Electronic journals don't need housing. Back issues are being scanned and made available fast. I don't have to leave my desk to get current journals.
I should consider it rather important to store multiple physical copies of scientific research in libraries throughout the world. There's already an alarming amount of obscure but relevant research from the 19th century and early 20th century that simply hasn't been widely reprinted and is in the danger of becoming folklore because the original manuscripts are so rare. Electronic storage is even less longevous than paper storage, it's not a solution for the ages.
Libraries are like RAID-5 of the research community.
Re:Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematic
on
Mathematica 6 Launched
·
· Score: 1
The reason why no-one has bothered to make free software for this niche is that it is so fucking boring.
If you think you're up to it, why not start by implementing the full functionality of Mathematica's FullSimplify routine (one single routine). I can guarantee you it's not boring at all, though you're unlikely to finish it this millenium unless you have a PhD and some serious experience.
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX, which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
Blackboard/whiteboards have existed for centuries for a reason. Use for them to display any information that is not too cumbersome to duplicate by hand (like tables and complicated graphs). Use slides only for what you can't write by hand on the board. You'll also find it's easier for the audience if you suddenly notice that your slides are missing a point you wanted to make. Simply write it down on the board instead of only trying to convey your idea verbally. The board also forces you to slow down to the level of your listeners' thought process, since most people go way too fast with slides.
The only downside is if you have really bad handwriting, but I refuse to believe people with no motoric disabilities are incapable of writing legibly in a large enough font if they concentrate.
First things first - Writely is not really a word processor. I cannot see anyone writing a book with this (fair enough, some might say the same goes for Word). It's more like a glorified visual text editor - except that for those used to really powerful text editors, it's not really a text editor either.
Having recently pulled my hair out trying to collaborate on a changes document using e-mails sent back and forth, I told everyone to use Word instead. Without the new fancy collaboration features it's not much more than being able to see changes and comments made by other users, but even that is good enough for basic collaborative document writing.
So what about Writely? I'd suggest the makers of Writely forget about secondary things like layout and formatting. As long as you can export in some common format, you can always take your finished document out and do the layout and formatting in another software. What they could really shine in is collaborative editing with easy to use and powerful tools that I'm not sure even exist anywhere today. There are clever people at Microsoft trying to come up with similar functionality, but it's all tied to their expensive complicated server products like Sharepoint and Exchange.
I missed the part where Washington employeed suicide bombers, or targeted the citizens of Philadelphia to death for being insufficiently pro-rebellion, or where Ben Franklin used sabotage to attack London, or where Patrick Henry cut the balls off captured British soldiers. But other than that, yeah, the American rebels were complete terrorists.
Do you think all that is needed to be labeled a "terrorist" nowadays? Spray-painting some federal buildings, sending some threatening letters, throwing stones at riot police, etc. will probably do it.
Try dumping the left join and using simple queries" is the first thing I suggest to my junior developers when they have gone and done the competent thing and ended up with a web app query that takes a full minute to return a result. Once they actually analyze the problem (instead of just trying to brute-force it with a MySQL one-liner), they usually discover there are other shortcuts and optimizations they can make, too. They may end up with 100 lines of code instead of 1 query, but they also end up with a much better application, because that 1 query was just an alias for 50,000 lines of code and a full minute of disk thrashing in MySQL.
I know nothing about MySQL but this doesn't sound right. What's the point of having a relational database if all you do is use it as a flat storage with all the relations done in code? I agree that sometimes it is necessary to do things the painstaking way, but usually with a RDBMS you handle such issues with clever indexing and table design. If your queries are so slow with a regular load then there's something badly wrong with your database or your database design.
As a lithmus test, any such device should be fed the writings of Jack Sarfatti, PhD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sarfatti). It is perfectly possible that a paper produced 100% by a human still consists of random bullshit (See: "Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr: A Comment on Emergent Gravity" at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602111).
Re:Geeks are smart but when it comes to this stuff
on
The Physics of Friendship
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's as if they get retarded real quick. It's complicated, but if you want to make a science out of it, it's very stupid to focus on the "physics" of friendship. This is like focising on the "shape" of love, or the weight of emotion. Well okay, it does make sense to focus on these things, but why focus on these things?
