I couldn't disagree more. We've had some agency ringing around all the technical guys at our office recently, and the moron just won't go away despite the fact that we long ago realised he was just trying to get everyone's details and many of my colleagues have told him explicitly to **** off. His behaviour is now outright harassment, but unfortunately our legislation only lets you block nuisance calls to personal numbers, not business ones. This isn't doing the "industry" any favours at all.
I can see what you're getting at, but I suggest to you that you are posing a problem to which a solution is already known.
While, as you rightly say, we have no objective measure of things like "quality", we do have an objective measure of how much value people place on something: money. A useful work may be high art that appeals greatly to the connoisseur but has little value to most people. A useful work might instead be a mass-produced novel that is entertaining enough that many people will value it a little, yet not good enough that any one person or small group would pay a lot to read it. Either has significant value to society, though of course in different ways, and the fact that either can bring in a worthwhile income for the creator of the work given the basic idea of copyright and our general economic system is a pretty reasonable and objective demonstration of that value.
There isn't really any government grant involved here in an economic sense. There is no guarantee that a given work will make any money at all, and certainly if it does the money doesn't in general come from the government. However, by introducing the copyright mechanism, we can realistically evaluate the worth of creative works in the same way that we evaluate the worth of material goods or services rendered, and thus incorporate them in a coherent way into our overall economy.
On the other hand, while I'm sure we could agree with the principles that it would be nice to reward quality and improvement to society, to date I have seen no-one describe an effective, objective mechanism for doing so, nor even achieving a realistic approximation based on some specific criteria, that doesn't boil down to reinventing copyright or something pretty close to it. If you think you've got one, I'm sure many of us would be interested to hear about it.
I'm about to get on a plane, so apologies for the brief reply, but I just want to make two points.
Firstly, I don't think it's fair to compare copyright expiry with infringement when talking about one group subsidising another. In the case of copyright infringement, both groups are getting the same, it's just that one is playing by the rules and the other is breaking them. In the case of expiry, sure, you can have the work for free, but only if you wait a long time. If you want it sooner, you have to pay the going rate like everyone else. So while in a sense one group is subsidising another in both cases, that doesn't mean they're getting the same deal.
Secondly, regarding the Sweden/WIPO issue, perhaps you have a better answer than any I've heard so far for this: what alternative model do you propose where, assuming people play by the rules and without relying entirely on charity, it is possible both for an artist to be compensated to a reasonable level for producing a useful work and for that compensation to come from many small contributions from those benefiting from the work rather than a single major benefactor or other large-scale contributions?
Re:When complaining about missing features
on
OpenOffice 2.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It needs to act like Word in one particular case. It must load Word documents and format them exactly like Word, and when it saves them there must be no way of telling whether it was done in Word or OpenOffice. [...] One of the distribution channels for OpenOffice must be by sneaking in as a faster replacement for Word
I respectfully disagree. OO is never going to be a better Word than Word, nor is it realistic to expect perfect preservation of complex formatting when moving between different software packages that use different models for the data and different file formats to store them. This is a battle that cannot be won, and it is a waste of resources trying to fight it.
In any case, we can readily see that perfect document interchange is not a priority for most users. After all, people open Word documents that were laid out for US Letter paper in A4-friendly Europe and vice versa, even though this typically affects pagination. It's the content that matters for most people, not the round trip, which means you need to be able to import and export readable files but the odd blemish isn't catastrophic. For in-house people, you'll typically be using the same software across an organisation anyway, so round-tripping isn't a problem if you need to do it. And if you really do need exact reproduction for an external source, for example to send to a print shop or for a downloadable brochure, then it's better to use a format such as PDF or PostScript that is designed for that purpose. But this is usually a one-way trip, so that's not a problem.
Of course there will always be exceptions, where people want to round-trip with perfect formatting between different packages. But to be brutally honest, that is unrealistic, and it always has been. Once you can import the content accurately and a good approximation of the formatting, you rapidly get diminishing returns trying to get the corner cases with complex page layouts and the like. Personally, once you've reached that point, I'd rather see the developers of other word processors try to do things in their own way that is better than Word. Fighting for every extra last ounce of.doc compatibility can yield a Pyrrhic victory at best.
It's not just native controls; that's the easy part. UI guidelines go far beyond what controls look like, and it's probably even more important to match platform-specific things like any expected language support (spelling checkers etc.), localisation (for dates, currencies, etc.), standard dialog boxes (open, save, etc.), printer system, font configuration, conventions for windows/menus/toolbars/opening multiple documents, and more.
People who think writing a good cross-platform UI just means using some cross-platform toolkit that does native widgets have a lot to learn about writing a good, user-friendly, cross-platform UI.
