Gmail kicks the shit out of the web access client. Yahoo! mail kicks the shit out of the web access client.
I can't search at all, or select all messages in a view in OWC. It's pretty much the same since I first used it (well, it used to work only in IE/Windows; now it's at least accessible from other browsers).
Lotus Notes is ass-ugly, but I'd never need a web client, as I'd replicate the mail database and have things locally. (but it is ass-ugly, and even the last time I saw it - ~v6 - still seemed to have an awful time rendering markup in email.
The latest Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint work together absolutely amazingly if your sysadmin... configured them correctly instead of relying on the installer or 3rd party hacks. would you please qualify "absolutely amazingly" and "configured them correctly" - we've got tens of Exchange servers and probably half an admin for each of them. THEY want nothing to do with allowing SharePoints, workflowing from mail to other apps, etc.
this has been the case in most Exchange shops I've worked in the last 10 years.
Before that, I was at IBM for four years. In Lotus Notes, *end users* could define team pages and workflows - within their permissions - to receive mail, route mail, publish pages based on content of that mail - in about 10 minutes.
rather than... a collection of hacked together scripts to do things like... getting mail or calendar entries out of exchange is frustratingly convoluted, imo: if i don't want (or can't [it's both]) to run IIS on the actual exchange server, or if I want a java or php app running on another server to access mail contents, it still takes too long to pull a piece of mail w/ a known subject, e.g.
I guess you're saying "in a Microsoft-only environment, with admins in possession of deep product knowledge (which default installers and 3rd party software vendors don't have), Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint is a terriffic solution."
had to play at least some small part in this: the CTO and to-be Software Achitect at MSFT created Notes, and now IBM will help enable the (very sizable) install base to have one less reason NOT to migrate desktops of most "knowledge workers" away from MSFT tech.
It's not just no link in the summary, but none in the article, neither.
Bruce P. summarizes it below, and a poster above mentions Zabbix and Naggios.
There's been a bunch of interested work in monitoring and diagnostics with "Netsaint / Nagios for some time. SysAdmin has had a few *very* cool articles about not just network monitoring with it, but resource monitoring and preventative maintenance of all kinds.
IT Groundwork's done some very interesting things. SpikeSource is doing similar stuff (presumably so "you don't have to"). Splunk is interesting (w/r/t checking log entries against know issues in an automated fashion.) We've leveraged Nagios for "preventative diagnostics" of our Test, Dev and Prod environments. It's worked very well at our scale.
I'm less inclined to get excited about stress testing Java middleware as my hope is JBoss, IBM / Websphere, BEA and Oracle would already be doing that for me. If I'm using Tomcat or Resin, it probably means it's because I can and am less concerned.
I'm going to check out Zabbix now - thanks for the tip.
more usability testing, more QA, and more effective marketing as well as tried-and-true "advertising" techniques, I'd agree.
One of the many wonderful things about the model is we can provide those things ourselves, as individuals, and out of whichever mode of personal reasoning we d*rn well please: directed self-interest (very Randy of Mr. Phipps, btw), volunteerism, revolutionary proclivity, or all or none of the above.
That the bulk of this discussion surrounds the Zealotry v. [*] PoVs means the discussion is, for the most part, missing Mr. Phipp's point.
From the perspective of capitalism, the fact these things are needed (and, IMO, they are) has been and continues to be a fantastic opportunity for those with the wherewithal to provide the "Fit and Finish" needed by many technically and functionally fantastic projects to get them better suited for business.
Someone's got to figure out a way to make this work: it's not about enabling you to sell stuff for US$1, it's about letting you pay publishers US$.10 to click through to a story.
Google's got it down well with AdSense (sure, there're complaints and complainers, legitimate ones, too, but it works well for a lot of people and businesses, and they're working on improvements).
Once you've got the self-contained ecosystem (i.e. where the "currency" remains within the "GRealm"), it's doable. e.g. A publisher racks up dimes in her account by selling click-throughs to her popular blog articles. Those dimes are worth the full US$.10 so long as they're applied to her AdWords account, or Google Base purchases. When she requests a disbursement, Google takes its cut before sending the Cash Money Check.
If you can extend the GRealm (or YRealm, or MSRealm, etc.) to a large enough universe, it'd work very well for a lot of people (producers as well as consumers).
