I've used all 3... Office 2003, Office 2007, OO.o 3.1.... and never seen Office 2007 to be particularly slow.
Yes, you need much beefier hardware to run Office 2007, than you need to run 2003 or OO.
At bare minimum dual core 2.7 GHz on a 64-bit proc, and 4GB of RAM
More is recommended, putting any less on your workstation is asking for trouble.
More CPU power and more RAM is strongly recommended, especially when running on Vista.
The beefier hardware is part of the cost of running the latest and greatest versions.
It sounds like you might have a hardware problem..:)
I always thought that was more about teasing the user (E.g. more "evil" than "insane"), getting the user to click as much as possible to get at the bits they want to read, and to have to stay on the site as long as possible, rather than simply reading the text off a plain text page.
That way, while they're fighting with the site to get at the next juicy bits of content, they stay longer and see more advertising.
When users see more advertising, it may increase the click through and conversion rates... and therefore, profits for the site operator, further encouraging said behavior.
Also, by using flash instead of text, noone can easily paste much in the way excerpts from the site to their blog. Thus reducing the likelihood of users just reading a blog's summary, without visiting the site.
Yes, that was dumb. But it would have been a lot smarter if it just sounded an alarm to alert the driver.
Or if instead of imposing breaking, it prevented a stopped bus from accelerating if there was something directly in front of it.
The problem inherent is not the safety sensor, but the 'action' wired to the safety sensor.
It's a bad idea for a safety device to FORCE a vehicle to do something that might be unsafe in some situations (such as slam the breaks), the decision should be left to the driver if possible.
At least until the technology is a lot better and can determine the speed of the vehicle ahead, whether there's a vehicle near the rear, and whether there's anyone standing up the on the bus that might be injured, and act more intelligently...
e.g. forced slowing to minimize the probability damage incurred to the vehicle ahead, the vehicle behind, and the bus itself, based on physics modelling of expected collision based on measurements taken.
That is, until onboard computers are smart enough to actually drive the vehicle, they shouldn't be allowed to preempt the operator and make decisions that are likely to be bad in any common situation.
Unless all video footage is systemically destroyed after the coach reviews it, and the neutral driving coach is overseas, and therefore unavailable to subpoena as a witness....
Well, a single lost sale can be bad. Unless it can be demonstrated that the improvements to form have caused so many more additional sales to occur, that the small number of lost sales wouldn't have a negative impact.
A company as large as eBay is unlikely to care much about a small number of lost sales. It's just "part of the cost" of the redesign, part of the cost of doing business.
However, it may make the redesign more expensive in the long run than otherwise anticipated, esp. if eBay's response (or lack of response) to customer complaints (or lack of appearance to care) hurts their reputation; causing sellers to seek other venues.
I would expect sellers on the site care a lot more about some people being unable to read their description, and their item selling for less (due to fewer bidders), than eBay does.
It may lower seller revenues, and (as a result) increase their cost of using eBay as a result....
Much like eBay has already done with frequent fee increases. (Though note: there are still sellers on eBay after fee increases, it's not like there's a viable competitor for them to move to.)
But a lot of people seem to prefer keeping the flash, even if it compromises function a bit.
The Google home page design philosophy seems to be the exception to the rule, most businesses follow the Yahoo philosophy, meaning more flash = better, sometimes even better than working 100% correctly.
Wanting things to just work and be simple, fast, and efficient as possible seems to be a totally nerdy/geeky thing.
Most of the marketing and business people who make actual decisions seem to think flashiness is really really important, even if it means the site's coding will be much more complex, a good bit slower/less efficient, more memory hungry, and have some bugs.
The problem here is there are open standards for web sites, published by the W3C. HTML4, CSS, DOM.
If eBay would follow the standards and perform some basic testing on the common browsers which all happen to be easily available for testing, they could assure the site would work for everyone.
They're going beyond the standards and trying to do some browser-specific scripting no doubt, or utilizing features that are buggy in some browsers and beyond the basic standard.
All this to try and be cute. And make their pages feel more dynamic.
If they weren't doing this, nobody would be complaining, noone's experience or ability to use the site for it's intended purpose would be getting degraded.
Expecting users to switch browsers or clear cache to see page text is absurd.
If users can't see description text, they have a bug in their application.
By the way. I'm not at all pleased with the new eBay design.
They think they're being all fancy, cute, and Web 2.0-like i'm sure.
And in the process... forgetting about the quality of the user experience and ease of use (which includes not having to switch browsers, clear cache, cookies, re-login, and other voodoo "self help" techniques), which basically are hallmarks of a low-quality, poorly done, poorly tested web site.
