I agree wholeheartedly. Profanity is a way for the speaker to let off steam. There is no semantic content to "fuck" when used as an expletive; it is just emphatic.
I used to work in tech support (for Apple, during the switch to PPC--not a fun time for that company), and the rule was that if the customer swore, we were allowed to terminate the call. I always hated that, because most reps just used that as an excuse to get rid of annoying customer service problems. But the thing is that if you disconnect someone while they're venting, they are just going to get angrier and call back. It makes the problem worse.
After noticing this trend, I stopped disconnecting customers who were screaming. As long as they weren't personally abusive to me (they almost never were--they were angry at the computer, angry at the company, angry at themselves for not backing up, angry at life, angry at a really shitty day--almost never were they angry at the person on the other end of the line), I let them just go. Just let them get it all out. I took notes whenever something emerged that was actually useful information, but mostly they just wanted to vent. And who doesn't???
I found that if you let people do this for about 2 minutes, and let them know that you empathized, as a fellow human being, with what they were going through, they would calm down and just be the easiest people to deal with all day. They felt relaxed. They felt like someone who could help them actually listened to them. They were also incredibly polite after that because they knew that the person listening had done them the human kindness of listening, when most people would have just hung up, and that they could not really be angry at them.
Profanity is very rarely about the listener; it's about the speaker. Sure, we could all walk around quantifying and qualifying our exact feelings in measured, calculated, meaningful lexical choices, but when we want to use profanity is when the idea is not really worth encoding, but we feel a need to express the emotion nonetheless. This is profanity's role in the English language, and most other languages have analogues.
People who are offended by profanity are weak, small, scheming people, IMO. They don't want to be around anyone who expresses their feelings, because feelings and human interaction embarrass them. As a general rule, I don't trust people who do not swear. They are obviously controlling their output, hiding their feelings. What else are they hiding? When I think back on the people who have been loyal coworkers who treated people with respect and fairness, they are the swearers. I have never been backstabbed by a swearer. It's always, in my experience, the people who don't. Swearing in front of someone is saying "I consider you close enough to expose this part of me." Refraining from doing so says, "You and I are wholly unrelated. You will act upon the information I impart." Granted, it's not like non-swearers are bad people. It's just that I am much more careful in dealing with them.
(Full disclosure: I swear like a motherfucker, so I may be a bit biased.)
What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.
And what you're basically saying is this: "Your preferences are wrong, and it's because you're stupid." It's the classic Slashdot rebuttal, and it is often modded as insightful, but it's not.
I don't purport to know what someone else needs to do his/her job. When a guy says OO.o doesn't cut it, despite trying, I tend to believe him. What makes you think you know what he needs?
Personally, I used OO.o for a year (Writer, to be precise) in grad school because I wanted to get rid of pirated MS Office, and I didn't have the $125 for the student version, and besides, I wanted more than the student version had... Why, I don't know, since I only would have used Word at the time. Anyway, I got quite good at Writer, and there are some great features in there (predictive input!), but ultimately, I had to call it quits and buy the $100 volume license of MS Office from the school.
What were my problems?
OO.o tables do not save correctly to.doc. If I needed to work on the document elsewhere, or was collaborating with someone, they had to be reformatted every time.
Making tables is an arduous process in OO.o. And being that I use a lot of statistics in my writing, tables are abundant. Word table formatting is quick and easy, and you can get them to look exactly as you'd like in a number of different ways (this has always been the best part of MS software--any way you can think of doing something probably has a way to do it).
Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals. This is in violation of the UI metaphor: Those sliders snapped on electric typewriters. Last time I complained about this on Slashdot some pompous ass told me I was too stupid to use styles so I'd better just stick with Word. Except, I did use styles, and I use them in Word, too, and those sliders are the easiest way to set the indent in Word--why the hell should I type everything in when there's a damn GUI slider there? Why doesn't the OO.o slider work right? You can't get the same indent twice. It's maddening.
I have to work with other people, and they don't know or want to learn OO.o. This obviously isn't a problem with the software, but it is a big problem with using it.
I finally decided that getting things done was more important than being different. And this is what it comes down to, really, with a lot of FOSS. There are a few things that are improved by the removal of the profit motive (video software that plays anything, PDF writers --utilities like that whose proprietary counterparts are too worried about making money to be any good), but major applications don't seem to benefit. FOSS requires people to learn something new that doesn't do as much and isn't as compatible with the rest of the world's software. And that's why uptake is slow. Not because people are stupid, but because they are smart enough to know it's not worth it for them to switch. Until OO.o is better and more compatible than MS Office, this will be the case, and people will stick to MS Office in droves.
I value supporting FOSS projects in theory, but at the end of the day, I have work to do, and OO.o doesn't cut it. And I say that as the world's leading expert on how to do my job and live my life. That ought to be a satisfying enough reason for anyone.
I've had stops like that. Really, there's no good reason why it should be illegal to gun cops like this down. They are parasites, and extremely dangerous. They erode the credibility of our legal system and violate the nigh-sacred trust we put in them. They are, in all seriousness, the worst people in the world. Worse than the more archetypical criminals, because they masquerade as the "good guys."
I find that anyone who has used Office XP or earlier tends to enjoy using the latest OOo, unless they have a bunch of VB macros that don't work quite right, or some badly-created templates that don't display correctly.
