im not even going to bother googling the stats on that one, but since ive never heard of SharePoint before...
The SharePoint primer for the clueless and lazy:
Microsoft has sold more than 100 million seat licenses since 2001 and is on track to generate $1 billion in SharePoint-related revenue this year.
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
General Mills, a longtime SharePoint user, is replacing all its file sharing systems with SharePoint and has begun using it for blogs and wikis, and to automate some workflows. The maker of Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, and 100 other food brands counts 20,000 active SharePoint users, with more than 1,500 people contributing content on a regular basis.
Most proprietary software companies spend little money on software development. The big players have margins close to 80% with a significant portion of their expenses in marketing and sales.
The geek throws out numbers without proof and expects them to be taken at face value.
MIcrosoft spends $9.5 billion a year on R&D.
That represents 50% of its pre-tax profit:
$250-300 million in pure research. Investments in applied research - not product related - on the same scale. Call it $1-1.5 billion total.
The rest of the money going to Microsoft's five core business groups.
Now, a massive movement to open source software will cause less total employment in the software industry, but the vast majority of those losses will be in non-technical fields.
You could argue - with some justice, I think - that FOSS needs dramatically more investment and staffing in "non-technical" fields.
The FOSS-oriented geek tends to see everything in software development as a narrowly defined problem in engineering.
There are times when he never sees it coming.
When he misses his chance:
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?
The idea is, basically, that you vote your friends into your parliament and they pass laws that forbid hi-tech crowd control.
This will work only in a parliamentary democracy, with fair elections and multiple parties. This will not work in today's USA because of the one-party (some say two-party) rule.
No government will willingly surrender its right to effective crowd control.
That is typically the sign of its imminent collapse and the emergence of something far more dangerous - all you will accomplish is a return to low-tech methods.
The shield and the bludgeon. The fire hose. The firearm.
The American third "party" tends to be more nativist and reactionary than progressive. I suspect that the anti-geek coalition would emerge far stronger than any American incarnation of the Pirate Party.
Tailgating is not a zero risk event. Which is riskier?
The chain reaction collision in heavy traffic. There is no way the drivers behind the driver behind you can anticipate the EMP burst.
There is also the interesting question of whether you have effectively contained and controlled the blast- a question that won't be answered until after you have pressed the big red button.
So "caring about driving and their car" mysteriously repels the morons who jump lights, drive too fast
The classic fifties tail-fin car was massive - overweight and unresponsive. The suspension and steering were "soft," giving you little sense or feel of the road.
Notably, a number of the panelists on the hearing about the sinking of the Titanic expressed serious doubts that mere ice could have torn iron
The collision with the iceberg didn't have to tear anything, it only had to buckle the plates and pop the rivets.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 1
I've lived in both East Asia and Europe for the past 6 years of my life and every time I come back home I am just shocked at the utter disdain towards people who don't drive.
Its no wonder why Americans are the fattest people in the world
The U.S. ranks ninth.
Canada 35th, about the same as Mongolia, Germany, Cuba or the Bahamas.
The pedestrian and the cyclist of the 1890s felt persecuted as well. It has much to do with the way the American city evolved.
The eastern American city is the creation of the railroad and the streetcar.
There was never any great need or desire to build cities as densely packed as those of Europe or Asia - and the migration of the middle class to the suburbs was well under away before the American Civil War.
The American city of the south and southwest is a creation of the air conditioner. Their explosive growth belongs to the post-war years of the 1950s. A generation earlier, they looked - and felt - very different.
the more the government becomes responsible for taking care of us, the more motivated they are to regulate our behavior to keep the costs of said care down.
The same applies to everyone who shares the burden and cost of your health care.
Your boss will listen when the HMO tells him to ditch the cigarette machines and sugared sodas.
Your wife will have even more to say when the next physical exam threatens to put you and your family in the high-risk pool.
The more Microsoft makes fuss about Chrome Frame the more people will find out about this options.
The only "fuss" I'm hearing about Chrome Frame is on Slashdot. The geek needs to remember that to almost everyone else Google remains simply a search engine.
