Is more accurately described as an elaborate blame shifting mechanism.
From Microsoft's perspective it's worth every man-hour that went into it because they can plausibly say, "But Vista is sooo great, it warned you and YOU ignored it. Sucks to be you." Which papers over the geek-fact that UAC is a permeable barrier to root-ish priviledge, so really nothing technically like sudo despite what Microsoft marketing will tell you.
Now that the writer's strike is over, you should shop your story in Hollywood. It's part Erin Brockovich, part "Anatomy of a Murder" with a "lawyer with a heart of gold" main character. Hollywood LOVES remakes.
Thanks for all of your time and effort on this.
Off topic: how do we, as non-lawyer types, bring some of the lawyers working for the RIAA up to their respective Bar Association for ethical/procedural violations? I would hope that would contain the RIAA better.
You and the moderators have no clue. Here's a couple of Fun Hollywood Facts.
1. There is so much money flowing through the distribution cartel, that unions are the only way to wrestle it out of the Producers/Studios. I'm old enough to remember a blockbuster low-budget movie called "My big fat greek wedding" has, to date, not turned a profit. Now, I could see a bad movie not turning a profit, but that movie was and still is INSANELY popular. Hell, my wife still gets residuals from a commercial that appeared in a big-budget movie made 20 years ago. That's how shady Hollywood accounting is.
2. Writers are about the least respected guild in Hollywood. Seriously, food craft gets more respect. (probably because they aren't a union)
5. Producers routinely turn great stories/scripts into trash. Once they own the rights to the script, let the destruction begin!!! This is why good books rarely make good movies. Once the writer gives up control it's all downhill. Notable exceptions usually have the writer having final say on the script.
You, and the idiots who modded you up have no clue.
As someone that used to work for a company that developed strong authentication systems, I can tell you that big-business has been having some kind of orgasm about this for quite a while now.
The typical big-dreamer sees "identity" as a problem of too many logins/passwords. Yahoo and IBM have different customers, but similar goals simplifying authentication/identity for their customers. As usual, Microsoft is conspicuously absent because they think they've got the proprietary solution already.
Fact is you can connect to AD over standard LDAP, And do what exactly? Store encrypted passwords in the directory? No. Password authentication via LDAP? No. Connect to other authentication backends? No. Search using the syntax as presented in microsoft's ldap gui? No. Unix for Windows? A nasty pile of crap.
authenticate via Kerberos from UNIX/Linux to AD quite easily. Microsoft's "kerberos" is a black box. Kerberos-ish is more like it. The "easy" part is not because Microsoft makes it easy but because there are devs unwinding Microsoft's totally undocumented black box.
Look, I admin both Linux and Windows "Enterprise" products as my career of choice so I know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's time to acknowledge that maybe it's possible Microsoft doesn't have all of the answers.
The parties are working up their versions of a budget and waiting for the elections to play out. In the meantime, they'll temporarily fund the government.
For those hawks that believe that private industry can do research "better" I offer the following.
1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application.
2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped. This is already happening in the now-privatized University R&D and it happened long, long ago in business.
3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style.
4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation.
My original point was that setting up a DC++ server to lower WAN traffic isn't an option for ISP's
1. The legality of file sharing is none of the ISP's business! They aren't liable for the content over their network service. Except the American media cartel does not find that an acceptable condition so they find any means necessary to change it in their favor. Ridiculous actions like this cut to the heart of why innovation slows in the developed world.
2. You imply that P2P is inherently illegal. It is not. I got my last knoppmyth and debian installers via bittorrent. OpenOffice is out there too.
I want to emphasize that you are promulgating the false notion that "P2P is unconditionally bad." or that it is a matter for law enforcement to get involved with when neither one resembles the consumer-friendly legal framework that denies the media conglomerates even more profit and predates P2P.
Granted, the average win32 admin will hit a wall because Microsoft does not design their product, documents and services for an admin smart enough to DIY.
Openldap/kerberos5/apache2 opens many, many more security/identity/authentication possibilities than Microsoft's active directory.
hat has much more to do with the less sophisticated law enforcement in those countries
Please stop this kind of faulty thinking. While this sounds plausible, there is not an ounce of truth contained within the statement. Reality suggests some combination of the following:
1. Activity is not illegal or otherwise unenforced. This is a classic developing nation strategy. Consumers in these countries cannot afford developed-nation pricing for the content in question, so they use it as they see fit.
