I mean, it's ridiculous: if you like Firefox you should upgrade to the 3rd version and if in any case your OS is older and it doesn't support Firefox 3 I see no reason not to use Opera which supports every OS from Win 95 to Vista and from OS X 10.0 to 10.5 (unlike Firefox 3 of course).
And what if you are still on FF version 2 because you don't like some of the 'features' introduced in FF version 3? I'm looking at you, 'Awesome Bar'.
When you, the taxpayer, decide that you do want to pay the taxes to actually build those things, and you will be astute enough to vote the right people in to ensure that your tax dollars go to education and research, and not to wars that noone can win!
I do apologise, I wasn't aware that my perception of my own companies desktop environment was so wrong - obviously you know more about it than I do!
In an ideal world, LoB applications will closely follow the current 'best practices' or ideas - in this case, web applications. We are not in an ideal world, we are in a world where I work for a 25 year old company who have had internal software development done from day one. Any company of age will have lots of 'hidden' LoB applications that sit quietly on someone or others desktop doing their job, never needing to be rewritten because they do it so well - and they certainly wont get rewritten just because the current best practice has changed.
That is the reality. That is the reality most companies of age live in. That is the reality most of Slashdot seems to gloss over.
Your statement may be true if you include the word 'new' in there, but in a company that has legacy systems it most certainly is not true.
Also, you seem fixated on Microsoft software - there are other vendors out there, and the lack of an alternative on a different platform is just as limiting as any MS software we 'need'. To put it bluntly - I would say that for a large proportion of businesses, MS software is not the issue with migrating to different platforms, while legacy systems most certainly are.
This is also something a lot of people do, just say 'you should do this and thats the end of it'. Replacing the above with open products is all very well and good, but the devil is in the detail - actually replacing the above with open products!
CAP and TopCalc are used because of the industry data they expose, which you can't replace and we don't want to write our own complex front end for. So wheres the open product or web app?
And again with the Autoroute thing - sure, Google Maps has its points, but its not there when theres an internet connection glitch, our when our mobile users are... well, actually mobile. So, no contest.
So what do you do when you are looking at actually doing something productive, or doing something else? In a business environment, productive is always the winner...
A desktop environment is so much more than the OS, its even more than the OS plus Office suite.
Off the top of my head, our 'desktop environment' consists of:
OS (Windows XP Pro or Windows 2003 R2 for Terminal Services)
Office 2007
CRM application
Report generator
CCM application
Autoroute 2007
TopCalc (a third party Line of Business application)
CAP (a third party Line of Business application)
Legis (a third party Line of Business application)
And thats without listing the several internal Line of Business applications we use.
I can't remember when the last time was that a 'desktop environment' I used consisted solely of the OS and an office suite - and thats why we can't migrate to a different platform: theres no alternatives to 90% of the applications we use on other platforms.
I think thats a point that many people gloss over.
So when are we going to have lawsuits about not getting the specific CPU or hard disk that you want when you buy a computer? Wheres my refund for just the disk? Just how stupid is this pick-and-choose going to get?
When an application regularly crashes while its being used for its advertised purpose, I would certainly say that its the applications fault.
The bottom line is this - Apple advertise the Safari browser on the iPhone as being a proper browser. It shouldn't be regularly crashing while browsing regular web pages. End of story.
Actually there are a *lot* of adverts for mobile phones on the TV in the UK at the moment with small notes on the bottom of the screen saying something like 'Screen images are simulated' - its something I chuckle at each time I see one.
... was the instability of Safari - I'm currently away from the office on a week long business trip, with my iPhone acting as my primary browsing device during the day (while I'm away from the hotel - London has fairly extensive 3G and wifi coverage), and I have to say that I am getting at least one crash per browsing session.
I would expect this if I was visiting weird websites, but I'm talking about sites like Slashdot, BBC News etc. The entire page can be loaded, and I can be halfway through a Slashdot comments page and Safari will crash, I haven't even hit anything that should trigger Safari to do anything other than scroll down the page!
