Well... IMHO, producing product manuals is a desktop publishing task, not a simple word-processing task. Therefore, a word processor is certainly not enough to cope with that kind of work. A proper computer-aided publishing program is required at that point: Quark XPress, Adobe InDesign, FrameMaker would fit your needs. Certainly not MS Word. There are chances that Open Office will cause problems too at some point.
On the free software side, I would tend to recommend Scribus
which is one of the most promising attempts at reaching the quality level of Quark XPress that I have seen this far.
Well, another feature missing in WordPad is the "justify" paragraph style. If it weren't for that one, I would not have bothered with MS Office. But guess what: it was available in MS Write for Windows 3.xx! I suppose it was removed from WordPad for the same reason you mention above... You can't have something that is *both* compatible with MS Word (*.doc format) *and* really useful, can you ? Well, not for free anyway...
Maybe there was also a fear of getting slammed with a suit if M$ *did* bundle a useable word processor with their OS. Corel (owning WordPerfect) would surely have filed a complaint at the time...
I won't pretend to represent the whole/. community but here is my opinion. Using MS Office over Wine exposes us all to lots of potential licence infringements (see the increasingly restrictive EULAs) and drives us deeper into the proprietary and monopolistic lock-in that a few corporations are trying to build -- and this does not apply only to Microsoft. Besides, you may have $500 to spend on a new version of MS Office every 2 years or so, but I don't.
However we would be much better off trying to improve the stability of the existing applications, rather than trying to catch up with the level of functionality of the proprietary competitors. Go easy on the new features (exporting to PDF is a great idea, though); concentrate on enhancing the stability of OOo, KOffice, Abiword and so on; enhancing/debugging the import/export filters is an important point as well.
This point has already been made, it needs to be repeated time and time again... Just my 2 cents anyway.
In Germany they have this weird concept that a seller liying in an advertisement is fraud, as the seller is misrepresenting the product.
Wait a minute, I'll take an example. OK, there's an ad which says that there's a shop in a remote suburb selling goods (say, laptops with excellent configurations) at discount prices. It also says that the sales will be over tomorrow. I've been waiting for a bargain on a laptop for a while, this one seems to be good, but I have not planned to go shopping tonight.
Since the sales will be over tomorrow, I decide to leave work a little earlier than I had planned to, get into my car, and prepare for 45 minutes of fun in the traffic jams. Once I get to the shop, I realize that the features of the damn laptops they're selling are not half the ones that are mentionned in the ad. This was a deliberate lie on behalf on the sales people just to drag people into their shops.
Now, you can go on and say this is about freedom of speech. Meanwhile, I've lost 2x45 minutes of my precious time in traffic jams, only to find out that there was no interesting deal at all, because the ads were a pile of bullshit. This is one good reason (among many others) why in some countries (France as well -- usual suspects...) there are laws against lying in ads and commercials.
...the WTO/Free Trade/Free Market zealots moaning : "Yeah, okay, but these are only exceptions, see, the free market always corrects this kind of abuse by itself". The same lame excuses we heard about Enron.
I say, if it weren't for Australian justice and anti-trust regulations, those two corporations would still be ripping off consumers. Yet, most of our countries are engaged in WTO negotiations which compell countries to get rid of those "embarrassing regulations" in the name of so-called "competition" and "fairness". I'm not saying we need more regulations; just that the existing ones need to be upheld.
Do you see where "competition" stands when corporations agree on pricing to rip off their consumers? What about "fairness" if the existing regulations are cancelled ? (Robot slams door open:) IP droid: `By using the words "fairness" and "competition", you just infringed on Trademark #AE6521 by corporation SueMyAss Inc. We'll see you in court, sir.'
Well, yeah -- until it becomes a required standard in shopping malls. After all, WalMart can decide some day that in order to have a standardised shoplifting prevention system, all their providers ar required to fit an RFID chip in their products. Remember barcodes ?
So where will your "freedom of choice" stand when all the shops have adopted this system ? Make no mistake: this is actually what RFID chips providers are puhing for.
Oh, and I could also talk about how genetically engineered food is being forced down our throats as well, but that would be another can of worms (slightly OT by the way).
"Freedom of choice" is there as long as it is compatible with the lobbies' points of view. It IS a basic requirement in an ideal free market, but the main (corporate) actors of the current "free market" are trying to avoid it at all costs. Never take it for granted : we have to fight for it everyday.
