Sorry - you left that door wide open:-). Having said that, there appears to be hope at last. I read an article somewhere where someone has taken the utter total heap of crud that Sony made of Vista on its laptops (the thing that caused me to nuke it as soon as I managed to find time) into something that actually made it work, especially after Service Pack 1. IMHO, anyone who uses a new MS OS in production before the first SP has been issued should be made to admit to board level that he uses the entire company as MS beta-test site. Or, in case of Vista, alpha test.
And I hate the interface changes, every time a new OS comes out you spend weeks playing a game of menu based hide and seek with the toolset. Clever move, putting a search facility in the program list and then still making sure all program names start with "Microsoft". Duh.
But heck, most of my work can be done with OOo and Linux and most of our dev guys don't even have any MS software installed, so I probably postpone looking at it until I get brutally bored..
---
Keep up the good work, and don't bother me with it..
If the control rooms were taped and we could see those tapes (after all, we're paying for the damn things) *that* would make a difference, because abuse would be a little bit more visible (barring people working off copies and secondary feeds). Even if such data only became viewable with 24h or 48h delay (to protect ongoing surveillance of *real* criminals) or only on request, fine. But at least there IS then some oversight.
At the moment it's all nicely hidden from view, with lots of weasel word exit routes to stop you finding out what exactly they do. That has to change.
Sorry, you set yourself up for that one, it had to be said.
Ray is *not* defending the indefensible. Ray is defending against the abuse of the system which affects all of us. If there is a genuine claim to be made, so be it. But the skunks who continue process after they find out the defendant is an octogenarian, a little child or even dead need indeed slowing down.
From what I've read so far, this newly minted judge falls rather deeply into the skunk category. If you're willing to ignore that sort of past you might as well get the guy back who sued his dry cleaners for millions because they lost his pants. Morally they appear to be in the same league.
The guys who take the decisions have huge share packages. Do you really think they'll do anything that reflects reality and thus nuke their potential retirement?
It's already hard enough work to keep shareholders from bolting after the Vista debacle, the EU fine (which IMHO will get worse as a problem) and the ISO farce which will come back to haunt them. The amount of BS that is required to drown out reality is enough work as it is without someone trying to be realistic about their prospects as well..
[yes, I'm being sarcastic, but MS *is* taking huge hits, whatever spin they put on it. To have to report a loss *after* they had several months to massage the figures with creative accounting is a *very* bad sign]
Not very newsworthy IMHO. Few people have it, even fewer people want it as the Zune totally pales in comparison with what Apple is offering. Zune is a desperate me-too, and it shows.
Given the large amount of NSLs that have been issued it would be fair to suspect that if anyone wanted to act on this abuse it would have happened by now. Instead it takes pressure from outside the system to start addressing this - that sort of says it all, no?
I think it depends a bit on how formal a formal study is. Given the "effectiveness" of those usability studies I'm not too unhappy with the state of OO. It tends to amuse me to read the claims that new software UI will save "minutes per day" where the efficiency drain in having to retrain people is totally ignored in that calculation, so maybe I've gone a bit cynical after 25 years of computing.
In the days of IBM AT (286) I had to code for people that were actually *scared* of computers. I can tell you that that teaches you about usability, wel before that became a sales argument:-).
The nice thing about open source based development is that it's partially merit driven. If a UI is stupid you can either throw a verbal brick at the developers or suggest an alternative. The latter approach might even be listened to if it's sensible. Does that replace a proper study? Don't know, but as said before, it seems to work for me and a number of people I convinced to give it a try.
So IMHO the jury's still out on that one. I find Vista and Office 2007 prove that throwing buckets of money at it isn't working either. Vist has the worst UI for an OS I've ever had my hands on. The tragic bit is that some FOSS people still think they have to copy it, even when it's bad. The new KDE menu is IMHO thus also a step in the wrong direction.
I've got no problem what-so-ever with cloning-just wish the cloners paid half as much attention to UI as they do to the features.
That's funny, I've had a company switch to OOo precisely because of the UI. Their sound argument was that Open Source products in general do not change UI so quickly and dramatically, allowing staff to grow with the changes.
The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.
The showstopper was in the backoffice to adjust available skills in dev and support in time, so they went half way and switched to OOo only as test. I suspect they'll take the Linux step as well once they've seen how OOo worked for them, but that's at least half a year away.
