Hydro never lived up to the hype. Dams silt up, dams ruin rivers, and, aside from a few really good spots, dams don't generate enough power.
If we went to fission with waste reprocessing, we could be in good shape...It'll provide more power and vastly reduce the amount of waste produced. We could even reprocess the waste we have now. The paranoia over radiation is so overblown, and has been hyped for so long that people just sort of accept that all nuclear power is going to lead to three eyed fish and crap like that.
Carbon sequestration is relatively easy. Plant more trees, create artificial algae blooms...Anything green and growing will take in a lot of carbon. There have been studies recently dealing with certain types of pine trees that even suggest that the trees are growing faster in the higher CO2 environment we're making for them, which suggests that natural processes will step up to take advantage of the carbon rich environment.
The problem is, all these solutions are geologically short term, and they're not as space-efficient as say, coal. Forests catch fire, algae blooms sink to the bottom (which is good) but are bad bad bad for the water ecosystem in which they're created, and everything else gets used and processed.
Basically, we're screwed on a quick fix until someone bio-engineers us some quick growing trees that sequester so much carbon that they're shiny. The best solution is to reduce our output of carbon, and allow the carbon cycle to re-balance itself.
In the meantime, if you're wondering whether to take up snow skiing or water skiing, might want to go water.
I'm hoping some people will take a look at the sort of model Blizzard works with, where they bust their asses on a project, and aren't afraid to delay the hell out of it until it's exactly what they want. They don't have many titles under their belt, but their hit record is second to none, and you can't say it's not making them a ton of money.
You didn't notice the common thread in all the past evil empires that you listed.
AT&T (The Bells): Phone/Telecom monopoly. Is there a phone/telecom monopoly today? No. IBM: Hardware monopoly. Is there a hardware monopoly today? No. Microsoft: Software monopoly. Is there a software monopoly today? Yes. Is it shrinking? Yes.
There is always that guy who jumps in and grabs the whole market when it's brand new. The thing is, it never lasts, and then the market gets filled up with a lot of small savvy competitors, and fragments. This happens over and over throughout history. Microsoft seems eternal to us, but they're still pretty new, I mean, they're younger than I am. In forty years, they'll be completely different, and will not have the same level of dominance.
Apple may become an evil empire, if they work out a way to do real digital convergence so well that all other attempts fall hilariously flat. But the iPod is not an empire in itself...It's just a nice product.
I disagree...I myself am a coder, and I started out without a degree, and got a degree later...The upshot of this is that while I know the right way to do it, in times of stress I revert to crazy ass voodoo methods which work, but which are completely unsupportable by normal people...I got started in LISP, as an example, so I fall back on recursion at times when it's quicker to type than bulkier iterative loops, and I also have that "who needs meaningful variable names?" issue that seems to afflict the self-taught.
I get people sending me code snippets from a fricking decade ago where even I don't know what the hell I was thinking anymore...I just helped out a guy by turning a 10 line chunk of perl into a 90 line chunk of semi-readable perl, and I had trouble convincing the guy that the new code was functionally identical to the old code...That is a serious problem for a business.
You hire a "brilliant" person who doesn't have a solid grounding in "the way things are supposed to be done" you get someone whose idiosyncratic methods and disregard for style issues creates this morass of functional but unsupportable work, and when that person gets hit by a bus, or gets fed up and quits, you have no one who can follow what's been done, and no one who can fix it if it breaks, and that is a terrible position to put yourself in as a company.
Get a plodder who does readable, straightforward work without crazy leaps of brilliance, and you'll reap the benefit of it for years to come. Get an erratic genius, and everything that you've got will hinge on keeping that cult of personality alive by hiring more people who can maintain that work, and the type of people who can maintain that work will only make the problem worse.
Some people are naturally inclined toward CS, but generally the best people are people who have both inclination and the dedication needed to get a degree.
Natural talent without the focusing influence of a degree usually produces the sort of brilliant-but-erratic person who is a fricking NIGHTMARE to replace...Much better to hire two less brilliant minds who will do decent work, and not leave a giant hole in your company when they inevitably move on.
