The other day, someone asked me for a friend's phone number, and I went to send it as a text message, like you can with every other phone in existence, and generally with ease. It won't do it.
Just to clarify that "cut and paste" part, if your friend's number is in Contacts, you have to open their contact page, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu, select the number from the correct field on the edit page, then tap "Edit" from the bottom menu again. Don't worry, it's a different "Edit"...
Then you start a new text message, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu yet again, select "Paste" from the pop-up, add any explanations and/or apologies for the delay, then tap "Send".
If your OS hasn't crashed in the mean time, you'll have sent your friend's number. Congratulations!
I'm just amazed that after six iterations, it's still as clumsy, unintuitive and unrefined as ever.
While I don't believe that Microsoft is infallible, they are in a much better position with desktop lock-in then IBM ever was.
I'm not so sure. Microsoft's aggression and refusal to interoperate has forced their only real competition (FOSS) to build an entire software stack - Operating systems, office suites, drawing packages etc etc - separate from the MS software ecosystem. For the moment, much of that software is not being used by the larger community, but it is still being actively developed, and has more momentum than most Microsoft equivalents - compare a 2000 vintage Linux distro with any recent version and look at how much has improved, then compare Windows 2000 with Vista, for example.
There's a threshold effect in place here because Microsoft's stranglehold relies mostly on executable lockin and format lockin. If Wine becomes good enough to run most Windows software, and/or if ODF or an equivalent get enough of a foothold, Microsoft will be in a lot of trouble.
Let's face it, the pillars of their business are Office and Windows. Neither has significantly improved in the better part of a decade.
The people like Suse and Xandross are essentially TiVos: people who are just hanging off the side making money off of the fat of Free Software and giving little-to-nothing back
That's actually an unfair statement.
I disagree strongly with the agreements both companies have made with Microsoft, and believe it will rebound badly for them. Nevertheless, both companies, and Novell in particular have made very strong contributions to both Linux and FOSS in general.
So I've decided that I'm not going to buy a new phone until I can get some decent hardware running OpenMoko or similar.
I'd agree with that, except they seem to be taking forever to get to market. I don't thing the JasJam's going to survive that long, especially if the annoying little sucker keeps crashing on me.....
I'll second that. The mobile phone market's wide open to someone who can introduce a coherent and sensible interface that doesn't behave like the bastard child of a mediocre desktop OS. Palm had their chance and blew it. Psion/Symbian had momentum for a while, but have been stagnant for half a decade.
I've been provided with an iMate JasJam, but I'd bin it in a heartbeat and pay good money for a replacement if there was a choice that meant I didn't have to navigate through weird menus and tolerate frequent crashes and lockups.
I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:
You did say you already had a list. Can't you just post it?
PDF export is fundamentally broken: when dealing with certain OpenType fonts (such as almost all pro grade fonts from major foundries supplied today), they are substituted with some other font in the output PDF. Worse, you don't get to find out that it's broken and there's no workaround until after you've spent all your time creating and laying out your document. I've even been told that this isn't a bug, it's just a missing feature!
Um, Word has no PDF export at all.
Mail merge is fundamentally broken: the data sources model is screwed up in several ways, even in the more recent versions of OO, and there are basic things in terms of output to file rather than printer that still don't seem to be possible. I don't know what you're doing, but mail merge works fine for me. Have you tried using the mail merge wizard? As far as your problem with output to file, you can specify the output of a mail merge as "Save, Print or Send", so outputting to files is one of your basic choices.
Support for styles is weak: theoretically Writer can do more than Word, but things like the numbering schemes are so buggy that much of the power is not usable in practice. Basic things like being able to assign styles or reset manual formatting to the style defaults are needlessly difficult or impossible, while they're just a keyboard shortcut away in Word.
Um, numbering in OOo has always been better and more manageable than in Word. It was one of the reasons I switched in the first place. As far as styles go, selecting the text, then double-clicking the style in the style window is too hard for you? You could assign shortcut keys in Tools/Customize/Keyboard, if you want it to work exactly like Word.
