alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.... what do these three items have in common?
UnAmerican laws and restrictions. You can merge it with the FCC, expand it's mission to "software stewardship" and have something that Stalin would have admired.
Looks like it's time to burry a school bus in the back yard. It will make a nice little server room, but when the RIAA^H^H^H^HATF comes for me, I give up. If they try to shoot me instead of letting me walk out, I'm going to be in that buss with the women and children. So long as they don't drop a bomb on it or gas me, we will all be AOK. Oh shit, they gassed the Koreshians.... Got gas mask, will use.
No, I don't pirate music, I simply use free software. Yet, I know that's the real target. They will be fine and dandy with the Next Generation M$ lock in even if a few people do figure out how to share with it. Free software, however, is like a printing press in the 15th century - dangerous to own. Hell, printing presses can still get you killed but free software is much more frightening to the world's petty tyrants.
You're absolutely right. Sorry for trying to deceive you. My other username, BillGates, just gets flamed way too often.
Microsoft is a dishonest company that pays people to lie on their behalf. When you say XP is stable and not buggy, you are either decieved or paid to say that. When you are dishonest, you bring down even your honest advocates, tough luck. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. When you tie your system down with Microsoft, you get popups and all manner of buggy anoyances. My little brother keeps one of those nasty little boxes. He's good, but it sucks time and life. Good for you if you managed to weather the Slammer storm and all the other nasties that have jammed the web for the last 2 years thanks to XP.
i dont see why redhat can get away with EOLing its products, and still maintain integrity as a company?
As the current situation proves, what Red Hat sells has value. Because anyone can step up to the plate and make things work, someone will. Because Red Hat has something of value the company will continue to have value, even if the worst things you might say about what they are doing were true.
Of course, they have not really dumped anything. The last two interviews that Slashdot had with Red Hat CEOs should have cleared up all of this FUD. People are not in anyway left with such a poor choice as abandoning 1 year old software or moving to a whole new OS. I don't feel like treading all of that ground again, go read the interviews. Let's just say that I know people running Red Hat 6 without security or performance problems, it should not be hard for individual users to transition to Fedora and corporate users are going to have their needs looked after as always.
We can contrast the situation with Micorosoft's EOL for win98. In that case the "support" was not worth much to begin with as you were still rooted once a year like clockwork. Who's going to pick up the "support" for systems like that? They are going to go the same place Win 3.1 and win 95 systems have gone - liberated or trashed.
Say, I run an important mailing list. A random power failure, severe disk corruption, nobody really knows what works OK and what is broken, week-old backup of data, no system backup, no network, no other computer to move the harddisk, I must work with this broken system. I must get it back up and running with as much of remaining database as possible, possibly fixing any corruption. Is the user support good enough to lead me through such landmine-ridden system?
I think what users of Red Hat 8 and 9 are looking for is package management and security fixes. Like you, I've never used tech support, except to configure hardware devices for other people. Then, I read the manual and call the vendor's dial up line to get it right. That has nothing to do with "user support" though.
In the windoze world you are just as screwed as you are elsewhere. If the box won't boot, you need to take it to someone or have someone look at it.
Your case leads you two places. Either you have a hardware problem or you don't. If you have a hardware problem with a hard disk and don't have an identical disk, you have to send it off to someone who does who might be able to spin it up for you. Chances are, you are hosed. Software problems are much more rare, but you will be fixed.
Free software is amazinly resiliant. I've actually formatted a hard disk to fat, wrote data onto it and then had Linux boot! Not just Lilo trying to load a blown up kernel, but the kernel loading and device modules loading. It scared my little brother to death because the fat partition had customer data on it. In any case, fsck generally fixes screwed up file systems without data loss because it's very redundant. I've been running a system with a known bad root partition for half a year now. Every other boot it comes up with a corrupted root partition and is fixed by fsck without fuss. That's something you could walk a customer through on the phone. If the drive is really zapped worse than a partial format, you need Knoppix to get your list and all is well. This too, you could walk a client through and then shell into the box yourself, but it may require a visit. Now for my nighmare.
In the windoze world, things are not as robust. The worst case is some poor little box that's been exposed to the internet, gimped up with IE powerbar, gator wallet, and other malware, viruses that turn off all virus software you try, kazaa, and well, your typical M$ hell hole owned by some nasty fat chick who's worried about her job and thinks she knows about computers. The box will have to be rebuilt all over and you might not get the data, depending on what wrote it. If they trusted MS Access to keep it... oh well partial recovery may be possible but good luck and never do that again. I will turn a job like that down and let the fool who set it up suffer.
Yeah, and a home-brewed tactical nuke has legitimate uses as an excavation tool. Just because you can find an obscure use for a tool that has a prominent list of evil uses doesn't mean the tool should be released to the public.
Wow, that's pig headed and ignorant. It's so bad I suspect you did it on purpose just to piss people off. Your whole premis and understanding are backward - one evil use prevents much good use.
