"It's also a shame that Number 2 is the same every episode as the way he changed sometimes illustrated the lack of personal importance. Number 2 was an identity that, if a particular person were performing it badly as happened, could mysteriously be replaced by someone else. Individuality didn't matter - continuity did."
Aren't there at least two episodes where the change in Number 2 is a key plot element? One, late in the series is where Number 6 gets "elected" as the new Number 2, where the earlier changes in Number 2 were not accompanied by talk of an election. This points to the doubts many have with the electoral processes in which "groupthink" gets people elected without regard to the validity of campaign promises, etc.
In another episode I think the changeover in Number 2 takes place during the episode, and I don't remember the details other than that it would require writing that part of the script out.
With those sorts of exceptions I don't have a particular problem with stabilizing the cast. In fact during the original run of the series I assumed that the reasons for the change had to do with the relative pay for stars, vs co-stars and other "formula" reasons. Consider all the programs that used to have only a single main character that appears in every episode with ALL the other main characters (in a particular episode) being variable from one episode to the next, the "continuity" characters would usually be bit parts that didn't show up in even half the episodes (Rockford's father in the Rockford Files comes to mind).
I don't know if it is just my perception, but it feels like MS is back to their old ways with a lot of their activities these days - particularly with regard to anything web facing.
At what point did you think that they had left their old ways? The most annoying aspect of their old ways to me was that they were constantly lying about what their intentions/directions were. They did after all start working on OS/2 as the future direction for Windows. More recently they hired a single Open Source guru and did some still mysterious deals with Novell which have done more to make Novell look like Microsoft than they have to make Microsoft look like Novell.
If you don't think they intend to lie cheat and steal to beat Google then I have some property I'd like you to look at.
"Syndrome" sounds like a disease. When you really do engage in anticompetitive, manipulative, underhanded practices, have been convicted in multiple nations of doing so in an illegal fashion, have (in my opinion) resorted to bribery to compromise independent standards bodies, have made Webmasters everywhere bear additional costs because you refuse to fully adhere to open standards, and have abused the meaning of "updates to the OS" to install phone-home software (WGA), perhaps it's understandable that many people won't like you? Just maybe that's not a "syndrome" but a predictable outcome?
Sounds like informed and healthy behavior to me. "Syndrome" sounds more like continue doing things against your own self interest when an alternative approach is readily available.
No, I've never copied a DVD in my life and I have no desire to have a collection of the things.
I do not live within 50 miles of one of their distribution centers, so when I got a batch of 3 I made sure to return each one ASAP allowing for the delay in the mail which was not Netflix fault of course. As a new customer I had a lot of catching up to do and so it wasn't unusual for me to watch two, and sometimes all three movies on the day I received them. Eventually I noticed there was more than a mail delay going on though and there would sometimes be two days between their receipt of my last batch (or movie) and them mailing out the next one(s).
I also receive a VERY high percentage of disks that were either unplayable, but even more so physically broken. Again, this wouldn't be Netflix fault although in some cases the disk looked like it had been used as a hockey puck in someone's unfinished basement. Seems like it would have been fairly easy to automate some sort of playability test for returned disks. My guess is that it is both easier and cheaper for them to let customers be the testers and bear the time and expense. Friends of mine living closer to the distribution point did not have nearly so many broken disk as I had, but they certainly had as many unplayable ones. The rule at the time was you reported a broken disk but did not return it, unplayable disks you did return, and in either case they sent a replacement "immediately". However I found that this often amounted to several days as well.
I still had the service when the lawsuit was settled and for several months after that. I saw no change in service and wondered if the suit accomplished anything at all (other than fat lawyers fees). Months after I canceled I got the ridiculous offer mentioned above. Not surprisingly the thought of getting 4 disks for the price of 3 for one full month doesn't send tingles down my leg.
