The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.
Well, of course. But on average, this is done through better products. Can you cite times when inferior products have made it to #1? Sure. But over time, the better products win out almost every time. The point isn't that capitalism is perfectly efficient; the point is that it's self-correcting (with rare exceptions).
Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs.
I've got news for you... 90% of all computer innovations came straight out of IBM in the 50s-70s.
But in any case, it's hardly surprising that many innovations come out of small companies. An innovation or an efficiency is how small companies start and survive. But to say that innovations never come out of big companies is just absurd. I could cite any number of them: Post it notes. Cellular phones. Satellite communications. Composite plastics. Laser Printers. Railroads. The "butterfly" laptop keyboard. Auto-everything cameras. Microprocessors. Compact Discs. And my personal favorite lately: Electronically Image Stabilized binoculars (by Canon).
And let's not even get into the amazing track record of the medical industry, which is almost exclusively the realm of large companies.
I'm all about choice and freedom. If you believe thats what we have today, I should like to get my glasses tinted the same shade of rose. Just because we begin each ball game by singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" doesn't make it so. The real trick has been to make the general populace believe that's what we have. Pulling that one over on us was quite a coup. Yes, we have choices, as long as they are the ones printed for us by the corporations and federally approved. Theres quite a difference between "freedom of choice" and "freedom from choice". I'm all about choice. I just don't like this mandated menu.
Sorry for the long quote, but I think it's all important. You throw out all these statements as if we live in some police state or something. It's long on drama (maybe you should've been a drama major...), but very short on facts. I never claimed that we live in a perfect society (far from it), but I see no reason to have this cynical, pessimistic outlook on life. I mean, what would it take to make you happy? It's seems perfectly clear to me that, on balance, life is getting better with every decade that passes.
"The land of the free and the home of the brave" are not intended to be descriptive of every event that ever has or will take place in the US. It's meant to be the ideal, a statement of the foundational vision for the country.
And what "mandated" menu are you talking about? That you only have the Colas that the "corporations" allow you to have? You have total freedom to make your own Cola if you want (or fill in your own product). Products are not legislated into existence, they are created by real human beings. If you don't like a particular option, then make one yourself. But to complain that someone isn't delivering you custom made-to-order products is just silly. What is it you expect? Of course your options are limited to what people actually produce. What other option is there?
BTW, what is a gold standard? You mean an ideal? If that's what a gold standard is, sure I long for it. Don't you?
The value of the dollar used to be tied to the price of gold (which was originally legislated in the constitution). The "gold standard" was abandoned in the sixties (early 70s?), but every so often someone complains that we should go back to that valuation method.
If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.
I'll accept your refinement of the definition ("capital"-wise, at least), but this doesn't make sense to me. Of course there is a drive toward 100% marketshare, since every company has the desire to sell to every possible consumer. When dominant marketshare becomes detrimental to free competition through abuses of power, we call it a monopoly. And that's why we have anti-trust laws.
In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.
I agree with that to some degree, although I would phrase it differently. I would say it's used by people who expect 100% perfection from capitalism, and call it corporatism when it fails to achieve it. They cling to the naive notion that it's possible to legislate perfect economies, and wilfully ignore the historical evidence that every other economic system produces far worse abuses and misery.
Besides, I'm out of school a long time ago, sonny.
Sorry; so much of Slashdot is young and naive, I guess I'm making too many assumptions.:)
Obviously the system we have nowadays strays far from the so-ideal of so-called "free" trade. I'm don't think capitalism is a good word to describe it anymore.
This is what I've never understood. We have more choices, more information and more opportunity than at any time in history, yet many people like you seem to have some image in their mind of a point in the past when we had some "mom and pop" Utopia. Tell me, when was this golden era of Capitalism that you are comparing "nowadays" to?
And please don't tell me you long for the gold standard.
Napster gets Bob and Joe together, and then Joe sells Bob some crack. Napster is witness to this, and fails to inform the authorities. Napster has violated the law.
There's no such thing as a good samaritan law, despite what you might have seen on Seinfeld. I have no legal obligation to report a crime to the authorities.
The better analogy is that Napster is like manufacturing safe cracking tools. They can be used for legitimate or illegal purposes, but the manufacturer has no obligation to follow every purchaser around to make sure they don't rob anyone.
Capitalism is a process based on the noble process of sharing honest information.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Consider that more Coca-cola gets drank in America than water, and I can't think of a better all around product than water. Why is this so? Marketing.