I've seen this over and over. If you're a startup, and you want to grab hold of a genius to make your revolutionary never-been-done-before product, grab a guy who dropped out of high school at 12 to code full time...But if you want a guy to design your financial applications, or code your CMS, or design your network, or build your rocket...Get someone whose work is going to be clean and professional.
The difference is, damn heroes would try to fight (whereas the shuttle wouldn't), and the enemy spent the whole mission sending in reaver tanks against me, so the heroes kept attacking the goddamn tanks and getting killed. Leaving them out in the open was a lose lose situation. Putting them out of the way was the best way to win, and with the protoss, the only way to do that was to "hide" them in a shuttle, and then make sure the shuttle was defended.
And with Homeworld, it was a ship issue. I had mostly fighters and other light ships the first time I got to that mission, and not enough resources to build the capital ships that could have made it through the "tube". Didn't stop me from trying to beat it for a fricking week before I gave up and restarted the game from scratch.
I think my favorite ever was in Warcraft III...It was 2v2 and me and my teammate screwed the pooch early...We did one attack which was half-assed, and the other guys counter attacked so hard that they wiped out my partner...Almost.
So I forted up (was playing humans), built a second hero, and just sat in my little base mining, and killing everything that came at me, while my partner slowly, quietly, built back up...I think they just assumed they'd wiped him out completely, and he was just hanging around to watch. They were smack talking me like no tomorrow, not even bothering to expand because they had me "trapped".
The only thing nastier than a group of knights, priests, and riflemen with a wizard and a pally, is that same group joined up with a group of taurens, shaman, and spear throwers...We chewed their asses apart. I sent a single peasant to every resource dump on the board, and whenever they tried to expand, I teleported there and crushed 'em. Super satisfying win.
That's exactly what I did, actually. The first time I played it through, however, I took too long winning individual fights (still learning the game) so when I got to this mission I confidently believed that I could just swarm the enemy under with relatively small ships, like I'd done every previous mission...Which was completely impossible. I didn't have the resources, and I didn't have any carriers.
But if you had carriers and battleships, you could send them through, dump out your fighters, and crush the enemy...That game was a great example of "starcraft blindness" for me, because I assumed that the enemy had a solid defensive setup as soon as the scenario started, so I didn't try to rush 'em the first time around. The second time I did, and it turned out that it would take MUCH longer to mine all the minerals on the field than it did to wipe out the opposing force.
Whatever man. I can't even load a patch half the time without it shutting down some piece of software, and you're talking about DOS compatibility? Screw that.
And goddamn emulation is what I fricking WANT. Attempting to run stuff in so-called compatibility mode is a joke, and you can't always do a virtual machine, because you need real hardware interfaces.
Dude, I just had to load DOS FUCKING FIVE not a week ago to do the exact shit I'm talking about, whereas with Linux I'd have just used ldconfig and fudged the goddamn linker so it pointed to the library I needed for the goddamn code.
Dos fucking five...that's how long I've been dealing with this shit. I had to go into the goddamn second subbasement to find a goddamn 5.25 drive and everything. Go out and work in the real world for thirty seconds, deal with this shit, and then start calling me a fucking zealot for wanting something that just WORKS.
Yea, I did it both ways. He's beatable without any of the super-sexy stuff...in fact, it's a much better fight, but it's truly special to go in and crush him with a couple of consecutive limit breaks.
I'm just the opposite; I never fricking quit. I'm the guy who's building random photon cannons all over the map, just to piss off the guys who are beating my ass...And I've pulled it off before, where I've been in an "unwinnable" situation and ended up winning, because the opponents slacked off. I was in a 3v3 in Warcraft III once, and had two of my teammates quit, and managed to footy rush and wipe out two of my three remaining opponents, and then just outplayed the last guy. It ain't over until it's fricking over.
