On Windows, anyway, Word 6 is the best version. Anything after added mostly 'bloat' features that the average user doesn't need.
But Microsoft jumped from Word for Windows 2.0 all the way to 6.0 in one leap, so Word 6 is kind of their 'version 3' which proves the 'third version' theory. Microsoft had to really scramble to come up with something businesses needed that was better than Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 for the average business desktop. And it was a COMPELLING need, because Office 4.3 runs better in the Windows subsystem on OS/2 than it does in Windows itself. So $version_of_office_newer_than_4.3 had to be better. Office 95 sucked, so they scrambled to come up with Office 97. Really the only reason to upgrade beyond Word 6/Office 4.3, aside from the 'compatability with your co-workers' sucking black-hole that FORCES upgrades, is long filename support.
Word for Windows 2.0 has a lot of slick advantages, though. All you need to run it is the one file, winword.exe, which is small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy diskette. With winword.exe in hand on a floppy, you can plug it into the A: drive of any windows machine, anywhere, and run winword.exe. Which includes the WordBasic engine built into Word 2. It's really cool that way.
I'd kind of like to figure out how to hook up my Tandy TRS-80 PC-5 'Personal Computer' to the net. It has a sort of an I/O interface, a row of pins on one side that you're supposed to hook a printer to.
But doing external I/O on that thing would probably drain it's batteries pretty bad. I've owned that particular Personal Computer for three+ years now. Bought it on eBay. It still has the coin battery in it that it had when I bought it. And I've used it some, it hasn't just sat on the shelf. I programmed in my little 'benchmark' BASIC program that calculates PI. It's pretty slow.
A worm/virus that trashes it's host doesn't do a good job of propagating. These sorts of programs can do so at a 'time bomb' setpoint, if the designer feels the virus/worm will have propagated widely by that time, of course.
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
Tax cuts don't have to be justified. Taking people's money away and spending it for them has to be justified. There shouldn't be a single tax in place that doesn't have to be explicitly re-authorized by legislative vote every five years or so.
That's partly because 'the good ole HAMs' are often, indeed usually, up near the front leading the advances in technology. i.e.: Wireless? HAMs have been doing Packet radio since the early 80's. Don't misinterpet the fact that in certain HAM radio communities there are still people using Commodore 64's for various purposes. Using a good blend of the old and the new is an innovative thing.
Someone listened to you clowns and actually followed through on your ideology, and guess what? Now they're sleaze.
Naw, here we are talking about someone who has gone out of their way to make no mention of the fact that anybody can download the 'product' they're selling. One that they've done nothing but slap a bitmap on the front of and global search/replace the name of. They're parasites. They've gone out of their way to 'fork' the code and keep their captive band of 'customers.'
Naw. Then only one copy can be read at a time. I'm just saying, anybody interested in his work, here's a CD with all of it. No need for the library to buy copies, no need for the bookstore to stock them.
I downloaded that years ago when the beta was available. Not that long ago I came across it on a CDR and ran it once again. With modern hardware (relatively speaking, i.e. Pentium 3 450) it was pretty slick. Obviously limited, but not the bog-mess it was on the current hardware when Corel first floated the beta code.
Actually, MP2 was first. I started fiddling around with MP2 compression, using the 'reference implementation' source code that was (probably still is) downloadable from the MPEG consortium. I thought 'this is cool. I can rip CD Audio (only with a select few CDROM drives at first, though- most drives blocked CDDA extraction in those days) and 'compress' it, and fit a bunch of albums on one CD.' I thought to myself 'that would be cool and could make a lot of money.'
I'm sure I'm not the only person who was fooling around with it back then on Linux but who sat back and didn't take action to 'cash in' on it like a few others did.
The problem with Apple is that you can't buy a desktop system without their mouse and keyboard.
Is this true? It used to be the case that you always had to buy the keyboard as a separate item when you bought a Mac.
Hell, with the original Apple 1 machine, you had to source your own keyboard from somewhere. There wasn't even a keyboard connector on the board. There was a 'scratchpad' area on the board to add inverters if the parallel-strobing ASCII keyboard you chose used negative instead of positive logic. The Apple I also was shipped without a power transformer (it had the rectifiers, filter caps, and voltage regulator on the main board) because including a transformer would have increased the shipping cost too much.
