> 1. Speed: There's no point in being 100% > compatible with MS Office, if it's 200% slower.
Don't forget - you are a "power user" and speed is therefore important. If you sat down at 80% of the workstations installed in most government departments or boring old corporates around the world you'd see that most places are still happily using things like PIII600's with 128Mb RAM and users don't complain at all. Oh, and don't forget the laptops of similar age.
If we assume these machines will be upgraded in the next 18 months though, they'll have more than enough speed to run OO for the next four or even five years.
> 2. Bloated: Same as MS Office.
OK, but what's wrong with that, exactly?
> 3. No option to install a dumbed-down version.
Isn't this the same as point 2?
For the other two points see my answer to point 1.
Remember - don't judge people by your own standards. Most people in the corporate or public sector workplace don't give a toss about speed, let alone sofware elegance, if they can write that report/spreadhseet/email and print it out.
I hear alot of jokes and comments involving working in "cubicles" (e.g. Dilbert, this article...) - but here in the UK, I've never worked in an office that has them.
I've worked in large companies/corporations (the BBC, IPC Magazines) and seen the inside of many more (BSkyB, Cisco UK, Diageo) as well as several smaller outfits of about 50-100 employees, and apart from a couple of dividers here and there, I've never seen an office divided up into cubicles.
It sounds like hell on earth! Are they just American?
> As a poster above said, the really HOT nuke
> waste is fairly easy to get rid of - breader
> reactors.
... apart from the fact that unless you build a fast-breeder next door to your other reactor, then you have to transport the waste to the fast-breeder site, which might be a long, dangerous journey.
> Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or > software, from a serious vendor, your support > contract is a little different.
Of course, we're talking generalities here, but I have to say that's just not my experience. We are Oracle and BEA partners, and have developed systems using OpenMarket (now "Divine Content Server") and MediaSurface.
Without exaggeration, I can say that *every single* time we have had a significant problem with those applications that cannot be solved by looking in a manual, the support lines have been at best marginally helpful and usually completely hopeless. We usually work the problem out ourselves, or get it a fix from somebody on usenet.
There is a HUGE gap between the theory of commercial software support, and the practice. The reason this isn't visible to most people is that the people who PAY for the support contract are hardly ever the people who have to USE it.
Why the gap? I can only think that the high complexity of modern software, combined with the high cost of licenses, ensures that most people who buy that software don't need to rely on support desks. If they did, well, our company for one would now be out of business.
> Saddam was delusional to the end. Not insane, > but really more the way Bush is. He was (by > choice)
OK let's stop this drivel now.
The next time you are tempted to pontificate on an individual's personality in order to try to understand events, think about this:
Hitler was not the Third Reich. Martin Luther King was not the American civil rights movement.
There seems to be a growing tendency, particularly in the US media and with Americans in general I would say, to focus on the nature of individuals to the exclusion of the situations those people exploit or exist in. I don't know exactly why this is, but perhaps it's easier to understand history or societies in terms of "bad" and "good" individuals (Hitler's mother beat him... he was insecure... so he thought he'd invade Poland) as if those individuals somehow *are* history or their societies. It's much harder to look at the much more complex, but far more important, sets of situations that enabled those people to do what they did.
You may say "So what? But there is a damaging side to this way of looking at things. Focussing on personalities all the time is self-deception. We can speculate all we like, but we will never know whether Alexander the Great was gay, or whether Clinton was addicted to sex. It's a truly pointless effort.
Further, it implies that we are not in control. It implies that no matter what we do there will always be some mysteriously "evil" or "good" people completely unlike us or anyone we know who will come along out of the blue and change things. We can only stand on the sidelines and hope that if only the "evil" people can be found and eradicated, or that some supernaturally "good" people can prosper then all will be right with the world.
Which is bullshit of course. But whaddya know? It plays right into the hands of people like George Bush who would really rather we worried about how many babies Saddam eats for breakfast than why the US supported him during the Iran-Iraq war, or why most people in the Middle East regard the US support of Israel as the biggest problem facing the region today.
It's much easier to say "Saddam is evil - so we're going to bomb Iraq until he's gone."
> If any country had to be in possession of these > things, it should be the US. You don't want it > to be the US? Well, let's look at the > alternatives:
You have just perfectly illustrated why a large part of the world's population hates America. If you find it odd that people should go out of their way to fly aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre, then think about what you have said - and then you'll understand!
Hooray! I'm mod this guy up! I'm *really* glad he posted!
> I don't think anybody should be making any new > life forms or modifying any existing life forms
My grandfather bred chickens. His father corresponded with Charles Darwin about it (my aunt has the letters). Breeding animals to enhance or supress certain traits has been going on for ages.
