Terrorism didn't EXIST in a mearningful way until the 20th century, so what's your point?
Leaving aside the question of whether your claim is true, would my point be any less valid if I'd written "Since the start of the twentieth century, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the state"? I don't think so.
It very much is true in many meaningful ways. Go ahead and check my posting history, and the comments of others in the same discussions. We've previously enumerated plenty of ways OpenOffice applications are objectively inferior to their Microsoft Office counterparts, from little use of shortcut keys in Writer to limited graphing facilities in Calc. We've also covered plenty of areas that were more subjective but where the general concensus was that OpenOffice's UI was more awkward or limiting, e.g., the whole data sources mess for mail merging, the very poor on-line help in OO, and of course the accessibility issues we're discussing today.
As a long time user of both product lines, I maintain that OpenOffice applications are not yet in the same league as MS Office. They lack both the power and the usability. Sure, you can write a letter in Writer just as easily, but then you can write a letter in your OS's basic text editor, too.
I always add a disclaimer at this point, to be clear that I'm not knocking OpenOffice per se. It's great that we have access to a basic suite of office software for free, and it's a much newer product range. But it's no MS Office beater, and serious users with non-trivial requirements aren't going to consider it so until a lot has changed.
Oh, please. This one is getting as old as the Micro$oft joke. There is absolutely no danger that in future we won't be able to read documents in a Microsoft proprietary format that's used all over the world by businesses and governments everywhere. Countless applications, including OpenOffice, already have importers that do a comparable job to Microsoft's own software, and the lack of an official spec has done them little harm. Your argument is 100% pure FUD.
Yes. Open Source projects never die and are always maintained to the latest standards, as a quick look at somewhere like SourceForge will quickly verify.
I'm in a somewhat similar position: although I don't have quite as much driving experience as you, I've got well over a decade and well into six figures of miles under my belt with no accidents. I've also had more than your average basic training, from a former police instructor (who get about the best training there is in my country), and I drive a well-maintained, high-performance vehicle. Statistically, this lot makes me much less likely to have an accident than an average driver. So why do I obey the speed limit and drive no faster than 30mph around town, even when I judge it safe to drive faster?
Because I appreciate that in the interests of general safety, road laws must be tailored to the least common denominator. Short of having some sort of scale where different drivers have different permissions, assuming such a system could even work if those drivers were sharing the same road space, we have to consider that a novice driver in a typical small car probably can't drive much over 30mph safely so that is an appropriate legal limit. This disadvantages me personally, in the sense that sometimes it slows me down unnecessarily, but I accept it on a "greater good" basis.
I don't see why using a mobile phone while driving would be any different. I'm sure some people do use them responsibly, but IME the majority do not. My country, England, banned handheld phones in cars a while back, and in the run up to the ban I observed other drivers using phones quite carefully, so that experience isn't just random speculation and selective memory. I would have preferred that we not have separate legislation - particularly when it tacitly implied that hands-free kits were OK - but rather prosecuted more aggressively for dangerous or inconsiderate driving. But I can understand why the government chose to do what it did.
Like any group of people small enough not to make a difference in our elections. Any system that ultimately comes down to one candidate/party getting the most votes will always be vulnerable to electoral mathematics, where resources are concentrated on enough groups of sufficient size to secure those votes, to the exclusion of all others.
It's far from ideal, and I'm sure it does disadvantage many groups. I don't think it's a very good system. But as long as it's what we've got, my previous statement will hold, even if that means screwing blind people, black people, women, the unemployed, or for that matter, white, middle-class males. They're not being screwed because of those properties, they're being screwed on the basis of whether their group has enough votes to make a significant difference at election time.
To beat this, you'd need a reform of the electoral voting method.
You're complaining that Open Office - one of 15 applications that can read/write Open Document - is inferior to Microsoft Office.
Actually, I think the complaint is that all of the 15 applications in question are inferior to Microsoft Office. And right now, that's a valid complaint.
The truth of it is that open formats allow the customer to decide what's best for him, without fear of finding himself at the mercy of a single, predatory vendor.
You are arguing the politically-trendy fallacy that more choice implies better results. This holds only if the optimal result is one of the available choices, which isn't automatically the case. Indeed, it may be that the resources necessary to provide multiple choices could better be invested in a single approach that will be better than all of the multiple choices as a result.
