If you're going to switch, now is as good a time as any. The questions will stay about the same as far as I can tell. Data backups and protection should be managed carefully no matter what OS / APPs you use. If you have the backend taken care of, the tools used to manipulate the data should be about equal. My 'users' really didn't use calendaring too much, or other group productivity tools, so that might be something to be watchful of.
The biggest difference is ease of install and machine stability. Mepis takes about 20 minutes to put on a slow machine. That with an apt-get of a few favorites, like gqview, and the machine is good to go for years. Debian stable takes a little longer to install but lasts even longer. Not having those oh so important business memos to type up, OO sees use only for fancy fonts with Kword doing just as well and GIMP doing even better. Then you don't have to mess with it - no antivirus, spyware programs and all that. It just works, so you don't have to.
For backup, grsync or rsync on chron work wonders.
For group ware, Kontact works well enough even when naively set up. It's like Outlook should be.
You're really clutching at straws now, aren't you?
I'm not sure what my biggest fan means above, but I imagine he things that the M$ upgrade train and Vista are going to be good for the environment. That's something I wish were true but intentional waste of computers has been very bad where they usually end up. Next you will tell me that the intentional waste of Vista will be good for the economy.
Carmack throws a lot of light on PS3 that was missing from the previous article's summary:
Nevertheless, he plans to support Sonys console with his next generation engine and games. Weve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and weve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. [praise of M$] I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but theyre not helpful to the developers Its not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, its not even that its ugly--they just took a design decision that wasnt the best from a development standpoint.
The good news is that they have their games ported and they are going to be on the platform. The superiority of the DX tools is to be expected over a brand new system, but that does not mean the new system is broken. I'd like to know more about that design decision, after all the PS3 has more raw processing power than most consoles and completely shames the average PC. I expect most of the problems to go away as Cell development matures and takes over general purpose computing.
As much as some can hate Microsoft, this is good and others should follow. At least good for the environment, less hardware, less energy used for shipping.
That's a joke?
Just in case you mean it, let's review:
Free software has been downloadable for ever. I doubt "software activation" will compare favorably with any of the free software package systems for utility or ease of use.
By refusing to install, XP "obsoleted" equipment like the PII laptop I'm using to write this. Vista, with it's 10 GB footprint and massive RAM and video requirments, is on track to make even more toxic waste of perfectly good equipment.
The equipment required to run Vista is going to be very power hungry, requiring as much power for the graphics as older computers used for everything.
So, as usual, M$ is following badly, making waste and encouraging power waste. This violates every tennet of eco friendly behavior. Refurbish, reuse and recycle is not something you can do Vista and it's going to suck like never before.
Still, it's amazing that anyone would defend M$ against the charge of thwarting interoperation, given the OOXML fiasco. The whole reason to buy a silly program like Office is so you can communicate and work with other people silly enough to use Office, they depend on the "networking effect," and monopoly position now as much as they did back in the 1980s. Just to prove the point, M$ has introduced a new 6,000 page "open" format specification which was quickly proven incomplete and unworkable, dependent on M$ owned, even patented and secret stuff, so that no one but M$ will be able to untangle it anytime soon. They even had the nerve to name it ooxml, to confuse users of the other oo, open office. The new Office, of course, saves to the new format with a hidden save as button and a file browser that hides the docx extension from the user, insuring that clueless users will soon be filling email inboxes with the obnoxious new format. From the start, people realized this was anti-competitive, yet here it is in all it's stinking glory. If that's not everything M$ ever was, I'm not sure what would be. Yet, here is Macthrope's big sneer:
So by my reading, they've been given the right to talk to the DoJ about something they have found that may or may not prove that they have broken the law? It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but I'll be waiting for the next story along in this chain before I start jumping to conclusions.
A masterpiece of arrogance and misdirection. Let's review Grocklaw's take:
the latest Joint Status Report on Microsofts Compliance with the Final Judgments [PDF], which as usual documents the difficulty in getting Microsoft to write documentation, with Microsoft alleging that the new schedule, which dragged out the proceess, may need to be adjusted again if Microsoft finds it can't meet the new schedule either.
Five years after conviction, they have yet to live up to their obligations and
Plaintiffs in the current Iowa antitrust trial against Microsoft told the court yesterday that it is in possession of certain materials, obtained in part in discovery in that case, that they believe is evidence of Microsoft failing to disclose APIs
Notice that it's the US Government that has judged M$ as "slow" to meet their obligations and the State of Iowa that had to jump through hoops to get around M$'s ability to seal public records of their misdeeds.
The question is not, "are they breaking the law," it's how long they can continue to avoid the consequences and how much they will be forced to fork over. The biggest bust for them will be if Government simply addopts ODF. The "pawns and one night stands" are just the tip of the outrageous iceburg the Iowa case will reveal.
The time will be when Vista comes out and new PCs come preloaded with Vista and IE7. At that time, people will get rid of the old PCs and we'll see whether they're sufficiently satisfied with IE7 that they won't bother with downloading Firefox.
Vista is out but what's worth watching is how badly it damages new PC sales. Forcing IE7 and the massive UI changes for Office and Vista are like a punch in the face for longtime M$ fans. Vendors are licking their chops, dreaming of upgrade train riches. They have been waiting for five long years and are very hungry. If Vista sales disappoint them, it's all over for the M$ monopoly. All of them have their toes in the GNU/Linux market. If Vista is a big enough failure, those vendors will jump ship like developers did years ago. M$ and closed source have been stale for a long time, Vista is shaping up to be putrid.
