It's a big deal because students on a limited income are more likely to use free tools such as Google Docs, than they are to use paid software.
And at a university, these students typically submit coursework which may often be written using a word processing tool.
If said word processing tool is subsequently blocked for a few hours without prior warning, it's quite easy to see how this could well pose an issue for students making last minute changes to their course work.
MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!
I'd assume the logic is more to do with retraining costs for every head that uses MS Office. Libre/OpenOffice may look very similar to a 10 year old version of MS Office, but office uses like their familiarity and learned shortcuts - even if there is a quicker or easier way of doing something.
And that's before you consider the retraining costs for all new starters, who will more than likely be familiar with MS Office. And the retraining costs for your tech support who will have to support users through a product transition.
You mentioned macros too. With MS Office, I can get help from the many users out there who post on specialist forums. In most situations, I've found that my question has been asked before so I don't even need to start a new thread. I'm sure there are similar sites out there for Libre/OpenOffice, but is the same breadth and depth of knowledge available? So for users who write advanced macros, you not only have initial retraining cost, but also an ongoing requirement to enhance said users' knowledge.
Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?
A bit of a sensationalist summary, but this is absolutely not a breach of the walled garden; the App Store rules and guidelines only apply for apps which are published in the App Store.
Web apps, due to their very nature, are not covered by these guidelines and I suspect Apple isn't bothered by this. It's no different than buying a Kindle book via a web page and then downloading & reading it within the Kindle app itself.
For me, my "obligations" to friends and family would stop depending on the nature of the crime. For example, if a friend or family member was committing a "victimless crime" such as taking illegal drugs, I would absolutely feel no need to report this. But for something like drink driving, you can be certain I'd reporting this.
I've never understood the desire to pirate apps iOS (or Android/WP) apps. If I'm paying over £500 for the device, then logic dictates that I have enough disposable income to pay the going rate for apps, particularly when most of the popular apps start at the ridiculously low price of 69p. Many of these are published by independent developers or small software firms, where every sale counts.
And seriously, who is so cheap that they would refuse to pay 69p for whatever game is popular at the moment?
Alternatives such as Open/LibreOffice and Google Docs can't compete effectively when even companies associated with such alternatives can't stand behind their own offerings.
Realistically, the alternatives you mentioned won't compete in the business world until they are at least as good as Microsoft Office.
I do get where you're coming from. It's good to have employees who understand the theory behind a type of application, rather than just knowing a single application itself, but given the choice between hiring someone who knows Excel and someone who knows spreadsheets (but not Excel), I would hire the Excel specialist (all other things being equal).
In business, time is money and I want employees who are comfortable with the tools already in use so they can immediately understand our spreadsheets, macros, and formulas.
I'm an experienced Excel user and my "Help function" is the vast multitude of online forums out there where other professionals hang out and provide answers to users who have encountered similar challenges to me. This includes VBA code samples as well as the theory behind the formula. In my experience, I've found the Help feature to be primarily useful when I know which formula or feature I want to use - and if I know that, then I probably already know how to use it.
When Open Office has a similarly widespread knowledge base, spread across the internet, then we can consider its Help function to be fit for purpose.
The BSD license and philosophy, I'm not sure you understand it...
I very well know that the BSD license is 'freer' and more permissive than the GPL, which was the motivation for Apple to steal BSD licensed code and close their additions to it.
Maybe you could clarify how Apple "stole" this BSD-licensed code; did they take a hard drive or CD/DVD which contained the only copy of the code?
If you're actually accusing them of infringing on the copyright, then you should just have said so. Though from reading the BSD license, it appears that Apple is in compliance.
Apple is the *one company* that is using open standards, does not pollute them, uses open source and gives all additions it does to the open source software back to the community.
Yes, because their 2013 iDevice range uses MicroUSB, which as we know is required under European law.
By now, I think we all get it - non-techies included; if we visit a website, we might get a cookie installed onto our computers. These intrusive banners have made that perfectly clear to the point where it is now extremely annoying.
I especially hate it on my phone. Due to the nature of my interactions with apps like Twitter, I quite often end up visiting sites I've never visited before. And these floating banners with the X are incredibly difficult to close and get rid of - hampering my browsing experience.
