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#1 |
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 5,787
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Microsoft switches to a "one computer only, permanently" licence with Office 2013
Microsoft switches to a "one computer only, permanently" licence with Office 2013.
In previous versions you could install it on your PC. And then when you get a new PC, install it on that one. Not any more. If you want that ability back you have to get the new subscription version of Office called Office 365 which is a hundred bucks a year plus tax. And even then it is only allowed on 5 devices and you technically don't own it, you are subscribing to it. http://www.slashgear.com/office-2013...home-16269573/
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http://www.slashgear.com/tags/microsoft-office-365/ http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/...5Launch_012813 |
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#2 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Bierland. I mean , germany.
Posts: 7,745
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I doubt that'll fly in some part of the EU where "permanent licence" starts to be taken as "it is yours", therefore you willb e able to move it to another newer PC.
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Omnes Blessant Ultima necat "I want, and this is my last and most dear wish, I want that the last of the king be strangled with the guts of the last priest" (Jean Meslier / 1664-1729 / Testament) A very early french atheist, a catholic priest in life. |
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#3 |
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Daydreamer
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Downunder
Posts: 4,262
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Just one more reason to switch to LibreOffice.
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"That is just what you feel, that isn't reality." - hamelekim |
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#4 |
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Critical Thinker
Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 441
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Long time lurker |
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#5 |
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Teddy Bears do have teeth!
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: In The Woods Behind Your House
Posts: 1,612
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I've been using OpenOffice for years, it does everything I need. That said, it sounds like LibreOffice is more frequently updated and better supported, so maybe I'll give 'er a shot.
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I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes. - Robert A. Heinlein If Christ died for our sins, dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them? - Jules Feiffer |
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#6 |
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NWO Master Conspirator
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Albany Park, Chicago
Posts: 48,985
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I willl never, ever buy Office 2013. How unbelievebaly stupid, you replace your computer you have to buy a new copy?
Go **** yourself MS. I'll stick with Office 2007 until it no longer works, then use Open Office or something. |
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#7 |
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Critical Thinker
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Albuquerque, NM
Posts: 314
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OpenOffice does everything I need it to at home. Meanwhile, we finally migrated to Office 2010 about a year ago at work. I absolutely positively hate it. I can't figure out what it improved over the earlier version, other than making menus harder to find, and occasionally being slower than ****.
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#8 |
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Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
Posts: 3,634
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Sadly, interact properly with other copies of Microsoft Office, which is used by a vast majority of businesses in many countries.
If you're using an office suite for personal use, LibreOffice is pretty good. If you're running a business and need to exchange documents with another business, LibreOffice doesn't cut it. Running a complex Word document through LibreOffice and back to Word again is like running English text through a translation program into Dutch and back to English again: the results are likely to be intelligible, but not very pretty. |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum. |
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#9 |
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Graduate Poster
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 1,997
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#10 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: up in the air
Posts: 9,974
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Meh. So is using Microsoft Office with other versions of Microsoft Office.
Do they pay some attention to being compatible with recent versions? Sure. Does that mean that the newer Office version will do something reasonable with the older Office version? Not necessarily. At least if I'm using OpenOffice, I can have someone with whom I am in correspondence install the same version I'm using, and it won't cost them anything. |
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#11 |
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Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Detroit suburbs
Posts: 11,440
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I wonder if this will really have any effect?
How many legal individual sale copies of MS Office are there? The businesses I've worked for have had site licenses. The individual copies I've used on home PCs have been pretty much, what's the word I'm looking for, stolen. Well, actually, just marginally legal. I've had MSDN subscriptions, and installed Office on several "development" machines. |
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Dave "War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Particles are waves." |
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#12 |
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Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Central Illinois
Posts: 34,702
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This is mainly part of the shift to the Cloud, at my employer we gave up on our Exchange server and went to Outlook.com, it doesn't do all an Exchange server does but we don't have to maintain it. We do have to switch to 360 in march or april.
Now $99 a year is a big whack for a home user, so fairly stiff. |
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Hell, dynamiting fish in a barrel is more challenging. - Ladewig I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager |
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#13 |
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Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
Posts: 3,634
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Well, it will cost them zero dollars / euros / etc out-of-pocket. But it will cost them in time and effort to locate the version you're using (provided it's still available somewhere for download), install it, and (should they wish to make changes to your document and send it back), the time required to learn enough about LibreOffice to make the change.
If they don't want to take the time to do that, then they have to compose an email that says, "On page X in the paragraph that starts with "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ...", you should add in "adipiscing" after the phrase "Aenean semper, dui eu egestas", etc. Then the receiver has to do the work of making all the described changes and email the resulting document back to make sure he got everything correct. That's not very efficient. An extreme example of this would be me suggesting you install Linux on your Windows computer because I sent you a file that originated in a program that runs only on Linux. Hey, Linux is free, right? (Don't get me wrong: I like Linux. But I don't suggest everyone run it. I do, however, I wish more people did.) |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum. |
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#14 |
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Guest
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Geneva
Posts: 3,110
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#15 |
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Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
Posts: 3,634
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And in larger businesses, the PCs are locked down so they can't simply install some random program downloaded off the internet. Even though the program itself may be legitimate, it's easy for people to get fooled by shady download sites that offer not only the program you want but a bunch of crapware, too. Sometimes they go so far as to alter the installation program to install the malware along with the program you asked for.