When someone with a compellingly-encompassing realm pulls it off, it adds another tier to the Free->Semi-Free->Subscription-Only models that exist today and "web 3.0" will be well on its way.
I do like Digg's community-driven aspect that tends to surface many interesting articles very rapidly. Slashdot could "easily" offer a community-driven story pipeline if they wanted to (we've talked about itfor years here...)
That said, the signal-to-noise ratio in Digg's discussions is way too crappy. When I go to digg, I wind up following offsite links to original stories; when I come here, it's to participate in the discussions.
And Top / Bottom Ten lists are generall self-serving horse-crap, anyway. (and the audio ad that starts automaticaally when reading this Biz 2.0 is downright offensive)
This is Google we're talking about, right? They'll find a way to project ads onto skittering pigeons in Bryant Park and you're somehow surprised they're placing ads atop videos they're hosting and serving?
if you don't like it, don't watch it
the whole point of having a COMPUTOR is so that you can manipulate your own media, ie get rid of ads.
whose whole point? Not mine, certainly. I user a computer to create my own media (fwiw...); I don't expect to forever to be able to manipulate others' media as I wish and free-of-charge.
i hope more people realize that this is just headed to having all internet videos with commercials on them, without the user knowing what they are even getting.
Unlike television, cable and satelite where you're given a rundown of every advertiser beforehand?
this shit has to be left in the dust by everyone, or you wont recognize the internet in 15 years; it will be like digital cable, only with commercials.
George Carlin's as right as ever: use the knobs to change the station or just turn it off completely. Don't try to take away my ability to chose just because you don't like it.
the online advertising ecosystem - should it take hold for video, as well - will provide a lot of incentive for some creative people to do creative things and perhaps even profit by it. (There must be *some* entertainer you don't begrudge a profit?)
It also creates opportunities for...
hopefully people will keep writing software to prevent this from happening.
bingo - that, too -
Google makes money placing advertising on services people like using. To this point, I still don't mind their advertising. If you do, you should stop using Google.
>> "... what can Google do that would make this more special then any other ubuntu release/spin off?"
Forgive the ad hominem-iness of this, but that's among the most ridiculous and / or soft-balliest tosses ever seen here on Slashdot (that's saying something...).
Three things that immediatly come to mind are 1. billions of US$$, 2. some of the most brilliant and directed engineering minds and 3. humoungous gobs of clout of several stripes (e.g. marketing; visibility; corporate).
Regarding the "trust" it'd bring to GNU/Linux as a platform, allow me to play Devil's Advocate and say it would also bring out the foil hats: would a running a GoogleOS mean they have deep knowledge of your search and other online activities, but also of your application preferences and usage patterns, even the specifics of your local docs, log files, etc?
For my own use and reasons, I would not have an issue with this presuming this the Value of this (speculative) OS outweighed the privacy concerns AND said privacy concerns were fully documented and published.
It's all moot until something actually comes out of Google Labs for use by the public; presuming there even is "Goobuntu / Goonux / GNUgle" work going on, who's to say it's not intended for Internal Use Only?
(I see there's been quite a good, informed dialog sparked by this initial question while I've been thinking / writing / spell checking (silly me...); forgive the -1 Redundancy)
The following is "screaming into an abyss," but what the hell:
Many posters use the "It Just Works" line re Macs and it's true, but it doesn't capture the whole picture and essence of the platform. That Apple controls the hardware and the software and can, therefore, control the quality of the system in its entirty - AND THEN DOES control the quality of the system in its entirty is huge.
I'm writing this on a Dell laptop running WinXP. Dell and Microsoft talk to each other, right? There should be very little going on from the hardware or OS PoV that both companies are unaware of, right? WELL THEN WHY DOES THIS THING SHIT THE BED EVERY TIME I REMOVE IT FROM THE DOCKING STATION? Even when I use "Unlock Computer" function they've so thoughtfully given me? Why are there continual problems waking this from sleep? Why is there tweakiness when I use an external monitor or projector? I have NONE of these issues with an 8-year old PowerBook and 2-year old iBook.
I'll work to stay away from analogs in the car world: of the comforting rumble of a BMW motor, the perfection with which the seats and mirrors can be adjusted or the way the breaks feel as compared to Nissan or a Saturn. I've driven all of those within a short timeframe of one another; all of them get me to the coffee shop. The difference in experience - with the BMW providing the best one - is more than simply a matter of It Just Working.
