Not only are all the financial and business reasons offered by readers here probably completely true, I'd bet they also don't want the support calls. It doesn't matter what you tell people about what you will or won't support -- I would imagine Dell gets hundreds of calls a day about something not working right in the pre-installed copy of Word someone bought with their Dell machine. I wouldn't think it would be worth it to either train support staff to provide basic support for OpenOffice or even to spend the time telling each confused caller that they have to go somewhere else for help.
Which just brought me to a related thought -- OOo online documentation is, in spots, quite skitchy. Dell and other manufacturers may have set standards for what they consider to be a product worthy of inclusion, and those standards may be partially dependent upon level of documentation.
But this is all Reason Three at best -- I'm sure marking up the OEM version AND getting a better volume discount from Microsoft weigh more heavily than this.
Gotta be careful, though -- George Pullman did this for his railcar company here in the Chicago area in the mid- to late-1800's, and he overstepped his bounds. He ended up housing his employees in company-owned housing, paying them in company-honored chits, and basically taking people's freedoms away one at a time. I'm not suggesting that Google is doing this, but I must admit that it rings some bells. Separation from work is good, and housing owned by your company seems to put a lot of eggs in one basket. It's a one-stop shop -- get fired and evicted all in the same week!
Yes and no. The guidelines state that you should not edit anything about yourself or your company. So if a falsehood is posted about you, you can't change it. This turns into people recruiting other people to make changes, which tends to get certain great big software companies in hot water.
Look, I don't know what kind of emotional investment you have in hating Office on the Mac, but lighten up, please. These people have stated that it works well for them. What is it to you?
I haven't used Office on the Mac. I can tell you that Office 2007 on PC is a very pleasant improvement (still imperfect in many ways, but a hell of a lot better than Office 2003) as far as interface goes. I haven't had enough time to test reliably for stability. But I have tried more than my share of OpenOffice ports for the Mac, and the ones I tried were all (X11 or not) buggy and crash-prone. I, like many Mac users, have not had a seamless transition to X11-based apps. There's often a bunch of tweaking that has to happen -- something most geeks find irritating and most average joes find completely overwhelming. And I think in this Slashdot environment, it is sufficient to say that X11 on the Mac is a dealbreaker and most people with Macs and X11 experience would understand, if not agree.
I don't think you are listening. Based on the utter breakdown of logic in your comment I'm not sure you are capable, but I'm going to try again.
Hm. Since we're playing blockquote-and-pithy-translation, how about this: "You didn't respond submissively to my rapier wit, so I shall insult your intelligence and pretend to enlighten you." Please.
I hope, as another person here has stated, that it gets better for Mac users -- they could use a good open source, free office suite. I'm a graphic designer, so I tend toward hammering Quark or InDesign inappropriately into service as a word processor anyway. But I can certainly see the dearth of good office suite alternatives for the average Mac user. Get off your high horse, please. It's a tool. These people have real experience with using Office for the Mac, and have been genuinely pleased with the results and displeased with the open source options. They stated this here for our common edification. And you were a dick to them for it. Come on.
Did we actually manage to Slashdot the BBC? I finally got to it, but boy, it was slow.
Sounds to me like he's got quite a hodgepodge of hardware there, and it got more exotic and strange as he added things to deal with the problems he was having. So while it's not his fault that his machine evolved in that manner over the years, it's no surprise that a four-year-old machine with a bunch of random hardware added will have problems with a bleeding-edge OS.
I guess the moral of the story is that if he wants it all to work together, a new machine might have been the better choice (and if my pounds-to-dollars conversion is right, not a much more expensive one). Too bad about his PDA, though.
Frankly, if he's such a gadget geek, I think he probably could have (and in some ways, did) predict this result. We all want the latest toys, but this method of upgrading (all at once, he popped in a new video card and upgraded the system to a brand-new OS instead of a clean install in a few months after all the driver woes could be worked out) is rife with peril.
Whoa, now, let's not get carried away. I know this is Slashdot, but you're suggesting that Microsoft is responsible for other people's illegal actions just because of certain aspects of its products are confusing or inconvenient? That's hardly a compelling defense -- it's the corporate version of "stop hitting yourself."
Me too, particularly as the CompUSA near me (Skokie/Niles) is one of the ones closing. It was no great shakes, of course, but they very effectively ran smaller retailers (ElekTek, for one, and countless smaller others) in the area out of business. So their leaving now will leave the near north burbs with relatively few options for retail (I sure do hate shopping for computer stuff at Best Buy). So Fry's, if you're reading, north burbs of Chicago, please!
Good points all around. I hope Dell sees it that way -- I have my doubts about the corporate model here, but I'd love to see it go well. What it needs is VERY dedicated support, though -- the minute buyers have to go digging for drivers, all is lost.
And because of that, I agree that Ubuntu is the way to go. I'd even go so far as to say that Kubuntu would be even better. It's not without fault, but it certainly does offer a foolproof Linux option (for the most part).
I certainly appreciate the idea here, and hope they're doing this for the right reasons (not some of the cynical-but-possibly-true ideas posted in this thread elsewhere). But I've never known two Linux users who preferred the same setup. Ubuntu here, Redhat there, BeOS, OpenBSD, and so on. I'm a Windows guy for the most part, but have run installations of all of these here and there over the years. I don't quite know how they're going to implement something like this and please much of anyone. With Windows or OSX, you get one default installation and you adjust it cosmetically a little bit (though at the OS level it's pretty much the same). With all the flavors of Linux, you can set it up almost any way you want.
It's great that the system cost might be lower if the Windows tax isn't applied, but is anyone who prefers Linux really going to use whatever comes installed? Most will wipe it as soon as they get it, just like you would if you ordered a Windows box/laptop. I think what would be nice (though certainly not a productive business model for Dell) would be to step up their options for OS-free machines and then put the energy otherwise spent on Linux installations on creating a repository of drivers for ALL platforms for their hardware. That way you could install whatever the hell you want but have some help with the hardware fun that all Linux users spend so much time on.
Linux users, for the overwhelmingly large part, seem to me to be roll-your-own types, and fairly advanced in their understanding of stuff like this compared to their Windows (and even OSX) counterparts. So why not work with that instead of making this "Linux alternative" option viable?
