Team Password Manager (http://teampasswordmanager.com/)is self hosted and has a Chrome extension, and free for two users.
So you have to trust a closed source program, and run it on a server with PHP, IconCube, MySQL (with ALL privileges, no separation between user and admin rights) and Apache, and poke a hole in your firewall to reach its web server? That's increasing security?
Never mind the mind boggling idea of using a browser extension to give your browser a backdoor into it to increase convenience.
LastPass doesn't provide access to source code, either. However, if Open Source == Security, that can be arranged. I have no idea how LastPass isolates its database. Really, the question is who I'm trying to protect my passwords from. Hackers by way of a firewall? At a purely technical level, yeah, LastPass probably wins this one, though my Untangle firewall is pretty strict. From three-letter-agencies and mass data dumps? If nothing else, security-through-obscurity would land squarely in my favor.
Regarding the Chrome extension, it works on Chromium, it's optional, and "Over a VPN" is a perfectly viable way to avoid poking a hole in my firewall.
Team Password Manager (http://teampasswordmanager.com/)is self hosted and has a Chrome extension, and free for two users. Not affiliated, just a happy user.
Why is it bad to be able to pay more for higher speeds to some selected destinations?
Because no proposal I have ever heard for "preferred traffic" has ever involved letting me decide what those destinations are.
Overall your cable bill could be lower if you just need browsing speed for most sites but want to have a very fast connection for a handful of streaming video sites you use regularly...
Has your cell bill gone down since carriers implemented data caps? This graphic is years old, but please provide literally any evidence that it is not the logical conclusion of such a plan.
That would actually make 4k streaming practical, for example.
What would make 4K streaming practical is for the backhaul to be upgraded to the point where 100mbits/sec down is a de facto standard, with 300mbit/sec remotely affordable. Comcast isn't hurting for a buck, and even if this was the case in "selected cities" to start with, it's not the kind of thing that needs cooperation from everyone, everywhere, all at once. Then again, it's not like the general public is clamoring for 4K content - 1080p is so heavily compressed that good picture quality is still more dependent on Blu-Ray or 1080p file downloads than streaming.
You say that's bad, I say that's progress which is something we've not seen in a while. Under existing laws our network speeds are stagnating, Google is pulling out of fiber now...
Google is pulling out of fiber because they are Google, and pretty much everything that isn't Search, Mail, or Android is a 'pet project' to them...and also because being an ISP delivering gigabit is not the kind of thing they were charging properly for. Meanwhile, what online destinations besides Netflix aren't served 'well enough' by a 25/5 connection for 7 out of 10 Charter customers, and is my cable company's 300/35 tier not enough for 7/10 slashdotters? I'm not saying that progress should stop marching on or that the first round of Carbonite backups isn't going to be a pain, but internet speeds are well within the region where the router can very well be the bottleneck, and though the 300/35 tier is relatively new for my cable company, their standard level is 60/25, up from 25/5 about two years ago, and up from 15/2 from five years before that - and I'm nowhere near a Google Fiber area. Admittedly, my cable company is somewhat-regional and I know that AT&T hasn't done its customers any favors recently, but now we get into the classical argument of whether everyone's speeds need to go up in order for progress to be considered 'reached'.
OK, I'm not a DBA (IANADBA? Hmm, I like the sound of that, 'yanadba', which syllable to put the accent on though.)
But, really, why do corporations not use postgres? Is it some inherit deficiency in the product? A general antipathy to Open Source? Lack of publicity and marketing on the part of Postgres? Nobody from the company to hold the customer's hand when they first get it? (In that case, maybe there needs to be a Red Hat Postgres) Or something else?
Honestly, it may be a bit of everything, but I'll share my own personal anecdote...
I used to provide desktop and network support to a relatively small insurance company (about a hundred employees). Their line-of-business application that handled everything from claims to brokers to billing was coded and maintained by a firm who built the product on an Oracle backend. It's a relatively small Oracle installation - $90,000/year was the number I remember hearing, which is obviously peanuts for an Oracle install.
The coding company was mortified of change. Virtualizing the old Solaris boxes was months of meetings and performance metrics ("virtualized servers will be slower" - we were migrating from servers old enough to still have "Sun Microsystems" logos on them to a high end Poweredge blade chassis...). The people coding for it knew Oracle and Java, and genuinely believed that "write once, run everywhere" was a promise that Java delivered - it took over a year to convince them that "running in IE compatibility mode was not a long-term solution"; the product was indeed written for IE6, though to be fair they did indeed update it to run properly in Webkit and newer iterations of Trident.
Checkbox Compliance is a very, very powerful thing. No matter how much PostrgeSQL and EnterpriseDB promises to be a drop-in replacement, and no matter how true that actually is, the fact that it isn't "Oracle" scared the crap out of the developers and the people who supported them. MariaDB was able to overcome this to an extent because it was literally the exact same code at the beginning, and answered to the same SQL commands (still using 'mysql' where appropriate). The first time something goes wrong, no matter whose fault it is, it's blamed on the recent change. It very well could be - and probably is - someone else's fault...but when you're dealing with management - even remotely competent management - and saying that something they asked for isn't going to work right because Postgres != Oracle, or the upstream vendor keeps saying "we don't support PostgreSQL" no matter what the issue is (...the website isn't compatible with Edge...), migrating to Postgres becomes a headache for 100% PEBKAC reasons.
I guess my point was that back then, you *had* somewhere else to go, and your online persona in the IRC rooms wasn't as nearly a big a part of social circles as it is now. If you didn't log into your IRC room, that was one social circle with whom you didn't interact. Now, *all* the social circles are there, so "walking away" is walking away from everyone. Is it a drug addiction? Well, solitary confinement is a worst-of-the-worst punishment in prisons for a reason, and it is effective on people who have never logged into Facebook...so I would file it somewhere between "unhealthy obsession" and "implementation of core human need".
An important psychological study may be to determine why younger generation doesn't just "walk away" from the online bullying when there isn't a physical intimidation keeping them from it.
Like me, I'm assuming you're old enough to remember when "socializing online" was primarily done by IRC and BBS...things that 95% of kids then and 99.8% kids today wouldn't be able to figure out. Those dedicated to clearing that bar tended to be smart enough to have already learned "words are words", so even when we did have mean things written to us, we generally had the sense to ignore it. Additionally, the name 'voyager529' is about 20 years old, and although *now* it's pretty simple to figure out my real name, it was far more difficult in a pre-Google, pre-Facebook world. Social Media has so normalized the lack of a pseudonym that having a creative or whimsical e-mail name is considered "juvenile" or "from the 90's" - even places that don't require it live in a world where the concept of an online/offline disconnect is a relic of a bygone era. What you remember dealing with and what the younger generation actually deals with are two very different levels of online interaction.
I remember my daughter freaking out because she participated in this absolutely weird "ask.fm" where you anonymously ask and answer questions about a person. My first response to seeing what was being said was rage, but then I said to her...just don't go there. Don't ask anonymous questions about yourself...don't answer questions about other people. No one has power over you if you just ignore it. And luckily that was enough and it was no longer a problem.
It is amazing what adolescents will do in the name of peer pressure. Again, by virtue of you being a Slashdotter, I'll wager that there was a point in your life when you more-or-less had a choice between "pursuing your technical aptitude" and "pursuing high social status", and coming to terms with the fact that they were mutually exclusive and choosing the former. Again, with no technical barrier to internet-based things, use of the internet to achieve or retain high social standing is going to happen.
But years go by and kids seem just so attached to their social personas that they can't just walk way.
In a world where kids can't play outside or meet at the arcade or the soda fountain because they barely exist..and if they do, kids can't go without their parents needing to know exactly where they are and where and when they're returning, and providing transportation in either direction. Staying inside and curating one's online persona is basically an extension of who they are, because staying inside and playing with iPads and Playstations is the only "safe" thing left to do. Walking away from online communication is basically walking away from communicating with peers at all, and that's about the worst thing possible for adolescence.
I get into an argument on facebook or whatever and I'll just close it if I get too worked up. And voila I stop thinking about it. But kids don't seem to have that capability and it makes me wonder why not.
Because you're a grown-up. You're a parent. You are a digital immigrant, not a digital native. You've matured enough to say, "sucks to be that moron!" and move on with your life - you've got 1,001 other things to do that getting worked up and running a fool's errand to sustain an argument on a forum somewhere gets to a point where it's clearly a waste of time. Meanwhile, kids who are bullied online are stuck trying to argue their way into social acceptance, or out of having their peers turn on them. You're well beyond the stage in your life where that's a problem, and I'm certain that if ten people unfriended you on Facebook, it would have approximately the same affect on you as ten people/quitting an IRC room - you've got plenty of other things that contribute to self-worth. When self-worth is t
They probably don't have a choice of OS. That is likely determined by their software vendor.