Usability is poor in many places: dialog layout is confused, help text isn't helpful, navigation is poor around things like contents and tables; it isn't even close to as user-friendly as Word, even before the 2007 UI changes.
That's just a rant, and expresses your opinion. There's nothing in there I can address directly.
The automation model in OO is weak and clumsy.
It's almost identical to Word's, with the exception that it allows the use of other languages than VBA. Do you have anything specific about it that you don't like?
One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.
These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.
But nothing specific that anyone can actually address?
OK, I'll take that back: I should have said "no realistic plans". Two divisions for the whole of Australia is hardly credible.
Plans change rapidly in wartime, and circumstances meant that the Japanese did not get the opportunity to mount the invasion. Nevertheless, the intention was there as early as 1938 (Operation Mo). The planning included Yamamoto, Tomioka, Fukudome and Nagano, and involved landing the main force in North Queensland, not Darwin, hence the use of rail transport.
You might also want to re-read the linked page. To quote:
I found nothing in that book to support Dr Stanley's claim that only "middle-ranking naval staff officers" were proposing an invasion of Australia in 1942, and his claim that "The plans got no further than some acrimonious discussions." On the contrary, Professor Frei provides very clear evidence that a limited invasion of the northern Australian mainland was being planned and proposed at the highest level of Japan's Navy General Staff through December 1941, and January and February 1942. This site is probably a more informative reference for the plans. http://www.answers.com/topic/planned-invasion-of-a ustralia-during-world-war-ii.
Japan never had any intention of invading Australia: no plans for such were ever made
The Japanese navy was responsible for planning an invasion of Australia. In February 1942, Admiral Yamamoto had set a plan before Japanese General Staff to land two Divisions on the northern coastline of Australia. They would then follow the north-south railway line to Adelaide, thus dividing Australia into two fronts. The plan was opposed by the Japanese army, and was not approved by Emperor Hirohito.
But Americans tend not to be aware of it, because a certain egomanicial general by the name of McArthur had this nasty tendency to ignore allies and claim that everything was done by the Americans.
Actually, MacArthur had some justification for the claim.
Roosevelt and Churchill had tried to force the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions to remain in Burma, effectively abandoning New Guinea and Northern Australia to the Japanese. The Prime Minister of Australia at the time, John Curtin, made the decision to recall the troops despite intense pressure from the other allied leaders. At the same time, MacArthur needed Australia as a supply and staging post, so the agreement was made that the Australian troops would be returned to defend their country, but commanded by MacArthur. So in that sense, they were part of the American military effort rather than acting as an independent force.
It's worth emphasising though, both America and Britain initially wanted to abandon Australia, and allow us to be occupied by Japan. If it wasn't for Curtin's leveraging of those two divisions, it'd likely have happened
The only point I wonder is this: if Novell took a GPLed software and wrote documentation for it, should the documentation be under the GPL?
It's an interesting point. I've been using a laptop running SLED 10 for a few months now (Disclaimer: I won it in a Novell promotion), and I'm still impressed with it as a very clean, professional Linux distro - anyone wanting to introduce Linux to corporate desktops could use it as a drop-in replacement for XP/Office easily. One of the great things about it though, is the set of tutorials that comes with it. They're accessed from one of only three icons on the default SLED 10 desktop, and include enough for a beginner to get comfortable with the OS.
That's a better question than you probably intended.
This new memory card format marks a major shift in who's leading and shaping the market for electronics. The companies involved in setting this standard are all what used to be second-tier manufacturers - companies like Asustech and BenQ. In the past, it's been Sandisk, Sony, Siemens et al who've decided what shape our storage cards will be.
