Thanks for the link to a French article. At any rate though, what will people do with all that bandwidth? What do they do with it now? No, seriously I'm just wondering. I have about 12 megabits download speed right now, and honestly I don't really need that much. I do wish my 600 kilobit upload speed were much faster. But what would I do with a gigabit of download?
I hope the contest rewards documentation! A CMS is not a simple beast, yet the systems I have examined (I remember Joomla and its predecessors, in particular) were not well documented. The best docs I could find for Joomla was some tutorial posted by a user in a phpBB forum. A great CMS isn't too useful if it can't be figured out because there are no docs.
The product page says that r3 patched the kernel with Software Suspend 2, that wifi works, that all the special keyboard buttons (e.g. web browser) works, that they fiddled with the X server configuration to get the video working, etc. But I agree that the review would have been more useful if it had stated this information, as that seems to set this laptop apart.
All these arguments show why it's not a good laptop for you, but that doesn't make it a "terrible laptop." First, you're wrong about the lack of OpenGL support. Intel chips do support OpenGL, and what's more, they do it with fully open-source kernel drivers. Compare that to nVidia or ATI chips which require proprietary kernel modules to get the same support.
Second, the graphics memory is shared, but so what? That does matter if you're playing heavy duty games, but if your laptop use consists mainly of Web browsing, email, and Vim usage (as is true for my usage) then it doesn't matter if your memory is shared. If that's a real concern, throw an extra 512MB of RAM in there, which is still cheaper than going for a dedicated GPU.
Third, yes, the screen is only 1024x768, but that also means it's small. The laptop is light and fits easily in my bag. Compare that to 1400x1050, which means widescreen and it means having a bigger panel. It's fine if you want that, but to some people portability is more important than screen real estate.
Fourth, happiness might be doubling up on 9-cell batteries, but to me, happiness is not having to carry two batteries. Weight, weight, weight.
In short, the laptop is made for someone with basic computing needs who values portability over power. It's not a gamers' notebook. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, it just makes it a notebook not suited to everyone's needs. The same is true of one of those XPS monsters with a huge screen, high resolution, and dedicated GPU: it's a hulking machine that weighs several pounds more. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, even if it does make it a notebook that I wouldn't buy.
Gotta love the way MS words the alerts. "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting," Thurott's screen says. "This copy of Windows is not genuine and is not eligible to receive the full range of upgrades and product support..."
MS could have stated the truth: "Microsoft may be a victim of software counterfeiting," or "You are now a victim of Microsoft's greed," but that would have been a turnoff.
You are right, but my point is that if you are slapping together a basic page, it does not matter that the browser is in compatibility (or "quirks") mode. If I am writing a simple page with a little text and some family reunion photos, the intricacies of "padding: 0" do not matter. Just leave out the DTD, throw some basic h1 and b and href tags on the page, and be done with it. Forget CSS and forget validation, and don't worry about how every last point and em looks.
This was not one of Dvorak's better rants because if he wants to make a basic webpage without the complications of CSS, he can still do that. If he wants to make a table-ridden page with spacer GIFs, he can still do that too. If he wants to make a complex page that renders on multiple browsers, that will take some work, whether or not he uses CSS. That's not CSS' fault, it's his fault because he is too lazy to learn how to make a webpage. Being lazy is fine; go and use someone else's hard work (he uses a Wordpress weblog; go get one of the many very good Wordpress templates that are already out there!) or pay someone to do a webpage.
But complaining about CSS is pointless. Writing a sophisticated webpage is a complicated thing to do.
Re:Experts should be optional
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 2, Informative
Meh. Experts are optional. You don't have to use CSS. The HTML you taught your grandfather years ago will still work just fine. The HTML I learned over five years ago in college, using NCSA's tutorial, will still work fine.
You don't need that xmlns declaration at the top of the webpage. Yeah, you need it to validate the page--but only programmers care about that. The browser won't shut down if you don't have it.
Programmers have taken over, but an amateur can still do a basic web page or even a complex one with a little study. It took me a couple of weeks of spare time to put together some basic CSS that's enough for my needs.
"As for "online OS", could anyone tell me the benefit of having even less control over the OS I'm running?"
Mostly because then you don't have to maintain it. Downloading updates and keeping a machine secure is a pain. So is backing up data. By letting full-time experts do this you save time and hassle.
