Mom moved over to Office Student-Teacher edition (she teaches) two or three years ago. When she was using Works, she wasn't exchanging documents with anyone but me, and OpenOffice, frankly, wasn't nearly as mature.
I think a difficulty we're having, is that when I talk about GOP Values, I refer to the traditional GOP, not the current administration's admittedly rather paranoid wackiness. In that context, I don't think you can dispute that the Democratic Party's TRADITIONAL platform is closer to a "take care of me" philosophy than the TRADITIONAL GOP platform. You probably will, but you will be wrong.
My biggest problem for several comments, however, has not been your arguments - indeed, at one point, I said I had nothing to say about the specific topic, because I was not familiar with the issue.
My problem, sir, has been the tone of your arguments - equal parts condescension and insult. It isn't ad hominem to tell an ass that he's an ass. Based on a limited sampling of you thought processes, you're an ass.
"Ritchie Boy"? Give me a break. Maybe you think you're charming or amusing. You're not. You're just rude.
So I'm done with you, because there's no point. I have enough stress in my life without dealing with you. Have a nice weekend and a lovely life.
A bit of friendly advice, thouugh - perhaps you could take five minutes to decide if you really are as big an ass as you appear to be based on your posts here. You're probably not; you're probably perfectly charming in real life. There's some filter between brain and mouth that gets disabled for many people in forums such as this.
If you are, maybe you could get therapy or something, because it just isn't attractive. I don't know, maybe you just need to get laid.
This is the low-end PC market. Knocking $40 off the manufacturer's build costs is probably major for them in this market. I know, Open Office, etc, but Works 7 (the last one I've seen) is actually pretty decent for what most people use, and the naive user who's buying these PCs just knows "Microsoft" for "Officey" stuff.
I would have been glad to get a free shrink wrap Works a few years ago. My mom was sending me documents in Works Word Processor format and I had to go buy Works to read them. Trust me, teaching "Save As . . . scroll down to Word... " wasn't practical with her at the time. It was a lot less painful to just go buy Works.
Finally, I hate to tell you, but the Works 7 Word Processor isn't actually that bad. It looks exactly like Word did a few years ago, and has all the features most people use.
I'm remembering why you don't try to have a calm discussion with a liberal.
Obviously some things are better done by government than by individuals. Some things are better done by individuals than by government. Some things are better done by non-governmental groups (like churches, or the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army) than by either.
I, frankly, can't address your rant about Osama Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, or the oil supply implications of the current middle eastern situation. I haven't given the issue much attention, and, given the crazed tone of your rant, feel that's the amount of attention it probably deserves.
I do know that blaming the stupidity this original topic was about (terrorists plotting in Second Life, etc.) on a specific political party is silly.
Wanting the government to protect everyone in every way is not the traditional platform of the GOP. It is much more the traditional platform of the Democratic Party. If you disagree, please explain how the parties view of things like health care or welfare conflict with this statement rather than ranting about either President Bush.
What is it that makes you bring up the political parties here?
Sure, the administration is presently Republican, but this sounds more like bureaucrats run amok to me than anything you can assign to a party.
For the most part, the Republicans want to aggressively defend against/attack the enemies of the US; it's the Democrats who want to be taken care of by their mommy, the federal government.
I doubt Novell can release SCO's products under the GPL.
If you've ever dealt with a SCO system, the copyrights are a complete mess. Many of the header files have Microsoft copyright notices along with the ones you would expect. There's BSD notices. There's AT&T notices. The cost of sorting all of this out to where it could be released under any license would probably be extreme.
Then SCO made a bigger mess by packaging FOSS into their "custom" packages, not giving notice to SCO users about the real source of it.
And, just my personal little rant, why should it be GPL? Big chunks of it are BSD-derived. Why not the darn BSD license? GPL is great if you're trying to make a political statement, but it scares the lawyers, especially lawyers who aren't used to technology.
Because the thing I knew (but neglected to write) was that my wife, on the other hand, has high five-digits, possibly six-digits, of student debt.
I'm not sure because, in order to avoid homicide, we keep our finances pretty much separate. Either one of us would drive the other nuts; our attitudes toward money and money management are quite different.
