Whoa there. Photoshopping up child porn is going to be a crime, even if no child abuse occurs? What if the original was adult porn, and the photo was altered to make one of the participants appear younger?
What if there was no original photograph used, and a picture of a child having sex was created entirely from scratch?
What if the artist insists the person depicted in the picture is at least 18? Since there was no actual child involved, how old they appear to be is entirely subjective; who gets to decide whether a nonexistent person appears to be of legal age or not? Wow.:P
Many of these new features are attempts to catch up.
These are new features they can advertise to normal everyday users, that we Slashdotters don't care about (because we already have them, or because they don't appeal to us). That doesn't mean they aren't also fixing a bunch of stuff at the same time.
Some bad reputations cannot be redeemed, and sometimes those who are unrepentant, persistent and relentless can no longer be forgiven.
Not to mention the security and privacy implications of having multiple large organizations and, eventually, private individuals moving all of their e-mail and documents onto Google servers.
Are we so in love with the concept of web apps that we're forgetting we'd have to hand more our personal lives over to corporate entities? Do we truly have "nothing to hide"?
I will take a slightly contrarian point here. The "Mac HIG" was originally horrible. In promoting a "common" menu bar that forced applications into a particular mode
The purpose of the global menu bar is to present document windows as spaces in which to do work, and not as applications. When you switch to another document window, the menubar at the top of the screen changes to present options appropriate to working with that document.
Still, NFS on OS-X *REQUIRES* the command line (by default, I do believe that there are some 3rd party GUI tools).
It has always been possible to mount NFS servers from the Finder desktop.
NIS also has problems (pretty intense command line work for setup) -- and NIS auto.master maps for automount don't work.
NIS is obsolete in the UNIX world.
Before hammering Xerox PARC, please have a close look at Squeak (and, yes, it is available on Macs).
Didn't mean to knock Xerox PARC at all - much respect to them, there was genius there.
So, in response to your post, I think you're a bit too critical of free software. I think Apple has a much more consistent development platform and user experience, but I also think that if you suggested the idea that a Free Software desktop would have had as much success as it has had and still continue to be growing, say, 10 years ago, people would think you're ridiculous.
Actually I think the progress the free desktop has made is impressive beyond words. The fact that people do have a choice to use something completely free and customizable down to its very core is tremendous - and its impacts have been felt in the proprietary software world.
What bugs me is the presentation of the free desktop as though it's every bit as good as anything else out there. To see where the free desktop is and have a clear picture of how to make it useful to people, one has to recognize its weaknesses rather than stirring up hype.
I think it's amazing that a movement that is so dedicated towards the idea that the freedom to collaborate is a moral imperative has fragmented so much, but I think it's even more amazing how much free software there is today, and how high the quality has become.
News to me -- I'd always assumed that free software and open source both at least have licenses that allow them to collaborate. Most proprietary software doesn't. How much code is shared between Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage?
Please explain to me how Entourage and Apple Mail developers should collaborate, seeing as they're products from competing organizations? The supposed and much-hyped strength of free software development is the creation of software that's ideologically, legally and technically unfettered by all the limitations that come from proprietary development.
What the fuck?
Dunno dude. Try not to become so emotional.
They tested it on the entire range of users, did they?
Pretty much.
If not, then it's entirely their opinion -- specifically, often Steve Jobs' opinion -- on which interface will work "as best as possible for the entire range of users."
Steve Jobs' opinion eh - are you his personal assistant, or is this your opinion?
And I find that I do far more, with much more efficiency, without OS X getting in the way. And I did use it for a very long time -- long enough, I think, to understand the "application of its metaphors" (or, in less flowery-bullshit words, the way its UI works).
By that reasoning, nothing is as good as what Xerox has, because they established the fundamental metaphor first. Nevermind they didn't take that project out of the prototype phase themselves, they must know better than Apple because they did something with a mouse first. It's simply not accurate to say ideas cannot be built upon and improved by anyone other than the first. The first one to establish something doesn't *necessarily* follow the most prudent evolution of the ideas. What the state of things 30, 20, 10, or even 5 years ago isn't automatically overriding of the situation of *today* (though certainly heritage influences the current, hence Microsoft being able to moderately screw up and lag in innovation and still maintain a lead).
