Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Is there such thing from MS?

Oh, you mean the snapshot stuff? Sure, that's "Volume Shadow Service". Been 
around since XP or so.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
> some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX", 

There's a bunch of internal stuff, as well as things like Media Center, 
.NET, etc.

> unless it is something in the class of user interfaces, and those tend 
> to be used to "hide" things you don't want people mucking with,

Sounds like One True Scotsman syndrome to me.  Because Microsoft doesn't 
innovate, anything Microsoft does is, by definition, not innovation.

> FOSS has an excuse for this, they don't have thousands of developers 
> working 24/7 on *one* project, trying to make it bloody work right. 

Actually, it's worse. FOSS actually discourages getting projects "finished" 
and easy to use and reliable, unless it's infrastructure for the people 
working on other projects. Apache and gcc work great, because on top of 
*that* people can write code that you can sell without giving it away (like 
google does, in other words). But if you actually turned out a 
professional-quality piece of software that needed what it did and it had to 
work well, you couldn't make money off of maintenance. Hence the dearth of 
games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Hence the dearth of
> games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.

Games are creative endeavours, not programs.  There's a program behind
controlling, yes, but it's the graphics, music and sound effects, level
layouts, story and dialoguing that take center stage.  Hardly something the GPL
can automagically churn out from collaborative efforts.

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Hence the dearth of
>> games, accounting software, user electronics, and so on.
> 
> Games are creative endeavours, not programs.  There's a program behind
> controlling, yes, but it's the graphics, music and sound effects, level
> layouts, story and dialoguing that take center stage. 

Ding ding ding!  Congratulations. You understood my point.

> Hardly something the GPL
> can automagically churn out from collaborative efforts.

Actually, you *can* churn out all that from a collaborative effort. See, for 
example, the "Thief 2X" game.

However, there's little "ongoing maintenance" you can contract for, so once 
you release it and everyone copies it for free, you're pretty SOL if you're 
expecting to make a living at it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> I see MS doing lots of new things that aren't on Linux, tho. You don't 
>> stay ahead by not inventing anything new.
>>
> What exactly?

BTW, have you looked at Microsoft's open source OS called Singularity? It's 
pretty darn innovative. I guess if you never actually look at what research 
MS is publishing, you're unlikely to find anything they're doing new, no.

> want at all, or trust, *or* someone goes, "Gee, doesn't GFBunk (or some 
> similarly weirdly named thing) already do that on such an such OS?"

BTW, can you name me perhaps three things that Linux does that's 
distinctively new and innovative? Because I thought about it for a couple 
hours, and I can't think of anything significant I can do in Linux that I 
wasn't doing on Version 7 in 1983 or so, except internet stuff which is new 
with BSD 4.2 about oh 15+ years ago?  Linux doesn't even go as far as Apple 
did and rearrange the file system or fix the X-Windows subsystem.  Heck, 
even NeWS would be better than X.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

> Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
> some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX",

Huh? How many programs have you written using DirectX9 and DirectX10?  Why 
do you think the improvements are a mess?

1) DX10 now allows multiple programs and threads to use the hardware at the 
same time, and is totally integrated with the OS GUI now, unlike in WinXP / 
DX9.  This means that many more fancy stuff can be done with non-fullscreen 
3D apps and multi-threaded programs can use DX without careful programming.
2) DX10 got rid of the fixed function pipeline which has made the API much 
simpler.  Everything must be done with shaders now.
3) Scenes can be rendered to multiple render targets at the same time, which 
makes generating cube-maps and multi-view scenes way faster
4) Geometry shaders have been introduced, which for the first time allows 
the GPU to have some concept of triangles rather than just working blindly 
on vertices and pixels.  This can be widely used to improve performance and 
display quality.
5) Geometry instancing has been much improved, allowing meshes to be 
rendered multiple times without so much overhead as in DX9.  Again, for 
scenes with large amount of vegetation or people etc, this will have big 
speed ups.
6) The usual increase in flexibility of the shaders, including a massive 
increase in the number of registers (like a factor of 1000 increase), 
complete dynamic flow control, unlimited execution length blah blah blah.

Of course some of the above can be implemented using DX9, but it would be 
horrendously complex and very slow.  DX10 is definitely a welcome 
improvement, it will just take a while before game writers can drop DX9 
support and really concentrate on DX10 only games.

Post a reply to this message

>> Yeah, that's right. Because a faulty power supply *completely 
>> explains* why Word crashes when you open certain documents. Oh, 
>> wait... actually it doesn't. :-P
> 
> I didn't say that.

No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
hardware is unreliable. This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems 
are because they produce poor quality products.

Post a reply to this message

> No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
> hardware is unreliable.

IME, every time I am called because of a friend/family computer "not 
working", it is nothing to do with MS.  I can give you a long list of 
reasons, mostly due to other software, hardware malfunction or drivers, but 
none MS.

> This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems are because they produce 
> poor quality products.

I use MS products daily on 3 or 4 machines and cannot remember the last time 
one of them crashed or when MS Office behaved badly.

