I'm liberal. I'm fiscally conservative. I believe in the market. Stop the process and let prices go up. Tell Americans that they don't want to import gas from Russia and Iran. If they don't listen to you then you were wrong all along.
The argument most trolls use is that you can use OO rather than MS Office, since you save the cost of buying licenses when using OO over MS Office, you get a cost savings in that aspect.
Of course, for most companies, given the choice between free OO and paying for MS Office, they'll still choose MS Office for a number of reasons.
No retraining needed being the biggest reason. The second being that OO is asstastic in almost every imaginable way for your everyday desk jockey that just wants to get their job done and not be part of some crusade against MS.
All the cost savings depends on ignoring the fact that people are used to Office, even the transition to the ribbon isn't really that bad, and MS Office has far more features and better performance, like it or not. Retraining the people who use Office and the IT staff that supports it is expensive, and really in the grand scheme of thing, software licenses are SO trivial to a business that the argument for savings is a joke. The computer itself will use more power in a few years than the cost of licenses for the software on it.
The cost savings argument is rather ignorant and short sighted, its only true if you have such tunnel vision that you ignore all the other work that goes into using the tool.
I'm not wiling to be the one to push to convert people to OpenOffice. It's always risky to implement change, and most people don't have any will to change even for the better if they don't get something for it directly. (I guess if you told everyone at the company that they would get the license saving's for two years as direct payment, they prorbaly would switch likity split.)
But I would take difference with the idea that OpenOffice is so less capable than MS Office. The only major item that has ever come up in years of usage was that oocalc can't open as large a spreadsheet. I'm created dozens of reports (distributed in PDF once done), ran departments, managed people wrote countless memos all using OpenOffice. It's perfectly capable as long as you don't need to collaborate with someone who is using a large Word document.
Personally I was always sad that WordPerfect diminished so long ago. That was a great WP.
That's too bad. I've been a Sprint customer for a while and never really had an issue. A couple of years ago I set up a family data plan which everybody loves. I never had a billing issue, but it's fixed rate (and we never get to the daytime cap). Years ago one person I knew complained about their coverage in NYC, but it seems to be good. I think some of it is getting a good phone. The "free" phones tend to be crap, and just a few bucks more will get you something decent insofar as signal reception.
If you want to see a real free trade agreement, you need look no further than our own constitution:
Article I, Section 9. No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
That's it. In contrast CAFTA is 3700 pages long. NAFTA is 2000 pages long. These agreements do not give freedom, they take it away.
I have see two Sony Vio laptops, which tend to be a bit underpowered, esp, under the weight of fat fat Vista. The minute you take it out of an overnight sleep Vista will trash the disk for 20 min. The near zero latency of the SSD means the laptop is usable from the start, the HD is like molasses.
One could argue against sw bloat, or that the SSD doesn't actually save power in some cases but from a raw performance eliminating the seek and rotational delays can be a huge boon. Most people don't need capacity, they are well under the drive storage needs.
I did find this interesting:
While it may seem odd that the Seagate drive performed better on a restart than on a cold boot, keep in mind that the drive is still spinning and plenty of OS data is still residing in memory.
I didn't think that data in memory (not in a disk cache) would be preserved across boots. I think this does not make sense.
The faiulre mode of an SSD is disconcerting to me. People don't backup enough as is it.
You can't even buy SPARC workstations new. What is disturbing is that the applications haven't come over with Solaris to x86. Solaris x86 is a very solid implementation, but w/o the apps it going to be a moot point.
Has anyone else noticed this?
I've worked in public lab settings. After one winter where I had a number of colds, I started using a hand sanitizer regularly -- every time I came off of one of the keyboards. It made a huge difference. I think that any point of contact for multiple people, which is basically not clean ever is a health risk.
If it's you home keyboard, I think this is less of an issue, just given the lower number of people using the device.
I'm not sure how true that is given wireless and satellite technologies. If I skip that issue though, I would say that this is reasonable. The US suffers for its constant sprawl in many ways, not just bandwidth availability. If the government would stop constantly subsidizing this expensive and wasteful habit, we would have more density and less issues like this. All utilities in this country get huge subsidies, or are forced to tax for "fair access." This is just the latest in a long line.
What do we think would be the problem with proposing, "You need to live closer to an urban hub, or pay the full cost of access?" Local communities could band together to reduce the costs.
I would say, it seems to me that the real complaint is often that people would like to live way out in their communities,and want to know why they can't have the same services at the same price as those willing to deal with more density. That's what the open market would bring.
