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If you leave it alone... how do you convince people to buy a new version, when they are totally happy with the old one?

MS Word was way better back then too.

The application "office suite" reached its maturity at that point but no one seemed content to leave it alone. Ribbons? XML? Are you kidding me?

There was a Bayesian spam filter that as a side benefit was able to do something very much like that. SpamBayes I think?

Typo - please fix and then feel free to delete this comment. Thanks.

Nobody is lined-up and waiting to blast-off to Mars right now

This might be true. But it still is sad. More and more hurdles against human space flights are discovered. Faster than light... good chances that it will never happen. Manned interstellar flights?
At speeds above 0.3c, which is for all its worth far too slow to get anywhere, the space dust turns into deadly and hard to shield radiation:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0610030

When a ship accelerates to a relativistic velocity above 0.3c, interstellar gas becomes a flow of relativistic nucleons, which, in itself, is nothing less than hard radiation bombarding the starship, its travelers, and all of the electronic equipment aboard.

And now even flying around within the solar system is no really reliable possible.

Matter of taste. I like my stuff separated. 'Check and follow-up'... I see what you mean, but for me a couple of procmail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail) rules, which sort my email into folders, are totally sufficient. Everything in a standard format, so I never have to fear vendor lock-in is extremely important to me. Rule of thumb: If a program changes my mail folder in any way that I cannot open it in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_%28email_client%29 mutt anymore... it is dead to me. Even though I rarely use plain old mutt nowadays.

The tragedy of gmail is that at first the interface was very good and it's gotten worse with each iteration.

That is the reason why I avoid web services wherever I can. I got my fair share of flame, when I said that I hated this or that new version of interface, for instance /., or sourceforge. 'Conservative', 'mossback', 'stick-in-the-mud'... and worse I have been called. Strangely, I never got a clear answer when I asked how they would like it when I enter their homes while they are away, and redecorate. Paint the wallpapers in a different color, change the carpets, and reorganize their wardrobes and such things. They come home and suddenly everything is different.

A web service, unless I host it myself, never belongs to me. Features can come and go, or get changed. And very often I have the feeling, it has nothing to do with usability, but politics.

Believe it or not my best experience was with StarOffice 7 back in 2004 or so. OO.o has been iffy, and LO.o, while better in some ways, remains annoying in ways that matter to me. I love the stylist and navigator, but I sense the project lacks a vision. SO7 was still kind of a techie tool not afraid to expose some of its more complicated functionality. I'm afraid LO and OO.o are too obviously chasing Microsoft's tail. Pasting graphics into a written doc is one pain point: Mac Pages does it so much better and elegantly without having to dick around with "anchors" or having stuff jump all over the page. Just this week I had headaches trying to paste a properly-sized graphic into the header of a LibreOffice doc and I have no idea why.

I've tried a lot of other software: Mellel, Copywrite, Appleworks, Abiword, Softmaker Office (thumbs up on Linux/BSD), WordPerfect 2013, and a few others. I detest MS Word but honestly I found WP to be kind of a mess and missing important functionality. Too bad, because I really wanted to like it and really wanted it to be my alternative to Word on my Windows machine. No dice. Not only did they want like $300 for it but it was annoying and very obviously not-as-good as Word in important ways (can't remember which ones anymore, but I only gave it a week or so of free trial before deciding 'no way.')

I remember WP on DOS fondly, but systems have moved on. Word sucks, but there's practically no escaping it. Unemployment, maybe would help. And before I forget, the Ribbon sucks!

Docbook, Blearch! I happen to like LaTeX, though I accept it's not the tool for everyone (I wrote the Dictator's Handbook using LaTeX and wrote about the process here). But in 2013 I got my first exposure to DocBook and I didn't like it at all. I signed onto the Trojita project to write them some docs using the KDE templates and formats, and though I made it through the project I didn't like it and didn't write any more docs. Maybe KDE's stuff was part of the problem, I don't know - I haven't had experience with anyone else's docbook stuff. But I found it unwieldy, unpleasantly complicated, and kind of plodding. Maybe it's better elsewhere. I also never really found an editor and markup syntax system I liked that well when using it. What's your setup?