Xerox established the beginnings of the technology, and the concept of using multiple panes of information on the screen to simulate paper. They by no means developed any metaphor; the interfaces on the Alto computers were horrendous works in progress at best. Apple created the desktop metaphor in its fullness.
Among the various Ubuntu flavors, each has picked and preferred a HIG. OSX, Windows, and Linux platforms can all be subject to misfit applications that refuse to obey HIGs or even use the most common toolkit. The following behind HIGs in the Linux desktop world is not so small as to be counted out.
For the moment we'll put aside the fact that all the human interface guideline documents from the various open source desktops don't amount to a fifth of the documentation provided in Apple's HIG and begin dwelling on the fact that if we limit ourselves to the selection of applications that are native to each respective desktop environment, our selection drops to dramatically fewer applications than are available for commercial platforms.
"We're doing it too" isn't good enough. You have to be doing it as well, or better. Linux based desktops do not succeed when tested on the general public. Most end-users are completely lost even after extended use.
By your logic, OSX 'just isn't there yet' either, because the market en masse hasn't ditched Windows entirely. The market reality is that an intrinsically better platform is *not* going to automatically win over the market magically. The market reality is one of a great deal of maintaining the status quo.
The market reality as I said is that the customer picks the cheapest thing they can stand. The reason Windows PC's prevail over Macintosh desktops is due to this. The combination of Windows and generic PC compatible hardware is the cheapest thing the market at large can stand to use. PC manufacturers are itching to switch to Linux. The compatibility is sufficient for the end-user at this point, but the usability isn't there.
Application developers are in the same boat, they target the platform that is popular, helping to contribute to a deadlock of microsoft. Microsoft's technical work in the mid 90s was on par with the Mac experience...
This is a common myth among apologists. The interface presented by Windows 95 was widely recognized as much superior to its predecessor Windows 3.x, but also recognized as chaotic, arbitrary and failing to respect sensible desktop metaphors that make a graphical interface discoverable. Right from 1984 to the present day, the Macintosh HIG has been superior to the graphical offerings from Redmond.
The OSX world of 'just drag and drop the appfolder' can still leave you without required Library bundles, so it too is damned to having arbitrary installers for complex apps just like windows. Even if you can drag and drop it, that doesn't mean bugfixes/security fixes will come down for you automatically without some other arbitrary service to track it for you.
Centralized package management is a pretty minor concern. A user installs what a user wants, whethe
Ubuntu is somewhat ahead with application installation, with synaptic, while OS X is somewhat ahead with commercial application support.
Synaptic is easier than dragging an icon into a folder? If you're referring to the apt repository behind Synaptic, a central repository for all applications is conventional Linux wisdom that fosters a lack of standard layout and management systems. This is a key weakness of Linux as it prevents commercial vendors from easily writing deployable software.
The article presents Ubuntu and MacOS as equals, if even only recently.
The author, as such, appears to have slept through the last 30 years, in which the original Macintosh established the desktop metaphors Microsoft poorly reimplemented and Linux re-re-implemented many many times over.
Many commenters are also operating under this illusion; the statement that 'While the Mac may present a more unified visual appearance, that's the only benefit it has over Ubuntu' is unbalanced for quite a number of reasons - the design and construction of MacOS and Macintosh human interface guidelines shape aspects of the use of a Mac from the subtle to the impressive. By comparison, there are few if any human interface guidelines or cohesive metaphors between multiple pieces of free software that are not driven by the egotism of their authors. I won't even touch on the pandemic of duplicated effort caused by the free software community's inability to collaborate, and the fractured, partly functional selection of software that has emerged as a result.
When speaking of user interface quality it's important to be objective. Try not to state subjective experiences like snap-to-screen-edge or focus-follows-mouse being far more efficient when this clearly can only be true for you. While Linux software attempts to satisfy the whim of every computer geek who ever used it, Apple spends an incredible amount of time and energy making a single, unified interface that will work as best as possible for the entire range of users.
Ubuntu just as good? No. Free software just isn't there yet. If it were, Dell, HP and Acer would have dumped Microsoft quite some time ago in the home market. People want cheap and easy. Not necessarily good, just cheap and easy. Linux doesn't even qualify as that yet - the market has spoken as always.
