This switch is easy because not only is OpenOffice.org superior software in every respect, it's also feature-compatible with Microsoft Office, supports reading and writing of Microsoft's file formats Ã" even the ones that Microsoft Office itself no longer supports Ã" and is free to boot, both free as in freedom and free as in price.
To be fair, I used to think sort of the same thing - why use MS Office when OpenOffice is there and does most of that stuff?
Then I got MS Office at work - mostly to combat problems we had with compatibility with our clients sending us 'real'.doc files. OpenOffice would spit out something that didn't maintain the exact formatting, which pissed everyone off.
But the main thing for me is just the sheer awesomeness of the whole thing. I never used 2003 so didn't struggle at all with the new 'ribbon' thing, which I think is great. I find the whole Office package shits all over OpenOffice in terms of usability and performance.
I thought I'd get MS Office and only use it for stuff that had to be interoperable with our clients and use OOo for everything else - but I've switched to using MS Office for everything. Sorry, but it's better.
If you have to interoperate with anyone doing high-end Word stuff you might struggle to switch to OOo. But if you can make EVERYONE you deal with use it ALL at once and the formatting stuff isn't that big a deal - then sure, it'll work for you.
. I could afford a 65TB server without any difficulty. I don't need one, but we're not talking about something astonishing here.
Could you direct me to a company that will give me 65TB of bandwidth?
Almost all commercial hosts I've looked at don't offer plans with anywhere near up to this, and additional bandwidth up to that amount would run into the thousands of dollars a month. So either I'm looking at completely the wrong countries, or...
So you'd rather Hulu and Netflix be sued into bankruptcy for streaming content to places in the world they have no right to do so? Yeah, that'd be a much greater idea...
The specific reason they HAVE no rights is because the people that OWN the rights refuse to adapt to the Internet and license these rights on a global scale, presumably so they can price gauge people on a territorial basis.
Until these rights owners realise the Internet is one place, we'll keep seeing territorial licensing agreements and most people outside the US will still be boned.
1) Create a Steam account for every game you buy 2) Sell each Steam account separately.
I haven't read the EULA but it wouldn't surprise me to find it's prohibited by the license, but I suspect they'd have a hard time enforcing it (and probably wouldn't bother).
Actually just checked out the RTFM thing and it looks really helpful.
I guess I'm (possibly unfairly) comparing it to the awesome snippets that Fogbugz has. You could type, for example:
`nosupport
(backtick followed by a keyword)... and once you'd finished typing the keyword, it would fill out the entire job. If you had even a vaguely good memory or had spent some time with the system it made powering through many jobs really easy - you could do it all with the keyboard and almost never needed to slow down to use the mouse. Ahh, the good old days.
you really did not look well into it: http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/ [bestpractical.com] ; rtfm is really simple and useful, it works great.
I have barely looked at all - I decided a while ago that I'd rather move off RT entirely and extend our homebrew solution. It's easier for us and we'll get better customisation. I'll check that link out anyway though as it will prolly be helpful for the interim, thanks.
Were you using (old) pc hardware for the RT server? What OS did you install RT on? There has been quite a big problem with the perl version that redhat installed in their OS, so maybe you were bitten by it.
We were using an HP DL380 I think - dual processor xeon, 2gb RAM - it was pretty beefy. We upgraded it to 4gb RAM and got little improvement. But we WERE running Red Hat - so maybe we ran afoul of the perl problem you mentioned.
RT is fast, simple and like they say in their website:
Yep, and I do like that aspect of it. The simplicity and flexibility of it is nice. i just find the resource requirements generally seem to be massively high - a quad core xeon with 4gb of RAM to me seems like MASSIVE overkill for what is a relatively simple web application. That's part of the reason I think I unconsciously am pissed off with it - we had SO many problems with it performance wise that just didn't make sense (so it must've just been some stupid distro-specific bug that was causing it - I was away on holidays when it was resolved and don't know how they did it).
We use RT at our work at the moment for both development/bug tracking and also user support. We had a LOT of teething problems and invested (imo) far too much time in trying to making it work properly - lots of odd performance issues, regular 10sec + load times, all sorts of weirdness. We spent a lot of time tweaking and finally got it running nicely (note: we're webdevs working on high utilisation sites so we know what we're doing as well, or at least think we do).
