You are probably part of those people who don't care why things don't work.
I'm not responsible for Linux, and I have no interest in whether it succeeds or not. I'm perfectly happy with Windows and OS X.
How can somebody from Linux side take care of this issue, how can somebody convince all the retailers to make Linux version of their programs and how can somebody convince hardware manufacturers to make Linux drivers or to release specification?
Well, for a start, they could ask those retailers why they don't currently offer a Linux program and then break down the barriers the retailers point out. They could ask the hardware manufacturer what it would take to make the specs open, or to allow an experienced Linux coder access to the specs to write a driver to share with the rest of the community. Of course, these things all involve getting off your chair and going into the world at large...
Of course since people don't care "why" and "how" there's no need to respond to this.
It's not "people in general." It's "people who want to see Linux succeed on the desktop." Like I said above, I have no interest in it, but a lot of people on this site do. The problem is that none of those people are really sheepdogging the issues and getting the hard work done, they'd rather just blame it on Broadcom, or HP, or Microsoft, or whatever.
What's the last version of Windows you installed? 98?
If you're allowed to point out Windows flaws from 1998, I'm so going to dig out a huge steaming pile of Linux flaws from 1998 to counter with.
Windows has a really sucky text-based installer, and contrary to popular belief, Windows lacks far more drivers than Linux does -- to get any modern hardware to work under Windows, you have to install third-party drivers separately,
A half-lie, assuming you're talking about a relatively recent version of Windows (i.e. new enough to not have a text-based installer.)
First, XP does have driver issues related to SATA drivers because the install disk is freakin' old, it was developed before SATA really existed and Microsoft waited so long to put out another OS that it became completely obsolete years before Vista was ready. This is a genuine complaint about Microsoft, go ahead and make it.
To get any modern hardware to work with Windows, you have to follow the following steps: 1) Plug it in
(There are a lot of hardware devices that people assume need drivers, but actually don't. For instance, printers-- 99.99% of printers can work fine with drivers built-in to Windows, but the printer companies don't tell you that, giving the false belief that their CD is necessary for the printer to work. There's also devices like iPods/Zunes which don't really work without their supporting applications which don't ship with Windows. That said, Windows will still detect them and install a token USB thumbdrive driver, but they probably won't be very useful without iTunes/Zune installed.)
Now, you may not get *all* the features of the device. Vista, with no drivers, was perfectly capable of using my nVidia video card to draw a 1650x1080 desktop at a reasonable speed. But it did a terrible job of 3D acceleration in video games. (It worked, just did a terrible job of it.) When you say "work" you have to define whether you mean "work" or "everything works."
People don't care *why* things don't work. They don't care who you blame. They only care that it says "Ubuntu" on the box, and their wireless doesn't work. That's it, period.
Harry Truman was famous for having a plaque on his desk that read: "The Buck Stops Here." Linux is engaged in playing a endless, circular, blame game where every flaw in their distributions is to blame on somebody else: Linux can't play DVDs legally because the DVD forum won't give out free licenses. You can't use Linspire's licensed DVD player because it's proprietary!
Linux needs someone to just get in there and take care of the damned problem. Microsoft is successful because of people like Raymond Chen ( http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ ) who is willing, able, and even eager to drill a problem down to the source, the machine code, to fix the bug and deliver a quality product. Linux doesn't have people like that, and it doesn't seem to know how to motivate them, so instead of someone saying "hey, look, I figured out this wireless driver thing once and for all" all you get is "it's Broadcom's fault! It's Apple's fault!"
There's also the concept of "the basics." That's what keeps me away from Linux.
"The basics" are things like:
Does copy and paste work *all* the time in *all* applications for the OS? Does it always have the same keyboard shortcut? The first time I tried Linux, copy-and-paste didn't work if you closed the source application before pasting. The second time (more recently, early 2006) you couldn't copy cells from a spreadsheet into a bitmap paint program, you just got nothing.
