>>I think someone who embeds video in a Word file is retarded. Make an HTML file. Or Flash. Or whatever presentation format.
>Word *is* a presentation format.
>As is anything else that isn't plain text.
OK, strictly you're right. By "presentation format" I was thinking of something for making presentations; eg PowerPoint. Word (notice the name "WORD") can be used for lots of things, as you can drive a nail with any heavy object, but I think prinarly for creating printable documents. Movies aren't.
But working in publishing as I do, I don't think of Word as a presentation format, but an authoring environment. Once the author is done with the text, I export it to marked up plain text and use a real DTP app to get ready for print. And often authors embed illustrations in Word; it's possible to extract them but often they're munged into uselessness and I have to get them separately. Embedding videos in Word strikes me as a stunt, perhaps a subterfuge to send porn, and a stupid way to lock up data in a weird format.
Because you want something that they have. They developed the file formats, so they own the intellectual property. If you want them to spell out how they work for you, you'll have to play by their rules. If you don't like that, that's fine too.
This is in the context of governments storing data in proprietary formats. The public information would then be available only to those who use MS software or signed such an agrement with them. That's the objection. The "something they have" is the information that you have a right to already, but can't use without MS's permission.
Plus any boss who fiddles with Linux for a bit isn't going to take long before concluding Linux is retarded because you can't embed video in docs like you can in Word.
I think someone who embeds video in a Word file is retarded.
Make an HTML file. Or Flash. Or whatever presentation format.
Windows may be the biggest pile of bugs
Because they keep using duct tape to add on inane features like embedded video (which will inevitably become a vector for spam and exploits).
but PHBs aren't going to fanny around with all that geeky crap.
Let them get a Mac. Thye can play whatever they want.
Price fixing is never justified (IMO). If it kills off farmers who can't compete that's survival of the fittest.
If it was just the farmers' fine. Problem is, it may make economic sense for farmers to "mine" their land -- to maximise production for several years, take their profit, and leave a desert. Same as the timber industry -- given the choice between moderate profits indefinitely and high profits for 10 years and cashing out, economics pushes you to go for the shorter term, clearfelling, rather than selective harvesting. Or fisheries -- take all you can this year and don't care about wiping out the next generation. And if any competitors go for the long term, they go broke as they can't compete on price with someone who doesn't care about is destroying their land.
The quarter-by-quarter business model is fine for some industries, but not agriculture.
The AOL kid chat rooms were specifically advertised as being monitored and safe. This one was not.
Yes it was safe. She never met him in real life. (The suit is fo "emotional damage" or some such.) And she was almost 17, a kid possibly, but not a child.
If you are 15 and stupid enough to meet someone from the net to have sex...you're an idiot.
More importantly, she never met him at all, and it didn't come to almost meeting him till she was 17. The slashdot headline and even summary is, as usual, bullshit.
Again, like a lot of the kids replying to my post here, you obviously don't utilize the more powerful features of the software.
I'm not a kid; I've been using computers since 1977. I edit and do DTP for a living, so your assumption is wrong, and I'll thank you not to be so patronising.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
I know how to do all that. But when I need to, I use a real DTP app. One that does them right, not in the fucked up way Word does.
Tables of contents and indices aren't advanced; the were standard in DOS word processors.
That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
No one I've ever met in the last 10 years. I get dozens of Word files every year that I have to edit and turn into books. The style feature alone is impossibly fucked up. Because some users found the concept difficult, it's been made "friendly" and "intuitive", so that style definitions change automatically, when Word thinks you might want to WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Maybe you know how to turn this off, but it's certainly not the default behaviour. I spend hours removing the cruft before I can expose the structure in a file and export it to a sensible format when I can forget about Word till the next time someone sends me a file.
Thus my deep hatred for Word. I use it, I know how to, but I do so only from necessity.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
I've been doing that with Ventura and PageMaker snce about 1989.
And while theoretically you can separate content from presentation, in Word it gets harder every year. I also see the awful results when people actually do use Word for publishing.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
They add features that look good in the reviews. Not in real life. It's a truism (I think Gates said it) that features sell, not fewer bugs and more efficiency. And I'll say that the quality of writing and the documents produced has not improved one iota despite all these vaunted improvements.
I'm still laying out books in GEM Ventura (DOS box under Win98). A nice boost on how it ran on the old PCXT -- output 300 pages print file in 2 seconds.
