In Word up to 2003, you can restore the default formatting for the selected styles with Ctrl+Space and Ctrl+Q (one's for characters, one's for paragraphs). I never use the mouse for this, so I've no idea what the equivalent command would be. I can't say I've tried it that I remember in 2007, but I don't remember it not working, so it probably does.
Technically you're right of course. Still, in cases like this it seems to be the norm for courts to award in favour of the consumer if they've brought a legitimate, successful case but incurred some costs in doing so. Regardless of whether the consumer can strictly rely on this, the manager at the store is going to know that it's likely if things get to court...
What's the difference between styles and templates?
In most cases, templates apply to the whole document, while styles apply to specific elements. A style typically specifies how to format some text, a frame, a table, a page, etc. A document template might include the definitions of several styles, along with default content, and perhaps other document-wide properties depending on the application.
Put another way, a template might define the corporate standard structure and appearance for "letter" or "technical report", while styles might say that text tagged as "emphasized" should be displayed in italics, and the "address" paragraph should be right-aligned.
When Frame goes away, I'll be very sad, because there won't be a well supported writing tool that can handle heavily-laden technical documents.
I doubt it's going any time in the immediate future. It's too well-established, and the brand is worth too much. Adobe will probably kill it off quietly when the long document support in InDesign reaches a similar level, at which point obviously InDesign provides a viable alternative.
The other obvious alternative, given that you're talking about technical documents, is something in the TeX family. For all its quirks and the estimated release date for LaTeX3 of approximately November 2154, there are several relatively recent offshoots that deal with the more annoying limitations (lack of Unicode support, lack of support for native fonts, etc.) that will support Plain TeX, LaTeX or even your own custom set-up if you're of Knuthian ingenuity.
Of course not (and I'm aware that since I'm not a lawyer, the requirements on me are different).
However, people new to places like Slashdot have a way of trusting advice from anonymous sources too much, and while I offer the information in good faith, I would never advise anyone to trust it completely without checking it themselves. The general "don't assume I'm qualified to comment, go check this for yourself" advice is recognisable and sound, and I include wording to that general effect in posts like this by way of looking out for the new guy.
In the UK, new goods sold from a shop to a private customer must be fit for purpose. This is a statutory obligation, and the related consumer rights cannot be waived regardless of anything the shop says. Those rights derive primarily from the Sale of Goods Act. The law provides for various replace/refund possibilities, depending on what is reasonable given the nature of the problem and how long it has been since the item was bought.
Protection can last for several years if this is the normal expected lifespan of the item purchased, but the law isn't stupid: you probably aren't entitled to a full refund if your device that should last at least six years fails after only five, for example, though you might find you're entitled to a contribution towards repair or replacement.
For recently purchased items, shops might like to offer you gift vouchers or something rather than a refund, but they'll be out of luck if they try to make it stick and you fight them. Most managers know this, and will back down when confronted. They know they will likely lose a case in the small claims court, and incur costs (we have a loser pays legal system) and damage to their store's reputation as well as having to pay up in the end anyway.
There are additional legal remedies connected with various specific circumstances, such as the Distance Selling Regulations, but these don't seem to apply in this case.
If I were the guy who'd been screwed here, I would first return to the shop, ask politely to speak to the manager, inform him that I didn't find his staff's behaviour reasonable, and ask for what I believed that I was reasonably entitled to under the consumer protection legislation. If that didn't work, I'd consult my local Trading Standards folks, who are generally knowledgeable, helpful, quick to answer questions and on the consumer's side. Then I'd probably do whatever they suggested was best in the circumstances, which might mean anything from sending a registered letter of complaint to the business's head office to filing against them in the small claims court (which can actually be done on-line quite efficiently these days).
Insert standard disclaimers here: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and if you follow any advice you find on Slashdot without checking it for yourself then you deserve whatever comes of it. If you want real legal advice, speak to a lawyer, or at least your local Trading Standards, Citizens Advice Bureau or similar reputable organisation.