Really, the only problem I've found so far for normal users is that Word documents don't always convert indices and other complex objects correctly, and need to be re-formatted once imported into ODF.
Yes, I, too, find that people who are used to and comfortable with and generally enjoy using one thing tend to enjoy being switched to something else that requires them to reformat everything they did with the old thing, one by one!
Yup. All these guys 'round here talking about how they switched their wives/girlfriends/parents and they didn't mind or notice... These people either already came to them for every little thing on their computer so nothing changed for the writer, or their parents/whatever are pretty good with computers, or they REALLY used nothing but the browser. Because I tried with my parents' spare machine, and my mom panicked and got angry and was like, "Why can't you just install XP? What is this???"
And I'm smart enough not to try such a thing with my wife. I live with her.
Seriously, that's a recipe for disaster with most people. For them, it's like getting a Johnny Strong doll when they asked for G.I. Joe. You may think it's cool or better; they just think you're cheap.
Indeed. I just sold some stuff after a 2-year hiatus and I made a bunch of mistakes setting things up because so many rules had changed. It really pissed me off.
I, too, have switched to Foxit. I love it! I actually own Acrobat 7 (the writer), but I've found that, for what I need to do with PDF, anyway, PDFcreator (check Sourceforge) and Foxit meet my needs faster and more elegantly.
And this right here is why I don't use Linux. I like the idea of it (why else would I hang around here?), but when push comes to shove, it's a bitch to set up, and even if you do get everything to work right, it doesn't do everything you want it to do.
Let me just save everyone some time, and I'll type in your counter-arguments for you:
Have you tried it recently? It's made great strides! Yes, I have, thanks. The first time was on my laptop, and I found that the wi-fi drivers just plain didn't exist and I'd have to buy a card and have it sticking out of the side, banging into everything. No thanks. The second time was on my desktop, and despite two days of reading manpages and forums, my mid-model, last-generation nVidia graphics card never spit out more than 640x480. This was in June and July of this year. I expect the computer to work within a couple hours of installing the OS. I have no use for a computer that doesn't have all the drivers available.
Mine works just fine. You obviously did something wrong.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. I know that, in the case of my video card, I was doing something wrong, but I had no idea WHAT, and ran out of patience trying to figure it out, especially knowing that if I ever did figure it out, I'd still be running Linux, and be forced to use knock-offs of popular applications instead of the real things (I do use the knock-offs under Windows fairly frequently, when it's an application I don't need much--like Inkscape instead of buying or pirating Illustrator). If a guy as computer-proficient as I am (that's not much compared to a lot of the folks around here, granted, but so, so far beyond that of the general population) can't get the damn thing to work in 2 days, it's a no-go.
You're obviously too stupid for Linux. You don't deserve it!
Way to sell it, asshole.
It runs the internet.
Very good for it. I don't want to do that.
I'd love to be proprietary-free. But, in all seriousness, the problems with proprietary platforms are not nearly as bad as the problems with Linux. The former is a legal and financial hassle, but as long as you write a check every once in awhile, it'll work very nicely. The latter is a usability hassle, followed by not working right and no one to blame.
Please come live here before you believe that Japan is ahead of the rest of the world. Because one of the biggest shocks (for Americans and Canadians, anyway) when they first move here is how behind it is.
Can you get FTTH? Yes. In some areas. In some areas with high population density. What you're seeing at NYTimes is typical for foreign reporting about Japan. They seem to think that the Kantou plain (where Tokyo, Chiba, Yokohama, etc. are) is representative of the entire country. Having lived both out in the sticks (where my wife is from) and here in Kantou, I can tell you, they are worlds apart. I had to pay $400 to get ADSL installed at my old place in the rural area.
And here? Can I get FTTH here? Yes and no. This area is listed as a service area for 3 FTTH providers, but none of them will wire my apartment, because it is too far from the street.
See, all these people listed with FTTH? They aren't living in houses. They are living in MASSIVE apartment blocks. My buddy down the street has FTTH. He shares with with about 100 families. But in that metric, you're going to see him listed as having FTTH.
You can get a dedicated fibre line to your individual residence, but it's substantially more expensive. And you have to be right on the street. I'm about 50m back, so no FTTH for me.
So why not use "mansion type" (as mentioned earlier, in Japan, "mansion" means "apartment"), like everyone else, and share the connection with the building?
Because, contrary to what the article implies, many Japanese do not actually have computers or internet access. The cellphone came into Japan in force, and this is what "mail" means to most people. However, all those people living in those apartment blocks with FTTH, especially the new ones where the apartments are hardwired for LAN, are going to be listed as subscribers. It's part of their rent. That doesn't mean they are using it. In the case of my building, despite having fliers sent to the whole building from the providers, hoping they'd call and request it, I can't get enough interest here to get it to happen. The providers, understandably, aren't going to install a line for the building if only one guy is going to use it. Again, no FTTH for me.
But why am I bothering? What would I do with my share of 100Mbit, especially since my ADSL is 50Mbit?
Enter the next big lie that gets reported as truth in foreign news publications: Network speeds.
As far as I know, US and EU companies are required to advertise the speed you get as opposed to the speed of the line. Not so here. You see all these phenomenal speeds advertised here, but those are the speed at the post. My 50Mb line, which, with ISP, costs me about $60/mo., runs at 3Mb down on a good day, with 800kb up. My 4Mb cable service in the US was $40/mo with about 1Mb up. Also, I'd like to point out, there was about a 3-day wait between me ordering the service and the guy coming with my modem in the US. Here, you might be looking at over a month, during which you are required to submit information about every aspect of your life. It's a major ordeal.
