I think the real niche for this is to replace traditionally embedded one-application devices like inventory systems.
This thing won't last a day on a single charge. Who's going to swap out their cheap and reliable barcode scanners for that?
First, it runs standard XP, which means you can now have your standard business applications in a smaller form factor.
Oh yeah, like all I want is to run M$ Office at 640x480 or less. Palm, GPE and Opie all work because the interface is geared to a small screen. This device has already been panned by the BBC as not living up to expectations. Sharp and others have done a much better job of making the thing you want. Check out the new Zaurus for starters.
I'm shocked that the MPAA spokesweasel didn't blame piracy.
Why would he have to? Every damn DVD I rent, and probably every movie on the screen, has told me I'm a dirty rotten thief. As a bonus, at home I get to stare at the dire FBI warning and at the theater I get to watch half an hour of adverts. The overwhelming industry message is that sharing is wrong, equivalent to stealing cars or snatching purses.
They've lost their minds. The message they need is that movies are fun. All the rest is just a turn off that will drive people to alternative makers of media.
You would think Clinton would have other things on her mind. What is the influence on popular culture of seeing an old dope smoking geezer with a sax on MTV. What influence did porn have on his behavior and career? What influence did his career have on porn? Girl on girl porn, she'd surely like a study on that.
To be honest, I don't see a lot of reason for discontent over 'stagnant' pay coming from rank and file workers at Microsoft.
I'm glad you're honest.
When your company has a "best year ever" because you busted your ass and you don't get a raise, you might not work as hard the next year.
A company has obligations to it's customers, it's owners and it's employees. If it ever screws one, it will eventually get around to screwing them all. That's what happens when you think it's OK to screw people. Microsoft has screwed all three repeatedly.
Great, he's got a copy of Vista and a fast machine. Most of his complaints can either be dismissed because Vista is still a BETA or not attributed to Microsoft at all.... And who cares if Linux and Mac OS X have had feature X for years?
Let me get his point across for you:
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
You know they want to give him the best they have, but it did not live up to the competition, much less they hype. If you own a computer go get things done, you can get those things done with far less money. You can even do it with "beta" versions of free software, like Debian Etch or Sid, which do not hog up 6 GHz of processor or 850 MB of RAM on idle, but do offer every feature a user could want.
Five years ago, XP offered the world a pretty good reason to leave the Microsoft world. Indeed, until a year or two ago, the majority of people on Microsoft had not yet moved to XP, despite it being the default install on every Major brand of computer sold. Sales of Vista are going to be much worse because the hardware suck is so much greater.
The author himself offers a summary that's worth while:
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
Message: you can pay more to get less.
This is a surprising message from anyone at Ziff Davis, much less a senior editor. It's the first sensible thing I've read from them in years.
He's run Vista and thinks it sucks because it has all the old crufty problems M$ is infamous for, despite a few superficial improvements. Have you done as much? It ate his biggest and best dual core 3GHz monster and will cost the average person thousands of dollars in hardware and software if they try to upgrade the M$ way. What are you willing to sacrifice
If you want suck, look at your own boring little sneer. Microsoft really needs to hire some better joke writers.
OK, I am no WinMo 5.0 fanboy by any means (OK, so I used to catchy shortened form) but the statement that it won't support a higher res because Windows can't is full of CRAP.
CRAP? If that's not a fanboy, what is?
For whatever reason, Microsoft and Palm were unable to get together a driver for the better screen. A software limitation, of the non free kind, lead to a hardware downgrade. M$ should have done the work and given them whatever they needed to avoid that kind of embarrassment. People might start to think Opie and GPE are easier to use. If Palm can't get it done, who can? Why would anyone else want to use a platform that's owned by such assholes?
There are people out there who have a hard time working the remote control for their TV. When these people go on the Internet they use "Internet Explorer" with no updates and they don't even know there are alternatives to it. Imagine your mother on the Internet to get an idea who's looking at the pop-ups desperately trying to figure out how to close that (or any other) window.
Yeah, TV and IE both suck life, so I avoid both. In the IE case, I also avoid the sub par software under IE, aka Windows, which is just as pushy, greedy and stupid as daytime TV. Some of the worst sites are things that combine both, like MSNBC.
For all that, I will actually click on Google ads. They are unobtrusive, topical and good for the most part. It's amazing how far a little consideration and respect goes.