Coca-cola sells more because it is a better product than water. The important question, of course, is what is the definition of "better". Health-wise, water is probably better. Taste-wise, Coca-cola is better, which is why it sells more. It also has caffeine which many people like to have in their drink of choice. The key word here is "choice".
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
Because he wanted the program to be useful to the most people (namely, a lot of his friends in the beginning). The number of people who use Unix/Linux day-to-day with multimedia capabilities is microscopic.
What kind of civilization do we have that we celebrate a poor living cell being forced to be a gateway for electrical current. How do we know that these cells don't long to be free, to be able to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of Amoeba happiness?
I am appalled. Appalled! We must storm the lab, and free these poor nuclei from the savage brutality of bondage.
Who's with me? Light your torches, and follow me! FOLLOW ME!!
Microsoft does make a small profit on thier operating systems, but they earn the big bucks on thier applications, like MS Office.
According to Microsoft's 1999 Annual Report, OS revenues were 8.5B in 1999, and Productivity Applications and Developer Revenue was 8.82B. Hardly a "small profit".
Why didn't you just post a message saying "I'm an Apple bigot and will always hate them, no matter what" and get it over with. Darwin is the core of the OS, and yes, all of it is open source. It doesn't include the GUI, but it contains the kernel, the networking stack, file system etc.
I have history on my side. I'll believe it when I see OS/X running on non-Apple hardware.
And what did opening up to competition for IBM do? It killed their PC sales and almost sent them out of business...
IBM's big mistake early on was trying to keep their architecture proprietary. Remember Microchannel? Two problems: 1) it was incompatible with legacy hardware, and 2) IBM refused to license it, which isolated them into IBM and everyone else. And the people bought everyone else.
But what if IBM had kept it proprietary from the start? I think a case could be made that the IBM architecture wouldn't have gone anywhere, and eventually the industry would have invented a new standard a la CP/M.
Besides, with Darwin OpenSource, what's honestly stopping anyone from making a computer that can't run MacOS? Didn't IBM release an open spec PPC motherboard? I have a hard time believing that motorola will refuse to sell chips to anyone but Apple.
First of all, I don't think all of Darwin is Open Source. The important (i.e. proprietary) parts will be closed source. Also, I'm certain that Apple will have some sort of proprietary EPROMS that will be necessary to make the thing work. After all, if your theory were true, the clone manufacturers could've kept making Mac clones. Instead, Apple sued them out of existence.
You're forgetting about the big success story: Microsoft. One of the reasons that Microsoft destroyed Apple in the 80s, even with a far inferior Win 3.1, was the open commodity hardware model.
The smartest thing Microsoft did was to work very hard to capture the corporate market. They did this with two weapons: 1) have the best applications, which means court developers like crazy, and 2) multiple source hardware, which means the hardware cost is going to be much lower.
The reason Be is unsuccessful is lack of applications, not lack of proprietary hardware. Don't forget that NeXT tried the same proprietary model, and suffered the same fate. Applications are everything.
What's in it for Apple is focus. They would no longer have the millstone of doing both hardware (low margins) AND software (high margins).
I've hated Apple for a long time. I think the hardware is overrated and WAY overpriced. I owned a Mac back in '84 when they first came out. I think MacOS belongs back in '84. Today it's a backward, decrepit piece of garbage. All this having been said...
I think Apple has finally pulled their head out of their butt and it looks like they are finally doing a respectable operating system. In fact, I will say it looks damn cool and I find myself being excited about Apple for the first time since... well, 1984.
But I will never buy overpriced Apple hardware. Apple, are you listening? A Mac-hater is interested again in the Mac. But I am not going to buy hardware from a single supplier. And I have a feeling there are a lot of people who feel the same.
Please, Apple, send in the clones, and give them an iron-clad license that you can't stab them in the back with later.
While a Linux handheld would be cool in its own right, I see very few references to what applications this thing is going to run. Have they been developed by Samsung? If this is going to be a useful PDA, then I hope they are going to have to have some decent PDA-style applications to go along with it.
I'm a little suspicious that none of the screenshots are showing any scheduling programs or other PDA-mainstays.
Have you ever owned a diesel car? I have. You may or may not remember they got pretty popular in the late 70s when gas got expensive (I didn't own one then). The minor superiority that they had was gas mileage. When gas got cheaper, people ran away once again.