First, you can indeed use small nuclear devices for excavation. Look up the plowshears project from the US govenment. That kind of excavation would save billions of dollars and thousands of lives when used for ordinary construction of canals. More importantly, such cost savings would make lots of nice projects possible, like harbor construction is solid stone.
Second, it's not a particular configuration of special nuclear materials that's against the law, it's the possesion of them without license.
Good cause has been shown for the control of these materails, but the control has overriden many legitimate uses. The bottom line is that materials that have one or two significant evil uses have been controled and that prevents hundreds of very good uses. We are restricted to fewer harbors and less energy production. The poor energy production makes all manner of industry more difficult. This is a shame.
They retired them because they did not want to get them into compliance and spend the resources on those packages.
Right, they had no intentions of improving or modifying W98SE. In fact, new sales must be so low it was time to shoot it anyway. So nice of them to blame Sun for what they obviously indended from the start. It's so much better than saying that 98 simply sucked, like they said about 95 and 3.1 and you get the picture. Oh wait, they did say that 98 sucks.
As with most MS settlements, they win even when they lose.
As with most Microsoft statements, it was a lie even when partially factual.
OK you stupid little worthless piece of shit, I will say this just once: Outlook supports threading by conversation since Office 2000 was released four years ago. And it supports sorting by just about any field. I wonder if you've actually ever used Outlook (or for that matter any Microsoft software) - do you just 'blither' whatever comes to mind as long as it's negative? I thought so. But more importantly, do you feel stupid yet? The entire premise of your troll post, invalidated. Gawd that must hurt.
I get one or two of these insulting little nasties per post, but this one is really excellent.
Yes, I had to use Outlook for two years. The last version of it I suffered under was OfficeXP. Like much esle violently promoted by Microsoft, threading did not work. In fact, Outlook's silly database did not work either. At a certian size it simply broke, and workarounds were required if you cared to keep a mail archive. Of course, it was difficult to browse those archives, but tha't just Microsoft quality for you.
How much do you get paid to write this stuff? It's not enough but you are not worth half of it.
The real Microsoft objective is to blame another company for their own failure to support their customers. If they manage to blame Sun for that, they really will have scored a victory. You fall straight into the trap set by Microsoft's press release when you claim:
[this means] people that still have their Packard Bells and Dells and the such with Windows 98 OEM copies are not going to be able to do Windows Updates and are basically going to have to upgrade to another PC if they want support.
You don't really question the reason this is happening, accept that something has really been lost and recomend a "solution" to a problem that never existed.
First, what support? For all the trouble "updating" caused, it never did well at actually protecting anyone from the latest greatest Microsoft spread disease. People like you are funny. When an Update breaks X compatibilty or a competitor's software, you shrug or blame the victim. When another program messes with windblows, you cry out loud. When a M$ worm does the same, you want someone to go to jail. It's funny because all three things are the same, but your reaction is different.
Microsoft has always shafted it's customers. Last time I checked a mojority of PeeeCeees still ran 98 or even 95. So M$ is going to dump "support" for the majority of their customers. When you consider the fact that their new OS won't even run on their hardware, you realize support for them is already dropped. When you also consider the fact that Windows 98 won't work on newer hardware with a clock speed that's too high, you might imagine that Microsoft never intended to "support" their software anyway. Signed, sealed and delivered as planned.
The real answer is right if front of you and requires no new purchase, hardware or software. 98/95 users should get themselves a Knoppix CD right away. It DOES work on older hardware, sometimes very nicely. On a single, free CD that can be obtained at the cost of a download, you will have a complete OS and all the goodies. You get your network and printer support, two or three browsers, two Microsoft Office substitutes, music playing and recording software, games, superior scripting launguages and the ability to mount and read your old files, without writing a single byte to your hard disk. It mostly works out of the box, with very little user intervention or effort. What does Microsoft have to offer against that? "Support"? Tell me another one.
To easy to turn around.
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You claim:
How about: I don't *like* other operating systems [besides unnamed windows version]?
and offer this as the most important reason:
WinXP just *works*
and offer this as well:
That's the one concept that you Mac and Linux fanatics don't seem to get.
The last statement really should be a question. Here's part of the answer.
Mac heads may be fanatics but there's nothing like a Micfosoft fanboy. People who are not Microsoft fanboys actually look at and enjoy other software. I actually like Solaris, Mac, Mac OSX, HPUX, Just about every thing Linux, BSD, even OS/2, but not Windows. I'm not a fanatic for saying that Windows is buggy and that Microsoft demands way too much money and EULA restrictions for such buggy junk in it's XP forms. Experience shows me that, I'm nothing special. No one that's ever really used another OS for long is really able to put up with Microsoft. Microsoft has to invent switchers because they can't find real ones. Because of this and from my own experience confirmed by many others, I have to suspect that you are paid to say what you just did. That might not be true, I have met people who describe themselves as "Wintel all the way", who blindly refuse to look at anything but Microsoft on Intel. They froth at the mouth with violent hatred of anything different. It's really wierd, but that's the kind of stuff Microsoft actively promotes, is it not?
here's a flame^H^H^H^Hact
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The "enlightened ones," as I mention, won't need to bother with this book, as they have Linux, or a Mac. But the rest of us, who do battle with our PCs daily, will get a lot of useful information out of this book.