You appear not to understand what signing is, how it works, or why it is important.
You know, there something eerily predictable about Slashdot. Whenever someone starts a reply to your post by stating that you are incompetent and/or ill-informed just because you happen to disagree with them, it's a good bet the argument they're about to make will be unrealistic.
In this case, I'm well aware of what the signing concept represents, thank you. However, as far as I can see, nothing in your post affects the validity of the claims I've made in this discussion: charging a fee for this is a cheap profit-grab, and since Microsoft care far more about Vista developing a reputation for being an unusable mess than your average free software developer cares about being accepted by Vista users (both of them), if Microsoft were smart they would either offer this service for a nominal fee or not make a fuss about it when installing under Vista. Shifting the burden onto the little guy is just going to result in the little guy ignoring you, and a whole load of users noticing that it's harder to do stuff on Vista than it is on XP (or, for that matter, alternatives like OS X or Linux, but this isn't really a Windows vs. non-Windows issue).
On top of that, most hard drive controllers are limited by the technology they use. For instance, a SATA hard drive, even plugged into a USB 2 or 3 port, is limited to 150 MB/s -- but, that's burst speed, not sustained transfer rate.
Indeed. And realistically, it's going to be a pretty short burst: most hard drives today only have something like 8–16MB of cache that might be filled by a smart lookahead algorithm, so your best case with current hard drive technology is that you'll get perhaps 1/10 of a second of high-speed data transfer before hitting the physical barriers.
I'm not sure this is directly applicable to this discussion, though, because AFAIK all current USB drives use different storage technology anyway. It's going to be the limits of that technology that tell us whether USB3's theoretical speeds will actually be useful with storage hardware available in the same time frame.
Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.
Here maybe I can be helpful: for text, select text and ctrl-shift-space; for a paragraph, put cursor within paragraph without any text selected and ctrl-shift-space.
You're a star. It was worth joining this discussion for that tip alone. Thank you. (I missed a usability point before: the on-line help for this sort of thing is mostly hopeless.)
I don't suppose you also know a way to remove the formatting of text on-the fly? For example, if I insert some text immediately after a formatted section, Writer will continue the formatting by default. However, it seems I can't just hit Ctrl-Shift-Space before typing to turn the formatting off, because that would cancel formatting for the entire paragraph, and not just at the insertion point for the text I am about to type. (Another usability point I missed before: keyboard shortcuts to switch styles on or off are far too difficult to set up, which probably explains why everyone I know just hits Ctrl-B to enable bold, rather than defining some sort of "strong emphasis" style.)
Certification isn't just about paying $100, it's about meeting a standard. Here's an html version of the MS doc saying what a package must be/do to be certifiable (as 'twere).
In a sense, that's even worse. If it's not intended to be a "financial bond" but actually a human-verified, technical standard, then there is no reason to charge for it at all. Microsoft has more than enough resources to provide this service for free, or for some token sum of money just to prevent flooding the system ($100 is not a token sum of money if you're a hobbyist giving away your code for free).
This is a problem entirely of their own making, and expecting all the small commercial outfits and freeware/OSS/whatever developers to pay up to get their installer certified when they don't otherwise charge much, if anything, for their products is just deluded. After all, what do the freeware developers lose if Vista users refuse to buy their software? Microsoft, however, has literally everything to lose if Vista sales don't pick up in the way they are hoping, and making it a hostile platform for application developers is a pretty good way to ensure that outcome.
well, there's "applied" view and "hierarchical" view, which both improve usability.
Sure, but the one thing I'd guess most people want — a view that shows a list of styles they are likely to need (whether or not they are used yet) for the current document type — is still missing. If the default list of styles only had a small number of things in it, that might be OK, but since it has vast numbers of things I doubt many people ever use, all the "show everything" views are cumbersome. Meanwhile, the "show applied" alternative is no use when you're starting from a blank document template.
in any case, it is a good idea to avoid direct formatting as much as possible.
Indeed it is, but surely that just makes it all the more important to have easy-to-define and easy-to-apply styles, and to have an easy-to-use command to remove direct formatting and revert to whatever the styled behaviour is?
You're missing the point. Paying a fee to sign the installer is just a tax on legitimate software developers. Everyone else manages without it, and if all it takes is a $100 bill to get a certificate, then that is exactly what a certificate is worth (and deflation will take place the first time a major trojan is installed by signed software).
OK, I'll play too. Some of these are really usability flaws and some might be classed as bugs but feel like usability flaws to the user:
Fix mail merge in Writer. The whole data sources mess is broken, and the mail merge feature itself is unable to do simple things like merging to a single document that can subsequently be edited.