Why? Because they have other problems. They are very noisy. The performance is not that great (good torque, though). They are much more polluting (ever seen a mis-tuned diesel smoking down the highway?). They last a long time, but that just means that you have to live with the noise longer.:)
Problem is, because it takes more to make a diesel -- the engines tend to cost more, so the auto manufacturers have very little incentive to use them. [Imagine a company CEO saying to the company stock holders "sure, now our cars last three times as long -- but that's okay, we made a one time $500 extra profit..."]
Oh, please. Auto manufacturers make whatever the people are willing to buy (and did when there was a demand for diesels). Now imagine that same CEO saying to the shareholders, "Uh, we know the people are clamoring for diesels, but we didn't want to make them, and our marketshare is now down to 5%." Hasn't happened yet.
Wow! That's a great deal; they must have lowered the prices in recent years. Or maybe it's because I was pricing them through the RS/6000 Unix division, and it was "server" markup.:)
My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come.
Maybe you will come, but history has shown that most people won't. See many electric cars on the road? They are heavily subsidized, and the public still runs away in droves. Basically, the reason is because they suck. The range stinks, and they are built like golf carts with delusions of grandeur.
For a new vehicle to succeed, it's going to have to be superior to the gasoline engine in some significant way (cost, performance, etc), or it's doomed to failure. Pollution superiority is not enough, simply because modern cars are already almost non-polluting.
IBM is the keyboard king. They are incredibly well made, the keys have exactly the right "click" feel, and the sloping is perfect. The only problem is that they are very expensive (last I checked a few years ago, about $150). But if you want quality that makes every other keyboard feel like utter crap, these are the keyboards. It does make a difference in your typing speed.
They spun off their keyboard division into Lexmark a few years ago; I don't know where they are making them now. I stole about 5 of them from one of my previous companies so I would always have a good supply.
As for these newfangled "ergonomic" keyboards, I'm not a believer. I think the key is to keep your wrists straight, regardless of the type of keyboard. I've never had wrist problems using a normal keyboard, but I think I got lucky by naturally holding my hands in the "angled" position that split keyboards use. I just angle them across the normal keyboard, rather than the "hands straight in" that typing manuals try and teach you to do.
Bush lays his use of Front Page out there and says, so what? -- and that who-cares attitude is also reflected in his web page which sets a new standard for user-unfriendliness. Even on a SPARC with the entire page in cache, it still takes over 20 seconds for Netscape to show you anything but a blank white page.
I can't believe the guy has the gall to blame the suckiness of Netscape on the web site. Particularly Netscape under Unix, which is god-awful slow on every web site.
The "ancient nomads" had abundance because of a lack of population, not a lack of technology.
It's a common misconception that ancient peoples had some sort of "nobility" because of a lack of technology. There is no nobility in ignorance. Technology is simply a byproduct of knowledge.
Furthermore, it is even more common for people to get defensive and to ridicule the lives of "modern people" without knowledge of any facts when someone points out a negative impact of ignorant primitives.
In wordperfect you can put formulas in your table cells you don't need to embed anything.
I'm not talking about simple adding of columns or whatever, I'm talking about very complex financial models, which is what spreadsheets are for. Why would I use a word processor for doing the job of a spreadsheet?
You create your business plan using excel. If you want it to look pretty because you want to show it to the bank you export it something and doll it up and print it. Once you have your numbers together you just want to print it nice. Why does your banker want to fiddle your numbers in you word document?
That's not the point. A financial model is a living document; it's constantly revised as you learn more about your assumptions. It contains assumption statements, growth models, income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, etc projected over multiple years. The business plan, on the other hand, is the "big picture", and contains only summaries of the financial model. When I embed linked cells into my business plan, and I update the financial model, the document is automatically updated to reflect the most current information.
It's about using the right tool for the job. A spreadsheet is about manipulating complex formulas, and a word processor is about producing documents.
Now, as for sending it anywhere, the point is not whether the receiver needs to modify it, the point is why should I have to do an extra step? Why not just send the original? Also note that I don't have to send the spreadsheet along with the Word document. The Word document contains a copy of the spreadsheet cells, so you don't need the original spreadsheet.
Slashdot Mirror
The number one goal of most modern corporations is to keep themselves at the forefront of their market, even if they don't deserve to be.
Well, of course. But on average, this is done through better products. Can you cite times when inferior products have made it to #1? Sure. But over time, the better products win out almost every time. The point isn't that capitalism is perfectly efficient; the point is that it's self-correcting (with rare exceptions).
Note that in computing every advancement I can think of has come from research labs and academics unconcerned with making money, or from small startup companies and entrepreneurs.
I've got news for you... 90% of all computer innovations came straight out of IBM in the 50s-70s.
