I don't know which is more impressive: Twain's ability to look ahead and write stuff that would first become sort of meaningful a hundred years after his death, or parent poster's fantastically creative skills with copy'n'paste operations.
There have been several replies to parent (that are siblings of this post) that very cleverly point out that there may be a statistical fallacy in parent's presentation.
Taken as a group, these posts mostly demonstrate that cleverness is not intelligence.
The context has been the very fuzzily defined quality of "intelligence" in an undefined population of rather large size. In this context, neither 'mean', 'median', nor 'mode' has any validity since all of these terms imply more precision than we have to work with. The ambiguity of the term 'average' is actually truthier in fuzzy contexts than any of the more precise terms, precisely because it has connotations of imprecision. So the insistence on splitting hairs between 'mean' and 'median' and 'average' is very clever in a schoolkid kind of way, but not very bright.
Intelligence is not cleverness. They are not spelled the same, they have different roots, and they have different meanings. Try not to confuse the two. That only wastes bandwidth by scattering ego food to those who need to exercise their minds, not feed their complacency.
Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.
Google might shape stupidity in new and different ways, just like literacy did back in an earlier day. But whether most people are saying "I heard it in the marketplace", "I read it in the newspaper", or "I googled it" doesn't much matter: the intelligence divide will continue to separate those who make decisions based on what some authorities say from those who make decisions through their own critical thinking.
The important thing is whether Google is becoming a catalyst for changing the compounds of administratium that we all have to deal with. The amount of administratium in the local universe appears to be constant for human scale time periods, but if Google is increasing the rate at which administratium oxides ("corporate rust") are converted to more reactive compounds of the element, then the upper quartile of intelligent people need to take notice, and make appropriate adjustments to the strategies and tactics that they use to guide the administrators.
An alternate approach that Google could use is to support continued development of the client-side interfaces to Google Docs.
That might be part of the reason that 85% of Mozilla's revenues come from Google. It is doubtful that Google can actually do anything more on the server side to improve Google Doc performance. But as Firefox gets leaner, faster, and more extensible, Google Docs will become much more interesting. I also expect that improvements in moving files between OOo and Google Docs will be forthcoming from the Firefox community in the next year: FFv3.0 looks like a sound foundation for such work.
I like OOo since Writer and Calc do what I need, Base is rock-solid where it counts, and Draw is at least adequate.
But I am one of the few clear seers who know that the first and biggest step to improving an organization's performance is to ban the use of PowerPoint. (The second step, which would also result in a significant boost in efficiency, is to limit the use of MS Access to persons who have the training to know when it is actually the right tool for the job-- which, in corporate America, is roughly 3.72% of its current usage.)
...if another computer were to request the files, they would get them.
We need to find those sentient computers and send them all to Gitmo. Darn things are getting way too uppity, acting independently of their humans like that.
Having files in a publically shared folder demonstrate *intent* to share.
Does not.
A shared folder can also be the product of an intent to sometimes move files between different computing devices owned by the same individual.
A shared folder can also be the productive of ignorance about basic operating system security measures. And when you look at the entire history personal computer usage, it is clear that the existence of a shared folder is more likely due to this kind of ignorance than to any kind of intentional action.
...accounting firms absolutely do NOT (in general) stay away from excel!
...excel is probably one of the most widely used tools by engineers.
Okay, I now see where you're coming from.
In annual financial reports, accounting firms will, in general, say that any value between $9,550 and $10,450 is $10,000. In that same sense, I'm sure they do often use excel.
I know first hand (from my father and his colleagues) that engineers most commonly use 3 as the value of pi in first-pass rough analysis work. So I'm sure engineers also use excel quite a bit.
...of course [excel's usage is] (generally) validated and displaced with higher fidelity analysis and testing as appropriate when the design matures.
Whew! So about the time my Dad would stop doing the numbers in his head and reach for his sliderule, today's aerospace engineers drop excel in favor of something with more than one significant digit of accuracy. That's reassuring. Truly.
Just in passing-- my Dad worked on heat exchange problems in jet engines in the 1950s and 1960s. I think the work he was most proud of was his contributions to the heat sheild of the Apollo. My own most demanding computational work was calculating nitropruside drip rates to maintain pulmonary artery pressures in the range that the cardiologist set as the therapeutic goal. At that time I used the best computational aid that could be brought to the bedside: a Texas Instruments four function calculator that would run for half a shift on a nine volt battery.