In less time than it takes to read and implement solutions presented in this book, you could become enlightened several times over. Then Microsoft will make changes that break your workarounds to their problems. For less money than you will spend on the two systems you will be forced to buy in the next three years, you could have bought a Mac and been happy. That's why most of us consider Windoze so annoying, it's not cheap , it's not easy and it hardly works.
All that email clients seem to let you do is split the stream into smaller ones, which you must still and laboriously examine.
Yeah, and if you have a reasonable amount of time to do your job and your work has been reasonably prioritized, this is great. Threads segregate work by task and enable placekeeping. You can attend to the more pressing tasks and get to the less pressing ones when you have a minute.
Outlook lacks this simple tool and allmost all of the problems they described are a direct result of that lack. You can and do miss important messages when they are all scattered by date, subject or author. It is very difficult to compare letters about the same subject when all your mail is disorganized, because the subject is the default thread and people are forced to keep it the same. There's no hint of what the message contains. Even in a structured organization where document have long been numbered and systemitized, subjects fail as threads. You do indeed have to read every message when you work this way. If you are really with it, you will start to make mail directories so you don't have to go sorting throught the whole pile each time you look at your mail, though you still have to go picking through the fake directories. It's a painful mess and simple threads helps a great deal.
From the article...
"People are overwhelmed by the volume of new email they receive each day. They report spending increasing amounts of time simply managing their email."
Actually, most of the problems cited in the article are Outlook specific. Most are caused by lack of threads. This really has nothing to do with "computer literacy" and being familiar with a nasty tool like Outlook will acutally harm the user by teaching them stupid workaround tricks that no sane client would have. IBM has made a nice client that does this and offers much else, outlook is doomed.
The lack of threads in outlook is a glaring shortcoming. All outlook does is sort by to, from and date. Because most people have many projects going at once, all involving many overlapping groups of people, it is very difficult to organize your mail without threads. You end up making your own threads by hand! Having things automatically thread your messages saves lots of time, because you can respond to the most important and interesting threads first, unless someone with a brain dead client like Outloook mails you. Almost every other mail client has threads and requires no effort on the part of the user. Their work simply gets easier to manage.
IBM has also put in a gagle of awsome visulizations to further enhance the threading. I particularly like the blue lines, and think that will be a great way to determine an individual message's place in the thread. Hopefully, they have done like Mozilla, Balsa and other clients and used standard mailbox formats so that normal text searching tools like grep can be used for searches. Prety GUI faces can be put onto powerful cli tools.
I imagine IBM merging this with their good Notes system, calanders and all that. Hey, they might even provide KDE with reasonable competition.
Outlook, that misserable, insecure, featurless nightmare of vendor lockin should die a quick and painful death.
They didn't want to pay 20% of installed cost per year for an information system, so they decided to maintain it themselves.... a few years later... maintenance... cost... beyond 60% of installed cost per year... there is no upgrade path to the latest commercial version
You cite an example where a comercial package was "forked" by maintaining an older version. This seems to have nothing at all to do with free software. Some questions that need to be answered are:
Was the software originally free and how much was open. If the original package had closed binaries and was designed to self destruct, it's a wonder you have anything at all.
Did you try to share development costs by making your own efforts free? If you are going it alone, your costs will be much greater.
Have you looked for free software designed to do any of the specific tasks your comercial package did?
Lacking answers to questions like that, there's no way to evaluate your specific case. From here, it's no justification for the implied statement, "free software does not work in the enterprise market".
If free software is not working for you, you are doing something wrong. There's a wealth of free software available to do any task. These can be used by anyone without having to share back, if you are so inclined, but are most powerful when you can identify a community of users who may also benefit with you. What's more, there are now many consultants who are willing to do the work for you. From IBM to the local linux dude, the thing you ask for is what you get. Because most of it can be done without an onsite visit, you literally have the whole world of developers to chose from. For instance, Duck Central is now being programmed by a Russian. There's way more talent on the market than there is demand and the loser is going to be the high priced comercial software solution.
Duck Central is a duck hunting web site. It was built by rubes in Baton Rouge using free and open software. It's fiercly competitive and widely recoginized as the best of it's kind. It has all the pieces of the "enterprise" and could not be a more custom application. If they can do it, anyone can even your PhD supervisor at Schroders Bank.
