You might want to read my rebuttal to that before you draw many conclusions. The author of that post was being deceptive (deliberately or not) in ways that actually matter. (In particular, he wasn't exercising the PPTX import "feature" of OpenOffice at all; he evidently converted the PPTX file to PPT via other means and opened that. The import abilities of the older format actually works well, but I made no statements to the contrary. Furthermore, this distinction matters significantly for reasons that I explain in my post.)
Note that you apparently converted them to PPT before opening them in OpenOffice (note the.ppt, and not.pptx, in the title bar). This is, I think, what the OOXML import filter for earlier versions of PowerPoint (which you are clearly using) does. It also means that what you're saying isn't very relevant, because you're using the PPT import filter in Impress, not the PPTX one (which is the one I'm saying is pretty crappy).
This is fine if you want something to distribute for informational purposes, and you can even present from it. However, it appears to have some of the same flavor of working with a Photoshop PSD file or a Gimp whatever file in a way that makes heavy use of layers, then saving it as a PNG (which requires flattening those layers), then wondering why you can't really edit the resulting image anywhere near as nicely as before.
Try this experiment. Try to resize that box on the lower left (I'm trying it Impress, but I suspect it'll be the same in PowerPoint). Can't do it reasonably? Can you change the text? No?
That's because it converted the PowerPoint shapes in the PPTX file -- which are freely editable in PowerPoint 2007 -- to raster images, then embeds those images. It "flattened the image".
I've put two new files up there... editing.png shows what I get if I resize the image (I deleted the other things on the slide first, but neither did I cherry pick what I was changing. The other elements of the slide behave the same). I also put up the PPT file that I used for this test. It's converted by using the "Save As Office 1997-2003" export in PowerPoint 2007. I suppose it's possible that other methods (like the standalone converter or import filter for earlier versions of Office that MS distributes) would do something different, but I have my doubts. Regardless, if you can actually make reasonable edits, let me know how you got that "Ppt0000000.ppt" file.
This is sort of a nit and not really germane to the current discussion about optimization, but...
An example: in C, the keyword "volatile" instructs the compiler that the field may be changed at any time, thus all reads/writes must take place and must do so atomically
"Atomically" isn't the right word for what "volatile" means. Basically, "volitile" specifies that reads should always come from memory, and writes should always go to memory. (This is as opposed to a register.) So for instance, if you had a loop where "x" was unchanged by the loop but you wanted to force it to be reloaded each time (because it might be changed by another thread for instance) you can declare "x" as "volatile int x" or whatever.
I think it is the case that accesses to volatile variables can't be reordered too.
There isn't really any guarantee of atomicity though; "x++" might not actually increment x (or might cause lost updates), and I suspect that a conforming implementation might be able to update, say, both words of a two-word integer independently on an operation (even though that could lead to races in multithreaded code and stuff like that).
Humans inevitably die anyway so there is no point in slowing down the code to prevent it.
In fact, think of how much of an optimization that is! I mean, suppose people were killed by our robot overloads at 25. That's 1/3 of 75 years old; that's a 3x improvement in the speed we go through our life! In a world where a 20% improvement in speed for a new optimization is very impressive, 3x is just great!
Replace a mod (e.g. x % 32) with a bitwise-and (e.g. x & 31) when the divisor is a power of two.
Another very similar one, and one that comes up more commonly, is the replacement of a multiplication or division by a constant by a series of additions, subtractions, and bitshifts.
For instance, "x/4" is the same as "x>>2", but the division at one point in time (and still with some compilers and no optimization) would produce code that ran slower. Some people still make this optimization by hand, but I'd say it's almost certainly a bad idea nowadays, at least in the absence of information that your compiler isn't optimizing it and that it would be important.
(You can combine operations too. x*7 is the same as x3-x, x*20 is the same as x4 + x2, etc.)
I do believe that web browsers are more common then pdf readers (Windows does come with a web browser but not a pdf reader), but not by much at all
I bet more people have PDF readers than a non-IE browser though. And how long do you think it'd take MS to implement enough CSS and such to make formatting academic papers and such in it a good idea?
