Posted on 04/08/2008 7:22:14 AM PDT by Mike Acker
my personal top 5 gripes about windows
You can turn off the auto-formatting.
Word will do what you tell it to do just as well. You just have to learn how to use it.
Word Perfect had it's own way of doing things, and generally had a greater learning curve.
Word makes it easier to do a lot of things, but if you have a specific way you want to do things that differs from the default in Word, you need to turn off the auto-formatting and know how to format things yourself. If you know how to format things yourself in Word, the auto-formatting gets in the way far more than it helps.
Personally, I liked Word Star. Not because it was such a great program, but because I learned how to use it well enough that I could edit text into the format I desired very quickly. It had a lot of limitations, but once you learned what it could do, you could make use of it's features quickly.
Word Perfect added more features, but also added a lot of complexity. I loaded different versions of Word Perfect on my computers over the years and every time I ended up deleting them and wondering why I had wasted my time with such an unintuitive program.
However, people that had invested the time to learn to use it found it to be very full featured.
Word is far easier for the casual user than Word Perfect ever was.
Word is also powerful and full of features for those that put in the time to learn to use it.
I find it amusing that people who liked Word Perfect, don't like Word because they are unwilling to learn how to use its features, because Word Perfect has quite a learning curve of it's own, and what they are generally arguing against is having to invest the time to learn how to use a different software package than the one they have already learned.
Oh now I see what you’re saying, that’s a stupid feature. Why make it so you can turn off capslock with two keys when you can already turn it off with one?
Remember capslock exist on the HARDWARE side at least as much as in the software.
Waht keyboard interface chip would you put it in? The BIOS? Before calling other people incompetent you really should make sure you’re talking about things that are real.
I have my own rounding function that allows scientific or accounting rounding in Access. I got it back in ‘95 when Access didn’t have one. Let me know and I’ll FReepmail it to you.
You do realize that the vast majority of online fraud has nothing to do with computer security and everything to do with personal irresponsibility and gullibility right? People getting your credit card numbers out of your trash and start buying the entire Amazon catalog on your card can’t be beaten by computer security, nor can people giving their bank numbers to the Nigeria scam guys. And those are the primary sources of online fraud.
agree,-- only sort of:
Dark Reading recently published a story on Hannaford Grocery involving the loss of 4.2 MILLION credit cards. Here's an excerpt from the start of the article:
Hannaford, Security Industry Hunt for Cause of Massive Breach Speculation runs rampant as grocery retailer attempts to find out how 4.2 million credit card records were stolen
they didn't steal those from garbage cans and why would they when they can buy good information on the net black markets without digging credit card offers out of spaghetti sauce? hackers like to drive Beamers!
Another essay, again published on Dark Reading describes the spread of malware-- the stuff is being commercialized. again, an exerpt
New Crimeware-as-a-Service Market Thriving
Lets criminals get stolen information via a Web-based service that does the dirty work for them
I could go on but I think you get the point: while your argument is valid it does nothing to mitigate the problems in computer security that do exist
one of the things that commercal interests look at is the question of what is an acceptable rate of loss. fifteen to twenty cents per $100, roughly for online commerce.
which such an acceptable loss rate might be ok for a big bank for the single mom who has her account drained and ends up without money for gas to go to work, pay her house payment and feed the kids while she fights with some banking house that has rebuffs its customers with an automated phone system -- IS NOT ACCEPTABLE
the internet today stands at a crossroads: it must change or die, and the outcome will depend to a great extent on the perception people have
right not that public perception is the the internet is a dark alley owned by computer hackers. at the same time corporations are pushing customer accounts on web sites as the prefered means of customer-company communication.
and certainly a customer account web page is vastly better than being rebuffed by an automated telephone menu response system. but the question is will customers trust the customer account web page and do business that way?
If HTTPS and Verisign really mean you have secure communications then the way is open to future progress.
but as things stand peoiple generally do not trust that there is ANY security on the Net at all.
and they're right: If you have a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) in your computer HTTPS or Verisign is MEANINGLESS. No security or encryption system is on any value if the client or server has been compromised with malware. and that is the reason security must begin with a SHUTOUT win over malware
if I live to be 100 I'll NEVER understand why they put Bankers' Rounding in as the ROUND function. By convention we Half-Adjust. Half-adjust might not be as good but it's what people expect and if you don't do what people expext then you are going to be called wrong
Access could have offered another function "BROUND" perhaps to provide Bankers' Rounding for those desiring
Your top five complaints?