Want WinAmp to work? OK, get Mepis or Debian Etch. XMMP still works the way Winamp was supposed to and won't eat your machine. You don't even have to install Mepis to start playing your music, just boot it and double click on the hard drive icon on your desk to start playing music.
Then try Amarok and wonder what giant waste of cycles is going on with the other programs. Amarok comes with Mepis and is an easy "apt-get install amarok" from working with Etch. Amarok is both network and culturally aware. It plays off networked boxes, so you can easily share your music with yourself without needing a 200GB hard drive in your laptop. sftp support seems a little sketchy for some reason, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon. Nice features are cover art and lyric management. It works without skipping while I work on a 1GHz laptop.
If Amarok is too heavy you can run Juk, which is also network aware and has most of what you want in a media player. Random playlists, tag sorting by artist, record year, etc, auto collection scanning and good sftp support make it a fine but light player.
Imagine if they had space to colaborate and did not have to email their stuff back and forth in a versionless manner. Microsoft kludges their stuff to make up for a lack of easy to use CVS and a foolish insistence on asymmetrical computing, aka "server" and "client" versions.
That's right, next to nothing for Star Wreck. All you need is a good idea, several computers, a camera, a blue screen and time. Most Star Treck movies dissappoint, this one does not.
I work for a large (85,000 people) multinational company, and we simply couldn't get by without the integrated features of Office. I spend all day editing Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and occasionally Powerpoint, and without the tight integration I'd be in a mess.
If that's your job, I'd say it was somewhere between the 97th and XP ring of hell. It reminds me of the South Park movie, where Kenny glimpses heaven with it's 1,003 population and naked ladies only to be cast into the pit of hell to the tune of "Little boy, you're going to hell" and billions and billions served as the population meter spins out of control. With all the M$ "partners" out there, the average geek who actually gets a job will indeed land in M$ hell. The cool little companies that spend most of their time working and keep a single M$ computer in the corner to communicate with big dumb companies are far and few between.
You must be the one person at your company that actually cares. I'm amazed your coworkers actually use Word's revision controls. The leaks from government agencies are a clue that someone uses them, but the last fortune 500 company I worked for would never bother or care about a feature like that. Nor would they ever trust anything but two floppies to keep their latest revisions because nothing else was reliable. There were one or two Word lovers, but they were entities unto themselves. Has it ever struck you that your ability to master Latex comes from a thouroughness that would make you successful regardless of the tool you use?
Did I miss some crucial thing that OOo does? It's a nice product and all, but, the truth is, it doesn't match the hype.
Yes, you missed a few things. OO is in general more consistent than Office and OO2 has much better layout than any version of Office. The differences are often small and something someone who's got bad habits from Office use might overlook. Other differences are huge and obvious. Like you, I use other software for most of my work because Office is heavy. Unlike you, I can appreciate where Sun is kicking M$'s ass. It might be because I use Mepis, which comes with great fonts and all the bells and whistles, or it might be because I have used OO instead of Office for four years now.
A glaring difference is the slide show generator. OO2's interface is MUCH better than M$'s, which has remained the same for years. OO gives you three tabbed panels for navigation and manipulation of slides. That might sound confusing, but manipulation is more intuitive than Office ever was. Everything is visible and shallow, right clicks do what you would expect them to do, and there are no hidden gottchas where content is irrationally tied to presentation. You can change slide type without erasing everything you typed.
A small difference is the summation behavior in the spreadsheet. In Office, you grab cells and press the sum button and Office guesses where you want the sum. In OO, you select the location of the sum, press the button and OO guesses what you want summed. OO usually gets what you want summed correctly, but it's easy to include more by dragging around. Office knows what you want, but can be crazy about where to put it. Moving the sum then changes the result, Argh, time to pull your hair! If you do your sums the M$ way, OO is frustrating even though it's better, and your bad habit has defeated you. If you do your sums by typing in "=sum(" and dragging what you want, you won't notice the difference.
I'm sure there are countless other differences where Sun and the free software community does it right and M$ makes you pull your hair. Reading about it has been amusing this morning.
Tub girl? Hopefully, that accounts for less than 5E-6% of web surfing.
Companies like American Express paying hackers to stick ad servers onto people's computers bring the number up to believable proportions.
It's not the sites that get you when you run a crappy Monopoly O$. They can, of course, but people who say so are more of the "blame the user" camp than people who know what they are talking about. Study after study shows M$ PCs get whacked without the user doing anything in ever decreasing times. The shortest interval, measured in the last year, is four minutes. The time to own 1/2 of "unprotected" Windoze computers is 12 minutes. Browsing questionable sites, like American Express, Home Depot, US government, porn and gambling sites, should not be dangerous but it is when you use crappy software.
