You know what, ICANN (private company in California) is in control of the DNS root servers. They can turn off unruly TLDs unilaterally. Only then will you find out that the spam won't stop because it really comes from your own country. But it sure is easier to wipe other countries from the face of the internet than to tackle the problem at home, isn't it?
Knock off the inferiority complex. Yes, most spam comes from the US, which is undebated. However, if a law is passed only in the US, I'm assuming most of these assholes will move offshore like the guys who run gambling sites, as most of them for some crazy reason think being rich and in Aruba is better than being poor and in jail. Additionally, most spam comes, at some point, through an open relay in Hong Kong, Korea, China, etc. Don't believe that, I'll send you the damned headers. So the point is, even if Ralsky lives here, proving he sent it can be tough, because a server that doesn't even block external SMTP probably won't keep stellar records of who used such services.
And quite frankly, any country that, after a theoretical treaty was signed, WILLFULLY participated in spam has no right to participate in a world that allows free email. Additionally, yes, we could solve the problem unilaterally since ICANN is in the US. But you whiners bitch when we make any decision unilaterally without consulting places like Myanmar first, so my plan made it an international thing so everyone was involved in the decision making process. I swear, some people do nothing BUT bitch.
Let's see here....I have some wood and a blanket for smoke signals. I have a mirror, that might work when it's sunny. I also have a big steel barrel I can bang Morse code on real loud. Oh, and none of them are standards compliant - the wood is wet, the blanket is moth-eaten, the mirror is broken, and I don't actually know Morse code.
I think this is how Peltier elements work to some extent. The electrons want to reach an equlibrium between the differing densities of the n-type and-p-type semiconductors, but the aplication of current interfers with this and somehow causes the electrons to transfer thermal energy.
Right, electrons would like to flow from the n-type to the p-type. Actually, it's not the current exactly that does it, but the applied voltage that flattens the E vs. penetration depth curves. This same voltage generates a current. Splitting hairs, I know, but that's what I do.;)
Have all the countries with TLD's get together and sign a treaty supporting extradition of spammers. If anyone refuses, have the signing countries turn off those TLD's until they comply. At a minimum advocate that servers in their respective countries do so. When.hk finds itself unable to communicate with America and W. Europe, for instance, they would likely comply quickly.
...in the sense that a thermocouple does sort of work on the same basic principle, in that one of the metals donates electrons to the other, so that they have the same Fermi level at their junction. If you had used semiconductors instead of metals (you wouldn't, but still), you'd have a region where the materials electrically "alloy," in that there would be a depletion region where the electrons have energies different than either material individually. But you're right of course, there's no alloying in a thermocouple in order to create a good junction, and metals don't show a depletion region or bandbending over any measureable distance.
Again, this is my idealism speaking when I say "Musicians care about the music. Artists care about the art. Money, or the lack of it, is just something we have to live with, and if we can get it from our arts, so much the better."
I think it would be reasonable to assume that when people start caring about the money, what they create tends to no longer be Art.;) So if you hold the term "artist" to the higher standard you seem to be using, I'd generally agree.
You're quite right, you can't change the work function of a pure metal - but if you have a blend of materials, they will have to equilibrate, as the energies of the electrons in one material will have higher energies than the electrons in the other. Therefore, electrons will move from one material to the other like water flowing downhill, until the average energies of the electrons in the material are uniform between domains (or atoms) of the different materials. This yields a single Fermi level, which is described as the average energy of the electrons in the material. By varying the quantities of the materials (here, nickel and silicon), you can change the fermi level of the material, thereby changing the work function of the material. So, while you can't change the work function of a pure metal (you'd have to apply an impossibly obscene amount of charge to do so), you can make different blends.
Thank you. If musicians (with business sense) ran the business, consumer costs would probably be limited to equipment, maintinence, delivery and related costs, with enough profit margins to keep up with technology. This way the musicians can concentrate on making their music and fans still have easy access to it.
Wow, are YOU naive! Musicians like Metallica, huh? Dr. Dre? Brittney? Eminem? All of which have come out in support of the RIAA and against their fans? Face it, as soon as anyone gets access to money, they get greedy. It's human nature, and there are very few people immune to that.
The only people who say otherwise are those like you and me who have never had the opportunity to be rich. It's damned easy to sit here and say "I wouldn't act like that if I were rich!" I'm sure Gates said it too when he was 18 and idealistic. Now he's in his 40's, rich, and stifles software innovation for exercise.
As a musician, I see no need to make money from my work. It would help, and I'd probably be able to focus on it more if money came back from it, but it is nowhere near nessecary.
Like I said, that's because you haven't seen the money. Your perspective might change then.