Did you actually follow those links before posting them? They provide pretty compelling evidence that he's right and you're wrong.
In any case, we are discussing Word 2007 here, and as was pointed out, Word 2007 basically respects all the old keyboard shortcuts, including the Alt-based ones that come from the old menu layout. Game, set, match.
If you're talking about pretty much straight text then I imagine any recent version of Word on a modern machine would cope OK with 200 pages, but if you're low on available memory (whatever that means given your system capacity and what else you're doing at the time) it doesn't seem happy. I suspect some of its algorithms or data structures rely on having all the key data in RAM at once. This problem has been amplified dramatically in previous versions if you're using extensive formatting, but I haven't yet used a document both long and complex in Word 2007 so I can't comment with any conviction on how much of a difference the formatting makes in the latest incarnation.
Unfortunately, the “What's new” page is just the customary OO mess. They could have added the world's best feature in there, and only someone with several hours to kill would ever find it.
Any series of articles that thinks OpenOffice Writer has been better than Word in the past is dead before it starts. Only the most OSS-loving evangelist would make such a claim. Of course, the claim is only made because Writer won (according to the reviewer) in more categories (arbitrarily selected by the reviewer, and having equal weight).
In this case, it's interesting that he pans the ribbons in Office 2007. It's only as anecdotal as his claim, but I personally haven't yet found anyone who's given Office 2007 a fair try and didn't prefer the ribbons after a period of getting used to them. Microsoft's usability people seem to have done their job well on this one. Word certainly isn't perfect as far as usability goes, but it's hardly the disaster this guy makes out.
On the styles count, he pans Word 2007 for not having page and frame styles, but frankly, I have never used those features in OO Writer. I use styles and templates a lot, but if I'm doing something with enough flash to be using styles like that, I'll probably be using a DTP program anyway, and neither Word nor OO Writer is really up to that kind of page layout. Meanwhile, has OO Writer got shortcut keys for styles (and for removing them) that actually work yet?
On page layout, apparently the only thing Writer lacks is the ability to link text frames. I imagine that will be of great concern to the DTP big boys! Or not, unless a whole bunch of other stuff has been added since 2.2, and a whole load of bugs fixed. (I can't tell, since only 2.2.1 appears to be available for download so far.)
The comments about templates are only about those supplied with the packages, which unless you're Joe 12-year-old doing a high school project are utterly irrelevant. Professional organisations will generally set up their own, if they use them at all, which means the tools for setting up and modifying templates are far more important than the page layout equivalent of clip-art.
On numbered/bulleted lists, Writer apparently has little room for improvement over 2.2. I imagine anyone who's suffered the pain of trying to get multi-level lists to lay out properly and struggled through the ludicrously overcomplicated numbering architecture will disagree. Lists suck in Word, but they suck even more in Writer. Neither has a feature worthy of a serious word processor.
On headers and footers, the review criticises Word for its limited flexibility. When Writer can even put the most recent heading in the header automatically, get back to us.
On the footnotes and endnotes thing, calling Word's facilities basic in comparison to Writer is rather harsh. There are one or two nice tweaks in Writer that Word doesn't have (at least, I haven't found them yet if they were added in 2007, and it didn't before). Most people will never use these features.
On the subjects of cross-references, both Word and Writer suck beyond the point of being usable. They just suck in different ways. Someone should introduce them to LaTeX, which uses the stunningly complicated system of naming a place you might want to refer to later, and then referring to it by name elsewhere. When the word processors here have bookmarking facilities that do this, reliably, and without a tendency to corruption, they can claim to even have a useful cross-reference facility, but until then, it's just not true.