To bring this back into context, physics is very analytical and structured, and persons who just don't work that way would be best served by an undergraduate program that emphasized this early in their academic careers. And thus encouraged them to go switch majors to web design, or marketing, or bus sci, or any of a myriad of other majors that would better fit the shape of their minds.
To that end, a freshman or sophomore course that involved rudimentary programming skills would perhaps be a good requirement of physics majors.
I have taught Excel for use in business settings. It can be a good tool for simple utilitarian things like inventory management.
Excel's macros do support structured programming, modularity, encapsulation, etc. However its cells insist on being too damn smart to do the right thing in a number of situations: "0" is not always 0 is not always false-- but you can't always tell Excel that. Further, Excel's internal rules for numeric conversions are completely opaque to the user, and are known to have unexpected edge conditions with certain "magic" numbers in some versions of the product.
The end result can be templates for financial statements or market analyses that do not always calculate properly under some conditions. Also, the same template may yield different results when run on different computers, even when the hardware and major/minor version numbers are the same. Excel is usually good enough for most home uses and many small business uses, but accounting firms stay away from it. So should most scientists and engineers, and IMO so should students of science, engineering, or accounting. There are better approaches.
Today's crop of script languages are pretty good for learning basic programming concepts, after which learning Excel would be a piece of cake. For a couple of reasons, I favor using Javascript in Firefox with a good syntax highlighting text editor as a first language:
This is universally available
It is an excellent framework for teaching modularity and structure
It is an adequate framework for teaching much of OOP (why oh why did they go with prototype inheritance? --but that's really a minor quibble at the undergrad level)
It has a broad range of uses that is immediately evident to undergraduates, so they tend to be interested
Since the scripts are embedded in web pages, students are encouraged to share, borrow, and develop collaborative skills
I'm a little concerned about using Excel in aerospace engineering. I don't trust it to reliably compare effective ROIs in what-if investment scenarios, so I really wouldn't care to see it used calculate aerodynamic forces on any airplane I might fly in. If its use is limited to tracking spare engines as they are shipped from factories to warehouses to maintenance hangars, I'd be comfortable with that. Probably. I think.
All of the libraries and programs of interest are in C and FORTRAN. C++ is interesting and used but the other two still dominate. If you had to chose between the two for teaching people to program, take C. For utility, the two are about equal.
It would seem that the logical extension of your argument is to teach undergraduates how to use a glue language like Perl, or even Python, that can call on the C or FORTRAN libraries as needed, but which allow a very high level modeling of the problem domain.
I can't really imagine any undergraduate studies that would require the low level optimizations where C excels, or the precision and cross platform reliability that are FORTRAN's strengths. Yet I can imagine undergraduates benefiting from knowing how to interface their high level and possibly sluggish original scripts with established code libraries.
Parent's suggestion that this is all part of a cleverly evil long term marketing strategy is possible.
But it is also possible that Microsoft has lost too many of the key people who have the savvy to run large software development projects. This seems to fit better with the known facts: a continuous brain drain from Redmond for many years now; Bill Gates constantly pushing to lower barriers to bringing in foreign developers, claiming there aren't enough bright guys in the USA; and of course dropping key components of Vista in a way that suggests that MS could not get them finished despite major budget and timeline overruns.
Rather than some clever long term marketing strategy, I think it more likely that Microsoft has lost the functioning synapses needed to produce a marketable OS. Think of Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan in their post mature years. We could call it Corporate Alzheimer's Syndrome.
I hope slashdot talks with computer recyclers about the cast-offs. Places like Free Geek in Portland OR use volunteers to break systems down into reusable components, test them, and reassemble what still has some life let in it into working FOSS-based systems. Junk that can't be re-used is recycled in appropriately. A couple of tons of obsolete or failed CPUs sitting in large bin is a sight to behold, and is worth a fair bit for the gold content.