You mention corrupted Word documents, but IIRC we decided that was due to 
everyone using the same template/file that was corrupted and spreading this 
corruption through all your documents.  This is not really a fault of MS 
Office, especially when you didn't even use the "Open and Repair" command 
which would have probably fixed the problem.

Post a reply to this message

>> No. But you make it sound as if all M$'s problems are because computer 
>> hardware is unreliable.
> 
> IME, every time I am called because of a friend/family computer "not 
> working", it is nothing to do with MS.  I can give you a long list of 
> reasons, mostly due to other software, hardware malfunction or drivers, 
> but none MS.

Most of the problems I get to look at aren't due to M$ either - but a 
significant number of them are.

>> This is manifestly not the case. M$'s problems are because they 
>> produce poor quality products.
> 
> I use MS products daily on 3 or 4 machines and cannot remember the last 
> time one of them crashed or when MS Office behaved badly.

Actual OS crashes are fairly rare, assuming you use your computer in a 
sane mannar.

But I'm not just talking about complete crashes of the entire OS, or 
even crashes of a single application. I'm talking about the whole 
quality equation - how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily 
complicated, poorly documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so 
forth.

> You mention corrupted Word documents, but IIRC we decided that was due 
> to everyone using the same template/file that was corrupted and 
> spreading this corruption through all your documents.  This is not 
> really a fault of MS Office, especially when you didn't even use the 
> "Open and Repair" command which would have probably fixed the problem.

Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

I opened the same file in OpenOffice, and it just opened up as if there 
was nothing wrong with it. I saved it again, and it has worked in Word 
ever since.

Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description 
of the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they 
somehow did a better job than the people who *designed* that file 
format. How can that be right??

(Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
than OpenOffice to start with...)

Post a reply to this message

> how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily complicated, poorly 
> documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so forth.

TBH I've found MS products to be really well documents, in fact I would say 
better than any other software I've used.  Really, even if you have a 
complicated thing you want to do in Excel, the documentation usually has the 
answer.

> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
> read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
> failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

Yeh, they should just use the code from "Open and repair" for the normal 
"Open" operation, and if there were no faults just act silently.  OTOH maybe 
load times would increase significantly for large documents?

> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
> can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description of 
> the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they somehow 
> did a better job than the people who *designed* that file format. How can 
> that be right??
>
> (Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
> than OpenOffice to start with...)

I think you've answered your own questions there anyway, MS has to make 
money so they have all sorts of constraints that OpenOffice doesn't.  If an 
OpenOffice update is delayed by 6 months because they are fixing the 
loading-corrupt-files code, nobody can complain. But if MS attempts to delay 
Office 2013GT by 6 months because they want to fix the loading-corrupt-files 
code, they will likely be forced to release it anyway by the financial 
people.

Post a reply to this message

>> how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily complicated, poorly 
>> documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so forth.
> 
> TBH I've found MS products to be really well documents, in fact I would 
> say better than any other software I've used.  Really, even if you have 
> a complicated thing you want to do in Excel, the documentation usually 
> has the answer.

Well, there are plenty of open-source projects that have *no* 
documentation at all. OTOH, most of what M$ provides leaves much to be 
desired. (E.g., I managed to find a KB article explaining how to use the 
Recovery Console. Except that, actually, it just duplicates, word for 
word, the terse command help built into the Recovery Console...)

In general, if you're trying to do something simple (e.g., how do I 
change the IE start page?), the documentation tells you. If you're 
trying to do anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to 
not help at all... I guess this says something about their intended 
target audience?

>> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
>> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I 
>> can't read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what 
>> "graceful failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.
> 
> Yeh, they should just use the code from "Open and repair" for the normal 
> "Open" operation, and if there were no faults just act silently.  OTOH 
> maybe load times would increase significantly for large documents?

I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash 
all of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

>> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
>> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
>> can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description 
>> of the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they 
>> somehow did a better job than the people who *designed* that file 
>> format. How can that be right??
>>
>> (Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times 
>> more than OpenOffice to start with...)
> 
> I think you've answered your own questions there anyway, MS has to make 
> money so they have all sorts of constraints that OpenOffice doesn't.  If 
> an OpenOffice update is delayed by 6 months because they are fixing the 
> loading-corrupt-files code, nobody can complain. But if MS attempts to 
> delay Office 2013GT by 6 months because they want to fix the 
> loading-corrupt-files code, they will likely be forced to release it 
> anyway by the financial people.

OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 
whereas M$ can afford to hire the brightest people in the business and 
pay them to work on the problem 9-5 every single day. Given the hugely 
superior resources available to M$, you'd *think* they could produce a 
product that works properly under forceeable circumstances...

Post a reply to this message

> In general, if you're trying to do something simple (e.g., how do I change 
> the IE start page?), the documentation tells you. If you're trying to do 
> anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to not help at 
> all... I guess this says something about their intended target audience?

Dunno, I've found lots of quite detailed articles before.

eg googling "windows recovery console" give me

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

which tells me that you can use bootcfg without the /scan to avoid spending 
hours scanning all your drives.

> I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
> handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash all 
> of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

Maybe the load routine works fine, it just loads some corrupted data so when 
another part of the program comes to use it that bit crashes?

> OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 
> whereas M$ can afford to hire the brightest people in the business and pay 
> them to work on the problem 9-5 every single day. Given the hugely 
> superior resources available to M$, you'd *think* they could produce a 
> product that works properly under forceeable circumstances...

I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.  The 
main difference is MS can't just go and recruit 20 more people to work on 
something, unless it is going to be *profitable* for them to do so.  If the 
bored boffins at OO want to spend another 1000 man hours perfecting things, 
they can, they don't have to worry about profit.

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> In general, if you're trying to do something simple (e.g., how do I 
>> change the IE start page?), the documentation tells you. If you're 
>> trying to do anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends 
>> to not help at all... I guess this says something about their intended 
>> target audience?
> 
> Dunno, I've found lots of quite detailed articles before.
> 
> eg googling "windows recovery console" give me
> 
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
> 
> which tells me that you can use bootcfg without the /scan to avoid 
> spending hours scanning all your drives.

The command descriptions given here are a word-for-word reproduction of 
the interactive command help. It does not explain anywhere, for example, 
that bootcfg is merely a programatic way of editing BOOT.INI. (Also, it 
seems that /scan, /add and /rebuild *all* scan your disks for hours - 
I've tried it.)

*This* article explains it properly:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980

>> I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
>> handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash 
>> all of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...
> 
> Maybe the load routine works fine, it just loads some corrupted data so 
> when another part of the program comes to use it that bit crashes?

Thinking about it, the load routine probably does just dump a bunch of 
pointers directly into Word, which probably then trips the rendering 
engine over or something. (I've seen Word go into in infinite loop 
instead of crashing also. That, at least, you'd think would be 
detectable quite easily.)

>> OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 
>> whereas M$ can afford to hire the brightest people in the business and 
>> pay them to work on the problem 9-5 every single day. Given the hugely 
>> superior resources available to M$, you'd *think* they could produce a 
>> product that works properly under forceeable circumstances...
> 
> I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.  

Uh... they're the largest software corporation on the face of the Earth? 
(And the richest too.)

> The main difference is MS can't just go and recruit 20 more people to 
> work on something, unless it is going to be *profitable* for them to do 
> so.  If the bored boffins at OO want to spend another 1000 man hours 
> perfecting things, they can, they don't have to worry about profit.

Well, if M$ doesn't consider "making our products work properly" to be a 
"profitable" thing to do, then there's your answer. :-}

Post a reply to this message

>> I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.
>
> Uh... they're the largest software corporation on the face of the Earth? 
> (And the richest too.)

But still they cannot hire or steer extra employees onto projects without 
justification.  That's the main point.  It's simply a matter of economics - 
if MS pushed more resources onto fixing every little bug they'd run out of 
money pretty quickly - it's just not feasible when you have to pay people to 
write/debug your code.

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>>> I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.
>>
>> Uh... they're the largest software corporation on the face of the 
>> Earth? (And the richest too.)
> 
> But still they cannot hire or steer extra employees onto projects 
> without justification.  That's the main point.  It's simply a matter of 
> economics - if MS pushed more resources onto fixing every little bug 
> they'd run out of money pretty quickly - it's just not feasible when you 
> have to pay people to write/debug your code.

Fixing every tiny bug might be infeasible, but you'd think they could at 
least fix the huge ones.

Anyway, somebody asked why people hate M$. And I gave an answer: because 
M$ does not consider performance or reliability to be "important" enough 
to make any attempt to improve them.

Fortunately, the makers of safety-critical hardware and software are 
bound by *laws* which prevent them from not fixing bugs just because 
it's "not profitable".

Post a reply to this message

> Fortunately, the makers of safety-critical hardware and software are bound 
> by *laws* which prevent them from not fixing bugs just because it's "not 
> profitable".

And as a result their software is orders of magnitudes more expensive, not 
exactly something you could sell to the masses...

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> Fortunately, the makers of safety-critical hardware and software are 
>> bound by *laws* which prevent them from not fixing bugs just because 
>> it's "not profitable".
> 
> And as a result their software is orders of magnitudes more expensive.

I'll grand you that.

OTOH, M$'s products aren't exactly "cheap", by any stretch of the 
imagination. I think what most people really object to is paying vast 
sums of money for a product that isn't actually all that good. Let's 
face if, when you run KLogic and it crashes for the 18th time, you think 
to yourself "oh well, it least it didn't cost me anything". If you paid 
£400 for a piece of software and it behaved the same way, you'd be 
pretty upset.

Post a reply to this message

> OTOH, M$'s products aren't exactly "cheap", by any stretch of the 
> imagination.

I don't think paying 2x-3x the price of a game for your OS and Office suite 
is expensive, and I guess most other people don't either.

> I think what most people really object to is paying vast sums of money for 
> a product that isn't actually all that good. Let's face if, when you run 
> KLogic and it crashes for the 18th time, you think to yourself "oh well, 
> it least it didn't cost me anything". If you paid £400 for a piece of 
> software and it behaved the same way, you'd be pretty upset.