If hardware is on your "supported" list, does it actually work? Ubuntu claimed to support my 14" iBook, but it didn't support the wireless, and it didn't support sleep mode. The RedHat distro I tried back in the day specifically listed the SoundBlaster 128 as a supported sound card, but when I installed it I got nothing but system beeps. (BTW, according to Apple, iBooks need to sleep while closed otherwise they could potentially overheat and damage themselves.) The IVTV driver says it supports Hauppauge WinPVR 250 cards, but I have a card of that model it doesn't support. When I talked to Linux users about it, they'd always tell me "well Hauppauge must have changed the chipset." Fine, but don't claim you support it if you can't back it up!
There are also several other annoyances that drive me crazy. A few years ago, there was a big push behind Knoppix for troubleshooting Windows installs. Well, I had a funky buggy Windows install so I tried burning a Knoppix CD and troubleshooting it. The problem is, Knoppix required a 700 MB CD and I only had 650 MB CDs available... groan! After hunting the entire office for a 700 MB blank CD, I finally get Knoppix burned, boot it up, and what do I see on the start menu? VIDEO GAMES! You really pushed the requirements of the OS from 650 to 700 MB to add video games? Most of which didn't even work on the computer I booted it on!
Now I know all of these incidents are "old", but every time I try Linux I find a new one to gripe about. These are things that every other operating system has nailed down pat, and Linux is still struggling with. If you want Linux to conquer the desktop, you need to go back to basics and make sure your 2008 Linux distro as a bare minimum can do everything that Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.5 can do. (Yes, copying spreadsheet cells into a bitmap program works flawlessly on both of these. In fact, I think I can safely say it worked fine in Mac OS 6 and Windows 3.11 also.)
but going from xp -> vista is also quite a "learning" investment.
Why? Because they removed the word "My" from "Computer," "Documents," etc?
The *only* parts of Vista that's different from XP is the Control Panel and Start Menu. And both of those can be easily toggled to look and work exactly like previous versions of Windows.
Hell, hasn't Slashdot spent the better part of the last year with this exact complaint: "Vista isn't different enough from XP to be worth upgrading"? Now you're griping that it's too different to be easy to learn for XP users?
I'm calling BS on you. Sorry, but you're going to have to justify your thinking at least a little bit before I'm going to invest in it.
I answered that with "spoofing" noting the number of moronically designed web sites that check the user agent and if it isn't IE on Windows tells you to "upgrade to a modern browser".
Yeah, there's a lot of badly designed websites out there. But what other method would you propose for detecting the number of Linux users? You said yourself that download counts are woefully inaccurate, Linux users are way too paranoid to let any of their distros report back install data. It sounds to me that the weblog-based approach is the best in this situation.
Either that, or you'd just rather say "Linux has more users than that for these reasons!" everytime somebody attempts to estimate how many Linux installs are out there. My guess is that's probably the case.
Now, lets take this to its logical conclusion (and I apologise if you're a programmer for Microsoft but you should get a job with a better company if you value your reputation).
Reputation? A single improvement made in an Office product has the potential to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of users. An improvement to Windows itself has the potential to reach a billion plus people. Where else can you work as a programmer where you have that level of influence over the world?
IE hires web site coders who code stupid web sites stupidly - in this case, Hotmail. It is simplly moronic to exclude ANY potential customers.
First of all, the Internet Explorer team doesn't have any web site coders except those required to maintain its own site... if they even manage their own, which they very well may not. In any case, they certainly don't work on Hotmail.
Secondly, you're assuming hostility where there is no need. Isn't it more likely that it's a simple bug?
It isn't a leap of the imagination to say that if their site coders are fucktarded morons, their OS and app programmers probably are as well.
Uh, yes it is. Do you think Microsoft regularly takes people from the Windows and Office teams and tells them to work on web design projects? Seriously? Microsoft has something like 70,000 employees-- don't you think they might have specialized roles just a teeny bit?
I dislike Microsoft becaue I'm forced to use their products at work.