Most of these places don't lack for volunteer help, not when receiving a newly refurbished Linux computer is the incentive for 20 hours or so volunteering. A lot of churches, non-profits, and volunteer organizations in the Portland area are now using Linux machines to handle their mailing lists, archives of sermons, etc, complements of Free Geek grants. A lot of non-geeky people have been introduced to FOSS through volunteering at Free Geek. And a lot of tonnage has been diverted from the waste stream before it got to the landfills.
93% of experts polled say that the most effective and efficient answer is to upgrade to Housemate 2.0, which will also resolve a lot of other nagging resource sharing issues that at first glance may seem unrelated.
Caveat: 89% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Other caveat: it can still be funny even if it is unoriginal.
A great number of companies have been considering moving away from Microsoft Office as well as avoiding the Vista experience. Now that a company knows that their vendors and customers who stay in the Microsoft herd will soon be able to use ODF removes a major disincentive. Companies are going to be looking at OpenOffice and Linux migrations more favorably because of this news. For this, and for other reasons.
Since all corporations and institutions that stay with Microsoft will become ODF compliant as they move to Office 2007, the smart upgrade path for companies that want to control their costs is to go with ODF compliant OpenOffice on either their existing platforms or on Linux. There is now no business reason not to do so.
Those companies that had hitched their wagons to Microsoft's rising star, and now decide to stay the course, will continue to experience all the thrills of a ballistic rocket... including that sudden stop at the end of the trajectory.
The bane of software design since the days of Fortran is that significant projects involve a hell of lot of blue-sky design. Basically, unless you are simply re-implementing something that has already been done, you can have no idea what parts are going to flow easily, and what parts are going to be total bitches. When you are doing something new and different, you cannot possibly know what is reasonable.
Twenty years ago when I was closer to the development end of the industry, the common sense was that completing the last 10% of a project would require 90% of the time. I think things are much better now, due to better concepts about encapsulation among other things, but the underlying basis remains: when you don't know what you are doing, you WILL make costly mistakes that cause serious delays.
That's what has driven modular design and then object oriented design. Build things so that you can limit interdependencies and prune out stuff that isn't yet working right. When some core object cannot be brought in on time, replace dependent objects with ones that provide the minimal necessary function, and plan to make things oh so much better in a later upgrade.
Good software is never completed. Good software is in a continuous upgrade cycle. A regular upgrade cycle with the various freeze points that go along with it models this very well, and encourages productivity.
I think what matters most is that MS has committed itself to providing ODF compliance, even if that is a bit limited way, by the end of the first quarter of 2009.
This means that businesses who have been delaying the normal computer upgrade cycle (sometimes for years) now have a clear pathway: they can immediately migrate to OpenOffice under existing WinXP licenses on new hardware, or they can jump directly to an enterprise Linux with OpenOffice. Either way, they can move forward knowing that before they have finished the rollout, the documents they are producing will be compliant with the Microsoft universe.
The timing of this is great for the USA economy. It is much less costly to do a major rollout in a slack period, and we can count on slack for the rest of 2008. It will be easier to hire the needed tech support people, and if the rollout involves moving to Linux, it can be done with a lot less expense in hardware than the cost forecasts of even last year. The time and cost for retraining staff can be more easily absorbed during the competitive lull. Then when the economy gets back on track in 2009, these companies will be very well positioned for fast and strong growth.
I applaud Microsoft for biting the bullet and coming out with this news now. Perhaps now USA IT departments can get out of these doldrum eddies and start making headway again.
Trying to alter this basic truth results in death marches, bad, bug-ridden software, disaffected developers, dissatisfied users, and "we'll fix that in the next release" bullsh*t.
If there were Godwin Awards, parent post would be a contender...
When there is a set release date, responsible developers will keep it in mind and change plans as the freeze approaches: things that are unlikely to be finished are put off to the next release; efforts are concentrated on bullet proofing what can done. Developers that can't or won't take on this kind of responsible change of focus are going to produce crappy software no matter what (irresponsible behavior is a quality of the developer that affects everything he touches; it is not an attribute of blocks of code).
I have also found that insulting people really helps to get them to listen to the details of my arguments.
Oh, you silly thing, you! Your point is exactly why you should wait until after presenting your argument to deliver the insults!
Then of course always finish with a nice rational summation. Those who would agree with you anyway will still be on your side; some of those who hadn't made up their minds might be swayed by either argument or witticism or both; those who would disagree with you no matter what you said might be provoked into an angry or childish response and start throwing chairs. And as everyone on slashdot now knows, throwing a chair is not a very good rebuttal.
