The bottom line is: Star Office can never beat MS Office, because it emulates MS Office. To send MSWord and PowerPoint to their well-deserved place on the ash heap of history, will take a replacement that shoots higher. It's not good enough to match the MS Office feature set and be cheaper. The cost of the software is trivial, compared to the lock-in that comes from familiarity alone.
For an Open-source office replacement to kill MS, the word processor has to be better than Pages and InDesign combined. The presentation program has to be better than Keynote. The spreadsheet has to be better than Lotus Improv. Not better by a little bit, either: they have to completely blow MS's products away. They have to make the deficiencies of MS's products glaringly obvious to anyone who spends a couple of minutes comparing them.
Until the Star Office guys aim that high, they won't make a dent in the monopoly.
Hey, I like Heinlein's work as much as the next guy, but how many people do you kow who really can do all those things? Did Robert ever set a bone or design a building?
You see, our FBI and federal government has the right to tap all our phones, wiretap everything, spy on us, use satelites to watch our every move, and to control our thoughts and remove our freedom of speech. The FBI owns you, you do not own the FBI.
Not the right, the power. It's an important distinction to make.
At any rate, legally speaking, policies of the FCC and the FBI do not trump the constitution. Encrypt your VOIP conversations all you want (and if you're using Skype, you're already doing so), and let them try to beat you in court for doing it.
It's simply not necessary for people to know how everything they use works. I know how to series-wind an AC motor, but there's no reason why everyone who wants to vacuum their floor should have to. It's called the social division of labor. I don't really know how to make clothes, operate a bottling plant, or weave a carpet, but there are people who do.
Back in the days when most people lived on farms and made most of the things they used by themselves, we all lived in rather squalid conditions. Let's hear it for specialization!
Nerve cells will grow at a speed of about 1 mm per year.
Umm.. I'm about 1.82 meters tall, so my longest neurons are probably close to a meter long. I'm no spring chicken anymore, but I'm not 1,000 years old, either.
FWIW, the last time I had a nasty cut that made me lose sensation in the end of my thumb, my doctor told me that nerves regenerate about a mm per day. Sure enough, sensation returned in about a week.
I got to listen to some stranger make a fool of himself for no reason, and i got paid to do it.
Don't you try to tell me what he did was for no reason. If he yelled at you or verbally abused you in any way, it was nothing less than you deserved. He wasn't the asshole, YOU WERE. Understand?
I heard people yell at me every day and it didn't change anything.
I notice that you're not in that line of work anymore.
A little polite respect gets you much farther than spewing vitriol across the telephone line.
Ah, but who says you have to choose one or the other?
When people treat telemarketers with the contempt and hostility that they deserve, it helps to increase attrition, which increases the costs of telemarketing. Personally, my policy is to say something along the lines of: "Take me off your call lists for all clients right fucking now, motherfucker, and if you ever call me again, you'll wish you'd never been born."
I had learned the magic phrase, "Could you take me off the call list?"
Better still: "Take me off all of your call lists, for all of your clients". Otherwise, they can still get away with calling you for different customers.
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product?
Well, YMMV, but the last place where I worked that used Exchange had two incidents within a month of each other where some smart ass script-kiddie sent obscene messages to our entire (7+ million) userbase.
Naturally, those of us in California argued for abandoning the Exchange server and just using our existing, working FreeBSD/Sendmail server, but the PHB's back in Singapore decided that the solution was to stick with Exchange, and just cough up about $300K a year to outsource it to a Microsoft Certified Enterprise Partner or some such tripe. They outsourced it, the script kiddies kept owning them whenever they wanted to. It was a farce.
The real money in the US is in salesmenship and ownership.
Close. The real money anywhere is in property (as you say, ownership). The most I ever made for the time I spent on a project was when I struck a deal that paid me a royalty for the life of the product. Six month project, and it kept paying me for about three years.