Actually, it's not stupid at all. There is lots of research into building formal models that describe and explain human behaviour. Some of it is game theoretic, this I suppose statistical. Of course you can argue that comparing human relationships to molecules bouncing around randomly doesn't make for a good model, but that's another issue.
Google is overvalued because the have no product. They only have a service. There is some college kid right now working on a technology that will put Google to shame.
Hate to break it to you but service-based business is nothing new nor will it go away.
There was search long before Google, there will be search long after Google and it seems Google is making the mistake that most tech companies make when they hit it big. They assume that nothing will change and they will continue to make money.
This is the company that introduces a couple of new services a year.
There is no security in service companies, if liquidated, Google would have but a tiny fraction of its worth in assets.
The same goes for just about company, considering the huge costs involved in liquidating real estate, machinery, etc. Staring at the assets is a fool's way of valuing a company. If anything, they can be a liability.
Information may be money in this day and age but our economy is based on material production. This whole web thing will eventually be replaced by something else, just as all technologies are and when it is, Google will realize it is fucked.
"I think this Interweb thingy is just a fad."
Brilliant, fucking brilliant. Don't quit your day job. Unless your day job is really being a trader, in which case please please please please quit your day job.
So is it any wonder that there are less.Net developers.
More likely the story is that the old Windows developers are clinging to VC++ and VB instead of making the transition to the new.NET languages. Many of these.NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the.NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.
I know we have to deal with this transition at work, so probably many others will have to, too.
not to be overly cynical...but this seems to be the typical "human" method of studying new things. first, we take a cursory glance from a distance. next, we think about how we can study it. in the process, we destroy or cause harm to it.
Rubbish. Mars is not some delicate ecosystem that withers and dies when you look at it funny. It's basically a dead rock. When your methods of observation are not precise enough to get the results with small-scale measurements, you sometimes have to blow the system up to see what it contains. Consider the analogy between particle physics and smashing a watch to pieces to figure out how it works.
Yes, Microsoft's hosting partners are paying a bundle in licensing fees. But, they-the hosting companies-are making it back plus a substantial profit. This is just a classic cut out the middleman move. Microsoft will charge a bit less than the current hosting companies can and will will still make the licensing fees plus the profit that the hosting companies previously enjoyed.
Granted, but it's not obvious that destroying fruitful business partnerships by entering into direct competition is necessarily more productive. It all depends on the situation in ways which can be complicated. For example, if they sell 10 Exchange seats+support to a customer who wants hosted Exchange, they get the license fees for the seats and the profit from the support, but they also get the costs of running the data centre, which might or might not be a profitable business in the future. On the other hand, if they sell the licenses to a VAR, who trains two of their people to host those seats (MCSE + MSDN memberships), they get not only the license fees and the money for training, they can cut out the investment and risk related therein. So it's not really cut and dried that they would make more money in every single case by getting rid of the VAR.
The question for many of the hosting companies is whether or not Microsoft will enter their specific niche by introducing their own products or will simply purchase a company in the niche to get a jump start.
Hosting off-the-shelf products (Microsoft as well as FOSS) is a difficult business anyway, since it's such an easy market to enter. To make it in the hosting business you really need your own product or some special expertise that other players don't have to gain an edge. Microsoft might have muscle, but it's not hard to compete against their products in terms of quality and price. Other major software companies are probably even worse in this aspect. At least Microsoft can afford to cut prises to one third of what SAP, for example, are asking.
After thinking about it a bit... what advantage does a shared electronic calendar offer an office with only 5-10 computers? Couldnt a whiteboard handle all the calendaring they would need?
Bah... whiteboards! A pen and paper is all they need. No, scratch that, a piece of flint and a big rock to carve on. An replace e-mail with pidgeons.
I doubt Microsoft want to put their enterprise hosting partners out of business, after all they are paying bundles in license fees, training, certification etc. I have a hunch that Microsoft are having difficulties finding partners willing to host certain products in a large enough scale and they decided it's just easier to do it themselves. I certainly wouldn't want to host Navision or Exchange for any reasonably large number of users.
I don't know about these particular gripes, seem more like a different philosophy than faults to me, but one big problem seems to be total lack of tolerance for criticism.
