Well that depends.
$400.00 a year for Email for 8 people with aliases for everyone.
Document sharing, Collaboration between the whole family. Fully integrated with all kinds of useful tools.
Add to that groups and sites if used well is a huge benefit to families.
Then you add to that the calendering and lack of ads and I think that if you can afford it that a good case can be made for its worth.
When you put it like that, it doesn't sound so bad - until you realise that if you can live without 25MB, no adverts and 24/7 reliability (which those who were signing up for the free account clearly could live without) then you can everything else you've listed for free with a bog standard Gmail account.
So essentially I'm paying $50 per person per year and in return the only benefit I get which I really want is the ability to use my own domain.
At that point, it doesn't sound quite so much like a great deal.
Google's senior vice president in charge of Google Apps said Google wants to provide small businesses that use the free version of the software with dedicated customer support - something only paying customers currently get.
What I'm not entirely clear about is what happens to the middle ground of people who own their own domain and want to be able to have email address for each member of their family linked to the various Google services.
If they are now trying to push those people onto the business tier then a family of 4 with 2 grand-parents each side is going to cost $400 a year - which is way too expensive to properly consider.
(I'm thankful I set my family up several years ago before they reduced the number of users from 50 to 10)
What netbook? I had* an 3 year old 9 inch dell mini that can stream just fine. I don't have it in front of me but if I remember right it has a 1.6 atom, 2GB of RAM, 32GB ssd (PCIE RAM type not hard drive type) and it is running win 7. I did upgrade the RAM to 2GB.
It's a Samsung NC-10 which I increased the memory to 2GB and replaced XP with Windows 7 Home Premium.
The SSD may make the difference, mine has a HDD and I'm wary of upgrading it on the basis that I'm not sure it's worth the cost based on how little it is used over the iPad - which whilst being more limited, is a lot more convenient for browsing and email.
It's a Samsung NC-10 which I increased the memory to 2GB and replaced XP with Windows 7 Home Premium.
I'm sure there are netbooks out there which do handle HD video - however I've not seen any. This is possibly because they are more expensive and therefore go against the ethos of netbooks being cheap.
I mean that seriously: what does it do that a $200 netbook doesn't do at least as well?
Play HD video for starters. My netbook chokes on anything greater than PAL and flash video playback of nearly any resolution is choppy as hell.
I'd also throw in there boot instantly and launch the browser instantly. Last time I started my Windows 7 netbook, it took forever to start (applying patches), then I had several pop-ups for software updates and to top it off Firefox took an eternity to get to a point where I could click on something and it happen.
Part way through, I just picked up my iPad and used that instead. Far far quicker.
You just documented people lost 2 to 3 weeks of full productivity.
Don't be silly, it wasn't like everyone sat around doing nothing during that time and then suddenly because productive again.
Some things just took slightly longer as people had to find the new location for things that weren't immediately obvious. I, personally, found several things quicker because the UI placed them directly in front of me at the time I needed them - rather than forcing me to hunt through menus and sub-menus.
The 2-3 weeks was just for IT support to walk the room and answer peoples questions. Not everyone sits at their desk using Office tools every day and not everyone is in the office every single day. Those that were, picked the changes up quickly.
In one office they budgeted for a week more than they actually needed as the tech guys were complaining that no-one was asking any questions after a while.
It's reminds me of all the doom and gloom over the Ribbon UI and how people would never accept and it'll be the downfall of Office.
In reality, I've been in three companies now which have transitioned from Office 2003 to one of the versions with the ribbon. In all three cases, they provided some documentation on the intranet (a couple of pages in a PDF, not very much), an hour long class for people who really wanted it (of which take up was pretty poor) and floor walkers in the first two weeks helping anyone with problems.
It took about 2-3 weeks for people to get used to the software. A month later and the large majority were perfectly happy and only a select few wanted to go back to Office 2003.
You are comparing server upgrades to desktops? Really?
Why not? Upgrades are a fact of life and whilst a server upgrade might be easier to perform, they're more frequent.
Meanwhile the desktop guys have to do quite a bit more work but, on the flip-side, have ten years to prepare for it.
In short, it's work that has to be done. The only difference being that whilst the desktop guys have to contend with hardware too, they at least get ten years to get themselves prepared.
Do you think that's not long enough? If so, how long do they need? Twenty years?
Whenever I hear people moan about how they're running XP and it has been working just fine for the last ten years, I immediately think to myself that they've been lucky that they haven't needed to do part of their job for so long.
The folks running and maintaining servers or software products do an upgrade once every couple of months and you cannot do one upgrade in ten years?
Upgrading any hardware and software (not just Windows) is part of the cost of doing business, if you haven't factored it in (and after 10 years, calling the "upgrade treadmill" is a tad overly dramatic), then what forward planning have you been doing?
