Yes, it's called Google's profit. Why that should be of interest to anyone else, including their advertising customers, is not obvious.
Well, if you are depending on your advertising distributor for your business, you would want your advertising distributor to be profitable, so that they don't disappear into bankruptcy.
A profitable business is one that you might be able to sue and get money out of. If they are not profitable, and they steal your money, you may have no recourse as the money may not be there to recover.
Hope that clears up why someone might care if the people they are doing business with are profitable or not.
Personally I am not concerned if the bike shop I patronize is profitable, however if I made my living with bikes, (racing, courier service, etc.) I would care about the profitability of the bike shop I did business with.
Well hate to disappoint you but rmmod is also in the base Gentoo installs:-)
Debian has lot's of problems, but messy filesytem layout is not one of them. The files sytem is very structured so that no two programs ever colide. Not the case with Slackware, Fedora, SuSE, FreeBSD or Gentoo.
Why didn't your just write "I can't figure out sysv, whaa"?
~600 packages I have installed (and 600 is a lot of packages, most people have less)
dpkg-query -l | grep ii | wc -l
2306
is a typical number of packages for my debian workstations (some have more). I use FreeBSD and Gentoo, but I don't have enough workstations to justify the effort that they would require to duplicate the functionality I get with debian. (150 ports is typical of one of my FreeBSD servers that uses php mysql and apache)
I could see using gentoo on the desktop if I was developing desktop apps, or had enough workstations to justify a build server and quality testing of my workstations.
Oh I forgot, he is a commie hard line dictator that suppressed all the media. And this bill must be a commie simp bill.
No, but he is a bit of a military strong man that has his share of human rights issues. (as opposed to the US pupet regimes that have more than their share of human rights issues.)
Venezuela could do a lot worse than Hugo Chavez, but they could do a lot better as well.
Sorry for the off topic post, but I find it a little infuriating to see all the adulation the left gives to a military strong man just because he is not a CIA supported military strong man.
I also don't see why runners, not sprinters, should be segregated by sex. A female can be just as endurance conditioned as a man.
Let's see, Men generally have a narrow more efficient hip structure than women, Larger lung capacity than women, greater muscle to weight ratio, and greater strength.
If a woman and a man run a half marathon in close to the same time, the woman is a much better athlete.
As a reguards to tennis, the speed of your serve is a big factor in how good you can be. and you can typically serve some factor faster than you can throw a baseball. Men typically can throw harder/faster than women do to the higher center of gravity, and greater upper body strength.
The only sports that I have seen women do close to as well as men are auto racing and horse racing. One big factor is that the more you weigh the worse you do. So sub hundred pound athletes like Danika Patrick have an advantage to make up for their relatively less upper body strength.
In gymnastics, the men and women have different competitions because of the biological differences between men and women.
I suppose curling may be a wash in terms of which gender is better, but that is the extent of what I can think of.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect we will expose your password in plain text over the internet to be in a privacy policy.
There is also the expectation that the privacy policy will be within the confines of the law (Google's doesn't or didn't comply with EU law).
Google seems to believe that just because they have the corporate motto "don't be evil" means that people will think of them as good.
It appears that Google is one of the main funders of the recall of a San Francisco Supervisor that voted against the Google/Earthlink wifi deal that reeks of corruption.)
Overall as a linux user with a Gmail account and multiple adsense accounts, I am starting to view Microsoft in a more positive light than Google. It's sad because I know many people that work at Google and almost without exception they respond with "our search results are uncensored" as if that has anything to do with the trashed security, government corruption, and illegal data mining.
I haven't seen an EULA yet, closed or open source, that didn't waive any and all responsibility or fitness for any purpose.
Check out Quiken's tax software EULA (if the software makes a mistake Quiken pays the IRS fines for making the mistake. One year they laid out some serious cash over a bug.)
As someone that has paid very little for software in the last five years, I would seriously consider buying quicken for linux the EULA would make it worth a look, to me at least.
A variant of the BSD license that adds the clause that I can do with what ever I want to any code aggregated with this code is closer to no copyrights.
You cannot legally download vista even though it most probably contains BSD licensed code (I don't have a copy to grep, but I can't see why microsoft wouldn't save some money by legally appropriating useful BSD licensed code.) Yes the GPL contains a source distribution clause, but really that is the only section that would be invalid if software was declared to not be copyrightable.