It's different, that does not mean it's worse. I Actually find the menu structure more logical in OOo than in MSO. E.g. headers/footers (Writer/Word): in OOo: Format/Page.../Header in MSO: View/Header Footer. In OOo you get to see an editable frame in in your page, in Word it's hidden in a dialog... Which one is the more inuitive, if you never used either ? Your issue is being more used to MSO than to OOo, I think.
You know, that's always a valid point, and I was attempting to account for that when I commented - though of course that's impossible to achieve completely. Naturally, things may have changed a bit, but frequently it seemed like they put things in the most asinine places on the menus - I love trying new software, so I am very tolerant of a little menu hide-n-seek, but there were times where I couldn't fathom why they made the choices they did. Unfortunately, I can't back myself up intelligently, as it's been a while since I've tried OO. When 1.1 comes out as release, I'm sure we'll have some version of this debate again. Perhaps then I'll be on your side, we'll see.;)
I realy hate to use Word: it has a bad UI, encourages terrible formatting, wreaks havoc with image locations in documents etc.
God, no doubt. I'm not saying that Word is a good word processor, mind you - it's hideous, and has almost made me cry on a number of occasions. And if OO had the marketshare, and it was MS that couldn't open their file formats, then I expect my comments would, for the most part, reverse. And I will give the new version a chance. Quite frankly, if anything I've wondered why OO mimicked some of MS Word's retarded "features." And I will give OO kudos on one thing - when you get used to that autocomplete feature, it rocks. A lot. Particularly for a scientist who is frequently reduced to typing a lot of rather large words.
OTH, I like Excel, it does behave (it has the same disorderly style of menus, though, but you can get used to that, I guess)
Honestly, the Excel vs. OO debate is, in my opinion, where OO crashes and burns. I would love to hear from someone who prefers the OO spreadsheet, and what work you do in it. Preferably, someone who uses functions other than AVERAGE and SUM.
I use MSOffice at work, and have OO1.1beta2 at home. When I want to look at something from work at home, OO handles it just fine. I'm sure that you could find something that doesn't work, but I haven't.
I will admit, I haven't tried 1.1 yet, as their regular versions are buggy enough to throw me off their betas. My attitude may change when I see that though, so assume my comments are restricted to 1.0.
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''? If your mission in life is to run MSOffice, then you will be happiest running Windows and MSOffice.
Sadly, I was stating that in relative terms...to MS Office! I know, hard to believe, and trust me, I'm not trying to sell copies of MS Office. I spend a decent amount of time cursing it, and have weaned myself away from it as much as humanly possible, but there are things you need an office suite for. Namely, when some jackass sends you a.doc file with crap embedded in it and you need to work with it. Which happens to me all the time.
But I swear, OO functions worse that MSO in general usability. I'll admit, OO had some cute features I really liked (like a very functional equation editor), but it didn't overcome the way it took over my desktop and sucked RAM like a vampire...again, even compared to MSO.
If your mission is to work with data, and produce structured documents, you shouldn't be using an office suite at all.
Well, yes and no. What I do is pretty much what you say, working with data and making structured documents. I'm in grad school and I do a bunch of work with signal processing sorts of things. But when your boss is tied to MS Office, you have little choice, as horrible as it may be compared to LaTeX for writing a paper for publication (ie, "structured document"). And I use Matlab for working with data, but there are a few graphical things matlab does badly, like its errorbar capability is fairly poor compared to excel. Now I know that's a small thing, but that's the last time I used windows and it was last week. So there are still some things that I just have to be able to do, and excel is frequently the best thing I have for the job. And I believe I mentioned by being held hostage to MS Word, much to my chagrin.
So I don't want to give the wrong impression - I hate MS Office. I would give anything for a decent office suite that does what it does without crashing, taking over my desktop, and requiring me to spend a long time trying to figure out ill-placed menu schemes. When that comes with MS compaitbility, I'll jump all over it. But that's not here now, especially not OO. Though I guarantee I will try 1.1 as soon as it goes general release.
The problems you mention are problems with MS Office compatibility, not as StarOffice/OpenOffice.org as an independent program.
First, I'll debate usability and the general UI of star office all day long - it's horrible. It's also slow and bloated, all things that have nothing to do with file formats. And, as I said, the spreadsheet is completely unusable.
Additionally, interoperability with MS is a requirement - there's no such thing as an "independent program" anymore for 99% of the population. You can say it sucks for them that they have to perfectly reverse engineer the MS file format, but that's life. The business world requires MS compatibility. So you can say it's not their fault, but it's irrelevant.
There's nothing wrong with it for creating documents in most other formats, and at least for me, it's good enough so I can read MS Office documents not available in other formats, which is all that I need MS compatibility for.
I can show you a lot of MS documents that got so corrupted as to be unusable. This will be an issue of how complex a word processor you need, of course - but if you only need something simple, then I can recommend a lot of WP's that are faster and smaller than 00. Put it this way - it doesn't have the functionality or interoperability of office, and it doesn't have the speed of other options, so it doesn't win in any case.