I'm with you that he went personal rather that try to retain a decent style of debate, but I do have some agreement with his argument that it's all a bit big. The main issue I see is that you may sit on top of a heap of horticultural fertilizer (to put it politely), and have little way of finding out.
The challenge is that you ARE sitting on top of a large program - the assorted calculations and decisions made in such a huge spreadsheet. Although it's not a "language", it does act as a large processing engine, and thus suffers the same problems of potential bugs hiding somewhere (and even before switching to OO I knew just how easy it is to accidentally allow Excel to "adjust" a formula (when you mess with row and column deletes/inserts). The difference with a "proper" language is that spreadsheets have near zero change control capability.
You're not alone in having this problem, BTW, it's a common risk factor in businesses that decisions are taken on data that is processed in basically an unaudited fashion - spreadsheets in critical business processes draw attention from any auditor worth his/her money..
You've switched to Office 2007 for a simple business reason: cool. However, from a risk management perspective you may want to start looking at a potentially more controllable way of handling so much data anyway. And when it's structurally and process wise sound (which I reckon to involve some query remodelling) you may find you no longer need a gazillion line spreadsheet.
Caveat: this assertion is naturally based on a total absence of knowledge of what you actually get up to with such a heap of data, it is after all Slashdot:-).
I hope I got that wrong, but that's the first impression I got from reading your post. Although I would agree with you that Gates is less of a bull in a chine shop than Gates is, I don't think I'd trust Gates as far as I could throw him either. We have seen enough charades over the past (and these days with the Foundation) to be pretty sure Gates isn't a fair player either.
However, Yahoo as well as buying their way through the ISO process are indeed very much Ballmer. Gates would have been a lot more subtle. He'd have worked the buy-in of many shareholders well before he'd approach Yahoo - Yahoo would have been taken over from the inside before the offer would have ever been made. The way it's now done is 100% Ballmer: "do what I say or I'll destroy you", which is soo 90s:-).
We're currently examining replacing a lot of lights on a boat with LEDs, because they make the battery last a lot longer before we need to kick in the generator (it's also safer because the mooring lights don't burn out). Maybe we'll add solar panels, but that's phase II.
Your average lightbulb converts (AFAIK) about 65% of the energy into heat - which we don't need as the boat already in a hot climate:-).
Meanwhile I had some more coffee and got back to the original article.
I don't know how they can clock up a 24% loss with Windows, which is much more "automatically" sold than Office. Something doesn't add up here (pardon the pun).. Maybe using those flawed OOXML math interpretations on an old system with the Intel FPU bug?
1. MS management sees this figures early. This decline must have been known for months, we just get the bit they can no longer hide. So there may be more we (and shareholders) don't know about.
2. This decline has been registered despite extra sales of Windows XP that people bought before MS "fixed" the issue by allowing XP licenses in parallel with Vista (only Pro versions). To clarify, Many new PCs have forced us to pay the Vista tax, and early adopters/sufferers paid for an XP license on top. Sales, however, are still down - which makes me wonder how much of that loss is due to Office.
3. The shareholders have picked up on it as the share price has dropped.
IMHO this would be an EXCELLENT time for the EU to reveal a new prosecution. With nervous shareholders this could trigger problems for MS market value..
I think he wanted to continue using the laptop himself as well. I don't think "it's an anti theft device" will go very far when picked up by police, customs or those lovely TSA people.
The latter may even decide to check for more hiding places. Do you really want to invite the rubber glove treatment?
As for solution, there are forensic identity marking kits available. They're like a special liquid (also comes in a microdot form), and it comes with warning stickers. The stuff is nigh impossible to remove, it proves who the owner is and if you sell the laptop you just update the registration. And as someone else said, stick crypto on it so the data isn't vulnerable. You can do that in archive or bootup form with the latest version of Truecrypt (5.1a).
The only risk left is someone stealing it specifically for the reward:-)
Slashdot Mirror
.. since a lot less people run it than XP :-)
:-). Having said that, there appears to be hope at last. I read an article somewhere where someone has taken the utter total heap of crud that Sony made of Vista on its laptops (the thing that caused me to nuke it as soon as I managed to find time) into something that actually made it work, especially after Service Pack 1. IMHO, anyone who uses a new MS OS in production before the first SP has been issued should be made to admit to board level that he uses the entire company as MS beta-test site. Or, in case of Vista, alpha test.
Sorry - you left that door wide open
And I hate the interface changes, every time a new OS comes out you spend weeks playing a game of menu based hide and seek with the toolset. Clever move, putting a search facility in the program list and then still making sure all program names start with "Microsoft". Duh.