Slashdot loves to post links to these "OS is doing it all wrong" editorials, and regardless of the veracity of their claims, the response is always the same: Full-scale ad-hominem attacks at the author, claims of FUD being thrown about, blue-eyed optimism galore and generally anything reasonable and unreasonable that seeks to discredit the author's opinion in whichever way possible.
The proper way to handle critique is to not respond anything, ignore the rubbish and improve on the real issues, then silently let the results speak for themselves. Posting huge counter-diatribes and staging muck-throwing operations on Groklaw is not the proper way to handling critique.
old style logging. why not just log the exception to a file (as its usually done), and mail it to the programmers at a regular interval. why waste so much of bandwidth, especially in the case where things go horribly wrong and exceptions are thrown just about everywhere.
Having an app that has nothing to do with e-mail start sending out e-mail is a faux pas. How does it even do it? Does it ask the user for mail preferences? Does it sniff around for an SMTP host? Does it just blast stuff out and run into a firewall? If the user is supposed to do the e-mailing they never will and you might as well not have bothered.
Of course, having the app do HTTP-SOAP calls is also questionnable, but at least the proxy settings can be dug up from somewhere and the requests secured properly with SSL.
As usual for/., most of the other comments are simple: "Waah, why must I pay money for a commercial service, waah".
When it comes down to it, nobody really want's to hear what you had for dinner, how your date went, or if your hemorrhoids are clearing up. If there's a shared interest it might invoke some discussions, and that's the only valuable attribute of a "blog". People have always fawned over celebrities, so when Brad Pitt starts a public "blog" fanatics don't get excited because he's "blogging", it would be the same as if he was yelling out his window. I'm not sure what's more depressing, when some average Sally "blogs" about what she's going to wear today, or when somebody actually *reads* that crap regularily.
The irony of venting on a blog about how much blogs suck and expecting other people to read with interest is apparently lost on many of these blog-haters.
Not all blogs are about the boring lives of mundane people, and even if they were that would still be more interesting than reading this perpetual moaning about blogs.
Not to contradict, but why then would the spammers spend the effort to actually send out the spam? It wouldn't be necessary once someone has been conned into purchasing their services.
Most spammmers seem to live in self-delusion. They believe (or at least have convinced themselves) that what they do is perfectly ethical and that sending spam is beneficial. In the world according to spammers, the only people who don't like spam are a small vocal group of "antis" that resort to criminal acts against the poor honest businessmen.
I suppose they could be using a different con on people (who end up spamming) by saying "here, use this program and get lots of money."
Many spammers have a side business selling spamware.
Economics problem - spam is profitable as long as 0.01% of the spammed masses buy the pills. As long as there are just a few idiots buying into the crap, we all get spammed.
The spammers aren't making a profit selling physical products, they're making a profit selling spamming services. The best ones usually have a huge network of contacts where small businesses buy "opt-in mailing campaigns" or some such rubbish from a third party, who then subcontract someone to harvest or buy a list from the Internet and then give it to a another spammer who sends the actual spam. The end result is that the product seller is inundated by angry e-mails but has no idea what happened (plausable deniability) and the only one who gets anything out of it is the spammer.
All my documentation consisted of a TeX file, a DVI file and finally a PDF file. All open formats. But none of them can be loaded into MS-Word and edited. The emails where from developers who inherited the projects and wanted to update the documentation. My point was, that even though we have open document formats, we will still have to struggle with proprietary Word files, because that's what "they" use.
While I like TeX myself, it's probably less "open" in practice. Yes, it's versatile, prints out great and is an absolute necessity in most technical documents. But 99% of computer users can't make head nor tail out of it. It's like Postscript vs. PDF - no one outside of acedemia (except the Linux/Unix users) has a clue as to how to open or print Postscript files. What's the use of spreading documents in an open format that no one can realistically edit and few can open? At least most OSS word processors now work somewhat reliably with Word.
Of course I'm writing this while cursing at having to write a lab report with Word...
Slashdot Mirror
Electronic journals don't need housing. Back issues are being scanned and made available fast. I don't have to leave my desk to get current journals.
