With that said, aside from it being "easier than ever to do..." can someone give me a REAL example of how office has changed from 2000 to 2007? I'm serious, I want to know what features have been added (and I don't mean changed to the GUI that make it prettier) that actually ADD FUNCTIONALITY.
Pad example to nib on since Office 2007 is indeed an excellent software suite (now I can't agree with the force-the-parents-to-buy-it however).
It's full of productivity features and brand new features that make your work better (I know I use it every day). Excel's new "table" management that takes a far more intelligent interface to the way you layout data. Auto-shapes in Word/Powerpoint that takes your simple (one level or nested) butllet list and turns it into complex flow charts with a single click (and you can flip between hundreds of presets and customize and make your own).
The interface makes it easy to discover features you've never known about before.
The new rendering engine is gorgeous with photo realistic 3D, reflections, soft shadows.
The picture processing has been greatly enhanced and you can make your Word documents look really nice for the first time (you probably hated the damn ugly rainbow word art from previous versions. They replaced that with a far more subtle and professionally looking wordart based on the new rendering engine - it's actually USEFUL for the first time!).
That's just my point of view as a word/excel/powerpoint user. I bet the rest of the products also got a decent upgrade.
There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more. They invest in news that can double as entertainment to sell commercials in a prime-time entertainment slot. The way they advertise their own news programmes makes this obvious, and on television there's no alternative. TV3, in particular, spends a lot of time trying to stress how much better it is than TV1. Any story that has anything to do with that is promoted to the front of its bulletin.
Most reporters are young and inexperienced, with the experienced journalists having either lost their jobs, retired or moved overseas for better opportunities. A lot of reports seem to be more about making sure people know who the reporter is and adding superlatives, annoying clichés, metaphors, and background music that just distract from the actual information.
This EXACTLY mirrors the situation in bulgaria (we have two private TV-s NTV and BTV, and one state: Channel 1, but that's all the difference).
Looks like the market in a small country simply provokes this kind of TV today. I've always been amused how people say "I've stopped watching TV completely". I mean: you can't stop watching TV completely right?.. Wrong. As I also did 4-5 months ago.
It's a mix of stupid game shows, women talk shows, cheap soap operas, and pseudo-news (indeed they keep putting their journalist prizes and tv rating statistics in the news every second week. It's hilariously stupid), not worth watching.
My question is, is he tapping into an unused portion of the brain or is that portion unused because of his disability and the brain just happened to wire it up in the way he's currently using it?
The latter. It's a proven fact in science that most of the "super abilities" in mentally impaired people are directly related to their other mental problem.
For example we read earlier that it's critical for normal human beings to be able to drop neuron connections and make new ones which match their current requirements better. Autists can't do this and hence become proficient in tasks which we balance with other abilities they don't have.
Still, I can only say, thank god for the versatility, and this is just one more example that there is no "smartest" or "best" human being: we're far more powerful when we're all different and working together on a bigger goal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the specific abilities of people with mental disabilities spawn new industries in the decades to come. It has already happened with computer industry (a very large number of the top programmers in the industry have the asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, also responsible for their social awkwardness).
Which, by the way, brings me to a question I have had for a very long time. Why don't we have an assembled laptops kind of concept? People could sell us the lcd/keyboard and cases as a single unit and w could buy and fit our own mobos/procys and stuff into them.
You can't have assembled laptops since they're not made of generic parts. Same reason why there are no assembled mobile phones. The casing is usually custom, the parts are fitted in a custom way to fit the tight space inside a laptop.
Notice how much empty space is in your assembled PC tower. No such thing in a laptop.
And since you need lots of money to build all the custom parts, laptops are branded, and big brands can't afford to be mouthed as distributing machines open to rampant piracy - so they license Windows. And since Microsoft gets into funny contracts with its OEMs, most laptop makers can't even sell Linux laptops per contract. The contract is exclusive (apparently DELL made is somehow though).
However let's face it, most people would need Windows on those laptops. Most laptops come with specialized drivers that run specialized buttons and features on their laptop. If you simply wipe the Windows install and install, say, Ubuntu, you may lose some of the laptop functionality and reduce it to a generic PC part.
Microsoft Launches OSS Site, Submits License for Approval
Your comments:
Blah blah about Windows not supporting fork. "If they actually cared", "wake me up when", "until then, I couldn't give a shit", "gaping flaws in software development" and more cliches about how terrible MS is in principle, so anything they do sucks.
So I'm sitting here wondering. WTF has your post to do with the article at hand. Do you just copy and paste this on all Microsoft related news? Definitely wouldn't be noticeable, it's some quite generic rant.