In addition to that, if you look at normal automotive development, you'll see that a lot of the R&D actually takes place in the F1 circuit. Talk about expensive
One of Henry Ford's first discoveries was that the mass market product generates a lot of cash for R&D.
Henry put 20 million cars on the road.
The Stanleys, 11,000.
The Duesenbergs less than 1,000.
In 1930 a Duesenberg chassis would have set you back $8500. The finished price with coachwork around $15 to $20,000.
Ford was in the business of basic transportation. The Srtanleys and the Duesenbergs were building a land-yacht.
I believe the Negroponte's goal is to get computers into the hands of students in developing countries. Not to promote open source software. Now, I know from experience that open source software is significantly less expensive on a per seat basis... All Negroponte is doing is adjusting to his customers to get the hardware through the door. Now I'd prefer he use his bully pulpit to drive the cost savings and flexibility open source provides, but they've chosen not to. The technology is easy, the politics are hard.
The customer was the third world education minister - and he didn't like the product. Summary of Laptop Orders
The demand for Windows and Office came from the bottom up.
A US-based non profit organization called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is planning to distribute three million XO laptops, each costing Rupees 11000, among children entering schools by the end of 2009.
It has already distributed 1000 laptops in 20 schools in UP, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on an experimental basis.
Its ultimate mission is to ensure that all school children, aged between five and 12, are able to effectively engage with their own personal laptop.
Each XO PC comes with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office pre-loaded, besides many other features.
Satish Jha, President and C.E.O, OLPC India, said the project is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Bright star Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, Microsoft, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat.
Each company has donated two million dollars. Microsoft is contributing through its features that are fitted into the XOs
The OLPC has set up its India office in New Delhi.
For 80% of the users it can do everything they need. For 90% of the users it can 90% of what they need, and for 100% of the users it can do 80% of what they want. While those are made up statistics, I believe that 80% of the market can switch to a Linux desktop tomorrow and be just as productive as it is today. The problem is convincing them to do it. What the Linux desktop really needs is a marketing budget.
How about some more made-up stats:
100% of the user's 32 bit Windows apps will run under Win 7.
100% of the user's 64 bit Windows apps will run under 64 bit Win 7.
100% of the user's FOSS apps will run under Win 7 - and he can reasonably expect damn near everything in FOSS for the Linux desktop to be ported to Windows or begin as a native Windows app.
There are workable solutions for classic MSDOS and Windows games. gog.com
When the user goes shopping for a new PC he'll find a broad spectrum of Windows product in every form factor and at every price point.
Every desktop-oriented Linux distribution has video drivers built in that provide basic support for anything a "normal user" will need to do. If the user wants to play games or whatever most desktop-oriented distributions provide a nice GUI to download and install the proprietary drivers automatically.
To me this reads like a very strange definition of "normal" - particularly in the home market - where media play and gaming are important to a very broad spectrum of users.
They not only add the.Net plugin to Firefox without asking you, they change the useragent string for Firefox... oh and the.Net plugin doesn't have a built-in uninstaller like every other plugin.
The Update:
In.NET Framework 3.5 SP1, the.NET Framework Assistant enables Firefox to use the ClickOnce technology that is included in the.NET Framework. The.NET Framework Assistant is added at the machine-level to enable its functionality for all users on the machine. As a result, the Uninstall button is shown as unavailable in the Firefox Add-ons list because standard users are not permitted to uninstall machine-level components.
In this update for.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and in Windows 7, the.NET Framework Assistant will be installed on a per-user basis. As a result, the Uninstall button will be functional in the Firefox Add-ons list.
This update will also make this version of the.NET Framework Assistant for Firefox compatible with future versions of the Firefox browser. To properly update the.NET Framework Assistant, this update must be applied while the extension is enabled in Firefox.... Updates to the.NET Framework Assistant may include updates to the Windows Presentation Foundation Plug-in for Firefox causing it to be enabled upon its initial update.
There is a defacto standard that works relatively well (and keeps getting better) until that changes gaming on linux is king of screwed
Microsoft can sit down at a table with the hardware and software developers, hammer out a roadmap for gaming on the Windows platform - audio, video, anything than seems relevant - and make it happen.
