Why, what a useful solution! I can see why you're hired full time by a FTSE 100/Fortune 500 class company to do all of their incredibly important back office IT work, what with fantastic and insightful advice like "don't use Windows, use Linux" and "use a generic external hard drive and rsync instead of the backup-oriented tape drive you just bought and some specialised backup software"!
Ah yes, but the cheap solution works. For some reason, this makes Microsoft partners angry.
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
Just give Bill Gates $150 and it will work, yeah right. According to the fine summary, this problem was not resolved as of September (link has Windows Vista build 5728), do you think it's fixed now? Will spending your money magically make it work?
This sort of story makes me a bit ill.
Me too, but for entirely different reasons. I think I'm going to stop reading now - I already know that I'm never going to use XP or Vista. The problems M$ creates for their own users with their little anti-competitive tricks are not fun for long. Let me translate a part of the second article for you:
The culprit is the built-in firewall software on the DI-724U router, which features Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI). This is not the only router in the SOHO market that features SPI - Netgears WGR614 and Linksys WRT54GS are among dozens of products that offer similar capabilities. Trouble is, the new and improved TCP/IP stack in Windows Vista falls apart when it encounters an SPI-enabled router.
One workaround is to disable SPI on the router. That significantly weakens a key layer of network security, but it allows Internet traffic to get through. Unfortunately, the D-Link DI-724U, like several other products in the same family, doesnt allow SPI to be disabled.
Because Windoze is too weak to hook up to a real network, we have a spiffy protection scheme. It's so spiffy, that it screws up Windoze spyware and that makes Bill angry, so your life will be hard. The solution is to turn off the extra security, but that's un-possible.
Then we get clowns like you... "just buy teh boxed version, retard!" Stupid, upon broken because of previous stupid in an endless loop.
It's not your fault Dell does not make things easy, but you can help them see the light. Together, we can make this abuse a money loser.
The reason this makes sense is because it forces Dell to go through the wasteful process they have in place. Done enough times, the process will change. No one can afford to tie up their phones and support staff over a $50.00 refund they will have to give you if they don't want to break the law.
There are a lot of people who use free software exclusively and the potential for a whole lot more. Free Software finds it's way onto more than 30% of computers, if you include big packages like GIMP and Firefox. Most of those people may correctly suspect that a free operating system is the easiest way to get and keep those applications. If so much as 5% of Dell users spend the time demanding a refund for software they don't intend to use, Dell will be forced to change for the better. That change for the better will remove on more barrier to free software use - the computer without an OS will be cheaper to the end user as it always should have been.
... immediately render billions of existing MSO documents obsolete if you could get govt to mandate ODF exclusively. And the bonus is that such govt mandate would render any and all features not supported by ODF (i.e. not supported by OO.o) irrelevant.
Eh? Isn't that why M$ made this supposedly "open" format? Because governments were tired of paying through the nose for secret formats that broke between versions? The purpose of an archive is to read it later. Governments and companies have already moved to pdf for archives. They are going to move their working documents to reasonable formats next.
But MS opened their own format, thus leveling the playing field so that you must again compete on features...
You must not have read the 6000 page spec, which includes lots of sections like this:
Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance
That's neither open, nor a standard.
Microsoft is hoping people believe what you say, but everyone knows better. Shit like OOXML this only proves that they have not changed. It's just another, more elaborate and more expensive lie. Even the name, by using "OO" is intentionally confusing. The New Office is everything the old Office was and always will be. Vista and Office 2007 are non starters.
The hitch here is that *not* having them means tons and tons of reverse engineering, and that's only after tracking down every release of every version of every MS Office ever.
The real hitch, as the article hints, is that the releases are contradictory. For instance, the Mac version of small caps is different from others. This is part of the reason Word is so bloated and does not preserve printing type setting from one machine to the next.
Ten years ago, a state agency I was working for was forced to move from Word Perfect to Word. Hundreds, if not thousands, of documents were painstakingly converted from one format to the other. The typesetting, which they had never had a problem with previously, was easily broken by moves from one machine to the other or by changing printers. That is the kind of thing that no program can account for - it was broken from then and can not be created correctly today. It's also probably the reason for all of the nebulous "guidance" sections that don't tell you anything other than to look at, and presumably measure, old printed examples. Not even M$ knows what it was really doing in the field. As I saw at the time, no two were alike.