Actually the debt is all my wife's, and we keep our finances fairly separate (to keep from killing each other) so I'm not even sure if it's a mere 5 digits or if it's made it to 6.
My father had a lot of issues, but he paid for my BS, and for that I will always be grateful.
Oh please, who do you think your parents generation is?
If you're a "millenial" (what a stupid term) then, roughly speaking, it's me. Everyone I know in the technology arena has at least a bachelor's degree.
I just have a BS in Computer Science. My wife has an MBA, half of another Master's degree, and a BA with a double English/Math major. And don't tell me about student debt!
When I started working in technology 17 years ago, everyone at that company had at least a bachelor's, and most of them had an advanced degree, including some doctorates.
There's nothing special about this latest generation except being whiney spoiled brats. And get off my lawn, damnit.
I absolutely agree that the various latest security schemes (limiting fluids, etc) are nuts.
It makes sense to me that you want to decide if the passenger is dangerous, not his stuff. I don't care if he's a terrorist, an escaped felon, or a mental patient who's going to decide to defecate on the beverage cart. Let's keep him off the plane.
But where I disagree with you - and others - is in the comparison of terrorist deaths to traffic deaths, or cancer deaths, or any other flavor. After the World Trade Center was knocked down, the economy (especially in certain sectors) TANKED. The entire tech consulting company I was working for was laid off. All of us. It took me six months to find another job. That's a pretty common story if you ask around (and I'm sure others here will agree with me.)
We can say "don't let the terrorists get us down" but it did have a major economic impact in 4Q 2001/1Q 2002 and it will again if something of that magnitude happens again.
The only way I got two screens was by having a laptop.
Think I could convince my cheap boss to spring for another video card and a second monitor for a desktop? No way.
Think I could scrounge a video card that wasn't ISA? Nope.
Think he's let me get a laptop "for all the meetings?" Yep.
Think he'd let me keep the monitor and desktop I had? Yep.
It amazes me that none my my coworkers with laptops use theirs like this. They all have full size monitors, keyboards, and mice for when at their desk, but not a single one of them uses both screens simultaneously.
Think he'd care if I was still using the desktop or not? Nope.
I'm afraid you're wrong here. The thing that SP2 really kills you on is the memory.
I have a PII-400 with 384M in the basement, it's running XP SP2. As you would expect, video playback isn't great, and some of the programs are a little slow, but all in all it's usable. All I usually use it for any more is a print server, scanning station and iTunes "server" but it does all of that just fine, and web browsing is OK too.
By contrast, the much more modern desktop system I have at work (for one specific task, thank god) barely runs with its 256M.
If this WalMart PC has 512M of memory, it's probably ok for XP.
In the US, the poppy is more associated with Memorial Day than Veterans Day - the American Legion organization distributes (fabric) poppies on Memorial Day.
I have no intention of spending the rest of my career at my current job.
I am also truly the ONLY person in the company (in the world, I suppose) who understands how some of the stuff I do on a quarterly basis gets done. There are people who know the grand overview (maybe) but nobody knows the details. I implemented it, I maintain it, and it impacts about 10,000 of our 13,000 of our US locations on a weekly basis.
I will certainly offer to train someone, and will document what I do when I leave, but I have doubts as to whether my managers will care until the next quarterly update comes around.
I'm trying to think what a) has a safety-critical metal component and b) sells for around £1 (which my American brain is translating to around $2) and c) would have been designed and developed 30 years ago and I'm just not coming up with anything.
What the heck do you sell?
In my comment I was assuming that the component itself was costing a few dollars at least. I can certainly see the financial issue if you're talking a few cents cost on a component that goes into an item that sells for a couple dollars total.
In the case of cheap plastic crap for which quality isn't top priority (like most toys) I absolutely understand that.
But the grandparent post to which I was replying talked about a safety-critical metal part that they had to "test the hell out of" because they're buying it from a supplier in China, a supplier they can't trust to use the specified type of steel.
In such a case, I'd pick up the appropriate industrial directory and start calling more local metal fabricators for quotes. And after I got their quotes, I'd subtract off about 75% of the cost of testing I was doing, and see how they matched up against the Chinese supplier.
