Interestingly, a friend of mine who seriously studied Old English married a Dutch fellow who's mother was from Friesland. She can understand Fries, though her husband cannot (he was raised elsewhere in Holland, speaking standard Dutch, and never learned Fries). There's also considerable archaeological evidence suggesting that the Angle ethnicity arose from an area around the southern end of the Jutland (Danish) peninsula -- i.e., right around Friesland. I'm not in any way saying that Fries is Old English, but rather pointing out that Fries is a closer relative than German -- but then all three come from the same roots. It's a bit like English and Fries being cousins, with German as that other cousin twice removed on your uncle's side.:)
Now here's someone who gets both their history *and* their linguistics right. Kudos to Sr. Martínez. And with a name like Stanislav as well -- Slavs in Spain, there's got to be an interesting story there somewhere.;)
As a fluent Japanese speaker and part-time studier of Korean, I can vouch for the grammatical similarities -- most intriguing. And also as a part-time studier of Chinese, I can vouch that Chinese and Korean are about as similar as English and Korean -- Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither. Okay, so Chinese influenced Korean (and Japanese too) in terms of how counters are used (words like "brace" in "a brace of ducks", or "murder" in "a murder of crows", or "loaf" in "three loaves of bread"), but otherwise Chinese and Korean have pitifully little to do with each other. For that matter, Chinese is closer to English structurally speaking than it is to Korean, so there.;)
What then of the commonly heard "brang" and "brung"? How would this fit into this pattern? Perhaps there is some intuitive understanding of how strong verbs conjugate that is then misapplied in such cases as this?
I'm also intrigued by the similarity of strong verb conjugation with the way Semitic consonantal roots derive new words through vowel changes -- though admittedly I know very little about Semitic languages. But the similarity does make me wonder if it's one of the basic linguistic paradigms for word formation -- vowel change, vs. consonant change. Vowel change shows up in Japanese (more my area of familiarity) to some extent as well, with koro koro and kuru kuru both denoting a rolling motion, for instance, from which may be derived korogaru "to roll, intransitive" and kuruma "car or carriage"...
< sigh. > More evidence that I should get off my duff, make some time in my schedule, and actually get around to reading up on linguistics.:)
Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right!
Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointedthisout numerous times.
I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.
OOo provides an API for programming Java OLE objects. The problem is not OOo, it is a lack of third party developers actually using this feature.
Incidentally, OOo also allows for the use of Python and other programming languages as well. However, while it might be my lack of Java-ness, it looks to me like the underlying problem is that the OOo API docs are mindbogglingly poorly organized. Say for instance you have an object of type TextCursor, and want to find out quickly what properties and methods such an object has. So you go into OOo's online API documentation and find the entry for TextCursor -- only to discover that you cannot tell what properties and methods this object provides. The docs show what *interfaces* it has, but while this might be exciting in terms of software architecting and discovering how OOo reuses its own code base, it doesn't offer a lot to anyone simply trying to make use of OOo objects. To actually find the methods and properties for any object, you'd have to click through each and every interface listing, which is hardly convenient or easy to use.
I strongly suspect that a reworking of the API documentation would give OOo a big leg up in terms of third party development.
Don't be mad at Verizon because your government is completely fraudulent and corrupt -- if you vote, kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions.
Color me cynical, but what do you suggest when the whole election process has been subverted to the point that only pro-business candidates ever seem to get far enough to be voted upon? Seriously, when was the last time a truly progressive (and I don't mean "liberal", I mean "working for positive change for more than the candidate's own pocketbook") candidate made it through all the primaries and other BS to reach the ballot with any serious chance of gaining office? A few third parties have historically made it to the ballot, but by the time of the election, they've been painted with such a broad brush of unacceptabilty by the media and the two entrenched parties that they haven't stood much of a chance. Armed revolution has been brought up a few times as one possible option, but it really looks to me like the vast majority of the country is either too apathetic or too enamoured of the status quo to go that far. People aren't poor and pinched enough yet to really get motivated.
I read nothing funny there, only starkly depressing truths. But seriously folks, anyone looking at the history of patents will see this all as... well, "patently" obvious. Not funny at all.
No offence meant to you, Toreo. My ire is directed firmly at Apple and other DRM hucksters. Note too that my iTunes purchases dropped off to nil after I figured out what they were doing.
Anyone who owns an iPod will know the firmware gets updated fairly regularly will fixes and on occasion new features too.