I think it's pretty revealing that this group of second-tier Taiwanese manufacturers has come up with a unifying design instead of fragmenting the market even more, as has been the habit of Sony et al. Your DRM comment becomes more relevant when we realise it's this same group who've been providing us with inexpensive DVD players that support way more standards, with less restrictions than the old guard Euro/America/Japanese based electronics companies.
It's probably a good sign for those of us who despise DRM.
I've got plenty of hardware that's Linux only, a lot of which I got free or cheap when the owners upgraded to a version of Windows which obsoleted drivers. There's Matrox G200 MMS video cards that won't work under any version of Windows, but's fine with Linux, Half a dozen D-Link wireless cards that have never been supported on XP (I scored those for free when the company that bought them upgraded from '98), and more.
The thing is, the pool of drivers for Linux is increasing all the time as people get motivated to write support for their favorite toy. The pool of drivers for Windows is shrinking each time a manufacturer drops support for an older version.
Linux doesn't have as complete hardware support as some of the other OSs out there.
Linux has far better hardware support than any other OS out there.
It's extremely rare that you need to install any drivers on any modern distro. Mac supports a very limited hardware set, while Windows needs half a dozen drivers post-install just to get everything working.
In the context of a media player capable of booting from any modern computer, Linux much better placed than other OSs.
However, nobody has stepped forward with definitive evidence to show me that there is a link between warming and CO2 emissions.
Lots of people have stepped forward.
To anyone with a basic understanding of the science, there's no controversy. The best thing you can do is to make the effort to understand the topic properly, and be your own judge. This is a good place to start http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11462. There are plenty of links to the original data if you want to verify anything.
You're calling him an authority on climate change?
The most noticeable features of Harvey's idiosyncratic delivery are his dramatic pauses, quirky intonations and his folksiness. A large part of his success stems from the seamlessness with which he segues from his monologue into reading commercial messages. He explains his enthusiastic support of his sponsors as such: "I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
Why do you bother with such long, argumentative posts when you're so short on credible information?
This is also a major hurdle to people. How is Joe User going to know which of the 30 browsers he should use
Well, fuck me dead, choices to make.
Now that's going to ruin my life and make me bitter forever. You dirty evil FOSS arseholes aren't forcing me to use whatever piece of virus-riddled shit you want to foist on me. How am I going to cope? Tragedy!
For fuck's sake, don't you shills have something better to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Just to clarify that "cut and paste" part, if your friend's number is in Contacts, you have to open their contact page, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu, select the number from the correct field on the edit page, then tap "Edit" from the bottom menu again. Don't worry, it's a different "Edit"...
Then you start a new text message, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu yet again, select "Paste" from the pop-up, add any explanations and/or apologies for the delay, then tap "Send".
If your OS hasn't crashed in the mean time, you'll have sent your friend's number. Congratulations!
I'm just amazed that after six iterations, it's still as clumsy, unintuitive and unrefined as ever.
Hey! That's my password. Why're they doing articles on that?
Hell yeah.
Cool but untested tech is always best recommended to others before you try it. Preferably LOTS of others.
I'm not so sure. Microsoft's aggression and refusal to interoperate has forced their only real competition (FOSS) to build an entire software stack - Operating systems, office suites, drawing packages etc etc - separate from the MS software ecosystem. For the moment, much of that software is not being used by the larger community, but it is still being actively developed, and has more momentum than most Microsoft equivalents - compare a 2000 vintage Linux distro with any recent version and look at how much has improved, then compare Windows 2000 with Vista, for example.
There's a threshold effect in place here because Microsoft's stranglehold relies mostly on executable lockin and format lockin. If Wine becomes good enough to run most Windows software, and/or if ODF or an equivalent get enough of a foothold, Microsoft will be in a lot of trouble.
Let's face it, the pillars of their business are Office and Windows. Neither has significantly improved in the better part of a decade.
That's actually an unfair statement.
I disagree strongly with the agreements both companies have made with Microsoft, and believe it will rebound badly for them. Nevertheless, both companies, and Novell in particular have made very strong contributions to both Linux and FOSS in general.