I disagree with the portion of parent post that I understood.
Ubuntu provides a better desktop experience for adult, first time computer users than any version of Windows. The metrics for the quality of the desktop experience are: initial ease of use; productivity in the first day of use without assistance from a mentor in common office tasks; and where the user declares himself to be on the frustration-to-satisfaction axis by the end of the day. By adult, I mean: anyone over 12 years old who is literate in English (though I suspect Ubuntu's i18n is strong enough that this could be generalized to a dozen or more other languages). By first time, I mean just that: persons who've had no opportunity to run a computer before (although they may have had to interact with programs other persons controlled).
The portion of parent post that I don't understand is where it says the user has "no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks". That is not my experience with Ubuntu. Finding and installing new software and removing applications no longer of interest are GUI pushbutton operations that are far simpler than what is available in Windows. Menu management, managing the file system, configuring hardware, etc, can all be done with the GUI at the same level of difficulty as with Windows. I use the CLI to make scripts I have written operational, but I do not consider programming, even shell scripting, to be a basic user task.
Ubuntu has arrived and is ready for the n00bes. The Ubuntu experience doesn't have the power of Microsoft's or Apple's marketeering illusions and fantasy worlds behind it. But I see its realism as a strength: it is a utilitarian vehicle capable of carrying any reasonable load its driver puts on it to any place where there is a road. It doesn't much encourage the driver to imagine he can carry impossible loads, or to go off-road into unknown territory. People who can afford to live in fantasy worlds would find that Microsoft and Apple products are better suited to dreamers who don't need to do actual work. People who are interested in a computer for correspondence, creating resumes, managing budgets and projects, doing bookkeeping, and so on will find that Ubuntu provides excellent support for home and office work.
Additionally with bash and the full complement of unix CLI tools available from the terminal prompt, Ubuntu offers excellent support to intermediate and expert computer users, far beyond anything available in the Windows fantasy. But that is a subject for a different post.
Have you looked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation financials? They are in the public record.
What you will find is that B&MGF has consistently given away 5% of the previous end of year assets, while their return on investments (ROI) has been reasonably good for a conservative investment strategy at 8% to 20% per year.
In short, B&MGF has given nothing away: it makes more money than it dispenses. Its primary purpose is to take advantage of US federal tax laws.
+5 Funny would be more appropriate. It is a wonderful joke.
The joke is confusing Microsoft's fantastic marketing prowess, built upon freedom of encumbrance of any form of ethics, with good technology. Besides, everybody at this point knows that Microsoft's developers developers developers have all cashed in their stock options and gone to more interesting work at Google, IBM, and yea even unto Yahoo. The whole point of that Microsoft - Yahoo deal is that Ballmer misses having some developers around.
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
My trajectory in 3D modeling has been from POV-Ray to Blender. My trajectory in computer interfaces has been from FORTRAN and COBOL on Hollerith cards through CPM, DOS, Win3.x, WinXP, and now (finally something sensible) Ubuntu.
From my perspective, Blender's interface IS INDEED intuitive. In the same way that Microsoft products are intuitive. Where to end a session you press the "Start" button, and to ensure a session remains active and unchanged during your BRB you use the Shutdown dialog, and you use one Explorer or maybe the other one for everything from file system operations to internet access. Page formating obviously belongs on the "File" menu, since otherwise you might confuse it with formating paragraphs or characters, and the list goes on, ad nauseum.
So Blender isn't all that easy to learn. So what? It is easy to use. Once learned, the process of using its tools become as intuitive as a watercolorist's use of brushes.
Most of the learning curve in 3D modeling has more to do with the non-intuitive nature of the subject than with any aspect of the interface. It doesn't make any intuitive sense to treat the material as a completely separate entity from the model, and don't get me started with the absurdities of today's lighting mechanisms. But that is the way that 3D modeling is done. To make something that looks realistic, you've got to go through a large but probably finite set of absurdly non-intuitive steps. An intuitive interface isn't going to make a wit of difference in learning how to get from cubes and spheres to realistic naturescapes.