Yeah, yeah, another MBA pusher adicted to power point and other M$ junk that thinks he knows something. I can't stand these idiots. They never personally demand more of computers than cutsey clip art and tiny access databases that they don't know how to organize and never use, but they think they know how to run an IT department.
This particular one is just echoing the usual set of M$ bullshit. Only Microsoft could continue to blither on about some myserious Total Cost of Ownership that has nothing to do with real cases. The forking argument is a really ancient troll. Blah, blah, blah, can't these dummies think of anything new?
Forking is a great strenth. Free software developers are free to take the best parts of any fork and roll them into any project they want. A project only forks when there's great interest in it and no project like that ever dies. If there are not enough developers to sustain more than one branch, surprise, there is no fork. There are countless examples of forks, such as EGCS, where the best parts of both project were merged without harming anyone's code or requiring much work from the users.
Back in reality, comercial software yanks you around much more and therefore must cost more. You can the GCC case to M$ junk such as VB which continually changes form and contiually burdens it's users with modifications and rework. Microsoft has even made versioned something as simple as word processing. If rewriting word docs all day is not a hidden cost of comercial software, it's hard to think of one.
Other hidden costs of comercial software are poor security, uncertian lifespan, virus/worm trouble, and all else connected with the upgrade train. The intentional waste alone always costs more than honest efforts. The cost of virus protection and all the other evil Microsoft band-aids adds to it. Everyone knows that you need more "admins" to run a Microsoft shop than you do for an equivalent Unix, Mac or free shop.
Look at the automobile market. A 1993 car is $1000, a 1997 is $5000, and a 2003 is $15000. The old stuff is cheaper... but there is no way a manufacturer could build a new car to 1993 standards for any less than a 2003 model.
No, until a few months ago you could go to Mexico and buy a new VW bug for $2000. This was essentially a 1973 super beatle. Of course, automobiles are a great analogy if all new cars really only cost about $2,000 to make but everyone pays ten times that much due to greedy marketers and such.
nobody could ever prove that they had not discovered it independently anyway.
Unless you had the nerve to publish it openy. Nerve? No, it should not take nerve to share your knowledge and no one will ever know anything if knowledge can't be shared globally.
One person asked if software is really an issue where there are still large numbers of people living below the poverty line and where access to clean water and a fairly paid job is generally a more important issue than whether or not someone can hack around on a PC.
Ah! what a thought. First ask yourslef what you do with your PC. When you answer that question honestly, you will understand how digital information is for hackers of all types and you might see how important localization is.
Clean water, that would be nice. Localization can help people who are already trying to get clean water. The people who do arsnic testing can get the information to cetral offices and people drilling wells can get the information back, without knowing English. The information will be available in every vilage with a phone and a PC and lots of pulp publication will be avoided. That what we use PCs for, isn't it, because it's a cheaper, easier and better way to get information where it's needed.
Localization is an example of people helping themselves too. Then up and up goes everyone's standard of living, cool! This is what free software is all about. Yep, just like you said, it's important for people using IT to control it.
though I might reasonably be bound to keep any secret I discover [about your own equipment}
You might not want to tell anyone anything and no one you know may be intersted, but there's no reason you should not be able too. If you accept this, you accept the worst kind of prior restraint on your property. Apply your thinking to your old parallel printer. Are you telling me that you would accept not being able to go to a local meeting to share your hacks as you just did here? That's nuts. The whole reason the kernel works with so much hardware is that people have been able to share their hacks. DMCA type laws interpreted by people willing to be shut up would kill free software off completely and no amount of mandatory disclosure would make up for it. Hardware used by free software routinely does much more than it's makers ever envisioned.
Wow. I hope someday I'm enough of a badass to be able to flame people like that and get away with it.
All it takes is truth, gnat. Depending on what was said, the poster in question may have been a weasel.
In any case, all of this is temporary. Binary only modules suck. Compared to free code, their quality is poor. Even when the quality is good, they are not flexible enough to survive kernel changes and don't work. I've heard of Nvidia binaries that make X take 5 minutes to load and I've dealt with a wi-fi binary only that would only work with specific versions of Red Hat. Free software is taking over and hardware makers are going to release GPL'd drivers if they want to be competitive. It's only a mater of time before binary only distribution is just a bad memory.
As placing microphones on every building in London or Paris to measure noise was not practical, data on the amount of traffic carried by roads and the noise levels was fed into computers to generate a model of noise levels across the city.
Translation: Echelon did not co-operate so they had to get background noise from people's cell phones from their own telcos which incedently gave them great traffic data.
I guess you work for one of those pathetic little companies where the PMs are just glorified clerks.... the PM does all the resource-managment, schedule juggling, workflow info distribution, and other organizational scutwork...
Sounds like a clerk to me. Shut up and go back to your cubicle before I replace you with a tiny shell script.
The fictional old guy in that ad probably would sneer at Linux almost as much as he would at Windows.