And my buddy with FTTH? He isn't getting 100Mbit of course. But he is getting 20. Nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but this is largely due to the fact that no one is using their internet connections. I don't know where the NYTimes even found an online gamer. Seriously. I've never met one or even heard of one. Obviously they must exist, but that's largely a Korean thing. Seriously. I teach university. I have actively tried to find students who are playing. Never once have I found a student--nerdy or otherwise--who was playing an online game. They all play Final Fantasy and idiotic JRPGs like that.
I take that back. I once met another BF2 player. It was the geeky phone company guy who got my ADSL line up to 3Mbit from the 680k I was getting. And he's also the one who told me that the numbers were essentially bullshit.
Okay, so you are arguing that people should just cope with having to do command line crap on Linux despite the fact that they haven't done it on the Mac ever and the PC in 12 years.
You are blaming customer expectations (i.e. "it just works"), which they've gotten from proprietary systems, for the failure of Linux to take hold on the desktop.
You are telling people to just cope.
And that, my friend, is why Linux will never take hold on the desktop. It's made by people for whom the CLI is no problem, to solve their problems and meet their needs. It wasn't and isn't designed with normal people in mind, doesn't meet their needs, and makes demands on them no computer ever has before.
The reason people aren't flocking to Linux isn't that they aren't smart enough to understand its worth; it's that they are smart enough to know it doesn't meet their needs and expectations. For 99.987524% of the population, the UI is the OS. That's a fact of life. Until the UI does everything it does on the Man and Windows, Linux is a sideshow.
Do you ever get the impression that the Slashdot crowd feel compelled to complain whenever someone points out the obvious shortcomings of Linux?
Linux doesn't work at all without a lot of time and effort put into tinkering. Here it comes...
You must not have tried it recently. It's come a long way!
Yes, I tried it in July. And used it yesterday and the day before on others' systems.
The only people who find it fairly clear as to how to go about things in Linux are those who have Unix and/or programming backgrounds. I have no idea how to compile something, for example. I have no idea what files define what. When my graphics card is only putting out 640x480, and the driver install doesn't help, I'm stymied. And I'm in the 1% of the population that even knows what a driver is.
I used to tell people how easy it was to build your own PC. Then I started trying to teach them. They ask the most bizarre, ignorant questions you could ever imagine. No, actually, that's not true. You couldn't imagine them. They treated hardy components with ultimate care and tossed fragile components on the carpet. They tried to force cables into the wrong connectors. They didn't know the difference between power and data. They forgot to plug things in. They didn't understand things like "master" and "slave." No idea what BIOS is, nor CMOS, nor OS, nor driver, nor the difference between Windows and Office.
These weren't dumb people; these were normal people who didn't have the vast experience and the resulting intuitions regarding computer basics that I had. So for me, putting together a PC is like "well, you just plug this in, plug that in, and you're off!" But each of those steps requires a set of assumptions and knowledge that I take totally for granted.
Linux is like this, but on a software level. I'm sure I could learn. But I just don't want to. I am not interested in the ins and outs of how all of it works; I just want it to work with a minimal amount of fuss. And I am so much more sophisticated than Joe Sixpack it's unreal.
Until at least someone like me finds Linux easy to install and get to running correctly, it is little more than a curiosity. A hobbyist's toy or the tool of the networking professional (or, as the article stated, someone who has no needs beyond what an Ubuntu install offers right away--provided the display driver ever works right).
These aren't stupid complaints about Linux. They're objective observations from a very proficient computer user who has no reason to go out of his way to shoot down Linux.
No. Bloggers make no difference. Burma has been oppressing people for decades. Decades. The first thing I ever learned about Burma in my Asian studies classes was: Burma has been oppressing people for decades. Anyone in power anywhere in the world has known about it.
Simply put: "Sucks to be them." Same as with Iraq. Not that I believe going into Iraq had anything to do with oppression, but even if it had, I wouldn't have thought that a good reason to interfere. I don't want any other countries coming and telling my country how to do things; I don't expect any country does.
It is none of our business. None. We can't save everyone, so we should just stay out of it.
Actually, I think that this is exactly why students come to US universities. Whether profs teach or not, there definitely is teaching involved (GTAs were some of my best teachers as an undergrad--what's wrong with that?--and at the graduate level, of course you're dealing with real profs). I will bash the US K-12 system day and night. It's a joke. But our university system is fantastic. We let just about anyone in, but make sure you work hard to get out. This is the opposite of most countries' systems. US university is a place where anyone can prove themselves. A US diploma means something around the world. I work with people who have at least master's degrees from all over. The US graduates had to do much, much more to get them, and it shows in their level of professionalism and knowledge.
There are a lot of things to bash the US for. But our university system is top-notch. (Granted, I am a product of it, so you may want to factor out some bias.)
Hey, there's the best thing I've read on Slashdot for a long time. I'd still rather pay someone to ensure that it actually works right, but I'll certainly look into it!
You share my pain. My wife does the exact same thing. It's enough to make me weep sometimes. But she gets angry if I stop her and ask for her to re-state the topic, so I usually just reply noncommittally (easy to do in Japanese: "Un. Un. Un.") until it comes to me. Usually it does, but sometimes I have to break down and ask. This is even worse, though, because now she's been talking for a long time, and realizes that everything she has been saying has been a waste. Now she's really angry.