Aside from all the messing around - I don't like it for user support. We're doing maybe between 600-1000 inquiries a month - I can't imagine doing it at the sort of volume specified in the OP.
My big woes are the lack of good reporting, so its hard to identify trends - short of putting issues in queues I can't get visibility on what issues are cropping up regularly unless our staff remember them.
Also, there's no option for doing Standard Responses (at least not in the base install), meaning every response needs to be custom-written. There might be an addon or something for this; I haven't looked.
I got/really/ used to this in FogBugz (which I really liked for support purposes, but we got turned off by the price tag and closed-sourceness - we wanted something open so we could extend it. We've made a few changes to RT although have found hacking on it to be a pain in the ass (largely due to our inexperience with perl/mason/etc.
We also rolled our own and use that, which works much better for our purposes, as it is heavily customised for our specific uses.
All that said, I'd encourage you to try RT and see if it meets your needs. It's not terrible by any means, it just doesn't do what I want as well as I'd like.
I just scanned the article but this looks like a misleading subject.. basically only one ISP is doing this (although it's the biggest), and the others have been threatened with legal action (just like what is happening here in Australia, with one of our ISPs targeted by the media industry and currently getting sued (disclosure: our site) for not taking action against file sharers).
So, this is basically ISPs caving to legal threats - which I guess either means they're complete pussies, or they have deals with the ISPs to provide content themselves (ie, sell music to their subscriber base) so its in their financial interests to comply, or they've actually crunched the numbers with their lawyers and Irish law doesn't look so good for ISPs.
If that latter is true, THEN I would believe reduced revenues might be likely - or if this ISP is just the biggest because it has a monopoly on infrastructure or whatever. If it's not though, users should just vote with their feet and jump ship on this ISP and go to one that is not going to tell them what they can and can't do with their Internet connections.
Going wildly off topic, but... like the rest of the world I paid more-than-usual attention to the US election (I'm in.au).
The best thing I saw McCain do was in one of those weird discussion things where some redneck-sounding lady got up and said something like "I don't like Obama because he's a Muslim".
McCain just pulled the mike away from her and no-nonsense just said "that's not true" - not even dignifying her response with any sort of beating around the bush, just flat out saying it was bullshit. Obviously to NOT do that probably would have been a PR nightmare, but I just thought the way he handled it was good.
(Still happy Obama won though, like everyone else on the planet, it seems)
Well, we're trying this plan in Australia. Many Australians are about to get around AU$1000 as a tax refund thing. I'll let you know how TV sales go, because that's exactly what I think is going to happen here.
Nope, but neither does it mean its doomed to fail. There's plenty of startups out there that probably aren't headed by Monty, but I know which one I'd be leaning towards if I was throwing money around!
Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Movies, television, software, digital texts, and other forms of useful information and cultural entertainment are being lost to time permanently. All because these items fall out of circulation and copyright law prevents enough copies from being kept around to prevent their untimely demise.
I've often thought that'd be a good extension to copyright law. As soon as something stops being available for sale (or maybe after some reasonable time, like a couple months), then it should enter the public domain.
If companies want to keep owning the rights to something, they should have to demonstrate they're prepared to make it available commercially so people can actually buy it. Otherwise people that want it will be forced to become criminals to get their hands on it (or, obviously, do without).
Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.
One of our sites (http://www.ausgamers.com) recently passed the 50% mark for Firefox users. We've ditched IE6 support entirely (the site mostly works but there's a bunch of rendering issues that we're simply not going to fix - if people point them out we explain why it's like that and advise them to upgrade to Firefox or at LEAST IE7, which many of them do).
We develop mostly in Firefox and IE support is now (as it should be) largely an afterthought.
I think ditching IE6 support (with clear explanations prepared for users that don't understand why something doesn't work) is a great start for most sites as it sends a clear message to users/customers that Microsoft can no longer set the standard.
Heh I've heard similar tales about people deploying Firefox - change the shortcut link and icon to be "Internet Explorer" and noone knows the difference.
I wonder if MS caught wind of this in a large organisation though if they could whine about trademark infringement or something?
I am so sick of techies having hissy attacks because every damn thing isn't instantly streamed to their iPhone or twittered to their PSP.
You should probably avoid reading sites that are intended for nerds, cuz they'll probably delve into the technical aspects when the Common People start talking about ze innernetz!
