Sure, for text and (most) html docs, most) pdfs. Those formats have been designed to not change. Applix I'm not so sure of, and LaTeX certainly has changed.
Everyone wants you to buy an upgrade. I've spent more money on linux software than windows, even, and I don't pirate MS software. SuSE never turns down my money.
MS does more than just pay lip service to backward compatibility. They do work on it. It's just a big job. Linux programs change their file formats frequently, and the programs do not always enforce 100% backwards compatibility. This is not a Microsoft Achille's heel.
The latest Red Hat is not fully compatible with the early Red Hat, either. The point I'm trying to make is it is unlikely you will stay 100% compatible as you advance, change, or delete features.
We can't blame Microsoft for things we do, too. That is not helpful.
There isn't any database as part of OOo. Even Staroffice's database is odd and restrictive (in functionality). Staroffice's access support is just database drivers so calc can access an access database.
If IBM makes access run on linux, then linux customers can use access. If IBM just makes an access driver for OOo, then linux customers still need to run windows.
Opera isn't (as far as I can tell) banking on making all its money by selling directly to end-users. It has a very big push to embedded devices. If the development aspect of Opera is better than IE's, then they have a good chance.
I tried using mouse gestures in firebird 0.7 -- couldn't get them to work consistantly. Gave up, went back to opera. I did have some problems in version 6 of opera getting tabs to come up properly, but since opera has decided that tabs are the One True Way, it's much easier.
This agency needs neither a direction nor an enema. Just close it. The only employees should be some IT guys, DBAs, and a stack of secretaries (people, not furniture) to scan in the technical docs they have. Throw the info up on the web.
When a combo research/engineering agency gets so bad, it has no hope. If mozilla was the right direction for Netscape, killing NASA is the right direction for the US taxpayer.
$80. $80 is a great price for an office suite. It just isn't also a great upgrade price, especially considering the new features.
I imagine they didn't change the manual much, export to pdf is cool, and they've made some bug fixes. Once someone has switched to staroffice a big competitor is OpenOffice. Staroffice 6.0 to OpenOffice 1.1 is fairly painless, you get to keep adabas, a printed manual, and all the staroffice 6.0 templates, plus get almost all the new features.
I would have paid $30 for a download only 7.0 copy, but I wasn't going to pay $80. And I do pay money for software -- I've paid for every Opera upgrade from 3.x, for example.
Sun have had a number of StarOffice customer wins for over 10,000 seats, and a few for the Linux desktop bundle it seems (reading around a bunch of press articles).
While the pricepoint is fine, Sun has erred by not giving any sort of upgrade price option for StarOffice. Hmm, that's not quite right. You can pay full price again...
The Army does use SCO for a bunch of her computer systems, like for Field Artillery fire direction. It's kind of fun to watch people discover that backspace and delete aren't what they're used to.
I think as techies we underestimate how much Windows 95 was used in the workplace, though. Outside of computer companies many employees were on Windows 98 since it was the cheaper computer when they bought it, and the employees didn't rate the additional features / stability of NT.
Windows ME was a strange release for Microsoft. I believe most of the reason it was a big flop was that Win2k already had most of the home use (e.g. Direct X, plug and play, USB) features built in.
Almost everything I wanted to run from Windows 95 ran on Windows 2000. The stuff that didn't looked like it explicitly asked the OS what it was, and since the answer was "NT", decided that Direct X wouldn't work.
Also, since the Windows 95 line was officially dead, and MS has been putting out for years that they would merge the codebases / features, paying for an ME upgrade was silly.
Longhorn is a continuation of the NT codebase and the NT product. It should be much more straightforward for Microsoft to push people to Longhorn than encourage folks to buy ME.
I've seen the registration over-eagernes before, too. My company has a perpetual license for a product, and the vendor expires the key every year. We asked him why he did that, and he said he wanted to ensure his customers talked to him every year.
I guess he didn't mind that they were angry with him when they had their annual "chat."
