Sunbird/Lightning takes care of the Calendar part. There are plenty of Exchange replacements
My chances of using an alternative mail client as long as it is truly a drop-in replacement for Outlook, including contacts and calendaring (or can be made so with plugins/extensions): 100%
My chances of convincing the business to replace Exchange with anything else, let alone something that isn't 100% drop-in replacement and utterly transparent to the users: 0%.
This isn't about Exchange replacements, this is about Outlook replacements. For me to rid myself of Outlook (oh, happy day!) I either have to find something that supports all Outlook's features and requires zero work from the systems department (and is zero cost), or move to a company that doesn't use it. As annoying as Outlook is, that last option is a little on the extreme side.
Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.
Do you have a source for that number, or did you just make it up? I only ask as 100% of the people I know who use Outlook do so for the Exchange calendaring features. For them Thunderbird really isn't a viable option.
Believe me I'd love for it to be, I hate Outlook with a passion (not that I'm overly keen on Thunderbird either to be honest, although it's the best GUI mail client I've used on Windows, that really isn't saying much)
Winows folks would love to have that kind of reliability;-)
Actually, this Windows user prefers not to waste all that electricity having the computer sat switched on doing nothing while he's asleep, watching TV, out with friends, etc...
But I don't want an Exchange replacement, I want an Outlook replacement. I don't use Exchange, I use Outlook because someone else decided that the company was going to use Exchange.
Why is it my job (metaphorically speaking) to ensure those who are disabled can use my facilities? Why isn't it their job to somehow adapt?
They are adapting - they use assisstive technologies like screen readers. The law essentially says that you have to meet them halfway, because they can't come all the way to you. Screen readers aren't magic, and they're not string AI, they need pages to be built within certain guidelines or they can't do their job properly.
As for why the law exists, your attitude and that of others like you is why: because there will always be certain people who simply don't care enough about their fellow human beings to do the right thing.
Let me turn the question around, and ask this: why do you not want to take a little more time doing your job to help potentially hundreds of thousands of people world-wide live their lives a little more easily? What does it cost you to do this?
Yes I would. I would say that that's an extraordinary claim with extremely far-reaching, grave consequences if true. (Not the second claim, obviously, but the first)
I would expect Google or any other business to want to see some proof of that first claim before running ads containing it. In fact if someone had proof, I'd expect the news to be broken somewhere other than an advert on Google...
Also, does anyone else share the feeling that the extra commentaries and features on DVDs are pretty much completely worthless?
I generally skim through the extras; deleted scenes and out-takes I usually watch, making of and commentaries never. As someone else said, it kind of spoils the magic when I know how it was done. I know the wires are there, but that doesn't mean I want to see them.
And once again we see how bad a car analogy can be - even if I've installed and used Vista, as long as any materials I received (eg disk, manual, etc) are in good condition MS loses nothing by swapping my Vista licence for an XP one and exchanging the disks.
Cars lose the value the moment they're driven out of the showroom.
The point is that you're supposed to disclose that sort of thing, although in this case it doesn't really matter. Now if the people behind the game were also owned/paid by the same company, that would need to be disclosed.
No it doesn't but then Microsoft would attack IBM with their patents and the whole thing would turn into the expensive legal version of Armageddon which I'm sure both companies would try to avoid.
Which is exactly what would happen if MS were to attack RedHat openly, surely. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I just really don't see the advantage to MS attacking RedHat (or any other Linux company) through a proxy over doing it openly, apart perhaps from avoiding some bad press. (Although in some quarters it would be *good* press, of course)
You're right, Linux is a kernel; but every single person I know refers to GNU/Linux distributions in the general as simply "Linux", in the same was as people (used to) talk of "NT" (technically a kernel - Windows NT is the OS), or talk of "Unix", etc.
Even here, you really should realise that 9 times out of 10 if someone says "Linux" they mean it in the context of a generic term for "a GNU/Linux-based operating system", which hardly rolls of the tongue...
Probably even better than Deus Ex, though that's a hard comparison to make for sure.
I love Deus Ex. (Don't talk to me about Deus Ex 2, it didn't happen).
But SS2 "probably" better?
Even now, 8 years on, from time to time I'll see something (a hallway in a building, the layout of a foyer, or just a feeling of a dark night) that sparks a little voice at the back of my mind: "Silence the discord..." Sure, I have memories of playing Deus Ex, but nothing as vivid or lasting.
I've sought out survival horror games and the like, and this is the only one that's actually creeped me out.
I'm biased. I love the genre, and the Thief games. But any list of "top X games of all time" that doesn't have either SS or SS2 in it is simply wrong.