But even in the case of the plastic crap - what has the cost to the reputation of Mattel, Playskool, Fisher-Price, and now this Moose company been? I won't be surprised if it drives the Moose company out of business.
When it came time to find a gift for our infant nephew, we paid careful attention to the toy we selected, and did our best to get something from a company that seemed likely to have safe toys. Even then we weren't sure, but let me tell you - it wasn't a brand I had ever heard of, because we didn't feel like any of them can be trusted.
I absolute agree that there is greatness in Wright, but there is also eccentricity and flakiness, which you seem to agree with.
As I said before, I don't know Mies, so I'm not going to comment.
I didn't interpret the grandparent as calling these gentlemen incompetent, but rather as having expressed a preference for the mundane and servicable over the flamboyant, spectacular and fragile. Maybe I should have, or maybe you should not have. Who knows, and really, do you care? I surely don't.
I know very little about Mies Van Der Rohe's body of work.
I do have some familiarity with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and there are some significant problems with many of his buildings. Many of them leak or have other significant structural problems due to design flaws, not poor maintenance or construction. He designed to a human scale, and to be practical, attractive and comfortable, but he did not necessarily design buildings that were strong or reliable.
Some of his own dwellings (such as Taliesin in WI) were built largely as ongoing experiments from stunningly cheap materials by largely unskilled laborers (students are not carpenters,) and it shows if you visit. Things don't line up, the window glass isn't sealed, etc. The ceilings are stunningly low at Taliesin - I'm 5'9" and bumped my head a few times. Our guide claimed that Mr. Wright once said that anyone over 6' tall is a waste of good material.
It makes for a difficult conservation question - if you get the windows sealed up, the building will better survive the Wisconsin winter, but it makes it deviate from how Wright left it. The ideal answer would probably be a big invisible dome over the whole building but that clearly isn't possible.
Some of his furniture designs were also hideously impractical. For example, he designed some 3-legged chairs for the Johnson Wax headquarters that had to be redesigned with 4 legs because they tip over easily.
So far as the server going offline being noticed, I'll bet there are a lot of servers out there that could go down for ten minutes and not exactly have an instant response.
If you can put a CD-ROM in the drive, you have full physical access. At least for a typical PC-type system (which most servers are these days) physical access means you own the box. Reboot, boot from the CD, mount the hard drive, bang.
If you like that domain name, then stick up for it. If it was just a whim, you're right, just move on.
Based on searching the USPTO, it looks to me like you're the only one with a registered trademark.
GoDaddy is your slimeball's registrar as well, by the way.
I would do a whois search and have a lawyer send a "nasty lawyer letter" as I call them to the snail-mail address, with a PDF CC to the email address you've been dealing with. In my experience, people take "F.U." letters from lawyers more seriously than "F.U." letters from non-lawyers, and letters on paper more seriously than letters via email.
Ask your lawyer if the plaintiff in this scenario can sue you, the defendant, for legal costs. I suspect not, but IANAL.
I was born in 1968. My parents bought me a chemistry set at an appropriate age, and there really wasn't anything interesting to be done with it. It had a dozen or so plastic bottles of chemicals and some test tubes, but all the described experiments amounted to "watch the colors change." Dull.
By contrast, I have some books that were (based on the date) my dad's or grandfather's. Chock full of hideously dangerous stuff for "boys to do." I assume my dad's chemistry set would have been similar.
Well, yes, frankly, they should take the customer's word for it.
I've owned and run much smaller businesses than a single Best Buy store. Business much closer to bankruptcy at all times, to be brutally honest.
When a customer comes in to complain, or has a problem, you proactively take care of them. That's how you keep dissatisfied customers and turn them into satisfied ones, and that's how you get their friends and family as customers.
Once you've gone above and beyond for someone, that customer is not just a customer - they're an advocate for you.
Will you get screwed over occasionally? Sure. But most people are basically honest and won't do it.
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Mom moved over to Office Student-Teacher edition (she teaches) two or three years ago. When she was using Works, she wasn't exchanging documents with anyone but me, and OpenOffice, frankly, wasn't nearly as mature.