But in any case, it's hardly surprising that many innovations come out of small companies. An innovation or an efficiency is how small companies start and survive. But to say that innovations never come out of big companies is just absurd. I could cite any number of them: Post it notes. Cellular phones. Satellite communications. Composite plastics. Laser Printers. Railroads. The "butterfly" laptop keyboard. Auto-everything cameras. Microprocessors. Compact Discs. And my personal favorite lately: Electronically Image Stabilized binoculars (by Canon).
And let's not even get into the amazing track record of the medical industry, which is almost exclusively the realm of large companies.
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I'm all about choice and freedom. If you believe thats what we have today, I should like to get my glasses tinted the same shade of rose. Just because we begin each ball game by singing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave" doesn't make it so. The real trick has been to make the general populace believe that's what we have. Pulling that one over on us was quite a coup. Yes, we have choices, as long as they are the ones printed for us by the corporations and federally approved. Theres quite a difference between "freedom of choice" and "freedom from choice". I'm all about choice. I just don't like this mandated menu.
Sorry for the long quote, but I think it's all important. You throw out all these statements as if we live in some police state or something. It's long on drama (maybe you should've been a drama major...), but very short on facts. I never claimed that we live in a perfect society (far from it), but I see no reason to have this cynical, pessimistic outlook on life. I mean, what would it take to make you happy? It's seems perfectly clear to me that, on balance, life is getting better with every decade that passes.
"The land of the free and the home of the brave" are not intended to be descriptive of every event that ever has or will take place in the US. It's meant to be the ideal, a statement of the foundational vision for the country.
And what "mandated" menu are you talking about? That you only have the Colas that the "corporations" allow you to have? You have total freedom to make your own Cola if you want (or fill in your own product). Products are not legislated into existence, they are created by real human beings. If you don't like a particular option, then make one yourself. But to complain that someone isn't delivering you custom made-to-order products is just silly. What is it you expect? Of course your options are limited to what people actually produce. What other option is there?
BTW, what is a gold standard? You mean an ideal? If that's what a gold standard is, sure I long for it. Don't you?
The value of the dollar used to be tied to the price of gold (which was originally legislated in the constitution). The "gold standard" was abandoned in the sixties (early 70s?), but every so often someone complains that we should go back to that valuation method.
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If capitalism was linked to free markets, there would be no drive by companies toward monopolies and oligopolies, since they would be harmful to capitalism itself.
I'll accept your refinement of the definition ("capital"-wise, at least), but this doesn't make sense to me. Of course there is a drive toward 100% marketshare, since every company has the desire to sell to every possible consumer. When dominant marketshare becomes detrimental to free competition through abuses of power, we call it a monopoly. And that's why we have anti-trust laws.
In my experience, it is a word used by people who see that so-called free market capitalism regularly produces results which seem unsound, but are unwilling to question whether capitalism itself provides incentives toward sub-optimal outcomes.
I agree with that to some degree, although I would phrase it differently. I would say it's used by people who expect 100% perfection from capitalism, and call it corporatism when it fails to achieve it. They cling to the naive notion that it's possible to legislate perfect economies, and wilfully ignore the historical evidence that every other economic system produces far worse abuses and misery.
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That's great, except it has nothing to do with the point I made. What I said was that I have no legal obligation to report a crime.
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Besides, I'm out of school a long time ago, sonny.
Sorry; so much of Slashdot is young and naive, I guess I'm making too many assumptions. :)
Obviously the system we have nowadays strays far from the so-ideal of so-called "free" trade. I'm don't think capitalism is a good word to describe it anymore.
This is what I've never understood. We have more choices, more information and more opportunity than at any time in history, yet many people like you seem to have some image in their mind of a point in the past when we had some "mom and pop" Utopia. Tell me, when was this golden era of Capitalism that you are comparing "nowadays" to?
And please don't tell me you long for the gold standard.
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Napster gets Bob and Joe together, and then Joe sells Bob some crack. Napster is witness to this, and fails to inform the authorities. Napster has violated the law.
There's no such thing as a good samaritan law, despite what you might have seen on Seinfeld. I have no legal obligation to report a crime to the authorities.
The better analogy is that Napster is like manufacturing safe cracking tools. They can be used for legitimate or illegal purposes, but the manufacturer has no obligation to follow every purchaser around to make sure they don't rob anyone.
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You must be a drama major.
Capitalism is a process based on the noble process of sharing honest information.
Capitalism has nothing to do with sharing information. It is simply an economic system allowing regulated free trade among individuals.
