I assume you know, but I'd like to point out that Turku is in Finland.
It was Swedish for a good long time and still known as Åbo, though the importance of that died out a generation or two back. However, it's not an example for its geographical location or its history.
This is new to me, do you know what was the outcome?
Old news. Maybe you can find some old articles.
Åbo was one of the first to investigate 'linux' back in the second round of F/OSS interest some years back. The first round, IMHO came with the web. The second around 1999/2000. The third now. Anyway, the sort version of the outcome is that MS was able to block (through the hardware vendor) the investigation long enough that they could rally top managers to let them "help" with the evaluation. Åbo had made too much noise and MS came in like a ton of bricks. After that, business and agencies around the world watched and learn that you don't say squat about your IT plans until they are already implemented.
...sure I have a Windows laptop which I usually read email on. Only, I haven't bothered to start it since the harddrive broke down and the support staff replaced it. All real work is done on a Sparc Solaris and an AMD SuSE Linux workstation. In fact, our unit does not even use Word, but Framemaker for technical documentation,
That was rather common before 1999 and is experiencing a renaissance as people are starting to look for a way to use computers to get work done rather than as an end in themselves. The most productive shop I passed through, both in terms of deliverables and SEK/EUR brought in, ran a mixture of Solaris and Debian for both workstations and servers. It, by the way, outlasted the dot-bomb era with more money than was good for it, a condition which ultimately brought on the carpetbaggers and, subsequently, demise. Currently getting good use out of OS X, Ubuntu and Debian at work.
... but that is not popular at all with our IT management.
What's wrong with the IT management there? If the data is a in a well-documented format, then staff can use the tool that's most productive for them. No man-weeks spent on time wasters based on sending crates of money to Chairman Bill's representatives. Deliverables made in HTML or PDF any time the last 10 years and are still readable to this day.
The world is not black or white.
Nothing in the post said it was black or white. Ditching any remaining MS systems does not leave going to "linux" as the only option nor does it even rule out using closed source. There's still plenty of quality closed source products out there. They're just fewer and harder to find since MSoftologists starting having their way with trade journals through their advertising budgets.
Sure at a large enough university you will find all manner of systems, so nothing will ever be 100% gone, it can be so low as to be as good as gone.
Word on the street was that UU was going to go completely FOSS, or at least completely non-MS, on its workstations. Many other institutions were heading that way until 2000-2002. Turku was a notable case, but there were quite a few others that weren't able to move even that far before MSofters flew in and thus didn't get as much press.
Other bad decisions were made around that time, too: People got sold a lot of junkj hardware, too: gross income deduction in exchange for last year's hardware, at this years full retail prices, delivered 6 to 12 months from now. That gross income reduction cuts rather deeply into the pensions, given the new pension system.
It would be useful, though nearly impossible, to find out all the places that have been trying to dump M$ junk since 1998, but have been threatened with raids, or threatened with audits, or given 95%+ discounts in order to keep or extend the lock-in. As you can see it's been part of the business model for a long time. The BSA/FAST raids seem not just about licensing but about even getting rid of non-MS commercial software.
Hmm. Kind of like how you can criticize IBM, Sony, Apple, Oracle, or Novell, their behavior, ethics or their products, but anything other than praise for MS brings out all kinds of ad hominem attacks.
I have used Gandi on and off since 2002 really only one complaint, the price has gone up. Depending on currency fluctuation it can cost $18 USD, if you are still on the US dollar. I tried Joker last year, but was not pleased with either their interface or their customer service. It took a few weeks to get the domain to kick in even after coughing up the money. It was rather smooth, though not fast, to transfer some domains away from Joker. That took about a week.
One of the other posts mentioned an idea about registering five or six years at a discount place and then transfefring to Gandi. It's worth investigating, but does involve some delay and some risk. The delay is from minimum time before transfer that many registrars
It'd be interesting to hear a few months down the road what you decided on and how it turned out.
MS has lost billions on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and will probably never make that investment back.
The investment there is not in the game console itself or even the games. It's simply the staging area for various digital restriction technologies to work out user-acceptance issue before rolling out the same commodity hardware into enterprise level business agreements.
Neither the console nor the games need to turn a dime on their own if they lead to 100% proprietary hardware-software lock-in, even in peripherals like audio, video, network, printers and storage devices.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...