As hardware gets better, new software utilizes it. Sure, the end result of a word processor is to put shit down on paper, usually. But that's a really simplistic way to view such a widely used and powerful peice of software.
In my simplistic view, a word processor should process words. I haven't noticed any inrcease in quality of writing over what was done back in the 80s with Wordstar, and no faster (in words/day) today. It reminds me of parents who think that giving their kids a more powerful computer will help them with school reports.
Grammar checking did not exist at all.
Heuristics like auto correct and auto formatting did not exist.
You can argue if any of those features have value to you,
Actually, to me these features have a negative value. Word once had a usable style model, (back about version 5 for DOS) now in an attempt to make it user-friendly it always tries to second guess you, (the auto-formatting you mention)and destroys any attempt at logical styling. (I deal with a lot of files from university lectureers and other professionals; not a single one has used styles correctly because it's gotten so laden with auto-this and that that it has become almsot impossible to do so.) Grammar checking is and always has been a joke and 99% of the time its flagged "errors" are false. (Though grammar checking was available also back in DOS days as a third-party add-on if you wanted it.)
. If you booted up a 486DX-25 today and ran WordPerfect 5.1 on it you would probably wonder how people got anything done on a machine so slow.
Actually WP 5.1 on DOS on a 486 performs as well as Word XP on Win XP a 3GHz Pentium 4. That is, no perceptible lag. I did DTP on a 286 for several years. And most office workers would be more productive if they were using these to type up their memos. Current machines are massively overpowered for what they actually need to do, to the point that most of the cycles are used on totally frivolous fripperies that distract and often annoy those workers who just wanbt to get the job done, if they don't crash the whole system.
>All they had to do was install the equipment at the local phone exchange, then we coul;d plug in our DSL modems. You're lucky. In the U.S. they usually have to replace all the wire to the street. Not luck, it comes if the infrastructure up to date. The former monopoly company (PCCW) still has most of the business, and they're doing lots of value-added services, even with telephony (voice mail, etc) so they needed a digital-ready network to support that. But the management went crazy during the dotcom boom and lost billions, so now they're hurting badly. They'll screw you if they can get away with it, fortunately they're forced to play nice with competing services.
it simply isn't cost effective to wire up a "small" subscriber base of 100,000 people
I live in a village in rural Hong Kong (it's not all high rise) with a population of about 3000. We got broadband three or four years ago; 3M DSL. All they had to do was install the equipment at the local phone exchange, then we coul;d plug in our DSL modems.
As TFAs point out, the problem isn't that providing broadband is unprofitable; but that it will eat into the profits of the phone companies (by allowing IP telephony) and cable companies (by allowing downloading or streaming of video content). So they're delaying installing broadband as long as they can get away with it, while doing everything to block other providers using their circuits. Here the old phone monopoly company was forced to share its network, which led to several companies offering DSL at less than half their rate, along with IP phones and broadband TV.
In tech, we often find ourselves referring to the Hollywood Operating System. You know, the one where every key press makes a "click" sound, and passwords are cracked one character at a time (admittedly, something that actually worked against Windows 9x file shares).
Not to mention that text appears line by line on screen (slower than a PCXT) with a sound reminiscent of a line printer...
I was actually impressed with the UI in Minority Report.
I don't know why MR is getting the "credit" for this. It's hardly a new idea in academia; in fiction there's of course Neuromancer-style cyberspace (and and many others), and in movies 1995's Johnny Mnemonic (almost exactly the same) and 1994's Disclosure (full body immersion).
The latter reminds me of another element of the Hollywood interface: files are deleted line by line, or page by page, as you watch... and no one ever seems to have an offline backup, one copy is all there is.
Apple can optimize its OS for its components. It doesn't have to worry how it works on XYZCorp's motherboard or whether it will support the next version of Podunk Inc's sound card.
Podunk Inc won't sell any cards if they don't work acceptably with Windows. They work or Podunk is dead. MS doesn't have to worry about Podunk either.
Windows' stability problems are mostly pure software, not drivers. The classic buffer overflows that they issue patches for every month. The intertangled browser, media, MSOffice apps that all fuck deeply with the internals of the OS. The registry that decays with every app you install or remove. Multiple DLLs. Open wide networking.
(Maybe this really is all fixed now, but not in any version I've used.)
