Except the only real reason to buy Office is if you need 100% compatibility with the latest version of Office producing the latest version of Office files. For the rest of us, free software is good enough.
There is something to what you say. But the reason people only use Office because they *have* to, instead of (here's a new idea...) *wanting* to, is because that very monopoly meant that Microsoft did not need to make the product engaging. It's that part that would need to change. (Also, the pricing needs to be restructured.)
I think part of the reason Microsoft is slipping on the office suite is their insistence on tying their office tools to their operating system products. (The only exception of which I'm aware is Office on Mac.) If they dropped the OS and concentrated on apps, there'd be a lot more incentive to have Office on a variety of operating systems, rather than trying to force people into Winders so that they can use Office, which as a strategy is demonstrably not working anymore.
> A new Bloomberg report suggests that Stephen Elop, who's apparently on the short list of candidates to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO, would eliminate company projects such as Xbox and Bing while focusing resources on Office.
Firstly this seems like wild conjecture to me, but let's say for the sake of argument that this is actually Elop's plan, and that he'd have the authority, personal power, and get the buy-in necessary to do all of this. (A huge leap of faith, but let's say it all happens.)
Is this necessarily a bad thing, moving forward? The time where you could make huge amounts of money selling operating systems is past. We can all see that. The practice of tying all products irrevocably together to, I dunno, circle the wagons, and make other Microsoft income streams mandatory in order to participate in any other Microsoft income stream, also appears to becoming less and less effective.
So, if you're going to sell software, what software is there left to sell? Why not drop (or spin off) the side products that aren't part of the company's core comptency, and also drop the infrastructure and operating system stuff (let other people do that for free) and concentrate on applications? I've felt for a long time that Microsoft's attempt to own everything is a conceit from a time that doesn't exist anymore, and will ultimately result in owning nothing. As an app developer, they could eck out a long term existence, although perhaps as a somewhat smaller company. But a smaller company that has long term survival prospects is a heck of a lot better than a huge company approaching a wall at speed.
It may have. I started later in the series, when they introduced the jumpers and the mechanized armor, and it was fairly interesting. Not high art, but watchable.
> the premise of the movie is absurd to begin with
True. But the premise of the book, I would argue, is not. One might disagree with Heinlein's politics, but the novel is fairly self-consistent. The idea that there will still be a reason for infantry for certain types of military operations, even in an interstellar war, was fairly well fleshed out. He went into great detail on just what kind of equipment that infantry would have. In the movie, it didn't make a lick 'o' sense. Why they'd take soldiers light-years away and then drop them on a hostile planet with conventional weapons, no armor, and no air support was never explained, except "it's a parody" and "you're just too stupid to understand it". In the book, they didn't need armor or air support because they *were* their own armor and air support.
> unless it was undergoing rewrites in the middle of filming.
Got it in one. They started out with powered suits, and then had to nix that, and had something else ("jump shoes"? something like that) but didn't have the budget for that effect either... there were other things. The scope of the film kept getting smaller and smaller, and at some point they just embraced it.
Interesting. Please explain how you can satirize a source which you have not read.
I didn't want to bring that up because I wasn't sure of my memory, but I seem to remember that either Verhoeven or Neumeier (perhaps both?) had said publicly that he hadn't read the novel and didn't really know what it was about.
...Verhoeven hasn't made a Hollywood film since the turn of the century.
Uh, what? He's no more or less busy now than he ever was. He has four movies under his belt since 2000 with two more announced, which is about on par with the rest of his career.
How does that make what I said inaccurate? Neither Zwartboek nor Steekspel were Hollywood movies. Were they even released outside the netherlands?
Does it matter how it got that way? It obviously has dystopian future government themes. And maybe they edited it into a parody, without setting out to make one, but it is a parody.
Right, but... side issue... so why didn't they edit John Carter into a parody? It clearly needed the same treatment. who knows fifteen years from now, John Carter could have been heralded as a parody of... I dunno, human expansionism, maybe. God only knows, it needed something.
But why does it matter? It matters to the extent that the claim that all the cheese was intentional doesn't match the advanced information (including fairly credible inside information) and it annoys me when someone slices into the rough and then insists they meant to do that and I'm just too stupid to get the joke. Beyond that, I've already spent too much time on this. By the time the last bit of bug juice had drizzled off the screen, I had already decided never to see a Verhoeven or Neumeier film again, and so far I've kept that promise.
This is not a new argument. It was made often at the time the film came out. Anyone following rec.arts.movies at the time is very familiar with the arguments that "it's a parody" and "you hate it because you just don't get it". (Check google groups for references.) This rang hollow at the time and it still does. There are several counter-arguments: If you followed the advance information while the film was being made, you know that aspects of the film were more expensive than originally thought, and the script kept getting simplified... and simplified again... and what ended up on screen were some pretty spectacular digital bug effects (for the time) coupled with unbelievably cheesy sets, costumes, and dialog, that being all they could afford with what was left. About that time the shift to "it's a parody! Really!" started.
