The key phrase with Evolution is "comfort zone". It looks and pretty much acts like Outlook and it hooks into most versions of MS Exchange. If Evolution appeared on XP I think it would give many companies pause for thought. I'd add that it's also a great PIM in its own right
Thunderbird is a great HOME email system. I use it as my main email & usenet app. But it sucks for any enterprise that doesn't use IMAP (or POP3). Since many, many enterprises (bizarrely) use Exchange server, it means it needs to support Exchange. That shouldn't be a problem since the plugin for Evolution was GPL'd a long while back so it could be ported.
The calendar part is more of a concern since this is essential for most office users. Netscape has always had terrible calendaring and it seems to have rubbed off on Mozilla. I've used Sunbird and it seems okay for personal use but does it offer the kind of features that will win it enterprise friends? Again I think it boils down to Exchange support. Get the exchange plugin working and you are well positioned for enterprises.
OO 2.0 is much better from a UI perspective but it still behaves pretty clunky compared to other productivity apps. The form designer in particular is evil and reminiscent of something Access 2.0 might inflict on you.
I certainly wouldn't say the UI is 10 years behind - it's probably comparable to Office XP in most areas. And of course underneath the surface some features of OO are cutting edge, such as its support for a clean open document format, cross platform capabilities, export options and more. They just have to keep working on that UI, simplifying the common tasks, working on the startup time, polishing the wizards, improving the drag / drop behaviour etc.
Evolution and Thunderbird have the potential to render Outlook obsolete. Evolution has the Exchange support and calendaring but no XP version. Thunderbird is cross-platform but Exchange support and Calendaring are ongoing.
If both upped things up a notch we could be in a position by the end of the year of having not one but two enterprise level cross platform email clients, both of which would work pretty well from Open Office.
Anyway, I reckon that Microsoft have realised that Outlook is pretty superfluous for most people. Windows Vista (finally) comes with a calendar app which would be sufficient for most people. Or perhaps they haven't - Vista does seem to be lifting a lot of features from Mac OS X.
Really? Care to bet on that one. My Razr v3 certianly takes up much less space than any candybar phone out there.
Yes really. You compare a model which comes in a flat and flipper model and the flipper is almost certainly larger by volume. Since you mentioned your Razr I suggest you compare its volume to the flat version - the Slvr. The flipper version is larger by volume. Back in the days when GSM was young, I owned a Motorola Slimlite which was a flattened Startac and the same applied. It's not Motorola either since other phone makers like Sharp often produce a flat and flipper version with the same results. Some flat models even benefit from not having some horrid antenna sticking out the top because they're generally longer to begin with.
Besides which, the Slvr / Razr are pretty sucky phones for features. Their compactness is their main selling point, certainly not their features which don't hold a candle to most other models of comparable price.
Why is there a vs at all? Flip phones might prevent accidental dialling & scratches but they consume more volume than the equivalent "brick" phone and often have extra protusions. I don't see why you'd fail for promoting one over the other. I don't see that Vodafone would promote one over the other. Their range in other countries includes flip phones and brick phones so its up to the consumer to pick.
Actually it does matter if you're in an MLM or a franchise. A franchise is designed to be a viable business model where the franchisee is able to make money from selling products under a brand, usually in a certain territory. Contracts are signed by mutual assent with lawyers present stating the expectations of each party. One expectation that McDonalds and other franchise do not have is that 95% of its franchisees will fail. Why? because it damages their brand. A franchiser doesn't want a single one of them to fail. Franchisees make damned sure too when signing the paper that their business model is sound.
Whereas an MLM gives you no guarantees. Suckers attend a sales pitch, slap down money and think the money will roll in. It doesn't with boxes of soap if they flogged themselves to death trying. The profit model is not designed around selling soap or other products. The profit model doesn't even take into account fuel, time expenses and the training crap that is practically mandatory for members. It's around recruiting others as quickly as possible. The products for what they're worth in MLM are all that separate it from being a pyramid scheme. The people at the bottom rungs cannot make a profit because the margins are low and the market is saturated. They are guaranteed to lose money unless they recruit others. The model depends on the people at the bottom losing money to pay the ones above them. Failure in an MLM such as Amway is a virtual certainty unless you happen to be starting in virgin territory where no one knows how these schemes work. Which rules out most of the world.