That merely shifts the blame. The software vendor was foolish for choosing that OS. Collective foolishness is still foolishness.
The problem isn't "the software vendor", it's "all the software vendors".
EMR is more frequently than not a SaaS application like PointClickCare. Have Browser, Will Travel. This is the height of "cross platform awesomeness". It's also basically the end of the highlights.
Prescription medication inventory and ordering software is a trainwreck, and even if that's ported to Linux, now you have to worry about some highly specific printers, some with MICR funcitonality, for which you'll need drivers.
Then, let's get into all the different gadgets in a hospital, from MRI machines to EKG logging to weight distribution sensors to X-ray machines to chiropractic thermal sensors to sonogram machines to things I simply haven't spent enough time in a hospital to recall. A nontrivial amount of these machines cost a solid six figures or more and require dedicated training in their use...and all have a highly vertical software stack that even flows into downstream situations (doctors don't exactly get 3D MRI scans in PDF formats...), and yes, there's frequently DRM involved.
There's also the billing office, which is the kind of place where drop-in replacement for the existing billing software *and* near-infinite accessibility of archived data is going to be a requirement. I wouldn't be surprised if more than a handful of hospitals are either still directly using an AS/400, or a frontend for one. To be fair, this is one place where a number of EMR vendors as well as separate cloud vendors have products, but incumbent data is going to be a major problem.
Remember how I said it wasn't "the vendor"? I wasn't kidding - it's *all the vendors*. If a hospital is going to switch to Linux, everything above has to be compatible. Tell a hospital they need to replace their three year old, $4 million MRI machine because it's not Linux compatible, and see how far that gets you. Conversely, the software developers who write the custom software to run that MRI machine aren't going to reinvent the wheel because one hospital says "pretty please", and even if half of those vendors *did* revamp their software for Linux *and* they managed to avoid situations like one company only supporting Red Hat while another company only supports Ubuntu...you'll still need to have Windows around for the other half.
Ultimately, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, because it requires far too much cooperation from far too many people at once to write some highly expensive software for a niche within a niche. Don't get me wrong, if Mark Shuttleworth wants to spend a billion or two to target a specific hospital and cover the bill to bootstrap the development of a fully HIPPA compliant Ubuntu software stack and ensure that there isn't a device, application, or workflow in that hospital that would require Windows, I'd be beyond thrilled. However, I'm not holding my breath on that.
Is that they rely on IT Teams to deploy their collaboration tools. [SNIP] the people in control are not the users.
The problem is a constantly moving pendulum.
MBA: "We need to do better document and revision management than a shared folder because everyone overwrites my stuff!" IT: "Okay, here's Sharepoint." MBA: "Great! People will just figure this out, right?" IT: "It's a bit more complicated than that. We can do a one-hour training session in shifts, and have the whole company trained in 2-3 days." MBA: "We can't afford the downtime! Just roll it out, provide a cheat sheet, and prepare for the service desk tickets to come in!" IT: *shrug*
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint sucks because people keep locking documents and setting the permissions so only they can access them!" IT: "Users aren't respecting the policy, or don't know how to set them properly...which we'd have taught them all to do in the training class." MBA: "We don't have time for that! Disable the ability for users to set permissions!" IT: "...so, everyone has access to everything?" MBA: "Exactly!"
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint didn't protect our data! How did Steve in HR manage to take financial documents with him when he got fired?" IT: "...because we gave everyone permissions." MBA: "Why would you do that! Our information needs to be secure secure secure!!" IT: "...because management was having a tough time with the permissions and told us to revoke them all."
The endless cycle of IT deployments is from convenient/insecure when things are annoying, to inconvenient/secure when hackers rule the news circuit, and back again when everyone is sick of 12 passwords and the budget is too tight for SSO systems to be implemented. Rules and procedures when the rollouts start, to the real-world workflows they impede because the committee who designed them didn't account for corner cases they didn't know existed.
Sharepoint and Team and any number of other collaboration tools *can* be used effectively in an organization. Those who require their implementation, however, are unlikely to account for the fact that the super-smooth tech demo they saw at a conference assumed a use case that perfectly fit with the tool and its demonstration, as well as the fact that all the users spent hours and hours rehearsing that demo. When management thinks in terms of a rollout as a combination of research, acquisition, more research, implementation, even more research, training, and optimization...it is only then that any collaboration tool will work. They cannot work in a situation involving separate fiefdoms and immovable workflows or unwilling users.
I still haven't completely given up hope, though, that this will change one day.
Unfortunately, I have.
We'll talk exclusively about desktop apps, and ignore web-based applications and mobile apps for the moment.
Who are some of the big players in the desktop software market? Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit, Sage, and Nuance are all in the list of top-100 software companies by revenue, admittedly a list heavily skewed toward the enterprise market - SAP and VMWare are clearly outside the scope of this exercise.
Most of these companies' flagship applications (Photoshop, AutoCAD, Quickbooks, ACT, NaturallySpeaking) are cross-compatible with MacOS/OSX, so to be honest, Apple is a more viable path than ever before...once one gets past the sticker shock of not only buying the hardware, but re-buying the software. The real cross-platform challenge is all the niche applications, everything from software that runs law firms and software that runs intelligent lighting arrays to software that runs dental offices to the knockoffs of industry standards.
However, none of those applications run on Linux. Look, I like Linux on the desktop. I too would love nothing more than for commercial software vendors to consider Linux a viable platform for development. Game developers have started to do so, which is a great start...but for commercial software houses, there's the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Who wants to wipe a computer that ships with Windows in order to install Linux when their line-of-business applications won't support it? What software vendor is going to take the plunge on making something like that happen, knowing it's a gamble that may well not pay off? Plenty of Slashdotters have made Linux their primary, and I am glad that they have, but there are very few lawyers here, and even fewer dentists.
The only thing that I think will push software vendors to make this happen is for Microsoft to fully depreciate the Win32 API and push for Modern-Only apps on the platform. Nadella may not always make the decisions I agree with, but I can't possibly believe he would be stupid enough to push *that* button. If he does, he creates a vacuum that will suddenly be viable for desktop Linux to fill.
"There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel"
Encouraging people to use a spreadsheet for large amounts of data (or anything else!) is *not* an improvement!
Yes, but the alternatives are awkward. Obviously, that much data belongs in a database for actual-storage, but how does one implement that for end users?
"Use Access!" Well, Access is only a part of the professional versions of Office now, and it's twice as expensive. Therefore, most users don't have Access.
"Use LibreOffice Base!" The closest thing to an actual-answer, but there's still a solid learning curve there, as well as import problems.
"Use MariaDB!" So, now end users need to learn how to use command line SQL?
"Use MariaDB and phpMyAdmin!" So, now end users need a full LAMP stack?
"SQL Server Express and ODBC!" smh...
Yes, Excel is a very crude application for database functions. It's also ubiquitous, and for relatively simple things like averaging a single column in half a million rows, spending hours getting that data into a database to then process it back in Excel is an absurd notion.
One thing that comes to mind that made old software "better" was how much smaller it was. The oldest Microsoft Office ISO I have immediately available is 2003 Professional. It's 410MB for, if memory serves, everything including Access and Frontpage. The Office 2016 Professional installer is 2.4GB...
Why do you care? If I have a 2TB HDD then 400MB or 2.4GB is equally trivial. Same goes for RAM.
I'd much rather have features than save disk or RAM space that cost peanuts to upgrade.
For one program? No. The problem comes when *everyone* starts thinking that way. Applications use more and more RAM because "It's cheap" and "everyone has plenty". Nobody optimizing means that multitasking becomes needlessly more difficult. Applications use more and more hard drive space because "everyone has plenty". Everyone using twice as much disk space as they could if users were shown a real custom installer menu or simply optimizing their usage means that I *need* a larger hard disk to fit the same amount of personal data.
Optimized applications show that the developers value my resources.
The failure of windows phone had nothing to do with 'developer engagement'. Simply put they were far too late to market to compete with the already established iphone & Android.
They might have had a shot if they had realized it and focused from day one on the business market (which they were already a player in), but instead attempted to compete with Google and Apple who had more cachet with consumers.
Smartphone history doesn't start in 2010. It didn't start in 2007 with the iPhone, either.
Those of us who have longer memories are aware of the iPhone's predecessors. For quite some time, it was a three-horse race between Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm. Blackberry was preferred by many businesses because of BES - it was a bit expensive, but it was super secure and made it possible to replace a lost or damaged Blackberry with a fresh one in about 20 minutes, with all the user's accounts and data intact. Palm was very simple to use, had great battery life, and Palm Desktop was like Outlook Lite and Salesforce Lite rolled into a bundled application.