Fix handling of fonts and typography (starting with being able to draw OpenType fonts properly and export them to PDFs at all).
Fix the style selection mechanism. I don't generally use around 100 styles in one document, and I don't need 15,746 different views of the styles. I just want a list of the dozen or so styles I actually care about.
Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.
Obligatory disclaimer/excuse: I haven't yet had chance to install 2.3, so although I've seen no reports that the above have been addressed in this version, some of this may now be out of date.
The problem with your slightly flippant reply is that some of us did once file and vote for bugs, but after seeing some of the most popular bugs in the whole system stay dormant for literally years and given that the OO bug reporting system is ludicrously overcomplicated for casual users, we don't generally bother any more.
I mean, if it's not Microsoft, it's not really "official", what makes you sure you should be running this application. You probably shouldn't. There's a nice Microsoft alternative which is "official". Wouldn't you like to download that instead? Yes/No
You forgot option 3:
[T]hanks, but I already did download an alternative to Microsoft.
Seriously, though, how can anyone possibly believe this could ever work? The computing world is driven by countless specialist applications, many of them written in-house by small businesses, or just by individuals to solve a specific problem they have. It's pretty obvious that no organisation could possibly whitelist all of this stuff effectively, without having some sort of automated system that every malicious developer in the world could abuse just as easily.
But you miss the other part of my argument: you can't infer that personal copying is OK just because it is widespread today even though illegal and people still make money, simply because law-abiding consumers are paying for the goods. The law-abiding members of the population are directly subsidising the lawbreakers.
On the subject of copying for friends, clearly I should have been more careful in how I phrased my comments about legality, but of course some people do pay for the content in places like Canada, whether they like it or not: the levy on blank media offsets the cost of the material. Personally, I think this is unethical, since it imposes costs that go to Big Media even if people are just buying media for back-ups or other personal uses, and I much prefer a model where the people benefitting from the content are also the ones who pay for it. YMMV.
Sweden is an odd case, because the copying may be legal under their local law today, but nevertheless they are signatories to the major WIPO treaty on the subject, and by allowing essentially unrestricted personal copying and redistribution they are blatantly ignoring their promises under that treaty. This is a one-sided deal for other countries that protect Swedish artists' copyrights, and will inevitably change if Sweden ever gets a big enough commercial advantage out of it that anyone cares. More realistically, given the stakes involved, if the Swedish approach becomes a big enough threat to the economic well-being of other countries because of TPB and the like, I don't think it's a completely unrealistic jump to see them effectively cut off from the Internet (though of course they would cave and ban TPB like everyone else long before that happened).
Now, it is certainly possible that even if you changed the law to allow any personal copying people wanted to do, the population would still pay for the material out of charity. We don't have enough data to know this either way. But you can't infer that from the current situation, and given the parallels in the open source world, I sure wouldn't bet an industry on it on my first visit to the casino.
I'm not sure what you mean by "personal copying". If you literally mean making copies for personal convenience (back-up, format-shifting, etc.) then I agree completely. It is entirely reasonable that, having paid the going rate for access to some content, people should be entitled to enjoy that content as they see fit. I have no sympathy with media groups who want everyone to buy the same material each time a new format comes out, yet justify the high prices of media that costs almost nothing to mass produce on the basis that the content on that media is the expensive thing.
Where I personally would draw the line is in allowing copying for friends. If you allow that, then the entire economic model breaks down on a "six degrees of separation" argument. Right now, such copying is not legal anywhere that I know of, and I don't think you can legitimately argue that softening the law here wouldn't make a difference unless you can show that people's behaviour won't change. In particular, right now those who pay the going rate for legal copies of material are subsidising the freeloaders. If you remove any legal/moral obligation on those people to pay for the content, who is going to pay for it?
I think the old PDF chestnut is vastly overrated in these discussions. It's wheeled out by supporters of OpenOffice because they have no other argument to make (except possibly the extra categories of style, but those are even less relevant considering how buggy the style and page layout support in OO is).
It is perfectly possible for professionals who need to generate serious PDF files using Word, and having seen this done in several offices, I don't see how you can possibly claim that Acrobat isn't a suitable replacement for a built-in feature. For casual use, OpenOffice's feature is helpful, but it's so buggy that it's not actually useful for professional work. There are bugs with many votes that have been logged for years on this but still not fixed.
I respectfully disagree. I don't think Microsoft ever had much credibility to lose here: it's not like their business motive to attempt subversion of the ISO process is questionable, nor their tactics unexpected. The fact that ISO avoided such subversion more by luck than judgement is the unfortunate thing here.