For companies that make extensive use of Acrobat, 'output capabilites' is a small part of the Acrobat product.
Acrobat PDF files are editable, hyperlinkable, comment boxes can be added, etc. and there's a sufficient amount of 'security locking' built in to be useful in most office environments. And I'd certainly rather have the collection of numbered archival versions of my corporate documents stored as 'semi-frozen' PDF files than as Word or OO.org documents.
Do you think McDonalds would be paying $100 a head for every zit faced teenager asking "da ja' want fries wit' that?" in every company owned location if they want one Sun system?
McDonalds is a franchise-based system. McDonalds Corporation itself is mostly people who work in offices or warehouses. The people working at the actual hamburger stands are employees of whatever small/medium-sized company has a franchise with McDonalds.
Companies don't need Adobe Reader on the desktop, they need Adobe Acrobat (full version) on the desktop. Until Adobe comes out with that product, Acrobat alone is going to block a lot of people from wanting a Sun/Linux desktop in their departments.
The difference between having a 'dummy' reader and a tool to manipulate, edit, and create documents isn't any different with PDF files than it would be if companies started putting 'MS Word Reader' on their employee's desktops instead of full MS Word. Invariably people who detest PDF files (aside from Open Standard Documents folks, who are a significant minority) are people who have no ability to edit them.
I would imagine that companies with large workforces that don't actually go anywhere near a computer would lose out on a deal like this.
Now, we all know that the $100 figure is a figure to get the salesman in the door at companies. It's going to often be a fraction of that if Sun wants to be competetive, and signficantly less in companies that have 600 office staff and 6000 guys turning nuts out on the plant floor.
Sun isn't giving away StarOffice. I was at Staples a few weeks ago and I was happy to see Sun-branded StarOffice boxes on the shelf below the OfficeXP boxes.
The StarOffice was $70 and we all know how expensive the OfficeXP is. I think it's excellent for there to be an alternative Office Suite on the shelf competing with MS Office that is from a big reputable firm like Sun, not just the usual wobbly 'Better Working Office' knockoff that's common in those spots on the shelf.
I recently bought an auction lot of a whole bunch of boxes of 'computer stuff' so I've seen what teachers have historically gone through. One entire box was filled with thirty or so manilla folders. Each folder had a machine number on it, and there were bunches of various licenses and CDs for the software on that machine. I'm assuming the school district kept those files somewhere near the 'Computer Room' and they were forced to track and file everything for each machine each time the machines were upgraded. What a mess! I much preferred the other box from the skid lot that had all the unopened new Laser Toner cartridges in it (the whole skid was $5).
And since the batteries are most likely to die when the keyboard/mouse is in use, not when it's not in use, it by design will fail at the more critical point in time.
Get off it with your elitism. 'The market decided...' is a weak arguement, but you can and should offer a better counter-arguement than some snobby comparison to Beta and Windows.
I just recently started liking the Macintosh, now that reasonable useful Power Macs are almost free at auction (I'm using MacOS 8.1 on a 200 MHz 603 that I paid less than a dollar for right now) and it still bugs the hell out of me that the mouse has that big stupid single button. It's one of the few things I'm still disliking.
Apple could make an expensive (they love that sort of thing) pop-out/pop-in modular mouse button thing as a 'two button' option on Mac laptops, but they won't because of arrogance. Come on, Jobs: you gave up on the no-fan dogma (hell, Mac Plus users were spending two hundred bucks and more for a drop in muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole to counteract that dogma ages ago...), it's time to give on the button issue, for Laptops if not for the desktop models (where an easy replacement mouse can be obtained).
Hay, the Slashdot Cruiser was coolness. A part of 'the culture' just like 'Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified.' Seeing that wondefully wacky bitmap of the Slashdot Cruier up there on top made it actually tolerable to not block the banner server for a time.
Slashdot Mirror
On Windows, anyway, Word 6 is the best version. Anything after added mostly 'bloat' features that the average user doesn't need.