And straight up, that sucks, and shows unprofessional behavior on eBay's part IMO.
It's not the least bit hard to hire and train CSRs who won't blame the user for everything, and who'll actually help determine what's going wrong, and get the user in touch with someone to report the bugs....
Blame the user, or their choice of browser is the absolute worst thing they could possibly do.
In a decade when standards-based is the norm, and REAL web-sites are tested and qualified with the major browsers, including IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, and any malfunction of the site is the site's problem, not just the complaining users' problem!
When I say 'bricked'; I mean, bricked as far as the unauthorized user is concerned.
E.g. Useless to anyone except the rightful owner.
The device basically is worthless; the chance of the rightful owner getting it back and being able to unlock it is almost negligible.
If I said 'locked out' instead of bricked; it would imply the unauthorized user might be able to figure out a way to unlock it.
I'm saying Amazon should secure the device strongly enough that there's no way an unauthorized user could unlock it, even if one of the conspirators works for Amazon and has technical specs and complete insider knowledge of the device.
E.g. should be impossible to tamper with or use some secret backdoor to defeat the lock.
Botnets do not have to be self propagating.
The very first botnets were on IRC.
Where in fact, the machines weren't compromised.
The owners of the machines actually ran the code (commonly Eggdrop) and voluntarily joined their bots to the botnet. They weren't even malicious.
The term "botnet" does not imply a network of compromised hosts, or even malware. It refers to a network of robotic agents that are in communication with each other.
Botnets were commonly used to form shared "party lines", to allow people to DCC CHAT their Eggdrop bots and communicate with people visiting from other channels, and other IRC networks.
At first, these were used only for communication, people joined the botnets to chat with each other, there was no way to control other bots.
At some point, some of the botnets got pretty large...
Some of the botnets had a feature where a trusted "bot owner" or "bot master" as they were called, could be made "botnet admins" by bots they were peering with... allowing these botnet admins to command other hosts to do certain things on IRC
Some botnets had member nodes run scripts that were able to do things like pingflood a user off IRC.
This would be commonly used if some bad boy had taken over a popular channel.
Ping flooding a user off IRC is undesired by the victim, but one time, it may have been used to encounter other hacking techniques the "victim" of the flood had been using to sabotage IRC channels.
At some point, some IRC botnets started getting formed whose sole purpose was to flood.
Eventually the term escaped IRC... other types of botnets started forming like Peer to Peer ones, smart ones that automatically added nodes (instead of two botnet admins deciding to interconnect), and botnets whose sole purpose was to accept commands from a central point.
But the point is, the notion of a "Bot" and a "Botnet" has an origin that causes the term to not imply self replication.
No. Manually compromising servers and setting up nginx on them to serve files does not make it a botnet. "Botnet" or not has nothing to do with infection vector.
It refers to compromised machines that have a certain 'intelligence' so that they form a network of their own, and allow the botmaster to easily deploy new instructions to them all.
And all bots will execute the new instructions automatically.
Manually compromising servers and installing a tool that causes all those servers to rendezvous with or receive commands from a central control point to execute instructions would make them a botnet.
The key question would be: do the compromised servers also run a program that periodically polls a control station for commands, or does the script kiddie manually command individual compromised servers?
If the servers only run nginx to serve files, or just periodically pull new files to serve from other servers (even a central one), then no, they're not a botnet, even if they've been backdoored so the blackhat can come back later and upload new malware files.
To be a botnet, there must be a button where a botmaster can deploy instructions or code to a control point, and the nodes will automatically perform the instructions directed.
Time to switch to FreeBSD, TrustedBSD, and hardened OpenSolaris:)
Oh, and to be secure, you really should have an IDS on your network anyways, use strong unique passwords for each system (random >10 character passwords), and never store those passwords on a computer, except the hash in the system password file.
Ideally they should just force you to authenticate with your existing account before you can disassociate/re-associate the device.
E.g. the moment you click 'disassociate', the device actually becomes bricked until the device password is entered.
When you associate with a new account, the password you type becomes the 'device' password.
There ought to also be a way to password-lock the kindle as you can with cell phones. And they should take care to make sure a thief can't easily defeat the device password.
In other words, Amazon is basically saying "f*** you, unless given a subpoena requiring us by law to assist, we will not."
Seems to be the corporate motto these days, only help track down lost/stolen things when legally required to do so.
It's already standard fair for asking companies to release any info. Got ripped off by an eBay seller or paypal contact you sent $$$ to and want to sue?
