The earth is not static, it evolves and has cycles, so it's a long shot (not to say junk science) to claim it corroborates theories on a specific cause of those climate changes.
Yes, climate "evolves and has cycles". But those "cycles" don't just happen by themselves, they are caused by changes in the environment, atmosphere, radiation, etc. Currently, it evolves in the direction of getting warmer, and that is something that deserves a scientific explanation.
It just happens that CO2 levels are a highly plausible explanation of it. If you have a specific other explanation, please share it with us. Right now, your alternative theory seems to be "shit happens", and that really is junk science.
It's still moderately interesting but how come this is considered a bigger science story than this?
You don't need PCA in order to see trends in that data, you can use your own eyes. On the other hand, even if done correctly, PCA is probably a bogus procedure for this kind of analysis. So, you have a stupid response to a stupid analysis. Frankly, even observing a single warm water squid in cold water tells you more.
Welcome to the Apple section. If you're not interested in discussion of things related to Apple, please uncheck the appropriate box in your preferences, and we will all be happier.
I don't get this. Apple advocates constantly feel the need to point out in every other discussion about how much better Macintosh does everything. For example, pretty much like clockwork, Macintosh advocates will post to any discussion of Linux UIs some claim or other that the Macintosh is "the" system to use if you want to have a high quality UI on a UNIX-like system.
Slashdot is, after all, not a site where every group of people can retreat into their little corner, it's a site where people from different communities talk to each other.
OK, the "proprietary crap" discussed here is for: #1 XServes runing (wait for it....) Mac OS X. #2 Supercomputers This is not your linux box you're using for a NAT server, or a Beowolf running SETI
So what is your point? There are lots of 64-bit Linux clusters with high-speed interconnects. Much of the software used on those clusters was created in non-proprietary environments. It certainly makes sense to ask the question of what those proprietary systems bring to the table. I'm sorry if you are offended when people start asking hard questions.
You are not giving any specifics at all, you're just saying "Smith and Voltaire would not like they way they do it."
It is you who are using the names of two respected historical philosophers and social scientists to promote and advance your present-day political agenda. History is full of political parties and movements that have done just that: attempt to gain respectability by claiming to be the successors to some respected thinkers, and everybody should be suspicious of such claims. So, the onus is upon you to provide an overwhelmingly clear and convincing justification of that association that you are attempting, in particular since the people you make reference to aren't here to defend their positions or themselves against their association with you anymore.
Oh. I see now. You're just another person who doesn't really understand the difference between libertarianim and anarchy.
I understand the difference just fine: libertarianism is not anarchy, but neither are Social Darwinism or corporatism.
I mean, what good is "end-to-end colour workflow" when I can't even PROFILE THE MONITOR on Linux??
X11 has Xcms to characterize devices, and LCMS provides color management for applications. ImageMagick and the Gimp both can use the LCMS.
Mac dual G5 with Sony Artisan monitor is the way to do it. Linux still has a long way to go before I'd even consider it for color-sensitive photography.
If that makes you happy, fine. But just because you don't know about color management on other platforms doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Which views do you think they would object to? That free markets increase prosperity? That freedom of religion and expression are required in a just society?
I think they would disagree with the Libertarian notions of what constitutes "free markets", "freedom of religion", "property", "personal liberty", "voluntary behavior", and a "just society". For example, they would likely argue that the Libertarian approach to the economy would not lead to a free market and not increase prosperity. They would probably also point out that Libertarian notions of "individual freedom" are internally contradictory.
To me, US Libertarianism looks like just like a verbal front for Social Darwinism and corporatism.
[Libertarianism] designs for the worst rather than the best case
Designing for the worst case often is a really bad way of designing a system: you expend a lot of resources in order to protect against a case that may never arise. That is, you might end up condemning an entire nation to live in abject poverty just in order to guard against some theoretical risk or danger.
that one of the reasons for the current situation is that people are fundamentally greedy, and we currently have a system that doesn't account for it.