I may be a candidate customer for the view on demand service, thus ignoring the mailing of DVDs altogether, but I'm waiting to see other people's reaction to it. Obviously this, and the confusion over differences between the Xbox, Roku, and PC interfaces (I don't run Windows so that's not even an option) has convinced me that waiting was a good move. I also think it's quite possible with all the other play on demand services coming out, some of which are free, Netflix is going to find quite a bit of its market evaporated. We now know that the future does not consist of visiting the video store, nor does it consist of propping up the US postal service, although both of those methods may exist for quite some time.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can get a spur of the moment notion to watch any movie that has ever been made, push a few buttons and be watching it. I'm quite sure that when we get there it (a) won't require that I run Windows, (b) will probably be available for a variety of hardware players, some of which might be built in to "TV sets", (c) won't be outrageously expensive and might be augmented by advertising (maybe as an option). The thing is that the technology to do all this has been around for years now, so we can be pretty sure that the hold-up is vested interests, sitting on a cash stream they long ago stopped working for surrounded by lawyers looking out for themselves by encouraging this fortress mentality.
Once we get where we are going, burning copies of DVDs will make about as much sense as devoting a room of your house to buckets of water drawn from your tap. You only need to horde things like that when you fear that in the future they will become unavailable. Of course as one who had a nice LaserDisk collection the bigger problem might be that the things needed to play them on become unavailable. CD and DVD players won't be around forever, hence have no desire to build another collection of such things.
They respond to complaints when they are accompanied by lawsuits.
I canceled mine over the secret throttling issue, so I can't join the protest this time around.
I've since gotten my apology letter from Netflix promising me a whole goddamn month of one extra DVD if I ever sign up again. The lawyers probably got the rest (and I bet they still do throttling).
Go screw yourselves Netflix. I'll just wait for full online view-on-demand or do without.
Hey people learn to do without. Your going to have to do a lot of that in the future anyway, might as well make a protest out of it while it can do some good.
I think you are right, and after all, how do you build the foundation for an encyclopedia? You have to either rely on information so old it is no longer under any sort of copyright, pay a bunch of people to write it from scratch, or as was done, get an even larger bunch of people to do it for free.
Once the base is established, it takes a much smaller group of people to keep it up to date.
Wikipedia is free in the sense that I can send someone a link to an article without having to worry that I've committed them to sign up for something to read it. I don't see how Britannica will ever be able to match this. Their mistake was to remain in the hardware business (selling blue leather-bound books) for too long and in the process actually devalued the quality of their own content. I had a fancy set of the books and a subscription to the update service for a few years. Those updates (which would potentially find their way into future books) were every bit as sloppy as the Wikipedia updates. Only the iteration rate for Wikipedia is hundreds of times faster than for Britannica. Wikipedia's problem is to make sure they don't just iterate randomly and instead converge on something generally regarded as accurate. A wide-open system can't do that, and a fully closed system isn't guaranteed to do that either.
While it is possible that Britannica could become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, I think such a thing is unlikely. But maybe Wikipedia morphing into something more like Britannica is the next best thing. We need sources of information that are a cut above folk-lore, but the Internet has guaranteed us that folk-lore is here to stay, that is, unless and until we have another dark age/system reset.
Thanks for your comment and the links. Every time I run across an article like this and sigh, wishing I had the technical cojones to explain why it is that we were doing things like this on mainframes in the 80s with complete safety... and continuing to wonder why Intel couldn't just COPY the damned concepts if they can't figure out how to implement them from scratch.
Our world continues to be saddled with a half assed operating system running on a third rate architecture and for no other reason that technology takes a back seat (or maybe it's more like back of the bus) to marketing, bribery and collusion (with an unhealthy dose of buyer ignorance thrown in for good measure).
I continue to hope that good technology will win out eventually, although I'm almost convinced at this point that it will have to come from some country that hasn't been bought out by the Borg.
I wonder though, and maybe you know, why isn't the Power-PC mentioned in the Wikepedia article. I would assume because of its origin that it is closer to the 370 than to the Intel architecture in being fully virtualizable, a concept apparently not on the "roadmap" that Steve Jobs kept referring to in his rationale for Apple's switch to Intel. The Power-PC represented our best hope of escaping the Intel monoculture and I'd like nothing better than to once again have a mainstream non-Intel (and non-Intel-like) choice when I pick my next laptop.
Of course if Intel had a deserved (I'm being generous) third of the market then what Google is doing with this initiative would be dead in the water (as it probably should be).
It's too bad the submitter decided to be cute and pass along his form of censorship in not using a left-leaning site to bolster his argument. The cutesy 'leave your smart remarks to yourself' is a weak attempt at humor, and smacks of the very attitude he/she rails against.