2. IP owners don't particularly care. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft operate under the general idea that today's pirate is tomorrow's customer. They benefit more from piracy than they would otherwise have you believe. That is why retail products like photoshop still ship without hardware drm.
3. There is no sophistication required!!!! This is a petty crime in every country industrialized or otherwise. A DA will not devote much time or effort to the case because it won't get them re-elected. It's pretty much the copyright cartel driving these prosecutions.
4. The crime-fighting budget devoted to copyright infringement is a meaningless compared to other priorities. The vast, vast majority of the "piracy ring busted" news-ish content is PR designed to make developed-nation consumers afraid or to give the perception that "piracy is not welcome in our country" PR.
In principal, I agree with your reasoning, but in practice most humans will not give credibility to anything that falls outside of their range of beliefs. The result being vi-or-die content isn't considered by the emacs-rulez crowd anyway.
Most people do not go out an intentionally re-evaluate their fragile, contradictory belief systems.
In theory, the solution would return more relevant results than google because they agree with the person's views/opinions/etc. It would turn google into something of an "academic" search engine versus their more popular one.
Definitely worth watching if they can return valuable results.
How is choice between different networks and network technologies supported by multiple vendors a bad thing again?
Industry has allocated twice (or more) of the capital required to provide the wireless service. It is pretty easy to argue that the resources spent replicating the infrastructure could have been used elsewhere.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy, And you probably don't USE the insurance very much. You would find that there will be lots of bills you must pay AFTER insurance has "covered" you. And they cover progressively less every year while your premiums go up.
Social Security: Currently is broken You know, my retired mother in law thought the same thing when she was young and it worked out just fine. Instead of throwing away a service that keeps the retired generally housed and barely fed, how about addressing our Governmental spendthrift ways?
Its interesting that the three unsatisfactory "free market" examples are heavily distorted by government regulation.
1. I defy you to come up with a legitimately unregulated products market in the Industrialized world. I'll give you an illegitimate example, illicit drugs. Totally unregulated. Will I get a good fix this week? Will I get killed buying/selling/using? Maybe CDO's are a good example of a legally unregulated market and look where that's gotten us.
2. What you also conveniently forget is economic history is full of examples of what ACTUALLY happens with unregulated markets. The market swiftly changes into a monopoly. End of story.
3. Do you like price fixing? How about collusion? How about doctors and medicine that kill your loved ones. How about a house that doesn't fall down in a strong wind or earthquake? You like freeway bridges that stay up don't you?
It's time for you and the jokers moderating you up to move out of your parent's basement and join the real world.
I'm on one of their "faster" dynamic IP residential plans and I can only send mail from my mail server by smtp authenticating against a valid earthlink account. Otherwise, I get an smtp time out message in postfix no matter what.
Earthlink cannot provide me with a static IP which is easy enough to blame on the telco.
Americans for the most part are perfectly willing to suffer for the "free markets" rationale.
-Mobile phones (multiple, incompatible networks) -Health care -Data infrastructure
In other areas, we are quite happy to nationalize, Railway services Interstate highways. "free" too. Social Security (just try being the elected grinch that cuts that program) and most recently, education with no child left behind.
Depending on your politics, some of these issues cannot be discussed with any civility whatsoever.
This is some interoperability play most likely to placate some government entity without actually doing much. It is the equivalent of the skin of an onion.
This is also temporary as Microsoft has already made well known their intentions to move to signed drivers only. After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?
Virtual machines are stupid What inspires such wanton disregard for a legitimately great tool?
and difficult for normal users to comprehend I never tell my end users how anything works, so why would I even begin explaining their application is running in an emulator?
and use. A clickable shortcut and the end-user is using their windows app just like the every other app. Let the productivity begin!
I use wine to run an old version of quick-something at home and select kid-friendly games. It's not the impediment you think it is.
