The real answer is not dropping applications from the OS bundle or breaking up the company. The real answer is to ban convicted monopolists from having closed APIs or formats. Microsoft gained and maintain their dominant position by controlling the formats people use to exchange information. Force them to freely interoperate with anyone who wants to, and let competition do the rest.
TRS 80 Model 1, Level 2 with all the power of a Z-80 (1.78 MHz) And I got all that at the bargain price of A$799, plus the value of a junked television, two radios and about fifty blisters, burns and assorted injuries trying to cobble together a stepdown 240V 50hz to 110V 60hz power supply stable enough to stop the thing instantly crashing when it was switched on.
I work for IBM too, and Lotus Notes was forced upon us. It is a pig; resource hungry, slow, unintuitive and unfriendly.
Um, yes. But my point is that those perjoratives were applied to early versions of Star Office too. Opening the source could be a way of getting it working properly.
I work for IBM and while Notes itself is alright once you get past the annoying interface
It would be unlikely, but interesting if IBM open sourced Notes. Groupware & scheduling is a key weakness in current FOSS office products. Star Office suffered from a clunky interface for most of its working life, but from the current beta versions, it looks like OO/SO 2 is going to break that hoodoo. Maybe a similar kick forward would work for Notes as well.
People buy red sport cars because they want to be flashy and get the attention (I'm sure you agree on this). But it nonetheless has some drawbacks - just see how much tickets you get when you have a red and then a green sport car.
I have a green sports car, and I just got a ticket, you insensitive clod!
That's my point--the tool isn't actually good for anything. Even the Notes support and development people I know admit that as an e-mail system, it really sucks compared with other products on the market that are available.
I suspect a lot of your problems might vanish if you had support & dev people who could explain to you how Notes actually worked.
It's getting a bit late here (Australia) for me to give you much of a hint, but it might help you if you started thinking of Notes as a distributed document manager rather than an email client. An email is a document which is synchronised (replicated) between two clients. Forms are containers for documents (notes). The database capability is not (primarily) intended for the storage and retrieval of individual fields, but of whole documents. If you've followed the debate over WinFS (the metadata filesystem in Longhorn), you can think of the database capabilities in Notes as a way of attaching, storing and retrieving documents using document metadata, and Notes/Domino themselves as an efficient way of distributing those documents.
Your problem with the RichText field is an example of missing the point. If you just want to distribute information, you can make a html document within Notes, a Word document, a pdf or whatever suits you, put it in a library and the next time users replicate, the information will be available. No need to send it at all.
Microsoft's closest competitor to Notes is not Outlook, it's Sharepoint/Infopath.
I hate to hurt your feelings, but it seems like you've been making some horrible mistakes with Notes. It sounds like you're trying to fit it into a paradigm you know instead of learing what it really is. I'll address a few of your comments though, but I suspect you've already made up your mind...
you can't Alt-tab to Firefox and check out the sports scores; no, you have to watch a stupid splash screen.
I can't say much about this except that on any of the computers I have here, the splash screen is on the screen and gone so quickly it isn't worth alt-tabbing.
As it turns out, apparently Ctrl-E is the "Lose everything I've been working on without warning me" button.
I've just tried this and it doesn't do that on any of the forms or fields I'm using. Are you sure it's not something one of your developers has coded in?
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones)
Notes isn't intended to be a relational database. That's not the point of the program. If you want relational capabilities, Notes will cheerfully link to a proper RDBMS, but if you're trying to use it as one, you're using the wrong tool.
I'll leave the rest of your rant alone. It's just a piece of software after all, but I think the problems you're having stem from you trying to force the tool to fit what you know instead of learning what the tool is actually for. It's a lot harder to hammer in a screw than a nail, but once you work out what a screwdriver is for...
besides its called notes, but there is no place to put a little note like there is in Outlook.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I generally use the Journal for little notes. If that's not what you're looking for, you could just make a new database and call it "place for little notes"...
Outlook 2003 is the best calendar/to do program available for Windows.
I know I'll probably get shouted down over this, but I switched from Outlook to Lotus Notes and have never looked back. The interface is, um, idiosyncratic, but once you get used to it, it's immensely customisable, and surprisingly effective at ensuring you know what you need to know.
The election results I see in the paper tells the whole story.
No, they don't. You're forgetting that media are some of the biggest corporations. They tell the story of those who control the papers. Likewise, when the political parties are all essentially identical, voting achives nothing except endorsing the illusion of democracy.
Granted, we all know that Microsoft can operate on the scale of years when they want a market, but unveiling a poorly polished offering seems like a bad idea if they're aiming to capture the pro designer/artist market.