I saw it for free (a company perk) and wanted my money back.
One could argue there's a reason this was Ed Neumeier's last big screen script, and why Verhoeven hasn't made a Hollywood film since the turn of the century.
So, no. Just no.
...and then, for no reason whatsoever, the Starship Troopers animated series came out, "based on the movie by Paul Verhoeven", and it wasn't half bad. Shrug.
You're right, parents need to carry the flag. But in the mean time, no kid of mine is going to be forbidden to hold hands with her friend. And she would know that, and know that I would back her up with the principal if necessary. I'm not convinced that teaching your children to obey anyone just because they're an adult is a good idea. In fact, this could be a learning opportunity -- that not everything an adult tells you is (a) true or (b) in your best interest.
I think to a certain extent that is true. I would observe that in my experience there isn't anything you can do as a public official to keep your ass from being sued again. It kinda goes with the job.
Are they trying to create an entire class of socially maladjusted kids? Because that sounds like exactly what they're doing. It's not like you can easily learn the subtleties of touch later on in life. Even a year gap can get you labeled a creep and carry nasty, debilitating consequences for decades.
Agreed. I think another poster had it right -- the creepy, antisocial kids we grew up with all became school administrators.
When my daughter was in high school, the school district announced at one point that they were going to ban all public displays of affection, no matter how casual. It became known as the "no-hugging rule".
Although I don't know what the reaction was at other schools, at my daughter's school "hug-ins" and hugging sessions were organized via facebook and texting. Kids would have massive group hugs during recess, designated "hug monitors" would hug everyone who went by in the hallway, (daughter was one such) and hugging became the common greeting. A few days into it I asked daughter how it was going. She said the principal had made an announcement that they were not going to adopt that particular guideline.
Point is, change can be wrought, even by children. If all (or most) of the kids held hands at every recess on every day, what could the authorities do? Suspend the entire school?
This kind of thing only continues when the people don't stand up to it.
Um, let's see if I remember... LOTR should be a 22 hour miniseries, because that's the only way they could put every poem and every step of the journey on the screen, with CGI for elves because humans are not by definition beautiful enough. Problem is, only geeks would watch it, and there aren't enough geeks to support such an endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
Begging the question.
Except the only real reason to buy Office is if you need 100% compatibility with the latest version of Office producing the latest version of Office files. For the rest of us, free software is good enough.
There is something to what you say. But the reason people only use Office because they *have* to, instead of (here's a new idea...) *wanting* to, is because that very monopoly meant that Microsoft did not need to make the product engaging. It's that part that would need to change. (Also, the pricing needs to be restructured.)
I think part of the reason Microsoft is slipping on the office suite is their insistence on tying their office tools to their operating system products. (The only exception of which I'm aware is Office on Mac.) If they dropped the OS and concentrated on apps, there'd be a lot more incentive to have Office on a variety of operating systems, rather than trying to force people into Winders so that they can use Office, which as a strategy is demonstrably not working anymore.
> A new Bloomberg report suggests that Stephen Elop, who's apparently on the short list of candidates to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO, would eliminate company projects such as Xbox and Bing while focusing resources on Office.
Firstly this seems like wild conjecture to me, but let's say for the sake of argument that this is actually Elop's plan, and that he'd have the authority, personal power, and get the buy-in necessary to do all of this. (A huge leap of faith, but let's say it all happens.)
Is this necessarily a bad thing, moving forward? The time where you could make huge amounts of money selling operating systems is past. We can all see that. The practice of tying all products irrevocably together to, I dunno, circle the wagons, and make other Microsoft income streams mandatory in order to participate in any other Microsoft income stream, also appears to becoming less and less effective.
So, if you're going to sell software, what software is there left to sell? Why not drop (or spin off) the side products that aren't part of the company's core comptency, and also drop the infrastructure and operating system stuff (let other people do that for free) and concentrate on applications? I've felt for a long time that Microsoft's attempt to own everything is a conceit from a time that doesn't exist anymore, and will ultimately result in owning nothing. As an app developer, they could eck out a long term existence, although perhaps as a somewhat smaller company. But a smaller company that has long term survival prospects is a heck of a lot better than a huge company approaching a wall at speed.
It may have. I started later in the series, when they introduced the jumpers and the mechanized armor, and it was fairly interesting. Not high art, but watchable.
> the premise of the movie is absurd to begin with
True. But the premise of the book, I would argue, is not. One might disagree with Heinlein's politics, but the novel is fairly self-consistent. The idea that there will still be a reason for infantry for certain types of military operations, even in an interstellar war, was fairly well fleshed out. He went into great detail on just what kind of equipment that infantry would have. In the movie, it didn't make a lick 'o' sense. Why they'd take soldiers light-years away and then drop them on a hostile planet with conventional weapons, no armor, and no air support was never explained, except "it's a parody" and "you're just too stupid to understand it". In the book, they didn't need armor or air support because they *were* their own armor and air support.
> unless it was undergoing rewrites in the middle of filming.