1. Jail
2. Death by hanging
3. Hands chopped
4. Buuurn him! Buuuurn!
5. Single fare on the next Mars mission
6. Brain reformatting (partition type : 82)
7. Becoming CowboyNeal's sexual slave
--- From: your_friend@yahoo.com
--- To: you@hotmail.com
--- Subject: Virus alert
WARNING ! You have just received an e-mail virus.
To get rid of it, and to make sure noone else gets caught, do the following:
1. Forward this message to all people in your address book.
2. Format your hard drive.
"It was France that a couple of years ago had massive protests against Jews. Not the United States."
"Massive" ? Phew ! This is gross propaganda from Sharon. And since it's all about bashing France, a fair number of media in the US are happy to propagate this kind of crap. There have been a few assaults from isolated individuals (most of them belonging to the Muslim community) on Jews in France. Sure, those incidents should not have happened in the first place. They are due to the fact that some people assimilate the opinion of the Jewish community with Ariel Sharon's politics, which is again a gross misrepresentation of the truth: lots of Israelis strongly oppose the Likud's views.
But Ariel Sharon used those incidents to call for French Jews to migrate to Israel: he needs settlers to achieve his colonization of Palestine, what's more efficient than using a few incidents to scare those people into migrating ?
Besides, there have been demonstrations against the Israeli policy towards Palestinians, demonstrations which included anti-racist movements and human rights movements such as Amnesty International. A couple of thousand people in Paris. There again, those movements were against the policies, not against the Jewish people (or would you call the guys at Amnesty a bunch of antisemitic, racist bastards ?).
Now, to say there were "massive protests against Jews in France" is at best misleading, at worst a gross, deliberate lie.
Re:Political Agnostics???
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They believe with a passion that everything should be taken from everyone they don't like, and given freely to everyone the do like.
Come to think about it, that's exactly what the Bush team is doing. Taking away health care and welfare from the poor, and giving it to the rich through tax returns.
So it works both ways, I suppose. But there again, I might be another clueless rabid commie zealot...
Also note that according to the market quotes, on July 23rd SCOX
reaches an all-times high, but it's all downhill from there. We should expect the IBM announcements to accelerate this trend... Anyway, a SEC inquiry should be ordered.
C'mon, you would'nt even be able to put a 10 lb payload on them. And they wouldn't be moving much faster than 70 mph.
This
project is much more interesting. $5000, that's the price of a third-hand car. How many of these puppies can an Al-Qaeda-like organisation build ?
When the DNC list first appeared, the Direct Marketing Association shrieked that telemarketing contributed $600 billion to the GNP. That's 6% of the economy. A quick poll of friends showed they didn't buy *anything* from phone spammers, so that number was immediately suspect.
This also shows how stupid it is to evaluate the development level of a country based on its sole GNP. Do they also count the amount of money wasted on cleaning up beaches after an oil spill ? Does that reflect the development level of a country ? I thought that a developed country was one where industrial accidents rarely happened. Are telemarketers actively taking part in the development of a country when only 10% of the people they call will actually buy something? Are parasites of the economic system also considered to be contributors to the GNP? Lawyers? Drug dealers, anyone? Do we count in the same GNP both the amount of money made by the tobacco industry and the amount of money spent on curing lung cancers?
I think it is time to drop this "Gross" National Product criterion for judging the development level of a country. It's a buzz word in the media, but it obfuscates the overal view we can have on the development of a nation.
Troll: `Sheesh, bersl2 has just posted a decent, well reasoned answer to the previous post. How dare he ? Let's mod him down as "Troll" and ooga-booga him a while in AC mode, that's so very brave of us... That'll teach him! Trollz r00l !'
Metamod, rate the "Troll" moderation for the parent as "unfair".
Jules: "You know how they call a quarter-pounder Astronomer with cheese in the UK ?" Vincent: "How d'they call it ?" Jules: "They call it an Astronomer Royal"
Totally agree, but this practice of giving a certain autonomy to the regiments on the front line had been in use for a while in the German army. It was already the case during WWI. This worked quite well.
As far as WWII is concerned, don't forget that when Hitler attacked France, the French army was directed by a handful of old farts who had made technological choices that proved disastrous. France had concentrated on building a huge line of bunkers on its border with Germany (ligne Maginot) while its air force was ridiculously underequipped compared with the Luftwaffe, and it had nearly no armoured vehicles to counter the PanzerDivizionen.
The French army got smashed to tiny bits when the Germans attacked...
I'll stop here, no point in going further on the subject...
