Ignorant Linux users who haven't used Office since 97 marked this "funny."
He's serious. Microsoft's Office team has completely gone back to the drawing board and rewritten the interface to the program from scratch. No menus, no dialogs. That's huge for a program this complex and entrenched... imagine if Adobe trashed the entire Photoshop interface and started over with an entirely different paradigm! This is the kind of thing that Apple get accolades for when they do it with products like, say, iTunes.
And what's more, the new interface is good. Really good. It uses less screen space, it reduces the learning curve of the product to a flat line. Seriously, if you think this release of Office is going to be another 'ho-hum the toolbars are blue now' (like Office 2003), think again.
I'm sure Slashdot is going to mark me "funny" or even "flamebait," but I'm really looking forward to the next release of Office.
I agree with the other posts on this thread that that won't do any good because the problem with young drivers isn't their specific age (whether 16 or 21 or even 14), but their inexperience with the car. I didn't respond to that because that point is covered in a bunch of other posts on this thread, and I agree with it. There's no way you can conquer inexperience, even if you make the driving age 30.
Why? They were already breaking about 8 traffic laws as is, and they didn't get apprehended by police. Why do you think adding in more offenses would have suddenly caused a police vehicle to appear behind them with its lights on?
First of all, the behavior of those two was suicidal, and, in fact, they did manage to kill themselves. If it wasn't driving while drunk and on drugs, it would have been shooting up acid they found in a pile of shit or some other method of self-destruction.
Secondly, it seems that the only way of solving this problem is to have more cops or alert citizens on the road calling stuff like this in.
Which was borrowed from Marathon, like a lot of other stuff in Half-Life. Personally, I think that game is over-rated... Marathon did most of what Half-Life did first, but since the Mac wasn't a popular gaming platform, it's utterly ignored in the gaming press.
Read the review. From what I saw, his MAIN complaint is that it froze and spontaneously reboot often, had poor battery life, and a relatively long boot time. Nothing to do with features it lacks.
You're completely glossing over these issues. Does yours display the same problems or not? If so, how is the reviewer wrong or misleading in any way?
(c) in the six years since Taco answered the question they still haven't reached a decision about foreign mirrors?
Please, look how long it took Slashdot to become standard xhtml+CSS. Look how many bugs in Slashcode have been around for ages. Look at all the shoddy editing, duplicate stories... sure the Slashdot editors are lazy as hell, but that doesn't say anything about the US in general.
Ok, enough other people have debunked your other points so I won't go into detail here, but:
1) Unix was not originally designed with security in mind. 2) The Windows NT kernel, used by all current Microsoft OSes, was.
(Not that this implies that NT is currently more secure than Unix, or that Mac OS, another OS that had no conception of security whatsoever until 2001, is less secure than NT.)
But the real problem is that the "SECURITY OMG!" crowd here in Slashdot completely and utterly misses the point. When you say "security" what you mean is two things:
1) The average user/program can't muck around in the system files and break things. 2) A user can't muck around in another user's files and destroy data.
But what you're missing is the most important part of security:
3) A malware program (regardless of how it is installed, whether via trojan horse, social engineering, or a security flaw in some client program) can destroy a user's data.
NO OS has any type of protection against number 3 whatsoever right now, and it's a shame because while the OS might be worth $300 (the cost of an off-the-shelf Windows XP Pro install), the data in the user's directory is, in the vast majority of cases, worth several times that. I can attest that all my financial records are worth a heck of a lot more than my CD of Windows on the shelf.
In addition, the OS is easy to reinstall. If my files are lost, they're gone forever. (Now, I backup, but the computer industry needs to figure out once and for all that 99% of users *do not* back up files and act accordingly.)
What I'd like to see is a CVS-like feature built-into the filesystem so that if some malware *did* delete my files, I could "revert disk to yesterday" or some-such feature and get everything back. THAT would be TRUE SECURITY as far as I'm concerned... and yet where is it? Microsoft doesn't have it, Mac OS doesn't have it, Linux doesn't have it. Who gives a crap about my easily-replaced system files? Give me my data back!
They're not expecting people to use the full bandwidth 24/7. The normal user will log on, maybe download a few songs from iTunes while chatting with a buddy over Skype and sharing links to Google Video files. That's why they buy the bandwidth for, so they can do all these things at once. Then (and this is the important part that sets pirates apart from everyone else) they log off and go about their lives.