Anyone remember the original Homeworld? There was this one damn mission where you basically had to move your whole fleet down this effing "tube" of asteroids in order to avoid "solar radiation" which would basically pwn your ships if you weren't perfectly in the goddamn "tube". First time I got to that mission it was a deal breaker; I'd wasted too many resources early in the game. So I went back and started over; got to that point with (literally) every ship I could possibly have, and it was still a huge pain in the ass. Theoretically you could waypoint your ass down the "tube" but in practice it was nearly impossible, and forget trying to do it by eyeball.
How about Sacrifice? I can think of more than a few missions in that game which made me chew on things.
How about the last mission in the Warcraft III expansion? Pain in my ass...And there was one in the original Starcraft...One of the last Protoss missions...Wasn't hard to beat the enemy, but beat them without them managing to kill one of your goddamn heroes? Good luck. I'd literally put them in a shuttle (can't let them roam around on their own...goes without saying), and put the shuttle on "hold" over a pile of photon cannons, and they'd send one damn capital ship in to specifically kill that fucking shuttle.
I think "walls" are a good thing, in some ways, because they challenge your ass to go to a new level...On the other hand, a poorly designed "wall", where the designers are basically just fucking with you, that's no fun. Why bother to play the damn game when they're basically just cheating to annoy you?
It's especially annoying in a "strategy" game (real-time strategy is generally far more about tactics than strategy, and most turn based strategy isn't mission based), because you're left in a situation where only a fricking moron would have attacked, and you've got to deal with it.
There is a difference in saying, "Well it's a different kernel so you're screwed" and saying, "Oh you need a specific system library? You're still screwed." In Linux I could bring in a library that was standard during a previous kernel, and run my software using that library; In Windows, I'm S.O.L because the system comes in an inflexible standard configuration, and trying to backport any system library will basically destroy your system.
I have to say that it irks the holy living hell out of me that MS breaks backwards compatibility so often...Basically, if you upgrade windows, you have to accept that any software that wasn't written by Microsoft will probably not work in the new version.
It's especially annoying in the business world, because it means that you are forced to maintain crap legacy systems in order to maintain applications that cannot be ported to a better OS, and no, you can't always get a better version of a piece of software that's sole purpose is to diagnose sensor faults in a 1k ton piece of machinery.
Microsoft releases an OS that won't run software that ran on it's own earlier operating system, and also tends to corrupt a music device which is in competition with their own music device and it's Apple's fault? Microsoft has pushed multiple DRM setups and then stopped supporting it's own damn standards but Apple is the bad guy?
I don't buy any drm'd music, but Apple's is surely the least abusive...It allows you to burn it to a cd, which can then be ripped back into an un-drm'd format...Pretty obvious that they did the minimum amount of work that would satisfy record companies that were so damn drm obsessed that they were shipping cd's with a free rootkit included.
Except for the whole: "[T]hese images... are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up [the same] single page of [HTML] with a single picture."
That was actually shot down a while ago...Basically, if you can see it from public property, you can't claim ownership of all pictorial representations.
In addition to property-release issues, you also need to think about copyright concerns vis-à-vis buildings if they were built after December 1, 1990. Before that, buildings did not have copyright protection and were thus, by definition, in the public domain. Shoot away.
In general, buildings erected after December 1, 1990 do not pose a big problem either. There is a "photographer's exception" to a building's copyright owner's rights that permits the photography of buildings. This gives a wide leeway to the definition of "building"; everything from gazebos to office towers are included. As long as the building is in a public place, or visible -- and photographable -- from a public place, there is no infringement of the building's copyright owner's rights. This rule includes private as well as public buildings. --American Society of Media Photography
You're giving Microsoft too much credit for understanding what their market "wants". Sure, Office and Windows are pretty user friendly, as long as you don't need to move off the beaten path. But anywhere else? It's like they just stagger around doing things and when something takes off, they don't really understand why.
You know that this comment is an outgrowth of some marketing discussion where they're trying to figure out why the game did so well, and they're completely missing the lesson about "quality" and "originality" and writing the higher-than-expected sales off on the elusive girl-gamer market that makes titles like "The Sims" so popular.
Public forums are never held accountable for libel posted on their pages. The most that will happen is that the company will subpoena them for the identity of the individual who posted the information in the first place.