'once you have worked at one, it's a lot easier to get into another'
This doesn't surprise me at all -- I'm sure you're seen as not only good enough to have worked at the other ones, but as a possible wealth of information about the workings of the others. And you're cheaper and lower-profile than hiring away the competition's bigger fish.
I was about to post something spouting off an opinion before reading the article, but figured I'd better check it first. I was GOING to say, "but do that many sites contain information worth stealing?" But I then wimped out and read the article.
According to the article, the ground rules (in particular, what kinds of sites are fair game) are still up in the air. So this whole thing is still lacking in some pretty basic parameters, which makes use of such a definitive range of percentages kind of silly. It's like saying, "70% percent of some people are redheads." That sounds like a lot of redheads, but without defining the "some people" part, it's just wind.
It's an interesting thought and gets people talking about it, which is certainly not a bad thing. But it's little more than that at this point.
I mostly agree -- hey, everyone, please mod mandelbr0t up.
I don't necessarily feel the same conspiracy-minded stuff I used to about Microsoft, though. You're right -- our privacy is not as great a concern to a large software company as is their bottom line, and the more information they can have about consumers, the more they can make (both monetarily and in terms of data mining).
However, while I don't disagree in principle with what you've said, I'd bring up some totally uneducated counter-arguments.
If big business was interested in using the Internet as a vehicle for expansion rather than exploiting consumers, we'd see reliable and cheap wifi-enabled routers in every home with broadband.
You're mostly right (my opinion, of course) -- I would only argue that telcos are big business, too, and it's not in their best interest to let ANYONE have reliable wireless routers for free. They make a stack of money from households that want a router so they can have multiple computers online but don't know how to do it themselves or are too intimidated by it. For example, only three or so years ago, all the high-speed options around here (Comcast, SBC/Ameritech, and RCN) had policies against any type of support for homes with routers. Unless you bought their router (or in RCN's case, installed a separate modem and bought another dynamic IP -- crazy, no?), they wouldn't help you if your service went down. It was maddening and transparently predatory, and you could generally convince a tech support person on the phone that their service was down (particularly if you were able to drop a bunch of buzzwords on them). But the policies were there -- buy our crap or you don't get support when we tank our service. And moreover, a lot of people who bought these services back then still have them and pay for them now.
So that kind of makes your point, I know -- but what the telcos (and their power in the business world and their lobbying power in Washington) want is not necessarily what other aspects of big business want. Microsoft's a bad example, but there are a lot of companies who want to use the Internet purely as a medium for expansion and exposure. Amazon has a lot of problems with how they've done things lately, but I heard Jeff Bezos speak at BookExpo several years ago and was struck by what he said -- his point was that Amazon succeeded because it built a community, not because it maximized customer data exploitation. In other words, build it, and they will come.
(Forgive me, I also bring up Amazon as intentional flamebait -- I have some ethical problems with them lately due largely to treatment of Jimmy Carter's last book, but I mostly want to hear other Slashdotter's problems with them. I know a lot of people 'round here are down on Amazon, but I kind of want to know why.)
Google is another interesting one -- they seem to build community and then hope that builds business. So far, so good. But I could be wrong -- am I baiting again?
Windows viruses would be nothing more than an annoyance, maybe even a joke like in the good old days.
Yeah, I miss the Michelangelo days. It stunk and cost money, but nothing like now. And it was clever and a little funny and historically aware, which for some reason really did soften the blow. I remember calling in to my local radio station (WGN in Chicago) when they were talking about some virus or other and explaining to them that if you type CHKDSK at a DOS prompt and the memory doesn't line up right (I can't remember what the number was, but I feel like it was around 1.2 MB), you might have some kind of virus. If only it were still that simple.
They certainly wouldn't threaten to cause billions of dollars of unaccountable transactions.
Indeed. But this comes back to responsibility. Big business is a user of the Internet, too, and therefore is just as responsible for its own privacy. (In fact, one could argue that the ide
... particularly because Vista was supposed to address some of the problems Microsoft had when trying to balance security and ease of use in XP. We now live in a very dangerous time as far as digital stuff is concerned, and I think continuing to hide as much security from people as possible (while paying lip service to it in other ways like UAC) is foolish. End users are going to have to learn to be careful, and learn a little bit about security. Cars didn't used to have locks, either. Times change, and people have to adapt to it to some extent.
That said, I personally very much liked the Vista user experience (I'm back to XP for now, but I had the beta and RC1). But after the first couple of days, I turned off UAC (and besides, I like to manage my security myself). It did nothing but ask me if I wanted to do what I was doing. Like another early poster here, I almost immediately reverted to clicking any damn OK button I saw. And God knows, I turned the sound off almost immediately. Moreover, I turned it off because it seemed like a talented Bad Guy would simply bury his Evil Code in something that seemed benign, and Joe User would just click through it. But all of that has been covered at great length in these hallowed halls already.
My point is still this: the bad guys are out there now. That's just reality. Telling people not to worry and to go back to sleep doesn't serve anyone anymore. I don't think power user knowledge is necessary for the average person, but frank awareness of basic online safety puts it in the hands of the individual user to some extent, and eases some of the strain for the OS designers/engineers. Because while MS has made some dumb and dangerous mistakes in the past, I still think of it this way: when you're designing any piece of software, you can't completely anticipate the security issues that will come up a year down the road, and you can't reduce how hard a user will work to circumvent your attempts to protect them, no matter how inobtrusive they may be.
I'm not defending MS for its past mistakes, oversights, poor execution, and so on, but I do think people need to pony up a little more energy to protect themselves. I'm no security expert, but it just seems like responsible living to me.
Do what you want for whatever reasons, of course, but Wal-Mart does a lot of things far worse to larger numbers of people. There was a Frontline episode about Wal-Mart and how they basically leave American towns as smoking holes (RCA and Rubbermaid were brands used as examples). One tactic targets areas with lots of local business, runs all the mom-and-pops out of business by opening a Wal-Mart, and then when the area's resources are tapped they close the Wal-Mart.
Not behavior entirely unique to Wal-Mart, and arguments about shopping there can be made in either direction (competitive pricing, world economy, blah blah). I personally won't shop at Wal-Mart for these reasons, but I do think it would be presumptuous to expect that kind of boycott from everyone, particularly people in areas where business has gone away for whatever reason and Wal-Mart offers the best prices for feeding and clothing your family. Check out the link above, though -- I personally think it's quite alarming how much they'll do to people here and overseas to shave as little as a couple cents per unit off of a product. I'd prefer to pay the extra nickel, but I can only speak for my own nickels. And live in an area with ample choices.
