Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Another good argument for file sharing.

Remind me again just why we use Microsoft product.

Since you have the CD key for the previous version, using somebody else's disk installer is not really piracy: You own your license and I own a different one. Next time I see you in Jimmy Bean's FIFO cafe or at Strada I'll lend you my copy of the installer (if I can find it in the junkyar... huh.. the file cabinets).

In reply to David, I use LaTeX in lieu of Word, and Keynote in lieu of Powerpoint (graphics by Adobe CS, formulas from LaTeX). However Excel is still my spreadsheet program and other people (and journals) send me Office files for word and powerpoint...

Since you have the CD key for the previous version, using somebody else's disk installer is not really piracy: You own your license and I own a different one. Next time I see you in Jimmy Bean's FIFO cafe or at Strada I'll lend you my copy of the installer (if I can find it in the junkyar... huh.. the file cabinets).

In reply to David, I use LaTeX in lieu of Word, and Keynote in lieu of Powerpoint (graphics by Adobe CS, formulas from LaTeX). However Excel is still my spreadsheet program and other people (and journals) send me Office files for word and powerpoint...

I don't understand why you needed the 98 version of office. My iBooks hard drive crashed and I had no problem reinstalling office from the disks.
On an aside - it made me realize how much the iLife stuff has us putting really important data on computers now, stuff we expect to last. I don't care about email, work, etc, but I almost lost a bunch of baby photos - stuff that I actually do want to keep for my entire lifetime.
I now make a bootable mirror of my disc on an internal disc - but even this is not an archival solution. I am convinced that computers need to address this issue automatically as part of the operating system.

Just as a note, any laptop backup that's on the same laptop isn't really a backup - particularly not if it's on a separate partition of the same drive. I can almost guarantee that the four things most likely to cause data loss for a laptop are:
1) User error - you delete the wrong thing and don't realize it until much later when you're looking for it again.
2) Software error or system crash - some application or the OS eats itself and heaves its guts out over the rest of the file system. I don't know how common this is on Macs, but I'm always paranoid about it on Windows boxes particularly if they've been running without a reinstall for 2+ years.
3) Hardware failure - that laptop hard drive gets bounced around a lot more than a desktop drive, which makes it more likely to suffer damage over time. If the laptop is a primary system and is almost always on except when being moved this may be more likely since most laptop HDs are spec'd for 300 hours/month run time - they may be just fine with more than that, but it is additional wear.
4) Theft - you think it's convenient because it's portable, so does someone else. If you're unlucky or careless, you may find just how convenient it really was for someone else.

Anyone running on a Mac from the past few years has almost no excuse for not backing up to an external drive - all of those systems have Firewire/1394 connections and you can get an external 160GB FW drive for ~$210 from Amazon ($160 after rebates) or for less if you shop around elsewhere. Anyone on a PC with USB2 or Firewire can do much the same; older PCs with USB1.1 are more troublesome since it's much slower.

Is Movable Type a Microsoft product? It sure acts like one.

I strongly second Alan's caution about laptop disk failure. Disks do (relatively) often fail, so do back them up!

One further caution about backups is that they contain all your confidential data at the time of the backup. One-year old backups contain your confidential stuff that you had one year ago, etc., even if you deleted it from your disk meanwhile. So if you have any concerns about your data getting into the wrong hands, don't forget to protect your backups as much as your PC.

Brad, I thought Mac products were uncrashable?

But hard disk controller chips do blow out... spectacularly...

Try Open Office, from openoffice.org. It is a big download, I thnk 65MB or so, but it is free and it will open and edit all of your old Microsoft files. You don't get quite as many bells and whistles, but you probably wouldn't miss them. It takes up less same, which on a laptop can be a benefit.

What's odd about the exchange is that I wouldn't have guessed that there *was* an OEM channel for Office for the Mac (as opposed to the dark side, where preloading Office is more commonplace).

Is this iMac too old for an OS X/Office v.X installation?

"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile."

Compare MicroSoft's sharp-stick-in-your-eye thinkspeak with F-Prot's security software, (which we've transitioned to because Semantec
is like dodging Help file minefields in SAP.)

F-Prot software effortlessly uploads the latest patches automatically, and automatically keeps your hard disc scrubbed clean. In the event you spend time on AIM or PC gamer sites and catch a new bug before F-Prot downloads today's patch, all you have to do is send an e-mail to F-Prot.

