But why? Both of them work very similarly, are locally centered, with no/poor server interaction. I see them as much of a muchness for replacing Outlook.
I agree. The Mozilla staffers moaned about not wanting to put resources into Thunderbird, and therefore spin it off into a separate organisation - and then turn around and start supporting a new email client with a different set of features and limitations.
Of course, you are right: for small business, Exchange+Outlook is the combo to beat. But I don't see where you leap to the conclusion "bringing Eudora back and making it work on any platform is the way to go". Why Eudora? If anything, I imagine it is much less suitable than other alternatives. Surely Evolution is going to be 1000% closer to the desired end goal?
But its been virtually unused and nobody can suggest much use for it in the future. Certainly space manufacturing is decades or centuries away and there is nothing valuable enough to justify using the shuttle to return it.
Of course, not that much has changed in rocketry and space exploration since the 70's. Faster computers, yes, but that doesn't really change the basic design.
Not to mention the terrible job they did of joining it up - it's supposed to have been a liquid covering him, this looks exactly like someone cut a rough hole with scissors and stuck a different mold in...
Strange thing - I noticed the other day using a slow embedded web server - Seamonkey only redraws the page when you move the mouse over it. What's that about? Is it used to imply you're looking at the page, or just an artefact of their redraw approach? Is it changed in FF2?
Is there anything better these days? Could they substitute something else? I'm guessing not, because otherwise they probably would have done it. Interesting to think that state of the art material from 30 years ago is still state of the art.
That article is just repeating the old "not all the waveform is really there" argument. ie. digital is discrete vs continuous analog. This has nothing to do with whether it sounds better or even the actualy audio quality produced, which is dependent on noise, cross-talk, frequency response and other factors, all of which any practical LP and player does worse at than CD, except under some possible (extreme) conditions.
Well I agree, and I think there is a (near?) consensus in WP policy that such things are not useful, unless they are particularly notable, and should be deleted.
Are they good at making software? Not as far as I can tell.
This is exactly the blindness that is being talked about. Its obvious that Microsoft ARE good at some software; Office applications for example, where they lead the world by a wide margin having beaten many competitors including current free ones.
They are also the only company willing to really put the effort into a desktop OS that general users want, including all the tedious things like backwards compatibility, phone support, and massive testing. They also created a competent server OS in Windows NT.
Not EVERYTHING they do is good, and they do have problems, and they do nasty things I dislike a lot, but you need to see both the good and bad to compete with them properly.
I've often thought that Task Manager shouldn't be just an ordinary application. It should be (in a minimal form) part of the logon system, so that you can use it without having to launch an app from the full screen C-A-D screen. Besides this kind of problem, it would also help with CPU/disk hogs that make the task manager take a long time to load.
Some combination of multiple approaches would be best, because you don't want to find that your single hope of survival failed to light it's second stage (or whatever).
MS is good at this game of incrementally taking market share away from competitors. They have been doing it for years. They will match features, add luxuries, push it hard to business types, give it away, offer automated conversion... whatever they think it takes.
Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.
Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server,.NET, Office, etc, all the stuff that millions of developers are already familiar with.
It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.
But if you have millions of years, trillions of tons of liquid, and all kinds of random events like lightning, meteorites, cosmic rays, local radiation, varying magnetic field, tectonic changes, changes in the sun, and of course this process happening on billions of planets throughout the universe... it seems like a LOT of possibilities will be explored. Most of them would be dead-ends but by sheer luck, here on this one spot everything went right and we got where we are now.
Salary/wages are usually less than 50% of the total cost of an employee. The cost of the office rent, power, PCs, desks, support systems, infrastructure, and all the people who maintain those things is at least as much as their salary. So your figure of 2k probably comes out to 5k in total costs.
Like others I am amazed at how grudgingly some publishers offer demos (sometimes not at all).
However, in some cases the demo is a very worthwhile, if small, game in itself. I am thinking in particular of Unreal Tournament 2004, which made a demo with several maps on several game types, including online play. This demo is still being played today, 3 years later, so in fact that was a very entertaining ame in itself (albeit a bit limited).