True. As I recall, the people who moved the chairs kept them. Or destroyed them, or something. (People here get irrational about parking in the winter, and it's not uncommon for people to damage each other's cars or lawn chairs just to prove a point about this or that.)
But I agree -- this one seems fairly clear-cut, and perhaps my example was a needlessly convoluted one. Point is, I agree wholeheartedly that this guy should be punished just as he would be if he, say, broke into a school and vandalized the inside of it.
IANAL, but I seem to recall this very thing coming up somehow in the past. I think it may have been people leaving lawn chairs in their shoveled-out parking spaces -- a common (though dumb and also illegal) practice here in Chicago in the winter to "reserve" that spot for when you get home from work. They left the chairs out, the chairs were taken, and whoever took the chairs was convicted of theft. Even though the chairs were clearly not secured in any way and were, in effect, abandoned in a public street. (I think the people who left the chairs got tickets for something too, probably for placing an obstruction in the road.)
Poor judgment (for example, leaving money in the driveway) on the part of the owner of something does not make it okay to take the property. While I generally don't have much use for people who fall back on Webster's Dictionary to make a point, here is what m-w.com says about "theft":
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
So the concept of theft, at least semantically, has little or nothing to do with whether the owner made a sufficient effort to secure his or her property. (I only throw in "little" because I suppose you could say that burglary involves entry to a building, thus implying some effort to contain one's own stuff.)
But your point about criminal trespass on a computer is a good one -- the difference between chairs on a street and bits of data may prove to be legally different somehow. Or in this case, the difference between writing your name all over a wall like a butthead may be different than digitally tagging a million pages. Is it vandalism if the wall you're writing on doesn't really exist? I would hope (from a logical standpoint) that there would be no difference between virtual property and physical property as far as criminal or negligent behavior is concerned, but the way the law sees digital stuff never ceases to surprise me.
That's not what he did. If that were his true intent, he would have contacted MySpace about the vulnerability. Instead, he pasted his name all over the place (I thought he was nineteen -- that sounds more like the actions of a nine year old). To call this an altruistic attempt to help MySpace is akin to calling the guy who broke into Buckingham Palace in the 80's a security consultant. He didn't really hurt anything and clearly disclosed some problems with palace security procedures, but that wasn't his reason for doing it.
You can't commit a crime and then claim you were simply displaying a flaw in the system. "But your honor, I was simply showing my friend here how lax he was about avoiding punches to the face!"
But what's the difference, from the end user's perspective? I mean really, do you honestly think that the average desk jockey cares that their information is "stuck" in Excel or Word? I don't think they do, as they will never in a million years try to open those files with anything other than Excel or Word.
All they know is that it works like they expect. Maybe I'm not making my opinions clear: this doesn't necessarily equate to "it works right." It simply works reliably like they expect it to. And because of that, it costs them NO thought. They do their thing, it does its thing, and we all move on.
There seems to be some general misconception in responses to my post that I expect to use Word and Excel willy nilly and then have the open source community fix other problems I have for free. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I expect nothing outside of how Word or Excel, for example, will respond to some command. That's not for free, and it's not necessarily the right solution. But it's reliable. If a user has to adjust to some dumb thing Word does, they will. JUST LIKE THEY WOULD FOR OPEN OFFICE, except for the fact that they don't perceive it to be worth it to them to do so for OpenOffice. This is often based on what their office does, not what they personally believe.
Cars are a good example, now that you bring it up. They SHOULD run on hydrogen, have central drivers' seats instead of offset ones, should all have smooth automatic transmissions, and should allow great visibility in all directions. None of these things are true, though. Why? Because the cost of building them this way is prohibitive, and yet is dwarfed by the cost of CONVINCING consumers that they should be this way. There was a great theoretical discussion recently at the humanized website about different ways to differentiate between forward and reverse in a car. Fascinating, but it's not like you're going to get Detroit/Japan/China/Germany to change the fundamental way you set the transmission in your car. It would cause chaos and would quickly kill off anyone who has been driving a car their whole life and can't easily adapt to a new transmission.
I think my point is that Office and Windows are going nowhere -- we have them for the time being. And they're not evil. They're not perfect (in fact, you could argue that certain versions are fundamentally flawed), but they're not evil either. Again, flawed != evil. So rather than bark about how sucky they are, why not simply accept that there are some things for which they are appropriate and be done? If I'm working with a client who prefers Microsoft proprietary formats (and while I don't want to start ANOTHER fight, if it's used by an overwhelming majority of the world, is it still a proprietary format or is it a standard?), why SHOULD I fight the good fight? Word, for example, is simply a tool to create a certain type of document. If it exists on my hard drive either because I bought it or my employer did, why shouldn't I just use it and be done? I could download a big executable and install OpenOffice to emulate Word or Excel, or I could simply use Word or Excel.
I understand and, in theory, agree with the righteous, windmill-fighting answers, but that's because I read Slashdot. The typical user couldn't give less of a damn about the business issues behind how difficult it is for them to make a Word file. We can bark all we want around here about it, but it won't change anything about how the vast majority of users deal with stuff day in and day out. Nor should it, perhaps.
Free open source software is fine -- I use and support it when I can, and appreciate it for what it is (and don't expect support or features I'm not paying for). However, many don't use it. And that's fine, too. There seems to be some feeling around here, though, that it's the open source way or the highway, and that Microsoft embodies everything that is evil and wrong about software development. In some ways that may be true, but the brush with which
So by that logic, anything wrong that happens to me while I'm using my computer is my fault because I'm not properly ready for the idiosyncrasies of whatever OS I'm using? That's crazy talk, whether you're talking about Linux, Windows, OS X, or the Canon-friggin'-Cat.
This is a classic example of the silly defensiveness that drives me nuts. Windows users just want to use Windows because they can get stuff done. Linux users fight like dogs to try to prove the mettle and superiority of their OSes and interfaces and have ready excuses for stuff that doesn't work as expected (or intended or promised). These excuses often include user fault or laziness (we should all be happy to occasionally open a terminal window and type a bunch of arcane gibberish to make something work). I'm reminded of baseball fans here in Chicago -- generally speaking, Sox fans deeply hate the Cubs and Cubs fans, and Cubs fans tend not to have strong opinions one way or the other about the Sox. There's a certain level of comfort in one's own skin among Cubs fans (and Windows users) that doesn't seem to come out as often in Sox fans/Linux advocates.