Luckily nobody demands that I produce documents in the MS Office formats. If they did, perhaps I'd have to purchase MS Office (for MacOS X).
This isn't a troll or anything, but what do you DO? Are you in school? Because when you get a job, you WILL have to use MS, unless you are lucky enough to be a hard-core unix geex, at which point you'll end up at a place that lives in LaTeX-nirvana. Otherwise, get ready for shitsville like the rest of us.
I've been using exclusively OO.o for a number of months. I recently installed MS Office 2003 b2 and took it for a run, and while tight and very modern, it's full of many crazy features and the XML is writes is hopelessly unreadable.
I haven't used Office 2003, I will admit, so what are all these crazy features? Not being familiar with it, I'm not sure what you mean. As for XML...yeah, people had this idea that all these companies that previously used proprietary file formats now will make them clear...yeah, right.;)
Most people take open source apps for granted, but this is one app that is DEFINITELY worth your cash. Ifd you really want to be part of a free software community, buy StarOffice 6 from Sun.
I think this is the clearest statement here. Buy Star/Openoffice if you want to be part of the free sofware community. This is true, and that needs to be your biggest criterion if you choose OO. I'm not trying to flame here, but if your priority is getting things to work in a heterogeneous setting where you can't make everyone use OO, then it's not a reasonable choice.
I'd argue: why is there a social security tax at all? As I said in another post, if the govt can't provide an economic/social reason for separate taxation then all tax should be income tax.
You're completely correct. Ultimately I'd like to fight both battles, but one at a time here;). The first problem is that investors don't pay it AT ALL - the second problem is that, even for working people, it's a flat tax. Short term, I'd like to see either changed, I have no hope for both.
Of course, I'll tell you why no one does anything about it - it goes by the attention of the typical journalists, so the government basically gave a tax break to the rich without too many people figuring it out. Journalists aren't exactly finance experts, typically, and they figure that if the rich are paying income tax at twice the rate as poor people that things must be OK.
Naturally, with all the tax loopholes that exist, that's a joke. So it's just another tax break for the wealthy that the public's too stupid to figure out.
Look, modding that -1 Flamebait simply proves that we have too many damned Linux/OSS fanboys on here who are incapable of objectively looking at a problem. He's not flaming anyone, even if you happen to be an OO developer. Not liking that someone's right doesn't count as flamebait.
Outside of the fact thats it's free, OO is nowhere near ready for use in a business setting. Anything more than a simple letter gets screwed up in the word processor, and the WP is the most advanced part of 00. If you have anything embedded in an MS document, you can almost say goodbye upon opening it. When you have a busines, you don't have the option of telling clients "Hey, could you resend that in Word 2.0 format, my word processor is incompatible with any version of Word put out in the last decade." That's just not an option. Hey, I hate MS as much as most of you, but I wouldn't shoot my business in the foot or lose my job over my zealotry, right or wrong.
And don't even think about defending the spreadsheet. It might be OK for balancing your checkbook, but don't try graphing, as it's horrible. Also, even moderately advanced spreadsheet functions (that I use very often) are missing from MS Office. As for compatibility, graphs often lose their axes among other problems.
The presentation software has similar problems - font issues (admittedly, much of the font problems were in Linux, so it's hard to isolate), images getting trahsed, other embedded stuff getting completely lost, etc.
Bottom line is OpenOffice is NOT READY for a business setting. I tried like hell, I really did. It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke, and how sad is that considering their competition in the matter is frigging MICROSOFT!
There are other options if your goal is running an office suite under linux (obviously these don't help you if you're trying to avoid MS): codeweavers crossover is a little buggy, but if they've made it more stable since I gave up on it, well, it's better than OO and has no compatibility problems. I would suggest VMware - you'll need a lot of RAM to run it well, but that's cheap, and it's pretty much rock-solid.
You don't need to require someone to have full production capacity. All that is required is to only allow patents on a specific method of making a TurboWidget. If you could make it, then you can write that specific method down, and if you couldn't, then you can't. And that's what's supposed to be the case now - but seems to have been forgotten.
Damn straight. That's why I'm arguing for keeping the patent system as it exists on paper. Natuarally, that bears no relevance to the way it is currently implemented (I realize I might have been clearer on that initially;>). But to me, that's a global USPTO problem, not an "I had an idea and patented it without a clear plan to get it to market" problem.
This is how people infinge on other people or companies, and court should decide if Wigetworks INC knowingly or intentionaly infinge on the patent. If wigetworks was not determined to have done either then the patent is invalid.
At that point no company would ever do a patent search and the entire point of the patent system would be nullified. In the same way that companies use "cleanroom" design to avoid being tainted by copyright, they'd do the same thing for patents. But since patents are much more general and intended to be exclusive (hence the registry), that would be a bad thing indeed.