Will the full trilogy (5 books) be made or is it being played by ear to see how the first goes?
With respect, a stupid question, and we don;t have many to waste. Of course he'll say sequels ar planned. That will mean absolutely nothng as far as what happens -- after all this one has been in development for about 20 years.
Look at previous disasters of British comedy being remade for a US audience
Not always disasters: Till Death Do Us Part became All in the Family which was pretty good, Steptoe and Son became Sanford and Son; not the quality of the orignal but a successful sitcom.
Not only did he get the wrong language (Spanish instead of Portugese), he got the wrong name. In English it's "Joe Sixpack".
I thought of using Jose, but Juan seemed more euphonious; I don't know any Portuguese names offhand, and for this little aside I didn't think a literal translation was really vital, and I didn't translate the "sixpack" at all for that reason.
It was a joke.
Journalists have a rule that anything between quotation marks has to be an exact quote. You're not even allowed to correct the grammar or make irrelevant changes to help it fit into your sentence better.
Yes you are. I was editing a book some years ago and the author was apparently taking delight at quoting grammatical mistakes his non-English speaking subjects made, which I thought a cheap shot. Looking up some reputable texts on journalism supported my view that minor errors can be silently corrected in quotes unless it's from a published text, and this is common practice. Actually listen to what someone says in an interview and compare with a written article -- you won't see the "ums" and false starts that almost everyone makes, unless they're trying to make the subject look like an idiot. Of course, trying to make any sense of what GWB says off the cuff may require more than that.
Both Slashdot and the poster also screwed up, but The Reg is the one who really blew it, IMHO.
I don't know if you're a regular reader of the Reg, but pisstakes are a feature of their writing. Their logo is a vulture; their slogan is "Biting the hand that feeds IT". They don't post lies but they sometimes do sex things up a bit. The poster is obviously a troll, he knew what he was doing. However, there is no excuse at all for Cowboy Neal. The "we just made that quote up" is prominently in the third paragraph. CN is just lazy and sloppy, like they all seem to be now. They collect a salary for editing this, they should be ashamed. But they're not -- I've sent several messages to him via the editor's address on similar issues, and they all bounce, he doesn't even want to know when he fucks up.
That was the case for original Doctor Who but the new series has a proper budget - about £1,000,000 per episode
Wow. I have to feel nervous about that -- they'll have to get big overseas sales to pay for that, and that pressure leads to the almost inevitable loss of any edge. I thought with CGI being cheap and effective now they'd be able to do impressive stuff on a shoestring, instead of having alien planets always resembling the same quarry.
I wonder if MS can justify $400 million to secure 1 million Brazilian users. They might as well pay for the PCs with pre-installed Windows OS free of charge.
If even one country, even not a first world one, was to "switch" to Linux (or anything else), there'd be an incubator for creating the whole ecosystem: business apps, games, servers; to force hardware companies to make drivers; to provide polished interfaces for Juan Sixpack. This would be an immediate threat to MS worldwide. So nothing is too much to justify, that's why Gates and Balmer will fly to Australia, India, Munich, London; ANYWHERE to bribe and/or threaten to stop this happening.
Slashdot Mirror
>Word *is* a presentation format.
>As is anything else that isn't plain text.
OK, strictly you're right. By "presentation format" I was thinking of something for making presentations; eg PowerPoint. Word (notice the name "WORD") can be used for lots of things, as you can drive a nail with any heavy object, but I think prinarly for creating printable documents. Movies aren't.
But working in publishing as I do, I don't think of Word as a presentation format, but an authoring environment. Once the author is done with the text, I export it to marked up plain text and use a real DTP app to get ready for print. And often authors embed illustrations in Word; it's possible to extract them but often they're munged into uselessness and I have to get them separately. Embedding videos in Word strikes me as a stunt, perhaps a subterfuge to send porn, and a stupid way to lock up data in a weird format.
Yes; but MS is claiming that its format is "open", which is a false representation that maybe the govt fell for.
This is in the context of governments storing data in proprietary formats. The public information would then be available only to those who use MS software or signed such an agrement with them. That's the objection. The "something they have" is the information that you have a right to already, but can't use without MS's permission.
I think someone who embeds video in a Word file is retarded. Make an HTML file. Or Flash. Or whatever presentation format.