Windows is far from perfect, as are Microsoft's business practices. But this doesn't automatically make Linux OSes and windowing environments the right solution. What makes a better solution is user comfort, and (frankly) Microsoft often does a better job of instilling this comfort. Are their solutions the best possible? Almost always not. But the average business is not interested in spending its time fighting the good fight for open source software. It's interested in doing whatever it actually does, and using its computers as tools to help accomplish that. They know what to expect from Windows, it generally works pretty well for its intended uses, and life goes on for yet another day of not thinking more about their chosen OS than the task at hand.
For the record, I use Kubuntu, XP, Vista, and OS X (often all in one day). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and each can be used well or poorly (I do both). That's that. The holy war thing is getting old, and does nothing to dissuade people from viewing Linux users as geeks and defensive fanatics.
Yet another batch of truly astounding BS about Vista topped by a misleading headline. This is not a Vista-specific defect, this is a characteristic of voice commands (but granted, a very valid reason why it's an unreliable way to try to run a computer under many circumstances).
And more to the point, if I have a Mac with voice recognition software installed, is it somehow NOT prone to this?
There are several things wrong with Vista, but this isn't one of them. Are we all so hungry for security-related dirt about Vista that THIS is what constitutes "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Good gravy.
Simmer down, and knock off the dumb asteroid stuff.
I have a moderate to severe stutter that worsens on the phone and worsens still when I have to rattle off my phone number (or a thirty-digit serial number). I don't know why numbers are so much harder for me to speak, but I'm sure Blakey Rat has an opinion about that, too.
Not worth owning an alternative form of communication like TTY, but it's BS that I need to talk to as many people as I do to activate my software that I can prove in writing that I own. It should be enough that I can provide written proof of who I am -- the fact that I need to talk to Comcast, Sprint, Quark, Adobe, Microsoft as often as I do signals a failing in the system, not in my ability to carry on a fluent phone conversation. Those of us who need to reinstall our licensed software shouldn't have to jump through MORE hoops (particularly given the likelihood that we're reinstalling the software due to some failing in it). Take, for example, any call to an online service provider. The first thing you have to do is punch in your home phone number to prove you're an account holder. Then you wait, and once you get someone, what's the first thing you do? Recite the same damn number all over again.
Why can't that come up on screen in front of them before they start talking to me? I don't know how these systems are built, but I refuse to believe that it's impossible. Perhaps impractical, but not impossible. Nor is some basic training so I don't get laughed at and teased (something that happens less now than it used to but still more than you'd think). But now I know I'm asking too much.
I'm not as thin-skinned as I probably sound here, and have the ability to tell each damn customer service rep I talk to to "stop snickering, I have a stutter." Moreover, I can have a sense of humor about it all when it's reasonable. Really.
All I'm saying is that it's BS answers like this one from Blakey Rat that chap my ass. The number of people who have paid stacks of money for their systems and their software but have either speech-related or hearing-related or language-related issues is significant. Do their difficulties (dare I say problems?) make their licenses invalid? And as a Quark user, I'm acutely and regrettably used to having to call to reinstall and reactivate my software. I'm not unwilling to do it as I have to do it all the time, but I have not one but two levels of aggravation on this one. I shouldn't even have the first, non-speech-related one. It's dumb and far too easy to circumvent to make it worth subjecting paid users to.
I'm not asking for special treatment -- in fact, I'm asking for minimally equivalent treatment. And I'm not half the accessibility Nazi that most of my programmer friends are (though maybe they're talking the talk in front of me because they think I care more than I do -- I don't know;) ). But if things worked logically and technologically as they should FOR EVERYONE, there would be less distinction between those of us with speech or hearing or language or social impediments and those without. True efficiency serves everyone, false efficiency serves only the system owners (i.e., the people who already have our money).
Err, this seems wrong somehow. If OpenOffice switches to a new file format and calls it MS_XML, do you think Microsoft would mind?
Actually, their stance is that they wouldn't mind. The current argument between Microsoft and IBM is based on Microsoft wanting multiple specs to meet multiple needs and IBM wanting one spec that covers everything. MS believes (with ample evidence) that ODF is not complete enough to meet the needs of past MS Office users who want to upgrade to a new version of Office. You can form your own opinions about that, but the MS logic would state that if OpenOffice comes up with some other spec that meets a good, solid need (like interoperability with Office 2007), it should be allowed to stand.
I would actually say compatibility has significantly increased as time has progressed. I do not see why you would say otherwise. I don't know how Office 2007 compatibility is yet, but then again, it hasn't even been released to the public at large yet, so there can hardly be an expectation of compatibility right now.
Actually, I say that because I'm running Office 2007 beta right now and have a buddy on the Office 2007 team. Don't start flaming, I'm not here as a shill for them -- in fact, I'll argue five things against Microsoft for every one I'll support. But I happen to believe that Office 2007 is pretty cool and that the case made for a separate spec is a valid one.
ANYHOW, all disclaimers aside, the differences between OpenXML and ODF are significant enough that they don't translate back and forth easily at all. That's what I meant -- the two formats are very similar in concept, but in practice have enough differences that it almost makes translation harder than it would be between ODF and binary.
That's not necessarilly true. OpenOffice often does a better job of converting to and from old versions of Word documents than new versions of Word do.
Point taken. You'll get no argument from me here.
And do you know what works even better? OpenOffice to OpenOffice. For some reason they do not lose backward compatibility for their own documents like Microsoft Office tends to do. And there is the simple issue that if I use OpenOffice at work, I can also work on these documents with OpenOffice at home without paying for an extra home copy of MS Office, and without having to worry at all about compatibility as I work on a document. (And also without having to worry about losing the ability to open the document ten years later.) Nobody I share documents with can complain that OpenOffice is not an option for them or is outside of their budget.
No, but they can argue that they don't want another full-boat office suite on their machine. Many companies use Office as a whole because Excel is the best spreadsheet app around. And it is, according to most. I'm not deeply into spreadsheet stuff, but I know that even people who gripe bitterly about Word and PowerPoint and Access and whatever else always seem grudgingly obliged to admit that Excel is the best -- you can't tolerate errors in a spreadsheet app like you can in a word processor. Anyhow, as I understand it, there are significant differences in the ODF spec and the OpenXML spec between how tables are rendered in spreadsheets -- ODF has a very rudimentary way of dealing with it, and OpenXML has a much more complex set of standards for this to allow the full feature set past Office users have had.
