It doesn't matter how much msft products suck. Msft wants to create a world where you *have* to have msft - if you want to use computers.
Anything other than msft won't handle the OOXML, or the new multi-media formats. And only the newer versions of msft's OS will run the new applications, and have up-to-date drivers.
If you have that level of control, who cares if everybody hates your products?
If the poster can prove that any factual statements he made, are true, then he has a strong defense.
But, at what cost? Any well financed institution can easily run your legal expenses into the the tens of thousands - and very possibly more.
Then there is the issue of your time, if you have a full-time job, or if you are full time student, or parent; you just may not the time to spend the next few years in the court room. Big institutions know this.
The new Koffice is supposed to be pretty good. Should be out within a year. From what I've been reading, it is much faster than OpenOffice. Google stuff should be getting better also.
I suppose if you can get by with abiword and gnumeric, you'll be alright.
I have a 1.6gz/512mb 5 year old box. I dual boot debian and w2k. I play movies on it all the time, no problem at all.
My machine if very responsive, on both sides. I would buy a new PC, if I had any reason to do so. But, since I'm not a gamer, everything works just fine as it is.
For example, you know a utility company is doing something illegal. You put it in your blog. The utility company files a lawsuit against you. You fight the lawsuit, but go broke in the process, so the suit is never settled. This will send the message to other would-be bloggers: "don't screw with the utility company."
It is no problem for the utility company to drop $250K on a lawsuit. Can you say the same?
Okay, this guy decided to fight, and he won. But, what about the other 99% of the time when the blogger just says "f**k it" and removed the blog entry? What about huge legal fees that bloggoers may be forced to pay, just to use their constitutional rights?
What about the chilling effect that this bogus litigation has on other bloggers?
Of course it's not an open standard. MSFT haters like you shot it down for recommendation
I think you are confusing cause and effect. People like me shot down OOXML because msft refuses to make OOXML an actual open standard. Much of OOXML is closed.
"ALL my applications run. No DRM or other weird limitations. I've changed almost all the hardware (CPU, mother board, power supply, CD, DVD, Memory, Video Card, Sound card, network card...) and the system just prompts for news drivers...a reboot...I'm up. No reinstalls in years"
I have the exact same experience. Win2K is also lighter than XP, and *much* lighter than Vista: 1ghz cpu and 512mb ram is plenty for Win2k. Also, Win2k doesn't have that awful fisher-price interface.
Most of the most recent windows software works with Win2K. The newest version of quicktime doesn't work. So I use VLC for quicktime movies. I don't know if msie7, or newest msft media-player, will work, don't care either.
The best anybody can say about Vista, it seems, is that it doesn't suck all that much worse than XP.
October 25, 2007: "Microsoft said sales of its Windows Vista OS experienced double-digit growth through multi-year business contracts, and demand for Microsoft Office, Windows Server and SQL Server was also high."
I think KDE is pulling away from gnome anywhere. Personally, I use IceWM. If you don't have hardware resources to burn, you may be happier with lighter DE.
This is slashdot. Everybody here knows that OOXML is just another msft attempt to control the standard. OOXML is not open, and everybody here knows it.
I happen to think that mono and evolution suck. I'll bet a lot of other people think so also.
Why doesn't Miguel just go work for msft? If Miguel is so happy sucking up to msft, and working with msft to ruin F/OSS; then I think that F/OSS community would be just as happy to see Miguel take his suckie dev tools elsewhere.
From my experience, friends and family, who are outside of the IT field, don't really understand what I do. I have this to be a major problem with the networking approach.
Also, available jobs often go right to the recruiters, nobody knows about them before that.
Networking services like linkedin are a joke.
So if job ads are not the right approach, what is?
IT recruiters are notorious for not knowing anything about technology. All they do is match key-words. Certainly they don't consider stuff like:"hmm, this guy has an aptitude for music, might make a good programmer."
IT recruiters is rarely done for the company that does the hireing. Often it's more like multi-level marketing. I'm working three contracts deep right now. A company doesn't want an outside recruiter to evaluate soft skills, instead they just hand the recruiter a long list of products knowledge that they want.
I also think there are just too many people trying to break in to IT today, and you can't count on an IT person staying very long, and you don't know when your own needs will change. Train somebody in SAP, then that person gets a better job else-where. Or, your company is purchased by another company that doesn't use SAP, or the entire department is getting offshored next year.
There was a time that there were true entry level jobs in customer service, or operations. I have a friend who started as an operator way back when, now he earns over $100K/year as a sysadmin. The guy is smart, but never even graduated high-school. But, as you said, those days are gone. Those entry level jobs have been offshored.
You can not get a decent job until you have experience, and with much of entry level gone, you can't get experience.
You sound like an academian. Here in the real world, in IT, it all comes down to x years of experince with y products. Employers, and academians, give lip service to all that stuff about communication skills, and critical thinking, etc. But, when it comes to actually hiring somebody, they want a long laundry list of experience with several specific products. Take a look at the job ads, if you don't believe me.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter how much msft products suck. Msft wants to create a world where you *have* to have msft - if you want to use computers.
Anything other than msft won't handle the OOXML, or the new multi-media formats. And only the newer versions of msft's OS will run the new applications, and have up-to-date drivers.
If you have that level of control, who cares if everybody hates your products?
If you want something to grin about: take a look at a 5 year chart that compares: msft, aaple, rhat (or whatever it is now), and goog.
If the poster can prove that any factual statements he made, are true, then he has a strong defense.
But, at what cost? Any well financed institution can easily run your legal expenses into the the tens of thousands - and very possibly more.
Then there is the issue of your time, if you have a full-time job, or if you are full time student, or parent; you just may not the time to spend the next few years in the court room. Big institutions know this.