So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project?
No, I just don't give credit until the results justify it. The 100 or so developers who have been working on OO via Sun haven't worked miracles in several years; why would we expect a few more to change things overnight?
Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.
On the contrary. It's giving them what they expect right now. There is no doubt that the majority of users will follow where the software leads them. There is also no doubt that there are substantial cost savings to be made from better manipulation of these documents and presentation of the data in them. But until the software leads the user to do things in these better ways, we'll be stuck with the sort of horrendous presentations and awkward documents many of us have to work with every day.
I've backed it up, in great detail and with many objective examples of features and specific bugs, in multiple previous posts. I didn't see the point in repeating all of that here, but please do Google my posting history (search for things like Writer and Word) if you're interested.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo.
I respectfully disagree. While I really am grateful to the OpenOffice guys for giving me a basic office suite I can use for free at home, I think OO is damaging in the long run, because (a) it insists on trying to be a Word clone, and (b) it sucks up most of the community volunteers, commercial resources and publicity that could otherwise be used to work on a better alternative.
No-one in Windows world has yet produced a really good tool for writers who want to produce beautiful documents efficiently, nor a really easy-to-use spreadsheet that still supports powerful data analysis and well-presented graphs, nor a presentation package that actually supports making good presentations rather than bullet-laden monstrosities, nor for that matter a good PIM that supports serious corporate infrastructure but still provides good e-mail, scheduling, etc. There is huge demand for these things, but since no-one is currently doing them (in part because they're all working on Office, OpenOffice, and various other less good versions of the same things, I presume) the market doesn't even realise what it's missing.
ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.
I'm not sure how you can support that claim. Pretty much all businesses today are heavily reliant on Windows and Office. I suspect a rather small proportion of all businesses use IBM kit, and I suspect that nearly all of those that do are medium-sized or large businesses, not the small businesses that drive economies.
now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.
Sure they are. Also, this is the year of Linux on the desktop and Firefox will have a majority share of the browser market by 2008.
The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office. If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine. But it lacks the power, usability and feature completeness of MS Office. Pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking by OSS fans, as is pretending businesses are going to change their office suite just to avoid spending a few dollars per employee on a more productive tool.
Not premature, but undue hype all the same. You would think that after ISO lost most of its credibility in this field following the recent OOXML mess, people wouldn't assign much value to any document format just because it's been ISO certified.
While the rights you're talking about are technically legal, it would probably be no stretch to assume most here think they're not legitimate. Most of us are aware of the finagling these organizations have done to aquire these rights, and at least some of us believe that they do not reflect the fair balance copyright really needs.
If we were talking about, say, using P2P to circumvent copy protection that inhibits fair use, then I agree you'd have a strong case there. But let's be honest: a substantial proportion of people using P2P aren't "trying things out before buying" or using them to circumvent those paid-for provisions in the DMCA and its ilk; they're just breaking the basic principle of copyright, pure and simple, and for as long as our economic approach to creative works is based on copyright, there's nothing fair about that.
One definite element to overturning such laws is to instill in the people the mindset that such laws are indeed wrong.
Yes, it certainly is. But you do that by making reasonable arguments for why they are wrong, and by electing representatives who share your views.
The only statement you make by just ignoring them and hoping to get away with it is that you believe yourself to be above the law, and the principle that no-one is above the law is way, way more important than the right to listen to the latest cookie-cutter pop record on P2P. (This applies equally to Big Media, of course. And the principle that the laws should represent the will of the people is important too. I'm not disputing either of these things, or that the system is broken.)
The thing is, just releasing the specs for OSS people to write drivers makes a negligible difference to their market share. However, money does talk, in terms of hardware specs, codec licensing, and all the rest of it.
Linux does pretty well as a freebie OS for geeks who are happy to live with (or more often fix/work around) its limitations. But a free-as-in-both operating system is always going to be at an inherent disadvantage compared to a commercial player that can afford the cost of including good stuff as part of the purchase price, and the 98% of the world who just want their computer to work don't care about the geek perspective and the legal issues and the fact that if you just download this patch and recompile your kernel it can be fixed (at least 98% of the time).
I suspect I agree with everything the AC parent writes (other than the irritating tendency to care only about Americans, as distinct from the people who live in the US, or people generally for that matter). I certainly agree that the actions of Big Media appear remarkably similar to anti-competitive behaviour prohibited by law. But the answer to this is to enforce the law, not to start freeloading and promote vigilante justice.