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
Troubling that slashdot always posts articles like this. Slashdotters are by far the worst enemies of good user interface design.:P
Highly unrealistic. Regular computer users buy portable media players, printers and cameras among other things regularly. Stating that Linux doesn't have to work with hardware because the average user doesn't bother anyway is highly wishful thinking.
On the second point, word of mouth bashing of companies and their products seems to happen a lot in the Linux world.
If you can't live with the way debian stable releases work choose another distro.
Many organizations have and will continue to do so. Thanks for the advice.
If you can't manage your IT infrastructure such that deploying local patches is not unreasonably difficult fire your IT staff.
When backports and patches amass to the point where a smooth upgrade path to the next major release is no longer possible, it's time to start laughing at the militant ignorance of the distribution's maintainers and adherents.
I've been here. My experience is the same - when a manager is technically minded, he or she involves himself far too deeply in the details of projects they should simply be overseeing.
Sometimes, in the case of managers with particularly stunted emotional makeup, you'll find them attempting to use their managerial position to prove themselves as technical geniuses, to the detriment of the people on their team.
While it may be beneficial in theory to have a technically savvy manager, in practice it's very dependent on the person. Most tech people don't have the emotional makeup required to successfully manage.
I was hoping Outlook 2003 would be among the Office 2003 applications supported, as it's one of the most popular. Oh well.
Nice to see WINE advancing as a platform though. Keep up the good work!
Commonly accepted wisdom reads very much like your post did - nebulous, dismissive, voice-of-reason style speak that derives an almost guaranteed collective harrumph from Slashdot moderators and the IT community at large.
My post being followed up by a reply that begins with mischaractization and ad-hominem is also predictable.
Office 2003 is a collaboration suite? WTF? It's not even intended to be used as a "collaboration suite". It's a desktop application suite, and a rather bad one at that (with the possible exception of Excel). Microsoft's collaboration suite is Exchange.
Exchange is groupware, and Office enables sharing, revision, versioning and collaboration on documents. I didn't say Office was a collaboration suite as its primary function (if that's how it was interpreted then I apologize). OpenOffice.org however, is quite limited in these areas.
I performed thousands of tests and generated more raw test data than would fit on a DVD because my company needed to know the facts about server performance.
That's good to hear. But server performance is one datapoint and only applies to circumstances where high loads will be placed on servers. Additionally a server can be as fast as it wants, but if it doesn't do what is needed, what good is it?
Sort of like how every major Internet virus disaster, spyware infestation, and countless other sorts of electronic calamity occurs as a direct result of using Microsoft software. You can't spin that.
Yes I can.:P Most of the world uses Microsoft software, and therefore most calamitous attacks are directed at it. The same will occur if/when Linux rises to sizeable popularity, but that's a debate for another day.
I call you out on this. We need to define value for the money. This is the ambiguous TCO that is talked about. I will gladly put Linux and open source products against most of Microsofts. But before we debate on that issue we need to define TCO. Also, I would like to add that I have been part of one of the worlds largest I.T./Microsoft only shops. I have also been in a pure Linux environment as well. I will say that both technologies have "issues", but if you want to talk about "value" and TCO I would love to debate you on it.
Hmm. Largely I'm concerned about needed functionality weighed against licensing costs (ongoing) as well as cost of maintenance; I recently dealt with a company which wanted to deploy groupware for all of its employees so that they could (in teams) perform scheduling and project management. Several options existed, the most likely candidate being Novell Groupwise in combination with Evolution on the clientside (they were OS agnostic, which was quite nice to deal with). The requirement nothing but Exchange satisfied though was that everyone in the organization has a Palm Pilot and needed to sync all that information with them regularly both locally and remotely.
Another unexpected attribute is that the Exchange server has functionalities which have improved their workflow in unexpected ways, which is another credit to the value it provides, although this is subjective and the same effect may well have been experienced with Groupwise server.
The total cost of this remains to be seen, as it has just been deployed in the last month - setting the system up securely took a great deal of time and effort, which is a strike against it, and over the course of time having to upgrade the Windows servers to maintain support will enter into the picture too.
In this particular case though, the company needed something only the Exchange solution could provide (there was also Lotus Notes, but we didn't spend a great deal of time looking into that option), which (from where I'm sitting anyway) indicates that the value provided by it was better even though the costs may be higher than the alternatives.
I would agree that some of Microsofts products do provide some value. Would you agree that they also provide vendor lock in?
