Not just in the office, but the home user market still has a huge installed base for Win98. To completely drop Win98 would further anger a large number of customers. I am no fan of Microsoft, but I would have to say that keeping support alive for another couple of years if a wise choice if they don't want to further upset their customers.
Some will leave Microsoft anyway, and that's unavoidable. However, this way they have time to evaluate a little better what transition to make. Microsoft will of course hope that they will all go for XP or whatever is next.
At my last job, our CIO gave a nice presentation to other company heads in the city. His said that there were a few things that were necessary to help employees with the transition. Paraphrasing, he said only two things:
Tell your employees not to panic.
Tell them to find something else to do.
I hope he shows more tact to his family when the stock holders vote his sorry ass out.
From the article: "Why should we work with another music store when we're working with the Microsoft of music stores?" - Steve Jobs
If Jobs is not on the ball, he may end up with another Netscape on his hands. They owned the market, thought they were invulnerable, and then circled the drain for a bit before selling off to AOL.
Am I cheering for Microsoft? Hardly. But they play to win, fair or otherwise.
When the iTunes service starts to lose major share of the market, though... That's when there will be real trouble. Losing the iPod is a small fish compared to iTunes.
Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology.
The word primary is very important here. It implies that Yahoo! is not completely abandoning Google, but is making it second string instead. If they're still letting us access Google, even if it requires a couple of extra clicks, then I can't see this as entirely bad. I like Google and it's my first pick, but I certainly don't limit myself to Google...
I did not see in the article where Yahoo! is completely dropping Google. If it's in there, I missed it.
What if you want that glut of hits? Sometimes you have to dig through some pretty obscure hits on a search to get what you want, and categorizing them or putting them in funny circles just complicates the process and can make the search take longer. I'll hang with Google and Teoma, thank you very much.
And I certainly don't want a downloadable search app running, that's just another possible inroad for spyware. I've been burned enough times by apps I thought were "clean" that went off and chewed up enough bandwidth to choke a horse.
Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment."
Here's another related thought. (And, this is not intended as a slam on Microsoft)
Open Source systems (bazaar) are often much more stable than commercial systems (cathedral) just because of the number of bug hunters, and when it comes to military apps, stability is absolutely crucial. Would you really want your military systems to blue screen or dump core right in the middle of a firefight?
Having just come from a company that was rabildly outsourcing, we saw a different backlash of the outsourcing problem. The execs were outsourcing everything they possibly could, even when it made no sense. However, the company was still not going to be positively improved financially by this happening. What everyone remaining on staff could see is that it would boost short-term profits just long enough for the execs to rape the company with fat bonuses just before bailing out. That's apparently another popular trend.
Unfortunately for me, I am the tech savvy person in my family. I have a brother who is certainly not dumb, but when it comes to the compter, he regards it as a "magic box" or something. On more than one occasion, he has felt the need to box it up and ship it to me. So, not only do I get the priviledge of repairing his PC on my oown free time, I get to pay to ship it back to him.
The way the article describes the process, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg process to get a fistfull of dirt from space. If a good portion of it is ice, would it not be water by the time it passes back through the atmosphere before it gets studied? Let us hope this galactic dirt is not water-soluble. Then again, I suppose that might tell the scientists something in its own right.
On an aside, as I read the article I got an image of the monkey in the Lion King grabbing the dust and hair out of the air as it happened to be floating by. I guess the difference here is that were going to the dust instead of the other way around...
Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore...
Another poster spoke of the specifics of Dell, so I will not touch that. However, Capital One is beginning to bring back [some of the] work it mailed off to the other side of the planet, as they have been losing accounts hand over fist by customers pissed off about not being able to converse with support personnel due to a language gap. Sure, the labor is cheaper, but is it cheap enough to compensate for lost business? Apparently not, in the case of CapOne.
The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything.
This unnerves me a little. We saw the dot com bubble burst after everyone decided thast the internet was the future of commerce, and we still have not fully recovered from that one. I sure as hell don't want to put all our eggs in this basket all over again and potentially see another messy commercial disaster take out the communications infrastructure... Maybe I am being a little too uptight about it, but I can't shake the feeling after last time.
I have 1.4 (have not bothered to update yet), and you have described the exact problem I am seeing. Weird part is, it was fine up until recently, and now it just doesn't quite fly. Maybe./ changed something...