As for sales, some of them can make a good bit of cash, but It is pretty easy for salesmen to get shafted, too. I've lost count of the times I've seen some idiot stiff a salesman for the commission he owed, and then be surprised when the salesman went elsewhere. I hope the day comes when I hand a salesman a seven-figure commission check. The salesman though, is still working for wages. He doesn't get continuing income from the sales he's already made.
True, but it's also important for it to be well-taught. lest you end up with students who can crank through a formula, but not really understand the meaning of what they're doing. People who don't grasp the material on a deeper level can only work hard, not smart.
I had the great fortune to learn trigonometry at work, the summer before it came up in high school. My boss needed me to order some transformers, which meant that he needed me to understand AC power. So, he took a couple of hours one day, and explained power to me.
Later that year, I looked at the graphs my teacher drew on the board, and said "Oh, sine is voltage. Phase is capacitance. I've done this." Where the other kids saw a unit circle, I saw a schematic representation of a generator armature.
I'd love to see math taught with applications, wherever possible. That's what can keep it from putting kids to sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line is: Star Office can never beat MS Office, because it emulates MS Office. To send MSWord and PowerPoint to their well-deserved place on the ash heap of history, will take a replacement that shoots higher. It's not good enough to match the MS Office feature set and be cheaper. The cost of the software is trivial, compared to the lock-in that comes from familiarity alone.
For an Open-source office replacement to kill MS, the word processor has to be better than Pages and InDesign combined. The presentation program has to be better than Keynote. The spreadsheet has to be better than Lotus Improv. Not better by a little bit, either: they have to completely blow MS's products away. They have to make the deficiencies of MS's products glaringly obvious to anyone who spends a couple of minutes comparing them.
Until the Star Office guys aim that high, they won't make a dent in the monopoly.
-jcr
Who do you think picks all the judges?
Not the FBI, much to J. Edgar Hoover's chagrin.
-jcr
the intricacies of corporate law in Botswana
Just learn the following phrase: "But surely, there must be some kind of fee?"
That's all you need to know to get anything you want done in a third-world country.
-jcr
Hey, I like Heinlein's work as much as the next guy, but how many people do you kow who really can do all those things? Did Robert ever set a bone or design a building?
-jcr
You see, our FBI and federal government has the right to tap all our phones, wiretap everything, spy on us, use satelites to watch our every move, and to control our thoughts and remove our freedom of speech. The FBI owns you, you do not own the FBI.
Not the right, the power. It's an important distinction to make.
At any rate, legally speaking, policies of the FCC and the FBI do not trump the constitution. Encrypt your VOIP conversations all you want (and if you're using Skype, you're already doing so), and let them try to beat you in court for doing it.
-jcr
I recall a person being served process in an airplane over Arkansas while he was passing over it to give jurisdiction.
I've never heard of jursidiction depending on where a party was served his summons. Do you know what case that was?
-jcr
It's simply not necessary for people to know how everything they use works. I know how to series-wind an AC motor, but there's no reason why everyone who wants to vacuum their floor should have to. It's called the social division of labor. I don't really know how to make clothes, operate a bottling plant, or weave a carpet, but there are people who do.
Back in the days when most people lived on farms and made most of the things they used by themselves, we all lived in rather squalid conditions. Let's hear it for specialization!
-jcr
(let's just ignore the fact that "IQ" is stupid and "intelligence" (whatever that means) is a multi-variable function)
Oh, IQ can be very handy: anyone who brags about their score can be immediately dismissed as a worthless putz.
-jcr
Nerve cells will grow at a speed of about 1 mm per year.
Umm.. I'm about 1.82 meters tall, so my longest neurons are probably close to a meter long. I'm no spring chicken anymore, but I'm not 1,000 years old, either.
FWIW, the last time I had a nasty cut that made me lose sensation in the end of my thumb, my doctor told me that nerves regenerate about a mm per day. Sure enough, sensation returned in about a week.
-jcr
Your rationalizations are getting lamer with each iteration.
-jcr
Wow, given this potential, I am surprised this work was not published in one of the bigger journals like Science or Nature?
Isn't the journal they used much more specific to their field? Doesn't seem very surprising to me...