I mean, I have only twice ever heard of someone buying MS software. Once, when someone bought Vista. I ended the friendship, because he thought it would be the greatest OS, and that MS is a nice company.
1 Open Amazon.com. 2 Search for software best sellers. 3 Case closed.
Which is likely why they started suggesting people use it as a darknet--connect only to people / nodes you know.
But how well do you know them - and how far can you trust them? It strikes me that with each node the "web of trust" becomes more fragile.
If I know from other sources that A, B and C are as thick as thieves and that C, E and F are much the same - then perhaps the darknet is not so very dark at all.
Redmond may not be strictly speaking a company town - but 30,000 high-skilled. high-paying, jobs and 8 million square feet of taxable office space is worth something to city of 49,000.
Specifically, it translates to a median family income of $95,000.
If you want to complain about the bridge, you might more usefully ask why the city needed stimulus fund to build it.Redmond, Washington
I wouldn't report any kind of crime or safety hazard if this becomes a regular tactic.
The key word here is "report" - not "exploit."
as in rummaging through the DA's files when you find his door unlocked.
The geek reminds me of the born loser - the all-day-sucker - in the murder mystery who everyone remembers as being the man they saw breaking the window, standing in the library, toying with the knife.
You report the break-in - if for no better reason than because you don't know who is following in your tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits
SharePoint is a $1.3 billion dollar a year hit.
How often do you expect to see numbers like that in this business?
im not even going to bother googling the stats on that one, but since ive never heard of SharePoint before...
The SharePoint primer for the clueless and lazy:
Microsoft has sold more than 100 million seat licenses since 2001
and is on track to generate $1 billion in SharePoint-related revenue this year.
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
General Mills, a longtime SharePoint user, is replacing all its file sharing systems with SharePoint and has begun using it for blogs and wikis, and to automate some workflows. The maker of Cheerios, Häagen-Dazs, and 100 other food brands counts 20,000 active SharePoint users, with more than 1,500 people contributing content on a regular basis.
Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling? [Nov 1, 2008]
Just refer to it as the GNU Image Manipulation Program. If anyone calls it GIMP, tell them it is an unfortunately acronym, and move on.
The problem is that unfortunate acronyms and obscure WTF? names -
Ogg Vorblis Theora Thusnelda, I'm looking at you, kid -
undermine the credibility of your project and are all to common in FOSS.
The image it conveys is that of a dork in Star Trek briefs geeking out over the comic books he keeps under his bed.
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC...has the smarts to not be in retail.
This attitude isn't helpful when you need the salesman to make the sale.
It might just explain why no one is busting their gut to push OEM Linux in big box retail.
Which is where you need to be if you want Linux to win more than a fractional 1% share of the consumer desktop.
Most proprietary software companies spend little money on software development. The big players have margins close to 80% with a significant portion of their expenses in marketing and sales.
The geek throws out numbers without proof and expects them to be taken at face value.
MIcrosoft spends $9.5 billion a year on R&D.
That represents 50% of its pre-tax profit:
$250-300 million in pure research. Investments in applied research - not product related - on the same scale. Call it $1-1.5 billion total.
The rest of the money going to Microsoft's five core business groups.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer On "Moving The Needle" [Sept 28], Microsoft boosts research budget and targets public safety[April 15]
Now, a massive movement to open source software will cause less total employment in the software industry, but the vast majority of those losses will be in non-technical fields.
You could argue - with some justice, I think - that FOSS needs dramatically more investment and staffing in "non-technical" fields.
The FOSS-oriented geek tends to see everything in software development as a narrowly defined problem in engineering.
There are times when he never sees it coming.
When he misses his chance:
Ask CIOs about their collaboration strategy, and a good number will start rattling off SharePoint projects. The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget. Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?
The idea is, basically, that you vote your friends into your parliament and they pass laws that forbid hi-tech crowd control.
This will work only in a parliamentary democracy, with fair elections and multiple parties. This will not work in today's USA because of the one-party (some say two-party) rule.
No government will willingly surrender its right to effective crowd control.
That is typically the sign of its imminent collapse and the emergence of something far more dangerous -
all you will accomplish is a return to low-tech methods.
The shield and the bludgeon. The fire hose. The firearm.