I think a difficulty we're having, is that when I talk about GOP Values, I refer to the traditional GOP, not the current administration's admittedly rather paranoid wackiness. In that context, I don't think you can dispute that the Democratic Party's TRADITIONAL platform is closer to a "take care of me" philosophy than the TRADITIONAL GOP platform. You probably will, but you will be wrong.
My biggest problem for several comments, however, has not been your arguments - indeed, at one point, I said I had nothing to say about the specific topic, because I was not familiar with the issue.
My problem, sir, has been the tone of your arguments - equal parts condescension and insult. It isn't ad hominem to tell an ass that he's an ass. Based on a limited sampling of you thought processes, you're an ass.
"Ritchie Boy"? Give me a break. Maybe you think you're charming or amusing. You're not. You're just rude.
So I'm done with you, because there's no point. I have enough stress in my life without dealing with you. Have a nice weekend and a lovely life.
A bit of friendly advice, thouugh - perhaps you could take five minutes to decide if you really are as big an ass as you appear to be based on your posts here. You're probably not; you're probably perfectly charming in real life. There's some filter between brain and mouth that gets disabled for many people in forums such as this.
If you are, maybe you could get therapy or something, because it just isn't attractive. I don't know, maybe you just need to get laid.
That ad hominem enough for you?
This is the low-end PC market. Knocking $40 off the manufacturer's build costs is probably major for them in this market. I know, Open Office, etc, but Works 7 (the last one I've seen) is actually pretty decent for what most people use, and the naive user who's buying these PCs just knows "Microsoft" for "Officey" stuff.
I would have been glad to get a free shrink wrap Works a few years ago. My mom was sending me documents in Works Word Processor format and I had to go buy Works to read them. Trust me, teaching "Save As . . . scroll down to Word... " wasn't practical with her at the time. It was a lot less painful to just go buy Works.
Finally, I hate to tell you, but the Works 7 Word Processor isn't actually that bad. It looks exactly like Word did a few years ago, and has all the features most people use.
You really are incapable of calm and reasoned discourse, aren't you.
Fucking hillaryous. (That's a joke, son, a joke, not a misspelling.)
I'm remembering why you don't try to have a calm discussion with a liberal.
Obviously some things are better done by government than by individuals. Some things are better done by individuals than by government. Some things are better done by non-governmental groups (like churches, or the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army) than by either.
I, frankly, can't address your rant about Osama Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, or the oil supply implications of the current middle eastern situation. I haven't given the issue much attention, and, given the crazed tone of your rant, feel that's the amount of attention it probably deserves.
I do know that blaming the stupidity this original topic was about (terrorists plotting in Second Life, etc.) on a specific political party is silly.
Wanting the government to protect everyone in every way is not the traditional platform of the GOP. It is much more the traditional platform of the Democratic Party. If you disagree, please explain how the parties view of things like health care or welfare conflict with this statement rather than ranting about either President Bush.
What is it that makes you bring up the political parties here?
Sure, the administration is presently Republican, but this sounds more like bureaucrats run amok to me than anything you can assign to a party.
For the most part, the Republicans want to aggressively defend against/attack the enemies of the US; it's the Democrats who want to be taken care of by their mommy, the federal government.
I doubt Novell can release SCO's products under the GPL.
If you've ever dealt with a SCO system, the copyrights are a complete mess. Many of the header files have Microsoft copyright notices along with the ones you would expect. There's BSD notices. There's AT&T notices. The cost of sorting all of this out to where it could be released under any license would probably be extreme.
Then SCO made a bigger mess by packaging FOSS into their "custom" packages, not giving notice to SCO users about the real source of it.
And, just my personal little rant, why should it be GPL? Big chunks of it are BSD-derived. Why not the darn BSD license? GPL is great if you're trying to make a political statement, but it scares the lawyers, especially lawyers who aren't used to technology.
Because the thing I knew (but neglected to write) was that my wife, on the other hand, has high five-digits, possibly six-digits, of student debt.
I'm not sure because, in order to avoid homicide, we keep our finances pretty much separate. Either one of us would drive the other nuts; our attitudes toward money and money management are quite different.