The tragedy of gmail is that at first the interface was very good and it's gotten worse with each iteration. Clearly this is the fruit of some Google employee's pet project (what do they call them? 10% projects or something?) and is gaining some attention and traction. In 2006 or so gmail was a pretty straight-forward thing that did everything you were used to doing but better, more cleanly, and more easily.

They've pissed around with the UI ever since then and generally made it into a beast that's less likeable by those who value their email. It might have helped folks that oversubscribed to junk or facebook status updates and didn't know how to create filters to deal with all of it. But to serious emailers the changes were annoyances.

Shout-out, by the way, to Fastmail.com, who does nothing but IMAP and does it right. I don't often use their web interface because I'm a email-client kind of person, but when I do I find it easy to manage and not too "fruity."

Good tips - that's my future strategy, once this one "ages" out. For the moment though, it's working well and I'm happy with it. You're right that backups don't have to be read by anyone other than the receiving system, but it's a nice bonus if you can test the drives' readability on a different machine/system, just to verify the writes are happening and the data is being correctly backed up. I had a database nearly get destroyed because I didn't verify the backups, and when it came time to use them I discovered to my horror they were bad. I won't forget that feeling soon, let me tell you.

Bryan makes some good points about the lack of universal file systems, too. NTFS, UFS, ZFS, HFS+ all have their positives and negatives, but it would be nice if manufacturers and systems-builders took into consideration of the need for something more transversal. FAT as a lowest common denominator is really f*cking low.

Yes, agree - this was very interesting, and I didn't know about any of it. I wonder if this doesn't strengthen the case for increased/additional/future robotic exploration of the type already happening and with some considerable success.

I fear politicians choose projects of this type more for their "splash" and "cool" factor than for their scientific merit, whereas the technical folk might argue for different projects or types of projects. In fact, there might be no obvious need to do manned exploration of Mars at the moment, since our little wheeled machines are exploring them so admirably. This keeps the politicians on their leashes, where they belong, and might help encourage funding of missions like the ones already under way.

Fascinating stuff - I had no idea. Thanks for the great article.

Yeah, Wow. I hadn't heard of that conspiracy before. Their website is still being updated, with new newsletters. I looked at the most recent one. Nothing appears to be immediate. There are a lot of fears of other groups that know what they know and are plotting to destroy them once the big pole shift happens. Maybe they should try not posting what they know about the pole flip, to keep a step a head of the others. It takes a special kind of delusion to keep it up this long after so many missed predictions.

Well, if it could automatically associate not obviously associated emails ( not part of the same chain) that would be great. Think of mailing lists. Someone emails the same obscure behavior of a product and your email client finds the related emails automatically. So you can respond back, see this email from a year ago that solved your issue without having to do the search yourself. That would be awesome ( but unfortunately difficult for a machine to do automatically)

Did you read the article? It doesn't simplify e-mail, so much as it integrates it into your calendar/todo list, adds features for tracking packages you've ordered, notifies you about delays in flights, etc, etc.

It actually could be very useful. I'm sure I'm not the only one that uses my inbox as a (cumbersome) TODO list, and integrating some intelligence could clean-up your e-mail experience, and make it easier to check and follow-up on any bits of information you receive through e-mails.

Nobody is lined-up and waiting to blast-off to Mars right now, so I think we're good. In a few years, when people are ready to go, solar weather will be swinging the other way. It's an extreme case right now, but still part of a cycle that has been observed going for several centuries, so it's only a matter of a bit more time before things get back to normal:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Sunspot_Numbers.png

Yes. This. Exactly.

DocBook or latex these days for me.

We'll just reverse the polarity, plugin in a spare lithium reactor, don't you worry about it

I had a nicely written counterpoint but Pipedot ate it when my connection dropped temporarily.

In short, my experience is the opposite of yours. LO is a lot more stable for me than OO ever was, crashing about as often as MS Office. And I simply avoid pasting in graphics with HTML. Poof, no lockups.