Placing things in Public Domain and the BSD style licenses doesn't really replicate no copyright. The GPL is not quite the same. (if you are thinking about putting Linux on watch the code clause can be a bit of a pain, but if you striped out all the comments and shipped the code as single line files. and did a global search and replace with variables so that they had names such asckaodgas, asgdewoai, gawegisd, gowe, giaoing, hoiserldkx, and ibogftjtseyoish, you are probably in compliance with the letter of the GPL and have gone a long ways towards duplicating the effects of software being beyond the scope of copyright law.
What you are confusing is the specific law, compared to the effective ecosystem. Yes public domain is the same as no copyright, however, removing copyright selectively is far different from removing copyright from an entire class of works.
Personally, I favor eight years renewable for a total of sixteen years books, maps, movies, and six years, software, music, and still graphics.
The point is to increase the forward progress of the useful arts, if it makes people rich fine, J.K. Rowling would possibly still be a billionaire. but Harry Potter would be entering the public domain in the next decade.
Bad sequels would be limited as they would have less copyright protection than original work. (with the current effectively perpetual copyright law there is no advantage to be creating new content.)
But back to my original reply. No copyright is about the same as the GPL minus sections 2a and 2b.
I guess the question is how many of them do you have to have used in order to keep your nerd card? (counting the different versions of IE and Netscape they list my count is 41 which probably puts me as a poser, I would guess 70 is the minimum to keep your geek badge.) I had never heard of Alefox, Gollum, or TorPark, but at least I knew of one browser missing from their list Atlantis, and a rendering engine not mentioned gtkhtml So that should count for retaining my geek badge, right?
If I purchase an internet connection (in any form), and I decide that I want to let people use it, should I not be allowed to dictate HOW it is used, or more closely related to this topic, what is viewed on it?
Sure you can dictate the the terms of use. And if you detect violations of the terms of use you have full rights to revoke usage rights or even demand compensation for violating the terms of the agreement.
IF this is your concern I would recommend spending some time configuring your logging so that it logs what you want it to and no more.
You should also set up your reporting so that you can be notified of events you care about at the apropriate time (text message, weekly report, monthly report, etc.).
Counting on filtering actually makes everyones life harder because everything winds up going over port 80 to a proxy. (irc over port 80 is just one example)
I am not allowed to run IRC by any of my hosting provdiors unless I specifically ask. If I were to get caught doing so I would have my connection to the net cut and not get my money back.
Not being able to filter does not mean that you cannot prohibit people from using your equipment in a manner you don't approve of. Of coure if the other party thinks you are being unreasonable in your demands they may violate your agreement and possibly try and hide the evidence but that probably speaks more to the nature of the agreement.
I find that experimental/sid is in the sweet spot for my desktop.
But, then I remember having cron doing a cvs pull from mozilla.org and make followed by rebuilding galeon every morning just because that made my webbrowsing the least painful
Interestingly, the article confirms what I've been doing on my own IBM Thinkpad 570e lately. My only question to whomever still might be reading this is: is there a lightweight CSS-compatible browser that's not a memory pig on the order of Konqueror or even Firefox? Dillo works well enough, but I'm wondering if there isn't maybe a browser between Dillo and the heavyweights.
apt-get install kazehase should install it. (I don't know if it is in anything other than
It is lighter than the XUL (Firefox, SeaMonkey, IceApe, Iceweasel) or Gnome (Galeon, Epiphany) Gecko browsers browsers.
Last time I used Kazehakase, it was fine on a 200mhz machine with 64meg ram and window maker.
Skipstone was another gtk web browser, but as far as I can tell it has been dead for a while now.
If you are serving static content, use something tested like Debian stable.
If your business depends on you being at the technological front edge, (Etrade for example) then you run something like Gentoo or Debian unstable (Etrade runs Gentoo, but Debian unstable has packages of about the same age and quality.)
If you run something like Debian SID, Gentoo, FreeBSD current, or Microsofts current beta server, you need to set up a test server, and you need to have a staged rollout, but you were going to do that anyways if the site was at all critical. If you are just running a file server, or static web server or some such similar server, Debian Stable, windows 2003 Server, Solaris, and some versions of FreeBSD are all worth a look as you can get them supported in 2008, even if you don't decide to upgrade. (longer than that, a popular release of FreeBSD is probably the only server with a real chance of getting security patches back ported to it.)