On another note, on every iPhone or iPod Touch device I have used (one first gen iPhone, one 3G iPhone and two iPod Touches), Safari has one hell of a difficult time picking up link clicks on the BBC News website - I haven't had any problems elsewhere, just on the BBC News site. It manifests itself as a total lack of registering the fact that I am clicking on a link, with Safari only reacting at all either after I have held down the click for several seconds, or zoomed right in and clicked then. Has anyone else experienced this?
From Websters -
Product
Prod"uct\, n. [L. productus, p. pr. of producere. See Produce.]
1. Anything that is produced, whether as the result of generation, growth, labor, or thought, or by the operation of involuntary causes; as, the products of the season, or of the farm; the products of manufactures; the products of the brain.
The only thing my definition doesn't seem to fit is your narrow one that you are trying to foist on other people to win your own perceived 'argument'.
Get over it - the user is the product Google sells to advertisers through exposure to adverts. Google creates that product by offering other things to users - the specific userbase for its advertising service is a result of Google specifically engineering it into existence, hence it is a product of Googles labors.
Theres nothing stopping him picking a support company that doesnt have a partnership contract with the vendor in question - thats whats in question here, the terms of the partnership contract that the preferred support companies have with the vendor.
The contract probably gives the support companies priority access to knowledgebases, backend vendor support and the development team for feature requests or bug fixes. In return for that, the support company agrees to only support specific versions of the software (and hands over some money).
Theres nothing stopping anyone else picking up the GPL version and offering third party support for it.
Ok, now you are just taking it way way too far and essentially just making stuff up - I said you were a product, and I proved that. I never ascribed any moral stance to it, and I certainly never gave any 'selling souls' speech (I have no issues at all with what Google are doing, I use Gmail freely myself as you can tell from my email address).
The basic fact of the matter is that Googles income is not being made off of the users of their tools such as Gmail or search, but is instead being made off of services being sold to third parties which will be exposed via those tools.
Its not a word game, its the basic truth - you, the end user of Gmail or search, are not a direct contributer to Googles income, but you are infact an indirect contributor. Google is selling exposure to *you* to third parties.
They just use nice shiny offerings to entice you to play ball.
The minute you stop paying directly for the services, and start paying indirectly for the services, is the minute you become the product - if Google was not relying on income from advertisers, Google would otherwise be charging *you* for usage.
I also wouldn't call it a fairly novel approach - people have been doing it for years.
What I was trying to say is that pretty much everything you need can be done with a bit of elbow grease and it's a one-time investment.
Again, I'm going to have to disagree with you (and not just for the sake of being argumentative!) - its not a one-time investment, its an ongoing investment in the upkeep of the corporate desktop you are managing, as things *will* change throughout the life of the desktop. As I said above, central management of settings is a godsend when you need to roll out a small change to a significant number of desktops - thats not a one-time investment, thats something that may have to be done weekly or more often depending on local requirements.
If you are expecting corporations to have an essentially static desktop, then theres a bit of dellusion going on IMHO - adding favourites to someones browser is something I don't even think about these days after it gets approved, as its a simple edit of one list and bingo, it gets rolled out to a thousand machines without any more effort.
Thats what we are really talking about.
I'm talking a bit tongue in cheek here as I know that stuff first-hand (having supported large deployments and knowing a few people in the biz of *really* large deployments). Reality is that indeed, many large enterprise deployments use MSIE. Not because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...
Most enterprise deployments use MSIE because it is required elsewhere - I know ActiveX and other integration features get the bad rap here (and quite rightly in nearly all regard), but its those very features that make it so endearing to corporations - there are so many things you can do with the integration features that it makes it worthwhile to suffer the downsides of MSIE while getting the benefits.
What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?
Considerably more than auto detecting the proxy server and updating - you really seem to be missing the point.
Some very good examples are default Favourites, very helpful in a lot of corporations (have you ever got the shit job of having to add a new favourite to a thousand PCs?), default Homepage, again very helpful, default popup blocker and security settings for known good websites that you have no control over but need to use, and local browser security settings for when you don't want your employees from setting their own proxy server or otherwise mess with the browser setup.
