Actually, MS has tried to put Office out on rental at least four or five times before.
It's never worked, of course, because MS could never get all the parts of MS to work properly together. The user rapidly discovered that none of the supposed advantages of renting actually existed.
I was deeply involved in one such attempt back in 2005. The local supplier (who was responsible for the relationship with the customers; MS did not want to dirty their hands with any of that) got screwed and had to give the trial customers each a full permanent license to get out of the deal.
I have watched several other attempts since. There must be some undead person at MS who keeps reviving the corpse of this idea, and they clearly have such a short corporate memory that the seniors approve yet again.
>I have to wonder what the impact is on the wildlife then:(
First, the icebreakers are active in the hardest of winter, when almost no wildlife is active. Second, they are mostly active out at sea, where wild life is (a) sparse (b) able to avoid them.
I recognise your concern, but I'm convinced the impact is minimal in this case.
I used to live in Stockholm, and used to see the icebreakers going out to do their stuff. I lived on top of a granite cliff two thousand yards from the path the ship was taking, and I could feel the engine vibration up through the soles of my feet into my chest cavity. I could clearly understand how those ultrasound-based crowd control weapons work. [Note that these were by comparison "tiny" icebreakers - one example of several http://www.sjofartsverket.se/en/About-us/Activities/Icebreaking/Our-Icebreakers/Research-VesselIcebreaker-Oden/Icebreaker-Oden/
and every really hotshot piece of software I have ever encountered (and I'm talking world-wide success here) has been written by a very small team of highly-motivated developers working very long hours at very odd times of day with no management interference at all. They weren't rock stars before the project or they would have been managed into oblivion. After they had completed the product and it became successful, then they were rock stars. The self-motivation usually came from "fuck you, manager, I'm going to prove that my ideas are correct" One of these projects, where I knew the people well, became one of IBM's top 5 most profitable products world-wide (you've never heard of it), and those guys broke every rule in the book. They worked nights, never went to meetings, smoked cigars at their desks, suppressed all records of how many hours they were really working. By working those hours, the two of them held the entire structure of a big application, its database, and all its interactions with the operating system in their heads, and that mental state enabled them to write vast quantities of simple clear code that contained no serious errors on shipment, and none revealed in the first year. Later people added on to the project for subsequent releases never found any serious errors in the backbone written by the first two guys, nor did they have any problems adding to the code.
Code written during the normal working day, with constant interruptions, will never soar like that.
Wow! That's new! Speech never used to be "auditory" before. That's a real breakthrough. Maybe these guys can tackle the old problems of Visual Sight, or Sensory Touch, or even... Olfactory Smelling.
From my days in the "large blue multinational computer company" sales force:
"How do you find out you're in a sales competition?"
"They announce in a team meeting that you won a prize".
No kidding, this happened so often there was a joke about it.
especially for being pornographic. That guarantees lots of kids will read it.
Since it's slightly better written than most other trash kids read, maybe the ban will have a [slight] positive outcome.
In fact, pitifully incompetent. There's no need to spend so much on vehicles and wages, if you have a bit of imagination. I was recently working for GlobalMobilePhoneProvider, who also sell M2M (machine-to-machine) applications. They gave away data mobile units to the company that collects garbage, and fitted them to the garbage trucks. Guess what? Those guys visit every premises. And collect signal strength data. And they collect signal strength not only of GMPP's network, but al the competitors too. What's the cost? A few hundred mass-produced cell devices, no wages, and no capital cost of trucks.
Usng USA solutions elsewhere is really risky. I've seen several of my customers go down (ie cease to exist) ultimately because they chose a software solution built for US states (as opposed to a whole country). Example: one of my customers (a savings bank) wanted to completely refresh every software application they had, so bought an American integrated package that appeared to be pretty successful and pretty widely used. They ran almost immediately into severe performance problems - the elapsed time to process a whole day's transactions was 28 hours. On digging into why this was the case, they discovered that none of the other user sites had more than 100,000 accounts. My customer had 2 million accounts. The software package was simply not built to handle that, and the authors didn't care enough about one customer to rewrite the package. That savings bank now exists only as a brand name.
At my last contract, I was given a corporate laptop - good recent hardware with Win 7 on it, perfectly capable of booting in 60 secs. However the build on it took 2 mins to reach the log-in screen, and a further 5 mins to reach a usable desktop.
This was because there was so much corporate cruft to run before I could be permitted to do actual work.
I'm 66. In the last few years I've learned enough Python and PHP to do useful work, and learned Linux enough to get an LPI cert.
Considering all these things are free to download, there's no barrier preventing you learning, except your own false belief that you are too old.