The comments to the article really point to some of the things the author was unaware of, and happily accepted the advice and hints. I have never used Gentoo, but there are people and organizations that run large server farms with Gentoo, so it clearly is suitable for some server use.
The only thing that was of interest is that on a few of the smaller sites ie7 has passed firefox. Those sites also have unusually low ie6 numbers, relatively high firefox on windows numbers, and are the only sites that linux shows up above 3%.
It might be a glimpse at the direction things are going, or maybe just statistical noise. Time will tell, I guess.
. . . but I doubt there's anyone who hasn't noticed that driving through any area with moderate traffic, the lights seem to work OK, but come 4-5:00pm (or 6-7:00am), irrespective of traffic flow, the lights start turning read with increasing frequency, and traffic starts backing up. My guess is there's a BOFH version of a traffic controller in every city doing it on purpose.
As I understand it, you are sort of correct. Lights are timed to slow cars down at rush hour to reduce the number of traffic accidents, resulting in a net increase in the average speed of traffic at rush hour. There is also the concept called "metering lights" which are stoplights on the freeways (bridges mostly) in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Idea is to get some space between cars so that they will move faster.
Take another careful look at Google's front page. Want a map? You have to click once to be offered the choice, then a second additional time to get to the map page.
You could do it that way, but I and most other people that use Google maps just type in the address in the main search field and click on the first search result, which is a map of that address. which is the same number of steps as if I had clicked on a google maps button and then typed in an address, except - I didn't have to hunt around for anything.
Most of the rest of the examples in the article are similarly flawed. They look at Google from the point of writing documentation not from the point of end users that are not going to read the documentation until they have no other choice actually do. (Or ask themselves what else can this program I love do?)
Joel may be a detail oriented programmer, but his stuff is no where near as easy to use as he thinks it is. (The user has to adapt to how Joel thinks people should work as opposed to how they currently work.) If the article was correct, people would be running from Word to LyX in droves.
If you do a lot of research you will find that studies that claim that there is a relationship between EMF forces and cancer are almost all fatally flawed, (the infamous 1972 Colorodo Powerline study that started the scare had the flaw of all the group with elevated cancer rates having being exposed to herbicides that are known carcinogens) to the studies funded by the manufacturer of low emf electric blankets after the product was on the market.
There is no evidence to support the parents beliefs that withstands scrutiny, despite 35 years of research. (there does seem to be a statistically insignificant negative corralation between cell phone use and brain cancers, but nothing that is not accounted for by socioeconomic variables.)
The next step would be an html feature to have images directly in the html; many legitimate uses of images do actually involve tiny images and including them directly in a webpage or email would probably be more efficient anyway;
Images can already be imbedded in emails, and anyone that wants their html emails to have the images show up relibably already does this. It is horribly inefficient however, as mimencoding an image increases the size by a factor of about four IIRC.
High end email blasts embed all the images except the one pixel bug. What gets done with the bug varies. Some just give the sender open rates, others like constant contact, give detailed graphs of the open rate over time, number of unique ip addresses that the image has been requested from (possible forward rate), etc.
The most invasive are the ones that use a client side script to gather info about the client and embed them in the image name. Appearantly this can be fairly relibaly if the audience uses outlook, and seems to be what was done by HP's investigators.
A proxy does not get around the fact that you are downloading <img src=http://www.foo.com/email7tothrillseaker.gif >
But it does reduce the ability to track down where that email was forwarded to. Of course if a client side script gives the image a more informative name such as 10.0.0.34.sf.cnet.windowsxp.outlook11.johnsmith.em ail7tothrillseaker.gif and your email client fetches an image like that, it doesn't matter if you use a proxy or not to fetch it.
Not getting into the sides of email marketing. (I see both sides, and both sides have points. The con artists making life hell for everyone.)
I know someone that has a double opt in list that was reported as spam because one of his opponents subscribed so that they could report the email as spam.
I worked for a medium sized investment bank in the '90s about 20% of the VPs used calculators to add up rows of numbers on their spread sheets.
Most of us that used excel had live quote feeds in our spreadsheets. "what is the current cost of this investment strategy that I pitched to a client a week ago?" and watching synthetic positions were frequent uses.
An in house customized version of google spreadsheets could be able to satisfy both users. the quote feeds are already causing the spreadsheet to be dependent on network prformance (which frequently sucked), and does it matter what spread sheet you give someone that does not know how to use sum()?