The real surprise is that IE7 only got 25% of the market, using all of their might. That may be huge, but it's nothing that can be called a "standard" that will always work. I think this has huge implications for the browser and OS markets.
Try treating IE as a "standard" and you will lose. That was the Mozilla plan all along and it has worked perfectly. Real competition is coming back to both the browser and OS space, which is death for M$ who's only strength was a large captive audience.
The bad news for M$ is that they can't use browser share to force their way into the server market. That 79% is the total IE share. IE 7 only has 25% after three months of mandatory update, which has put it in all sorts of surprising places. Their IE 6, "winner" only has 60%. The 20% non IE share keeps developers from using IE only crap - no business is going to turn away one in five customers, especially when that one in five is the more likely to spend early adapter type.
This really is the spiral of doom for M$. They can't push their stuff, so the rest of us are no longer punished for not having IE. Because non IE browsers are better, the market share will continue to increase making it even harder for them to force IE only on people, and so on and so forth. Their push of IE 7 was a desperate measure that has failed and showed their weakness. They used every ounce of their strength and lost. As the Internet is the main reason to own a computer, their weakness in browser space is also a weakness in OS space. They think the new interface is going to spur Vista sales, but it's going to be just the opposite. User dissatisfaction with the never ending upgrade train is going to drive people to alternatives. Now is the time to give people free software. They just might try it and be happy before they spend a thousand dollars on a low end, soon to be M$ obsolete, Vista machine.
I was waiting for the 'astroturfing' allegation. You can't actually have a discussion without getting that one in, can you? I work in the UK, and MS doesn't have an ISP over here. That pisses that little theory up the wall, doesn't it?
You are not a very good M$ defender, but you are one and a general pest. A brief review of your posting history shows you:
I'm don't know what you really do for a living, but I am sure that I can't trust anything you say.
No one should confuse what you say with popular sentiment. What I've see above is all designed to aggravate and annoy. Besides the obviously wrong opinions, you express yourself with phrases like, "You have no excuse," "needs a lobotomy," "terrible English, seriously immature, and really, really fucking stupid," and, my favorite, "finding entirely spurious evidence on the internet."
I was waiting for the 'astroturfing' allegation. You can't actually have a discussion without getting that one in, can you? I work in the UK, and MS doesn't have an ISP over here. That pisses that little theory up the wall, doesn't it?
You are not a very good M$ defender, but you are one and a general pest. A brief review of your posting history shows you:
I'm don't what you really do for a living, but I am sure that I can't trust anything you say. I'm not going to confuse what you say with popular sentiment. What I've see above is all designed to aggravate and annoy. If you don't see yourself that way, you need to look back at what you've written and ask yourself if you still believe any of it.
for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant. Send four "hardened" troops in ahead of the "soft" troops to clear the building, then let them return to base to cool off.
It's called a robot and they are already sent in.
If the armor is good for anyone in a situation, it should be issued to all.
... you could always answer my actual points instead of wasting my time for 5 minutes. Why do you hold MS to a higher standard than you hold OSS.
Your time is entirely your own, or whoever has had you on staff for the last six months. That ISP is probably M$ because they are the only organization that could exchange M$ documents that long without complaining, publically that is.
I already answered your questions, but I'll do it explicitly. I hold M$ to "higher" standards of performance than free software because:
They promise as much.
They take people's money to deliver as much.
They are a monopoly and when they screw around, everybody suffers.
Just the same, they fail miserably to match any kind of competition. I can say so from watching my peers use any M$ program and noticing that things have gotten worse, not better.
How the fuck do you know that Office's new UI is worse when you haven't used it?
Because I've watched a long time Office user get stumped by it trying out the simplest of tasks and I've read reviews. Amazing how something can suck from such a distance, isn't it? That's the way monopolies are.
Is it better to change or not to change? If it's better to change and evolve, why don't MS have the right to make their products better without the insane 'usability is broken because people know how it worked before' argument?
It's better to change incrementally, offering features and improvements that users actually want. This is what free software does and that's why Konqueror, KWord even Open Office are more consistent and easier to use than M$ junk.
What M$ does is mostly for marketing purposes and it has indeed broken their user's knowledge base. Open Office forced this change on M$ because few people were willing to shell out $400 for something that works better and they could get for free. Open Office does everything M$ Office does that any sane person cares about. The new Word, IE and Vista interface are change for change's sake. They provide an illusion of newness but the underlying features are mostly the same. The only thing that's really changed are the buttons the user has to push and where they are hidden. Because Office had lots and lots of buttons to push for every task, there are a lot of people who are going to be pushing lots of the wrong buttons for years to come.
Monopolies are bad. They always provide the worst services at the greatest cost. Their entire focus is on keeping others out of the market instead of what their original purpose.
Fortunately, tech monopolies don't last long, especially one as flaky as software. Vista and the new Office are the end of Microsoft. Both openly show contempt for the user.
Personally I care more about other people being able to benefit from my code than preventing corporations from using it for profit.
The problem comes when a company claims "ownership" of your code and then determines who benefits and under what contitions. That's what happens when you don't worry enough to make things right.