Of course, the time to get things right is not in your XML it's when you import the document. The author tells us this in so many words. The XML should be general enough to encompass any kind of typesetting. It is the importing program's task to figure out what the old format wanted things to look like. As the author points out, the spec does not do anything other create something impossible to follow. It's not going to magically make things look right no matter how hard they wish it would.
"Measured as Manhattan telephone books, each containing about 1,000 pages of 10-point type," said Simpson, "the genome of the bacterium E. coli is about a third of a book. Baker's yeast, which is my specialty, is a full book. The human genome will occupy two hundred books."
Other parts of the article about genetic disorders, witches and demonic possesion are also appropriate when talking about M$.
OpenXML is Microsoft trying to translate its proprietary DOC file inside a XML container.... The good thing for Microsoft, is that they can pretend this limitation is "Not-a-bug-but-a-feature", and brag around that there are a lot of stuffs that MS-Word couldn't store inside an ODF and only OpenXML can carry.
Pretend is the operative word. Translation is supposed to happen when you import the crufty old crap. M$ may have an advantage there, but you won't find that ability in the 6000 pages of their spec. The only place you will really find 20 year binary history of M$ Word is in M$'s source code, which itself must be contradictory and crazy because it's not really compatible with itself and has never been a portable typesetting system. Basically, the extra material in M$XML is noise and stuff they will never use. That and stuff you use that's not described is exactly what you want to make sure no one else can implement it.
The real bragging rights go to those who manage to open those nasty old documents without all of the bloat. KWord will happily import most Word Perfect documents and save them as ODF. Open Office as good a job as Word does with the crazy formats. M$XML is yet another waste of time from DoS central.
My truck was unsafe 365 days. I could have been in an accident on any one of those days!
True, but most people don't. Your truck has a better than four minute half life on any road and far fewer than 90% of all trucks are actually owned by malware that takes them for spins and bank robberies while you are not looking.
Microsoft my not kill as many people as trucks do, but that's not a mater of reliability. The power required to use a computer is not as high as motor vehicles, yet.
If the market was free, there would be no monoculture and IE share would be close to 0%. A market for lemons would assure some people would always use IE, but most people would chose the obviously superior offerings. That IE continues to enjoy significant market share is a good indicator of continued anti-competitive practices: threats to vendors, abuse of data formats, hostility to user preference and other abuse.
The real sting is that Microsoft continues to enjoy an OS majority share. They won't for long.
Ah yes, the fairy princess with a magic ribbon made by wizards saves the company it two or three days. They even take their Sunday off to learn the magic. Amazing. The free software people have had the same dream for eight years but have many further advantages than a spiffy UI. How does the M$ thing really do down? From the fine article:
In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldn't find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.
Mossberg's experience is going to be closer to reality for those organizations foolish enough to roll this poop out. The whole point of using M$ junk is that they had already forced their staff to learn the painful click combinations required to do the job. Better alternatives, like Word Perfect, had already been swept under the rug to satisfy the muscle memory of "decision makers" sold on it.
Those of you wanting more efficient interfaces should be using free software. The click reduction has been going on there for a decade or so and you won't have to spend $150 to try it out.
As long as they havn't changed the keyboard shortcuts I couldn't give a monkeys.
I watched someone repeatedly punch the short cut for "save as" with no result. After a few minutes, I noticed the "office button" doing some kind of slow color change strobe. It forced her to push the button with her mouse. Bye bye keystroke shortcut.
Don't hurt any monkeys over this, OK? You can just switch to Open Office, which has shortcuts that work. Who knows, some M$ rep might have the new left handed trick to make things work so you only have to learn one or two more things, ha ha.
A few weeks ago, I watched someone install this program by mistake onto a new computer. It's what the university is now pushing, so they kept it.