Overall not as crazy as it first sounds. (and who knows google might offer google ubersecure spreadsheets if you are willing to over pay )
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you are depending on your advertising distributor for your business, you would want your advertising distributor to be profitable, so that they don't disappear into bankruptcy.
A profitable business is one that you might be able to sue and get money out of. If they are not profitable, and they steal your money, you may have no recourse as the money may not be there to recover.
Hope that clears up why someone might care if the people they are doing business with are profitable or not.
Personally I am not concerned if the bike shop I patronize is profitable, however if I made my living with bikes, (racing, courier service, etc.) I would care about the profitability of the bike shop I did business with.
Hope that makes sense.
Well hate to disappoint you but rmmod is also in the base Gentoo installs :-)
Debian has lot's of problems, but messy filesytem layout is not one of them. The files sytem is very structured so that no two programs ever colide. Not the case with Slackware, Fedora, SuSE, FreeBSD or Gentoo.
Why didn't your just write "I can't figure out sysv, whaa"?
dpkg-query -l | grep ii | wc -l
2306
is a typical number of packages for my debian workstations (some have more). I use FreeBSD and Gentoo, but I don't have enough workstations to justify the effort that they would require to duplicate the functionality I get with debian. (150 ports is typical of one of my FreeBSD servers that uses php mysql and apache)
I could see using gentoo on the desktop if I was developing desktop apps, or had enough workstations to justify a build server and quality testing of my workstations.
popularity-contest you can see the results of it's spying at popcon.debian.org
I admit that you have to opt in, and it is for a good cause, but it is spyware.
No, but he is a bit of a military strong man that has his share of human rights issues. (as opposed to the US pupet regimes that have more than their share of human rights issues.)
Venezuela could do a lot worse than Hugo Chavez, but they could do a lot better as well.
Sorry for the off topic post, but I find it a little infuriating to see all the adulation the left gives to a military strong man just because he is not a CIA supported military strong man.
Let's see, Men generally have a narrow more efficient hip structure than women, Larger lung capacity than women, greater muscle to weight ratio, and greater strength.
If a woman and a man run a half marathon in close to the same time, the woman is a much better athlete.
As a reguards to tennis, the speed of your serve is a big factor in how good you can be. and you can typically serve some factor faster than you can throw a baseball. Men typically can throw harder/faster than women do to the higher center of gravity, and greater upper body strength.
The only sports that I have seen women do close to as well as men are auto racing and horse racing. One big factor is that the more you weigh the worse you do. So sub hundred pound athletes like Danika Patrick have an advantage to make up for their relatively less upper body strength.
In gymnastics, the men and women have different competitions because of the biological differences between men and women.
I suppose curling may be a wash in terms of which gender is better, but that is the extent of what I can think of.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect we will expose your password in plain text over the internet to be in a privacy policy.
There is also the expectation that the privacy policy will be within the confines of the law (Google's doesn't or didn't comply with EU law).
Google seems to believe that just because they have the corporate motto "don't be evil" means that people will think of them as good.
It appears that Google is one of the main funders of the recall of a San Francisco Supervisor that voted against the Google/Earthlink wifi deal that reeks of corruption.)
Overall as a linux user with a Gmail account and multiple adsense accounts, I am starting to view Microsoft in a more positive light than Google. It's sad because I know many people that work at Google and almost without exception they respond with "our search results are uncensored" as if that has anything to do with the trashed security, government corruption, and illegal data mining.
Check out Quiken's tax software EULA (if the software makes a mistake Quiken pays the IRS fines for making the mistake. One year they laid out some serious cash over a bug.)
As someone that has paid very little for software in the last five years, I would seriously consider buying quicken for linux the EULA would make it worth a look, to me at least.
Not in our current legal system.
A variant of the BSD license that adds the clause that I can do with what ever I want to any code aggregated with this code is closer to no copyrights.
You cannot legally download vista even though it most probably contains BSD licensed code (I don't have a copy to grep, but I can't see why microsoft wouldn't save some money by legally appropriating useful BSD licensed code.) Yes the GPL contains a source distribution clause, but really that is the only section that would be invalid if software was declared to not be copyrightable.