I understand that the people who came up with this idea probably had their heart in the right place, but seriously, it really needs to stop.
In the 90s/00s I used to have my own website. I designed it myself, wrote the HTML and paid for web hosting so I could avoid Geocities. I uploaded my photos and shared the link with friends via email.
These days, I just don't have the time anymore and after a long day at work, the last thing I want to do is sit coding all evening just to upload a new album. So I share holiday snaps etc via Facebook and amusing pics via Twitter (different audiences). It's easy because someone else has done the hard work.
As everyone knows, there is no such thing as a free lunch and so developers and support staff must get paid. My understanding is that Instagram intends to do this by monetising the content users upload. The problem with today's society is that we don't want to pay people for their hard work, but we also don't want them to come up with innovative solutions like this which will allow them to keep their services to the end user.
I don't personally use Instagram but I do use Facebook and Twitter. I'm happy to keep uploading because I am too lazy to roll my own solution. I've given advice to my immediate family about finding HTML tutorials and inexpensive web hosts but strangely they don't seem to like the idea...
What makes Turing any different from any other person who was convicted of this offence back when it was illegal?
I'm aware of his work on the Enigma machines and he is quite rightly recognised for this, but a person's achievements should have no bearing on how they are treated in the eyes of the law. If we go ahead and pardon Turing, we must go ahead and pardon everyone else who was convicted under the same legislation.
Similarly, what makes the law against homosexuality any different or any worse than other laws which have changed over the years?
If you follow this idea to its logical conclusion, then we must surely go ahead and pardon anyone whoever lived, who was ever convicted of something which is no longer a crime. And of course, a formal process would need to be created to ensure that pardons are issued in the future if and when we change other laws.
So I've nothing against pardoning Turing and would probably consider it a good idea. I just feel it's important that we act in a consistent manner and understand the consequences which would come with such a solution.
That being said, instead of answering your question, let me rather tell you why so many people hate Stallman and rant against him. The reason is simply that he's right about most of the things he says, but people do not always like hearing the truth if it is inconvenient. With that respect he has a lot in common with Socrates...
I genuinely don't think this is the reason. Like everyone, Stallman is entitled to an opinion on things (generally, opinions are neither right nor wrong) but his uncompromising stance and attitude to those who disagree with him gets people's backs up. And I think that this can cause challenges because some of his messages (maybe even this one) may well be important and valuable, but this can often be lost because people focus on the messenger rather than the message.
The problem is with this theory is that electronics can and do fail. Are you willing to pay the extra costs which would be incurred for manufacturers to ensure their products have 99.9999% reliability?
(Note that I do think Dell could do a lot more in terms of hardware quality. I don't personally know anyone who's bought a Dell laptop and who hasn't had problems with it. And as for Apple, their obsession with thin and small will be their undoing).
If your inquiries around the coders' schooling and skill levels were only made after you started to realise the output was poor, or if the decision maker took this into account yet still went ahead and outsourced to this organisation, then surely the fault is all your organisation's for hiring an unsuitable outsourcing firm?
If a haulage firm goes out and buys a fleet of new cars instead of trucks - despite knowing their limitations - they can hardly complain when huge pallets don't fit in the back of the car.
InTrade is an Irish company, founded by an Irishman, with a HQ in Dublin. They also banned the use of US credit and debit cards in 2010 - so cannot be actively seen to be soliciting business from the US.
Considering these facts, I'm not entirely comfortable with an unrelated country being able to have such an impact on a foreign company, which only operates overseas.
We are big on Powerpoints in my organisation, We use them for presenting and sharing all kinds of data and insight.
To minimise production time, I have various spreadsheets linked to raw data stored in Access which ultimately produce graphs, data tables and associated commentary (mostly automatically). And these are then stored as linked tables and graphs within Powerpoint itself so all I have to do each morning/week/month is run a couple of Macros and verify that nothing went wrong.
But it does take a certain kind of person who's obsessed with automating repetitive tasks to make something like this happen; for most people, the closest they'll get to linking MS Office apps is when sending an Office doc via email without having to go into Outlook.
And I've heard (maybe this is just a rumor) that the next version of Windows server is not going to have a GUI interface and will be completely command line driven; what sysadmin wants to sit there typing command after command into a Dos prompt.
