Well just so you know, I live in Belgium and if I want to get my paperwork to travel to the US I have to CALL the US embassy (I cannot just go there, no sir, we're all terrorist here in Europe, you see) and without so much as getting a human operator to respond, like to - I don't know, ask me what the hell I want - I just have to hand over my CC number so I can be charged xx dollars, just to get them to make an appointment.
I find that very disturbing, off putting and blatantly rude... It is not because the US can do that that it bloody should. I do not want to go to the US but sometimes the circumstances force me to, but when I do I am treated like a piece of s**t with no rights... It really makes me want to go through all the hassle of getting my visa, then canceling my card and getting a new one.
When I googled my name it took me to a really nasty website that probably wanted to install some spyware on my machine... thank god for NoScript:S Google at least screens webpages for this kind of misuse and keyword spamming.
They have a long way to go I fear.
Also, although eye pleasing, the results are not really presented in a "one glance and you know what to click" kind of way...
Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best?
If these guys are really that good, then why don't they get their sh**t together more quickly and get the stuff out of Beta sooner?:) Oh, and make stuff like Google Docs actually useful for anything...
Funny how my install takes u 22GB, but it includes:
Origin Pro and a boatload of other scientific apps Visual Studio2008 + MSDN support libraries (huge) Office 2007 A Full install of Labview All my documents and files of the last 3 years...
One word: vLite
Funny how people always bitch and moan about how crappy and bloated Vista is while all can be solved with some nice tools and a minimum of effort...
Hardly a day seems to go by without some unfounded Vista bashing going on somewhere on the planet.
Where are the numbers to back up the claims?? Would it really be so hard to more precisely describe said "highly demanding applications"???
I could go on all day.
My Copy of Vista 64 has a stability index of 10 on my simple XPS1330 notebook and it's powered up 18 hours a day. The only thing that ever brought it down were Acrobat.exe and mfetdik.sys after a resume from hibernate. Go figure...
Come up with cold hard facts of shut up, that's what I say.
...is this:
they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. If they can find a vulnerability 5 hrs. after release, chances are it was probably already their in the RC's.
Why didn't they file a bug _then_????
Just smells like cheap attention seeking on their part...
...in favor of keeping some minor share of customers happy I think you might actually be surprised of how big the share of customers is that use undocumented and or bad coding practices.:S
This is a bit stupid if you don't mind me saying. Single employees that do some wrong stuff in the workplace can still be held accountable for their own actions without you being negatively implicated in any way...
Furthermore, the whole "it is my infrastructure so I can do whatever the bloody hell I please" argument also doesn't make much sense. My ISP and phone provider also own their infrastructure, so I guess that makes it ok for them to read all my email and listen to all my conversations too? Because god forbid, I might be a bomb packing terrorist and/or a porn smuggler with a penchant for young boys and I might use their infrastructure for something malicious and they would be held accountable... Give me a break.
Here in Europe, Belgium in particular, it is a crime to read someone elses paper mail and or electronic communications and thank god for that.
Why the need to read and snoop on everything without the persons consent? What makes this more effective than storing certain types of communication and looking into the logs if there is an actual and founded suspicion that someone is doing something wrong?
The only question should be, how far ahead is MS thinking? They have always been a pretty good chess player. Then the OSS community needs to become a better chessplayer.
Less bitching, more action. The Anti-MS rethoric is getting pretty stale by now.
Give me something that can replace Outlook, a Thunderbird on steroids with some Gcal support and I'll never buy expensive MS stuff again. Making something like that would be far more constructive than the gazillionth thread about how evil MS is.
Just my 2 cents...
So people who keep a scrapbook of sorts are not human?:)
Recording EVERYTHING is crazy, but it might be nice to replace the tin mementos box with something more up-to-date. After all, we already have eBooks, eDictionaries,...
It is highly common, even in business, to encounter French and Spanish _natives_ who don't speak English at all.
Being from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, I'm also fluent in French and thank God for that, because you needn't go further then our capital Brussels to encounter French speakers that don't know Dutch nor English. Move a bit more south to France and it gets even worse.
The problem with these countries is that French, Spanish,... are languages spoken by a lot more people than say, Dutch. People from these regions therefore often don't need to speak any other language than their own to get by.