In brief, some of the more common ones are things like substituting known values for expressions (e.g. x = 3; y = x + 2; can be changed to x = 3; y = 5;), moving code that doesn't do anything when run repeatedly outside a loop, and architecture-specific optimizations like code scheduling and register allocation. (E.g. with no -O parameters, or -O0, for something like "y = x; z = x;" GCC will generate code that loads "x" from memory twice, once for each statement. With optimization, it will load it once and store it in a register for both instructions.)
If the compiler tries to do this, wouldn't it likely screw your code up?
There are cases where optimizations will screw something up. One example is as follows. It's considered good security practice to zero out memory that held sensitive information (e.g. passwords or cryptographic keys) to limit the lifetime of that data. So you might see something like "password = input(); check(password); zero_memory(password); delete password;". But the compiler might see that zero_memory writes into password, but those values are never read. Why write something if you never need it? So it would remove the zero_memory call as it's useless code that can't affect anything. So it removes it. And your program no longer clears the sensitive memory.
This was actually a bug in a couple crypto libraries for a while.
it has everything that you are looking for and can be easily compiled to ps, dvi, pdf
While I want to emphasize that Latex is probably the best of a bunch of not-very-good solutions, I strongly suggest targeting PDF. Windows users sort of have the shaft when it comes to PS viewers; the best one out there is (or at least until recently was; if something like Okular now works on Windows through KDE-Windows this might have changed) GSView, which says a lot because it's a piece of crap.
DVI? I personally think that ceased to be a benefit a while ago, since other formats became available, and really no one has DVI viewers.
And while you can do ps2pdf (or weird DVI->PDF flows), targeting PDF directly also lets you use some spiffy pdflatex-only packages that add things like comment/annotation support, hyperlinks, etc. One very impressive package that I believe is pdflatex-only is called PGF; it's a graphics package, and can do a lot of the things you'd use something like pstricks or xylatex for.
That's sort of my personal view, but it's one that I think is increasingly "correct".
and (I am told but haven't used) html
Eh, I haven't put a ton of investigation into it, but I've not been very impressed with the HTML output those converters generate. They're usually fine for conveying information, but I don't really consider what I've seen to be sort of on "equal footing" with the PS/DVI/PDF output you'd get from latex proper. I'm also not sure at all what they would produce for things like xypic code.
It even plays nicely with version control, bibliography management (BiBTeX), etc.
This is one of the best parts about it, and is nowadays probably the biggest benefit (IMO) over Word. If you're working with collaborators (and if you're doing academic publications, when are you not?) then easy merging is usually essential, and $FAVORITE_VCS usually just works so well.
As a bonus you can run it on linux via command line.
Or even... the same way on Windows.;-)
But really that's possibly not the best way; get a Latex mode for Emacs that will let you compile and open the resulting file right from emacs (I think auktex does this), a dedicated Latex editor, etc.
Oh, I'm sure. Except for the last one which I just grabbed from the front page, the ones I posted are ones that I've actually watched recently.
(The commentated Starcraft matches for instance have a very noticeable quality difference, to the point where it's sometimes much easier to see what's going on in the HQ version.)
You're representative of the worst parts of the open source community; arrogant, accusative without any evidence, and your refusal to acknowledge verifiable problems does it a disservice. Believe me, the best thing people like you can do to further the cause of open source and free software is to shut the fuck up.
Now that that's out of the way, I can address your "points".
Ignore all advances in the past half a decade
"Half a decade"? OOXML support was added to OpenOffice in 3.0, released October 2008. That's less than a year ago.
But want a verifiable trail? I can give you one. (I think the bad screenshots I posted before were from Impress 3.0.) I have OO 3.1 installed (if you go to their website, that's the latest stable version), so I opened the same file I used to take those screenshots before.
I put them back into that directory.
For the first one, I think I must have gotten a different slide since the colors are wrong, but the slide renders basically as poorly as ever. The text in the boxes isn't present, and the boxes themselves don't have anywhere near the right appearance.
For the second slide, the rendering has improved rather a bit. The text is no longer truncated at the bottom, and the borders around the textboxs are not displayed. However, the translation is still pretty poor -- there's an extra date box at the bottom that's displayed for some reason, and it ignores the background color of the slide. This is good enough if you want to get the information from the slide, but not good enough if you wanted to use OO to present a PPTX presentation.