Believe it or not, Windows Mobile was amongst the most versatile platforms of its day, and it was king of the third party apps. Those apps weren't purchased through the App Store, they were purchased at retail on SD cards or from developers' websites...but there were more for WinMo than anything else. It was kinda ugly on the surface, but in HTC's heyday with the Touch Diamond, Touch Pro2, and HD2, it had more eye candy than the iPhone. WinMo was easy to manage because it was treated like a desktop in Active Directory, and though Windows Media Player for WinMo had its idiosyncrasies, it wasn't until maybe the Blackberry Curve that there was a media playback application for a mobile platform that outperformed it. As an added bonus, XDA-Developers started with WinMo phones. If you think Android is customizable, you should see some of the mods that were done back when WinMo was a thing.
The writing was on the wall for WinMo when it became abundantly clear that stylus-based input was a compromise, not a desirable state of existence. With the exception of the HD2, everyone else had a resistive touchscreen, which has long since been obsoleted. If you've never used IE Mobile, be grateful - it'll make you pine for IE6.
Microsoft attempted to reinvent itself with Windows Phone 7, right around when Android hit the scene. It was definitely more polished at the time than Android was, but they bet on XAML and Silverlight-based applications, which wasn't the best start. They also bet that having a rooting/modding community was a liability rather than an asset, so they put the kibosh on it early and were pretty successful at preventing third party ROMs and mods from making the platform attractive to the technically savvy. Meanwhile, stability was a major problem, Nokia phones took *years* to arrive, and when they did, most carriers had more options in their iPhone lineup than their WinMo lineup. On top of that, Microsoft was still trying to not-suck at the media management department; WMP10-12 wasn't bad for local media syncing, but this was back when iTunes was actually good, and Microsoft still didn't have a good way for users to download music and movies.
Developers had to start from scratch upon the arrival of WP8. WP7 apps weren't compatible with WP8, and WP8 wasn't compatible with the majority of WP7 devices - keeping in mind that this happened when 2-year handset contracts were still very much a thing. Microsoft could have given themselves excellent mindshare by allowing WP7 users to trade their phones in for WP8 phones at no cost, but instead they released 7.8 which had about half the heralded WP8 features...and for all the complaints about Android fragmentation, the complete incompatibility between WP7 and WP8 was far worse. There was all kinds of attempts to do Google-style integration with Bing, which worked as well as you think it did, and Cortana tried to eat Siri's lunch, but especially in its ear
I concur that the benefits of "upgrades" have been a matter of diminishing returns for quite some time now. Even if there's upgrades and features now, I worry that in five years from now, the real value will be "not losing access to your data".I share your staunch aversion to software subscriptions for that reason.
The problem with relying on the Open Source community to fill the vacuum is that there are lots and lots of factors that are involved. People genuinely do appreciate and benefit from ubiquitous access to their data. That's certainly possible with a whole lot of self-hosted software, but those methods require back end resources, a firewall of consequence, backups, and an internet connection that not only has enough upload bandwidth to support these applications, but an internet connection that doesn't block ports 80 and 443. Here at Slashdot those things aren't a problem, and the Synology NAS units (as well as a few others) help to streamline these through things like QuickConnect, but now we've left OSS solutions.
If we're looking at desktop applications, Quickbooks' greatest asset is the fact that every accounting firm will take a.QBW file, and any Main Street business owner can talk to any other Main Street business owner and probably find out how to do what they need to do. Meanwhile, virtually every OSS accounting package I've looked at has either had a Spartan UI, doesn't do payroll, is gross overkill, or is cloud-only...and all of them are double-entry. The closest I've found from a UI perspective is Xtuple, but its server requirements are insane compared to Quickbooks for a single-machine install. Thus, I submit that the reason why Intuit (whose level of evil in the software world is only eclipsed by Oracle) owns the small business accounting market is because there aren't any single entry OSS financial management applications at all...and with the exception of GNUcash, the only reason why there are the higher end OSS products is because all of their commercial packages have massive price tags attached to them that will rival Intuit's enterprise editions.
On the creative software front, OSS is still very difficult to acclimate to. GIMP can generally do the job in spite of its suboptimal interface, Inkscape is limited but can do the basics well enough, and Scribus is in the uncanny valley between Publisher and InDesign. KDenLive isn't the worst thing ever, but video editing = patent encumbered formats = OSS license hell. Ardour and Audacity can do the job, but they definitely lack the polish of Audition. Honestly, the best competitor to Adobe is Corel, not Github.
There are lots of places where OSS shines (pick just about anywhere in the server closet - you're crazy to run Windows Server as a router, but pfSense, Untangle, Smoothwall, Endian, ClearOS......). There are, however, going to be areas where OSS just will always play second fiddle to commercial software houses. As my very loose rule of thumb, I've found that the further away from programming a discipline is, the worse the OSS software packages are for it.
The definition of the term "better" is the key here. In broad terms, a product is "better" if it more closely meets the needs of the person or organization than what was previously being used.
One thing that comes to mind that made old software "better" was how much smaller it was. The oldest Microsoft Office ISO I have immediately available is 2003 Professional. It's 410MB for, if memory serves, everything including Access and Frontpage. The Office 2016 Professional installer is 2.4GB, and doesn't allow for any installation customization unless you use the volume licensed editions. There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel, multiple Exchange server support in Outlook, sparklines, and better PDF support and WordArt in Word), but a sixfold upshot in installer size? Those don't align. A kitchen-sink installation of the current version of Winamp is about 50MB - a number that is incredibly bloated by 2.91's 26MB full install, but a bargain compared to the 200-300MB required by iTunes. Then, there is the train wreck that are HP printer drivers...
Older software was much more frugal with its system resource usage. Today's software couldn't care less. Whether the increase in user friendliness really justifies the much larger increase in application size is an exercise left to the reader - there are plenty of examples in either direction. Install size is just one example. The increased requirement of an internet connection is a point of contention for me. The mass migration to "cloud applications" that are indefinitely rented, but never owned, isn't something I'm generally a fan of. The increase in telemetry and decrease in customization options are two things that I find are not things from which I benefit. There is a reason why OldVersion.com is a thing - because newer is not always better.
I am a simple man. A touchpad from ten years ago can fit my needs - left button, right button, edge scrolling. I do like the "chiral scrolling" as well, but that's a bonus. These are all provided with every Synaptics touchpad ever, and Synaptics even awesomely has a driver right on their website that'll handle basically every touchpad you install it on. They have enable/disable/optimization controls for every gesture control available, as well as tutorials on how to use them. It's great. I can't speak highly enough about them. I only realized that there were worse touchpads because I'd been spoiled by getting Synaptics touchpads on my laptops for years, and boy was that lucky.
Alps touchpads aren't too bad either, but that entirely depends on whether you get a Dell branded driver or not. Alps drivers are pretty feature complete, but when they're rebadged as Dell, it's luck of the draw whether there's useful stuff or not. Literally, there are Dell touchpad drivers that don't allow the disabling of tap-to-click.
The ones I can't stand are the touchpads with the "virtual buttons", and HP I'm looking squarely at you. May the lovechild of Carly Fiorina and Leo Apotheker be sentenced to use one of those atrocities until the end of time. They think you click when you don't, and they invariably end up with a slight mouse movement when you do actually click. It's nearly impossible to get an exact location clicked without a mouse on those stupid things, and the drivers for them don't do much to compensate.
The somebody-hates-you company when it comes to touchpad, though, is Sentelic. I returned a $3,100 Origin laptop because the touchpad was THAT bad. I attempted to use the multi-touch features, but it was terrible at its ability to discern exactly how many fingers were on the pad. The PalmCheck discernment was abhorrent, and the button placement was such that I was right-clicking when I typed because I'd hit the button. The drivers were a year old when I got the laptop, and good luck finding Sentelic online. It was the worst touchpad experience I've ever had.
So yes, Windows providing a standardized interface is a godsend for people who have Sentelic touchpads or the crappy Dell drivers on the Alps ones. I do hope that Precision is able to be overridden by my Synaptics drivers though, because I'll take them over the Windows implementation any day.
If I can get a bit more theoretical here, a number of people have posted the Free Speech xkcd comic. It's absolutely right that there is a difference between 'the government won't arrest you' and 'no one should be compelled to host content they disagree with'. For this reason, I am indeed glad that Milo is keeping 4chan as a place where people can indeed post unpopular opinions.
However, I've been thinking about this recently: to what end is it not required for there to be a platform given? Twitter doesn't want to host offensive tweets. Fine. I'll join the four people on Google Plus and do it. Well, seems the other three people on Google Plus don't like my offensive speech, either.
Okay. I'll head on over to HostGator and install Friendica and make my own place where I can post my offensive things. Well, HostGator says I can't do that on their servers, rinse and repeat for GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1. I head over to Amazon and rent some server time there, but Amazon says I can't post my offensive things there.