Regardless, we're straying from the 'gadget' topic and the fact still remains that if eDictionaries can be useful to Asian people (and they are popular over there) then I still fail to see why other parts of the world don't have them as well.
But then again, the same can be said about high res camera phones, ultraportables,... Why the hell aren't the same high tech devices we can find in Asia released over here?? Why this constant bias when it comes to gadgets??
Because everybody speaks english I dare you to go to France, Spain,... and test that hypothesis:-).
This is not meant as an insult to said countries, but in general mastery of English leaves much to be desired in some parts of Europe. And regardless of that, some European languages are just nice to learn so a good alternative to heavy, semi-luggable paper versions of dictionaries might be nice whilst traveling across the old continent. I am Belgian myself btw...
Also the reasons that Languages have not been popular in English speaking countries If we follow that logic, we could just get rit of all languages all together... I honestly don't see a difference between the average Korean or Japanese guy needing a good e-Dictionary (or a westerner in Asia for that matter) and a European needing some help getting buy in another European country.
This always surprised me. I can understand these devices can be useful in Korea and Japan but they are quite powerful, they often have some neat PDA functionality and by God, it would be nice to have a good alternative to the over priced and especially pants devices that companies like Franklin try to flog us...
The market is steadily moving towards laptops. And laptops are harder to custom-build And how is this exactly?
Most of the Dell notebook customizations involve the CPU and RAM. It is just a matter of plugging som chips into a standard mainboard design.
Anyhow... I hope that Dell will keep on building custom machines. The new Latitude E series looks rock-solid, maybe this will turn things around for Dell.
But Boston-area Internet entrepreneur and real estate developer Bill Kaplan is saying that if anyone is the basis for Micky Rosa, it's him Most of the time, when people explicitly try to take credit like this, they couldn't be further from the truth...
Just my 2 cents:)
Have you tried Xandros server + Scalix? Well no, and I don't intend to. The things you mention are similar in concept to what MS Server together with exchange probably offers.
The problem is that I want to do similar things with my personal calendar/mail, not just work related stuff. The funny thing is that one could almost do it, if only there would be some decent support for GCal in Thunderbird itself and not through some shaky 3rd party plugin. If this would be possible you would have full and powerfull access to your email all the time and scheduling would be handled from a central point and I would even get nice reminders on my cellphone through sms or the mobile google apps, that would be all I will ever need.
...is the fact that many people are taking shots at Vista for being buggy or not having enough drivers while it is very clear that it just might be the hardware vendors themselves that are to lazy to provide support or that purposefully decide not to provide support because they can make a quick buck selling new hardware with new drivers.
As far as I am concerned a company is allowed to make a reasonable profit if they offer me a good product in return.
Paying software doesn't necessarily mean 'Evil'. It's features that I am interested in. An example: why still doesnt Thunderbird, after all these years, offer decent calendaring support? As far as I am concerned, MSO Outlook is a great, yet expensive scheduling tool but it's IMAP support (which I absolutely need) just stinks. On the other side we have the free Thunderbird which is great at handling mail and has a kick ass spamfiltering system, I love it. Yet TB offers no scheduling (Lightning sucks), so the question is, what is better in the end?
The OSS community should focus less on big bad Microsoft and just start making killer apps. Make me a TB with good, robust scheduling and built in GCal support (2 way please and without combersome GCal Daemons or whatever that might not be there/supported in 6 months) and I will NEVER look at MS again. But it won't happen, not even with the supposedly big group of people advocating open source goodness.
My question is, WHY? Would charging 10 or so bucks do anything to rectify this/speed things up?
I have not missed it at all, and in fact sharing it with others was never so easy I am sorry, but if you state this then you clearly do not work with complicated documents.
I need a wordprocessor to write reports, my thesis,... I need to implement large amounts of images into my docs. These images need captions. I need equations, footnotes and references in my doc, preferably with hyperlinks for easy online reading,...
This stuff is hard enough to accomplish in MSO (although feasible) but don't even try in OO and _certainly_ not in Google Writer.
The only thing that really gets the job done hassle free is my LaTeX/WinEdt combo. Pretty sad in my mind given the age of both and the undoubtably much smaller dev teams working on both when compared to both the Google and MS coding teams. What a joke.