Still don't believe me? The origin PPTX file is in that directory as well; give it a shot. I didn't do anything I'd fancy in PowerPoint to do anything in it.
Why does google now require a phone number when applying for Gmail?!
One of my friends has Grand Central/Google Voice; I stopped calling that number and just using the direct one (slightly to his chagrin, but not much), in large part because I decided I didn't want Google to know every time I talked to him.
They check the default locations for the icons, if not found, it puts them there. Does that behavior suck?--Yes it does, but it's nowhere near an "Apple" problem. It's universal.
What? I haven't done this for a while (4 years? I got lazy, and then Windows got a better way to launch programs then menu hunting), but I used to keep my Start Menu pretty divided up by genre of application (Games, Office, Graphics... sort of like what you get with KDE or Gnome, but with an extra layer of hierarchy since I would just put the folders that the installer makes in the genre folder). I would do things like rename or eliminate folders named by the company and change it to the actual program, move things around, the whole works.
I don't ever remember having the behavior described with any program. If Apple has really started doing this, that's just more bad behavior from them. (Like the starting ipodservice on boot, always replacing that, etc. (Replacing boot programs IS something that a number of programs will do, but still is less common than listening to you and not replacing it.))
I have seen the so-called "High Quality" clips, and, while a substantial improvement to the base quality, they still pale in comparison to what I get by default from competing services.
That's not the point; the point is that the competing services are using more bandwidth and processing power to serve those higher quality videos. Is it in Google's interest to do the same for YouTube? Who knows. But whether it is or not, switching to Theora would, at least in their view, require them to either do so to keep the quality the same, or keep the cost the same and reduce the quality.
At any rate, I can't seem to find the HQ links anymore, even on videos that once had them.
Something I think is wrong with your setup. I haven't seen any go away (except one*), and there are still plenty out there. For instance, do you see one here? I do. Here?Here? (That one should be HD.)
* The one place where I haven't seen the HQ/HD link lately that I have before is Weird Al's Craigslist, which used to have HD available.
We used to have full page reports with details, explanations, and facts.
I didn't realize that installing PowerPoint prevented you from creating those.
If you are using PowerPoint in dumbass ways, this is why you're business is failing.
FTFY. Just because a tool can easily be used in dumbass ways (or even usually is!) doesn't mean it's a bad tool. (How many people here would say that because most BitTorrent use is pirating stuff and illegal, that BitTorrent is a bad tool?)
Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
First, have you been to YouTube lately? Have you noticed how they've added high(er) quality versions of many videos? Why would they do that if they didn't care about quality? Hell, some videos have an "HD" option.
Secondly, pretend your parent said "quality per bandwidth". Because bandwidth use is something that Google definitely does care about.
Maybe for Word that's true, but between PowerPoint and OO Presenter my experience is that the PPTX import filter on OpenOffice is just trash. (See samples; unfortunately I forget what version of OpenOffice produced them.)
OO certainly does compete with MS office
I would say the following: OO Writer is pretty good, and OO Calc is pretty good. I have some issues with some things, but they're either about relatively minor features (like how Writer's track changes feature kind of sucks) or are just a "I'm used to MS Office" thing.
But PowerPoint vs. Impress I think is still no contest in favor of PowerPoint. This is true if you go back a couple versions of PowerPoint, and the difference just gets bigger with PPT 2k7.
It's got nothing (or only slightly) to do with fear of submarine patents in ogg. H.264 still could have submarine patents anyway.
While I don't know for sure, I believe that the H.264 licensing authority indemnifies licensees against third-party patent lawsuits over use of the codec. There's no such organization for Theora.
I don't want to guess how much of Apple's decision actually is based on patent worries, but the submarine patent situation between H.264 and Theora is pretty darn different for implementers (if I'm right).
In recent years, they have both been proponents of DRM at some point, both support their own proprietary formats (Microsoft with WMA/WMV/ASF, Apple with Quicktime, and AAC), and are both patent whores.
Apple has also been far worse with near-SLAPPish quality lawsuits in the courts over the past few years than MS ever was.
Firefox is too big to ignore now, so most major sites will support them.
Yeah, but the question is whether they'll support them with the video tag, or do something like what YouTube is doing (and I suspect will continue to do for some time) and support it with Flash apps. And if a site as big as YouTube is going to continue to feed Flash to Firefox, almost everyone will continue to have it around, and the video tag hasn't really won us all that much.