And how many of those "fixes" have to do with obfuscating the iPod database and audio file titles, as part of the never-ending cat-and-mouse game that is DRM? I've had an iPod for years, and poked around on it a good bit -- terminal is your friend -- without hacking the firmware at all, and during that time, each "update" only ever seemed to do more to separate me still further from the music I had already bought.
It comes at a price.
Yes, it does -- the price I paid in the goddamn store. All this after-sale bullshit is really pissing me off.
Where are the more creative modpoint options when you need them...
And don't forget, kiddies, big important people have been known to select Windows software to do such things as run naval destroyers. So outfit your bunker, pop open a beer, and sit back to watch the show!
While I generally agree about the punctuation issue, there are fringe cases where this is actually more useful, particularly in translation. Say for instance the source text has "-->" (minus the quotes), and the client expects proper arrows in the target text -- that winds up being, for all intents and purposes, a "word" that needs translating. But I'll be first to admit that's not the usual case.:)
Part of my beef about shortcomings on OOo's part regarding Western text is the lack of data found in the Count dialog. MS Word shows us counts for:
Pages
Words
Characters (no spaces)
Characters (with spaces)
Paragraphs
Lines
Non-Asian words
Asian characters, Korean words
Meanwhile, OOo's dialog gives us only:
Words
Characters
OOo doesn't give any indication of how many of those characters might be whitespace. Nor do we get any other stats about the document, like number of pages or paragraphs. Sure, we could go to File -> Properties -> Statistics for that as well, but if folks are bothering to imitate MS Word's UI for the sake of user familiarity, why are they only going halfway and leaving out some of the useful bits?
Once we get into CJK text, OOo counts get really silly. Take for example the first paragraph from the Japanese Wikipedia article on Eleanor Roosevelt. It's nice and short, and includes some mixed Western + CJK text. Simply given the more robust stats available on the Word Count dialog, you might expect more and more accurate info from MS Word -- and you'd be right.
MS Word gives us a "Non-Asian words" count of 11, and an "Asian characters, Korean words" count of 71. OOo, meanwhile, gives us the completely spurious "Words" count of 41, and an unhelpful "Characters" count of 116. Japanese does not have a clear linguistic sense of "word" for counting purposes, not least because they don't generally use any spaces on the one hand, while on the other there's little agreement as to whether particles should be considered suffixes or separate words in their own right. So any "word count" for Japanese is silly right off the bat. Never mind that Japanese folks themselves only ever count Japanese texts by the number of non-space characters.
Not distinguishing between Japanese and Western words and characters is another strike against OOo, as I cannot tell how many words in a mixed-text document might already be in English and therefore not need translating. Since most clients ask for billing based either on the number of Asian non-space characters in the source, or the number of English words translated (i.e. target Western word count - source Western word count), OOo is useless to me in this regard.
So sure, while MS Word's count might be flawed, it's still a far cry better than what OOo offers.
"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."
People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not.
I'll back it up. How's this bug for starters. It's been on the tracker for over four years. It covers the basic fundamental functionality of counting words and characters in a word processor document. Anyone who writes / edits / translates professionally needs this to work well, simply, and accurately -- and OOo simply doesn't measure up.
I know -- I translate for a living, and I *very* much would like to be able to use OOo as my primary office software solution. But I cannot do so, as I need accurate counts that break down Western and Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK, i.e. double-byte) character counts. MS Word has done this for a long time, at least since around 1998. And yet despite reporting this bug and detailing what needs to happen, the OOo dev team still has not even acknowledged the CJK issue, let alone set a specific target milestone.
Try it yourself. Open MS Word in one window, copy or type in a paragraph or three. Copy the same text to an OOo Writer window. Run the word count function in both apps, and compare. Pitiful. And even worse if your sample text includes any CJK text.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo...
This isn't an issue of training. This is an issue of "room for improvement". In this case, enough room to park a semi, complete with an enormous, though ignored and weatherbeaten, sign right next to the gaping hole in the wall, saying "PUT GARAGE DOOR HERE".
I'm not joking. I've had Microsoft Word destroy its own file and I've used OO to repair the file, and so have many other people.
Indeed. I'm a translator, and many times I've had clients send me amazingly fugly files where the internal structure and formatting was so borked that simply trying to open them kills Word. Other times, something might go boing when I'm partway through translating. The *only* thing that's saved my bacon in those situations is OOo.
Kinda messed up when a bunch of FOSS reverse engineers seem to understand Microsuck's formats better than Microsuck's own software does.