Are you sure?
if you have a table containing two rows and one column is called FLAG, one row has FLAG="X" the other has FLAG=NULL
then if you SELECT * from SAMPLE where FLAG = "X" you will get the one row that has a "X" in FLAG
now if you SELECT * from SAMPLE where FLAG <> "X" you won't get the other row like you'd think -- if that other row has a NULL in FLAG
a NULL is not the same as "X" and so ACCESS has a BUG of the INCORROUT ccategory. ACCESS just disregards the NULL value, failing to report an error or to abort.
might come up with a few more, we'll see :-)
because it SAVES you 1 key and possibly retyping a whole line as well as the cussing
CAPSLOCKS operated when you were MAKING AN ERROR: typing as though you thought cap lock was off when it was in fact on.
what the TSR did was: when you held SHIFT and then pressed a letter: if cap lock was on, the TSR would turn cap lock off for you and then output the capital letter they way you're trying to type it.
it was like getting a stone out of your shoe on a 10 mile hike!
I apply some hacks to my registry to disable caps lock and I personally also disable the windows key.
I modified HKLM/system/CurrentControlSet/Control/KeyboardLayout
to make this work. You can freepMail me for details.
Go to tools/options/General and select “help for Wordperfect users” and “navigation keys for Wordperfect users.” You may also want to select “blue background, white text” just to assuage your ennui.
>>Word Perfect was an even worse piece of crap than Word.<<
The Windows version, maybe. But WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was probably the greatest piece of software ever written. You couldn’t crash it, it was very functional to skilled users, took little training (~4 hours) to be competent and only about a month of experience to be good, and it produced documents with as good of quality as what people are producing today.
With WordPerfect you could do a REVEAL CODES and fix various problems. With WORD you can fuss around for hours and the * thing does what it wants. you end up junking the document and starting over
That is the program I've been referring to
When Novell grabbed WP and tried to make a windows version of it they really botched the job. what a travesty
Here’s the code. To bypass bankers rounding, you do nothing, just run the function MyRound([Number Field],[Number of decimals]) To use banker’s rounding, use MyRound([Number Field],[Number of decimals],-1).
Public Function MyRound( _
ByVal Number As Variant, NumDigits As Long, _
Optional UseBankersRounding As Boolean = False) As Double
Dim dblPower As Double
Dim varTemp As Variant
Dim intSgn As Integer
If Not IsNumeric(Number) Then
‘ Raise an error indicating that
‘ you’ve supplied an invalid parameter.
Err.Raise 5
End If
dblPower = 10 ^ NumDigits
‘ Is this a negative number, or not?
‘ intSgn will contain -1, 0, or 1.
intSgn = Sgn(Number)
Number = Abs(Number)
’ Do the major calculation.
varTemp = CDec(Number) * dblPower + 0.5
’ Now round to nearest even, if necessary.
If UseBankersRounding Then
If Int(varTemp) = varTemp Then
‘ You could also use:
‘ varTemp = varTemp + (varTemp Mod 2 = 1)
‘ instead of the next If ...Then statement,
‘ but I hate counting on TRue == -1 in code.
If varTemp Mod 2 = 1 Then
varTemp = varTemp - 1
End If
End If
End If
‘ Finish the calculation.
MyRound = intSgn * Int(varTemp) / dblPower
End Function
That is pretty standard. Oracle does the same thing. NULL is nothing, and is therefore neither equal nor not equal to anything. Always assign a value to null using ISNULL or NZ.
Neither of your excerpts give any proof at all of the problem being computer security. The grocery store could have easily been an inside source (legitimate access for illegitimate reasons), and the website could be phishing. You could go on but it would do nothing to prove your point, you want to hold computer security responsible for all internet fraud and that’s simply BS and nothing about using bold underlined capitals changes the fact that most fraud is happens because PEOPLE screwed up.
And again there is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be anything that even slightly resembles shutout security. It’s not possible, as long as legitimate access can happen illegitimate access is always possible. How many of these malware packages you complain about actually get installed by a stupid user probably thinking they’re getting free software or porn, they hang out in the scary parts of the internet, download stuff from people they know can’t trusted, and then are shocked to find they now have software on their machine sending their credit card info to bad guys. You can’t shut that down, how do you stop someone from installing (bad) software and still let them install (good) software? Shutout security is the saddest type of pipe dream.
Unless you really wanted do a quick inversion, leetspeak has a lot of wEIRD stuff, for no apparent reason. Of course if you really think that’s such an awesome feature then go to Tucows, search on “capslock” and this will be the first product in the list: http://www.tucows.com/preview/321409 . Now OK they charge $25 but if you really think your computer is inoperable without it $25 ain’t much, download.com has one that’s only $15. Since the “feature” you want was a TSR for DOS it was probably from a 3rd party anyway.
You keep using that stone thing and it keeps making absolutely no sense. Hitting the capslock again isn’t difficult, probably even less difficult than taking your shoe off to get a stone out, which ain’t that tough either.
Or you can push shift-F1 and reveal codes (you can find it on the menu too but as a Wordperfect fan keyboard commando should be your preferred method).
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