Besides which, what is the correlation between violence and gun ownership? Or kids who play cops and robbers? Or kids who were bullied? Or cowboy movies? There's probably a correlation between every form of media / play which promots violence and acts of violence. Video games are no better or worse than anything else.
I suggest all kids spend the first 18 years of their lives in a pink padded room with no stimulus of any kind.
Whooppeee a whole $3 "profit". You'll be rolling in money in no time, especially with the massive potential for door to door soap selling. I put "profit" in quotes since that doesn't cover your time, fuel or expenses, or all the crap you must buy from Amway to sell that soap, or the fact that the is a miniscule market for door to door sales is already saturated, or that more often than not you'll be ordering stuff for yourself because you can't shift it onto others, or that anyone interested in selling soap could buy it wholesale with no other costs.
But what a deal! It's so great you'll feel compelled to recruit other suckers into the scheme with you. After all, what makes more sense than to recruit people who are competing with you for the same sales. But now you've got yourself downline right? You won't be selling as much soap anymore, but you'll be able to sell them a bunch of shit like motivational courses and seminars. What a deal!
Usana, for example, manufactures arguably the highest quality vitamin supplements on the market.
How do you quantify a statement like that? I have no idea what happens in the US, but EU vitamin makes state clearly on the side what the contents of each pill are by the milligram, plus the RDA. And vitamins are so cheap to buy that I fail to see any point in a MLM scheme set up to sell them. For example my local Tesco sells 60 multivitamin pills for 1.76 Euros. If I want to buy in bulk I can head to Puritan's Pride or similar where I will find a massive and extremely cheap selection of pills for next to nothing.
I disagree. There might be actual products for sale in a MLM means that a very large percentage of people will lose money. This is not because they are lazy or "quitters" but simply because of mathematical certainty. It is next to impossible to recruit hundreds in an already saturated market and sell them products which are no better or cheaper than those from a store. As the people at the bottom of the heap always outnumber the people above them it means the majority lose.
Besides most profits in an MLM don't even come from the products anyway, they come from recruiting others and junk motivational courses. Since that is reality, losing is a virtual certainty. Even if you did manage through some miracle to recoup your investment by selling products, it certainly wouldn't pay for your time, the courses, the products you had to buy from your uplink, the damage done to your relationships etc. The only winners in such schemes are the immoral scumbags who set them up.
MLMs are poison, pure and simple. They promise riches, most people will get rags. By design.
Most non-tech people i know already have to make an effort to place two stereo speakers correctly in their livingroom, placing six or eight is often too much trouble.
Replace often with always. I can understand how some audiophile might appreciate the ability to fine tune dozens or hundreds of parameters such as speaker positions, direction, tilt, balance, cabling etc. With such people the quest for perfection is neverending and sometimes exceeds common sense. I suspect that most other people would be happy with a sub $6000 5:1 system from their local electrical outlet or nothing at all.
I myself like watching films on my big widescreen TV but I haven't had a strong urge to hook it up to a sound system. The speakers do the job adequately for my needs. Just the thought of extra cabling, power plugs, amps (occupying space in my cabinet) and remotes puts me off. The same goes for my PC. I play lots of FPS games, but I make do with a pair of stereo speakers and a subwoofer, both of which were bundled with my last PC. It would be nice to hear sounds from behind but IMHO not worth the hassle of all that extra gear.
What's the big deal with Java? It's simply a control language. If virtually every phone in the last 5 years can implement J2ME then there is certainly little if any cost associated with doing the same in a player.
These are all good points but the reality is that GTK# won't have any mindshare or eyeballs while it is perceived rightly or wrongly to be hard to use than Windows.Forms. It takes a few minutes to produce a form in DevStudio, moves some buttons around, build and test it.