It would be hard to describe their frustration, so I won't bother. It took them half an hour to find "save as". As usual, the OS itself hid the extension so you could not tell that it was saving everything in.DOCX, the 6000 page "open XML" successor to the previous M$ "open" format, RTF. I can only imagine the anger and sadness that awaits true Word users who have been using all the painful tools that M$ bloated into the program, drawing tools, flight simulator, whatever.
The upgrade train is roaring on and M$ is really pushing hard this time. It's going to piss a lot of people off and offers great opportunity for free software. You can now say that it's easier to make the move to Open Office for a new system than it is to move to Office 2007.
"Paid" Information has Nothing to Fear.
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
I've begun to feel lately that there is a real danger that free information will drive out paid information in much the same way that economists note that cheap money drives out the dear.
Get over the pulp publishing model. People published books before there was a buck to be made and they will publish even if the worst of your fears come true.
How can I say that? Easy, the information is already "free" at the library and book publishers and book stores thrive anyway. It can be argued that it's easier to get things from the library than it is to get them from a book store.
There is no downside to easier access to publishing and knowledge. Free is good.
Much of the information in the article about data recovery is also covered by DebianAdministration.org. TestDisk and photorec, are afterall, free software.
I take pictures, post it on my website, post it on flickr and hardly anybody sees it. What do I care:(
People who love you will one day get it, so cheer up.
Now, the reason you might worry about data deletion and privacy may have nothing to do with you personally. The best way to judge the harm done by snooping is to think of the worst thing it can be used for against someone who's fighting for your rights. See this post for information on harm done by previous domestic spying. Automated spying of that kind has the ability to snuff out "political dissent" before it has a chance to start.
Then again, like WWII "strategic" bombing, it might backfire and create a stronger will to fight.
I'm sad to hear you think that. It's not true, as the 3/5 that did not report abusive behavior should make clear. There's obviously something that most people do to make sure they get along with their peers and subordinates. Be careful that you don't use your universal condemnation of your fellow man as an excuse to be abusive because they can tell the difference and will shun you.
It's amazing how people can still fall for that line of reasoning. Witness this gem from Network world:
If you've never read Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists," published in February, 1976, it's highly recommended as Gates goes off on the "majority of hobbyists" who are "stealing" their software. He was right, of course, but the language he uses sounds so incredibly whiney that you wonder how the man ever became Bill Gates.
As your single quote from Gate's infamous whine shows so well, Gates' fundamental operating principle was wrong and everything built off it is a lie. Anyone who's used free software knows that the quality exceeds Mr. Gate's wished for 3 many years and the quality of most non free software projects. People co-operating under a completely different principle have completely outclassed M$ and the non free way.
The game is nearly over and this word analysis will soon have interest only to business historians.
Anybody who follows Gates knows that he has been serious about speach (sic) recognition for a long time.
It's hard for anyone who does not "follow" the cult of Gates to take anything he says seriously. He's been promising the moon and stars for decades but has yet to deliver anything but mild UI modifications. Generally, his company writes down a wish list of competitor's features and promises to deliver them bigger and better in his "next" release. As the years roll by he drops all of the features until he's left with something like Vista, which offerst the user little beyond DRM madness and a UI upgrade, which he then invariably promotes as "revolutionary".
Despite all of that, I thought he liked to talk about handwriting recognition. You know, the tablet PC, that' he's promissed the world since the Apple Newton. Palm, OpenZarus and Xstroke all beat him to the punch and his tablet PC has yet to catch on.
He might as well claim his next OS will have AI and do "seemless" speech recognition. He won't loose much credibility that way. At this point, he's got so little to use, I'd sooner believe penis pill spam.
Why not just run the client from work with ssh -X? Shell into your gateway, then shell into your mail machine and run the client you usually do. I use Kontact and it works well, given an adequate network. There is some lag, but it's not much worse than the lag experienced at home.
Just because someone reports a positive Microsoft experience - - that cannot be right!! They must be a dupe, shill or paid off to be so stupid.
Six years ago, I was dumb enough to trust a slew of shill reports about XP. They said that M$ finally did something right and that XP was "stable". It was bullshit, just like the bullshit surrounding Windows 98 and 95 before it. When something goes against a long history of let downs, of course it's suspect. I no more believe that Vista will be any more worth running than XP is. It's software that does not meet my needs and never will.