I seem to recall some sci-fi book I read where they'd solved the problem by surrounding the astronauts with water (ie, the ship's water supply was basically in the hull). I can't recall any of the details, but that's always stuck in my mind as a vaguely good idea, assuming it works, as you need heaps of water anyway and if you can double it as a radiation shield then so much the better!
I'm always impressed when I see that list of awesome shit NASA has done.
Question: I must assume there are patents on all that stuff. Does NASA own them? Surely those things would generate a huge amount of revenue for NASA if that was the case? (I guess the question is, what happens if a US Government employee invents something awesome?)
Thing is, money goes a long ways with books in the Third World. I'd guess that $100 bucks could buy a 100 books. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the price point was chosen in part to compete with the cost of third world books.
Yeh.. but I would guess (wild speculation on my part here) that lots of it comes from certain organisations that try to make sure copies of things like The Bible are included.
if I see a flashing part of the screen in google chrome, I AVOID READING IT, but the fact it's there disturbs me to no end.
Yep, that's fair enough too. There's a few reasons they use Flash, but the main one is obviously because they can get away with stupid shiny flashing animated obnoxiousness, because it draws your eyes (I assume there's a lot of studies about this in advertising lore).
Sure, we guys who run AdBlock realize ads keep some sites free. Let them keep their ads. We'll keep control over our browsing experience. Seems fair to me.
That's a pretty interesting definition of 'fair'. They're providing you with a free service; the unwritten "Internet browsing contract" that exists between you and them is that you occasionally look at their ads, and they'll keep providing you with interesting content.
I fully support your rights to run whatever software you want and control your own browsing experience - I just don't think you should be surprised when more and more sites move to subscription-based services and use more techniques like interstitial ads, page takeovers, self-served ads, etc.
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This switch is easy because not only is OpenOffice.org superior software in every respect, it's also feature-compatible with Microsoft Office, supports reading and writing of Microsoft's file formats Ã" even the ones that Microsoft Office itself no longer supports Ã" and is free to boot, both free as in freedom and free as in price.
To be fair, I used to think sort of the same thing - why use MS Office when OpenOffice is there and does most of that stuff?
Then I got MS Office at work - mostly to combat problems we had with compatibility with our clients sending us 'real' .doc files. OpenOffice would spit out something that didn't maintain the exact formatting, which pissed everyone off.
But the main thing for me is just the sheer awesomeness of the whole thing. I never used 2003 so didn't struggle at all with the new 'ribbon' thing, which I think is great. I find the whole Office package shits all over OpenOffice in terms of usability and performance.
I thought I'd get MS Office and only use it for stuff that had to be interoperable with our clients and use OOo for everything else - but I've switched to using MS Office for everything. Sorry, but it's better.
If you have to interoperate with anyone doing high-end Word stuff you might struggle to switch to OOo. But if you can make EVERYONE you deal with use it ALL at once and the formatting stuff isn't that big a deal - then sure, it'll work for you.
oh, you mean 65TB of storage. NEVER MIND!@#
. I could afford a 65TB server without any difficulty. I don't need one, but we're not talking about something astonishing here.
Could you direct me to a company that will give me 65TB of bandwidth?
Almost all commercial hosts I've looked at don't offer plans with anywhere near up to this, and additional bandwidth up to that amount would run into the thousands of dollars a month. So either I'm looking at completely the wrong countries, or...
So you'd rather Hulu and Netflix be sued into bankruptcy for streaming content to places in the world they have no right to do so? Yeah, that'd be a much greater idea...
The specific reason they HAVE no rights is because the people that OWN the rights refuse to adapt to the Internet and license these rights on a global scale, presumably so they can price gauge people on a territorial basis.
Until these rights owners realise the Internet is one place, we'll keep seeing territorial licensing agreements and most people outside the US will still be boned.
I suppose as a workaround you could:
1) Create a Steam account for every game you buy
2) Sell each Steam account separately.
I haven't read the EULA but it wouldn't surprise me to find it's prohibited by the license, but I suspect they'd have a hard time enforcing it (and probably wouldn't bother).
My mod points just vanished today, but if anyone else has some this is prolly worth modding up to clarify the differences between the books.
Heh, most of the rest of us outside the US find American cars big and ugly as well, and they seem to do OK over there :)
Actually just checked out the RTFM thing and it looks really helpful.