Unfortunately you are absolutely in the minority when it comes to road bike riders...
As someone who is an occasional biker, it is unfortunate that so many bikers ride so recklessly, because it gives the sport a bad name and leads to things like all the posts around here about "get off the roads onto the sidewalk" which sounds like a much more reasonable idea then it actually is if you don't actually try to bike for transportation purposes. (Not saying you fall into that category.)
Personally, I try pretty hard to uphold what I see as my end of the deal. I'm a firm believer that bikes belong on the roads, but in exchange, bikes have to follow the rules of the road: stop at stop signs, wait a red lights, etc. (I don't view "stay against the curb" in that set, though in the absence of passing opportunities for cars, pulling over to let people pass is a good idea.) Accordingly, I usually follow said rules, and would be in favor of increased policing of moving violations committed by cyclists.
I am not going to claim that I always hold to that ideal, but when I break a rule I basically follow four guidelines: (1) is it safe for me, (2) is it safe for everyone else, and (3) will it affect the decision making of anyone else, and (4) leave a substantial safety margin. Often (3) translates to "there aren't other cars on the road". (Incidentally, I follow similar guidelines when jaywalking.) I have a variety of reasons for how I justify this to myself, which you might think are justified or not.
Regardless, I at least think I'm pretty courteous when I'm biking around, at least given the constraints of riding a me-powered vehicle. The problem isn't with bikers on the road; it's with the dumbass and selfish bikers who give us a bad name. (Which I'll admit to be a sizable proportion.)
Slashdot Mirror
as a humorous aside: "lol you got owned"
You referring to your sibling post?
You might want to read my rebuttal to that before you draw many conclusions. The author of that post was being deceptive (deliberately or not) in ways that actually matter. (In particular, he wasn't exercising the PPTX import "feature" of OpenOffice at all; he evidently converted the PPTX file to PPT via other means and opened that. The import abilities of the older format actually works well, but I made no statements to the contrary. Furthermore, this distinction matters significantly for reasons that I explain in my post.)
Note that you apparently converted them to PPT before opening them in OpenOffice (note the .ppt, and not .pptx, in the title bar). This is, I think, what the OOXML import filter for earlier versions of PowerPoint (which you are clearly using) does. It also means that what you're saying isn't very relevant, because you're using the PPT import filter in Impress, not the PPTX one (which is the one I'm saying is pretty crappy).
This is fine if you want something to distribute for informational purposes, and you can even present from it. However, it appears to have some of the same flavor of working with a Photoshop PSD file or a Gimp whatever file in a way that makes heavy use of layers, then saving it as a PNG (which requires flattening those layers), then wondering why you can't really edit the resulting image anywhere near as nicely as before.
Try this experiment. Try to resize that box on the lower left (I'm trying it Impress, but I suspect it'll be the same in PowerPoint). Can't do it reasonably? Can you change the text? No?
That's because it converted the PowerPoint shapes in the PPTX file -- which are freely editable in PowerPoint 2007 -- to raster images, then embeds those images. It "flattened the image".
I've put two new files up there... editing.png shows what I get if I resize the image (I deleted the other things on the slide first, but neither did I cherry pick what I was changing. The other elements of the slide behave the same). I also put up the PPT file that I used for this test. It's converted by using the "Save As Office 1997-2003" export in PowerPoint 2007. I suppose it's possible that other methods (like the standalone converter or import filter for earlier versions of Office that MS distributes) would do something different, but I have my doubts. Regardless, if you can actually make reasonable edits, let me know how you got that "Ppt0000000.ppt" file.
it's actually slightly more ubiquitous since there are so many printers that use it.
To play devil's advocate, I'd guess there are more computers without a printer than there are computers without the ability to read PDF files.
This is sort of a nit and not really germane to the current discussion about optimization, but...
An example: in C, the keyword "volatile" instructs the compiler that the field may be changed at any time, thus all reads/writes must take place and must do so atomically
"Atomically" isn't the right word for what "volatile" means. Basically, "volitile" specifies that reads should always come from memory, and writes should always go to memory. (This is as opposed to a register.) So for instance, if you had a loop where "x" was unchanged by the loop but you wanted to force it to be reloaded each time (because it might be changed by another thread for instance) you can declare "x" as "volatile int x" or whatever.