MS got away with their little impropriety because they did it before the Internet got prevalent; nowadays, word gets around a LOT quicker.
The case you reference is interesting because Microsoft specifically used Compuserve groups to blame DEC for the problems that Microsoft created. They astroturfed and fanboyed their way through it and planned it all in advance. Today, they only have to spend more money to do exactly the same thing.
Of course, their reputation has suffered. It cost them much more to fool casual computer users and anyone who remembers anything will never trust them again.
And considering that AT&T and Cingular had considerable overlap in many areas, they were then able redeploy their coverage to reduce overlap and extend area coverage.
You mean they didn't just fire half their employees and turn off half their equipment? Can't you just add new stations cheaper than moving old ones?
what I do to lure customers away from my competition is:
1) "educate" my target segment to expect a higher level of service (change their expectations)
2) tell my competitor's customers that my competitor does not offer that higher level of service (given the new expectations, make them feel unhappy with their current provider)
3) make damn sure my own company offers the higher level of service when my competitor's now-unhappy customers go looking
#2 and #3 are flawed. In practice, #2 is often false or provided by sabotage. As a salesman you really have no control of #3 and may be as duped as your customers.
Cingular's "Raising the bar" is a great example. Instead of building out their network, they are spending money on exclusive phone deals and billboards. The purpose of those billboards is to expect a fictional level of service and simply say, without proof, that theirs is better. Having had Cingular and Sprint, I can say their promise is bogus where I live and I enjoy better service than Verizon and other incumbent subscribing friends do. "Education" has to be built on fact.
Uhhh, they could install software they can actually own and lock down instead of the crap they buy from Microsoft. Provided with reasonable tools, they would not need Google's tool.
At the end of the day, your closed source software vendor can sell you and your company's data out no mater what you do.
Don't blame Google for making a tool that a lot of people find useful.
I won't because they tell you what they are doing.
I will blame M$ for much worse. I blame them for intentional leaks, by making an OS that does much of the same without telling anyone, and demanding even more in their EULAs. I also blame them for making an OS with so many holes and backdoors that corporate espionage is easy.
I'll also blame any clueless Admin who bans Google while using M$. Fanboys who "standardize" on IE, Outlook, Exchange and all that other garbage should have no expectations of privacy or data integrity. These are the kinds of people who ban cell phones with cameras, but let people keep normal cameras. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I'm never going back to piles of notes in a drawer. I used to print out a calendar and carefully transfer all of my to do items from one page to the next, making notes along the way. This allowed some automation and, for once, I could remember people's birthdays. It worked but it had lots of problems my Handspring Visor fixed. It was hard to put everything in it and it was hard to search. When my list of things got bigger than one page, I was scratching in the margins. Invariably, small pieces of paper with information would accumulate in my drawers before I had time to organize them. The visor does searches and it alarms when I need to do something. Though it only had 8MB of storage, I never filled it up and everything was easy to find. No, I'm sticking to the pen based PDA.
HP only hates them because M$ can't get handwriting recognition right. Palm got it write and do does Xstroke. HP and M$ may exit the category, but the category will exist until someone invents something that can read my mind.
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This thing won't last a day on a single charge. Who's going to swap out their cheap and reliable barcode scanners for that?
First, it runs standard XP, which means you can now have your standard business applications in a smaller form factor.
Oh yeah, like all I want is to run M$ Office at 640x480 or less. Palm, GPE and Opie all work because the interface is geared to a small screen. This device has already been panned by the BBC as not living up to expectations. Sharp and others have done a much better job of making the thing you want. Check out the new Zaurus for starters.
Why would he have to? Every damn DVD I rent, and probably every movie on the screen, has told me I'm a dirty rotten thief. As a bonus, at home I get to stare at the dire FBI warning and at the theater I get to watch half an hour of adverts. The overwhelming industry message is that sharing is wrong, equivalent to stealing cars or snatching purses.
They've lost their minds. The message they need is that movies are fun. All the rest is just a turn off that will drive people to alternative makers of media.
I'm glad you're honest.
When your company has a "best year ever" because you busted your ass and you don't get a raise, you might not work as hard the next year.