"shit-poor quality"
Yep. It's usually bowdlerized, but the quality does call for expletives. If you don't like it then don't come here to other open source / open standards sites.
Funny how pretty much all defense of Microsoft products is based on name calling like that. Even organized defense like the astroturfers, both announced and unannounced, on Wikipedia. If MS products could stand up to competition on technical merits, then the solution in that case would have been to publish a white paper and let the facts stand for themselves. However, everyone, including the politburo in Redmond know that any white paper would get ripped to shreds and leave no doubt as to the problems with their technologies, thus the name calling route.
You forget or want to forget that brand recognition works both ways. Microsoft has an established and well-documented history of shit-poor quality, high prices and illegal, anti-competitive business methods.
Lack of quality you can see for yourself by evaluating any of the technologies and comparing them. Or you see how licenses and other maneuvers prevent reviews, inferring that the product can't stand on its own. You can see the high prices by looking at the company's SEC fillings, or by reading the findings of fact from the multitude of States and nations that had filed lawsuits for overcharging. Likewise, the courts' findings of facts and even decisions and decisions after appeal point to strong dependence on illegal, anti-competitive business methods.
Then you can add other shining moments like the then CEO's perjury on the stand and forged video evidence during trials. That goes beyond bad judgment far into disrespect. A group that has so little respect for US laws, US courts and the US people appears by its behavior to be both anti-American and a threat to the nation. So you could say that the company and it's management have worked very hard for decades to earn and keep the all-around poor reputation.
Brand recognition hurts if you product and your company suck: It's not about an arbitrary like / dislike, despite however much you want it to be that way. It's about sucks / doesn't suck and from that people tend to dislike things that suck. Like / dislike is earned.
Israel has a pretty high birth rate for an industrialized nation and they are unfortunately also beholden to microsoft. Lots of israeli websites are IE only
That and Chairman Gates called Sharon on the carpet a few years back. The press was actively excluded from all aspects of the meeting and from Gates during his visit. However, the Israeli government started a fast back-pedal on non-MS technologies right after, so it's probably easy to guess at least one topic of discussion.
Now I actively dislike Sharon, his policies and his goals, but that won't stop me from saying that he was a very strong, shrewd, effective and powerful politician. Therefore I surmise that he got something of perceived benefit out of the deal, assuming no damage to his cognitive abilities. But what was it? Not that it has to be a benefit for or even be non-harmful to Israel itself, no politician of his calibre is going to give in without getting at least as much back either for himself or his politics.
... Which leads me to another point--why'd they name it OOXML? Office Open XML? Pretty slimy to try and pawn itself off as something related to Open Office when it's a Microsoft format....
Because it took a chunk out of Open Office's Google ranking starting the very same day MS announced the new name. The same reason that the next MS boondoggle got named Vista, after our esteemed Chairman Gates decided to turn his guns on healthcare systems. He even took a try at RMS.
That was also the theme back in 1975, but not 2002. It seems to be one bit of information that corporatists wish to remove from common knowledge: someone came up with the plan, and other individuals were involved in approving it and trying to carry it out.
Not that I'm for public services. I think private ones are better.
Like I said, some things work better public. Some things work better private. IF you try to shoehorn everything into one model or the other you end up with a fucked up situation like you have had in the USSR, or nowadays the USSA or Sweden.
Private services can work when you're building up from nothing, but with many things you reach a point where it becomes more efficient to nationalize in someway. The service becomes like a utility of sorts. However, taking a well-running service, whether public or private, and then switching models for purely ideological reasons is completely stupid, as is sticking with badly messed up services.
Privatization is marketed as a panacea: "good for what ails ya" and all that. But the math is wrong. You can't get lower net cost out of same operating costs + profit + executive salaries as you can with operating costs + break-even.
Dude, your map needs an update. Sweden hasn't had those services you mention for about 10 years now. There are some private company shells acting as place holders, but those will be sold off soon, too. It's not the sociological, economic, or technological powerhouse it was in the 70's. All that stopped when they stumbled (or hopped) from the "middle path": somethings work best private, others public. That's how it is and trying to shoehorn everything into one extreme ideology or another doesn't work and drive a country under. That was known before and is being re-learned the hard way again now.