They'll respond within a few hours depending on time of day, requesting your log file. E-mail them that file, then they review it and suggest manual uninstall methods, and by some F-Magic, their downloads over the next few days seem to always hunt down and kill the bug and its spawn no matter how dispersed on your hard drive.

F-Prot will actually have a dialogue with you for just one low, low annual maintenance fee!

What's MSFT's dialogue pay-per-view? $250/hour?

Still, least MSFT isn't like QWest used to be, bouncing you all over the planet to outsourced barely-English speaking user support trained to listen and coddle you, but take no real action.

Now *that* was a sharp-stick-up-the-butt!

I have had great success using openoffice to open and save to .doc and .xls files. It also exports to .pdf

The answer has been stated above, but to make it plain, get what you need off Limewire, then use your own CD Key and Serial number. BTW, MSOffice is one of the apps (like Flash and Sorenson Squeeze) that 'phones home' so it'll disable itself if it's using a dupe serial number. There seems to be an easy way around that, but it's not my place to repeat it...

Jose Silva writes:
>
> In reply to David, I use LaTeX in lieu of Word, and
> Keynote in lieu of Powerpoint (graphics by Adobe CS,
> formulas from LaTeX).

Keynote is a very nice product, but I really, truly miss the ability to do subscripts and superscripts directly from the keyboard; it makes preparing a lecture where C++ (that's a calcium ion, not a computer language) a royal pain. I've also found the tools for integrating LaTeX into Keynote pretty clumsy.

> However Excel is still my
> spreadsheet program and other people (and journals)
> send me Office files for word and powerpoint...

Others have mentioned OpenOffice.org (stupid name), but I've found that Keynote does a fairly decent job opening PowerPoint files, while TextEdit (yes, TextEdit) works just fine for plain-ish Word files, and let's you edit them using your favorite emacs-like editing keys. :-)

If Brad's writing is mostly just text and a few displayed graphics and formulas, I would advise him to try out some combination of LaTeX for the latter and something like TextEdit. No stinking installation key issues there...

What you need is to move to free software, free as in free from annoying arguments about how you should be using something else.

Instead of reinstalling Office98 move to Civilization III. OK so the word processing facilities are not as complete (OK there are none whatsoever) but the user interface is vastly superior to anything that traditional word processors have to offer.

Your fatal mistake was to assume that Microsoft recognises that the exchange of your hard-earned money for their crap-awful software endows you with any rights at all.

On OpenOffice:
- the Mac version is still only a late beta, but the Linux and Windows versions have been stable for some time;
- the Windows one (which is what I know) does a good job and exports to / imports from the 3 main MS formats as advertised, and pdf; but odd glitches on fancy bullets, dropped arguments in spreadsheet functions etc. mean that the platforms shouldn't be treated as identical for ongoing projects;
- the macro languages are entirely different and do not convert;
- the help files for Excel at least are much less comprehensive.

I love OpenOffice, and I will never switch back to an MS Office product as long as OpenOffice is available. But I'm also a PC and Linux user, and while I've tried the Mac version, I've found it does have a number of issues, not to mention it requires some familiarity with X11. So maybe the solution is to use the awesome power of your Semi-Daily Journal to prompt the open source community to get their Mac compatible gears a'churnin. Well, it might be a good long-term solution, anyway.

This story just illustrates why I don't think Microsoft "Software Activation" is a good idea. After my hard drive crashes, do I want to be arguing with Microsoft about whether I have the privilege to rebuild my computer?

This is a horrible story of licensing. Microsoft's antipiracy attempts have been pretty ham-handed. It is hard to argue that they should give up the antipiracy game altogether, but they must improve this.
I hope that we will soon reach a stage where delivery of software bits is more efficient over the line, rather thatn hard copy + FedEx.
There are still issues with authentication/validation -- Microsoft and Sun have made some gestures in this direction (Passport/Liberty[I think]), but interestingly enough, backed down as a response to customer feedback.
I think you will find that Microsoft is getting better about this kind of stuff, but still has to work out some very annoying kinks.

> Your fatal mistake was to assume that Microsoft
> recognises that the exchange of your hard-
> earned money for their crap-awful software
> endows you with any rights at all.

MS and the Bush Administration: separated at birth?

Stephen Richards: "...it made me realize how much the iLife stuff has us putting really important data on computers now, stuff we expect to last... but even this is not an archival solution."