Perhaps worse is when I figure the topic out wrong, but the conversation still makes sense for a long time until I say something that doesn't fit and she stops talking, stares at me, and goes, in English, "...WHAT?" Then I tell her what I think we're talking about, and she gets this look of exasperation and disbelief and something along the lines of "why the hell would I be talking about that?" And then I offer the theory I had about why she was talking about that, and then she gets that look again.
In that example of yours, I would assume she was asking if I was taking the train. I'd be like:
ME:... Where to? (doko e?)
SHE: To the meeting. (miitingu made)
ME: What meeting? (nan no?)
SHE: THAT meeting! (ANO miitingu!)
ME:...
SHE: Noriaki's meeting! (Noriaki-kun no!)
ME:... I'm not going to that meeting. (Boku wa ikanai.)
SHE: NORIAKI! (NORIAKI!)
ME:...OHHHHHhhhh! "Is NORIAKI taking the train!" Okay. Yeah.(OHHHHHhhhh! "NORIAKI-kun wa densha de iku!" Okay. Hai.)
SHE: (under her breath) Are you stupid? (Baka ja nai?)
Or my favorite: That is that, isn't it?! (Sore wa are da yo ne!) I usually just throw my hands up at that point and leave the room. That doesn't even make sense in Japanese, but her friends seem to understand. I think it's a boy vs. girl thing, though, because my Japanese guy friends have complained about that phrase before as well.
Japanese/Anglophone marriages are fun, though. Must be why so many people do it.
Why is any comment pointing out the flaws in the Linux user experience considered trolling 'round here? I, too, am constantly being accused of trolling, when I'm actually just reporting my own trouble getting Ubuntu to work on my commodity hardware.
Cue the people saying I'm obviously too stupid for Linux, and therefore don't deserve it, and then cue the guys saying "and you wonder why Linux adoption is so low, with an attitude like that." And cue me not having any mod points for months.
Windows really isn't that bad. Or, rather, the things that are bad about it aren't really bad enough to push developers and users to other platforms. Linux's good points, on the other hand, aren't really good enough to draw users and mainstream developers, and its bad points are more than enough to keep people away. I agree; Linux isn't "finished" yet. Ubuntu is the best I've seen, and I'd love to be using it day-to-day, but I don't count editing config files as "using." That is what I call "setting up," and that process takes maybe an hour on Windows, considerably less on OSX, and as far as I can tell, an infinite amount of time on Linux, because I've never gotten EVERYTHING to work on a Linux box.
Every OS has its good points and bad points. Pointing them out isn't trolling.
Heheh, linguistics classes. I also taught Japanese at a university in the US (i.e. to students who took it on purpose and therefore actually wanted to learn--the most fun I've ever had teaching) for awhile, so I have some practice explaining it.
Disclaimer: I'm a second language acquisition researcher and assessor.
I concur. Absolutely. Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.
Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.
Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).
Yikes. Well said, even if some of it was kidding on the square.
The problem, however, isn't that MS is a mean company (it is) that makes bad products (well--bad OSes. I can't believe how much I love my Xbox 360, and I've never even been tempted to buy a console before). The problem is that so many of us need their OSes to do our jobs. There really is very little most people can do about it. Linux really isn't an option for most people, and for a considerable number, OSX really isn't either.
The new Macs are the only threat I see, being that they can now boot Windows natively. I have a Mac laptop now, because I can still run my critical Windows apps either natively or in emulation (I haven't noticed any speed difference between the two, but games require a native reboot), and this has caused me to begin to loathe XP, whereas I used to be ambivalent. The Intel move is the smartest thing Apple has ever done.
Similarly, what may make Linux a viable option (provided drivers for people's hardware actually existed and worked), and which would give me pause, would be someone like VMware entering the fray with a desktop-class emulator like Fusion for OSX (which is what I use and which is awesome, BTW) on Linux. I've been accused of trolling about Linux's lack of viability 'round these parts, but really, until people can run the programs they really actually run (hint: MS Office isn't the only program people run) in a Linux environment, it's just going to live at the sysadmin level, and at the sysadmin's home computer level. A workhorse or a toy (as something of a statistician--don't tell a real statistician that I said that, though--I would like to head off any comments of "but I use it and I'm not a sysadmin" with a word of caution about generalizing from small N sizes, statistical outliers, and self-selected populations).
I'd happily reformat my desktop and put on Ubuntu (which I find slick and intuitive--though I suppose that has more to do with the Gnome folks than the Ubuntu folks, but still) if I could still use my Windows apps without a reboot (I'm open to a reboot for games)... Provided, that is, that I could get the nVidia drivers to work this time...
A cogent and balanced reply from a fellow OSX chooser (as in, one who knows why he chose to switch to OSX, over Windows or Linux). Apple is not evil for trying to make a buck, and even the annoyances that come from that drive are made up for by general quality of their products.
Seriously, though, I used to think and say things like that, but now, thanks to the folks around here, I understand that it's not OpenOffice's clunkiness that made me feel that way, but my own stupidity and incompetence! You should really re-think your expectations of software, like I have. FOSS is always better, even when it doesn't work quite right. Or at all!
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I agree wholeheartedly. Profanity is a way for the speaker to let off steam. There is no semantic content to "fuck" when used as an expletive; it is just emphatic.
