LibreOffice's help is awful, so wouldn't filing some generic issue to that effect be closer to mockery than constructive assistance?
If this had an isolated case that was overlooked, sure, maybe it's worth flagging. But the complete lack of any useful organisation across the entire help system, the complete failure of its search facility to find even the most basic topics, and the reliance on finding minor links somewhere in the middle of a page or hidden right at the end to navigate to any related topics or even anything resembling an index, these aren't just individual cases. The entire system isn't up to the necessary standards to compete with the likes of MS Office, and making it so would be a massive undertaking that I'm sure the LO devs are well aware is in need of doing without any passive aggressive bug reports from people like me.
Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source... so no, this is not a obvious bug.
Yes, it really is. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who is going to actually use the software and not just develop it. And if you want to be taken seriously in the office software market, catering to normal users instead of geeks is step #1.
Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing and all that stuff. FOSS projects like LibreOffice apparently don't, or at least not effectively. And that's the difference that makes buying MS Office almost an automatic decision for a lot of customers.
Apparently they didn't, presumably because they use Ninite to install their standard software bundle. LibreOffice has a track record of not working well with Ninite, so this isn't a huge surprise.
In any case, would that have fixed the main problem, which was that the search feature didn't actually find something as basic as a spreadsheet function that was requested by its exact name?
I don't feel that bad for you... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.
I don't know whether that was meant as some sort of insult, but if you'd read my post carefully you might have realised that it was a different organisation's computer I was working with at the time, so any feeble ad hominems aimed at me are way off target.
Then again, maybe if you're the kind of person who doesn't pay attention to getting details right, you're the type of person the LibreOffice project is targeting?:-)
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there. I've been very disappointed with the amount of unskippable junk on Blu-rays, having only bought a player fairly recently when I was upgrading my TV anyway. What happened to the promise of instantly getting to your content -- I thought this was actually something that the Blu-ray marketing peeps were promoting as an advantage over DVDs at one point, but clearly it isn't the reality.
I do have some concerns about the system being broken by design and subject to changes (malicious or otherwise) that leave me without access to Blu-ray content. However, I consider that risk much lower than losing access because someone suddenly removed content from a library where it was never guaranteed to stay. And like you, I generally don't pirate material, but I suspect that if someone ever did break my Blu-ray player so I couldn't watch stuff I actually paid for, my moral objections would rapidly disappear in the affected cases (assuming suing them for significant damages was not a viable option).
I generally agree with you about training, but I don't think that's all there is to the comparison. These are complicated software applications we're talking about, and realistically any training is only going to be provided for some brief initial period to get users familiar with how things generally work.
The ongoing ease of use, and how polished the software is when you get into the details, will continue to matter long after any training is over. This is where a lot of FOSS fails compared to established but proprietary and commercial alternatives, because without the commercial incentive to put that polish on and take care of the boring stuff, often no-one does.
What would you have me write in that bug report? This isn't a minor bug, it's a complete failure of the help system to do its job, based on a complete lack of basic usability. And it's representative of a general problem throughout LibreOffice, not just an isolated case for one specific function in Calc that we were looking for at the time. The bug report would be along the lines of "On-line help doesn't", which isn't exactly constructive.
In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company.
How exactly would that happen? I don't think I've ever seen a SP server actually deployed in any organisation I've worked in, from a tiny local business to one of the largest corps in the world. Most of them were Microsoft customers, though.
I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.
It's not a popular sentiment around here, but I suspect the CIO is right about going with Microsoft even without any undisclosed deal, at least in major sectors like office software. The organisation where I was working yesterday picked LibreOffice on cost grounds, but the money lost to silly inefficiencies like the terrible on-line help system I mentioned above would pay for a copy of MS Office within weeks, if not days or hours.
You're right to express concern about proprietary data formats like the MS Office file formats, but the reality is that right now MS Office is widely used and you often have to be compatible with their formats anyway to communicate effectively. So either your alternative software can read MS formats, in which case the lock-in problem doesn't exist, or you can't, in which case your alternative comes with a serious limitation before you even start.
The problem with streamed media is they lose the rights and bam- you can't watch it any more.
This is my main problem with streaming, aside from the bandwidth issues.