Almost is not good enough. We know which way these guys are going to go. Once they get there, they love it. I know lots of 55+ year old people who love Linux and other free software.
However, the ad looks to be targeted at those who didn't catch the Windows wave in the first place.
What windows wave? Microsoft suckered a few big dumb companies with their "standardized" platform BS, but it's hardly been an overwhelming wash out in server land. The desktop fiasco has been more than enough to squash M$'s efforts at mail serving, data warehousing, etc. at all but the most terminal companies.
Example, I remember at one CS program, the OS class was 9 weeks of learning how to _use_ Microsoft Windows.
Where was that?
A lack of resources overseas is a significant impediment. I know people who came to the US for CS graduate courses who's only experience to computers was one or two basic electronics courses. They were bright, they learned, but any US CS undergrad was MUCH better. Their degrees were full of holes and they represented the top 1% of their whole country. This condition won't last forever, but it's a significant fact right now.
This offshoring should be seen as a huge scandal. With comercial, closed source junk you never know what you are getting. Free software eliminates this problem and assures a good quality product. Good quality people here in the US are being shitcanned by greedy companies that will do anything to get their earnings up to justify their bloated stock prices. Rather than fire overpaid executives, marketing drones or idiots that prevent work they tossed their code quality to God knows what.
The big winner here is free software because it's quality is known regardless of where the writer is from. Everyone is welcome to write and use it and everyone can review it. What more can you ask for?
Slashdot Mirror
UnAmerican laws and restrictions. You can merge it with the FCC, expand it's mission to "software stewardship" and have something that Stalin would have admired.
No, I don't pirate music, I simply use free software. Yet, I know that's the real target. They will be fine and dandy with the Next Generation M$ lock in even if a few people do figure out how to share with it. Free software, however, is like a printing press in the 15th century - dangerous to own. Hell, printing presses can still get you killed but free software is much more frightening to the world's petty tyrants.
Microsoft is a dishonest company that pays people to lie on their behalf. When you say XP is stable and not buggy, you are either decieved or paid to say that. When you are dishonest, you bring down even your honest advocates, tough luck. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. When you tie your system down with Microsoft, you get popups and all manner of buggy anoyances. My little brother keeps one of those nasty little boxes. He's good, but it sucks time and life. Good for you if you managed to weather the Slammer storm and all the other nasties that have jammed the web for the last 2 years thanks to XP.
As the current situation proves, what Red Hat sells has value. Because anyone can step up to the plate and make things work, someone will. Because Red Hat has something of value the company will continue to have value, even if the worst things you might say about what they are doing were true.
Of course, they have not really dumped anything. The last two interviews that Slashdot had with Red Hat CEOs should have cleared up all of this FUD. People are not in anyway left with such a poor choice as abandoning 1 year old software or moving to a whole new OS. I don't feel like treading all of that ground again, go read the interviews. Let's just say that I know people running Red Hat 6 without security or performance problems, it should not be hard for individual users to transition to Fedora and corporate users are going to have their needs looked after as always.
We can contrast the situation with Micorosoft's EOL for win98. In that case the "support" was not worth much to begin with as you were still rooted once a year like clockwork. Who's going to pick up the "support" for systems like that? They are going to go the same place Win 3.1 and win 95 systems have gone - liberated or trashed.
I think what users of Red Hat 8 and 9 are looking for is package management and security fixes. Like you, I've never used tech support, except to configure hardware devices for other people. Then, I read the manual and call the vendor's dial up line to get it right. That has nothing to do with "user support" though.
In the windoze world you are just as screwed as you are elsewhere. If the box won't boot, you need to take it to someone or have someone look at it.
Your case leads you two places. Either you have a hardware problem or you don't. If you have a hardware problem with a hard disk and don't have an identical disk, you have to send it off to someone who does who might be able to spin it up for you. Chances are, you are hosed. Software problems are much more rare, but you will be fixed.
Free software is amazinly resiliant. I've actually formatted a hard disk to fat, wrote data onto it and then had Linux boot! Not just Lilo trying to load a blown up kernel, but the kernel loading and device modules loading. It scared my little brother to death because the fat partition had customer data on it. In any case, fsck generally fixes screwed up file systems without data loss because it's very redundant. I've been running a system with a known bad root partition for half a year now. Every other boot it comes up with a corrupted root partition and is fixed by fsck without fuss. That's something you could walk a customer through on the phone. If the drive is really zapped worse than a partial format, you need Knoppix to get your list and all is well. This too, you could walk a client through and then shell into the box yourself, but it may require a visit. Now for my nighmare.
In the windoze world, things are not as robust. The worst case is some poor little box that's been exposed to the internet, gimped up with IE powerbar, gator wallet, and other malware, viruses that turn off all virus software you try, kazaa, and well, your typical M$ hell hole owned by some nasty fat chick who's worried about her job and thinks she knows about computers. The box will have to be rebuilt all over and you might not get the data, depending on what wrote it. If they trusted MS Access to keep it ... oh well partial recovery may be possible but good luck and never do that again. I will turn a job like that down and let the fool who set it up suffer.