I downloaded it and gave it a go. It's not actually all that bad a product, but it's not competition for Illustrator/Photoshop. I think that's why there's so much criticism - Microsoft's marketing is pitching this at the big boys, but it performs much more like a shallower version of Realdraw http://mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html. There's nothing wrong with a product like Realdraw, it has good support and at $55, it's a bargain. Unless Microsoft can better that bargain price, they're going to have to put a LOT more effort into Acrylic.
I didn't vote for them. I'm not an American. I still have to live with the consequences of their actions. I didn't make a choice. You are making a lot of assumptions. And very short sentences. It's quite disconcerting. I'm getting the impression that you are an arrogant person.
If you try giving fewer abrupt orders to people you don't know, maybe you will get better responses from them.
Sorry...Uh uh...It take lazy/corrupt individuals to allow/encourage this. Let's not blame our own lack of attention span and ability to stay focused on anybody but ourselves.
Nope, our job is to get on with enjoying our lives. The fault lies with the dirty lazy corrupt scum who are prepared to destroy that enjoyment in order to serve their own ends. We need to find a way to punish them and prevent them from doing it again.
We're still stuck with having to fix the problem, but there's no way we should accept blame for it as well.
Given Windows' propensity for fscking with the MBR seemingly at will and for being somewhat twitchy when another OS changes things around, you might be better off having your Linux setup leave the MBR alone
Garbage. Windows won't change the boot record randomly, and for the average user there's no reason to do anything but accept the default that your distro offers you when setting boot options.
I guess I could throw in my rotting corpse and forged recipts showing I paid for Flash MX *shudder*
You think you've been done. I paid for Studio MX2004 AND a Devnet subscription. Now I have to deactiveate/reactivate every app each time I change my hardware.
Laws need to be passed that will make this type of carelessness illegal
Actually, this sort of thing is better dealt with by ISO standards (like ISO/IEC TR 10032:2003) than with laws. Legislation is inflexible, and lawmakers are easily swayed by whatever lobby currently has their pockets/ears.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that a missile with a capsule designed to send humans back and forth into space can also easily carry WMDs right?
So can a freighter or container ship. Which do you think would be easier to get to America?
it's MicroSoft that needs to be broken up.
The real answer is not dropping applications from the OS bundle or breaking up the company. The real answer is to ban convicted monopolists from having closed APIs or formats. Microsoft gained and maintain their dominant position by controlling the formats people use to exchange information. Force them to freely interoperate with anyone who wants to, and let competition do the rest.
TRS 80 Model 1, Level 2 with all the power of a Z-80 (1.78 MHz)
And I got all that at the bargain price of A$799, plus the value of a junked television, two radios and about fifty blisters, burns and assorted injuries trying to cobble together a stepdown 240V 50hz to 110V 60hz power supply stable enough to stop the thing instantly crashing when it was switched on.
I work for IBM too, and Lotus Notes was forced upon us. It is a pig; resource hungry, slow, unintuitive and unfriendly.
Um, yes. But my point is that those perjoratives were applied to early versions of Star Office too. Opening the source could be a way of getting it working properly.
Point is, you can't possibly fit everyone's vision in to "a few great" distros.
Except for T2 maybe? http://www.t2-project.org/index.html
I work for IBM and while Notes itself is alright once you get past the annoying interface
It would be unlikely, but interesting if IBM open sourced Notes. Groupware & scheduling is a key weakness in current FOSS office products. Star Office suffered from a clunky interface for most of its working life, but from the current beta versions, it looks like OO/SO 2 is going to break that hoodoo. Maybe a similar kick forward would work for Notes as well.
If only I could put this brain back in that 20-year-old body.
Perhaps with some fava beans and a nice chianti?
People buy red sport cars because they want to be flashy and get the attention (I'm sure you agree on this). But it nonetheless has some drawbacks - just see how much tickets you get when you have a red and then a green sport car.
I have a green sports car, and I just got a ticket, you insensitive clod!
That's my point--the tool isn't actually good for anything. Even the Notes support and development people I know admit that as an e-mail system, it really sucks compared with other products on the market that are available.
I suspect a lot of your problems might vanish if you had support & dev people who could explain to you how Notes actually worked.
It's getting a bit late here (Australia) for me to give you much of a hint, but it might help you if you started thinking of Notes as a distributed document manager rather than an email client. An email is a document which is synchronised (replicated) between two clients.
Forms are containers for documents (notes). The database capability is not (primarily) intended for the storage and retrieval of individual fields, but of whole documents. If you've followed the debate over WinFS (the metadata filesystem in Longhorn), you can think of the database capabilities in Notes as a way of attaching, storing and retrieving documents using document metadata, and Notes/Domino themselves as an efficient way of distributing those documents.