> Imagine a scenario where terrorists could
I can imagine any scenario "where terrorists could.." do just about anything (brainwash my children into blowing up their schools... putting poison in the water supply... the list is frickin endless). But that is not a good reason not to conduct this research. If it was, the world WOULD be run by terrorists.
> I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
Don't worry - you're just being ridiculous, that's all. We can all be ridiculous occasionally:-)
Clay Shirky, the undisputed king of thinkers about the Internet (well, almost) says micropayment systems are doomed in a paper he wrote a couple of months back.
I have to say I agree with him on this. He makes several very good points about micropayments, free content, and how the Internet shifts the balance of power from publishers to consumers.
Absolutely. At work, we've been listening to some radio stations here in London, England and they all play the SAME stuff OVER and OVER again all day. I swear they must have a playlist of 20 tunes maximum and just randomly rotate them.
It got so bad one day after I'd heard that cock-awful remix of the Stones's "Sympathy For The Devil" for the THIRD time that day and it was only 1:30pm, that I rang the station and asked to speak to the controller.
They put me through to somebody and this is the gist of the convsation I had with them:
ME: "I'm calling to ask you why you repeat the same tunes again and again all day."
THEM: "Well, we repeat music no more than the other stations do."
ME: "So you're telling me that Virgin FM are no different from any other radio station?"
THEM: "Yes."
ME: "So how are you going to pesruade me to listen to you?"
THEM: "I'm not, you can always switch channels."
ME: "Are you on CRACK? What's you're job title?"
THEM: "PA to the programme controller."
ME: "Well, I can't be bothered if you can't - you can shove your station up your arse. You wouldn't know the meaning of piss-poor."
THEM: "If you are abusive, sir, I will put the phone down."
ME: "Go ahead you pathetic idiot."
So they did. I *was* rather angry by that time.
I then spent the next couple of hours configuring and installing THIS and we've never looked back.
Why have lights you can override at all? Why don't the emergency services just jump the lights like they do in the UK?
If I come up to a red light, I'm stopping. If I hear an ambulance behind me, I expect it to jump the lights! The poeple on the green lane hear the ambulance and stop/slow down too.
Works fine over here. Is there something special about US traffic?
> Has been a management-level decision at every business I've worked at.
It's been a management decisiton TO do it, not HOW to do it!
From the document, first para of Summary:
"These guidelines are for IT managers and practitioners who are planning or doing a migration to Open Source Software..."
If you've worked for companies where the managers would have read this document for more than about 5 mins without falling asleep, then you sure have worked for some odd companies. Nowhere does the document say it's for management, and nowhere are there any business case figures, etc. included.
But it's too late, I'm a troll now. Oh well, this is/. - the moderators are the least likely to RTFA.
> Ever notice how the MiniDisc format truely never caught on?
Pardon? Here in the UK I can buy a pack of MiniDiscs at my local supermarket, in fact they're next to the tinned foods counter at Sainsbury's accross the road.
If that's not an indication of the level of penetration the format has, I don't know what is!
Oh, and we're using MO at work because we need to keep data for more than ten years. Something that's probably not going to be possible with other formats.
> Also, Microsoft designed some sites for the UK Gov
I think you mean "some sites designed for the UK gov only worked with Microsoft browsers"
Microsoft's influence may stretch far and wide, but it does not extend to web site design. The governement would have drawn upon the closed shop that is it's "outsourcing" of site design and build agencies.
And BTW, I have conducted a study of my video and DVD collection and can tell you that in fact, WinTel PCs feature in approx 30% of films that show computers (that can be classified as being either Mac or WinTel).
But 45% of *all* films showing computers used mocked-up interfaces on non-specific hardware.
The study looked at approx 65 films made in the last 10-15 years.
> They were American. Just like I am American. > This is a fact that "American's get" and > European's tend not to. We don't care where you > were born, or what your past life was.
Of course, those people not here to verify your conjecture on that, but you seem to be saying that just because somebody lives in America they are American.
That does actually explain to me a lot about how Americans think. The whole "melting pot" mentality (racist lunatics or various flavours notwithstanding) basically comes down to that.
But can you see how using that logic to claim that America has been responsible for basically all technological innovation in the last 100 years might be, erm, completely ridiculous?
Slashdot Mirror
> 1. Speed: There's no point in being 100%
> compatible with MS Office, if it's 200% slower.
Don't forget - you are a "power user" and speed is therefore important. If you sat down at 80% of the workstations installed in most government departments or boring old corporates around the world you'd see that most places are still happily using things like PIII600's with 128Mb RAM and users don't complain at all. Oh, and don't forget the laptops of similar age.
If we assume these machines will be upgraded in the next 18 months though, they'll have more than enough speed to run OO for the next four or even five years.
> 2. Bloated: Same as MS Office.