I think it is the case that accesses to volatile variables can't be reordered too.
There isn't really any guarantee of atomicity though; "x++" might not actually increment x (or might cause lost updates), and I suspect that a conforming implementation might be able to update, say, both words of a two-word integer independently on an operation (even though that could lead to races in multithreaded code and stuff like that).
No, I just got the precedence wrong. ;-)
In my post, pretend that << has a higher precedence than + and -.
Humans inevitably die anyway so there is no point in slowing down the code to prevent it.
In fact, think of how much of an optimization that is! I mean, suppose people were killed by our robot overloads at 25. That's 1/3 of 75 years old; that's a 3x improvement in the speed we go through our life! In a world where a 20% improvement in speed for a new optimization is very impressive, 3x is just great!
(You can combine operations too. x*7 is the same as x3-x, x*20 is the same as x4 + x2, etc.)
That should be
x*7 == x << 3 - x
x*20 == x << 4 + x << 2
Slashcode (somewhat reasonably) ate my <<s.
Replace a mod (e.g. x % 32) with a bitwise-and (e.g. x & 31) when the divisor is a power of two.
Another very similar one, and one that comes up more commonly, is the replacement of a multiplication or division by a constant by a series of additions, subtractions, and bitshifts.
For instance, "x/4" is the same as "x>>2", but the division at one point in time (and still with some compilers and no optimization) would produce code that ran slower. Some people still make this optimization by hand, but I'd say it's almost certainly a bad idea nowadays, at least in the absence of information that your compiler isn't optimizing it and that it would be important.
(You can combine operations too. x*7 is the same as x3-x, x*20 is the same as x4 + x2, etc.)
I do believe that web browsers are more common then pdf readers (Windows does come with a web browser but not a pdf reader), but not by much at all
I bet more people have PDF readers than a non-IE browser though. And how long do you think it'd take MS to implement enough CSS and such to make formatting academic papers and such in it a good idea?
What things can a compiler do to your code to 'optimize' it for you?
Check out the Wikipedia article on optimization for some examples.
In brief, some of the more common ones are things like substituting known values for expressions (e.g. x = 3; y = x + 2; can be changed to x = 3; y = 5;), moving code that doesn't do anything when run repeatedly outside a loop, and architecture-specific optimizations like code scheduling and register allocation. (E.g. with no -O parameters, or -O0, for something like "y = x; z = x;" GCC will generate code that loads "x" from memory twice, once for each statement. With optimization, it will load it once and store it in a register for both instructions.)
If the compiler tries to do this, wouldn't it likely screw your code up?
There are cases where optimizations will screw something up. One example is as follows. It's considered good security practice to zero out memory that held sensitive information (e.g. passwords or cryptographic keys) to limit the lifetime of that data. So you might see something like "password = input(); check(password); zero_memory(password); delete password;". But the compiler might see that zero_memory writes into password, but those values are never read. Why write something if you never need it? So it would remove the zero_memory call as it's useless code that can't affect anything. So it removes it. And your program no longer clears the sensitive memory.
This was actually a bug in a couple crypto libraries for a while.
it has everything that you are looking for and can be easily compiled to ps, dvi, pdf
While I want to emphasize that Latex is probably the best of a bunch of not-very-good solutions, I strongly suggest targeting PDF. Windows users sort of have the shaft when it comes to PS viewers; the best one out there is (or at least until recently was; if something like Okular now works on Windows through KDE-Windows this might have changed) GSView, which says a lot because it's a piece of crap.
DVI? I personally think that ceased to be a benefit a while ago, since other formats became available, and really no one has DVI viewers.
And while you can do ps2pdf (or weird DVI->PDF flows), targeting PDF directly also lets you use some spiffy pdflatex-only packages that add things like comment/annotation support, hyperlinks, etc. One very impressive package that I believe is pdflatex-only is called PGF; it's a graphics package, and can do a lot of the things you'd use something like pstricks or xylatex for.