Fine, no more cloud for me - want something done right, DIY time. So, I call up Verizon and get their you-can-have-a-web-server FiOS package and load up an old desktop with a LAMP stack and host it myself. Verizon says they're not obligated to give me a platform, and when I call Cablevision, I get the same story. So, "no one is required to give me a platform" is, at its logical conclusion, a statement that can prevent a sufficiently offensive message from ever reaching the internet.
What is the reasonable expectation here? Should someone sufficiently down the line be expected to provide the same platform to hate speech as they provide to acceptable speech? Obviously I paint a picture of a fairly remote possibility, but it does raise the question of how "freedom of the press" works if no one will sell you a printing press.
I get, and to a certain extent agree with your premise that the newsworthy cases of police brutality are most certainly the exception and not the rule, there are two parts of your post with which I shall formally rebut:
While it is true that there are a few officers that deserve jail time (and the do get it most of the time) 99.99% of the LEOs our there are the good guys. They go out every day with a target painted on their back to protect the rest of us for crap pay. I am fine if they want to make sure their neighbors/acquaintances/dates don't have drug or assault convictions. Using that information to blackmail is different, but just having the information is fine as long as they are responsible with it.
I think the 99.99% figure is exaggerated, but I'll roll with it for the moment. I don't get to check if my date has an assault conviction. Just because the police office is in a place where such information is readily accessible doesn't mean that they are allowed to just use it for whatever they want. As an IT/support tech, I have remote access and admin passwords to dozens of servers for dozens of companies. Only once have I ever used one of my clients' servers for personal use, and that was to demonstrate a particular piece of software for a friend of mine, with explicit consent of the owner of that server. LEOs don't sign up to be LEOs with the promise of a $250,000 salary and then realize it's between $40K and 70K a year. That information is abundantly clear long before they ever step foot in the police academy. Access to my confidential data is not penance for making less money than a doctor or lawyer. Even if you are okay with it (as is your right), I am not. The question is which one of us should be able to impose our feelings upon the other.
The second issue I have is with this part...
Put yourself in their shoes. [snip] You have no clue if he just murdered his girlfriend, has $5M in heroine in the trunk, is off his meds or is high out of his gourd.
Nope. But the foundation of everything LEOs are required to uphold is summed up in the following sentence: Innocent until proven guilty. Maybe he did just murder his girlfriend...but unless there's a dead body in the front seat, he didn't. Maybe he's got $5M of heroin in his trunk...but until there's probable cause to search the vehicle, he doesn't. Maybe he is indeed high...that will become bleeding obvious in about 30 seconds of interaction.
If he is not obeying orders and is putting his hands in places where a weapon might be concealed, you have a very reasonable fear for your life. So while not 100% of police shootings are justified, you are a sociopath if you can't at least empathize with the people in our society who put their lives in danger to protect us from the criminal element.
My level of empathy is strenuous at best, for two reasons. First, if the job is too hard, quit. It's not hard to stop being a police officer. There is no shame in saying, "being a competent police officer is too hard for me". It is a tough job, but the difficulties of that job are no secret. If someone signs up to be a police officer, they are signing up to carry a gun that they will hopefully never have to use, but are lawfully authorized to use far more liberally than the average citizen. With that authority should come accountability...and the perceived lack of said accountability is the root of the challenges at hand.
I've done some minor Linux administration, generally in the realm of getting some Turnkey Linux appliance or other to run. When I've done so, I've always used nano - it tends to do what I need it to do, it has command cues on the bottom so I don't need to memorize the man file to use it, and it seems to be available basically-everywhere. I used vi a bit in college, and the concept of a modal text editor with next-to-no window dressing doesn't seem, at first blush, to have any real advantages to using something more like nano.
I am *not* looking to enter into some sort of flame war, but I do hope that someone would be generous enough to help me understand the draw to either vi or emacs.
Nobody likes either, they both play dirty, they're sufficiently well-connected and well-funded to avoid the rules applying to them, and they make promises they never had any intention of really keeping.
Windows Media Center... which was free in Windows 7, cost you a bit (if you didn't grab it during the first year) in 8, and is no longer available as part of Windows 10.
It took a few tries to get it to work, but I can speak from personal firsthand experience that it works on Win10 the way you remember it, down to the guide data downloads.
With respect to other options, I'm hoping that the PlexDVR app allows for live streaming eventually, if SiliconDust doesn't get their life together.
I love how Apple has become the new Microsoft here.
Clearly, you've been out of the loop recently. Let me catch you up:
Facebook is the new Google. Google is the new Apple. Apple is the new Microsoft. Microsoft is the new IBM. IBM is the new Xerox. Xerox is the new Smith Corona.
You misunderstand my question.... I was asking why heavier penalties for false DMCA takedowns would make any difference when anytime high penalties for piracy are ever talked about around here, someone usually brings up the point that higher penalties for crimes is not an effective preventative.
Lemme break it down...
Suppose that I, Voyager529, were to download a copy of Fantastic Voyage, and that I was one of a million people to do so. Suppose I was stupid enough to leave a nobody-doubts-it evidence trail that I personally committed that specific act of copyright infringement. It goes to court, the judge decides to make an example out of me and give me a $150,000 fine for my misdoing. My current socioeconomic status is such that a $150,000 fine would basically be life ruining. Whether it was $150K or $150M, I'm screwed for life; the fact that there's a few orders of magnitude difference between those two numbers is inconsequential. I downloaded the film figuring that I wouldn't get caught, but since I did, I'm screwed. 20th Century Fox can try to file a few more lawsuits, but since I had the most clear paper trail available and the case was the easiest to win for them, even if they went down the line to the next 5-10 people who were similarly easy to successfully sue, any one person would have less than a 0.01% chance of being a target. Increasing the fines to "ruin the defendant's life even more" isn't going to be much more of a deterrent.
By contrast, 20th Century Fox sends a DMCA notice for Fantastic Voyage to one million random Youtube videos. that guy smoking a pipe? infringer. Pewpewdie? Infringer. Jenna Marbles? Infringer. Justin Bieber music video? Infringer. One guy who did, in fact, upload a ten second clip from the film? Infringer. Rinse and repeat a million more times, except that last one. 20th Century Fox has spent a few hundred dollars sending out those mostly-automated takedown notices. Google treats all million of those takedown notices equally, which takes weeks to sort out. The one guy with the ten second clip gets hit with an infringement suit. He loses and the judge says the defendant has to pay $10,000. 20th Century Fox says "oops" 999,999 times and made thousands of dollars on the one guy, meaning that there is incentive to basically treat DMCA takedowns like phishing e-mails - send 'em out, see who bites, and the cost of being wrong is $0.
Now, the GP says that $10 per invalid notice is a reasonable number. I'd personally make that $100 plus any expense incurred fighting the invalid notice (including down time, lost wages, etc.), but we'll keep the math simple and stick to ten bucks per 'oops'. Same scenario as above: one million takedowns sent, one technically-not-valid-but-judge-says-so $10,000 ruling. 20th Century Fox isn't making a few grand, they're paying $9,999,990. Even if they got ten times the maximum $150,000 penalty, it's still a losing proposition by millions of dollars.
tl;dr: The fines for infringement are extremely high, but the enforcement rate is very low. Increasing the fine without increasing enforcement isn't going to change things much for the unlucky person, but giving copyright holders a disincentive for sending out massive numbers of DMCA takedowns is clearly a requirement as a result of its abuse.
In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.
A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Timescommented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.
I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.
This absolutely doesn't surprise me. The concept of thinking about where one's data lives is nearly extinct outside of technical circles, and even Access is seen as "too complicated" by a lot of people. The utility of third normal form is obvious to us, but lots of people are perfectly served with pivot tables. How many people receive formal training in any form of database anymore? Even lots of web designers who use MySQL on the back end of their CMS software don't do a whole lot in PHPMyAdmin unless they have to.
Excel is very simple, ubiquitous, and has a low ceiling of functionality. It's the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately, it's "good enough" for lots of people.
ImageMagick definitely has its place; it is invaluable as a backend to Piwigo, Coppermine, (presumably) Pixlr, and plenty of others. No hate against it at all. However, the benefit to using it on a CLI, by your own admission, is based upon its capacity to perform batch actions like resizing. Would you do one-off image processing using a CLI rather than using GIMP or Photoshop? What about things that aren't easily automated, like color correction? There are some things that still require human input, and the process/export/evaluate/repeat concept doesn't save anyone any time.
By contrast: http://www.faststone.org/FSRes.... GUI tool that will do virtually all of the same batch processing as ImageMagick, giving users a simple to use GUI that does not take nearly as long to use or operate.
Slashdot Mirror
Team Password Manager (http://teampasswordmanager.com/)is self hosted and has a Chrome extension, and free for two users.