So say I'm a small business owner who hires someone to do some number crunching for me. They send me something in a Calc sheet because they have to preserve their formatting. If they tell me that all I have to do is go download a 100MB installer, wait 20 minutes through the install, and then putter about figuring out how to turn off the OpenOffice quickstart, all just so I can crack the file, am I going to do all that? Or am I going to tell him to figure out how to send
Slashdot Mirror
Not only are all the financial and business reasons offered by readers here probably completely true, I'd bet they also don't want the support calls. It doesn't matter what you tell people about what you will or won't support -- I would imagine Dell gets hundreds of calls a day about something not working right in the pre-installed copy of Word someone bought with their Dell machine. I wouldn't think it would be worth it to either train support staff to provide basic support for OpenOffice or even to spend the time telling each confused caller that they have to go somewhere else for help.
Which just brought me to a related thought -- OOo online documentation is, in spots, quite skitchy. Dell and other manufacturers may have set standards for what they consider to be a product worthy of inclusion, and those standards may be partially dependent upon level of documentation.
But this is all Reason Three at best -- I'm sure marking up the OEM version AND getting a better volume discount from Microsoft weigh more heavily than this.
I'm trying to book an overnight flight on this thing, but I'm not seeing any on the schedule. Oh, wait ...
Gotta be careful, though -- George Pullman did this for his railcar company here in the Chicago area in the mid- to late-1800's, and he overstepped his bounds. He ended up housing his employees in company-owned housing, paying them in company-honored chits, and basically taking people's freedoms away one at a time. I'm not suggesting that Google is doing this, but I must admit that it rings some bells. Separation from work is good, and housing owned by your company seems to put a lot of eggs in one basket. It's a one-stop shop -- get fired and evicted all in the same week!
Why encrypt it? Everyone is speaking Swedish -- who can understand THAT anyway?
Yes and no. The guidelines state that you should not edit anything about yourself or your company. So if a falsehood is posted about you, you can't change it. This turns into people recruiting other people to make changes, which tends to get certain great big software companies in hot water.
I haven't used Office on the Mac. I can tell you that Office 2007 on PC is a very pleasant improvement (still imperfect in many ways, but a hell of a lot better than Office 2003) as far as interface goes. I haven't had enough time to test reliably for stability. But I have tried more than my share of OpenOffice ports for the Mac, and the ones I tried were all (X11 or not) buggy and crash-prone. I, like many Mac users, have not had a seamless transition to X11-based apps. There's often a bunch of tweaking that has to happen -- something most geeks find irritating and most average joes find completely overwhelming. And I think in this Slashdot environment, it is sufficient to say that X11 on the Mac is a dealbreaker and most people with Macs and X11 experience would understand, if not agree.Hm. Since we're playing blockquote-and-pithy-translation, how about this: "You didn't respond submissively to my rapier wit, so I shall insult your intelligence and pretend to enlighten you." Please.
I hope, as another person here has stated, that it gets better for Mac users -- they could use a good open source, free office suite. I'm a graphic designer, so I tend toward hammering Quark or InDesign inappropriately into service as a word processor anyway. But I can certainly see the dearth of good office suite alternatives for the average Mac user. Get off your high horse, please. It's a tool. These people have real experience with using Office for the Mac, and have been genuinely pleased with the results and displeased with the open source options. They stated this here for our common edification. And you were a dick to them for it. Come on.
Did we actually manage to Slashdot the BBC? I finally got to it, but boy, it was slow.
Sounds to me like he's got quite a hodgepodge of hardware there, and it got more exotic and strange as he added things to deal with the problems he was having. So while it's not his fault that his machine evolved in that manner over the years, it's no surprise that a four-year-old machine with a bunch of random hardware added will have problems with a bleeding-edge OS.
I guess the moral of the story is that if he wants it all to work together, a new machine might have been the better choice (and if my pounds-to-dollars conversion is right, not a much more expensive one). Too bad about his PDA, though.
Frankly, if he's such a gadget geek, I think he probably could have (and in some ways, did) predict this result. We all want the latest toys, but this method of upgrading (all at once, he popped in a new video card and upgraded the system to a brand-new OS instead of a clean install in a few months after all the driver woes could be worked out) is rife with peril.
Whoa, now, let's not get carried away. I know this is Slashdot, but you're suggesting that Microsoft is responsible for other people's illegal actions just because of certain aspects of its products are confusing or inconvenient? That's hardly a compelling defense -- it's the corporate version of "stop hitting yourself."
Me too, particularly as the CompUSA near me (Skokie/Niles) is one of the ones closing. It was no great shakes, of course, but they very effectively ran smaller retailers (ElekTek, for one, and countless smaller others) in the area out of business. So their leaving now will leave the near north burbs with relatively few options for retail (I sure do hate shopping for computer stuff at Best Buy). So Fry's, if you're reading, north burbs of Chicago, please!
MOD PARENT UP.
Good points all around. I hope Dell sees it that way -- I have my doubts about the corporate model here, but I'd love to see it go well. What it needs is VERY dedicated support, though -- the minute buyers have to go digging for drivers, all is lost.
And because of that, I agree that Ubuntu is the way to go. I'd even go so far as to say that Kubuntu would be even better. It's not without fault, but it certainly does offer a foolproof Linux option (for the most part).
T
I certainly appreciate the idea here, and hope they're doing this for the right reasons (not some of the cynical-but-possibly-true ideas posted in this thread elsewhere). But I've never known two Linux users who preferred the same setup. Ubuntu here, Redhat there, BeOS, OpenBSD, and so on. I'm a Windows guy for the most part, but have run installations of all of these here and there over the years. I don't quite know how they're going to implement something like this and please much of anyone. With Windows or OSX, you get one default installation and you adjust it cosmetically a little bit (though at the OS level it's pretty much the same). With all the flavors of Linux, you can set it up almost any way you want.
It's great that the system cost might be lower if the Windows tax isn't applied, but is anyone who prefers Linux really going to use whatever comes installed? Most will wipe it as soon as they get it, just like you would if you ordered a Windows box/laptop. I think what would be nice (though certainly not a productive business model for Dell) would be to step up their options for OS-free machines and then put the energy otherwise spent on Linux installations on creating a repository of drivers for ALL platforms for their hardware. That way you could install whatever the hell you want but have some help with the hardware fun that all Linux users spend so much time on.