GTK# has no integration at all with DevStudio so you must create a console based.NET app, start changing the references, write the code to initialise / terminate GTK#, fire up Glade, screw around with its just plain weird interface, pop back to DevStudio, test and build. That's even assuming you could be bothered doing all that. I suspect it would be a very hard sell to management to justify wasting so much time on GTK#.
The same for the rest of the so-called alternative application stack in Mono. I'm sure it is better in certain ways but immediacy isn't one of them. It might leave a bitter taste in certain develop's mouths but they have got to embrace and extend DevStudio if they expect to make any dent on Microsoft at all. If the alternate stack were served up to MS Developers, including any advantages that GTK# or whatever offered. Cross-platform support is an obvious benefit but I fear that most people assume that.NET is cross platform anyway and that Mono perfectly implements Windows.Forms to begin with.
GTK# could be better but it isn't better until such time as it becomes as easy as or easier to design a form using GTK# on Win32 as it is to design one with Windows.Forms. That certainly implies writing wizards and plugins that integrate into DevStudio to provide equivalent support for the alternative widget set. Until that day arrives, NO ONE using.NET on Windows is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to it.
Windows.Forms at least for 1.1 is pretty wretched. What makes it nice to use is the visual designer in.NET. Since it has no layout manager and the designer is so straightforward, it is easy enough to slap a form together. It's only when you start playing around with it in detail that you realise it is very much tied to the Win32 platform.
I understand.NET 2.0 has layout managers but I haven't spent any time playing around with them yet. I know from experience of Java IDEs that it could hardly do a worse job than they do of trying to visually design a form with a layout manager installed. I consider the VE plugin for Eclipse to be a fairly good form designer but even that can be hellishly confusing especially if you flip from one layout model to another.
JFC is a fine class library but it is horribly, horribly slow, and not even the latest versions pick up the native look & feel properly. Of course JFC is a nice API so that counts for it, as does the fact that installs by default, as do the abundance of tools. But SWT uses native widgets for its rendering so its considerably faster and more integrated with the environment. If both shipped in the same box, I'd pick SWT. As they're not, I'm reluctantly stuck with JFC.
I don't understand how any console gamer plays any first person shooter. I have yet to see one yet which is as easy to control as on a PC with a mouse. Game controllers are simply lousy for the fine control that you need for such games. So many games implement autoaim functionality to compensate and more often than not it doesn't aim at you want to aim at.
Aside from Flash, Java et al, even IE 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0 used just Javascript to deliver rich interactive content. IE 4.0 even used it in their desktop. In NS it was called Netcaster and included quite sophisticated channel finders and a "webtop". They also both provided documents, tools and APIs for providers to create rich experiences. Both browsers may have failed to deliver a decent experience, but anyone claiming in 2001 (a full 3-4 years after these browsers did it) that using JS and HTML to deliver interactive content is either novel or original is flat out wrong.
Or more importantly, what happens if you put your hot coffee on what presumably must be a touch screen / LCD device. Warning stickers such as "do not put hot coffee on screen" will make the device even more lame than it already sounds.
DVD players don't contain any DRM. Region coding isn't DRM. Region coding doesn't stop me from ripping as many copies of a disc as I want. DRM doesn't stop the large scale pirates making verbatim copies of that disc (though usually with the region encoding removed).
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Thunderbird is a great HOME email system. I use it as my main email & usenet app. But it sucks for any enterprise that doesn't use IMAP (or POP3). Since many, many enterprises (bizarrely) use Exchange server, it means it needs to support Exchange. That shouldn't be a problem since the plugin for Evolution was GPL'd a long while back so it could be ported.
The calendar part is more of a concern since this is essential for most office users. Netscape has always had terrible calendaring and it seems to have rubbed off on Mozilla. I've used Sunbird and it seems okay for personal use but does it offer the kind of features that will win it enterprise friends? Again I think it boils down to Exchange support. Get the exchange plugin working and you are well positioned for enterprises.