I should consider it rather important to store multiple physical copies of scientific research in libraries throughout the world. There's already an alarming amount of obscure but relevant research from the 19th century and early 20th century that simply hasn't been widely reprinted and is in the danger of becoming folklore because the original manuscripts are so rare. Electronic storage is even less longevous than paper storage, it's not a solution for the ages.
Libraries are like RAID-5 of the research community.
The reason why no-one has bothered to make free software for this niche is that it is so fucking boring.
If you think you're up to it, why not start by implementing the full functionality of Mathematica's FullSimplify routine (one single routine). I can guarantee you it's not boring at all, though you're unlikely to finish it this millenium unless you have a PhD and some serious experience.
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX, which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
Prosper has all the glitz you need anyway.
so how are we supposed to give a presentation?
Blackboard/whiteboards have existed for centuries for a reason. Use for them to display any information that is not too cumbersome to duplicate by hand (like tables and complicated graphs). Use slides only for what you can't write by hand on the board. You'll also find it's easier for the audience if you suddenly notice that your slides are missing a point you wanted to make. Simply write it down on the board instead of only trying to convey your idea verbally. The board also forces you to slow down to the level of your listeners' thought process, since most people go way too fast with slides.
The only downside is if you have really bad handwriting, but I refuse to believe people with no motoric disabilities are incapable of writing legibly in a large enough font if they concentrate.
First things first - Writely is not really a word processor. I cannot see anyone writing a book with this (fair enough, some might say the same goes for Word). It's more like a glorified visual text editor - except that for those used to really powerful text editors, it's not really a text editor either.
Having recently pulled my hair out trying to collaborate on a changes document using e-mails sent back and forth, I told everyone to use Word instead. Without the new fancy collaboration features it's not much more than being able to see changes and comments made by other users, but even that is good enough for basic collaborative document writing.
So what about Writely? I'd suggest the makers of Writely forget about secondary things like layout and formatting. As long as you can export in some common format, you can always take your finished document out and do the layout and formatting in another software. What they could really shine in is collaborative editing with easy to use and powerful tools that I'm not sure even exist anywhere today. There are clever people at Microsoft trying to come up with similar functionality, but it's all tied to their expensive complicated server products like Sharepoint and Exchange.
I missed the part where Washington employeed suicide bombers, or targeted the citizens of Philadelphia to death for being insufficiently pro-rebellion, or where Ben Franklin used sabotage to attack London, or where Patrick Henry cut the balls off captured British soldiers. But other than that, yeah, the American rebels were complete terrorists.
Do you think all that is needed to be labeled a "terrorist" nowadays? Spray-painting some federal buildings, sending some threatening letters, throwing stones at riot police, etc. will probably do it.
Try dumping the left join and using simple queries" is the first thing I suggest to my junior developers when they have gone and done the competent thing and ended up with a web app query that takes a full minute to return a result. Once they actually analyze the problem (instead of just trying to brute-force it with a MySQL one-liner), they usually discover there are other shortcuts and optimizations they can make, too. They may end up with 100 lines of code instead of 1 query, but they also end up with a much better application, because that 1 query was just an alias for 50,000 lines of code and a full minute of disk thrashing in MySQL.
I know nothing about MySQL but this doesn't sound right. What's the point of having a relational database if all you do is use it as a flat storage with all the relations done in code? I agree that sometimes it is necessary to do things the painstaking way, but usually with a RDBMS you handle such issues with clever indexing and table design. If your queries are so slow with a regular load then there's something badly wrong with your database or your database design.
As a lithmus test, any such device should be fed the writings of Jack Sarfatti, PhD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sarfatti). It is perfectly possible that a paper produced 100% by a human still consists of random bullshit (See: "Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr: A Comment on Emergent Gravity" at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602111).
It's as if they get retarded real quick. It's complicated, but if you want to make a science out of it, it's very stupid to focus on the "physics" of friendship. This is like focising on the "shape" of love, or the weight of emotion. Well okay, it does make sense to focus on these things, but why focus on these things?
Actually, it's not stupid at all. There is lots of research into building formal models that describe and explain human behaviour. Some of it is game theoretic, this I suppose statistical. Of course you can argue that comparing human relationships to molecules bouncing around randomly doesn't make for a good model, but that's another issue.
Google is overvalued because the have no product. They only have a service. There is some college kid right now working on a technology that will put Google to shame.
