It's not automatically bad, but using semi-automated memory management like this tends to reduce the emphasis on constructing things only when they're needed and destroying them immediately when you're done with them. This concern, known as "Java bloat syndrome" in honour of the language that first popularised it, can lead to major performance problems in applications that manipulate a lot of data, and is a favourite mistake made by the cult of "hardware is cheap, so optimisation doesn't matter".
The thing is, this sort of care-free programming philosophy is natural in languages like Java, so languages like Java have had to learn from their early mistakes and adapt. There have been dramatic improvements in GC technology since those early days, and today there isn't the same degree of performance penalty associated with relying on GC to clear everything up.
However, this sort of behind-the-scenes magic isn't really the "C++ way". You can do it, but tools like shared_ptr don't have the same level of sophistication as full-blown GC. Using them requires some care from programmers, and as the grandparent post said, this can lead to problems if the programmers come to rely on them more than they ought.
FWIW, I'm not sure I'd have described things in quite such black-and-white terms as the GP, but I can see the underlying point and I think it's a valid one.
You're just making my point for me. Most of your post boils down to "I don't like Microsoft, so everyone else shouldn't use them", with no objective evidence at all to support your position.
The rest is an argument about standards that is never going to work, because to some extent these things always come down to what people have already. Even if it's not software, it will be hardware. If it's not hardware, it will be cost. Not everyone has a computer of their own at all.
In other words, any principled stand about public access has to be based on some publicly-available facility provided by the government itself: paper files at City Hall, access to a government network via computers at the local library, or whatever. As long as you have that, the information is freely available to the public. The details are then the government's problem, and there's no requirement for anyone to purchase anything just to see public information.
Provision beyond that is only about public convenience. And when 95% of your target market uses the same format, the most convenient thing for the greatest number of people is to use that same format. You personally may not like it, but you're in the 5%.
Of course you're perfectly entitled to your own beliefs, but please recognise that everything you wrote in your post is based on assumption. There is no evidence, as far as I'm aware, supporting the theory that significantly more people or businesses would move from MS Office to OpenOffice if the file formats weren't an issue. They have, after all, switched formats several times already but stuck with MS Office even when there have been compatibility issues, and OpenOffice has done a respectable job of importing things like Word and Excel files for a long time now.
The trouble with this whole debate is that the pro-ODF people have become the very thing they claim to stand against. This is just politicking to try and push their own agenda and damage the competition. The Linux and OpenOffice crowd have failed to displace MS Windows and MS Office in a competitive market for years, and now they are resorting to FUD and back room politics, the very same things for which they have often criticised commercial, closed-source developers.
There is a valid point here, in that documents created by government should in general be freely available to the public. IMHO, the correct answer to this is that national (and, ideally, local) libraries should keep all of the reference material stored safely, along with any hardware and software necessary for a visiting member of the public to read it. They should be free to use whatever mechanisms they want to store the data, as long as the content is preserved and you or I can see it on request. If formats become more difficult to access with time, the librarians can migrate the content to something more future-proof, just as they already do when different kinds of hardware storage are obsolete. In the meantime, if they want to store it in a popular format that is viewable by many people over the Internet in addition to their basic obligation to preserve the information and make it accessible to anyone who wants to see it, then that harms no-one and helps many.
No, trolling because you don't seem to be interested in a real discussion. Your previous reply dismissed my earlier comments as being without specifics you could address, despite my citing a whole thread full of them, and you made patronising comments that simply aren't true. I have now provided further, very specific examples in the areas where I wasn't explicit in my earlier post. Would you like to address any of them now?
I can't open a Word document written *last week* by somebody 2 desks over with a slightly different version of MS Word -- and my version of MS Word is just *newer* than his. When I can open them, they're frequently not "100% accurate". What's your secret?
I don't have one. The last time I saw that kind of compatibility cock-up was the format shift about three versions back (on Windows), and that seemed to be patched up long ago. Which versions are you using, and what sort of formatting or features don't import correctly? Are you sure you haven't got one PC formatting for A4 and the other for US Letter paper or something, with the result that some of the pagination changes slightly?
I really can't relate to any of your other points either, with the possible exception of version control. Word itself does have some features for tracking changes and the like, but it's true, if you usually use a text-based diffing tool then Word documents (like any binary format) aren't version control friendly. Whether that's a problem with Word or a problem with your approach to version control is a different question.
Ah, sorry, I was feeding the troll. My mistake. However, since you force me to defend my claims, let me be blunt and ruthlessly objective:
Um, Word has no PDF export at all.
Word 2007 can save to PDF. I can get a valid PDF right out of Word. I cannot get a valid PDF out of Writer with the fonts correct, short of relying on third party software.
I don't know what you're doing, but mail merge works fine for me. [...] As far as your problem with output to file, you can specify the output of a mail merge as "Save, Print or Send", so outputting to files is one of your basic choices.
Mail merging can be done to a separate file for each record, but not to a single file for all records that can then be tweaked as necessary. The ability to make minor customisations to merged documents before printing is a fundamental feature of any half-decent mail merge facility. Even printing to files fails without error message if you type an output directory that doesn't yet exist, rather than doing something useful like prompting to create it.
Mail merge in recent OO versions is also fundamentally broken in its reliance on the database module. What's with generating crap all over my root directory every time I add a new data source? Why can't I delete old data sources I no longer need to keep the system clean? Why, after four hours of searching the on-line help, OO web site and web generally, could I not find any reference to these things, or to the fact that without Base installed, the mail merge dialog just appears half-blank and the merge itself doesn't work properly?