I certainly wouldn't say the UI is 10 years behind - it's probably comparable to Office XP in most areas. And of course underneath the surface some features of OO are cutting edge, such as its support for a clean open document format, cross platform capabilities, export options and more. They just have to keep working on that UI, simplifying the common tasks, working on the startup time, polishing the wizards, improving the drag / drop behaviour etc.
If both upped things up a notch we could be in a position by the end of the year of having not one but two enterprise level cross platform email clients, both of which would work pretty well from Open Office.
Anyway, I reckon that Microsoft have realised that Outlook is pretty superfluous for most people. Windows Vista (finally) comes with a calendar app which would be sufficient for most people. Or perhaps they haven't - Vista does seem to be lifting a lot of features from Mac OS X.
Yes really. You compare a model which comes in a flat and flipper model and the flipper is almost certainly larger by volume. Since you mentioned your Razr I suggest you compare its volume to the flat version - the Slvr. The flipper version is larger by volume. Back in the days when GSM was young, I owned a Motorola Slimlite which was a flattened Startac and the same applied. It's not Motorola either since other phone makers like Sharp often produce a flat and flipper version with the same results. Some flat models even benefit from not having some horrid antenna sticking out the top because they're generally longer to begin with.
Besides which, the Slvr / Razr are pretty sucky phones for features. Their compactness is their main selling point, certainly not their features which don't hold a candle to most other models of comparable price.
Why is there a vs at all? Flip phones might prevent accidental dialling & scratches but they consume more volume than the equivalent "brick" phone and often have extra protusions. I don't see why you'd fail for promoting one over the other. I don't see that Vodafone would promote one over the other. Their range in other countries includes flip phones and brick phones so its up to the consumer to pick.
RFID are insidious for all kinds of reasons but the "mark of the beast"? People who think such should be be herded onto an island and forgotten about.
Whereas an MLM gives you no guarantees. Suckers attend a sales pitch, slap down money and think the money will roll in. It doesn't with boxes of soap if they flogged themselves to death trying. The profit model is not designed around selling soap or other products. The profit model doesn't even take into account fuel, time expenses and the training crap that is practically mandatory for members. It's around recruiting others as quickly as possible. The products for what they're worth in MLM are all that separate it from being a pyramid scheme. The people at the bottom rungs cannot make a profit because the margins are low and the market is saturated. They are guaranteed to lose money unless they recruit others. The model depends on the people at the bottom losing money to pay the ones above them. Failure in an MLM such as Amway is a virtual certainty unless you happen to be starting in virgin territory where no one knows how these schemes work. Which rules out most of the world.
I suggest all kids spend the first 18 years of their lives in a pink padded room with no stimulus of any kind.
But what a deal! It's so great you'll feel compelled to recruit other suckers into the scheme with you. After all, what makes more sense than to recruit people who are competing with you for the same sales. But now you've got yourself downline right? You won't be selling as much soap anymore, but you'll be able to sell them a bunch of shit like motivational courses and seminars. What a deal!
How do you quantify a statement like that? I have no idea what happens in the US, but EU vitamin makes state clearly on the side what the contents of each pill are by the milligram, plus the RDA. And vitamins are so cheap to buy that I fail to see any point in a MLM scheme set up to sell them. For example my local Tesco sells 60 multivitamin pills for 1.76 Euros. If I want to buy in bulk I can head to Puritan's Pride or similar where I will find a massive and extremely cheap selection of pills for next to nothing.
Besides most profits in an MLM don't even come from the products anyway, they come from recruiting others and junk motivational courses. Since that is reality, losing is a virtual certainty. Even if you did manage through some miracle to recoup your investment by selling products, it certainly wouldn't pay for your time, the courses, the products you had to buy from your uplink, the damage done to your relationships etc. The only winners in such schemes are the immoral scumbags who set them up.
MLMs are poison, pure and simple. They promise riches, most people will get rags. By design.