Not sure I agree. GMail is actually a terrible user interface, with the usual hide and seek options and disappearing buttons so inexplicably in vogue now. It also happens to be ugly as sin. It could get a LOT better. I'm also torn on the "understand their device" construct. It should only be necessary to a point. Machines serve and should anticipate humans. Apple's always gone too far the wrong way, removing mouse buttons and power switches.

The single most glaring flaw of iOS is the missing Back button. It makes the entire interface a chore. They will likely introduce a sneaky alternative to much fanfare (a la the "Magic Mouse") in a version or three.

I think LaTeX is something very great. I use it for several things. I have even made several issues of a magazin with pure LaTeX and for most projects handling some kind of printed reports, I generate LaTex code from the program and get a good looking document at the printer or a nice looking PDF at the screen.

That said, I still think LaTeX is far from replacing a standard word processor. Unless you write a very simple document with the same structure all the way from the first page to the very last, you actually break the flow a lot more by looking up stuff in LaTeX reference manuals. Very few write enough of LaTeX to remember all tags. They get forgotten unless they are used daily. Also, as soon as it comes to something a little bit more odd you end up searching for the LaTeX documentation and the thought you had gets lost.

If a text really is simple, and has nothing odd in it, write it in Markdown, then convert it to LaTeX and add the final touch. Markdown is faster to type than the LaTeX tags and is breaking less the flow of thought. Also, LyX is a good alternative as you still have the power there if needed.

A good choice for beginners. But I worked with LaTeX long before there was LyX, so it is no real help for me.

The author is talking about escaping from Word to WP. However, the route most take will be to Libreoffice. This is giving me really mixed feelings:
1. Libreoffice is open source and free. It is good people notice there are alternatives to the highly priced commercial products.
2. However they might get a bad taste of how open source programs are. Libreoffice is extremely unstable. Openoffice had its unstabilities too, but not nearly as many as Libreoffice is having. This is the cost of a speeded up development.

If you copy a picture from the web, you actually copy both the HTML-tag and the picture. Libreoffice decides to use the HTML tag as default. This is causing more hangs and locks than should ever be allowed and it prevents the document from getting opened unless that picture is accessable online at the moment you open the document. Sure, you can go to Edit/Paste Special (Ctrl-Shift-V) and pick Bitmap, but despite how many times you tell a user to do this, they will just right click and paste as they would do with Word.

If you handle a lot of pictures in a document, you almost should expect a crash at some point and you need to remember to all the time press ctrl-s. This is about properly inserted pictures and not pasted HTML.

If you make a presentation with Impact you should save every time before adding an "animation" (even if it is just a simple "appear" because you want something hidden on the slide until later).

If you add a table but forgot to add an empty line under the table, you have big trouble to continue the text.

Sometimes documents get so messed up that there is no other way to correct them than pasting to a plain text editor and then again apply all the styles.

One minor update fixes often some problems but adds serveal other. For example 4.2.5 had problems with animations, 4.26 fixed some problems with animations but added instead some problems with pictures.

OpenOffice always had some problems but not nearly as many and as frequently as LibreOffice. While most people cheerish Libreoffice, I do not do it. I know a fork was necessary as Oracle almost stopped development of OpenOffice but the fork should have continued in a slow and stable pace adding the features and not rushing like now.

Libreoffice works well as a "Word Viewer" (for opening Word documents and printing them), but to actually work with Libreoffice might sometimes really annoy.

Does google mail need to be even more simple? It seems simple enough but I'm not exactly the "Can you dumb that down for me to my level?" type of person. The way technology is being directed at the moment by many companies reminds me of the jokes about an Apple device that only has a single button for simplicity. I dread a future where everyone has the devices they used dumb down so they can understand them strait away instead of elevating themselves to understanding their device, and perhaps by extension the world around them more.

My first urge was to start ranting how Word is anything but genius, but I calmed myself down and read the article first (that's allowed here, right? ;). I think I understand what the author is saying, although I don't entirely agree with it.

WP had (I haven't used it in decades, so I don't know if it's still true) a much simpel model for storing the document than Word. It was just a bunch of "bold on", "bold off" etc codes, similar to HTML tags. There was a mode in which you could display and edit those markup codes directly. That made it relatively easy to visualize what WP was doing internally.