Now, I understand the point of your argument that it's stupid to offer unlimited if you don't want people using it unlimitedly, but it doesn't mean your solemn duty as a subscriber is to keep your internet pipe full 24/7. The only thing I keep running close to 24/7 is my IM client, and even it goes off when I sleep. (I'm not counting all the various automatic update systems and such on my computer, of course.)
I live about 6 miles from where I work. I've love to bike to work, but the only road between our two towns is a state highway with no shoulders... hm. I think I'll drive and not end up as a pedestrian pancake.
Most people I know with SUVs have them to tow trailers or boats. I wouldn't say that hauling is a big reason to buy them, but towing capacity almost certainly is.
I seem to recall that every other time we (meaning mankind) have tried to "fix" an ecological problem, we end up making it about a dozen times worse. See Australia, for instance.
There's about 4 layers here:
1) Convince me that global warming is happening
2) Convince me that it's due to human activity
3) Convince me that it *can* be 'solved' or at least reduced
4) Convince me that working to 'solve' it won't make things worse like it has in the past.
Right now I'm somewhere between number 1 and 2 there.
Serious Sam has already out-Duke Duke Nukem, and it's had an expansion pack and a sequel, both of which were fun and (most importantly) came out on time. 3DRealms needs to just give up and admit it's a scam.
His theory is BS anyway, because there's as many incompetent losers doing *nix system administration (percentage-wise) as doing Windows administration. And there are as many good Windows administrator (percentage-wise) as good *nix system administrators. And the only conclusion we end up drawing is that it doesn't really matter what OS/platform you choose as long as you hire smart and skilled admins for it, which supports my personal experience.
Nice rant, but, uh, Dell *does* give you the plain jane Windows XP install CD (separate from the bloatware Restore CD), at least on all their Dimension machines. I can't guarantee it does on the XPS machines, though.
You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.
Just say Esperanto, you're not insulting anybody here.:)
But yes, I agree with you. Added to that, Word documents have features that OpenDoc doesn't have specifications for. It's interesting that Microsoft (if I remember correctly) has joined the OpenDoc committee because maybe working together with the OpenOffice folks they can come up with a file format that supports all the Word features, all the OpenOffice features, and is still backwards-combatible with either OpenOffice or Word. It'll be a challenge and a half, though.
You can do more with Office on Windows or Macintosh than you can with OpenOffice on Linux, and they're more integrated with the OS to boot.
You might not use the features in Office that OpenOffice doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that nobody uses them. Where I work, I constantly come across documents that use Word's revision tracking. It's not something I use, but it's an extremely handy feature that, frankly, OpenOffice doesn't do well.
That's true, but you have to admit that people who use TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) without defining them the first time should be shot on sight, then dragged into the middle of a freeway and shot again.
Imagine how many Slashdot articles we have where the top 3-4 comments do nothing but define the TLAs the article's author used without defining, meaning we all have to read the comments (even if we don't find the subject interesting) just to figure out what the hell is going on.
Or if you're not a Microsoft fan, I ran Mac OS System 7 just fine on a Motorola 68040, and it was a full desktop environment by any definition of the term. Even had drag&drop.
Hah. It might as well read, "The Online Book Portal Created By Morons!" as far as I'm concerned. How do you let such a easy-to-spot mistake go unnoticed on the first sentence of your home page? Criminy. Even worse, what the hell is it supposed to mean? My guess is they mean "1133 registered users and 334 unregistered users," but your guess is as good as mine.
More criticisms: Their website design is questionable; it looks like a combination of the default phpbb subSilver theme combinaed with poorly-created transparent.gifs. There's no site search other than Google's, which isn't *terrible*, except that Google's search isn't designed for books and doesn't return the fields you'd be most interested in. (i.e. Title, Author, Genre.) The DB doesn't contain an entry for the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, but good luck figuring that out from the Google search. (In fact, three search strings in, I'm still not entirely sure it's not there.)
Happens to me with my Cingular Motorola v180 when close to the speakers Dell sent with my Precision 340 workstation computer. I just put the phone on the back counter instead of under the monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorant Linux users who haven't used Office since 97 marked this "funny."
He's serious. Microsoft's Office team has completely gone back to the drawing board and rewritten the interface to the program from scratch. No menus, no dialogs. That's huge for a program this complex and entrenched... imagine if Adobe trashed the entire Photoshop interface and started over with an entirely different paradigm! This is the kind of thing that Apple get accolades for when they do it with products like, say, iTunes.