Blu-ray and DVDs both have their irritations, but at least once I've bought a disk it's mine and I know I can rewatch it or lend it to a friend as often as I like. There are still potential problems with longevity but they tend to involve bad firmware updates and DRM-friendly connectivity rather than the disks themselves.
With a library model, it's great as long as what you want to watch is in the library right now, but if you get halfway through a season of your favourite show and then someone's licensing agreement runs out, bam, no second half of the season in the library any more.
I suspect the subscription/library model will have a kind of "golden age" as bandwidth gets good enough and there are only a tiny number of different libraries to subscribe to, but in the long run the most likely positions seem to be market fragmentation (you have to subscribe to several libraries, and your favourite shows might jump around between them) or consolidating into a near-monopoly (with the natural tendency to then push prices up). Neither is good for consumers, and as we saw with music, sooner or later you find people just want to download a permanent, DRM-free copy of what they paid for to enjoy on their own terms, and the world does not end if you give the customer what they want and charge a fair price for it.
I am a user interface guy, and I promise you the kind of "throw **** at a wall and see what sticks", "always move fast and break everything" mentality that has invaded parts of the industry in recent years has nothing to do with creating a good user experience.
Good user experiences tend to require, among other things, consistent, intuitive, predictable behaviour. But you can't keep selling something that by definition isn't changing radically all the time, as if it's lots of different things that users should pay for many times over.
I wonder whether part of the problem is that after having one of these devices, people aren't so keen to replace them. Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things, and of course Apple themselves pushing us to upgrade to a new version of iOS that gets terrible reviews. Plus the general closed ecosystem isn't an obvious downer for most people when you buy the first time, but after finding all the little frustrating things it can't do, I can see that at least some significant proportion of users might be put off.
Tablets as a format seem to be useful for a certain niche: basically, they're good for receiving information and some basic interaction, but not serious interaction/content creation. But there are more tablets than just Apple's, and Android tablets seem to be increasing their market share at Apple's expense. So it might be a market saturation issue with the tablet format, but I suspect there's more to it than just that in the specific case of iPads.
What you're describing is exactly the "obvious" solution I mentioned: shift the tax burden from corporation tax (tax on profits) to alternatives such sales tax (tax on revenues).
I think eventually this will be the logical conclusion to the problem of international tax shifting, but it's not something you can just change overnight. Sales taxes are messy already, with their own set of complicated rules to figure out the place where a sale is deemed to have taken place.
TFA says that the French government thinks they are not following the laws.
But which part of the French government? The implication is very different depending on whether we're talking about the legislative authorities, the tax collection authorities, or someone's PR department.
Of course some countries, most notably the UK, are against this because they like being tax havens.
I think you're confusing the UK with Ireland. Large international businesses are playing much the same games to avoid paying corporation tax in the UK as they are in France.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is unfortunate for the hunter, but more fortunate for women who don't like being burned at the stake. I know which group I'd prefer my society to support.
But natural causes is...and if you are not teaching children that the warming could very well be simply natural warming than you are not teaching them the scientific method
Luckily for us, there's an organisation dedicated to reviewing the best data that scientific studies have to offer, with contributions from thousands of practising scientists all over the world collected over more than 25 years. Let's see what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say:
Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
...
Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (see [data citations]). This evidence for human influence has grown since [the previous IPCC Assessment Report]. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
...
Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
— IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
Just to be clear, those quotations are directly from the highlighted key points in the sections about attributing the detected changes in the climate and what will happen in the future. The emphasis was retained from the original publication.
I'll leave you with one more quote, from a slightly less heavyweight source but no less valid:
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Actually, I'm in the UK, and I'm reasonably sure my MP does lurk on Slashdot. :-)
1984: A cautionary tale about the power of the state and the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance.
2014: A real life documentary in which everyone carries around a mobile phone, everyone's car includes trackers with automatic remote location capabilities, major population centres are observed by numerous cameras logging to central databases under government control and backed by technology doing everything from facial recognition to gait analysis, even the privacy of your own home isn't private because there are literally cameras tucked away on your TV, and lots of people are OK with this as long as the pizza is still hot when it gets delivered and arrives in time for tonight's reality TV show.
Or just don't buy a TV that comes right out of 1984 with a camera and mic included. If you want to Skype, get separate (probably better...) inputs, and connect them up via a system you control and trust.