Note that I happily acknowledge that there are problems with Japanese companies. Note too that the problem with Sony's media arm and the whole DRM rootkit fiasco seems to stem from non-Japanese managers -- an important distinction. Generally speaking, though, Japanese companies -- when run by Japanese people -- tend to be less aggressive in their fucking-over.
No issue there, I fully agree that things have been worse further back. Speaking more recently, the corporate world seemed to be getting better. There was a lot of embarrassing bitching and moaning and begging from the car industry in the 1980s, and all the corporate raiding and downsizing, and then the overall picture appeared to even out a bit. But like many things, bullshit appears to be a cyclical market, and we're back into an upswing in terms of production volume.
For some reason people seem to think that the point of (most) corporations is to help the public. Clue : It's NOT. The ONLY responsibility of a corporation is to its SHAREHOLDERS.... The thought that corporations somehow are supposed to care for what they do to the public at large is totally foreign to the concept of the corporation in the first place. It's a sociopathic entity, a non-being given the rights (in some cases more rights than actual human beings.) Yes there are some beneficial corporations out there, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
I think it's worth noting that the most particularly virulent and aggressive manifestation of the "corporation" appears to be peculiar to the US. I've lived in Japan for many a year, and although there are problems with corporations here too, it works out differently, and generally speaking corporations in Japan are much less likely to so obviously fuck somebody over. I therefore have come to think that some of the "stench" I referred to previously is peculiar to the US.
To put it another way, there's an old quote: Don't shit where you eat. I don't think US corporations (and perhaps more importantly MBA programs) have figured that one out yet.
Is it just me, or is being a lying sack of shit a prerequisite to operating with the big corporations in the US? I'm puzzled and disturbed by what appears to be an increase in skullduggery and flat-out bullshitting. Sure, it's always been there, but the stench seems to be getting stronger...
and we're still running a deficit! It appears to me that the conservative movement is over funding government.
... just not the right parts of it. How is it that schools seem to be going down the toilet, and that even with all this war-mongering and "surge, surge, surge" BS from the White House, our troops still need to be creative in their own fundraising efforts (c.f. this post about a reservist posted to Afghanistan and advertising a local beer brewery to raise money for his unit)? So that leads me to wonder -- rather pointedly -- where in the devil's briefcase all this military spending is going? How much of a kickback is Cheney getting from Halliburton, I wonder...
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Interestingly, a friend of mine who seriously studied Old English married a Dutch fellow who's mother was from Friesland. She can understand Fries, though her husband cannot (he was raised elsewhere in Holland, speaking standard Dutch, and never learned Fries). There's also considerable archaeological evidence suggesting that the Angle ethnicity arose from an area around the southern end of the Jutland (Danish) peninsula -- i.e., right around Friesland. I'm not in any way saying that Fries is Old English, but rather pointing out that Fries is a closer relative than German -- but then all three come from the same roots. It's a bit like English and Fries being cousins, with German as that other cousin twice removed on your uncle's side. :)
Cheers,
Dude, wtf?
Either you're trolling, or you seriously have to let me know where you bought your stash.
Cheers,
Now here's someone who gets both their history *and* their linguistics right. Kudos to Sr. Martínez. And with a name like Stanislav as well -- Slavs in Spain, there's got to be an interesting story there somewhere. ;)
Cheers,
As a fluent Japanese speaker and part-time studier of Korean, I can vouch for the grammatical similarities -- most intriguing. And also as a part-time studier of Chinese, I can vouch that Chinese and Korean are about as similar as English and Korean -- Korean has borrowed words from both languages, but structurally resembles neither. Okay, so Chinese influenced Korean (and Japanese too) in terms of how counters are used (words like "brace" in "a brace of ducks", or "murder" in "a murder of crows", or "loaf" in "three loaves of bread"), but otherwise Chinese and Korean have pitifully little to do with each other. For that matter, Chinese is closer to English structurally speaking than it is to Korean, so there. ;)
Cheers,
What then of the commonly heard "brang" and "brung"? How would this fit into this pattern? Perhaps there is some intuitive understanding of how strong verbs conjugate that is then misapplied in such cases as this?
I'm also intrigued by the similarity of strong verb conjugation with the way Semitic consonantal roots derive new words through vowel changes -- though admittedly I know very little about Semitic languages. But the similarity does make me wonder if it's one of the basic linguistic paradigms for word formation -- vowel change, vs. consonant change. Vowel change shows up in Japanese (more my area of familiarity) to some extent as well, with koro koro and kuru kuru both denoting a rolling motion, for instance, from which may be derived korogaru "to roll, intransitive" and kuruma "car or carriage"...