Epic might have gone too far with UT2004. But the fact remains that often a demo can be an entertaining diversion in itself, as well as an advertisement for the full game. PERHAPS there is sometimes a case that a demo could be worth paying a small amount of money for.
Incidentally, it's clear the demos are quite costly; they have to package it and test it like a full release, and then someone has to pay the rather large download costs (on a 500MB demo thats going to be significant).
I have to agree that this is Apple's standard mode. In the same way they don't like to mar their product design with ugliness like replacable batteries (or whatever), they don't like to mar their marketing with annoying truths about their products. I guess this is hardly unique to Apple, however. And if you go that route, of specifically pointing out in large type all the downsides the customer should be aware of, you get a Microsoft style box covered in disclaimers and notices.
Agreed. There is talk of $50 million per year. If so, I see virtually no evidence of it being used. Sure Firefox is a reasonably complex app but 50mil pays a lot of developers - especially when they get to work on something as interesting and popular as this, and there are dozens or hundreds of free contributors as well.
The logical thing to me is to use the money to fund a) the most critical key improvments and b) all the dull boring work like bug fixing and email client that free contributors won't work on. Not to just play round with exciting new tech and ideas on the browser.
Instead, it seems to be a little junket for self-selected mozilla developers to play with Firefox.
Harry Potter has entertaining scenes and characters. But most plot points are resolved by miraculous deus ex machina or accident, and Harry Potter is a very passive protagonist who for most of the series does little to no work at all, just being helped out by others for no apparent reason.
With major mistakes like that, it's ridiculous to claim that it's great writing. It's just well marketed "pulp magic" really.
Slashdot Mirror
. Thunderbird isn't it. I'm hoping Eudora is.
But why? Both of them work very similarly, are locally centered, with no/poor server interaction. I see them as much of a muchness for replacing Outlook.
I heard that many batteries contain ATOMS which as we know contain enormous amounts of energy! Nuclear bomb in your laptop! This must be stopped!
I agree. The Mozilla staffers moaned about not wanting to put resources into Thunderbird, and therefore spin it off into a separate organisation - and then turn around and start supporting a new email client with a different set of features and limitations.
Mozzila guys, you have ALREADY lost focus
Of course, you are right: for small business, Exchange+Outlook is the combo to beat.
But I don't see where you leap to the conclusion "bringing Eudora back and making it work on any platform is the way to go". Why Eudora? If anything, I imagine it is much less suitable than other alternatives. Surely Evolution is going to be 1000% closer to the desired end goal?
That doesn't cover shuttle costs either, which are a lot higher, at around $20,000 per pound. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-02-04-shu ttle-critics_x.htm
Doesn't look to good in comparison to the expendables.
But its been virtually unused and nobody can suggest much use for it in the future. Certainly space manufacturing is decades or centuries away and there is nothing valuable enough to justify using the shuttle to return it.
Of course, not that much has changed in rocketry and space exploration since the 70's. Faster computers, yes, but that doesn't really change the basic design.
Not to mention the terrible job they did of joining it up - it's supposed to have been a liquid covering him, this looks exactly like someone cut a rough hole with scissors and stuck a different mold in...
Strange thing - I noticed the other day using a slow embedded web server - Seamonkey only redraws the page when you move the mouse over it. What's that about? Is it used to imply you're looking at the page, or just an artefact of their redraw approach? Is it changed in FF2?
Is there anything better these days? Could they substitute something else? I'm guessing not, because otherwise they probably would have done it. Interesting to think that state of the art material from 30 years ago is still state of the art.
That article is just repeating the old "not all the waveform is really there" argument. ie. digital is discrete vs continuous analog. This has nothing to do with whether it sounds better or even the actualy audio quality produced, which is dependent on noise, cross-talk, frequency response and other factors, all of which any practical LP and player does worse at than CD, except under some possible (extreme) conditions.
Well I agree, and I think there is a (near?) consensus in WP policy that such things are not useful, unless they are particularly notable, and should be deleted.
Are they good at making software? Not as far as I can tell.