I'm rapidly coming around to the view that it should be legally required for anything you buy to declare all sensors it includes (camera, mic, GPS, WiFi receiver, etc.) and all networking capabilities (wired or wireless) prominently on the packaging, and to provide a hardwired switch to disable these facilities when they aren't (or shouldn't be) in use. It's crazy how many people are buying things that have all kinds of surveillance capabilities that have already been shown to be vulnerable and don't realise it because they just assume they can trust a TV from a big name brand like Samsung.
there is no expectation of privacy in a public place what so ever.
People keep saying that, but it's obviously nonsense.
If you walked around obviously looking up women's skirts in a park, I imagine they would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.
If you followed someone around with a video camera (or Google Glass or whatever) recording their every move, I imagine they too would quickly demonstrate that they expect a level of privacy even in a public place.
If you walked down the street peering into everyone's front window through a 2in gap in the curtains at night, do you really think most people would consider that normal, acceptable behaviour?
Try explaining to a police officer why you were hanging around with a video camera filming people entering their PINs at a cash machine, and see how far an argument that there is no expectation of privacy in a public place gets you. Or, you know, don't, because it's obvious that people do expect privacy under those conditions and that someone violating that privacy is unwelcome.
The "no privacy in a public place" mantra needs to die. It's an absurd proposition even today, as readily demonstrated by everyday examples like the above. Moreover, the origins of any laws that might (arguably) support the position from a legal rather than ethical perspective today are found in times where the risks to privacy posed by being seen in public were on a completely different (and much lower) level than they are today. Changes in those laws to reflect the capabilities and risks posed by modern technology are long overdue.
In terms of if the police enter a private place like your home the police can probably just declare they are constantly recording at all times before they enter and most of the public would not have a problem with it.
There is a difference between having a problem with some behaviour and being willing to do something dramatic enough to get that behaviour changed. It is unfortunate that such things are left to laws that are readily amended by the administration of the day for political reasons, almost invariably after some high profile but statistically outlying event that turns public sentiment enough for at least a brief period that the changes can be pushed through. This makes such illiberal measures borderline voter-proof, and IMHO that sort of situation is one of the most dangerous threats to civil liberties in modern politics.
Clue: Not all video is uploaded to Youtube.
The mere existence of footage that invades someone's privacy is reason enough for concern. Whether it has been leaked (yet) or not is at best a secondary issue.
It's not as if large government departments have a great track record on security and protecting privacy. And it's certainly not as if data originally gathered for one stated purpose has never subsequently been reused for other, very different purposes.
It's safer for everyone to have them always on - more to record what the officer's doing than anything else.
But these things won't just be recording what the officers are doing. If they're always on, they'll be recording everything else as well, and contributing to the same surveillance state that things like CCTV and ANPR do. The evidence seems to suggest that using cameras at times where some sort of confrontation or disagreement is likely is beneficial for all concerned, but that doesn't necessarily make running them full time (or keeping the footage they record if you do) a good idea.
Exactly. Only on a forum like Slashdot would "Have you filed a bug report?" be considered a credible (or at least +5, Insightful) reaction to reporting a wide-ranging problem that should never have existed, in the middle of a debate about why in the real world a lot of people still consider MS software to have a lower TCO than FOSS.
Yet they still managed to subject everyone to Ribbon and Metro and sent a lot of long time users running for the hills.
Ribbon was driven directly by monitoring how actual users were using the software. There's a fascinating series of blog posts about where it came from and how it developed. And although my initial reaction as a "power user" was similarly sceptical, the fact for me is that most people I know who've tried it came around to preferring it after a short time.
Metro is clearly a mess, but let's not pretend that was driven by the usability guys rather than the marketing/management types who thought everything had to be touch-friendly for no logical reason.
This idea that "payment translates into quality" is certainly bogus for Microsoft. They haven't had to "sing for their dinner" for a very long time.
Then why are they still dominant? It's not as if the FOSS community lacks the resources to create a rival office suite or consumer operating system of a similar scale. They've done both, multiple times.
Although more likely than not, any such "flagship brand" inspires the same mindless loyalty you're showing here.
There's no need for pointless ad hominem attacks, and loyalty has nothing to do with my views anyway. I choose which tools to use based on what gets the job done best at the time, and as someone who has on several occasions in recent years had to contrast MS Office and Open/LibreOffice, it hasn't even been close on any of those occasions.
