The earth, royally pissed off at the evil, treacherous natives and especially at the traitorous humans who betrayed humanity, sends a follow up mission.
Three ships show up in orbit, undetected by the planet bound organic techology primitive society, set up and then shell the planet with high-velocity, non nuclear kinetic missiles killing 99% of all life on the planet. They then take the damned unobtanium which is their birthright and leave an empty husk to the surviving tribes 115 years later. At that point, they allow themselves to feel guilty (a little) and set up a museum honoring the lost Navi culture.
His movies have an effective score. The score has a lot more to do with a movies success than most realize.
A bad score is what damaged, "The Watchman". The soundtrack wasn't bad, but the score sucked. My daughter commented it was actively misleading-- at times the score would imply a climactic moment was coming and then nothing happened.
Imagine Star Wars with a bad score instead of John Williams score... some cheesy quasi 70's porno flick score.
There is no point in seeing this film outside of the theater.
Dances with Wolvatars is not even remotely as good as Dances with Wolves which did the same story much better and with better acting.
This is a "B" movie with mostly "B" actors and 100 million dollars of special effects.
I paid the tariff to see it and recommend seeing it as a new experience like you would see a ride film at disney.
Actually, the first 2/3 is not bad, and then it gets really, really dumb and has a tacked on holly wood ending instead of whatever the real ending was.
unobtanium is actually a wry nod to the nasa (and other) engineers who used this term as a substitute for a part of the design that needed a material with impossible characteristics (for example the bottom of the shuttle until they invented a material that was light, unmeltable at 3k C, etc.).
I'm old, I think the movie was dumb, the last third was exceptionally dumb, and yet it was worth seeing in 3d, if you can see 3d (I know some folks can't).
Your old... truly "new" experiences come along infrequently. This movie is something new visually and the experience can't be duplicated outside of the theatre.
This opinion is so far from reality where a few very powerful people step on other people, take their property, deny them their rights, etc. on a regular basis.
Perhaps for those areas where a wealthy person like Bono backs them up, people power works.
Mostly, corporations and the wealthy just step all over you and as long as they don't physically injure you, the legal system has become such a farce, that the worst result is some rich, powerful attorney makes several million dollars, and you get a check for $42.50 to cover your being ripped off for a few grand.
I'm unclear on your final statement. If you mean, without damaging the planet like china inflicts damage the planet, then okay.
If you mean to learn to not damage the planet the way china does not avoid the planet, you are seriously mistaken about china. They are like Russia in that they do enormous damage.
Oh.. and Word 2003. Couldn't print them in Word 2007. Had to import them into OOo 3.0 to print them. So I took all of my 2003 documents over. I was tired of getting 3 pages and then Word 2007 hanging (Reason appears to be overlapping pictures and tables btw).
What do you recommend for reading Microsoft "Write" documents? Less than 20 years old. I basically stripped the text out with a binary editor but the embedded graphics were lost.
I agree... my so's office has gone to gmail for mail, thunderbird for mail client, and openoffice for all documents. My office used a google docs spreadsheet to coordinate data from 10 users recently. It did what excell under sharepoint *should* do. We were all entering our data, you could see colored boxes whipping around over the sheets and the graphs constantly updating. We were in multiple locations.
There are some real threats out there to Office.
However, at this point, I trust microsoft very little and it probably wouldn't matter if office were $33 instead of $99 (teacher/student version which they will sell to anyone at Fry's).
Okay... So I loaded a simple file into calc and word 2007 excel.
15 seconds calc 8 seconds excel
I resized the cells by clicking and dragging my mouse across 4 columns and then drug the right most edge over and all cells resized equally.
I resized the cells by clicking and dragging my mouse across 4 columns, selected column width from the format menu and set them all to 1".
Next, I entered a long text box and then double clicked on the columns right border. It autosized as expected.
I agree, this is B A S I C functionality and it works for me EXACTLY the same as it does in excel. Are you sure you were using OO 3.1? I'm using OO from Portable Apps. It's awesome. It runs without installation off a thumb drive (but I copy it to the hard drive to speed it up).
Next, I opened a 11 sheet document with many formulas. Each sheet had 365 rows of date related data. Load time Openoffice, 2 seconds. Load time Excel, 2 seconds. All formalas the same in both documents. Even the sheet cross references.
It is likely that your performance issue is the time to get the application off the hard drive. Excel is partially preloaded and openoffice is not (there is an option to do so but then it consumes memory... as Excel probably does). Also, ever since at least office 95, microsoft has used unapproved API's to speed up their performance (re: "Certified Word 95" vs "Corel Office"- microsoft really screwed them over). Also, microsoft has a history of putting parts of their applications *in* the operating system. Which saves load time. And I suppose that's their right.