On indices and tables of contents, the reviewer apparently confuses his own stylistic preferences with faulty design — unfortunate, considering that almost any professional typesetter is likely to disagree with him on that one. In any case, again neither program really shines in this area, though. Simple things (in terms of the kind of documents where you'd care about these things) like having both a table of chapters and a detailed table of contents are bizarrely awkward if they work at all. Again, without better support for pulling these things in and actually getting them to work (there's no point being able to generate both tables if you can't get
That would be funny if I hadn't really had to reinstall Firefox after some auto-update for an add-on apparently reset every preference I had ever set, including some for other add-ons, a few days ago.
(In case anyone's wondering: I had an update of HTML Validator, which seemed to go fine, and Firefox started up as normal after the update. The time after that when I started Firefox, my home page had been reset and several tabs opened up, one of which was all about the Download Statusbar add-on I also use; there was no message about a Download Statusbar update first. I subsequently discovered that all my font/links configuration, tab behaviour, cookie/privacy settings, and more had been reset. Even my Slashdot-friendly add-on had had its settings put back to defaults! So much had changed that I decided the only safe thing to do was export the bookmarks, zap the lot, and then reinstall Firefox and all my add-ons — excluding the two suspects in the "trashing all the settings" case, of course. I'm still trying to find all those little settings I had tweaked in about:config. My disillusionment with the whole modular, add-on based architecture is pretty high right now...)
One highly subjective, criminally over-simplified take on the whole liberal/conservative question is: it boils down to one of modeling society. If you want "one big family" then you lean to the left, and want more socialized policies. If you question whether people scale well and want more individual responsibility and less safety net, then you might prefer conservative policies.
I'm not sure that's as over-simplified as you think. I was discussing this with a politically-minded colleague at work the other day, and he characterised the political spectrum as reaching from individualism on one extreme to collectivism on the other. Things like major economic policy and the scope of government tend to follow naturally from that choice.
Of course, there are numerous separate issues where the position you take does not follow automatically from your big picture philosophy. Any political spectrum is only a crude approximation. But it's surprising how much does follow from that one simple idea. I think talking about "economic" left/right wings vs. "social" left/right wings is mostly an illusion. Economics and social structure aren't independent.
If it works well for everyone except one person, I wouldn't call that "sucking". It may lack something that someone needs, meaning it's incomplete, but there's a difference between that and worthless.
But the question isn't whether it's worthless, it's whether it's worth less. If you look up my posting history, you'll find several relevant discussions where others and I have compared notes on good and bad features in both MS Office and OpenOffice. Objectively, there is no doubt that OO Writer is less capable and less usable than MS Word has been. (The jury is still out on the Office 2007 facelift, though initial feedback suggests users are overwhelmingly in favour of the new look once they've had time to get over the initial unfamiliarity.)
If all you ever do is write simple letters with minimal formatting, then it doesn't really matter what word processor you use — or even whether you use a word processor at all, to be honest. But if you need more serious writing and review tools, more powerful formatting and page layout, and the like, then that's word processor territory. Maybe the Editor character mentioned earlier in this thread was simply the only guy in his department who currently needs those things? If he routinely needs to do this stuff and can't, but the rest of his department with their much lesser requirements are saying "Well it works for me!", of course he's going to argue that it sucks and throw his weight around, because the tool isn't good enough for him to do his job.
Phones are supposed to last at least 24 hours if not days when you're not talking on them.
And mine does, despite having only on and off modes.
Now, I appreciate that in trendy hi-tech land, my phone is prehistoric. Newer phones have larger, full-colour displays, and may require the whole screen to be off to conserve power. But if this is the case, was it really so difficult to have some other indicator (such as the little LEDs everyone used to use) to show that the device was still on and just in stand-by mode when the screen is off? This is, after all, what pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics does when in stand-by.
Ask yourself if you would assume that the action you normaly take to do one thing, would do something completely different just because you were leaving the country?
I assume that's what the poor fellow we're talking about here has been asking himself, since he got landed with a bill for $4,800 for something that would have been free at home.
As I wrote several posts ago, the usability problem is not that you need to turn the phone off by holding the button down. The problem is firstly that the phone in stand-by is visually indistinguishable from the phone actually switched off, and secondly that "stand-by" on this phone does way more than stand-by on most phones.
