That is because corporate infrastructure software does not generate revenue. Why spend money that does not directly impact the bottom line?
Marketing can always get fat funding to have designers polish the turds on the web site, but the backend people don't have access to that kind of money.
Maybe when you get people who actually understand the underlying business rather than a MBA graduate, that will change.
If payroll is threatened, you may get some action, but anything else usually gets a Band-Aid.
[...] it just loses the plot sometimes when trying to connect and sync with multiple IMAP accounts on a flaky Internet connection
Unfortunately it's just on flaky connections. I have a pretty stable connection, but Tbird still thrashes for minutes on end just to download the next message. I tested the identical config for the same accounts using Claws-Mail, and it responded just fine.
I detest webmail interfaces: cluttered with stuff I will never use, and often missing key features (Redirect, Reply List) or hiding them knee deep (View Source).
You can also apply the ultimate test: what currently happens when the power goes out? Assuming you don't have a UPS (so all systems are dead) and that your kitchen uses gas (so you can actually carry on cooking) and that you can use candles on the tables. Do you have a manual (paper) system that you can run with temporarily?
Three seems a bit extreme/stupid. 8 or so, under close supervision, sounds reasonable to me though.
Some of this is cultural. My father was an electrical engineer, so I learned about how to wire stuff up (and about not touching the wrong wires!) and use a soldering iron and an engineer's tools from about age 4, bit by bit. He had learned the same from his father, who was in the same business. Around that time, we lived out in the fen country of eastern England, so in summer I was allowed head off with the other 4/5/6/7yr olds in the village down to the disused canal lock to go swimming. The older kids who could swim kept an eye on the younger ones, and no-one ever had any trouble. This was all pretty much regarded as normal in England of the 1950s. It never made me a leader, but I know how to swim, and I can fix stuff so it works, which seems to baffle a lot of people (not/.ers, of course:-)
I've been considering a Galaxy Note, but I also need LaTeX, and I haven't explored the Galaxy ecosystem (or its cyanogenmod equivalent). And I hadn't heard of the Beam either, thank you.
We pair up the salesguys with a "presales engineer" who is much more techie and a product expert but less responsible for the relationship.
I spent several years as presales tech support, going out on calls with some of the best sales people in the business at the time. My job was to ensure that we knew what the client actually wanted (surprising how many of them didn't really know), and also to make sure the salesperson didn't promise something we couldn't deliver.
I learned a lot about sales from this, including the fact that as a salaried engineer, you won't get any cut of the sales commission no matter how much you contributed to the sale. At which point I left the company and went elsewhere:-)
And while we're at it, what does "independent university email accounts" mean? Is that all those separate unauthorized departmental accounts running on little servers in the corner of the lab or behind the reception desk in each department, created by some enterprising grad student because central IT took too long to create accounts, or because the users wanted accounts with a particular hostname in the remote-part?
WTF is this about? My university provides Exchange accounts for staff and faculty (default Outlook or OWA), and branded Gmail for students. But both types of account are accessible over IMAP with Thunderbird or the client of your choice. Yes, I know most users are unaware nowadays that there are such things as email clients besides Outlook, but unless the IT service is actually blocking or banning IMAP, I don't see what it matters what the backend hosting arrangements are. Much:-)
Not just the resolution: it needs to be a 4:3 aspect ratio. Document developers need a lot of vertical pixels, and those pixels need to be big enough that a full page fits readably on the screen.
Ubuntu pops up a warning window, and if you ignore it the battery light turns orange, and then red, and then it should hibernate. Flat-out dying is not something I've come across under Ubuntu (and I have some flaky old machines with old batteries, and they still warn me and then shut down).
First of all, private organizations would have no incentive to build roads to nowhere.
Bullshit. Private corporations are no better at making decisions than are the institutions of government; they can just do it in secrecy, and cover up its after-effects better. The history of corporations is littered with the evidence of crassly stupid decisions taken by people whose heads are so far up their asses they might just as will climb up in after them and disappear. Just like government institutions.
It's goverments, not corporations, that kill people by the tens of millions.
Only war between governments kills on the 10,000,000 scale, but industrial accidents, corporate carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would easily kill at the 1,000,000 scale. Government accidents, carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would probably kill at the 1,000 level.