Consider that more Coca-cola gets drank in America than water, and I can't think of a better all around product than water. Why is this so? Marketing.
Coca-cola sells more because it is a better product than water. The important question, of course, is what is the definition of "better". Health-wise, water is probably better. Taste-wise, Coca-cola is better, which is why it sells more. It also has caffeine which many people like to have in their drink of choice. The key word here is "choice".
"Corporatism" is a nonsense word created by people who don't understand what corporations are. It means absolutely nothing.
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Why has he switched to windows-only?
Because he wanted the program to be useful to the most people (namely, a lot of his friends in the beginning). The number of people who use Unix/Linux day-to-day with multimedia capabilities is microscopic.
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What kind of civilization do we have that we celebrate a poor living cell being forced to be a gateway for electrical current. How do we know that these cells don't long to be free, to be able to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of Amoeba happiness?
I am appalled. Appalled! We must storm the lab, and free these poor nuclei from the savage brutality of bondage.
Who's with me? Light your torches, and follow me! FOLLOW ME!!
--
Microsoft does make a small profit on thier operating systems, but they earn the big bucks on thier applications, like MS Office.
According to Microsoft's 1999 Annual Report, OS revenues were 8.5B in 1999, and Productivity Applications and Developer Revenue was 8.82B. Hardly a "small profit".
Why didn't you just post a message saying "I'm an Apple bigot and will always hate them, no matter what" and get it over with. Darwin is the core of the OS, and yes, all of it is open source. It doesn't include the GUI, but it contains the kernel, the networking stack, file system etc.
I have history on my side. I'll believe it when I see OS/X running on non-Apple hardware.
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And what did opening up to competition for IBM do? It killed their PC sales and almost sent them out of business...
IBM's big mistake early on was trying to keep their architecture proprietary. Remember Microchannel? Two problems: 1) it was incompatible with legacy hardware, and 2) IBM refused to license it, which isolated them into IBM and everyone else. And the people bought everyone else.
But what if IBM had kept it proprietary from the start? I think a case could be made that the IBM architecture wouldn't have gone anywhere, and eventually the industry would have invented a new standard a la CP/M.
Besides, with Darwin OpenSource, what's honestly stopping anyone from making a computer that can't run MacOS? Didn't IBM release an open spec PPC motherboard? I have a hard time believing that motorola will refuse to sell chips to anyone but Apple.
First of all, I don't think all of Darwin is Open Source. The important (i.e. proprietary) parts will be closed source. Also, I'm certain that Apple will have some sort of proprietary EPROMS that will be necessary to make the thing work. After all, if your theory were true, the clone manufacturers could've kept making Mac clones. Instead, Apple sued them out of existence.
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You're forgetting about the big success story: Microsoft. One of the reasons that Microsoft destroyed Apple in the 80s, even with a far inferior Win 3.1, was the open commodity hardware model.
The smartest thing Microsoft did was to work very hard to capture the corporate market. They did this with two weapons: 1) have the best applications, which means court developers like crazy, and 2) multiple source hardware, which means the hardware cost is going to be much lower.
The reason Be is unsuccessful is lack of applications, not lack of proprietary hardware. Don't forget that NeXT tried the same proprietary model, and suffered the same fate. Applications are everything.
What's in it for Apple is focus. They would no longer have the millstone of doing both hardware (low margins) AND software (high margins).
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I've hated Apple for a long time. I think the hardware is overrated and WAY overpriced. I owned a Mac back in '84 when they first came out. I think MacOS belongs back in '84. Today it's a backward, decrepit piece of garbage. All this having been said...
I think Apple has finally pulled their head out of their butt and it looks like they are finally doing a respectable operating system. In fact, I will say it looks damn cool and I find myself being excited about Apple for the first time since... well, 1984.
But I will never buy overpriced Apple hardware. Apple, are you listening? A Mac-hater is interested again in the Mac. But I am not going to buy hardware from a single supplier. And I have a feeling there are a lot of people who feel the same.
Please, Apple, send in the clones, and give them an iron-clad license that you can't stab them in the back with later.
--
While a Linux handheld would be cool in its own right, I see very few references to what applications this thing is going to run. Have they been developed by Samsung? If this is going to be a useful PDA, then I hope they are going to have to have some decent PDA-style applications to go along with it.
I'm a little suspicious that none of the screenshots are showing any scheduling programs or other PDA-mainstays.
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Does anyone else see a partial Micky Mouse painted on a globe whenever they see that logo?
