This is precisely the problem with mandating OSS in government, particularly municipal government. OSS is a strong value add in some situations but not in every situation. Those that suggest Open Office is "good enough" to replace office haven't seen how large organizations use MS Office. Spreadsheets end up being applications as do access databases. Many Word documents are based on specialized templates that provide focus for a specific business process.
And yes OSS is about choice but we are also hitting the law of diminishing returns here. Office 11 may be the first compelling upgrade to office since Office 97. NT 4.0 sp6a is good enough for many users purposes and it will stay deployed until desktops need to be replaced (or Office 11 proves compelling enough to force the upgrade). Bear in mind that many large organizations have made the decision not to refresh technology as a cost cutting measure during the current economic downturn.
Mandating OSS deployments without carefully considering the Total Economic Impact (TEI) is just as bad as mandating proprietary software.
Or you could just edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAN D PROCESSOR\CompleteionChar or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\S OFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAND PROCESSOR\CompleteionChar and set the value to 9 in (I believe) every version of windows (certainly in all of the NT/XP lines) and you can tab along happily
I am also an old school sf reader and there are only a few writers that I look forward to publications from at this point.
1. Orson Scott Card - I have to plan on not sleeping when I purchase one of his books, I just read them until they are done to the exclusion of all else.
2. Neil Gaiman - American Gods is well worth the time.
3. Tim Powers - nearly always a new story
4. Tonya Huff - mental junk-food but the good kind:-)
5. Laurell K. Hamilton - Ann Rice with what is usually a different story every book instead of publishing the same story with different names.
Really I have found that in large part that the stories that are actually new have been few and far between. I wish Harlen Ellison was still being creative and someone could fill the shoes of Phil Dick but have found myself falling back on classic mystery (Rex Stout) and humor (Wodehouse) but those tend to be somewhat repetitive as well. At least the characters are well written.
Buffy is wrapping up but as a series probably has reached the end of its natural life. If you look at the season villains they have got larger and larger (by season 1: The Master - Uber Vamp; 2: Spike, Angel, Dru - Multiple uber vamps; 3: The Mayor - My personal fav big bad; 4: Adam - Frankenstein's demon; 5: Glory - a god; 6: Willow gone evil; 7: The first evil) to the point that it will be very difficult to top the current big bad. A spin off appears to be in the works. that may have SMG guest appearances.
Angel hasn't been renewed yet either. That is fairly disappointing.
Enterprise has been terrible since the get go. The suggestion that they weren't going to use technology to solve problems was a blatant lie and basic Star Trek races (Vulcans for example) ended up being written so badly it was astonishing.
The most interesting part of this is the reason Merril Lynch gave as to why they posted patches back. They wanted to have a seat at the development table and did not want to have to maintain a fork of the product forever. Certainly not a RMS view of OSS, but one that makes more sense (and dollars) in the long run.
Some of the books have been fantastic. I have gotten more value from the JavaScript Bible by Danny Goodman then almost any other book I have purchased (I'm a Web developer).
K
In previous court testimony he has said that source code is free speach (see his public policy page). Yet he seems to be suggesting that Microsoft's private free speach can be regulated by law while others cannot. I want to have my cake and eat it too as well, but it seems to me that he has to pick one postion or the other. K.
Any comparison of AOL w/ Nazi Germany is absurd. If you dislike AOL because they make the Internet sucky - fine, however for a number of other people they make the Internet possible. It may be nice to be a wise old netizen "I remember when I upgraded to my 300 buad modem, boy what a day that was." but many people do not have that luxury and to a certain extent are trepedatious around their computers. Please give them a break. Let them use AOL in peace.
Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals.
Two of the three guys you mentioned are partners with Nielsen. Go to Nielsen Norman Group to see more. They seem to believe that their ideas are compatible.
K.
Re:Who could have predicted this nightmare
on
Electronic Abacus
·
· Score: 1
The use of the PC in the business has reached and passed the point of dimishing returns and really manay people could better serve companies by shoving the PC aside and getting out a good old pad of paper. We have so lost touch with reality. How many of you do nothing when you can't login or access the network?
You are forgetting the orders of magnitude change in scale of the amount of business being done. Shut down all PC's and sit around for three days a week and you will still get twice as much work done in two days as you did 50 years ago w/o computers.