This is exactly the blindness that is being talked about. Its obvious that Microsoft ARE good at some software; Office applications for example, where they lead the world by a wide margin having beaten many competitors including current free ones.
They are also the only company willing to really put the effort into a desktop OS that general users want, including all the tedious things like backwards compatibility, phone support, and massive testing. They also created a competent server OS in Windows NT.
Not EVERYTHING they do is good, and they do have problems, and they do nasty things I dislike a lot, but you need to see both the good and bad to compete with them properly.
I've often thought that Task Manager shouldn't be just an ordinary application. It should be (in a minimal form) part of the logon system, so that you can use it without having to launch an app from the full screen C-A-D screen. Besides this kind of problem, it would also help with CPU/disk hogs that make the task manager take a long time to load.
Or indeed Soyuz.
Some combination of multiple approaches would be best, because you don't want to find that your single hope of survival failed to light it's second stage (or whatever).
MS is good at this game of incrementally taking market share away from competitors. They have been doing it for years. They will match features, add luxuries, push it hard to business types, give it away, offer automated conversion ... whatever they think it takes.
.NET, Office, etc, all the stuff that millions of developers are already familiar with.
Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.
Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server,
It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.
But if you have millions of years, trillions of tons of liquid, and all kinds of random events like lightning, meteorites, cosmic rays, local radiation, varying magnetic field, tectonic changes, changes in the sun, and of course this process happening on billions of planets throughout the universe... it seems like a LOT of possibilities will be explored. Most of them would be dead-ends but by sheer luck, here on this one spot everything went right and we got where we are now.
Salary/wages are usually less than 50% of the total cost of an employee. The cost of the office rent, power, PCs, desks, support systems, infrastructure, and all the people who maintain those things is at least as much as their salary. So your figure of 2k probably comes out to 5k in total costs.
Just because their legal team might be assholes (by design), doesn't mean we have to lower ourselves to their level.
So why can't Ubuntu have a paid edition that includes licenses for the codecs?
Bored of the theme? Why not download something like Stardock WIndowBlinds? Thousands of new skins...
Like others I am amazed at how grudgingly some publishers offer demos (sometimes not at all).
However, in some cases the demo is a very worthwhile, if small, game in itself. I am thinking in particular of Unreal Tournament 2004, which made a demo with several maps on several game types, including online play. This demo is still being played today, 3 years later, so in fact that was a very entertaining ame in itself (albeit a bit limited).
Epic might have gone too far with UT2004. But the fact remains that often a demo can be an entertaining diversion in itself, as well as an advertisement for the full game. PERHAPS there is sometimes a case that a demo could be worth paying a small amount of money for.
Incidentally, it's clear the demos are quite costly; they have to package it and test it like a full release, and then someone has to pay the rather large download costs (on a 500MB demo thats going to be significant).
I have to agree that this is Apple's standard mode. In the same way they don't like to mar their product design with ugliness like replacable batteries (or whatever), they don't like to mar their marketing with annoying truths about their products. I guess this is hardly unique to Apple, however. And if you go that route, of specifically pointing out in large type all the downsides the customer should be aware of, you get a Microsoft style box covered in disclaimers and notices.
Agreed. There is talk of $50 million per year. If so, I see virtually no evidence of it being used. Sure Firefox is a reasonably complex app but 50mil pays a lot of developers - especially when they get to work on something as interesting and popular as this, and there are dozens or hundreds of free contributors as well.
The logical thing to me is to use the money to fund a) the most critical key improvments and b) all the dull boring work like bug fixing and email client that free contributors won't work on. Not to just play round with exciting new tech and ideas on the browser.
Instead, it seems to be a little junket for self-selected mozilla developers to play with Firefox.
Harry Potter vs 1984 or Catch 22? Are you joking?
Harry Potter has entertaining scenes and characters. But most plot points are resolved by miraculous deus ex machina or accident, and Harry Potter is a very passive protagonist who for most of the series does little to no work at all, just being helped out by others for no apparent reason.
With major mistakes like that, it's ridiculous to claim that it's great writing. It's just well marketed "pulp magic" really.