Qemu is the silver bullet. Let's say the company has legit Dell-sourced windows licenses. They can switch over to linux and run the windows partition through qemu in a window/fullscreen on the Linux desktop. Qemu is plenty fast enough to run quickbooks especially on recent hardware. There. Problem solved.
Except qemu has been around for a while and it's not the Linux killer app. Neither is wine. I'm not slagging qemu or wine, but merely pointing out that Linux will succeed on it's own merits. Smaller benefits include qemu and wine, but they aren't the killer app that drives adoption.
Can this topic come up and not a single person asks ANY of the following questions:
1. I get someone elses ssn, and I'm off to the bank. (or whatever) Why is the process that associates a unique identifier (U.S. = SSN) with financial activity so simple?
2. Why does "sucks to be you" suffice every single time this issue comes up?
3. While individual financial data is available to the financial institutions, it's totally opaque to the consumer. Ex. how is my credit score calculated? How come consumers have practically no control over it?
4. The risks of an easy credit system far outweigh the benefits and yet no one seems to acknowledge this. An indirect example of this is the bad packaged loans that are driving the current "credit crunch."
Transparency is the keystone to a healthy economy and yet there's less and less with each passing year.
As a very involved side hobby, I have been a digital photographer for some time now
And nowhere in your recent past were you a color engineer at either the input or output ends of the process. You and others like you are running on a broad and deep set of misconceptions bordering on mythology regarding imaging technology. It is marketing's fault, but that's another story.
There are in fact a number of displays that can go beyond the current 8 bits per channel you normally see (generally 12 bits)
This statement is a perfect example of the mythology imaging enthusiasts rely on. More importantly, you stubbornly hang on to the mythology when there's no basis in fact for such an absurd statement. Here's a tip for you: more bits does not equate to a wider gamut.
The actual threat to your personal media freedom posed by HDMI is worth sticking with analog or go fancy and get a digital output for your freevo/mythtv box.
Digital offers all the hi-def goodness with none of the DRM evil.
You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well
Stop the color madness now. And I mean Right Now. In order to get you to consume DRM equipment, they are selling you a convenient fiction called "Deep Color." HDMI is a Trojan Horse and Deep Color is an absurd lie used to get DRM through the consumers front door.
This is one takes too long to explain and requires some ****actual**** technical knowledge of rendering color digitally. I don't mean color pablum on some well-regarded hdtv forum, because Teco's/Samsung/etc LCD panel engineers aren't hanging around dispelling the marketing myths.
Deep Color is designed to fool everyone, including the geeks because so few people know about rendering digital color. In summary, let's assume the player device can actually send images in some kind of fantastical super-wide-gamut to the display. (which it can't and won't. Ever. ) You still have a display utterly incapable of rendering all of those colors!!
Please recall the display beauty of the 32-bit CRT. The display industry won't ever forget the business disaster that was and that's why you'll never see one again.
Digital output is fully capable of rendering all of the color that a display can render and it is Free from DRM. Which is why it should be the output of choice in any Freedom-loving home in the world. Except it's status as being free from DRM makes it public enemy #1.
Stories like this are extremely harmful. What most of you fail to recognize is you are discussing the noose the media conglomerates will use to overcharge you for their product, limit competition, and ultimately hang you.
Today's lesson: HDMI is how consumers all over the world will submit to total media control.
I dunno about the "heads and shoulders" claims. If you are 1 user, there aren't any of the problems I deal with.
The gui is different, but it's a very complicated argument to justify its betterness.
I support a small office with a mix including 2007 desktops and I still have the same old support issues with "smart" formatting battles, odd (per-user basis) gui design. The same old troubles with trying to "upgrade" the file in question at every possible moment is hopefully in check. Interoperability between versions remains problematic.
Word (still) reminds me of a cheap swiss army knife. It doesn't do anything particularly well. I hope the writing projects have enough stuff to keep going.
Slashdot Mirror
Is more accurately described as an elaborate blame shifting mechanism.
From Microsoft's perspective it's worth every man-hour that went into it because they can plausibly say, "But Vista is sooo great, it warned you and YOU ignored it. Sucks to be you." Which papers over the geek-fact that UAC is a permeable barrier to root-ish priviledge, so really nothing technically like sudo despite what Microsoft marketing will tell you.