I guess I'm (possibly unfairly) comparing it to the awesome snippets that Fogbugz has. You could type, for example:
`nosupport
(backtick followed by a keyword) ... and once you'd finished typing the keyword, it would fill out the entire job. If you had even a vaguely good memory or had spent some time with the system it made powering through many jobs really easy - you could do it all with the keyboard and almost never needed to slow down to use the mouse. Ahh, the good old days.
you really did not look well into it: http://bestpractical.com/rtfm/ [bestpractical.com] ; rtfm is really simple and useful, it works great.
I have barely looked at all - I decided a while ago that I'd rather move off RT entirely and extend our homebrew solution. It's easier for us and we'll get better customisation. I'll check that link out anyway though as it will prolly be helpful for the interim, thanks.
Were you using (old) pc hardware for the RT server? What OS did you install RT on? There has been quite a big problem with the perl version that redhat installed in their OS, so maybe you were bitten by it.
We were using an HP DL380 I think - dual processor xeon, 2gb RAM - it was pretty beefy. We upgraded it to 4gb RAM and got little improvement. But we WERE running Red Hat - so maybe we ran afoul of the perl problem you mentioned.
RT is fast, simple and like they say in their website:
Yep, and I do like that aspect of it. The simplicity and flexibility of it is nice. i just find the resource requirements generally seem to be massively high - a quad core xeon with 4gb of RAM to me seems like MASSIVE overkill for what is a relatively simple web application. That's part of the reason I think I unconsciously am pissed off with it - we had SO many problems with it performance wise that just didn't make sense (so it must've just been some stupid distro-specific bug that was causing it - I was away on holidays when it was resolved and don't know how they did it).
We use RT at our work at the moment for both development/bug tracking and also user support. We had a LOT of teething problems and invested (imo) far too much time in trying to making it work properly - lots of odd performance issues, regular 10sec + load times, all sorts of weirdness. We spent a lot of time tweaking and finally got it running nicely (note: we're webdevs working on high utilisation sites so we know what we're doing as well, or at least think we do).
Aside from all the messing around - I don't like it for user support. We're doing maybe between 600-1000 inquiries a month - I can't imagine doing it at the sort of volume specified in the OP.
My big woes are the lack of good reporting, so its hard to identify trends - short of putting issues in queues I can't get visibility on what issues are cropping up regularly unless our staff remember them.
Also, there's no option for doing Standard Responses (at least not in the base install), meaning every response needs to be custom-written. There might be an addon or something for this; I haven't looked.
I got /really/ used to this in FogBugz (which I really liked for support purposes, but we got turned off by the price tag and closed-sourceness - we wanted something open so we could extend it. We've made a few changes to RT although have found hacking on it to be a pain in the ass (largely due to our inexperience with perl/mason/etc.
We also rolled our own and use that, which works much better for our purposes, as it is heavily customised for our specific uses.
All that said, I'd encourage you to try RT and see if it meets your needs. It's not terrible by any means, it just doesn't do what I want as well as I'd like.
I just scanned the article but this looks like a misleading subject.. basically only one ISP is doing this (although it's the biggest), and the others have been threatened with legal action (just like what is happening here in Australia, with one of our ISPs targeted by the media industry and currently getting sued (disclosure: our site) for not taking action against file sharers).
So, this is basically ISPs caving to legal threats - which I guess either means they're complete pussies, or they have deals with the ISPs to provide content themselves (ie, sell music to their subscriber base) so its in their financial interests to comply, or they've actually crunched the numbers with their lawyers and Irish law doesn't look so good for ISPs.
If that latter is true, THEN I would believe reduced revenues might be likely - or if this ISP is just the biggest because it has a monopoly on infrastructure or whatever. If it's not though, users should just vote with their feet and jump ship on this ISP and go to one that is not going to tell them what they can and can't do with their Internet connections.
Going wildly off topic, but... like the rest of the world I paid more-than-usual attention to the US election (I'm in .au).
The best thing I saw McCain do was in one of those weird discussion things where some redneck-sounding lady got up and said something like "I don't like Obama because he's a Muslim".
McCain just pulled the mike away from her and no-nonsense just said "that's not true" - not even dignifying her response with any sort of beating around the bush, just flat out saying it was bullshit. Obviously to NOT do that probably would have been a PR nightmare, but I just thought the way he handled it was good.