Agreed, but my Windows or Office doesn't crash 18 times, and I didn't pay 
400 pounds for it :-)

However we did pay 10 thousand pounds for some CAD software, and that 
crashes occasionally (which is infinitly more often than the OS!).

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> OTOH, M$'s products aren't exactly "cheap", by any stretch of the 
>> imagination.
> 
> I don't think paying 2x-3x the price of a game for your OS and Office 
> suite is expensive, and I guess most other people don't either.

I've yet to meet anybody who thinks MS's prices are reasonable. (OTOH, 
everybody wants things to be cheaper, so I guess that's not saying a lot.)

>> I think what most people really object to is paying vast sums of money 
>> for a product that isn't actually all that good. Let's face if, when 
>> you run KLogic and it crashes for the 18th time, you think to yourself 
>> "oh well, it least it didn't cost me anything". If you paid £400 for a 
>> piece of software and it behaved the same way, you'd be pretty upset.
> 
> Agreed, but my Windows or Office doesn't crash 18 times, and I didn't 
> pay 400 pounds for it :-)

Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times per 
day. :-P

Also...

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123456

M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.

Pretty close, considering I guessed the number off the top of my head. I 
see Vista is currently selling for £180 or so.

If you think that's "cheap", then good for you. To me, that seems 
seriously steep. Hell, the super-dupa-ultra-mega edition of Nero only 
costs £40 or so, and everybody complains about how over-priced that is.

> However we did pay 10 thousand pounds for some CAD software, and that 
> crashes occasionally (which is infinitly more often than the OS!).

OK, that's pretty lame. I'd ask why you don't go use a better package 
instead, but I suspect the answer is going to be some combination of

- There aren't any better products to choose from.
- Our clients use this product and we need to be compatible.
- We've bought it now so we can't get our money back anyway.

If I paid that amount of money for something that didn't work right, I'd 
be *pissed*! o_O

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:

> 
> Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
> careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times per 
> day. :-P
> 

heh. I think Word has a hidden option named "Automatically corrupt 
documents as they are saved to make them irrecoverable"

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

>> Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
>> careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times per 
>> day. :-P
> 
> heh. I think Word has a hidden option named "Automatically corrupt 
> documents as they are saved to make them irrecoverable"

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'hiddenoptions.gif' (10 KB)

Preview of image 'hiddenoptions.gif'

Invisible wrote:
>>> Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
>>> careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times 
>>> per day. :-P
>>
>> heh. I think Word has a hidden option named "Automatically corrupt 
>> documents as they are saved to make them irrecoverable"
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 

I remember that one :)

heh seriously, it seems like any time I work on a non-trivial document 
more than the average letter Word begins corrupting the document. I 
wrote a huge document for an API I created, only to have word chew it to 
pieces as it saved. :/

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

> heh seriously, it seems like any time I work on a non-trivial document 
> more than the average letter Word begins corrupting the document. I wrote 
> a huge document for an API I created, only to have word chew it to pieces 
> as it saved. :/

Funny, we work continuously on 100+ page spec documents for all our products 
in Word, and I don't recall ever having see any corrupted ones.  It's not 
like they are simple, they are full of diagrams, tables, photos, embedded 
CAD drawings, cross-references etc.

What version of Word is that you're using?

Did you try the "Open and repair" option and then resave it?

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
>> heh seriously, it seems like any time I work on a non-trivial document 
>> more than the average letter Word begins corrupting the document. I 
>> wrote a huge document for an API I created, only to have word chew it 
>> to pieces as it saved. :/
> 
> Funny, we work continuously on 100+ page spec documents for all our 
> products in Word, and I don't recall ever having see any corrupted 
> ones.  It's not like they are simple, they are full of diagrams, tables, 
> photos, embedded CAD drawings, cross-references etc.
> 
> What version of Word is that you're using?
> 
> Did you try the "Open and repair" option and then resave it?
> 
> 

2003 I think.. yep. Open and Repair killed all the formatting and 
jumbled half the content. :) I was able to piece it together and 
reformat ... eventually .. but it seriously hosed the document.

-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

> 2003 I think.. yep. Open and Repair killed all the formatting and 
> jumbled half the content. :) I was able to piece it together and 
> reformat ... eventually .. but it seriously hosed the document.

And after that did it get corrupted again?

Post a reply to this message

Mike Raiford wrote:

> heh seriously, it seems like any time I work on a non-trivial document 
> more than the average letter Word begins corrupting the document. I 
> wrote a huge document for an API I created, only to have word chew it to 
> pieces as it saved. :/

I used to write all my assignments with Word at college, and at uni. 
However, one time Word *ate* my assignment, 20 minutes before the handin 
date. (No, *obviously* I didn't have a backup. You don't expect a 200K 
file on a network drive to suddenly go down like that just because you 
make a few spelling alterations.)

 From that day forth, all my assignments were written in HTML. (Or later 
LaTeX.)

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> Funny, we work continuously on 100+ page spec documents for all our 
> products in Word, and I don't recall ever having see any corrupted 
> ones.  It's not like they are simple, they are full of diagrams, tables, 
> photos, embedded CAD drawings, cross-references etc.