WP was also terrible in my opinion. It would often get the codes into such a mess that the high-level editing couldn't produce the right result anymore and you were forced to hand-correct the markup tags. Some people liked having that kind of low-level control, but to me it felt like being forced to clean up after the program made a mess.

When I first used Word (Word for Windows 2.0), I really liked it. No more messing around with markup codes. And wysiwyg was great for trying different layouts without having to make a dozen prints. But that changed as both Word and the documents I was editing became more complex. Instead of short letters and greeting cards, I started to write reports with embedded illustrations and formulas, tables of contents and often co-writing them with other students.

In particular having multiple people working on a document caused problems. Track Changes didn't play well with auto-numbering and ToC, marking text inserted automatically by Word as changes. Different authors had different ideas about layout: some used direct formatting and some used styles, but even the ones using styles picked them based on the way they looked and not for their semantic role in the document. And they would use various tricks to get the right visual effect, which would fail when other parts of the document changed, or even when switching to a different printer. (If you want a page break before a new chapter, configure that in the header numbering style instead of attempting to fake it by inserting empty lines until the page wraps, grrr...)

Coming back to the article, WP has a simpler model that the writer can directly see and manipulate. This allows the writer to bend WP to their will with some moderate effort: it is not WP being mediocre but right, it is WP being mediocre and the user making it right. Word has a more complex and less visible model, which is great when it works well, but very hard to diagnose when it fails. And it will fail, both because users are not using it properly and because Word itself has bugs and misfeatures that will mess up the document. Comparing Word to Plato suggests that it isn't possible to do real-world word processing based on an ideal model. It might be true that any tool has to compromise to real-world concerns at some point, but I'm convinced that it is possible to do so with far less kludges than Word.

Word tries to support two approaches at once: direct formatting where you change the properties of the text until it looks good and structured documents where the look of a text fragment is determined by its style. I think a lot of problems could be avoided if each document would use either direct formatting or styles exclusively.

I also think Word encourages bad habits by offering formatting features at every step of the way. It distracts from the writing of the text itself, it often leads to inconsistent layout decisions and it wastes time because effort is put into formatting text that will later be deleted or merged. So the last decade and a half I've been using DocBook, HTML and MarkDown, where I can write focusing on just the text itself and worry about the layout later.

Hadn't heard that one (Where's Robert Stack when you need him?). "Planet X" typically refers to Pluto and other dwarf-planets.

According to Wikipedia, the conspiracy theory involves the Earth PHYSICALLY flipping up-side-down, nothing to do with magnetic poles:

"(a physical pole shift, with the Earth's pole physically moving, rather than a geomagnetic reversal)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_collision

Fortunately, this was predicted to happen in 2003, so those Zetas have quite the skill for causing cataclysms that nobody notices. I certainly didn't know I was upside-down.

As a Microsoft Word replacement I'd recommend LyX instead of writing LaTeX directly.

If Inbox really uses IMAP that would be hilarious, as GMail does its darnedest to make IMAP as weird and unpredictable as possible. GMail is really just big POP3 boxes with funky search and labels/tags.

What? OO.o added a stupid ribbon too? Thank the FSM I use LibreOffice that still uses logical SAA menus as the great god IBM intended.

Using the ribbon at work for years at it gets in my way every single day. LibreOffice saves my sanity.

Inbox uses gmail behind the scenes, including IMAP.

Except that in practice Earthlink over TWC performs exactly as TWC itself performs. When TWC makes changes they affect ELN customers, from throttling to port blocks to network upgrades. You can disregard and pooh pooh the last mile all you wish, but that's where we live and it's where effects are felt. It would be great if what you said were true, and it made a difference, but it's simply not true, not in present reality. Thanks for the response.

Private ISPs are no longer competing with each other to install fibre. The government is laying down fibre with the NBN.
They're not so stupid to compete with NBN.

Here we go again.

https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en

IMAP for the win.

So was Lavabit.

Wait.. isn't this just that Planet X conspiracy theory all over again?