Wow, that's pig headed and ignorant. It's so bad I suspect you did it on purpose just to piss people off. Your whole premis and understanding are backward - one evil use prevents much good use.
First, you can indeed use small nuclear devices for excavation. Look up the plowshears project from the US govenment. That kind of excavation would save billions of dollars and thousands of lives when used for ordinary construction of canals. More importantly, such cost savings would make lots of nice projects possible, like harbor construction is solid stone.
Second, it's not a particular configuration of special nuclear materials that's against the law, it's the possesion of them without license.
Good cause has been shown for the control of these materails, but the control has overriden many legitimate uses. The bottom line is that materials that have one or two significant evil uses have been controled and that prevents hundreds of very good uses. We are restricted to fewer harbors and less energy production. The poor energy production makes all manner of industry more difficult. This is a shame.
Right, they had no intentions of improving or modifying W98SE. In fact, new sales must be so low it was time to shoot it anyway. So nice of them to blame Sun for what they obviously indended from the start. It's so much better than saying that 98 simply sucked, like they said about 95 and 3.1 and you get the picture. Oh wait, they did say that 98 sucks.
As with most MS settlements, they win even when they lose.
As with most Microsoft statements, it was a lie even when partially factual.
OK you stupid little worthless piece of shit, I will say this just once: Outlook supports threading by conversation since Office 2000 was released four years ago. And it supports sorting by just about any field. I wonder if you've actually ever used Outlook (or for that matter any Microsoft software) - do you just 'blither' whatever comes to mind as long as it's negative? I thought so. But more importantly, do you feel stupid yet? The entire premise of your troll post, invalidated. Gawd that must hurt.
I get one or two of these insulting little nasties per post, but this one is really excellent.
Yes, I had to use Outlook for two years. The last version of it I suffered under was OfficeXP. Like much esle violently promoted by Microsoft, threading did not work. In fact, Outlook's silly database did not work either. At a certian size it simply broke, and workarounds were required if you cared to keep a mail archive. Of course, it was difficult to browse those archives, but tha't just Microsoft quality for you.
How much do you get paid to write this stuff? It's not enough but you are not worth half of it.
The real Microsoft objective is to blame another company for their own failure to support their customers. If they manage to blame Sun for that, they really will have scored a victory. You fall straight into the trap set by Microsoft's press release when you claim: [this means] people that still have their Packard Bells and Dells and the such with Windows 98 OEM copies are not going to be able to do Windows Updates and are basically going to have to upgrade to another PC if they want support.
You don't really question the reason this is happening, accept that something has really been lost and recomend a "solution" to a problem that never existed.
First, what support? For all the trouble "updating" caused, it never did well at actually protecting anyone from the latest greatest Microsoft spread disease. People like you are funny. When an Update breaks X compatibilty or a competitor's software, you shrug or blame the victim. When another program messes with windblows, you cry out loud. When a M$ worm does the same, you want someone to go to jail. It's funny because all three things are the same, but your reaction is different.
Microsoft has always shafted it's customers. Last time I checked a mojority of PeeeCeees still ran 98 or even 95. So M$ is going to dump "support" for the majority of their customers. When you consider the fact that their new OS won't even run on their hardware, you realize support for them is already dropped. When you also consider the fact that Windows 98 won't work on newer hardware with a clock speed that's too high, you might imagine that Microsoft never intended to "support" their software anyway. Signed, sealed and delivered as planned.
The real answer is right if front of you and requires no new purchase, hardware or software. 98/95 users should get themselves a Knoppix CD right away. It DOES work on older hardware, sometimes very nicely. On a single, free CD that can be obtained at the cost of a download, you will have a complete OS and all the goodies. You get your network and printer support, two or three browsers, two Microsoft Office substitutes, music playing and recording software, games, superior scripting launguages and the ability to mount and read your old files, without writing a single byte to your hard disk. It mostly works out of the box, with very little user intervention or effort. What does Microsoft have to offer against that? "Support"? Tell me another one.
How about: I don't *like* other operating systems [besides unnamed windows version]?
and offer this as the most important reason:
WinXP just *works*
and offer this as well:
That's the one concept that you Mac and Linux fanatics don't seem to get.
The last statement really should be a question. Here's part of the answer.