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, you'll find it really supports effective work habits." —That's what the guy should have said. It's possible that he was dain bramaged by overexposure to intuitive operating systems when he was young. I'm seeing a lot of that around me these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Twain really say "open your mouse"?
I don't know which is more impressive: Twain's ability to look ahead and write stuff that would first become sort of meaningful a hundred years after his death, or parent poster's fantastically creative skills with copy'n'paste operations.
Better to say nothing and be thought a fool
Than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Wish I knew who first said that.
There have been several replies to parent (that are siblings of this post) that very cleverly point out that there may be a statistical fallacy in parent's presentation.
Taken as a group, these posts mostly demonstrate that cleverness is not intelligence.
The context has been the very fuzzily defined quality of "intelligence" in an undefined population of rather large size. In this context, neither 'mean', 'median', nor 'mode' has any validity since all of these terms imply more precision than we have to work with. The ambiguity of the term 'average' is actually truthier in fuzzy contexts than any of the more precise terms, precisely because it has connotations of imprecision. So the insistence on splitting hairs between 'mean' and 'median' and 'average' is very clever in a schoolkid kind of way, but not very bright.
Intelligence is not cleverness. They are not spelled the same, they have different roots, and they have different meanings. Try not to confuse the two. That only wastes bandwidth by scattering ego food to those who need to exercise their minds, not feed their complacency.
Good points.
Here's the old adage: You know how stupid the average person is? Statistically, half the people are more stupid than that.
Google might shape stupidity in new and different ways, just like literacy did back in an earlier day. But whether most people are saying "I heard it in the marketplace", "I read it in the newspaper", or "I googled it" doesn't much matter: the intelligence divide will continue to separate those who make decisions based on what some authorities say from those who make decisions through their own critical thinking.
The important thing is whether Google is becoming a catalyst for changing the compounds of administratium that we all have to deal with. The amount of administratium in the local universe appears to be constant for human scale time periods, but if Google is increasing the rate at which administratium oxides ("corporate rust") are converted to more reactive compounds of the element, then the upper quartile of intelligent people need to take notice, and make appropriate adjustments to the strategies and tactics that they use to guide the administrators.
An alternate approach that Google could use is to support continued development of the client-side interfaces to Google Docs.
That might be part of the reason that 85% of Mozilla's revenues come from Google. It is doubtful that Google can actually do anything more on the server side to improve Google Doc performance. But as Firefox gets leaner, faster, and more extensible, Google Docs will become much more interesting. I also expect that improvements in moving files between OOo and Google Docs will be forthcoming from the Firefox community in the next year: FFv3.0 looks like a sound foundation for such work.
I like OOo since Writer and Calc do what I need, Base is rock-solid where it counts, and Draw is at least adequate.
But I am one of the few clear seers who know that the first and biggest step to improving an organization's performance is to ban the use of PowerPoint. (The second step, which would also result in a significant boost in efficiency, is to limit the use of MS Access to persons who have the training to know when it is actually the right tool for the job-- which, in corporate America, is roughly 3.72% of its current usage.)
...if another computer were to request the files, they would get them.We need to find those sentient computers and send them all to Gitmo. Darn things are getting way too uppity, acting independently of their humans like that.
Having files in a publically shared folder demonstrate *intent* to share.Does not.
A shared folder can also be the product of an intent to sometimes move files between different computing devices owned by the same individual.
A shared folder can also be the productive of ignorance about basic operating system security measures. And when you look at the entire history personal computer usage, it is clear that the existence of a shared folder is more likely due to this kind of ignorance than to any kind of intentional action.
...accounting firms absolutely do NOT (in general) stay away from excel!
...excel is probably one of the most widely used tools by engineers.Okay, I now see where you're coming from.
In annual financial reports, accounting firms will, in general, say that any value between $9,550 and $10,450 is $10,000. In that same sense, I'm sure they do often use excel.
I know first hand (from my father and his colleagues) that engineers most commonly use 3 as the value of pi in first-pass rough analysis work. So I'm sure engineers also use excel quite a bit.
...of course [excel's usage is] (generally) validated and displaced with higher fidelity analysis and testing as appropriate when the design matures.Whew! So about the time my Dad would stop doing the numbers in his head and reach for his sliderule, today's aerospace engineers drop excel in favor of something with more than one significant digit of accuracy. That's reassuring. Truly.