The American third "party" tends to be more nativist and reactionary than progressive. I suspect that the anti-geek coalition would emerge far stronger than any American incarnation of the Pirate Party.
Tailgating is not a zero risk event. Which is riskier?
The chain reaction collision in heavy traffic. There is no way the drivers behind the driver behind you can anticipate the EMP burst.
There is also the interesting question of whether you have effectively contained and controlled the blast-
a question that won't be answered until after you have pressed the big red button.
So "caring about driving and their car" mysteriously repels the morons who jump lights, drive too fast
The classic fifties tail-fin car was massive - overweight and unresponsive. The suspension and steering were "soft," giving you little sense or feel of the road.
Notably, a number of the panelists on the hearing about the sinking of the Titanic expressed serious doubts that mere ice could have torn iron
The collision with the iceberg didn't have to tear anything, it only had to buckle the plates and pop the rivets.
I've lived in both East Asia and Europe for the past 6 years of my life and every time I come back home I am just shocked at the utter disdain towards people who don't drive.
Its no wonder why Americans are the fattest people in the world
The U.S. ranks ninth.
Canada 35th, about the same as Mongolia, Germany, Cuba or the Bahamas.
Japan, 163.
But below that you are not talking "thin" - you are talking "starved." World's Fattest Countries
The pedestrian and the cyclist of the 1890s felt persecuted as well. It has much to do with the way the American city evolved.
The eastern American city is the creation of the railroad and the streetcar.
There was never any great need or desire to build cities as densely packed as those of Europe or Asia - and the migration of the middle class to the suburbs was well under away before the American Civil War.
The American city of the south and southwest is a creation of the air conditioner. Their explosive growth belongs to the post-war years of the 1950s. A generation earlier, they looked - and felt - very different.
the more the government becomes responsible for taking care of us, the more motivated they are to regulate our behavior to keep the costs of said care down.
The same applies to everyone who shares the burden and cost of your health care.
Your boss will listen when the HMO tells him to ditch the cigarette machines and sugared sodas.
Your wife will have even more to say when the next physical exam threatens to put you and your family in the high-risk pool.
That $30 Atari game from 1977 would cost $108 in 2009 dollars.
The $80 NES game from 1985, $120. Inflation Calculator: The Changing Value of a Dollar
The more Microsoft makes fuss about Chrome Frame the more people will find out about this options.
The only "fuss" I'm hearing about Chrome Frame is on Slashdot. The geek needs to remember that to almost everyone else Google remains simply a search engine.
In addition to that, if you look at normal automotive development, you'll see that a lot of the R&D actually takes place in the F1 circuit. Talk about expensive
One of Henry Ford's first discoveries was that the mass market product generates a lot of cash for R&D.
Henry put 20 million cars on the road.
The Stanleys, 11,000.
The Duesenbergs less than 1,000.
In 1930 a Duesenberg chassis would have set you back $8500. The finished price with coachwork around $15 to $20,000.
Ford was in the business of basic transportation. The Srtanleys and the Duesenbergs were building a land-yacht.
I believe the Negroponte's goal is to get computers into the hands of students in developing countries. Not to promote open source software. Now, I know from experience that open source software is significantly less expensive on a per seat basis... All Negroponte is doing is adjusting to his customers to get the hardware through the door. Now I'd prefer he use his bully pulpit to drive the cost savings and flexibility open source provides, but they've chosen not to. The technology is easy, the politics are hard.
The customer was the third world education minister - and he didn't like the product. Summary of Laptop Orders
The demand for Windows and Office came from the bottom up.
A US-based non profit organization called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is planning to distribute three million XO laptops, each costing Rupees 11000, among children entering schools by the end of 2009.
It has already distributed 1000 laptops in 20 schools in UP, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on an experimental basis.
Its ultimate mission is to ensure that all school children, aged between five and 12, are able to effectively engage with their own personal laptop.
Each XO PC comes with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office pre-loaded, besides many other features.
Satish Jha, President and C.E.O, OLPC India, said the project is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Bright star Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, Microsoft, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat.
Each company has donated two million dollars. Microsoft is contributing through its features that are fitted into the XOs
The OLPC has set up its India office in New Delhi.