Bingo.
As I was reading through the comment it occurred to me that this might be the most unintentionally self-referential article in Slashdot history.
I've finally begun to realize that Slashdot, like Digg is not hospitable to conservative viewpoints except in isolated cases and mostly after the events have already played out: "Gee we sure could have used some strong police enforcement to prevent this (whatever just made headlines)".
I can only think it is the result of a generational change in the readership to a group of readers who largely get their news from MTV and the Comedy channel. It's hard to conduct a conversation with people to whom actual facts are so undervalued and consequently in such short supply.
That's all true, plus no footnotes. Absolute deal-breaker.
It's had footnotes for a few weeks.
I had never expected Google Docs to match Office in features. Feature bloat is after all one of the thing I was trying to escape.
I load e-mail attachments that are in doc format directly into Google Docs and in most cases they come out looking just fine.
For those that don't I use Open Office, at least long enough to convert it to a simple readable form.
For those that don't open in Open Office I contact the sender and explain to them how they are idiots for using special fonts that most people don't have, setting margins and table widths outside of page boundaries and using tables for bizarre page placements, often leaving huge numbers of empty cells from hours of tinkering, or worst of all, leaving change tracking on so that I see bits and pieces of every document they have ever created in what should be a one page 20K company newsletter.
Nevertheless it will be interesting to see the competition that this initiates.
Microsoft faces a rock and a hard place. If they make the online version too feature rich and also free, they will hurt their own sales. If they don't, Google will continue to grow its user base (and my guess is that Google is content for that base to grow slowly for now).
Beyond feature competition I think the game is who can most cost effectively do this with a combination of efficient server techniques, advertising, data center placement, etc. It's hard to imagine Microsoft winning such a competition and even if they win they will have significantly reduced their profit margin from what it is now.
except for when you dont have internet connectivity, then you cant get them even if your life depended on it.
Quite a bit of the time most of the people I know can't get documents off their own PC if their life depended on it. Just two days ago I helped someone out by locating photos that he needed in his yet undeleted online e-mail.
It is precisely because Personal Computers (particularly of the Windows variety) are so unreliable (and hard to use for the average user and below) that online alternatives are catching on.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Is the notion of "choice" in every day decision making being bred out of our society along with much of our political freedoms?
You want to use OO, or Word, or Commodore Basic for your word processing needs, that's fine by me.
Personally, now that Word files attached to my e-mail messages can be directly imported to Google Docs, I'm finding it far less necessary to store local documents at all. My guess is that 99.9 percent of the business documents of 99.9 percent of businesses do not contain any proprietary information, and if they did, they would be just as likely, if not more likely to leak out from a compromised PC as they would from some online storehouse. And both of these leak types are overwhelmed by ordinary human intelligence like hiring your competitors former employees. If you have a lot of such documents, maybe you shouldn't be using any of the approaches discussed regarding this article because they have all been hacked at on time or another.
The other aspect of this argument that I find amusing is that it reminds me of people who go to some out of the way place (like where I live) to get away from it all and then start complaining because we don't have their favorite cable channels, or FIOS or an Apple store. As your ability to get on the Internet by any means diminishes, you certainly have a greater need to store local documents, but as that connectivity approaches zero you are either talking about a document that contains a catalog of your record collection, or something that has to be stuck in an envelope to be of any use. Where's the "beef"?
Seriously. I like the idea of doing research for the sake of research, and I would probably respect this more, except Microsoft keeps representing it as
1. The coolest thing they have ever come up with.
But in a way it *IS* the coolest thing they ever came up with.
Most of what they sell they got from someone else one way or another.
Most of what they patent is prior art that just hasn't been challenged yet.
Most of what they show in their R&D web pages is nonsense.
Maybe they can get the cost of this thing down to the point where millions of homes will have to have one. If so it might be the most "from scratch" thing they've ever done.
Although something tells me that someone will respond to this with a link to something similar that was around in the 70's.
In the event you are actually ignorant and not just trying to pick a fight, I can assure you that as someone who hasn't run Windows in several years, and does most of his computing on Linux (along with OS X on a laptop), I am not doing so out of any sense of "rebellion", although I don't see anything wrong with that mindset under certain circumstances.