Microsoft stability has been about the same since Windoze 3.1, which was a step down from DOS. The user interface, except for a few meaningless but confusing changes, remained about the same as well. Because I had seen people watch movies and do voice over IP communications all the way back in Win 3.1, I never saw any increase in functionality, ever. The world of Windows has been a constant struggle to keep hardware up to the ever more bloated software, against viruses and worms, to master confusing new controls all to maintain ability that other software invented or matched years ago.
So...this deal is bad for Novell how?? [points to the return of Mantel]
Mantel has NOTHING to do with the M$ deal, despite the following spin:
Indeed, Mantel approves of the partnership. "I think it is a good thing especially for the users. If you think some years back, Linux was not taken seriously. Now even Microsoft acknowledges that it exists and will not go away,"
I'm not sure they should say he approves of the partnership, so much as he's happy M$ has acknowledged the existence of free software and might drop some of it's FUD. He's wrong about that, M$ still claims free software is impractical. The legal FUD is going on as strong as ever as is the "Get the Facts" nonsense.
The article was clear, I think, about his reasons for going back and they have nothing to do with the evil deal he's trying to ignore.
Mantel explained that he had left Novell because, "Basically I just was burned out. " Mantel explained that he had come back because, "I had more than one year of time to think about my future and came to the conclusion that the thing I'm most interested in still is Linux. Also I do have many good friends at SuSE and I really like to work with and for Linux."
He missed his friends and wanted a job working with Linux.
Others have adequately explained why the deal is bad news.
Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.
But they still force the use of Outlook? Does this decision come from the same people who banned cellphones with cameras but not cameras themselves? Only cluelessness is obvious about policies like that. Must be a Microsoft partner office.
With old-style non-electronic messages, there is no distinction between the contents of the letter and the physical letter itself. Hundreds of years of laws and general ethical principles were written based on the assumption this will always be true. Now it's not, and it's all breaking down... Copyright has the exact same problem.
The intent of the supreme law of the land is quite clear:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That was not made to protect pieces of paper, it was made to protect people from government intrusion.
My communications, in any form or place, are supposed to be secure. The government does not have a "right" to spend my money on agents, human or electronic, that read my mail.
Copyright is completely different. It is an invented rather than natural right, requiring positive government action to exist. My right to privacy, on the other hand, exists with no further effort. To violate my privacy, the government must waste money that it should spend on worthwhile things, like roads and national defense. Given the cheapness of electronic publication and ease of recoup through advertising, it may also be wasteful and counter productive to "encourage" publication by enforcing insanely strict copyright laws of material which is not human readable, like binary executable code. Piano rolls, for famous instance, were not covered by copyright law because they are essentially a machine part.
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Why, what a useful solution! I can see why you're hired full time by a FTSE 100/Fortune 500 class company to do all of their incredibly important back office IT work, what with fantastic and insightful advice like "don't use Windows, use Linux" and "use a generic external hard drive and rsync instead of the backup-oriented tape drive you just bought and some specialised backup software"!
Ah yes, but the cheap solution works. For some reason, this makes Microsoft partners angry.
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
Just give Bill Gates $150 and it will work, yeah right. According to the fine summary, this problem was not resolved as of September (link has Windows Vista build 5728), do you think it's fixed now? Will spending your money magically make it work?
This sort of story makes me a bit ill.
Me too, but for entirely different reasons. I think I'm going to stop reading now - I already know that I'm never going to use XP or Vista. The problems M$ creates for their own users with their little anti-competitive tricks are not fun for long. Let me translate a part of the second article for you:
Because Windoze is too weak to hook up to a real network, we have a spiffy protection scheme. It's so spiffy, that it screws up Windoze spyware and that makes Bill angry, so your life will be hard. The solution is to turn off the extra security, but that's un-possible.
Then we get clowns like you ... "just buy teh boxed version, retard!" Stupid, upon broken because of previous stupid in an endless loop.
I play games you insensitive clod!
That's what play station is for, silly. You expect something with a top selling title called "Office" to help you play? A fool and his money ...