For what it's worth, I do think there is a point where civil disobedience becomes a legitimate tactic in a civilised country. But that point is usually when the alternative is something like civil war, and I reckon we're a few million lightyears short of reaching that point in the copyright debate. And in any case, real civil disobedience is not at all the same as trying to get away with breaking the law for selfish reasons because you can.
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I couldn't disagree more. We've had some agency ringing around all the technical guys at our office recently, and the moron just won't go away despite the fact that we long ago realised he was just trying to get everyone's details and many of my colleagues have told him explicitly to **** off. His behaviour is now outright harassment, but unfortunately our legislation only lets you block nuisance calls to personal numbers, not business ones. This isn't doing the "industry" any favours at all.
I can see what you're getting at, but I suggest to you that you are posing a problem to which a solution is already known.
While, as you rightly say, we have no objective measure of things like "quality", we do have an objective measure of how much value people place on something: money. A useful work may be high art that appeals greatly to the connoisseur but has little value to most people. A useful work might instead be a mass-produced novel that is entertaining enough that many people will value it a little, yet not good enough that any one person or small group would pay a lot to read it. Either has significant value to society, though of course in different ways, and the fact that either can bring in a worthwhile income for the creator of the work given the basic idea of copyright and our general economic system is a pretty reasonable and objective demonstration of that value.
There isn't really any government grant involved here in an economic sense. There is no guarantee that a given work will make any money at all, and certainly if it does the money doesn't in general come from the government. However, by introducing the copyright mechanism, we can realistically evaluate the worth of creative works in the same way that we evaluate the worth of material goods or services rendered, and thus incorporate them in a coherent way into our overall economy.
On the other hand, while I'm sure we could agree with the principles that it would be nice to reward quality and improvement to society, to date I have seen no-one describe an effective, objective mechanism for doing so, nor even achieving a realistic approximation based on some specific criteria, that doesn't boil down to reinventing copyright or something pretty close to it. If you think you've got one, I'm sure many of us would be interested to hear about it.
I'm about to get on a plane, so apologies for the brief reply, but I just want to make two points.
Firstly, I don't think it's fair to compare copyright expiry with infringement when talking about one group subsidising another. In the case of copyright infringement, both groups are getting the same, it's just that one is playing by the rules and the other is breaking them. In the case of expiry, sure, you can have the work for free, but only if you wait a long time. If you want it sooner, you have to pay the going rate like everyone else. So while in a sense one group is subsidising another in both cases, that doesn't mean they're getting the same deal.
Secondly, regarding the Sweden/WIPO issue, perhaps you have a better answer than any I've heard so far for this: what alternative model do you propose where, assuming people play by the rules and without relying entirely on charity, it is possible both for an artist to be compensated to a reasonable level for producing a useful work and for that compensation to come from many small contributions from those benefiting from the work rather than a single major benefactor or other large-scale contributions?
It needs to act like Word in one particular case. It must load Word documents and format them exactly like Word, and when it saves them there must be no way of telling whether it was done in Word or OpenOffice. [...] One of the distribution channels for OpenOffice must be by sneaking in as a faster replacement for Word
I respectfully disagree. OO is never going to be a better Word than Word, nor is it realistic to expect perfect preservation of complex formatting when moving between different software packages that use different models for the data and different file formats to store them. This is a battle that cannot be won, and it is a waste of resources trying to fight it.
In any case, we can readily see that perfect document interchange is not a priority for most users. After all, people open Word documents that were laid out for US Letter paper in A4-friendly Europe and vice versa, even though this typically affects pagination. It's the content that matters for most people, not the round trip, which means you need to be able to import and export readable files but the odd blemish isn't catastrophic. For in-house people, you'll typically be using the same software across an organisation anyway, so round-tripping isn't a problem if you need to do it. And if you really do need exact reproduction for an external source, for example to send to a print shop or for a downloadable brochure, then it's better to use a format such as PDF or PostScript that is designed for that purpose. But this is usually a one-way trip, so that's not a problem.
Of course there will always be exceptions, where people want to round-trip with perfect formatting between different packages. But to be brutally honest, that is unrealistic, and it always has been. Once you can import the content accurately and a good approximation of the formatting, you rapidly get diminishing returns trying to get the corner cases with complex page layouts and the like. Personally, once you've reached that point, I'd rather see the developers of other word processors try to do things in their own way that is better than Word. Fighting for every extra last ounce of .doc compatibility can yield a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Native controls for each OS are a requirement!
It's not just native controls; that's the easy part. UI guidelines go far beyond what controls look like, and it's probably even more important to match platform-specific things like any expected language support (spelling checkers etc.), localisation (for dates, currencies, etc.), standard dialog boxes (open, save, etc.), printer system, font configuration, conventions for windows/menus/toolbars/opening multiple documents, and more.