But heck, most of my work can be done with OOo and Linux and most of our dev guys don't even have any MS software installed, so I probably postpone looking at it until I get brutally bored..
---
Keep up the good work, and don't bother me with it..
.. and they'll be selling them on wickedlasers.com :-)
If they want to use the Guardian Angel name for this they'll have a bit of a fight on their hands..
:-).
The name is taken internationally by anything from tracker equipment sellers to bodyguard agencies
Dear US, we hear you. Our response is but two lines:
- waterboarding
- Guantanamo Bay
Kind regards, China.
I really hope whoever becomes the new president will restore the rule of law for all (aka a democracy).
If the control rooms were taped and we could see those tapes (after all, we're paying for the damn things) *that* would make a difference, because abuse would be a little bit more visible (barring people working off copies and secondary feeds). Even if such data only became viewable with 24h or 48h delay (to protect ongoing surveillance of *real* criminals) or only on request, fine. But at least there IS then some oversight.
At the moment it's all nicely hidden from view, with lots of weasel word exit routes to stop you finding out what exactly they do. That has to change.
Sorry, you set yourself up for that one, it had to be said.
Ray is *not* defending the indefensible. Ray is defending against the abuse of the system which affects all of us. If there is a genuine claim to be made, so be it. But the skunks who continue process after they find out the defendant is an octogenarian, a little child or even dead need indeed slowing down.
From what I've read so far, this newly minted judge falls rather deeply into the skunk category. If you're willing to ignore that sort of past you might as well get the guy back who sued his dry cleaners for millions because they lost his pants. Morally they appear to be in the same league.
The guys who take the decisions have huge share packages. Do you really think they'll do anything that reflects reality and thus nuke their potential retirement?
It's already hard enough work to keep shareholders from bolting after the Vista debacle, the EU fine (which IMHO will get worse as a problem) and the ISO farce which will come back to haunt them. The amount of BS that is required to drown out reality is enough work as it is without someone trying to be realistic about their prospects as well..
[yes, I'm being sarcastic, but MS *is* taking huge hits, whatever spin they put on it. To have to report a loss *after* they had several months to massage the figures with creative accounting is a *very* bad sign]
Not very newsworthy IMHO. Few people have it, even fewer people want it as the Zune totally pales in comparison with what Apple is offering. Zune is a desperate me-too, and it shows.
Given the large amount of NSLs that have been issued it would be fair to suspect that if anyone wanted to act on this abuse it would have happened by now. Instead it takes pressure from outside the system to start addressing this - that sort of says it all, no?
I think it depends a bit on how formal a formal study is. Given the "effectiveness" of those usability studies I'm not too unhappy with the state of OO. It tends to amuse me to read the claims that new software UI will save "minutes per day" where the efficiency drain in having to retrain people is totally ignored in that calculation, so maybe I've gone a bit cynical after 25 years of computing.
:-).
In the days of IBM AT (286) I had to code for people that were actually *scared* of computers. I can tell you that that teaches you about usability, wel before that became a sales argument
The nice thing about open source based development is that it's partially merit driven. If a UI is stupid you can either throw a verbal brick at the developers or suggest an alternative. The latter approach might even be listened to if it's sensible. Does that replace a proper study? Don't know, but as said before, it seems to work for me and a number of people I convinced to give it a try.
So IMHO the jury's still out on that one. I find Vista and Office 2007 prove that throwing buckets of money at it isn't working either. Vist has the worst UI for an OS I've ever had my hands on. The tragic bit is that some FOSS people still think they have to copy it, even when it's bad. The new KDE menu is IMHO thus also a step in the wrong direction.
The question is: will these paranoid people realise that their violence will be recorded? :-)
I've got no problem what-so-ever with cloning-just wish the cloners paid half as much attention to UI as they do to the features.
That's funny, I've had a company switch to OOo precisely because of the UI. Their sound argument was that Open Source products in general do not change UI so quickly and dramatically, allowing staff to grow with the changes.
The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.
The showstopper was in the backoffice to adjust available skills in dev and support in time, so they went half way and switched to OOo only as test. I suspect they'll take the Linux step as well once they've seen how OOo worked for them, but that's at least half a year away.
I'm with you that he went personal rather that try to retain a decent style of debate, but I do have some agreement with his argument that it's all a bit big. The main issue I see is that you may sit on top of a heap of horticultural fertilizer (to put it politely), and have little way of finding out.