So you have to trust a closed source program, and run it on a server with PHP, IconCube, MySQL (with ALL privileges, no separation between user and admin rights) and Apache, and poke a hole in your firewall to reach its web server? That's increasing security?
Never mind the mind boggling idea of using a browser extension to give your browser a backdoor into it to increase convenience.
LastPass doesn't provide access to source code, either. However, if Open Source == Security, that can be arranged. I have no idea how LastPass isolates its database. Really, the question is who I'm trying to protect my passwords from. Hackers by way of a firewall? At a purely technical level, yeah, LastPass probably wins this one, though my Untangle firewall is pretty strict. From three-letter-agencies and mass data dumps? If nothing else, security-through-obscurity would land squarely in my favor.
Regarding the Chrome extension, it works on Chromium, it's optional, and "Over a VPN" is a perfectly viable way to avoid poking a hole in my firewall.
Team Password Manager (http://teampasswordmanager.com/)is self hosted and has a Chrome extension, and free for two users.
Not affiliated, just a happy user.
Why is it bad to be able to pay more for higher speeds to some selected destinations?
Because no proposal I have ever heard for "preferred traffic" has ever involved letting me decide what those destinations are.
Overall your cable bill could be lower if you just need browsing speed for most sites but want to have a very fast connection for a handful of streaming video sites you use regularly...
Has your cell bill gone down since carriers implemented data caps? This graphic is years old, but please provide literally any evidence that it is not the logical conclusion of such a plan.
That would actually make 4k streaming practical, for example.
What would make 4K streaming practical is for the backhaul to be upgraded to the point where 100mbits/sec down is a de facto standard, with 300mbit/sec remotely affordable. Comcast isn't hurting for a buck, and even if this was the case in "selected cities" to start with, it's not the kind of thing that needs cooperation from everyone, everywhere, all at once. Then again, it's not like the general public is clamoring for 4K content - 1080p is so heavily compressed that good picture quality is still more dependent on Blu-Ray or 1080p file downloads than streaming.
You say that's bad, I say that's progress which is something we've not seen in a while. Under existing laws our network speeds are stagnating, Google is pulling out of fiber now...
Google is pulling out of fiber because they are Google, and pretty much everything that isn't Search, Mail, or Android is a 'pet project' to them...and also because being an ISP delivering gigabit is not the kind of thing they were charging properly for. Meanwhile, what online destinations besides Netflix aren't served 'well enough' by a 25/5 connection for 7 out of 10 Charter customers, and is my cable company's 300/35 tier not enough for 7/10 slashdotters? I'm not saying that progress should stop marching on or that the first round of Carbonite backups isn't going to be a pain, but internet speeds are well within the region where the router can very well be the bottleneck, and though the 300/35 tier is relatively new for my cable company, their standard level is 60/25, up from 25/5 about two years ago, and up from 15/2 from five years before that - and I'm nowhere near a Google Fiber area. Admittedly, my cable company is somewhat-regional and I know that AT&T hasn't done its customers any favors recently, but now we get into the classical argument of whether everyone's speeds need to go up in order for progress to be considered 'reached'.
OK, I'm not a DBA (IANADBA? Hmm, I like the sound of that, 'yanadba', which syllable to put the accent on though.)
But, really, why do corporations not use postgres? Is it some inherit deficiency in the product? A general antipathy to Open Source? Lack of publicity and marketing on the part of Postgres? Nobody from the company to hold the customer's hand when they first get it? (In that case, maybe there needs to be a Red Hat Postgres) Or something else?
Honestly, it may be a bit of everything, but I'll share my own personal anecdote...
I used to provide desktop and network support to a relatively small insurance company (about a hundred employees). Their line-of-business application that handled everything from claims to brokers to billing was coded and maintained by a firm who built the product on an Oracle backend. It's a relatively small Oracle installation - $90,000/year was the number I remember hearing, which is obviously peanuts for an Oracle install.
The coding company was mortified of change. Virtualizing the old Solaris boxes was months of meetings and performance metrics ("virtualized servers will be slower" - we were migrating from servers old enough to still have "Sun Microsystems" logos on them to a high end Poweredge blade chassis...). The people coding for it knew Oracle and Java, and genuinely believed that "write once, run everywhere" was a promise that Java delivered - it took over a year to convince them that "running in IE compatibility mode was not a long-term solution"; the product was indeed written for IE6, though to be fair they did indeed update it to run properly in Webkit and newer iterations of Trident.
Checkbox Compliance is a very, very powerful thing. No matter how much PostrgeSQL and EnterpriseDB promises to be a drop-in replacement, and no matter how true that actually is, the fact that it isn't "Oracle" scared the crap out of the developers and the people who supported them. MariaDB was able to overcome this to an extent because it was literally the exact same code at the beginning, and answered to the same SQL commands (still using 'mysql' where appropriate). The first time something goes wrong, no matter whose fault it is, it's blamed on the recent change. It very well could be - and probably is - someone else's fault...but when you're dealing with management - even remotely competent management - and saying that something they asked for isn't going to work right because Postgres != Oracle, or the upstream vendor keeps saying "we don't support PostgreSQL" no matter what the issue is (...the website isn't compatible with Edge...), migrating to Postgres becomes a headache for 100% PEBKAC reasons.
I guess my point was that back then, you *had* somewhere else to go, and your online persona in the IRC rooms wasn't as nearly a big a part of social circles as it is now. If you didn't log into your IRC room, that was one social circle with whom you didn't interact. Now, *all* the social circles are there, so "walking away" is walking away from everyone. Is it a drug addiction? Well, solitary confinement is a worst-of-the-worst punishment in prisons for a reason, and it is effective on people who have never logged into Facebook...so I would file it somewhere between "unhealthy obsession" and "implementation of core human need".
An important psychological study may be to determine why younger generation doesn't just "walk away" from the online bullying when there isn't a physical intimidation keeping them from it.
Like me, I'm assuming you're old enough to remember when "socializing online" was primarily done by IRC and BBS...things that 95% of kids then and 99.8% kids today wouldn't be able to figure out. Those dedicated to clearing that bar tended to be smart enough to have already learned "words are words", so even when we did have mean things written to us, we generally had the sense to ignore it. Additionally, the name 'voyager529' is about 20 years old, and although *now* it's pretty simple to figure out my real name, it was far more difficult in a pre-Google, pre-Facebook world. Social Media has so normalized the lack of a pseudonym that having a creative or whimsical e-mail name is considered "juvenile" or "from the 90's" - even places that don't require it live in a world where the concept of an online/offline disconnect is a relic of a bygone era. What you remember dealing with and what the younger generation actually deals with are two very different levels of online interaction.
I remember my daughter freaking out because she participated in this absolutely weird "ask.fm" where you anonymously ask and answer questions about a person. My first response to seeing what was being said was rage, but then I said to her...just don't go there. Don't ask anonymous questions about yourself...don't answer questions about other people. No one has power over you if you just ignore it. And luckily that was enough and it was no longer a problem.
It is amazing what adolescents will do in the name of peer pressure. Again, by virtue of you being a Slashdotter, I'll wager that there was a point in your life when you more-or-less had a choice between "pursuing your technical aptitude" and "pursuing high social status", and coming to terms with the fact that they were mutually exclusive and choosing the former. Again, with no technical barrier to internet-based things, use of the internet to achieve or retain high social standing is going to happen.
But years go by and kids seem just so attached to their social personas that they can't just walk way.
In a world where kids can't play outside or meet at the arcade or the soda fountain because they barely exist..and if they do, kids can't go without their parents needing to know exactly where they are and where and when they're returning, and providing transportation in either direction. Staying inside and curating one's online persona is basically an extension of who they are, because staying inside and playing with iPads and Playstations is the only "safe" thing left to do. Walking away from online communication is basically walking away from communicating with peers at all, and that's about the worst thing possible for adolescence.
I get into an argument on facebook or whatever and I'll just close it if I get too worked up. And voila I stop thinking about it. But kids don't seem to have that capability and it makes me wonder why not.
Because you're a grown-up. You're a parent. You are a digital immigrant, not a digital native. You've matured enough to say, "sucks to be that moron!" and move on with your life - you've got 1,001 other things to do that getting worked up and running a fool's errand to sustain an argument on a forum somewhere gets to a point where it's clearly a waste of time. Meanwhile, kids who are bullied online are stuck trying to argue their way into social acceptance, or out of having their peers turn on them. You're well beyond the stage in your life where that's a problem, and I'm certain that if ten people unfriended you on Facebook, it would have approximately the same affect on you as ten people /quitting an IRC room - you've got plenty of other things that contribute to self-worth. When self-worth is t
They probably don't have a choice of OS. That is likely determined by their software vendor.
That merely shifts the blame. The software vendor was foolish for choosing that OS. Collective foolishness is still foolishness.