But Microsoft jumped from Word for Windows 2.0 all the way to 6.0 in one leap, so Word 6 is kind of their 'version 3' which proves the 'third version' theory. Microsoft had to really scramble to come up with something businesses needed that was better than Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 for the average business desktop. And it was a COMPELLING need, because Office 4.3 runs better in the Windows subsystem on OS/2 than it does in Windows itself. So $version_of_office_newer_than_4.3 had to be better. Office 95 sucked, so they scrambled to come up with Office 97. Really the only reason to upgrade beyond Word 6/Office 4.3, aside from the 'compatability with your co-workers' sucking black-hole that FORCES upgrades, is long filename support.
Word for Windows 2.0 has a lot of slick advantages, though. All you need to run it is the one file, winword.exe, which is small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy diskette. With winword.exe in hand on a floppy, you can plug it into the A: drive of any windows machine, anywhere, and run winword.exe. Which includes the WordBasic engine built into Word 2. It's really cool that way.
I'd kind of like to figure out how to hook up my Tandy TRS-80 PC-5 'Personal Computer' to the net. It has a sort of an I/O interface, a row of pins on one side that you're supposed to hook a printer to.
But doing external I/O on that thing would probably drain it's batteries pretty bad. I've owned that particular Personal Computer for three+ years now. Bought it on eBay. It still has the coin battery in it that it had when I bought it. And I've used it some, it hasn't just sat on the shelf. I programmed in my little 'benchmark' BASIC program that calculates PI. It's pretty slow.
One of the first BBSes that I was really active on was a C-Net board. It ran on a Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem and two floppy drives.
But then, I started BBSing before I had a computer, on a DecWriter Printing Terminal I got at a thrift store, hooked to an acoustic coupler.
My SYM-1 is a home computer. So is the KIM-1.
A worm/virus that trashes it's host doesn't do a good job of propagating. These sorts of programs can do so at a 'time bomb' setpoint, if the designer feels the virus/worm will have propagated widely by that time, of course.
I would be satisfied with Bush using the bright blue color of the sky as a justification for a tax cut.
Tax cuts don't have to be justified. Taking people's money away and spending it for them has to be justified. There shouldn't be a single tax in place that doesn't have to be explicitly re-authorized by legislative vote every five years or so.
That's partly because 'the good ole HAMs' are often, indeed usually, up near the front leading the advances in technology. i.e.: Wireless? HAMs have been doing Packet radio since the early 80's. Don't misinterpet the fact that in certain HAM radio communities there are still people using Commodore 64's for various purposes. Using a good blend of the old and the new is an innovative thing.
Someone listened to you clowns and actually followed through on your ideology, and guess what? Now they're sleaze.
Naw, here we are talking about someone who has gone out of their way to make no mention of the fact that anybody can download the 'product' they're selling. One that they've done nothing but slap a bitmap on the front of and global search/replace the name of. They're parasites. They've gone out of their way to 'fork' the code and keep their captive band of 'customers.'
Naw. Then only one copy can be read at a time. I'm just saying, anybody interested in his work, here's a CD with all of it. No need for the library to buy copies, no need for the bookstore to stock them.
There's always Corel's 'Corel Office for java'
I downloaded that years ago when the beta was available. Not that long ago I came across it on a CDR and ran it once again. With modern hardware (relatively speaking, i.e. Pentium 3 450) it was pretty slick. Obviously limited, but not the bog-mess it was on the current hardware when Corel first floated the beta code.
Actually, MP2 was first. I started fiddling around with MP2 compression, using the 'reference implementation' source code that was (probably still is) downloadable from the MPEG consortium. I thought 'this is cool. I can rip CD Audio (only with a select few CDROM drives at first, though- most drives blocked CDDA extraction in those days) and 'compress' it, and fit a bunch of albums on one CD.' I thought to myself 'that would be cool and could make a lot of money.'
I'm sure I'm not the only person who was fooling around with it back then on Linux but who sat back and didn't take action to 'cash in' on it like a few others did.
How about instead I produce a compendium of all his books and give it away, widely, to anybody who might want a copy?
The problem with Apple is that you can't buy a desktop system without their mouse and keyboard.
Is this true? It used to be the case that you always had to buy the keyboard as a separate item when you bought a Mac.
Hell, with the original Apple 1 machine, you had to source your own keyboard from somewhere. There wasn't even a keyboard connector on the board. There was a 'scratchpad' area on the board to add inverters if the parallel-strobing ASCII keyboard you chose used negative instead of positive logic. The Apple I also was shipped without a power transformer (it had the rectifiers, filter caps, and voltage regulator on the main board) because including a transformer would have increased the shipping cost too much.