People who think writing a good cross-platform UI just means using some cross-platform toolkit that does native widgets have a lot to learn about writing a good, user-friendly, cross-platform UI.
You appear not to understand what signing is, how it works, or why it is important.
You know, there something eerily predictable about Slashdot. Whenever someone starts a reply to your post by stating that you are incompetent and/or ill-informed just because you happen to disagree with them, it's a good bet the argument they're about to make will be unrealistic.
In this case, I'm well aware of what the signing concept represents, thank you. However, as far as I can see, nothing in your post affects the validity of the claims I've made in this discussion: charging a fee for this is a cheap profit-grab, and since Microsoft care far more about Vista developing a reputation for being an unusable mess than your average free software developer cares about being accepted by Vista users (both of them), if Microsoft were smart they would either offer this service for a nominal fee or not make a fuss about it when installing under Vista. Shifting the burden onto the little guy is just going to result in the little guy ignoring you, and a whole load of users noticing that it's harder to do stuff on Vista than it is on XP (or, for that matter, alternatives like OS X or Linux, but this isn't really a Windows vs. non-Windows issue).
On top of that, most hard drive controllers are limited by the technology they use. For instance, a SATA hard drive, even plugged into a USB 2 or 3 port, is limited to 150 MB/s -- but, that's burst speed, not sustained transfer rate.
Indeed. And realistically, it's going to be a pretty short burst: most hard drives today only have something like 8–16MB of cache that might be filled by a smart lookahead algorithm, so your best case with current hard drive technology is that you'll get perhaps 1/10 of a second of high-speed data transfer before hitting the physical barriers.
I'm not sure this is directly applicable to this discussion, though, because AFAIK all current USB drives use different storage technology anyway. It's going to be the limits of that technology that tell us whether USB3's theoretical speeds will actually be useful with storage hardware available in the same time frame.
Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.
Here maybe I can be helpful: for text, select text and ctrl-shift-space; for a paragraph, put cursor within paragraph without any text selected and ctrl-shift-space.
You're a star. It was worth joining this discussion for that tip alone. Thank you. (I missed a usability point before: the on-line help for this sort of thing is mostly hopeless.)
I don't suppose you also know a way to remove the formatting of text on-the fly? For example, if I insert some text immediately after a formatted section, Writer will continue the formatting by default. However, it seems I can't just hit Ctrl-Shift-Space before typing to turn the formatting off, because that would cancel formatting for the entire paragraph, and not just at the insertion point for the text I am about to type. (Another usability point I missed before: keyboard shortcuts to switch styles on or off are far too difficult to set up, which probably explains why everyone I know just hits Ctrl-B to enable bold, rather than defining some sort of "strong emphasis" style.)
Certification isn't just about paying $100, it's about meeting a standard. Here's an html version of the MS doc saying what a package must be/do to be certifiable (as 'twere).
In a sense, that's even worse. If it's not intended to be a "financial bond" but actually a human-verified, technical standard, then there is no reason to charge for it at all. Microsoft has more than enough resources to provide this service for free, or for some token sum of money just to prevent flooding the system ($100 is not a token sum of money if you're a hobbyist giving away your code for free).
This is a problem entirely of their own making, and expecting all the small commercial outfits and freeware/OSS/whatever developers to pay up to get their installer certified when they don't otherwise charge much, if anything, for their products is just deluded. After all, what do the freeware developers lose if Vista users refuse to buy their software? Microsoft, however, has literally everything to lose if Vista sales don't pick up in the way they are hoping, and making it a hostile platform for application developers is a pretty good way to ensure that outcome.
well, there's "applied" view and "hierarchical" view, which both improve usability.
Sure, but the one thing I'd guess most people want — a view that shows a list of styles they are likely to need (whether or not they are used yet) for the current document type — is still missing. If the default list of styles only had a small number of things in it, that might be OK, but since it has vast numbers of things I doubt many people ever use, all the "show everything" views are cumbersome. Meanwhile, the "show applied" alternative is no use when you're starting from a blank document template.
in any case, it is a good idea to avoid direct formatting as much as possible.
Indeed it is, but surely that just makes it all the more important to have easy-to-define and easy-to-apply styles, and to have an easy-to-use command to remove direct formatting and revert to whatever the styled behaviour is?
You're missing the point. Paying a fee to sign the installer is just a tax on legitimate software developers. Everyone else manages without it, and if all it takes is a $100 bill to get a certificate, then that is exactly what a certificate is worth (and deflation will take place the first time a major trojan is installed by signed software).