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum. |
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#16 |
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Thinker
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 196
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So if my hard drive fails I have to buy a new version of Office?
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#17 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: up in the air
Posts: 9,974
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Yep. They can certainly have policies that preclude them from using whatever program you're using. And they can, no doubt, screw up in attempting to use whatever program you're using. It will be interesting to see if under the subscription model, you receive regular updates to your word processing software. If so, I wonder how long it will be before a regular update breaks a file using some less-often-used function written under a previous version. |
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#18 |
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Master Poster
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Hamilton New Zealand
Posts: 2,042
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Unemployment isn't working |
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#19 |
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Graduate Poster
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 1,997
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How much shared document editing really goes on between different companies? Is it enough to justify the cost of thousands of licenses across a large enterprise? I could see it for professional services firms. But it seems like many large companies could standardize around Libre/Open Office, require vendors and service providers to use that platform, and deploy MS licenses if and when they are needed for special situations.
Does MS Office provide technical advantages or capabilities not available in FOSS? My own needs in this area are primitive. I can't tell the difference. |
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#20 |
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Guest
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Geneva
Posts: 3,110
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My guess - it's what everyone else does, and what they have always done, so it's what they'll always do (until any pain caused by ms office justifies potentially large projects to choose a successor).
I use word, excel and PowerPoint daily at work. I use perhaps 1% of the available features of word and PowerPoint and maybe a bit more of excel. I doubt I'm unusual here. So, yes, I do think a lot of people could switch without losing anything (I'd go as far as suggesting most people could in fact) |
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#21 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: up in the air
Posts: 9,974
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I don't know about shared editing, but you'd at least like it to render similarly in the two different places.
In those situations, I've taken to printing to a .pdf file. Though that can have problems, too, if fonts get substituted. And of course, some people don't like Adobe, the same way some people don't like Microsoft. |
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#22 |
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Muse
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: East coast, U.S
Posts: 618
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I'm so happy to hear this! Another big boost for Open Office and GNU/Linux!
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#23 |
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Other (please write in)
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: NeverLand
Posts: 9,898
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Anecdote: When I was in school I ran into problems because OpenOffice had odd formatting quirks (There was odd auto-spacing after line breaks and headers were problematic).
A few weeks ago my sister was using LibreOffice for her schoolwork... and she had the exact same problems. For my work Mail Merge is essential, and I hear LibreOffice is... not too successful in that regard. And when working with other people, native file format support is almost essential. But this is more of a social problem than an intrinsic software one. Basically, I would like to leave Office, but I haven't reached the cost/benefit yet. |
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As cultural anthropologists have always said "human culture" = "human nature". You might as well put a fish on the moon to test how it "swims naturally" without the "influence of water". -Earthborn |
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#24 |
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Posts: 5,787
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#25 |
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The Infinitely Prolonged
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Westchester County, NY (when not in space)
Posts: 13,518
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And, MSDN Premium Subscribers are now down to 5 allowed installations of Office, instead of the prior limit of 10, this year.
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WARNING: Phrases in this post may sound meaner than they were intended to be. SkeptiCamp NYC: http://www.skepticampnyc.org/ An open conference on science and skepticism, where you could be a presenter! By the way, my first name is NOT Bowerick!!!! |
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#26 |
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The Infinitely Prolonged
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Westchester County, NY (when not in space)
Posts: 13,518
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You know, I don't think so! I think you are allowed to re-install Office onto the same machine, if you ever needed to.
For one thing: The Activation process is tied to a unique ID for your machine. As long as the replacement hard drive is in the same machine, it should produce the same ID. Thus, the activation should still be allowed. I don't know this officially. But, I would be surprised if I was wrong. |
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WARNING: Phrases in this post may sound meaner than they were intended to be. SkeptiCamp NYC: http://www.skepticampnyc.org/ An open conference on science and skepticism, where you could be a presenter! By the way, my first name is NOT Bowerick!!!! |
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#27 |
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Illuminator
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Hunting Moose and Squirrel
Posts: 4,154
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I think that if you change the size of the new hard drive that the algorithm will also change the ID number. I know that when they first implemented this type of system for XP validation there was some wriggle room for things like that but if you say increased the HD size and added memory at the same time that it could trigger the re-validation requirement. Although to be honest in practice if you simply called Microsoft and said that you had simply done some hardware upgrades they would send you a new id number without even bothering to check because it was so common.
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"Swift, silent and deadly" was a part of my job description Upon hearing me say that my friend asked me "So you're a fart?"... About my avatar. |
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#28 |
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The Infinitely Prolonged
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Westchester County, NY (when not in space)
Posts: 13,518
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Unless you are using old hardware, this might not be true, anymore.