Um, numbering in OOo has always been better and more manageable than in Word.
It would be if it worked. Alas, numbering in OO Writer is so bug-ridden that I don't see how you can possibly defend it. Nested numbering, linking with styles, and starting/stopping lists all have basic bugs in them that I've run into several times, though I've never worked out exactly what triggers them.
As far as styles go, selecting the text, then double-clicking the style in the style window is too hard for you? You could assign shortcut keys in Tools/Customize/Keyboard, if you want it to work exactly like Word.
No, messing around scrolling up and down lists (which constantly flip back to some default display mode even if I changed it earlier) to find what I want is not acceptable. Styles are things people should be encouraged to use. Hiding shortcut keys for them somewhere completely different from where everything else is set up sucks. Relying on an ambiguous "Default" command on the context menu to remove manual formatting sucks. Not being able to reset a derived style to match its parent properties once you've changed anything sucks. This is all basic stuff, fundamental to making styles a useful feature.
That's just a rant, and expresses your opinion. There's nothing in there I can address directly.
What do you want, a list of 100 different usability gremlins in OpenOffice? How about starting with help buttons on all dialog boxes that actually work, and take you to help text that really tells the user what the significance of the different options is?
Try this: in Writer, create yourself a table at the start of the document, and then move the cursor to just before it, so you can insert new material right at the top of the document. Try the same creating a table of contents at the top instead of a table, with the table of contents set not to allow manual modifications. Annoying, isn't it?
Try setting up a fixed-width table in Writer that isn't full-width on the page, and then setting the widths of the various columns. You have to go rearrange the options on other t
I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:
PDF export is fundamentally broken: when dealing with certain OpenType fonts (such as almost all pro grade fonts from major foundries supplied today), they are substituted with some other font in the output PDF. Worse, you don't get to find out that it's broken and there's no workaround until after you've spent all your time creating and laying out your document. I've even been told that this isn't a bug, it's just a missing feature!
Mail merge is fundamentally broken: the data sources model is screwed up in several ways, even in the more recent versions of OO, and there are basic things in terms of output to file rather than printer that still don't seem to be possible.
Support for styles is weak: theoretically Writer can do more than Word, but things like the numbering schemes are so buggy that much of the power is not usable in practice. Basic things like being able to assign styles or reset manual formatting to the style defaults are needlessly difficult or impossible, while they're just a keyboard shortcut away in Word.
Usability is poor in many places: dialog layout is confused, help text isn't helpful, navigation is poor around things like contents and tables; it isn't even close to as user-friendly as Word, even before the 2007 UI changes.
The automation model in OO is weak and clumsy.
One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.
These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.
I'm not sure we really do disagree as much as you suggest. For example, I would agree that there is a difference between an incidental occurrence of a window in a photograph and a photograph that shows in detail the contents of a private home viewed through that window, if that's what you mean.
One thing we do seem to disagree on is the intent issue. To me, it doesn't matter whether someone deliberately violated someone else's privacy, or did so only inadvertently. The privacy was still violated, and the same data about someone's private life/space is still available as a consequence.
The other thing I suspect we disagree on is the "common sense allowance" point. While I am generally a pragmatist about these things, I think the rules of the privacy game are changing fundamentally with the ability to store and data mine huge repositories of personal information. What might be an innocent, incidental, inconsequential invasion of privacy in isolation can become much more than that when combined with other such minor invasions using modern technology. Thus while I might have called "no harm, no foul" a few years ago, I increasingly take the view that the presumption should be absolute respect for privacy, and it is the reasonable exceptions that should then be given explicitly (e.g., taking a picture that incidentally shows the outside of someone's home, which is visible to anyone from a public place at any time, but not any detail through the windows, which I think most people would agree is private).
As a final point, the British government example was in response to accusations of paranoia by another poster. My point in the example was that people said the same about isolated CCTV cameras a few years ago. Now, we have 4 million of them, ANPR cameras monitoring the roads, facial recognition technology being trialled, and suddenly the government really does have a system that can effectively track much of the movement of the entire population and record it forever. There is nothing paranoid about thinking this is open to abuse, as any Holocaust survivor (or British Muslim, perhaps?) can testify.
A while ago, I might have considered that. However, I have gone to the trouble of filing detailed bug reports with various big name OSS packages, OpenOffice among them, and watched those reports get essentially ignored (or, even more disappointing, flagged as not being a bug by some developer when I and many other users clearly thought it was). I no longer bother filing bugs on the big name projects, because I have seen literally zero results from doing so, even where things I filed or voted for have become among the most-requested features and sat on the bug database for literally years.
Today, I'd rather spend my time sending messages of support or donations to individuals or small teams who also produce software I also find useful/enjoyable. These people tend to be genuinely grateful IME. They do listen, they don't make me jump through hoops to try and help them, and just a quick vote of thanks or a little financial support seems to make a real difference.
Wow. I'm not sure how to reply to your post, because I don't think most of your post was a reply to anything I actually wrote in my post.
Either our privacy matters, or it doesn't.
This is not true. It is like saying that we either have the freedom to say anything we want any time or we don't have freedom of speech.
Well, no, it's not, is it? It might be like saying that either we have the freedom to say anything we want at any time or we don't, but even that is more black-and-white in practice than what I wrote. What you wrote is like saying that either my favourite colour is blue or I like to go swimming.
In fact, I've never argued for absolute freedom of speech; check my posting history. My position on rights and responsibilities in general is that they come together, that rights should never be given up lightly, but that sometimes it is necessary to balance some rights of one person with some other rights of another. That last case is where things get difficult, because inevitably in such a conflict someone will wind up losing a right that in general we hold to be a good thing.