I moved my e-mail to Yahoo years ago and then to Gmail, precisely because I was tired of backing up email and making sure email got scanned for viruses. I know there are disadvantages. I have to be connected to the Net to read or compose messages, but with broadband that's no big deal. Yahoo and Google can read all my mail, but email isn't private anyway unless you use GnuPG, which I don't. Google can go out of business or suffer a hardware failure, thus taking all my mail with them, but I consider that to be unlikely--much less likely than me wiping out all my data due to an error or the failure of a cheap hard disk.
Having professionals get my mail and back it up is worth it to me and if someone could pull that off with an OS I would consider that too.
I checked out the article linked to the words "Vista killer." The word "killer" appears nowhere in the article, leaving me to wonder: "Vista killer" alleged by whom? We Linux users are hopeful, but not stupid. The article does compare Vista and SUSE, but and the summary's vague "alleged" without support, coupled with a quotation from an unknown and possibly imaginary source, strikes me as distortion.
I just don't shop at places that have mail-in rebates. Period.
Wow, that's a bit extreme. I don't consider rebates when I'm deciding what to buy. So if one product is $50 with a $25 mail-in rebate, and the other product is $49.99 with no rebate, I'll take the $49.99 one.
If after this decision-making process I have a product that has a rebate anyway, I will mail it in unless the rebate is for a trivial amount. Might as well collect the money.
There are MORE than enough extra computing cycles out there.
Exactly. The columnist's time would have been much better spent growing the pie by publicizing other distributed apps and how easy it is to get them running. Google Toolbar has Google Compute, which donates cycles to Folding@Home. There's no easier way to get started with donating CPU cycles. A column of "Wow, this distribued computing thing is so neat, here are good projects" would have gotten many more people to donate cycles than his ridiculous column of "SETI at Home sucks and is stealing CPUs from better projects."
Let's assume (though this is far from obviously true) that underground lines are indeed more reliable. Having a reliable electric supply generates lots of positive externalities--and of course unreliable power has large negative externalities.
The problem is that the positive externalities generated by the underground lines would not be captured by the power company. Even if the buried lines generate benefits to society far in excess of their high costs, the power company would see only a fraction of those benefits (e.g. less money spent on repairs, assuming that's even true.) The cost, though beneficial to society, is prohibitive to the utility.
Possible solutions of course involve government subsidies to bury the power lines, or perhaps requiring them to be buried and allowing the higher cost to be passed to consumers (for instance in Maryland, where electricity has been deregulated, it's only the generation of power that's deregulated. Retail delivery is still regulated.)
It's good to see that the USA is not the only country where the "intellectual property" regime has a death grip on the legislature. Canada's got a fee like this too.
Re:For the love of (insert Deity here) RTA b4 comm
on
$5 Social Wi-Fi Router
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· Score: 1
For the love of (insert Deity here) I did RTFA and I even read the article you linked to, and neither of them says that the router allows the owner to limit the amount of bandwidth that FON visitors use; nor do they say that my own traffic would get priority. That's too bad because if I were sure that my own traffic would get priority I likely would go ahead and order one of those routers...
"Link them up" with what? All that dark fiber does no good if it doesn't connect to all those FON routers. That's why Verizon is spending big bucks to run fiber to the premises.
Reminds me of the story I heard about the guy who wonders why they build power plants. "Why don't they just plug the power plant into the wall?" FON isn't creating bandwidth, and Google's dark fiber isn't directly connected to all these routers. Thus "AT&T et al" are still crucial players here and I doubt they're shaking in their boots...
"may be impossible to see" are the operative words there. Ever used a Sharpie to black out the routing number on the bottom of a check? You can still make out the numbers. One way I've found to really black them out is to Sharpie the numbers, and then Xerox that check. Even Sharpies don't work as they might at first appear to.
Real redactors use razors. You hold up one of those redacted documents and it looks like a punch card.
My understanding was that Firefox has some interesting things in the pipeline. I find bookmarks to be inflexible and useless, but the del.icio.us UI is a bit clunky. Firefox has got some sort of new bookmark framework that will allow tagging and sharing amongst multiple users, all with the fast UI of built-in bookmarks. There are innovations out there to be made in browsers, but we're just now recovering from years of IE hegemony and stagnation.
The Washington Post is an excellent newspaper with an outstanding editorial staff. It's a shame that their website wastes the paper's editorial resources.