Skynet has taken it...getting tooled up for the fight....when the Falcon hits the ground at Mach 20, the target will get obliterated. If you are named Connor, and are in the phone book, and live anuwhere near Vandenberg, now's the time to Get Moving.
You are absolutely right about the attitudes - the mountain rescue team mentioned that. Three problems (1) mobile phone signal in the mountains is completely untrustworthy (and Murphy's Law says that the place where you bust your leg has lousy signal) (2) smartphone batteries do not last long enough (while GPS and map screen are in use) for a whole day on the hill. Murphy's Law also says the moment that your battery starts giving up is the moment the fog arrives (3) the maps in smartphones are not good enough to enable you to work a safe route off the mountain - people end up stuck at the top of cliffs
"IBM now finds itself in a situation previously experienced by Microsoft and Intel."
How fast we forgot! Or maybe it's that you young uns never knew...IBM wrote the book on fighting and defeating anti-trust actions by not winning in court, but winning in the market place.
Check out what happened 1956 and 1969, and how those events made IBM stronger, not weaker.
Quick, quick, somebody mod parent up +1 Educated.
Seriously, Alan, my sig is for all the people and filters that don't know that cocks and beavers are wild animals, valves, hats, newspapers, pubs, and various other items useful to humanity.
They are actually moderating now, marking duplicates, removing real nonsense (suggestions to repeal a law that doesn't exist) etc. They didn't on Day 1 because of the volume of traffic.
Unfortunately, that still allows a lot of idiocy to be on display.
But there is also plenty of good highlighting of idiotic laws and regs. Have a read - you might enjoy it.
Unfortunately, the surface of the Moon (and I guess probably Mars, too) is subject to a continuous bombardment of infalling space debris and ejecta from other impacts. So a balloon is going to get punctured.[obligatory secondary debate "but you can make it strong enough", "that makes it too heavy to transport from Earth", blah blah]
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, MS has tried to put Office out on rental at least four or five times before.
It's never worked, of course, because MS could never get all the parts of MS to work properly together. The user rapidly discovered that none of the supposed advantages of renting actually existed.
I was deeply involved in one such attempt back in 2005. The local supplier (who was responsible for the relationship with the customers; MS did not want to dirty their hands with any of that) got screwed and had to give the trial customers each a full permanent license to get out of the deal.
I have watched several other attempts since. There must be some undead person at MS who keeps reviving the corpse of this idea, and they clearly have such a short corporate memory that the seniors approve yet again.
>I have to wonder what the impact is on the wildlife then :(
First, the icebreakers are active in the hardest of winter, when almost no wildlife is active. Second, they are mostly active out at sea, where wild life is (a) sparse (b) able to avoid them. I recognise your concern, but I'm convinced the impact is minimal in this case.
Correct, should be infrasound...apologies, electrical fault in text composition memory, reboot in progress.
I used to live in Stockholm, and used to see the icebreakers going out to do their stuff. I lived on top of a granite cliff two thousand yards from the path the ship was taking, and I could feel the engine vibration up through the soles of my feet into my chest cavity. I could clearly understand how those ultrasound-based crowd control weapons work. [Note that these were by comparison "tiny" icebreakers - one example of several http://www.sjofartsverket.se/en/About-us/Activities/Icebreaking/Our-Icebreakers/Research-VesselIcebreaker-Oden/Icebreaker-Oden/
and every really hotshot piece of software I have ever encountered (and I'm talking world-wide success here) has been written by a very small team of highly-motivated developers working very long hours at very odd times of day with no management interference at all. They weren't rock stars before the project or they would have been managed into oblivion. After they had completed the product and it became successful, then they were rock stars. The self-motivation usually came from "fuck you, manager, I'm going to prove that my ideas are correct" One of these projects, where I knew the people well, became one of IBM's top 5 most profitable products world-wide (you've never heard of it), and those guys broke every rule in the book. They worked nights, never went to meetings, smoked cigars at their desks, suppressed all records of how many hours they were really working. By working those hours, the two of them held the entire structure of a big application, its database, and all its interactions with the operating system in their heads, and that mental state enabled them to write vast quantities of simple clear code that contained no serious errors on shipment, and none revealed in the first year. Later people added on to the project for subsequent releases never found any serious errors in the backbone written by the first two guys, nor did they have any problems adding to the code.
Code written during the normal working day, with constant interruptions, will never soar like that.
Wow! That's new! Speech never used to be "auditory" before. That's a real breakthrough. Maybe these guys can tackle the old problems of Visual Sight, or Sensory Touch, or even ... Olfactory Smelling.
Crap. I just ordered a new router. Why can't the Prez just buy one of his own instead of pinching mine?
Those showers? Would they be showers in Zyklon B? [This post is not subject to Godwin's Law, since it does not mention the H person]
Can they fix us up with some cute Neandert(h)al girls? If not, they ain't no experts.