If you can't understand the difference between that and what you're describing (which the rest of us all acknowledged several hours ago) then please go read all the relevant posts by me and others before responding. They're even modded up for you to make them easy to see.
And no, I've never made that mistake, nor would I since my phone clearly distinguishes between its on and off states. Why does a certain type of person always assume an ulterior motive or inherent bias on the part of anyone with a different perspective to their own?
I'm sorry, I missed your point. I didn't say it wasn't codified in law. I just said it was an affirmative defence and not a right. Looking on the official House web site, there is no indication that title 17 section 107 has been amended to say otherwise, and as you point out yourself, it is unlikely to be so given that such a change would invalidate substantial parts of the DMCA, which doesn't sound like a move likely to get much support from Big Media-funded senators and congresscritters. Are you referring to case law from a higher court or something?
It's the only possible scenario since when you actually power the phone off, it's completely off.
Unfortunately, that isn't true. Another possible scenario is that the users (if you follow the article links, quite a few people have now been had by this one) did something they thought would switch off their phones, but in fact didn't, and then they couldn't tell the difference. And as I've said throughout this discussion, the latter is a serious usability flaw, given the potential consequences of the mistake.
Yes, it does require a button to be held. But on my phone, if it's on, you can clearly see this from the time display on the LCD and the "on" light flashing every couple of seconds, and when you turn it off, you get a clear indication both audibly and from the screens and lights going off.
The usability problem here isn't requiring the user to switch a phone off, it's the fact that there is apparently no way to distinguish whether the phone is currently off or just in stand-by mode, unless you do something that would bring it out of stand-by or someone happens to call you. That and the fact that this phone's "stand-by" mode isn't really standing by at all, because it's doing very significant, very expensive things in the background.
The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.
Well, that and the fact that with the iPhone you can apparently be racking up thousands of dollars of charges while your phone is visually indistinguishable from being switched off. According to the source material cited, the only way you'd know that is if you read small print that runs to nearly 7,000 words, since the summary of the plan features doesn't indicate it.
However, these people didn't even try to turn their phones off. They simply set them down and assumed that a darkened screen meant it was off.
Where does it say that in TFA or any of the stories from other sources linked from it?
I do have a "brick from 6 years ago", near enough. What's your point? It makes and receives calls, sends and receives texts, stores a phone list, and does all of this simply and with good reliability. Why would I spend a fortune or commit to a year or more of dubious price plans on a new network, just to get a different phone?
In any case, the phone I use is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact remains that if a phone has two modes that behave very differently (and getting or not getting a $4,800 bill is "very differently" in my book) then it is poor UI design not to distinguish them clearly. This is not an emotional statement — after all, I'm not the guy out several grand for a simple mistake — it's simply acknowledging a basic usability error rather than joining the collective Apple worship that a scary number of people in this discussion are exhibiting.
My trusty Samsung A series has only two modes: off (which means "off"), and on (in which calls can be made or received and messages can be received and sent).
Frankly, I don't see why you need a sleep mode on a mobile phone. Of course, you guys who have to upgrade your phone every five minutes, and now use something running a vastly overpowered operating system that supports myriad other features, crashes on occasion, and does stupid things like incurring $4,800 of charges because you pressed the wrong button or didn't press the right one, may find your mileage varies.
He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.
A plausible alternative theory is that OOo does suck, but your Editor is the only person who needs certain features or communicates with certain other parties that demonstrate this.
In most office environments, the cost of paying for business software is a negligible expense relative to the money saved or wasted by making a poor choice of which software to use. My employer probably spends several times more money on employing me for a single day than they do on whatever blanket MS Office licence they have.
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In Word up to 2003, you can restore the default formatting for the selected styles with Ctrl+Space and Ctrl+Q (one's for characters, one's for paragraphs). I never use the mouse for this, so I've no idea what the equivalent command would be. I can't say I've tried it that I remember in 2007, but I don't remember it not working, so it probably does.