That's sort of my personal view, but it's one that I think is increasingly "correct".
and (I am told but haven't used) html
Eh, I haven't put a ton of investigation into it, but I've not been very impressed with the HTML output those converters generate. They're usually fine for conveying information, but I don't really consider what I've seen to be sort of on "equal footing" with the PS/DVI/PDF output you'd get from latex proper. I'm also not sure at all what they would produce for things like xypic code.
It even plays nicely with version control, bibliography management (BiBTeX), etc.
This is one of the best parts about it, and is nowadays probably the biggest benefit (IMO) over Word. If you're working with collaborators (and if you're doing academic publications, when are you not?) then easy merging is usually essential, and $FAVORITE_VCS usually just works so well.
As a bonus you can run it on linux via command line.
Or even... the same way on Windows. ;-)
But really that's possibly not the best way; get a Latex mode for Emacs that will let you compile and open the resulting file right from emacs (I think auktex does this), a dedicated Latex editor, etc.
Oh, I'm sure. Except for the last one which I just grabbed from the front page, the ones I posted are ones that I've actually watched recently.
(The commentated Starcraft matches for instance have a very noticeable quality difference, to the point where it's sometimes much easier to see what's going on in the HQ version.)
Typical MS Marketing slight of hand.
You're representative of the worst parts of the open source community; arrogant, accusative without any evidence, and your refusal to acknowledge verifiable problems does it a disservice. Believe me, the best thing people like you can do to further the cause of open source and free software is to shut the fuck up.
Now that that's out of the way, I can address your "points".
Ignore all advances in the past half a decade
"Half a decade"? OOXML support was added to OpenOffice in 3.0, released October 2008. That's less than a year ago.
But want a verifiable trail? I can give you one. (I think the bad screenshots I posted before were from Impress 3.0.) I have OO 3.1 installed (if you go to their website, that's the latest stable version), so I opened the same file I used to take those screenshots before.
I put them back into that directory.
For the first one, I think I must have gotten a different slide since the colors are wrong, but the slide renders basically as poorly as ever. The text in the boxes isn't present, and the boxes themselves don't have anywhere near the right appearance.
For the second slide, the rendering has improved rather a bit. The text is no longer truncated at the bottom, and the borders around the textboxs are not displayed. However, the translation is still pretty poor -- there's an extra date box at the bottom that's displayed for some reason, and it ignores the background color of the slide. This is good enough if you want to get the information from the slide, but not good enough if you wanted to use OO to present a PPTX presentation.
Still don't believe me? The origin PPTX file is in that directory as well; give it a shot. I didn't do anything I'd fancy in PowerPoint to do anything in it.
That's a good point; I hadn't even caught that. This article is basically the definition of assumptions.
Not to say it's wrong, but it is not even remotely well-sourced.
Why does google now require a phone number when applying for Gmail?!
One of my friends has Grand Central/Google Voice; I stopped calling that number and just using the direct one (slightly to his chagrin, but not much), in large part because I decided I didn't want Google to know every time I talked to him.
They check the default locations for the icons, if not found, it puts them there. Does that behavior suck?--Yes it does, but it's nowhere near an "Apple" problem. It's universal.
What? I haven't done this for a while (4 years? I got lazy, and then Windows got a better way to launch programs then menu hunting), but I used to keep my Start Menu pretty divided up by genre of application (Games, Office, Graphics... sort of like what you get with KDE or Gnome, but with an extra layer of hierarchy since I would just put the folders that the installer makes in the genre folder). I would do things like rename or eliminate folders named by the company and change it to the actual program, move things around, the whole works.
I don't ever remember having the behavior described with any program. If Apple has really started doing this, that's just more bad behavior from them. (Like the starting ipodservice on boot, always replacing that, etc. (Replacing boot programs IS something that a number of programs will do, but still is less common than listening to you and not replacing it.))
I have seen the so-called "High Quality" clips, and, while a substantial improvement to the base quality, they still pale in comparison to what I get by default from competing services.
That's not the point; the point is that the competing services are using more bandwidth and processing power to serve those higher quality videos. Is it in Google's interest to do the same for YouTube? Who knows. But whether it is or not, switching to Theora would, at least in their view, require them to either do so to keep the quality the same, or keep the cost the same and reduce the quality.
At any rate, I can't seem to find the HQ links anymore, even on videos that once had them.