I also have found that when I download various media files, such as mpg's, the file achieved from the download is not readable/usable by my media player. Have you seen this problem?
No, I haven't had this problem. Downloads aren't a problem. I usually use a third-party download manager instead of the one built in, but Mozilla's d/l manager has never posed a problem.
As much as I like Mozilla, Mozilla does a miserable job rendering./'s site. It worked great for a very long time, doing a better job than MSIE, but now what I get is digital peanut butter when I come to./ with Mozilla. Sometimes, it just skips the articles and leaves a bunch of little buttons all over everywhere. Other times, everything gets rendered to the same line. Anyone else have the same problem?
I have not tried the new Firebird on/. yet, maybe that'll fix whatever's broke?
I'd like to see more countries do this. Hopefully it'll help convince businesses and people that Microsoft isn't the only choice.
What M$ will end up doing is waffling on the price down the road somewhere and try to schmooze Israel into coming back to them. It then becomes a matter of whether or not Israel is disenchanted enough with M$ to tell them to go away or if they'll recant and take the new deal.
In an effort to keep India from going open source at one point, M$ decided that offering software at a steep break would work to keep India in the shackles. IIRC, India went open source anyway after much debate.
Will the scenario play out the same way? Dunno. Either way, it'll be interesting to see what happens next. I am willing to bet that M$ will cave on the price to avoid losing business, with not too much concern over the revenue. It could be too little, too late, but they have little to lose by trying that. And since they have done that before, I expect history to repeat itself.
In the end, I hope Israel sticks to their plan and turns from M$ Office. And perhaps this is the new trend?
If you can do the work, and do it well - - and you're reliable and honest and willing to take what's offered in the way of starting compensation - - many doors will open.
Not to be argumentative, but this is not necessarily always true.
A past employer can be an awful liability, especially in the case of a high-profile fraud situation or a combative company. Many times if you are a former employee you are "guilty by association."
It's somewhat similar to looking for a job and being overqualified. You have the skills, you can hit the ground running and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the best damn candidate for the job. BUT... You have a PhD. The employer will snub his nose at you because you're overqualified. Does it matter that you are willing to take entry level and 60/hrs a week? Not really, because then they'll wonder why you're willing to work cheap.
Yes, your past credentials and associations matter.
Carp features prominently in the cuisines of many Asian and eastern European countries...
Does Australia export the carp to Europe and Asia for food? If so, wouldn't the backlash potentially kill their exports for genetically engineered meat? I suppose if they are trying to kill them off, they are considering this anyway, but still...
As I read through the article, I saw lots of ooh's and aah's over the cool toys and services they are offering, as well as the integration to certain systems. The iTunes service was acknowledged as their biggest gainer.
Ok, so they have all of this cool technology and neat services. So, now what? How are they working to increase market share and compete with the Wintel market? It's one thing to shore up the market you have, but when that market is relatively small, that leaves one to wonder how to expand. What do they intend to do about a limited market share? The article does not say that. iTunes might be making money for them now, but how will they keep it on top with new competitors emerging?
...it HAS to be bad, and an attempt to kill Linux.
There is no mention that this will be tailored to Windows in the article, but MS's hearty endorsement is a suspicious indicator of such. If so, would this simply become a matter of the BIOS not allowing anything but "acceptable" OSes to boot? That's where my nickel gets bet.
As I look through the benchmarks, I see the Parhelia consistently in the basement. For a 256bit card, it's a pig. And this raises an interesting question -- do any gamers actually use Matrox anymore?
Amen to that. I have a Targus bag for my laptop that has performed wonderfully, and the bag is much older than the laptop. When I got it, it had contained a 486-50 laptop (ick) for a couple of years.
I have dropped it on more than one occasion (what can I say, I'm clumsy), things have been stacked on it, it has been toted across the country in the car, it's used on a daily basis, and it still looks to be in very good shape.
When/if I need a new laptop bag, it will be another Targus bag. And I'm guessing it will be stolen before it gets screwed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporate usage of this OS is still widespread...
Not just in the office, but the home user market still has a huge installed base for Win98. To completely drop Win98 would further anger a large number of customers. I am no fan of Microsoft, but I would have to say that keeping support alive for another couple of years if a wise choice if they don't want to further upset their customers.