History shows that that is not the case: people are not necessarily greedy, and they are capable of selfless cooperation. While some greed may exist in any society, if greedy and selfish behavior becomes the norm in a society, it is probably because the society has chosen to make that the preferred behavior.
I think it's pretty arrogant for Libertarians to claim Adam Smith and Voltaire as some kind of intellectual progenitors of Libertarianism. Yes, Adam Smith and Voltaire both expressed strong ideas about "liberty", but I seriously doubt they would have approved of the views and policies espoused by modern US Libertarianisms.
What's happening to the US is the same that has happened to every other empire before, except that technology has accelerated the rise and is accelerating the fall. No society, no empire, and no superpower lasts forever.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
But "the growth in general" was the point of my calculation: with only 1.7% of newly shipped PCs, where actually is the growth in Macintosh?
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low
Everybody likes to throw around TCO claims. If they are demonstrably low for OS X, why isn't everybody buying it? See, I think TCO claims are just hard to prove, for anybody.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity.
You state those as if they are self-evident facts. I'm sorry, but to someone who uses OS X part time, they are not self-evident. Stability seems to have stopped being a distinguishing factor between systems anyway: all major OSes seem to be able to stay up, even under load. I keep challenging people to show me quantifiable data demonstrating that OS X has better usability, but nobody has. I don't even know how to measure "simplicity" and "flexibility", but informally, I just don't see much of a difference. (The Macintosh's built-in color management support is of no use to us.)
I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And I used to be a UNIX sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, and Linux sysadmin, and I've been exploring the use of OS X because of all those claims of lower TCO and simplicity. I don't see it. I think a mostly-Mac environment might be slightly simpler, but adding Macs to a mixed environment causes more work, not less, as far as I can tell.
and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available) [...] As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
So, Apple's technical vision of the future is to continue to make incremental improvements to Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua, keep offering Carbon, and keep offering Java? That is, as a language mix, people will keep writing software in Objective-C++, they will keep writing GUI apps built out of widgets in user interface builders, and occasionally write Java applications, often with non-WORA Cocoa API calls? Is that it, or are there any other major initiatives?
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
I'm not even sure what that means: do you mean a single Linux-based distribution, anything based on a Linux kernel, Linux running PC apps in compatibility mode? I am also not sure whether the question even makes sense for Linux (since there are no "applications" in the OS X sense) or whether having 50% market share is even desirable.
In any case, based on your question, I conclude that you indeed believe that the PC market is a prize worth going for and that it is Apple's goal to get a large share of it and to get lots of applications for its platform. Is that the vision of the future that Apple has?
That is a clear demonstration that Windows NT/XP is not being used because people love it so much technically; if they did, NT/XP on other hardware would have taken off. Instead, people run NT/XP because it runs the binaries they happen to have.
What you apparently didn't learn when you were 5 years old is that there are different kinds of slang terms: smart, hip, cool terms, and tired, old, dorky terms. "Virii" is a tired, old, dorky term.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's
I think your comparison is quite apt: Macintosh is a luxury product, and presumably, it can remain that for some time to come. The question is whether they are anything other than that. At this kind of market share, it doesn't look like it's going to take over the world.
Total shipments were 48.4 million for 2004q4. So, Apple's share of that is 1.7%. HP, in contrast, shipped 7.5 million PCs in the same time frame, a 15.5% share.
Where do you expect Apple to be 5-10 years from now with their platform in terms of market share given those numbers? Where do you expect them to be technologically? What is the motivation of software developers to develop for that platform? Please explain.
Well, and maybe in another 6 years, Microsoft's spell/grammar checker will catch that error as well, because right now, it doesn't either (I just tried).
Spell and grammer checkers aren't a replacement for learning how to spell and write correctly. They are best at catching typos and fail badly on many common mistakes.
One of the big attractions of OOo is that it works predictably the same under Windows. It couldn't do that if it were Gtk+ based (Windows support not quite ready yet) and Qt (license issues on Windows). Using STL would probably complicate it unnessarily and lead to other problems. Basing it on the Mozilla runtime or wxWindows might work, but it would be a major effort, and you'd end up with something that wasn't a lot more mainstream or a lot more extensible.