Technically you're right of course. Still, in cases like this it seems to be the norm for courts to award in favour of the consumer if they've brought a legitimate, successful case but incurred some costs in doing so. Regardless of whether the consumer can strictly rely on this, the manager at the store is going to know that it's likely if things get to court...
What's the difference between styles and templates?
In most cases, templates apply to the whole document, while styles apply to specific elements. A style typically specifies how to format some text, a frame, a table, a page, etc. A document template might include the definitions of several styles, along with default content, and perhaps other document-wide properties depending on the application.
Put another way, a template might define the corporate standard structure and appearance for "letter" or "technical report", while styles might say that text tagged as "emphasized" should be displayed in italics, and the "address" paragraph should be right-aligned.
If you liked Framemaker then you should check out Scribus.
Unless you're using Windows, in which case, don't bother. The Windows port of Scribus is so bug-ridden as to be utterly unusable.
When Frame goes away, I'll be very sad, because there won't be a well supported writing tool that can handle heavily-laden technical documents.
I doubt it's going any time in the immediate future. It's too well-established, and the brand is worth too much. Adobe will probably kill it off quietly when the long document support in InDesign reaches a similar level, at which point obviously InDesign provides a viable alternative.
The other obvious alternative, given that you're talking about technical documents, is something in the TeX family. For all its quirks and the estimated release date for LaTeX3 of approximately November 2154, there are several relatively recent offshoots that deal with the more annoying limitations (lack of Unicode support, lack of support for native fonts, etc.) that will support Plain TeX, LaTeX or even your own custom set-up if you're of Knuthian ingenuity.
Of course not (and I'm aware that since I'm not a lawyer, the requirements on me are different).
However, people new to places like Slashdot have a way of trusting advice from anonymous sources too much, and while I offer the information in good faith, I would never advise anyone to trust it completely without checking it themselves. The general "don't assume I'm qualified to comment, go check this for yourself" advice is recognisable and sound, and I include wording to that general effect in posts like this by way of looking out for the new guy.
In the UK, new goods sold from a shop to a private customer must be fit for purpose. This is a statutory obligation, and the related consumer rights cannot be waived regardless of anything the shop says. Those rights derive primarily from the Sale of Goods Act. The law provides for various replace/refund possibilities, depending on what is reasonable given the nature of the problem and how long it has been since the item was bought.
Protection can last for several years if this is the normal expected lifespan of the item purchased, but the law isn't stupid: you probably aren't entitled to a full refund if your device that should last at least six years fails after only five, for example, though you might find you're entitled to a contribution towards repair or replacement.
For recently purchased items, shops might like to offer you gift vouchers or something rather than a refund, but they'll be out of luck if they try to make it stick and you fight them. Most managers know this, and will back down when confronted. They know they will likely lose a case in the small claims court, and incur costs (we have a loser pays legal system) and damage to their store's reputation as well as having to pay up in the end anyway.
There are additional legal remedies connected with various specific circumstances, such as the Distance Selling Regulations, but these don't seem to apply in this case.
If I were the guy who'd been screwed here, I would first return to the shop, ask politely to speak to the manager, inform him that I didn't find his staff's behaviour reasonable, and ask for what I believed that I was reasonably entitled to under the consumer protection legislation. If that didn't work, I'd consult my local Trading Standards folks, who are generally knowledgeable, helpful, quick to answer questions and on the consumer's side. Then I'd probably do whatever they suggested was best in the circumstances, which might mean anything from sending a registered letter of complaint to the business's head office to filing against them in the small claims court (which can actually be done on-line quite efficiently these days).
Insert standard disclaimers here: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and if you follow any advice you find on Slashdot without checking it for yourself then you deserve whatever comes of it. If you want real legal advice, speak to a lawyer, or at least your local Trading Standards, Citizens Advice Bureau or similar reputable organisation.