In this case, the anti-MS argument is flawed because no tool currently available that uses ODF is even close to beating MS Office in several important areas, which apparently include support for people with various disabilities. Mandating the use of ODF would thus not be in the immediate interests of those who use office applications in MA and use those areas of the product.
Now, whether mandating open specifications for public documents is in the long-term interests of the people of MA is a different question. You could certainly make a case that it is, if you believe the move to standardise on ODF would probably result in MS Office supporting the format at least as well as it supports the proprietary formats used at present, or that other, better choices will become available. But for this argument to have any merit, it needs to show why the long-term benefits outweigh any short-term disadvantages, and that the short-term disadvantages aren't show-stoppers. This appears to be where the senator sees a problem (or has had one shown to him by Microsoft; it doesn't really matter).
I know, that with many years experience, I know when I can talk on the phone and when I shouldn't.
I very much doubt that. The vast majority of drivers consistently over-rate their own performance, and in particular, drivers who are on the phone consistently underestimate the effect it has on them (as do those under the influence of alcohol or drugs). You can never be an impartial judge of your own skill level based only on your own experience of it.
When you bought the software, you had a reasonable expectation that it is "free of bugs," and that any problems with the software will be fixed by the company at no additional cost to you, for the life of the product.
Fortunately for every professional software developer in the world, just about everything in that statement is completely untrue.
FWIW, if you managed to get the beta running, I'd be interested to know whether I got the right impressions from the video demo (see my my post just above).
It has been eons since I read the EULA, but it basically says that MS owns the systems. That means that they can do whatever they want.
But only if they can convince a court that what the EULA says is legally correct. I could give you a copy of my software with a licence agreement saying you forfeit the soul of your first born child to me, but I rather doubt a court would uphold it. Then again, this is the US we're talking about.;-)
I even went through all the info-gathering rubbish first, and downloaded their ActiveX control. And then when I actually tried to start the interactive "test drive" thing, I got an error message popping up (apparently within their application) saying it had gone wrong, and a blank screen. I hope that's not the demo of what Office 2007 is actually going to do!:-/
I did watch the streaming video demo of the new UI though, and I have to say that it pretty much plays out my worst fears since the first previews appeared. A lot of the stuff they pitch as being "great" and "amazing" and "beautiful" doesn't look all that hot to me.
For a start, there is going to be a significant amount of retraining required for the UI. Things have moved, big time, and by the looks of it we're stuck with context-sensitive everything. (I'm guessing I'm not the only Office user here who disables the "smart" menus that hide items as one of the first things they do on a new install?) Just having a significantly rearranged UI is going to put a lot of people off, regardless of any merit the actual layout has.
But what's worse is all the missed opportunities. Everything and its brother now comes with "live updates", e.g., as you move your mouse over the font combo box, the document text in the background switches to the font you select in "real time". Sounds handy, but I can see it getting old real quick, given the lag time for the visual updates evident in the demo.
There are also loads of "galleries", where you can select a particular setting for everything from table formats to the position of an imported picture on the page, based on effectively a pane of thumbnail previews of the options. The thing is, Word's default templates have always sucked big time from a design and typography perspective, and all the examples they used in the video demo were a million times worse. Do I really want a lime green, 3D-shaded border around my text box, if I'm producing a document for print? Probably not. I won't even mention the Powerpoint demo, where our host takes a perfectly readable six-item bullet list, and with a wave of his magic mouse turns the list into several different graphics... all of which were completely unreadable by comparison (but the colours were pretty). Oh, sorry, I did mention it. Never mind.
What was conspicuously missing from the video was any information about how customisable this all is (or isn't). While the example footer style they add with "just one click" isn't offensive in isolation, it's completely unrelated to the rest of the document formatting, and unlikely to be much use to anyone as it stands. There's no concept mentioned of an overall document template with consistent styles across all these different settings. And all of the demonstrations about text formatting still focus on manually clicking random formatting icons, just like people do with a toolbar now. You'd think they could take the opportunity to catch up with the semantics-based formatting that everything from LaTeX to HTML has been working towards for decades.
There are a load of minor things as well, but personally as a "power user", I found pretty much all of their "improvements" sounded like things that were more limited and awkward to work with than the status quo. Of course you have to use something for real for a while to be sure how much things will really help or get in the way, but after a couple of decades, I'm a pretty reliable judge ahead of time, and things are not looking good.