I think you wouldn't get enough return on your investment porting the OOo code to a different C++ toolkit. For the same amount of work, you could probably convert the code to managed C++ running on Mono, and an XUL-like GUI system. That would then really make it much simpler for third party contributors to create additional functionality.
Read the roadmap; usability and import/export are at the top of the list.
Let's hope that Microsoft's move to XML formats is going to happen for real; that should greatly simplify the creation of import/export filters for OOo and other applications.
I fully agree: as far as I'm concerned, I don't miss MS Office at all. And OOo keeps getting better; have a look at the roadmap for OOo 2.0. The people working on it are fully aware of what users need and want most.
Nonsense. OOo's PDF export feature works like a charm; I use it every day with never a problem.
Maybe you get problems if you try to import documents saved in poorly documented and poorly implemented proprietary file formats like Microsoft Office, but that is really not OOo's problem: there is a limit to how well other people can fix the mess that Microsoft has created. It can't and won't be the long-term goal of open source tools to try to provide workarounds for people who are addicted to using proprietary software.
I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a.doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere.
Yes, you are right: Microsoft Office's compatibility with the rest of the world sucks. That is a serious bug with Microsoft Office; Microsoft should fix their default save format and document it better.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, has a well-documented XML-based format that not only works well, but also is easy to process with other tools. Microsoft should become compatible with OOo, not the other way around.
As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
OpenOffice has the features people need for day-to-day office work, and a lot more.
It's better than TeX for WP, but...
It's neither better nor worse than TeX, it's a different program for different purposes. If you try to use OOo or Word, for that matter, for the kind of publishing people do with TeX, you really don't know what you are doing.
On my 700MHz laptop, OOo is zippy, and that's an underpowered laptop by today's standards. I have had no problems with loading/saving stuff. Menus are no more unintuitive than in MS Office, but finding something buried three levels deep is hard in any program.
After having used both MS Office and OOo for about the same amount of time overall, I prefer OOo--it has many flaws, but so does MS Office. I suspect dyed-in-the-wool MS Office users just like to complain about OOo because they are reduced to being newbies on OOo.
Writing off Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" is an insult to every Vietnam veteran.
Just to be clear: obviously, I did not write off Vietnam vets in general as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men", I wrote off these particular Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" based on the actions they have taken and the statements they have made.
And what should be "insulting to every Vietnam veteran" is that Bush's political machinery has been permitted to drag Kerry's name and distinguished service record through the mud just so that Bush can stay in the White House for another for years and start another couple of wars. I mean, if Kerry didn't really deserve those medals and wasn't really at risk, why should we believe anybody else does?
[The war] can't be summarized in a paragraph or two. Why don't you talk to some Vietnam vets and Vietnamese refugees living in America?
I did not even attempt to summarize the entire war; I made a specific statement about a specific group of Vietnam veterans that have engaged in a specific set of politically motivated actions against another Vietnam veteran.
The war was a very complicated situation, with both good and bad aspects.
Don't give us those wishy-washy phrases. In a democracy, it is your obligation to make up your mind about what the ultimate balance of the good and bad aspects of such a war is and vote accordingly.
It's a pretty faithful imitation of MS Office, both the good parts and the bad parts. Most of its limitations seem to be the result of trying to be compatible with MS Office. And, like Microsoft Office, it's a huge, C++ application suite, with all the problems that that entails.
Overall, between the two, I like OpenOffice slightly better than MS Office at this point: the UI makes more sense to me and was easier to learn, the file formats are actually usable and accessible with standard XML tools, and it has some functionality that I like that either doesn't exist in MS Office at all or requires an MS Office guru to find. I think people who claim that Microsoft's UI is better just happen to be more familiar with it.
