Most comments made so far are completely irrelevant.
If you read the blog post it is fairly clear that this means that Word will send what you wrote to a blog through a blog API like Atom.
The means that the HTML that needs to be generated is fairly straightforward as it only needs to mark-up the text on a post and entire page - i.e. all it needs to do is paragraphs, lists, blockquote, headings, <em> and <strong>. It probably will be OK on the details given the the post.
Secondly it means it will not be doing FTP transfers.
Thirdly it means that this can only be used by someone who already has a blog with an API that allows posting with a blogging tool.
It is a perfectly logical step given the MS principle of making a few complex tools rather than lots of simple ones.
It is not a direct threat to Blogger, Moveable Type etc., as people will still need to host their blog somewhere. Of course MS might use the opportunity to point some people towards MSN Spaces - but the far stronger use of IE to point people towards MSN Search as not got them very far, has it?
Not only that, he has taught other parrots to speak, even going so far as to stop them when they pronounce a word wrong and saying the correct pronunciation.
Nothing could possibly be better than Windows by definition.
Even if your Linux distro could foretell the future and installed software automatically before you knew you needed it, people like this would still "know" that the way Windows does it is easier.
You and I and a lot of other people know Ubuntu or Mandriva is generally a lot easier to use than Windows, but it is a waste of time trying to convince people who have an emotional investment in Windows and do not want to believe that Linux could be more user friendly.
You can keep your prized nerdiness by switching distros. While the rest of us use Ubuntu to get work done, you can have fun compiling Gentoo, or even better LFS.
Excel is very nice for financial models of any size: there is not that much difference between one spreadsheet and another but Excel has a slight edge.
These days I no longer spend weeks working on building one spreadsheet (thank God) and I am quite happy with Gnumeric.
Not everyone agrees with me and one guy who used to work for me, and now does do big spreadsheets using Excel, says he prefers Excel.
The embedded video and audio in office documents is a menace. It just gets used as a way of emailing stuff that would otherwise be blocked by corporate mail filters, resulting in huge attachments. Of course this is partly the fault of admins who are over-agressive about blocking.
XmlHTTPRequest was developed by Microsoft..... MS should get the props for inventing it.
Not much though. Every other scripting language has a way of making http requests (at least in a common library if not the core language) so it was a pretty obvious gap in javascript.
Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.
What about Lyx? Simpler than a word-processor, near enough WYSIWIG, nice clean pdf, html, plain text or postscript output.
I assume it means that Sun is better off persuading language developers to run the "P" of the LAMP stack on the JVM (instead of their own byte-code interpreters), growing with LAMP rather than competing head-on with it and losing market share to it.
If Sun is to do that, they should do it before Parrot and the language implementations for it are finished - so that gives them plenty of time.
From what I was told, it took all the other applicants with their certifications at least 6 hours to not succeed in a simple task
There are two problems here, neither unique to IT:
One is that some qualifications (degrees in particular) are not designed to teach you directly usable skills - they are designed to teach you how to think. They are not in themselves complete from the point of view of actually doing useful work.
The other problem is that many people cram their way to qualification without understanding what they are studying. Thi is of course completely useless and does not get them anything other than a piece of paper.
SQLite is available under a BSDish license and it had bindings to a huge range of langauges. It stores data in a file and opening a database essentially means opening the file.
I would think it is easier than parsing text.
It would discredit FF in the eyes of the IE users being excluded. If they are increasingly being turned away by websites, commercial or otherwise, by a page which is associating FF with the inconvenience said IE users feel, are they really going to feel warm and fuzzy about it?
What about all the people who way they use IE because other browsers are incompatible with some web site they use? MY point is that IE only websites have boosted IE usage. IE blocking websites should therefore reduce IE usage.
You think people will blame FF. Do you think that people faced with an IE only site blame IE or MS?
People may not like it initially, but it will encourage people to switch. Once they switch three things will happen. Firstly, they find FF's good features. Secondly, they will want to believe that it is better (as people do not like to think they have downgraded and they adjust their beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance). Finally, having switched they are not going to bother to switch back.