Absolutely. In the short term this can be a good thing, because a person relying on Microsoft solutions will continue to use a familiar platform. In the mid term costs begin to go up and the weight of the solution begins to be felt. But in the long term, once sufficient demand has been built up, the market always responds with viable alternatives that will either drive costs back down or provide a cheaper alternative (this is indeed the impact Linux is having on Microsoft right now, due to increasing customer dissatisfaction).
So basically, no vendor lockin is perfect, there's always a way to loosen it up or break out of it before it becomes intolerable.
Question for you: If given the chance, do you think Novell or IBM, or one of these companies providing proprietary solutions on top of an open source stack, won't take the opportunity to attempt to lock their customers in?
I feel somewhat qualified to say that Microsoft doesn't care about their customers unless it effects their bottem line.
I agree. Unfortunately the only way Microsoft has seen the need to improve its products and lower its prices is due to rapidly increasing competition, which is always the greatest equalizer but it doesn't say much about the company's commitment to its customers otherwise.
You are making very specific points about specific products and services being better then others and the most logical choice.
I mentioned Server 2003 and Office as nice products, not the best or most logical choice for any given scenario.
Sambe doesn't provide directory services, ACL's based on them, or any of the other features Active Directory provides a workgroup, so it's really not more than a basic filesharing protocol daemon. That's fine for groups of three, but in larger numbers other needs begin to appear.
Similarly Microsoft Office has collaborative features which make it great for midsized workgroups, and doesn't require significant retraining to get started on (OpenOffice doesn't require a great deal of training either, but in my experience workers lose a lot of time becoming accustomed to the different placement of all its functionality).
WordPerfect is a bygone product, so I'd hope you limit your choices to OpenOffice and MS Office. As it happens I do the same thing with these two, offering them as solutions where they best fit.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it.
Some bad reputations cannot be redeemed, and sometimes those who are unrepentant, persistent and relentless can no longer be forgiven.
0.999... != 1. Archimedes says hi. Enjoy.
Not to mention the security and privacy implications of having multiple large organizations and, eventually, private individuals moving all of their e-mail and documents onto Google servers.
Are we so in love with the concept of web apps that we're forgetting we'd have to hand more our personal lives over to corporate entities? Do we truly have "nothing to hide"?
The initial setup at the web GUI makes it apparent that it wants to send stats back to home-base. How this can take people by surprise is baffling.
The purpose of the global menu bar is to present document windows as spaces in which to do work, and not as applications. When you switch to another document window, the menubar at the top of the screen changes to present options appropriate to working with that document.
It has always been possible to mount NFS servers from the Finder desktop.
NIS is obsolete in the UNIX world.
Didn't mean to knock Xerox PARC at all - much respect to them, there was genius there.
Actually I think the progress the free desktop has made is impressive beyond words. The fact that people do have a choice to use something completely free and customizable down to its very core is tremendous - and its impacts have been felt in the proprietary software world.
What bugs me is the presentation of the free desktop as though it's every bit as good as anything else out there. To see where the free desktop is and have a clear picture of how to make it useful to people, one has to recognize its weaknesses rather than stirring up hype.
Agreed.
Please explain to me how Entourage and Apple Mail developers should collaborate, seeing as they're products from competing organizations? The supposed and much-hyped strength of free software development is the creation of software that's ideologically, legally and technically unfettered by all the limitations that come from proprietary development.
Dunno dude. Try not to become so emotional.
Pretty much.
Steve Jobs' opinion eh - are you his personal assistant, or is this your opinion?
Touching, but subjective.
Xerox established the beginnings of the technology, and the concept of using multiple panes of information on the screen to simulate paper. They by no means developed any metaphor; the interfaces on the Alto computers were horrendous works in progress at best. Apple created the desktop metaphor in its fullness.
For the moment we'll put aside the fact that all the human interface guideline documents from the various open source desktops don't amount to a fifth of the documentation provided in Apple's HIG and begin dwelling on the fact that if we limit ourselves to the selection of applications that are native to each respective desktop environment, our selection drops to dramatically fewer applications than are available for commercial platforms.
"We're doing it too" isn't good enough. You have to be doing it as well, or better. Linux based desktops do not succeed when tested on the general public. Most end-users are completely lost even after extended use.