IIRC that political movement hired away many of Borland's top developers attempt to eliminate Borland's C/C++ as a competitor. Prior to that, Borland was at the top of proprietary C/C++ compilers.
So how much of the motivation behind this recent hire is just an attempt to hurt IBM ? Clearly the overall development of the IT sector would be better if he had stayed.
Why must the entire nation implement DRM, anyway?
So that WMA/WMV and WMP then become mandatory and by extension the one operating system that can use them also becomes mandatory. It also makes it easier for the political party (yeah it's not a company any more) that owns that operating system to force new purchases by dragging its feet or stopping altogether DRM support for older versions. The other political party (the one running the junta) gets to feel like they're holding the leash a while longer then by having the ability to track or limit who listens to what, when and where.
One of E O Wilson's recent books, Consilience, is in a similar category.
I expect a few more from his generation to add their insights to existing fields or point to new fields during the next few years. He and his peers have been retired and now realize that they themselves must write before they kick off.
I was thinking that 'meh, Telvin is probably right'...
Yeah, you're probably right that he's right. But here's an explanation from Ken Thompson covering the same topic. I'd count Ken Thompson as an authority myself.
Except we're talking about a productivity suite here. Mostly that means a word processor and a spreadsheet. Those are mature technologies which in practice haven't changed that much in about 15 years, but just for the sake of argument we'll say 10. The basic functions, those that are used daily, have been around that long.
... Each employee will save on average 20 hours of work. So it's a net gain.
Speculation. Any reason why the changes in this version will not decrease productivity instead of decrease them ? It's kind of hard to know until it's been tested on larger populations, more than just the pundits, reviewers and marketeers. Even if it's about the same to use, it's more likely that the obstacles to productivity lie elsewhere in the system.
The new software also introduces new levels of complexity with Information Restriction Management technologies. Love it or hate it, it means more parts, and more parts means more complexity and complexity means chances for users to muck things up. It also introduces single point of failure twice: once in needing an external server for the Restrictions Management, once more in the network connectivity needed to reach that Restrictions Management server
... That's why new software comes out.
Depends on the source. In most of the cases, the new software come out so that a new, slightly incompatible file format can be spread and hopefully (from the vendor's view) gain enough market share to drive around of upgrade purchases. However, that hasn't been happening lately.
Better off just sticking with OpenOffice.org, though I hear rumours of KOffice for legacy systems, also, sometime.
... mail should be able to be searched with just cause....
That's what search warrants are for. Or did you mean to write "just 'cause" instead ?
If warrantless searching of US mail becomes practice, then it will actually reduce security. Previously, certain grades of classified materials could be sent through the mail, with certain conditions. However, if it can be opened by any slob working for the department of homespun security, then that violates need to know principle if nothing else, and for good or bad the practice will have to stop. Re-tooling a government practice or policy is not easy, cheap, efficient, or quick.
...There is esmtpverbs control parameter in AD which by default does not play very nice with some other smtp servers(its arguable whose fault is that - every party claims its other party to blame) .
Easy enough to deduce: On the one side we have all the other MTAs which, unsurprisingly, are able to communicate well with each other. That leaves, on the other side, one system the odd man out which does not play very nice with the others.
What's wrong with admitting that it's still broken or don't normal rules of any kind apply to that one vendor ?
Most sites seem to use it because they're addicted to the calendaring, but there were better apps for that before that were cross platform (unlike that one). And there are better calendaring apps, now too, just different from a few years ago. Otherwise, it'd be gone in a heartbeat and replaced with a real mail transfer agent.
... AFAICT it's fine for use as a groupware server...
I used to believe that, in absence of other data, until I had more and more contact with people actually using it. Even people on the same physical server. It'd be funny to see if it weren't such a sabotage of productivity. Losing an important mail is not just losing 5 minutes: there's waiting for the important mail, figuring out that it really is gone and not at the destination, the phone calls, the stress, calming from the stress and then figuring out what you were doing before you figured out the error and then getting back to where you left off.
I recall installing some additional power outlets in one building in the tropics and worrying about violating code by doing it myself. The building was wired with 8-gauge multiple strand copper wire (for 110VAC 60Hz) with one hot, one neutral and (ostensibly) one ground. Once I got a look under the faceplate, however, I realized that code wouldn't be a problem.
