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Yes, on Windows 7. Most of our computers aren't running Windows 10.

Many articles say Microsoft and Windows cannot be trusted. Two of those articles: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.

And: 7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you...

So, it seems to me that Google and Microsoft are, more and more, poorly managed. They are in the abuse business, not in any real business.

Several years ago, I talked with a mid-level Google manager who said that Google had more money than it knew how to manage. Also, that it was difficult for Google employees to know what was happening inside the company.

And Linux: We have 2 computers running Linux. Mostly they don't get used. It is too difficult to deal with all the poorly-documented variations. This story about Linux makes me laugh: Why is the Number of Linux Distros Declining? Linux had 285 variations when that article was published!

A deeper problem: 285 Linux distributions! This story about Linux makes me laugh: Why is the Number of Linux Distros Declining?

AMAZING QUOTE from that story of 3 1/2 years ago: "In 2011, the Distrowatch database of active Linux distributions peaked at 323. Currently, however, it lists only 285."

285 different ways to do one thing!!! "Only" 285? Quote from a Slashdot comment: "You know Linux Desktop is a junk OS from the fact an app may require version 2.5 of a library and another one might require no more than 2.4, and Desktop Linux offers no way around the problem."

Linux has VERY poor documentation. Who will document 285 varieties of the same thing? A friend of mine said this perhaps 20 years ago: "It's free but you will spend at least a week getting it to work." So, Linux is NOT free.

Those who arrange Linux have apparently never heard of cooperation. (What did you say? Co-what??? Is that an English word?)

Microsoft needs to stay in their own yard and leave OSS to those who actually respect it and the license.

Like who? Oracle? Google? How exactly is it that Microsoft doesn't "respect OSS and the license"? Like you already said, the license allows it and they have made many contributions under the GPL to the Linux kernel. Over the past few years they have also released a *lot* of projects under OSS licenses.

A company with the EEE mentality Microsoft has needs to mind its own business.

Companies are not people, they don't have a "mentality". Perhaps they have a "culture" but of course that is always in flux particularly when you have a changing world and changing leaders. This "EEE" was something from a specific case 2 decades ago targeted at Java that has never, ever succeeded at "embracing, extending, extinguishing" anything. It's the mind-numbing stupidity of people like you that cling to this one thing and extrapolate over all the companies actions forever. I mean people don't go out and say open source contributors are murderous, sexist deviants at every opportunity, but hey why not take one historical action of one small part of a group now made of vastly different people and extrapolate it across everybody forever.

"most Microsoft Haters apparently assume their stance largely as a rebellion. They seem to take their identity from their opposition. And, in extreme cases, could be described as conspiracy theorists" link

And straight from the mother ship ..

“I’m thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux they should do a delicate dance”, Joachim Kempin, Microsoft

This is why I've been telling folks "Don't judge LO yet, they got a LOT of legacy cruft they are gonna have to remove so for a project THAT big give them around 2-3 years to get it all cleaned up" and I have to say they are making pretty good progress so far.

But you are right as far as CPUs go, I have an engineer doing huge Solidworks model presentations on a Phenom I triple and use a Bobcat dual core netbook as an HTPC running 1080P so if your spreadsheet manages to drag down even a 5 year old chip? You are doin it wrong.

Over at datamation.com they have two reviews worth reading. One general review on GNOME 3.8 and a separate review on the all new GNOME Classic.

Over at datamation.com they have two reviews worth reading. One general review on GNOME 3.8 and a separate review on the all new GNOME Classic.

To me, having used it exclusively for the last 6+ years, it's never been better.

6+ years puts you into the long suffering crowd, (with me) to whom almost anything approximating stable earns high praise.
Somewhere around 4.6 it actually became fully functional again. I can't wait to try RC1. There were many releases where I
wouldn't dream of trying an RC?, having been bitten too often.

It has been a long and bumpy road. One more upgrade like 4.0 would probably kill this project completely. Its not totally the KDE Team's fault,
there were far too many Distros that jumped on way too early, making 4.0 the default, then claiming they really didn't.

Some of the most obvious additions since KDE4, Activities, are still poorly understood, and under utilized. A very large subset of users ignore them all together, finding old-school multiple Desktops much more satisfactory for their work environment.

no, its not. Because now you can type movie names and have it find it on netflix

That sounds like a brilliant idea, and I'm sure that all users will embrace it without reservation.

The problem is that most people quit thinking like kids; they get afraid to try new things.

I'm 60 and not afraid to try new things, provided there's a reason. And I have yet to see anyone put forth a single reason to try W8.

Also, arguments can be made all day about the interface being designed to be easier, but it's not what we're used to; it's a shallower learning curve for new users, but all our new users are kids, and learning the new interface for existing users is a waste of what could otherwise be productive time blah blah blah MS Office Ribbon blah blah...

OK, we have the new Microsoft Car. The brake's on the right and the throttle's on the left and you have a joystick instead of a steering wheel. A brand new driver would have no more triouble learning to drive it than a normal car, but someone who's been driving for twenty years is going to wreck the damned thing as soon as he drives it off of the car lot.