As soon as you said POP3 you went off the deep end. No corporation is going to migrate from MAPI (MS's weird IMAP clone) to POP3, and frankly, there is no reason why they should.
POP3 is fine if you're only ever going to be working in one place, but the first time you start working from home, and part of your mail goes home, and part of it is at the office, or you have to start screwing around with "leave messages on server"...It's far more trouble than it's worth, and it's an obvious loss of functionality. Say goodbye to web mail interfaces.
And that doesn't even touch the other crap that you're going to need to provide to get people off Exchange. You need shared calendars, shared email folders, and fancy LDAP mail directories, and shared contacts, tasks, notes...There is no open source product out there that provides half that stuff.
Then lets talk about the Crackberry, and all the goddamn executives that make you make everything friendly to their goddamn PDAs. All this stuff integrates with Microsoft. All this stuff integrates with Lotus. Do you have any conception how annoying it is to build hotsyncing into an application?
In order to build a product to replace Exchange, you first have to understand why people want more than just an email client. Christ, if that was all they really needed, we could still be running mm or Pine.
Don't ask me why they felt the need to break standards. It's microsoft. Huge pain in my ass though because the management wanted access to the "Premium" web app from outside the LAN, and that's a total bitch on the secure proxy I set up...Finally got someone higher up in corporate to tell them they couldn't have it because it's a security risk, so it's something of a sore subject with me.
Eh people "Pie in the Sky" Linux, and they hate to hear you throw down on WINE, but I've had WINE bite me in the ass over and over again, and as far as I'm concerned, you're fricking insane to depend on WINE for anything.
And I like Evolution, and I've used Evolution exclusively at home for years, but it will never, ever replace Outlook in a work environment unless they do some sort of a dramatic overhaul.
And I still don't think Star/Open Office will ever beat out Microsoft office, just because the tight integration isn't there. MS Office is a hell of a product.
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Hydro never lived up to the hype. Dams silt up, dams ruin rivers, and, aside from a few really good spots, dams don't generate enough power.
If we went to fission with waste reprocessing, we could be in good shape...It'll provide more power and vastly reduce the amount of waste produced. We could even reprocess the waste we have now. The paranoia over radiation is so overblown, and has been hyped for so long that people just sort of accept that all nuclear power is going to lead to three eyed fish and crap like that.
Carbon sequestration is relatively easy. Plant more trees, create artificial algae blooms...Anything green and growing will take in a lot of carbon. There have been studies recently dealing with certain types of pine trees that even suggest that the trees are growing faster in the higher CO2 environment we're making for them, which suggests that natural processes will step up to take advantage of the carbon rich environment.
The problem is, all these solutions are geologically short term, and they're not as space-efficient as say, coal. Forests catch fire, algae blooms sink to the bottom (which is good) but are bad bad bad for the water ecosystem in which they're created, and everything else gets used and processed.
Basically, we're screwed on a quick fix until someone bio-engineers us some quick growing trees that sequester so much carbon that they're shiny. The best solution is to reduce our output of carbon, and allow the carbon cycle to re-balance itself.
In the meantime, if you're wondering whether to take up snow skiing or water skiing, might want to go water.
I'm hoping some people will take a look at the sort of model Blizzard works with, where they bust their asses on a project, and aren't afraid to delay the hell out of it until it's exactly what they want. They don't have many titles under their belt, but their hit record is second to none, and you can't say it's not making them a ton of money.
You didn't notice the common thread in all the past evil empires that you listed.
AT&T (The Bells): Phone/Telecom monopoly. Is there a phone/telecom monopoly today? No.
IBM: Hardware monopoly. Is there a hardware monopoly today? No.
Microsoft: Software monopoly. Is there a software monopoly today? Yes. Is it shrinking? Yes.
There is always that guy who jumps in and grabs the whole market when it's brand new. The thing is, it never lasts, and then the market gets filled up with a lot of small savvy competitors, and fragments. This happens over and over throughout history. Microsoft seems eternal to us, but they're still pretty new, I mean, they're younger than I am. In forty years, they'll be completely different, and will not have the same level of dominance.