Actually the debt is all my wife's, and we keep our finances fairly separate (to keep from killing each other) so I'm not even sure if it's a mere 5 digits or if it's made it to 6.
My father had a lot of issues, but he paid for my BS, and for that I will always be grateful.
Oh please, who do you think your parents generation is?
If you're a "millenial" (what a stupid term) then, roughly speaking, it's me. Everyone I know in the technology arena has at least a bachelor's degree.
I just have a BS in Computer Science. My wife has an MBA, half of another Master's degree, and a BA with a double English/Math major. And don't tell me about student debt!
When I started working in technology 17 years ago, everyone at that company had at least a bachelor's, and most of them had an advanced degree, including some doctorates.
There's nothing special about this latest generation except being whiney spoiled brats. And get off my lawn, damnit.
I absolutely agree that the various latest security schemes (limiting fluids, etc) are nuts.
It makes sense to me that you want to decide if the passenger is dangerous, not his stuff. I don't care if he's a terrorist, an escaped felon, or a mental patient who's going to decide to defecate on the beverage cart. Let's keep him off the plane.
But where I disagree with you - and others - is in the comparison of terrorist deaths to traffic deaths, or cancer deaths, or any other flavor. After the World Trade Center was knocked down, the economy (especially in certain sectors) TANKED. The entire tech consulting company I was working for was laid off. All of us. It took me six months to find another job. That's a pretty common story if you ask around (and I'm sure others here will agree with me.)
We can say "don't let the terrorists get us down" but it did have a major economic impact in 4Q 2001/1Q 2002 and it will again if something of that magnitude happens again.
The only way I got two screens was by having a laptop.
Think I could convince my cheap boss to spring for another video card and a second monitor for a desktop? No way.
Think I could scrounge a video card that wasn't ISA? Nope.
Think he's let me get a laptop "for all the meetings?" Yep.
Think he'd let me keep the monitor and desktop I had? Yep.
It amazes me that none my my coworkers with laptops use theirs like this. They all have full size monitors, keyboards, and mice for when at their desk, but not a single one of them uses both screens simultaneously.
Think he'd care if I was still using the desktop or not? Nope.
I'm afraid you're wrong here. The thing that SP2 really kills you on is the memory.
I have a PII-400 with 384M in the basement, it's running XP SP2. As you would expect, video playback isn't great, and some of the programs are a little slow, but all in all it's usable. All I usually use it for any more is a print server, scanning station and iTunes "server" but it does all of that just fine, and web browsing is OK too.
By contrast, the much more modern desktop system I have at work (for one specific task, thank god) barely runs with its 256M.
If this WalMart PC has 512M of memory, it's probably ok for XP.
In the US, the poppy is more associated with Memorial Day than Veterans Day - the American Legion organization distributes (fabric) poppies on Memorial Day.
Absolutely.
I have no intention of spending the rest of my career at my current job.
I am also truly the ONLY person in the company (in the world, I suppose) who understands how some of the stuff I do on a quarterly basis gets done. There are people who know the grand overview (maybe) but nobody knows the details. I implemented it, I maintain it, and it impacts about 10,000 of our 13,000 of our US locations on a weekly basis.
I will certainly offer to train someone, and will document what I do when I leave, but I have doubts as to whether my managers will care until the next quarterly update comes around.
I'm trying to think what a) has a safety-critical metal component and b) sells for around £1 (which my American brain is translating to around $2) and c) would have been designed and developed 30 years ago and I'm just not coming up with anything.
What the heck do you sell?
In my comment I was assuming that the component itself was costing a few dollars at least. I can certainly see the financial issue if you're talking a few cents cost on a component that goes into an item that sells for a couple dollars total.
In the case of cheap plastic crap for which quality isn't top priority (like most toys) I absolutely understand that.
But the grandparent post to which I was replying talked about a safety-critical metal part that they had to "test the hell out of" because they're buying it from a supplier in China, a supplier they can't trust to use the specified type of steel.
In such a case, I'd pick up the appropriate industrial directory and start calling more local metal fabricators for quotes. And after I got their quotes, I'd subtract off about 75% of the cost of testing I was doing, and see how they matched up against the Chinese supplier.