Hate to break it to you but service-based business is nothing new nor will it go away.
There was search long before Google, there will be search long after Google and it seems Google is making the mistake that most tech companies make when they hit it big. They assume that nothing will change and they will continue to make money.
This is the company that introduces a couple of new services a year.
There is no security in service companies, if liquidated, Google would have but a tiny fraction of its worth in assets.
The same goes for just about company, considering the huge costs involved in liquidating real estate, machinery, etc. Staring at the assets is a fool's way of valuing a company. If anything, they can be a liability.
Information may be money in this day and age but our economy is based on material production. This whole web thing will eventually be replaced by something else, just as all technologies are and when it is, Google will realize it is fucked.
"I think this Interweb thingy is just a fad."
Brilliant, fucking brilliant. Don't quit your day job. Unless your day job is really being a trader, in which case please please please please quit your day job.
So is it any wonder that there are less .Net developers.
More likely the story is that the old Windows developers are clinging to VC++ and VB instead of making the transition to the new .NET languages. Many of these .NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the .NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.
I know we have to deal with this transition at work, so probably many others will have to, too.
not to be overly cynical...but this seems to be the typical "human" method of studying new things. first, we take a cursory glance from a distance. next, we think about how we can study it. in the process, we destroy or cause harm to it.
Rubbish. Mars is not some delicate ecosystem that withers and dies when you look at it funny. It's basically a dead rock. When your methods of observation are not precise enough to get the results with small-scale measurements, you sometimes have to blow the system up to see what it contains. Consider the analogy between particle physics and smashing a watch to pieces to figure out how it works.
Yes, Microsoft's hosting partners are paying a bundle in licensing fees. But, they-the hosting companies-are making it back plus a substantial profit. This is just a classic cut out the middleman move. Microsoft will charge a bit less than the current hosting companies can and will will still make the licensing fees plus the profit that the hosting companies previously enjoyed.
Granted, but it's not obvious that destroying fruitful business partnerships by entering into direct competition is necessarily more productive. It all depends on the situation in ways which can be complicated. For example, if they sell 10 Exchange seats+support to a customer who wants hosted Exchange, they get the license fees for the seats and the profit from the support, but they also get the costs of running the data centre, which might or might not be a profitable business in the future. On the other hand, if they sell the licenses to a VAR, who trains two of their people to host those seats (MCSE + MSDN memberships), they get not only the license fees and the money for training, they can cut out the investment and risk related therein. So it's not really cut and dried that they would make more money in every single case by getting rid of the VAR.
The question for many of the hosting companies is whether or not Microsoft will enter their specific niche by introducing their own products or will simply purchase a company in the niche to get a jump start.
Hosting off-the-shelf products (Microsoft as well as FOSS) is a difficult business anyway, since it's such an easy market to enter. To make it in the hosting business you really need your own product or some special expertise that other players don't have to gain an edge. Microsoft might have muscle, but it's not hard to compete against their products in terms of quality and price. Other major software companies are probably even worse in this aspect. At least Microsoft can afford to cut prises to one third of what SAP, for example, are asking.
After thinking about it a bit... what advantage does a shared electronic calendar offer an office with only 5-10 computers? Couldnt a whiteboard handle all the calendaring they would need?
Bah... whiteboards! A pen and paper is all they need. No, scratch that, a piece of flint and a big rock to carve on. An replace e-mail with pidgeons.
I doubt Microsoft want to put their enterprise hosting partners out of business, after all they are paying bundles in license fees, training, certification etc. I have a hunch that Microsoft are having difficulties finding partners willing to host certain products in a large enough scale and they decided it's just easier to do it themselves. I certainly wouldn't want to host Navision or Exchange for any reasonably large number of users.
I don't know about these particular gripes, seem more like a different philosophy than faults to me, but one big problem seems to be total lack of tolerance for criticism.
Slashdot loves to post links to these "OS is doing it all wrong" editorials, and regardless of the veracity of their claims, the response is always the same: Full-scale ad-hominem attacks at the author, claims of FUD being thrown about, blue-eyed optimism galore and generally anything reasonable and unreasonable that seeks to discredit the author's opinion in whichever way possible.