It's not your fault Dell does not make things easy, but you can help them see the light. Together, we can make this abuse a money loser.
The reason this makes sense is because it forces Dell to go through the wasteful process they have in place. Done enough times, the process will change. No one can afford to tie up their phones and support staff over a $50.00 refund they will have to give you if they don't want to break the law.
There are a lot of people who use free software exclusively and the potential for a whole lot more. Free Software finds it's way onto more than 30% of computers, if you include big packages like GIMP and Firefox. Most of those people may correctly suspect that a free operating system is the easiest way to get and keep those applications. If so much as 5% of Dell users spend the time demanding a refund for software they don't intend to use, Dell will be forced to change for the better. That change for the better will remove on more barrier to free software use - the computer without an OS will be cheaper to the end user as it always should have been.
Eh? Isn't that why M$ made this supposedly "open" format? Because governments were tired of paying through the nose for secret formats that broke between versions? The purpose of an archive is to read it later. Governments and companies have already moved to pdf for archives. They are going to move their working documents to reasonable formats next.
But MS opened their own format, thus leveling the playing field so that you must again compete on features ...
You must not have read the 6000 page spec, which includes lots of sections like this:
That's neither open, nor a standard.
Microsoft is hoping people believe what you say, but everyone knows better. Shit like OOXML this only proves that they have not changed. It's just another, more elaborate and more expensive lie. Even the name, by using "OO" is intentionally confusing. The New Office is everything the old Office was and always will be. Vista and Office 2007 are non starters.
The hitch here is that *not* having them means tons and tons of reverse engineering, and that's only after tracking down every release of every version of every MS Office ever.
The real hitch, as the article hints, is that the releases are contradictory. For instance, the Mac version of small caps is different from others. This is part of the reason Word is so bloated and does not preserve printing type setting from one machine to the next.
Ten years ago, a state agency I was working for was forced to move from Word Perfect to Word. Hundreds, if not thousands, of documents were painstakingly converted from one format to the other. The typesetting, which they had never had a problem with previously, was easily broken by moves from one machine to the other or by changing printers. That is the kind of thing that no program can account for - it was broken from then and can not be created correctly today. It's also probably the reason for all of the nebulous "guidance" sections that don't tell you anything other than to look at, and presumably measure, old printed examples. Not even M$ knows what it was really doing in the field. As I saw at the time, no two were alike.
Of course, the time to get things right is not in your XML it's when you import the document. The author tells us this in so many words. The XML should be general enough to encompass any kind of typesetting. It is the importing program's task to figure out what the old format wanted things to look like. As the author points out, the spec does not do anything other create something impossible to follow. It's not going to magically make things look right no matter how hard they wish it would.
It's appropriate to note that the 6000 pages will only fit the DNA of a few pathogens:
Other parts of the article about genetic disorders, witches and demonic possesion are also appropriate when talking about M$.
OpenXML is Microsoft trying to translate its proprietary DOC file inside a XML container .... The good thing for Microsoft, is that they can pretend this limitation is "Not-a-bug-but-a-feature", and brag around that there are a lot of stuffs that MS-Word couldn't store inside an ODF and only OpenXML can carry.
Pretend is the operative word. Translation is supposed to happen when you import the crufty old crap. M$ may have an advantage there, but you won't find that ability in the 6000 pages of their spec. The only place you will really find 20 year binary history of M$ Word is in M$'s source code, which itself must be contradictory and crazy because it's not really compatible with itself and has never been a portable typesetting system. Basically, the extra material in M$XML is noise and stuff they will never use. That and stuff you use that's not described is exactly what you want to make sure no one else can implement it.
The real bragging rights go to those who manage to open those nasty old documents without all of the bloat. KWord will happily import most Word Perfect documents and save them as ODF. Open Office as good a job as Word does with the crazy formats. M$XML is yet another waste of time from DoS central.
My truck was unsafe 365 days. I could have been in an accident on any one of those days!
True, but most people don't. Your truck has a better than four minute half life on any road and far fewer than 90% of all trucks are actually owned by malware that takes them for spins and bank robberies while you are not looking.