You reckon? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/01/08/AR2007010801352.html
I'd agree with that, except they seem to be taking forever to get to market. I don't thing the JasJam's going to survive that long, especially if the annoying little sucker keeps crashing on me.....
I'll second that. The mobile phone market's wide open to someone who can introduce a coherent and sensible interface that doesn't behave like the bastard child of a mediocre desktop OS. Palm had their chance and blew it. Psion/Symbian had momentum for a while, but have been stagnant for half a decade.
I've been provided with an iMate JasJam, but I'd bin it in a heartbeat and pay good money for a replacement if there was a choice that meant I didn't have to navigate through weird menus and tolerate frequent crashes and lockups.
Trolling for disagreeing with you. Right.
I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:
You did say you already had a list. Can't you just post it? PDF export is fundamentally broken: when dealing with certain OpenType fonts (such as almost all pro grade fonts from major foundries supplied today), they are substituted with some other font in the output PDF. Worse, you don't get to find out that it's broken and there's no workaround until after you've spent all your time creating and laying out your document. I've even been told that this isn't a bug, it's just a missing feature!Um, Word has no PDF export at all.
Mail merge is fundamentally broken: the data sources model is screwed up in several ways, even in the more recent versions of OO, and there are basic things in terms of output to file rather than printer that still don't seem to be possible. I don't know what you're doing, but mail merge works fine for me. Have you tried using the mail merge wizard? As far as your problem with output to file, you can specify the output of a mail merge as "Save, Print or Send", so outputting to files is one of your basic choices.Support for styles is weak: theoretically Writer can do more than Word, but things like the numbering schemes are so buggy that much of the power is not usable in practice. Basic things like being able to assign styles or reset manual formatting to the style defaults are needlessly difficult or impossible, while they're just a keyboard shortcut away in Word.
Um, numbering in OOo has always been better and more manageable than in Word. It was one of the reasons I switched in the first place. As far as styles go, selecting the text, then double-clicking the style in the style window is too hard for you? You could assign shortcut keys in Tools/Customize/Keyboard, if you want it to work exactly like Word.
Usability is poor in many places: dialog layout is confused, help text isn't helpful, navigation is poor around things like contents and tables; it isn't even close to as user-friendly as Word, even before the 2007 UI changes.That's just a rant, and expresses your opinion. There's nothing in there I can address directly.
The automation model in OO is weak and clumsy.It's almost identical to Word's, with the exception that it allows the use of other languages than VBA. Do you have anything specific about it that you don't like?
One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.
These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.
But nothing specific that anyone can actually address?
Plans change rapidly in wartime, and circumstances meant that the Japanese did not get the opportunity to mount the invasion. Nevertheless, the intention was there as early as 1938 (Operation Mo). The planning included Yamamoto, Tomioka, Fukudome and Nagano, and involved landing the main force in North Queensland, not Darwin, hence the use of rail transport.
You might also want to re-read the linked page. To quote:
I found nothing in that book to support Dr Stanley's claim that only "middle-ranking naval staff officers" were proposing an invasion of Australia in 1942, and his claim that "The plans got no further than some acrimonious discussions." On the contrary, Professor Frei provides very clear evidence that a limited invasion of the northern Australian mainland was being planned and proposed at the highest level of Japan's Navy General Staff through December 1941, and January and February 1942. This site is probably a more informative reference for the plans. http://www.answers.com/topic/planned-invasion-of-The Japanese navy was responsible for planning an invasion of Australia. In February 1942, Admiral Yamamoto had set a plan before Japanese General Staff to land two Divisions on the northern coastline of Australia. They would then follow the north-south railway line to Adelaide, thus dividing Australia into two fronts. The plan was opposed by the Japanese army, and was not approved by Emperor Hirohito.
Actually, MacArthur had some justification for the claim.