Some will leave Microsoft anyway, and that's unavoidable. However, this way they have time to evaluate a little better what transition to make. Microsoft will of course hope that they will all go for XP or whatever is next.
At my last job, our CIO gave a nice presentation to other company heads in the city. His said that there were a few things that were necessary to help employees with the transition. Paraphrasing, he said only two things:
Tell your employees not to panic.
Tell them to find something else to do.
I hope he shows more tact to his family when the stock holders vote his sorry ass out.
No misunderstanding the metric system here. -40F happens to be the same as -40C.
Found this little gem in the article:
It kept our CPU running in the mid -40C range while gaming at default clock speeds.
Last AMD I had ran hot enough to roast a turkey from 10 feet away. -40C would freeze it solid.
From the article: "Why should we work with another music store when we're working with the Microsoft of music stores?" - Steve Jobs
If Jobs is not on the ball, he may end up with another Netscape on his hands. They owned the market, thought they were invulnerable, and then circled the drain for a bit before selling off to AOL.
Am I cheering for Microsoft? Hardly. But they play to win, fair or otherwise.
When the iTunes service starts to lose major share of the market, though... That's when there will be real trouble. Losing the iPod is a small fish compared to iTunes.
Yahoo! plans to dump Google as its primary search technology.
The word primary is very important here. It implies that Yahoo! is not completely abandoning Google, but is making it second string instead. If they're still letting us access Google, even if it requires a couple of extra clicks, then I can't see this as entirely bad. I like Google and it's my first pick, but I certainly don't limit myself to Google...
I did not see in the article where Yahoo! is completely dropping Google. If it's in there, I missed it.
There are much worse ways that software can fail. One of the worst is software that looks like it's working...
I have to agree with you there, wholeheartedly.
What if you want that glut of hits? Sometimes you have to dig through some pretty obscure hits on a search to get what you want, and categorizing them or putting them in funny circles just complicates the process and can make the search take longer. I'll hang with Google and Teoma, thank you very much.
And I certainly don't want a downloadable search app running, that's just another possible inroad for spyware. I've been burned enough times by apps I thought were "clean" that went off and chewed up enough bandwidth to choke a horse.
Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment."
Here's another related thought. (And, this is not intended as a slam on Microsoft)
Open Source systems (bazaar) are often much more stable than commercial systems (cathedral) just because of the number of bug hunters, and when it comes to military apps, stability is absolutely crucial. Would you really want your military systems to blue screen or dump core right in the middle of a firefight?
Having just come from a company that was rabildly outsourcing, we saw a different backlash of the outsourcing problem. The execs were outsourcing everything they possibly could, even when it made no sense. However, the company was still not going to be positively improved financially by this happening. What everyone remaining on staff could see is that it would boost short-term profits just long enough for the execs to rape the company with fat bonuses just before bailing out. That's apparently another popular trend.
Unfortunately for me, I am the tech savvy person in my family. I have a brother who is certainly not dumb, but when it comes to the compter, he regards it as a "magic box" or something. On more than one occasion, he has felt the need to box it up and ship it to me. So, not only do I get the priviledge of repairing his PC on my oown free time, I get to pay to ship it back to him.
The way the article describes the process, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg process to get a fistfull of dirt from space. If a good portion of it is ice, would it not be water by the time it passes back through the atmosphere before it gets studied? Let us hope this galactic dirt is not water-soluble. Then again, I suppose that might tell the scientists something in its own right.
On an aside, as I read the article I got an image of the monkey in the Lion King grabbing the dust and hair out of the air as it happened to be floating by. I guess the difference here is that were going to the dust instead of the other way around...
Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore...
Another poster spoke of the specifics of Dell, so I will not touch that. However, Capital One is beginning to bring back [some of the] work it mailed off to the other side of the planet, as they have been losing accounts hand over fist by customers pissed off about not being able to converse with support personnel due to a language gap. Sure, the labor is cheaper, but is it cheap enough to compensate for lost business? Apparently not, in the case of CapOne.
From the article:
The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything.
This unnerves me a little. We saw the dot com bubble burst after everyone decided thast the internet was the future of commerce, and we still have not fully recovered from that one. I sure as hell don't want to put all our eggs in this basket all over again and potentially see another messy commercial disaster take out the communications infrastructure... Maybe I am being a little too uptight about it, but I can't shake the feeling after last time.