Linux users, for the overwhelmingly large part, seem to me to be roll-your-own types, and fairly advanced in their understanding of stuff like this compared to their Windows (and even OSX) counterparts. So why not work with that instead of making this "Linux alternative" option viable?
All good points. I stand corrected!
This doesn't surprise me at all -- I'm sure you're seen as not only good enough to have worked at the other ones, but as a possible wealth of information about the workings of the others. And you're cheaper and lower-profile than hiring away the competition's bigger fish.
I was about to post something spouting off an opinion before reading the article, but figured I'd better check it first. I was GOING to say, "but do that many sites contain information worth stealing?" But I then wimped out and read the article.
According to the article, the ground rules (in particular, what kinds of sites are fair game) are still up in the air. So this whole thing is still lacking in some pretty basic parameters, which makes use of such a definitive range of percentages kind of silly. It's like saying, "70% percent of some people are redheads." That sounds like a lot of redheads, but without defining the "some people" part, it's just wind.
It's an interesting thought and gets people talking about it, which is certainly not a bad thing. But it's little more than that at this point.
I don't necessarily feel the same conspiracy-minded stuff I used to about Microsoft, though. You're right -- our privacy is not as great a concern to a large software company as is their bottom line, and the more information they can have about consumers, the more they can make (both monetarily and in terms of data mining).
However, while I don't disagree in principle with what you've said, I'd bring up some totally uneducated counter-arguments.
You're mostly right (my opinion, of course) -- I would only argue that telcos are big business, too, and it's not in their best interest to let ANYONE have reliable wireless routers for free. They make a stack of money from households that want a router so they can have multiple computers online but don't know how to do it themselves or are too intimidated by it. For example, only three or so years ago, all the high-speed options around here (Comcast, SBC/Ameritech, and RCN) had policies against any type of support for homes with routers. Unless you bought their router (or in RCN's case, installed a separate modem and bought another dynamic IP -- crazy, no?), they wouldn't help you if your service went down. It was maddening and transparently predatory, and you could generally convince a tech support person on the phone that their service was down (particularly if you were able to drop a bunch of buzzwords on them). But the policies were there -- buy our crap or you don't get support when we tank our service. And moreover, a lot of people who bought these services back then still have them and pay for them now.
So that kind of makes your point, I know -- but what the telcos (and their power in the business world and their lobbying power in Washington) want is not necessarily what other aspects of big business want. Microsoft's a bad example, but there are a lot of companies who want to use the Internet purely as a medium for expansion and exposure. Amazon has a lot of problems with how they've done things lately, but I heard Jeff Bezos speak at BookExpo several years ago and was struck by what he said -- his point was that Amazon succeeded because it built a community, not because it maximized customer data exploitation. In other words, build it, and they will come.
(Forgive me, I also bring up Amazon as intentional flamebait -- I have some ethical problems with them lately due largely to treatment of Jimmy Carter's last book, but I mostly want to hear other Slashdotter's problems with them. I know a lot of people 'round here are down on Amazon, but I kind of want to know why.)
Google is another interesting one -- they seem to build community and then hope that builds business. So far, so good. But I could be wrong -- am I baiting again?
Yeah, I miss the Michelangelo days. It stunk and cost money, but nothing like now. And it was clever and a little funny and historically aware, which for some reason really did soften the blow. I remember calling in to my local radio station (WGN in Chicago) when they were talking about some virus or other and explaining to them that if you type CHKDSK at a DOS prompt and the memory doesn't line up right (I can't remember what the number was, but I feel like it was around 1.2 MB), you might have some kind of virus. If only it were still that simple.
Indeed. But this comes back to responsibility. Big business is a user of the Internet, too, and therefore is just as responsible for its own privacy. (In fact, one could argue that the ide
... particularly because Vista was supposed to address some of the problems Microsoft had when trying to balance security and ease of use in XP. We now live in a very dangerous time as far as digital stuff is concerned, and I think continuing to hide as much security from people as possible (while paying lip service to it in other ways like UAC) is foolish. End users are going to have to learn to be careful, and learn a little bit about security. Cars didn't used to have locks, either. Times change, and people have to adapt to it to some extent.
That said, I personally very much liked the Vista user experience (I'm back to XP for now, but I had the beta and RC1). But after the first couple of days, I turned off UAC (and besides, I like to manage my security myself). It did nothing but ask me if I wanted to do what I was doing. Like another early poster here, I almost immediately reverted to clicking any damn OK button I saw. And God knows, I turned the sound off almost immediately. Moreover, I turned it off because it seemed like a talented Bad Guy would simply bury his Evil Code in something that seemed benign, and Joe User would just click through it. But all of that has been covered at great length in these hallowed halls already.
My point is still this: the bad guys are out there now. That's just reality. Telling people not to worry and to go back to sleep doesn't serve anyone anymore. I don't think power user knowledge is necessary for the average person, but frank awareness of basic online safety puts it in the hands of the individual user to some extent, and eases some of the strain for the OS designers/engineers. Because while MS has made some dumb and dangerous mistakes in the past, I still think of it this way: when you're designing any piece of software, you can't completely anticipate the security issues that will come up a year down the road, and you can't reduce how hard a user will work to circumvent your attempts to protect them, no matter how inobtrusive they may be.
I'm not defending MS for its past mistakes, oversights, poor execution, and so on, but I do think people need to pony up a little more energy to protect themselves. I'm no security expert, but it just seems like responsible living to me.
Do what you want for whatever reasons, of course, but Wal-Mart does a lot of things far worse to larger numbers of people. There was a Frontline episode about Wal-Mart and how they basically leave American towns as smoking holes (RCA and Rubbermaid were brands used as examples). One tactic targets areas with lots of local business, runs all the mom-and-pops out of business by opening a Wal-Mart, and then when the area's resources are tapped they close the Wal-Mart.
Not behavior entirely unique to Wal-Mart, and arguments about shopping there can be made in either direction (competitive pricing, world economy, blah blah). I personally won't shop at Wal-Mart for these reasons, but I do think it would be presumptuous to expect that kind of boycott from everyone, particularly people in areas where business has gone away for whatever reason and Wal-Mart offers the best prices for feeding and clothing your family. Check out the link above, though -- I personally think it's quite alarming how much they'll do to people here and overseas to shave as little as a couple cents per unit off of a product. I'd prefer to pay the extra nickel, but I can only speak for my own nickels. And live in an area with ample choices.