You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space.
Because there's no reason it would. First wave of Firefox adoption was developers and savvy users. They got development extensions and they cared about good CSS/JS support.
You don't develop for e-mail. You could assemble the occasional HTML email but that's hardly "development".
Second wave of adoption came from the fact not that Firefox is good, but that IE was bad. No tabs (the mythical tabs) and poor security led companies and users to switch.
There were some VBS related exploits for Outlook (part of Office) but nothing last few years about Outlook Express (part of Windows). Outlook Express is a very decent mail client, and people just use it for what it is.
Killer features can't push people to adopt Thunderbird since people care to receive and send their email only. Thunderbirds spam filtering isn't noticed by anyone using Outlook Express. (hm.. what about email tabs...? naah).
You can't count cards in Texas Hold'em. The single deck is shuffled every hand.
I don't mean count literally. In any way recognize the card order. It may even be about specs on the back of each card invisible with simple eye.
Computers can scale and improve their detection detail by simply tacking on a better/faster device to use. Humans have to do with their own eyes/brain.
This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house.
If they would put bots to play against you in a casino, they'll need more bots to grab you in the middle of the street and threaten with death if you don't come inside and play.
The idea of a casino is, it seems plausible you may win. It's very important to keep that plausability.
As for computations, they are ALREADY used in casinos, to setup a system with bias to the casino. House wins, even if you introduce only people in the already so "computed" system. That's the beauty of it.
So computer may lose in a game that has certain amount of pure randomness in it. I'm shocked.
What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.
But sure, introduce noise and win sometimes if it makes you better. They gotta introduce dice rolling in chess as well:
"Haha, HAL, you threw an even number, which means I take your queen for no reason at all and you can't do anything about it!"
Prices don't go up because people are "greedy," prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
I see, so this is why Nintendo games sold in US are times cheaper, and PS3/360 games are even more expensive abroad now (I'm in Europe, I know).
I agree the government in US hurts the value of the dollar, but it's bad for your cause to just slap your pet cause randomly on things unrelated, such as the price of the 3G highend console games.
That cuts the attractions of SL by 50%...When the "Think of the Children" crowd gets 'em to ban sex, Second Life will become officially pointless.
It's like a storm in a jar. I agree it's not fair to Linden Labs. But.
Sex in Second Life - isn't that already pointless. I've always wondered what kind of people hang into this game. It's all about gambling and 3D porn, it's pretty sad.
Despite the fact there's not a shred of observable plausability in this company and their product, I've browsed the blogs and news sites around and saw evidence of hundreds upon hundreds of people apparently placing an order for this laptop, and sometimes even buying some for their family and co-workers.
It truly boggles the mind: it's not supposed (from anything on the site) to be limited stock, so there's no particular hurry to order. On top of that, it's all apparent it's a scam.
Why would people do this? Are people so damn stupid? Makes me wanna become a scammer myself - why work hard on creating real actual working products when there's a bunch of idiots flapping their credit cards if I just say I'll deliver them heaven in 4 to 6 weeks.
So beware: if you see me offering something amazing for $100 these days (still thinking what it may be: free energy, $100 Mercedes S Class, space trip to Mars.. I'll see), I've converted myself to the dark side.
I was not "whining." I make it a point to respond to any post that references communism or socialism as totalitarian with a bit of education.
I didn't talk about totalitarian regimes or anything of the sort. It's a damn joke (with a slight nod to McCarthyism).
If you want to hear my honest opinion: the truth is always more complex than simple ideology. A modern country would usually have a mixed bag of capitalism and communism (such as health care and social care), since none of the systems works in all contexts. To make matter more complex, none of the systems is sustainable in long term without changes, at least if you want to run at maximum capacity for as much of the time as possible. Of course you don't hear the politicians call social care "communism" since it's painted in bad tones for historical reasons.
Politics is a complex thing (done right). Let's not oversimplify it.
As his website says, he is on vacation in Thailand but he will consider doing an interview when he returns. He claims he knows nothing about the rampant fraud/vaporware suspicions all over the internet about this.
The "ceo" you asked, is a known scammer, Ken Eric. He is into get-rich-quick schemes, spam, and financial pyramids.
I am not sure waiting for him to confirm it is a scam or not is very productive. In these situations he likes to play stupid, while the stupid play his game.
Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops? A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop.
That's a great explanation of how they managed to reach so low prices. Democracy, people! I'll never buy another communist laptop from DELL.