I have this problem with Mozilla (V 1.5) as well.
I have 1.4 (have not bothered to update yet), and you have described the exact problem I am seeing. Weird part is, it was fine up until recently, and now it just doesn't quite fly. Maybe ./ changed something...
I also have found that when I download various media files, such as mpg's, the file achieved from the download is not readable/usable by my media player. Have you seen this problem?
No, I haven't had this problem. Downloads aren't a problem. I usually use a third-party download manager instead of the one built in, but Mozilla's d/l manager has never posed a problem.As much as I like Mozilla, Mozilla does a miserable job rendering ./'s site. It worked great for a very long time, doing a better job than MSIE, but now what I get is digital peanut butter when I come to ./ with Mozilla. Sometimes, it just skips the articles and leaves a bunch of little buttons all over everywhere. Other times, everything gets rendered to the same line. Anyone else have the same problem?
I have not tried the new Firebird on /. yet, maybe that'll fix whatever's broke?
I'd like to see more countries do this. Hopefully it'll help convince businesses and people that Microsoft isn't the only choice.
What M$ will end up doing is waffling on the price down the road somewhere and try to schmooze Israel into coming back to them. It then becomes a matter of whether or not Israel is disenchanted enough with M$ to tell them to go away or if they'll recant and take the new deal.
In an effort to keep India from going open source at one point, M$ decided that offering software at a steep break would work to keep India in the shackles. IIRC, India went open source anyway after much debate.
Will the scenario play out the same way? Dunno. Either way, it'll be interesting to see what happens next. I am willing to bet that M$ will cave on the price to avoid losing business, with not too much concern over the revenue. It could be too little, too late, but they have little to lose by trying that. And since they have done that before, I expect history to repeat itself.
In the end, I hope Israel sticks to their plan and turns from M$ Office. And perhaps this is the new trend?
If you can do the work, and do it well - - and you're reliable and honest and willing to take what's offered in the way of starting compensation - - many doors will open.
Not to be argumentative, but this is not necessarily always true.
A past employer can be an awful liability, especially in the case of a high-profile fraud situation or a combative company. Many times if you are a former employee you are "guilty by association."
It's somewhat similar to looking for a job and being overqualified. You have the skills, you can hit the ground running and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the best damn candidate for the job. BUT... You have a PhD. The employer will snub his nose at you because you're overqualified. Does it matter that you are willing to take entry level and 60/hrs a week? Not really, because then they'll wonder why you're willing to work cheap.
Yes, your past credentials and associations matter.
From the article:
Carp features prominently in the cuisines of many Asian and eastern European countries...
Does Australia export the carp to Europe and Asia for food? If so, wouldn't the backlash potentially kill their exports for genetically engineered meat? I suppose if they are trying to kill them off, they are considering this anyway, but still...
As I read through the article, I saw lots of ooh's and aah's over the cool toys and services they are offering, as well as the integration to certain systems. The iTunes service was acknowledged as their biggest gainer.
Ok, so they have all of this cool technology and neat services. So, now what? How are they working to increase market share and compete with the Wintel market? It's one thing to shore up the market you have, but when that market is relatively small, that leaves one to wonder how to expand. What do they intend to do about a limited market share? The article does not say that. iTunes might be making money for them now, but how will they keep it on top with new competitors emerging?
There is no mention that this will be tailored to Windows in the article, but MS's hearty endorsement is a suspicious indicator of such. If so, would this simply become a matter of the BIOS not allowing anything but "acceptable" OSes to boot? That's where my nickel gets bet.
As I look through the benchmarks, I see the Parhelia consistently in the basement. For a 256bit card, it's a pig. And this raises an interesting question -- do any gamers actually use Matrox anymore?
Oooooh! Fire! Pretty!
Amen to that. I have a Targus bag for my laptop that has performed wonderfully, and the bag is much older than the laptop. When I got it, it had contained a 486-50 laptop (ick) for a couple of years.
I have dropped it on more than one occasion (what can I say, I'm clumsy), things have been stacked on it, it has been toted across the country in the car, it's used on a daily basis, and it still looks to be in very good shape.
When/if I need a new laptop bag, it will be another Targus bag. And I'm guessing it will be stolen before it gets screwed up.
Read closer... I said I sit in front of a computer 8/5, not work 8/5. If you count paperwork and meetings and all that other garbage, it's a bit more.