Just in passing-- my Dad worked on heat exchange problems in jet engines in the 1950s and 1960s. I think the work he was most proud of was his contributions to the heat sheild of the Apollo. My own most demanding computational work was calculating nitropruside drip rates to maintain pulmonary artery pressures in the range that the cardiologist set as the therapeutic goal. At that time I used the best computational aid that could be brought to the bedside: a Texas Instruments four function calculator that would run for half a shift on a nine volt battery.
To bring this back into context, physics is very analytical and structured, and persons who just don't work that way would be best served by an undergraduate program that emphasized this early in their academic careers. And thus encouraged them to go switch majors to web design, or marketing, or bus sci, or any of a myriad of other majors that would better fit the shape of their minds.
To that end, a freshman or sophomore course that involved rudimentary programming skills would perhaps be a good requirement of physics majors.
I have taught Excel for use in business settings. It can be a good tool for simple utilitarian things like inventory management.
Excel's macros do support structured programming, modularity, encapsulation, etc. However its cells insist on being too damn smart to do the right thing in a number of situations: "0" is not always 0 is not always false-- but you can't always tell Excel that. Further, Excel's internal rules for numeric conversions are completely opaque to the user, and are known to have unexpected edge conditions with certain "magic" numbers in some versions of the product.
The end result can be templates for financial statements or market analyses that do not always calculate properly under some conditions. Also, the same template may yield different results when run on different computers, even when the hardware and major/minor version numbers are the same. Excel is usually good enough for most home uses and many small business uses, but accounting firms stay away from it. So should most scientists and engineers, and IMO so should students of science, engineering, or accounting. There are better approaches.
Today's crop of script languages are pretty good for learning basic programming concepts, after which learning Excel would be a piece of cake. For a couple of reasons, I favor using Javascript in Firefox with a good syntax highlighting text editor as a first language:
I'm a little concerned about using Excel in aerospace engineering. I don't trust it to reliably compare effective ROIs in what-if investment scenarios, so I really wouldn't care to see it used calculate aerodynamic forces on any airplane I might fly in. If its use is limited to tracking spare engines as they are shipped from factories to warehouses to maintenance hangars, I'd be comfortable with that. Probably. I think.
It would seem that the logical extension of your argument is to teach undergraduates how to use a glue language like Perl, or even Python, that can call on the C or FORTRAN libraries as needed, but which allow a very high level modeling of the problem domain.
I can't really imagine any undergraduate studies that would require the low level optimizations where C excels, or the precision and cross platform reliability that are FORTRAN's strengths. Yet I can imagine undergraduates benefiting from knowing how to interface their high level and possibly sluggish original scripts with established code libraries.
Parent's suggestion that this is all part of a cleverly evil long term marketing strategy is possible.
But it is also possible that Microsoft has lost too many of the key people who have the savvy to run large software development projects. This seems to fit better with the known facts: a continuous brain drain from Redmond for many years now; Bill Gates constantly pushing to lower barriers to bringing in foreign developers, claiming there aren't enough bright guys in the USA; and of course dropping key components of Vista in a way that suggests that MS could not get them finished despite major budget and timeline overruns.
Rather than some clever long term marketing strategy, I think it more likely that Microsoft has lost the functioning synapses needed to produce a marketable OS. Think of Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan in their post mature years. We could call it Corporate Alzheimer's Syndrome.
"Scrapped" has such an ugly, ungreen conotation.
I hope slashdot talks with computer recyclers about the cast-offs. Places like Free Geek in Portland OR use volunteers to break systems down into reusable components, test them, and reassemble what still has some life let in it into working FOSS-based systems. Junk that can't be re-used is recycled in appropriately. A couple of tons of obsolete or failed CPUs sitting in large bin is a sight to behold, and is worth a fair bit for the gold content.
Most of these places don't lack for volunteer help, not when receiving a newly refurbished Linux computer is the incentive for 20 hours or so volunteering. A lot of churches, non-profits, and volunteer organizations in the Portland area are now using Linux machines to handle their mailing lists, archives of sermons, etc, complements of Free Geek grants. A lot of non-geeky people have been introduced to FOSS through volunteering at Free Geek. And a lot of tonnage has been diverted from the waste stream before it got to the landfills.