True. As I recall, the people who moved the chairs kept them. Or destroyed them, or something. (People here get irrational about parking in the winter, and it's not uncommon for people to damage each other's cars or lawn chairs just to prove a point about this or that.)
But I agree -- this one seems fairly clear-cut, and perhaps my example was a needlessly convoluted one. Point is, I agree wholeheartedly that this guy should be punished just as he would be if he, say, broke into a school and vandalized the inside of it.
IANAL, but I seem to recall this very thing coming up somehow in the past. I think it may have been people leaving lawn chairs in their shoveled-out parking spaces -- a common (though dumb and also illegal) practice here in Chicago in the winter to "reserve" that spot for when you get home from work. They left the chairs out, the chairs were taken, and whoever took the chairs was convicted of theft. Even though the chairs were clearly not secured in any way and were, in effect, abandoned in a public street. (I think the people who left the chairs got tickets for something too, probably for placing an obstruction in the road.)
Poor judgment (for example, leaving money in the driveway) on the part of the owner of something does not make it okay to take the property. While I generally don't have much use for people who fall back on Webster's Dictionary to make a point, here is what m-w.com says about "theft":
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
So the concept of theft, at least semantically, has little or nothing to do with whether the owner made a sufficient effort to secure his or her property. (I only throw in "little" because I suppose you could say that burglary involves entry to a building, thus implying some effort to contain one's own stuff.)
But your point about criminal trespass on a computer is a good one -- the difference between chairs on a street and bits of data may prove to be legally different somehow. Or in this case, the difference between writing your name all over a wall like a butthead may be different than digitally tagging a million pages. Is it vandalism if the wall you're writing on doesn't really exist? I would hope (from a logical standpoint) that there would be no difference between virtual property and physical property as far as criminal or negligent behavior is concerned, but the way the law sees digital stuff never ceases to surprise me.
You've answered your own question -- that's where the expense is.
More to the point, things like this statement (from the original post) get under my skin:
Clearly, disclosing security vulnerabilities doesn't pay.
That's not what he did. If that were his true intent, he would have contacted MySpace about the vulnerability. Instead, he pasted his name all over the place (I thought he was nineteen -- that sounds more like the actions of a nine year old). To call this an altruistic attempt to help MySpace is akin to calling the guy who broke into Buckingham Palace in the 80's a security consultant. He didn't really hurt anything and clearly disclosed some problems with palace security procedures, but that wasn't his reason for doing it.
You can't commit a crime and then claim you were simply displaying a flaw in the system. "But your honor, I was simply showing my friend here how lax he was about avoiding punches to the face!"
But what's the difference, from the end user's perspective? I mean really, do you honestly think that the average desk jockey cares that their information is "stuck" in Excel or Word? I don't think they do, as they will never in a million years try to open those files with anything other than Excel or Word.
All they know is that it works like they expect. Maybe I'm not making my opinions clear: this doesn't necessarily equate to "it works right." It simply works reliably like they expect it to. And because of that, it costs them NO thought. They do their thing, it does its thing, and we all move on.
There seems to be some general misconception in responses to my post that I expect to use Word and Excel willy nilly and then have the open source community fix other problems I have for free. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I expect nothing outside of how Word or Excel, for example, will respond to some command. That's not for free, and it's not necessarily the right solution. But it's reliable. If a user has to adjust to some dumb thing Word does, they will. JUST LIKE THEY WOULD FOR OPEN OFFICE, except for the fact that they don't perceive it to be worth it to them to do so for OpenOffice. This is often based on what their office does, not what they personally believe.
Cars are a good example, now that you bring it up. They SHOULD run on hydrogen, have central drivers' seats instead of offset ones, should all have smooth automatic transmissions, and should allow great visibility in all directions. None of these things are true, though. Why? Because the cost of building them this way is prohibitive, and yet is dwarfed by the cost of CONVINCING consumers that they should be this way. There was a great theoretical discussion recently at the humanized website about different ways to differentiate between forward and reverse in a car. Fascinating, but it's not like you're going to get Detroit/Japan/China/Germany to change the fundamental way you set the transmission in your car. It would cause chaos and would quickly kill off anyone who has been driving a car their whole life and can't easily adapt to a new transmission.
I think my point is that Office and Windows are going nowhere -- we have them for the time being. And they're not evil. They're not perfect (in fact, you could argue that certain versions are fundamentally flawed), but they're not evil either. Again, flawed != evil. So rather than bark about how sucky they are, why not simply accept that there are some things for which they are appropriate and be done? If I'm working with a client who prefers Microsoft proprietary formats (and while I don't want to start ANOTHER fight, if it's used by an overwhelming majority of the world, is it still a proprietary format or is it a standard?), why SHOULD I fight the good fight? Word, for example, is simply a tool to create a certain type of document. If it exists on my hard drive either because I bought it or my employer did, why shouldn't I just use it and be done? I could download a big executable and install OpenOffice to emulate Word or Excel, or I could simply use Word or Excel.
I understand and, in theory, agree with the righteous, windmill-fighting answers, but that's because I read Slashdot. The typical user couldn't give less of a damn about the business issues behind how difficult it is for them to make a Word file. We can bark all we want around here about it, but it won't change anything about how the vast majority of users deal with stuff day in and day out. Nor should it, perhaps.
Free open source software is fine -- I use and support it when I can, and appreciate it for what it is (and don't expect support or features I'm not paying for). However, many don't use it. And that's fine, too. There seems to be some feeling around here, though, that it's the open source way or the highway, and that Microsoft embodies everything that is evil and wrong about software development. In some ways that may be true, but the brush with which
You're the one who isn't ready
So by that logic, anything wrong that happens to me while I'm using my computer is my fault because I'm not properly ready for the idiosyncrasies of whatever OS I'm using? That's crazy talk, whether you're talking about Linux, Windows, OS X, or the Canon-friggin'-Cat.