Ignoring the assertion that you're "forced" to do anything (unless you're in Iran maybe), if that's the best reason you have to dislike Microsoft I guess Microsoft's doing a pretty good job. If you were "forced" to use Apple products, would you dislike them too?
I'm using Yahoo mail, where does that leave me if Microsoft is sucessful in buying them out?
Based on the rest of your post, I'd have to say whining about it on Slashdot.
Except Hotmail *does* work, just one little feature doesn't. It also doesn't work in Outlook Web Access. The part that nobody's discussing is: does this not work because Microsoft hates you and wants you to die, or does it not work because Firefox lacks the capability to make it work?
There are a million JS differences between browsers, some big and some tiny, and Mozilla seems to often go out of its way specifically to be incompatible with IE and/or bullheadedly refuse to change or add anything to be more compatible with IE. It's possible, even likely, that the reason Hotmail doesn't have this feature on FF is because in FF it doesn't work.
I love how diligently the off-topic tag is used. Regardless of how "funny" this is (I'll bow to the opinion of LOTR fans or whatever the hell that's about on this matter), this is completely and utterly off-topic and a waste of your mod points. At least try to vaguely know what the article's about before moderating.
Is there any statement they could possibly have said that wouldn't result in 400 Slashdot comments talking about how crappy Vista is? What would this statement look like?
In any case, is this a surprise? They're saying that the 100k retails they sell every year don't influence their opinion as much as the 250 million that Dell and HP are selling every month. Duh? It kind of reminds me of the old woman in Futurama who goes to the stockholder meeting with one share and demands to be heard.
I never thought there would be a day when XP would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs.
It's considered a step up from the current state of affairs... by about a dozen loud posters on Slashdot. "Dozen loud posters on Slashdot" != "Reality".
Given the fact that poor foreign policy was what created extremists in the first place, yeah we should step back and re-evaluate our priorities and our approach in dealing with other countries.
No, we don't "create" extremists.
Look, if you are so fucked up in the head that you think it's a good idea to murder people, you're beyond all help. You're owed nothing. I'm sick of people apologizing for these sick psychopaths, saying that because the US has troops in some country it's OK for them to murder-- it's not!
Grown-ups can settle disputes without killing each other.
Look, here's one of the features missing from ODF: "autoSpaceLikeWord95." You just admitted it, you've actually pasted in a link to where it's described in the OOXML format.
And yet you don't think it "counts" for some reason. So why should I being a jerk to get you a list of features when you're just going to arbitrarily decree that they don't "count" towards your list? Why would I waste my time?
so why the feck did you bring it up in the first place?
Because I have friends who are qualified to judge, and they've told me this and I trust them. Yes, I could go seek them out and ask them three dozen annoying questions about exactly which features the format doesn't support, but then: 1) I'd be being a jerk to friends of mine 2) Everybody on Slashdot would just shoot them down by cherry-picking what counts as a "feature" and what doesn't. Like the grandparent did.
Either you're an idiot, you're lying or it's a WAG.
I'm probably an idiot, but I'm not lying. Also, I hope I'm not a WAG. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds bad.
Please, I don't care what they say. The fact of the matter is that they're willing and able to attack anybody on Earth for drawing a cartoon and putting it in a newspaper. Why are you defending these people?
Look, it's great that we're having this conversation. Freedom of speech is my most cherished right. But if these terrorists had their way, the entire world would be living under Sharia law, and I'm not willing to just lie down and let that happen regardless of where the US stations troops.
I doubt Castro is happy about having US troops in Cuba, but he's not sending his citizens to the US to blow themselves up.
The ODF format is technically superior, but because it won't work with old Microsoft "features" (read: bugs), Microsoft cannot compete.
You know there are actual features supported by Microsoft Office products that aren't included in the ODF format, right? The only way Microsoft *could* use that standard is to remove features from their product, or extend the standard. If they remove features, customers are unhappy. If they extend the standard, the howler monkeys at Slashdot go "embrace and extend! embrace and extend!"