That sounds easy to do, but most offices are more decentralized than that. Its really hard to force a particular application set. When you can, management's first inclination is usually to go with the safer market alternative, which in this day is MS.
Yes, that's true. The issue comes up with the set of applications they need to run. When someone wants to run Adobe Acrobat Pro or Illustrator; or the new webmaster needs to run Dreamweaver, then Linux becomes limiting. This is really what holds back adoption.
You should talk to your advisor to see if he would have a problem if an NDA is required, since it could affect publishability.
You should be checking on the MS oriented technical lists and forums. You're talking about some very deep and complicated types of coding, and your run of the mill programmer or admin is not the best resource.
Fact is that running or programming Unix based systems in production environments is not well learned by use of a book. It's fine if you're looking to plunk around, but you probably know the basics anyway.
If there is some training available through the company, that's great. Number one is to find a good mentor and/or systems group; an apprentice experience that can really make the difference. That's because most books will tell the how to with clarity, but often skip the why parts.
There are also difference in the major variants, [Linux, *BSD and System V] which take time and practice to learn. This stuff will follow as you gain experience.
Yeah that was my first thought as well. While it's great to see Linux getting desktop exposure, it's always a loss when a mature Unix needs to take the hit.
I bet that part of the reason is that Solaris x86 has Gnome support, but doesn't have tight KDE integration. [Note: I'm more of a Gnome user myself.]
They also seem to be doing a one-to-one migration of the clients. I was wondering of they might be moving to a more "thin client" model. Anybody have more details?
Java's JDBC does support this on the connection, but more as an optimization than security. The only solid way to secure the data is to grant permissions properly in the DB. If you have two roles (one for update one for read), then create two DB users.
Really the weakness comes more from the application tiers which don't support good authentication mechanisms. The constant use of a single DB login for efficiency, while giving up all of the powerful data protection tools is the real problem.
Absolutly. It should also be understood that what made PCs (of any kind) a break away success was the ability to avoid the IT guys always telling you what you need, and never giving you what you want. Until and unless a thin client give application flexibility to the organization as a whole instead of just handing power back to the IT shops, it ain't gonna happen.
Even for archiving, PDF looses all of the metadata. If you'd like to search for a formula, as opposed to just some text (like 2x), PDF doesn't help. What something is can be just as important in some cases as the text. When people stop thinking of documents as things you just print out, that will become apparent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm liberal. I'm fiscally conservative. I believe in the market. Stop the process and let prices go up. Tell Americans that they don't want to import gas from Russia and Iran. If they don't listen to you then you were wrong all along.
I always figured that Google's interest is in the free flow of your information. They seem to do a pretty good job keeping their own secrets.
On behalf of Sun...
Create two account with the same UID. Log in on both accounts (you can set them to auto-login you lazy person.) Viola!
The argument most trolls use is that you can use OO rather than MS Office, since you save the cost of buying licenses when using OO over MS Office, you get a cost savings in that aspect.
Of course, for most companies, given the choice between free OO and paying for MS Office, they'll still choose MS Office for a number of reasons.
No retraining needed being the biggest reason. The second being that OO is asstastic in almost every imaginable way for your everyday desk jockey that just wants to get their job done and not be part of some crusade against MS.
All the cost savings depends on ignoring the fact that people are used to Office, even the transition to the ribbon isn't really that bad, and MS Office has far more features and better performance, like it or not. Retraining the people who use Office and the IT staff that supports it is expensive, and really in the grand scheme of thing, software licenses are SO trivial to a business that the argument for savings is a joke. The computer itself will use more power in a few years than the cost of licenses for the software on it.
The cost savings argument is rather ignorant and short sighted, its only true if you have such tunnel vision that you ignore all the other work that goes into using the tool.
I'm not wiling to be the one to push to convert people to OpenOffice. It's always risky to implement change, and most people don't have any will to change even for the better if they don't get something for it directly. (I guess if you told everyone at the company that they would get the license saving's for two years as direct payment, they prorbaly would switch likity split.)
But I would take difference with the idea that OpenOffice is so less capable than MS Office. The only major item that has ever come up in years of usage was that oocalc can't open as large a spreadsheet. I'm created dozens of reports (distributed in PDF once done), ran departments, managed people wrote countless memos all using OpenOffice. It's perfectly capable as long as you don't need to collaborate with someone who is using a large Word document.