No, he wasn't saying that he knew wordperferct better, he was saying that he worked more constant with wordperfect's model than with words model. Wordperfect wasn't perfect ( especially the first windows versions), but its vastly more sane of a word processor.

Use zfs send/receive..either locally or via network. It should work great with minimal fuss. As to restoration FreeBSD/Linux/OpenSolaris should all work just fine. A backup doesn't need to be read by "anything", afterall..just read by something sufficiently common.

Try OpenOffice. The menu is on the right and can be disabled.

I use runbox now. Not as good as gmail. Private. Cheap. Decent mailbox allocation. Email is a service worth paying for.

....what's perfect for me is still LaTeX.

That's a lot of words just to say:

I know Wordperfect better, and have a hard time switching to Word.

I can't say I like either one, and find Word very nearly unusable since the switch to the "ribbon" interface, but his claims are ridiculous. You can change the tab-stops at any line of a document, and go right back as soon as you want to. Don't know how to set tab stops just how you'd like? You can middle-click anywhere in a document, and start typing. Don't like how some Word feature decides to auto-format your text? You certainly don't have to ever use it again. I am sadly well acquainted with just how deeply buried in obscurity commonly used features are in both of them (eg. header & footers, with first page different from the rest, and including page number, for MLA), but both are still infinitely better than a typewriter, word processor, or similar methods which don't allow you to quickly reformat your entire document from portrait to landscape, or letter to A4, without needing to go through it to manually fix layout and formatting.

The article serves as a perfectly good rebuttal to everything you've said. But I guess I could point-out a few specifics:

What, there was never a capacity limit on the ability of a local CO switch to handle voice traffic?

For phones, you either got a dial-tone and your call connected, or it didn't. There was no equivalent to throttling a phone call. You weren't placing hundreds of calls at once, to services of different quality and needs. So policing the equal access with telephones was vastly more obvious and straight-forward than with internet.

They should keep their network maintained and upgraded to allow the traffic that they are actively selling to business and consumer.

Your ISP doesn't run a line to Netflix. Netflix's ISP doesn't pay your ISP a standard amount for every packet "connected". There is no single ISP for each geographic area to take responsibility. etc. Peering arrangements are very complex, and aren't just a matter of your ISP expanding its capacity to deliver what they sold you.

You can tell it was written by lawyers and not technologists.

The topic is laws and FCC regulations. The lawyers (that deal with technology) are the only ones with any insights to the topic. A "technologist" doesn't know jack about Title II.

the miracle of competition will suddenly mean that congested hybrid coax-fiber infrastructure and leased lines will be able to deliver higher capacity just by changing a bill-to address.

The problems Netflix and others are having has NOTHING to do with congestion over the last-mile... Net neutrality in general, similarly has little or nothing to do with last-mile congestion. The problems to be addressed are all past that point, in the respective backhauls, and peering points onto each ISP's network. Those would be completely different if you switched your ISP. Presumably, with several ISPs competing for customers, the one that throttles something like Netflix the worst, will lose many customers to competitors, and will changes their behavior if they want to keep them.

Hmm... hard to flame and troll about this story. So no need for me to go to /. ;-)

n/t

...thanks, but no thanks, Google. Google services are simply too unreliable. They come and go. For me normal email is good enough as it is and my inbox is exactly as smart as I want it to be.

This is interesting to me because not long ago I read the spectacular A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi. There's an interesting chapter about the old magnetic core memory that persisted well into the early years of DEC and the minicomputer revolution. This is different, but similar.

Non-physicist here, but I wonder how hard it will be as an engineering challenge to keep all those little magnetic fields isolated and separated, and how resilient it would be to ambient effects? Still, glad to see innovation for the sake of innovation, if only because if we stop trying to stop making progress.

Agreed. Too much FUD and two second sound bites. Not enough substantial debate on the merits.

Not directly, but looting and riots would be likely. Fires in urban areas would be very dangerous. And medical care would be reduced to some pretty poor levels.

No rebuttals? I figured I must have gotten at least something wrong in my little screed. (For example, while competitors have to share the same cable plant, they don't necessarily have to use the same modems and certainly not the same upstream links. Though as far as I know Earthlink does.)