No. That would be the Walmart management that prevailed. Walmart don't care if those Linux systems sell out all the time, because selling these systems in preference to a Windows PC ends up costing them money.
While the Linux users are off using apt-get to download all their packages, Windows users have to return to the store to buy their Anti-virus software, Office packages, games etc. Windows users will continue to generate income long after they have got their neighbor's kid to setup the PC for them.
Sure, there are some Windows users who know about all the free software available for that platform. These people won't generate any extra income for the retailer, but they would not have anyway, so they are out of the equation.
Finally, I have always wondered how many returns they get from people who thought that the computer was faulty because it would not run all their software they already owned. It is possible that Walmart wants to avoid losing good will of their less technically inclined customers who think that they are selling broken PCs
Quite right. I did mean to say that mice were unheard of on the PC, not unheard of in general. The first mouse that I ever used on the PC came with a free copy of Windows 2.0. I never bothered to install it. Maybe the mouse came with Windows. Either way it was cheaper than buying a mouse by itself. We had to buy it because we had written our software to work with a mouse in DOS, but had never tested it until we were just about to ship.
That's a good list there. Because Windows started in the days when mice were almost unheard of, there has always been an emphasis on keyboard access to everything. This contrasts with the Mac that always came with a mouse, and so it is reasonable to assume that people can click on a button. Keyboard access was not so important.
For more information, people might like to have a look at the Windows Keyboard Access FAQ. I haven't read it too closely, but it looks like it might be a good place to start learning about keyboard shortcuts.
my biggest issue is getting to the system tray with the keyboard
Yes, I have never found a direct way of getting to that. You can bring up the Start menu with the Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc if your keyboard doesn't have one of those). Then hit Esc to get rid of the menu. Now you can hit the tab key to access the different toolbars, including the Quick Launch and System Tray. On my system configuration, I have to do Windows Key, Esc, Tab, Tab, Tab.
Once on the System Tray, you can use the arrow keys to move to the different icons. Enter will perform the default action that clicking on the icon would have. The menu key (or Shift-F10) brings up the context menu.
Hmmm. I just found that you can access the desktop when you tab past the system tray, even though other windows are still in front of it. You can use the menu key to access the context menu of the desktop. I just got into the desktop properties with Opera still maximised. If you have an icon selected on the desktop, then pressing menu key will get the context menu of that icon. You can de-select the icon by pressing Ctrl-Space. Then the menu key will access the desktop menu.
So do you(or anyone else) know of a keyboard combo that will make a new folder?
You could always use the menus in the Explorer window. Alt-F W Enter (or Alt-F W F). This is the same as clicking on the menus.
One of the worst things that Microsoft did was to defaulting to remove the underlines from the keyboard equivelents of menus, fields and buttons. If you tap the Alt key in a dialog box it underlines all the keyboard short cuts. For example, to click on the Advanced button in a random form, I typed Alt-D. I didn't have to move the mouse to it, or even tab to get to button. It is much faster than having to dive for the mouse.
Pay for the MAC OS when MAC OS Final is released, till then it's just the latest beta software. Pay for the Windows OS when Windows OS Final is released, till then it's just the latest beta software.
Great, there goes the neighborhood! The BeOS fanboys have arrived.
I think that it is a good thing that it is easier to declare someone dead than undead. Firstly, people die more often than they come back to life so it is a much more common thing to need to do.
Secondly, in this day and age of identity theft, you don't want to make it too convenient for someone to turn up claiming to be a person that everyone thought was dead. We aren't living in a soap opera, you know!
There's bound to be some important data in some Word 2 documents.
So you are just complaining for the sake of complaining. I assumed that you actually had some old Word documents that you were worried about supporting.
No matter, you must have been happy to hear that you still can open those old documents after all. And if they do eventually remove support for the file format, then you can either keep an old version of Office to convert them (perhaps under VMWare), or use OpenOffice.
That means while Open Office will open up your Word 6 document, latest MS Office won't.
Actually, it will. It is Word 2 format (and earlier) that is blocked by default. The DOC file format changed dramatically between version 2 and version 6, so it makes sense for to draw the line at that version. The link above shows that you can still open old formats if you want to. I doubt many people still be able to find any documents from that long ago anyway. The Word docs that I still have from back then are from the Unix version of Word, which I presume used the same format at Word for DOS.
As for VBA, reports that they were dropping it from Office were wrong. They did remove VBA from the Mac version, which I think was a mistake. Sure they should support Applescript, but they should have kept VBA for backwards compatibility.
1997 + 3-4 years = 2000. PS2 came out in October 2000, mass availability in early 2001.