I'm afraid I don't really know where your government vs. company stuff comes from. OK, I gave one example mentioning the British government, but the issues of privacy and the dangers of data mining that I raised are general principles, and apply to everything from governments using them to damage political opponents through to supermarkets using them to work out how to get away with overcharging their customers most efficiently.
Sure, but that relies on anticipating, N years in advance, what the "non-standard" packages will be in the future. In the LaTeX world, some very useful packages that were typically supplied with installations as standard a decade ago have been superceded by more generic, future-proof or otherwise adaptable alternatives. Maybe in ten years' time, LaTeX3 will finally have materialised, and almost everything from today will only run with backward compatibility modes; who knows?
It also relies on your personal copies of things never failing, which isn't 100%, particularly if you ever trusted CD-Rs for back-ups. Of course, you can probably find copies of most of them hidden away on CTAN, or on someone's personal home page, but then you'll probably be able to find filters that will convert the most popular document format in the world to newer formats for a long time, too.
Just out of interest, why are you considering moving to new software? What's wrong with whatever you've been using until now? Office 2007 will be expensive, and may represent at least some loss of productivity for a while as people adjust to the new UI. OOo is full of silly bugs and limitations, and is simply not good enough (IME) for use in a professional environment with more than trivial requirements. To be sure, both have their good points too, but what does either package offer over whatever you're currently using that you actually need?
Incidentally, it sounds as though you're not very familiar with these newer products yet and still doing your research. If that's the case, I advise caution in trusting reviews you find on the net. OpenOffice reviews hosted on OSS-friendly sites, such as the Bruce Byfield comparison of Word and OpenOffice Writer mentioned in the blog entry you cited, can be horribly biased: that particular one is simply wrong on many counts, and reads more like a commercial for OpenOffice than a balanced report written by someone genuinely familiar with both products under comparison. Similarly, the mainstream PC magazines tend to rave about new versions of MS Office regardless of how good, bad or indifferent they are, and have done for years. caveat lector.
Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash.
Sorry, but it's pretty much just you.
For one thing, of those people I know who have actually tried using Office 2007 for a while, nearly all seem to prefer the new UI after a fairly short amount of time getting used to it. I haven't used it much myself yet, so I don't have a personal opinion either way, but it certainly sounds like Microsoft's usability people did their homework well on this one.
For another thing, you can download a freebie tool from the Microsoft web site that lets Office 2003 read Office 2007 format files. (If you're using Office 2003 and Windows XP, this can also be useful as a way to get Microsoft's nice new fonts even if you don't need to open the newer document formats.) Of course, you can still save in other formats from Office 2007 itself.
Your final point about Vista is off-topic and irrelevant to this discussion, but it's pretty much without merit anyway since you can disable the graphic-intensive display options in Vista if you want, and just about any decent graphics card from the past few years will handle Aero.
Of course if those people had any clue, they'd realize that file formats matter in the long run and if they use popular word processors, they will probably not be able to reopen their own documents 100% accurately in ten years time.
/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.
/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.
Seriously though, for anything longer than 3 pages, LaTeX is easier. You just write the content and let it figure out the formatting.
Which is fine if the formatting it "figures out" is reasonable, as it usually is. If not, though, you're basically screwed, because manual formatting in LaTeX is what they use to scare people who are already consigned to a fiery underworld for all eternity...
FWIW, I had this discussion with a lawyer friend a few years ago as Word was becoming dominant. At the time, he said most legal firms were still using WordPerfect for the simple reason that they had lots of boilerplate material in that format and weren't prepared to spend time and money converting and checking it all.
There are several good alternatives to the new Office but no good reason to buy into it. There's Kword, Open Office, Abiword, Star Office and Word Perfect. With LyX, you can do GUI Tex if you want. If you are really stuck on Office, Open Office is a good fit. The only reason to move to the new Office is that you want M$ at any cost.
That simply isn't true. Right now, if you want a word processor with the most powerful features and the best usability, the winner — by quite some way — is Microsoft Word. Imagining that things like OpenOffice Writer or AbiWord are competition is simply wishful thinking by someone who, for whatever reason, regards Microsoft products as bad simply because they are made by Microsoft.
And no, I don't work for Microsoft. In fact, I even run OpenOffice on my home PC, because I don't believe in infringing copyright and I don't use office apps enough at home to justify paying for the Microsoft suite. But for professionals at work, I wouldn't dream of recommending Writer over Word. I could write (and have written) a detailed list of objective criticisms to support this position, but I doubt you'd have any interest in reading it since you already appear to have made up your mind. If you (or anyone else) really is interested, a quick Google search of my posting history here will turn up several relevant posts.
I'm not talking about the US. The US legal system, including the police, is all kinds of fucked up. I was talking about the UK.
So am I.
The cops can't arrest your for "almost anything". They can, however, arrest you for committing arrestible offenses.
In fact, they can arrest you on suspicion of committing an offence they suspect has been committed.
When the cops search you in London, which they usually only do in tube stations, they're searching for something specific, like guns or knives.
Do people of Arab descent statistically carry knives and guns in London an order of magnitude more often than other people, then? The police don't exactly have a stellar record of not over-reacting in tube stations when someone mentions the dreaded word "terrorism", you see.
And yes, they can give instant fines, but you can contest them in court if you want, or just pay the £80 and be done with it.