OpenOffice is the only thing within striking distance of MS Office And even then, it often leaves much to be desired. I honestly applaud the efforts to come up with an alternative to MS Office. Because although MS offers a lot of functionality with it's software (You can produce some nice, stylish docs, as long as they stay relatively small) it also contains some absolutely incomprehensible faults;
1) Why the hell doesn't Outlook provide decent IMAP access?? 2) Why can't I copy my Word2007 equations to Powerpoint??? 3) What is up with that crap Master Document implementation 4)...
That said though, OO can only compete with Office it it offers at least full support for all features in MSO. That means, opening doc or docx in OO would not lead to layout corruption, etc... Until now, that still is the case. Especially the OO Powerpoint counterpart I find particularly horrible.
I have been watching OO for a long time (4 years), but it seems bewildering to me that with current adoption by some governments and the large open source community, development of OO still seems to be progressing so horribly slow.
In the meantime I will stick to LaTeX and my trusty WinEdt for big docs...
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Well just so you know, I live in Belgium and if I want to get my paperwork to travel to the US I have to CALL the US embassy (I cannot just go there, no sir, we're all terrorist here in Europe, you see) and without so much as getting a human operator to respond, like to - I don't know, ask me what the hell I want - I just have to hand over my CC number so I can be charged xx dollars, just to get them to make an appointment.
I find that very disturbing, off putting and blatantly rude... It is not because the US can do that that it bloody should. I do not want to go to the US but sometimes the circumstances force me to, but when I do I am treated like a piece of s**t with no rights... It really makes me want to go through all the hassle of getting my visa, then canceling my card and getting a new one.
Lol... at least we don't get up in arms when somebody shows a nipple on telly or when somebody says f**k on the radio.
Also, we don't go about meddling in other peoples backyard, telling them what to do and not do... free speech I hear you say?
I'll take our version of freedom any day...
because they can
And I am a big fan of astalavista . com for exactly that reason.
Paying for software is unnecessary :)
When I googled my name it took me to a really nasty website that probably wanted to install some spyware on my machine... thank god for NoScript :S Google at least screens webpages for this kind of misuse and keyword spamming.
They have a long way to go I fear.
Also, although eye pleasing, the results are not really presented in a "one glance and you know what to click" kind of way...
Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best?
If these guys are really that good, then why don't they get their sh**t together more quickly and get the stuff out of Beta sooner? :) Oh, and make stuff like Google Docs actually useful for anything...
Funny how my install takes u 22GB, but it includes:
Origin Pro and a boatload of other scientific apps
Visual Studio2008 + MSDN support libraries (huge)
Office 2007
A Full install of Labview
All my documents and files of the last 3 years...
One word: vLite
Funny how people always bitch and moan about how crappy and bloated Vista is while all can be solved with some nice tools and a minimum of effort ...
After I had noticed it was trying to cache an incomplete ~100 MB file that was being downloaded
How exactly did you check this? It would be interesting to try it on my machine... Just to check if my copy of Vista behaves equally stupid :)
Hardly a day seems to go by without some unfounded Vista bashing going on somewhere on the planet.
Where are the numbers to back up the claims?? Would it really be so hard to more precisely describe said "highly demanding applications"???
I could go on all day.
My Copy of Vista 64 has a stability index of 10 on my simple XPS1330 notebook and it's powered up 18 hours a day. The only thing that ever brought it down were Acrobat.exe and mfetdik.sys after a resume from hibernate. Go figure...
Come up with cold hard facts of shut up, that's what I say.
Why didn't they file a bug _then_????
Just smells like cheap attention seeking on their part...
...in favor of keeping some minor share of customers happy I think you might actually be surprised of how big the share of customers is that use undocumented and or bad coding practices....How long before some hacker group gets their nefarious hands on this 'plugin'?
OSS Community; Code me a viable alternative to Outlook and Office PRONTO, so I can use Linux! (And no, OO is no option, it is TeH SuX0000rrrZZ)
This is a bit stupid if you don't mind me saying. Single employees that do some wrong stuff in the workplace can still be held accountable for their own actions without you being negatively implicated in any way...
Furthermore, the whole "it is my infrastructure so I can do whatever the bloody hell I please" argument also doesn't make much sense. My ISP and phone provider also own their infrastructure, so I guess that makes it ok for them to read all my email and listen to all my conversations too? Because god forbid, I might be a bomb packing terrorist and/or a porn smuggler with a penchant for young boys and I might use their infrastructure for something malicious and they would be held accountable... Give me a break.