Side-by-side comparisons are important: I will never say "Machine X can do Z, while Machine Y cannot." Given time, anything is possible on any platform. I've had and have side-by-side machines running Linux (since Slackware 2.3 on a PS/2 [the MicroChAnnel kind]), OS/2, BeOS (when PPC was the only game in town) and Windows. I was a late-comer to the Mac, but my first one (running OS8.x) made so many things possible and easier w/r/t working with audio and video (even in a shared memory, cooperatively multitasking OS) that I didn't feel the need to continue yoking the other machines into doing what I wanted them to.
CAUTION: Generalization Ahead: The DIYers who can get the latest / cheapest motherboard, RAM modules, gpus, etc. are NOT likely the ones spending 12 hours cutting a good 116 seconds of video into a great 60 seconds of video. They're not likely the ones to spend a 65-hour week tweaking and testing an app that runs well for the widest possible audience. They don't likely need or want to spend a weekend working out song transitions, trying the latest softsynths, writing the Next Lame Novel, etc.
By this, I don't mean building / tweaking / performance tuning your workstation is not Fun and Real Work, but I do mean it's generally more an end unto itself (or unto gaming) rather than the means to another end (like a book, an application, a song or a film short). For people more interested in the latter, I recommend trying an elegant, powerful Macintosh - and to let Apple do most of the work for you beforehand.
Fareq wrote:
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill.
Your assertion that Office currently remains King of the Hill does not refute mine that "good enough" alternatives will chip away at Office's marketshare if more of the compatibility issues become non-issues (e.g. via a complete implementation of OpenDocument by MicroSoft).
The second part of your assertion contains faulty logic:
I assert:... Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
Current marketshare levels of the alternatives do not do not refute either of my premises; if marketshare levels of the alternatives were falling, you'd have a point. I do not believe that fewer people are installing and using OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, etc. now than they were last year, for example. More people seem to be discovering they can get the majority of their work done sans the King of the Hill.
As more users explore alternatives, and if MicroSoft fully adopts open standards to improve compatibility with these alternatives, these alternatives would be more attractive to more people. This was the point in my original response to the question "if Office is so superior, why does MS need to lock users in?"
Sure MS office is good, but if its that good, why are they trying to MAKE you use it.
... because if there are other ~office apps that do 80% as well for 80% of the populace for 20% of the costs (and there are), the cash cow becomes skirt steak.
This will more than likely become another (quarter-heartedly) Embrace and Extend instance.
this has potential for some *really* Bad Shi*t to happen: If some other nation - one with fewer good intentions than the US has with regard to these animals - gets their hands on them, who's to say there won't be a Killer Animal Training Arms Race. If that doesn't paint a clear enough picture, think of these four words: Napalm Dromedaries; Simian Tazers.
Like my mother always said, "It's all fun and games until the government-trained killer aquatic mammals wind up in the hands of your country's enemies."
(Man, that was pretty prescient of her...)
So long, and thanks for screwing up AvantSlash (again) with your CSS...
Agreed that that's part of it. And, as we slip down that slope where there are hardware- and OS-level mechanisms determining what we can and cannot view, hear and run, let's please thank the heavens and stars for GNU, the FSF and the thousands of players who've given us the ability to circumvent these things.
I personally don't get too up in arms about "some DRM." I think, e.g.,
FairPlay is pretty fair for consumers. Currently.
I no longer hear (m)any rants about CPU IDs. It's not because it's no longer there - it's because - per the parent post - we're desensitized.
From my PoV, a little governing of our digital Freedoms is acceptable if it means there's incentive for entities to build and offer good services. I thank heavens for the eternal vigilance we're all provided by the likes of GNU and FSF because they're the ones who've made possible the tools that can help us decide for ourselves when others decide to clamp down too tightly (and that threshold will differ for diferent individuals).
I'd built some apps running on an OS/2 "pc server" running in a back closet during my time at IBM. Almost 4 years later, it was still going with my (or any other dev afaik) touching it.
I don't know about "hate," but you make good points.
The publishing house I work for - 37 consumer titles and a bunch of B-to-B - is in the process of migrating EVERYONE away from Quark and their workflow Publishing System to InDesign and k4. I don't think we were the first or the last. That's gotta hurt.
our migration is by no means solely "away from Quark": it's been good, but InDesign / K4 is apparently pretty compelling.