Good luck getting any info out of eBay / PayPal themselves, even as much as an address or phone number for you to send a letter to.... (without a subpoena).
It's basically just a cover-your-ass, "me-first" strategy. A criminal could conceivably sue Amazon over releasing info that lead to their identification, I guess.
Or maybe the "criminal" turns out to be an ex-spouse or ex-girlfriend who didn't actually steal the device, but the boyfriend's a stalker and wants to figure out where she's hiding, OR to deactivate the kindle he had given her as revenge after the bad breakup.
On Terminal Servers you actually have to either do this or take a command-line action to place the server in Install Mode to allow applications to be installed.
Outside of terminal servers though... I think the only thing i've used "Add/remove" to add are Windows components accessible through that UI.
It's not a given that MS wants to do everything possible to destroy Linux, at least not immediately.
Having a (bad) competitor can be better than not having one at all, as it's a useful tool to deny having a monopoly. They can use this as an example to show to the EU commissisions in order to prove they're not trying to stop Linux from competing.
Linux can help MS... it can get companies that are still using proprietary UNIX such as HP-UX, AIX on SPARCs or Itaniums to switch to Xeon over time. Adopting x86 architecture with a familiar UNIX-like OS is the first step towards maybe someday switching those to Windows 2008...
Also, when makers of various gadgets build devices that contain embedded open source software, MS would probably prefer that the popular devices interoperate with Windows (in some cases, using MS technologies), and not just Apple...
And there's a remote possibility that one day, a version of Windows could be based on an open source kernel <G>
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I've used all 3... Office 2003, Office 2007, OO.o 3.1.... and never seen Office 2007 to be particularly slow.
Yes, you need much beefier hardware to run Office 2007, than you need to run 2003 or OO. At bare minimum dual core 2.7 GHz on a 64-bit proc, and 4GB of RAM
More is recommended, putting any less on your workstation is asking for trouble.
More CPU power and more RAM is strongly recommended, especially when running on Vista. The beefier hardware is part of the cost of running the latest and greatest versions.
It sounds like you might have a hardware problem.. :)
I want to see them succeed beautifully first, and to actually show meaningful improvement after the switch. :)
I'm all for switching to open source software. But MS Office works extremely well. And OO.o is no Firefox.
The problem is not that eBay's site is broken with elaborate non-standards-compliant proxy servers.
The problem is their site is broken even when using plain common browsers running no special plugins, e.g. the common configurations.
I always thought that was more about teasing the user (E.g. more "evil" than "insane"), getting the user to click as much as possible to get at the bits they want to read, and to have to stay on the site as long as possible, rather than simply reading the text off a plain text page.
That way, while they're fighting with the site to get at the next juicy bits of content, they stay longer and see more advertising.
When users see more advertising, it may increase the click through and conversion rates... and therefore, profits for the site operator, further encouraging said behavior.
Also, by using flash instead of text, noone can easily paste much in the way excerpts from the site to their blog. Thus reducing the likelihood of users just reading a blog's summary, without visiting the site.
Yes, that was dumb. But it would have been a lot smarter if it just sounded an alarm to alert the driver.
Or if instead of imposing breaking, it prevented a stopped bus from accelerating if there was something directly in front of it.
The problem inherent is not the safety sensor, but the 'action' wired to the safety sensor.
It's a bad idea for a safety device to FORCE a vehicle to do something that might be unsafe in some situations (such as slam the breaks), the decision should be left to the driver if possible.
At least until the technology is a lot better and can determine the speed of the vehicle ahead, whether there's a vehicle near the rear, and whether there's anyone standing up the on the bus that might be injured, and act more intelligently...
e.g. forced slowing to minimize the probability damage incurred to the vehicle ahead, the vehicle behind, and the bus itself, based on physics modelling of expected collision based on measurements taken.
That is, until onboard computers are smart enough to actually drive the vehicle, they shouldn't be allowed to preempt the operator and make decisions that are likely to be bad in any common situation.
People on the road may drive less safely with such a device due to Risk compensation.
They perceive driving as being less risky, because they have an electronic device to 'save' them.
There's also a possibility that when it malfunctions, it could cause accidents.
People could come to rely on the device too much and become dangerous when they're driving their spouse's older car that doesn't have the device.
Unless all video footage is systemically destroyed after the coach reviews it, and the neutral driving coach is overseas, and therefore unavailable to subpoena as a witness....
I will never put a camera in my car that wirelessly transmits to anyone. I think a lot of people would have problems with this...
So you never have a cell phone with a built-in camera that you ever place in your car...? :)
Except one of their partners is Drivecam.com
Drivecam advertises a behavior-based risk mitigation program for fleet drivers.