Bottom line: it's not a good demo video if they want people like me to buy their product. If they were willing to bite the bullet and go for a radical UI change, they could have made a lot of the features so much better, but from the video, it looks like all we've got is yet another facelift on the same tired old feature set and underlying models. Let's hope that's just bad advertising, and not how things turn out in the finished product...
Not exactly royalties, but we have a profit-sharing scheme: twice each financial year, 20% of the company's profits are shared among the staff. Hurting the company therefore directly hurts everyone working for it.
This isn't unique among small, privately-owned companies IME, though it's rare-to-never among big corporations.
I'm pretty sure that in the UK, neither debit cards nor "credit card cheques" carry the same legal protections as a proper credit card (which are regulated under the relevant consumer credit legislation). But ask your card supplier or a real financial adviser if you want to be really sure.
Yet google is advertising this as a replacement for credit cards on all of your purchases.
That seems unlikely, at least here in the UK, where credit card companies become jointly liable with the seller for purchases within a fairly wide price range. As a result, you'll find PC magazines and the like usually recommend using a credit card to pay for major purchases, because if the seller goes bust before shipping, you can get your money back from the credit card company. The card companies are unsurprisingly reluctant to pay up too often, but they know that in genuine cases they can be forced to in court, so if a company you're dealing with does fold, using a credit card does provide useful protection. Unless Google's facilities fall under the same consumer credit laws, I doubt they'll take much custom away from credit card companies on this side of the pond.
Obligatory disclaimer: If you get your legal or financial advice on Slashdot, you're a very silly person. The above was pretty much general knowledge the last time I checked, but if it matters to you, go read the small print for yourself.
Personally, you won't find me going near most of the services offered by the likes of Paypal and now Google until organisations that are acting like banks or credit companies are regulated like them as well. My high street bank and credit card have pretty crappy customer service at times, but compared to some of the things Paypal's been accused off, the other guys are saints.
Speaking as someone whose teeth were basically wrecked by an incompetent orthodontist years ago, I can promise you that not everyone with dental problems brought them upon themselves. My dentist often comments on how good my oral hygiene is, yet I have some sort of filling in nearly every tooth in my mouth.
Firstly, I'm not a "big supporter of the BSA". I just don't buy unsupported hype, on either side of a discussion, and I do believe copyright owners are entitled to defend their legal right in court if they feel it's being abused.
Now, in the article you cited, it says that the BSA "collects fees of up to $150,000 for every unregistered software program installed on a company's computers." However, it also says that they collect a little over $10m total per year. It doesn't take a genius to work out that they're not really getting $150,000 per installed copy, or anywhere close to it, despite the probably-not-accidental ambiguity in the former statement.
In the article you cited, it says that the BSA may conduct a raid if they believe they're being had. However, it also notes that they require judicial oversight to do so, and that they must be accompanied by US marshalls during the raid. They don't have any magical powers of entry, search and seizure.
In the article you cited, two people say the burden of proof is on the defendant, and that only certain evidence of licensing will be accepted. But guess what? Those two people are the BSA's enforcement goons, and their opinion is irrelevant. What counts is what the court believes, and courts are not known for liking corporate lawyers pretending to be judges, even in the US.
And of course, the article is based on the US, which means it's still just as irrelevant to this discussion as any other US-based anecdotes. What is it about Americans and this thread; is it really so hard to grasp that legal systems elsewhere may work differently, and the fact that the US court system is so screwed up that barratry is an effective means of money-making doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the world would accept the same behaviour?
Once again, in the UK, we have a loser-pays system. We also don't have punitive damages. And we give the BSA no special powers in law. Defending a company that's not breaking the rules against the BSA should consist of little more than the corporate legal team sending off a letter refuting the allegations, and if necessary, standing up for itself in court. The BSA aren't about to prosecute without a good case, because it would cost them a fortune (and contrary to their PR stunt guys' claims in the article, I think you'll find that the burden of proof is very much on the claimant in UK courts).
