No. No it's not. OpenOffice sucks. It's usability is worse than MS Office
Oddly enough, I've been using OpenOffice since its early StarOffice days (before it was bought out by Sun). Its kept its UI generally stable and I've never had to waste my time learning new menu layouts at each new version release. It's available where ever I might need it.
Personally, I always remove Microsoft Office and replace it with OpenOffice. OO's the known quantity. MSO is the one with the dodgy shifting target document formats.
it's compatibility filters regularly screw up simple files
If Microsoft doesn't care if its own Office app is compatible with older copies of Office, why should I? Need to transfer a document to someone else? Use PDF, RTF or TXT.
They DO care about WindowsMedia 10
Sucks to be them. Everyone else has heard of Videolan's VLC.
Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed
Ah, so you're the one who doesn't use Windows Update, clean the viruses from your PC or run defrag every once in a while.
You want linux to really be valuable to people
Nope. Personally, I want Microsoft to buy out the QNX folks and impliment Windows 7 as its GUI. Then create a nice sandboxed emulator to handle all the old Win32 app cruft.
I have, many times. Which is why I commented that it's an annoyance. It's poor UI which sees me dragging a column around instead of adjusting column width half the time.
The Finder is by no means perfect, but you don't have to make stuff up to criticise it.
Another annoyance: Finder doesn't provide any cursor feedback when your mouse is above a column resizer and able to be clicked. You have to guess.
There's a lot to like about Mac OS X generally, but, honestly, Apple needs to pick up a copy of Windows 95 and take a look at the user experience side of Windows Explorer. Finder being worse than a file browser nearly 13 years old is something they should be horribly ashamed over.
I do wish people would use Google or Wikipedia for such simple questions...
See the list of filesystems listed under "Distributed fault tolerant file systems", "Distributed parallel file systems" and "Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems" here.
Given the terribly cluttered interface is just one of the things driving people away from Vista, you may or may not want to ignore those Vista Guidelines;-).
Be prepared to use at least two design styles. There's the Mac way (and you'll find a lot of good guidelines in their Human Interface Guidelines for that), but, follow those on Windows and X11 and your applications will look rather strange and not at all platform native; even when using native UI controls.
I don't have any suggestions for books on good design, but, here's a classic site which covers some bad design mistakes: The User Interface Hall of Shame. The examples are fairly dated now, but, the principles remain true.
An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.
Of course you can. It's currently called the magnetic strip. Can't be read from a distance, just with a reader. Go high tech with the basic principle and you'll use NVRAM or a DVD-RW optical stripe. Go high tech/low tech and you can have the data written in highly miniaturized bar codes, too small for the naked eye but, again, visible to readers.
Government will know what it wants to know know about you. That fight was lost decades ago. The questions remaining are: (1) whether that right is annoying at the day to day level, (2) whether we can at least benefit in lower paperwork from it (rather than being punished for clerical errors), and, (3) whether we can stop everyone else stealing our details in the process, given most governments are managed at the bureaucratic level by incompetent baboons.
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
Too convenient, less intrusive and far less paperwork for the bureaucrats to shuffle when compared to the existing 100 points of ID check;-). Seriously though, a card with RFID deserved to be killed dead: highly dodgy for anyone to be able to scan your ID from a distance (and potentially steal it).
ID cards and government database sharing are useful to governments for clubbing individuals who've messed up their paperwork. An ID card which works in our favour by reducing the red tape and paperwork we must deal with by auto-filling in the data they already have... now that would be a winner.
Just in case the Slashdot editors didn't get the memo: A news story like "Dog bites man" isn't interesting. Show me a story with "Man bites dog"... now that gets attention.
First of all, I personally know off-hand of five or six firms and small businesses who are still using UnixWare or OpenServer for their everyday operations. The stupidest thing for them to do would be to move away from these OSes. Why is that? Because their systems are working just fine. Their staff are trained to use the systems, and the systems themselves are stable and perform the functions that they should.
Well, no. The number of people who have ever used (let alone who still remember) SCO is tiny now. Any time a SCO setup hires someone, they'll generally have to train them in SCO's antiquated, primative dinosaur UNIX as their experience will most likely be in *BSD/Linux. There's precious few companies that would ever consider hiring a novice and teaching them sysadmin skills from scratch.
Second of all, porting the software that runs on OpenServer or UnixWare to Linux or BSD may not be an option.
The problem's almost never software available on SCO not being available for *BSD/Linux but the other way around.
But if the prices are too high, someone will come in and undercut them.