Did you actually follow those links before posting them? They provide pretty compelling evidence that he's right and you're wrong.
In any case, we are discussing Word 2007 here, and as was pointed out, Word 2007 basically respects all the old keyboard shortcuts, including the Alt-based ones that come from the old menu layout. Game, set, match.
If you're talking about pretty much straight text then I imagine any recent version of Word on a modern machine would cope OK with 200 pages, but if you're low on available memory (whatever that means given your system capacity and what else you're doing at the time) it doesn't seem happy. I suspect some of its algorithms or data structures rely on having all the key data in RAM at once. This problem has been amplified dramatically in previous versions if you're using extensive formatting, but I haven't yet used a document both long and complex in Word 2007 so I can't comment with any conviction on how much of a difference the formatting makes in the latest incarnation.
FWIW, I'm seriously considering giving Opera a try. I just decided that mentioning that before was a bit trollish.
Unfortunately, the “What's new” page is just the customary OO mess. They could have added the world's best feature in there, and only someone with several hours to kill would ever find it.
Any series of articles that thinks OpenOffice Writer has been better than Word in the past is dead before it starts. Only the most OSS-loving evangelist would make such a claim. Of course, the claim is only made because Writer won (according to the reviewer) in more categories (arbitrarily selected by the reviewer, and having equal weight).
In this case, it's interesting that he pans the ribbons in Office 2007. It's only as anecdotal as his claim, but I personally haven't yet found anyone who's given Office 2007 a fair try and didn't prefer the ribbons after a period of getting used to them. Microsoft's usability people seem to have done their job well on this one. Word certainly isn't perfect as far as usability goes, but it's hardly the disaster this guy makes out.
On the styles count, he pans Word 2007 for not having page and frame styles, but frankly, I have never used those features in OO Writer. I use styles and templates a lot, but if I'm doing something with enough flash to be using styles like that, I'll probably be using a DTP program anyway, and neither Word nor OO Writer is really up to that kind of page layout. Meanwhile, has OO Writer got shortcut keys for styles (and for removing them) that actually work yet?
On page layout, apparently the only thing Writer lacks is the ability to link text frames. I imagine that will be of great concern to the DTP big boys! Or not, unless a whole bunch of other stuff has been added since 2.2, and a whole load of bugs fixed. (I can't tell, since only 2.2.1 appears to be available for download so far.)
The comments about templates are only about those supplied with the packages, which unless you're Joe 12-year-old doing a high school project are utterly irrelevant. Professional organisations will generally set up their own, if they use them at all, which means the tools for setting up and modifying templates are far more important than the page layout equivalent of clip-art.
On numbered/bulleted lists, Writer apparently has little room for improvement over 2.2. I imagine anyone who's suffered the pain of trying to get multi-level lists to lay out properly and struggled through the ludicrously overcomplicated numbering architecture will disagree. Lists suck in Word, but they suck even more in Writer. Neither has a feature worthy of a serious word processor.
On headers and footers, the review criticises Word for its limited flexibility. When Writer can even put the most recent heading in the header automatically, get back to us.
On the footnotes and endnotes thing, calling Word's facilities basic in comparison to Writer is rather harsh. There are one or two nice tweaks in Writer that Word doesn't have (at least, I haven't found them yet if they were added in 2007, and it didn't before). Most people will never use these features.
On the subjects of cross-references, both Word and Writer suck beyond the point of being usable. They just suck in different ways. Someone should introduce them to LaTeX, which uses the stunningly complicated system of naming a place you might want to refer to later, and then referring to it by name elsewhere. When the word processors here have bookmarking facilities that do this, reliably, and without a tendency to corruption, they can claim to even have a useful cross-reference facility, but until then, it's just not true.