The problem is, that makes it easy for a police officer to fine you, and unreasonably difficult for you to contest it. If you want to go to court over it, you'll potentially be giving up at least a whole day, for which you will receive no compensation for any loss of earnings. That, for many people, will mean it costs more to fight a wrongful charge than just to cough up the cash and take the hit. Any such system is fundamentally broken, and does not serve the interests of justice.
If, though, you're a terror suspect, they can hold you for 7 days.
Actually, it's 28 days now, and still the authorities are pushing for 90.
And the key word there is "suspect". These are the same people Tony Blair thinks we should jail without trial, as he reaffirmed just the other day. A country where anyone can be jailed without trial because someone in authority determines arbitrarily that they are suspected of something is a police state. And if you don't think it's arbitrary, then take a look at some of the things done under the so-called anti-terror laws, starting with the Labour conference where a 82-year-old veteran party member and Holocaust survivor was kicked out for <shock> heckling the Foreign Secretary over an illegal war!
DNA in the database? I can't possibly see how that's a problem. It's led to thousands of arrests for crimes that would have otherwise gone unsolved. It's not a privacy infringement, as it can only be used against you if you've committed a crime.
Erm... No. I think my current sig probably says everything necessary here, but just to really hammer the point home, there have been tens of thousands of arrests under the increasingly draconian anti-terror legislation in this country, and fewer than 1% of them have resulted in a conviction. If you think mass DNA testing will do much better, you need to go look up the false positive rate for DNA matching, and then consider that courts in many places will accept a DNA match as correct effectively without question.
So if I am going to take a picture of some friends out on the driveway, I have to angle the shot so that it doesn't get any windows in the frame?
No, and I didn't say you did. But I believe you do have a responsibility not to take a photo so near to someone's window that you're recording a significant part of their private space in your picture. This is hardly a burden, since it's not exactly rocket science to spot that you're framing a photo where 1/3 of the area covered is someone's window or something.
With the money that celebrities have and the amount of frustration and anger that the paparazi is the (rather deservedly) target of, don't you think that proper legal channels, in regards to cameras, have been tread repeatedly?
Do you not believe that the law can be wrong, or should be adapted when it does not agree with the prevailing view among the people as situations change? The UK currently has the most pervasive network of CCTV cameras in the world, run by the government and all apparently quite legal, but an awful lot of people are starting to have a problem with it.
This is not one step towards public surveilance, as you submit it to be.
I'm sorry, but do you actually know who Google are? Their entire business model is based on gathering as much data about as many people as they possibly can, so as to maximise their ability to deliver advertising. As long as the law permits it, they will tend to build the largest database they can so they can exploit any information they have as much as possible. This is how businesses work. They have no soul. They don't believe in not being evil (or in being evil, for that matter). But they can and will damage people in the pursuit of profit, as long as the law permits them to do so. Thus, for the good of the people as a whole, laws should be made to restrict the behaviour of businesses to that which does not damage people. Net quality of life is always more important than net profit, regardless of what dubious campaign contributions say.
The irony of your post is that in the UK, a few months ago, they ran a series of Celebrity Big Brother that hit the media for all the wrong reasons. At least one of the three housemates accused of racism appeared genuinely distraught after leaving the show and discovering that what she had thought to be innocent wordplay inside the house had been blown out of all proportion by a publicity-mad media, leaving her labelled a racist for life, hounded by the press, receiving all kinds of unpleasant threats, and so on. If that can happen to a celebrity who is accustomed to the media spotlight and voluntarily being observed by the general public, then you'd think the public might realise that privacy does matter. I guess it was someone else getting hurt by it, though, so that's all right then.
But one picture does not warrant the level of paranoia that you are exhibiting.
It's not the one picture that matters, it's the general principle and the precedent and expectations that are being set.
Either our privacy matters, or it doesn't. Either someone taking a photograph of the inside of another's home is an invasion of their privacy or it isn't. If privacy matters, and someone taking a photograph of the inside of another's home is an invasion of that privacy, then as a simple matter of principle, taking that photograph should not be allowed.
If you don't draw the line there, in fairly black and white terms, then in a few years you have many people/organisations taking many photographs of many other people, and the data mining goes beyond simple invasion of privacy and starts leading to people being actively damaged by those who have compiled comprehensive information about them.
But by then, it's too late to stop it, because the damage was already done the moment you decided it was just one photograph so it didn't matter.
Oh, and it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. As you point out yourself, the British government already is well on the way to constant video surveillance of the entire population.
Your argument would have a little more credibility if they didn't show examples of cops following up these hunches on TV all the time. Watch any cop camera show and it's a good bet that at least once, one of the traffic guys will bemoan the fact that a "suspicious" car got away before he could U-turn and pull it over. By their own admission, these things are often based on nothing but a "sixth sense", not a failed number plate check or anything like that. Similarly, it's not unusual to see cops attending a house and wanting to search it based on nothing but an anonymous tip-off. What are they going to think if you don't let them in? Is a completely anonymous tip-off that you might be doing something that might be illegal really probable cause to enter and search your private property? And this is what they're like on TV, when they know the cameras are recording their behaviour. I'm sure most cops really are honest, decent people doing a difficult job, but it's not "most cops" you have to worry about when the safeguards are eroded.
Oh, and in the UK, cops can now arrest you for almost anything if you're out in public, can stop and search you completely arbitrarily if you're in an area designated at risk of terrorist attack (such as, say, the whole of London, which has had that status officially since almost the minute the enabling legislation was enacted), and can issue all kinds of instant fines without any due process at all. Once they arrest you, they can forcibly take DNA samples that are kept permanently on the national database regardless of whether you are ultimately convicted of any crime in court, hold you without even charging you for days, etc. Seriously, look it up. It's scary how open to abuse the system has become under the current administration. Don't for an instant think that it never happens; there are plenty of people who have publicly spoken out about it, including lawyers who have been on the wrong side of a cock-up and still couldn't do anything about it even with their detailed knowledge of how the system works.