If your primary reason for using a computer is to play games, you certainly should just stay with Windows. If I wanted to play games I think I'd rather have one of those thing you hook up to your TV.
I used to support Windows users for a living, and before that OS/2 users and before than DOS users and before that mainframe users.
I used to be quite a fan of Windows because it ran on several hardware platforms, was fairly fast, had a reasonable feature set. Interestingly enough, Linux does all that now, and Windows does not. So you see it is Windows (or Microsoft) that rebelled against me when they decided only to support Intel boxes, allowed the code to get bloated, buggy and slow. If you like being forced to buy a new computer every few years just to get the OS to boot in a reasonable amount of time, then by all means go ahead and do that. Not only are you having to pay, in most cases, full price to get the latest version of Windows (over the years MS hasn't been able to make up its mind regarding upgrade-only versions of Windows, but as I understand it these days it's better to go with the full release) but you are also required usually to get a whole new computer as your old one is maxed out on memory that is no longer easily available etc. Again, for gaming, having the fastest processor, and the mos memory, fastest bus, etc. are all important for running the game, regardless of your OS. For ordinary web browsing, light office work, photo-shop type stuff, my vintage 2000 machine does quite well. In fact, when Windows users see me on it they ask how I got it to be so fast. I am quite sure that if I tried to run Windows on this machine it would be a very frustrating experience.
Also, I'm not running Linux because it is "free". I purchased my first few versions of Linux in the form of Red Hat and Suse. Eventually found I liked Debian better (even purely for desktop use) and so I settled on it. Of course it's nice not to have to pay for your OS, but even if each major release of Debian cost as much as Windows I'd still be coming out way ahead both in terms of the hardware I'd need to run it and in terms of time wasted on virus scanning, defragging, cleaning my registry and of course mandatory upgrades. Of course if you are paying $3 for it in Africa, maybe you don't mind all the overhead. I'm sure those people paying $3 are getting full telephone support from Microsoft for that too.
I think you are probably right, but look at what has happened to Google products as an example of where commercial software will always go...
The started out with tagging for Gmail, Docs, and other thing, but recently they have buckled to user demands for something that looks like the hierarchical file systems they are used to, presenting the tag names as if they are folders and allowing the folders to be inside other folders (soon to come).
I think for a long time we are going to be stuck with hierarchical file systems coupled with either brute force or semi-intelligent search functions.
The alternative is to produce a tagging system that can be optionally viewed as hierarchical folders coupled with an almost infinite supply of tutorials explaining that the one thing is really the same as the other, and possibly state-run indoctrination centers (I'm looking for ways to be optimistic about the upcoming elections).
I know people with multiple gigs worth of e-mail already. I think Gears would be a mismatch for this level of storage.
If it were set up so that only the last (for example) hundred meg or so were being retained locally, that might be OK.
But in any event, simply running ANY POP reader every few days would make an accumulating local backup of your mail, if that is what you want to do.
Last time Google was said to be down (right here as a matter of fact) I found that my POP client worked fine and I could still both send and receive with it. What was down in that case was simply the web interface.
Sorry, I don't think I've ever used an e-mail system of any kind that NEVER became unavailable at on time or another. My entire Internet connection goes away about once a year and there is absolutely no way to send or recieve e-mail until Verizon gets its act together. Should I expect the Gmail team to come slap Verizon around for me? I wouldn't mind that.
"PC ADvisor has determined that your machine is unacceptably slow. You have probably installed, uninstalled and re-installed too many programs in response to PC ADvisor's previous suggestions. Now your Registry is hosed.
PC ADvisor recommends you now re-format your hard drive and do a fresh install of Windows.
Please have your credit card handy as I can assist you with repurchasing any software for which you have lost the appropriate paperwork.
Remember it was YOU who accepted all those terms and conditions without reading them, don't blame PC ADvisor.
And do not call and complain to those hard working programmers at Microsoft, they are far too busy innovating new features like PC ADvisor to have to deal with your silly little printer issues. Windows and Office together probably cost as much as your entire PC, but that DOES NOT include the manpower to listen to you bitch and moan over the telephone. Suck it up, admit you are the cause of your own problems and do as I say.