Now, if you can find me a single case in the UK where the kind of mob-handed approach you assign to the BSA was actually effective in a court, I'll reconsider my position. Until you find some good examples of that, we have nothing more to discuss here.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving aside the question of whether your claim is true, would my point be any less valid if I'd written "Since the start of the twentieth century, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the state"? I don't think so.
It very much is true in many meaningful ways. Go ahead and check my posting history, and the comments of others in the same discussions. We've previously enumerated plenty of ways OpenOffice applications are objectively inferior to their Microsoft Office counterparts, from little use of shortcut keys in Writer to limited graphing facilities in Calc. We've also covered plenty of areas that were more subjective but where the general concensus was that OpenOffice's UI was more awkward or limiting, e.g., the whole data sources mess for mail merging, the very poor on-line help in OO, and of course the accessibility issues we're discussing today.
As a long time user of both product lines, I maintain that OpenOffice applications are not yet in the same league as MS Office. They lack both the power and the usability. Sure, you can write a letter in Writer just as easily, but then you can write a letter in your OS's basic text editor, too.
I always add a disclaimer at this point, to be clear that I'm not knocking OpenOffice per se. It's great that we have access to a basic suite of office software for free, and it's a much newer product range. But it's no MS Office beater, and serious users with non-trivial requirements aren't going to consider it so until a lot has changed.
Really? It may be wise to allow for the worst, but assuming it is just paranoid if you have no particular reason to do so.
As the saying goes, we should not fear what we do not understand, we should fear because we do not understand.
Oh, please. This one is getting as old as the Micro$oft joke. There is absolutely no danger that in future we won't be able to read documents in a Microsoft proprietary format that's used all over the world by businesses and governments everywhere. Countless applications, including OpenOffice, already have importers that do a comparable job to Microsoft's own software, and the lack of an official spec has done them little harm. Your argument is 100% pure FUD.
Yes. Open Source projects never die and are always maintained to the latest standards, as a quick look at somewhere like SourceForge will quickly verify.
I'm in a somewhat similar position: although I don't have quite as much driving experience as you, I've got well over a decade and well into six figures of miles under my belt with no accidents. I've also had more than your average basic training, from a former police instructor (who get about the best training there is in my country), and I drive a well-maintained, high-performance vehicle. Statistically, this lot makes me much less likely to have an accident than an average driver. So why do I obey the speed limit and drive no faster than 30mph around town, even when I judge it safe to drive faster?
Because I appreciate that in the interests of general safety, road laws must be tailored to the least common denominator. Short of having some sort of scale where different drivers have different permissions, assuming such a system could even work if those drivers were sharing the same road space, we have to consider that a novice driver in a typical small car probably can't drive much over 30mph safely so that is an appropriate legal limit. This disadvantages me personally, in the sense that sometimes it slows me down unnecessarily, but I accept it on a "greater good" basis.
I don't see why using a mobile phone while driving would be any different. I'm sure some people do use them responsibly, but IME the majority do not. My country, England, banned handheld phones in cars a while back, and in the run up to the ban I observed other drivers using phones quite carefully, so that experience isn't just random speculation and selective memory. I would have preferred that we not have separate legislation - particularly when it tacitly implied that hands-free kits were OK - but rather prosecuted more aggressively for dangerous or inconsiderate driving. But I can understand why the government chose to do what it did.
Like any group of people small enough not to make a difference in our elections. Any system that ultimately comes down to one candidate/party getting the most votes will always be vulnerable to electoral mathematics, where resources are concentrated on enough groups of sufficient size to secure those votes, to the exclusion of all others.
It's far from ideal, and I'm sure it does disadvantage many groups. I don't think it's a very good system. But as long as it's what we've got, my previous statement will hold, even if that means screwing blind people, black people, women, the unemployed, or for that matter, white, middle-class males. They're not being screwed because of those properties, they're being screwed on the basis of whether their group has enough votes to make a significant difference at election time.
To beat this, you'd need a reform of the electoral voting method.
Actually, I think the complaint is that all of the 15 applications in question are inferior to Microsoft Office. And right now, that's a valid complaint.
It does, not least because of what happens to Alderaan shortly after that exchange.
Welcome to the harsh political reality that sometimes, a group of people is so small that it's not worth the effort to go for their votes.
You are arguing the politically-trendy fallacy that more choice implies better results. This holds only if the optimal result is one of the available choices, which isn't automatically the case. Indeed, it may be that the resources necessary to provide multiple choices could better be invested in a single approach that will be better than all of the multiple choices as a result.