Reasonable price for excel and word - about $99 for private use-- $300ish for business use (few pay rack rate). Reasonable price for calc and writer - about $0 for private or business use.
I like Openoffice and I disagree. If it takes a long time, it took a long time.
If his experience is that opening Excel takes 3 seconds and Calc takes 71 seconds, then that is an issue that OOo needs to work on (so if I had that experience... which I havn't... I'd report it as a bug or go to the Open Office forums and say, "here's a document that takes a long time to open, what can I do?"
There are things you can do to speed up Openoffice like turning off java and using the preload option. Personally, I prefer to avoid the preload option myself but I *think* I still have java turned off.
Load times are not an issue for me with OOo or Word 2007. Infopath is another issue entirely. Man that thing is a dog.
Creating tables takes me about the same as 2003. Is there a particular task which you are struggling with?
My most complex table is roughly 27 rows by 48 columns with rows of merged columns interspersed- different borders around different internal areas and different colors and fonts. My documents have 20-50 tables in them so I work with them a lot. I don't recall having a struggle.
I think they need to work on the import filters. Right now, they slavishly duplicate word. I wish there was an *option* to say, "start with 1 column per page formatting and insert columns in small sections." As it is now, I just delete all sections and reinsert them.
When I mod, I typically only up-mod. I might downmod a post like yours if it was anonymous but since you put your name to it, I'd let it stand.
I disagree with your statement-- my experience with 2007 was painful. My experience with Openoffice 1-2.XX was bad. But as of 3.0, I was very happy with it. I've bugzilla'd some features I missed and they were all in 3.0. I like the formatting model better and Word 2007 was giving me fits with my word 2003 documents so I just gave up and converted them all over to Openoffice 3.0 and haven't looked back.
I even wrote a star fleet battles damage allocated in Calc after only using it for about 3 hours. It took about 3 weeks to get it right but it supports an arbitrary number of starships and has damaged amount based sound effects. Cut about 3 hours off of a 12 hour SFB game and wow'd my buds.
Since, I had to do this recently to share some D&D documents with my players, I can say that it took us 37 minutes to find, download, and install Openoffice. My player who had never used Openoffice was using it the same day.
On the other hand my work installed Word 2007, it hung while printing many of my 2003 documents, and it took me about 5 months to fully recover my productivity.
I don't want to pay for an upgrade and I don't want my data accidentally locked away from me because microsoft forgot to update a certificate or decided my software is no longer supported.
That depends on what you mean by advanced features.
Macros? Sure. I use them but no one else I know does.
But these "advanced features" are used by many. * Mailmerge * Table of Contents * Index * Footnotes * Table of References * Autocomplete * Tables (--- this area took about 5 months for me to regain my productivity. It took me about 15 minutes to regain my productivity in Openoffice.)
I tried Openoffice at 1.00,1.04, 2.0, 2.x and bounced off. It was not "ready". I tried Openoffice at 3.0 and it was *THERE*. It was on. Except for work, I am now exclusively Openoffice and have converted three of my friends to it.
It took me nearly 5 months to recover most of my common actions in 2007.
However, I went to Openoffice because Word 2007 would not print many of my word 2003 documents. It just hung.
Once i loaded the documents into openoffice, I could see the issue- graphics and tables were overlapping. They looked correct in word2003 and 2007 but were confusing word 2007's print engine.
I converted all of my documents to word (each with hundreds of pictures and many complex tables) in about 2 hours per document. I even discovered some neat new functions like mirrored header graphics.
The key thing when converting a document is
* Delete EVERY section the importer created. * Create a default text style if you don't like "Default" * Add back in sections where you really need them (you'll probably drop from 70-110 sections to 11 for a complex document. * Change all "STYLEREF" header entries to chapter names * change bookmark cross references to heading cross references * Apply the default text style, then customize text as needed with italics (unless it is large blocks, then create another italic text style). * Reinsert Indices and tables of contents. (-- read the help, if you want something custom)
Done.
Enjoy your document for the rest of your life without ever having a problem with forced obsolescence.
Slashdot Mirror
The sequel to Avatar,
The earth, royally pissed off at the evil, treacherous natives and especially at the traitorous humans who betrayed humanity, sends a follow up mission.
Three ships show up in orbit, undetected by the planet bound organic techology primitive society, set up and then shell the planet with high-velocity, non nuclear kinetic missiles killing 99% of all life on the planet.
They then take the damned unobtanium which is their birthright and leave an empty husk to the surviving tribes 115 years later. At that point, they allow themselves to feel guilty (a little) and set up a museum honoring the lost Navi culture.
His movies have an effective score. The score has a lot more to do with a movies success than most realize.