Microsoft my not kill as many people as trucks do, but that's not a mater of reliability. The power required to use a computer is not as high as motor vehicles, yet.
If the market was free, there would be no monoculture and IE share would be close to 0%. A market for lemons would assure some people would always use IE, but most people would chose the obviously superior offerings. That IE continues to enjoy significant market share is a good indicator of continued anti-competitive practices: threats to vendors, abuse of data formats, hostility to user preference and other abuse.
The real sting is that Microsoft continues to enjoy an OS majority share. They won't for long.
Ah yes, the fairy princess with a magic ribbon made by wizards saves the company it two or three days. They even take their Sunday off to learn the magic. Amazing. The free software people have had the same dream for eight years but have many further advantages than a spiffy UI. How does the M$ thing really do down? From the fine article:
Mossberg's experience is going to be closer to reality for those organizations foolish enough to roll this poop out. The whole point of using M$ junk is that they had already forced their staff to learn the painful click combinations required to do the job. Better alternatives, like Word Perfect, had already been swept under the rug to satisfy the muscle memory of "decision makers" sold on it.
Those of you wanting more efficient interfaces should be using free software. The click reduction has been going on there for a decade or so and you won't have to spend $150 to try it out.
As long as they havn't changed the keyboard shortcuts I couldn't give a monkeys.
I watched someone repeatedly punch the short cut for "save as" with no result. After a few minutes, I noticed the "office button" doing some kind of slow color change strobe. It forced her to push the button with her mouse. Bye bye keystroke shortcut.
Don't hurt any monkeys over this, OK? You can just switch to Open Office, which has shortcuts that work. Who knows, some M$ rep might have the new left handed trick to make things work so you only have to learn one or two more things, ha ha.
A few weeks ago, I watched someone install this program by mistake onto a new computer. It's what the university is now pushing, so they kept it.
It would be hard to describe their frustration, so I won't bother. It took them half an hour to find "save as". As usual, the OS itself hid the extension so you could not tell that it was saving everything in .DOCX, the 6000 page "open XML" successor to the previous M$ "open" format, RTF. I can only imagine the anger and sadness that awaits true Word users who have been using all the painful tools that M$ bloated into the program, drawing tools, flight simulator, whatever.
The upgrade train is roaring on and M$ is really pushing hard this time. It's going to piss a lot of people off and offers great opportunity for free software. You can now say that it's easier to make the move to Open Office for a new system than it is to move to Office 2007.
I've begun to feel lately that there is a real danger that free information will drive out paid information in much the same way that economists note that cheap money drives out the dear.
Get over the pulp publishing model. People published books before there was a buck to be made and they will publish even if the worst of your fears come true.
How can I say that? Easy, the information is already "free" at the library and book publishers and book stores thrive anyway. It can be argued that it's easier to get things from the library than it is to get them from a book store.
There is no downside to easier access to publishing and knowledge. Free is good.
Much of the information in the article about data recovery is also covered by DebianAdministration.org. TestDisk and photorec, are afterall, free software.
Hip, hip hooray!
I take pictures, post it on my website, post it on flickr and hardly anybody sees it. What do I care :(
People who love you will one day get it, so cheer up.
Now, the reason you might worry about data deletion and privacy may have nothing to do with you personally. The best way to judge the harm done by snooping is to think of the worst thing it can be used for against someone who's fighting for your rights. See this post for information on harm done by previous domestic spying. Automated spying of that kind has the ability to snuff out "political dissent" before it has a chance to start.
Then again, like WWII "strategic" bombing, it might backfire and create a stronger will to fight.
The truth is, we're all like that.
I'm sad to hear you think that. It's not true, as the 3/5 that did not report abusive behavior should make clear. There's obviously something that most people do to make sure they get along with their peers and subordinates. Be careful that you don't use your universal condemnation of your fellow man as an excuse to be abusive because they can tell the difference and will shun you.
It's amazing how people can still fall for that line of reasoning. Witness this gem from Network world:
As your single quote from Gate's infamous whine shows so well, Gates' fundamental operating principle was wrong and everything built off it is a lie. Anyone who's used free software knows that the quality exceeds Mr. Gate's wished for 3 many years and the quality of most non free software projects. People co-operating under a completely different principle have completely outclassed M$ and the non free way.