I used to work in tech support (for Apple, during the switch to PPC--not a fun time for that company), and the rule was that if the customer swore, we were allowed to terminate the call. I always hated that, because most reps just used that as an excuse to get rid of annoying customer service problems. But the thing is that if you disconnect someone while they're venting, they are just going to get angrier and call back. It makes the problem worse.
After noticing this trend, I stopped disconnecting customers who were screaming. As long as they weren't personally abusive to me (they almost never were--they were angry at the computer, angry at the company, angry at themselves for not backing up, angry at life, angry at a really shitty day--almost never were they angry at the person on the other end of the line), I let them just go. Just let them get it all out. I took notes whenever something emerged that was actually useful information, but mostly they just wanted to vent. And who doesn't???
I found that if you let people do this for about 2 minutes, and let them know that you empathized, as a fellow human being, with what they were going through, they would calm down and just be the easiest people to deal with all day. They felt relaxed. They felt like someone who could help them actually listened to them. They were also incredibly polite after that because they knew that the person listening had done them the human kindness of listening, when most people would have just hung up, and that they could not really be angry at them.
Profanity is very rarely about the listener; it's about the speaker. Sure, we could all walk around quantifying and qualifying our exact feelings in measured, calculated, meaningful lexical choices, but when we want to use profanity is when the idea is not really worth encoding, but we feel a need to express the emotion nonetheless. This is profanity's role in the English language, and most other languages have analogues.
People who are offended by profanity are weak, small, scheming people, IMO. They don't want to be around anyone who expresses their feelings, because feelings and human interaction embarrass them. As a general rule, I don't trust people who do not swear. They are obviously controlling their output, hiding their feelings. What else are they hiding? When I think back on the people who have been loyal coworkers who treated people with respect and fairness, they are the swearers. I have never been backstabbed by a swearer. It's always, in my experience, the people who don't. Swearing in front of someone is saying "I consider you close enough to expose this part of me." Refraining from doing so says, "You and I are wholly unrelated. You will act upon the information I impart." Granted, it's not like non-swearers are bad people. It's just that I am much more careful in dealing with them.
(Full disclosure: I swear like a motherfucker, so I may be a bit biased.)
And what you're basically saying is this: "Your preferences are wrong, and it's because you're stupid." It's the classic Slashdot rebuttal, and it is often modded as insightful, but it's not.
I don't purport to know what someone else needs to do his/her job. When a guy says OO.o doesn't cut it, despite trying, I tend to believe him. What makes you think you know what he needs?
Personally, I used OO.o for a year (Writer, to be precise) in grad school because I wanted to get rid of pirated MS Office, and I didn't have the $125 for the student version, and besides, I wanted more than the student version had... Why, I don't know, since I only would have used Word at the time. Anyway, I got quite good at Writer, and there are some great features in there (predictive input!), but ultimately, I had to call it quits and buy the $100 volume license of MS Office from the school.
What were my problems?
OO.o tables do not save correctly to .doc. If I needed to work on the document elsewhere, or was collaborating with someone, they had to be reformatted every time.
Making tables is an arduous process in OO.o. And being that I use a lot of statistics in my writing, tables are abundant. Word table formatting is quick and easy, and you can get them to look exactly as you'd like in a number of different ways (this has always been the best part of MS software--any way you can think of doing something probably has a way to do it).
Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals. This is in violation of the UI metaphor: Those sliders snapped on electric typewriters. Last time I complained about this on Slashdot some pompous ass told me I was too stupid to use styles so I'd better just stick with Word. Except, I did use styles, and I use them in Word, too, and those sliders are the easiest way to set the indent in Word--why the hell should I type everything in when there's a damn GUI slider there? Why doesn't the OO.o slider work right? You can't get the same indent twice. It's maddening.
I have to work with other people, and they don't know or want to learn OO.o. This obviously isn't a problem with the software, but it is a big problem with using it.
I finally decided that getting things done was more important than being different. And this is what it comes down to, really, with a lot of FOSS. There are a few things that are improved by the removal of the profit motive (video software that plays anything, PDF writers --utilities like that whose proprietary counterparts are too worried about making money to be any good), but major applications don't seem to benefit. FOSS requires people to learn something new that doesn't do as much and isn't as compatible with the rest of the world's software. And that's why uptake is slow. Not because people are stupid, but because they are smart enough to know it's not worth it for them to switch. Until OO.o is better and more compatible than MS Office, this will be the case, and people will stick to MS Office in droves.
I value supporting FOSS projects in theory, but at the end of the day, I have work to do, and OO.o doesn't cut it. And I say that as the world's leading expert on how to do my job and live my life. That ought to be a satisfying enough reason for anyone.
I've had stops like that. Really, there's no good reason why it should be illegal to gun cops like this down. They are parasites, and extremely dangerous. They erode the credibility of our legal system and violate the nigh-sacred trust we put in them. They are, in all seriousness, the worst people in the world. Worse than the more archetypical criminals, because they masquerade as the "good guys."
Never trust a cop.
Yes, I, too, find that people who are used to and comfortable with and generally enjoy using one thing tend to enjoy being switched to something else that requires them to reformat everything they did with the old thing, one by one!
Yup. All these guys 'round here talking about how they switched their wives/girlfriends/parents and they didn't mind or notice... These people either already came to them for every little thing on their computer so nothing changed for the writer, or their parents/whatever are pretty good with computers, or they REALLY used nothing but the browser. Because I tried with my parents' spare machine, and my mom panicked and got angry and was like, "Why can't you just install XP? What is this???"