And their site lists a bunch of private companies that utilize their technology.
I think the idea is right, but the order should be:
Well, a single lost sale can be bad. Unless it can be demonstrated that the improvements to form have caused so many more additional sales to occur, that the small number of lost sales wouldn't have a negative impact.
A company as large as eBay is unlikely to care much about a small number of lost sales. It's just "part of the cost" of the redesign, part of the cost of doing business.
However, it may make the redesign more expensive in the long run than otherwise anticipated, esp. if eBay's response (or lack of response) to customer complaints (or lack of appearance to care) hurts their reputation; causing sellers to seek other venues.
I would expect sellers on the site care a lot more about some people being unable to read their description, and their item selling for less (due to fewer bidders), than eBay does.
It may lower seller revenues, and (as a result) increase their cost of using eBay as a result....
Much like eBay has already done with frequent fee increases. (Though note: there are still sellers on eBay after fee increases, it's not like there's a viable competitor for them to move to.)
Actually, I think XP rules the roost, for the time being, not Vista.
From the average desktop user's point of view, XP is a lot more functional and usable than Linux.
On the other hand, IIS doesn't rule the roost when it comes to web server software.
But web server software has a slightly different audience than Desktop applications do.
I would agree with that.
But a lot of people seem to prefer keeping the flash, even if it compromises function a bit.
The Google home page design philosophy seems to be the exception to the rule, most businesses follow the Yahoo philosophy, meaning more flash = better, sometimes even better than working 100% correctly.
Wanting things to just work and be simple, fast, and efficient as possible seems to be a totally nerdy/geeky thing.
Most of the marketing and business people who make actual decisions seem to think flashiness is really really important, even if it means the site's coding will be much more complex, a good bit slower/less efficient, more memory hungry, and have some bugs.
The problem here is there are open standards for web sites, published by the W3C. HTML4, CSS, DOM.
If eBay would follow the standards and perform some basic testing on the common browsers which all happen to be easily available for testing, they could assure the site would work for everyone.
They're going beyond the standards and trying to do some browser-specific scripting no doubt, or utilizing features that are buggy in some browsers and beyond the basic standard.
All this to try and be cute. And make their pages feel more dynamic.
If they weren't doing this, nobody would be complaining, noone's experience or ability to use the site for it's intended purpose would be getting degraded.
Expecting users to switch browsers or clear cache to see page text is absurd.
If users can't see description text, they have a bug in their application.
By the way. I'm not at all pleased with the new eBay design.
They think they're being all fancy, cute, and Web 2.0-like i'm sure.
And in the process... forgetting about the quality of the user experience and ease of use (which includes not having to switch browsers, clear cache, cookies, re-login, and other voodoo "self help" techniques), which basically are hallmarks of a low-quality, poorly done, poorly tested web site.
And straight up, that sucks, and shows unprofessional behavior on eBay's part IMO.
It's not the least bit hard to hire and train CSRs who won't blame the user for everything, and who'll actually help determine what's going wrong, and get the user in touch with someone to report the bugs....
Blame the user, or their choice of browser is the absolute worst thing they could possibly do. In a decade when standards-based is the norm, and REAL web-sites are tested and qualified with the major browsers, including IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, and any malfunction of the site is the site's problem, not just the complaining users' problem!
When I say 'bricked'; I mean, bricked as far as the unauthorized user is concerned.
E.g. Useless to anyone except the rightful owner.
The device basically is worthless; the chance of the rightful owner getting it back and being able to unlock it is almost negligible.
If I said 'locked out' instead of bricked; it would imply the unauthorized user might be able to figure out a way to unlock it.
I'm saying Amazon should secure the device strongly enough that there's no way an unauthorized user could unlock it, even if one of the conspirators works for Amazon and has technical specs and complete insider knowledge of the device.
E.g. should be impossible to tamper with or use some secret backdoor to defeat the lock.
Botnets do not have to be self propagating. The very first botnets were on IRC.
Where in fact, the machines weren't compromised. The owners of the machines actually ran the code (commonly Eggdrop) and voluntarily joined their bots to the botnet. They weren't even malicious.
The term "botnet" does not imply a network of compromised hosts, or even malware. It refers to a network of robotic agents that are in communication with each other.
Botnets were commonly used to form shared "party lines", to allow people to DCC CHAT their Eggdrop bots and communicate with people visiting from other channels, and other IRC networks.
At first, these were used only for communication, people joined the botnets to chat with each other, there was no way to control other bots.
At some point, some of the botnets got pretty large...