This is a good demonstration of why Income Tax is a much better form of taxation than Sales Tax: it's easier to enforce local taxation that way.
There are two sides to this: first, sales tax is a flat tax, which is, compared to income tax with a standard deduction and sliding scale, disproportionately felt by the poor. The rich in the US (Forbes et al) have been clamoring for a flat tax for years, and I wonder why! So, ultimately, a sales tax is unfair to the poor. Granted, grocery food is usually exempted (don't know of any states where it's not) but the poor need more than groceries.
On the other hand, income tax is easier to play games with loopholes and crap, so God knows what tax the rich really pay on income.
Of course, the one I really want answered: why don't the rich have to pay social security tax on their investment earnings? And why is that payroll tax a flat tax? Bunch of bullshit, if you ask me. I'd like to see THAT changed before the flat tax. If I work hard at a job, I pay a higher tax rate than some rich asshole doing nothing making investment income thanks to the FICA tax.
No doubt. My take on it is this : the intent of the patent system was to protect methods of doing things, not ideas of what to do.
The sad thing is, I don't think that's just your take - as I understand it, that's supposed to be the very definition of a patent. It's supposed to be an implementation. Sadly, these days, it's not. Blah.
The patent office is at fault for granting these overly broad patents. The government is also at fault for treating patents as a source of revenue.
Damn straight. Supposedly, the government got the idea that encouraging patents=encouraging ingenuity, when the misapplication of patents has the opposite effect. Morons.
The "broken" patent system gives everyone exactly what it wants, an extortion tool.
Well, if not everyone, at least everyone's lawyer.;P
The way patents are abused: lone sleazo lawyer in Menlo Park looks through industry rags for future trends in widgets. He patents rough concepts for UltraWidgets, TurboWidgets, Widget64, and WidgetXP. WidgetWorks, Inc., which is busy actually fucking innovating and employs engineers rather than lawyers, is working on their own next-generation widget. As soon as it appears that WidgetWorks is going to corner the market, lawyer shoves his patents up their ass. WidgetWorks pays up, lawyer now has hot tub full of Benjamins.
Yeah, that's bad. And admittedly, I'm not saying there aren't problems with the patent system - but requiring someone to have full production capacity for an idea (or capability thereof) before granting a patent isn't the answer, and as far as I can tell, that's the only obvious solution to the problem of the "sleazy lawyer" syndrome. In other words, I'm not against solving the problem, but I don't want to lose my rights as a potential inventor in the process.
The problem is that we are no longer at the point where virtually any invention required less than a few thousand dollars worth of tools to make. However, that doesn't mean, necessarily, that someone is incapable of coming up with a kickass new design for a widget, or whatever. Bottom line is I still want the possibility of doing that without having a fabrication facility.
As I've said, I would be certainly in favor of tightening the "nonobvious" clause for things not reduced to practive (ie, made). Or whatever. But I don't want to lose the right to get a patent based effectively off of a blueprint.
Isn't something just wrong with the very concept of people really doing nothing but thinking up of obscure concepts or ideas and getting money off of them when an individual or company, with genuine intent to create a working product, wants to create a product that happens to be covered by their patent?
That's why they call it "Intellectual" Property. And it's not too obscure if a company ultimately finds value in it.
Companies who wish to legitimately market a product would have to verify that it does not violate an existing patent, and then have to pay royalties if it already is a patent. Smaller companies and individuals who have that legit intent would probably not have enough capital to pay the royalties. This practice damages the IP marketplace more than anything else.
Yep, that's right. Then they should have thought of it first. And for what it's worth, it'll play out kind of the reverse - the chances are much better that a small company will have the capital to file a patent but not ramp up to production. If anything, offensive patents allow the "little man" to play the IP game. It's only the big companies that have the capital to do both, generally. So if an individual without a lot of cash has an idea, he generally has two options: 1) forget about it, or 2) sell it.
A patent is useless and counterproductive to the good of capitalism if no product comes out of it. This is just like cybersquatting, where people just register seemingly random DNS names just so large companies can buy them later. This was made illegal. Take that for precedent if anything is to be done about this.
Completely different - a patent requires (or should) a great deal more innovation than making up a URL. People should be rewarded for ideas. And this can be good even for those who eventually produce the product, as the patent serves as a great way to publicize an idea, making it more likely to get done. Naturally, this depends on the "nonobvious" nature, but if patents are awarded as they should, then even offensive patents benefit everybody. Any product with value gets made, the person who thought of it gets compensated justly, and the product likely gets to market sooner through the advertising nature of the patent registry system. The patent helps the inventor and a potential manufacturer find each other.
But the main thing here is that offensive patents help people with little cash the most.