A bad score is what damaged, "The Watchman". The soundtrack wasn't bad, but the score sucked. My daughter commented it was actively misleading-- at times the score would imply a climactic moment was coming and then nothing happened.
Imagine Star Wars with a bad score instead of John Williams score... some cheesy quasi 70's porno flick score.
Music communicates emotion.
Watch some Bollywood films.
You might get it then. They do little cool things that might take 10 minutes of the 3.5 hour run time.
I get the value of Chekhov with regard to having a tight story. The problem is, hollywood has turned a virtue into a vice.
This is just a special effects movie.
There is no point in seeing this film outside of the theater.
Dances with Wolvatars is not even remotely as good as Dances with Wolves which did the same story much better and with better acting.
This is a "B" movie with mostly "B" actors and 100 million dollars of special effects.
I paid the tariff to see it and recommend seeing it as a new experience like you would see a ride film at disney.
Actually, the first 2/3 is not bad, and then it gets really, really dumb and has a tacked on holly wood ending instead of whatever the real ending was.
unobtanium is actually a wry nod to the nasa (and other) engineers who used this term as a substitute for a part of the design that needed a material with impossible characteristics (for example the bottom of the shuttle until they invented a material that was light, unmeltable at 3k C, etc.).
I'm old, I think the movie was dumb, the last third was exceptionally dumb, and yet it was worth seeing in 3d, if you can see 3d (I know some folks can't).
Your old... truly "new" experiences come along infrequently. This movie is something new visually and the experience can't be duplicated outside of the theatre.
There was one amazing question about the movie 3d rendering technology for me.
How did they manage to render the colonel as a completely two dimensional character in an otherwise 3d movie?
"People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid"
This opinion is so far from reality where a few very powerful people step on other people, take their property, deny them their rights, etc. on a regular basis.
Perhaps for those areas where a wealthy person like Bono backs them up, people power works.
Mostly, corporations and the wealthy just step all over you and as long as they don't physically injure you, the legal system has become such a farce, that the worst result is some rich, powerful attorney makes several million dollars, and you get a check for $42.50 to cover your being ripped off for a few grand.
Proving a negative is more like, "There have never been elephants in my office" without a 100% accurate historical record.
And "There will never be elephants in my office" could be proved only by destroying the office.
Bonus points for introducing a second unrelated hot topic.
What I want to know is the impact of gay marriage, and dating co-workers on all this.
I'm unclear on your final statement.
If you mean, without damaging the planet like china inflicts damage the planet, then okay.
If you mean to learn to not damage the planet the way china does not avoid the planet, you are seriously mistaken about china. They are like Russia in that they do enormous damage.
They figured... they'd sacrificed their principles... why not sacrifice some principals as well.
Once you let go on a little evil, why not go ahead for the big evil and save time.
Oh.. and Word 2003. Couldn't print them in Word 2007. Had to import them into OOo 3.0 to print them. So I took all of my 2003 documents over. I was tired of getting 3 pages and then Word 2007 hanging (Reason appears to be overlapping pictures and tables btw).
What do you recommend for reading Microsoft "Write" documents?
Less than 20 years old. I basically stripped the text out with a binary editor but the embedded graphics were lost.
I have a friend who is much smaller than I am (his skull could probably fit inside my skull) and he's also much smarter than I am.
There will never be true DRM for books.
And with dragon dictate, even the typing part is easy.
OTH, printing your own personal hardcopy on a personal printer is bloody expensive.
We can read books from centuries ago.
There are already forms of digital storage less than three decades old which we cannot read.
And to me, the pace of storage changes seems to be picking up, not slowing down.
I agree... my so's office has gone to gmail for mail, thunderbird for mail client, and openoffice for all documents.
My office used a google docs spreadsheet to coordinate data from 10 users recently. It did what excell under sharepoint *should* do.
We were all entering our data, you could see colored boxes whipping around over the sheets and the graphs constantly updating.
We were in multiple locations.
There are some real threats out there to Office.
However, at this point, I trust microsoft very little and it probably wouldn't matter if office were $33 instead of $99 (teacher/student version which they will sell to anyone at Fry's).
Okay...
So I loaded a simple file into calc and word 2007 excel.
15 seconds calc
8 seconds excel
I resized the cells by clicking and dragging my mouse across 4 columns and then drug the right most edge over and all cells resized equally.
I resized the cells by clicking and dragging my mouse across 4 columns, selected column width from the format menu and set them all to 1".
Next, I entered a long text box and then double clicked on the columns right border. It autosized as expected.
I agree, this is B A S I C functionality and it works for me EXACTLY the same as it does in excel. Are you sure you were using OO 3.1? I'm using OO from Portable Apps. It's awesome. It runs without installation off a thumb drive (but I copy it to the hard drive to speed it up).
Next, I opened a 11 sheet document with many formulas. Each sheet had 365 rows of date related data.