Start with the home page. It's impossible to scan the thing. There are a few big stories at the top of the page, and then the bottom of the page falls into a huge morass of links arranged in multiple columns. The eye gets lost in this junkpile, and the little five-word headlines generally provide no context for the stories. Why don't these guys look at online-only news sites, like CNET News.com or Yahoo News? They're much better organized and easier to scan for interesting news.
Bad layout isn't all that's bad about the website though. Take the ads for example. You'd think that with the registration data they demand from users, they could serve targeted, useful ads. Nope--instead I always get the same ads for mortgage refinancing--how useful for an apartment dweller. Or you'd think that they could use the content of the news stories to serve up targeted ads--wouldn't advertisers pay a lot for that? If I'm reading, say, a story about computers, serve up computer ads; or if I'm reading Steve Barr's "Federal Diary" column, serve up ads for federal employees' health insurance? Hasn't the Post learned anything from Google? Nope--it's always the mortgage refinancing ads. And these guys wonder why they're not making any money on the Web?
Useless ads wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so irritating. All the Post's pages are littered with ads. They figure that annoying pop-ups aren't enough, so recently they started these irritating Flash ads that creep out, seizing a third of your browser window before receding. Are they trying to make it annoying? Is that what they've learned from powerhouse ad sellers like Google--annoying ads work? Did they really make that much money selling X10 camera ads?
I look at the Post website because they still have the best local DC coverage. I avoid the Post website for anything else--sure, the Post covers the White House the best, but the AP does almost as good a job and I can get their stuff on the annoyance-free Yahoo News. The Post is intent on annoying its users with cluttered pages and as long as that's the case, craigslist and Google will eat them alive in the online world.
Says the article: "The analogy with Richard Stallman's GNU General Public Licence is evident."
Not really. The article (I won't say Lessig, because the article may be distorting his views) ignores the fact that the GPL relies on copyright. Only with copyright can a GPL licensor ensure that other users of her code grant access to the source code.
Perhaps a better analogy for the point the article is making would be the BSD license, which has spurred creativity without the heavy reliance on copyright that is a feature of the GPL.
But overall the article is unconvincing because it ignores the fact that both GPL and BSD-licensed software exist even though (and indeed because) we have today's regime of long copyrights. One can certainly argue that the state's scarce resources are better spent on things other than enforcing 50-year-old copyrights (or even on enforcing some 1-year-old copyrights.) But creativity isn't being stifled by long copyrights--to the contrary, the Internet is promoting new waves of creativity, with scores of authors of works of all kinds--software, photographs, writings, and more--willingly submitting their works to the public for its use.
This has nothing to do with DRM. True, the wealthy have dominated broadcasting. The wealthy will try to lock their stuff up with DRM when they put it on the Internet. But a Britney Spears single is not political speech. Anyone who's making political speech (say, RMS, a political candidate or, even, Bruce Perens) is not going to use DRM to lock up what they're saying. They want the speech to be distributed on a wide basis.
No "Net neutrality" might be a threat to this--maybe. But DRM? No way.
Agreed. I think people are making this into something it is not. Frequently people say "companies are not going to switch from Excel to some online Google spreadsheet." That is true; you're not going to see TD Ameritrade switching its staff over to Google spreadsheet, for a variety of reasons.
But that is missing the point. The people at Google are not idiots and they understand that large enterprises, the bread and butter of MS Office, are not going to switch over to Google spreadsheet. They are going for a different market--one that MS has not served well. I think that market has two prongs: first, small businesses--I mean, three or four people--who do not have an IT department. They don't have full time geeks to manage computers, and they don't have sales reps paying them personal calls. These small businesses might see great value in what Google offers: a no-charge spreadsheet that doesn't need to be maintained. Compare that to Office, with its patches and high license fees. And it'll be easy for coworkers to collaborate too.
Google is already going for this market with the Gmail for you domain feature. "But big companies aren't going to switch from Exchange for that," people said. True but, again, missing the point. Tiny businesses aren't running Exchange, but they still want professional-looking email addresses. Gmail for your domain does that, without the hassle or the full-time geeks.
The other prong for Google spreadsheet is collaboration. Office does not do this very well. With Google spreadsheet it will be easy for people worldwide to work together on something, or for one person to access the same simple spreadsheet no matter what computer he is using.