This method is no different than the current system, you are correct. And the current system causes inflation and screws people on fixed incomes. If this method is followed to the extreme given in the article, the poor will suffer the most, because they get the money last, and they will get the least amount of money.
For pollution, I'd say Eastern Europe would be a good stat. You may disagree since private industry was outlawed, and skews the stats. If the government is only a bigger polluter than private industry because the government is bigger, then private industry is just as clean as the government.
Situations where a person can reap the benefits of an action without incurring the costs of the action break the system.
Here is another place where we agree. The thing is, I think that describes the rampant inflation of handing out tens of thousands of dollars to everyone without any goods in return. And it describes how money is created, today.
there are situations where, if not reined in, a capitalistic system cannot create even remotely equitable outcomes.
Here we agree on the face, but disagree in substance. The capitalistic (free market) system is not supposed to give equitable outcomes. It is supposed to allow equitable opportunites. When inflation is deliberately run up the way described the only people who benefit will be the ones tight in with the government, not the poor.
Corporations don't need to pay robots directly. They do have to pay to maintain capital equipment, people to invent and build new robots, and so on. With the three inputs of land, labor, and capital, the greatest scarcity these days in the West is labor. And it always has been, even since the industrial revolution kicked off. Labor isn't just ditch diggers, but individuals who can choose the best for their own situation, can think ahead, and plan for the future. We're short changing them if we believe they can't fix the problem(?) of having too many goods!
So the Great Unwashed are too stupid to pick the right things to buy? An economy of any size large enough to talk about is too large to have effective central planning. There is no way the planners can know what the right things are to invest in based on the priorites of the people they took the money from, and the priorities of the people the money is going to. Only the individual knows his preferences.
If you're smart enough to hold a franchise, you're smart enough to know if you should buy guns, butter, an education, or bread and circuses!
Anyone who thinks they know better than I do about what I should want, and demands to be able to force other people to pay for him to do it, is a megalomanic. You just aren't that smart -- and the hired bureaucrats aren't either.
I don't think it's possible that a Dean fan would have so many disjointed, non-sequitur ideas all strung together. I just can't figure out if he's been planted by the GOP, to beat in the 2004 election, or Senator John Kerry, to beat in the primaries.
Hear, hear. The robot argument devolves to the myth that if we just had 100% employment, everything would be great. There are plenty of jobs out there, but no-one seems to want to be a grass-blade straightener at the going rate. How could regulating robots, or raising the minimum wage, help this?
The world was not a magical place from 1776-1950, where everyone looked out for the other guy, employers paid their employees as much as they possibly could, and dogs and cats lived together peaceably.
It is extremely dangerous to think that it was all right for others to have Rights and Freedoms previously, but now things are different. So-and-so is no longer nice, supply and demand isn't what it used to be, and others can't be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves.
If it's October 1917, head for the hills. A government is about to deliberately starve tens of millions of people.
Price inflation destroys the wealth of the poor. It's the fixed income people (retired, on the dole, or minimum wage) that get the new money last. The folks who are buddies with the government handing out the money get the new, inflated, money first, and the prices rise. The fixed income folks get the new money last.
Yes, existing debts would be paid off rather quickly. Unless the banks got the government to declare bank holidays and other devices so they wouldn't go bankrupt. Oh, and interest rates would go through the roof! Try buying a house, then. Or even paying off a credit card. This is a textbook recipe for hyperinflation.
In the world today it is the governments that are the Bigasse Corp that pollutes. The Eastern Bloc had terrible environmental conditions, and in the U.S. the Federal Government is the biggest polluter. Regulations don't restrict the regulators very much.
What I do agree with you is that there are places where capitalism does not work. And that place is where there is no protection of private property, and no rule of law.
The Prime Directive is an excuse to let 3rd world planets / countries wallow in their own filth. What sane group of people wouldn't make available (even for trade!) a cure for cancer pill just because they haven't invented a vacuum cleaner yet? Heck, their yardstick for advancement isn't even an idea, it's a physical invention. It's just sad.