The problem isn't "the software vendor", it's "all the software vendors".
EMR is more frequently than not a SaaS application like PointClickCare. Have Browser, Will Travel. This is the height of "cross platform awesomeness". It's also basically the end of the highlights.
Prescription medication inventory and ordering software is a trainwreck, and even if that's ported to Linux, now you have to worry about some highly specific printers, some with MICR funcitonality, for which you'll need drivers.
Then, let's get into all the different gadgets in a hospital, from MRI machines to EKG logging to weight distribution sensors to X-ray machines to chiropractic thermal sensors to sonogram machines to things I simply haven't spent enough time in a hospital to recall. A nontrivial amount of these machines cost a solid six figures or more and require dedicated training in their use...and all have a highly vertical software stack that even flows into downstream situations (doctors don't exactly get 3D MRI scans in PDF formats...), and yes, there's frequently DRM involved.
There's also the billing office, which is the kind of place where drop-in replacement for the existing billing software *and* near-infinite accessibility of archived data is going to be a requirement. I wouldn't be surprised if more than a handful of hospitals are either still directly using an AS/400, or a frontend for one. To be fair, this is one place where a number of EMR vendors as well as separate cloud vendors have products, but incumbent data is going to be a major problem.
Remember how I said it wasn't "the vendor"? I wasn't kidding - it's *all the vendors*. If a hospital is going to switch to Linux, everything above has to be compatible. Tell a hospital they need to replace their three year old, $4 million MRI machine because it's not Linux compatible, and see how far that gets you. Conversely, the software developers who write the custom software to run that MRI machine aren't going to reinvent the wheel because one hospital says "pretty please", and even if half of those vendors *did* revamp their software for Linux *and* they managed to avoid situations like one company only supporting Red Hat while another company only supports Ubuntu...you'll still need to have Windows around for the other half.
Ultimately, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, because it requires far too much cooperation from far too many people at once to write some highly expensive software for a niche within a niche. Don't get me wrong, if Mark Shuttleworth wants to spend a billion or two to target a specific hospital and cover the bill to bootstrap the development of a fully HIPPA compliant Ubuntu software stack and ensure that there isn't a device, application, or workflow in that hospital that would require Windows, I'd be beyond thrilled. However, I'm not holding my breath on that.
Is that they rely on IT Teams to deploy their collaboration tools. [SNIP] the people in control are not the users.
The problem is a constantly moving pendulum.
MBA: "We need to do better document and revision management than a shared folder because everyone overwrites my stuff!"
IT: "Okay, here's Sharepoint."
MBA: "Great! People will just figure this out, right?"
IT: "It's a bit more complicated than that. We can do a one-hour training session in shifts, and have the whole company trained in 2-3 days."
MBA: "We can't afford the downtime! Just roll it out, provide a cheat sheet, and prepare for the service desk tickets to come in!"
IT: *shrug*
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint sucks because people keep locking documents and setting the permissions so only they can access them!"
IT: "Users aren't respecting the policy, or don't know how to set them properly...which we'd have taught them all to do in the training class."
MBA: "We don't have time for that! Disable the ability for users to set permissions!"
IT: "...so, everyone has access to everything?"
MBA: "Exactly!"
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint didn't protect our data! How did Steve in HR manage to take financial documents with him when he got fired?"
IT: "...because we gave everyone permissions."
MBA: "Why would you do that! Our information needs to be secure secure secure!!"
IT: "...because management was having a tough time with the permissions and told us to revoke them all."
The endless cycle of IT deployments is from convenient/insecure when things are annoying, to inconvenient/secure when hackers rule the news circuit, and back again when everyone is sick of 12 passwords and the budget is too tight for SSO systems to be implemented. Rules and procedures when the rollouts start, to the real-world workflows they impede because the committee who designed them didn't account for corner cases they didn't know existed.
Sharepoint and Team and any number of other collaboration tools *can* be used effectively in an organization. Those who require their implementation, however, are unlikely to account for the fact that the super-smooth tech demo they saw at a conference assumed a use case that perfectly fit with the tool and its demonstration, as well as the fact that all the users spent hours and hours rehearsing that demo. When management thinks in terms of a rollout as a combination of research, acquisition, more research, implementation, even more research, training, and optimization...it is only then that any collaboration tool will work. They cannot work in a situation involving separate fiefdoms and immovable workflows or unwilling users.
I still haven't completely given up hope, though, that this will change one day.
Unfortunately, I have.
We'll talk exclusively about desktop apps, and ignore web-based applications and mobile apps for the moment.
Who are some of the big players in the desktop software market?
Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit, Sage, and Nuance are all in the list of top-100 software companies by revenue, admittedly a list heavily skewed toward the enterprise market - SAP and VMWare are clearly outside the scope of this exercise.
Most of these companies' flagship applications (Photoshop, AutoCAD, Quickbooks, ACT, NaturallySpeaking) are cross-compatible with MacOS/OSX, so to be honest, Apple is a more viable path than ever before...once one gets past the sticker shock of not only buying the hardware, but re-buying the software. The real cross-platform challenge is all the niche applications, everything from software that runs law firms and software that runs intelligent lighting arrays to software that runs dental offices to the knockoffs of industry standards.
However, none of those applications run on Linux. Look, I like Linux on the desktop. I too would love nothing more than for commercial software vendors to consider Linux a viable platform for development. Game developers have started to do so, which is a great start...but for commercial software houses, there's the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Who wants to wipe a computer that ships with Windows in order to install Linux when their line-of-business applications won't support it? What software vendor is going to take the plunge on making something like that happen, knowing it's a gamble that may well not pay off? Plenty of Slashdotters have made Linux their primary, and I am glad that they have, but there are very few lawyers here, and even fewer dentists.
The only thing that I think will push software vendors to make this happen is for Microsoft to fully depreciate the Win32 API and push for Modern-Only apps on the platform. Nadella may not always make the decisions I agree with, but I can't possibly believe he would be stupid enough to push *that* button. If he does, he creates a vacuum that will suddenly be viable for desktop Linux to fill.
"There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel"
Encouraging people to use a spreadsheet for large amounts of data (or anything else!) is *not* an improvement!
Yes, but the alternatives are awkward. Obviously, that much data belongs in a database for actual-storage, but how does one implement that for end users?
"Use Access!"
Well, Access is only a part of the professional versions of Office now, and it's twice as expensive. Therefore, most users don't have Access.
"Use LibreOffice Base!"
The closest thing to an actual-answer, but there's still a solid learning curve there, as well as import problems.
"Use MariaDB!"
So, now end users need to learn how to use command line SQL?
"Use MariaDB and phpMyAdmin!"
So, now end users need a full LAMP stack?
"SQL Server Express and ODBC!"
smh...
Yes, Excel is a very crude application for database functions. It's also ubiquitous, and for relatively simple things like averaging a single column in half a million rows, spending hours getting that data into a database to then process it back in Excel is an absurd notion.
One thing that comes to mind that made old software "better" was how much smaller it was. The oldest Microsoft Office ISO I have immediately available is 2003 Professional. It's 410MB for, if memory serves, everything including Access and Frontpage. The Office 2016 Professional installer is 2.4GB...
Why do you care? If I have a 2TB HDD then 400MB or 2.4GB is equally trivial. Same goes for RAM.
I'd much rather have features than save disk or RAM space that cost peanuts to upgrade.
For one program? No. The problem comes when *everyone* starts thinking that way. Applications use more and more RAM because "It's cheap" and "everyone has plenty". Nobody optimizing means that multitasking becomes needlessly more difficult. Applications use more and more hard drive space because "everyone has plenty". Everyone using twice as much disk space as they could if users were shown a real custom installer menu or simply optimizing their usage means that I *need* a larger hard disk to fit the same amount of personal data.
Optimized applications show that the developers value my resources.
The failure of windows phone had nothing to do with 'developer engagement'. Simply put they were far too late to market to compete with the already established iphone & Android.
They might have had a shot if they had realized it and focused from day one on the business market (which they were already a player in), but instead attempted to compete with Google and Apple who had more cachet with consumers.
Smartphone history doesn't start in 2010. It didn't start in 2007 with the iPhone, either.
Those of us who have longer memories are aware of the iPhone's predecessors. For quite some time, it was a three-horse race between Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm. Blackberry was preferred by many businesses because of BES - it was a bit expensive, but it was super secure and made it possible to replace a lost or damaged Blackberry with a fresh one in about 20 minutes, with all the user's accounts and data intact. Palm was very simple to use, had great battery life, and Palm Desktop was like Outlook Lite and Salesforce Lite rolled into a bundled application.