Instead of a "Google lackey," what if they implement a distributed verification people-network of "cotent category experts" a la About.com's Guide Model?
i.e. One or more folks are in charge of Kids' birthday videos, one or more in charge of original animation, and 10,313 are in charge of the various porn categories.
They are "trained," "paid" based on performance, and are moderated (e.g. if copyrighted works slip through on their watch, they are somehow penalized).
The verification bottleneck opens up significantly without Google's staff of Full Time Employees expanding exponentially.
to your point, however, some % of that 58% are likely deleting cookies when e.g. AdAware or Yahoo! antispy is telling them to clean up this "tracking info."
Regardless, it's a Good Thing users are doing this.
From the summary and the concept, this could be a worthwhile service.
Yes, it will be DRM-encumbered and feature at least its fair share of shite: either get over it or don't avail of the service.
More signal, please, and less noise.
I've spent less time with MSFT products than most (OS/2 -> BeOS/Linux -> FreeBSD and now predominantly OS X [with GNU tools all along for the past ~10 years]) and am no apologist, but give the friggin service a chance - OR DON'T - but having a way to easily* pay for, download and play worthwhile video content could very well be... worthwhile.
Peace, lux, and thanks -
* - "easily" meaning I don't spend hours / days / weeks building, tweaking and searching for content i can "steal" / use without paying for / however you feel good about stating it.
Plus the whole concept of receiving payment for recordings of music was unheard of, prior to the advent of recording technology.
?
Now, onto "Guilt" :
There's something of an existing "social contract" that says "in return for [Product or Service X], I will provide [Compensation Y]." The contract is a multilateral one: you can disagree with what constitutes a [Product or Service X]; you may rail against the rate or form of [Compensation Y], but until the sides agree to change the terms and conditions, you are operating outside the confines of the current contract.
This is where, for some people, Guilt can enter the picture.
Now, I'm off to take ownership of my neighbor's Lamborghini - The entire concept of receivingpayment for fine Italian sportscars was unheard of before the advent of the piston engine...
Getting music is only "free" if your time and effort are worthless: if it's easier, faster and of higher quality to get the new Beck record from iTunes , it's worth it to purchase legitimately than to try and get it other ways.
Much like the scheme presented in the article, please remember that the "free" file sharing networks requires a broad base of participants to make them run. The utility of the "free" networks improves or deteriorates based on the numbers of people engaged in the activity of sharing freely:
even at US$.99, I would bet there has been an affect on the quality/quantity/availability of music on the "free" sharing networks. Presumably, that would deteriorate further if "legitimate" online services appealed to an even broader audience (as some or all of that broader audience would likely participate less in the "free" networks).
Slashdot Mirror
Gmail kicks the shit out of the web access client.
Yahoo! mail kicks the shit out of the web access client.
I can't search at all, or select all messages in a view in OWC. It's pretty much the same since I first used it (well, it used to work only in IE/Windows; now it's at least accessible from other browsers).
Lotus Notes is ass-ugly, but I'd never need a web client, as I'd replicate the mail database and have things locally. (but it is ass-ugly, and even the last time I saw it - ~v6 - still seemed to have an awful time rendering markup in email.
this has been the case in most Exchange shops I've worked in the last 10 years.
Before that, I was at IBM for four years. In Lotus Notes, *end users* could define team pages and workflows - within their permissions - to receive mail, route mail, publish pages based on content of that mail - in about 10 minutes. rather than
I guess you're saying "in a Microsoft-only environment, with admins in possession of deep product knowledge (which default installers and 3rd party software vendors don't have), Office/Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint is a terriffic solution."
That's probably true for several solutions.
this is someone many of you folks know.
perhaps you all know the details of the case and that's why there's no outrage.
I've followed the case only obliquely.
it "sounds suspicious," but not like a Murder One conviction.
Is the general consensus here that he's guilty?
How much trial materials would I need to get through to have an "Ahh!" moment? (links)
S http://meanbusiness.com/
It's not just no link in the summary, but none in the article, neither.
Bruce P. summarizes it below, and a poster above mentions Zabbix and Naggios.
There's been a bunch of interested work in monitoring and diagnostics with "Netsaint / Nagios for some time. SysAdmin has had a few *very* cool articles about not just network monitoring with it, but resource monitoring and preventative maintenance of all kinds.
IT Groundwork's done some very interesting things.