No, the typical inter office response is for the same stupid clerk who screwed up in the first place to first send out 1200 message retracts, followed by 1200 "Sorry, please ignore this message". After that of course the only slightly more clueful network administrator sends a message to everyone telling them not to send messages to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't there at least two episodes where the change in Number 2 is a key plot element? One, late in the series is where Number 6 gets "elected" as the new Number 2, where the earlier changes in Number 2 were not accompanied by talk of an election. This points to the doubts many have with the electoral processes in which "groupthink" gets people elected without regard to the validity of campaign promises, etc.
In another episode I think the changeover in Number 2 takes place during the episode, and I don't remember the details other than that it would require writing that part of the script out.
With those sorts of exceptions I don't have a particular problem with stabilizing the cast. In fact during the original run of the series I assumed that the reasons for the change had to do with the relative pay for stars, vs co-stars and other "formula" reasons. Consider all the programs that used to have only a single main character that appears in every episode with ALL the other main characters (in a particular episode) being variable from one episode to the next, the "continuity" characters would usually be bit parts that didn't show up in even half the episodes (Rockford's father in the Rockford Files comes to mind).
Probably mostly because Microsoft hasn't done anything lately. But don't worry, their slimy bad self is about to wake up again.
Meanwhile, the less Apple can do to imitate them, the better. It is an interesting exercise to see if people think this is an example of that.
That would be terrain the company is totally unfamiliar with.
At what point did you think that they had left their old ways? The most annoying aspect of their old ways to me was that they were constantly lying about what their intentions/directions were. They did after all start working on OS/2 as the future direction for Windows. More recently they hired a single Open Source guru and did some still mysterious deals with Novell which have done more to make Novell look like Microsoft than they have to make Microsoft look like Novell.
If you don't think they intend to lie cheat and steal to beat Google then I have some property I'd like you to look at.
Have you ever heard the saying: "good enough for government work"?
Sounds like informed and healthy behavior to me. "Syndrome" sounds more like continue doing things against your own self interest when an alternative approach is readily available.
is a container ship captain trying to figure out what happened to those five containers full of Jello mix he was supposed to deliver.
No, I've never copied a DVD in my life and I have no desire to have a collection of the things.
I do not live within 50 miles of one of their distribution centers, so when I got a batch of 3 I made sure to return each one ASAP allowing for the delay in the mail which was not Netflix fault of course. As a new customer I had a lot of catching up to do and so it wasn't unusual for me to watch two, and sometimes all three movies on the day I received them. Eventually I noticed there was more than a mail delay going on though and there would sometimes be two days between their receipt of my last batch (or movie) and them mailing out the next one(s).
I also receive a VERY high percentage of disks that were either unplayable, but even more so physically broken. Again, this wouldn't be Netflix fault although in some cases the disk looked like it had been used as a hockey puck in someone's unfinished basement. Seems like it would have been fairly easy to automate some sort of playability test for returned disks. My guess is that it is both easier and cheaper for them to let customers be the testers and bear the time and expense. Friends of mine living closer to the distribution point did not have nearly so many broken disk as I had, but they certainly had as many unplayable ones. The rule at the time was you reported a broken disk but did not return it, unplayable disks you did return, and in either case they sent a replacement "immediately". However I found that this often amounted to several days as well.
I still had the service when the lawsuit was settled and for several months after that. I saw no change in service and wondered if the suit accomplished anything at all (other than fat lawyers fees). Months after I canceled I got the ridiculous offer mentioned above. Not surprisingly the thought of getting 4 disks for the price of 3 for one full month doesn't send tingles down my leg.
I may be a candidate customer for the view on demand service, thus ignoring the mailing of DVDs altogether, but I'm waiting to see other people's reaction to it. Obviously this, and the confusion over differences between the Xbox, Roku, and PC interfaces (I don't run Windows so that's not even an option) has convinced me that waiting was a good move. I also think it's quite possible with all the other play on demand services coming out, some of which are free, Netflix is going to find quite a bit of its market evaporated. We now know that the future does not consist of visiting the video store, nor does it consist of propping up the US postal service, although both of those methods may exist for quite some time.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can get a spur of the moment notion to watch any movie that has ever been made, push a few buttons and be watching it. I'm quite sure that when we get there it (a) won't require that I run Windows, (b) will probably be available for a variety of hardware players, some of which might be built in to "TV sets", (c) won't be outrageously expensive and might be augmented by advertising (maybe as an option). The thing is that the technology to do all this has been around for years now, so we can be pretty sure that the hold-up is vested interests, sitting on a cash stream they long ago stopped working for surrounded by lawyers looking out for themselves by encouraging this fortress mentality.