In short, everything you need to be applied to every one (or a majority) of your desktops - you can either have your PC setup bods do it manually, or you can just ghost a new machine and let the central management server do it. I know which I would rather do.
From the sound of it, you haven't had to deal with an corporate environment with more than a dozen or so desktops. Believe me, central management becomes extremely handy when you are dealing with a thousand desktops in multiple locations (or even 100 in one).
On the other hand, Firefox does have an Active Directory GPO template available for doing many of the things corporate admins require.
I beg to differ - Google is the very epitome of a marketing company, and your post is a damn good example of why. Googles products are you, not Gmail or search, you. Googles customers are its advertisers. The fact that you think Google is a product company proves that their marketing is second to none.
The Silverlight framework is related to the.Net framework, but does not match it 100% - there are features and functionality unique to Silverlight not currently available in the latest.Net framework.
Theres a simple reason why the KC-X (or KC-45) tanker program was not used to fund the X-48 - cost. Developing a brand new airframe for the job would have instantly cost the DoD approaching $20billion even before they plump up for actual aircraft. Thats why the tanker program was based on existing commercial airframes.
Yet to fly, already 7 months past the date it was due to enter service - besides, its quietness isn't revolutionary, merely evolutionary since the much larger A380 already surpasses it in quietness.
Actually, large civil aircraft are at a fairly high thrust level all the way through the descent - not as much as take off, but still around the 50% or more mark. All those slow flying helper features such as flaps and slats etc are remarkably inefficient and induce a hell of a lot of drag, requiring a significant amount of thrust just to maintain slow speeds at low altitudes.
No, there will not be a new plane design out of this, there will be new technology concepts that existing manufacturers can employ during the next round of airframe refreshes (both Airbus and Boeing are due to replace their narrowbody products, being the A320 and 737 families, in the next 10 years). A new airframe design costs $Billions.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, it's ridiculous: if you like Firefox you should upgrade to the 3rd version and if in any case your OS is older and it doesn't support Firefox 3 I see no reason not to use Opera which supports every OS from Win 95 to Vista and from OS X 10.0 to 10.5 (unlike Firefox 3 of course).
And what if you are still on FF version 2 because you don't like some of the 'features' introduced in FF version 3? I'm looking at you, 'Awesome Bar'.
When you, the taxpayer, decide that you do want to pay the taxes to actually build those things, and you will be astute enough to vote the right people in to ensure that your tax dollars go to education and research, and not to wars that noone can win!
By using either alpha particles or neutrons as a replacement for ions in a basic mass reaction engines, just nuclear powered!
I do apologise, I wasn't aware that my perception of my own companies desktop environment was so wrong - obviously you know more about it than I do!
In an ideal world, LoB applications will closely follow the current 'best practices' or ideas - in this case, web applications. We are not in an ideal world, we are in a world where I work for a 25 year old company who have had internal software development done from day one. Any company of age will have lots of 'hidden' LoB applications that sit quietly on someone or others desktop doing their job, never needing to be rewritten because they do it so well - and they certainly wont get rewritten just because the current best practice has changed.
That is the reality. That is the reality most companies of age live in. That is the reality most of Slashdot seems to gloss over.
Your statement may be true if you include the word 'new' in there, but in a company that has legacy systems it most certainly is not true.
Also, you seem fixated on Microsoft software - there are other vendors out there, and the lack of an alternative on a different platform is just as limiting as any MS software we 'need'. To put it bluntly - I would say that for a large proportion of businesses, MS software is not the issue with migrating to different platforms, while legacy systems most certainly are.
Thats the reality.
This is also something a lot of people do, just say 'you should do this and thats the end of it'. Replacing the above with open products is all very well and good, but the devil is in the detail - actually replacing the above with open products!
... well, actually mobile. So, no contest.