Whether or not the ribbon has had an adverse impact on you personally, it is still what users coming from a Windows environment are used to - and they will no doubt find that an interface based on Office 97-2003 does indeed look old fashioned.
I certainly know from personal experience that when I have to use a machine which has an older version of Office on, I really struggle with finding my commonly-used features and it takes me longer to do pretty much anything.
My iPhone isn't a phone first - the phone is just one app out of many I use (majority being data hungry apps which present nicely arranged versions of web content I frequent). On my iPad, the screen is big enough to view web pages in Safari and there isn't such a need for apps to rearrange the content to fit on a smaller screen.
Mobile technology has come a long way in the last few years. Smartphones are more popular than ever and Mobile Broadband modems are easy to get hold of, and cheap too. More and more laptops are getting integrated HSPA chips.
In all major cities and the majority of towns, I can get 3.5G internet (I'm UK based). In other locations, I get EDGE or plain old GPRS. Chances are, if I'm in a town/village which doesn't have high speed mobile access, then I probably don't need it that much and get make do with GPRS.
It's also £5.00 per month for "unlimited" access (1GB fair use). Or I can get specific Mobile Broadband packages starting from £10 per month on both prepay and postpay.
So, given the fast pace of the mobile industry recently, I'm not sure that city-wide Wi-Fi is a necessity any more, or whether I would even pay for it if it's available.
Of course, the experience of others in different locations will no doubt vary.
Where fedora wants 400MHz, 256MB and 2.7GB HDD for a desktop system, XP wants 300MHz, 128MB and 1.5GB HDD.
I don't know about Fedora so cannot comment, however I don't think those hardware requirements for XP are particularly realistic; they might just allow you to login to Windows with all the eye candy turned off, but don't try running anything like MS Word/Outlook and certainly don't try to have more than one or two apps open at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a big deal because students on a limited income are more likely to use free tools such as Google Docs, than they are to use paid software.
And at a university, these students typically submit coursework which may often be written using a word processing tool.
If said word processing tool is subsequently blocked for a few hours without prior warning, it's quite easy to see how this could well pose an issue for students making last minute changes to their course work.
MS office is cheaper than Libre office because of.. what exactly? The rate for re-writing macros is more expensive than a few hundred dollars (depending on your license deal) per user running MS products every year forever according to their logic. And yes, according to their logic you will be rewriting macros forever too!
I'd assume the logic is more to do with retraining costs for every head that uses MS Office. Libre/OpenOffice may look very similar to a 10 year old version of MS Office, but office uses like their familiarity and learned shortcuts - even if there is a quicker or easier way of doing something.
And that's before you consider the retraining costs for all new starters, who will more than likely be familiar with MS Office. And the retraining costs for your tech support who will have to support users through a product transition.
You mentioned macros too. With MS Office, I can get help from the many users out there who post on specialist forums. In most situations, I've found that my question has been asked before so I don't even need to start a new thread. I'm sure there are similar sites out there for Libre/OpenOffice, but is the same breadth and depth of knowledge available? So for users who write advanced macros, you not only have initial retraining cost, but also an ongoing requirement to enhance said users' knowledge.
Is all that really worth it to save a few hundred bucks per seat?
A bit of a sensationalist summary, but this is absolutely not a breach of the walled garden; the App Store rules and guidelines only apply for apps which are published in the App Store.
Web apps, due to their very nature, are not covered by these guidelines and I suspect Apple isn't bothered by this. It's no different than buying a Kindle book via a web page and then downloading & reading it within the Kindle app itself.
Are you sure the cargo door issue wasn't with the DC-10?
For me, my "obligations" to friends and family would stop depending on the nature of the crime. For example, if a friend or family member was committing a "victimless crime" such as taking illegal drugs, I would absolutely feel no need to report this. But for something like drink driving, you can be certain I'd reporting this.
I've never understood the desire to pirate apps iOS (or Android/WP) apps. If I'm paying over £500 for the device, then logic dictates that I have enough disposable income to pay the going rate for apps, particularly when most of the popular apps start at the ridiculously low price of 69p. Many of these are published by independent developers or small software firms, where every sale counts.