Apple may become an evil empire, if they work out a way to do real digital convergence so well that all other attempts fall hilariously flat. But the iPod is not an empire in itself...It's just a nice product.
I disagree...I myself am a coder, and I started out without a degree, and got a degree later...The upshot of this is that while I know the right way to do it, in times of stress I revert to crazy ass voodoo methods which work, but which are completely unsupportable by normal people...I got started in LISP, as an example, so I fall back on recursion at times when it's quicker to type than bulkier iterative loops, and I also have that "who needs meaningful variable names?" issue that seems to afflict the self-taught.
I get people sending me code snippets from a fricking decade ago where even I don't know what the hell I was thinking anymore...I just helped out a guy by turning a 10 line chunk of perl into a 90 line chunk of semi-readable perl, and I had trouble convincing the guy that the new code was functionally identical to the old code...That is a serious problem for a business.
You hire a "brilliant" person who doesn't have a solid grounding in "the way things are supposed to be done" you get someone whose idiosyncratic methods and disregard for style issues creates this morass of functional but unsupportable work, and when that person gets hit by a bus, or gets fed up and quits, you have no one who can follow what's been done, and no one who can fix it if it breaks, and that is a terrible position to put yourself in as a company.
Get a plodder who does readable, straightforward work without crazy leaps of brilliance, and you'll reap the benefit of it for years to come. Get an erratic genius, and everything that you've got will hinge on keeping that cult of personality alive by hiring more people who can maintain that work, and the type of people who can maintain that work will only make the problem worse.
Some people are naturally inclined toward CS, but generally the best people are people who have both inclination and the dedication needed to get a degree.
Natural talent without the focusing influence of a degree usually produces the sort of brilliant-but-erratic person who is a fricking NIGHTMARE to replace...Much better to hire two less brilliant minds who will do decent work, and not leave a giant hole in your company when they inevitably move on.
I've seen this over and over. If you're a startup, and you want to grab hold of a genius to make your revolutionary never-been-done-before product, grab a guy who dropped out of high school at 12 to code full time...But if you want a guy to design your financial applications, or code your CMS, or design your network, or build your rocket...Get someone whose work is going to be clean and professional.
The difference is, damn heroes would try to fight (whereas the shuttle wouldn't), and the enemy spent the whole mission sending in reaver tanks against me, so the heroes kept attacking the goddamn tanks and getting killed. Leaving them out in the open was a lose lose situation. Putting them out of the way was the best way to win, and with the protoss, the only way to do that was to "hide" them in a shuttle, and then make sure the shuttle was defended.
And with Homeworld, it was a ship issue. I had mostly fighters and other light ships the first time I got to that mission, and not enough resources to build the capital ships that could have made it through the "tube". Didn't stop me from trying to beat it for a fricking week before I gave up and restarted the game from scratch.
I think my favorite ever was in Warcraft III...It was 2v2 and me and my teammate screwed the pooch early...We did one attack which was half-assed, and the other guys counter attacked so hard that they wiped out my partner...Almost.
So I forted up (was playing humans), built a second hero, and just sat in my little base mining, and killing everything that came at me, while my partner slowly, quietly, built back up...I think they just assumed they'd wiped him out completely, and he was just hanging around to watch. They were smack talking me like no tomorrow, not even bothering to expand because they had me "trapped".
The only thing nastier than a group of knights, priests, and riflemen with a wizard and a pally, is that same group joined up with a group of taurens, shaman, and spear throwers...We chewed their asses apart. I sent a single peasant to every resource dump on the board, and whenever they tried to expand, I teleported there and crushed 'em. Super satisfying win.
That's exactly what I did, actually. The first time I played it through, however, I took too long winning individual fights (still learning the game) so when I got to this mission I confidently believed that I could just swarm the enemy under with relatively small ships, like I'd done every previous mission...Which was completely impossible. I didn't have the resources, and I didn't have any carriers.
But if you had carriers and battleships, you could send them through, dump out your fighters, and crush the enemy...That game was a great example of "starcraft blindness" for me, because I assumed that the enemy had a solid defensive setup as soon as the scenario started, so I didn't try to rush 'em the first time around. The second time I did, and it turned out that it would take MUCH longer to mine all the minerals on the field than it did to wipe out the opposing force.