And what's more, the new interface is good. Really good. It uses less screen space, it reduces the learning curve of the product to a flat line. Seriously, if you think this release of Office is going to be another 'ho-hum the toolbars are blue now' (like Office 2003), think again.
I'm sure Slashdot is going to mark me "funny" or even "flamebait," but I'm really looking forward to the next release of Office.
I agree with the other posts on this thread that that won't do any good because the problem with young drivers isn't their specific age (whether 16 or 21 or even 14), but their inexperience with the car. I didn't respond to that because that point is covered in a bunch of other posts on this thread, and I agree with it. There's no way you can conquer inexperience, even if you make the driving age 30.
Why? They were already breaking about 8 traffic laws as is, and they didn't get apprehended by police. Why do you think adding in more offenses would have suddenly caused a police vehicle to appear behind them with its lights on?
First of all, the behavior of those two was suicidal, and, in fact, they did manage to kill themselves. If it wasn't driving while drunk and on drugs, it would have been shooting up acid they found in a pile of shit or some other method of self-destruction.
Secondly, it seems that the only way of solving this problem is to have more cops or alert citizens on the road calling stuff like this in.
I think it's most interesting feature was LAN play, with real-time voice chat. But whatever.
The HEV was a great idea in HL.
Which was borrowed from Marathon, like a lot of other stuff in Half-Life. Personally, I think that game is over-rated... Marathon did most of what Half-Life did first, but since the Mac wasn't a popular gaming platform, it's utterly ignored in the gaming press.
Read the review. From what I saw, his MAIN complaint is that it froze and spontaneously reboot often, had poor battery life, and a relatively long boot time. Nothing to do with features it lacks.
You're completely glossing over these issues. Does yours display the same problems or not? If so, how is the reviewer wrong or misleading in any way?
(c) in the six years since Taco answered the question they still haven't reached a decision about foreign mirrors?
Please, look how long it took Slashdot to become standard xhtml+CSS. Look how many bugs in Slashcode have been around for ages. Look at all the shoddy editing, duplicate stories... sure the Slashdot editors are lazy as hell, but that doesn't say anything about the US in general.
Ok, enough other people have debunked your other points so I won't go into detail here, but:
1) Unix was not originally designed with security in mind.
2) The Windows NT kernel, used by all current Microsoft OSes, was.
(Not that this implies that NT is currently more secure than Unix, or that Mac OS, another OS that had no conception of security whatsoever until 2001, is less secure than NT.)
But the real problem is that the "SECURITY OMG!" crowd here in Slashdot completely and utterly misses the point. When you say "security" what you mean is two things:
1) The average user/program can't muck around in the system files and break things.
2) A user can't muck around in another user's files and destroy data.
But what you're missing is the most important part of security:
3) A malware program (regardless of how it is installed, whether via trojan horse, social engineering, or a security flaw in some client program) can destroy a user's data.
NO OS has any type of protection against number 3 whatsoever right now, and it's a shame because while the OS might be worth $300 (the cost of an off-the-shelf Windows XP Pro install), the data in the user's directory is, in the vast majority of cases, worth several times that. I can attest that all my financial records are worth a heck of a lot more than my CD of Windows on the shelf.
In addition, the OS is easy to reinstall. If my files are lost, they're gone forever. (Now, I backup, but the computer industry needs to figure out once and for all that 99% of users *do not* back up files and act accordingly.)
What I'd like to see is a CVS-like feature built-into the filesystem so that if some malware *did* delete my files, I could "revert disk to yesterday" or some-such feature and get everything back. THAT would be TRUE SECURITY as far as I'm concerned... and yet where is it? Microsoft doesn't have it, Mac OS doesn't have it, Linux doesn't have it. Who gives a crap about my easily-replaced system files? Give me my data back!
They're not expecting people to use the full bandwidth 24/7. The normal user will log on, maybe download a few songs from iTunes while chatting with a buddy over Skype and sharing links to Google Video files. That's why they buy the bandwidth for, so they can do all these things at once. Then (and this is the important part that sets pirates apart from everyone else) they log off and go about their lives.