A great example of such a theft is Macsyma(tediously detailed article that's nice but misses the point), the grand-daddy of Maple, MathCAD, Mathematica and many other symbolic algebra systems. It was developed, largely at public expense by people who expected the public to be able to have it. Instead, the results were "commercialized" in the 80's. A single copy of the original code(much better history, as you would expect from a free software project) survived thanks to the efforts of Bill Schelter, a GNU Common Lisp author and one of the first to port GCC to i386. Schelter managed to convince the DOE to let him legally distribute that code... 20 years after it had been stolen from the public. Since then, development has been speedy and it will not be long before the quality matches or exceeds current commercial packages. The next time you spend a hundred bucks on one of it's commercial derivatives, remember that you might have had a free version a decade ago.
So, before you freely give your life's effort to others, you might consider what they will really do to other people with it and chose an explicit license that suits your real tastes. The GPL is the most common choice made and there's a reason for that. The same old assholes are up to new tricks, like "trusted computing" that are designed to lock everyone but themselves out of the market. In the future, if they have their way, you will not be able to run your code on commercial hardware. Is that the kind of thing you want to support in any way?
So Microsoft's old menus were shit, so they should have changed them, but they shouldn't have changed them because they should have got them right first time because change is bad.
That's about right, when you consider the historical context. Let me modify your words so that they make sense.
So Microsoft's old menus were shit, so they should have changed them [to be able to compete with other better word processors], but they [did not, preferring to use their platform advantage to quash those competitors.] [Now that they have done that and forced so many people to memorize their awful shit, they should stick to it. The problem is a competitor that's pulled the same nasty trick: dumping their product at no cost, except the product in this case is a duplicate. Ha ha, M$ can't insult the product without degrading themselves so they are forced to change and differentiate themselves. Overall, non of this should have happened. They should have competed fairly in the first place, changing till they had a winner or quit. What they have done is the worst possible thing. They forced an inferior product on everyone and are now forcing massive changes in how all those people do their work. The jury is out on the benefit of those changes but, they.] shouldn't have changed them because they should have got them right first time because change is bad.
There, does that make things clear to you? It's a no win situation for M$ because you never really win when you fuck people over.
... you haven't used an MS product in 7 years, so how would you even know? At least I had the decency to use OpenOffice before I deleted it.
It has only been five years since I was forced to use Word as part of my job. Since then, I've been lucky enough not to work for such stupid employers. I am forced to use a W2K box every day for data capture and can say it's a real piece of shit. My brief brushes with XP only convince me that M$ continues to insult users with heavy handed nonsense.
That does not, however, mean that I'm not surrounded by unhappy Word users and idiots who would force Word's quirks on me. The "Margin Lady" at LSU uses Word and so has "standardized" on her particular version's margins and styles. This has caused no end of headaches for people who chose Word to write their papers. OO in this case is preferable but Latex is the clear winner when it comes to crap like that. Typesetting of that type is what Word promisses but has yet to deliver in a machine independent way, someting competitors have done again and again all along. The biggest crime of it all is that it's a perfect waste of most people's time. Content is more important than form and a reasonable word processor has a good typographical form by default. Word is to word processing as MySpace is to web design.
[nothing] in word processing in the last ten years at least has been revolutionary. And how many thousands of dollars in Word upgrades have there been in 10 years?
The only revolutionary thing to happen to text editing in the last twenty years has been software freedom. Anyone who learned how to use Emacs back in the 80s is still happily using the same muscle memory today if they choose.
Most of the evolution/revolution has come in the form of layout. Yes, many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc. You can't compare this to Word Perfect for DOS.
That's funny, because I can remember doing most of that with Word Perfect for DOS. See the Wiki, nothing is new in typesetting:
The WordPerfect template and document file formats have remained remarkably stable since the WordPerfect 6.x DOS and Windows versions. Complete backward compatibility has been maintained and all WordPerfect versions since 6.0...
The only thing that I don't remember doing with Word Perfect 4 was rotating text. That might just be because I had printers that would not do that and had no need. Pictures, tables, columns and the rest have been part of any decent text processor for thirty years. Word may have lacked such features, but then again the Word Perfect memory manager was better than the one provided by DOS and Windows 3.1. You have to wonder if M$ ever caught up with Windows 95 or any subsequent memory manager because their system still hogs all your RAM and a huge swap file.
As for menu layout and ease of use, the simple keyboard template and reveal codes of Word Perfect have yet to be surpassed. KWord, with it's rational style sheet and excellent format management comes close. The M$ way of hiding options is the exact opposite and dead wrong method of ease of use - nothing is more difficult than invisible options!
The destruction of Word Perfect is one of the most obvious of M$'s monopoly abuses. Those who use Word suffer that abuse to this day.
an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Maybe not, but if you are charging people money for software that's supposed to be easy you can do better. M$ owed it to their customers to get things right the first time they made the menus. If they had, they would never have needed change. Even if they hadn't, change is a bad idea after spending years telling people that change is hard and that alone is reason to stick with M$. The problem is that it's all been a lie. They never got it right, sold bloat and arbitrary changes as new versions and continue to do so. The new Office represents the most radical departure yet, because they have abandoned the shortcuts that so many had committed to muscle memory. Still, it's nothing new from M$ and the cumulative result is a horribly fragmented and inconsistent GUI
This coming from a person who is on record as saying something to the effect of "some people aren't intelligent enough to install free software"
Really? That's news to me. My consistent take on things is that anyone able to master M$ upkeep has more than enough ability and patience for any GNU/Linux distribution. Those who need help are still better off getting that help with free software than they are getting it from a Microsoft partner. You might follow my link to where I help teach a Linux newbie class. I try very hard not to equate ignorance with intelligence.