Roosevelt and Churchill had tried to force the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions to remain in Burma, effectively abandoning New Guinea and Northern Australia to the Japanese. The Prime Minister of Australia at the time, John Curtin, made the decision to recall the troops despite intense pressure from the other allied leaders. At the same time, MacArthur needed Australia as a supply and staging post, so the agreement was made that the Australian troops would be returned to defend their country, but commanded by MacArthur. So in that sense, they were part of the American military effort rather than acting as an independent force.
It's worth emphasising though, both America and Britain initially wanted to abandon Australia, and allow us to be occupied by Japan. If it wasn't for Curtin's leveraging of those two divisions, it'd likely have happened
I'm interested. Can you post the list please.
It's an interesting point. I've been using a laptop running SLED 10 for a few months now (Disclaimer: I won it in a Novell promotion), and I'm still impressed with it as a very clean, professional Linux distro - anyone wanting to introduce Linux to corporate desktops could use it as a drop-in replacement for XP/Office easily. One of the great things about it though, is the set of tutorials that comes with it. They're accessed from one of only three icons on the default SLED 10 desktop, and include enough for a beginner to get comfortable with the OS.
The training is produced by a company called BrainStorm, and on checking the package info, http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/deskt op10/i386/sled-gnome-cbt_en.html, it looks like they're commercially licensed. Training like that could be a big differentiator between open and proprietary versions (such as OpenSuse).
That's a better question than you probably intended.
This new memory card format marks a major shift in who's leading and shaping the market for electronics. The companies involved in setting this standard are all what used to be second-tier manufacturers - companies like Asustech and BenQ. In the past, it's been Sandisk, Sony, Siemens et al who've decided what shape our storage cards will be.
I think it's pretty revealing that this group of second-tier Taiwanese manufacturers has come up with a unifying design instead of fragmenting the market even more, as has been the habit of Sony et al. Your DRM comment becomes more relevant when we realise it's this same group who've been providing us with inexpensive DVD players that support way more standards, with less restrictions than the old guard Euro/America/Japanese based electronics companies.
It's probably a good sign for those of us who despise DRM.
Sabayon and Kororaa both support Compiz/Beryl on live CDs. Why wouldn't TurboLinux do the same on their media drive?
I've got plenty of hardware that's Linux only, a lot of which I got free or cheap when the owners upgraded to a version of Windows which obsoleted drivers. There's Matrox G200 MMS video cards that won't work under any version of Windows, but's fine with Linux, Half a dozen D-Link wireless cards that have never been supported on XP (I scored those for free when the company that bought them upgraded from '98), and more.
The thing is, the pool of drivers for Linux is increasing all the time as people get motivated to write support for their favorite toy. The pool of drivers for Windows is shrinking each time a manufacturer drops support for an older version.
Linux has far better hardware support than any other OS out there.
It's extremely rare that you need to install any drivers on any modern distro. Mac supports a very limited hardware set, while Windows needs half a dozen drivers post-install just to get everything working.
In the context of a media player capable of booting from any modern computer, Linux much better placed than other OSs.
The mainstream media protects and fosters hypocrisy. Corporate media is one of the big players creating modern politics worldwide.
You might be interested in this critique of AP's role. http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/ap_bias.h tml
He was chipping you for your grammar.
Lots of people have stepped forward.
To anyone with a basic understanding of the science, there's no controversy. The best thing you can do is to make the effort to understand the topic properly, and be your own judge. This is a good place to start http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ climate-change/dn11462. There are plenty of links to the original data if you want to verify anything.
You're calling him an authority on climate change?
Why do you bother with such long, argumentative posts when you're so short on credible information?It's English for "Amiga". You can stop shaking now.
Well, fuck me dead, choices to make.
Now that's going to ruin my life and make me bitter forever. You dirty evil FOSS arseholes aren't forcing me to use whatever piece of virus-riddled shit you want to foist on me. How am I going to cope? Tragedy!
For fuck's sake, don't you shills have something better to do?