Whatever man. I can't even load a patch half the time without it shutting down some piece of software, and you're talking about DOS compatibility? Screw that.
And goddamn emulation is what I fricking WANT. Attempting to run stuff in so-called compatibility mode is a joke, and you can't always do a virtual machine, because you need real hardware interfaces.
Dude, I just had to load DOS FUCKING FIVE not a week ago to do the exact shit I'm talking about, whereas with Linux I'd have just used ldconfig and fudged the goddamn linker so it pointed to the library I needed for the goddamn code.
Dos fucking five...that's how long I've been dealing with this shit. I had to go into the goddamn second subbasement to find a goddamn 5.25 drive and everything. Go out and work in the real world for thirty seconds, deal with this shit, and then start calling me a fucking zealot for wanting something that just WORKS.
Yea, I did it both ways. He's beatable without any of the super-sexy stuff...in fact, it's a much better fight, but it's truly special to go in and crush him with a couple of consecutive limit breaks.
Heh, I've played you before.
I'm just the opposite; I never fricking quit. I'm the guy who's building random photon cannons all over the map, just to piss off the guys who are beating my ass...And I've pulled it off before, where I've been in an "unwinnable" situation and ended up winning, because the opponents slacked off. I was in a 3v3 in Warcraft III once, and had two of my teammates quit, and managed to footy rush and wipe out two of my three remaining opponents, and then just outplayed the last guy. It ain't over until it's fricking over.
Anyone remember the original Homeworld? There was this one damn mission where you basically had to move your whole fleet down this effing "tube" of asteroids in order to avoid "solar radiation" which would basically pwn your ships if you weren't perfectly in the goddamn "tube". First time I got to that mission it was a deal breaker; I'd wasted too many resources early in the game. So I went back and started over; got to that point with (literally) every ship I could possibly have, and it was still a huge pain in the ass. Theoretically you could waypoint your ass down the "tube" but in practice it was nearly impossible, and forget trying to do it by eyeball.
How about Sacrifice? I can think of more than a few missions in that game which made me chew on things.
How about the last mission in the Warcraft III expansion? Pain in my ass...And there was one in the original Starcraft...One of the last Protoss missions...Wasn't hard to beat the enemy, but beat them without them managing to kill one of your goddamn heroes? Good luck. I'd literally put them in a shuttle (can't let them roam around on their own...goes without saying), and put the shuttle on "hold" over a pile of photon cannons, and they'd send one damn capital ship in to specifically kill that fucking shuttle.
I think "walls" are a good thing, in some ways, because they challenge your ass to go to a new level...On the other hand, a poorly designed "wall", where the designers are basically just fucking with you, that's no fun. Why bother to play the damn game when they're basically just cheating to annoy you?
It's especially annoying in a "strategy" game (real-time strategy is generally far more about tactics than strategy, and most turn based strategy isn't mission based), because you're left in a situation where only a fricking moron would have attacked, and you've got to deal with it.
There is a difference in saying, "Well it's a different kernel so you're screwed" and saying, "Oh you need a specific system library? You're still screwed." In Linux I could bring in a library that was standard during a previous kernel, and run my software using that library; In Windows, I'm S.O.L because the system comes in an inflexible standard configuration, and trying to backport any system library will basically destroy your system.
I have to say that it irks the holy living hell out of me that MS breaks backwards compatibility so often...Basically, if you upgrade windows, you have to accept that any software that wasn't written by Microsoft will probably not work in the new version.
It's especially annoying in the business world, because it means that you are forced to maintain crap legacy systems in order to maintain applications that cannot be ported to a better OS, and no, you can't always get a better version of a piece of software that's sole purpose is to diagnose sensor faults in a 1k ton piece of machinery.
Microsoft releases an OS that won't run software that ran on it's own earlier operating system, and also tends to corrupt a music device which is in competition with their own music device and it's Apple's fault? Microsoft has pushed multiple DRM setups and then stopped supporting it's own damn standards but Apple is the bad guy?