The market reality as I said is that the customer picks the cheapest thing they can stand. The reason Windows PC's prevail over Macintosh desktops is due to this. The combination of Windows and generic PC compatible hardware is the cheapest thing the market at large can stand to use. PC manufacturers are itching to switch to Linux. The compatibility is sufficient for the end-user at this point, but the usability isn't there.
This is a common myth among apologists. The interface presented by Windows 95 was widely recognized as much superior to its predecessor Windows 3.x, but also recognized as chaotic, arbitrary and failing to respect sensible desktop metaphors that make a graphical interface discoverable. Right from 1984 to the present day, the Macintosh HIG has been superior to the graphical offerings from Redmond.
Centralized package management is a pretty minor concern. A user installs what a user wants, whethe
Synaptic is easier than dragging an icon into a folder? If you're referring to the apt repository behind Synaptic, a central repository for all applications is conventional Linux wisdom that fosters a lack of standard layout and management systems. This is a key weakness of Linux as it prevents commercial vendors from easily writing deployable software.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jive+turkey Definition #2.
The article presents Ubuntu and MacOS as equals, if even only recently.
The author, as such, appears to have slept through the last 30 years, in which the original Macintosh established the desktop metaphors Microsoft poorly reimplemented and Linux re-re-implemented many many times over.
Many commenters are also operating under this illusion; the statement that 'While the Mac may present a more unified visual appearance, that's the only benefit it has over Ubuntu' is unbalanced for quite a number of reasons - the design and construction of MacOS and Macintosh human interface guidelines shape aspects of the use of a Mac from the subtle to the impressive. By comparison, there are few if any human interface guidelines or cohesive metaphors between multiple pieces of free software that are not driven by the egotism of their authors. I won't even touch on the pandemic of duplicated effort caused by the free software community's inability to collaborate, and the fractured, partly functional selection of software that has emerged as a result.
When speaking of user interface quality it's important to be objective. Try not to state subjective experiences like snap-to-screen-edge or focus-follows-mouse being far more efficient when this clearly can only be true for you. While Linux software attempts to satisfy the whim of every computer geek who ever used it, Apple spends an incredible amount of time and energy making a single, unified interface that will work as best as possible for the entire range of users.
Ubuntu just as good? No. Free software just isn't there yet. If it were, Dell, HP and Acer would have dumped Microsoft quite some time ago in the home market. People want cheap and easy. Not necessarily good, just cheap and easy. Linux doesn't even qualify as that yet - the market has spoken as always.
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
Troubling that slashdot always posts articles like this. Slashdotters are by far the worst enemies of good user interface design. :P
Highly unrealistic. Regular computer users buy portable media players, printers and cameras among other things regularly. Stating that Linux doesn't have to work with hardware because the average user doesn't bother anyway is highly wishful thinking.
On the second point, word of mouth bashing of companies and their products seems to happen a lot in the Linux world.
If he thinks moving to Linux is going to result in fewer annoyances he's in for a surprise.
I've been here. My experience is the same - when a manager is technically minded, he or she involves himself far too deeply in the details of projects they should simply be overseeing.
Sometimes, in the case of managers with particularly stunted emotional makeup, you'll find them attempting to use their managerial position to prove themselves as technical geniuses, to the detriment of the people on their team.
While it may be beneficial in theory to have a technically savvy manager, in practice it's very dependent on the person. Most tech people don't have the emotional makeup required to successfully manage.
That's great news!
I was hoping Outlook 2003 would be among the Office 2003 applications supported, as it's one of the most popular. Oh well. Nice to see WINE advancing as a platform though. Keep up the good work!
The number of servers in the world is far outweighed by the number of end-users.
Commonly accepted wisdom reads very much like your post did - nebulous, dismissive, voice-of-reason style speak that derives an almost guaranteed collective harrumph from Slashdot moderators and the IT community at large.
My post being followed up by a reply that begins with mischaractization and ad-hominem is also predictable.
Office 2003 is a collaboration suite? WTF? It's not even intended to be used as a "collaboration suite". It's a desktop application suite, and a rather bad one at that (with the possible exception of Excel). Microsoft's collaboration suite is Exchange.
Exchange is groupware, and Office enables sharing, revision, versioning and collaboration on documents. I didn't say Office was a collaboration suite as its primary function (if that's how it was interpreted then I apologize). OpenOffice.org however, is quite limited in these areas.