-jcr
What is the ethical problem with executing all the people in jail for life terms?
Oh, for crying out loud. Why don't we just cut to the chase and yell "Hitler!" ?
-jcr
It hasn't got anything to do with me.
The hell it doesn't. You called him. "I was just doing my job" is not an excuse.
-jcr
I got to listen to some stranger make a fool of himself for no reason, and i got paid to do it.
Don't you try to tell me what he did was for no reason. If he yelled at you or verbally abused you in any way, it was nothing less than you deserved. He wasn't the asshole, YOU WERE. Understand?
-jcr
I hope acting like an ass hole was worth it.
Point of order, here: YOU were the asshole, not the guy you called. So, was it worth it?
-jcr
I heard people yell at me every day and it didn't change anything.
I notice that you're not in that line of work anymore.
A little polite respect gets you much farther than spewing vitriol across the telephone line.
Ah, but who says you have to choose one or the other?
When people treat telemarketers with the contempt and hostility that they deserve, it helps to increase attrition, which increases the costs of telemarketing. Personally, my policy is to say something along the lines of: "Take me off your call lists for all clients right fucking now, motherfucker, and if you ever call me again, you'll wish you'd never been born."
It's both effective and satisfying.
-jcr
I had learned the magic phrase, "Could you take me off the call list?"
Better still: "Take me off all of your call lists, for all of your clients". Otherwise, they can still get away with calling you for different customers.
HTH,
-jcr
Earth isn't a sphere
It might as well be. Proportionally, the deviation is miniscule.
-jcr
What kind of benefits would I see moving to another product?
Well, YMMV, but the last place where I worked that used Exchange had two incidents within a month of each other where some smart ass script-kiddie sent obscene messages to our entire (7+ million) userbase.
Naturally, those of us in California argued for abandoning the Exchange server and just using our existing, working FreeBSD/Sendmail server, but the PHB's back in Singapore decided that the solution was to stick with Exchange, and just cough up about $300K a year to outsource it to a Microsoft Certified Enterprise Partner or some such tripe. They outsourced it, the script kiddies kept owning them whenever they wanted to. It was a farce.
-jcr
The real money in the US is in salesmenship and ownership.
Close. The real money anywhere is in property (as you say, ownership). The most I ever made for the time I spent on a project was when I struck a deal that paid me a royalty for the life of the product. Six month project, and it kept paying me for about three years.
As for sales, some of them can make a good bit of cash, but It is pretty easy for salesmen to get shafted, too. I've lost count of the times I've seen some idiot stiff a salesman for the commission he owed, and then be surprised when the salesman went elsewhere. I hope the day comes when I hand a salesman a seven-figure commission check. The salesman though, is still working for wages. He doesn't get continuing income from the sales he's already made.
-jcr
There are few things in this world more useless than a Harvard graduate with a degree in Public Administration.
How about one who's also a Kennedy?
-jcr
Engineering is too important to be easy.
True, but it's also important for it to be well-taught. lest you end up with students who can crank through a formula, but not really understand the meaning of what they're doing. People who don't grasp the material on a deeper level can only work hard, not smart.
I had the great fortune to learn trigonometry at work, the summer before it came up in high school. My boss needed me to order some transformers, which meant that he needed me to understand AC power. So, he took a couple of hours one day, and explained power to me.
Later that year, I looked at the graphs my teacher drew on the board, and said "Oh, sine is voltage. Phase is capacitance. I've done this." Where the other kids saw a unit circle, I saw a schematic representation of a generator armature.
I'd love to see math taught with applications, wherever possible. That's what can keep it from putting kids to sleep.
-jcr
Ah, while the Iraq war is taxpayer money well-spent. Good to have that cleared up.
Is that your opinion, or are you trying to put words in my mouth?
-jcr
I can already create a video with an ad and distribute it with BitTorrent.
Sure you can, but you're not their customer.
-jcr
Sheehan is wasting the taxpayers' money, by deliberately getting arrested. Does that clear it up for you?
-jcr