Microsoft fanboys, well, that kind of willful blindness takes a special kind of brain: Foolish loyalty, technical patience beyond measure and masochistic tolerance for the costliest, ugliest, least consistent and least productive software available. It's amazing how successful Microsoft has been at promoting itself, given the low quality of their product.
It's nice of you to think of me, but the summary says it all. Blame the user is a bad policy, usually resorted to by people who own crappy software.
About the only thing that I can add to this is that non free software is hostile to users by it's very nature and Microsoft is the leading example. From the very beginning, the M$ mantra has been, "pay me or your computer won't work." After you have given them your money and your computer still does not do what you want, what is M$ supposed to say? They usually insult you until it's time for you to give them more money, at which time they promise the "new" version fixes the problems of the old version. If they were able to fix the problems and everything just worked, there would be no reason for you to buy another one. Exactly how bad things are was presented a few weeks back.
Amazingly enough, most users and IT people have realized the source of their problems. Most IT people I deal with understand the limitations of the software they work with and know how it frustrates users. They are also happy to help me out with non M$ software and are generally impressed by it's capabilities. I know things they don't and I don't have the problems most of their users do, that makes me fun to deal with. Outside of the Slashdot Astroturf, in real life that is, I've only run into one fanboy in the last five years or so. The rest of them are probably more fed up with M$ and other bullies than the users themselves are.
Mass adoption of free software will cure a lot of these problems. Free software is more consistent, less buggy and easier to fix and customize than non free. It's amazing how nice people can be when you give them a choice of applications to use.
The things missing are tags such as form and object, and some javascript support, but nobody is going to blame microsoft for not supporting onClick in emails. And yes tables are supported.
... and those things defeat formats now working and set M$ users back five years just like the summary says. Dillo displays better than that but, sanely for a restricted browser, does not use scripting. The article took less time to read than the list of "features" now supported, you might give it a look.
The funniest thing about this is that it showed me that html email could be useful. I'd never seen an html email I liked before I looked at their before and after images. 100% of the html formated email I've gotten so far has been a waste of the sender's time and would have been easier to read as plain text.
Kmail does it right. It shows the text of the message with a button that says something like "press here if you trust the sender and would like to this rendered." It works great.
Goldman handed out $16.5 billion in total compensation to 22,000 employees worldwide. I'm pretty sure that while no one would turn down an extra $2400 (about $1500 after taxes), it's not going to matter much to them either way.
You might also claim that nothing past the first $20,000,000 of holdings matters and that such people don't need compensation of any kind. What are they going to do with a $53,000,000 bonus, buy a gold bathtub? If they want, sure. That's not the point.
The point is that the money should be put to better use. $53,000,000 could be spent on a lot of things that make working for the company suck less. Think of a gyms and more employees so you have to use a gym. Hell, they could have simply bought people new office chairs. Instead, it's spent on a moral busting bonus. That bonus was your reward for putting in 60 hour work weeks in an office where they turn the damn AC off at 4:30. Nice.
Today, Apple's DRM may not feel so restrictive but it's an illusion. You can end run the DRM by burning a CD and reencoding the music with a minimal loss of quality. Apple has even reached out to be the new gatekeeper of massive sales for musicians. Compared to the analog past, it's not such a huge loss. Compared to the digital future, it's a travesty. Even people from the analog past can gripe about being required to buy a branded music player because they are used to things just working from any hardware maker. People used to platform independence and free software have the most to lose - Apple's DRM forces the purchase of software and hardware that puts you straight back into the commercial software world of the 1980s. Suddenly, to have popular media on your computer you have to give control of that computer to someone else. With that control, bad things happen. No thanks, I'll stay DRM free.
The problem is that others might not stay DRM free. If they can establish a market for DRM'd music, non free software makers can continue to push their poison. In the worst of worlds, it replaces the radio based media monopolies. In a free world, non DRM music publishers will push them out. With competition, only the pigopolists lose. The musicians and the public win. The non free software monopoly has the potential to be much worse than the old analog distribution monopoly and can be that much worse for everyone but the pigopolist. If they can make their poison just paletable enough for just long enough, they can win and become the new "gatekeepers" able to push whatever garbage they want by excluding everyone else. It's only when there are clear winners that the real abuse takes place, unless you are stupid like Microsoft is. Their platform is so abusive and painful that no one wants it.
Unfortunately, now that they've gotten this extra publicity due to not being part of a big label, the results are largely meaningless. Much as I'd like to say that this signals the end of the big labels, this almost proves that you do still need them...
A pigopolist, tries to sooth himself after a terrible night. "Yeah, that's it, it's a novelty thing - a one hit wonder," he croons to himself, "Now that one band has sold a lot of records without the help of a big publisher, it will never happen again because no one cares."
Five minutes later, he realizes it's over. The thought comes like thunder and there's no escape, "The "signing hype" was all made by the big publishers to help obscure the poor quality of the signed. No one cared to begin with... and oh shit, they don't need a big publisher to suck up all the sales."
