2025-03-24 11:43:44 <veltas      > I love/hate Word
2025-03-24 11:49:22 <X-Scale     > what about Excel?
2025-03-24 11:49:37 <X-Scale     > ;P
2025-03-24 12:19:20 <veltas      > I also/actually love/hate Excel
2025-03-24 14:54:23 <pgimeno     > I also love/hate both, minus the love part
2025-03-24 15:23:21 <KipIngram   > ^^ Me too, pgimeno.  And all other things Microsoft.
2025-03-24 16:03:05 <KipIngram   > What I love is the concept of "spreadsheet," but it's unfortunate that it's become almost synonymous with Excel.
2025-03-24 16:06:19 <veltas      > I love the concept of office software, but yeah not keen on the actual software
2025-03-24 16:20:19 <nmz         > KipIngram: what's a spreadsheet?
2025-03-24 16:21:03 <nmz         > Why though? excel programmers are wizards
2025-03-24 16:22:44 <veltas      > It's not a comment on Excel wizards
2025-03-24 16:23:55 <veltas      > Office 2007 sucked, can we all agree?
2025-03-24 16:24:17 <thrig       > customers to me: please don't install Word 6 (for mac) it sucks
2025-03-24 16:24:49 <thrig       > ... and the look in the eyes of the scientist after I told him "oh yeah excel corrupts data like that by default, you need to ..."
2025-03-24 16:27:57 <veltas      > Finally there is some reference to 'ribbon' in Word for DOS mentioned.  I thought this was a Mandella effect thing
2025-03-24 16:28:19 <veltas      > Word for DOS referred to the bar at top of its interface as a 'ribbon'
2025-03-24 16:28:27 <veltas      > In the 80's
2025-03-24 16:46:26 <KipIngram   > Right - no comment on Excel experts at all.  My wife is one, and I have a lot of respect for the talent.  I just hate Microsoft and their history of nasty corporate underhandedness.  And when they are caught up with legally and penalized, it's never more than a slap on the wrist - nothing that has any chance at all of changing their behavior.  They just look at those legal penalties as "business
2025-03-24 16:46:28 <KipIngram   > expenses."
2025-03-24 16:47:17 <veltas      > Not to excuse them, but they didn't start that and they certainly won't finish it
2025-03-24 16:47:35 <KipIngram   > You're right of course - they're just an "outstanding example" of it.
2025-03-24 16:47:37 <veltas      > Although they do have a unique role of blame in the state of things
2025-03-24 16:48:24 <veltas      > They leveraged copyright to benefit themselves, and it's funny because now tech is just overruling copyright to their benefit and getting away with it
2025-03-24 16:49:06 <veltas      > Tech enjoys some pretty incredible protection from the state, and leaves none for others
2025-03-24 16:49:33 <KipIngram   > At least in the early days of Apple, "Apple brand loyalty" made sense to me (it no longer does, but it did then).  But "Microsoft loyalty" has never made ANY sense to me.
2025-03-24 16:50:52 <veltas      > Apple are the ones who got the ruling to change copyright to protect software objects as opposed to just source code
2025-03-24 16:58:27 <KipIngram   > I'm not familiar with any details.  I just think that when they first appeared on the scene they had some creative flair, but these days they're just another corporation.
2025-03-24 16:59:30 <KipIngram   > I don't know how much of that was Jobs, but I guess he was part of it.  Ass that he was, he seemed to have talent / vision.
2025-03-24 16:59:56 <KipIngram   > I've heard some pretty nasty things about his vindictive nature over the years - you really didn't want to get on his bad list.
2025-03-24 17:00:29 <veltas      > Apple v Franklin
2025-03-24 17:04:10 <KipIngram   > I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.  I do see Apple's side of the argument.  Looks like Franklin pretty brazenly just copied their stuff.
2025-03-24 17:15:24 <KipIngram   > On the other hand, I guess Franklin didn't think they were doing anything wrong, because it looks like they made little to no effort to "cleanse" the content of stuff like names and other such strings.
2025-03-24 17:17:59 <KipIngram   > I can almost see a case for the notion that *binary* code should be covered by patent rather than copyright.  It's similar to a mechanical part, that has a particular shape and so on.  If Apple had designed a physical part and Franklin had just copied it, it would come down to whether or not Apple had patented it.
2025-03-24 17:30:01 <xentrac     > yes, exactly
2025-03-24 17:31:13 <xentrac     > and there have been other cases like Sega v. Accolade where literal copying was permitted because it was purely functional and lacked any real expressive element
2025-03-24 17:33:33 <xentrac     > I think "Microsoft loyalty" was really "open architecture loyalty", where what determines who can make money selling hardware is how good their hardware is rather than who likes them personally
2025-03-24 17:34:01 <xentrac     > or, selling applications
2025-03-24 17:35:19 <xentrac     > this was a case of Microsoft commoditizing its complements, of course, not of any kind of ethical code
2025-03-24 17:56:40 <thrig       > not having to pay the microsoft tax was one of the few good things that came out of the antitrust trial
2025-03-24 21:42:13 <cleobuline  > the new forthBoth  multi-users is next to be finished