For companies that make extensive use of Acrobat, 'output capabilites' is a small part of the Acrobat product.
Acrobat PDF files are editable, hyperlinkable, comment boxes can be added, etc. and there's a sufficient amount of 'security locking' built in to be useful in most office environments. And I'd certainly rather have the collection of numbered archival versions of my corporate documents stored as 'semi-frozen' PDF files than as Word or OO.org documents.
I wasn't aware that Dell was a good example of a potential big Sun customer.
Do you think McDonalds would be paying $100 a head for every zit faced teenager asking "da ja' want fries wit' that?" in every company owned location if they want one Sun system?
McDonalds is a franchise-based system. McDonalds Corporation itself is mostly people who work in offices or warehouses. The people working at the actual hamburger stands are employees of whatever small/medium-sized company has a franchise with McDonalds.
Psst! Unless you're running Solaris-x86, you're still buying and maintaining Sun hardware.
Companies don't need Adobe Reader on the desktop, they need Adobe Acrobat (full version) on the desktop. Until Adobe comes out with that product, Acrobat alone is going to block a lot of people from wanting a Sun/Linux desktop in their departments.
The difference between having a 'dummy' reader and a tool to manipulate, edit, and create documents isn't any different with PDF files than it would be if companies started putting 'MS Word Reader' on their employee's desktops instead of full MS Word. Invariably people who detest PDF files (aside from Open Standard Documents folks, who are a significant minority) are people who have no ability to edit them.
I would imagine that companies with large workforces that don't actually go anywhere near a computer would lose out on a deal like this.
Now, we all know that the $100 figure is a figure to get the salesman in the door at companies. It's going to often be a fraction of that if Sun wants to be competetive, and signficantly less in companies that have 600 office staff and 6000 guys turning nuts out on the plant floor.
If you want to see something truly revolting, though, look at how this sleaze outfit is rebranding and selling OpenOffice.org on eBay.
Sun isn't giving away StarOffice. I was at Staples a few weeks ago and I was happy to see Sun-branded StarOffice boxes on the shelf below the OfficeXP boxes.
The StarOffice was $70 and we all know how expensive the OfficeXP is. I think it's excellent for there to be an alternative Office Suite on the shelf competing with MS Office that is from a big reputable firm like Sun, not just the usual wobbly 'Better Working Office' knockoff that's common in those spots on the shelf.
I recently bought an auction lot of a whole bunch of boxes of 'computer stuff' so I've seen what teachers have historically gone through. One entire box was filled with thirty or so manilla folders. Each folder had a machine number on it, and there were bunches of various licenses and CDs for the software on that machine. I'm assuming the school district kept those files somewhere near the 'Computer Room' and they were forced to track and file everything for each machine each time the machines were upgraded. What a mess! I much preferred the other box from the skid lot that had all the unopened new Laser Toner cartridges in it (the whole skid was $5).
And since the batteries are most likely to die when the keyboard/mouse is in use, not when it's not in use, it by design will fail at the more critical point in time.
So where's the 'human factors design' in this?
Get off it with your elitism. 'The market decided...' is a weak arguement, but you can and should offer a better counter-arguement than some snobby comparison to Beta and Windows.
I just recently started liking the Macintosh, now that reasonable useful Power Macs are almost free at auction (I'm using MacOS 8.1 on a 200 MHz 603 that I paid less than a dollar for right now) and it still bugs the hell out of me that the mouse has that big stupid single button. It's one of the few things I'm still disliking.
Apple could make an expensive (they love that sort of thing) pop-out/pop-in modular mouse button thing as a 'two button' option on Mac laptops, but they won't because of arrogance. Come on, Jobs: you gave up on the no-fan dogma (hell, Mac Plus users were spending two hundred bucks and more for a drop in muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole to counteract that dogma ages ago...), it's time to give on the button issue, for Laptops if not for the desktop models (where an easy replacement mouse can be obtained).
Hay, the Slashdot Cruiser was coolness. A part of 'the culture' just like 'Mae Ling Mak, naked and petrified.' Seeing that wondefully wacky bitmap of the Slashdot Cruier up there on top made it actually tolerable to not block the banner server for a time.