93% of experts polled say that the most effective and efficient answer is to upgrade to Housemate 2.0, which will also resolve a lot of other nagging resource sharing issues that at first glance may seem unrelated.
Caveat: 89% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Other caveat: it can still be funny even if it is unoriginal.
No, you are shooting wide of the target.
A great number of companies have been considering moving away from Microsoft Office as well as avoiding the Vista experience. Now that a company knows that their vendors and customers who stay in the Microsoft herd will soon be able to use ODF removes a major disincentive. Companies are going to be looking at OpenOffice and Linux migrations more favorably because of this news. For this, and for other reasons.
No, no, you've got it all backwards!
Since all corporations and institutions that stay with Microsoft will become ODF compliant as they move to Office 2007, the smart upgrade path for companies that want to control their costs is to go with ODF compliant OpenOffice on either their existing platforms or on Linux. There is now no business reason not to do so.
Those companies that had hitched their wagons to Microsoft's rising star, and now decide to stay the course, will continue to experience all the thrills of a ballistic rocket... including that sudden stop at the end of the trajectory.
The bane of software design since the days of Fortran is that significant projects involve a hell of lot of blue-sky design. Basically, unless you are simply re-implementing something that has already been done, you can have no idea what parts are going to flow easily, and what parts are going to be total bitches. When you are doing something new and different, you cannot possibly know what is reasonable.
Twenty years ago when I was closer to the development end of the industry, the common sense was that completing the last 10% of a project would require 90% of the time. I think things are much better now, due to better concepts about encapsulation among other things, but the underlying basis remains: when you don't know what you are doing, you WILL make costly mistakes that cause serious delays.
That's what has driven modular design and then object oriented design. Build things so that you can limit interdependencies and prune out stuff that isn't yet working right. When some core object cannot be brought in on time, replace dependent objects with ones that provide the minimal necessary function, and plan to make things oh so much better in a later upgrade.
Good software is never completed. Good software is in a continuous upgrade cycle. A regular upgrade cycle with the various freeze points that go along with it models this very well, and encourages productivity.
I think what matters most is that MS has committed itself to providing ODF compliance, even if that is a bit limited way, by the end of the first quarter of 2009.
This means that businesses who have been delaying the normal computer upgrade cycle (sometimes for years) now have a clear pathway: they can immediately migrate to OpenOffice under existing WinXP licenses on new hardware, or they can jump directly to an enterprise Linux with OpenOffice. Either way, they can move forward knowing that before they have finished the rollout, the documents they are producing will be compliant with the Microsoft universe.
The timing of this is great for the USA economy. It is much less costly to do a major rollout in a slack period, and we can count on slack for the rest of 2008. It will be easier to hire the needed tech support people, and if the rollout involves moving to Linux, it can be done with a lot less expense in hardware than the cost forecasts of even last year. The time and cost for retraining staff can be more easily absorbed during the competitive lull. Then when the economy gets back on track in 2009, these companies will be very well positioned for fast and strong growth.
I applaud Microsoft for biting the bullet and coming out with this news now. Perhaps now USA IT departments can get out of these doldrum eddies and start making headway again.
Did I really see "Vista" and "KDE" linked by an "AND" operator???
Remarkable! Possibly a first!!
If there were Godwin Awards, parent post would be a contender...
When there is a set release date, responsible developers will keep it in mind and change plans as the freeze approaches: things that are unlikely to be finished are put off to the next release; efforts are concentrated on bullet proofing what can done. Developers that can't or won't take on this kind of responsible change of focus are going to produce crappy software no matter what (irresponsible behavior is a quality of the developer that affects everything he touches; it is not an attribute of blocks of code).
Maybe there should be Godwin Awards...
Oh, you silly thing, you! Your point is exactly why you should wait until after presenting your argument to deliver the insults!
Then of course always finish with a nice rational summation. Those who would agree with you anyway will still be on your side; some of those who hadn't made up their minds might be swayed by either argument or witticism or both; those who would disagree with you no matter what you said might be provoked into an angry or childish response and start throwing chairs. And as everyone on slashdot now knows, throwing a chair is not a very good rebuttal.
I disagree with the portion of parent post that I understood.