And I'm smart enough not to try such a thing with my wife. I live with her.
Seriously, that's a recipe for disaster with most people. For them, it's like getting a Johnny Strong doll when they asked for G.I. Joe. You may think it's cool or better; they just think you're cheap.
Indeed. I just sold some stuff after a 2-year hiatus and I made a bunch of mistakes setting things up because so many rules had changed. It really pissed me off.
I, too, have switched to Foxit. I love it! I actually own Acrobat 7 (the writer), but I've found that, for what I need to do with PDF, anyway, PDFcreator (check Sourceforge) and Foxit meet my needs faster and more elegantly.
Huzzah!
Preach it!
And this right here is why I don't use Linux. I like the idea of it (why else would I hang around here?), but when push comes to shove, it's a bitch to set up, and even if you do get everything to work right, it doesn't do everything you want it to do.
Let me just save everyone some time, and I'll type in your counter-arguments for you:
Have you tried it recently? It's made great strides!
Yes, I have, thanks. The first time was on my laptop, and I found that the wi-fi drivers just plain didn't exist and I'd have to buy a card and have it sticking out of the side, banging into everything. No thanks. The second time was on my desktop, and despite two days of reading manpages and forums, my mid-model, last-generation nVidia graphics card never spit out more than 640x480. This was in June and July of this year. I expect the computer to work within a couple hours of installing the OS. I have no use for a computer that doesn't have all the drivers available.
Mine works just fine. You obviously did something wrong.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. I know that, in the case of my video card, I was doing something wrong, but I had no idea WHAT, and ran out of patience trying to figure it out, especially knowing that if I ever did figure it out, I'd still be running Linux, and be forced to use knock-offs of popular applications instead of the real things (I do use the knock-offs under Windows fairly frequently, when it's an application I don't need much--like Inkscape instead of buying or pirating Illustrator). If a guy as computer-proficient as I am (that's not much compared to a lot of the folks around here, granted, but so, so far beyond that of the general population) can't get the damn thing to work in 2 days, it's a no-go.
You're obviously too stupid for Linux. You don't deserve it!
Way to sell it, asshole.
It runs the internet.
Very good for it. I don't want to do that.
I'd love to be proprietary-free. But, in all seriousness, the problems with proprietary platforms are not nearly as bad as the problems with Linux. The former is a legal and financial hassle, but as long as you write a check every once in awhile, it'll work very nicely. The latter is a usability hassle, followed by not working right and no one to blame.
Please come live here before you believe that Japan is ahead of the rest of the world. Because one of the biggest shocks (for Americans and Canadians, anyway) when they first move here is how behind it is.
Can you get FTTH? Yes. In some areas. In some areas with high population density. What you're seeing at NYTimes is typical for foreign reporting about Japan. They seem to think that the Kantou plain (where Tokyo, Chiba, Yokohama, etc. are) is representative of the entire country. Having lived both out in the sticks (where my wife is from) and here in Kantou, I can tell you, they are worlds apart. I had to pay $400 to get ADSL installed at my old place in the rural area.
And here? Can I get FTTH here? Yes and no. This area is listed as a service area for 3 FTTH providers, but none of them will wire my apartment, because it is too far from the street.
See, all these people listed with FTTH? They aren't living in houses. They are living in MASSIVE apartment blocks. My buddy down the street has FTTH. He shares with with about 100 families. But in that metric, you're going to see him listed as having FTTH.
You can get a dedicated fibre line to your individual residence, but it's substantially more expensive. And you have to be right on the street. I'm about 50m back, so no FTTH for me.
So why not use "mansion type" (as mentioned earlier, in Japan, "mansion" means "apartment"), like everyone else, and share the connection with the building?
Because, contrary to what the article implies, many Japanese do not actually have computers or internet access. The cellphone came into Japan in force, and this is what "mail" means to most people. However, all those people living in those apartment blocks with FTTH, especially the new ones where the apartments are hardwired for LAN, are going to be listed as subscribers. It's part of their rent. That doesn't mean they are using it. In the case of my building, despite having fliers sent to the whole building from the providers, hoping they'd call and request it, I can't get enough interest here to get it to happen. The providers, understandably, aren't going to install a line for the building if only one guy is going to use it. Again, no FTTH for me.
But why am I bothering? What would I do with my share of 100Mbit, especially since my ADSL is 50Mbit?
Enter the next big lie that gets reported as truth in foreign news publications: Network speeds.
As far as I know, US and EU companies are required to advertise the speed you get as opposed to the speed of the line. Not so here. You see all these phenomenal speeds advertised here, but those are the speed at the post. My 50Mb line, which, with ISP, costs me about $60/mo., runs at 3Mb down on a good day, with 800kb up. My 4Mb cable service in the US was $40/mo with about 1Mb up. Also, I'd like to point out, there was about a 3-day wait between me ordering the service and the guy coming with my modem in the US. Here, you might be looking at over a month, during which you are required to submit information about every aspect of your life. It's a major ordeal.
And my buddy with FTTH? He isn't getting 100Mbit of course. But he is getting 20. Nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but this is largely due to the fact that no one is using their internet connections. I don't know where the NYTimes even found an online gamer. Seriously. I've never met one or even heard of one. Obviously they must exist, but that's largely a Korean thing. Seriously. I teach university. I have actively tried to find students who are playing. Never once have I found a student--nerdy or otherwise--who was playing an online game. They all play Final Fantasy and idiotic JRPGs like that.