Microsoft has given compelling reasons why it's in their interest to make the desktop act like a phone, but they've given exactly zero reasons of how it's beneficial to a user.

If a change makes the job easier, that's a good change. If it has a learning curve and makes the task harder even after you're over the curve, that is NOT innovation, that's just stupidity.

Jacob Neilson, one of the prominant useability experts, says W8 is crap for useability, and it's not just an opinion, he did the research.

Most disturbing to Microsoft should be the reaction of Jakob Nielsen, a user interface expert at the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen has been testing interfaces for years with users, so what he has to say carries a lot of weight. In his tests of people using Windows 8, he found that people had "a lot of struggles," especially when trying to switch between the traditional desktop and the new Windows 8 start screen. He said Windows 8 was fine for tablets, but not traditional PCs. He concluded:

"I just think when it comes to the traditional customer base, the office computer user, they're essentially being thrown under the bus."

As to the "thinking like kids", well,

Peter Svensson with the AP wrote, "Microsoft is making a radical break with the past to stay relevant in a world where smartphones and tablets have eroded the three-decade dominance of the personal computer. Windows 8 is supposed to tie together Microsoftâ(TM)s PC, tablet and phone software with one look. But judging by the reactions of some people who have tried the PC version, itâ(TM)s a move that risks confusing and alienating customers." Svensson quoted one Windows user who said, "It was very difficult to get used to. I have an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, and they never got used to it. They were like, 'We're just going to use Mom's computer.'"

As mentioned already, RAID is not a backup solution. While it will likely work fine for a while, the risk of a catastrophic failure rises as drive capacity increases. From the linked article:

With a twelve -terabyte array the chances of complete data loss during a resilver operation begin to approach one hundred percent - meaning that RAID 5 has no functionality whatsoever in that case. There is always a chance of survival, but it is very low.

Granted, this is talking about RAID 5, so let's naively assume that doubling the parity disks for RAID 6 will halve the risk... but then since we're trying to duplicate 24 terabytes instead of twelve, we can also assume the risk doubles again, and we're back to being practically guaranteed a failure.

Bottom line is that 24 terabytes is still a huge amount of data. There is no reliable solution I can think of for backing it all up that will be cheap. At that point, you're looking at file-level redundancy managed by a backup manager like Backup Exec (or whatever you prefer) with the data split across a dozen drives. As also mentioned already, the problem becomes much easier if you're able to reduce that volume of data somewhat.

How to Use KDE Plasma Activities (a little old)

The Mystery of KDE Activities (apparently you aren't alone)

How to use KDE 4 Desktop Activities (really short if you are in a hurry)

A Bit on KDE Activities (More recent, more critical. I like it)
 
I've been using KDE for quite a while and I'll admit I don't really use Activities a whole lot right now. I do on multi-monitor setups but that's because it does it automatically. But in the sense of setting them up - I've only played with it and I'm not 100% sold on how useful it will be to me personally but these my help you get a handle on whether or not you think they are good for your style of computing.

Words uttered in 2001. Words which more than anything exhibit Ballmer's (mis)understanding of how GPL and other open source licenses work

Words uttered in 2007:

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/

Words uttered in 2009:

Microsoft has brought a lawsuit against car navigation system manufacturer TomTom. The products in question incorporate Linux, and at least one of the seven patents involved concerns a Linux kernel implementation rather than TomTom's own software. Is this Microsoft's first direct salvo against Linux?
Is this a serious suit, or an effort to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux at a critical time, when government and industry is taking up Open Source in a big way?

http://www.datamation.com/osrc/article.php/3807801/Bruce-Perens-Analyzing-Microsofts-Linux-Lawsuit.htm

Microsoft are just getting media sly. They haven't really changed otherwise.

no surprise to me that this guy (browse his other articles here http://www.datamation.com/author/Bruce-Byfield-6030.html - obviously a pretty big fan of open source and linux) can find 12 reasons why *HE* thinks libreoffice writer beats microsoft word.

but for every one person like this, there's a hundred + that can easily flip that around (word beats writer)

Interesting. So they got slammed, and the nancyboy admin decided to 403 that one page. Never seen that response to a slashdot avalanche. I'll dig it up later I suppose.

Oh, by the way, they have LOTS of interesting looking articles from the home page! <evil grin>
Check them out! http://www.datamation.com/

MuaHaHaHa!!

I just know I'm screwing my karma, but what the hell.

I got that too.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&hl=en&q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+http%3A//www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html&ct=clnk OR http://preview.tinyurl.com/7u9z3j4 for Google's cached copy.

Weird that the non-cached copy worked fine and home page's link to the first page is broken too.

Print pages worked too:
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-2.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-3.html

I got that too.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&hl=en&q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+http%3A//www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html&ct=clnk OR http://preview.tinyurl.com/7u9z3j4 for Google's cached copy.

Weird that the non-cached copy worked fine and home page's link to the first page is broken too.

Print pages worked too:
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-2.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-3.html

I got that too.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&hl=en&q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+http%3A//www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html&ct=clnk OR http://preview.tinyurl.com/7u9z3j4 for Google's cached copy.

Weird that the non-cached copy worked fine and home page's link to the first page is broken too.