I don't buy any drm'd music, but Apple's is surely the least abusive...It allows you to burn it to a cd, which can then be ripped back into an un-drm'd format...Pretty obvious that they did the minimum amount of work that would satisfy record companies that were so damn drm obsessed that they were shipping cd's with a free rootkit included.
Except for the whole: "[T]hese images... are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up [the same] single page of [HTML] with a single picture."
RTFS: Read The Fucking Summary.
That was actually shot down a while ago...Basically, if you can see it from public property, you can't claim ownership of all pictorial representations.
In addition to property-release issues, you also need to think about copyright concerns vis-à-vis buildings if they were built after December 1, 1990. Before that, buildings did not have copyright protection and were thus, by definition, in the public domain. Shoot away.
In general, buildings erected after December 1, 1990 do not pose a big problem either. There is a "photographer's exception" to a building's copyright owner's rights that permits the photography of buildings. This gives a wide leeway to the definition of "building"; everything from gazebos to office towers are included. As long as the building is in a public place, or visible -- and photographable -- from a public place, there is no infringement of the building's copyright owner's rights. This rule includes private as well as public buildings. --American Society of Media Photography
You're giving Microsoft too much credit for understanding what their market "wants". Sure, Office and Windows are pretty user friendly, as long as you don't need to move off the beaten path. But anywhere else? It's like they just stagger around doing things and when something takes off, they don't really understand why.
You know that this comment is an outgrowth of some marketing discussion where they're trying to figure out why the game did so well, and they're completely missing the lesson about "quality" and "originality" and writing the higher-than-expected sales off on the elusive girl-gamer market that makes titles like "The Sims" so popular.
And as always, it is a great time to be a mouse with cancer.
The real irony is when we succeed in wiping out cancer in mice a full decade before we do it for people.
Public forums are never held accountable for libel posted on their pages. The most that will happen is that the company will subpoena them for the identity of the individual who posted the information in the first place.
Even that seldom comes to anything.
As soon as you said POP3 you went off the deep end. No corporation is going to migrate from MAPI (MS's weird IMAP clone) to POP3, and frankly, there is no reason why they should.
POP3 is fine if you're only ever going to be working in one place, but the first time you start working from home, and part of your mail goes home, and part of it is at the office, or you have to start screwing around with "leave messages on server"...It's far more trouble than it's worth, and it's an obvious loss of functionality. Say goodbye to web mail interfaces.
And that doesn't even touch the other crap that you're going to need to provide to get people off Exchange. You need shared calendars, shared email folders, and fancy LDAP mail directories, and shared contacts, tasks, notes...There is no open source product out there that provides half that stuff.
Then lets talk about the Crackberry, and all the goddamn executives that make you make everything friendly to their goddamn PDAs. All this stuff integrates with Microsoft. All this stuff integrates with Lotus. Do you have any conception how annoying it is to build hotsyncing into an application?
In order to build a product to replace Exchange, you first have to understand why people want more than just an email client. Christ, if that was all they really needed, we could still be running mm or Pine.
Which version of Exchange are you using? In 2003 they have a "Premium" version of the OWA application which comes with all the annoying Active X crap.
This Page talks about OWA 2003 and the different versions.
Don't ask me why they felt the need to break standards. It's microsoft. Huge pain in my ass though because the management wanted access to the "Premium" web app from outside the LAN, and that's a total bitch on the secure proxy I set up...Finally got someone higher up in corporate to tell them they couldn't have it because it's a security risk, so it's something of a sore subject with me.
Eh people "Pie in the Sky" Linux, and they hate to hear you throw down on WINE, but I've had WINE bite me in the ass over and over again, and as far as I'm concerned, you're fricking insane to depend on WINE for anything.
And I like Evolution, and I've used Evolution exclusively at home for years, but it will never, ever replace Outlook in a work environment unless they do some sort of a dramatic overhaul.
And I still don't think Star/Open Office will ever beat out Microsoft office, just because the tight integration isn't there. MS Office is a hell of a product.