On indices and tables of contents, the reviewer apparently confuses his own stylistic preferences with faulty design — unfortunate, considering that almost any professional typesetter is likely to disagree with him on that one. In any case, again neither program really shines in this area, though. Simple things (in terms of the kind of documents where you'd care about these things) like having both a table of chapters and a detailed table of contents are bizarrely awkward if they work at all. Again, without better support for pulling these things in and actually getting them to work (there's no point being able to generate both tables if you can't get
That would be funny if I hadn't really had to reinstall Firefox after some auto-update for an add-on apparently reset every preference I had ever set, including some for other add-ons, a few days ago.
(In case anyone's wondering: I had an update of HTML Validator, which seemed to go fine, and Firefox started up as normal after the update. The time after that when I started Firefox, my home page had been reset and several tabs opened up, one of which was all about the Download Statusbar add-on I also use; there was no message about a Download Statusbar update first. I subsequently discovered that all my font/links configuration, tab behaviour, cookie/privacy settings, and more had been reset. Even my Slashdot-friendly add-on had had its settings put back to defaults! So much had changed that I decided the only safe thing to do was export the bookmarks, zap the lot, and then reinstall Firefox and all my add-ons — excluding the two suspects in the "trashing all the settings" case, of course. I'm still trying to find all those little settings I had tweaked in about:config. My disillusionment with the whole modular, add-on based architecture is pretty high right now...)
One highly subjective, criminally over-simplified take on the whole liberal/conservative question is: it boils down to one of modeling society. If you want "one big family" then you lean to the left, and want more socialized policies. If you question whether people scale well and want more individual responsibility and less safety net, then you might prefer conservative policies.
I'm not sure that's as over-simplified as you think. I was discussing this with a politically-minded colleague at work the other day, and he characterised the political spectrum as reaching from individualism on one extreme to collectivism on the other. Things like major economic policy and the scope of government tend to follow naturally from that choice.
Of course, there are numerous separate issues where the position you take does not follow automatically from your big picture philosophy. Any political spectrum is only a crude approximation. But it's surprising how much does follow from that one simple idea. I think talking about "economic" left/right wings vs. "social" left/right wings is mostly an illusion. Economics and social structure aren't independent.
Quoth the AC:
If it works well for everyone except one person, I wouldn't call that "sucking". It may lack something that someone needs, meaning it's incomplete, but there's a difference between that and worthless.
But the question isn't whether it's worthless, it's whether it's worth less. If you look up my posting history, you'll find several relevant discussions where others and I have compared notes on good and bad features in both MS Office and OpenOffice. Objectively, there is no doubt that OO Writer is less capable and less usable than MS Word has been. (The jury is still out on the Office 2007 facelift, though initial feedback suggests users are overwhelmingly in favour of the new look once they've had time to get over the initial unfamiliarity.)
If all you ever do is write simple letters with minimal formatting, then it doesn't really matter what word processor you use — or even whether you use a word processor at all, to be honest. But if you need more serious writing and review tools, more powerful formatting and page layout, and the like, then that's word processor territory. Maybe the Editor character mentioned earlier in this thread was simply the only guy in his department who currently needs those things? If he routinely needs to do this stuff and can't, but the rest of his department with their much lesser requirements are saying "Well it works for me!", of course he's going to argue that it sucks and throw his weight around, because the tool isn't good enough for him to do his job.
Phones are supposed to last at least 24 hours if not days when you're not talking on them.
And mine does, despite having only on and off modes.
Now, I appreciate that in trendy hi-tech land, my phone is prehistoric. Newer phones have larger, full-colour displays, and may require the whole screen to be off to conserve power. But if this is the case, was it really so difficult to have some other indicator (such as the little LEDs everyone used to use) to show that the device was still on and just in stand-by mode when the screen is off? This is, after all, what pretty much every other piece of consumer electronics does when in stand-by.
Ask yourself if you would assume that the action you normaly take to do one thing, would do something completely different just because you were leaving the country?
I assume that's what the poor fellow we're talking about here has been asking himself, since he got landed with a bill for $4,800 for something that would have been free at home.