Believe it or not, Windows Mobile was amongst the most versatile platforms of its day, and it was king of the third party apps. Those apps weren't purchased through the App Store, they were purchased at retail on SD cards or from developers' websites...but there were more for WinMo than anything else. It was kinda ugly on the surface, but in HTC's heyday with the Touch Diamond, Touch Pro2, and HD2, it had more eye candy than the iPhone. WinMo was easy to manage because it was treated like a desktop in Active Directory, and though Windows Media Player for WinMo had its idiosyncrasies, it wasn't until maybe the Blackberry Curve that there was a media playback application for a mobile platform that outperformed it. As an added bonus, XDA-Developers started with WinMo phones. If you think Android is customizable, you should see some of the mods that were done back when WinMo was a thing.
The writing was on the wall for WinMo when it became abundantly clear that stylus-based input was a compromise, not a desirable state of existence. With the exception of the HD2, everyone else had a resistive touchscreen, which has long since been obsoleted. If you've never used IE Mobile, be grateful - it'll make you pine for IE6.
Microsoft attempted to reinvent itself with Windows Phone 7, right around when Android hit the scene. It was definitely more polished at the time than Android was, but they bet on XAML and Silverlight-based applications, which wasn't the best start. They also bet that having a rooting/modding community was a liability rather than an asset, so they put the kibosh on it early and were pretty successful at preventing third party ROMs and mods from making the platform attractive to the technically savvy. Meanwhile, stability was a major problem, Nokia phones took *years* to arrive, and when they did, most carriers had more options in their iPhone lineup than their WinMo lineup. On top of that, Microsoft was still trying to not-suck at the media management department; WMP10-12 wasn't bad for local media syncing, but this was back when iTunes was actually good, and Microsoft still didn't have a good way for users to download music and movies.
Developers had to start from scratch upon the arrival of WP8. WP7 apps weren't compatible with WP8, and WP8 wasn't compatible with the majority of WP7 devices - keeping in mind that this happened when 2-year handset contracts were still very much a thing. Microsoft could have given themselves excellent mindshare by allowing WP7 users to trade their phones in for WP8 phones at no cost, but instead they released 7.8 which had about half the heralded WP8 features...and for all the complaints about Android fragmentation, the complete incompatibility between WP7 and WP8 was far worse. There was all kinds of attempts to do Google-style integration with Bing, which worked as well as you think it did, and Cortana tried to eat Siri's lunch, but especially in its ear
I concur that the benefits of "upgrades" have been a matter of diminishing returns for quite some time now. Even if there's upgrades and features now, I worry that in five years from now, the real value will be "not losing access to your data".I share your staunch aversion to software subscriptions for that reason.
The problem with relying on the Open Source community to fill the vacuum is that there are lots and lots of factors that are involved. People genuinely do appreciate and benefit from ubiquitous access to their data. That's certainly possible with a whole lot of self-hosted software, but those methods require back end resources, a firewall of consequence, backups, and an internet connection that not only has enough upload bandwidth to support these applications, but an internet connection that doesn't block ports 80 and 443. Here at Slashdot those things aren't a problem, and the Synology NAS units (as well as a few others) help to streamline these through things like QuickConnect, but now we've left OSS solutions.
If we're looking at desktop applications, Quickbooks' greatest asset is the fact that every accounting firm will take a .QBW file, and any Main Street business owner can talk to any other Main Street business owner and probably find out how to do what they need to do. Meanwhile, virtually every OSS accounting package I've looked at has either had a Spartan UI, doesn't do payroll, is gross overkill, or is cloud-only...and all of them are double-entry. The closest I've found from a UI perspective is Xtuple, but its server requirements are insane compared to Quickbooks for a single-machine install. Thus, I submit that the reason why Intuit (whose level of evil in the software world is only eclipsed by Oracle) owns the small business accounting market is because there aren't any single entry OSS financial management applications at all...and with the exception of GNUcash, the only reason why there are the higher end OSS products is because all of their commercial packages have massive price tags attached to them that will rival Intuit's enterprise editions.
On the creative software front, OSS is still very difficult to acclimate to. GIMP can generally do the job in spite of its suboptimal interface, Inkscape is limited but can do the basics well enough, and Scribus is in the uncanny valley between Publisher and InDesign. KDenLive isn't the worst thing ever, but video editing = patent encumbered formats = OSS license hell. Ardour and Audacity can do the job, but they definitely lack the polish of Audition. Honestly, the best competitor to Adobe is Corel, not Github.
There are lots of places where OSS shines (pick just about anywhere in the server closet - you're crazy to run Windows Server as a router, but pfSense, Untangle, Smoothwall, Endian, ClearOS......). There are, however, going to be areas where OSS just will always play second fiddle to commercial software houses. As my very loose rule of thumb, I've found that the further away from programming a discipline is, the worse the OSS software packages are for it.
The definition of the term "better" is the key here. In broad terms, a product is "better" if it more closely meets the needs of the person or organization than what was previously being used.
One thing that comes to mind that made old software "better" was how much smaller it was. The oldest Microsoft Office ISO I have immediately available is 2003 Professional. It's 410MB for, if memory serves, everything including Access and Frontpage. The Office 2016 Professional installer is 2.4GB, and doesn't allow for any installation customization unless you use the volume licensed editions. There are certainly improvements (>1 million rows in Excel, multiple Exchange server support in Outlook, sparklines, and better PDF support and WordArt in Word), but a sixfold upshot in installer size? Those don't align. A kitchen-sink installation of the current version of Winamp is about 50MB - a number that is incredibly bloated by 2.91's 26MB full install, but a bargain compared to the 200-300MB required by iTunes. Then, there is the train wreck that are HP printer drivers...
Older software was much more frugal with its system resource usage. Today's software couldn't care less. Whether the increase in user friendliness really justifies the much larger increase in application size is an exercise left to the reader - there are plenty of examples in either direction. Install size is just one example. The increased requirement of an internet connection is a point of contention for me. The mass migration to "cloud applications" that are indefinitely rented, but never owned, isn't something I'm generally a fan of. The increase in telemetry and decrease in customization options are two things that I find are not things from which I benefit. There is a reason why OldVersion.com is a thing - because newer is not always better.
I am a simple man. A touchpad from ten years ago can fit my needs - left button, right button, edge scrolling. I do like the "chiral scrolling" as well, but that's a bonus. These are all provided with every Synaptics touchpad ever, and Synaptics even awesomely has a driver right on their website that'll handle basically every touchpad you install it on. They have enable/disable/optimization controls for every gesture control available, as well as tutorials on how to use them. It's great. I can't speak highly enough about them. I only realized that there were worse touchpads because I'd been spoiled by getting Synaptics touchpads on my laptops for years, and boy was that lucky.
Alps touchpads aren't too bad either, but that entirely depends on whether you get a Dell branded driver or not. Alps drivers are pretty feature complete, but when they're rebadged as Dell, it's luck of the draw whether there's useful stuff or not. Literally, there are Dell touchpad drivers that don't allow the disabling of tap-to-click.
The ones I can't stand are the touchpads with the "virtual buttons", and HP I'm looking squarely at you. May the lovechild of Carly Fiorina and Leo Apotheker be sentenced to use one of those atrocities until the end of time. They think you click when you don't, and they invariably end up with a slight mouse movement when you do actually click. It's nearly impossible to get an exact location clicked without a mouse on those stupid things, and the drivers for them don't do much to compensate.
The somebody-hates-you company when it comes to touchpad, though, is Sentelic. I returned a $3,100 Origin laptop because the touchpad was THAT bad. I attempted to use the multi-touch features, but it was terrible at its ability to discern exactly how many fingers were on the pad. The PalmCheck discernment was abhorrent, and the button placement was such that I was right-clicking when I typed because I'd hit the button. The drivers were a year old when I got the laptop, and good luck finding Sentelic online. It was the worst touchpad experience I've ever had.
So yes, Windows providing a standardized interface is a godsend for people who have Sentelic touchpads or the crappy Dell drivers on the Alps ones. I do hope that Precision is able to be overridden by my Synaptics drivers though, because I'll take them over the Windows implementation any day.
If I can get a bit more theoretical here, a number of people have posted the Free Speech xkcd comic. It's absolutely right that there is a difference between 'the government won't arrest you' and 'no one should be compelled to host content they disagree with'. For this reason, I am indeed glad that Milo is keeping 4chan as a place where people can indeed post unpopular opinions.
However, I've been thinking about this recently: to what end is it not required for there to be a platform given? Twitter doesn't want to host offensive tweets. Fine. I'll join the four people on Google Plus and do it. Well, seems the other three people on Google Plus don't like my offensive speech, either.
Okay. I'll head on over to HostGator and install Friendica and make my own place where I can post my offensive things. Well, HostGator says I can't do that on their servers, rinse and repeat for GoDaddy, BlueHost, and 1&1. I head over to Amazon and rent some server time there, but Amazon says I can't post my offensive things there.