Luddite gargabe. If there was a single watershed event, it was the Industrial Revolution in the UK. When we get more machines (read: technology) involved in the economy, we lengthen the structure of captial, and we can reach higher levels of production.
And not just quantity, but quality and type! If you don't like people building a better mousetrap, go be a dirt farmer running Windows XP. Don't drag me into your personal hell.
The bug / missing feature that gets me is the inability to bring the line after an outline number back to a zero margin. It's mandatory for some folks, like law offices and the military.
Since wordperfect is so prevalent in law offices, and openoffice can't be bumped off there, I'm sure it has other minor problems that turn into big problems when you have to do it that way.
Rumored to be on the list for 2.0, but that doesn't help anyone in the short term.
I saw on another report that it was "more than 100 artillery rounds." 100 rounds is about a battalion 6, so it's 18 howitzers * 6 rounds. This could theoretically take 1 minute, probably two or three minutes.
Now, just about anything with MLRS (rockets and missles) counts as heavy, but I haven't seen much about this.
That's terrible analogy. If you got a faster computer with more memory, could you compile software faster? Just the same, when the US Army moved from the old 12 series radios to the new SINCGARS, frequency hopping radios, they got more capabilities. This guy is just saying to upgrade your radio.
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Everyone wants you to buy an upgrade. I've spent more money on linux software than windows, even, and I don't pirate MS software. SuSE never turns down my money.
MS does more than just pay lip service to backward compatibility. They do work on it. It's just a big job. Linux programs change their file formats frequently, and the programs do not always enforce 100% backwards compatibility. This is not a Microsoft Achille's heel.
We can't blame Microsoft for things we do, too. That is not helpful.
Troll. Linux isn't compatible with linux, either. My Fedora packages don't work right on Yggdrasil. The world hasn't ended.
If IBM makes access run on linux, then linux customers can use access. If IBM just makes an access driver for OOo, then linux customers still need to run windows.
Opera isn't (as far as I can tell) banking on making all its money by selling directly to end-users. It has a very big push to embedded devices. If the development aspect of Opera is better than IE's, then they have a good chance.
I tried using mouse gestures in firebird 0.7 -- couldn't get them to work consistantly. Gave up, went back to opera. I did have some problems in version 6 of opera getting tabs to come up properly, but since opera has decided that tabs are the One True Way, it's much easier.
Probably its best market, though, is the embedded devices. I like it on the desktop, but it has to keep bug-compatible with IE for display.
When a combo research/engineering agency gets so bad, it has no hope. If mozilla was the right direction for Netscape, killing NASA is the right direction for the US taxpayer.
I imagine they didn't change the manual much, export to pdf is cool, and they've made some bug fixes. Once someone has switched to staroffice a big competitor is OpenOffice. Staroffice 6.0 to OpenOffice 1.1 is fairly painless, you get to keep adabas, a printed manual, and all the staroffice 6.0 templates, plus get almost all the new features.
I would have paid $30 for a download only 7.0 copy, but I wasn't going to pay $80. And I do pay money for software -- I've paid for every Opera upgrade from 3.x, for example.
While the pricepoint is fine, Sun has erred by not giving any sort of upgrade price option for StarOffice. Hmm, that's not quite right. You can pay full price again...
The Army does use SCO for a bunch of her computer systems, like for Field Artillery fire direction. It's kind of fun to watch people discover that backspace and delete aren't what they're used to.
I think as techies we underestimate how much Windows 95 was used in the workplace, though. Outside of computer companies many employees were on Windows 98 since it was the cheaper computer when they bought it, and the employees didn't rate the additional features / stability of NT.
Almost everything I wanted to run from Windows 95 ran on Windows 2000. The stuff that didn't looked like it explicitly asked the OS what it was, and since the answer was "NT", decided that Direct X wouldn't work.
Also, since the Windows 95 line was officially dead, and MS has been putting out for years that they would merge the codebases / features, paying for an ME upgrade was silly.
Longhorn is a continuation of the NT codebase and the NT product. It should be much more straightforward for Microsoft to push people to Longhorn than encourage folks to buy ME.