Processors now have unique IDs, which, I believe, are used to activate the software. As an alternative, I think they could also go by the MAC address of the network adapter you are using, if you have one; before they start generating the ID based on hardware mix. |
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WARNING: Phrases in this post may sound meaner than they were intended to be. SkeptiCamp NYC: http://www.skepticampnyc.org/ An open conference on science and skepticism, where you could be a presenter! By the way, my first name is NOT Bowerick!!!! |
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#29 |
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Daydreamer
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Downunder
Posts: 4,262
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I don't use it much, but I haven't seen that problem before, so I had a fiddle around.
When I go to Style and Formatting and select first line indent I get an indentation on the first line immediately after each line break. Is that what was happening? If so, you can fix it by going to Style and Formatting and selecting default or complimentary close. |
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"That is just what you feel, that isn't reality." - hamelekim |
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#30 |
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Thinker
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 196
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#31 |
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Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Central Illinois
Posts: 34,702
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__________________
Hell, dynamiting fish in a barrel is more challenging. - Ladewig I suspect you are a sandwich, metaphorically speaking. -Donn And a shot rang out. Now Space is doing time... -Ben Burch You built the toilet - don't complain when people crap in it. _Kid Eager |
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#32 |
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Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
Posts: 3,634
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Between different companies, probably not too much. In the contract scenario I described above, probably the details would be hammered out in emails and telephone calls, and one party would take control of writing the contract and simple send drafts to the other until both were satisfied.
Within a company, probably a lot.
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I really wish StarOffice / OpenOffice / LibreOffice had gone with WordPerfect's "reveal codes" model instead of the Word's "guess where the page break + paragraph + picture code + italics actually are embedded within the document stream" model. |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum. |
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#33 |
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Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
Posts: 3,634
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More curious than anything else ... is the mail merge more complex than inserting a name and address into a form letter? How many people do the letters go to? Do you always send to the same list or do you need to select a subset based on (for example) age, postal code, dog owner vs cat owner, etc?
OO has a decent database in its own right, and has drivers that let you connect to other databases. I know it can connect to MySQL and I'd be surprised if it couldn't connect to Access and SQLite. I think it would be interesting to see what sort of challenge it would be to do a rather complex mail merge in both Word and OO. |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum. |
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#34 |
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Graduate Poster
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 1,997
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That's interesting - I often find myself doing something exactly like that. Most recently, my neighbor had some exotic tools for sale, and I made him a brochure with photos and captions, two photos per page.
I did it on a computer with an old version of MS Office. I didn't even try to use Word, because it re-sizes photo A as soon as one inserts photo B, and makes the process much harder than it needs to be. Perhaps Libre/Open does the same thing. My solution is to use Powerpoint and print/save as a pdf... that works pretty well. I have heard the same thing from MANY people. Why can't developers get this stuff right? Word processing programs are one of the oldest PC applications going, and they still suck. The best word processing package I have ever used was Envision Publisher, a DOS shareware. It had built-in limitations that make it useless in this day and age, but conceptually it was far better than what we have now. |
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#35 |
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Muse
Join Date: Nov 2010
Posts: 689
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It certainly will be tied to something, but what constitutes a 'same machine'? Think I had read somewhere, in fact it could have been regarding reinstalling a MS OS, that it was tied to the motherboard.
If you had an OEM version of the OS, you could ask sweetly if they could revalidate it after a mobo upgrade, perhaps once. But I am not sure regarding a full version which is not an OS. Either way, it's pretty shabby. Software is really becoming rental, and that ain't cool man. |
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#36 |
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Thinker
Join Date: Nov 2012
Posts: 155
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Re: Microsoft switches to a "one computer only, permanently" licence with Office 2013
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#37 |
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The Infinitely Prolonged
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Westchester County, NY (when not in space)
Posts: 13,518
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__________________
WARNING: Phrases in this post may sound meaner than they were intended to be. SkeptiCamp NYC: http://www.skepticampnyc.org/ An open conference on science and skepticism, where you could be a presenter! By the way, my first name is NOT Bowerick!!!! |
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#38 |
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I Void Warranties
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: The Treasure Valley
Posts: 3,236
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"I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us." "Sticking the flounce is the hardest move in forum gymnastics." -tsig |
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#39 |
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Graduate Poster
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: No matter where I go, there I am
Posts: 1,859
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Well, the biggest FUBARred Word document I have seen was shared between various Office versions. Opening the file with Libre-/Open Office would result in a readable text, albeit it would be a pain to actually work and edit it.
As far as I can tell, the document originated (or was at least still readable and editable) on an older Office/Win version, probably a student license, that has not been updated regularly. We tried to open it with the latest, completely up-to-date Office/Win, and the two latest Office/Mac versions, with all patches applied. |
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#40 |
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Gatekeeper of The Left
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: The Universe 35.2 ms ahead of this one.
Posts: 32,107
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So, what stops me from putting MS Office into a VM and then just moving the VM from machine to machine?
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