The article doesn't go into great details. The problem is with getting very broad patents. I recall reading an article about a guy who, in the very early 90s or late 80s patented the idea of transmitting music from one place to another. Did that patent really lead to the development of the Internet, broadband, and MP3s? Of course not.
That's a good point - supposedly, shouldn't there be a tighter restriction on patent applications that haven't been "reduced to practice" (as in your example)? Because if they'd enforce that, the problem would be largely solved, I expect.
When it comes to Napster and other technology tramping on commerce you scream it's "the user, not the tool".
Knock it off with that plural "you" bullshit - I wrote that post, not the rest of the idiots on this site. I fully understand the Napster decision, having read it and the Kazaa decision, and the Napster idiots got what they deserved. I understand this. So your generalities don't fit here, try them on someone else.
You seem to have me confused with someone else you met on here.
If you read the actual wording of the DCMA it is quite worthwhile, reasonable, clear and precise.
That may be, but as in most cases, that's fully irrelevant.
Just because someone might attempt to pervert it and just because it _might_ concievably cause some harm with it does not mean that it is not a very good thing.
Um, yes, it does. I don't give a rat's ass how beautiful a piece of legislation it is, I only care how it impacts me. And our Congresscritters need to be a little smarter about seeing the ultimate effects of the laws they pass, because a law in vacuum is pointless.
You can take just about any law, even good laws, and do much the same with them.
I would say that good laws are those skillfully and cleverly designed to exclude that sort of abuse. That's what makes them good. That's why the DMCA isn't a good law, because of the potential for (particularly) unintentional abuse. I would say that any law that, as written or through effects, precludes me from playing DVD's I OWN or using competitors' ink cartridges in MY printer, is certainly a bad law.
right - as previously discussed, I am unfamiliar with the legal systems there. However, it has also been proposed in the US, without the legal fee regulations, and I believe that would be a nightmare.
OK, so people are complaining about offensive patents. I have no problem with it - it helps people without resources play in the IP game. The barrier to filing a patent is still not trivial (though it's getting there), so if someone has an idea, spends $15000 (or whatever), it should then be theirs to market how they see fit. If anything, it will create an effective IP marketplace, as companies doing patent searches will find the guy with the patent, and buy it off him. If they elect to go ahead without the patent or without searching, that's their problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Knock off the inferiority complex. Yes, most spam comes from the US, which is undebated. However, if a law is passed only in the US, I'm assuming most of these assholes will move offshore like the guys who run gambling sites, as most of them for some crazy reason think being rich and in Aruba is better than being poor and in jail. Additionally, most spam comes, at some point, through an open relay in Hong Kong, Korea, China, etc. Don't believe that, I'll send you the damned headers. So the point is, even if Ralsky lives here, proving he sent it can be tough, because a server that doesn't even block external SMTP probably won't keep stellar records of who used such services.
And quite frankly, any country that, after a theoretical treaty was signed, WILLFULLY participated in spam has no right to participate in a world that allows free email. Additionally, yes, we could solve the problem unilaterally since ICANN is in the US. But you whiners bitch when we make any decision unilaterally without consulting places like Myanmar first, so my plan made it an international thing so everyone was involved in the decision making process. I swear, some people do nothing BUT bitch.
I think that's all. Want your $50k back?
Right, electrons would like to flow from the n-type to the p-type. Actually, it's not the current exactly that does it, but the applied voltage that flattens the E vs. penetration depth curves. This same voltage generates a current. Splitting hairs, I know, but that's what I do. ;)
Have all the countries with TLD's get together and sign a treaty supporting extradition of spammers. If anyone refuses, have the signing countries turn off those TLD's until they comply. At a minimum advocate that servers in their respective countries do so. When .hk finds itself unable to communicate with America and W. Europe, for instance, they would likely comply quickly.
...in the sense that a thermocouple does sort of work on the same basic principle, in that one of the metals donates electrons to the other, so that they have the same Fermi level at their junction. If you had used semiconductors instead of metals (you wouldn't, but still), you'd have a region where the materials electrically "alloy," in that there would be a depletion region where the electrons have energies different than either material individually. But you're right of course, there's no alloying in a thermocouple in order to create a good junction, and metals don't show a depletion region or bandbending over any measureable distance.
I think it would be reasonable to assume that when people start caring about the money, what they create tends to no longer be Art. ;) So if you hold the term "artist" to the higher standard you seem to be using, I'd generally agree.
You're quite right, you can't change the work function of a pure metal - but if you have a blend of materials, they will have to equilibrate, as the energies of the electrons in one material will have higher energies than the electrons in the other. Therefore, electrons will move from one material to the other like water flowing downhill, until the average energies of the electrons in the material are uniform between domains (or atoms) of the different materials. This yields a single Fermi level, which is described as the average energy of the electrons in the material. By varying the quantities of the materials (here, nickel and silicon), you can change the fermi level of the material, thereby changing the work function of the material. So, while you can't change the work function of a pure metal (you'd have to apply an impossibly obscene amount of charge to do so), you can make different blends.