For example, what you buy has always been public knowledge, and someone could have from the beginning of time followed you around every time you went to a store and see what you bought, and published this wherever he felt.
Except that, as you point out yourself, they couldn't. Until relatively recently, such behaviour would have required someone to devote an unrealistic amount of time to cataloguing your activities. Moreover, unless they had a small army of people to do it, they would have to be pretty obvious about it, which would inevitably have led to a confrontation where they were challenged because their actions were regarded as offensive to the person being spied upon. Ultimately, this might have led to legal action over the harassment.
Now, nothing about the relative ease with which such surveillance is conducted today changes the fact that a lot of people wouldn't like their whole life being catalogued in that way. If the surveillance happened in person today, it would still be just as creepy. But today, the data is gathered electronically, every time you use a card. Many people don't notice, because who really reads the ten pages of legal small print associated with the card?. Many of those who do understand that everything is being logged still think they're getting a good deal, because they see the perceived reduction in the price of their goods at the store. They don't realise that the store has long since absorbed that "discount" into the normal selling price (financially penalising those who don't give up their privacy along the way) and is now using software that deliberately sets the prices of goods higher to extract more from consumers who they identify as likely targets for giving them more money.
So, which part of this widespread, deceitful behaviour on the part of almost every major store at the expense of all their customers is actually in the interests of society?
So how many snapshots does it take to build a document? Two? Ten? A thousand? Is a 24/7 video record of your entire life just 2,073,600 snapshots a day that happen to be strung together in a 24fps video feed?
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It's not automatically bad, but using semi-automated memory management like this tends to reduce the emphasis on constructing things only when they're needed and destroying them immediately when you're done with them. This concern, known as "Java bloat syndrome" in honour of the language that first popularised it, can lead to major performance problems in applications that manipulate a lot of data, and is a favourite mistake made by the cult of "hardware is cheap, so optimisation doesn't matter".
The thing is, this sort of care-free programming philosophy is natural in languages like Java, so languages like Java have had to learn from their early mistakes and adapt. There have been dramatic improvements in GC technology since those early days, and today there isn't the same degree of performance penalty associated with relying on GC to clear everything up.
However, this sort of behind-the-scenes magic isn't really the "C++ way". You can do it, but tools like shared_ptr don't have the same level of sophistication as full-blown GC. Using them requires some care from programmers, and as the grandparent post said, this can lead to problems if the programmers come to rely on them more than they ought.
FWIW, I'm not sure I'd have described things in quite such black-and-white terms as the GP, but I can see the underlying point and I think it's a valid one.
You're just making my point for me. Most of your post boils down to "I don't like Microsoft, so everyone else shouldn't use them", with no objective evidence at all to support your position.
The rest is an argument about standards that is never going to work, because to some extent these things always come down to what people have already. Even if it's not software, it will be hardware. If it's not hardware, it will be cost. Not everyone has a computer of their own at all.
In other words, any principled stand about public access has to be based on some publicly-available facility provided by the government itself: paper files at City Hall, access to a government network via computers at the local library, or whatever. As long as you have that, the information is freely available to the public. The details are then the government's problem, and there's no requirement for anyone to purchase anything just to see public information.
Provision beyond that is only about public convenience. And when 95% of your target market uses the same format, the most convenient thing for the greatest number of people is to use that same format. You personally may not like it, but you're in the 5%.
Of course you're perfectly entitled to your own beliefs, but please recognise that everything you wrote in your post is based on assumption. There is no evidence, as far as I'm aware, supporting the theory that significantly more people or businesses would move from MS Office to OpenOffice if the file formats weren't an issue. They have, after all, switched formats several times already but stuck with MS Office even when there have been compatibility issues, and OpenOffice has done a respectable job of importing things like Word and Excel files for a long time now.
The trouble with this whole debate is that the pro-ODF people have become the very thing they claim to stand against. This is just politicking to try and push their own agenda and damage the competition. The Linux and OpenOffice crowd have failed to displace MS Windows and MS Office in a competitive market for years, and now they are resorting to FUD and back room politics, the very same things for which they have often criticised commercial, closed-source developers.
There is a valid point here, in that documents created by government should in general be freely available to the public. IMHO, the correct answer to this is that national (and, ideally, local) libraries should keep all of the reference material stored safely, along with any hardware and software necessary for a visiting member of the public to read it. They should be free to use whatever mechanisms they want to store the data, as long as the content is preserved and you or I can see it on request. If formats become more difficult to access with time, the librarians can migrate the content to something more future-proof, just as they already do when different kinds of hardware storage are obsolete. In the meantime, if they want to store it in a popular format that is viewable by many people over the Internet in addition to their basic obligation to preserve the information and make it accessible to anyone who wants to see it, then that harms no-one and helps many.
No, trolling because you don't seem to be interested in a real discussion. Your previous reply dismissed my earlier comments as being without specifics you could address, despite my citing a whole thread full of them, and you made patronising comments that simply aren't true. I have now provided further, very specific examples in the areas where I wasn't explicit in my earlier post. Would you like to address any of them now?
I don't have one. The last time I saw that kind of compatibility cock-up was the format shift about three versions back (on Windows), and that seemed to be patched up long ago. Which versions are you using, and what sort of formatting or features don't import correctly? Are you sure you haven't got one PC formatting for A4 and the other for US Letter paper or something, with the result that some of the pagination changes slightly?