This is a classic example of the silly defensiveness that drives me nuts. Windows users just want to use Windows because they can get stuff done. Linux users fight like dogs to try to prove the mettle and superiority of their OSes and interfaces and have ready excuses for stuff that doesn't work as expected (or intended or promised). These excuses often include user fault or laziness (we should all be happy to occasionally open a terminal window and type a bunch of arcane gibberish to make something work). I'm reminded of baseball fans here in Chicago -- generally speaking, Sox fans deeply hate the Cubs and Cubs fans, and Cubs fans tend not to have strong opinions one way or the other about the Sox. There's a certain level of comfort in one's own skin among Cubs fans (and Windows users) that doesn't seem to come out as often in Sox fans/Linux advocates.
Windows is far from perfect, as are Microsoft's business practices. But this doesn't automatically make Linux OSes and windowing environments the right solution. What makes a better solution is user comfort, and (frankly) Microsoft often does a better job of instilling this comfort. Are their solutions the best possible? Almost always not. But the average business is not interested in spending its time fighting the good fight for open source software. It's interested in doing whatever it actually does, and using its computers as tools to help accomplish that. They know what to expect from Windows, it generally works pretty well for its intended uses, and life goes on for yet another day of not thinking more about their chosen OS than the task at hand.
For the record, I use Kubuntu, XP, Vista, and OS X (often all in one day). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and each can be used well or poorly (I do both). That's that. The holy war thing is getting old, and does nothing to dissuade people from viewing Linux users as geeks and defensive fanatics.
Yet another batch of truly astounding BS about Vista topped by a misleading headline. This is not a Vista-specific defect, this is a characteristic of voice commands (but granted, a very valid reason why it's an unreliable way to try to run a computer under many circumstances).
And more to the point, if I have a Mac with voice recognition software installed, is it somehow NOT prone to this?
There are several things wrong with Vista, but this isn't one of them. Are we all so hungry for security-related dirt about Vista that THIS is what constitutes "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Good gravy.
Simmer down, and knock off the dumb asteroid stuff.
;) ). But if things worked logically and technologically as they should FOR EVERYONE, there would be less distinction between those of us with speech or hearing or language or social impediments and those without. True efficiency serves everyone, false efficiency serves only the system owners (i.e., the people who already have our money).
I have a moderate to severe stutter that worsens on the phone and worsens still when I have to rattle off my phone number (or a thirty-digit serial number). I don't know why numbers are so much harder for me to speak, but I'm sure Blakey Rat has an opinion about that, too.
Not worth owning an alternative form of communication like TTY, but it's BS that I need to talk to as many people as I do to activate my software that I can prove in writing that I own. It should be enough that I can provide written proof of who I am -- the fact that I need to talk to Comcast, Sprint, Quark, Adobe, Microsoft as often as I do signals a failing in the system, not in my ability to carry on a fluent phone conversation. Those of us who need to reinstall our licensed software shouldn't have to jump through MORE hoops (particularly given the likelihood that we're reinstalling the software due to some failing in it). Take, for example, any call to an online service provider. The first thing you have to do is punch in your home phone number to prove you're an account holder. Then you wait, and once you get someone, what's the first thing you do? Recite the same damn number all over again.
Why can't that come up on screen in front of them before they start talking to me? I don't know how these systems are built, but I refuse to believe that it's impossible. Perhaps impractical, but not impossible. Nor is some basic training so I don't get laughed at and teased (something that happens less now than it used to but still more than you'd think). But now I know I'm asking too much.
I'm not as thin-skinned as I probably sound here, and have the ability to tell each damn customer service rep I talk to to "stop snickering, I have a stutter." Moreover, I can have a sense of humor about it all when it's reasonable. Really.
All I'm saying is that it's BS answers like this one from Blakey Rat that chap my ass. The number of people who have paid stacks of money for their systems and their software but have either speech-related or hearing-related or language-related issues is significant. Do their difficulties (dare I say problems?) make their licenses invalid? And as a Quark user, I'm acutely and regrettably used to having to call to reinstall and reactivate my software. I'm not unwilling to do it as I have to do it all the time, but I have not one but two levels of aggravation on this one. I shouldn't even have the first, non-speech-related one. It's dumb and far too easy to circumvent to make it worth subjecting paid users to.
I'm not asking for special treatment -- in fact, I'm asking for minimally equivalent treatment. And I'm not half the accessibility Nazi that most of my programmer friends are (though maybe they're talking the talk in front of me because they think I care more than I do -- I don't know
Actually, their stance is that they wouldn't mind. The current argument between Microsoft and IBM is based on Microsoft wanting multiple specs to meet multiple needs and IBM wanting one spec that covers everything. MS believes (with ample evidence) that ODF is not complete enough to meet the needs of past MS Office users who want to upgrade to a new version of Office. You can form your own opinions about that, but the MS logic would state that if OpenOffice comes up with some other spec that meets a good, solid need (like interoperability with Office 2007), it should be allowed to stand.
Actually, I say that because I'm running Office 2007 beta right now and have a buddy on the Office 2007 team. Don't start flaming, I'm not here as a shill for them -- in fact, I'll argue five things against Microsoft for every one I'll support. But I happen to believe that Office 2007 is pretty cool and that the case made for a separate spec is a valid one.
ANYHOW, all disclaimers aside, the differences between OpenXML and ODF are significant enough that they don't translate back and forth easily at all. That's what I meant -- the two formats are very similar in concept, but in practice have enough differences that it almost makes translation harder than it would be between ODF and binary.
Point taken. You'll get no argument from me here.
No, but they can argue that they don't want another full-boat office suite on their machine. Many companies use Office as a whole because Excel is the best spreadsheet app around. And it is, according to most. I'm not deeply into spreadsheet stuff, but I know that even people who gripe bitterly about Word and PowerPoint and Access and whatever else always seem grudgingly obliged to admit that Excel is the best -- you can't tolerate errors in a spreadsheet app like you can in a word processor. Anyhow, as I understand it, there are significant differences in the ODF spec and the OpenXML spec between how tables are rendered in spreadsheets -- ODF has a very rudimentary way of dealing with it, and OpenXML has a much more complex set of standards for this to allow the full feature set past Office users have had.
So say I'm a small business owner who hires someone to do some number crunching for me. They send me something in a Calc sheet because they have to preserve their formatting. If they tell me that all I have to do is go download a 100MB installer, wait 20 minutes through the install, and then putter about figuring out how to turn off the OpenOffice quickstart, all just so I can crack the file, am I going to do all that? Or am I going to tell him to figure out how to send