And they used all those buzzwords for what can be described simply - "we wrote some code that allows you to spam people".
As for powered speakers, I wasn't referring to the speakers but to the amp that you usually require to plug them into.
That was my bad I put one too many noughts on the msg :)
Replace often with always. I can understand how some audiophile might appreciate the ability to fine tune dozens or hundreds of parameters such as speaker positions, direction, tilt, balance, cabling etc. With such people the quest for perfection is neverending and sometimes exceeds common sense. I suspect that most other people would be happy with a sub $6000 5:1 system from their local electrical outlet or nothing at all.
I myself like watching films on my big widescreen TV but I haven't had a strong urge to hook it up to a sound system. The speakers do the job adequately for my needs. Just the thought of extra cabling, power plugs, amps (occupying space in my cabinet) and remotes puts me off. The same goes for my PC. I play lots of FPS games, but I make do with a pair of stereo speakers and a subwoofer, both of which were bundled with my last PC. It would be nice to hear sounds from behind but IMHO not worth the hassle of all that extra gear.
What's the big deal with Java? It's simply a control language. If virtually every phone in the last 5 years can implement J2ME then there is certainly little if any cost associated with doing the same in a player.
GTK# has no integration at all with DevStudio so you must create a console based .NET app, start changing the references, write the code to initialise / terminate GTK#, fire up Glade, screw around with its just plain weird interface, pop back to DevStudio, test and build. That's even assuming you could be bothered doing all that. I suspect it would be a very hard sell to management to justify wasting so much time on GTK#.
The same for the rest of the so-called alternative application stack in Mono. I'm sure it is better in certain ways but immediacy isn't one of them. It might leave a bitter taste in certain develop's mouths but they have got to embrace and extend DevStudio if they expect to make any dent on Microsoft at all. If the alternate stack were served up to MS Developers, including any advantages that GTK# or whatever offered. Cross-platform support is an obvious benefit but I fear that most people assume that .NET is cross platform anyway and that Mono perfectly implements Windows.Forms to begin with.
GTK# could be better but it isn't better until such time as it becomes as easy as or easier to design a form using GTK# on Win32 as it is to design one with Windows.Forms. That certainly implies writing wizards and plugins that integrate into DevStudio to provide equivalent support for the alternative widget set. Until that day arrives, NO ONE using .NET on Windows is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to it.
I understand .NET 2.0 has layout managers but I haven't spent any time playing around with them yet. I know from experience of Java IDEs that it could hardly do a worse job than they do of trying to visually design a form with a layout manager installed. I consider the VE plugin for Eclipse to be a fairly good form designer but even that can be hellishly confusing especially if you flip from one layout model to another.
AWT is a waste of time. It's just too antiquated.
That CNet article supposes a blu ray drive will cost Sony $200-300. That sounds unimaginably unlikely.
I don't understand how any console gamer plays any first person shooter. I have yet to see one yet which is as easy to control as on a PC with a mouse. Game controllers are simply lousy for the fine control that you need for such games. So many games implement autoaim functionality to compensate and more often than not it doesn't aim at you want to aim at.
Aside from Flash, Java et al, even IE 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0 used just Javascript to deliver rich interactive content. IE 4.0 even used it in their desktop. In NS it was called Netcaster and included quite sophisticated channel finders and a "webtop". They also both provided documents, tools and APIs for providers to create rich experiences. Both browsers may have failed to deliver a decent experience, but anyone claiming in 2001 (a full 3-4 years after these browsers did it) that using JS and HTML to deliver interactive content is either novel or original is flat out wrong.
Or more importantly, what happens if you put your hot coffee on what presumably must be a touch screen / LCD device. Warning stickers such as "do not put hot coffee on screen" will make the device even more lame than it already sounds.
DVD players don't contain any DRM. Region coding isn't DRM. Region coding doesn't stop me from ripping as many copies of a disc as I want. DRM doesn't stop the large scale pirates making verbatim copies of that disc (though usually with the region encoding removed).