It's a no-win situation for Microsoft, and it's no wonder they're sticking with their own file format. What bothers me the most is the assertion that Microsoft's proposing their own format to be "evil" as opposed to simply "ODF doesn't have all we need."
I also think that's the reason some of their products (Lotus Notes, for example) are steaming piles of crap. IBM sells you the steaming pile of crap, then sells you the expensive consultants to make it less steaming.
And no, I don't believe that's good for the greater IT community. The greater IT community would be better served by quality software that does exactly what it's supposed to do and no more, and is usable by the average user. IBM's nowhere close. (Not that I'm saying Microsoft is.)
IBM's slamming a competitor. How is this any different than when Microsoft releases a press release saying Windows servers has a lower TCO than Linux servers?
No kidding. I live in the Seattle area, the hub of dozens or hundreds of dot coms and internet companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo of America, RealNetworks, etc... and we're nowhere even close to getting FIOS anywhere. Verizon also doesn't even bother to unbundle DSL from phone service in my area. (And the only competing ISP, Speakeasy, doesn't offer DSL service where I live.)
I have the same choices as the parent, with the exception that the DSL is from Verizon and not AT&T. I refuse to do business with Comcast, so Verizon it is. There's competing DSL vendors, notably Speakeasy (not in my city), and we have the expensive and slow Clearwire for people closer to Seattle, but I got nothing. Every six months or so, I re-check my Internet options, and I always end up with the same pointless between Verizon DSL and Comcast.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know how things work, do you?
I like to think I have a pretty good idea.
You are probably part of those people who don't care why things don't work.
I'm not responsible for Linux, and I have no interest in whether it succeeds or not. I'm perfectly happy with Windows and OS X.
How can somebody from Linux side take care of this issue, how can somebody convince all the retailers to make Linux version of their programs and how can somebody convince hardware manufacturers to make Linux drivers or to release specification?
Well, for a start, they could ask those retailers why they don't currently offer a Linux program and then break down the barriers the retailers point out. They could ask the hardware manufacturer what it would take to make the specs open, or to allow an experienced Linux coder access to the specs to write a driver to share with the rest of the community. Of course, these things all involve getting off your chair and going into the world at large...
Of course since people don't care "why" and "how" there's no need to respond to this.
It's not "people in general." It's "people who want to see Linux succeed on the desktop." Like I said above, I have no interest in it, but a lot of people on this site do. The problem is that none of those people are really sheepdogging the issues and getting the hard work done, they'd rather just blame it on Broadcom, or HP, or Microsoft, or whatever.
Windows has a really sucky text-based installer,
What's the last version of Windows you installed? 98?
If you're allowed to point out Windows flaws from 1998, I'm so going to dig out a huge steaming pile of Linux flaws from 1998 to counter with.
Windows has a really sucky text-based installer, and contrary to popular belief, Windows lacks far more drivers than Linux does -- to get any modern hardware to work under Windows, you have to install third-party drivers separately,
A half-lie, assuming you're talking about a relatively recent version of Windows (i.e. new enough to not have a text-based installer.)
First, XP does have driver issues related to SATA drivers because the install disk is freakin' old, it was developed before SATA really existed and Microsoft waited so long to put out another OS that it became completely obsolete years before Vista was ready. This is a genuine complaint about Microsoft, go ahead and make it.
To get any modern hardware to work with Windows, you have to follow the following steps:
1) Plug it in
(There are a lot of hardware devices that people assume need drivers, but actually don't. For instance, printers-- 99.99% of printers can work fine with drivers built-in to Windows, but the printer companies don't tell you that, giving the false belief that their CD is necessary for the printer to work. There's also devices like iPods/Zunes which don't really work without their supporting applications which don't ship with Windows. That said, Windows will still detect them and install a token USB thumbdrive driver, but they probably won't be very useful without iTunes/Zune installed.)
Now, you may not get *all* the features of the device. Vista, with no drivers, was perfectly capable of using my nVidia video card to draw a 1650x1080 desktop at a reasonable speed. But it did a terrible job of 3D acceleration in video games. (It worked, just did a terrible job of it.) When you say "work" you have to define whether you mean "work" or "everything works."