Time to polish the old resume. There's going to be work, it's just going to be different. Some of your old never made it buddies might be able to quit waiting tables.
Maybe now the "hype" won't be about who's signing with who or who's got the biggest billboard in L.A., maybe, just maybe the hype will be about who's got the best show or the most interesting music. That's something you can't do with a computer program in a central office, or an add campaign. No one's listening to radio anymore because the internet radio stations blow the locals away, so does your own collection for that matter. A couple hundred songs in heavy rotation is no longer a commercial success. Music TV, murdered by the music companies lost it's audience a decade ago.
Welcome to the long tail. There's something for everyone and it's going to be a lot harder to push trash. People are not going to stop singing and dancing, the party is moving on and it's getting better.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to switch, now is as good a time as any. The questions will stay about the same as far as I can tell. Data backups and protection should be managed carefully no matter what OS / APPs you use. If you have the backend taken care of, the tools used to manipulate the data should be about equal. My 'users' really didn't use calendaring too much, or other group productivity tools, so that might be something to be watchful of.
The biggest difference is ease of install and machine stability. Mepis takes about 20 minutes to put on a slow machine. That with an apt-get of a few favorites, like gqview, and the machine is good to go for years. Debian stable takes a little longer to install but lasts even longer. Not having those oh so important business memos to type up, OO sees use only for fancy fonts with Kword doing just as well and GIMP doing even better. Then you don't have to mess with it - no antivirus, spyware programs and all that. It just works, so you don't have to.
For backup, grsync or rsync on chron work wonders.
For group ware, Kontact works well enough even when naively set up. It's like Outlook should be.
Yeah, both of 'em.
The chances of them meeting are far lower than the 40-50% chance of their "squirt" failing. Yet another unverifiable, speculative statistic.
You're really clutching at straws now, aren't you?
I'm not sure what my biggest fan means above, but I imagine he things that the M$ upgrade train and Vista are going to be good for the environment. That's something I wish were true but intentional waste of computers has been very bad where they usually end up. Next you will tell me that the intentional waste of Vista will be good for the economy.
Carmack throws a lot of light on PS3 that was missing from the previous article's summary:
The good news is that they have their games ported and they are going to be on the platform. The superiority of the DX tools is to be expected over a brand new system, but that does not mean the new system is broken. I'd like to know more about that design decision, after all the PS3 has more raw processing power than most consoles and completely shames the average PC. I expect most of the problems to go away as Cell development matures and takes over general purpose computing.
As much as some can hate Microsoft, this is good and others should follow. At least good for the environment, less hardware, less energy used for shipping.
That's a joke?
Just in case you mean it, let's review:
So, as usual, M$ is following badly, making waste and encouraging power waste. This violates every tennet of eco friendly behavior. Refurbish, reuse and recycle is not something you can do Vista and it's going to suck like never before.
It's not surprising to find a first post by Macthorpe denying M$ has hidden things needed by "competitors" to interoperate with M$ junk. Just the other day, he annoyed me enough to research his faithful but insulting defense of M$ in all things.
Still, it's amazing that anyone would defend M$ against the charge of thwarting interoperation, given the OOXML fiasco. The whole reason to buy a silly program like Office is so you can communicate and work with other people silly enough to use Office, they depend on the "networking effect," and monopoly position now as much as they did back in the 1980s. Just to prove the point, M$ has introduced a new 6,000 page "open" format specification which was quickly proven incomplete and unworkable, dependent on M$ owned, even patented and secret stuff, so that no one but M$ will be able to untangle it anytime soon. They even had the nerve to name it ooxml, to confuse users of the other oo, open office. The new Office, of course, saves to the new format with a hidden save as button and a file browser that hides the docx extension from the user, insuring that clueless users will soon be filling email inboxes with the obnoxious new format. From the start, people realized this was anti-competitive, yet here it is in all it's stinking glory. If that's not everything M$ ever was, I'm not sure what would be. Yet, here is Macthrope's big sneer:
A masterpiece of arrogance and misdirection. Let's review Grocklaw's take:
the latest Joint Status Report on Microsofts Compliance with the Final Judgments [PDF], which as usual documents the difficulty in getting Microsoft to write documentation, with Microsoft alleging that the new schedule, which dragged out the proceess, may need to be adjusted again if Microsoft finds it can't meet the new schedule either.
Five years after conviction, they have yet to live up to their obligations and
Plaintiffs in the current Iowa antitrust trial against Microsoft told the court yesterday that it is in possession of certain materials, obtained in part in discovery in that case, that they believe is evidence of Microsoft failing to disclose APIs
Notice that it's the US Government that has judged M$ as "slow" to meet their obligations and the State of Iowa that had to jump through hoops to get around M$'s ability to seal public records of their misdeeds.
The question is not, "are they breaking the law," it's how long they can continue to avoid the consequences and how much they will be forced to fork over. The biggest bust for them will be if Government simply addopts ODF. The "pawns and one night stands" are just the tip of the outrageous iceburg the Iowa case will reveal.
The time will be when Vista comes out and new PCs come preloaded with Vista and IE7. At that time, people will get rid of the old PCs and we'll see whether they're sufficiently satisfied with IE7 that they won't bother with downloading Firefox.