More importantly, the DVD encryption was cracked and DeCSS was released in October 1999. Suddenly the DVD format became much more useful.
I certainly had no intention of buying a DVD player until I knew I was not going to be locked in to an uncopyable/uneditable system. And yet now I own hundreds of (legal) DVDs. People like me are the ones that the movie studios always forget to mention when they come up with the outrageous guestimates of how much piracy costs them. In my case, the ability to copy DVDs led to me spending thousands of dollars.
I would not have spent that much if DVDs weren't so cheap, and I doubt DVDs would be so cheap they didn't have to compete with the much cheaper option of copying borrowed and hired discs.
I certainly have no intention of buying a Blu-Ray player until I know I am not going to be locked in to an uncopyable/uneditable system. Even then, the lure of high definition is not greatly compelling.
I think that you will find that Microsoft does not (yet) own gmail. The grandparent said that Hotmail was MS's biggest web service, not the biggest service of all on the web.
Well another alternative to read old files is to legally download Word 5.5 for DOS. Warning - this links directly to the EXE (self extracting ZIP) on Microsoft's site.
I found this in the references footnotes on the Microsoft Word Wikipedia entry. I haven't tried it yet. Once I manage to extract some old Word docs from the obsolete tape backup format that I have my old backups on then I will give it a whirl.
Can you guarantee that it'll run on Wine? Do their viewers require WGA?
What? Why should I have to guarantee anything about someone elses product? If I want to run a Windows program, I just press a button on my monitor switch box or use my notebook computer.
A quick Google search shows that people are indeed installing and using the viewer programs, so I guess that the answers are yes it does run, and no it doesn't require WGA.
All it would take is for Microsoft to release a fully compatible viewer/converter so that everybody can open the oldest of documents, and companies would likely cease to care.
If Sony wins a format war, does that mean the end times are near? Should I be stocking up on canned goods and water and working on my underground bunker?
You can try, but due to the DRM you won't be able to get a can opener to open those goods. You would be better off getting sealed packets of hotdogs and bottles of open sauce.
The sales figures quoted are not comparable. The XP figure quoted was for 14 months while the Vista sales period was less than 12 months. The launch date of XP was October 25, while Vista was launched January 30 - yet both speeches were made on January 8. That's three months of sales that XP had over Vista.
To be honest, I am surprised that Vista has sold as much as it has, considering that the upgrade from Windows 9x to XP was a much bigger step than from XP to Vista. But based on the figures given, I would say that the Vista sales were pretty much on track for Microsoft.
These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.
I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.
The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.
Codecs aren't necessarily like languages. <snip> However, a music codec is just a way for me to store music on my computer and portable music player. Why should I care about compatibility?
But you are not a huge company deciding on what format to use to sell their library of music over the Internet. Nor are you a retailer wanting music to push sales of portable players that mostly do not support Ogg. Compatibility is a huge issue for them.
However, WMA does suffer from the familiar problem many other codecs do, in that it's binary-only AFAIK, so just like WMV
When I first read this I thought that you were suggesting something like XML to store your audio. What a great compression that would be!
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option
Technically yes, but in practice no. There is not enough support in players to make this a commercially viable format to use. I found that I had absolutely no sales when I used Ogg Vorbis to release my spoken word children's books written in Esperanto!
And when you think about it, Ogg Vorbis is the codec equivalent of Esperanto. Everyone can understand the reason to use it, but hardly anyone actually does. If you do use it, you will end up being incompatible with the rest of the world because they just found it easier to use the established codec/language.
MS Word is so irritating in its inability to stay backwards compatible that legal businesses still use Corel's WordPerfect because it is slightly better in this regard.
Is that really true these days? An article published in Law Technology News compared a current survey with one conducted in 1997. They claimed that the percentage of Wordperfect users dropped from around 66% (they actually said two-thirds) down to 47%. This article was published in December 2000. Does anyone think that the trend would get reversed in the years since then?
Interestingly, the corporate law departments were much more likely to use Word. Their percentages went from 42% using Word to 87% in 2000.
They also said that Netscape Navigator went from being used 4 times more than IE in 1997 (45% vs 12%) to half the number of systems (25% vs 55%). It is amazing how fast IE took over.
I would want to see some other, more up-to-date stats on this to get an idea of what is really happening. But it seems to me that we should not go around making claims that Wordperfect is still king of the legal software when they might have really lost their crown over 7 years ago.
To compare apples with apples, right click on your Windows desktop and select Properties. On the Appearance tab click on the Effects button. Turn on the second checkbox and try the different methods in the drop down list below it. They do not take effect until you close the dialog box and click the Apply button.