Ubuntu provides a better desktop experience for adult, first time computer users than any version of Windows. The metrics for the quality of the desktop experience are: initial ease of use; productivity in the first day of use without assistance from a mentor in common office tasks; and where the user declares himself to be on the frustration-to-satisfaction axis by the end of the day. By adult, I mean: anyone over 12 years old who is literate in English (though I suspect Ubuntu's i18n is strong enough that this could be generalized to a dozen or more other languages). By first time, I mean just that: persons who've had no opportunity to run a computer before (although they may have had to interact with programs other persons controlled).
The portion of parent post that I don't understand is where it says the user has "no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks". That is not my experience with Ubuntu. Finding and installing new software and removing applications no longer of interest are GUI pushbutton operations that are far simpler than what is available in Windows. Menu management, managing the file system, configuring hardware, etc, can all be done with the GUI at the same level of difficulty as with Windows. I use the CLI to make scripts I have written operational, but I do not consider programming, even shell scripting, to be a basic user task.
Ubuntu has arrived and is ready for the n00bes. The Ubuntu experience doesn't have the power of Microsoft's or Apple's marketeering illusions and fantasy worlds behind it. But I see its realism as a strength: it is a utilitarian vehicle capable of carrying any reasonable load its driver puts on it to any place where there is a road. It doesn't much encourage the driver to imagine he can carry impossible loads, or to go off-road into unknown territory. People who can afford to live in fantasy worlds would find that Microsoft and Apple products are better suited to dreamers who don't need to do actual work. People who are interested in a computer for correspondence, creating resumes, managing budgets and projects, doing bookkeeping, and so on will find that Ubuntu provides excellent support for home and office work.
Additionally with bash and the full complement of unix CLI tools available from the terminal prompt, Ubuntu offers excellent support to intermediate and expert computer users, far beyond anything available in the Windows fantasy. But that is a subject for a different post.
Have you looked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation financials? They are in the public record.
What you will find is that B&MGF has consistently given away 5% of the previous end of year assets, while their return on investments (ROI) has been reasonably good for a conservative investment strategy at 8% to 20% per year.
In short, B&MGF has given nothing away: it makes more money than it dispenses. Its primary purpose is to take advantage of US federal tax laws.
Parent is currently moderated +5 insightful.
+5 Funny would be more appropriate. It is a wonderful joke.
The joke is confusing Microsoft's fantastic marketing prowess, built upon freedom of encumbrance of any form of ethics, with good technology. Besides, everybody at this point knows that Microsoft's developers developers developers have all cashed in their stock options and gone to more interesting work at Google, IBM, and yea even unto Yahoo. The whole point of that Microsoft - Yahoo deal is that Ballmer misses having some developers around.
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
My trajectory in 3D modeling has been from POV-Ray to Blender. My trajectory in computer interfaces has been from FORTRAN and COBOL on Hollerith cards through CPM, DOS, Win3.x, WinXP, and now (finally something sensible) Ubuntu.
From my perspective, Blender's interface IS INDEED intuitive. In the same way that Microsoft products are intuitive. Where to end a session you press the "Start" button, and to ensure a session remains active and unchanged during your BRB you use the Shutdown dialog, and you use one Explorer or maybe the other one for everything from file system operations to internet access. Page formating obviously belongs on the "File" menu, since otherwise you might confuse it with formating paragraphs or characters, and the list goes on, ad nauseum.
So Blender isn't all that easy to learn. So what? It is easy to use. Once learned, the process of using its tools become as intuitive as a watercolorist's use of brushes.
Most of the learning curve in 3D modeling has more to do with the non-intuitive nature of the subject than with any aspect of the interface. It doesn't make any intuitive sense to treat the material as a completely separate entity from the model, and don't get me started with the absurdities of today's lighting mechanisms. But that is the way that 3D modeling is done. To make something that looks realistic, you've got to go through a large but probably finite set of absurdly non-intuitive steps. An intuitive interface isn't going to make a wit of difference in learning how to get from cubes and spheres to realistic naturescapes.
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, you'll find it really supports effective work habits." —That's what the guy should have said. It's possible that he was dain bramaged by overexposure to intuitive operating systems when he was young. I'm seeing a lot of that around me these days.
Hey! Get off my lawn!