A company has obligations to it's customers, it's owners and it's employees. If it ever screws one, it will eventually get around to screwing them all. That's what happens when you think it's OK to screw people. Microsoft has screwed all three repeatedly.
Yes.
Maybe, gasp, this fictional person everyone loves to talk about prefers the way Windows does things.
This fictional person will spend fictional money. In the real world, there will be no sales outside of new computer sales.
Let me get his point across for you:
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
You know they want to give him the best they have, but it did not live up to the competition, much less they hype. If you own a computer go get things done, you can get those things done with far less money. You can even do it with "beta" versions of free software, like Debian Etch or Sid, which do not hog up 6 GHz of processor or 850 MB of RAM on idle, but do offer every feature a user could want.
Five years ago, XP offered the world a pretty good reason to leave the Microsoft world. Indeed, until a year or two ago, the majority of people on Microsoft had not yet moved to XP, despite it being the default install on every Major brand of computer sold. Sales of Vista are going to be much worse because the hardware suck is so much greater.
I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
Message: you can pay more to get less.
This is a surprising message from anyone at Ziff Davis, much less a senior editor. It's the first sensible thing I've read from them in years.
He's run Vista and thinks it sucks because it has all the old crufty problems M$ is infamous for, despite a few superficial improvements. Have you done as much? It ate his biggest and best dual core 3GHz monster and will cost the average person thousands of dollars in hardware and software if they try to upgrade the M$ way. What are you willing to sacrifice
If you want suck, look at your own boring little sneer. Microsoft really needs to hire some better joke writers.
CRAP? If that's not a fanboy, what is?
For whatever reason, Microsoft and Palm were unable to get together a driver for the better screen. A software limitation, of the non free kind, lead to a hardware downgrade. M$ should have done the work and given them whatever they needed to avoid that kind of embarrassment. People might start to think Opie and GPE are easier to use. If Palm can't get it done, who can? Why would anyone else want to use a platform that's owned by such assholes?
Yeah, TV and IE both suck life, so I avoid both. In the IE case, I also avoid the sub par software under IE, aka Windows, which is just as pushy, greedy and stupid as daytime TV. Some of the worst sites are things that combine both, like MSNBC.
For all that, I will actually click on Google ads. They are unobtrusive, topical and good for the most part. It's amazing how far a little consideration and respect goes.
here and here.
They answer your questions.
Google wants you to get good value for your money and are doing it in their usual excellent way.
Then try Amarok and wonder what giant waste of cycles is going on with the other programs. Amarok comes with Mepis and is an easy "apt-get install amarok" from working with Etch. Amarok is both network and culturally aware. It plays off networked boxes, so you can easily share your music with yourself without needing a 200GB hard drive in your laptop. sftp support seems a little sketchy for some reason, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon. Nice features are cover art and lyric management. It works without skipping while I work on a 1GHz laptop.
If Amarok is too heavy you can run Juk, which is also network aware and has most of what you want in a media player. Random playlists, tag sorting by artist, record year, etc, auto collection scanning and good sftp support make it a fine but light player.
What, komrad, no one owns the phone but be careful how you use it.
Next News items:
You may think everything old is new but the new old can be much worse with DRM and evolved "IP" laws.
If that's your job, I'd say it was somewhere between the 97th and XP ring of hell. It reminds me of the South Park movie, where Kenny glimpses heaven with it's 1,003 population and naked ladies only to be cast into the pit of hell to the tune of "Little boy, you're going to hell" and billions and billions served as the population meter spins out of control. With all the M$ "partners" out there, the average geek who actually gets a job will indeed land in M$ hell. The cool little companies that spend most of their time working and keep a single M$ computer in the corner to communicate with big dumb companies are far and few between.
You must be the one person at your company that actually cares. I'm amazed your coworkers actually use Word's revision controls. The leaks from government agencies are a clue that someone uses them, but the last fortune 500 company I worked for would never bother or care about a feature like that. Nor would they ever trust anything but two floppies to keep their latest revisions because nothing else was reliable. There were one or two Word lovers, but they were entities unto themselves. Has it ever struck you that your ability to master Latex comes from a thouroughness that would make you successful regardless of the tool you use?
Yes, you missed a few things. OO is in general more consistent than Office and OO2 has much better layout than any version of Office. The differences are often small and something someone who's got bad habits from Office use might overlook. Other differences are huge and obvious. Like you, I use other software for most of my work because Office is heavy. Unlike you, I can appreciate where Sun is kicking M$'s ass. It might be because I use Mepis, which comes with great fonts and all the bells and whistles, or it might be because I have used OO instead of Office for four years now.