Windows may be the biggest pile of bugs
Because they keep using duct tape to add on inane features like embedded video (which will inevitably become a vector for spam and exploits). but PHBs aren't going to fanny around with all that geeky crap.
Let them get a Mac. Thye can play whatever they want.
If it was just the farmers' fine. Problem is, it may make economic sense for farmers to "mine" their land -- to maximise production for several years, take their profit, and leave a desert. Same as the timber industry -- given the choice between moderate profits indefinitely and high profits for 10 years and cashing out, economics pushes you to go for the shorter term, clearfelling, rather than selective harvesting. Or fisheries -- take all you can this year and don't care about wiping out the next generation. And if any competitors go for the long term, they go broke as they can't compete on price with someone who doesn't care about is destroying their land.
The quarter-by-quarter business model is fine for some industries, but not agriculture.
Yes it was safe. She never met him in real life. (The suit is fo "emotional damage" or some such.) And she was almost 17, a kid possibly, but not a child.
More importantly, she never met him at all, and it didn't come to almost meeting him till she was 17. The slashdot headline and even summary is, as usual, bullshit.
I'm not a kid; I've been using computers since 1977. I edit and do DTP for a living, so your assumption is wrong, and I'll thank you not to be so patronising.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
I know how to do all that. But when I need to, I use a real DTP app. One that does them right, not in the fucked up way Word does.
Tables of contents and indices aren't advanced; the were standard in DOS word processors.
That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
No one I've ever met in the last 10 years. I get dozens of Word files every year that I have to edit and turn into books. The style feature alone is impossibly fucked up. Because some users found the concept difficult, it's been made "friendly" and "intuitive", so that style definitions change automatically, when Word thinks you might want to WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Maybe you know how to turn this off, but it's certainly not the default behaviour. I spend hours removing the cruft before I can expose the structure in a file and export it to a sensible format when I can forget about Word till the next time someone sends me a file.
Thus my deep hatred for Word. I use it, I know how to, but I do so only from necessity.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
I've been doing that with Ventura and PageMaker snce about 1989.
And while theoretically you can separate content from presentation, in Word it gets harder every year. I also see the awful results when people actually do use Word for publishing.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
They add features that look good in the reviews. Not in real life. It's a truism (I think Gates said it) that features sell, not fewer bugs and more efficiency. And I'll say that the quality of writing and the documents produced has not improved one iota despite all these vaunted improvements.
I'm still laying out books in GEM Ventura (DOS box under Win98). A nice boost on how it ran on the old PCXT -- output 300 pages print file in 2 seconds.
In my simplistic view, a word processor should process words. I haven't noticed any inrcease in quality of writing over what was done back in the 80s with Wordstar, and no faster (in words/day) today. It reminds me of parents who think that giving their kids a more powerful computer will help them with school reports.
Actually, to me these features have a negative value. Word once had a usable style model, (back about version 5 for DOS) now in an attempt to make it user-friendly it always tries to second guess you, (the auto-formatting you mention)and destroys any attempt at logical styling. (I deal with a lot of files from university lectureers and other professionals; not a single one has used styles correctly because it's gotten so laden with auto-this and that that it has become almsot impossible to do so.) Grammar checking is and always has been a joke and 99% of the time its flagged "errors" are false. (Though grammar checking was available also back in DOS days as a third-party add-on if you wanted it.)
Actually WP 5.1 on DOS on a 486 performs as well as Word XP on Win XP a 3GHz Pentium 4. That is, no perceptible lag. I did DTP on a 286 for several years. And most office workers would be more productive if they were using these to type up their memos. Current machines are massively overpowered for what they actually need to do, to the point that most of the cycles are used on totally frivolous fripperies that distract and often annoy those workers who just wanbt to get the job done, if they don't crash the whole system.
Maybe the point upgrades, but even then I doubt this. System 6 to 7 to 8 to 9 to X; each bigger and slower and needs much more RAM than the previous.
>All they had to do was install the equipment at the local phone exchange, then we coul;d plug in our DSL modems.
You're lucky. In the U.S. they usually have to replace all the wire to the street.
Not luck, it comes if the infrastructure up to date. The former monopoly company (PCCW) still has most of the business, and they're doing lots of value-added services, even with telephony (voice mail, etc) so they needed a digital-ready network to support that. But the management went crazy during the dotcom boom and lost billions, so now they're hurting badly. They'll screw you if they can get away with it, fortunately they're forced to play nice with competing services.