Fine, no more cloud for me - want something done right, DIY time. So, I call up Verizon and get their you-can-have-a-web-server FiOS package and load up an old desktop with a LAMP stack and host it myself. Verizon says they're not obligated to give me a platform, and when I call Cablevision, I get the same story. So, "no one is required to give me a platform" is, at its logical conclusion, a statement that can prevent a sufficiently offensive message from ever reaching the internet.
What is the reasonable expectation here? Should someone sufficiently down the line be expected to provide the same platform to hate speech as they provide to acceptable speech? Obviously I paint a picture of a fairly remote possibility, but it does raise the question of how "freedom of the press" works if no one will sell you a printing press.
Discuss.
I get, and to a certain extent agree with your premise that the newsworthy cases of police brutality are most certainly the exception and not the rule, there are two parts of your post with which I shall formally rebut:
While it is true that there are a few officers that deserve jail time (and the do get it most of the time) 99.99% of the LEOs our there are the good guys. They go out every day with a target painted on their back to protect the rest of us for crap pay. I am fine if they want to make sure their neighbors/acquaintances/dates don't have drug or assault convictions. Using that information to blackmail is different, but just having the information is fine as long as they are responsible with it.
I think the 99.99% figure is exaggerated, but I'll roll with it for the moment. I don't get to check if my date has an assault conviction. Just because the police office is in a place where such information is readily accessible doesn't mean that they are allowed to just use it for whatever they want. As an IT/support tech, I have remote access and admin passwords to dozens of servers for dozens of companies. Only once have I ever used one of my clients' servers for personal use, and that was to demonstrate a particular piece of software for a friend of mine, with explicit consent of the owner of that server. LEOs don't sign up to be LEOs with the promise of a $250,000 salary and then realize it's between $40K and 70K a year. That information is abundantly clear long before they ever step foot in the police academy. Access to my confidential data is not penance for making less money than a doctor or lawyer. Even if you are okay with it (as is your right), I am not. The question is which one of us should be able to impose our feelings upon the other.
The second issue I have is with this part...
Put yourself in their shoes. [snip] You have no clue if he just murdered his girlfriend, has $5M in heroine in the trunk, is off his meds or is high out of his gourd.
Nope. But the foundation of everything LEOs are required to uphold is summed up in the following sentence: Innocent until proven guilty. Maybe he did just murder his girlfriend...but unless there's a dead body in the front seat, he didn't. Maybe he's got $5M of heroin in his trunk...but until there's probable cause to search the vehicle, he doesn't. Maybe he is indeed high...that will become bleeding obvious in about 30 seconds of interaction.
If he is not obeying orders and is putting his hands in places where a weapon might be concealed, you have a very reasonable fear for your life. So while not 100% of police shootings are justified, you are a sociopath if you can't at least empathize with the people in our society who put their lives in danger to protect us from the criminal element.
My level of empathy is strenuous at best, for two reasons. First, if the job is too hard, quit. It's not hard to stop being a police officer. There is no shame in saying, "being a competent police officer is too hard for me". It is a tough job, but the difficulties of that job are no secret. If someone signs up to be a police officer, they are signing up to carry a gun that they will hopefully never have to use, but are lawfully authorized to use far more liberally than the average citizen. With that authority should come accountability...and the perceived lack of said accountability is the root of the challenges at hand.
I've done some minor Linux administration, generally in the realm of getting some Turnkey Linux appliance or other to run. When I've done so, I've always used nano - it tends to do what I need it to do, it has command cues on the bottom so I don't need to memorize the man file to use it, and it seems to be available basically-everywhere. I used vi a bit in college, and the concept of a modal text editor with next-to-no window dressing doesn't seem, at first blush, to have any real advantages to using something more like nano.
I am *not* looking to enter into some sort of flame war, but I do hope that someone would be generous enough to help me understand the draw to either vi or emacs.
Nobody likes either, they both play dirty, they're sufficiently well-connected and well-funded to avoid the rules applying to them, and they make promises they never had any intention of really keeping.
Windows Media Center... which was free in Windows 7, cost you a bit (if you didn't grab it during the first year) in 8, and is no longer available as part of Windows 10.
Much hope is being held out for the SiliconDust effort to make a working DVR app... however they are a year behind schedule.
http://www.windowscentral.com/...
It took a few tries to get it to work, but I can speak from personal firsthand experience that it works on Win10 the way you remember it, down to the guide data downloads.
With respect to other options, I'm hoping that the PlexDVR app allows for live streaming eventually, if SiliconDust doesn't get their life together.
I love how Apple has become the new Microsoft here.
Clearly, you've been out of the loop recently. Let me catch you up:
Facebook is the new Google.
Google is the new Apple.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is the new IBM.
IBM is the new Xerox.
Xerox is the new Smith Corona.
You misunderstand my question.... I was asking why heavier penalties for false DMCA takedowns would make any difference when anytime high penalties for piracy are ever talked about around here, someone usually brings up the point that higher penalties for crimes is not an effective preventative.
Lemme break it down...
Suppose that I, Voyager529, were to download a copy of Fantastic Voyage, and that I was one of a million people to do so. Suppose I was stupid enough to leave a nobody-doubts-it evidence trail that I personally committed that specific act of copyright infringement. It goes to court, the judge decides to make an example out of me and give me a $150,000 fine for my misdoing. My current socioeconomic status is such that a $150,000 fine would basically be life ruining. Whether it was $150K or $150M, I'm screwed for life; the fact that there's a few orders of magnitude difference between those two numbers is inconsequential. I downloaded the film figuring that I wouldn't get caught, but since I did, I'm screwed. 20th Century Fox can try to file a few more lawsuits, but since I had the most clear paper trail available and the case was the easiest to win for them, even if they went down the line to the next 5-10 people who were similarly easy to successfully sue, any one person would have less than a 0.01% chance of being a target. Increasing the fines to "ruin the defendant's life even more" isn't going to be much more of a deterrent.
By contrast, 20th Century Fox sends a DMCA notice for Fantastic Voyage to one million random Youtube videos. that guy smoking a pipe? infringer. Pewpewdie? Infringer. Jenna Marbles? Infringer. Justin Bieber music video? Infringer. One guy who did, in fact, upload a ten second clip from the film? Infringer. Rinse and repeat a million more times, except that last one. 20th Century Fox has spent a few hundred dollars sending out those mostly-automated takedown notices. Google treats all million of those takedown notices equally, which takes weeks to sort out. The one guy with the ten second clip gets hit with an infringement suit. He loses and the judge says the defendant has to pay $10,000. 20th Century Fox says "oops" 999,999 times and made thousands of dollars on the one guy, meaning that there is incentive to basically treat DMCA takedowns like phishing e-mails - send 'em out, see who bites, and the cost of being wrong is $0.
Now, the GP says that $10 per invalid notice is a reasonable number. I'd personally make that $100 plus any expense incurred fighting the invalid notice (including down time, lost wages, etc.), but we'll keep the math simple and stick to ten bucks per 'oops'. Same scenario as above: one million takedowns sent, one technically-not-valid-but-judge-says-so $10,000 ruling. 20th Century Fox isn't making a few grand, they're paying $9,999,990. Even if they got ten times the maximum $150,000 penalty, it's still a losing proposition by millions of dollars.
tl;dr: The fines for infringement are extremely high, but the enforcement rate is very low. Increasing the fine without increasing enforcement isn't going to change things much for the unlucky person, but giving copyright holders a disincentive for sending out massive numbers of DMCA takedowns is clearly a requirement as a result of its abuse.
In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.
A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Times commented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.
I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.
This absolutely doesn't surprise me. The concept of thinking about where one's data lives is nearly extinct outside of technical circles, and even Access is seen as "too complicated" by a lot of people. The utility of third normal form is obvious to us, but lots of people are perfectly served with pivot tables. How many people receive formal training in any form of database anymore? Even lots of web designers who use MySQL on the back end of their CMS software don't do a whole lot in PHPMyAdmin unless they have to.
Excel is very simple, ubiquitous, and has a low ceiling of functionality. It's the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately, it's "good enough" for lots of people.
ImageMagick definitely has its place; it is invaluable as a backend to Piwigo, Coppermine, (presumably) Pixlr, and plenty of others. No hate against it at all. However, the benefit to using it on a CLI, by your own admission, is based upon its capacity to perform batch actions like resizing. Would you do one-off image processing using a CLI rather than using GIMP or Photoshop? What about things that aren't easily automated, like color correction? There are some things that still require human input, and the process/export/evaluate/repeat concept doesn't save anyone any time.
By contrast: http://www.faststone.org/FSRes.... GUI tool that will do virtually all of the same batch processing as ImageMagick, giving users a simple to use GUI that does not take nearly as long to use or operate.
Their safety comes from the fact that it's only sold in China, so they've already got a firewall.