And that somebody has far shorter pockets than the established monopolist who's had years to build up their assets. The monopolist undercuts the new entrant in a price war until the new entrant goes out of business or exits the market. Then the monopolist resumes charging as before.
I assume you are not in the US because you add an extraneous U to the word "labor" that does not belong there.
Every other English speaking country spells "labour" with a "u". Your early American dictionary writers were illiterate;-).
In the US, almost all labor markets/areas have a wide variety of jobs available.
Heh. The boiler maker can easily transfer their skills into secretarial work and the factory hand can easily get a job as an electrician. Not. Unless you have full (or close to full) employment -- and I know for sure you don't -- not all people can pick and choose their employers.
Monopolies, in fact, cannot exist without laws to protect their power.
The other way around, actually. Monopolies will be created by the free market as a result of competition. In a competition someone will eventually win, you see. Without laws, these monopolies will then use their market power to completely demolish new entrants by pricing them out of the market until the entrant's reserves are gone. Then raise the prices up and gouging of the market continues as before.
This is why the US has had such strong anti-monopoly laws. They've seen it in action.
Corporations otherwise are naturally perfectly accountable: if a corporation sucks, no one will work for it or do business with it.
You seem to be assuming a labour market with full employment, where people can pick and choose their employers. Most, particularly in the trades, don't have that luxury. They take the job that's available because jobs are scarce.
Oh great. Now you'll have the lunar Right like Alan Jones ranting on about how there are vans full of 'The Elite' listening for whether they're saying "differently abled person" instead of "worthless cripple"...
They're useful for understanding how the world of software patent got to where it is and what might be done to fix it.'
Well, the original plan was to leave the US system to fester and finally collapse under its own weight while our system just rolled on in comparative sanity. Alas, our idiotic elected neoconservatives in parliament went and signed us up to an astonishingly bad unilateral "Free Trade Agreement" with the US and now we're just as screwed.
Not too surprising: "Lets combine three genres and have a Dawson's Creek cast in the American Wild West in Space. That'll sell!"
Cute concept, except that it alienates a significant number of fans of both Science Fiction and Westerns and seriously stretches the boundaries of the audience's ability to suspend disbelief when trying to tie the conventions of each genre together.
MLB may actually have a leg to stand on here. If I were to print and sell my own baseball cards, I'd lose the case in court.
Can't see why. Unless you're using photos whose copyright you don't own (or whose copyright hasn't expired) or claiming they're officially sanctioned the league's governing body, there shouldn't be a problem.
I'll take them seriously when I see them installing MS Windows Server 2003 onto an 80386SX-33 with 4M RAM and a 256M hardrive.
Linux (and most of the other open source Unix-alikes; Free/Net/Open-BSD, etc) blows Microsoft out of the water as far as effectiveness on legacy hardware goes. No contest. I can't even imagine MS Windows Server 2003 surviving too well on a Pentium 2, let alone something really crusty.
How hard can it be? Video stores (at least here in Australia) have managed it for years: X and R rated videos on separate shelves, video clerks manage to not lease videos to minors because the rating is clearly marked. Games are just another medium.
Incompetent implimentation in the past doesn't mean that game rating is a bad idea, just that it needs a national censorship regime to clearly impliment a standard that can be applied across all states.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
Possibly true for the US. Not so elsewhere. In the UK and Australia though, Amstrad's PC clones were at the AUD $1000 price point in 1988 (mine was the PPC512S "luggable" with one of the first "CGA emulating" LCD screens) but there were also similar desktop models around. I used to do my highschool and uni assignments on that with Wordstar and did a bit of programming with Borland Turbo-Pascal 3 (which was released for both DOS and CP/M);-).
If we're excluding IBM PC clones, some home micros were quite affordable in the early days. AUD $100 bought me my very first computer: a DSE VZ-200 (aka Laser 200 in Germany, Texet TX8000 in the UK) in 1983, while schools in Australia were generally stocked with Microbees.
Have you ever actually tried to fix a bug in a large software system.
Yep, it's easy provided the workplace isn't so bureaucratic that they allow broken systems to stay broken long enough that people are forced to write nasty work-arounds which are then nasty to remove.
Chris, this is why good programmers make their software modular. Someone's found a fault with, say, your FSMNA Widget parsing? That's FSMNA_Widget_Parser(). Need to find what calls it? grep -r FSMNA_Widget_Parser/path/to/codebase/*. There really should be nothing at all difficult about that.
What this means in large systems is that any simple change needs to get writtren up and reviewed and aproved by some "change control board"
If you've allowed broken code to remain broken that long, you've already lost the war.