People don't care *why* things don't work. They don't care who you blame. They only care that it says "Ubuntu" on the box, and their wireless doesn't work. That's it, period.
Harry Truman was famous for having a plaque on his desk that read: "The Buck Stops Here." Linux is engaged in playing a endless, circular, blame game where every flaw in their distributions is to blame on somebody else: Linux can't play DVDs legally because the DVD forum won't give out free licenses. You can't use Linspire's licensed DVD player because it's proprietary!
Linux needs someone to just get in there and take care of the damned problem. Microsoft is successful because of people like Raymond Chen ( http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ ) who is willing, able, and even eager to drill a problem down to the source, the machine code, to fix the bug and deliver a quality product. Linux doesn't have people like that, and it doesn't seem to know how to motivate them, so instead of someone saying "hey, look, I figured out this wireless driver thing once and for all" all you get is "it's Broadcom's fault! It's Apple's fault!"
There's also the concept of "the basics." That's what keeps me away from Linux.
"The basics" are things like:
Does copy and paste work *all* the time in *all* applications for the OS? Does it always have the same keyboard shortcut? The first time I tried Linux, copy-and-paste didn't work if you closed the source application before pasting. The second time (more recently, early 2006) you couldn't copy cells from a spreadsheet into a bitmap paint program, you just got nothing.
If hardware is on your "supported" list, does it actually work? Ubuntu claimed to support my 14" iBook, but it didn't support the wireless, and it didn't support sleep mode. The RedHat distro I tried back in the day specifically listed the SoundBlaster 128 as a supported sound card, but when I installed it I got nothing but system beeps. (BTW, according to Apple, iBooks need to sleep while closed otherwise they could potentially overheat and damage themselves.) The IVTV driver says it supports Hauppauge WinPVR 250 cards, but I have a card of that model it doesn't support. When I talked to Linux users about it, they'd always tell me "well Hauppauge must have changed the chipset." Fine, but don't claim you support it if you can't back it up!
There are also several other annoyances that drive me crazy. A few years ago, there was a big push behind Knoppix for troubleshooting Windows installs. Well, I had a funky buggy Windows install so I tried burning a Knoppix CD and troubleshooting it. The problem is, Knoppix required a 700 MB CD and I only had 650 MB CDs available... groan! After hunting the entire office for a 700 MB blank CD, I finally get Knoppix burned, boot it up, and what do I see on the start menu? VIDEO GAMES! You really pushed the requirements of the OS from 650 to 700 MB to add video games? Most of which didn't even work on the computer I booted it on!
Now I know all of these incidents are "old", but every time I try Linux I find a new one to gripe about. These are things that every other operating system has nailed down pat, and Linux is still struggling with. If you want Linux to conquer the desktop, you need to go back to basics and make sure your 2008 Linux distro as a bare minimum can do everything that Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.5 can do. (Yes, copying spreadsheet cells into a bitmap program works flawlessly on both of these. In fact, I think I can safely say it worked fine in Mac OS 6 and Windows 3.11 also.)
but going from xp -> vista is also quite a "learning" investment.
Why? Because they removed the word "My" from "Computer," "Documents," etc?
The *only* parts of Vista that's different from XP is the Control Panel and Start Menu. And both of those can be easily toggled to look and work exactly like previous versions of Windows.
Hell, hasn't Slashdot spent the better part of the last year with this exact complaint: "Vista isn't different enough from XP to be worth upgrading"? Now you're griping that it's too different to be easy to learn for XP users?
I'm calling BS on you. Sorry, but you're going to have to justify your thinking at least a little bit before I'm going to invest in it.
I answered that with "spoofing" noting the number of moronically designed web sites that check the user agent and if it isn't IE on Windows tells you to "upgrade to a modern browser".