And if you really cannot upgrade, then maybe you should consider looking at implementing backup plans now? Because at some point, whatever you are relying on will stop working and you'll have to do something. It's not like you don't have any prior warning.
You mean an application that duplicates the functionality of a built-in app?
You really think Apple is going to allow this in the iOS store?
Your understanding of the rules of the App Store are a couple of years out of date - there are plenty of apps in there now that duplicate the functionality of built in apps:
Maps has Waze and MapQuest.
Safari has Chrome and Dolphin
Camera has Camera+ and Camera Awesome.
Calendar has Week Cal, Cue and Agenda Calendar.
Mail has Sparrow, Hotmail and Gmail.
Contacts has Smartr Contacts
iCloud has Dropbox and Google
Find my phone has Prey
iBooks has Kindle
Notes has Audio Memos, Simplenote, Drafts and Evernote.
Reminders has Chekmark and GoTasks
Weather has The Weather Channel, AccuWeather and Weather Underground.
Videos has Good Player.
It doesn't necessarily guarantee that Apple won't attempt to block Google's efforts though.
What makes you "hate to say it", but then go on and do so?
It's a saying and means that you wish that what you're about to say wasn't true.
Moving to Windows Phone 8 will get them everything that Blackberry provides for the corporate-land and more. And it's looking increasingly like the #3 smartphone platform, with its share of loyal users at large.
It has 3.2% market share. However you spin it, that is not a lot of "loyal users".
'We'd like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do,' she wrote, adding that Yahoo will shift away from BlackBerry as its corporate device of choice.
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think that moving people from BlackBerry to Windows Phone will solve the problem she's describing.
Where are the lawyers from Samsung when you need them?
Last time I bought chips from Qualcomm, all associated license and patent payments had already been handled by Qualcomm and included as part of the per chip fee.
Assuming this still happens (it was a while ago), I cannot see how Samsung will succeed.
A couple of years ago I flew back to London from Las Vegas via Denver (I think) and the TSA wouldn't let any drinks over 100ml purchased inside the airport terminal go onto the connecting flight.
Every single person was forced to either hand it over during the screening proces or stand around and drink it before proceeding. It was extremely annoying to find that we couldn't take our overpriced bottle of water onto the flight.
If they are now screening drinks then it's better than it was before.
Personally, there haven't really been any movies or music made in the past 15 years that are even worth downloading for free, I'll never understand why people bother wasting drive space.
That old Slashdot chestnut.
According to IMDb's these are the highest ranked films in their top 250 that were made in the last 15 years and scored 8/10 or higher:
The Dark Knight (2008), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Fight Club (1999), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Inception (2010), The Matrix (1999), City of God (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Memento (2000), American History X (1998), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Spirited Away (2001), American Beauty (1999), Toy Story 3 (2010), The Departed (2006), The Pianist (2002), Life Is Beautiful (1997), WALL-E (2008), The Lives of Others (2006), Amelie (2001), Gladiator (2000), The Prestige (2006), The Green Mile (1999), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Untouchable (2011), L.A. Confidential (1997), Avengers Assemble (2012), Oldboy (2003), Princess Mononoke (1997), A Separation (2011), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Downfall (2004), Batman Begins (2005), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Up (2009), Snatch. (2000), Gran Torino (2008), The Big Lebowski (1998), Sin City (2005), No Country for Old Men (2007), Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Sixth Sense (1999), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), The King's Speech (2010), Warrior (2011), The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), Into the Wild (2007), Black Swan (2010), Good Will Hunting (1997), How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Donnie Darko (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), V for Vendetta (2005), Million Dollar Baby (2004), There Will Be Blood (2007), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Artist (2011), Amores Perros (2000), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Mary and Max (2009), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Howl's Moving Castle (2004), District 9 (2009), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Ratatouille (2007), Infernal Affairs (2002), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011), The Truman Show (1998), The Wrestler (2008), Ip Man (2008), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Star Trek (2009), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003), Mystic River (2003), Shutter Island (2010), Let the Right One In (2008) and Big Fish (2003)
Are you really trying to say that none of these are worth watching?
In fact, the only merit to your argument is that all the films that scored higher than 8.8 were made before 1997:
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Pulp Fiction (1994), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), 12 Angry Men (1957) and Schindler's List (1993)
Out of interest, does anyone know how many of the original Psygnosis staff worked at Studio Liverpool till the end?
My gut feel is that all the people that really made it Psygnosis are probably long gone, which means the company (as we Amiga and Atari ST owners remember it) has actually been dead for a very long time.
Of course he's going to say that, he's the CEO and he's expected to say that.
Coming out and saying "we're screwed" may be technically more accurate - but it'll only hasten the demise of the company even more. Who knows? Maybe BB10 is amazing - but if he says anything other than "we're doing just fine" then he's running the risk of his careless talk meaning that it'll never ever see the light of day.
Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.
So now you're automatically assumed guilty.. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
According to Nokia Siemens Networks, the average amount of smartphone data used per day is 15MB (about 450MB per month). If you're using ten times that amount on a grandfathered plan that costs you peanuts, it's hardly surprising that someone somewhere will run the numbers and work out that you are of no value to the company.
By all means shout "right, that's it! I'm off to Sprint!" but it'll be a hollow victory as Verizon will probably be more than happy to see the back of you.
Slashdot Mirror
When you put it like that, it doesn't sound so bad - until you realise that if you can live without 25MB, no adverts and 24/7 reliability (which those who were signing up for the free account clearly could live without) then you can everything else you've listed for free with a bog standard Gmail account.
So essentially I'm paying $50 per person per year and in return the only benefit I get which I really want is the ability to use my own domain.
At that point, it doesn't sound quite so much like a great deal.
What I'm not entirely clear about is what happens to the middle ground of people who own their own domain and want to be able to have email address for each member of their family linked to the various Google services.
If they are now trying to push those people onto the business tier then a family of 4 with 2 grand-parents each side is going to cost $400 a year - which is way too expensive to properly consider.
(I'm thankful I set my family up several years ago before they reduced the number of users from 50 to 10)
My bet is that they came to an agreement because HTC hold some LTE patents that Apple need:
Wow, preemptively shutting something down on the basis that it might be used to infringe copyright before it's even launched?
Philip K. Dick and (to some extent) Scott Frank and Jon Cohen must be proud.
It's a Samsung NC-10 which I increased the memory to 2GB and replaced XP with Windows 7 Home Premium.
The SSD may make the difference, mine has a HDD and I'm wary of upgrading it on the basis that I'm not sure it's worth the cost based on how little it is used over the iPad - which whilst being more limited, is a lot more convenient for browsing and email.
It's a Samsung NC-10 which I increased the memory to 2GB and replaced XP with Windows 7 Home Premium.
I'm sure there are netbooks out there which do handle HD video - however I've not seen any. This is possibly because they are more expensive and therefore go against the ethos of netbooks being cheap.
Play HD video for starters. My netbook chokes on anything greater than PAL and flash video playback of nearly any resolution is choppy as hell.
I'd also throw in there boot instantly and launch the browser instantly. Last time I started my Windows 7 netbook, it took forever to start (applying patches), then I had several pop-ups for software updates and to top it off Firefox took an eternity to get to a point where I could click on something and it happen.
Part way through, I just picked up my iPad and used that instead. Far far quicker.
Windows 8 RT is specifically designed to be for consumers. If you want to use it in a business then you need to use Windows 8 Pro.
Don't be silly, it wasn't like everyone sat around doing nothing during that time and then suddenly because productive again.
Some things just took slightly longer as people had to find the new location for things that weren't immediately obvious. I, personally, found several things quicker because the UI placed them directly in front of me at the time I needed them - rather than forcing me to hunt through menus and sub-menus.
The 2-3 weeks was just for IT support to walk the room and answer peoples questions. Not everyone sits at their desk using Office tools every day and not everyone is in the office every single day. Those that were, picked the changes up quickly.
In one office they budgeted for a week more than they actually needed as the tech guys were complaining that no-one was asking any questions after a while.
It's reminds me of all the doom and gloom over the Ribbon UI and how people would never accept and it'll be the downfall of Office.
In reality, I've been in three companies now which have transitioned from Office 2003 to one of the versions with the ribbon. In all three cases, they provided some documentation on the intranet (a couple of pages in a PDF, not very much), an hour long class for people who really wanted it (of which take up was pretty poor) and floor walkers in the first two weeks helping anyone with problems.
It took about 2-3 weeks for people to get used to the software. A month later and the large majority were perfectly happy and only a select few wanted to go back to Office 2003.
Why not? Upgrades are a fact of life and whilst a server upgrade might be easier to perform, they're more frequent.
Meanwhile the desktop guys have to do quite a bit more work but, on the flip-side, have ten years to prepare for it.
In short, it's work that has to be done. The only difference being that whilst the desktop guys have to contend with hardware too, they at least get ten years to get themselves prepared.
Do you think that's not long enough? If so, how long do they need? Twenty years?
I'm amazed the number of people complaining.
Whenever I hear people moan about how they're running XP and it has been working just fine for the last ten years, I immediately think to myself that they've been lucky that they haven't needed to do part of their job for so long.
The folks running and maintaining servers or software products do an upgrade once every couple of months and you cannot do one upgrade in ten years?
Upgrading any hardware and software (not just Windows) is part of the cost of doing business, if you haven't factored it in (and after 10 years, calling the "upgrade treadmill" is a tad overly dramatic), then what forward planning have you been doing?
