I thought Powerpoint, and Microsoft Office as a whole, was paid for when I bought Office 4.3 (last version for Windows 3.1). Then Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, Office godawfulturdball, and finally Shitbag Office with Ribbons.

Office 4.3 still works pretty good on decently old systems.

Word 2.0 (the version that came out prior to Office 4.3) is so compact and tight that you could carry around the Winword.exe executable file on a 1.44M floppy diskette and use it as a stand-alone Word Processor and also as a Visual Basic (VBA) runtime system. That worked up until Windows XP if I am remembering right.

(the people who customarily say 'get off my lawn' need to just get the hell outta my rock garden now, thankyouverymuch)

Whenever I install Office, I generally install Word and Excel and maybe Access. Powerpoint and Outlook are skipped. This is not for business use, of course, it's how I personally use that software.

If I want graphics, I want something like Micrografx Designer or Corel Draw, where everything is freeform and vectorized and you can lay it on the page how you like. I've used Xfig that way in the past, too, and there are new tools like Inkscape now that somewhat fill the need.

Nerd Tidbit: Micrografx Designer didn't 'die' on me until Windows went 64 bit. I continued to use the version I bought for Windows NT 4.0 for many years with very few compatability quirks. It's one of the 'deepest' and most compatible Windows apps ever created outside Microsoft. It's prececessor In-A-Vision was actually one of the first 'real' Windows applications, it was sold bundled with a Windows 1.03 runtime version. It evolved concurrently with Windows and was always 'just there' and worked. Until Corel snuffed it out awhile ago.

Hope I didn't just Godwin myself - I think the comparison is accurate.

Not to be pedantic (oh, what the hell, why not!) Godwin's Law applied to Usenet threads that went on for day after day after week after week. A Usenet thread never needs to end. Godwin's law doesn't apply in a modern-day Blog context like on Slashdot, because every thread and all discussions die out in about a day.

It's unfortunate that we don't have the kind of weeks-long discussions anymore that Usenet afforded, but those old threads sometimes turned into monsters that only Godwin's Law could terminate.

I wish more people understood the real context of Godwin's Law, because it's so often misapplied.

Word Processors do that. I have been thinking for years of how to make a good indelible writing software tool. It would permanently record whatever you typed into it on the record in a saved document. Any changes you made would be markup and it would be impossible to obliterate the first things you had typed. Kinda like a sheet of paper in a good old IBM Selectric, or even an old Royal manual typewriter. Word processors don't produce durable thoughts, they allow writers to diddle around and produce nothing at all at worst.

Doing anything engineering-wise with Microsoft Office software is difficult. It isn't as bad as it used to be, but years ago I remember an engineer who spent hour upon hour fighting with Excel because he insisted on embedding greek characters into the text in his Excel spreadsheets. He'd done it before using horrid TSRs and text-mode DOS spreadsheets, and he was gonna do it with Excel now. The tool had taken over and become his main focus.

Excel is a beancounter thing, and it can be twisted into being a scientific/engineering tool. but it can also flex itself and turn back into a beancounter tool on you and in the process distort your data.

You can't really do math with a spreadsheet, but everybody here probably knows that.

Even more than this, YouTube is not documentation.

I can't count the number of times I want to look up a howto about some diverse topic on the Interenet, and the only thing I can find is some clod rambling on about it, or even worse, showing a video or screencap of themselves doing it with shitty music blaring loudly in the background.

There is a dearth of people who can produce good documentation, and no, the people who make shitty YouTube howtos don't OWE me anything at all. But it's a bane on the Internet just the same.

they have at least incorporated conferencing and "studios" into Bluebeam.

Yikes, is that the latest proprietary croft that Adobe has shoveled into the PDF format?

They'll never stop, but that makes sense, because PDF is a decent content container, but it's not 'owned' by Adobe anymore in enough people's minds (it never was, but Ghostscript has made huge inroads now.) They NEED to embed proprietary croft and convince enough people they can't do without it.

The Daily Show is one example that comes to mind for someone who uses visual aids well...

Possibly true. But remember, the Daily Show is comedy, so it's just for entertainment. No topic that is brought up on the Daily Show is there by necessity. Any time the presenter can pick and choose what goes into a presentation, it can and will be much more engaging and entertaining than a presentation that is necessary, i.e. a business presentation or an objective reporting of the news.

Meetings don't need to be banned. But the chairs could be removed from all meeting rooms and the tables raised about a foot.

Extinction is not bad, nor is it good, it simply is. It is evolution.

No, it's not. Evolution is a process where species diverge. It can only occur when one species splits into two, and/or a species radically changes as an adaptation to the environment.

It isn't 'survival of the fittest' or any other moronic thing they taught you in third grade.

The fossil record shows that there were sabre-tooth marsupials in South America before the land bridge at Panama connected the two continents. There was no 'evolution' at play when the land bridge occurred and sabre-tooth cats moved into the range and out-competed the marsupials. There was only extinction. There were then fewer species living on the planet, for better or worse.

I gave two separate and specific contexts where extinction is a clear loss to humanity

That's a very anthropocentric way of looking at things. It's really sad when even the people 'defending' the natural order feel the need to shape their argument in a way so that 'people' benefit.

It always strikes me that at least some of the scientists say 'damn, now how will I get tenure!?!' when an extinction event happens before they can study something.

It's worst with Archaeologists, whose goal in life is to root up everything and use 'the most modern techniques possible' to tear apart the historical evidence, then deposit some of the 'good bits' in modern steel and glass buildings.

The effects would probably be worse than DDT.

It wouldn't be difficult for the effect to be worse than DDT.

DDT was a problem mainly because it came out in the moronic era when any new 'miracle chemical' that came out was spread as widely as possible. It was dispersed so widely that it became a real problem. Selective and very controlled use of DDT is effective for controlling mosquito problems. It's simply a boogeyman thing, like 'nukes' for a lot of people.

They're not Gay. They're one of the other letters in that GBLTQ dealie.

There's even a game in all that data, somewhere.

Apparently, it means, 'no salary for jones_supa' by the look of it. I agree, that isn't plausible. For you.

The Internet historically has hated fucking spammers and advertisers. That hasn't changed. And the tools are in need of continual sharpening.