Once we get where we are going, burning copies of DVDs will make about as much sense as devoting a room of your house to buckets of water drawn from your tap. You only need to horde things like that when you fear that in the future they will become unavailable. Of course as one who had a nice LaserDisk collection the bigger problem might be that the things needed to play them on become unavailable. CD and DVD players won't be around forever, hence have no desire to build another collection of such things.
They respond to complaints when they are accompanied by lawsuits.
I canceled mine over the secret throttling issue, so I can't join the protest this time around.
I've since gotten my apology letter from Netflix promising me a whole goddamn month of one extra DVD if I ever sign up again. The lawyers probably got the rest (and I bet they still do throttling).
Go screw yourselves Netflix. I'll just wait for full online view-on-demand or do without.
Hey people learn to do without. Your going to have to do a lot of that in the future anyway, might as well make a protest out of it while it can do some good.
It was scheduled to be a dupe, but they forgot to post the original.
I think you are right, and after all, how do you build the foundation for an encyclopedia? You have to either rely on information so old it is no longer under any sort of copyright, pay a bunch of people to write it from scratch, or as was done, get an even larger bunch of people to do it for free.
Once the base is established, it takes a much smaller group of people to keep it up to date.
Wikipedia is free in the sense that I can send someone a link to an article without having to worry that I've committed them to sign up for something to read it. I don't see how Britannica will ever be able to match this. Their mistake was to remain in the hardware business (selling blue leather-bound books) for too long and in the process actually devalued the quality of their own content. I had a fancy set of the books and a subscription to the update service for a few years. Those updates (which would potentially find their way into future books) were every bit as sloppy as the Wikipedia updates. Only the iteration rate for Wikipedia is hundreds of times faster than for Britannica. Wikipedia's problem is to make sure they don't just iterate randomly and instead converge on something generally regarded as accurate. A wide-open system can't do that, and a fully closed system isn't guaranteed to do that either.
While it is possible that Britannica could become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, I think such a thing is unlikely. But maybe Wikipedia morphing into something more like Britannica is the next best thing. We need sources of information that are a cut above folk-lore, but the Internet has guaranteed us that folk-lore is here to stay, that is, unless and until we have another dark age/system reset.
Of course the fact that his demos don't regularly crash midway through helps a lot.
At similar Microsoft events the "tension in the air" is everyone anticipating the blue screen of death with every mouse click.
Thanks for your comment and the links. Every time I run across an article like this and sigh, wishing I had the technical cojones to explain why it is that we were doing things like this on mainframes in the 80s with complete safety... and continuing to wonder why Intel couldn't just COPY the damned concepts if they can't figure out how to implement them from scratch.
Our world continues to be saddled with a half assed operating system running on a third rate architecture and for no other reason that technology takes a back seat (or maybe it's more like back of the bus) to marketing, bribery and collusion (with an unhealthy dose of buyer ignorance thrown in for good measure).
I continue to hope that good technology will win out eventually, although I'm almost convinced at this point that it will have to come from some country that hasn't been bought out by the Borg.
I wonder though, and maybe you know, why isn't the Power-PC mentioned in the Wikepedia article. I would assume because of its origin that it is closer to the 370 than to the Intel architecture in being fully virtualizable, a concept apparently not on the "roadmap" that Steve Jobs kept referring to in his rationale for Apple's switch to Intel. The Power-PC represented our best hope of escaping the Intel monoculture and I'd like nothing better than to once again have a mainstream non-Intel (and non-Intel-like) choice when I pick my next laptop.
Of course if Intel had a deserved (I'm being generous) third of the market then what Google is doing with this initiative would be dead in the water (as it probably should be).
Bingo.
As I was reading through the comment it occurred to me that this might be the most unintentionally self-referential article in Slashdot history.