I use Cleartype on mine. I never used to until I saw Vista on my wife's notebook and wondered why the fonts looked so much better than on my XP notebook. Cleartype is on by default on Vista. It took me about a day to get used to the blurry look on XP (probably because I am not using the new Vista fonts that are optimised for Cleartype), but now I can't go back!
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No. That would be the Walmart management that prevailed. Walmart don't care if those Linux systems sell out all the time, because selling these systems in preference to a Windows PC ends up costing them money.
While the Linux users are off using apt-get to download all their packages, Windows users have to return to the store to buy their Anti-virus software, Office packages, games etc. Windows users will continue to generate income long after they have got their neighbor's kid to setup the PC for them.
Sure, there are some Windows users who know about all the free software available for that platform. These people won't generate any extra income for the retailer, but they would not have anyway, so they are out of the equation.
Finally, I have always wondered how many returns they get from people who thought that the computer was faulty because it would not run all their software they already owned. It is possible that Walmart wants to avoid losing good will of their less technically inclined customers who think that they are selling broken PCs
Quite right. I did mean to say that mice were unheard of on the PC, not unheard of in general. The first mouse that I ever used on the PC came with a free copy of Windows 2.0. I never bothered to install it. Maybe the mouse came with Windows. Either way it was cheaper than buying a mouse by itself. We had to buy it because we had written our software to work with a mouse in DOS, but had never tested it until we were just about to ship.
That's a good list there. Because Windows started in the days when mice were almost unheard of, there has always been an emphasis on keyboard access to everything. This contrasts with the Mac that always came with a mouse, and so it is reasonable to assume that people can click on a button. Keyboard access was not so important.
For more information, people might like to have a look at the Windows Keyboard Access FAQ. I haven't read it too closely, but it looks like it might be a good place to start learning about keyboard shortcuts.
Yes, I have never found a direct way of getting to that. You can bring up the Start menu with the Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc if your keyboard doesn't have one of those). Then hit Esc to get rid of the menu. Now you can hit the tab key to access the different toolbars, including the Quick Launch and System Tray. On my system configuration, I have to do Windows Key, Esc, Tab, Tab, Tab.
Once on the System Tray, you can use the arrow keys to move to the different icons. Enter will perform the default action that clicking on the icon would have. The menu key (or Shift-F10) brings up the context menu.
Hmmm. I just found that you can access the desktop when you tab past the system tray, even though other windows are still in front of it. You can use the menu key to access the context menu of the desktop. I just got into the desktop properties with Opera still maximised. If you have an icon selected on the desktop, then pressing menu key will get the context menu of that icon. You can de-select the icon by pressing Ctrl-Space. Then the menu key will access the desktop menu.
You could always use the menus in the Explorer window. Alt-F W Enter (or Alt-F W F). This is the same as clicking on the menus.
One of the worst things that Microsoft did was to defaulting to remove the underlines from the keyboard equivelents of menus, fields and buttons. If you tap the Alt key in a dialog box it underlines all the keyboard short cuts. For example, to click on the Advanced button in a random form, I typed Alt-D. I didn't have to move the mouse to it, or even tab to get to button. It is much faster than having to dive for the mouse.
Great, there goes the neighborhood! The BeOS fanboys have arrived.
I think that it is a good thing that it is easier to declare someone dead than undead. Firstly, people die more often than they come back to life so it is a much more common thing to need to do.
Secondly, in this day and age of identity theft, you don't want to make it too convenient for someone to turn up claiming to be a person that everyone thought was dead. We aren't living in a soap opera, you know!
So you are just complaining for the sake of complaining. I assumed that you actually had some old Word documents that you were worried about supporting.
No matter, you must have been happy to hear that you still can open those old documents after all. And if they do eventually remove support for the file format, then you can either keep an old version of Office to convert them (perhaps under VMWare), or use OpenOffice.
Actually, it will. It is Word 2 format (and earlier) that is blocked by default. The DOC file format changed dramatically between version 2 and version 6, so it makes sense for to draw the line at that version. The link above shows that you can still open old formats if you want to. I doubt many people still be able to find any documents from that long ago anyway. The Word docs that I still have from back then are from the Unix version of Word, which I presume used the same format at Word for DOS.
As for VBA, reports that they were dropping it from Office were wrong. They did remove VBA from the Mac version, which I think was a mistake. Sure they should support Applescript, but they should have kept VBA for backwards compatibility.