Vista is out but what's worth watching is how badly it damages new PC sales. Forcing IE7 and the massive UI changes for Office and Vista are like a punch in the face for longtime M$ fans. Vendors are licking their chops, dreaming of upgrade train riches. They have been waiting for five long years and are very hungry. If Vista sales disappoint them, it's all over for the M$ monopoly. All of them have their toes in the GNU/Linux market. If Vista is a big enough failure, those vendors will jump ship like developers did years ago. M$ and closed source have been stale for a long time, Vista is shaping up to be putrid.
The real surprise is that IE7 only got 25% of the market, using all of their might. That may be huge, but it's nothing that can be called a "standard" that will always work. I think this has huge implications for the browser and OS markets.
14% vs 80%... ya, that's one hella of a match.
Try treating IE as a "standard" and you will lose. That was the Mozilla plan all along and it has worked perfectly. Real competition is coming back to both the browser and OS space, which is death for M$ who's only strength was a large captive audience.
The bad news for M$ is that they can't use browser share to force their way into the server market. That 79% is the total IE share. IE 7 only has 25% after three months of mandatory update, which has put it in all sorts of surprising places. Their IE 6, "winner" only has 60%. The 20% non IE share keeps developers from using IE only crap - no business is going to turn away one in five customers, especially when that one in five is the more likely to spend early adapter type.
This really is the spiral of doom for M$. They can't push their stuff, so the rest of us are no longer punished for not having IE. Because non IE browsers are better, the market share will continue to increase making it even harder for them to force IE only on people, and so on and so forth. Their push of IE 7 was a desperate measure that has failed and showed their weakness. They used every ounce of their strength and lost. As the Internet is the main reason to own a computer, their weakness in browser space is also a weakness in OS space. They think the new interface is going to spur Vista sales, but it's going to be just the opposite. User dissatisfaction with the never ending upgrade train is going to drive people to alternatives. Now is the time to give people free software. They just might try it and be happy before they spend a thousand dollars on a low end, soon to be M$ obsolete, Vista machine.
I was waiting for the 'astroturfing' allegation. You can't actually have a discussion without getting that one in, can you? I work in the UK, and MS doesn't have an ISP over here. That pisses that little theory up the wall, doesn't it?
You are not a very good M$ defender, but you are one and a general pest. A brief review of your posting history shows you:
I'm don't know what you really do for a living, but I am sure that I can't trust anything you say.
No one should confuse what you say with popular sentiment. What I've see above is all designed to aggravate and annoy. Besides the obviously wrong opinions, you express yourself with phrases like, "You have no excuse," "needs a lobotomy," "terrible English, seriously immature, and really, really fucking stupid," and, my favorite, "finding entirely spurious evidence on the internet."
I was waiting for the 'astroturfing' allegation. You can't actually have a discussion without getting that one in, can you? I work in the UK, and MS doesn't have an ISP over here. That pisses that little theory up the wall, doesn't it?
You are not a very good M$ defender, but you are one and a general pest. A brief review of your posting history shows you:
I'm don't what you really do for a living, but I am sure that I can't trust anything you say. I'm not going to confuse what you say with popular sentiment. What I've see above is all designed to aggravate and annoy. If you don't see yourself that way, you need to look back at what you've written and ask yourself if you still believe any of it.
for SWAT-style military deployments into occupied buildings, this would be brilliant. Send four "hardened" troops in ahead of the "soft" troops to clear the building, then let them return to base to cool off.
It's called a robot and they are already sent in.
If the armor is good for anyone in a situation, it should be issued to all.
Your time is entirely your own, or whoever has had you on staff for the last six months. That ISP is probably M$ because they are the only organization that could exchange M$ documents that long without complaining, publically that is.
I already answered your questions, but I'll do it explicitly. I hold M$ to "higher" standards of performance than free software because:
Just the same, they fail miserably to match any kind of competition. I can say so from watching my peers use any M$ program and noticing that things have gotten worse, not better.
How the fuck do you know that Office's new UI is worse when you haven't used it?
Because I've watched a long time Office user get stumped by it trying out the simplest of tasks and I've read reviews. Amazing how something can suck from such a distance, isn't it? That's the way monopolies are.
Is it better to change or not to change? If it's better to change and evolve, why don't MS have the right to make their products better without the insane 'usability is broken because people know how it worked before' argument?
It's better to change incrementally, offering features and improvements that users actually want. This is what free software does and that's why Konqueror, KWord even Open Office are more consistent and easier to use than M$ junk.
What M$ does is mostly for marketing purposes and it has indeed broken their user's knowledge base. Open Office forced this change on M$ because few people were willing to shell out $400 for something that works better and they could get for free. Open Office does everything M$ Office does that any sane person cares about. The new Word, IE and Vista interface are change for change's sake. They provide an illusion of newness but the underlying features are mostly the same. The only thing that's really changed are the buttons the user has to push and where they are hidden. Because Office had lots and lots of buttons to push for every task, there are a lot of people who are going to be pushing lots of the wrong buttons for years to come.
Monopolies are bad. They always provide the worst services at the greatest cost. Their entire focus is on keeping others out of the market instead of what their original purpose.
Fortunately, tech monopolies don't last long, especially one as flaky as software. Vista and the new Office are the end of Microsoft. Both openly show contempt for the user.
Personally I care more about other people being able to benefit from my code than preventing corporations from using it for profit.