I've finally begun to realize that Slashdot, like Digg is not hospitable to conservative viewpoints except in isolated cases and mostly after the events have already played out: "Gee we sure could have used some strong police enforcement to prevent this (whatever just made headlines)".
I can only think it is the result of a generational change in the readership to a group of readers who largely get their news from MTV and the Comedy channel. It's hard to conduct a conversation with people to whom actual facts are so undervalued and consequently in such short supply.
Right.
It's had footnotes for a few weeks.
I had never expected Google Docs to match Office in features. Feature bloat is after all one of the thing I was trying to escape.
I load e-mail attachments that are in doc format directly into Google Docs and in most cases they come out looking just fine.
For those that don't I use Open Office, at least long enough to convert it to a simple readable form.
For those that don't open in Open Office I contact the sender and explain to them how they are idiots for using special fonts that most people don't have, setting margins and table widths outside of page boundaries and using tables for bizarre page placements, often leaving huge numbers of empty cells from hours of tinkering, or worst of all, leaving change tracking on so that I see bits and pieces of every document they have ever created in what should be a one page 20K company newsletter.
Nevertheless it will be interesting to see the competition that this initiates.
Microsoft faces a rock and a hard place. If they make the online version too feature rich and also free, they will hurt their own sales. If they don't, Google will continue to grow its user base (and my guess is that Google is content for that base to grow slowly for now).
Beyond feature competition I think the game is who can most cost effectively do this with a combination of efficient server techniques, advertising, data center placement, etc. It's hard to imagine Microsoft winning such a competition and even if they win they will have significantly reduced their profit margin from what it is now.
Quite a bit of the time most of the people I know can't get documents off their own PC if their life depended on it. Just two days ago I helped someone out by locating photos that he needed in his yet undeleted online e-mail.
It is precisely because Personal Computers (particularly of the Windows variety) are so unreliable (and hard to use for the average user and below) that online alternatives are catching on.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Is the notion of "choice" in every day decision making being bred out of our society along with much of our political freedoms?
You want to use OO, or Word, or Commodore Basic for your word processing needs, that's fine by me.
Personally, now that Word files attached to my e-mail messages can be directly imported to Google Docs, I'm finding it far less necessary to store local documents at all. My guess is that 99.9 percent of the business documents of 99.9 percent of businesses do not contain any proprietary information, and if they did, they would be just as likely, if not more likely to leak out from a compromised PC as they would from some online storehouse. And both of these leak types are overwhelmed by ordinary human intelligence like hiring your competitors former employees. If you have a lot of such documents, maybe you shouldn't be using any of the approaches discussed regarding this article because they have all been hacked at on time or another.
The other aspect of this argument that I find amusing is that it reminds me of people who go to some out of the way place (like where I live) to get away from it all and then start complaining because we don't have their favorite cable channels, or FIOS or an Apple store. As your ability to get on the Internet by any means diminishes, you certainly have a greater need to store local documents, but as that connectivity approaches zero you are either talking about a document that contains a catalog of your record collection, or something that has to be stuck in an envelope to be of any use. Where's the "beef"?
That would be asymmetrical anger.
But in a way it *IS* the coolest thing they ever came up with.
Most of what they sell they got from someone else one way or another.
Most of what they patent is prior art that just hasn't been challenged yet.
Most of what they show in their R&D web pages is nonsense.
Maybe they can get the cost of this thing down to the point where millions of homes will have to have one. If so it might be the most "from scratch" thing they've ever done.
Although something tells me that someone will respond to this with a link to something similar that was around in the 70's.
In the event you are actually ignorant and not just trying to pick a fight, I can assure you that as someone who hasn't run Windows in several years, and does most of his computing on Linux (along with OS X on a laptop), I am not doing so out of any sense of "rebellion", although I don't see anything wrong with that mindset under certain circumstances.
If your primary reason for using a computer is to play games, you certainly should just stay with Windows. If I wanted to play games I think I'd rather have one of those thing you hook up to your TV.
I used to support Windows users for a living, and before that OS/2 users and before than DOS users and before that mainframe users.