Here in Europe, Belgium in particular, it is a crime to read someone elses paper mail and or electronic communications and thank god for that.
Why the need to read and snoop on everything without the persons consent? What makes this more effective than storing certain types of communication and looking into the logs if there is an actual and founded suspicion that someone is doing something wrong?
So people who keep a scrapbook of sorts are not human? :)
...
Recording EVERYTHING is crazy, but it might be nice to replace the tin mementos box with something more up-to-date. After all, we already have eBooks, eDictionaries,
Well then you must live in a parallel universe...
... are languages spoken by a lot more people than say, Dutch. People from these regions therefore often don't need to speak any other language than their own to get by.
... Why the hell aren't the same high tech devices we can find in Asia released over here?? Why this constant bias when it comes to gadgets??
It is highly common, even in business, to encounter French and Spanish _natives_ who don't speak English at all.
Being from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, I'm also fluent in French and thank God for that, because you needn't go further then our capital Brussels to encounter French speakers that don't know Dutch nor English. Move a bit more south to France and it gets even worse.
The problem with these countries is that French, Spanish,
Regardless, we're straying from the 'gadget' topic and the fact still remains that if eDictionaries can be useful to Asian people (and they are popular over there) then I still fail to see why other parts of the world don't have them as well.
But then again, the same can be said about high res camera phones, ultraportables,
Does anybody know why those neat electronic translators by Sharp, Casio and some others http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/13/casio-electronic-dictionary-translator-talks-back-recognizes/ are never sold outside of Asia with some European language support??
This always surprised me. I can understand these devices can be useful in Korea and Japan but they are quite powerful, they often have some neat PDA functionality and by God, it would be nice to have a good alternative to the over priced and especially pants devices that companies like Franklin try to flog us...
Most of the Dell notebook customizations involve the CPU and RAM. It is just a matter of plugging som chips into a standard mainboard design.
Anyhow... I hope that Dell will keep on building custom machines. The new Latitude E series looks rock-solid, maybe this will turn things around for Dell.
The problem is that I want to do similar things with my personal calendar/mail, not just work related stuff. The funny thing is that one could almost do it, if only there would be some decent support for GCal in Thunderbird itself and not through some shaky 3rd party plugin. If this would be possible you would have full and powerfull access to your email all the time and scheduling would be handled from a central point and I would even get nice reminders on my cellphone through sms or the mobile google apps, that would be all I will ever need.
...is the fact that many people are taking shots at Vista for being buggy or not having enough drivers while it is very clear that it just might be the hardware vendors themselves that are to lazy to provide support or that purposefully decide not to provide support because they can make a quick buck selling new hardware with new drivers.
A sad affair indeed.
As far as I am concerned a company is allowed to make a reasonable profit if they offer me a good product in return. Paying software doesn't necessarily mean 'Evil'. It's features that I am interested in. An example: why still doesnt Thunderbird, after all these years, offer decent calendaring support? As far as I am concerned, MSO Outlook is a great, yet expensive scheduling tool but it's IMAP support (which I absolutely need) just stinks. On the other side we have the free Thunderbird which is great at handling mail and has a kick ass spamfiltering system, I love it. Yet TB offers no scheduling (Lightning sucks), so the question is, what is better in the end? The OSS community should focus less on big bad Microsoft and just start making killer apps. Make me a TB with good, robust scheduling and built in GCal support (2 way please and without combersome GCal Daemons or whatever that might not be there/supported in 6 months) and I will NEVER look at MS again. But it won't happen, not even with the supposedly big group of people advocating open source goodness. My question is, WHY? Would charging 10 or so bucks do anything to rectify this/speed things up?
1) Why the hell doesn't Outlook provide decent IMAP access??
2) Why can't I copy my Word2007 equations to Powerpoint???
3) What is up with that crap Master Document implementation
4)
That said though, OO can only compete with Office it it offers at least full support for all features in MSO. That means, opening doc or docx in OO would not lead to layout corruption, etc... Until now, that still is the case. Especially the OO Powerpoint counterpart I find particularly horrible.
I have been watching OO for a long time (4 years), but it seems bewildering to me that with current adoption by some governments and the large open source community, development of OO still seems to be progressing so horribly slow.
In the meantime I will stick to LaTeX and my trusty WinEdt for big docs...