OK, but what's wrong with that, exactly?
> 3. No option to install a dumbed-down version.
Isn't this the same as point 2?
For the other two points see my answer to point 1.
Remember - don't judge people by your own standards. Most people in the corporate or public sector workplace don't give a toss about speed, let alone sofware elegance, if they can write that report/spreadhseet/email and print it out.
And why should they care?
I hear alot of jokes and comments involving working in "cubicles" (e.g. Dilbert, this article...) - but here in the UK, I've never worked in an office that has them.
I've worked in large companies/corporations (the BBC, IPC Magazines) and seen the inside of many more (BSkyB, Cisco UK, Diageo) as well as several smaller outfits of about 50-100 employees, and apart from a couple of dividers here and there, I've never seen an office divided up into cubicles.
It sounds like hell on earth! Are they just American?
> waste is fairly easy to get rid of - breader
> reactors.
> Now, if you buy a serious piece of hardware or > software, from a serious vendor, your support
> contract is a little different.
Of course, we're talking generalities here, but I have to say that's just not my experience. We are Oracle and BEA partners, and have developed systems using OpenMarket (now "Divine Content Server") and MediaSurface.
Without exaggeration, I can say that *every single* time we have had a significant problem with those applications that cannot be solved by looking in a manual, the support lines have been at best marginally helpful and usually completely hopeless. We usually work the problem out ourselves, or get it a fix from somebody on usenet.
There is a HUGE gap between the theory of commercial software support, and the practice. The reason this isn't visible to most people is that the people who PAY for the support contract are hardly ever the people who have to USE it.
Why the gap? I can only think that the high complexity of modern software, combined with the high cost of licenses, ensures that most people who buy that software don't need to rely on support desks. If they did, well, our company for one would now be out of business.
> Saddam was delusional to the end. Not insane,
> but really more the way Bush is. He was (by
> choice)
OK let's stop this drivel now.
The next time you are tempted to pontificate on an individual's personality in order to try to understand events, think about this:
Hitler was not the Third Reich. Martin Luther King was not the American civil rights movement.
There seems to be a growing tendency, particularly in the US media and with Americans in general I would say, to focus on the nature of individuals to the exclusion of the situations those people exploit or exist in. I don't know exactly why this is, but perhaps it's easier to understand history or societies in terms of "bad" and "good" individuals (Hitler's mother beat him... he was insecure... so he thought he'd invade Poland) as if those individuals somehow *are* history or their societies. It's much harder to look at the much more complex, but far more important, sets of situations that enabled those people to do what they did.
You may say "So what? But there is a damaging side to this way of looking at things. Focussing on personalities all the time is self-deception. We can speculate all we like, but we will never know whether Alexander the Great was gay, or whether Clinton was addicted to sex. It's a truly pointless effort.
Further, it implies that we are not in control. It implies that no matter what we do there will always be some mysteriously "evil" or "good" people completely unlike us or anyone we know who will come along out of the blue and change things. We can only stand on the sidelines and hope that if only the "evil" people can be found and eradicated, or that some supernaturally "good" people can prosper then all will be right with the world.
Which is bullshit of course. But whaddya know? It plays right into the hands of people like George Bush who would really rather we worried about how many babies Saddam eats for breakfast than why the US supported him during the Iran-Iraq war, or why most people in the Middle East regard the US support of Israel as the biggest problem facing the region today.
It's much easier to say "Saddam is evil - so we're going to bomb Iraq until he's gone."
After all, who would argue with that??
> If any country had to be in possession of these
> things, it should be the US. You don't want it
> to be the US? Well, let's look at the
> alternatives:
You have just perfectly illustrated why a large part of the world's population hates America. If you find it odd that people should go out of their way to fly aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre, then think about what you have said - and then you'll understand!
Hooray! I'm mod this guy up! I'm *really* glad he posted!
> I don't think anybody should be making any new > life forms or modifying any existing life forms
:-)
My grandfather bred chickens. His father corresponded with Charles Darwin about it (my aunt has the letters). Breeding animals to enhance or supress certain traits has been going on for ages.
> Imagine a scenario where terrorists could
I can imagine any scenario "where terrorists could.." do just about anything (brainwash my children into blowing up their schools... putting poison in the water supply... the list is frickin endless). But that is not a good reason not to conduct this research. If it was, the world WOULD be run by terrorists.
> I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
Don't worry - you're just being ridiculous, that's all. We can all be ridiculous occasionally
Hmm. Seems inneresting. We'll know who's right if/when BitPass folds!
Given the current investment climate, I think we'll know either way in about 2 years time.
I have to say I agree with him on this. He makes several very good points about micropayments, free content, and how the Internet shifts the balance of power from publishers to consumers.