Ray,
Now that the writer's strike is over, you should shop your story in Hollywood. It's part Erin Brockovich, part "Anatomy of a Murder" with a "lawyer with a heart of gold" main character. Hollywood LOVES remakes.
Thanks for all of your time and effort on this.
Off topic:
how do we, as non-lawyer types, bring some of the lawyers working for the RIAA up to their respective Bar Association for ethical/procedural violations? I would hope that would contain the RIAA better.
You and the moderators have no clue. Here's a couple of Fun Hollywood Facts.
1. There is so much money flowing through the distribution cartel, that unions are the only way to wrestle it out of the Producers/Studios. I'm old enough to remember a blockbuster low-budget movie called "My big fat greek wedding" has, to date, not turned a profit. Now, I could see a bad movie not turning a profit, but that movie was and still is INSANELY popular. Hell, my wife still gets residuals from a commercial that appeared in a big-budget movie made 20 years ago. That's how shady Hollywood accounting is.
2. Writers are about the least respected guild in Hollywood. Seriously, food craft gets more respect. (probably because they aren't a union)
5. Producers routinely turn great stories/scripts into trash. Once they own the rights to the script, let the destruction begin!!! This is why good books rarely make good movies. Once the writer gives up control it's all downhill. Notable exceptions usually have the writer having final say on the script.
You, and the idiots who modded you up have no clue.
http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid_recipe
As someone that used to work for a company that developed strong authentication systems, I can tell you that big-business has been having some kind of orgasm about this for quite a while now.
The typical big-dreamer sees "identity" as a problem of too many logins/passwords. Yahoo and IBM have different customers, but similar goals simplifying authentication/identity for their customers. As usual, Microsoft is conspicuously absent because they think they've got the proprietary solution already.
Fact is you can connect to AD over standard LDAP,
And do what exactly? Store encrypted passwords in the directory? No. Password authentication via LDAP? No. Connect to other authentication backends? No. Search using the syntax as presented in microsoft's ldap gui? No. Unix for Windows? A nasty pile of crap.
authenticate via Kerberos from UNIX/Linux to AD quite easily.
Microsoft's "kerberos" is a black box. Kerberos-ish is more like it. The "easy" part is not because Microsoft makes it easy but because there are devs unwinding Microsoft's totally undocumented black box.
Look, I admin both Linux and Windows "Enterprise" products as my career of choice so I know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's time to acknowledge that maybe it's possible Microsoft doesn't have all of the answers.
Name them.
Interoperability.
Windows 2008+Active Directory is some hard core shit.
Not really.
It's clear you really don't understand what you/your employer over-paid for.
First pass at the budget is ALWAYS ignored.
The parties are working up their versions of a budget and waiting for the elections to play out. In the meantime, they'll temporarily fund the government.
For those hawks that believe that private industry can do research "better" I offer the following.
1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application.
2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped. This is already happening in the now-privatized University R&D and it happened long, long ago in business.
3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style.
4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation.
My original point was that setting up a DC++ server to lower WAN traffic isn't an option for ISP's
1. The legality of file sharing is none of the ISP's business! They aren't liable for the content over their network service. Except the American media cartel does not find that an acceptable condition so they find any means necessary to change it in their favor. Ridiculous actions like this cut to the heart of why innovation slows in the developed world.
2. You imply that P2P is inherently illegal. It is not. I got my last knoppmyth and debian installers via bittorrent. OpenOffice is out there too.
I want to emphasize that you are promulgating the false notion that "P2P is unconditionally bad." or that it is a matter for law enforcement to get involved with when neither one resembles the consumer-friendly legal framework that denies the media conglomerates even more profit and predates P2P.
That's some kind of contradiction along the lines of "military intelligence." I kid.
Slightly off topic:
Vista desktop + openldap win32 binaries + apache and bind = GNU Windows Server?
openldap on win32: http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200705/msg00152.html
apache2: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
kerberos5: http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/kfw-3.2/kfw-3.2.2.html
Granted, the average win32 admin will hit a wall because Microsoft does not design their product, documents and services for an admin smart enough to DIY.