The press is conflict-hungry. Google v. MS, they like to say. But Google is not so stupid as to try to compete directly with MS Office. They are going for a whole new market here that MS has not served well: the small business.
That from a company that wants to charge license fees for FAT? Yeah, right. They might not charge licensing fees now, but if this graphics standard ever gets to be twenty years old, not under active development, and ubiquitous, watch out.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link to a French article. At any rate though, what will people do with all that bandwidth? What do they do with it now? No, seriously I'm just wondering. I have about 12 megabits download speed right now, and honestly I don't really need that much. I do wish my 600 kilobit upload speed were much faster. But what would I do with a gigabit of download?
I hope the contest rewards documentation! A CMS is not a simple beast, yet the systems I have examined (I remember Joomla and its predecessors, in particular) were not well documented. The best docs I could find for Joomla was some tutorial posted by a user in a phpBB forum. A great CMS isn't too useful if it can't be figured out because there are no docs.
The product page says that r3 patched the kernel with Software Suspend 2, that wifi works, that all the special keyboard buttons (e.g. web browser) works, that they fiddled with the X server configuration to get the video working, etc. But I agree that the review would have been more useful if it had stated this information, as that seems to set this laptop apart.
All these arguments show why it's not a good laptop for you, but that doesn't make it a "terrible laptop." First, you're wrong about the lack of OpenGL support. Intel chips do support OpenGL, and what's more, they do it with fully open-source kernel drivers. Compare that to nVidia or ATI chips which require proprietary kernel modules to get the same support.
Second, the graphics memory is shared, but so what? That does matter if you're playing heavy duty games, but if your laptop use consists mainly of Web browsing, email, and Vim usage (as is true for my usage) then it doesn't matter if your memory is shared. If that's a real concern, throw an extra 512MB of RAM in there, which is still cheaper than going for a dedicated GPU.
Third, yes, the screen is only 1024x768, but that also means it's small. The laptop is light and fits easily in my bag. Compare that to 1400x1050, which means widescreen and it means having a bigger panel. It's fine if you want that, but to some people portability is more important than screen real estate.
Fourth, happiness might be doubling up on 9-cell batteries, but to me, happiness is not having to carry two batteries. Weight, weight, weight.
In short, the laptop is made for someone with basic computing needs who values portability over power. It's not a gamers' notebook. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, it just makes it a notebook not suited to everyone's needs. The same is true of one of those XPS monsters with a huge screen, high resolution, and dedicated GPU: it's a hulking machine that weighs several pounds more. That doesn't make it a "terrible" notebook, even if it does make it a notebook that I wouldn't buy.
Gotta love the way MS words the alerts. "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting," Thurott's screen says. "This copy of Windows is not genuine and is not eligible to receive the full range of upgrades and product support..." MS could have stated the truth: "Microsoft may be a victim of software counterfeiting," or "You are now a victim of Microsoft's greed," but that would have been a turnoff.
You are right, but my point is that if you are slapping together a basic page, it does not matter that the browser is in compatibility (or "quirks") mode. If I am writing a simple page with a little text and some family reunion photos, the intricacies of "padding: 0" do not matter. Just leave out the DTD, throw some basic h1 and b and href tags on the page, and be done with it. Forget CSS and forget validation, and don't worry about how every last point and em looks.
This was not one of Dvorak's better rants because if he wants to make a basic webpage without the complications of CSS, he can still do that. If he wants to make a table-ridden page with spacer GIFs, he can still do that too. If he wants to make a complex page that renders on multiple browsers, that will take some work, whether or not he uses CSS. That's not CSS' fault, it's his fault because he is too lazy to learn how to make a webpage. Being lazy is fine; go and use someone else's hard work (he uses a Wordpress weblog; go get one of the many very good Wordpress templates that are already out there!) or pay someone to do a webpage.
But complaining about CSS is pointless. Writing a sophisticated webpage is a complicated thing to do.
Meh. Experts are optional. You don't have to use CSS. The HTML you taught your grandfather years ago will still work just fine. The HTML I learned over five years ago in college, using NCSA's tutorial, will still work fine.
You don't need that xmlns declaration at the top of the webpage. Yeah, you need it to validate the page--but only programmers care about that. The browser won't shut down if you don't have it.
Programmers have taken over, but an amateur can still do a basic web page or even a complex one with a little study. It took me a couple of weeks of spare time to put together some basic CSS that's enough for my needs.