And seriously, who is so cheap that they would refuse to pay 69p for whatever game is popular at the moment?
Alternatives such as Open/LibreOffice and Google Docs can't compete effectively when even companies associated with such alternatives can't stand behind their own offerings.
Realistically, the alternatives you mentioned won't compete in the business world until they are at least as good as Microsoft Office.
I do get where you're coming from. It's good to have employees who understand the theory behind a type of application, rather than just knowing a single application itself, but given the choice between hiring someone who knows Excel and someone who knows spreadsheets (but not Excel), I would hire the Excel specialist (all other things being equal).
In business, time is money and I want employees who are comfortable with the tools already in use so they can immediately understand our spreadsheets, macros, and formulas.
I'm an experienced Excel user and my "Help function" is the vast multitude of online forums out there where other professionals hang out and provide answers to users who have encountered similar challenges to me. This includes VBA code samples as well as the theory behind the formula. In my experience, I've found the Help feature to be primarily useful when I know which formula or feature I want to use - and if I know that, then I probably already know how to use it.
When Open Office has a similarly widespread knowledge base, spread across the internet, then we can consider its Help function to be fit for purpose.
The BSD license and philosophy, I'm not sure you understand it...
I very well know that the BSD license is 'freer' and more permissive than the GPL, which was the motivation for Apple to steal BSD licensed code and close their additions to it.
Maybe you could clarify how Apple "stole" this BSD-licensed code; did they take a hard drive or CD/DVD which contained the only copy of the code?
If you're actually accusing them of infringing on the copyright, then you should just have said so. Though from reading the BSD license, it appears that Apple is in compliance.
Apple is the *one company* that is using open standards, does not pollute them, uses open source and gives all additions it does to the open source software back to the community.
Yes, because their 2013 iDevice range uses MicroUSB, which as we know is required under European law.
By now, I think we all get it - non-techies included; if we visit a website, we might get a cookie installed onto our computers. These intrusive banners have made that perfectly clear to the point where it is now extremely annoying.
I especially hate it on my phone. Due to the nature of my interactions with apps like Twitter, I quite often end up visiting sites I've never visited before. And these floating banners with the X are incredibly difficult to close and get rid of - hampering my browsing experience.
I understand that the people who came up with this idea probably had their heart in the right place, but seriously, it really needs to stop.
In the 90s/00s I used to have my own website. I designed it myself, wrote the HTML and paid for web hosting so I could avoid Geocities. I uploaded my photos and shared the link with friends via email.
These days, I just don't have the time anymore and after a long day at work, the last thing I want to do is sit coding all evening just to upload a new album. So I share holiday snaps etc via Facebook and amusing pics via Twitter (different audiences). It's easy because someone else has done the hard work.
As everyone knows, there is no such thing as a free lunch and so developers and support staff must get paid. My understanding is that Instagram intends to do this by monetising the content users upload. The problem with today's society is that we don't want to pay people for their hard work, but we also don't want them to come up with innovative solutions like this which will allow them to keep their services to the end user.
I don't personally use Instagram but I do use Facebook and Twitter. I'm happy to keep uploading because I am too lazy to roll my own solution. I've given advice to my immediate family about finding HTML tutorials and inexpensive web hosts but strangely they don't seem to like the idea...
What makes Turing any different from any other person who was convicted of this offence back when it was illegal?
I'm aware of his work on the Enigma machines and he is quite rightly recognised for this, but a person's achievements should have no bearing on how they are treated in the eyes of the law. If we go ahead and pardon Turing, we must go ahead and pardon everyone else who was convicted under the same legislation.
Similarly, what makes the law against homosexuality any different or any worse than other laws which have changed over the years?
If you follow this idea to its logical conclusion, then we must surely go ahead and pardon anyone whoever lived, who was ever convicted of something which is no longer a crime. And of course, a formal process would need to be created to ensure that pardons are issued in the future if and when we change other laws.
So I've nothing against pardoning Turing and would probably consider it a good idea. I just feel it's important that we act in a consistent manner and understand the consequences which would come with such a solution.
That being said, instead of answering your question, let me rather tell you why so many people hate Stallman and rant against him. The reason is simply that he's right about most of the things he says, but people do not always like hearing the truth if it is inconvenient. With that respect he has a lot in common with Socrates...