The wiring method was bizarre: at each terminal (screw) the wire was stripped of insulation by tearing for about 2 inches (~5 cm), wrapped around the screw and then continued on its way to the next. It went like that for all the outlets we examined.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Swedish for a good long time and still known as Åbo, though the importance of that died out a generation or two back. However, it's not an example for its geographical location or its history.
This is new to me, do you know what was the outcome?Old news. Maybe you can find some old articles.
Åbo was one of the first to investigate 'linux' back in the second round of F/OSS interest some years back. The first round, IMHO came with the web. The second around 1999/2000. The third now. Anyway, the sort version of the outcome is that MS was able to block (through the hardware vendor) the investigation long enough that they could rally top managers to let them "help" with the evaluation. Åbo had made too much noise and MS came in like a ton of bricks. After that, business and agencies around the world watched and learn that you don't say squat about your IT plans until they are already implemented.
...sure I have a Windows laptop which I usually read email on. Only, I haven't bothered to start it since the harddrive broke down and the support staff replaced it. All real work is done on a Sparc Solaris and an AMD SuSE Linux workstation. In fact, our unit does not even use Word, but Framemaker for technical documentation,That was rather common before 1999 and is experiencing a renaissance as people are starting to look for a way to use computers to get work done rather than as an end in themselves. The most productive shop I passed through, both in terms of deliverables and SEK/EUR brought in, ran a mixture of Solaris and Debian for both workstations and servers. It, by the way, outlasted the dot-bomb era with more money than was good for it, a condition which ultimately brought on the carpetbaggers and, subsequently, demise. Currently getting good use out of OS X, Ubuntu and Debian at work.
... but that is not popular at all with our IT management.What's wrong with the IT management there? If the data is a in a well-documented format, then staff can use the tool that's most productive for them. No man-weeks spent on time wasters based on sending crates of money to Chairman Bill's representatives. Deliverables made in HTML or PDF any time the last 10 years and are still readable to this day.
The world is not black or white.
Nothing in the post said it was black or white. Ditching any remaining MS systems does not leave going to "linux" as the only option nor does it even rule out using closed source. There's still plenty of quality closed source products out there. They're just fewer and harder to find since MSoftologists starting having their way with trade journals through their advertising budgets.
Sure at a large enough university you will find all manner of systems, so nothing will ever be 100% gone, it can be so low as to be as good as gone.
From 2004 : " Uppsala universitet betalar mindre än en tiondel av ordinarie pris för Office. " , which translate to English as "The University of Uppsala pays less than a tenth of the ordinary price for {MS} Office"
Word on the street was that UU was going to go completely FOSS, or at least completely non-MS, on its workstations. Many other institutions were heading that way until 2000-2002. Turku was a notable case, but there were quite a few others that weren't able to move even that far before MSofters flew in and thus didn't get as much press.
Other bad decisions were made around that time, too: People got sold a lot of junkj hardware, too: gross income deduction in exchange for last year's hardware, at this years full retail prices, delivered 6 to 12 months from now. That gross income reduction cuts rather deeply into the pensions, given the new pension system.
It would be useful, though nearly impossible, to find out all the places that have been trying to dump M$ junk since 1998, but have been threatened with raids, or threatened with audits, or given 95%+ discounts in order to keep or extend the lock-in. As you can see it's been part of the business model for a long time. The BSA/FAST raids seem not just about licensing but about even getting rid of non-MS commercial software.
Hmm. Kind of like how you can criticize IBM, Sony, Apple, Oracle, or Novell, their behavior, ethics or their products, but anything other than praise for MS brings out all kinds of ad hominem attacks.
I have used Gandi on and off since 2002 really only one complaint, the price has gone up. Depending on currency fluctuation it can cost $18 USD, if you are still on the US dollar. I tried Joker last year, but was not pleased with either their interface or their customer service. It took a few weeks to get the domain to kick in even after coughing up the money. It was rather smooth, though not fast, to transfer some domains away from Joker. That took about a week.
One of the other posts mentioned an idea about registering five or six years at a discount place and then transfefring to Gandi. It's worth investigating, but does involve some delay and some risk. The delay is from minimum time before transfer that many registrars
It'd be interesting to hear a few months down the road what you decided on and how it turned out.