Some of the botnets had a feature where a trusted "bot owner" or "bot master" as they were called, could be made "botnet admins" by bots they were peering with... allowing these botnet admins to command other hosts to do certain things on IRC
Some botnets had member nodes run scripts that were able to do things like pingflood a user off IRC.
This would be commonly used if some bad boy had taken over a popular channel. Ping flooding a user off IRC is undesired by the victim, but one time, it may have been used to encounter other hacking techniques the "victim" of the flood had been using to sabotage IRC channels.
At some point, some IRC botnets started getting formed whose sole purpose was to flood.
Eventually the term escaped IRC... other types of botnets started forming like Peer to Peer ones, smart ones that automatically added nodes (instead of two botnet admins deciding to interconnect), and botnets whose sole purpose was to accept commands from a central point.
But the point is, the notion of a "Bot" and a "Botnet" has an origin that causes the term to not imply self replication.
No. Manually compromising servers and setting up nginx on them to serve files does not make it a botnet. "Botnet" or not has nothing to do with infection vector.
It refers to compromised machines that have a certain 'intelligence' so that they form a network of their own, and allow the botmaster to easily deploy new instructions to them all. And all bots will execute the new instructions automatically.
Manually compromising servers and installing a tool that causes all those servers to rendezvous with or receive commands from a central control point to execute instructions would make them a botnet.
The key question would be: do the compromised servers also run a program that periodically polls a control station for commands, or does the script kiddie manually command individual compromised servers?
If the servers only run nginx to serve files, or just periodically pull new files to serve from other servers (even a central one), then no, they're not a botnet, even if they've been backdoored so the blackhat can come back later and upload new malware files.
To be a botnet, there must be a button where a botmaster can deploy instructions or code to a control point, and the nodes will automatically perform the instructions directed.
Time to switch to FreeBSD, TrustedBSD, and hardened OpenSolaris :)
Oh, and to be secure, you really should have an IDS on your network anyways, use strong unique passwords for each system (random >10 character passwords), and never store those passwords on a computer, except the hash in the system password file.
Why not programmers?
Ideally they should just force you to authenticate with your existing account before you can disassociate/re-associate the device.
E.g. the moment you click 'disassociate', the device actually becomes bricked until the device password is entered.
When you associate with a new account, the password you type becomes the 'device' password.
There ought to also be a way to password-lock the kindle as you can with cell phones. And they should take care to make sure a thief can't easily defeat the device password.
In other words, Amazon is basically saying "f*** you, unless given a subpoena requiring us by law to assist, we will not."
Seems to be the corporate motto these days, only help track down lost/stolen things when legally required to do so.
It's already standard fair for asking companies to release any info. Got ripped off by an eBay seller or paypal contact you sent $$$ to and want to sue? Good luck getting any info out of eBay / PayPal themselves, even as much as an address or phone number for you to send a letter to.... (without a subpoena).
It's basically just a cover-your-ass, "me-first" strategy. A criminal could conceivably sue Amazon over releasing info that lead to their identification, I guess.
Or maybe the "criminal" turns out to be an ex-spouse or ex-girlfriend who didn't actually steal the device, but the boyfriend's a stalker and wants to figure out where she's hiding, OR to deactivate the kindle he had given her as revenge after the bad breakup.
Probably ultimately escalating into computer destruction
Now, can I have my Atari 2700 now? And get the Cairo OS installed on my PC with an object-oriented file system.
Need this ASAP so I can finally get to playing Duke nukem forever...
Yes, I have.
On Terminal Servers you actually have to either do this or take a command-line action to place the server in Install Mode to allow applications to be installed.
Outside of terminal servers though... I think the only thing i've used "Add/remove" to add are Windows components accessible through that UI.
So hard drive failure lights and alarm lights on new gear will now be green instead of red?? :)
It's not a given that MS wants to do everything possible to destroy Linux, at least not immediately.
Having a (bad) competitor can be better than not having one at all, as it's a useful tool to deny having a monopoly. They can use this as an example to show to the EU commissisions in order to prove they're not trying to stop Linux from competing.
Linux can help MS... it can get companies that are still using proprietary UNIX such as HP-UX, AIX on SPARCs or Itaniums to switch to Xeon over time. Adopting x86 architecture with a familiar UNIX-like OS is the first step towards maybe someday switching those to Windows 2008...
Also, when makers of various gadgets build devices that contain embedded open source software, MS would probably prefer that the popular devices interoperate with Windows (in some cases, using MS technologies), and not just Apple...
And there's a remote possibility that one day, a version of Windows could be based on an open source kernel <G>