Print pages worked too:
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-2.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-3.html

I imagine that nobody is writing new applications in COBOL.

You could be wrong, you know

Fujitsu announced late Friday that it is shipping four middleware products designed to work with Microsoft's Windows Azure public cloud development platform

"The new line of products delivers runtime environments for Java and Cobol, two application programming languages that are commonly employed in building mission-critical systems, in addition to providing functionality enabling central monitoring between on-premise systems and the Windows Azure Platform."

Fujitsu Teams with Microsoft on Azure Middleware

Even Java, a much lauded language when it arrived 20 years ago, is already deemed to be old and "legacy". Yet, according to analyst Gartner, more than 70% of the world's business is run by a technology that was christened over 50 years ago - COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.

At JD Williams Ltd, UK's leading direct home shopping company, for example, COBOL is one of the strategic languages used due to its key strengths in its English-like syntax, and the fact that is it very quick to develop in and easy to debug.

Recent research revealed that an average person would interact with a COBOL application at least ten times a day. With Gartner estimates putting the number of lines of COBOL code in excess of 200 billion, the global investment in COBOL applications exceeds several trillion dollars.

The case for COBOL

http://blog.datamation.com/blog/2009/04/having-fud-with.html

The anti-Linux propaganda du jour, being dutifully parroted by "news" publications everywhere, is that Windows now owns 96% of the netbook market, and that Linux netbooks are returned four times more than windows netbooks. Both are untrue and have been debunked repeatedly. Yet they persist -- why?

I think Microsoft is growing increasingly desperate, and in hard economic times is finding equally desperate publications who will say anything for a few bucks. Which may be a harsh judgment, but I would rather believe that than believe they simply don't care to do even the simplest, most basic fact-checking, or are such hard-core Microsoft fanboys that they are only pretending to be journalists when they are really stringers for Microsoft's marketing department. How else can we explain the same nonsense repeated endlessly, their allergies to saying "Windows" and "malware" in the same sentence, the short shrift given to non-Windows software, the mind-boggling assumption that Windows is computing? ...

As it is not part of Microsoft's business plan to participate in a genuinely competitive marketplace, expect to see this sort of thing become even more prevalent. If that is possible; I thought the FUD and anti-Linux propaganda had already reached the saturation point, but it looks like I was wrong. ...

[Microsoft's Brandon] LaBlanc opened [his blog post] by claiming that almost all netbooks sold today are sold with Windows. Well, no, not really. The numbers LaBlanc cites are from NPD's sales survey. NPD focuses on brick-and-mortar U.S. sales, not overall sales. Notice how many Linux systems you see at Best Buy? NPD numbers say a lot more about retail channel sales than it does over-all sales. Besides, as Canonical's director of business development Kenyon wrote, "However here is an interesting fact--when customers are offered choice on equally well-engineered computers around a third will select Ubuntu over XP.

Since it's not mentioned on their webpage or in the article, I searched for a listing of the price points and found the following.

"The PetaBox nodes and racks are available now. Base pricing for the nodes (512K RAM, 10/100 interface, and no LCD) ranges from $1,595 (GB1000) to $3,395 (GB3000)." http://products.datamation.com/dms/sc/1156440622.h tml

The GB1000 is the 1TB node and the GB3000 is the 3TB node. I think they might mean 512MB of RAM base, but who knows. Sounds like it's a Fedora linux based product which makes me wonder what services it provides, they don't list. I would assume basic NFS/SMB/AFS services but there's no mention of backup / replication services, mirroring between twin nodes, etc that competitive products offer.

OLAP usually stands for On Line Analytical Processing. (Footnote: the OLAP Council website claims to intend to provide common definitions, but do not actually provide a definition for OLAP...)

Datamation describes it thus:

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a category of software technology that enables analysts, managers and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user.

OLAP is pretty strongly associated with the common buzzword, "Data Warehousing."

More precisely, what it is about is the notion of taking the data created by an online transaction processing system, and collecting this into a big database that you then want to do "analysis" on.

The point here is that the analysts that are looking for patterns need to have a separate copy, as the things they do may hit a DB server hard, and are probably not friendly to the transaction-oriented operations of "Entering Invoices," "Processing Sales," "Paying Bills," and such.

SAS is pretty big on OLAP, as they have been building powerful statistical software for many years now.

Sure, I might be interested in working on a project like this. I think of it as "trying to make the web a little more like Xanadu".

You folks could do worse than to read a bit of Ted Nelson to go with your Neal Stephanson: A New Home for the Mind?

It's pretty obvious these days that Xanadu was an attempt at doing too much all at once ("worse is better" and all that). Now that we've got part of what it was intended to be, it might be a good idea to try and evolve towards it...

Ok, the article refers to a study by D.H. Brown.
Strange, but a little earlier in 1998, another study was made by Datamation, which shows similar results except for Linux, which was rated second best OS, behind AIX.
I wonder why Linux sudenly "lost" so much ground, when the other OSes keep the same rank...

IMHO User Friendly has its moments, but Sluggy Freelance is funny far more often. Then there's Helen, an amusing and different take on the BOFH.