Mac heads may be fanatics but there's nothing like a Micfosoft fanboy. People who are not Microsoft fanboys actually look at and enjoy other software. I actually like Solaris, Mac, Mac OSX, HPUX, Just about every thing Linux, BSD, even OS/2, but not Windows. I'm not a fanatic for saying that Windows is buggy and that Microsoft demands way too much money and EULA restrictions for such buggy junk in it's XP forms. Experience shows me that, I'm nothing special. No one that's ever really used another OS for long is really able to put up with Microsoft. Microsoft has to invent switchers because they can't find real ones. Because of this and from my own experience confirmed by many others, I have to suspect that you are paid to say what you just did. That might not be true, I have met people who describe themselves as "Wintel all the way", who blindly refuse to look at anything but Microsoft on Intel. They froth at the mouth with violent hatred of anything different. It's really wierd, but that's the kind of stuff Microsoft actively promotes, is it not?
In less time than it takes to read and implement solutions presented in this book, you could become enlightened several times over. Then Microsoft will make changes that break your workarounds to their problems. For less money than you will spend on the two systems you will be forced to buy in the next three years, you could have bought a Mac and been happy. That's why most of us consider Windoze so annoying, it's not cheap , it's not easy and it hardly works.
Yeah, and if you have a reasonable amount of time to do your job and your work has been reasonably prioritized, this is great. Threads segregate work by task and enable placekeeping. You can attend to the more pressing tasks and get to the less pressing ones when you have a minute.
Outlook lacks this simple tool and allmost all of the problems they described are a direct result of that lack. You can and do miss important messages when they are all scattered by date, subject or author. It is very difficult to compare letters about the same subject when all your mail is disorganized, because the subject is the default thread and people are forced to keep it the same. There's no hint of what the message contains. Even in a structured organization where document have long been numbered and systemitized, subjects fail as threads. You do indeed have to read every message when you work this way. If you are really with it, you will start to make mail directories so you don't have to go sorting throught the whole pile each time you look at your mail, though you still have to go picking through the fake directories. It's a painful mess and simple threads helps a great deal.
Actually, most of the problems cited in the article are Outlook specific. Most are caused by lack of threads. This really has nothing to do with "computer literacy" and being familiar with a nasty tool like Outlook will acutally harm the user by teaching them stupid workaround tricks that no sane client would have. IBM has made a nice client that does this and offers much else, outlook is doomed.
The lack of threads in outlook is a glaring shortcoming. All outlook does is sort by to, from and date. Because most people have many projects going at once, all involving many overlapping groups of people, it is very difficult to organize your mail without threads. You end up making your own threads by hand! Having things automatically thread your messages saves lots of time, because you can respond to the most important and interesting threads first, unless someone with a brain dead client like Outloook mails you. Almost every other mail client has threads and requires no effort on the part of the user. Their work simply gets easier to manage.
IBM has also put in a gagle of awsome visulizations to further enhance the threading. I particularly like the blue lines, and think that will be a great way to determine an individual message's place in the thread. Hopefully, they have done like Mozilla, Balsa and other clients and used standard mailbox formats so that normal text searching tools like grep can be used for searches. Prety GUI faces can be put onto powerful cli tools.
I imagine IBM merging this with their good Notes system, calanders and all that. Hey, they might even provide KDE with reasonable competition.
Outlook, that misserable, insecure, featurless nightmare of vendor lockin should die a quick and painful death.
A Google Search provides 13,000 hits, with hoary Rothschild references. They claim $160,000,000,000 managed assests, but is the kind of thing really big dumb companies eat for breakfast. Like any other big dumb company Schroders has a bunch of overpaid executives but this one's tast in boats makes Jim Clark's look rational. Shiver me timbers!
You cite an example where a comercial package was "forked" by maintaining an older version. This seems to have nothing at all to do with free software. Some questions that need to be answered are:
Lacking answers to questions like that, there's no way to evaluate your specific case. From here, it's no justification for the implied statement, "free software does not work in the enterprise market".
If free software is not working for you, you are doing something wrong. There's a wealth of free software available to do any task. These can be used by anyone without having to share back, if you are so inclined, but are most powerful when you can identify a community of users who may also benefit with you. What's more, there are now many consultants who are willing to do the work for you. From IBM to the local linux dude, the thing you ask for is what you get. Because most of it can be done without an onsite visit, you literally have the whole world of developers to chose from. For instance, Duck Central is now being programmed by a Russian. There's way more talent on the market than there is demand and the loser is going to be the high priced comercial software solution.
Duck Central is a duck hunting web site. It was built by rubes in Baton Rouge using free and open software. It's fiercly competitive and widely recoginized as the best of it's kind. It has all the pieces of the "enterprise" and could not be a more custom application. If they can do it, anyone can even your PhD supervisor at Schroders Bank.
Congratulations to Ellen for her new boat. Arrrr!
Yeah, yeah, another MBA pusher adicted to power point and other M$ junk that thinks he knows something. I can't stand these idiots. They never personally demand more of computers than cutsey clip art and tiny access databases that they don't know how to organize and never use, but they think they know how to run an IT department.
This particular one is just echoing the usual set of M$ bullshit. Only Microsoft could continue to blither on about some myserious Total Cost of Ownership that has nothing to do with real cases. The forking argument is a really ancient troll. Blah, blah, blah, can't these dummies think of anything new?