Or do, it's pretty entertaining either way.
Wow, are YOU naive! Musicians like Metallica, huh? Dr. Dre? Brittney? Eminem? All of which have come out in support of the RIAA and against their fans? Face it, as soon as anyone gets access to money, they get greedy. It's human nature, and there are very few people immune to that.
The only people who say otherwise are those like you and me who have never had the opportunity to be rich. It's damned easy to sit here and say "I wouldn't act like that if I were rich!" I'm sure Gates said it too when he was 18 and idealistic. Now he's in his 40's, rich, and stifles software innovation for exercise.
As a musician, I see no need to make money from my work. It would help, and I'd probably be able to focus on it more if money came back from it, but it is nowhere near nessecary.
Like I said, that's because you haven't seen the money. Your perspective might change then.
You know, that's always a valid point, and I was attempting to account for that when I commented - though of course that's impossible to achieve completely. Naturally, things may have changed a bit, but frequently it seemed like they put things in the most asinine places on the menus - I love trying new software, so I am very tolerant of a little menu hide-n-seek, but there were times where I couldn't fathom why they made the choices they did. Unfortunately, I can't back myself up intelligently, as it's been a while since I've tried OO. When 1.1 comes out as release, I'm sure we'll have some version of this debate again. Perhaps then I'll be on your side, we'll see. ;)
I realy hate to use Word: it has a bad UI, encourages terrible formatting, wreaks havoc with image locations in documents etc.
God, no doubt. I'm not saying that Word is a good word processor, mind you - it's hideous, and has almost made me cry on a number of occasions. And if OO had the marketshare, and it was MS that couldn't open their file formats, then I expect my comments would, for the most part, reverse. And I will give the new version a chance. Quite frankly, if anything I've wondered why OO mimicked some of MS Word's retarded "features." And I will give OO kudos on one thing - when you get used to that autocomplete feature, it rocks. A lot. Particularly for a scientist who is frequently reduced to typing a lot of rather large words.
OTH, I like Excel, it does behave (it has the same disorderly style of menus, though, but you can get used to that, I guess)
Honestly, the Excel vs. OO debate is, in my opinion, where OO crashes and burns. I would love to hear from someone who prefers the OO spreadsheet, and what work you do in it. Preferably, someone who uses functions other than AVERAGE and SUM.
I will admit, I haven't tried 1.1 yet, as their regular versions are buggy enough to throw me off their betas. My attitude may change when I see that though, so assume my comments are restricted to 1.0.
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke ... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''? If your mission in life is to run MSOffice, then you will be happiest running Windows and MSOffice.
Sadly, I was stating that in relative terms...to MS Office! I know, hard to believe, and trust me, I'm not trying to sell copies of MS Office. I spend a decent amount of time cursing it, and have weaned myself away from it as much as humanly possible, but there are things you need an office suite for. Namely, when some jackass sends you a .doc file with crap embedded in it and you need to work with it. Which happens to me all the time.
But I swear, OO functions worse that MSO in general usability. I'll admit, OO had some cute features I really liked (like a very functional equation editor), but it didn't overcome the way it took over my desktop and sucked RAM like a vampire...again, even compared to MSO.
If your mission is to work with data, and produce structured documents, you shouldn't be using an office suite at all.
Well, yes and no. What I do is pretty much what you say, working with data and making structured documents. I'm in grad school and I do a bunch of work with signal processing sorts of things. But when your boss is tied to MS Office, you have little choice, as horrible as it may be compared to LaTeX for writing a paper for publication (ie, "structured document"). And I use Matlab for working with data, but there are a few graphical things matlab does badly, like its errorbar capability is fairly poor compared to excel. Now I know that's a small thing, but that's the last time I used windows and it was last week. So there are still some things that I just have to be able to do, and excel is frequently the best thing I have for the job. And I believe I mentioned by being held hostage to MS Word, much to my chagrin.
So I don't want to give the wrong impression - I hate MS Office. I would give anything for a decent office suite that does what it does without crashing, taking over my desktop, and requiring me to spend a long time trying to figure out ill-placed menu schemes. When that comes with MS compaitbility, I'll jump all over it. But that's not here now, especially not OO. Though I guarantee I will try 1.1 as soon as it goes general release.
First, I'll debate usability and the general UI of star office all day long - it's horrible. It's also slow and bloated, all things that have nothing to do with file formats. And, as I said, the spreadsheet is completely unusable.
Additionally, interoperability with MS is a requirement - there's no such thing as an "independent program" anymore for 99% of the population. You can say it sucks for them that they have to perfectly reverse engineer the MS file format, but that's life. The business world requires MS compatibility. So you can say it's not their fault, but it's irrelevant.