Until some alternative approach to building office apps catches on, OpenOffice seems like it is a worthy competitor and will probably keep eating away at MS Office's marketshare. And whether OpenOffice is objectively slightly better or worse than MS Office, it is good enough for just about any application, and that is good enough--after all, Microsoft itself has demonstrated throughout its history that it isn't quality and features that count, it is being more widely available and cheaper than the other guys. And with OpenOffice 2.0, OpenOffice may actually so clearly beat MS Office both on features and usability that there won't even be a contest anymore on features and quality.
Nice rationalization. However, people who still have their common-sense morality working know that, morally, there's no difference.
Don't be naive: of course, there is a difference between taking a physical object and copying software to which you don't have a license. Both are illegal and, arguably, both are unethical, but that doesn't mean that they are one and the same thing. In particular, illegally copying Mac OS X in order to run it on an emulator probably does not have much effect on Apple's bottom line either way and may even bring new customers to Apple.
I fully agree that people shouldn't pirate Mac OS. Apple has made their choices (Apple hardware only, proprietary GUI, etc.) and they should have to live with the consequences of their choices, both positive and negative.
Apple paid 400 million dollars to buy NeXT.
Well, while NeXT was a nice system for its time, it's not like NeXT was a particularly original company either; NeXT was based on an open source kernel (Mach) and a bunch of technologies from Stepstone, Adobe, and Xerox PARC.
If you are running a BSD Unix, or running Linix, chances are you are already benefiting from Apple contributions to open source projects on a daily basis.
As far as I know, Apple has made no significant contributions to any of the software I use on Linux. I can't even think of any software, technology, feature, or contributions from Apple I would want on my Linux system. In fact, the most important interaction between Apple and Linux users seems to be that Apple keeps advertising to Linux users wanting them to switch to OS X.
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The earth is not static, it evolves and has cycles, so it's a long shot (not to say junk science) to claim it corroborates theories on a specific cause of those climate changes.
Yes, climate "evolves and has cycles". But those "cycles" don't just happen by themselves, they are caused by changes in the environment, atmosphere, radiation, etc. Currently, it evolves in the direction of getting warmer, and that is something that deserves a scientific explanation.
It just happens that CO2 levels are a highly plausible explanation of it. If you have a specific other explanation, please share it with us. Right now, your alternative theory seems to be "shit happens", and that really is junk science.
It's still moderately interesting but how come this is considered a bigger science story than this?
You don't need PCA in order to see trends in that data, you can use your own eyes. On the other hand, even if done correctly, PCA is probably a bogus procedure for this kind of analysis. So, you have a stupid response to a stupid analysis. Frankly, even observing a single warm water squid in cold water tells you more.
Welcome to the Apple section. If you're not interested in discussion of things related to Apple, please uncheck the appropriate box in your preferences, and we will all be happier.
I don't get this. Apple advocates constantly feel the need to point out in every other discussion about how much better Macintosh does everything. For example, pretty much like clockwork, Macintosh advocates will post to any discussion of Linux UIs some claim or other that the Macintosh is "the" system to use if you want to have a high quality UI on a UNIX-like system.
Slashdot is, after all, not a site where every group of people can retreat into their little corner, it's a site where people from different communities talk to each other.
OK, the "proprietary crap" discussed here is for: #1 XServes runing (wait for it....) Mac OS X. #2 Supercomputers This is not your linux box you're using for a NAT server, or a Beowolf running SETI
So what is your point? There are lots of 64-bit Linux clusters with high-speed interconnects. Much of the software used on those clusters was created in non-proprietary environments. It certainly makes sense to ask the question of what those proprietary systems bring to the table. I'm sorry if you are offended when people start asking hard questions.
You are not giving any specifics at all, you're just saying "Smith and Voltaire would not like they way they do it."
It is you who are using the names of two respected historical philosophers and social scientists to promote and advance your present-day political agenda. History is full of political parties and movements that have done just that: attempt to gain respectability by claiming to be the successors to some respected thinkers, and everybody should be suspicious of such claims. So, the onus is upon you to provide an overwhelmingly clear and convincing justification of that association that you are attempting, in particular since the people you make reference to aren't here to defend their positions or themselves against their association with you anymore.
