Agreed, and before the naysayers start chiming in, I wrote my whole dissertation in LibreOffice Writer without any issues. LibreOffice is fine. My one and only gripe is that the resume templates are sorely lacking, but that's a community issue, not a software one.
Same, though technically I started it on OpenOffice before LO was a thing. Sent material back and forth with supervisors who all used Word, etc. just fine too, and LO has only improved in the past few years.
Office 97 not only has everything most people need (wordpad has all features most people need; most users have no need for Excel or other office tools) it also starts up faster and uses less resources. The only question is do you actually need any of the massive quantity of features in modern office, or is word processing today still fairly simple for you. And maybe if you don't like MDI and want your multiple windows instead (the thing I miss most about old office is having 15 documents open in a single window when writing essays in school, without cluttering up alt-tab or the taskbar. That and the toolbar button that initiates the active screensaver). If you want to use your cloud storage (you really don't need it most likely) you'll have to use a sync tool instead of having it directly.
Turn off macros for security and make sure it can actually run (no idea when office stopped using 16 bit components), and I recommend firewalling it as well, but office doesn't really need to be up to date.
There was an OOXML compatibility layer for Office 2000, though the latest version of that only runs on Win XP and later, but I suspect LibreOffice would be more compatible with OOXML made with current versions of Office.
I was one of those, way past its EOL. I could never switch to this braindead “ribbons” UI and refused to learn this idiotic new scheme so I stayed with office 2k. And then I switched to libreoffice.
free market capitalism will always end like this though. the end goal of capitalism is the consolidation of all things into a megacorporation or oligarchy that controls everything, creates nothing, and earns infinite money
Why is this downvoted? To me, it seems like a self-evident conclusion. Even the supporters of the current system would probably agree with it. When you have a system that encourages endless growth at absolutely all costs, while placing no limits at the amount of power a single entity can hold, what other outcome can there be but the biggest players absorbing everything into themselves and using their influence over people and governments to guarantee their dominance?
These mega-strong players always kill themselves and collapse. We can see this on the global geopolitical scale (which fundamentally acts as a true free market), where all the empires have always fallen.
The stressing part is when they are at their peak, so people would like to use regulation to short-cut right to the collapse part.
The only example we have a true free market victor that hasn't collapsed is humans, who have totally and completely dominated all other life on Earth, but man, it's certainly not looking good for us right now.
But does that collapse happen because of some universal axiom about controlling humans, or were those empires merely limited by what was possible in their era? This is the first time in history we have so much military power, ways to exert influence that's truly world-spanning, the most sophisticated technology and the most thorough surveillance ever - all at the same time. Whatever barrier there might be, who's to say that today's megacorporations won't be able to push past it?
I'd say the axiom is that as your system becomes larger, more complex, the number of stable states it can exist in shrink. Which is something that is just generally true about systems.
We can envision a future with an ASI controlled super corporation that owns everything with omnipresent micromanagement, but then why would the ASI even bother with humans. That event right there would be our "got to powerful for our(humans) own good" moment.
We haven't had a free market in the United States in awhile. It's public-private partnered market fixing. Which is good for the consumer, many times, though not all the time.
Is there a difference in terms of outcomes? In the final form of a complete 'free market' without a government, the biggest entity would simply replicate the same levers of power that a government has through private militias, issuing scrip, having their own private courts and so on. But, since the US has a powerful government, it's much cheaper, simpler and more stable for them to just buy out as much of it as possible and use the same power through a proxy. Admittedly, the US government is not completely controlled by them, so it could still get much worse.
I had the pleasure of growing up around gray markets (relatively free, bribes were predictable & reasonable enough for an average noodle seller) in Southeast Asia in the 90s. It's quite different from large corporations getting Federal agencies and municipalities to lock out any potential competition. The enforcement of the US govt is far stronger than the enforcement of a handful of corrupt cops, as each precinct is essentially its own feudal regime, and within the department you have individuals mostly loyal to their families. A corrupt cop in a corrupt system driven by loose associations of extended families & fictive kin groups, one of five in a neighborhood say, can be pressured by a group of aunties and uncles serving street food or pirated goods through a web of personal relationships. This was much easier for them than hiring a lobbyist here would be.
I'm not saying it's better, rule of law has many benefits, but it is an example of where there were markets which were more free, that did not have cyberpunk outcomes, and they were quite different.
I'll say that I don't know anything about 90s SEA, but I know a bit about gray markets. One thing that stands out to me in your description is that all the corruption is incredibly localized and small-scale. Everything happens at the scale of individuals. And I don't deny that living under these conditions won't be that bad (a single corrupt official's power can only go so far), but what's stopping it from eventually becoming more organized? With us encouraging endless growth of wealth and influence, corrupt individuals are bound to form groups, then rings, then whole organizations. To me, what you're describing seems like a transitory state caused by societal factors, instability and simply not having had enough time. What the thread is all about is end states. We're already in a place where removing government regulation would turn our biggest players into those same cops, except with trillions of dollars, offices in every country and an ability to get their hands onto anything that money can buy.
I'm saying that those biggest players and our governments already work hand in hand to do that. Which is to say, the government is used as the enforcement arm for corporate interests. This is less "free" market, and more market commanded by interests.
I don't dispute OP, but Adam Smith's premise was that the free market and "invisible hand" were meant to benefit society as a whole, and the minimal government intervention was there to enforce that. Therefore one could argue that the kind of capitalism we have today is not Smiths's original vision, but rather, a failure to implement that vision.
To be clear, I am not defending the position, and maybe that vision just cannot be implemented in practice, or the premise is wrong, etc. Just trying to answer the question as to why OP might be downvoted. We cannot generally conflate defenders of free-market capitalism with defenders of the existing capitalism. I've heard such arguments before, maybe somebody can elaborate in more detail.
I might agree with you if it wasn't for those annoying trap doors. I got so lost as a result of them back when I originally rented the game back in the 90s that I never managed to complete it.
The Dreamcast has it's own community servers and isn't compatible with Schtserv. Though I believe that might just be because Episode 2 wasn't release on the DC.
I do have an account for the DC servers too but I wouldn't recommend them. The DC takes too much hassle to get online for the value when most people on the DC PSO server are there for the novelty rather than the grind.
Blue Burst (PC) has it's own community servers too. But I've never owned nor played PSO on the PC.
I've played a few hours of the gamecube version online. I honestly would rather play the dreamcast version, I'm not a big MMO person so the novelty is why I'm playing
I'm a massive DC fanboy but even I have to concede that the GameCube version of PSO is better:
- you don't lose any unequipped items when you die (this is super annoying on the DC)
- you can level up your character to 200 instead of 100 (or 150, I forget which). Which is very useful in Ultimate campaigns (as well as lengthens the game)
- GC also comes with Episode 2, which is something like 6 extra dungeons. Some of them look absolutely gorgeous too.
The DC PSO is a fantastic game, but he Sonic Team basically doubled the scale of game when they released it on the GC.
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Edit: thinking about it, `Ultimate` mode might not even be available on the DC version. Or if it is, it's only available on the v2 of the DC version (there were two versions available for the DC). Ultimate is like another mod for Episode 1 because it comes with new skins for the mobs and the campaigns happen at different seasons and/or times of day.
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