Q: When can you deliver my laptop? A: We try to deliver as fast as possible, but the normal time is between 4 and 6 weeks.
Bummer, why the long time? No explanation.
Q: Do you have other products or can I add more memory to this laptop? A: Yes, we have other models coming up next month and if you want to expand with more memory on your laptop you can go to our 'Accessories' page and buy extra memory.
Support disaster: you can't just buy a laptop and then "buy some memory" as accessorie.
Q: How does Linux work? A:The Linux version that comes with the laptop is Fedora from RedHat and is not too much different from using Windows or MacOS
Support disaster: you don't tell people Linux runs just like Windows, or you get drowned in calls about "my game CD doesn't install". Apparently they never planned to support the thing (anything).
Q: Is your laptop a quality product? A: Yes it is, and it comes with 1 year warranty.
No copyright or patents on life? I thought that was implicit in my post - I should've accounted for you I guess.
Oh yea, great solution. Definitely will push the genetical engineering industry forward: investing billions on research and development, and then anyone could take a free sample and pay you nothing.
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation
I'm not interested in their investigation. I just want dark dramatic music background and analysis that makes us believe we're on the edge of epic environmental catastrophe.
Also it's ok to fudge some facts if it makes everything looks more scary, I wouldn't mind.
Patenting / copyright / other methods to articifially control something being copied are STUPID when applied to an entity who's sole purpose is to make copies of itself.
Yes, it's STUPID. So what's your SMART solution?
If you just wanted to declare something stupid and flip the bird, then we could've thought of that ourselves, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
With that said, aside from it being "easier than ever to do..." can someone give me a REAL example of how office has changed from 2000 to 2007? I'm serious, I want to know what features have been added (and I don't mean changed to the GUI that make it prettier) that actually ADD FUNCTIONALITY.
Pad example to nib on since Office 2007 is indeed an excellent software suite (now I can't agree with the force-the-parents-to-buy-it however).
It's full of productivity features and brand new features that make your work better (I know I use it every day). Excel's new "table" management that takes a far more intelligent interface to the way you layout data. Auto-shapes in Word/Powerpoint that takes your simple (one level or nested) butllet list and turns it into complex flow charts with a single click (and you can flip between hundreds of presets and customize and make your own).
The interface makes it easy to discover features you've never known about before.
The new rendering engine is gorgeous with photo realistic 3D, reflections, soft shadows.
The picture processing has been greatly enhanced and you can make your Word documents look really nice for the first time (you probably hated the damn ugly rainbow word art from previous versions. They replaced that with a far more subtle and professionally looking wordart based on the new rendering engine - it's actually USEFUL for the first time!).
That's just my point of view as a word/excel/powerpoint user. I bet the rest of the products also got a decent upgrade.
There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more. They invest in news that can double as entertainment to sell commercials in a prime-time entertainment slot. The way they advertise their own news programmes makes this obvious, and on television there's no alternative. TV3, in particular, spends a lot of time trying to stress how much better it is than TV1. Any story that has anything to do with that is promoted to the front of its bulletin.
Most reporters are young and inexperienced, with the experienced journalists having either lost their jobs, retired or moved overseas for better opportunities. A lot of reports seem to be more about making sure people know who the reporter is and adding superlatives, annoying clichés, metaphors, and background music that just distract from the actual information.
This EXACTLY mirrors the situation in bulgaria (we have two private TV-s NTV and BTV, and one state: Channel 1, but that's all the difference).
Looks like the market in a small country simply provokes this kind of TV today. I've always been amused how people say "I've stopped watching TV completely". I mean: you can't stop watching TV completely right?.. Wrong. As I also did 4-5 months ago.
It's a mix of stupid game shows, women talk shows, cheap soap operas, and pseudo-news (indeed they keep putting their journalist prizes and tv rating statistics in the news every second week. It's hilariously stupid), not worth watching.
Boo, Slashdot censors the cent and euro logos!!
Why is it that so many school districts are so quick to buy expensive Micro$soft software
This is lame, dude. It's about time we take the next level to show how evil Microsoft is: put more money signs in there!
Next time say: by¥ xpn$ive Miro$ot $otwar?
My question is, is he tapping into an unused portion of the brain or is that portion unused because of his disability and the brain just happened to wire it up in the way he's currently using it?
The latter. It's a proven fact in science that most of the "super abilities" in mentally impaired people are directly related to their other mental problem.
For example we read earlier that it's critical for normal human beings to be able to drop neuron connections and make new ones which match their current requirements better. Autists can't do this and hence become proficient in tasks which we balance with other abilities they don't have.