I guess he didn't mind that they were angry with him when they had their annual "chat."
For pollution, I'd say Eastern Europe would be a good stat. You may disagree since private industry was outlawed, and skews the stats. If the government is only a bigger polluter than private industry because the government is bigger, then private industry is just as clean as the government.
Here is another place where we agree. The thing is, I think that describes the rampant inflation of handing out tens of thousands of dollars to everyone without any goods in return. And it describes how money is created, today. Here we agree on the face, but disagree in substance. The capitalistic (free market) system is not supposed to give equitable outcomes. It is supposed to allow equitable opportunites. When inflation is deliberately run up the way described the only people who benefit will be the ones tight in with the government, not the poor.Corporations don't need to pay robots directly. They do have to pay to maintain capital equipment, people to invent and build new robots, and so on. With the three inputs of land, labor, and capital, the greatest scarcity these days in the West is labor. And it always has been, even since the industrial revolution kicked off. Labor isn't just ditch diggers, but individuals who can choose the best for their own situation, can think ahead, and plan for the future. We're short changing them if we believe they can't fix the problem(?) of having too many goods!
If you're smart enough to hold a franchise, you're smart enough to know if you should buy guns, butter, an education, or bread and circuses!
Anyone who thinks they know better than I do about what I should want, and demands to be able to force other people to pay for him to do it, is a megalomanic. You just aren't that smart -- and the hired bureaucrats aren't either.
And we're both off-topic.
I don't think it's possible that a Dean fan would have so many disjointed, non-sequitur ideas all strung together. I just can't figure out if he's been planted by the GOP, to beat in the 2004 election, or Senator John Kerry, to beat in the primaries.
Hear, hear. The robot argument devolves to the myth that if we just had 100% employment, everything would be great. There are plenty of jobs out there, but no-one seems to want to be a grass-blade straightener at the going rate. How could regulating robots, or raising the minimum wage, help this?
It is extremely dangerous to think that it was all right for others to have Rights and Freedoms previously, but now things are different. So-and-so is no longer nice, supply and demand isn't what it used to be, and others can't be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves.
If it's October 1917, head for the hills. A government is about to deliberately starve tens of millions of people.
Yes, existing debts would be paid off rather quickly. Unless the banks got the government to declare bank holidays and other devices so they wouldn't go bankrupt. Oh, and interest rates would go through the roof! Try buying a house, then. Or even paying off a credit card. This is a textbook recipe for hyperinflation.
In the world today it is the governments that are the Bigasse Corp that pollutes. The Eastern Bloc had terrible environmental conditions, and in the U.S. the Federal Government is the biggest polluter. Regulations don't restrict the regulators very much.
What I do agree with you is that there are places where capitalism does not work. And that place is where there is no protection of private property, and no rule of law.
The Prime Directive is an excuse to let 3rd world planets / countries wallow in their own filth. What sane group of people wouldn't make available (even for trade!) a cure for cancer pill just because they haven't invented a vacuum cleaner yet? Heck, their yardstick for advancement isn't even an idea, it's a physical invention. It's just sad.
And not just quantity, but quality and type! If you don't like people building a better mousetrap, go be a dirt farmer running Windows XP. Don't drag me into your personal hell.
Since wordperfect is so prevalent in law offices, and openoffice can't be bumped off there, I'm sure it has other minor problems that turn into big problems when you have to do it that way.
Rumored to be on the list for 2.0, but that doesn't help anyone in the short term.
I saw on another report that it was "more than 100 artillery rounds." 100 rounds is about a battalion 6, so it's 18 howitzers * 6 rounds. This could theoretically take 1 minute, probably two or three minutes.
Now, just about anything with MLRS (rockets and missles) counts as heavy, but I haven't seen much about this.
That's terrible analogy. If you got a faster computer with more memory, could you compile software faster? Just the same, when the US Army moved from the old 12 series radios to the new SINCGARS, frequency hopping radios, they got more capabilities. This guy is just saying to upgrade your radio.