< sigh. > More evidence that I should get off my duff, make some time in my schedule, and actually get around to reading up on linguistics. :)
Cheers,
Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.
I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.
It's been requested numerous times, and has been on OOo's issue list since at least April 2002 -- see here for reference.
Cheers,
Incidentally, OOo also allows for the use of Python and other programming languages as well. However, while it might be my lack of Java-ness, it looks to me like the underlying problem is that the OOo API docs are mindbogglingly poorly organized. Say for instance you have an object of type TextCursor, and want to find out quickly what properties and methods such an object has. So you go into OOo's online API documentation and find the entry for TextCursor -- only to discover that you cannot tell what properties and methods this object provides. The docs show what *interfaces* it has, but while this might be exciting in terms of software architecting and discovering how OOo reuses its own code base, it doesn't offer a lot to anyone simply trying to make use of OOo objects. To actually find the methods and properties for any object, you'd have to click through each and every interface listing, which is hardly convenient or easy to use.
I strongly suspect that a reworking of the API documentation would give OOo a big leg up in terms of third party development.
Cheers,
Color me cynical, but what do you suggest when the whole election process has been subverted to the point that only pro-business candidates ever seem to get far enough to be voted upon? Seriously, when was the last time a truly progressive (and I don't mean "liberal", I mean "working for positive change for more than the candidate's own pocketbook") candidate made it through all the primaries and other BS to reach the ballot with any serious chance of gaining office? A few third parties have historically made it to the ballot, but by the time of the election, they've been painted with such a broad brush of unacceptabilty by the media and the two entrenched parties that they haven't stood much of a chance. Armed revolution has been brought up a few times as one possible option, but it really looks to me like the vast majority of the country is either too apathetic or too enamoured of the status quo to go that far. People aren't poor and pinched enough yet to really get motivated.
I read nothing funny there, only starkly depressing truths. But seriously folks, anyone looking at the history of patents will see this all as ... well, "patently" obvious. Not funny at all.
PS --
No offence meant to you, Toreo. My ire is directed firmly at Apple and other DRM hucksters. Note too that my iTunes purchases dropped off to nil after I figured out what they were doing.
Cheers,
And how many of those "fixes" have to do with obfuscating the iPod database and audio file titles, as part of the never-ending cat-and-mouse game that is DRM? I've had an iPod for years, and poked around on it a good bit -- terminal is your friend -- without hacking the firmware at all, and during that time, each "update" only ever seemed to do more to separate me still further from the music I had already bought.
Yes, it does -- the price I paid in the goddamn store. All this after-sale bullshit is really pissing me off.
Where are the more creative modpoint options when you need them...
And don't forget, kiddies, big important people have been known to select Windows software to do such things as run naval destroyers. So outfit your bunker, pop open a beer, and sit back to watch the show!
< ...shudder... />
Let me say it again for good measure.
While I generally agree about the punctuation issue, there are fringe cases where this is actually more useful, particularly in translation. Say for instance the source text has "-->" (minus the quotes), and the client expects proper arrows in the target text -- that winds up being, for all intents and purposes, a "word" that needs translating. But I'll be first to admit that's not the usual case. :)
Part of my beef about shortcomings on OOo's part regarding Western text is the lack of data found in the Count dialog. MS Word shows us counts for:
Meanwhile, OOo's dialog gives us only:
OOo doesn't give any indication of how many of those characters might be whitespace. Nor do we get any other stats about the document, like number of pages or paragraphs. Sure, we could go to File -> Properties -> Statistics for that as well, but if folks are bothering to imitate MS Word's UI for the sake of user familiarity, why are they only going halfway and leaving out some of the useful bits?
Once we get into CJK text, OOo counts get really silly. Take for example the first paragraph from the Japanese Wikipedia article on Eleanor Roosevelt. It's nice and short, and includes some mixed Western + CJK text. Simply given the more robust stats available on the Word Count dialog, you might expect more and more accurate info from MS Word -- and you'd be right.
MS Word gives us a "Non-Asian words" count of 11, and an "Asian characters, Korean words" count of 71. OOo, meanwhile, gives us the completely spurious "Words" count of 41, and an unhelpful "Characters" count of 116. Japanese does not have a clear linguistic sense of "word" for counting purposes, not least because they don't generally use any spaces on the one hand, while on the other there's little agreement as to whether particles should be considered suffixes or separate words in their own right. So any "word count" for Japanese is silly right off the bat. Never mind that Japanese folks themselves only ever count Japanese texts by the number of non-space characters.