This defies belief.

It has been my experience that as soon as you ask Word to do anything 
remotely nontrivial, it slows to a crawl, produces gigantic files, and 
eventually starts to function eratically (e.g., sections of text being 
duplicated, random formatting changes, deleted text "moving" to other 
parts of the document, etc.)

Quite how you could produce really *large* documents with it I have no 
idea...

Post a reply to this message

> I've yet to meet anybody who thinks MS's prices are reasonable. (OTOH, 
> everybody wants things to be cheaper, so I guess that's not saying a lot.)

Yeh, a significant proportion of the population use price as the only 
criteria when buying anything.  They will go into a shop and buy the 
cheapest vacuum cleaner, the cheapest washing machine, then go and buy the 
cheapest car insurance, the cheapest food at the supermarket, etc.  Trying 
to make a quality service or product for these people is just a waste of 
time, they won't spend the money...

> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.

...but some people do (usually if they are a company) and so companies need 
to take advantage of this.  Notice how the "home" version of Office 2007 is 
60 pounds but the full version is 350 like you said.  What's the difference? 
The 6x price increase certainly doesn't seem to be justified, but I suspect 
that way it makes the most money for MS overall.

> Pretty close, considering I guessed the number off the top of my head. I 
> see Vista is currently selling for £180 or so.

Again, people who actually pay for this themselves have a much cheaper 
option, whereas people who don't care so much about money get stung for a 
way more expensive option.  It happens everywhere, not just in software.

> If you think that's "cheap", then good for you.

It seems completely in-line with other software available, which I assume 
has kind of settled down to the market price.

> OK, that's pretty lame. I'd ask why you don't go use a better package 
> instead, but I suspect the answer is going to be some combination of
>
> - There aren't any better products to choose from.

More specifically, the good things about the package we have far outweighs 
the fact that it crashes sometimes.  And the other packages probably crash 
sometimes too :-)

> - Our clients use this product and we need to be compatible.

Yes.

> - We've bought it now so we can't get our money back anyway.

True, but we still have to pay around 3K a year for maintenance.

> If I paid that amount of money for something that didn't work right, I'd 
> be *pissed*! o_O

I don't think they expect individuals to buy their software...

Post a reply to this message

> This defies belief.
>
> It has been my experience that as soon as you ask Word to do anything 
> remotely nontrivial, it slows to a crawl, produces gigantic files, and 
> eventually starts to function eratically (e.g., sections of text being 
> duplicated, random formatting changes, deleted text "moving" to other 
> parts of the document, etc.)
>
> Quite how you could produce really *large* documents with it I have no 
> idea...

Heh, I would post one here but I suspect that's not allowed :-)

Seriously, we never seem to have any problems editting these files. Maybe 
because everyone is using the same version of Word and the template files 
are not corrupted to start with :-)

Post a reply to this message

>> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.
> 
> ...but some people do (usually if they are a company) and so companies 
> need to take advantage of this.  Notice how the "home" version of Office 
> 2007 is 60 pounds but the full version is 350 like you said.  What's the 
> difference? The 6x price increase certainly doesn't seem to be 
> justified, but I suspect that way it makes the most money for MS overall.

That's because the "home" version has most of the stuff missing. I 
actually fell into this trap myself; I was asked to obtain a copy of 
Office, so I bought the home version. When we got it, we discovered that 
it doesn't contain the required components. So then we had to go spend 
*more* money...

>> If you think that's "cheap", then good for you.
> 
> It seems completely in-line with other software available, which I 
> assume has kind of settled down to the market price.

Are you crazy?? Most of the software I see around me costs £20 - £40. 
£350 is seriously expensive!

Hell, even Apple sell their stuff for less than that, and Apple are 
legendary for being expensive.

I wouldn't mind paying vast amounts of money for something if I got a 
quality product for it. (E.g., I own several software synthesizers which 
cost almost as much as M$ Office, or even more.) What makes me angry is 
paying vast sums of money for a crap product.

>> If I paid that amount of money for something that didn't work right, 
>> I'd be *pissed*! o_O
> 
> I don't think they expect individuals to buy their software...

Well, true, but you'd think in a commercial environment, wasted time due 
to preventable software issues would be an even bigger deal...

Post a reply to this message

>> Quite how you could produce really *large* documents with it I have no 
>> idea...
> 
> Heh, I would post one here but I suspect that's not allowed :-)

Oh, I'm sure you've done it. It just seems so utterly contrary to my 
experience that it seems impossible. A bit like zero-gravity...

> Seriously, we never seem to have any problems editting these files. 
> Maybe because everyone is using the same version of Word and the 
> template files are not corrupted to start with :-)

At college and uni I wasn't using any templates. :-P Nor on my mum's PC, 
for that matter.

And maybe there are corrupted templates, but that begs the question: how 
did they *get* corrupted to start with? Maybe because of yet another 
Word crash? Hmm? :-P

Post a reply to this message

> Are you crazy?? Most of the software I see around me costs £20 - £40. £350 
> is seriously expensive!