Slashdot Mirror
No. No it's not. OpenOffice sucks. It's usability is worse than MS Office
Oddly enough, I've been using OpenOffice since its early StarOffice days (before it was bought out by Sun). Its kept its UI generally stable and I've never had to waste my time learning new menu layouts at each new version release. It's available where ever I might need it.
Personally, I always remove Microsoft Office and replace it with OpenOffice. OO's the known quantity. MSO is the one with the dodgy shifting target document formats.
it's compatibility filters regularly screw up simple files
If Microsoft doesn't care if its own Office app is compatible with older copies of Office, why should I? Need to transfer a document to someone else? Use PDF, RTF or TXT.
They DO care about WindowsMedia 10
Sucks to be them. Everyone else has heard of Videolan's VLC.
Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed
Ah, so you're the one who doesn't use Windows Update, clean the viruses from your PC or run defrag every once in a while.
You want linux to really be valuable to people
Nope. Personally, I want Microsoft to buy out the QNX folks and impliment Windows 7 as its GUI. Then create a nice sandboxed emulator to handle all the old Win32 app cruft.
Yes it does. Try it and see.
I have, many times. Which is why I commented that it's an annoyance. It's poor UI which sees me dragging a column around instead of adjusting column width half the time.
The Finder is by no means perfect, but you don't have to make stuff up to criticise it.
Idiot.
Another annoyance: Finder doesn't provide any cursor feedback when your mouse is above a column resizer and able to be clicked. You have to guess.
There's a lot to like about Mac OS X generally, but, honestly, Apple needs to pick up a copy of Windows 95 and take a look at the user experience side of Windows Explorer. Finder being worse than a file browser nearly 13 years old is something they should be horribly ashamed over.
I do wish people would use Google or Wikipedia for such simple questions...
See the list of filesystems listed under "Distributed fault tolerant file systems", "Distributed parallel file systems" and "Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems" here.
Given the terribly cluttered interface is just one of the things driving people away from Vista, you may or may not want to ignore those Vista Guidelines ;-).
Be prepared to use at least two design styles. There's the Mac way (and you'll find a lot of good guidelines in their Human Interface Guidelines for that), but, follow those on Windows and X11 and your applications will look rather strange and not at all platform native; even when using native UI controls.
I don't have any suggestions for books on good design, but, here's a classic site which covers some bad design mistakes: The User Interface Hall of Shame. The examples are fairly dated now, but, the principles remain true.
An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.
Of course you can. It's currently called the magnetic strip. Can't be read from a distance, just with a reader. Go high tech with the basic principle and you'll use NVRAM or a DVD-RW optical stripe. Go high tech/low tech and you can have the data written in highly miniaturized bar codes, too small for the naked eye but, again, visible to readers.
Government will know what it wants to know know about you. That fight was lost decades ago. The questions remaining are: (1) whether that right is annoying at the day to day level, (2) whether we can at least benefit in lower paperwork from it (rather than being punished for clerical errors), and, (3) whether we can stop everyone else stealing our details in the process, given most governments are managed at the bureaucratic level by incompetent baboons.
What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?
Too convenient, less intrusive and far less paperwork for the bureaucrats to shuffle when compared to the existing 100 points of ID check ;-). Seriously though, a card with RFID deserved to be killed dead: highly dodgy for anyone to be able to scan your ID from a distance (and potentially steal it).
ID cards and government database sharing are useful to governments for clubbing individuals who've messed up their paperwork. An ID card which works in our favour by reducing the red tape and paperwork we must deal with by auto-filling in the data they already have... now that would be a winner.
I use a Bittorrent client that runs on curses. No fancy-schmancy Tcl for me!
Not necessarily so. Tcl/Tk has had a Curses extension for years... ;-).
For the themed widgets, instead of:
... you'd use:
"MPAA Boss Makes Case for ISP Content Filtering"
Just in case the Slashdot editors didn't get the memo: A news story like "Dog bites man" isn't interesting. Show me a story with "Man bites dog"... now that gets attention.
First of all, I personally know off-hand of five or six firms and small businesses who are still using UnixWare or OpenServer for their everyday operations. The stupidest thing for them to do would be to move away from these OSes. Why is that? Because their systems are working just fine. Their staff are trained to use the systems, and the systems themselves are stable and perform the functions that they should.
Well, no. The number of people who have ever used (let alone who still remember) SCO is tiny now. Any time a SCO setup hires someone, they'll generally have to train them in SCO's antiquated, primative dinosaur UNIX as their experience will most likely be in *BSD/Linux. There's precious few companies that would ever consider hiring a novice and teaching them sysadmin skills from scratch.