The problem comes when a company claims "ownership" of your code and then determines who benefits and under what contitions. That's what happens when you don't worry enough to make things right.
A great example of such a theft is Macsyma(tediously detailed article that's nice but misses the point), the grand-daddy of Maple, MathCAD, Mathematica and many other symbolic algebra systems. It was developed, largely at public expense by people who expected the public to be able to have it. Instead, the results were "commercialized" in the 80's. A single copy of the original code(much better history, as you would expect from a free software project) survived thanks to the efforts of Bill Schelter, a GNU Common Lisp author and one of the first to port GCC to i386. Schelter managed to convince the DOE to let him legally distribute that code ... 20 years after it had been stolen from the public. Since then, development has been speedy and it will not be long before the quality matches or exceeds current commercial packages. The next time you spend a hundred bucks on one of it's commercial derivatives, remember that you might have had a free version a decade ago.
So, before you freely give your life's effort to others, you might consider what they will really do to other people with it and chose an explicit license that suits your real tastes. The GPL is the most common choice made and there's a reason for that. The same old assholes are up to new tricks, like "trusted computing" that are designed to lock everyone but themselves out of the market. In the future, if they have their way, you will not be able to run your code on commercial hardware. Is that the kind of thing you want to support in any way?
So Microsoft's old menus were shit, so they should have changed them, but they shouldn't have changed them because they should have got them right first time because change is bad.
That's about right, when you consider the historical context. Let me modify your words so that they make sense.
There, does that make things clear to you? It's a no win situation for M$ because you never really win when you fuck people over.
It has only been five years since I was forced to use Word as part of my job. Since then, I've been lucky enough not to work for such stupid employers. I am forced to use a W2K box every day for data capture and can say it's a real piece of shit. My brief brushes with XP only convince me that M$ continues to insult users with heavy handed nonsense.
That does not, however, mean that I'm not surrounded by unhappy Word users and idiots who would force Word's quirks on me. The "Margin Lady" at LSU uses Word and so has "standardized" on her particular version's margins and styles. This has caused no end of headaches for people who chose Word to write their papers. OO in this case is preferable but Latex is the clear winner when it comes to crap like that. Typesetting of that type is what Word promisses but has yet to deliver in a machine independent way, someting competitors have done again and again all along. The biggest crime of it all is that it's a perfect waste of most people's time. Content is more important than form and a reasonable word processor has a good typographical form by default. Word is to word processing as MySpace is to web design.
[nothing] in word processing in the last ten years at least has been revolutionary. And how many thousands of dollars in Word upgrades have there been in 10 years?
The only revolutionary thing to happen to text editing in the last twenty years has been software freedom. Anyone who learned how to use Emacs back in the 80s is still happily using the same muscle memory today if they choose.
Most of the evolution/revolution has come in the form of layout. Yes, many authors want the ability to create very advanced documents that feature images, figures, tables, columns, rotated text, etc. You can't compare this to Word Perfect for DOS.
That's funny, because I can remember doing most of that with Word Perfect for DOS. See the Wiki, nothing is new in typesetting:
The only thing that I don't remember doing with Word Perfect 4 was rotating text. That might just be because I had printers that would not do that and had no need. Pictures, tables, columns and the rest have been part of any decent text processor for thirty years. Word may have lacked such features, but then again the Word Perfect memory manager was better than the one provided by DOS and Windows 3.1. You have to wonder if M$ ever caught up with Windows 95 or any subsequent memory manager because their system still hogs all your RAM and a huge swap file.
As for menu layout and ease of use, the simple keyboard template and reveal codes of Word Perfect have yet to be surpassed. KWord, with it's rational style sheet and excellent format management comes close. The M$ way of hiding options is the exact opposite and dead wrong method of ease of use - nothing is more difficult than invisible options!
The destruction of Word Perfect is one of the most obvious of M$'s monopoly abuses. Those who use Word suffer that abuse to this day.
an impossibly high standard for software menus. Is it even possible to, as he puts it, "obviate the need to learn how to find those commands and functions?"
Maybe not, but if you are charging people money for software that's supposed to be easy you can do better. M$ owed it to their customers to get things right the first time they made the menus. If they had, they would never have needed change. Even if they hadn't, change is a bad idea after spending years telling people that change is hard and that alone is reason to stick with M$. The problem is that it's all been a lie. They never got it right, sold bloat and arbitrary changes as new versions and continue to do so. The new Office represents the most radical departure yet, because they have abandoned the shortcuts that so many had committed to muscle memory. Still, it's nothing new from M$ and the cumulative result is a horribly fragmented and inconsistent GUI
.This coming from a person who is on record as saying something to the effect of "some people aren't intelligent enough to install free software"
Really? That's news to me. My consistent take on things is that anyone able to master M$ upkeep has more than enough ability and patience for any GNU/Linux distribution. Those who need help are still better off getting that help with free software than they are getting it from a Microsoft partner. You might follow my link to where I help teach a Linux newbie class. I try very hard not to equate ignorance with intelligence.
Microsoft fanboys, well, that kind of willful blindness takes a special kind of brain: Foolish loyalty, technical patience beyond measure and masochistic tolerance for the costliest, ugliest, least consistent and least productive software available. It's amazing how successful Microsoft has been at promoting itself, given the low quality of their product.
It's nice of you to think of me, but the summary says it all. Blame the user is a bad policy, usually resorted to by people who own crappy software.