Yeah, there's a lot of badly designed websites out there. But what other method would you propose for detecting the number of Linux users? You said yourself that download counts are woefully inaccurate, Linux users are way too paranoid to let any of their distros report back install data. It sounds to me that the weblog-based approach is the best in this situation.
Either that, or you'd just rather say "Linux has more users than that for these reasons!" everytime somebody attempts to estimate how many Linux installs are out there. My guess is that's probably the case.
Now, lets take this to its logical conclusion (and I apologise if you're a programmer for Microsoft but you should get a job with a better company if you value your reputation).
Reputation? A single improvement made in an Office product has the potential to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of users. An improvement to Windows itself has the potential to reach a billion plus people. Where else can you work as a programmer where you have that level of influence over the world?
IE hires web site coders who code stupid web sites stupidly - in this case, Hotmail. It is simplly moronic to exclude ANY potential customers.
First of all, the Internet Explorer team doesn't have any web site coders except those required to maintain its own site... if they even manage their own, which they very well may not. In any case, they certainly don't work on Hotmail.
Secondly, you're assuming hostility where there is no need. Isn't it more likely that it's a simple bug?
It isn't a leap of the imagination to say that if their site coders are fucktarded morons, their OS and app programmers probably are as well.
Uh, yes it is. Do you think Microsoft regularly takes people from the Windows and Office teams and tells them to work on web design projects? Seriously? Microsoft has something like 70,000 employees-- don't you think they might have specialized roles just a teeny bit?
I dislike Microsoft becaue I'm forced to use their products at work.
Ignoring the assertion that you're "forced" to do anything (unless you're in Iran maybe), if that's the best reason you have to dislike Microsoft I guess Microsoft's doing a pretty good job. If you were "forced" to use Apple products, would you dislike them too?
I'm using Yahoo mail, where does that leave me if Microsoft is sucessful in buying them out?
Based on the rest of your post, I'd have to say whining about it on Slashdot.
Except Hotmail *does* work, just one little feature doesn't. It also doesn't work in Outlook Web Access. The part that nobody's discussing is: does this not work because Microsoft hates you and wants you to die, or does it not work because Firefox lacks the capability to make it work?
There are a million JS differences between browsers, some big and some tiny, and Mozilla seems to often go out of its way specifically to be incompatible with IE and/or bullheadedly refuse to change or add anything to be more compatible with IE. It's possible, even likely, that the reason Hotmail doesn't have this feature on FF is because in FF it doesn't work.
I love how diligently the off-topic tag is used. Regardless of how "funny" this is (I'll bow to the opinion of LOTR fans or whatever the hell that's about on this matter), this is completely and utterly off-topic and a waste of your mod points. At least try to vaguely know what the article's about before moderating.
It's so shocking, because usually Internet petitions can make wide-ranging changes to our society, business and politics!
Be honest with me:
Is there any statement they could possibly have said that wouldn't result in 400 Slashdot comments talking about how crappy Vista is? What would this statement look like?
In any case, is this a surprise? They're saying that the 100k retails they sell every year don't influence their opinion as much as the 250 million that Dell and HP are selling every month. Duh? It kind of reminds me of the old woman in Futurama who goes to the stockholder meeting with one share and demands to be heard.
I never thought there would be a day when XP would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs.
It's considered a step up from the current state of affairs... by about a dozen loud posters on Slashdot. "Dozen loud posters on Slashdot" != "Reality".
Given the fact that poor foreign policy was what created extremists in the first place, yeah we should step back and re-evaluate our priorities and our approach in dealing with other countries.
No, we don't "create" extremists.
Look, if you are so fucked up in the head that you think it's a good idea to murder people, you're beyond all help. You're owed nothing. I'm sick of people apologizing for these sick psychopaths, saying that because the US has troops in some country it's OK for them to murder-- it's not!
Grown-ups can settle disputes without killing each other.
I feel like I'm in crazy world. You blame everybody except for the group that did the actual bombing!
"Sure she was raped, officer, but she was wearing really slutty clothing."
There's no cause for "murdering someone for making a documentary" that I would consider not insane.