Given Disney's litigiousness, I predict a future lawsuit. :)
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Er -- he didn't get any moderation points. He used his +1 bonus, which you get if you have over 25 karma points.
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Have you ever owned a diesel car? I have. You may or may not remember they got pretty popular in the late 70s when gas got expensive (I didn't own one then). The minor superiority that they had was gas mileage. When gas got cheaper, people ran away once again.
Why? Because they have other problems. They are very noisy. The performance is not that great (good torque, though). They are much more polluting (ever seen a mis-tuned diesel smoking down the highway?). They last a long time, but that just means that you have to live with the noise longer. :)
Oh, please. Auto manufacturers make whatever the people are willing to buy (and did when there was a demand for diesels). Now imagine that same CEO saying to the shareholders, "Uh, we know the people are clamoring for diesels, but we didn't want to make them, and our marketshare is now down to 5%." Hasn't happened yet.
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The Ad Critic is running the original "1984" ad that was run during the '84 Superbowl.
I have to admit, it was an incredibly cool commercial. It's worth watching if you haven't seen it.
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Wow! That's a great deal; they must have lowered the prices in recent years. Or maybe it's because I was pricing them through the RS/6000 Unix division, and it was "server" markup. :)
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My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come.
Maybe you will come, but history has shown that most people won't. See many electric cars on the road? They are heavily subsidized, and the public still runs away in droves. Basically, the reason is because they suck. The range stinks, and they are built like golf carts with delusions of grandeur.
For a new vehicle to succeed, it's going to have to be superior to the gasoline engine in some significant way (cost, performance, etc), or it's doomed to failure. Pollution superiority is not enough, simply because modern cars are already almost non-polluting.
--
IBM is the keyboard king. They are incredibly well made, the keys have exactly the right "click" feel, and the sloping is perfect. The only problem is that they are very expensive (last I checked a few years ago, about $150). But if you want quality that makes every other keyboard feel like utter crap, these are the keyboards. It does make a difference in your typing speed.
They spun off their keyboard division into Lexmark a few years ago; I don't know where they are making them now. I stole about 5 of them from one of my previous companies so I would always have a good supply.
As for these newfangled "ergonomic" keyboards, I'm not a believer. I think the key is to keep your wrists straight, regardless of the type of keyboard. I've never had wrist problems using a normal keyboard, but I think I got lucky by naturally holding my hands in the "angled" position that split keyboards use. I just angle them across the normal keyboard, rather than the "hands straight in" that typing manuals try and teach you to do.
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I already see a lot of questions being asked that are already on the FAQ list, so here's a handy list, with links:
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Bush lays his use of Front Page out there and says, so what? -- and that who-cares attitude is also reflected in his web page which sets a new standard for user-unfriendliness. Even on a SPARC with the entire page in cache, it still takes over 20 seconds for Netscape to show you anything but a blank white page.
I can't believe the guy has the gall to blame the suckiness of Netscape on the web site. Particularly Netscape under Unix, which is god-awful slow on every web site.
--
The "ancient nomads" had abundance because of a lack of population, not a lack of technology.
It's a common misconception that ancient peoples had some sort of "nobility" because of a lack of technology. There is no nobility in ignorance. Technology is simply a byproduct of knowledge.
Furthermore, it is even more common for people to get defensive and to ridicule the lives of "modern people" without knowledge of any facts when someone points out a negative impact of ignorant primitives.
--
In wordperfect you can put formulas in your table cells you don't need to embed anything.
I'm not talking about simple adding of columns or whatever, I'm talking about very complex financial models, which is what spreadsheets are for. Why would I use a word processor for doing the job of a spreadsheet?
You create your business plan using excel. If you want it to look pretty because you want to show it to the bank you export it something and doll it up and print it. Once you have your numbers together you just want to print it nice. Why does your banker want to fiddle your numbers in you word document?
That's not the point. A financial model is a living document; it's constantly revised as you learn more about your assumptions. It contains assumption statements, growth models, income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, etc projected over multiple years. The business plan, on the other hand, is the "big picture", and contains only summaries of the financial model. When I embed linked cells into my business plan, and I update the financial model, the document is automatically updated to reflect the most current information.
It's about using the right tool for the job. A spreadsheet is about manipulating complex formulas, and a word processor is about producing documents.
Now, as for sending it anywhere, the point is not whether the receiver needs to modify it, the point is why should I have to do an extra step? Why not just send the original? Also note that I don't have to send the spreadsheet along with the Word document. The Word document contains a copy of the spreadsheet cells, so you don't need the original spreadsheet.
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