Just a little anecdotal evidence

[Neredbojias]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:15:37
GMT dorayme scribed:

Not really, no. What would you call the cups I have previously
described without being silly? Would you make up your own terms?

Well, I might call the "punishment cup" a groin-drencher. Does that
help?

I can see that you have no patience or stomach for the enquiries
I have made to you to explore a distinction you yourself made.
There is no need to explain why this is so, I accept all
responsibility.

It's nice to see a woman who admits she's wrong when she's wrong at least
some of the time.

For anyone else that might be interested (highly unlikely to be
many <g>): The idea that a cup without a bottom is still a cup is
not some sort of joke. It is the serious point that if you do not
call it a cup, you have lost a perfectly proper and natural way
of describing it. This point is an objection to the common
practice of avoiding real issues by red herrings about words.

Who said one couldn't call it a cup? But what you call it and what it
is...

The point of probing the distinction between design and
engineering is to see what the true ingredients are of a designed
object, to distinguish in it the various aspects. These aspects
can be divorced from the actual histories and psychology of the
object and its creators.

Since when does an inanimate object have a psychology? Hast thee been
perusing too many cartoon teleshows of late?

 

[asdf]

There is nothing metaphysical at all about any of this. People
are making a distinction between engineering and design and I am
wanting to know more about the nature of this. If you do not like
my questions, you are welcome to ask some of your own that
illuminate the distinction further? Questions that do not seem
the least bit metaphysical to you or in the least bit off topic.
But perhaps you are simply satisfied with your present
understanding of what makes for a good website, what ingredients
there are in general for such things? Fair enough, I would not
want to press you further. Every man knows what the limits of his
interest and patience is and it is not for others to dictate to
him.

No, it was not the argument about engineering and design I was calling
physical, it was the argument about the cup- though because you neatly and
conveniently managed to snip the context, I suppose that's to be expected.

....and it was supposed to be a funny (ok... humour was never my strong
point)... again, a point you appear to have missed.

 

[dorayme]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:15:37
GMT dorayme scribed:


Well, I might call the "punishment cup" a groin-drencher. Does that
help?

This is supposed to be a non-silly answer?

It's nice to see a woman who admits she's wrong when she's wrong at least
some of the time.

I was trying to be courteous to you. You are greatly
misunderstand many things.

Who said one couldn't call it a cup? But what you call it and what it
is...

The question is not about what we *can* call something. It is
about what it ought to be called. We both can agree that a cup
without a bottom is a rather different object, with a different
purpose to a cup with a bottom. The question still arises about
the status of the bottom in the cup that does have a bottom vis a
vis the distinction between engineering and design.

Since when does an inanimate object have a psychology? Hast thee been
perusing too many cartoon teleshows of late?

Please add a "respectively" in the sentence:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories and
psychology of - respectively - the object and its creators."

or better still parse it into:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories the
object."

and

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual psychology of its
creators."

 

[dorayme]

No, it was not the argument about engineering and design I was calling
physical, it was the argument about the cup-

There was nothing metaphysical about any of my remarks about
cups.

...and it was supposed to be a funny (ok... humour was never my strong
point)... again, a point you appear to have missed.

I did not miss that you were being light hearted. You are missing
that an idiot like me can be serious on occasions.

 

[Neredbojias]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:20:51
GMT dorayme scribed:

This is supposed to be a non-silly answer?

Well, that is very much what you said (in different words.) However, I
admit that the term "punishment cup" makes me giddy.

I was trying to be courteous to you. You are greatly
misunderstand many things.

That could be. I have yet to achieve perfection although I strive for it
during commercials.

The question is not about what we *can* call something. It is
about what it ought to be called. We both can agree that a cup
without a bottom is a rather different object, with a different
purpose to a cup with a bottom. The question still arises about
the status of the bottom in the cup that does have a bottom vis a
vis the distinction between engineering and design.

Well, okay, a cup from which someone has, say, cut out the bottom could
certainly be called a "bottomless cup". But designing/engineering a ?
cup? without a bottom is impossible because !cups! have bottoms.

Please add a "respectively" in the sentence:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories and
psychology of - respectively - the object and its creators."

or better still parse it into:

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual histories the
object."

and

"These aspects can be divorced from the actual psychology of its
creators."

Yes, that makes sense. I still don't know what it has to do with
bottomless non-cups, but - oh well.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Oh please, if Microsoft pulled Office from the Mac it would go the way
the Amiga went.

2 or 3 years ago, I would have agreed. But Apple have started showing a
knack for taking an existing open source project, polishing it up and
creating a gem.

Look what they did when Microsoft seemed to be letting Internet Explorer
development on OSX slide: they took Konqueror's rendering engine, ported
it to Mac OS X, put some Aqua chrome around it and released it as Safari.
A few years down the line, Safari not only has close to 100% penetration
on Mac OS X, but it's now competing on Microsoft's home turf; WebKit (the
Safari rendering engine) has been improved so much that the Konqueror guys
are dropping their original engine in favour of it; and various Gecko-
based browsers (e.g. Epiphany) are thinking of going WebKit.