It can reasonably be regarded as a tactic that is at odds with the values of OSS. My reasons for believing it will work depend on human nature being less than ideal. Unfortunately the behaviour or people as consumers shows quite clearly that (whatever economists might think) that people are not rational about making complex choices. Its not a nice thought, but I remain convinced this will work.
Yes, you would have to be nuts to use this on a commercial website but there are LOTS of non-commercial sites out there.
I just looked through my bookmarks and there were a good many non-commercial sites there - and I am fairly selective about what I read so there are no vanity blogs etc. in my bookmarks.
I am not sure about "dig their heels in" response either - if people react of the existence of IE only sites by thinking "Firefox is broken" why should they not react to non-IE only sites by thinking "IE is broken".
BTW I have come across more FF only sites recently (not many of them, just a handful, none important) than IE only sites (I think one in the last few months, and that works in FF, OPera or Konqueror if you spoof the UA).
From the article Chaand remembers helping a small-business owner in Florida fix her PC's network connection so she could send the company's monthly business report to a printer.. It does rather sound like she is over-qualified.
Isn't this the same kind of actions that open source advocates condemn, when Microsoft and friends use it ?
Firefox does not have a monopoly
It works - why not learn from the other side
Give them a taste of their own medicine
I doubt anyone is using this on revenue generating sites and inconveniencing paying customers
Plenty of sites have "you need a modern browser" messages and few people object to that, so what is wrong with a "you need a standards compliant browser"?
Assuming it is being used on otherwise non-profit websites, it is a reasonable reaction to MS's assumption that everyone else should bear the cost of working around their bugs.
Akanksha has probably not made that good a career move - he is well paid for the moment, but it hardly gives you good experience.
The fact that it is possible to get people like him to do a job like that is a major reason for moving off-shore: not only do you pay people less, but you get better people at the same time.
As for Indian degrees, there is a great similarity to the US in that standards vary a lot. The best are very good but the gap in standards between the best and the worst is very wide.
You meant "left wing" (prob. a typo), other than that this remark is true all over europe. In most european countries, Democrats would well be the right wing and Republicans would be the far right.
many people in the USA have 'hacked' the database and altered their records?
The potential rewards for doing so are much smaller
Most of your other comments fall into the slippery-slope category
Like what?, in any case slippery slopes do happen (or should I say slip?) - look at the extension of police powers in the UK over the last 30 years.
is retarded
Well that is a nice bit of reason debate
They Just Don't Care that you went to work and then afterwards stopped at a conveniece store and bought doughnuts.
On the other hand if you nought your doughnuts at the starting point of a protest opposed to the governments current policies and got on a train near where it ended they might just care. If you were the leader of the opposition party and and you ordered a pizza to be delivered at your mistress's flat they might care, if you were a journalist critical of the government who was eating doughnuts with a source they might care.
I'm extremely familiar with Linux, having used it to do development and as a server platform continuously since 1995.
I have used a Linux desktop for the last 5 years, starting with a retail copy of Mandrake and knowing almost nothing about Linux/Unix. While there have been problems, it has not overall, been any more hassle than Windows. This is why people suspect you of trolling - your experience is so much worse than ours or that of anyone we know that it seems highly improbable.
and try to save a file to an SMB share
All the specific problems you have mentioned over the course of several posts have to do with SMB shares. OK, so at most all we know is that there are problems with SMB in FC 5. Going from that to "Linux sucks as a desktop" is a big leap.
Just installing the thing and getting a good set of apps on it took about 8 hours
I only took about three hours to install Mandrake with all the apps we needed on all four PCs in my small office a year and a half ago. Its not what I would do now - the way to use Linux in that environment is to have a single server and x terminals but I was still too much in the Windows mindset then.
Installing Ubuntu is faster. In fact if you have something else to do while waiting for the install, the actual amount of time you spend doing anything is very small.
Gnome and KDE are a different story... they have serious bugs and problems that affect everyday users and make using them really hard.
I found the Linux desktops I have used, the default KDE desktop on Mandrake and the Gnome Desktop in Ubuntu to be very productive - not just for me but for several people in a small business and several more home users. Your not liking Linux desktops is just a matter of taste or bad luck.