There's nothing wrong with it for creating documents in most other formats, and at least for me, it's good enough so I can read MS Office documents not available in other formats, which is all that I need MS compatibility for.
I can show you a lot of MS documents that got so corrupted as to be unusable. This will be an issue of how complex a word processor you need, of course - but if you only need something simple, then I can recommend a lot of WP's that are faster and smaller than 00. Put it this way - it doesn't have the functionality or interoperability of office, and it doesn't have the speed of other options, so it doesn't win in any case.
Luckily nobody demands that I produce documents in the MS Office formats. If they did, perhaps I'd have to purchase MS Office (for MacOS X).
This isn't a troll or anything, but what do you DO? Are you in school? Because when you get a job, you WILL have to use MS, unless you are lucky enough to be a hard-core unix geex, at which point you'll end up at a place that lives in LaTeX-nirvana. Otherwise, get ready for shitsville like the rest of us.
I haven't used Office 2003, I will admit, so what are all these crazy features? Not being familiar with it, I'm not sure what you mean. As for XML...yeah, people had this idea that all these companies that previously used proprietary file formats now will make them clear...yeah, right. ;)
Most people take open source apps for granted, but this is one app that is DEFINITELY worth your cash. Ifd you really want to be part of a free software community, buy StarOffice 6 from Sun.
I think this is the clearest statement here. Buy Star/Openoffice if you want to be part of the free sofware community. This is true, and that needs to be your biggest criterion if you choose OO. I'm not trying to flame here, but if your priority is getting things to work in a heterogeneous setting where you can't make everyone use OO, then it's not a reasonable choice.
You're completely correct. Ultimately I'd like to fight both battles, but one at a time here ;). The first problem is that investors don't pay it AT ALL - the second problem is that, even for working people, it's a flat tax. Short term, I'd like to see either changed, I have no hope for both.
Of course, I'll tell you why no one does anything about it - it goes by the attention of the typical journalists, so the government basically gave a tax break to the rich without too many people figuring it out. Journalists aren't exactly finance experts, typically, and they figure that if the rich are paying income tax at twice the rate as poor people that things must be OK.
Naturally, with all the tax loopholes that exist, that's a joke. So it's just another tax break for the wealthy that the public's too stupid to figure out.
Outside of the fact thats it's free, OO is nowhere near ready for use in a business setting. Anything more than a simple letter gets screwed up in the word processor, and the WP is the most advanced part of 00. If you have anything embedded in an MS document, you can almost say goodbye upon opening it. When you have a busines, you don't have the option of telling clients "Hey, could you resend that in Word 2.0 format, my word processor is incompatible with any version of Word put out in the last decade." That's just not an option. Hey, I hate MS as much as most of you, but I wouldn't shoot my business in the foot or lose my job over my zealotry, right or wrong.
And don't even think about defending the spreadsheet. It might be OK for balancing your checkbook, but don't try graphing, as it's horrible. Also, even moderately advanced spreadsheet functions (that I use very often) are missing from MS Office. As for compatibility, graphs often lose their axes among other problems.
The presentation software has similar problems - font issues (admittedly, much of the font problems were in Linux, so it's hard to isolate), images getting trahsed, other embedded stuff getting completely lost, etc.
Bottom line is OpenOffice is NOT READY for a business setting. I tried like hell, I really did. It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke, and how sad is that considering their competition in the matter is frigging MICROSOFT!
There are other options if your goal is running an office suite under linux (obviously these don't help you if you're trying to avoid MS): codeweavers crossover is a little buggy, but if they've made it more stable since I gave up on it, well, it's better than OO and has no compatibility problems. I would suggest VMware - you'll need a lot of RAM to run it well, but that's cheap, and it's pretty much rock-solid.
Damn straight. That's why I'm arguing for keeping the patent system as it exists on paper. Natuarally, that bears no relevance to the way it is currently implemented (I realize I might have been clearer on that initially ;>). But to me, that's a global USPTO problem, not an "I had an idea and patented it without a clear plan to get it to market" problem.
At that point no company would ever do a patent search and the entire point of the patent system would be nullified. In the same way that companies use "cleanroom" design to avoid being tainted by copyright, they'd do the same thing for patents. But since patents are much more general and intended to be exclusive (hence the registry), that would be a bad thing indeed.
There are two sides to this: first, sales tax is a flat tax, which is, compared to income tax with a standard deduction and sliding scale, disproportionately felt by the poor. The rich in the US (Forbes et al) have been clamoring for a flat tax for years, and I wonder why! So, ultimately, a sales tax is unfair to the poor. Granted, grocery food is usually exempted (don't know of any states where it's not) but the poor need more than groceries.
On the other hand, income tax is easier to play games with loopholes and crap, so God knows what tax the rich really pay on income.