I take that back. I once met another BF2 player. It was the geeky phone company guy who got my ADSL line up to 3Mbit from the 680k I was getting. And he's also the one who told me that the numbers were essentially bullshit.
Ja
Okay, so you are arguing that people should just cope with having to do command line crap on Linux despite the fact that they haven't done it on the Mac ever and the PC in 12 years.
You are blaming customer expectations (i.e. "it just works"), which they've gotten from proprietary systems, for the failure of Linux to take hold on the desktop.
You are telling people to just cope.
And that, my friend, is why Linux will never take hold on the desktop. It's made by people for whom the CLI is no problem, to solve their problems and meet their needs. It wasn't and isn't designed with normal people in mind, doesn't meet their needs, and makes demands on them no computer ever has before.
The reason people aren't flocking to Linux isn't that they aren't smart enough to understand its worth; it's that they are smart enough to know it doesn't meet their needs and expectations. For 99.987524% of the population, the UI is the OS. That's a fact of life. Until the UI does everything it does on the Man and Windows, Linux is a sideshow.
Yeah, "Step 3" is where everything falls apart.
Do you ever get the impression that the Slashdot crowd feel compelled to complain whenever someone points out the obvious shortcomings of Linux?
Linux doesn't work at all without a lot of time and effort put into tinkering. Here it comes...
You must not have tried it recently. It's come a long way!
Yes, I tried it in July. And used it yesterday and the day before on others' systems.
The only people who find it fairly clear as to how to go about things in Linux are those who have Unix and/or programming backgrounds. I have no idea how to compile something, for example. I have no idea what files define what. When my graphics card is only putting out 640x480, and the driver install doesn't help, I'm stymied. And I'm in the 1% of the population that even knows what a driver is.
I used to tell people how easy it was to build your own PC. Then I started trying to teach them. They ask the most bizarre, ignorant questions you could ever imagine. No, actually, that's not true. You couldn't imagine them. They treated hardy components with ultimate care and tossed fragile components on the carpet. They tried to force cables into the wrong connectors. They didn't know the difference between power and data. They forgot to plug things in. They didn't understand things like "master" and "slave." No idea what BIOS is, nor CMOS, nor OS, nor driver, nor the difference between Windows and Office.
These weren't dumb people; these were normal people who didn't have the vast experience and the resulting intuitions regarding computer basics that I had. So for me, putting together a PC is like "well, you just plug this in, plug that in, and you're off!" But each of those steps requires a set of assumptions and knowledge that I take totally for granted.
Linux is like this, but on a software level. I'm sure I could learn. But I just don't want to. I am not interested in the ins and outs of how all of it works; I just want it to work with a minimal amount of fuss. And I am so much more sophisticated than Joe Sixpack it's unreal.
Until at least someone like me finds Linux easy to install and get to running correctly, it is little more than a curiosity. A hobbyist's toy or the tool of the networking professional (or, as the article stated, someone who has no needs beyond what an Ubuntu install offers right away--provided the display driver ever works right).
These aren't stupid complaints about Linux. They're objective observations from a very proficient computer user who has no reason to go out of his way to shoot down Linux.
It just isn't ready yet.
I just sold all my other guitars because I like my Variax so much.
Bless you. You even got modded up!
No. Bloggers make no difference. Burma has been oppressing people for decades. Decades. The first thing I ever learned about Burma in my Asian studies classes was: Burma has been oppressing people for decades. Anyone in power anywhere in the world has known about it.
Simply put: "Sucks to be them." Same as with Iraq. Not that I believe going into Iraq had anything to do with oppression, but even if it had, I wouldn't have thought that a good reason to interfere. I don't want any other countries coming and telling my country how to do things; I don't expect any country does.
It is none of our business. None. We can't save everyone, so we should just stay out of it.
SyncBack for Windows, ChronoSync for Mac!
Got my mom using the former. You can automate it. It goes to a NAS in a storage room in another part of the house.
I'm not too concerned about thieves where they live, though.
Here at home, it gives me pause. Keeping all my personal data on a drive at the office, however, really doesn't sound prudent to me...
Actually, I think that this is exactly why students come to US universities. Whether profs teach or not, there definitely is teaching involved (GTAs were some of my best teachers as an undergrad--what's wrong with that?--and at the graduate level, of course you're dealing with real profs). I will bash the US K-12 system day and night. It's a joke. But our university system is fantastic. We let just about anyone in, but make sure you work hard to get out. This is the opposite of most countries' systems. US university is a place where anyone can prove themselves. A US diploma means something around the world. I work with people who have at least master's degrees from all over. The US graduates had to do much, much more to get them, and it shows in their level of professionalism and knowledge.
There are a lot of things to bash the US for. But our university system is top-notch. (Granted, I am a product of it, so you may want to factor out some bias.)
Hey, there's the best thing I've read on Slashdot for a long time. I'd still rather pay someone to ensure that it actually works right, but I'll certainly look into it!
You share my pain. My wife does the exact same thing. It's enough to make me weep sometimes. But she gets angry if I stop her and ask for her to re-state the topic, so I usually just reply noncommittally (easy to do in Japanese: "Un. Un. Un.") until it comes to me. Usually it does, but sometimes I have to break down and ask. This is even worse, though, because now she's been talking for a long time, and realizes that everything she has been saying has been a waste. Now she's really angry.