They have a firm to blame AND hold accountable that is dedicated to serving them
Like Microsoft has ever been held accountable for any software failure. Like they admit immediately that they are at fault. Like it never takes them more than 3 days to publish a patch. Like they are going to refund the administration for any inconvenience due to their software (the SQLServer vulnerabilities and worms, anyone ?). Like it wouldn't be better to have a FS/OSS infrastructure, with a handful of FS/OSS programmers with a good grasp of the code to act immediately in case of a major problem.
These knee jerk reactions are oldhat.
Riiiight. How about stupid excuses such as "They have a firm to blame" ? Why not "they have a dead horse to beat" ?
I think it would be a real change in the mentality and efficiency of everyone in his/her job, not only in the army but also in other administrations, if, instead of having a "blame Microsoft" excuse, people only had a "blame yourself" excuse. That would bring a real level of responsibility and commitment to everyone at every stage in the deployment of IT.
"Dedicated to serving them.". MmmmmppffrrtBWA-HA-HA-HA !!!
I don't agree with your prediction, even if this takes bloody ages to resolve. I'm pretty pessimistic, not about the SCO/IBM case, but about/.ers getting laid.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, wrong Heinlein novel...
- The airtrain (Aerotrain)
- Aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle
- Nuclear waste reprocessing, heh ? What about SuperPhenix?
- Oh, yeah, Concorde as well, France was so proud about it
- The infamous "ligne Maginot"
- Minitel, so successful in France, but not to be found anywhere else
- "La 5eme Republique" which brought the country on the verge of chaos on 2002-04-21
I could go on like this...On the free software side, I would tend to recommend Scribus which is one of the most promising attempts at reaching the quality level of Quark XPress that I have seen this far.
Maybe there was also a fear of getting slammed with a suit if M$ *did* bundle a useable word processor with their OS. Corel (owning WordPerfect) would surely have filed a complaint at the time...
However we would be much better off trying to improve the stability of the existing applications, rather than trying to catch up with the level of functionality of the proprietary competitors. Go easy on the new features (exporting to PDF is a great idea, though); concentrate on enhancing the stability of OOo, KOffice, Abiword and so on; enhancing/debugging the import/export filters is an important point as well.
This point has already been made, it needs to be repeated time and time again... Just my 2 cents anyway.
Since the sales will be over tomorrow, I decide to leave work a little earlier than I had planned to, get into my car, and prepare for 45 minutes of fun in the traffic jams. Once I get to the shop, I realize that the features of the damn laptops they're selling are not half the ones that are mentionned in the ad. This was a deliberate lie on behalf on the sales people just to drag people into their shops.
Now, you can go on and say this is about freedom of speech. Meanwhile, I've lost 2x45 minutes of my precious time in traffic jams, only to find out that there was no interesting deal at all, because the ads were a pile of bullshit. This is one good reason (among many others) why in some countries (France as well -- usual suspects...) there are laws against lying in ads and commercials.
Just my 0.02 euros...
I say, if it weren't for Australian justice and anti-trust regulations, those two corporations would still be ripping off consumers. Yet, most of our countries are engaged in WTO negotiations which compell countries to get rid of those "embarrassing regulations" in the name of so-called "competition" and "fairness". I'm not saying we need more regulations; just that the existing ones need to be upheld.
Do you see where "competition" stands when corporations agree on pricing to rip off their consumers? What about "fairness" if the existing regulations are cancelled ?
(Robot slams door open:)
IP droid: `By using the words "fairness" and "competition", you just infringed on Trademark #AE6521 by corporation SueMyAss Inc. We'll see you in court, sir.'
So where will your "freedom of choice" stand when all the shops have adopted this system ? Make no mistake: this is actually what RFID chips providers are puhing for.
Oh, and I could also talk about how genetically engineered food is being forced down our throats as well, but that would be another can of worms (slightly OT by the way).
"Freedom of choice" is there as long as it is compatible with the lobbies' points of view. It IS a basic requirement in an ideal free market, but the main (corporate) actors of the current "free market" are trying to avoid it at all costs. Never take it for granted : we have to fight for it everyday.
1. Jail
2. Death by hanging
3. Hands chopped
4. Buuurn him! Buuuurn!
5. Single fare on the next Mars mission
6. Brain reformatting (partition type : 82)
7. Becoming CowboyNeal's sexual slave
--- From: your_friend@yahoo.com
:
--- To: you@hotmail.com
--- Subject: Virus alert
WARNING ! You have just received an e-mail virus.
To get rid of it, and to make sure noone else gets caught, do the following
1. Forward this message to all people in your address book.
2. Format your hard drive.
Simple, huh ?
Everybody would be stinkin' smart then ?