I genuinely don't think this is the reason. Like everyone, Stallman is entitled to an opinion on things (generally, opinions are neither right nor wrong) but his uncompromising stance and attitude to those who disagree with him gets people's backs up. And I think that this can cause challenges because some of his messages (maybe even this one) may well be important and valuable, but this can often be lost because people focus on the messenger rather than the message.
The problem is with this theory is that electronics can and do fail. Are you willing to pay the extra costs which would be incurred for manufacturers to ensure their products have 99.9999% reliability?
(Note that I do think Dell could do a lot more in terms of hardware quality. I don't personally know anyone who's bought a Dell laptop and who hasn't had problems with it. And as for Apple, their obsession with thin and small will be their undoing).
If your inquiries around the coders' schooling and skill levels were only made after you started to realise the output was poor, or if the decision maker took this into account yet still went ahead and outsourced to this organisation, then surely the fault is all your organisation's for hiring an unsuitable outsourcing firm?
If a haulage firm goes out and buys a fleet of new cars instead of trucks - despite knowing their limitations - they can hardly complain when huge pallets don't fit in the back of the car.
InTrade is an Irish company, founded by an Irishman, with a HQ in Dublin. They also banned the use of US credit and debit cards in 2010 - so cannot be actively seen to be soliciting business from the US.
Considering these facts, I'm not entirely comfortable with an unrelated country being able to have such an impact on a foreign company, which only operates overseas.
We are big on Powerpoints in my organisation, We use them for presenting and sharing all kinds of data and insight.
To minimise production time, I have various spreadsheets linked to raw data stored in Access which ultimately produce graphs, data tables and associated commentary (mostly automatically).
And these are then stored as linked tables and graphs within Powerpoint itself so all I have to do each morning/week/month is run a couple of Macros and verify that nothing went wrong.
But it does take a certain kind of person who's obsessed with automating repetitive tasks to make something like this happen; for most people, the closest they'll get to linking MS Office apps is when sending an Office doc via email without having to go into Outlook.
And I've heard (maybe this is just a rumor) that the next version of Windows server is not going to have a GUI interface and will be completely command line driven; what sysadmin wants to sit there typing command after command into a Dos prompt.
A Linux sysadmin.
If only microsoft would've done the same two decades ago.
If Microsoft had done the same two decades ago, we'd have accused them of monopoly abuse.
Whether or not the ribbon has had an adverse impact on you personally, it is still what users coming from a Windows environment are used to - and they will no doubt find that an interface based on Office 97-2003 does indeed look old fashioned.
I certainly know from personal experience that when I have to use a machine which has an older version of Office on, I really struggle with finding my commonly-used features and it takes me longer to do pretty much anything.
Does the Macbook Pro not meet these requirements?
I've actually found the opposite.
My iPhone isn't a phone first - the phone is just one app out of many I use (majority being data hungry apps which present nicely arranged versions of web content I frequent). On my iPad, the screen is big enough to view web pages in Safari and there isn't such a need for apps to rearrange the content to fit on a smaller screen.
Mobile technology has come a long way in the last few years. Smartphones are more popular than ever and Mobile Broadband modems are easy to get hold of, and cheap too. More and more laptops are getting integrated HSPA chips.
In all major cities and the majority of towns, I can get 3.5G internet (I'm UK based). In other locations, I get EDGE or plain old GPRS. Chances are, if I'm in a town/village which doesn't have high speed mobile access, then I probably don't need it that much and get make do with GPRS.
It's also £5.00 per month for "unlimited" access (1GB fair use). Or I can get specific Mobile Broadband packages starting from £10 per month on both prepay and postpay.
So, given the fast pace of the mobile industry recently, I'm not sure that city-wide Wi-Fi is a necessity any more, or whether I would even pay for it if it's available.
Of course, the experience of others in different locations will no doubt vary.
I don't know about Fedora so cannot comment, however I don't think those hardware requirements for XP are particularly realistic; they might just allow you to login to Windows with all the eye candy turned off, but don't try running anything like MS Word/Outlook and certainly don't try to have more than one or two apps open at the same time.