OK, I'll play too. Some of these are really usability flaws and some might be classed as bugs but feel like usability flaws to the user:
Obligatory disclaimer/excuse: I haven't yet had chance to install 2.3, so although I've seen no reports that the above have been addressed in this version, some of this may now be out of date.
The problem with your slightly flippant reply is that some of us did once file and vote for bugs, but after seeing some of the most popular bugs in the whole system stay dormant for literally years and given that the OO bug reporting system is ludicrously overcomplicated for casual users, we don't generally bother any more.
I mean, if it's not Microsoft, it's not really "official", what makes you sure you should be running this application. You probably shouldn't. There's a nice Microsoft alternative which is "official". Wouldn't you like to download that instead? Yes/No
You forgot option 3:
[T]hanks, but I already did download an alternative to Microsoft.
Seriously, though, how can anyone possibly believe this could ever work? The computing world is driven by countless specialist applications, many of them written in-house by small businesses, or just by individuals to solve a specific problem they have. It's pretty obvious that no organisation could possibly whitelist all of this stuff effectively, without having some sort of automated system that every malicious developer in the world could abuse just as easily.
But you miss the other part of my argument: you can't infer that personal copying is OK just because it is widespread today even though illegal and people still make money, simply because law-abiding consumers are paying for the goods. The law-abiding members of the population are directly subsidising the lawbreakers.
On the subject of copying for friends, clearly I should have been more careful in how I phrased my comments about legality, but of course some people do pay for the content in places like Canada, whether they like it or not: the levy on blank media offsets the cost of the material. Personally, I think this is unethical, since it imposes costs that go to Big Media even if people are just buying media for back-ups or other personal uses, and I much prefer a model where the people benefitting from the content are also the ones who pay for it. YMMV.
Sweden is an odd case, because the copying may be legal under their local law today, but nevertheless they are signatories to the major WIPO treaty on the subject, and by allowing essentially unrestricted personal copying and redistribution they are blatantly ignoring their promises under that treaty. This is a one-sided deal for other countries that protect Swedish artists' copyrights, and will inevitably change if Sweden ever gets a big enough commercial advantage out of it that anyone cares. More realistically, given the stakes involved, if the Swedish approach becomes a big enough threat to the economic well-being of other countries because of TPB and the like, I don't think it's a completely unrealistic jump to see them effectively cut off from the Internet (though of course they would cave and ban TPB like everyone else long before that happened).
Now, it is certainly possible that even if you changed the law to allow any personal copying people wanted to do, the population would still pay for the material out of charity. We don't have enough data to know this either way. But you can't infer that from the current situation, and given the parallels in the open source world, I sure wouldn't bet an industry on it on my first visit to the casino.
I'm not sure what you mean by "personal copying". If you literally mean making copies for personal convenience (back-up, format-shifting, etc.) then I agree completely. It is entirely reasonable that, having paid the going rate for access to some content, people should be entitled to enjoy that content as they see fit. I have no sympathy with media groups who want everyone to buy the same material each time a new format comes out, yet justify the high prices of media that costs almost nothing to mass produce on the basis that the content on that media is the expensive thing.
Where I personally would draw the line is in allowing copying for friends. If you allow that, then the entire economic model breaks down on a "six degrees of separation" argument. Right now, such copying is not legal anywhere that I know of, and I don't think you can legitimately argue that softening the law here wouldn't make a difference unless you can show that people's behaviour won't change. In particular, right now those who pay the going rate for legal copies of material are subsidising the freeloaders. If you remove any legal/moral obligation on those people to pay for the content, who is going to pay for it?
I think the old PDF chestnut is vastly overrated in these discussions. It's wheeled out by supporters of OpenOffice because they have no other argument to make (except possibly the extra categories of style, but those are even less relevant considering how buggy the style and page layout support in OO is).
It is perfectly possible for professionals who need to generate serious PDF files using Word, and having seen this done in several offices, I don't see how you can possibly claim that Acrobat isn't a suitable replacement for a built-in feature. For casual use, OpenOffice's feature is helpful, but it's so buggy that it's not actually useful for professional work. There are bugs with many votes that have been logged for years on this but still not fixed.
I respectfully disagree. I don't think Microsoft ever had much credibility to lose here: it's not like their business motive to attempt subversion of the ISO process is questionable, nor their tactics unexpected. The fact that ISO avoided such subversion more by luck than judgement is the unfortunate thing here.
So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project?
No, I just don't give credit until the results justify it. The 100 or so developers who have been working on OO via Sun haven't worked miracles in several years; why would we expect a few more to change things overnight?
Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.