Placing things in Public Domain and the BSD style licenses doesn't really replicate no copyright. The GPL is not quite the same. (if you are thinking about putting Linux on watch the code clause can be a bit of a pain, but if you striped out all the comments and shipped the code as single line files. and did a global search and replace with variables so that they had names such asckaodgas, asgdewoai, gawegisd, gowe, giaoing, hoiserldkx, and ibogftjtseyoish, you are probably in compliance with the letter of the GPL and have gone a long ways towards duplicating the effects of software being beyond the scope of copyright law.
What you are confusing is the specific law, compared to the effective ecosystem. Yes public domain is the same as no copyright, however, removing copyright selectively is far different from removing copyright from an entire class of works.
Personally, I favor eight years renewable for a total of sixteen years books, maps, movies, and six years, software, music, and still graphics.
The point is to increase the forward progress of the useful arts, if it makes people rich fine, J.K. Rowling would possibly still be a billionaire. but Harry Potter would be entering the public domain in the next decade.
Bad sequels would be limited as they would have less copyright protection than original work. (with the current effectively perpetual copyright law there is no advantage to be creating new content.)
But back to my original reply. No copyright is about the same as the GPL minus sections 2a and 2b.
I always thought that Maxthon only used Trident (the IE rendering engine) but wikipedia claims that it uses both Trident and Gecko.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers lists 141 web browsers (if you count the different version of IE and Netscape)
I guess the question is how many of them do you have to have used in order to keep your nerd card? (counting the different versions of IE and Netscape they list my count is 41 which probably puts me as a poser, I would guess 70 is the minimum to keep your geek badge.) I had never heard of Alefox, Gollum, or TorPark, but at least I knew of one browser missing from their list Atlantis, and a rendering engine not mentioned gtkhtml So that should count for retaining my geek badge, right?
I haven't because I almost always find it in the hundreds of open bug reports.
As far as I know I cannot vote for which bugs are most important, but I have not looked at evo's bug tracking in a while.
Sure you can dictate the the terms of use. And if you detect violations of the terms of use you have full rights to revoke usage rights or even demand compensation for violating the terms of the agreement.
IF this is your concern I would recommend spending some time configuring your logging so that it logs what you want it to and no more.
You should also set up your reporting so that you can be notified of events you care about at the apropriate time (text message, weekly report, monthly report, etc.).
Counting on filtering actually makes everyones life harder because everything winds up going over port 80 to a proxy. (irc over port 80 is just one example)
I am not allowed to run IRC by any of my hosting provdiors unless I specifically ask. If I were to get caught doing so I would have my connection to the net cut and not get my money back.
Not being able to filter does not mean that you cannot prohibit people from using your equipment in a manner you don't approve of. Of coure if the other party thinks you are being unreasonable in your demands they may violate your agreement and possibly try and hide the evidence but that probably speaks more to the nature of the agreement.
Funny,
I find that experimental/sid is in the sweet spot for my desktop.
But, then I remember having cron doing a cvs pull from mozilla.org and make followed by rebuilding galeon every morning just because that made my webbrowsing the least painful
Was is the key word here. SCO vs IBM has unsealed most if not all of that.
Seems that it is an issue with flash on 64bit linux. (gnash http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/sucks ... still. Despite what RMS says.)
A flash player that works on FreeBSD, ppc Linux, 64 bit Linux, and other not competely mainstream operating systems will be really nice.
That is a bit of a bug in debian stable.
There is no gecko library so galeon, epiphany, and kazehkase depend on mozilla, just so they can get the gecko.
In etch the dependancy is libxul not mozilla. A welcome improvement.
When/if you migrate to etch, you can remove mozilla. and libxul will provide gecko, reducing disk space usage.
apt-get install kazehase should install it. (I don't know if it is in anything other than
It is lighter than the XUL (Firefox, SeaMonkey, IceApe, Iceweasel) or Gnome (Galeon, Epiphany) Gecko browsers browsers. Last time I used Kazehakase, it was fine on a 200mhz machine with 64meg ram and window maker. Skipstone was another gtk web browser, but as far as I can tell it has been dead for a while now.
This depends on what your servers are doing.
If you are serving static content, use something tested like Debian stable.
If your business depends on you being at the technological front edge, (Etrade for example) then you run something like Gentoo or Debian unstable (Etrade runs Gentoo, but Debian unstable has packages of about the same age and quality.)