Slashdot Mirror
I think slashdot swallowed part of your comment - an HTML tag by the look of it.
I am not supporting MS, I just do not think this matters very much - apart from making MS Word even more bloated.
Most users don't want to have to go out and search for the software they need for their day-to-day usage
UBuntu + EasyubuntuorR Mandriva or Mepis and a lot more the software you need is there than if you had a fresh install of Windows.My experience over the last few years is that Linux comes a lot closer to "just working" than Windows does.
Most comments made so far are completely irrelevant.
If you read the blog post it is fairly clear that this means that Word will send what you wrote to a blog through a blog API like Atom.
The means that the HTML that needs to be generated is fairly straightforward as it only needs to mark-up the text on a post and entire page - i.e. all it needs to do is paragraphs, lists, blockquote, headings, <em> and <strong>. It probably will be OK on the details given the the post.
Secondly it means it will not be doing FTP transfers.
Thirdly it means that this can only be used by someone who already has a blog with an API that allows posting with a blogging tool.
It is a perfectly logical step given the MS principle of making a few complex tools rather than lots of simple ones.
It is not a direct threat to Blogger, Moveable Type etc., as people will still need to host their blog somewhere. Of course MS might use the opportunity to point some people towards MSN Spaces - but the far stronger use of IE to point people towards MSN Search as not got them very far, has it?
Of course its better to know more, but sometimes the urge to mess around and get everything perfect can get in the way of real work.
So he would over-qualified to work as a /. editor?
Mangu, you do not understand.
Easy = exactly the same as in Windows.
Nothing could possibly be better than Windows by definition.
Even if your Linux distro could foretell the future and installed software automatically before you knew you needed it, people like this would still "know" that the way Windows does it is easier.
You and I and a lot of other people know Ubuntu or Mandriva is generally a lot easier to use than Windows, but it is a waste of time trying to convince people who have an emotional investment in Windows and do not want to believe that Linux could be more user friendly.
That is one of the best reasons not to buy from MS.
You are giving a supplier the power to examine all your operations and all your data AND probably severely disrupt your operations?
You can keep your prized nerdiness by switching distros. While the rest of us use Ubuntu to get work done, you can have fun compiling Gentoo, or even better LFS.
Not if its a branded MS jemmy....
Yes but that not your fault, its MS's.
On the other hand if you use Linux and something goes wrong, your PHB will blame you.
The bottom line is the the MS solution may be higher risk for the organisation, but it is lower risk for the person making the purchase decision.
Excel is very nice for financial models of any size: there is not that much difference between one spreadsheet and another but Excel has a slight edge.
These days I no longer spend weeks working on building one spreadsheet (thank God) and I am quite happy with Gnumeric.
Not everyone agrees with me and one guy who used to work for me, and now does do big spreadsheets using Excel, says he prefers Excel.
The embedded video and audio in office documents is a menace. It just gets used as a way of emailing stuff that would otherwise be blocked by corporate mail filters, resulting in huge attachments. Of course this is partly the fault of admins who are over-agressive about blocking.
I ahve exactly the same experience but worse - usually the media are inaccurate or misleading and show little sign of doing even basic fact checking.
Not much though. Every other scripting language has a way of making http requests (at least in a common library if not the core language) so it was a pretty obvious gap in javascript.
What about Lyx? Simpler than a word-processor, near enough WYSIWIG, nice clean pdf, html, plain text or postscript output.
I assume it means that Sun is better off persuading language developers to run the "P" of the LAMP stack on the JVM (instead of their own byte-code interpreters), growing with LAMP rather than competing head-on with it and losing market share to it.
If Sun is to do that, they should do it before Parrot and the language implementations for it are finished - so that gives them plenty of time.
There are a already lot language implementations that already target the JVM, Sun would not lose by throwing a bit of money at OSS projects that might improve them and add a few more.
There are two problems here, neither unique to IT:
One is that some qualifications (degrees in particular) are not designed to teach you directly usable skills - they are designed to teach you how to think. They are not in themselves complete from the point of view of actually doing useful work.
The other problem is that many people cram their way to qualification without understanding what they are studying. Thi is of course completely useless and does not get them anything other than a piece of paper.