Got it in one. They started out with powered suits, and then had to nix that, and had something else ("jump shoes"? something like that) but didn't have the budget for that effect either... there were other things. The scope of the film kept getting smaller and smaller, and at some point they just embraced it.
Interesting. Please explain how you can satirize a source which you have not read.
I didn't want to bring that up because I wasn't sure of my memory, but I seem to remember that either Verhoeven or Neumeier (perhaps both?) had said publicly that he hadn't read the novel and didn't really know what it was about.
...Verhoeven hasn't made a Hollywood film since the turn of the century.
Uh, what? He's no more or less busy now than he ever was. He has four movies under his belt since 2000 with two more announced, which is about on par with the rest of his career.
How does that make what I said inaccurate? Neither Zwartboek nor Steekspel were Hollywood movies. Were they even released outside the netherlands?
Does it matter how it got that way? It obviously has dystopian future government themes. And maybe they edited it into a parody, without setting out to make one, but it is a parody.
Right, but... side issue... so why didn't they edit John Carter into a parody? It clearly needed the same treatment. who knows fifteen years from now, John Carter could have been heralded as a parody of ... I dunno, human expansionism, maybe. God only knows, it needed something.
But why does it matter? It matters to the extent that the claim that all the cheese was intentional doesn't match the advanced information (including fairly credible inside information) and it annoys me when someone slices into the rough and then insists they meant to do that and I'm just too stupid to get the joke. Beyond that, I've already spent too much time on this. By the time the last bit of bug juice had drizzled off the screen, I had already decided never to see a Verhoeven or Neumeier film again, and so far I've kept that promise.
The satire was not subtle at all - how did so many people miss it?
My experience is that Europeans recognized the satire immediately, while Americans thought it was a serious movie glamourising American militarism.
Um, no, we did not think that. We thought it was a spectacularly badly made movie.
This is not a new argument. It was made often at the time the film came out. Anyone following rec.arts.movies at the time is very familiar with the arguments that "it's a parody" and "you hate it because you just don't get it". (Check google groups for references.) This rang hollow at the time and it still does. There are several counter-arguments: If you followed the advance information while the film was being made, you know that aspects of the film were more expensive than originally thought, and the script kept getting simplified... and simplified again... and what ended up on screen were some pretty spectacular digital bug effects (for the time) coupled with unbelievably cheesy sets, costumes, and dialog, that being all they could afford with what was left. About that time the shift to "it's a parody! Really!" started.
I saw it for free (a company perk) and wanted my money back.
One could argue there's a reason this was Ed Neumeier's last big screen script, and why Verhoeven hasn't made a Hollywood film since the turn of the century.
So, no. Just no.
You're right, parents need to carry the flag. But in the mean time, no kid of mine is going to be forbidden to hold hands with her friend. And she would know that, and know that I would back her up with the principal if necessary. I'm not convinced that teaching your children to obey anyone just because they're an adult is a good idea. In fact, this could be a learning opportunity -- that not everything an adult tells you is (a) true or (b) in your best interest.
Just... bravo.
> Remember that you're saying exactly what the other team believe about themselves.
Didn't the Nazi SS wear "Gott mit uns" on their uniforms?
Oh crap, you sent that in the clear! Erase! Erase!
They are in kindergarten.... I don't think revolt is an easy concept.
Clearly you've never worked in a daycare facility.....
I think to a certain extent that is true. I would observe that in my experience there isn't anything you can do as a public official to keep your ass from being sued again. It kinda goes with the job.
Are they trying to create an entire class of socially maladjusted kids? Because that sounds like exactly what they're doing. It's not like you can easily learn the subtleties of touch later on in life. Even a year gap can get you labeled a creep and carry nasty, debilitating consequences for decades.
Agreed. I think another poster had it right -- the creepy, antisocial kids we grew up with all became school administrators.
News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
I think that not touching anyone is very germane to nerds.
When my daughter was in high school, the school district announced at one point that they were going to ban all public displays of affection, no matter how casual. It became known as the "no-hugging rule".
Although I don't know what the reaction was at other schools, at my daughter's school "hug-ins" and hugging sessions were organized via facebook and texting. Kids would have massive group hugs during recess, designated "hug monitors" would hug everyone who went by in the hallway, (daughter was one such) and hugging became the common greeting. A few days into it I asked daughter how it was going. She said the principal had made an announcement that they were not going to adopt that particular guideline.
Point is, change can be wrought, even by children. If all (or most) of the kids held hands at every recess on every day, what could the authorities do? Suspend the entire school?
This kind of thing only continues when the people don't stand up to it.
Many games in recess involve at least some form of physical contact. How are kids going to play tag?
Throw rocks instead. Whack! "You're it."
How do you know who's "it"?
Obviously, you hit them with a rock.
Um, let's see if I remember... LOTR should be a 22 hour miniseries, because that's the only way they could put every poem and every step of the journey on the screen, with CGI for elves because humans are not by definition beautiful enough. Problem is, only geeks would watch it, and there aren't enough geeks to support such an endeavor.