US-based outfit to distribute three million laptops to poor Indian rural kids [Reuters July 10]
The largest single deployment of the the XO ever.
Ten times that of anything which came before - it triples the XO's installed base - and it is the first significant deployment of the XO in Asia.
These are hugely significant landmarks.
But not a word, not a breath, of the story seems to have penetrated Slashdot.
Or hide a microSD card inside a cake? The plastic on a uSD might melt a little, but I suspect the information will still be there.
This crackpot scheme is worthy of Boris Badanov or an episode from Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy.
How about some more made-up stats:
100% of the user's 32 bit Windows apps will run under Win 7.
100% of the user's 64 bit Windows apps will run under 64 bit Win 7.
100% of the user's FOSS apps will run under Win 7 - and he can reasonably expect damn near everything in FOSS for the Linux desktop to be ported to Windows or begin as a native Windows app.
There are workable solutions for classic MSDOS and Windows games. gog.com
When the user goes shopping for a new PC he'll find a broad spectrum of Windows product in every form factor and at every price point.
So tell me again why he needs Linux.
Every desktop-oriented Linux distribution has video drivers built in that provide basic support for anything a "normal user" will need to do. If the user wants to play games or whatever most desktop-oriented distributions provide a nice GUI to download and install the proprietary drivers automatically.
To me this reads like a very strange definition of "normal" - particularly in the home market - where media play and gaming are important to a very broad spectrum of users.
The Update:
In .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, the .NET Framework Assistant enables Firefox to use the ClickOnce technology that is included in the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework Assistant is added at the machine-level to enable its functionality for all users on the machine. As a result, the Uninstall button is shown as unavailable in the Firefox Add-ons list because standard users are not permitted to uninstall machine-level components.
In this update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and in Windows 7, the .NET Framework Assistant will be installed on a per-user basis. As a result, the Uninstall button will be functional in the Firefox Add-ons list.
This update will also make this version of the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox compatible with future versions of the Firefox browser. To properly update the .NET Framework Assistant, this update must be applied while the extension is enabled in Firefox. ... Updates to the .NET Framework Assistant may include updates to the Windows Presentation Foundation Plug-in for Firefox causing it to be enabled upon its initial update.
Update to .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 for the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 for Firefox [May 6 2009] [about 700 KB]
The update is in .Net framework 4.0, currently in beta. How to remove the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox [June 2, 2009]
There is a defacto standard that works relatively well (and keeps getting better) until that changes gaming on linux is king of screwed
Microsoft can sit down at a table with the hardware and software developers, hammer out a roadmap for gaming on the Windows platform - audio, video, anything than seems relevant - and make it happen.
I mean, I have only twice ever heard of someone buying MS software. Once, when someone bought Vista. I ended the friendship, because he thought it would be the greatest OS, and that MS is a nice company.
1 Open Amazon.com.
2 Search for software best sellers.
3 Case closed.
Which is likely why they started suggesting people use it as a darknet--connect only to people / nodes you know.
But how well do you know them - and how far can you trust them? It strikes me that with each node the "web of trust" becomes more fragile.
If I know from other sources that A, B and C are as thick as thieves and that C, E and F are much the same - then perhaps the darknet is not so very dark at all.
Microsoft is paying $17.5 million - about half the cost of the bridge. Critics slam Microsoft bridge as waste of stimulus money [March 31]
Redmond may not be strictly speaking a company town -
but 30,000 high-skilled. high-paying, jobs and 8 million square feet of taxable office space is worth something to city of 49,000.
Specifically, it translates to a median family income of $95,000.
If you want to complain about the bridge, you might more usefully ask why the city needed stimulus fund to build it.Redmond, Washington
...couldn't he fix them himself? With supervision, I mean.
It's always easier to start a fire than to rebuild the house.
But the experience will prove useful the next time you feel like tossing a match.
The key word here is "report" - not "exploit."
as in rummaging through the DA's files when you find his door unlocked.
The geek reminds me of the born loser - the all-day-sucker - in the murder mystery who everyone remembers as being the man they saw breaking the window, standing in the library, toying with the knife.
You report the break-in - if for no better reason than because you don't know who is following in your tracks.