Openldap/kerberos5/apache2 opens many, many more security/identity/authentication possibilities than Microsoft's active directory.
hat has much more to do with the less sophisticated law enforcement in those countries
Please stop this kind of faulty thinking. While this sounds plausible, there is not an ounce of truth contained within the statement. Reality suggests some combination of the following:
1. Activity is not illegal or otherwise unenforced. This is a classic developing nation strategy. Consumers in these countries cannot afford developed-nation pricing for the content in question, so they use it as they see fit.
2. IP owners don't particularly care. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft operate under the general idea that today's pirate is tomorrow's customer. They benefit more from piracy than they would otherwise have you believe. That is why retail products like photoshop still ship without hardware drm.
3. There is no sophistication required!!!! This is a petty crime in every country industrialized or otherwise. A DA will not devote much time or effort to the case because it won't get them re-elected. It's pretty much the copyright cartel driving these prosecutions.
4. The crime-fighting budget devoted to copyright infringement is a meaningless compared to other priorities. The vast, vast majority of the "piracy ring busted" news-ish content is PR designed to make developed-nation consumers afraid or to give the perception that "piracy is not welcome in our country" PR.
In principal, I agree with your reasoning, but in practice most humans will not give credibility to anything that falls outside of their range of beliefs. The result being vi-or-die content isn't considered by the emacs-rulez crowd anyway.
Most people do not go out an intentionally re-evaluate their fragile, contradictory belief systems.
In theory, the solution would return more relevant results than google because they agree with the person's views/opinions/etc. It would turn google into something of an "academic" search engine versus their more popular one.
Definitely worth watching if they can return valuable results.
BSD licensed for now. We all know these will die the minute Microsoft can stop it.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Maybe someone who has evaluated/used the libraries can post feedback?
How is choice between different networks and network technologies supported by multiple vendors a bad thing again?
Industry has allocated twice (or more) of the capital required to provide the wireless service. It is pretty easy to argue that the resources spent replicating the infrastructure could have been used elsewhere.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy,
And you probably don't USE the insurance very much. You would find that there will be lots of bills you must pay AFTER insurance has "covered" you. And they cover progressively less every year while your premiums go up.
Social Security: Currently is broken
You know, my retired mother in law thought the same thing when she was young and it worked out just fine. Instead of throwing away a service that keeps the retired generally housed and barely fed, how about addressing our Governmental spendthrift ways?
Its interesting that the three unsatisfactory "free market" examples are heavily distorted by government regulation.
1. I defy you to come up with a legitimately unregulated products market in the Industrialized world. I'll give you an illegitimate example, illicit drugs. Totally unregulated. Will I get a good fix this week? Will I get killed buying/selling/using? Maybe CDO's are a good example of a legally unregulated market and look where that's gotten us.
2. What you also conveniently forget is economic history is full of examples of what ACTUALLY happens with unregulated markets. The market swiftly changes into a monopoly. End of story.
3. Do you like price fixing? How about collusion? How about doctors and medicine that kill your loved ones. How about a house that doesn't fall down in a strong wind or earthquake? You like freeway bridges that stay up don't you?
It's time for you and the jokers moderating you up to move out of your parent's basement and join the real world.
I'm on one of their "faster" dynamic IP residential plans and I can only send mail from my mail server by smtp authenticating against a valid earthlink account. Otherwise, I get an smtp time out message in postfix no matter what.
Earthlink cannot provide me with a static IP which is easy enough to blame on the telco.
Americans for the most part are perfectly willing to suffer for the "free markets" rationale.
-Mobile phones (multiple, incompatible networks)
-Health care
-Data infrastructure
In other areas, we are quite happy to nationalize,
Railway services
Interstate highways. "free" too.
Social Security (just try being the elected grinch that cuts that program)
and most recently, education with no child left behind.
Depending on your politics, some of these issues cannot be discussed with any civility whatsoever.
Informative, Insightful, Funny. Just pick one.
Again!
This is some interoperability play most likely to placate some government entity without actually doing much. It is the equivalent of the skin of an onion.
This is also temporary as Microsoft has already made well known their intentions to move to signed drivers only. After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?
FYI: http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=24 (related topic and safe for work)
Virtual machines are stupid
What inspires such wanton disregard for a legitimately great tool?
and difficult for normal users to comprehend
I never tell my end users how anything works, so why would I even begin explaining their application is running in an emulator?
and use.