In this case, the anti-MS argument is flawed because no tool currently available that uses ODF is even close to beating MS Office in several important areas, which apparently include support for people with various disabilities. Mandating the use of ODF would thus not be in the immediate interests of those who use office applications in MA and use those areas of the product.
Now, whether mandating open specifications for public documents is in the long-term interests of the people of MA is a different question. You could certainly make a case that it is, if you believe the move to standardise on ODF would probably result in MS Office supporting the format at least as well as it supports the proprietary formats used at present, or that other, better choices will become available. But for this argument to have any merit, it needs to show why the long-term benefits outweigh any short-term disadvantages, and that the short-term disadvantages aren't show-stoppers. This appears to be where the senator sees a problem (or has had one shown to him by Microsoft; it doesn't really matter).
Or you don't notice the light turning red, or the police car coming from an unexpected direction.
I very much doubt that. The vast majority of drivers consistently over-rate their own performance, and in particular, drivers who are on the phone consistently underestimate the effect it has on them (as do those under the influence of alcohol or drugs). You can never be an impartial judge of your own skill level based only on your own experience of it.
Exactly.
Fortunately for every professional software developer in the world, just about everything in that statement is completely untrue.
FWIW, if you managed to get the beta running, I'd be interested to know whether I got the right impressions from the video demo (see my my post just above).
But only if they can convince a court that what the EULA says is legally correct. I could give you a copy of my software with a licence agreement saying you forfeit the soul of your first born child to me, but I rather doubt a court would uphold it. Then again, this is the US we're talking about. ;-)
...was this lousy video demo.
I even went through all the info-gathering rubbish first, and downloaded their ActiveX control. And then when I actually tried to start the interactive "test drive" thing, I got an error message popping up (apparently within their application) saying it had gone wrong, and a blank screen. I hope that's not the demo of what Office 2007 is actually going to do! :-/
I did watch the streaming video demo of the new UI though, and I have to say that it pretty much plays out my worst fears since the first previews appeared. A lot of the stuff they pitch as being "great" and "amazing" and "beautiful" doesn't look all that hot to me.
For a start, there is going to be a significant amount of retraining required for the UI. Things have moved, big time, and by the looks of it we're stuck with context-sensitive everything. (I'm guessing I'm not the only Office user here who disables the "smart" menus that hide items as one of the first things they do on a new install?) Just having a significantly rearranged UI is going to put a lot of people off, regardless of any merit the actual layout has.
But what's worse is all the missed opportunities. Everything and its brother now comes with "live updates", e.g., as you move your mouse over the font combo box, the document text in the background switches to the font you select in "real time". Sounds handy, but I can see it getting old real quick, given the lag time for the visual updates evident in the demo.
There are also loads of "galleries", where you can select a particular setting for everything from table formats to the position of an imported picture on the page, based on effectively a pane of thumbnail previews of the options. The thing is, Word's default templates have always sucked big time from a design and typography perspective, and all the examples they used in the video demo were a million times worse. Do I really want a lime green, 3D-shaded border around my text box, if I'm producing a document for print? Probably not. I won't even mention the Powerpoint demo, where our host takes a perfectly readable six-item bullet list, and with a wave of his magic mouse turns the list into several different graphics... all of which were completely unreadable by comparison (but the colours were pretty). Oh, sorry, I did mention it. Never mind.
What was conspicuously missing from the video was any information about how customisable this all is (or isn't). While the example footer style they add with "just one click" isn't offensive in isolation, it's completely unrelated to the rest of the document formatting, and unlikely to be much use to anyone as it stands. There's no concept mentioned of an overall document template with consistent styles across all these different settings. And all of the demonstrations about text formatting still focus on manually clicking random formatting icons, just like people do with a toolbar now. You'd think they could take the opportunity to catch up with the semantics-based formatting that everything from LaTeX to HTML has been working towards for decades.
There are a load of minor things as well, but personally as a "power user", I found pretty much all of their "improvements" sounded like things that were more limited and awkward to work with than the status quo. Of course you have to use something for real for a while to be sure how much things will really help or get in the way, but after a couple of decades, I'm a pretty reliable judge ahead of time, and things are not looking good.