I used to be quite a fan of Windows because it ran on several hardware platforms, was fairly fast, had a reasonable feature set. Interestingly enough, Linux does all that now, and Windows does not. So you see it is Windows (or Microsoft) that rebelled against me when they decided only to support Intel boxes, allowed the code to get bloated, buggy and slow. If you like being forced to buy a new computer every few years just to get the OS to boot in a reasonable amount of time, then by all means go ahead and do that. Not only are you having to pay, in most cases, full price to get the latest version of Windows (over the years MS hasn't been able to make up its mind regarding upgrade-only versions of Windows, but as I understand it these days it's better to go with the full release) but you are also required usually to get a whole new computer as your old one is maxed out on memory that is no longer easily available etc. Again, for gaming, having the fastest processor, and the mos memory, fastest bus, etc. are all important for running the game, regardless of your OS. For ordinary web browsing, light office work, photo-shop type stuff, my vintage 2000 machine does quite well. In fact, when Windows users see me on it they ask how I got it to be so fast. I am quite sure that if I tried to run Windows on this machine it would be a very frustrating experience.
Also, I'm not running Linux because it is "free". I purchased my first few versions of Linux in the form of Red Hat and Suse. Eventually found I liked Debian better (even purely for desktop use) and so I settled on it. Of course it's nice not to have to pay for your OS, but even if each major release of Debian cost as much as Windows I'd still be coming out way ahead both in terms of the hardware I'd need to run it and in terms of time wasted on virus scanning, defragging, cleaning my registry and of course mandatory upgrades. Of course if you are paying $3 for it in Africa, maybe you don't mind all the overhead. I'm sure those people paying $3 are getting full telephone support from Microsoft for that too.
I think you are probably right, but look at what has happened to Google products as an example of where commercial software will always go...
The started out with tagging for Gmail, Docs, and other thing, but recently they have buckled to user demands for something that looks like the hierarchical file systems they are used to, presenting the tag names as if they are folders and allowing the folders to be inside other folders (soon to come).
I think for a long time we are going to be stuck with hierarchical file systems coupled with either brute force or semi-intelligent search functions.
The alternative is to produce a tagging system that can be optionally viewed as hierarchical folders coupled with an almost infinite supply of tutorials explaining that the one thing is really the same as the other, and possibly state-run indoctrination centers (I'm looking for ways to be optimistic about the upcoming elections).
I know people with multiple gigs worth of e-mail already. I think Gears would be a mismatch for this level of storage.
If it were set up so that only the last (for example) hundred meg or so were being retained locally, that might be OK.
But in any event, simply running ANY POP reader every few days would make an accumulating local backup of your mail, if that is what you want to do.
Last time Google was said to be down (right here as a matter of fact) I found that my POP client worked fine and I could still both send and receive with it. What was down in that case was simply the web interface.
Sorry, I don't think I've ever used an e-mail system of any kind that NEVER became unavailable at on time or another. My entire Internet connection goes away about once a year and there is absolutely no way to send or recieve e-mail until Verizon gets its act together. Should I expect the Gmail team to come slap Verizon around for me? I wouldn't mind that.
Many amateur photographers have difficulty not to letting their thumb rest on top of the lens.
Although in this case that might actually be the best place for it.
"PC ADvisor has determined that your machine is unacceptably slow. You have probably installed, uninstalled and re-installed too many programs in response to PC ADvisor's previous suggestions. Now your Registry is hosed.
PC ADvisor recommends you now re-format your hard drive and do a fresh install of Windows.
Please have your credit card handy as I can assist you with repurchasing any software for which you have lost the appropriate paperwork.
Remember it was YOU who accepted all those terms and conditions without reading them, don't blame PC ADvisor.
And do not call and complain to those hard working programmers at Microsoft, they are far too busy innovating new features like PC ADvisor to have to deal with your silly little printer issues. Windows and Office together probably cost as much as your entire PC, but that DOES NOT include the manpower to listen to you bitch and moan over the telephone. Suck it up, admit you are the cause of your own problems and do as I say.
Do it NOW or PC ADvisor will punish you further!
No, the typical inter office response is for the same stupid clerk who screwed up in the first place to first send out 1200 message retracts, followed by 1200 "Sorry, please ignore this message". After that of course the only slightly more clueful network administrator sends a message to everyone telling them not to send messages to everyone.
It can only get better from here.