Not for nothing but, we are kind of at war. In the past that has led to significant rationing and suspension of liberties much more dear than the ability to walk into a government building unimpeded. This one strikes me as a reasonable search.
I'm not sure I believe that. It is shorter, but experience shows that the more that you obsure control structures (in this case what should function as a for loop) the more likely that code is to end up needing to be debugged.
Sometimes it is better to be obvious and allow future developers maintaining your code to quickly understand it.
In a corporate environment the normal use of SAMBA seems to be a *NIX file + other services server accessed by windows clients, will the inability to change a windows password from UNIX have an effect?
Gotta love a pricing model that says the better I do with the language the less incentive I have to use it.
K.
Re:KDE 2s2 feature depth is astounding
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
Being a person who develops web applications I can think of a use for pop-up windows (example: display details of line / item in a table without losing your place in a table.) nevertheless I would like to be able to disable them when I am browsing the web. As for the script-hackers playing with right-click, anyone who thinks that they can hide client side code is someone who really shouldn't be doing web work. If you want to remove / comment code from the site you are viewing, get yourself a good man in the middle program (Achilles for example - also good for exposing holes in your own work) and with a minimum of effort, anything you want to be gone - is gone
NT 4 lives on in companies because there is no essential software that runs on W2K that does not run on NT4. XP won't happen in the corporate arena for the same reason. Assume for a second that you are a SA for a company with 10,000 + desktops. Can you justify the cost (license, install time, potential hardware upgrades, user education, etc.) of 10,000 copies of XP (or 2K for that matter)?
TCO is everything in the corporate arena. This year and next XP will have more impact on home users then corporate users.
Linux and BSD can't or won't succeed until they can drive TCO down (Licensing is minimal here BTW) and a *nix user can open a MS Office file, modify it and send it back in the same condition w/o jumping through hoops.
K.
Re:Didn't anyone read the article?
on
Bionic Nurses
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· Score: 1
I suspect that a nurse tethered to a wall / generator will be less able to the every day things that potentially cause back injury. Additionally, nurses deal with making their patients comfortable - a nurse coming up to me in a robotic suit trailing cables isn't going to do anything for my peace of mind.
More importantly, these devices are going to cause problems in critical care situations (think delivering babies, emergency room, patients in cardiac arrest, etc.) a strength boost at that time may be more harmful then helpful. Conversely, if the nurse isn't wearing the thing continuously they may be stuck getting in or out when they are needed doing other things. Remember the nursing shortage causes existing nurses do more with less support, and unlike in software development, mistakes can cause death or permanent disability instead of a logged bug.
A powered suit doesn't look too helpful in those situations. Better to spend the money on getting more nurses or paying the ones that are already working better.
Rapid Development is the third best use of my money to buy a computer book that I can recall.
The best was Oracle8i: The Complete Reference by Kevin Loney, George Koch (Perhaps the only book with the word "Complete" in the title that doesn't make me cringe), It is quickly followed by Javascript bible by Danny Goodman.
Others that helped have been UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel (free online but dead trees are easier to read)
A web guy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is precisely the problem with mandating OSS in government, particularly municipal government. OSS is a strong value add in some situations but not in every situation. Those that suggest Open Office is "good enough" to replace office haven't seen how large organizations use MS Office. Spreadsheets end up being applications as do access databases. Many Word documents are based on specialized templates that provide focus for a specific business process.
And yes OSS is about choice but we are also hitting the law of diminishing returns here. Office 11 may be the first compelling upgrade to office since Office 97. NT 4.0 sp6a is good enough for many users purposes and it will stay deployed until desktops need to be replaced (or Office 11 proves compelling enough to force the upgrade). Bear in mind that many large organizations have made the decision not to refresh technology as a cost cutting measure during the current economic downturn.
Mandating OSS deployments without carefully considering the Total Economic Impact (TEI) is just as bad as mandating proprietary software.
Or you could just editN D PROCESSOR\CompleteionCharS OFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAND PROCESSOR\CompleteionChar /XP lines) and you can tab along happily
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMA
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\
and set the value to 9 in (I believe) every version of windows (certainly in all of the NT
I am also an old school sf reader and there are only a few writers that I look forward to publications from at this point.