Still, I can only say, thank god for the versatility, and this is just one more example that there is no "smartest" or "best" human being: we're far more powerful when we're all different and working together on a bigger goal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the specific abilities of people with mental disabilities spawn new industries in the decades to come. It has already happened with computer industry (a very large number of the top programmers in the industry have the asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, also responsible for their social awkwardness).
It quickly would turn into a prank you play at parties, school and college. Casually plug your friend's iPod in a nearby computer.
"Hahaha, I bricked your iPod FOREVER. LOLFMAOBBQ".
I'm sure it'll be very funny.
Just once more confirming that if the article's title ends with a "?", it's purified bullshit streaming down your internet connection.
:(
And that wastes so much energy
Which, by the way, brings me to a question I have had for a very long time. Why don't we have an assembled laptops kind of concept? People could sell us the lcd/keyboard and cases as a single unit and w could buy and fit our own mobos/procys and stuff into them.
You can't have assembled laptops since they're not made of generic parts. Same reason why there are no assembled mobile phones. The casing is usually custom, the parts are fitted in a custom way to fit the tight space inside a laptop.
Notice how much empty space is in your assembled PC tower. No such thing in a laptop.
And since you need lots of money to build all the custom parts, laptops are branded, and big brands can't afford to be mouthed as distributing machines open to rampant piracy - so they license Windows. And since Microsoft gets into funny contracts with its OEMs, most laptop makers can't even sell Linux laptops per contract. The contract is exclusive (apparently DELL made is somehow though).
However let's face it, most people would need Windows on those laptops. Most laptops come with specialized drivers that run specialized buttons and features on their laptop. If you simply wipe the Windows install and install, say, Ubuntu, you may lose some of the laptop functionality and reduce it to a generic PC part.
Article:
Microsoft Launches OSS Site, Submits License for Approval
Your comments:
Blah blah about Windows not supporting fork. "If they actually cared", "wake me up when", "until then, I couldn't give a shit", "gaping flaws in software development" and more cliches about how terrible MS is in principle, so anything they do sucks.
So I'm sitting here wondering. WTF has your post to do with the article at hand. Do you just copy and paste this on all Microsoft related news? Definitely wouldn't be noticeable, it's some quite generic rant.
You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space.
Because there's no reason it would. First wave of Firefox adoption was developers and savvy users. They got development extensions and they cared about good CSS/JS support.
You don't develop for e-mail. You could assemble the occasional HTML email but that's hardly "development".
Second wave of adoption came from the fact not that Firefox is good, but that IE was bad. No tabs (the mythical tabs) and poor security led companies and users to switch.
There were some VBS related exploits for Outlook (part of Office) but nothing last few years about Outlook Express (part of Windows). Outlook Express is a very decent mail client, and people just use it for what it is.
Killer features can't push people to adopt Thunderbird since people care to receive and send their email only. Thunderbirds spam filtering isn't noticed by anyone using Outlook Express. (hm.. what about email tabs...? naah).
You can't count cards in Texas Hold'em. The single deck is shuffled every hand.
I don't mean count literally. In any way recognize the card order. It may even be about specs on the back of each card invisible with simple eye.
Computers can scale and improve their detection detail by simply tacking on a better/faster device to use. Humans have to do with their own eyes/brain.
This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house.
If they would put bots to play against you in a casino, they'll need more bots to grab you in the middle of the street and threaten with death if you don't come inside and play.
The idea of a casino is, it seems plausible you may win. It's very important to keep that plausability.
As for computations, they are ALREADY used in casinos, to setup a system with bias to the casino. House wins, even if you introduce only people in the already so "computed" system. That's the beauty of it.
So computer may lose in a game that has certain amount of pure randomness in it. I'm shocked.
What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.
But sure, introduce noise and win sometimes if it makes you better. They gotta introduce dice rolling in chess as well:
"Haha, HAL, you threw an even number, which means I take your queen for no reason at all and you can't do anything about it!"
BusinessWeek has built good thesis on a bad assumption. Windows piracy is already rampant in China and India. It's harvesting time for Microsoft.
It's a phone. Yes, a PHONE.
It's supposed to do one thing and one thing well.
Hey, thanks for posting this from the stone age. I used to have a friend who said:
"It's a computer. Yes, a COMPUTE-ER.
It's supposed to do one thing and one thing well: compute numbers.
Graphics, audio, games, video, publishing, internet. All be damned."
Wake up and smell the roses. Phones will nave be just phones anymore. There's no reason they have to be.