Bad news about Bioshock by the way; I am severely tempted to get it, but the comparisons to SS2 have held me back, for fear that it simply won't measure up. From the sounds of it I may be right. (And yeah, I've played the demo, all 20 minutes or so of it; hardly enough to really judge)
supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
Yes. You service the computer, so that the computer can service the rest of us. Until such time as a computer is created that requires no maintenance at all, such will be the way of things. Thank you by the way - my job would be harder without people like you doing yours.
Even adding machines needed oiling and parts replacing sometimes.
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
Well I can't speak for you, but personally I'm a programmer. A large part of my job requires me to be sat at a keyboard, writing and modifying code. I guess it doesn't really matter where the PC itself is, as long as I have monitor, keyboard and mouse on my desk; I hardly ever use the CD drive. But I know that wasn't quite what you meant...
Actually, I could see someone trying to make a case that that's either obstructing the police or attempting to pervert the course of justice, assuming that you were caught for whatever it was that you're accused of.
Don't forget though that a number of things that are legal (eg carrying a crowbar while out and about) become illegal if you are engaged in a related crime (carrying that crowbar while breaking into a house becomes "going equipped").
Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client.
In 13 years of using email, Outlook 2000 is the worst email client I have ever used.
Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent with other apps, generally and within Office - ctrl-f is forward, ok, I'll stretch to that, but f4 is find? In other apps that don't/can't use ctrl-f, find is generally f3.
Outlook breaks mail threading - not just for the Outlook user, but for every single other person in the conversation. People rave about Gmail's conversation threading like it's something new, rather than something that even text-only mail clients were supporting in the early 90s.
Outlook's mail editor is unwieldy. It is hard or impossible in many mails to insert replies part-way through the body of the mail you're replying to. Sometimes it works, sometimes the blue "this bit is quoted" line just stays there, obscuring your reply or forcing you to top or bottom quote.
Outlook makes it very hard to view headers. Open the message, tools, options, (iirc) then scroll the headers in a tiny little pane.
No way to filter a mail to trash and mark it read and not be notified of its arrival. It went to trash for a reason - I don't want to read it. Please don't tell me I have mail when I effectively don't.
That's just the ones that I could think of off the top of my head when I really ought to be getting to bed. To my mind, Outlook (2000 at least, not used more modern versions) is a calendaring application which had email bolted on as an after thought. I had more pleasant mail experiences using mutt with procmail for filtering. To add insult to injury, not only am I forced to use it at work because of the calendaring, but no-one seems to bother to check people's calendars when booking meetings anyway.
People should have rights, except for when they don't
Of course. Freedom of expression must be limited to some degree in order to protect national secrets that could literally get people killed - eg the identities of undercover agents infiltrating gangs or foreign powers, etc.
I would argue that criminalising the possession of knowledge that could be useful to terrorists and other such criminals is so far the wrong side of the line as to be utterly abhorrent though. Any competent engineer or chemist, and a large number of physicists, physicians, biologists, historians, etc have as a matter of course knowledge that would be useful to terrorists. Hell, anyone with a physics degree could have a good crack at constructing a dirty nuke, given the right materials. Guess I'd better turn myself in.
given how much advertising it gets (I don't see daily RAZR stories here on Slashdot)
Well, I do see RAZR adverts pretty much daily here in the UK, but have yet to see any iPhone ads. That's not entirely fair I guess as it's not available for another month or so, but still.
No, it means they can't get a product they want. It doesn't mean that they can get the product on different terms than the rest of the world can.
It does indeed mean that, if Apple want to get into one of the world's largest mobile phone markets. Or they can stay outside and make significantly less money than they could; it's their choice. Meanwhile the competition will be developing and selling competing products without having to directly compete against Apple, giving them a chance to get entrenched.
Because the public as a whole are too bloody stupid - see for example cigarettes, the harmful effects of which have been common knowledge for decades and yet people still smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
Sunbird/Lightning takes care of the Calendar part. There are plenty of Exchange replacements
My chances of using an alternative mail client as long as it is truly a drop-in replacement for Outlook, including contacts and calendaring (or can be made so with plugins/extensions): 100%
My chances of convincing the business to replace Exchange with anything else, let alone something that isn't 100% drop-in replacement and utterly transparent to the users: 0%.
This isn't about Exchange replacements, this is about Outlook replacements. For me to rid myself of Outlook (oh, happy day!) I either have to find something that supports all Outlook's features and requires zero work from the systems department (and is zero cost), or move to a company that doesn't use it. As annoying as Outlook is, that last option is a little on the extreme side.
Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.
Do you have a source for that number, or did you just make it up? I only ask as 100% of the people I know who use Outlook do so for the Exchange calendaring features. For them Thunderbird really isn't a viable option.
Believe me I'd love for it to be, I hate Outlook with a passion (not that I'm overly keen on Thunderbird either to be honest, although it's the best GUI mail client I've used on Windows, that really isn't saying much)
Winows folks would love to have that kind of reliability ;-)
Actually, this Windows user prefers not to waste all that electricity having the computer sat switched on doing nothing while he's asleep, watching TV, out with friends, etc...
But I don't want an Exchange replacement, I want an Outlook replacement. I don't use Exchange, I use Outlook because someone else decided that the company was going to use Exchange.
Or maybe in a deodorant that tells your skin it's freezing so you don't sweat in the first place.
What, you don't have antiperspirants in your country already?
Why is it my job (metaphorically speaking) to ensure those who are disabled can use my facilities? Why isn't it their job to somehow adapt?
They are adapting - they use assisstive technologies like screen readers. The law essentially says that you have to meet them halfway, because they can't come all the way to you. Screen readers aren't magic, and they're not string AI, they need pages to be built within certain guidelines or they can't do their job properly.
As for why the law exists, your attitude and that of others like you is why: because there will always be certain people who simply don't care enough about their fellow human beings to do the right thing.
Let me turn the question around, and ask this: why do you not want to take a little more time doing your job to help potentially hundreds of thousands of people world-wide live their lives a little more easily? What does it cost you to do this?
Interesting. What exactly does that over-used quote have to do with the discussion at hand though?
Yes I would. I would say that that's an extraordinary claim with extremely far-reaching, grave consequences if true. (Not the second claim, obviously, but the first)
I would expect Google or any other business to want to see some proof of that first claim before running ads containing it. In fact if someone had proof, I'd expect the news to be broken somewhere other than an advert on Google...
No, they argue that having sex is a choice, and choosing sex outside of marriage (which necessarily includes homosexual sex) is sinful.
Well that's easily solved - permit same-sex marriage and the whole problem goes away.
Also, does anyone else share the feeling that the extra commentaries and features on DVDs are pretty much completely worthless?
I generally skim through the extras; deleted scenes and out-takes I usually watch, making of and commentaries never. As someone else said, it kind of spoils the magic when I know how it was done. I know the wires are there, but that doesn't mean I want to see them.
And once again we see how bad a car analogy can be - even if I've installed and used Vista, as long as any materials I received (eg disk, manual, etc) are in good condition MS loses nothing by swapping my Vista licence for an XP one and exchanging the disks.
Cars lose the value the moment they're driven out of the showroom.
The point is that you're supposed to disclose that sort of thing, although in this case it doesn't really matter. Now if the people behind the game were also owned/paid by the same company, that would need to be disclosed.
No it doesn't but then Microsoft would attack IBM with their patents and the whole thing would turn into the expensive legal version of Armageddon which I'm sure both companies would try to avoid.
Which is exactly what would happen if MS were to attack RedHat openly, surely. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I just really don't see the advantage to MS attacking RedHat (or any other Linux company) through a proxy over doing it openly, apart perhaps from avoiding some bad press. (Although in some quarters it would be *good* press, of course)
You're right, Linux is a kernel; but every single person I know refers to GNU/Linux distributions in the general as simply "Linux", in the same was as people (used to) talk of "NT" (technically a kernel - Windows NT is the OS), or talk of "Unix", etc.
Even here, you really should realise that 9 times out of 10 if someone says "Linux" they mean it in the context of a generic term for "a GNU/Linux-based operating system", which hardly rolls of the tongue...
Probably even better than Deus Ex, though that's a hard comparison to make for sure.
I love Deus Ex. (Don't talk to me about Deus Ex 2, it didn't happen).
But SS2 "probably" better?
Even now, 8 years on, from time to time I'll see something (a hallway in a building, the layout of a foyer, or just a feeling of a dark night) that sparks a little voice at the back of my mind: "Silence the discord..." Sure, I have memories of playing Deus Ex, but nothing as vivid or lasting.
I've sought out survival horror games and the like, and this is the only one that's actually creeped me out.
I'm biased. I love the genre, and the Thief games. But any list of "top X games of all time" that doesn't have either SS or SS2 in it is simply wrong.
Bad news about Bioshock by the way; I am severely tempted to get it, but the comparisons to SS2 have held me back, for fear that it simply won't measure up. From the sounds of it I may be right. (And yeah, I've played the demo, all 20 minutes or so of it; hardly enough to really judge)
Bioshock is not "dumbed down". I agree that it's way less complex than SS2 was
Forgot to use Preview, huh?