These lawsuits have a chilling effect on others who might want to expose wrong-doing.
to google.
Google is in a very different business. Lookup "vendor lock" and "network effect" on wikipedia.
Accouring to wikipedia
I think that's about twice as long as the original Star Trek.
The new Koffice is supposed to be pretty good. Should be out within a year. From what I've been reading, it is much faster than OpenOffice. Google stuff should be getting better also.
I suppose if you can get by with abiword and gnumeric, you'll be alright.
I have a 1.6gz/512mb 5 year old box. I dual boot debian and w2k. I play movies on it all the time, no problem at all.
My machine if very responsive, on both sides. I would buy a new PC, if I had any reason to do so. But, since I'm not a gamer, everything works just fine as it is.
If you are in charge of purchasing IT for a government, or a school, and you want free stuff from msft, just announce that you are going to use Linux.
Presto! Msft reps at your door! The reps have boat loads of software, hardware, training, service techs, and bribe money.
Better yet, get Linux on hardware that's much too low-end for Vista, get a major hardware upgrade, at msft's expense, then go back to Linux.
Or, just take a big fat bribe from msft, and tell the government that Linux, ODF, whatever, won't work.
I don't know why your response post goes on and on about it not being censorship, when I never claimed that anyway. You may want to re-read my post.
At least, it works most of the time.
For example, you know a utility company is doing something illegal. You put it in your blog. The utility company files a lawsuit against you. You fight the lawsuit, but go broke in the process, so the suit is never settled. This will send the message to other would-be bloggers: "don't screw with the utility company."
It is no problem for the utility company to drop $250K on a lawsuit. Can you say the same?
Okay, this guy decided to fight, and he won. But, what about the other 99% of the time when the blogger just says "f**k it" and removed the blog entry? What about huge legal fees that bloggoers may be forced to pay, just to use their constitutional rights?
What about the chilling effect that this bogus litigation has on other bloggers?
IMO: the system working is debatable.
http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/2007/07/the-last-one-pe.html
It sure seems like it to me.
What company is most threatened by google and "web 2.0"? And isn't infoworld a ziff-davis publication i.e. a msft mouthpiece?
Of course it's not an open standard. MSFT haters like you shot it down for recommendation
I think you are confusing cause and effect. People like me shot down OOXML because msft refuses to make OOXML an actual open standard. Much of OOXML is closed.
"ALL my applications run. No DRM or other weird limitations. I've changed almost all the hardware (CPU, mother board, power supply, CD, DVD, Memory, Video Card, Sound card, network card...) and the system just prompts for news drivers...a reboot...I'm up. No reinstalls in years"
I have the exact same experience. Win2K is also lighter than XP, and *much* lighter than Vista: 1ghz cpu and 512mb ram is plenty for Win2k. Also, Win2k doesn't have that awful fisher-price interface.
Most of the most recent windows software works with Win2K. The newest version of quicktime doesn't work. So I use VLC for quicktime movies. I don't know if msie7, or newest msft media-player, will work, don't care either.
The best anybody can say about Vista, it seems, is that it doesn't suck all that much worse than XP.
October 25, 2007: "Microsoft said sales of its Windows Vista OS experienced double-digit growth through multi-year business contracts, and demand for Microsoft Office, Windows Server and SQL Server was also high."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138958-c,companynews/article.html
I think KDE is pulling away from gnome anywhere. Personally, I use IceWM. If you don't have hardware resources to burn, you may be happier with lighter DE.
This is slashdot. Everybody here knows that OOXML is just another msft attempt to control the standard. OOXML is not open, and everybody here knows it.
I happen to think that mono and evolution suck. I'll bet a lot of other people think so also.
Why doesn't Miguel just go work for msft? If Miguel is so happy sucking up to msft, and working with msft to ruin F/OSS; then I think that F/OSS community would be just as happy to see Miguel take his suckie dev tools elsewhere.
Does anybody even use mono?
From my experience, friends and family, who are outside of the IT field, don't really understand what I do. I have this to be a major problem with the networking approach.
Also, available jobs often go right to the recruiters, nobody knows about them before that.
Networking services like linkedin are a joke.
So if job ads are not the right approach, what is?
IT recruiters are notorious for not knowing anything about technology. All they do is match key-words. Certainly they don't consider stuff like:"hmm, this guy has an aptitude for music, might make a good programmer."
IT recruiters is rarely done for the company that does the hireing. Often it's more like multi-level marketing. I'm working three contracts deep right now. A company doesn't want an outside recruiter to evaluate soft skills, instead they just hand the recruiter a long list of products knowledge that they want.
I also think there are just too many people trying to break in to IT today, and you can't count on an IT person staying very long, and you don't know when your own needs will change. Train somebody in SAP, then that person gets a better job else-where. Or, your company is purchased by another company that doesn't use SAP, or the entire department is getting offshored next year.
Robin Williams plays video games. Many more just "attended" college which may mean one semester. Still there are worth-while entries.
Silicon Valley.
I don't know anything about Casper. Casper the friendly ghost town?
There was a time that there were true entry level jobs in customer service, or operations. I have a friend who started as an operator way back when, now he earns over $100K/year as a sysadmin. The guy is smart, but never even graduated high-school. But, as you said, those days are gone. Those entry level jobs have been offshored.
You can not get a decent job until you have experience, and with much of entry level gone, you can't get experience.
You sound like an academian. Here in the real world, in IT, it all comes down to x years of experince with y products. Employers, and academians, give lip service to all that stuff about communication skills, and critical thinking, etc. But, when it comes to actually hiring somebody, they want a long laundry list of experience with several specific products. Take a look at the job ads, if you don't believe me.