"Massive" ? Phew ! This is gross propaganda from Sharon. And since it's all about bashing France, a fair number of media in the US are happy to propagate this kind of crap. There have been a few assaults from isolated individuals (most of them belonging to the Muslim community) on Jews in France. Sure, those incidents should not have happened in the first place. They are due to the fact that some people assimilate the opinion of the Jewish community with Ariel Sharon's politics, which is again a gross misrepresentation of the truth: lots of Israelis strongly oppose the Likud's views.
But Ariel Sharon used those incidents to call for French Jews to migrate to Israel: he needs settlers to achieve his colonization of Palestine, what's more efficient than using a few incidents to scare those people into migrating ?
Besides, there have been demonstrations against the Israeli policy towards Palestinians, demonstrations which included anti-racist movements and human rights movements such as Amnesty International. A couple of thousand people in Paris. There again, those movements were against the policies, not against the Jewish people (or would you call the guys at Amnesty a bunch of antisemitic, racist bastards ?).
Now, to say there were "massive protests against Jews in France" is at best misleading, at worst a gross, deliberate lie.
Come to think about it, that's exactly what the Bush team is doing. Taking away health care and welfare from the poor, and giving it to the rich through tax returns.
So it works both ways, I suppose. But there again, I might be another clueless rabid commie zealot...
That's a good one now... Mod this guy up !
Also note that according to the market quotes, on July 23rd SCOX reaches an all-times high, but it's all downhill from there. We should expect the IBM announcements to accelerate this trend... Anyway, a SEC inquiry should be ordered.
This project is much more interesting. $5000, that's the price of a third-hand car. How many of these puppies can an Al-Qaeda-like organisation build ?
This also shows how stupid it is to evaluate the development level of a country based on its sole GNP. Do they also count the amount of money wasted on cleaning up beaches after an oil spill ? Does that reflect the development level of a country ? I thought that a developed country was one where industrial accidents rarely happened. Are telemarketers actively taking part in the development of a country when only 10% of the people they call will actually buy something? Are parasites of the economic system also considered to be contributors to the GNP? Lawyers? Drug dealers, anyone? Do we count in the same GNP both the amount of money made by the tobacco industry and the amount of money spent on curing lung cancers?
I think it is time to drop this "Gross" National Product criterion for judging the development level of a country. It's a buzz word in the media, but it obfuscates the overal view we can have on the development of a nation.
A : Here's a few:
Free speech
Privacy
Protection from unreasonable search and seizure
the fact that people are innocent until proven guilty
Customs droid : Hello, you are now entering Corporate America. Please leave your obsolete moral values and individual rights at the entrance...
Metamod, rate the "Troll" moderation for the parent as "unfair".
Jules: "You know how they call a quarter-pounder Astronomer with cheese in the UK ?"
Vincent: "How d'they call it ?"
Jules: "They call it an Astronomer Royal"
s/space/environment/
s/space/digital rights/
s/space/intellectual property/
s/space/work legislation/
Oh, wait... Did I read something in the paper this morning ?
Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Darl McBride, Saddam,... er, hold on a second... not sure about the latter though. Maybe he's already there.
As far as WWII is concerned, don't forget that when Hitler attacked France, the French army was directed by a handful of old farts who had made technological choices that proved disastrous. France had concentrated on building a huge line of bunkers on its border with Germany (ligne Maginot) while its air force was ridiculously underequipped compared with the Luftwaffe, and it had nearly no armoured vehicles to counter the PanzerDivizionen. The French army got smashed to tiny bits when the Germans attacked...
I'll stop here, no point in going further on the subject...
Like Microsoft has ever been held accountable for any software failure.
Like they admit immediately that they are at fault.
Like it never takes them more than 3 days to publish a patch.
Like they are going to refund the administration for any inconvenience due to their software (the SQLServer vulnerabilities and worms, anyone ?).
Like it wouldn't be better to have a FS/OSS infrastructure, with a handful of FS/OSS programmers with a good grasp of the code to act immediately in case of a major problem.
These knee jerk reactions are oldhat.
Riiiight. How about stupid excuses such as "They have a firm to blame" ? Why not "they have a dead horse to beat" ?
I think it would be a real change in the mentality and efficiency of everyone in his/her job, not only in the army but also in other administrations, if, instead of having a "blame Microsoft" excuse, people only had a "blame yourself" excuse. That would bring a real level of responsibility and commitment to everyone at every stage in the deployment of IT.
"Dedicated to serving them.". MmmmmppffrrtBWA-HA-HA-HA !!!
But I had a good laugh reading this :-))