Of course, the one I really want answered: why don't the rich have to pay social security tax on their investment earnings? And why is that payroll tax a flat tax? Bunch of bullshit, if you ask me. I'd like to see THAT changed before the flat tax. If I work hard at a job, I pay a higher tax rate than some rich asshole doing nothing making investment income thanks to the FICA tax.
The sad thing is, I don't think that's just your take - as I understand it, that's supposed to be the very definition of a patent. It's supposed to be an implementation. Sadly, these days, it's not. Blah.
The patent office is at fault for granting these overly broad patents. The government is also at fault for treating patents as a source of revenue.
Damn straight. Supposedly, the government got the idea that encouraging patents=encouraging ingenuity, when the misapplication of patents has the opposite effect. Morons.
The "broken" patent system gives everyone exactly what it wants, an extortion tool.
Well, if not everyone, at least everyone's lawyer. ;P
Yeah, that's bad. And admittedly, I'm not saying there aren't problems with the patent system - but requiring someone to have full production capacity for an idea (or capability thereof) before granting a patent isn't the answer, and as far as I can tell, that's the only obvious solution to the problem of the "sleazy lawyer" syndrome. In other words, I'm not against solving the problem, but I don't want to lose my rights as a potential inventor in the process.
The problem is that we are no longer at the point where virtually any invention required less than a few thousand dollars worth of tools to make. However, that doesn't mean, necessarily, that someone is incapable of coming up with a kickass new design for a widget, or whatever. Bottom line is I still want the possibility of doing that without having a fabrication facility.
As I've said, I would be certainly in favor of tightening the "nonobvious" clause for things not reduced to practive (ie, made). Or whatever. But I don't want to lose the right to get a patent based effectively off of a blueprint.
That's why they call it "Intellectual" Property. And it's not too obscure if a company ultimately finds value in it.
Companies who wish to legitimately market a product would have to verify that it does not violate an existing patent, and then have to pay royalties if it already is a patent. Smaller companies and individuals who have that legit intent would probably not have enough capital to pay the royalties. This practice damages the IP marketplace more than anything else.
Yep, that's right. Then they should have thought of it first. And for what it's worth, it'll play out kind of the reverse - the chances are much better that a small company will have the capital to file a patent but not ramp up to production. If anything, offensive patents allow the "little man" to play the IP game. It's only the big companies that have the capital to do both, generally. So if an individual without a lot of cash has an idea, he generally has two options: 1) forget about it, or 2) sell it.
A patent is useless and counterproductive to the good of capitalism if no product comes out of it. This is just like cybersquatting, where people just register seemingly random DNS names just so large companies can buy them later. This was made illegal. Take that for precedent if anything is to be done about this.
Completely different - a patent requires (or should) a great deal more innovation than making up a URL. People should be rewarded for ideas. And this can be good even for those who eventually produce the product, as the patent serves as a great way to publicize an idea, making it more likely to get done. Naturally, this depends on the "nonobvious" nature, but if patents are awarded as they should, then even offensive patents benefit everybody. Any product with value gets made, the person who thought of it gets compensated justly, and the product likely gets to market sooner through the advertising nature of the patent registry system. The patent helps the inventor and a potential manufacturer find each other.
But the main thing here is that offensive patents help people with little cash the most.
That's a good point - supposedly, shouldn't there be a tighter restriction on patent applications that haven't been "reduced to practice" (as in your example)? Because if they'd enforce that, the problem would be largely solved, I expect.
Knock it off with that plural "you" bullshit - I wrote that post, not the rest of the idiots on this site. I fully understand the Napster decision, having read it and the Kazaa decision, and the Napster idiots got what they deserved. I understand this. So your generalities don't fit here, try them on someone else.
You seem to have me confused with someone else you met on here.
If you read the actual wording of the DCMA it is quite worthwhile, reasonable, clear and precise.
That may be, but as in most cases, that's fully irrelevant.
Just because someone might attempt to pervert it and just because it _might_ concievably cause some harm with it does not mean that it is not a very good thing.
Um, yes, it does. I don't give a rat's ass how beautiful a piece of legislation it is, I only care how it impacts me. And our Congresscritters need to be a little smarter about seeing the ultimate effects of the laws they pass, because a law in vacuum is pointless.
You can take just about any law, even good laws, and do much the same with them.
I would say that good laws are those skillfully and cleverly designed to exclude that sort of abuse. That's what makes them good. That's why the DMCA isn't a good law, because of the potential for (particularly) unintentional abuse. I would say that any law that, as written or through effects, precludes me from playing DVD's I OWN or using competitors' ink cartridges in MY printer, is certainly a bad law.
right - as previously discussed, I am unfamiliar with the legal systems there. However, it has also been proposed in the US, without the legal fee regulations, and I believe that would be a nightmare.
What's wrong with that?