A glaring difference is the slide show generator. OO2's interface is MUCH better than M$'s, which has remained the same for years. OO gives you three tabbed panels for navigation and manipulation of slides. That might sound confusing, but manipulation is more intuitive than Office ever was. Everything is visible and shallow, right clicks do what you would expect them to do, and there are no hidden gottchas where content is irrationally tied to presentation. You can change slide type without erasing everything you typed.
A small difference is the summation behavior in the spreadsheet. In Office, you grab cells and press the sum button and Office guesses where you want the sum. In OO, you select the location of the sum, press the button and OO guesses what you want summed. OO usually gets what you want summed correctly, but it's easy to include more by dragging around. Office knows what you want, but can be crazy about where to put it. Moving the sum then changes the result, Argh, time to pull your hair! If you do your sums the M$ way, OO is frustrating even though it's better, and your bad habit has defeated you. If you do your sums by typing in "=sum(" and dragging what you want, you won't notice the difference.
I'm sure there are countless other differences where Sun and the free software community does it right and M$ makes you pull your hair. Reading about it has been amusing this morning.
Companies like American Express paying hackers to stick ad servers onto people's computers bring the number up to believable proportions.
It's not the sites that get you when you run a crappy Monopoly O$. They can, of course, but people who say so are more of the "blame the user" camp than people who know what they are talking about. Study after study shows M$ PCs get whacked without the user doing anything in ever decreasing times. The shortest interval, measured in the last year, is four minutes. The time to own 1/2 of "unprotected" Windoze computers is 12 minutes. Browsing questionable sites, like American Express, Home Depot, US government, porn and gambling sites, should not be dangerous but it is when you use crappy software.
The case you reference is interesting because Microsoft specifically used Compuserve groups to blame DEC for the problems that Microsoft created. They astroturfed and fanboyed their way through it and planned it all in advance. Today, they only have to spend more money to do exactly the same thing.
Of course, their reputation has suffered. It cost them much more to fool casual computer users and anyone who remembers anything will never trust them again.
You mean they didn't just fire half their employees and turn off half their equipment? Can't you just add new stations cheaper than moving old ones?
Because, where ever you go, there you are. M$ astroturfers and other assholes will follow you where ever you go.
#2 and #3 are flawed. In practice, #2 is often false or provided by sabotage. As a salesman you really have no control of #3 and may be as duped as your customers.
Cingular's "Raising the bar" is a great example. Instead of building out their network, they are spending money on exclusive phone deals and billboards. The purpose of those billboards is to expect a fictional level of service and simply say, without proof, that theirs is better. Having had Cingular and Sprint, I can say their promise is bogus where I live and I enjoy better service than Verizon and other incumbent subscribing friends do. "Education" has to be built on fact.
Uhhh, they could install software they can actually own and lock down instead of the crap they buy from Microsoft. Provided with reasonable tools, they would not need Google's tool.
At the end of the day, your closed source software vendor can sell you and your company's data out no mater what you do.
I won't because they tell you what they are doing.
I will blame M$ for much worse. I blame them for intentional leaks, by making an OS that does much of the same without telling anyone, and demanding even more in their EULAs. I also blame them for making an OS with so many holes and backdoors that corporate espionage is easy.
I'll also blame any clueless Admin who bans Google while using M$. Fanboys who "standardize" on IE, Outlook, Exchange and all that other garbage should have no expectations of privacy or data integrity. These are the kinds of people who ban cell phones with cameras, but let people keep normal cameras. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I'm never going back to piles of notes in a drawer. I used to print out a calendar and carefully transfer all of my to do items from one page to the next, making notes along the way. This allowed some automation and, for once, I could remember people's birthdays. It worked but it had lots of problems my Handspring Visor fixed. It was hard to put everything in it and it was hard to search. When my list of things got bigger than one page, I was scratching in the margins. Invariably, small pieces of paper with information would accumulate in my drawers before I had time to organize them. The visor does searches and it alarms when I need to do something. Though it only had 8MB of storage, I never filled it up and everything was easy to find. No, I'm sticking to the pen based PDA.
HP only hates them because M$ can't get handwriting recognition right. Palm got it write and do does Xstroke. HP and M$ may exit the category, but the category will exist until someone invents something that can read my mind.