But even in the case of the plastic crap - what has the cost to the reputation of Mattel, Playskool, Fisher-Price, and now this Moose company been? I won't be surprised if it drives the Moose company out of business.
When it came time to find a gift for our infant nephew, we paid careful attention to the toy we selected, and did our best to get something from a company that seemed likely to have safe toys. Even then we weren't sure, but let me tell you - it wasn't a brand I had ever heard of, because we didn't feel like any of them can be trusted.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to eliminate some of the testing and find a supplier you can trust? Maybe even one in your own country?
I absolute agree that there is greatness in Wright, but there is also eccentricity and flakiness, which you seem to agree with.
As I said before, I don't know Mies, so I'm not going to comment.
I didn't interpret the grandparent as calling these gentlemen incompetent, but rather as having expressed a preference for the mundane and servicable over the flamboyant, spectacular and fragile. Maybe I should have, or maybe you should not have. Who knows, and really, do you care? I surely don't.
You, I'm afraid, are the dick.
I know very little about Mies Van Der Rohe's body of work.
I do have some familiarity with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and there are some significant problems with many of his buildings. Many of them leak or have other significant structural problems due to design flaws, not poor maintenance or construction. He designed to a human scale, and to be practical, attractive and comfortable, but he did not necessarily design buildings that were strong or reliable.
Some of his own dwellings (such as Taliesin in WI) were built largely as ongoing experiments from stunningly cheap materials by largely unskilled laborers (students are not carpenters,) and it shows if you visit. Things don't line up, the window glass isn't sealed, etc. The ceilings are stunningly low at Taliesin - I'm 5'9" and bumped my head a few times. Our guide claimed that Mr. Wright once said that anyone over 6' tall is a waste of good material.
It makes for a difficult conservation question - if you get the windows sealed up, the building will better survive the Wisconsin winter, but it makes it deviate from how Wright left it. The ideal answer would probably be a big invisible dome over the whole building but that clearly isn't possible.
Some of his furniture designs were also hideously impractical. For example, he designed some 3-legged chairs for the Johnson Wax headquarters that had to be redesigned with 4 legs because they tip over easily.
The key thing is "anyone worth their salt."
So far as the server going offline being noticed, I'll bet there are a lot of servers out there that could go down for ten minutes and not exactly have an instant response.
It's a reasonable tag if you ask me.
If you can put a CD-ROM in the drive, you have full physical access. At least for a typical PC-type system (which most servers are these days) physical access means you own the box. Reboot, boot from the CD, mount the hard drive, bang.
If you like that domain name, then stick up for it. If it was just a whim, you're right, just move on.
Based on searching the USPTO, it looks to me like you're the only one with a registered trademark.
GoDaddy is your slimeball's registrar as well, by the way.
I would do a whois search and have a lawyer send a "nasty lawyer letter" as I call them to the snail-mail address, with a PDF CC to the email address you've been dealing with. In my experience, people take "F.U." letters from lawyers more seriously than "F.U." letters from non-lawyers, and letters on paper more seriously than letters via email.
Ask your lawyer if the plaintiff in this scenario can sue you, the defendant, for legal costs. I suspect not, but IANAL.
Didn't this happen to some extent 20 years ago?
I was born in 1968. My parents bought me a chemistry set at an appropriate age, and there really wasn't anything interesting to be done with it. It had a dozen or so plastic bottles of chemicals and some test tubes, but all the described experiments amounted to "watch the colors change." Dull.
By contrast, I have some books that were (based on the date) my dad's or grandfather's. Chock full of hideously dangerous stuff for "boys to do." I assume my dad's chemistry set would have been similar.
Well, yes, frankly, they should take the customer's word for it.
I've owned and run much smaller businesses than a single Best Buy store. Business much closer to bankruptcy at all times, to be brutally honest.
When a customer comes in to complain, or has a problem, you proactively take care of them. That's how you keep dissatisfied customers and turn them into satisfied ones, and that's how you get their friends and family as customers.
Once you've gone above and beyond for someone, that customer is not just a customer - they're an advocate for you.
Will you get screwed over occasionally? Sure. But most people are basically honest and won't do it.