Forking is a great strenth. Free software developers are free to take the best parts of any fork and roll them into any project they want. A project only forks when there's great interest in it and no project like that ever dies. If there are not enough developers to sustain more than one branch, surprise, there is no fork. There are countless examples of forks, such as EGCS, where the best parts of both project were merged without harming anyone's code or requiring much work from the users.
Back in reality, comercial software yanks you around much more and therefore must cost more. You can the GCC case to M$ junk such as VB which continually changes form and contiually burdens it's users with modifications and rework. Microsoft has even made versioned something as simple as word processing. If rewriting word docs all day is not a hidden cost of comercial software, it's hard to think of one.
Other hidden costs of comercial software are poor security, uncertian lifespan, virus/worm trouble, and all else connected with the upgrade train. The intentional waste alone always costs more than honest efforts. The cost of virus protection and all the other evil Microsoft band-aids adds to it. Everyone knows that you need more "admins" to run a Microsoft shop than you do for an equivalent Unix, Mac or free shop.
No, until a few months ago you could go to Mexico and buy a new VW bug for $2000. This was essentially a 1973 super beatle. Of course, automobiles are a great analogy if all new cars really only cost about $2,000 to make but everyone pays ten times that much due to greedy marketers and such.
Unless you had the nerve to publish it openy. Nerve? No, it should not take nerve to share your knowledge and no one will ever know anything if knowledge can't be shared globally.
Ah! what a thought. First ask yourslef what you do with your PC. When you answer that question honestly, you will understand how digital information is for hackers of all types and you might see how important localization is.
Clean water, that would be nice. Localization can help people who are already trying to get clean water. The people who do arsnic testing can get the information to cetral offices and people drilling wells can get the information back, without knowing English. The information will be available in every vilage with a phone and a PC and lots of pulp publication will be avoided. That what we use PCs for, isn't it, because it's a cheaper, easier and better way to get information where it's needed.
Localization is an example of people helping themselves too. Then up and up goes everyone's standard of living, cool! This is what free software is all about. Yep, just like you said, it's important for people using IT to control it.
Those characters are beautiful.
You might not want to tell anyone anything and no one you know may be intersted, but there's no reason you should not be able too. If you accept this, you accept the worst kind of prior restraint on your property. Apply your thinking to your old parallel printer. Are you telling me that you would accept not being able to go to a local meeting to share your hacks as you just did here? That's nuts. The whole reason the kernel works with so much hardware is that people have been able to share their hacks. DMCA type laws interpreted by people willing to be shut up would kill free software off completely and no amount of mandatory disclosure would make up for it. Hardware used by free software routinely does much more than it's makers ever envisioned.
Wow. I hope someday I'm enough of a badass to be able to flame people like that and get away with it.
All it takes is truth, gnat. Depending on what was said, the poster in question may have been a weasel.
In any case, all of this is temporary. Binary only modules suck. Compared to free code, their quality is poor. Even when the quality is good, they are not flexible enough to survive kernel changes and don't work. I've heard of Nvidia binaries that make X take 5 minutes to load and I've dealt with a wi-fi binary only that would only work with specific versions of Red Hat. Free software is taking over and hardware makers are going to release GPL'd drivers if they want to be competitive. It's only a mater of time before binary only distribution is just a bad memory.
Translation: Echelon did not co-operate so they had to get background noise from people's cell phones from their own telcos which incedently gave them great traffic data.
Sounds like a clerk to me. Shut up and go back to your cubicle before I replace you with a tiny shell script.
Almost is not good enough. We know which way these guys are going to go. Once they get there, they love it. I know lots of 55+ year old people who love Linux and other free software. However, the ad looks to be targeted at those who didn't catch the Windows wave in the first place.
What windows wave? Microsoft suckered a few big dumb companies with their "standardized" platform BS, but it's hardly been an overwhelming wash out in server land. The desktop fiasco has been more than enough to squash M$'s efforts at mail serving, data warehousing, etc. at all but the most terminal companies.
Where was that?
A lack of resources overseas is a significant impediment. I know people who came to the US for CS graduate courses who's only experience to computers was one or two basic electronics courses. They were bright, they learned, but any US CS undergrad was MUCH better. Their degrees were full of holes and they represented the top 1% of their whole country. This condition won't last forever, but it's a significant fact right now.
This offshoring should be seen as a huge scandal. With comercial, closed source junk you never know what you are getting. Free software eliminates this problem and assures a good quality product. Good quality people here in the US are being shitcanned by greedy companies that will do anything to get their earnings up to justify their bloated stock prices. Rather than fire overpaid executives, marketing drones or idiots that prevent work they tossed their code quality to God knows what.
The big winner here is free software because it's quality is known regardless of where the writer is from. Everyone is welcome to write and use it and everyone can review it. What more can you ask for?