It's kinda sad how much my post was modded up. I just wanted first post and it was the only mildy relevant thing I could think of to say XD
But it is interesting to wonder nevertheless, these surveys can be interpreted in so many different ways if you put different arguments forward about how the amount of downloads actually represents the amount of people using it..
Though there's also the fact that you can download it onto your work network then install it onto users machines from there. I set it to default for all new machines we send out with our offshore workers
Exactly.. I don't think google comes with any kind of guarantee.. it's just another search engine, but they are the most prominent and somehow people think that since they are known for being the best search engine that it would be deceptive for their rankings to be infallible/influenced by their sponsors.
I don't even know if I want to read the rest of your post. When did I say bundled with Windows? I said machines. I know it's not always there by default, but it is the only option you get for buying an office application suite with a Dell PC for example. IMO it is dominant for the same reason that Windows is dominant, but I've always been happy to edit text documents using whatever I have to hand (Wordpad is fine for me, and I wrote a 13000 word essay on whatever version of Word that came with Windows 3.1 at one point). Word processing to me doesn't seem very different from when I first did it in the early 90s, there is no reason to me that people should have to pay so much for office other than pure greed and monopolism on Microsoft's part.
"And likewise, as I said, the open-ness or close-ness of the format has zero to do with why MS is dominant. They are winning because they are the superior app, and people prefer their product. But rather than compete on the basis of application superiority,"
That is a load of ass. People like it because they think that something is free *must* be worse, and also because the standard isn't open, they do end up with weird inconsistencies. Like one guy had a shadow being shown around the edge of his document (that had been created in word and he had tried to read in open office) and couldn't figure out how to remove it. The only thing that has stopped me converting the whole company to open office is that Outlook is a great email client that everyone is used to (and that I wrote the timesheet system to interact with Excel and cba to rewrite it for OpenOffice at the moment).
Actually I think the secretaries here would be happy to try a different word processor if I asked them nicely. I gave one of the girls an ancient machine with Linux on it, which she then overwrote with XP and realised how much faster Ubuntu was (rather than taking my word for it, which is fair enough really), then switched back. Most people only use MS because they don't know the fucking alternatives even exist, or there are Windows only apps that they want/need. I'm spending more and more time in Mac OS these days, though it's easier to use Windows at work just for ease of integration with the domain. Anyway, go take your flamebait elsewhere...
It's pretty impressive that they can do all that while drawing no power at all from the battery though:P Why don't they just leave the phone off, even when it's on?
Where are you in our darkest hour, Geek-Chic-Man? Are you reading up on all the options you can configure on your Gentoo build? Are you low level formatting your iPod? Are you out getting your hair cut and hydrogen peroxide painted with a motif resembling a penguin eating an apple? Please help us!
wtf.. it's nothing to do with being a superior application, it's to do with it being bundled with machines by default and then everyone being locked in because the file format is pretty much closed. When it comes to jpegs and the like, any viewer works. When it comes to text files, any viewer works. When it comes to files with *shock horror* text with different sizes, colours and styles, everyone seems to want or expect word. The only thing that I think makes Office stand out is Outlook, which I find is a pretty decent application to use, though it's not really very secure.
One more step to not being locked into Microsoft (ie paying through the nose) for an application than can make writing look prettier, and is universally accepted \o/
Because these days people take beatings more seriously than they used to. And if your victim has a great lawyer then they are more likely to be able to extract lots of money/time(jailtime) from you? Whereas from what I can make out of the american legal system (mostly from TV and slashdot), if you don't have an equally good lawyer to block all the crap then you'd do time for more than you deserve. It is a little neolithic to decide everything by raw physical power, and I certainly would want people in power just because they were physically stronger than me:p but otherwise a good beating never hurt anyone.
Yeah well I pretty much could do anything I want at work but I don't want to turn into too much of a slacker. In hindsight, the online stuff got boring as well and I was looking forward to the whole meeting in person thing, which in the end was a disappointment because a lot of things were still the same as online. I won't go into too many weird details, but she hardly EVER EVER spoke out loud to me online. I used to try to make excuses for her in my head, but basically if she had loved me, she would have done a lot of things differently. She now considers herself entirely asexual and doesn't ever expect to go out with anyone again (she kinda thought similar stuff before meeting me but I in my stupidity let myself fall in love with her and let her believe and say that she loved me and wanted to marry me, when her actions didn't seem to back that up).
Mostly saying that just because you get on with someone like a house on fire on the net, doesn't mean it will be like that for real. It's kind of obvious really. The reason we split up wasn't because of the differences anyway, I just noticed that I suddenly had a lot less time to spend on the computer when I was spending time with her for real:P Can be quite a shock when you've spent the last couple of decades doing nothing but using computers. So I reckon, find a girl that enjoys playing computer games too and I'm sorted.