Maybe he meant STENDEC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Dust_(aeroplane)
Christ, you're totally missing the point.
Look, here's one of the features missing from ODF: "autoSpaceLikeWord95." You just admitted it, you've actually pasted in a link to where it's described in the OOXML format.
And yet you don't think it "counts" for some reason. So why should I being a jerk to get you a list of features when you're just going to arbitrarily decree that they don't "count" towards your list? Why would I waste my time?
Toughest electronic item I've owned. I got it in 1996, and it's worked like a champ ever since.
so why the feck did you bring it up in the first place?
Because I have friends who are qualified to judge, and they've told me this and I trust them. Yes, I could go seek them out and ask them three dozen annoying questions about exactly which features the format doesn't support, but then:
1) I'd be being a jerk to friends of mine
2) Everybody on Slashdot would just shoot them down by cherry-picking what counts as a "feature" and what doesn't. Like the grandparent did.
Either you're an idiot, you're lying or it's a WAG.
I'm probably an idiot, but I'm not lying. Also, I hope I'm not a WAG. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds bad.
Please, I don't care what they say. The fact of the matter is that they're willing and able to attack anybody on Earth for drawing a cartoon and putting it in a newspaper. Why are you defending these people?
Look, it's great that we're having this conversation. Freedom of speech is my most cherished right. But if these terrorists had their way, the entire world would be living under Sharia law, and I'm not willing to just lie down and let that happen regardless of where the US stations troops.
I doubt Castro is happy about having US troops in Cuba, but he's not sending his citizens to the US to blow themselves up.
Care to name them? I can wait. I can wait all day...
And no, "Space this like Word 95" does not require an extension.
Why should anybody even try to name them when you're just going to cherry pick which features are features and which aren't? Calling BS on that.
But anyway, I'm not qualified to name them. Maybe someone from the Office team is reading and willing to chime in.
The ODF format is technically superior, but because it won't work with old Microsoft "features" (read: bugs), Microsoft cannot compete.
You know there are actual features supported by Microsoft Office products that aren't included in the ODF format, right? The only way Microsoft *could* use that standard is to remove features from their product, or extend the standard. If they remove features, customers are unhappy. If they extend the standard, the howler monkeys at Slashdot go "embrace and extend! embrace and extend!"
It's a no-win situation for Microsoft, and it's no wonder they're sticking with their own file format. What bothers me the most is the assertion that Microsoft's proposing their own format to be "evil" as opposed to simply "ODF doesn't have all we need."
I also think that's the reason some of their products (Lotus Notes, for example) are steaming piles of crap. IBM sells you the steaming pile of crap, then sells you the expensive consultants to make it less steaming.
And no, I don't believe that's good for the greater IT community. The greater IT community would be better served by quality software that does exactly what it's supposed to do and no more, and is usable by the average user. IBM's nowhere close. (Not that I'm saying Microsoft is.)
IBM's slamming a competitor. How is this any different than when Microsoft releases a press release saying Windows servers has a lower TCO than Linux servers?
There's no difference.
There is no question about it -- every statement, the founding of Al Qaeda, every attack begins and ends with U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia.
So they attack Spain because the US has troops in Saudi Arabia?
Great, they're homicidal maniacs *and* stupid.
No kidding. I live in the Seattle area, the hub of dozens or hundreds of dot coms and internet companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo of America, RealNetworks, etc... and we're nowhere even close to getting FIOS anywhere. Verizon also doesn't even bother to unbundle DSL from phone service in my area. (And the only competing ISP, Speakeasy, doesn't offer DSL service where I live.)
I have the same choices as the parent, with the exception that the DSL is from Verizon and not AT&T. I refuse to do business with Comcast, so Verizon it is. There's competing DSL vendors, notably Speakeasy (not in my city), and we have the expensive and slow Clearwire for people closer to Seattle, but I got nothing. Every six months or so, I re-check my Internet options, and I always end up with the same pointless between Verizon DSL and Comcast.
I'd kill a drifter for FIOS at this point.