The investment there is not in the game console itself or even the games. It's simply the staging area for various digital restriction technologies to work out user-acceptance issue before rolling out the same commodity hardware into enterprise level business agreements.
Neither the console nor the games need to turn a dime on their own if they lead to 100% proprietary hardware-software lock-in, even in peripherals like audio, video, network, printers and storage devices.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...
"shit-poor quality"Yep. It's usually bowdlerized, but the quality does call for expletives. If you don't like it then don't come here to other open source / open standards sites.
It's probably even better than that. Wasn't there a programme for M$ to help small businesses 'register' new business ideas?
Yes, this is true, but they don't need that info until they draw up the offer letter.
Actually they don't need the SSAN until they fill out the W-2 or W-5 so they can pay you. Not a second earlier.
... that "I hate Microsoft" syndromeFunny how pretty much all defense of Microsoft products is based on name calling like that. Even organized defense like the astroturfers, both announced and unannounced, on Wikipedia. If MS products could stand up to competition on technical merits, then the solution in that case would have been to publish a white paper and let the facts stand for themselves. However, everyone, including the politburo in Redmond know that any white paper would get ripped to shreds and leave no doubt as to the problems with their technologies, thus the name calling route.
You forget or want to forget that brand recognition works both ways. Microsoft has an established and well-documented history of shit-poor quality, high prices and illegal, anti-competitive business methods. Lack of quality you can see for yourself by evaluating any of the technologies and comparing them. Or you see how licenses and other maneuvers prevent reviews, inferring that the product can't stand on its own. You can see the high prices by looking at the company's SEC fillings, or by reading the findings of fact from the multitude of States and nations that had filed lawsuits for overcharging. Likewise, the courts' findings of facts and even decisions and decisions after appeal point to strong dependence on illegal, anti-competitive business methods.
Then you can add other shining moments like the then CEO's perjury on the stand and forged video evidence during trials. That goes beyond bad judgment far into disrespect. A group that has so little respect for US laws, US courts and the US people appears by its behavior to be both anti-American and a threat to the nation. So you could say that the company and it's management have worked very hard for decades to earn and keep the all-around poor reputation.
Brand recognition hurts if you product and your company suck: It's not about an arbitrary like / dislike, despite however much you want it to be that way. It's about sucks / doesn't suck and from that people tend to dislike things that suck. Like / dislike is earned.
That and Chairman Gates called Sharon on the carpet a few years back. The press was actively excluded from all aspects of the meeting and from Gates during his visit. However, the Israeli government started a fast back-pedal on non-MS technologies right after, so it's probably easy to guess at least one topic of discussion.
Now I actively dislike Sharon, his policies and his goals, but that won't stop me from saying that he was a very strong, shrewd, effective and powerful politician. Therefore I surmise that he got something of perceived benefit out of the deal, assuming no damage to his cognitive abilities. But what was it? Not that it has to be a benefit for or even be non-harmful to Israel itself, no politician of his calibre is going to give in without getting at least as much back either for himself or his politics.
... Which leads me to another point--why'd they name it OOXML? Office Open XML? Pretty slimy to try and pawn itself off as something related to Open Office when it's a Microsoft format.Because it took a chunk out of Open Office's Google ranking starting the very same day MS announced the new name. The same reason that the next MS boondoggle got named Vista, after our esteemed Chairman Gates decided to turn his guns on healthcare systems. He even took a try at RMS.
That was also the theme back in 1975, but not 2002. It seems to be one bit of information that corporatists wish to remove from common knowledge: someone came up with the plan, and other individuals were involved in approving it and trying to carry it out.
Like I said, some things work better public. Some things work better private. IF you try to shoehorn everything into one model or the other you end up with a fucked up situation like you have had in the USSR, or nowadays the USSA or Sweden.
Private services can work when you're building up from nothing, but with many things you reach a point where it becomes more efficient to nationalize in someway. The service becomes like a utility of sorts. However, taking a well-running service, whether public or private, and then switching models for purely ideological reasons is completely stupid, as is sticking with badly messed up services.
Privatization is marketed as a panacea: "good for what ails ya" and all that. But the math is wrong. You can't get lower net cost out of same operating costs + profit + executive salaries as you can with operating costs + break-even.