We stopped that when a few people once played out the entire script of Dumb and Dumber using characters registered just for the purpose. Harry, Lloyd and Mary were just one guy who'd spent 3 months trying to get his own +5 ROTFL thread. Unfortunately I found it so pathetic that I hunted him down, staples his fingers to his keyboard, his nads to his chair, then left him watching the first episode of the Teletubbies on repeat at full volume. Had I seen Saw at that point then I may have had some better ideas.
Relating online is also totally different to spending time with someone for real. In real life you can't do funny animated emotes like on MSN, you have to use your actual emotions. You also have to go out and eat and generally do things which are more focused on the fact that you are with the person. When you are just chatting online, be it in text or voice, you are usually doing other things, but if you do that in real life then it's considered rude. People can also be fun in a purely virtual situation, but dull in real life. Like my ex girlfriend. She didn't even like the taste of alcohol (not saying that you need alcohol to have fun, but she could have done with relaxing a bit). Whoopee -.-
Nah I knew what you were trying to say (like that bit in Fight Club where he says if it's cheaper to pay out damages to all the customers suing than perform a product recall, the car company doesn't bother doing the recall). I just didn't think the way you presented it made any sense. What you're talking about aren't metaphors either.. *inserts definition of metaphor*:
A figure of speech in which one thing is described as if it were another, as in "Life is just a bowl of cherries."
Processor 'upgrade'? The brain is pretty much the most awesome processor on the planet. Maybe if all you ever want to do again is play chess, or control an aeroplane then you could swap your brain for a CPU. But I wouldn't consider turning yourself into a vegetable an upgrade. Adding an FPU to your brain would be kind of handy though;)
Also, you either have really slow reactions, or.. you're just weird wanting to rewire yourself with glass instead of biological nerves:P You'd also need to outfit yourself with the appropriate transmitters and receivers since your body doesn't naturally send its signals as light. And you'd need a spare battery for when you got tired.
And then it'll all be cracked in a couple of days (well, it probably will already have been cracked if they use existing DRM tech) and have been a complete and utter waste of fscking money?
indeed;) I maybe would have been in the 7 or 8 hundred thousands if I'd registered when I started reading.. meh. I became a bit of a watered down geek when I started studying Computer Science, because it meant I was spending less time with computers/coding..:(
Slashdot Mirror
It's kinda sad how much my post was modded up. I just wanted first post and it was the only mildy relevant thing I could think of to say XD
But it is interesting to wonder nevertheless, these surveys can be interpreted in so many different ways if you put different arguments forward about how the amount of downloads actually represents the amount of people using it..
I like your thinking boy, you're hired!
Unfortunately it is filled with Microsoft zealots and Linux shills >_>
With regards to TFA, would you really WANT Microsoft code in anything? Ack.
Though there's also the fact that you can download it onto your work network then install it onto users machines from there. I set it to default for all new machines we send out with our offshore workers
How many of those downloads were downloaded using Firefox? :p
Exactly.. I don't think google comes with any kind of guarantee.. it's just another search engine, but they are the most prominent and somehow people think that since they are known for being the best search engine that it would be deceptive for their rankings to be infallible/influenced by their sponsors.
Yeah.. I was like wtf? Then saw the 'whatthefuck' tag. Good to see the tags thing working :D
I don't even know if I want to read the rest of your post. When did I say bundled with Windows? I said machines. I know it's not always there by default, but it is the only option you get for buying an office application suite with a Dell PC for example. IMO it is dominant for the same reason that Windows is dominant, but I've always been happy to edit text documents using whatever I have to hand (Wordpad is fine for me, and I wrote a 13000 word essay on whatever version of Word that came with Windows 3.1 at one point). Word processing to me doesn't seem very different from when I first did it in the early 90s, there is no reason to me that people should have to pay so much for office other than pure greed and monopolism on Microsoft's part.
"And likewise, as I said, the open-ness or close-ness of the format has zero to do with why MS is dominant. They are winning because they are the superior app, and people prefer their product. But rather than compete on the basis of application superiority,"
That is a load of ass. People like it because they think that something is free *must* be worse, and also because the standard isn't open, they do end up with weird inconsistencies. Like one guy had a shadow being shown around the edge of his document (that had been created in word and he had tried to read in open office) and couldn't figure out how to remove it. The only thing that has stopped me converting the whole company to open office is that Outlook is a great email client that everyone is used to (and that I wrote the timesheet system to interact with Excel and cba to rewrite it for OpenOffice at the moment).
Actually I think the secretaries here would be happy to try a different word processor if I asked them nicely. I gave one of the girls an ancient machine with Linux on it, which she then overwrote with XP and realised how much faster Ubuntu was (rather than taking my word for it, which is fair enough really), then switched back. Most people only use MS because they don't know the fucking alternatives even exist, or there are Windows only apps that they want/need. I'm spending more and more time in Mac OS these days, though it's easier to use Windows at work just for ease of integration with the domain. Anyway, go take your flamebait elsewhere...