...the FDA is prohibiting beef producers from testing every single animal for mad cow disease
And just whose pockets is the FDA in? The meat producers'. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
Do you know how many people the FDA kills every year by keeping drugs off the market that are saving lives in other countries?
The same applies. Big Pharma likes it this way because it increases profits.
Insurance is one of the most regulated industries we have, that's why it's so insanely expensive.
It's so regulated because without the regulations, hardly anyone would get insurance for anything, and those who did would never have any claim allowed, just like it was in the good old days before regulation. It's so insanely expensive because the judges keep awarding insanely large sums as "compensation". The solution isn't to withdraw regulation, it's to replace the judges with some who have some common sense.
Every regulation raises the barrier to new competition, and drives up the cost of insurance policies.
No, every regulation blocks another insurance company from shafting another customer. Left alone, they will repudiate every claim and hang you out to dry.
It wasn't always this way, google for "lodge doctors" if you want to learn how we once had medicine within just about everybody's reach,
In the days when the medical fraternity still had some shreds of decency and humanity left, they did indeed provide healthcare at affordable prices. But once they started being paid 10x or 100x the average, they became too used to the extra money to be bothred their ass about caring for the poor and needy. (There are of course some notable exceptions, I'm happy to say; doctors who still regard the Hippocratic Oath with some degree of reverence.)
until government intervened to make it as expensive as possible.
And who voted in the governments who did this? The US population. And who paid for the campaigns of the politicians thereby elected? Good ol' American industry.
It's not the cops' job to keep us safe
Actually, in a civilised country, it is. The United States is an exception in that regard. In some countries they are called civic guards, and their job is to protect the people from the government.
Regulation is the mantra of the robber barons, because it's regulation that protects them from competition.
Right. Corporations love to pay politicians to regulate in favor of Business. Privatization is the mantra of extreme right-wing fascist fundamentalist nutcases and crackpots who believe corporations inherently do a job better than the state. Privatizing prisons or the police, for example, is utter lunacy because the corporations' objectives are profit, not the control of offenders or the protection of society.
For instance, U.S. unemployment at 8.2% is higher than the U.S. military expenditure as fraction of GDP. But what conclusions can you expect to draw from it?
The conclusion that you don't have a clue what real unemployment is like. Spain has 20%. Ireland has 17%. Even that is survivable. Once unemployment goes over 50%, you're headed towards social collapse; the same applies if your military budget exceeds 50% of GDP.
8.2% is unpleasant for the country (and of course disastrous for the individuals affected), but it's not a catastrophe.
$2.4 billion higher last year, [...]. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent."
Actually 9.6%. But if it had paid that additional US tax, it would have paid $5.7Bn on profits of $34.2Bn, which is 16.7%
Personally, I think about 10% is a fair and reasonable corporate tax rate, and 16.7% is too high.
But then, I think 10% is a fair and reasonable personal income tax rate...
No, but adding a feature which would beat or rival the competition (Word) is surely A Good Thing.
But neither OO nor LO appears interested in using named styles professionally. The absence of a style margin (à la Word) is so glaring an omission that it makes Word the de facto interface for editing with styles. The inability of OO/LO to show all styles at a glance is what forces me to recommend Word to clients who need to edit their authors' documents. When I raised this with some OO/LO people they were seriously unable to understand what a style margin would be used for (editing documents, duuh), and suggested instead that if I wanted to see what style was used for a block, I could always right-click (or hover, or something). But professional editors need to see the styles used for whole screensful (even whole pages) at a glance, and until OO/LO can do this, it's a dead duck in the publishing business.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, have you considered punch cards? They are essentially impervious to electrical and magnetic pulses.
But, sadly, not to the firestorm that the movies would have us believe is our lot.
Nor to survivors seeking combustibles to heat the cookpot.
According to Wikipedia, a storm of this magnitude happens only once every 500 years or so.
On average.
Since one just happened about a hundred years back, the question is largely irrelevant.
The hallmark of random arrival is clustering.
That is because corporate infrastructure software does not generate revenue. Why spend money that does not directly impact the bottom line?
Marketing can always get fat funding to have designers polish the turds on the web site, but the backend people don't have access to that kind of money.