At the present time, there is no such thing as digital archival storage, at least not in the way that I think of "archival". I think of that as a minimum of 30 years -- storing stuff that your grandkids can examine when they're old enough to be interested in such stuff. There are a LOT of problems. Most of the media themselves -- magnetic tape, magnetic disks, CDR -- don't have a lifetime that long. Then there's the issues of finding an appropriate drive, a computer that supports the drive's physical interface, software that can handle the file system, and more software to decode the text/image.

Given a longer perspective, the situation is even worse. If you want to provide the source material for historians to use 100 years from now, I strongly suggest pigment-based ink on acid-free paper and silver-based black-and-white photography. Write letters to people who will store them away in the attic. Keep a paper journal. If you publish a book, donate multiple well-bound copies to your university library.

Three things you can do:

1. Stop using the word "piracy". Since corporations don't respect fair use, "reasonable duration" and other rights of the public, they have no reasonable expectation to have people advertise for their point of view.

2. Stop using the words "Intellectual Property". Property is something that the owner can collect rent on in perpetuity. Capital is the correct word to use. Intellectual Capital the correct frame of reference.

3. Stop buying products from companies which are known to break the law, buy influence and skate free of the consequences.

So, do you still believe outsourcing technical support to offshore workers, instructed to follow scripts literally without using independent thought or common sense, is a good idea?

So, do you still believe outsourcing technical support to offshore workers, instructed to follow scripts literally without using independent thought or common sense, is a good idea?

So, do you still believe outsourcing technical support to offshore workers, instructed to follow scripts literally without using independent thought or common sense, is a good idea?

Maybe this comes across as a rant, but Brad's post hits a really sore point.

I've been a Linux user for over 4 years, and the experience has soured me on Microsoft. It isn't that their software is bad so much as their distribution model repeatedly inconveniences me. The most serious issue involves the need to reinstall their software every 8 months to a year, and the way their OS refuses to cooperate with dual-boot systems.

Rather than simply download the latest and most up-to-date copy of their software however, Microsoft forces one to install from their last official release and patch-up online. Since going online with insecure software is a recipe for disaster, this is a fun, fun and often impossible process. Additionally, there is the question of whether to trust the automated update process. I mention this since Windows Update has crashed my machine twice.

Frankly, I have no incentive to buy anything from Microsoft ever again. The only reason the OS is still on my laptop is because my wireless Internet provider (CDMA-based) does not provide Linux drivers.

Hopefully they will soon.

I use OpenOffice regularly - I only use Office when I work with Access. Except I do have a feeling that Brad needs to have pretty high-end spreadsheet functionality (while I don't), and that a lot of that will need to be interoperable with other people's Excel spreadsheets. So I can see his issue.

But other than this, in a lot of ways, OpenOffice Write is better than Microsoft Office. Clearly the templating feature, and the way to manage styles, seems to be a lot better.

I use OpenOffice regularly - I only use Office when I work with Access. Except I do have a feeling that Brad needs to have pretty high-end spreadsheet functionality (while I don't), and that a lot of that will need to be interoperable with other people's Excel spreadsheets. So I can see his issue.

But other than this, in a lot of ways, OpenOffice Write is better than Microsoft Office. Clearly the templating feature, and the way to manage styles, seems to be a lot better.

I don't know if this helps Brad (or any other non WinTel partisans), but I have used WordPerfect products exclusively as my principal productivity apps since I got my first computer over a decade ago, and I believe I always will. As a lawyer, I use the spreadsheet, database, and presentation apps very little, but on those rare occasions I find that the WordPerfect products do just fine. I live and die by my word processor, and I would rather go back to using No. 2 pencils and Big Chief notebooks than use the utterly shitty MSWord. WordPerfect (currently using version 10; started with version 5) is so very superior as to be in a different class altogether.

Times certainly have changed. About a decade back, I upgraded from MS C 7.0 to Visual C++ 1.0 and found that I was missing the product Key. I was able to convince customer support that I did have the right documents (part numbers), just no product key. Once that was accepted, they gave me an alternative product key to use to install the compiler.

And now your Windows update might be compromised too- I just spent the better part of this morning cleaning up our home pc because I saw a box that said updates, blah blah blah. It was a picture perfect copy of the updates box and it shoved meganasty spyware down onto my box. If you see a bar titled ist search you had better get cwshredder and hijack this pronto. Garbage people with nothing better to do in this world.