In business terms, the cost of even a full price MS Office licence is usually negligible compared to the ongoing support costs and and efficiency savings/losses for either product, and the ongoing costs and inefficiencies for Open/LibreOffice are much higher than for MS Office. You can complain about why they're higher and how if everyone just switched to open file formats or didn't get brought up with Microsoft products it wouldn't matter, but the fact is that those things do matter, so unless you can convince most of the people that these businesses work with to agree with you and make the switch, your argument is not a strong one.
I don't think it's a big secret that LibreOffice's help is awful, so wouldn't filing some generic issue to that effect be closer to mockery than constructive assistance?
If this had an isolated case that was overlooked, sure, maybe it's worth flagging. But the complete lack of any useful organisation across the entire help system, the complete failure of its search facility to find even the most basic topics, and the reliance on finding minor links somewhere in the middle of a page or hidden right at the end to navigate to any related topics or even anything resembling an index, these aren't just individual cases. The entire system isn't up to the necessary standards to compete with the likes of MS Office, and making it so would be a massive undertaking that I'm sure the LO devs are well aware is in need of doing without any passive aggressive bug reports from people like me.
Developers usually don't use the help, mostly because they developed it or just look at the source ... so no, this is not a obvious bug.
Yes, it really is. It's blindingly obvious to anyone who is going to actually use the software and not just develop it. And if you want to be taken seriously in the office software market, catering to normal users instead of geeks is step #1.
Microsoft spend vast amounts of time and money doing user testing and QA and usability polishing and all that stuff. FOSS projects like LibreOffice apparently don't, or at least not effectively. And that's the difference that makes buying MS Office almost an automatic decision for a lot of customers.
Thanks for the link. I think the guys in question install via Ninite, so that's probably why they didn't have the downloaded version.
Does that fix the main problem of not finding obvious topics in the search, though?
So you didn't bother downloading the offline http://www.libreoffice.org/get... documentation?
Apparently they didn't, presumably because they use Ninite to install their standard software bundle. LibreOffice has a track record of not working well with Ninite, so this isn't a huge surprise.
In any case, would that have fixed the main problem, which was that the search feature didn't actually find something as basic as a spreadsheet function that was requested by its exact name?
I don't feel that bad for you ... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.
I don't know whether that was meant as some sort of insult, but if you'd read my post carefully you might have realised that it was a different organisation's computer I was working with at the time, so any feeble ad hominems aimed at me are way off target.
Then again, maybe if you're the kind of person who doesn't pay attention to getting details right, you're the type of person the LibreOffice project is targeting? :-)
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there. I've been very disappointed with the amount of unskippable junk on Blu-rays, having only bought a player fairly recently when I was upgrading my TV anyway. What happened to the promise of instantly getting to your content -- I thought this was actually something that the Blu-ray marketing peeps were promoting as an advantage over DVDs at one point, but clearly it isn't the reality.
I do have some concerns about the system being broken by design and subject to changes (malicious or otherwise) that leave me without access to Blu-ray content. However, I consider that risk much lower than losing access because someone suddenly removed content from a library where it was never guaranteed to stay. And like you, I generally don't pirate material, but I suspect that if someone ever did break my Blu-ray player so I couldn't watch stuff I actually paid for, my moral objections would rapidly disappear in the affected cases (assuming suing them for significant damages was not a viable option).
I generally agree with you about training, but I don't think that's all there is to the comparison. These are complicated software applications we're talking about, and realistically any training is only going to be provided for some brief initial period to get users familiar with how things generally work.
The ongoing ease of use, and how polished the software is when you get into the details, will continue to matter long after any training is over. This is where a lot of FOSS fails compared to established but proprietary and commercial alternatives, because without the commercial incentive to put that polish on and take care of the boring stuff, often no-one does.
What would you have me write in that bug report? This isn't a minor bug, it's a complete failure of the help system to do its job, based on a complete lack of basic usability. And it's representative of a general problem throughout LibreOffice, not just an isolated case for one specific function in Calc that we were looking for at the time. The bug report would be along the lines of "On-line help doesn't", which isn't exactly constructive.
In the price of every Microsoft Word license you have to include the potential that it forces you to invest in an entire set of SharePoint servers and an outsourced support company.