You've completely lost the plot.
As I wrote several posts ago, the usability problem is not that you need to turn the phone off by holding the button down. The problem is firstly that the phone in stand-by is visually indistinguishable from the phone actually switched off, and secondly that "stand-by" on this phone does way more than stand-by on most phones.
If you can't understand the difference between that and what you're describing (which the rest of us all acknowledged several hours ago) then please go read all the relevant posts by me and others before responding. They're even modded up for you to make them easy to see.
And no, I've never made that mistake, nor would I since my phone clearly distinguishes between its on and off states. Why does a certain type of person always assume an ulterior motive or inherent bias on the part of anyone with a different perspective to their own?
I'm sorry, I missed your point. I didn't say it wasn't codified in law. I just said it was an affirmative defence and not a right. Looking on the official House web site, there is no indication that title 17 section 107 has been amended to say otherwise, and as you point out yourself, it is unlikely to be so given that such a change would invalidate substantial parts of the DMCA, which doesn't sound like a move likely to get much support from Big Media-funded senators and congresscritters. Are you referring to case law from a higher court or something?
It's the only possible scenario since when you actually power the phone off, it's completely off.
Unfortunately, that isn't true. Another possible scenario is that the users (if you follow the article links, quite a few people have now been had by this one) did something they thought would switch off their phones, but in fact didn't, and then they couldn't tell the difference. And as I've said throughout this discussion, the latter is a serious usability flaw, given the potential consequences of the mistake.
Yes, it does require a button to be held. But on my phone, if it's on, you can clearly see this from the time display on the LCD and the "on" light flashing every couple of seconds, and when you turn it off, you get a clear indication both audibly and from the screens and lights going off.
The usability problem here isn't requiring the user to switch a phone off, it's the fact that there is apparently no way to distinguish whether the phone is currently off or just in stand-by mode, unless you do something that would bring it out of stand-by or someone happens to call you. That and the fact that this phone's "stand-by" mode isn't really standing by at all, because it's doing very significant, very expensive things in the background.
The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.
Well, that and the fact that with the iPhone you can apparently be racking up thousands of dollars of charges while your phone is visually indistinguishable from being switched off. According to the source material cited, the only way you'd know that is if you read small print that runs to nearly 7,000 words, since the summary of the plan features doesn't indicate it.
However, these people didn't even try to turn their phones off. They simply set them down and assumed that a darkened screen meant it was off.
Where does it say that in TFA or any of the stories from other sources linked from it?
I do have a "brick from 6 years ago", near enough. What's your point? It makes and receives calls, sends and receives texts, stores a phone list, and does all of this simply and with good reliability. Why would I spend a fortune or commit to a year or more of dubious price plans on a new network, just to get a different phone?
In any case, the phone I use is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact remains that if a phone has two modes that behave very differently (and getting or not getting a $4,800 bill is "very differently" in my book) then it is poor UI design not to distinguish them clearly. This is not an emotional statement — after all, I'm not the guy out several grand for a simple mistake — it's simply acknowledging a basic usability error rather than joining the collective Apple worship that a scary number of people in this discussion are exhibiting.
My trusty Samsung A series has only two modes: off (which means "off"), and on (in which calls can be made or received and messages can be received and sent).
Frankly, I don't see why you need a sleep mode on a mobile phone. Of course, you guys who have to upgrade your phone every five minutes, and now use something running a vastly overpowered operating system that supports myriad other features, crashes on occasion, and does stupid things like incurring $4,800 of charges because you pressed the wrong button or didn't press the right one, may find your mileage varies.
He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.
A plausible alternative theory is that OOo does suck, but your Editor is the only person who needs certain features or communicates with certain other parties that demonstrate this.
In most office environments, the cost of paying for business software is a negligible expense relative to the money saved or wasted by making a poor choice of which software to use. My employer probably spends several times more money on employing me for a single day than they do on whatever blanket MS Office licence they have.