Perhaps worse is when I figure the topic out wrong, but the conversation still makes sense for a long time until I say something that doesn't fit and she stops talking, stares at me, and goes, in English, "...WHAT?" Then I tell her what I think we're talking about, and she gets this look of exasperation and disbelief and something along the lines of "why the hell would I be talking about that?" And then I offer the theory I had about why she was talking about that, and then she gets that look again.
In that example of yours, I would assume she was asking if I was taking the train. I'd be like:
ME: ... Where to? (doko e?)
SHE: To the meeting. (miitingu made)
ME: What meeting? (nan no?)
SHE: THAT meeting! (ANO miitingu!)
ME: ...
SHE: Noriaki's meeting! (Noriaki-kun no!)
ME: ... I'm not going to that meeting. (Boku wa ikanai.)
SHE: NORIAKI! (NORIAKI!)
ME: ...OHHHHHhhhh! "Is NORIAKI taking the train!" Okay. Yeah.(OHHHHHhhhh! "NORIAKI-kun wa densha de iku!" Okay. Hai.)
SHE: (under her breath) Are you stupid? (Baka ja nai?)
Or my favorite: That is that, isn't it?! (Sore wa are da yo ne!) I usually just throw my hands up at that point and leave the room. That doesn't even make sense in Japanese, but her friends seem to understand. I think it's a boy vs. girl thing, though, because my Japanese guy friends have complained about that phrase before as well.
Japanese/Anglophone marriages are fun, though. Must be why so many people do it.
Why is any comment pointing out the flaws in the Linux user experience considered trolling 'round here? I, too, am constantly being accused of trolling, when I'm actually just reporting my own trouble getting Ubuntu to work on my commodity hardware.
Cue the people saying I'm obviously too stupid for Linux, and therefore don't deserve it, and then cue the guys saying "and you wonder why Linux adoption is so low, with an attitude like that." And cue me not having any mod points for months.
Windows really isn't that bad. Or, rather, the things that are bad about it aren't really bad enough to push developers and users to other platforms. Linux's good points, on the other hand, aren't really good enough to draw users and mainstream developers, and its bad points are more than enough to keep people away. I agree; Linux isn't "finished" yet. Ubuntu is the best I've seen, and I'd love to be using it day-to-day, but I don't count editing config files as "using." That is what I call "setting up," and that process takes maybe an hour on Windows, considerably less on OSX, and as far as I can tell, an infinite amount of time on Linux, because I've never gotten EVERYTHING to work on a Linux box.
Every OS has its good points and bad points. Pointing them out isn't trolling.
Heheh, linguistics classes. I also taught Japanese at a university in the US (i.e. to students who took it on purpose and therefore actually wanted to learn--the most fun I've ever had teaching) for awhile, so I have some practice explaining it.
Disclaimer: I'm a second language acquisition researcher and assessor.
I concur. Absolutely. Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.
Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.
Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).
Yikes. Well said, even if some of it was kidding on the square.
The problem, however, isn't that MS is a mean company (it is) that makes bad products (well--bad OSes. I can't believe how much I love my Xbox 360, and I've never even been tempted to buy a console before). The problem is that so many of us need their OSes to do our jobs. There really is very little most people can do about it. Linux really isn't an option for most people, and for a considerable number, OSX really isn't either.
The new Macs are the only threat I see, being that they can now boot Windows natively. I have a Mac laptop now, because I can still run my critical Windows apps either natively or in emulation (I haven't noticed any speed difference between the two, but games require a native reboot), and this has caused me to begin to loathe XP, whereas I used to be ambivalent. The Intel move is the smartest thing Apple has ever done.
Similarly, what may make Linux a viable option (provided drivers for people's hardware actually existed and worked), and which would give me pause, would be someone like VMware entering the fray with a desktop-class emulator like Fusion for OSX (which is what I use and which is awesome, BTW) on Linux. I've been accused of trolling about Linux's lack of viability 'round these parts, but really, until people can run the programs they really actually run (hint: MS Office isn't the only program people run) in a Linux environment, it's just going to live at the sysadmin level, and at the sysadmin's home computer level. A workhorse or a toy (as something of a statistician--don't tell a real statistician that I said that, though--I would like to head off any comments of "but I use it and I'm not a sysadmin" with a word of caution about generalizing from small N sizes, statistical outliers, and self-selected populations).
I'd happily reformat my desktop and put on Ubuntu (which I find slick and intuitive--though I suppose that has more to do with the Gnome folks than the Ubuntu folks, but still) if I could still use my Windows apps without a reboot (I'm open to a reboot for games)... Provided, that is, that I could get the nVidia drivers to work this time...
A cogent and balanced reply from a fellow OSX chooser (as in, one who knows why he chose to switch to OSX, over Windows or Linux). Apple is not evil for trying to make a buck, and even the annoyances that come from that drive are made up for by general quality of their products.
Just my $0.02, don't bite my head off =)
CHOMP!
Seriously, though, I used to think and say things like that, but now, thanks to the folks around here, I understand that it's not OpenOffice's clunkiness that made me feel that way, but my own stupidity and incompetence! You should really re-think your expectations of software, like I have. FOSS is always better, even when it doesn't work quite right. Or at all!