Not distinguishing between Japanese and Western words and characters is another strike against OOo, as I cannot tell how many words in a mixed-text document might already be in English and therefore not need translating. Since most clients ask for billing based either on the number of Asian non-space characters in the source, or the number of English words translated (i.e. target Western word count - source Western word count), OOo is useless to me in this regard.
So sure, while MS Word's count might be flawed, it's still a far cry better than what OOo offers.
Cheers,
I'll back it up. How's this bug for starters. It's been on the tracker for over four years. It covers the basic fundamental functionality of counting words and characters in a word processor document. Anyone who writes / edits / translates professionally needs this to work well, simply, and accurately -- and OOo simply doesn't measure up.
I know -- I translate for a living, and I *very* much would like to be able to use OOo as my primary office software solution. But I cannot do so, as I need accurate counts that break down Western and Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK, i.e. double-byte) character counts. MS Word has done this for a long time, at least since around 1998. And yet despite reporting this bug and detailing what needs to happen, the OOo dev team still has not even acknowledged the CJK issue, let alone set a specific target milestone.
Try it yourself. Open MS Word in one window, copy or type in a paragraph or three. Copy the same text to an OOo Writer window. Run the word count function in both apps, and compare. Pitiful. And even worse if your sample text includes any CJK text.
This isn't an issue of training. This is an issue of "room for improvement". In this case, enough room to park a semi, complete with an enormous, though ignored and weatherbeaten, sign right next to the gaping hole in the wall, saying "PUT GARAGE DOOR HERE".
Fabulous! I've never seen this before, but damn that looks useful. Cheers, mate!
Indeed. I'm a translator, and many times I've had clients send me amazingly fugly files where the internal structure and formatting was so borked that simply trying to open them kills Word. Other times, something might go boing when I'm partway through translating. The *only* thing that's saved my bacon in those situations is OOo.
Kinda messed up when a bunch of FOSS reverse engineers seem to understand Microsuck's formats better than Microsuck's own software does.
Doh! Oh well. Maybe they should be the ones to make these Faraday cages then? :)
"Faraday, for when you're going far away...and don't want to pay!"
Cheers,
Now they might want to stray somewhat from the "i[Whatever]" branding style and simply call it the "inCase(TM)".
Ba dum, tish...
Note that I happily acknowledge that there are problems with Japanese companies. Note too that the problem with Sony's media arm and the whole DRM rootkit fiasco seems to stem from non-Japanese managers -- an important distinction. Generally speaking, though, Japanese companies -- when run by Japanese people -- tend to be less aggressive in their fucking-over.
Cheers,
No issue there, I fully agree that things have been worse further back. Speaking more recently, the corporate world seemed to be getting better. There was a lot of embarrassing bitching and moaning and begging from the car industry in the 1980s, and all the corporate raiding and downsizing, and then the overall picture appeared to even out a bit. But like many things, bullshit appears to be a cyclical market, and we're back into an upswing in terms of production volume.
Cheers,
I think it's worth noting that the most particularly virulent and aggressive manifestation of the "corporation" appears to be peculiar to the US. I've lived in Japan for many a year, and although there are problems with corporations here too, it works out differently, and generally speaking corporations in Japan are much less likely to so obviously fuck somebody over. I therefore have come to think that some of the "stench" I referred to previously is peculiar to the US.
To put it another way, there's an old quote: Don't shit where you eat. I don't think US corporations (and perhaps more importantly MBA programs) have figured that one out yet.
Cheers,
Is it just me, or is being a lying sack of shit a prerequisite to operating with the big corporations in the US? I'm puzzled and disturbed by what appears to be an increase in skullduggery and flat-out bullshitting. Sure, it's always been there, but the stench seems to be getting stronger...
... just not the right parts of it. How is it that schools seem to be going down the toilet, and that even with all this war-mongering and "surge, surge, surge" BS from the White House, our troops still need to be creative in their own fundraising efforts (c.f. this post about a reservist posted to Afghanistan and advertising a local beer brewery to raise money for his unit)? So that leads me to wonder -- rather pointedly -- where in the devil's briefcase all this military spending is going? How much of a kickback is Cheney getting from Halliburton, I wonder...