I really can't relate to any of your other points either, with the possible exception of version control. Word itself does have some features for tracking changes and the like, but it's true, if you usually use a text-based diffing tool then Word documents (like any binary format) aren't version control friendly. Whether that's a problem with Word or a problem with your approach to version control is a different question.
Ah, sorry, I was feeding the troll. My mistake. However, since you force me to defend my claims, let me be blunt and ruthlessly objective:
Word 2007 can save to PDF. I can get a valid PDF right out of Word. I cannot get a valid PDF out of Writer with the fonts correct, short of relying on third party software.
Mail merging can be done to a separate file for each record, but not to a single file for all records that can then be tweaked as necessary. The ability to make minor customisations to merged documents before printing is a fundamental feature of any half-decent mail merge facility. Even printing to files fails without error message if you type an output directory that doesn't yet exist, rather than doing something useful like prompting to create it.
Mail merge in recent OO versions is also fundamentally broken in its reliance on the database module. What's with generating crap all over my root directory every time I add a new data source? Why can't I delete old data sources I no longer need to keep the system clean? Why, after four hours of searching the on-line help, OO web site and web generally, could I not find any reference to these things, or to the fact that without Base installed, the mail merge dialog just appears half-blank and the merge itself doesn't work properly?
It would be if it worked. Alas, numbering in OO Writer is so bug-ridden that I don't see how you can possibly defend it. Nested numbering, linking with styles, and starting/stopping lists all have basic bugs in them that I've run into several times, though I've never worked out exactly what triggers them.
No, messing around scrolling up and down lists (which constantly flip back to some default display mode even if I changed it earlier) to find what I want is not acceptable. Styles are things people should be encouraged to use. Hiding shortcut keys for them somewhere completely different from where everything else is set up sucks. Relying on an ambiguous "Default" command on the context menu to remove manual formatting sucks. Not being able to reset a derived style to match its parent properties once you've changed anything sucks. This is all basic stuff, fundamental to making styles a useful feature.
What do you want, a list of 100 different usability gremlins in OpenOffice? How about starting with help buttons on all dialog boxes that actually work, and take you to help text that really tells the user what the significance of the different options is?
Try this: in Writer, create yourself a table at the start of the document, and then move the cursor to just before it, so you can insert new material right at the top of the document. Try the same creating a table of contents at the top instead of a table, with the table of contents set not to allow manual modifications. Annoying, isn't it?
Try setting up a fixed-width table in Writer that isn't full-width on the page, and then setting the widths of the various columns. You have to go rearrange the options on other t
I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:
One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.
These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.
I'm not sure we really do disagree as much as you suggest. For example, I would agree that there is a difference between an incidental occurrence of a window in a photograph and a photograph that shows in detail the contents of a private home viewed through that window, if that's what you mean.
One thing we do seem to disagree on is the intent issue. To me, it doesn't matter whether someone deliberately violated someone else's privacy, or did so only inadvertently. The privacy was still violated, and the same data about someone's private life/space is still available as a consequence.
The other thing I suspect we disagree on is the "common sense allowance" point. While I am generally a pragmatist about these things, I think the rules of the privacy game are changing fundamentally with the ability to store and data mine huge repositories of personal information. What might be an innocent, incidental, inconsequential invasion of privacy in isolation can become much more than that when combined with other such minor invasions using modern technology. Thus while I might have called "no harm, no foul" a few years ago, I increasingly take the view that the presumption should be absolute respect for privacy, and it is the reasonable exceptions that should then be given explicitly (e.g., taking a picture that incidentally shows the outside of someone's home, which is visible to anyone from a public place at any time, but not any detail through the windows, which I think most people would agree is private).
As a final point, the British government example was in response to accusations of paranoia by another poster. My point in the example was that people said the same about isolated CCTV cameras a few years ago. Now, we have 4 million of them, ANPR cameras monitoring the roads, facial recognition technology being trialled, and suddenly the government really does have a system that can effectively track much of the movement of the entire population and record it forever. There is nothing paranoid about thinking this is open to abuse, as any Holocaust survivor (or British Muslim, perhaps?) can testify.
A while ago, I might have considered that. However, I have gone to the trouble of filing detailed bug reports with various big name OSS packages, OpenOffice among them, and watched those reports get essentially ignored (or, even more disappointing, flagged as not being a bug by some developer when I and many other users clearly thought it was). I no longer bother filing bugs on the big name projects, because I have seen literally zero results from doing so, even where things I filed or voted for have become among the most-requested features and sat on the bug database for literally years.
Today, I'd rather spend my time sending messages of support or donations to individuals or small teams who also produce software I also find useful/enjoyable. These people tend to be genuinely grateful IME. They do listen, they don't make me jump through hoops to try and help them, and just a quick vote of thanks or a little financial support seems to make a real difference.
Wow. I'm not sure how to reply to your post, because I don't think most of your post was a reply to anything I actually wrote in my post.
Well, no, it's not, is it? It might be like saying that either we have the freedom to say anything we want at any time or we don't, but even that is more black-and-white in practice than what I wrote. What you wrote is like saying that either my favourite colour is blue or I like to go swimming.
In fact, I've never argued for absolute freedom of speech; check my posting history. My position on rights and responsibilities in general is that they come together, that rights should never be given up lightly, but that sometimes it is necessary to balance some rights of one person with some other rights of another. That last case is where things get difficult, because inevitably in such a conflict someone will wind up losing a right that in general we hold to be a good thing.