Prices don't go up because people are "greedy," prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
I see, so this is why Nintendo games sold in US are times cheaper, and PS3/360 games are even more expensive abroad now (I'm in Europe, I know).
I agree the government in US hurts the value of the dollar, but it's bad for your cause to just slap your pet cause randomly on things unrelated, such as the price of the 3G highend console games.
That cuts the attractions of SL by 50%...When the "Think of the Children" crowd gets 'em to ban sex, Second Life will become officially pointless.
It's like a storm in a jar. I agree it's not fair to Linden Labs. But.
Sex in Second Life - isn't that already pointless. I've always wondered what kind of people hang into this game. It's all about gambling and 3D porn, it's pretty sad.
Despite the fact there's not a shred of observable plausability in this company and their product, I've browsed the blogs and news sites around and saw evidence of hundreds upon hundreds of people apparently placing an order for this laptop, and sometimes even buying some for their family and co-workers.
It truly boggles the mind: it's not supposed (from anything on the site) to be limited stock, so there's no particular hurry to order. On top of that, it's all apparent it's a scam.
Why would people do this? Are people so damn stupid? Makes me wanna become a scammer myself - why work hard on creating real actual working products when there's a bunch of idiots flapping their credit cards if I just say I'll deliver them heaven in 4 to 6 weeks.
So beware: if you see me offering something amazing for $100 these days (still thinking what it may be: free energy, $100 Mercedes S Class, space trip to Mars.. I'll see), I've converted myself to the dark side.
I was not "whining." I make it a point to respond to any post that references communism or socialism as totalitarian with a bit of education.
I didn't talk about totalitarian regimes or anything of the sort. It's a damn joke (with a slight nod to McCarthyism).
If you want to hear my honest opinion: the truth is always more complex than simple ideology. A modern country would usually have a mixed bag of capitalism and communism (such as health care and social care), since none of the systems works in all contexts. To make matter more complex, none of the systems is sustainable in long term without changes, at least if you want to run at maximum capacity for as much of the time as possible. Of course you don't hear the politicians call social care "communism" since it's painted in bad tones for historical reasons.
Politics is a complex thing (done right). Let's not oversimplify it.
The article concerned good products with bad decisions. Netscape was in the end a bad product with bad decisions. It deserved to die.
Now, what came out of it, is a different story. But Firefox isn't dead anyway.
As his website says, he is on vacation in Thailand but he will consider doing an interview when he returns. He claims he knows nothing about the rampant fraud/vaporware suspicions all over the internet about this.
The "ceo" you asked, is a known scammer, Ken Eric. He is into get-rich-quick schemes, spam, and financial pyramids.
I am not sure waiting for him to confirm it is a scam or not is very productive. In these situations he likes to play stupid, while the stupid play his game.
I'm posting some excerpts from their FAQ:
Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops?
A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop.
That's a great explanation of how they managed to reach so low prices. Democracy, people! I'll never buy another communist laptop from DELL.
Q: When can you deliver my laptop?
A: We try to deliver as fast as possible, but the normal time is between 4 and 6 weeks.
Bummer, why the long time? No explanation.
Q: Do you have other products or can I add more memory to this laptop?
A: Yes, we have other models coming up next month and if you want to expand with more memory on your laptop you can go to our 'Accessories' page and buy extra memory.
Support disaster: you can't just buy a laptop and then "buy some memory" as accessorie.
Q: How does Linux work?
A:The Linux version that comes with the laptop is Fedora from RedHat and is not too much different from using Windows or MacOS
Support disaster: you don't tell people Linux runs just like Windows, or you get drowned in calls about "my game CD doesn't install". Apparently they never planned to support the thing (anything).
Q: Is your laptop a quality product?
A: Yes it is, and it comes with 1 year warranty.
Shit, I'm convinced...
No copyright or patents on life? I thought that was implicit in my post - I should've accounted for you I guess.
:P
Oh yea, great solution. Definitely will push the genetical engineering industry forward: investing billions on research and development, and then anyone could take a free sample and pay you nothing.
Great
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation
I'm not interested in their investigation. I just want dark dramatic music background and analysis that makes us believe we're on the edge of epic environmental catastrophe.
Also it's ok to fudge some facts if it makes everything looks more scary, I wouldn't mind.
Patenting / copyright / other methods to articifially control something being copied are STUPID when applied to an entity who's sole purpose is to make copies of itself.
Yes, it's STUPID. So what's your SMART solution?
If you just wanted to declare something stupid and flip the bird, then we could've thought of that ourselves, thank you.