60 pounds for a pretty complex word processor, spreadsheet and presentation 
package seems completely reasonable to me.

290 extra pounds for an email client, desktop publisher and database seems a 
bit extreme, but this is aimed at companies, not individuals, so of course 
they make the price higher.

The alternative is to charge 100 pounds for the home edition, and 200 for 
the professional edition, but I suspect they would make vastly less money 
that way.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> M$'s problems are because they produce poor quality products.

That's their reputation, but the OS doesn't have significantly more bugs per 
line than Linux does, according to SANS.

I'd love to see something objective to back up your assertion that MS 
products are poor quality, other than "everybody knows that."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> unecessarily complicated, 

That kind of depends on whether you need the complicated bits, don't you 
think? The opposite of "unnecessarily complicated" is "lacking features."

> poorly documented, 

MS has some of the best documentation out there, and they teach classes in 
using their stuff. Just because you never learned it doesn't mean it isn't 
out there.

> resource-inefficient, 

Somewhat, but what are you comparing it to?  How resource-efficient *you* 
could make it if you didn't have any commercial constraints?

> insecure, 

Somewhat. Much of that is due to people not installing patches or people not 
using the system as designed.

> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
> read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
> failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. If it's corrupted in a way that's 
hard to check, it crashes, because if it didn't, you'd be using up even 
*more* resources to be doing the checking. See?

> I opened the same file in OpenOffice, and it just opened up as if there 
> was nothing wrong with it. I saved it again, and it has worked in Word 
> ever since.

It probably deleted whatever it was that was confusing Office.

> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
> can? 

Why is it that OpenOffice can't do something that Word can?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> desired. (E.g., I managed to find a KB article explaining how to use the 
> Recovery Console. Except that, actually, it just duplicates, word for 
> word, the terse command help built into the Recovery Console...)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

First link on "use recovery console" at msdn.microsoft.com.

You *are* searching MSDN, right?

What did you expect it to tell you? It's a command line interpreter. Looking 
for how to use it is going to give you the list of command lines it interprets.

I suspect what you're really saying is "I had a specific problem I didn't 
know how to solve, and I couldn't find a specific piece of documentation 
telling me how to solve that except for the ones that required me to learn 
more general priciples"?

> trying to do anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to 
> not help at all... 

I disagree. Plus, if you're trying to do something *really* sophisticated, 
like run a company's infrastructure, you go to a class to learn how to do 
it, just like with every other major piece of software or hardware.

It sounds like you have specific problems you want solved, like "my backup 
tape doesn't rewind before it tries to verify the backup", and you're 
looking for documentation to solve that exact problem. Such documentation 
*never* exists, for any product.

Gee, ya know, the owner's manual of my car doesn't tell me how to drive *or* 
how to fix it! What do ya know?

> I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
> handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash 
> all of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

When you say "crash", what do you mean?  It just exits with a GPF or 
something?  Guess what: that's the exception handler. :-)

> OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 

No it's not. It was developed by Sun so they could sell office software that 
doesn't need to run on Intel hardware.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> which tells me that you can use bootcfg without the /scan to avoid 
> spending hours scanning all your drives.

Hours scanning your drives? bootcfg /scan is the equivalent of building 
boot.ini, or the GRUB menu. It's not chkdsk.

> Maybe the load routine works fine, it just loads some corrupted data so 
> when another part of the program comes to use it that bit crashes?

Welcome to unsafe languages. :-)

> I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.  

And how much money they have. They just laid off a few thousand people, too.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> The command descriptions given here are a word-for-word reproduction of 
> the interactive command help. It does not explain anywhere, for example, 
> that bootcfg is merely a programatic way of editing BOOT.INI.

Given the description of the name and options, what did you *think* it was for?

 > (Also, it
> seems that /scan, /add and /rebuild *all* scan your disks for hours - 
> I've tried it.)

Really? I can't imagine why it would take hours to scan for Windows 
installations.  Mine never took more than maybe three or four seconds. Maybe 
if your disks are screwed up enough you need to scan them, it takes longer.

> *This* article explains it properly:
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980

But, you know, MS documentation never covers the stuff you need.

> Thinking about it, the load routine probably does just dump a bunch of 
> pointers directly into Word, which probably then trips the rendering 
> engine over or something. (I've seen Word go into in infinite loop 
> instead of crashing also. That, at least, you'd think would be 
> detectable quite easily.)

Doing so would require time and resources, both programming and end-user. 
*You* had this problem, so *you* think the bloat in this instance is OK. But 
you complain the program takes too many resources, because it's doing things 
*you* don't personally need.

> Uh... they're the largest software corporation on the face of the Earth? 

And they do a bunch more than just working on Office.

> Well, if M$ doesn't consider "making our products work properly" to be a 
> "profitable" thing to do, then there's your answer. :-}

Nobody considers "making our products work properly" a profitable thing, if 
you count "solving every last bug that someone somewhere might encounter" to 
be "working properly."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Fixing every tiny bug might be infeasible, but you'd think they could at 
> least fix the huge ones.

Like what? That you had *one* document that was corrupt and couldn't be opened?