Please explain how something is simultaneously way less complex than its spiritual predecessor and not dumbed-down.
I'm not saying that it's a bad game, I'm just saying that that sentence is logically contradictory.
The implication is that if you piss off the wrong people, you could end up dead. Quite how that's surprising (let alone staggering) I don't know.
supposed to make everyones lives easier by helping the person. now look at it. walk into any corporate office and you'll see countless people (myself included) clicking on this and that to satisfy what the computer wants out of you. it feels like you are there to help the computer achieve uptimes, or defragged disks, getting rid of viruses, blocking ports, unblocking ports...
Yes. You service the computer, so that the computer can service the rest of us. Until such time as a computer is created that requires no maintenance at all, such will be the way of things. Thank you by the way - my job would be harder without people like you doing yours.
Even adding machines needed oiling and parts replacing sometimes.
why does the computer occupy the center of my desk? why isn't it tucked away in the utility closet?
Well I can't speak for you, but personally I'm a programmer. A large part of my job requires me to be sat at a keyboard, writing and modifying code. I guess it doesn't really matter where the PC itself is, as long as I have monitor, keyboard and mouse on my desk; I hardly ever use the CD drive. But I know that wasn't quite what you meant...
Or how about the simple "Sinus of ninety degrees cents"?
Is that that new-fangled nasal trigonometry that I keep hearing about?
Actually, I could see someone trying to make a case that that's either obstructing the police or attempting to pervert the course of justice, assuming that you were caught for whatever it was that you're accused of.
Don't forget though that a number of things that are legal (eg carrying a crowbar while out and about) become illegal if you are engaged in a related crime (carrying that crowbar while breaking into a house becomes "going equipped").
Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client.
In 13 years of using email, Outlook 2000 is the worst email client I have ever used.
Keyboard shortcuts are inconsistent with other apps, generally and within Office - ctrl-f is forward, ok, I'll stretch to that, but f4 is find? In other apps that don't/can't use ctrl-f, find is generally f3.
Outlook breaks mail threading - not just for the Outlook user, but for every single other person in the conversation. People rave about Gmail's conversation threading like it's something new, rather than something that even text-only mail clients were supporting in the early 90s.
Outlook's mail editor is unwieldy. It is hard or impossible in many mails to insert replies part-way through the body of the mail you're replying to. Sometimes it works, sometimes the blue "this bit is quoted" line just stays there, obscuring your reply or forcing you to top or bottom quote.
Outlook makes it very hard to view headers. Open the message, tools, options, (iirc) then scroll the headers in a tiny little pane.
No way to filter a mail to trash and mark it read and not be notified of its arrival. It went to trash for a reason - I don't want to read it. Please don't tell me I have mail when I effectively don't.
That's just the ones that I could think of off the top of my head when I really ought to be getting to bed. To my mind, Outlook (2000 at least, not used more modern versions) is a calendaring application which had email bolted on as an after thought. I had more pleasant mail experiences using mutt with procmail for filtering. To add insult to injury, not only am I forced to use it at work because of the calendaring, but no-one seems to bother to check people's calendars when booking meetings anyway.
Of course. Freedom of expression must be limited to some degree in order to protect national secrets that could literally get people killed - eg the identities of undercover agents infiltrating gangs or foreign powers, etc.
I would argue that criminalising the possession of knowledge that could be useful to terrorists and other such criminals is so far the wrong side of the line as to be utterly abhorrent though. Any competent engineer or chemist, and a large number of physicists, physicians, biologists, historians, etc have as a matter of course knowledge that would be useful to terrorists. Hell, anyone with a physics degree could have a good crack at constructing a dirty nuke, given the right materials. Guess I'd better turn myself in.
given how much advertising it gets (I don't see daily RAZR stories here on Slashdot)
Well, I do see RAZR adverts pretty much daily here in the UK, but have yet to see any iPhone ads. That's not entirely fair I guess as it's not available for another month or so, but still.
No, it means they can't get a product they want. It doesn't mean that they can get the product on different terms than the rest of the world can.
It does indeed mean that, if Apple want to get into one of the world's largest mobile phone markets. Or they can stay outside and make significantly less money than they could; it's their choice. Meanwhile the competition will be developing and selling competing products without having to directly compete against Apple, giving them a chance to get entrenched.
Because the public as a whole are too bloody stupid - see for example cigarettes, the harmful effects of which have been common knowledge for decades and yet people still smoke.