Oh. I see now. You're just another person who doesn't really understand the difference between libertarianim and anarchy.
I understand the difference just fine: libertarianism is not anarchy, but neither are Social Darwinism or corporatism.
I mean, what good is "end-to-end colour workflow" when I can't even PROFILE THE MONITOR on Linux??
X11 has Xcms to characterize devices, and LCMS provides color management for applications. ImageMagick and the Gimp both can use the LCMS.
Mac dual G5 with Sony Artisan monitor is the way to do it. Linux still has a long way to go before I'd even consider it for color-sensitive photography.
If that makes you happy, fine. But just because you don't know about color management on other platforms doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Which views do you think they would object to? That free markets increase prosperity? That freedom of religion and expression are required in a just society?
I think they would disagree with the Libertarian notions of what constitutes "free markets", "freedom of religion", "property", "personal liberty", "voluntary behavior", and a "just society". For example, they would likely argue that the Libertarian approach to the economy would not lead to a free market and not increase prosperity. They would probably also point out that Libertarian notions of "individual freedom" are internally contradictory.
To me, US Libertarianism looks like just like a verbal front for Social Darwinism and corporatism.
[Libertarianism] designs for the worst rather than the best case
Designing for the worst case often is a really bad way of designing a system: you expend a lot of resources in order to protect against a case that may never arise. That is, you might end up condemning an entire nation to live in abject poverty just in order to guard against some theoretical risk or danger.
that one of the reasons for the current situation is that people are fundamentally greedy, and we currently have a system that doesn't account for it.
History shows that that is not the case: people are not necessarily greedy, and they are capable of selfless cooperation. While some greed may exist in any society, if greedy and selfish behavior becomes the norm in a society, it is probably because the society has chosen to make that the preferred behavior.
I think it's pretty arrogant for Libertarians to claim Adam Smith and Voltaire as some kind of intellectual progenitors of Libertarianism. Yes, Adam Smith and Voltaire both expressed strong ideas about "liberty", but I seriously doubt they would have approved of the views and policies espoused by modern US Libertarianisms.
What's happening to the US is the same that has happened to every other empire before, except that technology has accelerated the rise and is accelerating the fall. No society, no empire, and no superpower lasts forever.
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
But "the growth in general" was the point of my calculation: with only 1.7% of newly shipped PCs, where actually is the growth in Macintosh?
There are indeed corporations using OSX, often because the TCO is very low
Everybody likes to throw around TCO claims. If they are demonstrably low for OS X, why isn't everybody buying it? See, I think TCO claims are just hard to prove, for anybody.
That situation has now stopped and people are moving back to the Mac because of its superior colour management and stability and flexibility and simplicity.
You state those as if they are self-evident facts. I'm sorry, but to someone who uses OS X part time, they are not self-evident. Stability seems to have stopped being a distinguishing factor between systems anyway: all major OSes seem to be able to stay up, even under load. I keep challenging people to show me quantifiable data demonstrating that OS X has better usability, but nobody has. I don't even know how to measure "simplicity" and "flexibility", but informally, I just don't see much of a difference. (The Macintosh's built-in color management support is of no use to us.)
I used to be a Windows sysadmin, so I know what I'm talking about.
And I used to be a UNIX sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, and Linux sysadmin, and I've been exploring the use of OS X because of all those claims of lower TCO and simplicity. I don't see it. I think a mostly-Mac environment might be slightly simpler, but adding Macs to a mixed environment causes more work, not less, as far as I can tell.
and because it supports traditional Unix enterprise systems very well (The Java integration is the best available) [...] As long as Apple keeps on growing, developers will keep on making apps for the platform, even, with time, specialised ones.
So, Apple's technical vision of the future is to continue to make incremental improvements to Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua, keep offering Carbon, and keep offering Java? That is, as a language mix, people will keep writing software in Objective-C++, they will keep writing GUI apps built out of widgets in user interface builders, and occasionally write Java applications, often with non-WORA Cocoa API calls? Is that it, or are there any other major initiatives?