> Anyway, somebody asked why people hate M$. And I gave an answer: because 
> M$ does not consider performance or reliability to be "important" enough 
> to make any attempt to improve them.

Your hyperbole is amusing. "I hit a bug in Word. Therefore, neither 
performance nor reliability is worth spending *any* time working on."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> I've yet to meet anybody who thinks MS's prices are reasonable. (OTOH, 

> everybody wants things to be cheaper, so I guess that's not saying a lo
t.)

No. You know *lots* of people who think it's reasonable. You've also met 

lots of people who would rather pay less.

Everyone at your office who actually bought Microsoft products thinks the
 
price was reasonable.

> Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
> careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times per 

> day. :-P

Aren't you running the one that's like ten years old?  Office 97 or somet
hing?

> Also...
> 
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123456
> 
> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.

If you buy it one-off, it's pretty expensive. But given that you're buyin
g 
something like 8 programs, it's not all that bad. And it does a lot more 

than Nero does. If you really need a business contact manager, then a 
half-day's pay for software that handles all your business presentation 
needs isn't that bad.

> If you think that's "cheap", then good for you.

It is for a professional.

> To me, that seems seriously steep. 

You're not a professional.

> Hell, the super-dupa-ultra-mega edition of Nero only 
> costs £40 or so, and everybody complains about how over-priced tha
t is.

Except, you know, the people who are professionals at producing CDs, perh
aps.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:

>> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.
> 
> If you buy it one-off, it's pretty expensive. But given that you're 
> buying something like 8 programs, it's not all that bad. And it does a 
> lot more than Nero does. If you really need a business contact manager, 
> then a half-day's pay for software that handles all your business 
> presentation needs isn't that bad.
>

Compared to Photo$hop it's darned cheap..


-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:55:16 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> I'm guessing the first time she visits a site that demands ActiveX...?
>> 
>> Outside of Microsoft-owned sites, there are sites that still use
>> ActiveX?  Really?
>> 
>> I don't run into them *ever* unless I'm downloading something from the
>> MSDN site.
> 
> The server administration console for Trend Micro requires ActiveX, for
> example. (Not that this matters to a home user. I'm pretty sure I've
> seen various Internet equipment or ISP websites that also demand ActiveX
> though.)

Well, like you said, that's not a public website, nor is it one I'm 
likely to need to use myself.

> I'm drawing a blank on real "websites" that require ActiveX, but I think
> there are a few outside M$.

Probably not many, though - for anyone who wants to be cross-platform 
compatible (including being usable by Mac users), they'd have to avoid it.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:53:28 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> I'm guessing also that a lot of those pointless Flash games and
>>> similar only work well in IE.
>> 
>> Um, not if they're Flash games....Flash runs in Firefox....
> 
> And how much do you want to bet that the entire site markup is only
> tested with IE?

Anyone who designs a website and doesn't run it through a W3C checker is 
asking for trouble.  Given that Firefox has increased marketshare in the 
past year, not working with FF is going to increasingly become more of an 
issue for those sites.

That said, I've also not had a problem with *any* of the pointless Flash 
games not running on Linux.

But all the professional web developers I use test with multiple browsers 
and operating systems.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

>> I've yet to meet anybody who thinks MS's prices are reasonable. (OTOH, 
>> everybody wants things to be cheaper, so I guess that's not saying a 
>> lot.)
> 
> No. You know *lots* of people who think it's reasonable. You've also met 
> lots of people who would rather pay less.
> 
> Everyone at your office who actually bought Microsoft products thinks 
> the price was reasonable.

Everyone at my office who bought Microsoft products bought them with 
their PC. :-P

Most people are shocked and dissapointed when I tell them how much the 
software costs by itself.

>> Windows itself usually doesn't crash much if at all, provided you're 
>> careful with it. But Office? I've seen it crash more than 18 times per 
>> day. :-P
> 
> Aren't you running the one that's like ten years old?  Office 97 or 
> something?

We were using Office 97. (And, unsurprisingly, when I was at uni 10 
years ago, we were using a 10-year-old Office, yes.) Now we're using 
Office 2003 at work. It still glitches, but the people who use it have 
gradually figured out tricks to get round it.

>> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.
> 
> If you buy it one-off, it's pretty expensive. But given that you're 
> buying something like 8 programs, it's not all that bad. And it does a 
> lot more than Nero does. If you really need a business contact manager, 
> then a half-day's pay for software that handles all your business 
> presentation needs isn't that bad.
> 
>> If you think that's "cheap", then good for you.
> 
> It is for a professional.
> 
>> To me, that seems seriously steep. 
> 
> You're not a professional.

The trouble with this argument is, the so-called "home" version doesn't 
have half the stuff in it that home users want. I got caught out with 
this. Some guy wanted to edit a PowerPoint presentation for a local 
gathering, so I bought him a copy of Office Home, and... guess what? 
This "office" is actually just Word and Excell. That's a hell of a lot 
of money just for a buggy wordprocessor and a reasonable spreadsheet.

(I had expected that the home version would just leave out the high-end 
stuff like InfoPath that home users won't need. THAT would have made 
sense. But no, apparently not...)