On the contrary. It's giving them what they expect right now. There is no doubt that the majority of users will follow where the software leads them. There is also no doubt that there are substantial cost savings to be made from better manipulation of these documents and presentation of the data in them. But until the software leads the user to do things in these better ways, we'll be stuck with the sort of horrendous presentations and awkward documents many of us have to work with every day.
People keep saying this, but not backing it up.
I've backed it up, in great detail and with many objective examples of features and specific bugs, in multiple previous posts. I didn't see the point in repeating all of that here, but please do Google my posting history (search for things like Writer and Word) if you're interested.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo.
I respectfully disagree. While I really am grateful to the OpenOffice guys for giving me a basic office suite I can use for free at home, I think OO is damaging in the long run, because (a) it insists on trying to be a Word clone, and (b) it sucks up most of the community volunteers, commercial resources and publicity that could otherwise be used to work on a better alternative.
No-one in Windows world has yet produced a really good tool for writers who want to produce beautiful documents efficiently, nor a really easy-to-use spreadsheet that still supports powerful data analysis and well-presented graphs, nor a presentation package that actually supports making good presentations rather than bullet-laden monstrosities, nor for that matter a good PIM that supports serious corporate infrastructure but still provides good e-mail, scheduling, etc. There is huge demand for these things, but since no-one is currently doing them (in part because they're all working on Office, OpenOffice, and various other less good versions of the same things, I presume) the market doesn't even realise what it's missing.
ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.
I'm not sure how you can support that claim. Pretty much all businesses today are heavily reliant on Windows and Office. I suspect a rather small proportion of all businesses use IBM kit, and I suspect that nearly all of those that do are medium-sized or large businesses, not the small businesses that drive economies.
now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.
Sure they are. Also, this is the year of Linux on the desktop and Firefox will have a majority share of the browser market by 2008.
The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office. If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine. But it lacks the power, usability and feature completeness of MS Office. Pretending otherwise is just wishful thinking by OSS fans, as is pretending businesses are going to change their office suite just to avoid spending a few dollars per employee on a more productive tool.
Not premature, but undue hype all the same. You would think that after ISO lost most of its credibility in this field following the recent OOXML mess, people wouldn't assign much value to any document format just because it's been ISO certified.
While the rights you're talking about are technically legal, it would probably be no stretch to assume most here think they're not legitimate. Most of us are aware of the finagling these organizations have done to aquire these rights, and at least some of us believe that they do not reflect the fair balance copyright really needs.
If we were talking about, say, using P2P to circumvent copy protection that inhibits fair use, then I agree you'd have a strong case there. But let's be honest: a substantial proportion of people using P2P aren't "trying things out before buying" or using them to circumvent those paid-for provisions in the DMCA and its ilk; they're just breaking the basic principle of copyright, pure and simple, and for as long as our economic approach to creative works is based on copyright, there's nothing fair about that.
One definite element to overturning such laws is to instill in the people the mindset that such laws are indeed wrong.
Yes, it certainly is. But you do that by making reasonable arguments for why they are wrong, and by electing representatives who share your views.
The only statement you make by just ignoring them and hoping to get away with it is that you believe yourself to be above the law, and the principle that no-one is above the law is way, way more important than the right to listen to the latest cookie-cutter pop record on P2P. (This applies equally to Big Media, of course. And the principle that the laws should represent the will of the people is important too. I'm not disputing either of these things, or that the system is broken.)
The thing is, just releasing the specs for OSS people to write drivers makes a negligible difference to their market share. However, money does talk, in terms of hardware specs, codec licensing, and all the rest of it.
Linux does pretty well as a freebie OS for geeks who are happy to live with (or more often fix/work around) its limitations. But a free-as-in-both operating system is always going to be at an inherent disadvantage compared to a commercial player that can afford the cost of including good stuff as part of the purchase price, and the 98% of the world who just want their computer to work don't care about the geek perspective and the legal issues and the fact that if you just download this patch and recompile your kernel it can be fixed (at least 98% of the time).
I suspect I agree with everything the AC parent writes (other than the irritating tendency to care only about Americans, as distinct from the people who live in the US, or people generally for that matter). I certainly agree that the actions of Big Media appear remarkably similar to anti-competitive behaviour prohibited by law. But the answer to this is to enforce the law, not to start freeloading and promote vigilante justice.
For what it's worth, I do think there is a point where civil disobedience becomes a legitimate tactic in a civilised country. But that point is usually when the alternative is something like civil war, and I reckon we're a few million lightyears short of reaching that point in the copyright debate. And in any case, real civil disobedience is not at all the same as trying to get away with breaking the law for selfish reasons because you can.