A clickable shortcut and the end-user is using their windows app just like the every other app. Let the productivity begin!
I use wine to run an old version of quick-something at home and select kid-friendly games. It's not the impediment you think it is.
Qemu is the silver bullet. Let's say the company has legit Dell-sourced windows licenses. They can switch over to linux and run the windows partition through qemu in a window/fullscreen on the Linux desktop. Qemu is plenty fast enough to run quickbooks especially on recent hardware. There. Problem solved.
Except qemu has been around for a while and it's not the Linux killer app. Neither is wine. I'm not slagging qemu or wine, but merely pointing out that Linux will succeed on it's own merits. Smaller benefits include qemu and wine, but they aren't the killer app that drives adoption.
Can this topic come up and not a single person asks ANY of the following questions:
1. I get someone elses ssn, and I'm off to the bank. (or whatever) Why is the process that associates a unique identifier (U.S. = SSN) with financial activity so simple?
2. Why does "sucks to be you" suffice every single time this issue comes up?
3. While individual financial data is available to the financial institutions, it's totally opaque to the consumer. Ex. how is my credit score calculated? How come consumers have practically no control over it?
4. The risks of an easy credit system far outweigh the benefits and yet no one seems to acknowledge this. An indirect example of this is the bad packaged loans that are driving the current "credit crunch."
Transparency is the keystone to a healthy economy and yet there's less and less with each passing year.
As a very involved side hobby, I have been a digital photographer for some time now
And nowhere in your recent past were you a color engineer at either the input or output ends of the process. You and others like you are running on a broad and deep set of misconceptions bordering on mythology regarding imaging technology. It is marketing's fault, but that's another story.
There are in fact a number of displays that can go beyond the current 8 bits per channel you normally see (generally 12 bits)
This statement is a perfect example of the mythology imaging enthusiasts rely on. More importantly, you stubbornly hang on to the mythology when there's no basis in fact for such an absurd statement. Here's a tip for you: more bits does not equate to a wider gamut.
The actual threat to your personal media freedom posed by HDMI is worth sticking with analog or go fancy and get a digital output for your freevo/mythtv box.
Digital offers all the hi-def goodness with none of the DRM evil.
You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well
Stop the color madness now. And I mean Right Now. In order to get you to consume DRM equipment, they are selling you a convenient fiction called "Deep Color." HDMI is a Trojan Horse and Deep Color is an absurd lie used to get DRM through the consumers front door.
This is one takes too long to explain and requires some ****actual**** technical knowledge of rendering color digitally. I don't mean color pablum on some well-regarded hdtv forum, because Teco's/Samsung/etc LCD panel engineers aren't hanging around dispelling the marketing myths.
Deep Color is designed to fool everyone, including the geeks because so few people know about rendering digital color. In summary, let's assume the player device can actually send images in some kind of fantastical super-wide-gamut to the display. (which it can't and won't. Ever. ) You still have a display utterly incapable of rendering all of those colors!!
Please recall the display beauty of the 32-bit CRT. The display industry won't ever forget the business disaster that was and that's why you'll never see one again.
Digital output is fully capable of rendering all of the color that a display can render and it is Free from DRM. Which is why it should be the output of choice in any Freedom-loving home in the world. Except it's status as being free from DRM makes it public enemy #1.
Stories like this are extremely harmful. What most of you fail to recognize is you are discussing the noose the media conglomerates will use to overcharge you for their product, limit competition, and ultimately hang you.
Today's lesson: HDMI is how consumers all over the world will submit to total media control.
I dunno about the "heads and shoulders" claims. If you are 1 user, there aren't any of the problems I deal with.
The gui is different, but it's a very complicated argument to justify its betterness.
I support a small office with a mix including 2007 desktops and I still have the same old support issues with "smart" formatting battles, odd (per-user basis) gui design. The same old troubles with trying to "upgrade" the file in question at every possible moment is hopefully in check. Interoperability between versions remains problematic.
Word (still) reminds me of a cheap swiss army knife. It doesn't do anything particularly well. I hope the writing projects have enough stuff to keep going.