Dude, your map needs an update. Sweden hasn't had those services you mention for about 10 years now. There are some private company shells acting as place holders, but those will be sold off soon, too. It's not the sociological, economic, or technological powerhouse it was in the 70's. All that stopped when they stumbled (or hopped) from the "middle path": somethings work best private, others public. That's how it is and trying to shoehorn everything into one extreme ideology or another doesn't work and drive a country under. That was known before and is being re-learned the hard way again now.
IIRC that political movement hired away many of Borland's top developers attempt to eliminate Borland's C/C++ as a competitor. Prior to that, Borland was at the top of proprietary C/C++ compilers.
So how much of the motivation behind this recent hire is just an attempt to hurt IBM ? Clearly the overall development of the IT sector would be better if he had stayed.
One of E O Wilson's recent books, Consilience, is in a similar category.
I expect a few more from his generation to add their insights to existing fields or point to new fields during the next few years. He and his peers have been retired and now realize that they themselves must write before they kick off.
Except we're talking about a productivity suite here. Mostly that means a word processor and a spreadsheet. Those are mature technologies which in practice haven't changed that much in about 15 years, but just for the sake of argument we'll say 10. The basic functions, those that are used daily, have been around that long.
... Each employee will save on average 20 hours of work. So it's a net gain.Speculation. Any reason why the changes in this version will not decrease productivity instead of decrease them ? It's kind of hard to know until it's been tested on larger populations, more than just the pundits, reviewers and marketeers. Even if it's about the same to use, it's more likely that the obstacles to productivity lie elsewhere in the system.
The new software also introduces new levels of complexity with Information Restriction Management technologies. Love it or hate it, it means more parts, and more parts means more complexity and complexity means chances for users to muck things up. It also introduces single point of failure twice: once in needing an external server for the Restrictions Management, once more in the network connectivity needed to reach that Restrictions Management server
... That's why new software comes out.Depends on the source. In most of the cases, the new software come out so that a new, slightly incompatible file format can be spread and hopefully (from the vendor's view) gain enough market share to drive around of upgrade purchases. However, that hasn't been happening lately.
Better off just sticking with OpenOffice.org, though I hear rumours of KOffice for legacy systems, also, sometime.
... mail should be able to be searched with just cause.That's what search warrants are for. Or did you mean to write "just 'cause" instead ?
If warrantless searching of US mail becomes practice, then it will actually reduce security. Previously, certain grades of classified materials could be sent through the mail, with certain conditions. However, if it can be opened by any slob working for the department of homespun security, then that violates need to know principle if nothing else, and for good or bad the practice will have to stop. Re-tooling a government practice or policy is not easy, cheap, efficient, or quick.
...There is esmtpverbs control parameter in AD which by default does not play very nice with some other smtp servers(its arguable whose fault is that - every party claims its other party to blame) .Easy enough to deduce: On the one side we have all the other MTAs which, unsurprisingly, are able to communicate well with each other. That leaves, on the other side, one system the odd man out which does not play very nice with the others.
What's wrong with admitting that it's still broken or don't normal rules of any kind apply to that one vendor ?
Most sites seem to use it because they're addicted to the calendaring, but there were better apps for that before that were cross platform (unlike that one). And there are better calendaring apps, now too, just different from a few years ago. Otherwise, it'd be gone in a heartbeat and replaced with a real mail transfer agent.
... AFAICT it's fine for use as a groupware serverI used to believe that, in absence of other data, until I had more and more contact with people actually using it. Even people on the same physical server. It'd be funny to see if it weren't such a sabotage of productivity. Losing an important mail is not just losing 5 minutes: there's waiting for the important mail, figuring out that it really is gone and not at the destination, the phone calls, the stress, calming from the stress and then figuring out what you were doing before you figured out the error and then getting back to where you left off.
I recall installing some additional power outlets in one building in the tropics and worrying about violating code by doing it myself. The building was wired with 8-gauge multiple strand copper wire (for 110VAC 60Hz) with one hot, one neutral and (ostensibly) one ground. Once I got a look under the faceplate, however, I realized that code wouldn't be a problem.
The wiring method was bizarre: at each terminal (screw) the wire was stripped of insulation by tearing for about 2 inches (~5 cm), wrapped around the screw and then continued on its way to the next. It went like that for all the outlets we examined.