The game is nearly over and this word analysis will soon have interest only to business historians.
Anybody who follows Gates knows that he has been serious about speach (sic) recognition for a long time.
It's hard for anyone who does not "follow" the cult of Gates to take anything he says seriously. He's been promising the moon and stars for decades but has yet to deliver anything but mild UI modifications. Generally, his company writes down a wish list of competitor's features and promises to deliver them bigger and better in his "next" release. As the years roll by he drops all of the features until he's left with something like Vista, which offerst the user little beyond DRM madness and a UI upgrade, which he then invariably promotes as "revolutionary".
Despite all of that, I thought he liked to talk about handwriting recognition. You know, the tablet PC, that' he's promissed the world since the Apple Newton. Palm, OpenZarus and Xstroke all beat him to the punch and his tablet PC has yet to catch on.
He might as well claim his next OS will have AI and do "seemless" speech recognition. He won't loose much credibility that way. At this point, he's got so little to use, I'd sooner believe penis pill spam.
Why not just run the client from work with ssh -X? Shell into your gateway, then shell into your mail machine and run the client you usually do. I use Kontact and it works well, given an adequate network. There is some lag, but it's not much worse than the lag experienced at home.
Just because someone reports a positive Microsoft experience - - that cannot be right!! They must be a dupe, shill or paid off to be so stupid.
Six years ago, I was dumb enough to trust a slew of shill reports about XP. They said that M$ finally did something right and that XP was "stable". It was bullshit, just like the bullshit surrounding Windows 98 and 95 before it. When something goes against a long history of let downs, of course it's suspect. I no more believe that Vista will be any more worth running than XP is. It's software that does not meet my needs and never will.
Microsoft stability has been about the same since Windoze 3.1, which was a step down from DOS. The user interface, except for a few meaningless but confusing changes, remained about the same as well. Because I had seen people watch movies and do voice over IP communications all the way back in Win 3.1, I never saw any increase in functionality, ever. The world of Windows has been a constant struggle to keep hardware up to the ever more bloated software, against viruses and worms, to master confusing new controls all to maintain ability that other software invented or matched years ago.
So...this deal is bad for Novell how?? [points to the return of Mantel]
Mantel has NOTHING to do with the M$ deal, despite the following spin:
I'm not sure they should say he approves of the partnership, so much as he's happy M$ has acknowledged the existence of free software and might drop some of it's FUD. He's wrong about that, M$ still claims free software is impractical. The legal FUD is going on as strong as ever as is the "Get the Facts" nonsense.
The article was clear, I think, about his reasons for going back and they have nothing to do with the evil deal he's trying to ignore.
He missed his friends and wanted a job working with Linux.
Others have adequately explained why the deal is bad news.
Restoring Exchange is hard, but it CAN BE DONE, bitches!
Don't you wish people would just use Kmail in Kontact so that archiving and restoration were easy?
Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.
But they still force the use of Outlook? Does this decision come from the same people who banned cellphones with cameras but not cameras themselves? Only cluelessness is obvious about policies like that. Must be a Microsoft partner office.
With old-style non-electronic messages, there is no distinction between the contents of the letter and the physical letter itself. Hundreds of years of laws and general ethical principles were written based on the assumption this will always be true. Now it's not, and it's all breaking down ... Copyright has the exact same problem.
The intent of the supreme law of the land is quite clear:
That was not made to protect pieces of paper, it was made to protect people from government intrusion.
My communications, in any form or place, are supposed to be secure. The government does not have a "right" to spend my money on agents, human or electronic, that read my mail.
Copyright is completely different. It is an invented rather than natural right, requiring positive government action to exist. My right to privacy, on the other hand, exists with no further effort. To violate my privacy, the government must waste money that it should spend on worthwhile things, like roads and national defense. Given the cheapness of electronic publication and ease of recoup through advertising, it may also be wasteful and counter productive to "encourage" publication by enforcing insanely strict copyright laws of material which is not human readable, like binary executable code. Piano rolls, for famous instance, were not covered by copyright law because they are essentially a machine part.