Your problem with the RichText field is an example of missing the point. If you just want to distribute information, you can make a html document within Notes, a Word document, a pdf or whatever suits you, put it in a library and the next time users replicate, the information will be available. No need to send it at all.
Microsoft's closest competitor to Notes is not Outlook, it's Sharepoint/Infopath.
you can't Alt-tab to Firefox and check out the sports scores; no, you have to watch a stupid splash screen.
As it turns out, apparently Ctrl-E is the "Lose everything I've been working on without warning me" button.
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones)
I'll leave the rest of your rant alone. It's just a piece of software after all, but I think the problems you're having stem from you trying to force the tool to fit what you know instead of learning what the tool is actually for. It's a lot harder to hammer in a screw than a nail, but once you work out what a screwdriver is for...
besides its called notes, but there is no place to put a little note like there is in Outlook.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I generally use the Journal for little notes. If that's not what you're looking for, you could just make a new database and call it "place for little notes"...
Outlook 2003 is the best calendar/to do program available for Windows.
I know I'll probably get shouted down over this, but I switched from Outlook to Lotus Notes and have never looked back. The interface is, um, idiosyncratic, but once you get used to it, it's immensely customisable, and surprisingly effective at ensuring you know what you need to know.
The election results I see in the paper tells the whole story.
No, they don't. You're forgetting that media are some of the biggest corporations. They tell the story of those who control the papers. Likewise, when the political parties are all essentially identical, voting achives nothing except endorsing the illusion of democracy.
Granted, we all know that Microsoft can operate on the scale of years when they want a market, but unveiling a poorly polished offering seems like a bad idea if they're aiming to capture the pro designer/artist market.
I downloaded it and gave it a go. It's not actually all that bad a product, but it's not competition for Illustrator/Photoshop.
I think that's why there's so much criticism - Microsoft's marketing is pitching this at the big boys, but it performs much more like a shallower version of Realdraw http://mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html. There's nothing wrong with a product like Realdraw, it has good support and at $55, it's a bargain. Unless Microsoft can better that bargain price, they're going to have to put a LOT more effort into Acrylic.
I didn't vote for them. I'm not an American. I still have to live with the consequences of their actions. I didn't make a choice. You are making a lot of assumptions. And very short sentences. It's quite disconcerting. I'm getting the impression that you are an arrogant person.
If you try giving fewer abrupt orders to people you don't know, maybe you will get better responses from them.
Sorry...Uh uh...It take lazy/corrupt individuals to allow/encourage this. Let's not blame our own lack of attention span and ability to stay focused on anybody but ourselves.
Nope, our job is to get on with enjoying our lives. The fault lies with the dirty lazy corrupt scum who are prepared to destroy that enjoyment in order to serve their own ends. We need to find a way to punish them and prevent them from doing it again.
We're still stuck with having to fix the problem, but there's no way we should accept blame for it as well.
How can you not notice your bodyboard bag has suddenly gained 4kg of weight?
Schapelle's Song
Don't blame it on the sunshine
Don't blame it on the airline
Don't blame it on the Bali nine
Blame it on the boogie
Given Windows' propensity for fscking with the MBR seemingly at will and for being somewhat twitchy when another OS changes things around, you might be better off having your Linux setup leave the MBR alone
Garbage. Windows won't change the boot record randomly, and for the average user there's no reason to do anything but accept the default that your distro offers you when setting boot options.
Too bad it's hard to stuff a vaporized squirrel.
Oh, they'd be stuffed all right.
Why is there no Linux driver for Airport Extreme? Proprietary hardware.
Cheaper alternatives.
Australia. We only ever fight other people's wars.
I guess I could throw in my rotting corpse and forged recipts showing I paid for Flash MX *shudder*
You think you've been done. I paid for Studio MX2004 AND a Devnet subscription. Now I have to deactiveate/reactivate every app each time I change my hardware.
Maybe OpenGL could benefit but not the OS.
So what do you think WGF in Longhorn would be called then? Part of the OS or "high level libraries or apps"?
Laws need to be passed that will make this type of carelessness illegal
Actually, this sort of thing is better dealt with by ISO standards (like ISO/IEC TR 10032:2003) than with laws. Legislation is inflexible, and lawmakers are easily swayed by whatever lobby currently has their pockets/ears.
compare: how many people were working together towards penicillin versus the people at ONE company to cure cancer?
Compare the results. Penicillin and its derivatives are cheap, effective and widely available.
Still no cure for cancer.