Bottom line: it's not a good demo video if they want people like me to buy their product. If they were willing to bite the bullet and go for a radical UI change, they could have made a lot of the features so much better, but from the video, it looks like all we've got is yet another facelift on the same tired old feature set and underlying models. Let's hope that's just bad advertising, and not how things turn out in the finished product...
Not exactly royalties, but we have a profit-sharing scheme: twice each financial year, 20% of the company's profits are shared among the staff. Hurting the company therefore directly hurts everyone working for it.
This isn't unique among small, privately-owned companies IME, though it's rare-to-never among big corporations.
I'm pretty sure that in the UK, neither debit cards nor "credit card cheques" carry the same legal protections as a proper credit card (which are regulated under the relevant consumer credit legislation). But ask your card supplier or a real financial adviser if you want to be really sure.
That seems unlikely, at least here in the UK, where credit card companies become jointly liable with the seller for purchases within a fairly wide price range. As a result, you'll find PC magazines and the like usually recommend using a credit card to pay for major purchases, because if the seller goes bust before shipping, you can get your money back from the credit card company. The card companies are unsurprisingly reluctant to pay up too often, but they know that in genuine cases they can be forced to in court, so if a company you're dealing with does fold, using a credit card does provide useful protection. Unless Google's facilities fall under the same consumer credit laws, I doubt they'll take much custom away from credit card companies on this side of the pond.
Obligatory disclaimer: If you get your legal or financial advice on Slashdot, you're a very silly person. The above was pretty much general knowledge the last time I checked, but if it matters to you, go read the small print for yourself.
Personally, you won't find me going near most of the services offered by the likes of Paypal and now Google until organisations that are acting like banks or credit companies are regulated like them as well. My high street bank and credit card have pretty crappy customer service at times, but compared to some of the things Paypal's been accused off, the other guys are saints.
Speaking as someone whose teeth were basically wrecked by an incompetent orthodontist years ago, I can promise you that not everyone with dental problems brought them upon themselves. My dentist often comments on how good my oral hygiene is, yet I have some sort of filling in nearly every tooth in my mouth.
Sounds like a plan. Have your people call my people when you've got all your ducks in a row, and we'll take it to the next level.
Erm... What were we saying again? :-p
OK, let's not over-dramatise, shall we?
Firstly, I'm not a "big supporter of the BSA". I just don't buy unsupported hype, on either side of a discussion, and I do believe copyright owners are entitled to defend their legal right in court if they feel it's being abused.
Now, in the article you cited, it says that the BSA "collects fees of up to $150,000 for every unregistered software program installed on a company's computers." However, it also says that they collect a little over $10m total per year. It doesn't take a genius to work out that they're not really getting $150,000 per installed copy, or anywhere close to it, despite the probably-not-accidental ambiguity in the former statement.
In the article you cited, it says that the BSA may conduct a raid if they believe they're being had. However, it also notes that they require judicial oversight to do so, and that they must be accompanied by US marshalls during the raid. They don't have any magical powers of entry, search and seizure.
In the article you cited, two people say the burden of proof is on the defendant, and that only certain evidence of licensing will be accepted. But guess what? Those two people are the BSA's enforcement goons, and their opinion is irrelevant. What counts is what the court believes, and courts are not known for liking corporate lawyers pretending to be judges, even in the US.
And of course, the article is based on the US, which means it's still just as irrelevant to this discussion as any other US-based anecdotes. What is it about Americans and this thread; is it really so hard to grasp that legal systems elsewhere may work differently, and the fact that the US court system is so screwed up that barratry is an effective means of money-making doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the world would accept the same behaviour?
Once again, in the UK, we have a loser-pays system. We also don't have punitive damages. And we give the BSA no special powers in law. Defending a company that's not breaking the rules against the BSA should consist of little more than the corporate legal team sending off a letter refuting the allegations, and if necessary, standing up for itself in court. The BSA aren't about to prosecute without a good case, because it would cost them a fortune (and contrary to their PR stunt guys' claims in the article, I think you'll find that the burden of proof is very much on the claimant in UK courts).
Now, if you can find me a single case in the UK where the kind of mob-handed approach you assign to the BSA was actually effective in a court, I'll reconsider my position. Until you find some good examples of that, we have nothing more to discuss here.