The proper way to handle critique is to not respond anything, ignore the rubbish and improve on the real issues, then silently let the results speak for themselves. Posting huge counter-diatribes and staging muck-throwing operations on Groklaw is not the proper way to handling critique.
Plus logfiles can be analyzed too, enough handy tools around for that too (I use vi).
You have a magical version of 'vi' that penetrates the user's firewall, reads their logfiles over the Internet and reports back?
Well what if it's a desktop app deployed in thousands of sites around the world?
old style logging. why not just log the exception to a file (as its usually done), and mail it to the programmers at a regular interval. why waste so much of bandwidth, especially in the case where things go horribly wrong and exceptions are thrown just about everywhere.
Having an app that has nothing to do with e-mail start sending out e-mail is a faux pas. How does it even do it? Does it ask the user for mail preferences? Does it sniff around for an SMTP host? Does it just blast stuff out and run into a firewall? If the user is supposed to do the e-mailing they never will and you might as well not have bothered.
Of course, having the app do HTTP-SOAP calls is also questionnable, but at least the proxy settings can be dug up from somewhere and the requests secured properly with SSL.
As usual for /., most of the other comments are simple: "Waah, why must I pay money for a commercial service, waah".
When it comes down to it, nobody really want's to hear what you had for dinner, how your date went, or if your hemorrhoids are clearing up. If there's a shared interest it might invoke some discussions, and that's the only valuable attribute of a "blog". People have always fawned over celebrities, so when Brad Pitt starts a public "blog" fanatics don't get excited because he's "blogging", it would be the same as if he was yelling out his window. I'm not sure what's more depressing, when some average Sally "blogs" about what she's going to wear today, or when somebody actually *reads* that crap regularily.
The irony of venting on a blog about how much blogs suck and expecting other people to read with interest is apparently lost on many of these blog-haters.
Not all blogs are about the boring lives of mundane people, and even if they were that would still be more interesting than reading this perpetual moaning about blogs.
Funny, but it's worth mentioning that the BBC have no ads on their TV channels, radio stations or website
Last time I checked, there were ads on BBC World.
Not to contradict, but why then would the spammers spend the effort to actually send out the spam? It wouldn't be necessary once someone has been conned into purchasing their services.
Most spammmers seem to live in self-delusion. They believe (or at least have convinced themselves) that what they do is perfectly ethical and that sending spam is beneficial. In the world according to spammers, the only people who don't like spam are a small vocal group of "antis" that resort to criminal acts against the poor honest businessmen.
I suppose they could be using a different con on people (who end up spamming) by saying "here, use this program and get lots of money."
Many spammers have a side business selling spamware.
Economics problem - spam is profitable as long as 0.01% of the spammed masses buy the pills. As long as there are just a few idiots buying into the crap, we all get spammed.
The spammers aren't making a profit selling physical products, they're making a profit selling spamming services. The best ones usually have a huge network of contacts where small businesses buy "opt-in mailing campaigns" or some such rubbish from a third party, who then subcontract someone to harvest or buy a list from the Internet and then give it to a another spammer who sends the actual spam. The end result is that the product seller is inundated by angry e-mails but has no idea what happened (plausable deniability) and the only one who gets anything out of it is the spammer.
All my documentation consisted of a TeX file, a DVI file and finally a PDF file. All open formats. But none of them can be loaded into MS-Word and edited. The emails where from developers who inherited the projects and wanted to update the documentation. My point was, that even though we have open document formats, we will still have to struggle with proprietary Word files, because that's what "they" use.
While I like TeX myself, it's probably less "open" in practice. Yes, it's versatile, prints out great and is an absolute necessity in most technical documents. But 99% of computer users can't make head nor tail out of it. It's like Postscript vs. PDF - no one outside of acedemia (except the Linux/Unix users) has a clue as to how to open or print Postscript files. What's the use of spreading documents in an open format that no one can realistically edit and few can open? At least most OSS word processors now work somewhat reliably with Word.
Of course I'm writing this while cursing at having to write a lab report with Word...
As to copying ideas, the makers of the proprietary Civ game haven't independently invented turn-based games, programming, the computer, the transistor
To be fair, they started the game with The Wheel, stole Computers from the Iroquois and traded Electronics to Flight with the Americans.