I fail to understand why everyone accepts the "bundling" of sex and violence into one category. Violence is bad, but (consentual) sex isn't. Almost every 14 year old already has a basic understanding of what sex is about (then again, how the hell you depict a healthy sexual relationship in a video game is beyond me). I guess we're protecting our kids from seeing bare nipples and so on. Wow, that will really save them from ruining their futures. You betchya.
Actually I think Gartner just knows that 3 == 5... for very large values of 3 and very small values of 5.
If I could short every moronic "market X will expand by {number over 300%} in the next 2 years!" prediction that Gartner produces, I'd be richer than Gates. Anyone who back-checks their predictions can't take these guys seriously. In this case, past performance is a predictor of future results.
How, pray tell, will there *ever* be an intuitive interface for "take this table, make the inside lines 0.5 point dotted, the outside lines 1 point black, with a gray shadow offset to the lower right displaced by 1.5 points"?
Nuclear power plant control centers, being defined for a much less broad range of inputs and outputs *should* be a hell of a lot simpler than a word processor (and they'd better be intuitive, too).
If all you want to do is write a letter, nearly all word processors are overkill (some thread mentioned AmiPro, it was perfect for that sort of thing). If you're working on more complex documents, a lot of these features make it easier to communicate information more clearly (or, alas, far less clearly -- but that's not the vendor's problem).
A lot of this is a case of using the right tool for the job; the problem is that Office suites try to be all things to all people. As such they will intrinsically suck for lots of users because of complexity. You can't mask the advanced functionality in the UI, because then there's no way to deal with formatting in a file that you receive from an advanced user. I personally use documents that have a lot of intrinsic automation, from the simple "change the document title, see it reflected automatically in the page footer" to the complex "find all instances of this paragraph style, grab the title text, then move to the next table cell, grab the priority, sort the items by priority, stuff them into a table with updated paragraph number references". This saves me a lot of time and a lot of manual work, which lets me get the job done faster and better. For me, this stuff isn't bloat, it's useful.
Um... RTFM? Okay, MS probably doesn't explain that anywhere except in a $65 book you can buy from MS Press. Probably someone else will explain it better in a book that costs less. Either way, this is Microsoft... you have to go buy a decent manual first. Or you can invest some time and learn the product on your own. Go mess with all the menu options and see what they do, then the odds of recognizing something Word does to "help" you are much better.
Or just go download OpenOffice. It has almost all the functionality of Word (well at least Word 97, when I decided it was feature complete no matter what MS thinks). OpenOffice has a lot less of the "I know better than you, you mere user" crap, and a much better command organization. It also has its share of quirks and things that Word does better, but at least we can have some reasonable expectation that the problems can be fixed.
On the other hand, I have looked at the code for OpenOffice, and its not pretty. I'd have to be getting a salary from Sun before I got into it to the point where I could post useful changes.
There are also some disturbing comments on openoffice.org concerning the goals for the next major release, which include (paraphrasing) making the UI more like MS Office. Granted I'm comparing an older version of Office, but if this means taking oo's clear, clean command organization and scrambling it to resemble Word's historical structure just to make it easier for people to trasition, then that's a BAD idea.
This is false. Congress held hearings in several locations on the topic of software patents. I read the 600K+ of transcripts from hearings they held in California (talk about dull reading). Almost to a person, there was a stark division between two camps: the developers opposed software patents, largely arguing that "copyright and speed of innovation is sufficient"; the lawyers argued that patents were absolutely required.
Now the last time I checked, there were a hell of a lot more lawyers in Congress than developers and engineers, so you can figure out which argument carried the day.
The time is fast approaching when the developers should form a single voice (hello ACM, IEEE, are you there?) and say "we told you so, change it." This is and always will be an inherently political process.
How about applying the viral philosophy of the GPL to patents? Assign the patent to the FSF. The terms for using the patent being that you assign your rights for a "similarly useful" patent (yes, that's a can of worms, I know) to the FSF. If your organization has no software patents, then use is free. All we need is one critical, valid, useful patent to be assigned, and the process of levering these legal disgraces into an open environment can begin.
[Actually I think I saw a reference to a body like this but can't find it now... anyone out there know?]
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Quick, file a patent on "System and method for correcting multiple variants in content" before someone else does.
I fail to understand why everyone accepts the "bundling" of sex and violence into one category. Violence is bad, but (consentual) sex isn't. Almost every 14 year old already has a basic understanding of what sex is about (then again, how the hell you depict a healthy sexual relationship in a video game is beyond me). I guess we're protecting our kids from seeing bare nipples and so on. Wow, that will really save them from ruining their futures. You betchya.
If I could short every moronic "market X will expand by {number over 300%} in the next 2 years!" prediction that Gartner produces, I'd be richer than Gates. Anyone who back-checks their predictions can't take these guys seriously. In this case, past performance is a predictor of future results.
Nuclear power plant control centers, being defined for a much less broad range of inputs and outputs *should* be a hell of a lot simpler than a word processor (and they'd better be intuitive, too).
If all you want to do is write a letter, nearly all word processors are overkill (some thread mentioned AmiPro, it was perfect for that sort of thing). If you're working on more complex documents, a lot of these features make it easier to communicate information more clearly (or, alas, far less clearly -- but that's not the vendor's problem).
A lot of this is a case of using the right tool for the job; the problem is that Office suites try to be all things to all people. As such they will intrinsically suck for lots of users because of complexity. You can't mask the advanced functionality in the UI, because then there's no way to deal with formatting in a file that you receive from an advanced user. I personally use documents that have a lot of intrinsic automation, from the simple "change the document title, see it reflected automatically in the page footer" to the complex "find all instances of this paragraph style, grab the title text, then move to the next table cell, grab the priority, sort the items by priority, stuff them into a table with updated paragraph number references". This saves me a lot of time and a lot of manual work, which lets me get the job done faster and better. For me, this stuff isn't bloat, it's useful.
Or just go download OpenOffice. It has almost all the functionality of Word (well at least Word 97, when I decided it was feature complete no matter what MS thinks). OpenOffice has a lot less of the "I know better than you, you mere user" crap, and a much better command organization. It also has its share of quirks and things that Word does better, but at least we can have some reasonable expectation that the problems can be fixed.
On the other hand, I have looked at the code for OpenOffice, and its not pretty. I'd have to be getting a salary from Sun before I got into it to the point where I could post useful changes.
There are also some disturbing comments on openoffice.org concerning the goals for the next major release, which include (paraphrasing) making the UI more like MS Office. Granted I'm comparing an older version of Office, but if this means taking oo's clear, clean command organization and scrambling it to resemble Word's historical structure just to make it easier for people to trasition, then that's a BAD idea.
Now the last time I checked, there were a hell of a lot more lawyers in Congress than developers and engineers, so you can figure out which argument carried the day.
The time is fast approaching when the developers should form a single voice (hello ACM, IEEE, are you there?) and say "we told you so, change it." This is and always will be an inherently political process.
Patents are 20 years long because it takes an average of 19.5 years to litigate them. ;)
How about applying the viral philosophy of the GPL to patents? Assign the patent to the FSF. The terms for using the patent being that you assign your rights for a "similarly useful" patent (yes, that's a can of worms, I know) to the FSF. If your organization has no software patents, then use is free. All we need is one critical, valid, useful patent to be assigned, and the process of levering these legal disgraces into an open environment can begin.
[Actually I think I saw a reference to a body like this but can't find it now... anyone out there know?]