How exactly would that happen? I don't think I've ever seen a SP server actually deployed in any organisation I've worked in, from a tiny local business to one of the largest corps in the world. Most of them were Microsoft customers, though.
I did, however, spend about 20 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to do some simple data manipulation in LibreOffice Calc at an organisation that didn't use MS Office. It turns out that the on-line help in Calc is so good that if you search for the name of a function it doesn't find it. Also, it actually is on-line, meaning if your Internet connection is slow or down, your basic "productivity" software is broken.
It's not a popular sentiment around here, but I suspect the CIO is right about going with Microsoft even without any undisclosed deal, at least in major sectors like office software. The organisation where I was working yesterday picked LibreOffice on cost grounds, but the money lost to silly inefficiencies like the terrible on-line help system I mentioned above would pay for a copy of MS Office within weeks, if not days or hours.
You're right to express concern about proprietary data formats like the MS Office file formats, but the reality is that right now MS Office is widely used and you often have to be compatible with their formats anyway to communicate effectively. So either your alternative software can read MS formats, in which case the lock-in problem doesn't exist, or you can't, in which case your alternative comes with a serious limitation before you even start.
The problem with streamed media is they lose the rights and bam- you can't watch it any more.
This is my main problem with streaming, aside from the bandwidth issues.
Blu-ray and DVDs both have their irritations, but at least once I've bought a disk it's mine and I know I can rewatch it or lend it to a friend as often as I like. There are still potential problems with longevity but they tend to involve bad firmware updates and DRM-friendly connectivity rather than the disks themselves.
With a library model, it's great as long as what you want to watch is in the library right now, but if you get halfway through a season of your favourite show and then someone's licensing agreement runs out, bam, no second half of the season in the library any more.
I suspect the subscription/library model will have a kind of "golden age" as bandwidth gets good enough and there are only a tiny number of different libraries to subscribe to, but in the long run the most likely positions seem to be market fragmentation (you have to subscribe to several libraries, and your favourite shows might jump around between them) or consolidating into a near-monopoly (with the natural tendency to then push prices up). Neither is good for consumers, and as we saw with music, sooner or later you find people just want to download a permanent, DRM-free copy of what they paid for to enjoy on their own terms, and the world does not end if you give the customer what they want and charge a fair price for it.
I am a user interface guy, and I promise you the kind of "throw **** at a wall and see what sticks", "always move fast and break everything" mentality that has invaded parts of the industry in recent years has nothing to do with creating a good user experience.
Good user experiences tend to require, among other things, consistent, intuitive, predictable behaviour. But you can't keep selling something that by definition isn't changing radically all the time, as if it's lots of different things that users should pay for many times over.
It actually started the other way around: what was originally Google Docs became (part of) Google Drive a while back.
Yeah, Maps and Earth work well
Maps used to work well. The recent new version is, unfortunately, a textbook example of the tweaking-to-the-point-of-breaking that you mentioned.
Maybe in a couple of year's I'll replace mine.
I wonder whether part of the problem is that after having one of these devices, people aren't so keen to replace them. Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things, and of course Apple themselves pushing us to upgrade to a new version of iOS that gets terrible reviews. Plus the general closed ecosystem isn't an obvious downer for most people when you buy the first time, but after finding all the little frustrating things it can't do, I can see that at least some significant proportion of users might be put off.
Tablets as a format seem to be useful for a certain niche: basically, they're good for receiving information and some basic interaction, but not serious interaction/content creation. But there are more tablets than just Apple's, and Android tablets seem to be increasing their market share at Apple's expense. So it might be a market saturation issue with the tablet format, but I suspect there's more to it than just that in the specific case of iPads.
What you're describing is exactly the "obvious" solution I mentioned: shift the tax burden from corporation tax (tax on profits) to alternatives such sales tax (tax on revenues).
I think eventually this will be the logical conclusion to the problem of international tax shifting, but it's not something you can just change overnight. Sales taxes are messy already, with their own set of complicated rules to figure out the place where a sale is deemed to have taken place.
TFA says that the French government thinks they are not following the laws.
But which part of the French government? The implication is very different depending on whether we're talking about the legislative authorities, the tax collection authorities, or someone's PR department.
Of course some countries, most notably the UK, are against this because they like being tax havens.
I think you're confusing the UK with Ireland. Large international businesses are playing much the same games to avoid paying corporation tax in the UK as they are in France.