Maybe when you get people who actually understand the underlying business rather than a MBA graduate, that will change.
If payroll is threatened, you may get some action, but anything else usually gets a Band-Aid.
All Summer In A Day (Ray Bradbury).
Thunderbird is pretty good. There aren't many open-source graphical mail clients out there that work consistently across all platforms.
Actually I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned Claws which is pretty consistent. I wish they had an Android port as well, though.
[...] it just loses the plot sometimes when trying to connect and sync with multiple IMAP accounts on a flaky Internet connection
Unfortunately it's just on flaky connections. I have a pretty stable connection, but Tbird still thrashes for minutes on end just to download the next message. I tested the identical config for the same accounts using Claws-Mail, and it responded just fine.
I detest webmail interfaces: cluttered with stuff I will never use, and often missing key features (Redirect, Reply List) or hiding them knee deep (View Source).
For a moment I thought that said "Alien Institute..."
If BASIC was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for...oh, no, wait...
You can also apply the ultimate test: what currently happens when the power goes out? Assuming you don't have a UPS (so all systems are dead) and that your kitchen uses gas (so you can actually carry on cooking) and that you can use candles on the tables. Do you have a manual (paper) system that you can run with temporarily?
Three seems a bit extreme/stupid. 8 or so, under close supervision, sounds reasonable to me though.
Some of this is cultural. My father was an electrical engineer, so I learned about how to wire stuff up (and about not touching the wrong wires!) and use a soldering iron and an engineer's tools from about age 4, bit by bit. He had learned the same from his father, who was in the same business. Around that time, we lived out in the fen country of eastern England, so in summer I was allowed head off with the other 4/5/6/7yr olds in the village down to the disused canal lock to go swimming. The older kids who could swim kept an eye on the younger ones, and no-one ever had any trouble. This was all pretty much regarded as normal in England of the 1950s. It never made me a leader, but I know how to swim, and I can fix stuff so it works, which seems to baffle a lot of people (not /.ers, of course :-)
I've been considering a Galaxy Note, but I also need LaTeX, and I haven't explored the Galaxy ecosystem (or its cyanogenmod equivalent). And I hadn't heard of the Beam either, thank you.
We pair up the salesguys with a "presales engineer" who is much more techie and a product expert but less responsible for the relationship.
I spent several years as presales tech support, going out on calls with some of the best sales people in the business at the time. My job was to ensure that we knew what the client actually wanted (surprising how many of them didn't really know), and also to make sure the salesperson didn't promise something we couldn't deliver. I learned a lot about sales from this, including the fact that as a salaried engineer, you won't get any cut of the sales commission no matter how much you contributed to the sale. At which point I left the company and went elsewhere :-)
"What's your IP address?"
"Uh, 192.168.1.2"
It may turn out that Google's Wave, which was built on this idea, was just a bit ahead of its time.
Nonsense. Wave was just a threaded BB, much inferior to a News client, but graphical, so therefore cooler.
And while we're at it, what does "independent university email accounts" mean? Is that all those separate unauthorized departmental accounts running on little servers in the corner of the lab or behind the reception desk in each department, created by some enterprising grad student because central IT took too long to create accounts, or because the users wanted accounts with a particular hostname in the remote-part?
WTF is this about? My university provides Exchange accounts for staff and faculty (default Outlook or OWA), and branded Gmail for students. But both types of account are accessible over IMAP with Thunderbird or the client of your choice. Yes, I know most users are unaware nowadays that there are such things as email clients besides Outlook, but unless the IT service is actually blocking or banning IMAP, I don't see what it matters what the backend hosting arrangements are. Much :-)
Not just the resolution: it needs to be a 4:3 aspect ratio. Document developers need a lot of vertical pixels, and those pixels need to be big enough that a full page fits readably on the screen.
Ubuntu pops up a warning window, and if you ignore it the battery light turns orange, and then red, and then it should hibernate. Flat-out dying is not something I've come across under Ubuntu (and I have some flaky old machines with old batteries, and they still warn me and then shut down).
That's steganology. Steganography is drawing pictures of such dinosaurs.
First of all, private organizations would have no incentive to build roads to nowhere.