What would you say, perhaps, if in 5 to 10 years, Linux had captured 50% marketshare in the PC market? Would you also ask where the applications were now today? Or would you look at the growth in Linux in general.
I'm not even sure what that means: do you mean a single Linux-based distribution, anything based on a Linux kernel, Linux running PC apps in compatibility mode? I am also not sure whether the question even makes sense for Linux (since there are no "applications" in the OS X sense) or whether having 50% market share is even desirable.
In any case, based on your question, I conclude that you indeed believe that the PC market is a prize worth going for and that it is Apple's goal to get a large share of it and to get lots of applications for its platform. Is that the vision of the future that Apple has?
That is a clear demonstration that Windows NT/XP is not being used because people love it so much technically; if they did, NT/XP on other hardware would have taken off. Instead, people run NT/XP because it runs the binaries they happen to have.
What you apparently didn't learn when you were 5 years old is that there are different kinds of slang terms: smart, hip, cool terms, and tired, old, dorky terms. "Virii" is a tired, old, dorky term.
Why is it that there's constant hand wringing over apple's market share, and there's NOT constant hand wringing over BMW's
I think your comparison is quite apt: Macintosh is a luxury product, and presumably, it can remain that for some time to come. The question is whether they are anything other than that. At this kind of market share, it doesn't look like it's going to take over the world.
What saved them was not the $200m, but Microsoft's continued commitment to ship MS Office and other MS products for Mac.
Total shipments were 48.4 million for 2004q4. So, Apple's share of that is 1.7%. HP, in contrast, shipped 7.5 million PCs in the same time frame, a 15.5% share.
Where do you expect Apple to be 5-10 years from now with their platform in terms of market share given those numbers? Where do you expect them to be technologically? What is the motivation of software developers to develop for that platform? Please explain.
but the spellchecker frustrates me to know end.
Well, and maybe in another 6 years, Microsoft's spell/grammar checker will catch that error as well, because right now, it doesn't either (I just tried).
Spell and grammer checkers aren't a replacement for learning how to spell and write correctly. They are best at catching typos and fail badly on many common mistakes.
One of the big attractions of OOo is that it works predictably the same under Windows. It couldn't do that if it were Gtk+ based (Windows support not quite ready yet) and Qt (license issues on Windows). Using STL would probably complicate it unnessarily and lead to other problems. Basing it on the Mozilla runtime or wxWindows might work, but it would be a major effort, and you'd end up with something that wasn't a lot more mainstream or a lot more extensible.
I think you wouldn't get enough return on your investment porting the OOo code to a different C++ toolkit. For the same amount of work, you could probably convert the code to managed C++ running on Mono, and an XUL-like GUI system. That would then really make it much simpler for third party contributors to create additional functionality.
Read the roadmap; usability and import/export are at the top of the list.
Let's hope that Microsoft's move to XML formats is going to happen for real; that should greatly simplify the creation of import/export filters for OOo and other applications.
I fully agree: as far as I'm concerned, I don't miss MS Office at all. And OOo keeps getting better; have a look at the roadmap for OOo 2.0. The people working on it are fully aware of what users need and want most.
Nonsense. OOo's PDF export feature works like a charm; I use it every day with never a problem.
Maybe you get problems if you try to import documents saved in poorly documented and poorly implemented proprietary file formats like Microsoft Office, but that is really not OOo's problem: there is a limit to how well other people can fix the mess that Microsoft has created. It can't and won't be the long-term goal of open source tools to try to provide workarounds for people who are addicted to using proprietary software.
I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a .doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere.
Yes, you are right: Microsoft Office's compatibility with the rest of the world sucks. That is a serious bug with Microsoft Office; Microsoft should fix their default save format and document it better.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, has a well-documented XML-based format that not only works well, but also is easy to process with other tools. Microsoft should become compatible with OOo, not the other way around.
As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
OpenOffice has the features people need for day-to-day office work, and a lot more.
It's better than TeX for WP, but...