SQLite is available under a BSDish license and it had bindings to a huge range of langauges. It stores data in a file and opening a database essentially means opening the file. I would think it is easier than parsing text.
What about all the people who way they use IE because other browsers are incompatible with some web site they use? MY point is that IE only websites have boosted IE usage. IE blocking websites should therefore reduce IE usage.
You think people will blame FF. Do you think that people faced with an IE only site blame IE or MS?
People may not like it initially, but it will encourage people to switch. Once they switch three things will happen. Firstly, they find FF's good features. Secondly, they will want to believe that it is better (as people do not like to think they have downgraded and they adjust their beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance). Finally, having switched they are not going to bother to switch back.
It can reasonably be regarded as a tactic that is at odds with the values of OSS. My reasons for believing it will work depend on human nature being less than ideal. Unfortunately the behaviour or people as consumers shows quite clearly that (whatever economists might think) that people are not rational about making complex choices. Its not a nice thought, but I remain convinced this will work.
Yes, you would have to be nuts to use this on a commercial website but there are LOTS of non-commercial sites out there.
I just looked through my bookmarks and there were a good many non-commercial sites there - and I am fairly selective about what I read so there are no vanity blogs etc. in my bookmarks.
I am not sure about "dig their heels in" response either - if people react of the existence of IE only sites by thinking "Firefox is broken" why should they not react to non-IE only sites by thinking "IE is broken".
BTW I have come across more FF only sites recently (not many of them, just a handful, none important) than IE only sites (I think one in the last few months, and that works in FF, OPera or Konqueror if you spoof the UA).
From the article Chaand remembers helping a small-business owner in Florida fix her PC's network connection so she could send the company's monthly business report to a printer.. It does rather sound like she is over-qualified.
Akanksha is a female name by the way
Oops! I should have known that
Akanksha has probably not made that good a career move - he is well paid for the moment, but it hardly gives you good experience.
The fact that it is possible to get people like him to do a job like that is a major reason for moving off-shore: not only do you pay people less, but you get better people at the same time.
As for Indian degrees, there is a great similarity to the US in that standards vary a lot. The best are very good but the gap in standards between the best and the worst is very wide.
More than most of Europe, most of the world.
The potential rewards for doing so are much smaller
Most of your other comments fall into the slippery-slope category
Like what?, in any case slippery slopes do happen (or should I say slip?) - look at the extension of police powers in the UK over the last 30 years.
is retarded
Well that is a nice bit of reason debate
They Just Don't Care that you went to work and then afterwards stopped at a conveniece store and bought doughnuts.
On the other hand if you nought your doughnuts at the starting point of a protest opposed to the governments current policies and got on a train near where it ended they might just care. If you were the leader of the opposition party and and you ordered a pizza to be delivered at your mistress's flat they might care, if you were a journalist critical of the government who was eating doughnuts with a source they might care.
I have used a Linux desktop for the last 5 years, starting with a retail copy of Mandrake and knowing almost nothing about Linux/Unix. While there have been problems, it has not overall, been any more hassle than Windows. This is why people suspect you of trolling - your experience is so much worse than ours or that of anyone we know that it seems highly improbable.
and try to save a file to an SMB share
All the specific problems you have mentioned over the course of several posts have to do with SMB shares. OK, so at most all we know is that there are problems with SMB in FC 5. Going from that to "Linux sucks as a desktop" is a big leap.
Just installing the thing and getting a good set of apps on it took about 8 hours
I only took about three hours to install Mandrake with all the apps we needed on all four PCs in my small office a year and a half ago. Its not what I would do now - the way to use Linux in that environment is to have a single server and x terminals but I was still too much in the Windows mindset then.
Installing Ubuntu is faster. In fact if you have something else to do while waiting for the install, the actual amount of time you spend doing anything is very small.
Gnome and KDE are a different story... they have serious bugs and problems that affect everyday users and make using them really hard.
I found the Linux desktops I have used, the default KDE desktop on Mandrake and the Gnome Desktop in Ubuntu to be very productive - not just for me but for several people in a small business and several more home users. Your not liking Linux desktops is just a matter of taste or bad luck.