I'm afraid I don't really know where your government vs. company stuff comes from. OK, I gave one example mentioning the British government, but the issues of privacy and the dangers of data mining that I raised are general principles, and apply to everything from governments using them to damage political opponents through to supermarkets using them to work out how to get away with overcharging their customers most efficiently.
Sure, but that relies on anticipating, N years in advance, what the "non-standard" packages will be in the future. In the LaTeX world, some very useful packages that were typically supplied with installations as standard a decade ago have been superceded by more generic, future-proof or otherwise adaptable alternatives. Maybe in ten years' time, LaTeX3 will finally have materialised, and almost everything from today will only run with backward compatibility modes; who knows?
It also relies on your personal copies of things never failing, which isn't 100%, particularly if you ever trusted CD-Rs for back-ups. Of course, you can probably find copies of most of them hidden away on CTAN, or on someone's personal home page, but then you'll probably be able to find filters that will convert the most popular document format in the world to newer formats for a long time, too.
Just out of interest, why are you considering moving to new software? What's wrong with whatever you've been using until now? Office 2007 will be expensive, and may represent at least some loss of productivity for a while as people adjust to the new UI. OOo is full of silly bugs and limitations, and is simply not good enough (IME) for use in a professional environment with more than trivial requirements. To be sure, both have their good points too, but what does either package offer over whatever you're currently using that you actually need?
Incidentally, it sounds as though you're not very familiar with these newer products yet and still doing your research. If that's the case, I advise caution in trusting reviews you find on the net. OpenOffice reviews hosted on OSS-friendly sites, such as the Bruce Byfield comparison of Word and OpenOffice Writer mentioned in the blog entry you cited, can be horribly biased: that particular one is simply wrong on many counts, and reads more like a commercial for OpenOffice than a balanced report written by someone genuinely familiar with both products under comparison. Similarly, the mainstream PC magazines tend to rave about new versions of MS Office regardless of how good, bad or indifferent they are, and have done for years. caveat lector.
Sorry, but it's pretty much just you.
For one thing, of those people I know who have actually tried using Office 2007 for a while, nearly all seem to prefer the new UI after a fairly short amount of time getting used to it. I haven't used it much myself yet, so I don't have a personal opinion either way, but it certainly sounds like Microsoft's usability people did their homework well on this one.
For another thing, you can download a freebie tool from the Microsoft web site that lets Office 2003 read Office 2007 format files. (If you're using Office 2003 and Windows XP, this can also be useful as a way to get Microsoft's nice new fonts even if you don't need to open the newer document formats.) Of course, you can still save in other formats from Office 2007 itself.
Your final point about Vista is off-topic and irrelevant to this discussion, but it's pretty much without merit anyway since you can disable the graphic-intensive display options in Vista if you want, and just about any decent graphics card from the past few years will handle Aero.
/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.
/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.
Sorry, looks like you're wrong on that one.
Which is fine if the formatting it "figures out" is reasonable, as it usually is. If not, though, you're basically screwed, because manual formatting in LaTeX is what they use to scare people who are already consigned to a fiery underworld for all eternity...
FWIW, I had this discussion with a lawyer friend a few years ago as Word was becoming dominant. At the time, he said most legal firms were still using WordPerfect for the simple reason that they had lots of boilerplate material in that format and weren't prepared to spend time and money converting and checking it all.
That simply isn't true. Right now, if you want a word processor with the most powerful features and the best usability, the winner — by quite some way — is Microsoft Word. Imagining that things like OpenOffice Writer or AbiWord are competition is simply wishful thinking by someone who, for whatever reason, regards Microsoft products as bad simply because they are made by Microsoft.
And no, I don't work for Microsoft. In fact, I even run OpenOffice on my home PC, because I don't believe in infringing copyright and I don't use office apps enough at home to justify paying for the Microsoft suite. But for professionals at work, I wouldn't dream of recommending Writer over Word. I could write (and have written) a detailed list of objective criticisms to support this position, but I doubt you'd have any interest in reading it since you already appear to have made up your mind. If you (or anyone else) really is interested, a quick Google search of my posting history here will turn up several relevant posts.
So am I.
In fact, they can arrest you on suspicion of committing an offence they suspect has been committed.
Do people of Arab descent statistically carry knives and guns in London an order of magnitude more often than other people, then? The police don't exactly have a stellar record of not over-reacting in tube stations when someone mentions the dreaded word "terrorism", you see.
The problem is, that makes it easy for a police officer to fine you, and unreasonably difficult for you to contest it. If you want to go to court over it, you'll potentially be giving up at least a whole day, for which you will receive no compensation for any loss of earnings. That, for many people, will mean it costs more to fight a wrongful charge than just to cough up the cash and take the hit. Any such system is fundamentally broken, and does not serve the interests of justice.
Actually, it's 28 days now, and still the authorities are pushing for 90.
And the key word there is "suspect". These are the same people Tony Blair thinks we should jail without trial, as he reaffirmed just the other day. A country where anyone can be jailed without trial because someone in authority determines arbitrarily that they are suspected of something is a police state. And if you don't think it's arbitrary, then take a look at some of the things done under the so-called anti-terror laws, starting with the Labour conference where a 82-year-old veteran party member and Holocaust survivor was kicked out for <shock> heckling the Foreign Secretary over an illegal war!
Erm... No. I think my current sig probably says everything necessary here, but just to really hammer the point home, there have been tens of thousands of arrests under the increasingly draconian anti-terror legislation in this country, and fewer than 1% of them have resulted in a conviction. If you think mass DNA testing will do much better, you need to go look up the false positive rate for DNA matching, and then consider that courts in many places will accept a DNA match as correct effectively without question.