From my days in the "large blue multinational computer company" sales force:
"How do you find out you're in a sales competition?"
"They announce in a team meeting that you won a prize".
No kidding, this happened so often there was a joke about it.
especially for being pornographic. That guarantees lots of kids will read it. Since it's slightly better written than most other trash kids read, maybe the ban will have a [slight] positive outcome.
So, will we finally be able to read Stephen Maturin's papers?
In fact, pitifully incompetent. There's no need to spend so much on vehicles and wages, if you have a bit of imagination. I was recently working for GlobalMobilePhoneProvider, who also sell M2M (machine-to-machine) applications. They gave away data mobile units to the company that collects garbage, and fitted them to the garbage trucks. Guess what? Those guys visit every premises. And collect signal strength data. And they collect signal strength not only of GMPP's network, but al the competitors too. What's the cost? A few hundred mass-produced cell devices, no wages, and no capital cost of trucks.
Usng USA solutions elsewhere is really risky. I've seen several of my customers go down (ie cease to exist) ultimately because they chose a software solution built for US states (as opposed to a whole country). Example: one of my customers (a savings bank) wanted to completely refresh every software application they had, so bought an American integrated package that appeared to be pretty successful and pretty widely used. They ran almost immediately into severe performance problems - the elapsed time to process a whole day's transactions was 28 hours. On digging into why this was the case, they discovered that none of the other user sites had more than 100,000 accounts. My customer had 2 million accounts. The software package was simply not built to handle that, and the authors didn't care enough about one customer to rewrite the package. That savings bank now exists only as a brand name.
At my last contract, I was given a corporate laptop - good recent hardware with Win 7 on it, perfectly capable of booting in 60 secs. However the build on it took 2 mins to reach the log-in screen, and a further 5 mins to reach a usable desktop.
This was because there was so much corporate cruft to run before I could be permitted to do actual work.
Naturally, no-one was permitted admin access.
I'm 66. In the last few years I've learned enough Python and PHP to do useful work, and learned Linux enough to get an LPI cert. Considering all these things are free to download, there's no barrier preventing you learning, except your own false belief that you are too old.
Skynet has taken it...getting tooled up for the fight....when the Falcon hits the ground at Mach 20, the target will get obliterated. If you are named Connor, and are in the phone book, and live anuwhere near Vandenberg, now's the time to Get Moving.
But when they do, it's a choice lady. Remember who it was that Will Carling (captain of England national rugby team) (allegedly) had a fling with?
You are absolutely right about the attitudes - the mountain rescue team mentioned that. Three problems (1) mobile phone signal in the mountains is completely untrustworthy (and Murphy's Law says that the place where you bust your leg has lousy signal) (2) smartphone batteries do not last long enough (while GPS and map screen are in use) for a whole day on the hill. Murphy's Law also says the moment that your battery starts giving up is the moment the fog arrives (3) the maps in smartphones are not good enough to enable you to work a safe route off the mountain - people end up stuck at the top of cliffs
Story in The Telegraph, "Ramblers who use their iPhones to navigate and have no idea how to read a map are causing the number of emergency call-outs to increase by 50 per cent, mountain rescuers have complained. " http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8435019/Ramblers-who-rely-on-iPhones-to-navigate-increase-rescue-call-outs-by-50-per-cent.html
"IBM now finds itself in a situation previously experienced by Microsoft and Intel."
How fast we forgot! Or maybe it's that you young uns never knew...IBM wrote the book on fighting and defeating anti-trust actions by not winning in court, but winning in the market place. Check out what happened 1956 and 1969, and how those events made IBM stronger, not weaker.
Quick, quick, somebody mod parent up +1 Educated. Seriously, Alan, my sig is for all the people and filters that don't know that cocks and beavers are wild animals, valves, hats, newspapers, pubs, and various other items useful to humanity.
They are actually moderating now, marking duplicates, removing real nonsense (suggestions to repeal a law that doesn't exist) etc. They didn't on Day 1 because of the volume of traffic.
Unfortunately, that still allows a lot of idiocy to be on display.
But there is also plenty of good highlighting of idiotic laws and regs. Have a read - you might enjoy it.
>It will control the leading software for powering online airline reservations
Anybody ever heard of Galileo? Amadeus anyone?
Is this ITA something that is only used in the US? BTW, whatever happened to SABRE?
Unfortunately, the surface of the Moon (and I guess probably Mars, too) is subject to a continuous bombardment of infalling space debris and ejecta from other impacts. So a balloon is going to get punctured.[obligatory secondary debate "but you can make it strong enough", "that makes it too heavy to transport from Earth", blah blah]