(Still happy Obama won though, like everyone else on the planet, it seems)
Well, we're trying this plan in Australia. Many Australians are about to get around AU$1000 as a tax refund thing. I'll let you know how TV sales go, because that's exactly what I think is going to happen here.
Past success doesn't guarantee future success.
Nope, but neither does it mean its doomed to fail. There's plenty of startups out there that probably aren't headed by Monty, but I know which one I'd be leaning towards if I was throwing money around!
Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Movies, television, software, digital texts, and other forms of useful information and cultural entertainment are being lost to time permanently. All because these items fall out of circulation and copyright law prevents enough copies from being kept around to prevent their untimely demise.
I've often thought that'd be a good extension to copyright law. As soon as something stops being available for sale (or maybe after some reasonable time, like a couple months), then it should enter the public domain.
If companies want to keep owning the rights to something, they should have to demonstrate they're prepared to make it available commercially so people can actually buy it. Otherwise people that want it will be forced to become criminals to get their hands on it (or, obviously, do without).
Developers need to band together and stop hacking our sites for IE. Users who wish to use IE should either be directed toward download links for one of the many alternatives, or forced to deal with a degraded view of the site with a polite comment to upgrade. And by degraded, I mean "it works, but looks awful". If that right there doesn't sell users on getting an alternative browser, I don't know what will.
One of our sites (http://www.ausgamers.com) recently passed the 50% mark for Firefox users. We've ditched IE6 support entirely (the site mostly works but there's a bunch of rendering issues that we're simply not going to fix - if people point them out we explain why it's like that and advise them to upgrade to Firefox or at LEAST IE7, which many of them do).
We develop mostly in Firefox and IE support is now (as it should be) largely an afterthought.
I think ditching IE6 support (with clear explanations prepared for users that don't understand why something doesn't work) is a great start for most sites as it sends a clear message to users/customers that Microsoft can no longer set the standard.
Heh I've heard similar tales about people deploying Firefox - change the shortcut link and icon to be "Internet Explorer" and noone knows the difference.
I wonder if MS caught wind of this in a large organisation though if they could whine about trademark infringement or something?
Give him a break - lots of the US hasn't figured out there's a rest of the world yet!
(Thar be dragons)
I am so sick of techies having hissy attacks because every damn thing isn't instantly streamed to their iPhone or twittered to their PSP.
You should probably avoid reading sites that are intended for nerds, cuz they'll probably delve into the technical aspects when the Common People start talking about ze innernetz!
I seem to recall some sci-fi book I read where they'd solved the problem by surrounding the astronauts with water (ie, the ship's water supply was basically in the hull). I can't recall any of the details, but that's always stuck in my mind as a vaguely good idea, assuming it works, as you need heaps of water anyway and if you can double it as a radiation shield then so much the better!
I'm always impressed when I see that list of awesome shit NASA has done.
Question: I must assume there are patents on all that stuff. Does NASA own them? Surely those things would generate a huge amount of revenue for NASA if that was the case? (I guess the question is, what happens if a US Government employee invents something awesome?)
Thing is, money goes a long ways with books in the Third World. I'd guess that $100 bucks could buy a 100 books. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the price point was chosen in part to compete with the cost of third world books.
Yeh.. but I would guess (wild speculation on my part here) that lots of it comes from certain organisations that try to make sure copies of things like The Bible are included.
if I see a flashing part of the screen in google chrome, I AVOID READING IT, but the fact it's there disturbs me to no end.
Yep, that's fair enough too. There's a few reasons they use Flash, but the main one is obviously because they can get away with stupid shiny flashing animated obnoxiousness, because it draws your eyes (I assume there's a lot of studies about this in advertising lore).
So Slashdot's ads give them revenue on merely viewing them?
Because I sure never go around and click on ads. Anywhere.
Probably, yes. Many ad displays are "per impression", not "per click".
Sure, we guys who run AdBlock realize ads keep some sites free. Let them keep their ads. We'll keep control over our browsing experience. Seems fair to me.
That's a pretty interesting definition of 'fair'. They're providing you with a free service; the unwritten "Internet browsing contract" that exists between you and them is that you occasionally look at their ads, and they'll keep providing you with interesting content.
I fully support your rights to run whatever software you want and control your own browsing experience - I just don't think you should be surprised when more and more sites move to subscription-based services and use more techniques like interstitial ads, page takeovers, self-served ads, etc.