>> Hell, the super-dupa-ultra-mega edition of Nero only costs £40 or so, 
>> and everybody complains about how over-priced that is.
> 
> Except, you know, the people who are professionals at producing CDs, 
> perhaps.

I'm pretty sure professionals wouldn't buy a consumer-oriented product 
such as Nero. (The premium edition takes over your entire PC in an 
almost viral fashion...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

>> Fixing every tiny bug might be infeasible, but you'd think they could 
>> at least fix the huge ones.
> 
> Like what? That you had *one* document that was corrupt and couldn't be 
> opened?

Hahaha. Oh yeah, one document. Because, in the time I've been using 
Word, it has only ever screwed up one document. Ha. If only...

> Your hyperbole is amusing. "I hit a bug in Word. Therefore, neither 
> performance nor reliability is worth spending *any* time working on."

Have you noticed that every version of Windows/Word/Access/whatever has 
been slower than the one before?

I've yet to see anybody complain about Excel crashing (I assume it must 
do occasionally), but Word is legendary for its instability. You act 
like I'm making this up or something...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Some guy wanted to edit a PowerPoint presentation for a local 
> gathering, so I bought him a copy of Office Home, and... guess what? 

You didn't read the documentation? I'm pretty sure it's *easy* to figure out 
what comes with each version of Office before you buy it, so I think I know 
where the "microsoft doesn't document stuff" meme comes from. :-)

> I'm pretty sure professionals wouldn't buy a consumer-oriented product 
> such as Nero. 

Right. It's *too* cheap. :-)


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

>>>> I'm guessing also that a lot of those pointless Flash games and
>>>> similar only work well in IE.
>>> Um, not if they're Flash games....Flash runs in Firefox....
>> And how much do you want to bet that the entire site markup is only
>> tested with IE?
> 
> Anyone who designs a website and doesn't run it through a W3C checker is 
> asking for trouble.

I agree. But we're also talking about the same kinds of sites that use 
ActiveX to silently install spyware on your PC while you're playing the 
new shiny game, so... ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Have you noticed that every version of Windows/Word/Access/whatever has 
> been slower than the one before?

No.

> I've yet to see anybody complain about Excel crashing (I assume it must 
> do occasionally), but Word is legendary for its instability. You act 
> like I'm making this up or something...

No. I'm acting like some people seem to have no problem with it, and others 
seem to have problems all the time. Me, I can't get Linux to work for crap, 
even where web sites say its supported. I tend to think I'm just at one end 
of a long tail.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

>> Some guy wanted to edit a PowerPoint presentation for a local 
>> gathering, so I bought him a copy of Office Home, and... guess what? 
> 
> You didn't read the documentation?

For my sins, no. I just assumed that "Office Home Edition" would have 
the parts of Office that are useful to a home user, without the parts 
that only an office worker would want. I was wrong.

> I know where the "microsoft doesn't document stuff" meme comes from. :-)

It's OK. I'm used to people telling me I'm stupid. I've had to put up 
with it for my entire life. I guess one more person won't hurt...

>> I'm pretty sure professionals wouldn't buy a consumer-oriented product 
>> such as Nero. 
> 
> Right. It's *too* cheap. :-)

Or rather, professionals don't want wizzy "let me do this trivial 
operation for you automatically because you're too stupid" features, 
they want stuff that actually makes their job easier and lets them 
control what the software does.

Go install Norton Antivirus. Watch as your PC slows down and it pops up 
windows every 5 minutes letting you "your PC is at risk" or "an attack 
attempt has been blocked". Now go install Symtantec Antivirus Corportate 
Edition. Trust me, you'll never even realise it's running. (There's not 
even a tray icon.) Different target audiences. (And price tags, as it 
happens...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> For my sins, no. I just assumed that "Office Home Edition" would have 
> the parts of Office that are useful to a home user, without the parts 
> that only an office worker would want. I was wrong.

I don't know of too many "home users" that make public presentations.

>> I know where the "microsoft doesn't document stuff" meme comes from. :-)
> 
> It's OK. I'm used to people telling me I'm stupid. I've had to put up 
> with it for my entire life. I guess one more person won't hurt...

I'm teasing you, dear. :-)

> they want stuff that actually makes their job easier and lets them 
> control what the software does.

Yep. And they're willing to learn how to use the tools, even sometimes 
paying money to do so.  (And they're probably not using a PC to make the 
disks in the first place.)

> even a tray icon.) Different target audiences. (And price tags, as it 

Exactly.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

Post a reply to this message

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:20:59 +0100, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> The trouble with this argument is, the so-called "home" version doesn't  
> have half the stuff in it that home users want. I got caught out with  
> this. Some guy wanted to edit a PowerPoint presentation for a local  
> gathering, so I bought him a copy of Office Home, and... guess what?  
> This "office" is actually just Word and Excell. That's a hell of a lot  
> of money just for a buggy wordprocessor and a reasonable spreadsheet.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/suites/FX101674081033.aspx

The Home/Student suite includes PowerPoint. What makes you think otherwise?


-- 
FE

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