"As for "online OS", could anyone tell me the benefit of having even less control over the OS I'm running?"
Mostly because then you don't have to maintain it. Downloading updates and keeping a machine secure is a pain. So is backing up data. By letting full-time experts do this you save time and hassle.
I moved my e-mail to Yahoo years ago and then to Gmail, precisely because I was tired of backing up email and making sure email got scanned for viruses. I know there are disadvantages. I have to be connected to the Net to read or compose messages, but with broadband that's no big deal. Yahoo and Google can read all my mail, but email isn't private anyway unless you use GnuPG, which I don't. Google can go out of business or suffer a hardware failure, thus taking all my mail with them, but I consider that to be unlikely--much less likely than me wiping out all my data due to an error or the failure of a cheap hard disk.
Having professionals get my mail and back it up is worth it to me and if someone could pull that off with an OS I would consider that too.
I have been searching for something like this for months; thanks!
I checked out the article linked to the words "Vista killer." The word "killer" appears nowhere in the article, leaving me to wonder: "Vista killer" alleged by whom? We Linux users are hopeful, but not stupid. The article does compare Vista and SUSE, but and the summary's vague "alleged" without support, coupled with a quotation from an unknown and possibly imaginary source, strikes me as distortion.
Wow, that's a bit extreme. I don't consider rebates when I'm deciding what to buy. So if one product is $50 with a $25 mail-in rebate, and the other product is $49.99 with no rebate, I'll take the $49.99 one.
If after this decision-making process I have a product that has a rebate anyway, I will mail it in unless the rebate is for a trivial amount. Might as well collect the money.
Exactly. The columnist's time would have been much better spent growing the pie by publicizing other distributed apps and how easy it is to get them running. Google Toolbar has Google Compute, which donates cycles to Folding@Home. There's no easier way to get started with donating CPU cycles. A column of "Wow, this distribued computing thing is so neat, here are good projects" would have gotten many more people to donate cycles than his ridiculous column of "SETI at Home sucks and is stealing CPUs from better projects."
Let's assume (though this is far from obviously true) that underground lines are indeed more reliable. Having a reliable electric supply generates lots of positive externalities--and of course unreliable power has large negative externalities.
The problem is that the positive externalities generated by the underground lines would not be captured by the power company. Even if the buried lines generate benefits to society far in excess of their high costs, the power company would see only a fraction of those benefits (e.g. less money spent on repairs, assuming that's even true.) The cost, though beneficial to society, is prohibitive to the utility.
Possible solutions of course involve government subsidies to bury the power lines, or perhaps requiring them to be buried and allowing the higher cost to be passed to consumers (for instance in Maryland, where electricity has been deregulated, it's only the generation of power that's deregulated. Retail delivery is still regulated.)
It's good to see that the USA is not the only country where the "intellectual property" regime has a death grip on the legislature. Canada's got a fee like this too.
For the love of (insert Deity here) I did RTFA and I even read the article you linked to, and neither of them says that the router allows the owner to limit the amount of bandwidth that FON visitors use; nor do they say that my own traffic would get priority. That's too bad because if I were sure that my own traffic would get priority I likely would go ahead and order one of those routers...
"Link them up" with what? All that dark fiber does no good if it doesn't connect to all those FON routers. That's why Verizon is spending big bucks to run fiber to the premises.
Reminds me of the story I heard about the guy who wonders why they build power plants. "Why don't they just plug the power plant into the wall?" FON isn't creating bandwidth, and Google's dark fiber isn't directly connected to all these routers. Thus "AT&T et al" are still crucial players here and I doubt they're shaking in their boots...
"may be impossible to see" are the operative words there. Ever used a Sharpie to black out the routing number on the bottom of a check? You can still make out the numbers. One way I've found to really black them out is to Sharpie the numbers, and then Xerox that check. Even Sharpies don't work as they might at first appear to.
Real redactors use razors. You hold up one of those redacted documents and it looks like a punch card.
My understanding was that Firefox has some interesting things in the pipeline. I find bookmarks to be inflexible and useless, but the del.icio.us UI is a bit clunky. Firefox has got some sort of new bookmark framework that will allow tagging and sharing amongst multiple users, all with the fast UI of built-in bookmarks. There are innovations out there to be made in browsers, but we're just now recovering from years of IE hegemony and stagnation.