More importantly, the DVD encryption was cracked and DeCSS was released in October 1999. Suddenly the DVD format became much more useful.
I certainly had no intention of buying a DVD player until I knew I was not going to be locked in to an uncopyable/uneditable system. And yet now I own hundreds of (legal) DVDs. People like me are the ones that the movie studios always forget to mention when they come up with the outrageous guestimates of how much piracy costs them. In my case, the ability to copy DVDs led to me spending thousands of dollars.
I would not have spent that much if DVDs weren't so cheap, and I doubt DVDs would be so cheap they didn't have to compete with the much cheaper option of copying borrowed and hired discs.
I certainly have no intention of buying a Blu-Ray player until I know I am not going to be locked in to an uncopyable/uneditable system. Even then, the lure of high definition is not greatly compelling.
I think that you will find that Microsoft does not (yet) own gmail. The grandparent said that Hotmail was MS's biggest web service, not the biggest service of all on the web.
It is played in 101 countries. At least, that is the number of countries that play by the ICC rules. There may be more who play their own variations.
I am interested in your offer. Who shall I write to when it comes time to collect my money?
Well another alternative to read old files is to legally download Word 5.5 for DOS. Warning - this links directly to the EXE (self extracting ZIP) on Microsoft's site.
I found this in the references footnotes on the Microsoft Word Wikipedia entry. I haven't tried it yet. Once I manage to extract some old Word docs from the obsolete tape backup format that I have my old backups on then I will give it a whirl.
What? Why should I have to guarantee anything about someone elses product? If I want to run a Windows program, I just press a button on my monitor switch box or use my notebook computer.
A quick Google search shows that people are indeed installing and using the viewer programs, so I guess that the answers are yes it does run, and no it doesn't require WGA.
Actually, Microsoft Word was available for Xenix and Unix.
I can't help but wonder what the computer world would be like if Microsoft hadn't turned away from Xenix to work on OS/2...
Here you go.
But they have done this for years, and yet everybody still complains.
You can try, but due to the DRM you won't be able to get a can opener to open those goods. You would be better off getting sealed packets of hotdogs and bottles of open sauce.
The sales figures quoted are not comparable. The XP figure quoted was for 14 months while the Vista sales period was less than 12 months. The launch date of XP was October 25, while Vista was launched January 30 - yet both speeches were made on January 8. That's three months of sales that XP had over Vista.
To be honest, I am surprised that Vista has sold as much as it has, considering that the upgrade from Windows 9x to XP was a much bigger step than from XP to Vista. But based on the figures given, I would say that the Vista sales were pretty much on track for Microsoft.
I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.
The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.
But you are not a huge company deciding on what format to use to sell their library of music over the Internet. Nor are you a retailer wanting music to push sales of portable players that mostly do not support Ogg. Compatibility is a huge issue for them.
When I first read this I thought that you were suggesting something like XML to store your audio. What a great compression that would be!
Technically yes, but in practice no. There is not enough support in players to make this a commercially viable format to use. I found that I had absolutely no sales when I used Ogg Vorbis to release my spoken word children's books written in Esperanto!
And when you think about it, Ogg Vorbis is the codec equivalent of Esperanto. Everyone can understand the reason to use it, but hardly anyone actually does. If you do use it, you will end up being incompatible with the rest of the world because they just found it easier to use the established codec/language.
Is that really true these days? An article published in Law Technology News compared a current survey with one conducted in 1997. They claimed that the percentage of Wordperfect users dropped from around 66% (they actually said two-thirds) down to 47%. This article was published in December 2000. Does anyone think that the trend would get reversed in the years since then?
Interestingly, the corporate law departments were much more likely to use Word. Their percentages went from 42% using Word to 87% in 2000.
They also said that Netscape Navigator went from being used 4 times more than IE in 1997 (45% vs 12%) to half the number of systems (25% vs 55%). It is amazing how fast IE took over.
I would want to see some other, more up-to-date stats on this to get an idea of what is really happening. But it seems to me that we should not go around making claims that Wordperfect is still king of the legal software when they might have really lost their crown over 7 years ago.
To compare apples with apples, right click on your Windows desktop and select Properties. On the Appearance tab click on the Effects button. Turn on the second checkbox and try the different methods in the drop down list below it. They do not take effect until you close the dialog box and click the Apply button.
I use Cleartype on mine. I never used to until I saw Vista on my wife's notebook and wondered why the fonts looked so much better than on my XP notebook. Cleartype is on by default on Vista. It took me about a day to get used to the blurry look on XP (probably because I am not using the new Vista fonts that are optimised for Cleartype), but now I can't go back!