Something I think is wrong with your setup. I haven't seen any go away (except one*), and there are still plenty out there. For instance, do you see one here? I do. Here? Here? (That one should be HD.)
* The one place where I haven't seen the HQ/HD link lately that I have before is Weird Al's Craigslist, which used to have HD available.
We used to have full page reports with details, explanations, and facts.
I didn't realize that installing PowerPoint prevented you from creating those.
If you are using PowerPoint in dumbass ways, this is why you're business is failing.
FTFY. Just because a tool can easily be used in dumbass ways (or even usually is!) doesn't mean it's a bad tool. (How many people here would say that because most BitTorrent use is pirating stuff and illegal, that BitTorrent is a bad tool?)
Better to have poorer quality than no video at all.
When was "no video at all" the alternative? The alternative is "Flash video".
Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
First, have you been to YouTube lately? Have you noticed how they've added high(er) quality versions of many videos? Why would they do that if they didn't care about quality? Hell, some videos have an "HD" option.
Secondly, pretend your parent said "quality per bandwidth". Because bandwidth use is something that Google definitely does care about.
(can convert from and to ODF/OOXML)
Maybe for Word that's true, but between PowerPoint and OO Presenter my experience is that the PPTX import filter on OpenOffice is just trash. (See samples; unfortunately I forget what version of OpenOffice produced them.)
OO certainly does compete with MS office
I would say the following: OO Writer is pretty good, and OO Calc is pretty good. I have some issues with some things, but they're either about relatively minor features (like how Writer's track changes feature kind of sucks) or are just a "I'm used to MS Office" thing.
But PowerPoint vs. Impress I think is still no contest in favor of PowerPoint. This is true if you go back a couple versions of PowerPoint, and the difference just gets bigger with PPT 2k7.
It's got nothing (or only slightly) to do with fear of submarine patents in ogg. H.264 still could have submarine patents anyway.
While I don't know for sure, I believe that the H.264 licensing authority indemnifies licensees against third-party patent lawsuits over use of the codec. There's no such organization for Theora.
I don't want to guess how much of Apple's decision actually is based on patent worries, but the submarine patent situation between H.264 and Theora is pretty darn different for implementers (if I'm right).
In recent years, they have both been proponents of DRM at some point, both support their own proprietary formats (Microsoft with WMA/WMV/ASF, Apple with Quicktime, and AAC), and are both patent whores.
Apple has also been far worse with near-SLAPPish quality lawsuits in the courts over the past few years than MS ever was.
Firefox is too big to ignore now, so most major sites will support them.
Yeah, but the question is whether they'll support them with the video tag, or do something like what YouTube is doing (and I suspect will continue to do for some time) and support it with Flash apps. And if a site as big as YouTube is going to continue to feed Flash to Firefox, almost everyone will continue to have it around, and the video tag hasn't really won us all that much.
Unfortunately you are absolutely in the minority when it comes to road bike riders...
As someone who is an occasional biker, it is unfortunate that so many bikers ride so recklessly, because it gives the sport a bad name and leads to things like all the posts around here about "get off the roads onto the sidewalk" which sounds like a much more reasonable idea then it actually is if you don't actually try to bike for transportation purposes. (Not saying you fall into that category.)
Personally, I try pretty hard to uphold what I see as my end of the deal. I'm a firm believer that bikes belong on the roads, but in exchange, bikes have to follow the rules of the road: stop at stop signs, wait a red lights, etc. (I don't view "stay against the curb" in that set, though in the absence of passing opportunities for cars, pulling over to let people pass is a good idea.) Accordingly, I usually follow said rules, and would be in favor of increased policing of moving violations committed by cyclists.
I am not going to claim that I always hold to that ideal, but when I break a rule I basically follow four guidelines: (1) is it safe for me, (2) is it safe for everyone else, and (3) will it affect the decision making of anyone else, and (4) leave a substantial safety margin. Often (3) translates to "there aren't other cars on the road". (Incidentally, I follow similar guidelines when jaywalking.) I have a variety of reasons for how I justify this to myself, which you might think are justified or not.
Regardless, I at least think I'm pretty courteous when I'm biking around, at least given the constraints of riding a me-powered vehicle. The problem isn't with bikers on the road; it's with the dumbass and selfish bikers who give us a bad name. (Which I'll admit to be a sizable proportion.)