CAP and TopCalc are used because of the industry data they expose, which you can't replace and we don't want to write our own complex front end for. So wheres the open product or web app?
And again with the Autoroute thing - sure, Google Maps has its points, but its not there when theres an internet connection glitch, our when our mobile users are
So what do you do when you are looking at actually doing something productive, or doing something else? In a business environment, productive is always the winner...
Off the top of my head, our 'desktop environment' consists of:
And thats without listing the several internal Line of Business applications we use.
I can't remember when the last time was that a 'desktop environment' I used consisted solely of the OS and an office suite - and thats why we can't migrate to a different platform: theres no alternatives to 90% of the applications we use on other platforms.
I think thats a point that many people gloss over.
So when are we going to have lawsuits about not getting the specific CPU or hard disk that you want when you buy a computer? Wheres my refund for just the disk? Just how stupid is this pick-and-choose going to get?
The best thing is, theres an option in your user settings to not show tags, but it doesn't work....
When an application regularly crashes while its being used for its advertised purpose, I would certainly say that its the applications fault.
The bottom line is this - Apple advertise the Safari browser on the iPhone as being a proper browser. It shouldn't be regularly crashing while browsing regular web pages. End of story.
Actually there are a *lot* of adverts for mobile phones on the TV in the UK at the moment with small notes on the bottom of the screen saying something like 'Screen images are simulated' - its something I chuckle at each time I see one.
The complaint is that even under ideal conditions could the phone not carry out the actions demonstrated in the advert.
... was the instability of Safari - I'm currently away from the office on a week long business trip, with my iPhone acting as my primary browsing device during the day (while I'm away from the hotel - London has fairly extensive 3G and wifi coverage), and I have to say that I am getting at least one crash per browsing session.
I would expect this if I was visiting weird websites, but I'm talking about sites like Slashdot, BBC News etc. The entire page can be loaded, and I can be halfway through a Slashdot comments page and Safari will crash, I haven't even hit anything that should trigger Safari to do anything other than scroll down the page!
On another note, on every iPhone or iPod Touch device I have used (one first gen iPhone, one 3G iPhone and two iPod Touches), Safari has one hell of a difficult time picking up link clicks on the BBC News website - I haven't had any problems elsewhere, just on the BBC News site. It manifests itself as a total lack of registering the fact that I am clicking on a link, with Safari only reacting at all either after I have held down the click for several seconds, or zoomed right in and clicked then. Has anyone else experienced this?
From Websters -
Product Prod"uct\, n. [L. productus, p. pr. of producere. See Produce.] 1. Anything that is produced, whether as the result of generation, growth, labor, or thought, or by the operation of involuntary causes; as, the products of the season, or of the farm; the products of manufactures; the products of the brain.
The only thing my definition doesn't seem to fit is your narrow one that you are trying to foist on other people to win your own perceived 'argument'.
Get over it - the user is the product Google sells to advertisers through exposure to adverts. Google creates that product by offering other things to users - the specific userbase for its advertising service is a result of Google specifically engineering it into existence, hence it is a product of Googles labors.
Theres nothing stopping him picking a support company that doesnt have a partnership contract with the vendor in question - thats whats in question here, the terms of the partnership contract that the preferred support companies have with the vendor.
The contract probably gives the support companies priority access to knowledgebases, backend vendor support and the development team for feature requests or bug fixes. In return for that, the support company agrees to only support specific versions of the software (and hands over some money).
Theres nothing stopping anyone else picking up the GPL version and offering third party support for it.
Ok, now you are just taking it way way too far and essentially just making stuff up - I said you were a product, and I proved that. I never ascribed any moral stance to it, and I certainly never gave any 'selling souls' speech (I have no issues at all with what Google are doing, I use Gmail freely myself as you can tell from my email address).
The basic fact of the matter is that Googles income is not being made off of the users of their tools such as Gmail or search, but is instead being made off of services being sold to third parties which will be exposed via those tools.
Its not a word game, its the basic truth - you, the end user of Gmail or search, are not a direct contributer to Googles income, but you are infact an indirect contributor. Google is selling exposure to *you* to third parties.