About the only thing that I can add to this is that non free software is hostile to users by it's very nature and Microsoft is the leading example. From the very beginning, the M$ mantra has been, "pay me or your computer won't work." After you have given them your money and your computer still does not do what you want, what is M$ supposed to say? They usually insult you until it's time for you to give them more money, at which time they promise the "new" version fixes the problems of the old version. If they were able to fix the problems and everything just worked, there would be no reason for you to buy another one. Exactly how bad things are was presented a few weeks back.
Amazingly enough, most users and IT people have realized the source of their problems. Most IT people I deal with understand the limitations of the software they work with and know how it frustrates users. They are also happy to help me out with non M$ software and are generally impressed by it's capabilities. I know things they don't and I don't have the problems most of their users do, that makes me fun to deal with. Outside of the Slashdot Astroturf, in real life that is, I've only run into one fanboy in the last five years or so. The rest of them are probably more fed up with M$ and other bullies than the users themselves are.
Mass adoption of free software will cure a lot of these problems. Free software is more consistent, less buggy and easier to fix and customize than non free. It's amazing how nice people can be when you give them a choice of applications to use.
The things missing are tags such as form and object, and some javascript support, but nobody is going to blame microsoft for not supporting onClick in emails. And yes tables are supported.
... and those things defeat formats now working and set M$ users back five years just like the summary says. Dillo displays better than that but, sanely for a restricted browser, does not use scripting. The article took less time to read than the list of "features" now supported, you might give it a look.
The funniest thing about this is that it showed me that html email could be useful. I'd never seen an html email I liked before I looked at their before and after images. 100% of the html formated email I've gotten so far has been a waste of the sender's time and would have been easier to read as plain text.
Kmail does it right. It shows the text of the message with a button that says something like "press here if you trust the sender and would like to this rendered." It works great.
Goldman handed out $16.5 billion in total compensation to 22,000 employees worldwide. I'm pretty sure that while no one would turn down an extra $2400 (about $1500 after taxes), it's not going to matter much to them either way.
You might also claim that nothing past the first $20,000,000 of holdings matters and that such people don't need compensation of any kind. What are they going to do with a $53,000,000 bonus, buy a gold bathtub? If they want, sure. That's not the point.
The point is that the money should be put to better use. $53,000,000 could be spent on a lot of things that make working for the company suck less. Think of a gyms and more employees so you have to use a gym. Hell, they could have simply bought people new office chairs. Instead, it's spent on a moral busting bonus. That bonus was your reward for putting in 60 hour work weeks in an office where they turn the damn AC off at 4:30. Nice.
Today, Apple's DRM may not feel so restrictive but it's an illusion. You can end run the DRM by burning a CD and reencoding the music with a minimal loss of quality. Apple has even reached out to be the new gatekeeper of massive sales for musicians. Compared to the analog past, it's not such a huge loss. Compared to the digital future, it's a travesty. Even people from the analog past can gripe about being required to buy a branded music player because they are used to things just working from any hardware maker. People used to platform independence and free software have the most to lose - Apple's DRM forces the purchase of software and hardware that puts you straight back into the commercial software world of the 1980s. Suddenly, to have popular media on your computer you have to give control of that computer to someone else. With that control, bad things happen. No thanks, I'll stay DRM free.
The problem is that others might not stay DRM free. If they can establish a market for DRM'd music, non free software makers can continue to push their poison. In the worst of worlds, it replaces the radio based media monopolies. In a free world, non DRM music publishers will push them out. With competition, only the pigopolists lose. The musicians and the public win. The non free software monopoly has the potential to be much worse than the old analog distribution monopoly and can be that much worse for everyone but the pigopolist. If they can make their poison just paletable enough for just long enough, they can win and become the new "gatekeepers" able to push whatever garbage they want by excluding everyone else. It's only when there are clear winners that the real abuse takes place, unless you are stupid like Microsoft is. Their platform is so abusive and painful that no one wants it.
Unfortunately, now that they've gotten this extra publicity due to not being part of a big label, the results are largely meaningless. Much as I'd like to say that this signals the end of the big labels, this almost proves that you do still need them ...
A pigopolist, tries to sooth himself after a terrible night. "Yeah, that's it, it's a novelty thing - a one hit wonder," he croons to himself, "Now that one band has sold a lot of records without the help of a big publisher, it will never happen again because no one cares."
Five minutes later, he realizes it's over. The thought comes like thunder and there's no escape, "The "signing hype" was all made by the big publishers to help obscure the poor quality of the signed. No one cared to begin with ... and oh shit, they don't need a big publisher to suck up all the sales."
Time to polish the old resume. There's going to be work, it's just going to be different. Some of your old never made it buddies might be able to quit waiting tables.
Maybe now the "hype" won't be about who's signing with who or who's got the biggest billboard in L.A., maybe, just maybe the hype will be about who's got the best show or the most interesting music. That's something you can't do with a computer program in a central office, or an add campaign. No one's listening to radio anymore because the internet radio stations blow the locals away, so does your own collection for that matter. A couple hundred songs in heavy rotation is no longer a commercial success. Music TV, murdered by the music companies lost it's audience a decade ago.
Welcome to the long tail. There's something for everyone and it's going to be a lot harder to push trash. People are not going to stop singing and dancing, the party is moving on and it's getting better.