It got so bad one day after I'd heard that cock-awful remix of the Stones's "Sympathy For The Devil" for the THIRD time that day and it was only 1:30pm, that I rang the station and asked to speak to the controller.
They put me through to somebody and this is the gist of the convsation I had with them:
ME: "I'm calling to ask you why you repeat the same tunes again and again all day."
THEM: "Well, we repeat music no more than the other stations do."
ME: "So you're telling me that Virgin FM are no different from any other radio station?"
THEM: "Yes."
ME: "So how are you going to pesruade me to listen to you?"
THEM: "I'm not, you can always switch channels."
ME: "Are you on CRACK? What's you're job title?"
THEM: "PA to the programme controller."
ME: "Well, I can't be bothered if you can't - you can shove your station up your arse. You wouldn't know the meaning of piss-poor."
THEM: "If you are abusive, sir, I will put the phone down."
ME: "Go ahead you pathetic idiot."
So they did. I *was* rather angry by that time.
I then spent the next couple of hours configuring and installing THIS and we've never looked back.
Why have lights you can override at all? Why don't the emergency services just jump the lights like they do in the UK?
If I come up to a red light, I'm stopping. If I hear an ambulance behind me, I expect it to jump the lights! The poeple on the green lane hear the ambulance and stop/slow down too.
Works fine over here. Is there something special about US traffic?
> Has been a management-level decision at every business I've worked at.
/. - the moderators are the least likely to RTFA.
It's been a management decisiton TO do it, not HOW to do it!
From the document, first para of Summary:
"These guidelines are for IT managers and practitioners who are planning or doing a migration to Open Source Software..."
If you've worked for companies where the managers would have read this document for more than about 5 mins without falling asleep, then you sure have worked for some odd companies. Nowhere does the document say it's for management, and nowhere are there any business case figures, etc. included.
But it's too late, I'm a troll now. Oh well, this is
Dude - you don't understand what this story is about!
/. - lamers who don't even read the STORIES let alone the articles will surely get modded into oblivion.
But hey, this is
Surely...
Since when is a paper on software migration options anything to do with management?
Oh, but you've not read it have you?
> Ever notice how the MiniDisc format truely never caught on?
Pardon? Here in the UK I can buy a pack of MiniDiscs at my local supermarket, in fact they're next to the tinned foods counter at Sainsbury's accross the road.
If that's not an indication of the level of penetration the format has, I don't know what is!
Oh, and we're using MO at work because we need to keep data for more than ten years. Something that's probably not going to be possible with other formats.
Whoah there! It ain't over until a fat judge sings
I would think Microsoft was proceed with caution in this area if push came to shove.
I see the article says "HOAP-2 is designed as an aid to robotics research and therefore runs on open source, Linux-based software."
"therefore runs" is an interesting choice of words by the writer. Does it imply that Linux now has a reputation as a scientifically-orientated OS?
But nobody seems to care about that, so maybe we don't need to care about the GNU icon either.
> Also, Microsoft designed some sites for the UK Gov
I think you mean "some sites designed for the UK gov only worked with Microsoft browsers"
Microsoft's influence may stretch far and wide, but it does not extend to web site design. The governement would have drawn upon the closed shop that is it's "outsourcing" of site design and build agencies.
Holy Jesus and Mary God - you had to look up the word "offshore"???
Now I *know* that eduacation in the United States is truly dead.
You poor, poor fools.
Two years ago I used to get 3-5 fax spams a day at my home, and about 10-15 at my place of work.
I added out telephone numbers to the fax marketing opt-out list at www.dma.org.uk and in 60 days they had stopped dead.
I have had two junk faxes in that entire time since then. If only others things in life were so simple.
... but we get the joke anyway.
And BTW, I have conducted a study of my video and DVD collection and can tell you that in fact, WinTel PCs feature in approx 30% of films that show computers (that can be classified as being either Mac or WinTel).
But 45% of *all* films showing computers used mocked-up interfaces on non-specific hardware.
The study looked at approx 65 films made in the last 10-15 years.
> They were American. Just like I am American.
> This is a fact that "American's get" and
> European's tend not to. We don't care where you
> were born, or what your past life was.
Of course, those people not here to verify your conjecture on that, but you seem to be saying that just because somebody lives in America they are American.
That does actually explain to me a lot about how Americans think. The whole "melting pot" mentality (racist lunatics or various flavours notwithstanding) basically comes down to that.
But can you see how using that logic to claim that America has been responsible for basically all technological innovation in the last 100 years might be, erm, completely ridiculous?
Huh? Why has that been modded "insightful"?
Is it? I thought that Linux is the most *used* server on the net. So the amount of cracks are higher simply because there are more targets.
Or do you have some evidence to back up your claim?
I'd like to breathe the free air, but I've not got enough money for the per-seat licence...