No, and I didn't say you did. But I believe you do have a responsibility not to take a photo so near to someone's window that you're recording a significant part of their private space in your picture. This is hardly a burden, since it's not exactly rocket science to spot that you're framing a photo where 1/3 of the area covered is someone's window or something.
Do you not believe that the law can be wrong, or should be adapted when it does not agree with the prevailing view among the people as situations change? The UK currently has the most pervasive network of CCTV cameras in the world, run by the government and all apparently quite legal, but an awful lot of people are starting to have a problem with it.
I'm sorry, but do you actually know who Google are? Their entire business model is based on gathering as much data about as many people as they possibly can, so as to maximise their ability to deliver advertising. As long as the law permits it, they will tend to build the largest database they can so they can exploit any information they have as much as possible. This is how businesses work. They have no soul. They don't believe in not being evil (or in being evil, for that matter). But they can and will damage people in the pursuit of profit, as long as the law permits them to do so. Thus, for the good of the people as a whole, laws should be made to restrict the behaviour of businesses to that which does not damage people. Net quality of life is always more important than net profit, regardless of what dubious campaign contributions say.
The irony of your post is that in the UK, a few months ago, they ran a series of Celebrity Big Brother that hit the media for all the wrong reasons. At least one of the three housemates accused of racism appeared genuinely distraught after leaving the show and discovering that what she had thought to be innocent wordplay inside the house had been blown out of all proportion by a publicity-mad media, leaving her labelled a racist for life, hounded by the press, receiving all kinds of unpleasant threats, and so on. If that can happen to a celebrity who is accustomed to the media spotlight and voluntarily being observed by the general public, then you'd think the public might realise that privacy does matter. I guess it was someone else getting hurt by it, though, so that's all right then.
It's not the one picture that matters, it's the general principle and the precedent and expectations that are being set.
Either our privacy matters, or it doesn't. Either someone taking a photograph of the inside of another's home is an invasion of their privacy or it isn't. If privacy matters, and someone taking a photograph of the inside of another's home is an invasion of that privacy, then as a simple matter of principle, taking that photograph should not be allowed.
If you don't draw the line there, in fairly black and white terms, then in a few years you have many people/organisations taking many photographs of many other people, and the data mining goes beyond simple invasion of privacy and starts leading to people being actively damaged by those who have compiled comprehensive information about them.
But by then, it's too late to stop it, because the damage was already done the moment you decided it was just one photograph so it didn't matter.
Oh, and it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. As you point out yourself, the British government already is well on the way to constant video surveillance of the entire population.
Your argument would have a little more credibility if they didn't show examples of cops following up these hunches on TV all the time. Watch any cop camera show and it's a good bet that at least once, one of the traffic guys will bemoan the fact that a "suspicious" car got away before he could U-turn and pull it over. By their own admission, these things are often based on nothing but a "sixth sense", not a failed number plate check or anything like that. Similarly, it's not unusual to see cops attending a house and wanting to search it based on nothing but an anonymous tip-off. What are they going to think if you don't let them in? Is a completely anonymous tip-off that you might be doing something that might be illegal really probable cause to enter and search your private property? And this is what they're like on TV, when they know the cameras are recording their behaviour. I'm sure most cops really are honest, decent people doing a difficult job, but it's not "most cops" you have to worry about when the safeguards are eroded.
Oh, and in the UK, cops can now arrest you for almost anything if you're out in public, can stop and search you completely arbitrarily if you're in an area designated at risk of terrorist attack (such as, say, the whole of London, which has had that status officially since almost the minute the enabling legislation was enacted), and can issue all kinds of instant fines without any due process at all. Once they arrest you, they can forcibly take DNA samples that are kept permanently on the national database regardless of whether you are ultimately convicted of any crime in court, hold you without even charging you for days, etc. Seriously, look it up. It's scary how open to abuse the system has become under the current administration. Don't for an instant think that it never happens; there are plenty of people who have publicly spoken out about it, including lawyers who have been on the wrong side of a cock-up and still couldn't do anything about it even with their detailed knowledge of how the system works.
Except that, as you point out yourself, they couldn't. Until relatively recently, such behaviour would have required someone to devote an unrealistic amount of time to cataloguing your activities. Moreover, unless they had a small army of people to do it, they would have to be pretty obvious about it, which would inevitably have led to a confrontation where they were challenged because their actions were regarded as offensive to the person being spied upon. Ultimately, this might have led to legal action over the harassment.
Now, nothing about the relative ease with which such surveillance is conducted today changes the fact that a lot of people wouldn't like their whole life being catalogued in that way. If the surveillance happened in person today, it would still be just as creepy. But today, the data is gathered electronically, every time you use a card. Many people don't notice, because who really reads the ten pages of legal small print associated with the card?. Many of those who do understand that everything is being logged still think they're getting a good deal, because they see the perceived reduction in the price of their goods at the store. They don't realise that the store has long since absorbed that "discount" into the normal selling price (financially penalising those who don't give up their privacy along the way) and is now using software that deliberately sets the prices of goods higher to extract more from consumers who they identify as likely targets for giving them more money.
So, which part of this widespread, deceitful behaviour on the part of almost every major store at the expense of all their customers is actually in the interests of society?
So how many snapshots does it take to build a document? Two? Ten? A thousand? Is a 24/7 video record of your entire life just 2,073,600 snapshots a day that happen to be strung together in a 24fps video feed?