The Washington Post is an excellent newspaper with an outstanding editorial staff. It's a shame that their website wastes the paper's editorial resources.
Start with the home page. It's impossible to scan the thing. There are a few big stories at the top of the page, and then the bottom of the page falls into a huge morass of links arranged in multiple columns. The eye gets lost in this junkpile, and the little five-word headlines generally provide no context for the stories. Why don't these guys look at online-only news sites, like CNET News.com or Yahoo News? They're much better organized and easier to scan for interesting news.
Bad layout isn't all that's bad about the website though. Take the ads for example. You'd think that with the registration data they demand from users, they could serve targeted, useful ads. Nope--instead I always get the same ads for mortgage refinancing--how useful for an apartment dweller. Or you'd think that they could use the content of the news stories to serve up targeted ads--wouldn't advertisers pay a lot for that? If I'm reading, say, a story about computers, serve up computer ads; or if I'm reading Steve Barr's "Federal Diary" column, serve up ads for federal employees' health insurance? Hasn't the Post learned anything from Google? Nope--it's always the mortgage refinancing ads. And these guys wonder why they're not making any money on the Web?
Useless ads wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so irritating. All the Post's pages are littered with ads. They figure that annoying pop-ups aren't enough, so recently they started these irritating Flash ads that creep out, seizing a third of your browser window before receding. Are they trying to make it annoying? Is that what they've learned from powerhouse ad sellers like Google--annoying ads work? Did they really make that much money selling X10 camera ads?
I look at the Post website because they still have the best local DC coverage. I avoid the Post website for anything else--sure, the Post covers the White House the best, but the AP does almost as good a job and I can get their stuff on the annoyance-free Yahoo News. The Post is intent on annoying its users with cluttered pages and as long as that's the case, craigslist and Google will eat them alive in the online world.
Not really. The article (I won't say Lessig, because the article may be distorting his views) ignores the fact that the GPL relies on copyright. Only with copyright can a GPL licensor ensure that other users of her code grant access to the source code.
Perhaps a better analogy for the point the article is making would be the BSD license, which has spurred creativity without the heavy reliance on copyright that is a feature of the GPL.
But overall the article is unconvincing because it ignores the fact that both GPL and BSD-licensed software exist even though (and indeed because) we have today's regime of long copyrights. One can certainly argue that the state's scarce resources are better spent on things other than enforcing 50-year-old copyrights (or even on enforcing some 1-year-old copyrights.) But creativity isn't being stifled by long copyrights--to the contrary, the Internet is promoting new waves of creativity, with scores of authors of works of all kinds--software, photographs, writings, and more--willingly submitting their works to the public for its use.
No "Net neutrality" might be a threat to this--maybe. But DRM? No way.
But that is missing the point. The people at Google are not idiots and they understand that large enterprises, the bread and butter of MS Office, are not going to switch over to Google spreadsheet. They are going for a different market--one that MS has not served well. I think that market has two prongs: first, small businesses--I mean, three or four people--who do not have an IT department. They don't have full time geeks to manage computers, and they don't have sales reps paying them personal calls. These small businesses might see great value in what Google offers: a no-charge spreadsheet that doesn't need to be maintained. Compare that to Office, with its patches and high license fees. And it'll be easy for coworkers to collaborate too.
Google is already going for this market with the Gmail for you domain feature. "But big companies aren't going to switch from Exchange for that," people said. True but, again, missing the point. Tiny businesses aren't running Exchange, but they still want professional-looking email addresses. Gmail for your domain does that, without the hassle or the full-time geeks.
The other prong for Google spreadsheet is collaboration. Office does not do this very well. With Google spreadsheet it will be easy for people worldwide to work together on something, or for one person to access the same simple spreadsheet no matter what computer he is using.
The press is conflict-hungry. Google v. MS, they like to say. But Google is not so stupid as to try to compete directly with MS Office. They are going for a whole new market here that MS has not served well: the small business.
That from a company that wants to charge license fees for FAT? Yeah, right. They might not charge licensing fees now, but if this graphics standard ever gets to be twenty years old, not under active development, and ubiquitous, watch out.
(looks at phone) of course, the only problem is that a, d, g is 2, 3, 4. doh...
To the tune of "ABC" by the Jackson Five:
"a, d, g. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3."