I performed thousands of tests and generated more raw test data than would fit on a DVD because my company needed to know the facts about server performance.
That's good to hear. But server performance is one datapoint and only applies to circumstances where high loads will be placed on servers. Additionally a server can be as fast as it wants, but if it doesn't do what is needed, what good is it?
Sort of like how every major Internet virus disaster, spyware infestation, and countless other sorts of electronic calamity occurs as a direct result of using Microsoft software. You can't spin that.
Yes I can. :P Most of the world uses Microsoft software, and therefore most calamitous attacks are directed at it. The same will occur if/when Linux rises to sizeable popularity, but that's a debate for another day.
I call you out on this. We need to define value for the money. This is the ambiguous TCO that is talked about. I will gladly put Linux and open source products against most of Microsofts. But before we debate on that issue we need to define TCO. Also, I would like to add that I have been part of one of the worlds largest I.T./Microsoft only shops. I have also been in a pure Linux environment as well. I will say that both technologies have "issues", but if you want to talk about "value" and TCO I would love to debate you on it.
Hmm. Largely I'm concerned about needed functionality weighed against licensing costs (ongoing) as well as cost of maintenance; I recently dealt with a company which wanted to deploy groupware for all of its employees so that they could (in teams) perform scheduling and project management. Several options existed, the most likely candidate being Novell Groupwise in combination with Evolution on the clientside (they were OS agnostic, which was quite nice to deal with). The requirement nothing but Exchange satisfied though was that everyone in the organization has a Palm Pilot and needed to sync all that information with them regularly both locally and remotely.
Another unexpected attribute is that the Exchange server has functionalities which have improved their workflow in unexpected ways, which is another credit to the value it provides, although this is subjective and the same effect may well have been experienced with Groupwise server.
The total cost of this remains to be seen, as it has just been deployed in the last month - setting the system up securely took a great deal of time and effort, which is a strike against it, and over the course of time having to upgrade the Windows servers to maintain support will enter into the picture too.
In this particular case though, the company needed something only the Exchange solution could provide (there was also Lotus Notes, but we didn't spend a great deal of time looking into that option), which (from where I'm sitting anyway) indicates that the value provided by it was better even though the costs may be higher than the alternatives.
I would agree that some of Microsofts products do provide some value. Would you agree that they also provide vendor lock in?
Absolutely. In the short term this can be a good thing, because a person relying on Microsoft solutions will continue to use a familiar platform. In the mid term costs begin to go up and the weight of the solution begins to be felt. But in the long term, once sufficient demand has been built up, the market always responds with viable alternatives that will either drive costs back down or provide a cheaper alternative (this is indeed the impact Linux is having on Microsoft right now, due to increasing customer dissatisfaction).
So basically, no vendor lockin is perfect, there's always a way to loosen it up or break out of it before it becomes intolerable.
Question for you: If given the chance, do you think Novell or IBM, or one of these companies providing proprietary solutions on top of an open source stack, won't take the opportunity to attempt to lock their customers in?
I feel somewhat qualified to say that Microsoft doesn't care about their customers unless it effects their bottem line.
I agree. Unfortunately the only way Microsoft has seen the need to improve its products and lower its prices is due to rapidly increasing competition, which is always the greatest equalizer but it doesn't say much about the company's commitment to its customers otherwise.
You are making very specific points about specific products and services being better then others and the most logical choice.
I mentioned Server 2003 and Office as nice products, not the best or most logical choice for any given scenario.
Sambe doesn't provide directory services, ACL's based on them, or any of the other features Active Directory provides a workgroup, so it's really not more than a basic filesharing protocol daemon. That's fine for groups of three, but in larger numbers other needs begin to appear.
Similarly Microsoft Office has collaborative features which make it great for midsized workgroups, and doesn't require significant retraining to get started on (OpenOffice doesn't require a great deal of training either, but in my experience workers lose a lot of time becoming accustomed to the different placement of all its functionality).
WordPerfect is a bygone product, so I'd hope you limit your choices to OpenOffice and MS Office. As it happens I do the same thing with these two, offering them as solutions where they best fit.
D'oh! You're right, NetWare totally slipped my mind while writing the post. Excellent workgroup solution.
Care to give a source for that assertion?
Only the graphics layer has hooks in the kernel.