Personally I was always sad that WordPerfect diminished so long ago. That was a great WP.
That's too bad. I've been a Sprint customer for a while and never really had an issue. A couple of years ago I set up a family data plan which everybody loves. I never had a billing issue, but it's fixed rate (and we never get to the daytime cap). Years ago one person I knew complained about their coverage in NYC, but it seems to be good. I think some of it is getting a good phone. The "free" phones tend to be crap, and just a few bucks more will get you something decent insofar as signal reception.
If you want to see a real free trade agreement, you need look no further than our own constitution:
Article I, Section 9. No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state. No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
That's it. In contrast CAFTA is 3700 pages long. NAFTA is 2000 pages long. These agreements do not give freedom, they take it away.
The best reply in a sea of rants.
Boom & bust baby.
I have see two Sony Vio laptops, which tend to be a bit underpowered, esp, under the weight of fat fat Vista. The minute you take it out of an overnight sleep Vista will trash the disk for 20 min. The near zero latency of the SSD means the laptop is usable from the start, the HD is like molasses.
One could argue against sw bloat, or that the SSD doesn't actually save power in some cases but from a raw performance eliminating the seek and rotational delays can be a huge boon. Most people don't need capacity, they are well under the drive storage needs.
I did find this interesting:
I didn't think that data in memory (not in a disk cache) would be preserved across boots. I think this does not make sense.
The faiulre mode of an SSD is disconcerting to me. People don't backup enough as is it.
You can't even buy SPARC workstations new. What is disturbing is that the applications haven't come over with Solaris to x86. Solaris x86 is a very solid implementation, but w/o the apps it going to be a moot point. Has anyone else noticed this?
I've worked in public lab settings. After one winter where I had a number of colds, I started using a hand sanitizer regularly -- every time I came off of one of the keyboards. It made a huge difference. I think that any point of contact for multiple people, which is basically not clean ever is a health risk.
If it's you home keyboard, I think this is less of an issue, just given the lower number of people using the device.
What do we think would be the problem with proposing, "You need to live closer to an urban hub, or pay the full cost of access?" Local communities could band together to reduce the costs.
I would say, it seems to me that the real complaint is often that people would like to live way out in their communities,and want to know why they can't have the same services at the same price as those willing to deal with more density. That's what the open market would bring.
That sounds easy to do, but most offices are more decentralized than that. Its really hard to force a particular application set. When you can, management's first inclination is usually to go with the safer market alternative, which in this day is MS.
Yes, that's true. The issue comes up with the set of applications they need to run. When someone wants to run Adobe Acrobat Pro or Illustrator; or the new webmaster needs to run Dreamweaver, then Linux becomes limiting. This is really what holds back adoption.
Yes, true. NetDog? EtherBarnicle? InterTurd? --This really should have been a slashdot poll.
"There are two kinds of people. Sheep and sharks. Anyone who is a sheep is fired. Who is a sheep?"
Fact is that running or programming Unix based systems in production environments is not well learned by use of a book. It's fine if you're looking to plunk around, but you probably know the basics anyway.
If there is some training available through the company, that's great. Number one is to find a good mentor and/or systems group; an apprentice experience that can really make the difference. That's because most books will tell the how to with clarity, but often skip the why parts.
There are also difference in the major variants, [Linux, *BSD and System V] which take time and practice to learn. This stuff will follow as you gain experience.
Actually, a lot of the setups are kiosk mode. So these are less than your typical desktop users. (Yikes!)
I bet that part of the reason is that Solaris x86 has Gnome support, but doesn't have tight KDE integration. [Note: I'm more of a Gnome user myself.] They also seem to be doing a one-to-one migration of the clients. I was wondering of they might be moving to a more "thin client" model. Anybody have more details?
Really the weakness comes more from the application tiers which don't support good authentication mechanisms. The constant use of a single DB login for efficiency, while giving up all of the powerful data protection tools is the real problem.
Absolutly. It should also be understood that what made PCs (of any kind) a break away success was the ability to avoid the IT guys always telling you what you need, and never giving you what you want. Until and unless a thin client give application flexibility to the organization as a whole instead of just handing power back to the IT shops, it ain't gonna happen.
Boneless chicken farm.
That's true, but it appears that no one is dropping Google. :)
Even for archiving, PDF looses all of the metadata. If you'd like to search for a formula, as opposed to just some text (like 2x), PDF doesn't help. What something is can be just as important in some cases as the text. When people stop thinking of documents as things you just print out, that will become apparent.