It's pretty impressive that they can do all that while drawing no power at all from the battery though :P Why don't they just leave the phone off, even when it's on?
Where are you in our darkest hour, Geek-Chic-Man? Are you reading up on all the options you can configure on your Gentoo build? Are you low level formatting your iPod? Are you out getting your hair cut and hydrogen peroxide painted with a motif resembling a penguin eating an apple? Please help us!
wtf.. it's nothing to do with being a superior application, it's to do with it being bundled with machines by default and then everyone being locked in because the file format is pretty much closed. When it comes to jpegs and the like, any viewer works. When it comes to text files, any viewer works. When it comes to files with *shock horror* text with different sizes, colours and styles, everyone seems to want or expect word. The only thing that I think makes Office stand out is Outlook, which I find is a pretty decent application to use, though it's not really very secure.
One more step to not being locked into Microsoft (ie paying through the nose) for an application than can make writing look prettier, and is universally accepted \o/
Because these days people take beatings more seriously than they used to. And if your victim has a great lawyer then they are more likely to be able to extract lots of money/time(jailtime) from you? Whereas from what I can make out of the american legal system (mostly from TV and slashdot), if you don't have an equally good lawyer to block all the crap then you'd do time for more than you deserve. It is a little neolithic to decide everything by raw physical power, and I certainly would want people in power just because they were physically stronger than me :p but otherwise a good beating never hurt anyone.
Yeah well I pretty much could do anything I want at work but I don't want to turn into too much of a slacker. In hindsight, the online stuff got boring as well and I was looking forward to the whole meeting in person thing, which in the end was a disappointment because a lot of things were still the same as online. I won't go into too many weird details, but she hardly EVER EVER spoke out loud to me online. I used to try to make excuses for her in my head, but basically if she had loved me, she would have done a lot of things differently. She now considers herself entirely asexual and doesn't ever expect to go out with anyone again (she kinda thought similar stuff before meeting me but I in my stupidity let myself fall in love with her and let her believe and say that she loved me and wanted to marry me, when her actions didn't seem to back that up).
Mostly saying that just because you get on with someone like a house on fire on the net, doesn't mean it will be like that for real. It's kind of obvious really. The reason we split up wasn't because of the differences anyway, I just noticed that I suddenly had a lot less time to spend on the computer when I was spending time with her for real :P Can be quite a shock when you've spent the last couple of decades doing nothing but using computers. So I reckon, find a girl that enjoys playing computer games too and I'm sorted.
We stopped that when a few people once played out the entire script of Dumb and Dumber using characters registered just for the purpose. Harry, Lloyd and Mary were just one guy who'd spent 3 months trying to get his own +5 ROTFL thread. Unfortunately I found it so pathetic that I hunted him down, staples his fingers to his keyboard, his nads to his chair, then left him watching the first episode of the Teletubbies on repeat at full volume. Had I seen Saw at that point then I may have had some better ideas.
Relating online is also totally different to spending time with someone for real. In real life you can't do funny animated emotes like on MSN, you have to use your actual emotions. You also have to go out and eat and generally do things which are more focused on the fact that you are with the person. When you are just chatting online, be it in text or voice, you are usually doing other things, but if you do that in real life then it's considered rude. People can also be fun in a purely virtual situation, but dull in real life. Like my ex girlfriend. She didn't even like the taste of alcohol (not saying that you need alcohol to have fun, but she could have done with relaxing a bit). Whoopee -.-
That doesn't make any sense. By what you're saying it's cheaper to get engineers to fix the problem than getting lawyers.
And also what you mean is that the lawyer's place is higher than you would like
PS IANAL
"it makes me want to drag them out in the street and beat them"
Make sure you have a good lawyer before trying that one
Processor 'upgrade'? The brain is pretty much the most awesome processor on the planet. Maybe if all you ever want to do again is play chess, or control an aeroplane then you could swap your brain for a CPU. But I wouldn't consider turning yourself into a vegetable an upgrade. Adding an FPU to your brain would be kind of handy though ;)
.. you're just weird wanting to rewire yourself with glass instead of biological nerves :P You'd also need to outfit yourself with the appropriate transmitters and receivers since your body doesn't naturally send its signals as light. And you'd need a spare battery for when you got tired.
Also, you either have really slow reactions, or
Pfft, even I knew about that. And I only collected Star Trek Fact Files magazine for around 2 years.
Bah. That's just all manner of ghey. I'm moving to the ocean.
And then it'll all be cracked in a couple of days (well, it probably will already have been cracked if they use existing DRM tech) and have been a complete and utter waste of fscking money?
indeed ;) I maybe would have been in the 7 or 8 hundred thousands if I'd registered when I started reading.. meh. I became a bit of a watered down geek when I started studying Computer Science, because it meant I was spending less time with computers/coding.. :(