Second of all, porting the software that runs on OpenServer or UnixWare to Linux or BSD may not be an option.
The problem's almost never software available on SCO not being available for *BSD/Linux but the other way around.
And that somebody has far shorter pockets than the established monopolist who's had years to build up their assets. The monopolist undercuts the new entrant in a price war until the new entrant goes out of business or exits the market. Then the monopolist resumes charging as before.
I assume you are not in the US because you add an extraneous U to the word "labor" that does not belong there.
Every other English speaking country spells "labour" with a "u". Your early American dictionary writers were illiterate ;-).
In the US, almost all labor markets/areas have a wide variety of jobs available.
Heh. The boiler maker can easily transfer their skills into secretarial work and the factory hand can easily get a job as an electrician. Not. Unless you have full (or close to full) employment -- and I know for sure you don't -- not all people can pick and choose their employers.
The other way around, actually. Monopolies will be created by the free market as a result of competition. In a competition someone will eventually win, you see. Without laws, these monopolies will then use their market power to completely demolish new entrants by pricing them out of the market until the entrant's reserves are gone. Then raise the prices up and gouging of the market continues as before.
This is why the US has had such strong anti-monopoly laws. They've seen it in action.
Corporations otherwise are naturally perfectly accountable: if a corporation sucks, no one will work for it or do business with it.
You seem to be assuming a labour market with full employment, where people can pick and choose their employers. Most, particularly in the trades, don't have that luxury. They take the job that's available because jobs are scarce.
Oh great. Now you'll have the lunar Right like Alan Jones ranting on about how there are vans full of 'The Elite' listening for whether they're saying "differently abled person" instead of "worthless cripple"...
It's almost certainly an oblique reference to the Brazillian Soldiers joke:
Well, the original plan was to leave the US system to fester and finally collapse under its own weight while our system just rolled on in comparative sanity. Alas, our idiotic elected neoconservatives in parliament went and signed us up to an astonishingly bad unilateral "Free Trade Agreement" with the US and now we're just as screwed.
Not too surprising: "Lets combine three genres and have a Dawson's Creek cast in the American Wild West in Space. That'll sell!"
Cute concept, except that it alienates a significant number of fans of both Science Fiction and Westerns and seriously stretches the boundaries of the audience's ability to suspend disbelief when trying to tie the conventions of each genre together.
Can't see why. Unless you're using photos whose copyright you don't own (or whose copyright hasn't expired) or claiming they're officially sanctioned the league's governing body, there shouldn't be a problem.
Could it be that there are people still living there who experienced a time when "everything went wrong and nobody was free anymore"?
You're German and you've forgotten fascism already? Sheesh!
The pun wouldn't work in a Christian country. Lent's when people fast ;-).
I'll take them seriously when I see them installing MS Windows Server 2003 onto an 80386SX-33 with 4M RAM and a 256M hardrive. Linux (and most of the other open source Unix-alikes; Free/Net/Open-BSD, etc) blows Microsoft out of the water as far as effectiveness on legacy hardware goes. No contest. I can't even imagine MS Windows Server 2003 surviving too well on a Pentium 2, let alone something really crusty.
Incompetent implimentation in the past doesn't mean that game rating is a bad idea, just that it needs a national censorship regime to clearly impliment a standard that can be applied across all states.
Possibly true for the US. Not so elsewhere. In the UK and Australia though, Amstrad's PC clones were at the AUD $1000 price point in 1988 (mine was the PPC512S "luggable" with one of the first "CGA emulating" LCD screens) but there were also similar desktop models around. I used to do my highschool and uni assignments on that with Wordstar and did a bit of programming with Borland Turbo-Pascal 3 (which was released for both DOS and CP/M) ;-).
If we're excluding IBM PC clones, some home micros were quite affordable in the early days. AUD $100 bought me my very first computer: a DSE VZ-200 (aka Laser 200 in Germany, Texet TX8000 in the UK) in 1983, while schools in Australia were generally stocked with Microbees.
Yep, it's easy provided the workplace isn't so bureaucratic that they allow broken systems to stay broken long enough that people are forced to write nasty work-arounds which are then nasty to remove.
Chris, this is why good programmers make their software modular. Someone's found a fault with, say, your FSMNA Widget parsing? That's FSMNA_Widget_Parser(). Need to find what calls it? grep -r FSMNA_Widget_Parser /path/to/codebase/*. There really should be nothing at all difficult about that.
What this means in large systems is that any simple change needs to get writtren up and reviewed and aproved by some "change control board"
If you've allowed broken code to remain broken that long, you've already lost the war.