And if you really cannot upgrade, then maybe you should consider looking at implementing backup plans now? Because at some point, whatever you are relying on will stop working and you'll have to do something. It's not like you don't have any prior warning.
The idea that Steve Jobs never apologized for anything seems to be starting to become a common Slashdot misconception.
I'm sure people can think of times when they wish he did apologize for something, but to say he never did would be inaccurate.
Your understanding of the rules of the App Store are a couple of years out of date - there are plenty of apps in there now that duplicate the functionality of built in apps:
It doesn't necessarily guarantee that Apple won't attempt to block Google's efforts though.
It's a saying and means that you wish that what you're about to say wasn't true.
It has 3.2% market share. However you spin it, that is not a lot of "loyal users".
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think that moving people from BlackBerry to Windows Phone will solve the problem she's describing.
... but only if they use ICS or JB.
Unfortunately nearly all of the OEMs still insist on slathering their own crappy iOS-aping user interfaces over the top.
My Galaxy SIII would be a far nicer phone if Samsung hadn't let their TouchWiz team remotely near it.
Last time I bought chips from Qualcomm, all associated license and patent payments had already been handled by Qualcomm and included as part of the per chip fee.
Assuming this still happens (it was a while ago), I cannot see how Samsung will succeed.
A couple of years ago I flew back to London from Las Vegas via Denver (I think) and the TSA wouldn't let any drinks over 100ml purchased inside the airport terminal go onto the connecting flight.
Every single person was forced to either hand it over during the screening proces or stand around and drink it before proceeding. It was extremely annoying to find that we couldn't take our overpriced bottle of water onto the flight.
If they are now screening drinks then it's better than it was before.
That old Slashdot chestnut.
According to IMDb's these are the highest ranked films in their top 250 that were made in the last 15 years and scored 8/10 or higher:
The Dark Knight (2008), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), Fight Club (1999), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Inception (2010), The Matrix (1999), City of God (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Memento (2000), American History X (1998), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Spirited Away (2001), American Beauty (1999), Toy Story 3 (2010), The Departed (2006), The Pianist (2002), Life Is Beautiful (1997), WALL-E (2008), The Lives of Others (2006), Amelie (2001), Gladiator (2000), The Prestige (2006), The Green Mile (1999), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Untouchable (2011), L.A. Confidential (1997), Avengers Assemble (2012), Oldboy (2003), Princess Mononoke (1997), A Separation (2011), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Downfall (2004), Batman Begins (2005), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Up (2009), Snatch. (2000), Gran Torino (2008), The Big Lebowski (1998), Sin City (2005), No Country for Old Men (2007), Hotel Rwanda (2004), The Sixth Sense (1999), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), The King's Speech (2010), Warrior (2011), The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), Into the Wild (2007), Black Swan (2010), Good Will Hunting (1997), How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Donnie Darko (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), V for Vendetta (2005), Million Dollar Baby (2004), There Will Be Blood (2007), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Artist (2011), Amores Perros (2000), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Mary and Max (2009), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Howl's Moving Castle (2004), District 9 (2009), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Ratatouille (2007), Infernal Affairs (2002), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011), The Truman Show (1998), The Wrestler (2008), Ip Man (2008), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Star Trek (2009), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003), Mystic River (2003), Shutter Island (2010), Let the Right One In (2008) and Big Fish (2003)
Are you really trying to say that none of these are worth watching?
In fact, the only merit to your argument is that all the films that scored higher than 8.8 were made before 1997:
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Pulp Fiction (1994), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), 12 Angry Men (1957) and Schindler's List (1993)
Out of interest, does anyone know how many of the original Psygnosis staff worked at Studio Liverpool till the end?
My gut feel is that all the people that really made it Psygnosis are probably long gone, which means the company (as we Amiga and Atari ST owners remember it) has actually been dead for a very long time.
Great Steve, how about getting your teams to do some actual innovation on Windows Media Center - before you lose that to Apple too?
(note: adding de-interlacing, a bunch of codecs and then shoving it in a pay-for additional pack for Windows 8 isn't innovation)
Of course he's going to say that, he's the CEO and he's expected to say that.
Coming out and saying "we're screwed" may be technically more accurate - but it'll only hasten the demise of the company even more. Who knows? Maybe BB10 is amazing - but if he says anything other than "we're doing just fine" then he's running the risk of his careless talk meaning that it'll never ever see the light of day.
I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!
From the BBC News:
So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
According to Nokia Siemens Networks, the average amount of smartphone data used per day is 15MB (about 450MB per month). If you're using ten times that amount on a grandfathered plan that costs you peanuts, it's hardly surprising that someone somewhere will run the numbers and work out that you are of no value to the company.
By all means shout "right, that's it! I'm off to Sprint!" but it'll be a hollow victory as Verizon will probably be more than happy to see the back of you.