:-).
The challenge is that you ARE sitting on top of a large program - the assorted calculations and decisions made in such a huge spreadsheet. Although it's not a "language", it does act as a large processing engine, and thus suffers the same problems of potential bugs hiding somewhere (and even before switching to OO I knew just how easy it is to accidentally allow Excel to "adjust" a formula (when you mess with row and column deletes/inserts). The difference with a "proper" language is that spreadsheets have near zero change control capability.
You're not alone in having this problem, BTW, it's a common risk factor in businesses that decisions are taken on data that is processed in basically an unaudited fashion - spreadsheets in critical business processes draw attention from any auditor worth his/her money..
You've switched to Office 2007 for a simple business reason: cool. However, from a risk management perspective you may want to start looking at a potentially more controllable way of handling so much data anyway. And when it's structurally and process wise sound (which I reckon to involve some query remodelling) you may find you no longer need a gazillion line spreadsheet.
Caveat: this assertion is naturally based on a total absence of knowledge of what you actually get up to with such a heap of data, it is after all Slashdot
These days it's a bit better but NOT seeing Gates was harder work ..
I hope I got that wrong, but that's the first impression I got from reading your post. Although I would agree with you that Gates is less of a bull in a chine shop than Gates is, I don't think I'd trust Gates as far as I could throw him either. We have seen enough charades over the past (and these days with the Foundation) to be pretty sure Gates isn't a fair player either.
:-).
However, Yahoo as well as buying their way through the ISO process are indeed very much Ballmer. Gates would have been a lot more subtle. He'd have worked the buy-in of many shareholders well before he'd approach Yahoo - Yahoo would have been taken over from the inside before the offer would have ever been made. The way it's now done is 100% Ballmer: "do what I say or I'll destroy you", which is soo 90s
We're currently examining replacing a lot of lights on a boat with LEDs, because they make the battery last a lot longer before we need to kick in the generator (it's also safer because the mooring lights don't burn out). Maybe we'll add solar panels, but that's phase II.
:-).
Your average lightbulb converts (AFAIK) about 65% of the energy into heat - which we don't need as the boat already in a hot climate
I quote: Boeing engineers will help the West Philly kids with body modifications
No, really - go check it out. I didn't make this up.
Caaaaaaaafeine!
I bet the ones you bought are finished product. They do start out rough as 2x4, though :-)
And there's a fair bit of that or there wouldn't be a national deficit that is so large it's starting to develop its own gravitational pull..
You're new here, aren't you?
:-)
Hahahaaaaa haha.
ROFL..
Thanks for the laugh, I needed that
If this trend continues you may even get laid this evening (ducks). :-)
Meanwhile I had some more coffee and got back to the original article.
:-).
I don't know how they can clock up a 24% loss with Windows, which is much more "automatically" sold than Office. Something doesn't add up here (pardon the pun).. Maybe using those flawed OOXML math interpretations on an old system with the Intel FPU bug?
I bet it said "Vista capable"
1. MS management sees this figures early. This decline must have been known for months, we just get the bit they can no longer hide. So there may be more we (and shareholders) don't know about.
2. This decline has been registered despite extra sales of Windows XP that people bought before MS "fixed" the issue by allowing XP licenses in parallel with Vista (only Pro versions). To clarify, Many new PCs have forced us to pay the Vista tax, and early adopters/sufferers paid for an XP license on top. Sales, however, are still down - which makes me wonder how much of that loss is due to Office.
3. The shareholders have picked up on it as the share price has dropped.
IMHO this would be an EXCELLENT time for the EU to reveal a new prosecution. With nervous shareholders this could trigger problems for MS market value..
I figure they're in cahoots with Satan or high ranking Democrats. .. but I repeat myself (with apologies to Mark Twain :-).
I think he wanted to continue using the laptop himself as well. I don't think "it's an anti theft device" will go very far when picked up by police, customs or those lovely TSA people.
:-)
The latter may even decide to check for more hiding places. Do you really want to invite the rubber glove treatment?
As for solution, there are forensic identity marking kits available. They're like a special liquid (also comes in a microdot form), and it comes with warning stickers. The stuff is nigh impossible to remove, it proves who the owner is and if you sell the laptop you just update the registration. And as someone else said, stick crypto on it so the data isn't vulnerable. You can do that in archive or bootup form with the latest version of Truecrypt (5.1a).
The only risk left is someone stealing it specifically for the reward