Yet an Apple invitation that's vague but promises "fun new products" certainly does "promote or publicize...intensively," because from past experience Apple fans know that an understated invitation could mean incredible things.
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
> Did you also know that your use of quotation marks is non-standard? There are actually backquotes and forward quotes that are to be used at the start and end of quotations. The normal keyboard double quote is just a hack.
Not true, in fact. The backward quote is a grave accent; the "forward" quote is an apostrophe. The correct quotes are "'"', which on a Mac are easily typed using option + square brackets (with and without shift).
Sorry, should have previewed. What I was trying to say is that the existing Google home page is far uglier under the hood than than this one is, but that they do have their reasons (download time, server load, etc.).
The author may be referring to the controversy wherein Apple was accused of stealing Konfabulator's idea and renaming it to Dashboard. The two are remarkably similar.
Microsoft has already out-innovated open source when it comes to OpenOffice -- in all respects, OpenOffice is just an un-user-friendly imitation of the latest version of Word, with a few bugs added. New features, like the formatting palette, come out in Word first and soon appear in OpenOffice.
The only reason open-source software might cater better to customers' needs is that the "customers" for open-source software are usually developers in their own right. For user-conscious but predominantly closed-source companies like Apple, testing new software on real end users is a big priority, and this improves software. The bond between software developers and customers isn't dying soon, at least not with Apple.
Need more proof? Compare the user-friendliness of Apple Pages to that of OpenOffice. Pages might have fewer features, but the average user will be much happier using Pages than using OpenOffice.
Word definitely does look better for non-mathematical documents, but when it comes to math (and that's what TeX was designed for), I still assert that TeX wins.
--
http://ben.kazez.com/
"So in other words, Knuth produced a product that gives you results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word, while forcing you to learn a massive amount of practically useless contorted macro language."
I tend to agree with most of the remarks about the quality of TeX's output, but I strongly disagree with the notion that TeX output looks worse than Microsoft Word. Although the font will be normal, although the linespacing will be more standard (even though the pica of extra spacing that's mentioned in this article doesn't exist in TeX), all one has to do is whip out Microsoft Equation Editor and see how it compares to TeX's equations. There's absolutely no comparison -- TeX wins easily.
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Yet an Apple invitation that's vague but promises "fun new products" certainly does "promote or publicize...intensively," because from past experience Apple fans know that an understated invitation could mean incredible things.
Zimbra attempts to provide this (and much, much more):
http://www.zimbra.com/
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
> Did you also know that your use of quotation marks is non-standard? There are actually backquotes and forward quotes that are to be used at the start and end of quotations. The normal keyboard double quote is just a hack. Not true, in fact. The backward quote is a grave accent; the "forward" quote is an apostrophe. The correct quotes are "'"', which on a Mac are easily typed using option + square brackets (with and without shift).
I'd rather have this "problem" than "Please insert a disk into D: [Retry] [Cancel]".
Is there really any doubt as to what Slashdot's audience thinks about this issue?
Sorry, should have previewed. What I was trying to say is that the existing Google home page is far uglier under the hood than than this one is, but that they do have their reasons (download time, server load, etc.).
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The author may be referring to the controversy wherein Apple was accused of stealing Konfabulator's idea and renaming it to Dashboard. The two are remarkably similar.
I can already SEE the amazing potential for this.
This isn't just funny -- it happens all the time.
Microsoft has already out-innovated open source when it comes to OpenOffice -- in all respects, OpenOffice is just an un-user-friendly imitation of the latest version of Word, with a few bugs added. New features, like the formatting palette, come out in Word first and soon appear in OpenOffice.
The only reason open-source software might cater better to customers' needs is that the "customers" for open-source software are usually developers in their own right. For user-conscious but predominantly closed-source companies like Apple, testing new software on real end users is a big priority, and this improves software. The bond between software developers and customers isn't dying soon, at least not with Apple.
Need more proof? Compare the user-friendliness of Apple Pages to that of OpenOffice. Pages might have fewer features, but the average user will be much happier using Pages than using OpenOffice.
Well...referrers aren't completely reliable, and keeping the expirable identifier unique to each user means using cookies anyway.
Word definitely does look better for non-mathematical documents, but when it comes to math (and that's what TeX was designed for), I still assert that TeX wins. -- http://ben.kazez.com/