Happy World Toilet Day
Happy World Toilet Day! Yeah, it’s another stupid made-up UN holiday. I think we’re supposed to spend the day feeling bad that brown people shit in holes. And then send money. But, hey, am I supposed to ignore something called World Toilet Day? Heh. Nah.
Hey, does anybody know if I’ve screwed up? We have Office 2007 at work (speaking of shit). I’m working on a long publication in Publisher *spit* and I wanted to bring it home for the weekend, so I’ve just installed Publisher using our serial number on my home machine.
Is that kosher? If not, am I likely to go in tomorrow and find our whole Office is buggered? I want to do everything clean and legal, but Microsoft is so damned opaque.
It’s an academic license — perfectly appropriate for us — and I tried and failed to find out if I’m allowed to use it on more than one seat. Their help files are useless about licensing issues.
Turns out, no other desktop publishing software will open Publisher files. Publisher itself — even an academic license of an old version via eBay — is more money than I felt like spending. InDesign (still the leader, it seems) has gone to that hateful monthly fee model, like all Adobe products. QuarkXpress is £800. I didn’t like the open source alternatives.
Really, the desktop publishing world seems to have contracted and ossified since I stopped doing it professionally, like, a decade ago. What gives?
Posted: November 19th, 2015 under holidays, personal.
Comments: 14
Comments
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: November 19, 2015, 11:19 pm
Microsoft is giving themselves the right to spy on you, so all their stuff is free now :+)
Comment from Skandia Recluse
Time: November 19, 2015, 11:58 pm
What gives?
Proprietary lock in. Once you have our stuff, you can’t use anything else.
Comment from Stephen Falken
Time: November 20, 2015, 2:14 am
I’ve long thought that Word 97 was the pinnacle of Microsoft’s technology. Every version of anything that company has done since that time has gone downhill with each version less user friendly than the previous version.
Comment from Oceania
Time: November 20, 2015, 3:14 am
Muslims don’t use toilets – but their hands
Comment from mojo
Time: November 20, 2015, 3:40 am
Not a lot of TP out in the desert. And cleaning your hand with sand is a lot better than the alternative.
Comment from Timothy S. Carlson
Time: November 20, 2015, 5:29 am
I haven’t used toilet paper as toilet paper in 5 years.
A tabo (small hand-held pail), water and soap is the routine.
Which is why lefties are traditionally taboo – because you eat with your right hand, and use the left for sanitary purposes. Don’t mix them up!
The big problem is – now I am obsessed with checking out the fingernails on left hands.
Comment from svs
Time: November 20, 2015, 11:16 am
For your licencing question, the answer seems to be ‘yes’ per http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-office_install/how-many-computers-can-i-install-microsoft-office/573a3755-041e-485f-808f-9484c5772cbd?auth=1
Comment from Tom
Time: November 20, 2015, 12:12 pm
I work in academenia and our licence allows all of our staff to have a copy of the wonderful Office suite for home use. However, licensing agreements are like contracts with Satan, the small print is really important and probably changes slightly with each doomed soul and\or corporate entity.
Either way you should be safe to install it for weekend work without damning your compatriots to licence abuse Hell.
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: November 20, 2015, 2:58 pm
IANAG (geek) It’s almost impossible to guess because of the variations possible, but there generally three kinds of licenses with Microsoft -single machine, single user; multiple machine, multiple user; multiple machine, single-user-at-any-single-time.
So if it installs, you are probably fine. However it’s possible that if someone else tried to fire it up at the same time, they’d be rejected.
I had an interesting situation a few years ago when my Dell motherboard failed on my PC. Dell cheerfully came to my home and replaced the board, but I booted up, Windows said, “your license is already on another machine (my dead motherboard), and you can go to Hell, THIEF!” . The Dell repairman turned pale and left, muttering “I is Hardware Man, No spikka Software, bye, K? Bye!” It took three days of phone calls to straighten things out.
By now, you probably know the answer anyhow, so please let us know if you got your work done or just had to spend the weekend drinking, er thinking about your project.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: November 20, 2015, 3:55 pm
Everything was fine at work. I am the principal user of that machine, and probably the only user of Publisher, so that copy will never be running simultaneously on two different machines. I’m hoping that’s my salvation.
I had a motherboard failure once up a time too, Some Veg. I actually remember the process of sorting it out with Microsoft to be curiously painless, which is why I wasn’t sweating this too much. Perhaps I don’t know how lucky I am…
Comment from Gromulin
Time: November 20, 2015, 8:46 pm
I’m tryna remember the last time I heard someone use the phrase “Desktop Publishing”. Probably was back when I still had a ‘desktop computer’. I think it was a Compaq Pentium 90.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: November 20, 2015, 9:27 pm
Well, consarnit, Grom — what do you call it when you make a booklet on a com-put-er?
Comment from gromulin
Time: November 21, 2015, 2:26 pm
Heh, No idea Sweas. Just seems that phase used to be in every other article on software in the 90s. Haven’t heard it in a long time.
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