:-)
1. Orson Scott Card - I have to plan on not sleeping when I purchase one of his books, I just read them until they are done to the exclusion of all else.
2. Neil Gaiman - American Gods is well worth the time.
3. Tim Powers - nearly always a new story
4. Tonya Huff - mental junk-food but the good kind
5. Laurell K. Hamilton - Ann Rice with what is usually a different story every book instead of publishing the same story with different names.
Really I have found that in large part that the stories that are actually new have been few and far between. I wish Harlen Ellison was still being creative and someone could fill the shoes of Phil Dick but have found myself falling back on classic mystery (Rex Stout) and humor (Wodehouse) but those tend to be somewhat repetitive as well. At least the characters are well written.
Buffy is wrapping up but as a series probably has reached the end of its natural life. If you look at the season villains they have got larger and larger (by season 1: The Master - Uber Vamp; 2: Spike, Angel, Dru - Multiple uber vamps; 3: The Mayor - My personal fav big bad; 4: Adam - Frankenstein's demon; 5: Glory - a god; 6: Willow gone evil; 7: The first evil) to the point that it will be very difficult to top the current big bad. A spin off appears to be in the works. that may have SMG guest appearances.
Angel hasn't been renewed yet either. That is fairly disappointing.
Enterprise has been terrible since the get go. The suggestion that they weren't going to use technology to solve problems was a blatant lie and basic Star Trek races (Vulcans for example) ended up being written so badly it was astonishing.
The most interesting part of this is the reason Merril Lynch gave as to why they posted patches back. They wanted to have a seat at the development table and did not want to have to maintain a fork of the product forever. Certainly not a RMS view of OSS, but one that makes more sense (and dollars) in the long run.
Some of the books have been fantastic. I have gotten more value from the JavaScript Bible by Danny Goodman then almost any other book I have purchased (I'm a Web developer).
K
It is easy enough to turn on tabbing for filename completion in NT4/W2K or XP by editing
\ SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAND PROCESSOR\CompleteionChar
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\COMMAND PROCESSOR\CompleteionChar
and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
set the value to 9
That particular bug is still present in the 1.2.1 release
In previous court testimony he has said that source code is free speach (see his public policy page). Yet he seems to be suggesting that Microsoft's private free speach can be regulated by law while others cannot. I want to have my cake and eat it too as well, but it seems to me that he has to pick one postion or the other.
K.
not an AOL user
I would take Ellison a lot more seriously if he were to come up with the hardware and a development crew along with the software.
K.
Two of the three guys you mentioned are partners with Nielsen. Go to Nielsen Norman Group to see more. They seem to believe that their ideas are compatible.
K.
You are forgetting the orders of magnitude change in scale of the amount of business being done. Shut down all PC's and sit around for three days a week and you will still get twice as much work done in two days as you did 50 years ago w/o computers.
Not for nothing but, we are kind of at war. In the past that has led to significant rationing and suspension of liberties much more dear than the ability to walk into a government building unimpeded. This one strikes me as a reasonable search.
K.
Sometimes it is better to be obvious and allow future developers maintaining your code to quickly understand it.
K.
K
K.
K
TCO is everything in the corporate arena. This year and next XP will have more impact on home users then corporate users.
Linux and BSD can't or won't succeed until they can drive TCO down (Licensing is minimal here BTW) and a *nix user can open a MS Office file, modify it and send it back in the same condition w/o jumping through hoops.
K.
More importantly, these devices are going to cause problems in critical care situations (think delivering babies, emergency room, patients in cardiac arrest, etc.) a strength boost at that time may be more harmful then helpful. Conversely, if the nurse isn't wearing the thing continuously they may be stuck getting in or out when they are needed doing other things. Remember the nursing shortage causes existing nurses do more with less support, and unlike in software development, mistakes can cause death or permanent disability instead of a logged bug.
A powered suit doesn't look too helpful in those situations. Better to spend the money on getting more nurses or paying the ones that are already working better.
K.
Rapid Development is the third best use of my money to buy a computer book that I can recall. The best was Oracle8i: The Complete Reference by Kevin Loney, George Koch (Perhaps the only book with the word "Complete" in the title that doesn't make me cringe), It is quickly followed by Javascript bible by Danny Goodman. Others that helped have been UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel (free online but dead trees are easier to read) A web guy.