They just use nice shiny offerings to entice you to play ball.
The minute you stop paying directly for the services, and start paying indirectly for the services, is the minute you become the product - if Google was not relying on income from advertisers, Google would otherwise be charging *you* for usage.
I also wouldn't call it a fairly novel approach - people have been doing it for years.
What I was trying to say is that pretty much everything you need can be done with a bit of elbow grease and it's a one-time investment.
Again, I'm going to have to disagree with you (and not just for the sake of being argumentative!) - its not a one-time investment, its an ongoing investment in the upkeep of the corporate desktop you are managing, as things *will* change throughout the life of the desktop. As I said above, central management of settings is a godsend when you need to roll out a small change to a significant number of desktops - thats not a one-time investment, thats something that may have to be done weekly or more often depending on local requirements.
If you are expecting corporations to have an essentially static desktop, then theres a bit of dellusion going on IMHO - adding favourites to someones browser is something I don't even think about these days after it gets approved, as its a simple edit of one list and bingo, it gets rolled out to a thousand machines without any more effort.
Thats what we are really talking about.
I'm talking a bit tongue in cheek here as I know that stuff first-hand (having supported large deployments and knowing a few people in the biz of *really* large deployments). Reality is that indeed, many large enterprise deployments use MSIE. Not because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...
Most enterprise deployments use MSIE because it is required elsewhere - I know ActiveX and other integration features get the bad rap here (and quite rightly in nearly all regard), but its those very features that make it so endearing to corporations - there are so many things you can do with the integration features that it makes it worthwhile to suffer the downsides of MSIE while getting the benefits.
What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?
Considerably more than auto detecting the proxy server and updating - you really seem to be missing the point.
Some very good examples are default Favourites, very helpful in a lot of corporations (have you ever got the shit job of having to add a new favourite to a thousand PCs?), default Homepage, again very helpful, default popup blocker and security settings for known good websites that you have no control over but need to use, and local browser security settings for when you don't want your employees from setting their own proxy server or otherwise mess with the browser setup.
In short, everything you need to be applied to every one (or a majority) of your desktops - you can either have your PC setup bods do it manually, or you can just ghost a new machine and let the central management server do it. I know which I would rather do.
From the sound of it, you haven't had to deal with an corporate environment with more than a dozen or so desktops. Believe me, central management becomes extremely handy when you are dealing with a thousand desktops in multiple locations (or even 100 in one).
On the other hand, Firefox does have an Active Directory GPO template available for doing many of the things corporate admins require.
I beg to differ - Google is the very epitome of a marketing company, and your post is a damn good example of why. Googles products are you, not Gmail or search, you. Googles customers are its advertisers. The fact that you think Google is a product company proves that their marketing is second to none.
The Silverlight framework is related to the .Net framework, but does not match it 100% - there are features and functionality unique to Silverlight not currently available in the latest .Net framework.
Theres a simple reason why the KC-X (or KC-45) tanker program was not used to fund the X-48 - cost. Developing a brand new airframe for the job would have instantly cost the DoD approaching $20billion even before they plump up for actual aircraft. Thats why the tanker program was based on existing commercial airframes.
Yet to fly, already 7 months past the date it was due to enter service - besides, its quietness isn't revolutionary, merely evolutionary since the much larger A380 already surpasses it in quietness.
That would be the C-17 Globemaster III.
Actually, large civil aircraft are at a fairly high thrust level all the way through the descent - not as much as take off, but still around the 50% or more mark. All those slow flying helper features such as flaps and slats etc are remarkably inefficient and induce a hell of a lot of drag, requiring a significant amount of thrust just to maintain slow speeds at low altitudes.
No, there will not be a new plane design out of this, there will be new technology concepts that existing manufacturers can employ during the next round of airframe refreshes (both Airbus and Boeing are due to replace their narrowbody products, being the A320 and 737 families, in the next 10 years). A new airframe design costs $Billions.