It's neither better nor worse than TeX, it's a different program for different purposes. If you try to use OOo or Word, for that matter, for the kind of publishing people do with TeX, you really don't know what you are doing.
On my 700MHz laptop, OOo is zippy, and that's an underpowered laptop by today's standards. I have had no problems with loading/saving stuff. Menus are no more unintuitive than in MS Office, but finding something buried three levels deep is hard in any program.
After having used both MS Office and OOo for about the same amount of time overall, I prefer OOo--it has many flaws, but so does MS Office. I suspect dyed-in-the-wool MS Office users just like to complain about OOo because they are reduced to being newbies on OOo.
Writing off Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" is an insult to every Vietnam veteran.
Just to be clear: obviously, I did not write off Vietnam vets in general as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men", I wrote off these particular Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" based on the actions they have taken and the statements they have made.
And what should be "insulting to every Vietnam veteran" is that Bush's political machinery has been permitted to drag Kerry's name and distinguished service record through the mud just so that Bush can stay in the White House for another for years and start another couple of wars. I mean, if Kerry didn't really deserve those medals and wasn't really at risk, why should we believe anybody else does?
[The war] can't be summarized in a paragraph or two. Why don't you talk to some Vietnam vets and Vietnamese refugees living in America?
I did not even attempt to summarize the entire war; I made a specific statement about a specific group of Vietnam veterans that have engaged in a specific set of politically motivated actions against another Vietnam veteran.
The war was a very complicated situation, with both good and bad aspects.
Don't give us those wishy-washy phrases. In a democracy, it is your obligation to make up your mind about what the ultimate balance of the good and bad aspects of such a war is and vote accordingly.
It's a pretty faithful imitation of MS Office, both the good parts and the bad parts. Most of its limitations seem to be the result of trying to be compatible with MS Office. And, like Microsoft Office, it's a huge, C++ application suite, with all the problems that that entails.
Overall, between the two, I like OpenOffice slightly better than MS Office at this point: the UI makes more sense to me and was easier to learn, the file formats are actually usable and accessible with standard XML tools, and it has some functionality that I like that either doesn't exist in MS Office at all or requires an MS Office guru to find. I think people who claim that Microsoft's UI is better just happen to be more familiar with it.
Until some alternative approach to building office apps catches on, OpenOffice seems like it is a worthy competitor and will probably keep eating away at MS Office's marketshare. And whether OpenOffice is objectively slightly better or worse than MS Office, it is good enough for just about any application, and that is good enough--after all, Microsoft itself has demonstrated throughout its history that it isn't quality and features that count, it is being more widely available and cheaper than the other guys. And with OpenOffice 2.0, OpenOffice may actually so clearly beat MS Office both on features and usability that there won't even be a contest anymore on features and quality.
Nice rationalization. However, people who still have their common-sense morality working know that, morally, there's no difference.
Don't be naive: of course, there is a difference between taking a physical object and copying software to which you don't have a license. Both are illegal and, arguably, both are unethical, but that doesn't mean that they are one and the same thing. In particular, illegally copying Mac OS X in order to run it on an emulator probably does not have much effect on Apple's bottom line either way and may even bring new customers to Apple.
I fully agree that people shouldn't pirate Mac OS. Apple has made their choices (Apple hardware only, proprietary GUI, etc.) and they should have to live with the consequences of their choices, both positive and negative.
Apple paid 400 million dollars to buy NeXT.
Well, while NeXT was a nice system for its time, it's not like NeXT was a particularly original company either; NeXT was based on an open source kernel (Mach) and a bunch of technologies from Stepstone, Adobe, and Xerox PARC.
If you are running a BSD Unix, or running Linix, chances are you are already benefiting from Apple contributions to open source projects on a daily basis.
As far as I know, Apple has made no significant contributions to any of the software I use on Linux. I can't even think of any software, technology, feature, or contributions from Apple I would want on my Linux system. In fact, the most important interaction between Apple and Linux users seems to be that Apple keeps advertising to Linux users wanting them to switch to OS X.