Load time Openoffice, 2 seconds.
Load time Excel, 2 seconds.
All formalas the same in both documents. Even the sheet cross references.
It is likely that your performance issue is the time to get the application off the hard drive. Excel is partially preloaded and openoffice is not (there is an option to do so but then it consumes memory... as Excel probably does). Also, ever since at least office 95, microsoft has used unapproved API's to speed up their performance (re: "Certified Word 95" vs "Corel Office"- microsoft really screwed them over). Also, microsoft has a history of putting parts of their applications *in* the operating system. Which saves load time. And I suppose that's their right.
Reasonable price for excel and word - about $99 for private use-- $300ish for business use (few pay rack rate).
Reasonable price for calc and writer - about $0 for private or business use.
I like Openoffice and I disagree. If it takes a long time, it took a long time.
If his experience is that opening Excel takes 3 seconds and Calc takes 71 seconds, then that is an issue that OOo needs to work on (so if I had that experience... which I havn't... I'd report it as a bug or go to the Open Office forums and say, "here's a document that takes a long time to open, what can I do?"
There are things you can do to speed up Openoffice like turning off java and using the preload option. Personally, I prefer to avoid the preload option myself but I *think* I still have java turned off.
Load times are not an issue for me with OOo or Word 2007. Infopath is another issue entirely. Man that thing is a dog.
Creating tables takes me about the same as 2003. Is there a particular task which you are struggling with?
My most complex table is roughly 27 rows by 48 columns with rows of merged columns interspersed- different borders around different internal areas and different colors and fonts. My documents have 20-50 tables in them so I work with them a lot. I don't recall having a struggle.
I think they need to work on the import filters. Right now, they slavishly duplicate word. I wish there was an *option* to say, "start with 1 column per page formatting and insert columns in small sections." As it is now, I just delete all sections and reinsert them.
Bad mods happen.
There are a lot of good mods out there too.
When I mod, I typically only up-mod. I might downmod a post like yours if it was anonymous but since you put your name to it, I'd let it stand.
I disagree with your statement-- my experience with 2007 was painful. My experience with Openoffice 1-2.XX was bad. But as of 3.0, I was very happy with it. I've bugzilla'd some features I missed and they were all in 3.0. I like the formatting model better and Word 2007 was giving me fits with my word 2003 documents so I just gave up and converted them all over to Openoffice 3.0 and haven't looked back.
I even wrote a star fleet battles damage allocated in Calc after only using it for about 3 hours. It took about 3 weeks to get it right but it supports an arbitrary number of starships and has damaged amount based sound effects. Cut about 3 hours off of a 12 hour SFB game and wow'd my buds.
Since, I had to do this recently to share some D&D documents with my players, I can say that it took us 37 minutes to find, download, and install Openoffice. My player who had never used Openoffice was using it the same day.
On the other hand my work installed Word 2007, it hung while printing many of my 2003 documents, and it took me about 5 months to fully recover my productivity.
I don't want to pay for an upgrade and I don't want my data accidentally locked away from me because microsoft forgot to update a certificate or decided my software is no longer supported.
That depends on what you mean by advanced features.
Macros? Sure. I use them but no one else I know does.
But these "advanced features" are used by many.
* Mailmerge
* Table of Contents
* Index
* Footnotes
* Table of References
* Autocomplete
* Tables (--- this area took about 5 months for me to regain my productivity. It took me about 15 minutes to regain my productivity in Openoffice.)
I tried Openoffice at 1.00,1.04, 2.0, 2.x and bounced off. It was not "ready".
I tried Openoffice at 3.0 and it was *THERE*. It was on. Except for work, I am now exclusively Openoffice and have converted three of my friends to it.
It took me nearly 5 months to recover most of my common actions in 2007.
However, I went to Openoffice because Word 2007 would not print many of my word 2003 documents. It just hung.
Once i loaded the documents into openoffice, I could see the issue- graphics and tables were overlapping. They looked correct in word2003 and 2007 but were confusing word 2007's print engine.
I converted all of my documents to word (each with hundreds of pictures and many complex tables) in about 2 hours per document. I even discovered some neat new functions like mirrored header graphics.
The key thing when converting a document is
* Delete EVERY section the importer created.
* Create a default text style if you don't like "Default"
* Add back in sections where you really need them (you'll probably drop from 70-110 sections to 11 for a complex document.
* Change all "STYLEREF" header entries to chapter names
* change bookmark cross references to heading cross references
* Apply the default text style, then customize text as needed with italics (unless it is large blocks, then create another italic text style).
* Reinsert Indices and tables of contents. (-- read the help, if you want something custom)
Done.
Enjoy your document for the rest of your life without ever having a problem with forced obsolescence.