I live in a village in rural Hong Kong (it's not all high rise) with a population of about 3000. We got broadband three or four years ago; 3M DSL. All they had to do was install the equipment at the local phone exchange, then we coul;d plug in our DSL modems.
As TFAs point out, the problem isn't that providing broadband is unprofitable; but that it will eat into the profits of the phone companies (by allowing IP telephony) and cable companies (by allowing downloading or streaming of video content). So they're delaying installing broadband as long as they can get away with it, while doing everything to block other providers using their circuits. Here the old phone monopoly company was forced to share its network, which led to several companies offering DSL at less than half their rate, along with IP phones and broadband TV.
Not to mention that text appears line by line on screen (slower than a PCXT) with a sound reminiscent of a line printer...
I was actually impressed with the UI in Minority Report.
I don't know why MR is getting the "credit" for this. It's hardly a new idea in academia; in fiction there's of course Neuromancer-style cyberspace (and and many others), and in movies 1995's Johnny Mnemonic (almost exactly the same) and 1994's Disclosure (full body immersion).
The latter reminds me of another element of the Hollywood interface: files are deleted line by line, or page by page, as you watch... and no one ever seems to have an offline backup, one copy is all there is.
The one that gives you a blowjob while you code?
Podunk Inc won't sell any cards if they don't work acceptably with Windows. They work or Podunk is dead. MS doesn't have to worry about Podunk either.
Windows' stability problems are mostly pure software, not drivers. The classic buffer overflows that they issue patches for every month. The intertangled browser, media, MSOffice apps that all fuck deeply with the internals of the OS. The registry that decays with every app you install or remove. Multiple DLLs. Open wide networking.
(Maybe this really is all fixed now, but not in any version I've used.)
With respect, a stupid question, and we don;t have many to waste. Of course he'll say sequels ar planned. That will mean absolutely nothng as far as what happens -- after all this one has been in development for about 20 years.
Not always disasters: Till Death Do Us Part became All in the Family which was pretty good, Steptoe and Son became Sanford and Son; not the quality of the orignal but a successful sitcom.
Yes, but PK Dick wasn't a script writer, Adams was; and Adams was better playwright than novelist in my opinion.
I thought of using Jose, but Juan seemed more euphonious; I don't know any Portuguese names offhand, and for this little aside I didn't think a literal translation was really vital, and I didn't translate the "sixpack" at all for that reason.
It was a joke.
Yes you are. I was editing a book some years ago and the author was apparently taking delight at quoting grammatical mistakes his non-English speaking subjects made, which I thought a cheap shot. Looking up some reputable texts on journalism supported my view that minor errors can be silently corrected in quotes unless it's from a published text, and this is common practice. Actually listen to what someone says in an interview and compare with a written article -- you won't see the "ums" and false starts that almost everyone makes, unless they're trying to make the subject look like an idiot. Of course, trying to make any sense of what GWB says off the cuff may require more than that.
Both Slashdot and the poster also screwed up, but The Reg is the one who really blew it, IMHO.
I don't know if you're a regular reader of the Reg, but pisstakes are a feature of their writing. Their logo is a vulture; their slogan is "Biting the hand that feeds IT". They don't post lies but they sometimes do sex things up a bit. The poster is obviously a troll, he knew what he was doing. However, there is no excuse at all for Cowboy Neal. The "we just made that quote up" is prominently in the third paragraph. CN is just lazy and sloppy, like they all seem to be now. They collect a salary for editing this, they should be ashamed. But they're not -- I've sent several messages to him via the editor's address on similar issues, and they all bounce, he doesn't even want to know when he fucks up.
Wow. I have to feel nervous about that -- they'll have to get big overseas sales to pay for that, and that pressure leads to the almost inevitable loss of any edge. I thought with CGI being cheap and effective now they'd be able to do impressive stuff on a shoestring, instead of having alien planets always resembling the same quarry.
If even one country, even not a first world one, was to "switch" to Linux (or anything else), there'd be an incubator for creating the whole ecosystem: business apps, games, servers; to force hardware companies to make drivers; to provide polished interfaces for Juan Sixpack. This would be an immediate threat to MS worldwide. So nothing is too much to justify, that's why Gates and Balmer will fly to Australia, India, Munich, London; ANYWHERE to bribe and/or threaten to stop this happening.