Bullshit. Private corporations are no better at making decisions than are the institutions of government; they can just do it in secrecy, and cover up its after-effects better. The history of corporations is littered with the evidence of crassly stupid decisions taken by people whose heads are so far up their asses they might just as will climb up in after them and disappear. Just like government institutions.
It's goverments, not corporations, that kill people by the tens of millions.
Only war between governments kills on the 10,000,000 scale, but industrial accidents, corporate carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would easily kill at the 1,000,000 scale. Government accidents, carelessness, stupidity, and arrogance would probably kill at the 1,000 level.
...the FDA is prohibiting beef producers from testing every single animal for mad cow disease
And just whose pockets is the FDA in? The meat producers'. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
Do you know how many people the FDA kills every year by keeping drugs off the market that are saving lives in other countries?
The same applies. Big Pharma likes it this way because it increases profits.
Insurance is one of the most regulated industries we have, that's why it's so insanely expensive.
It's so regulated because without the regulations, hardly anyone would get insurance for anything, and those who did would never have any claim allowed, just like it was in the good old days before regulation. It's so insanely expensive because the judges keep awarding insanely large sums as "compensation". The solution isn't to withdraw regulation, it's to replace the judges with some who have some common sense.
Every regulation raises the barrier to new competition, and drives up the cost of insurance policies.
No, every regulation blocks another insurance company from shafting another customer. Left alone, they will repudiate every claim and hang you out to dry.
It wasn't always this way, google for "lodge doctors" if you want to learn how we once had medicine within just about everybody's reach,
In the days when the medical fraternity still had some shreds of decency and humanity left, they did indeed provide healthcare at affordable prices. But once they started being paid 10x or 100x the average, they became too used to the extra money to be bothred their ass about caring for the poor and needy. (There are of course some notable exceptions, I'm happy to say; doctors who still regard the Hippocratic Oath with some degree of reverence.)
until government intervened to make it as expensive as possible.
And who voted in the governments who did this? The US population. And who paid for the campaigns of the politicians thereby elected? Good ol' American industry.
It's not the cops' job to keep us safe
Actually, in a civilised country, it is. The United States is an exception in that regard. In some countries they are called civic guards, and their job is to protect the people from the government.
Regulation is the mantra of the robber barons, because it's regulation that protects them from competition.
Right. Corporations love to pay politicians to regulate in favor of Business. Privatization is the mantra of extreme right-wing fascist fundamentalist nutcases and crackpots who believe corporations inherently do a job better than the state. Privatizing prisons or the police, for example, is utter lunacy because the corporations' objectives are profit, not the control of offenders or the protection of society.
Stand on the backs of the workers, demanding that they fruit of their labors be taken away and given to others... this is also known as slavery.
No, it's called Capitalism.
For instance, U.S. unemployment at 8.2% is higher than the U.S. military expenditure as fraction of GDP. But what conclusions can you expect to draw from it?
The conclusion that you don't have a clue what real unemployment is like. Spain has 20%. Ireland has 17%. Even that is survivable. Once unemployment goes over 50%, you're headed towards social collapse; the same applies if your military budget exceeds 50% of GDP.
8.2% is unpleasant for the country (and of course disastrous for the individuals affected), but it's not a catastrophe.
$2.4 billion higher last year, [...]. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent."
Actually 9.6%. But if it had paid that additional US tax, it would have paid $5.7Bn on profits of $34.2Bn, which is 16.7%
Personally, I think about 10% is a fair and reasonable corporate tax rate, and 16.7% is too high.
But then, I think 10% is a fair and reasonable personal income tax rate...
Adding features is not necessarily a good thing.
No, but adding a feature which would beat or rival the competition (Word) is surely A Good Thing.
But neither OO nor LO appears interested in using named styles professionally. The absence of a style margin (à la Word) is so glaring an omission that it makes Word the de facto interface for editing with styles. The inability of OO/LO to show all styles at a glance is what forces me to recommend Word to clients who need to edit their authors' documents. When I raised this with some OO/LO people they were seriously unable to understand what a style margin would be used for (editing documents, duuh), and suggested instead that if I wanted to see what style was used for a block, I could always right-click (or hover, or something). But professional editors need to see the styles used for whole screensful (even whole pages) at a glance, and until OO/LO can do this, it's a dead duck in the publishing business.
Simples.