If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac, Apple could fork OpenOffice.org/
NeoOffice and have a decent suite within 6-12 months -- one that supported
Microsoft Office formats and was more at home on OS X, fitting in better
with the native look and feel, integrating with Apple Address Book,
Safari, etc.

Microsoft won't drop Office for Mac precisely because they're afraid of
that happening, and the inevitable Windows port (a la iTunes, Safari,
Bonjour, etc).

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 22:46.]

Looking Ahead to PHP 6
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/01/29/php6/

 

[Ben C]

2 or 3 years ago, I would have agreed. But Apple have started showing a
knack for taking an existing open source project, polishing it up and
creating a gem.

Look what they did when Microsoft seemed to be letting Internet Explorer
development on OSX slide: they took Konqueror's rendering engine, ported
it to Mac OS X, put some Aqua chrome around it and released it as Safari.
A few years down the line, Safari not only has close to 100% penetration
on Mac OS X, but it's now competing on Microsoft's home turf; WebKit (the
Safari rendering engine) has been improved so much that the Konqueror guys
are dropping their original engine in favour of it; and various Gecko-
based browsers (e.g. Epiphany) are thinking of going WebKit.

If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac, Apple could fork OpenOffice.org/
NeoOffice and have a decent suite within 6-12 months -- one that supported
Microsoft Office formats

That's much harder than making a browser based on KHTML though. For
HTML/CSS/JS there are open standards and specifications. For Office
software you'd have to reverse-engineer MS Office as quickly as they add
new features to it.

OpenOffice is a fine product if you like that kind of thing, but it
isn't as interoperable with MS Office as many people need, and it would
be hard to achieve that.

Macs seem to be quite popular as home computers. They're more
fashionable-looking, usually less noisy, get infested with viruses less,
and people associate PCs with work. You don't need Office software at
home much anyway, so I think people would still buy them.

 

[Tim Streater]

That's much harder than making a browser based on KHTML though. For
HTML/CSS/JS there are open standards and specifications. For Office
software you'd have to reverse-engineer MS Office as quickly as they add
new features to it.

OpenOffice is a fine product if you like that kind of thing, but it
isn't as interoperable with MS Office as many people need, and it would
be hard to achieve that.

Macs seem to be quite popular as home computers. They're more
fashionable-looking, usually less noisy, get infested with viruses less,
and people associate PCs with work. You don't need Office software at
home much anyway, so I think people would still buy them.

Hardly fashionable looking, dear boy. I have a Mini - because its cheap,
small, and I don't need a number of permanently empty slots. I maxed out
the RAM and bought a LaCie external drive that sits nicely under the
Mini. Small footprint. The KVM components got recycled from the previous
Mini. The only thing it lacks is a second video port.

I have Office 2004 (prolly to be upgraded to Office 2008) for
compatibility with others, and I do all my page layout using Pages.
Meanwhile at work I have a Mac Pro with three 2-port video cards (three
screen used for network monitor displays). I have TextWrangler (free,
you know) for PHP development (PHP included), and I downloaded mysql and
installed that (not quite trivial but nearly).

Typically at work I have three Safari windows and 20 or so tabs open. I
could wish Safari had better JavaScript error reporting, but hey, I
haven't been a programmer for 40 years for nothing. I get by.

I wouldn't have said a Mac Pro is particularly fashionable looking -
although everybody went "Wow!" when I took it out of the box.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

That's much harder than making a browser based on KHTML though. For
HTML/CSS/JS there are open standards and specifications. For Office
software you'd have to reverse-engineer MS Office as quickly as they add
new features to it.

For 99% of real world Word and Excel files, OpenOffice is close enough.

And as far as new features go, Microsoft Office's native format is now XML-
based, and they've submitted the format to ECMA and ISO as an open
standard. (ECMA has approved it, ISO hasn't.) Sure, it's an incredibly
convoluted format and the documentation is several thousand pages, but the
documentation for it *is* out there.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.17.14-mm-desktop-9mdvsmp, up 6 days, 21:57.]

The World in 2050?
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2008/02/03/world-2050/

 

[Andy Dingley]

For 99% of real world Word and Excel files, OpenOffice is close enough.

Only for older versions of Word. M$oft have a track record of changing
their internal standards and formats frequently and significantly.
This is nearly as much of a problem for users of old Office versions
as it is for FOS users, although M$ often reduce the ire by
distributing free patches to add support for new formats to old
versions.

It's not just openness that's the problem with M$ standards, it's
their stability (or lack of).

 

[Ben C]

For 99% of real world Word and Excel files, OpenOffice is close enough.

That's not been my experience.

I don't use OpenOffice myself, but occasionally non-technical people ask
me to help them sort out computer problems. I usually start by removing
Windows, installing Linux and telling them to use OpenOffice. But I
haven't always had a 100% rate of customer satisfaction with this
approach.

These people are using Office for work on fairly typical documents and
spreadsheets.

And as far as new features go, Microsoft Office's native format is now XML-
based, and they've submitted the format to ECMA and ISO as an open
standard. (ECMA has approved it, ISO hasn't.) Sure, it's an incredibly
convoluted format and the documentation is several thousand pages, but the
documentation for it *is* out there.

http://www.noooxml.fr/local--resized-images/start/drbill.jpg/small.jpg