Now, I understand the point of your argument that it's stupid to offer unlimited if you don't want people using it unlimitedly, but it doesn't mean your solemn duty as a subscriber is to keep your internet pipe full 24/7. The only thing I keep running close to 24/7 is my IM client, and even it goes off when I sleep. (I'm not counting all the various automatic update systems and such on my computer, of course.)
I live about 6 miles from where I work. I've love to bike to work, but the only road between our two towns is a state highway with no shoulders... hm. I think I'll drive and not end up as a pedestrian pancake.
Most people I know with SUVs have them to tow trailers or boats. I wouldn't say that hauling is a big reason to buy them, but towing capacity almost certainly is.
I seem to recall that every other time we (meaning mankind) have tried to "fix" an ecological problem, we end up making it about a dozen times worse. See Australia, for instance.
There's about 4 layers here:
1) Convince me that global warming is happening
2) Convince me that it's due to human activity
3) Convince me that it *can* be 'solved' or at least reduced
4) Convince me that working to 'solve' it won't make things worse like it has in the past.
Right now I'm somewhere between number 1 and 2 there.
Yeah, but Echostar is one of the very few entertainment/media companies I still respect. It's a shame.
Serious Sam has already out-Duke Duke Nukem, and it's had an expansion pack and a sequel, both of which were fun and (most importantly) came out on time. 3DRealms needs to just give up and admit it's a scam.
His theory is BS anyway, because there's as many incompetent losers doing *nix system administration (percentage-wise) as doing Windows administration. And there are as many good Windows administrator (percentage-wise) as good *nix system administrators. And the only conclusion we end up drawing is that it doesn't really matter what OS/platform you choose as long as you hire smart and skilled admins for it, which supports my personal experience.
Nice rant, but, uh, Dell *does* give you the plain jane Windows XP install CD (separate from the bloatware Restore CD), at least on all their Dimension machines. I can't guarantee it does on the XPS machines, though.
Why not tell us?
Criminy. I'm sick of having to read the comments in every single story because the story summary doesn't give you any useful information.
Wow, that's pretty impressive. All I can say is: "Away from me, housecat! Look at that fur, what a disgrace!"
Hehehe.
You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.
:)
Just say Esperanto, you're not insulting anybody here.
But yes, I agree with you. Added to that, Word documents have features that OpenDoc doesn't have specifications for. It's interesting that Microsoft (if I remember correctly) has joined the OpenDoc committee because maybe working together with the OpenOffice folks they can come up with a file format that supports all the Word features, all the OpenOffice features, and is still backwards-combatible with either OpenOffice or Word. It'll be a challenge and a half, though.
You can do more with Office on Windows or Macintosh than you can with OpenOffice on Linux, and they're more integrated with the OS to boot.
You might not use the features in Office that OpenOffice doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that nobody uses them. Where I work, I constantly come across documents that use Word's revision tracking. It's not something I use, but it's an extremely handy feature that, frankly, OpenOffice doesn't do well.
That's true, but you have to admit that people who use TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) without defining them the first time should be shot on sight, then dragged into the middle of a freeway and shot again.
Imagine how many Slashdot articles we have where the top 3-4 comments do nothing but define the TLAs the article's author used without defining, meaning we all have to read the comments (even if we don't find the subject interesting) just to figure out what the hell is going on.
Or if you're not a Microsoft fan, I ran Mac OS System 7 just fine on a Motorola 68040, and it was a full desktop environment by any definition of the term. Even had drag&drop.
Grah. Ignore the stupid typos, please.
Hah. It might as well read, "The Online Book Portal Created By Morons!" as far as I'm concerned. How do you let such a easy-to-spot mistake go unnoticed on the first sentence of your home page? Criminy. Even worse, what the hell is it supposed to mean? My guess is they mean "1133 registered users and 334 unregistered users," but your guess is as good as mine.
.gifs. There's no site search other than Google's, which isn't *terrible*, except that Google's search isn't designed for books and doesn't return the fields you'd be most interested in. (i.e. Title, Author, Genre.) The DB doesn't contain an entry for the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, but good luck figuring that out from the Google search. (In fact, three search strings in, I'm still not entirely sure it's not there.)
More criticisms: Their website design is questionable; it looks like a combination of the default phpbb subSilver theme combinaed with poorly-created transparent
Happens to me with my Cingular Motorola v180 when close to the speakers Dell sent with my Precision 340 workstation computer. I just put the phone on the back counter instead of under the monitor.