If you run something like Debian SID, Gentoo, FreeBSD current, or Microsofts current beta server, you need to set up a test server, and you need to have a staged rollout, but you were going to do that anyways if the site was at all critical. If you are just running a file server, or static web server or some such similar server, Debian Stable, windows 2003 Server, Solaris, and some versions of FreeBSD are all worth a look as you can get them supported in 2008, even if you don't decide to upgrade. (longer than that, a popular release of FreeBSD is probably the only server with a real chance of getting security patches back ported to it.)
The comments to the article really point to some of the things the author was unaware of, and happily accepted the advice and hints. I have never used Gentoo, but there are people and organizations that run large server farms with Gentoo, so it clearly is suitable for some server use.
Those stats look about like what my sites see,
The only thing that was of interest is that on a few of the smaller sites ie7 has passed firefox. Those sites also have unusually low ie6 numbers, relatively high firefox on windows numbers, and are the only sites that linux shows up above 3%.
It might be a glimpse at the direction things are going, or maybe just statistical noise. Time will tell, I guess.
As I understand it, you are sort of correct. Lights are timed to slow cars down at rush hour to reduce the number of traffic accidents, resulting in a net increase in the average speed of traffic at rush hour. There is also the concept called "metering lights" which are stoplights on the freeways (bridges mostly) in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Idea is to get some space between cars so that they will move faster.
You could do it that way, but I and most other people that use Google maps just type in the address in the main search field and click on the first search result, which is a map of that address. which is the same number of steps as if I had clicked on a google maps button and then typed in an address, except - I didn't have to hunt around for anything.
Most of the rest of the examples in the article are similarly flawed. They look at Google from the point of writing documentation not from the point of end users that are not going to read the documentation until they have no other choice actually do. (Or ask themselves what else can this program I love do?)
Joel may be a detail oriented programmer, but his stuff is no where near as easy to use as he thinks it is. (The user has to adapt to how Joel thinks people should work as opposed to how they currently work.) If the article was correct, people would be running from Word to LyX in droves.
If you do a lot of research you will find that studies that claim that there is a relationship between EMF forces and cancer are almost all fatally flawed, (the infamous 1972 Colorodo Powerline study that started the scare had the flaw of all the group with elevated cancer rates having being exposed to herbicides that are known carcinogens) to the studies funded by the manufacturer of low emf electric blankets after the product was on the market.
There is no evidence to support the parents beliefs that withstands scrutiny, despite 35 years of research. (there does seem to be a statistically insignificant negative corralation between cell phone use and brain cancers, but nothing that is not accounted for by socioeconomic variables.)
Images can already be imbedded in emails, and anyone that wants their html emails to have the images show up relibably already does this. It is horribly inefficient however, as mimencoding an image increases the size by a factor of about four IIRC.
High end email blasts embed all the images except the one pixel bug. What gets done with the bug varies. Some just give the sender open rates, others like constant contact, give detailed graphs of the open rate over time, number of unique ip addresses that the image has been requested from (possible forward rate), etc.
The most invasive are the ones that use a client side script to gather info about the client and embed them in the image name. Appearantly this can be fairly relibaly if the audience uses outlook, and seems to be what was done by HP's investigators.
Well your solution gets around part of the issue.
m ail7tothrillseaker.gif and your email client fetches an image like that, it doesn't matter if you use a proxy or not to fetch it.
A proxy does not get around the fact that you are downloading <img src=http://www.foo.com/email7tothrillseaker.gif >
But it does reduce the ability to track down where that email was forwarded to. Of course if a client side script gives the image a more informative name such as 10.0.0.34.sf.cnet.windowsxp.outlook11.johnsmith.e
Not getting into the sides of email marketing. (I see both sides, and both sides have points. The con artists making life hell for everyone.)
I know someone that has a double opt in list that was reported as spam because one of his opponents subscribed so that they could report the email as spam.
I worked for a medium sized investment bank in the '90s about 20% of the VPs used calculators to add up rows of numbers on their spread sheets.
Most of us that used excel had live quote feeds in our spreadsheets. "what is the current cost of this investment strategy that I pitched to a client a week ago?" and watching synthetic positions were frequent uses.
An in house customized version of google spreadsheets could be able to satisfy both users. the quote feeds are already causing the spreadsheet to be dependent on network prformance (which frequently sucked), and does it matter what spread sheet you give someone that does not know how to use sum()?
Overall not as crazy as it first sounds. (and who knows google might offer google ubersecure spreadsheets if you are willing to over pay )