SpikeSource is doing similar stuff (presumably so "you don't have to").
Splunk is interesting (w/r/t checking log entries against know issues in an automated fashion.)
We've leveraged Nagios for "preventative diagnostics" of our Test, Dev and Prod environments. It's worked very well at our scale.
I'm less inclined to get excited about stress testing Java middleware as my hope is JBoss, IBM / Websphere, BEA and Oracle would already be doing that for me. If I'm using Tomcat or Resin, it probably means it's because I can and am less concerned.
I'm going to check out Zabbix now - thanks for the tip.
S
http://www.meanbusiness.com/
more usability testing, more QA, and more effective marketing as well as tried-and-true "advertising" techniques, I'd agree.
One of the many wonderful things about the model is we can provide those things ourselves, as individuals, and out of whichever mode of personal reasoning we d*rn well please: directed self-interest (very Randy of Mr. Phipps, btw), volunteerism, revolutionary proclivity, or all or none of the above.
That the bulk of this discussion surrounds the Zealotry v. [*] PoVs means the discussion is, for the most part, missing Mr. Phipp's point.
From the perspective of capitalism, the fact these things are needed (and, IMO, they are) has been and continues to be a fantastic opportunity for those with the wherewithal to provide the "Fit and Finish" needed by many technically and functionally fantastic projects to get them better suited for business.
S
http://www.meanbusiness.com/
Google's got it down well with AdSense (sure, there're complaints and complainers, legitimate ones, too, but it works well for a lot of people and businesses, and they're working on improvements).
Once you've got the self-contained ecosystem (i.e. where the "currency" remains within the "GRealm"), it's doable. e.g. A publisher racks up dimes in her account by selling click-throughs to her popular blog articles. Those dimes are worth the full US$.10 so long as they're applied to her AdWords account, or Google Base purchases. When she requests a disbursement, Google takes its cut before sending the Cash Money Check.
If you can extend the GRealm (or YRealm, or MSRealm, etc.) to a large enough universe, it'd work very well for a lot of people (producers as well as consumers).
There've been *so* many Close But No Cigars on this front, and there are many interesting contenders now.
When someone with a compellingly-encompassing realm pulls it off, it adds another tier to the Free->Semi-Free->Subscription-Only models that exist today and "web 3.0" will be well on its way.
Steve
http://meanbusiness.com/
I do like Digg's community-driven aspect that tends to surface many interesting articles very rapidly. Slashdot could "easily" offer a community-driven story pipeline if they wanted to (we've talked about it for years here ...)
That said, the signal-to-noise ratio in Digg's discussions is way too crappy. When I go to digg, I wind up following offsite links to original stories; when I come here, it's to participate in the discussions.
And Top / Bottom Ten lists are generall self-serving horse-crap, anyway. (and the audio ad that starts automaticaally when reading this Biz 2.0 is downright offensive)
Steve
if you don't like it, don't watch it
the whole point of having a COMPUTOR is so that you can manipulate your own media, ie get rid of ads.
whose whole point? Not mine, certainly. I user a computer to create my own media (fwiw ...); I don't expect to forever to be able to manipulate others' media as I wish and free-of-charge.
i hope more people realize that this is just headed to having all internet videos with commercials on them, without the user knowing what they are even getting.
Unlike television, cable and satelite where you're given a rundown of every advertiser beforehand?
this shit has to be left in the dust by everyone, or you wont recognize the internet in 15 years; it will be like digital cable, only with commercials.
George Carlin's as right as ever: use the knobs to change the station or just turn it off completely. Don't try to take away my ability to chose just because you don't like it.
the online advertising ecosystem - should it take hold for video, as well - will provide a lot of incentive for some creative people to do creative things and perhaps even profit by it. (There must be *some* entertainer you don't begrudge a profit?)
It also creates opportunities for ...
hopefully people will keep writing software to prevent this from happening.
bingo - that, too -
Google makes money placing advertising on services people like using. To this point, I still don't mind their advertising. If you do, you should stop using Google.
Pax; Lux -
S
Forgive the ad hominem-iness of this, but that's among the most ridiculous and / or soft-balliest tosses ever seen here on Slashdot (that's saying something ...).
Three things that immediatly come to mind are 1. billions of US$$, 2. some of the most brilliant and directed engineering minds and 3. humoungous gobs of clout of several stripes (e.g. marketing; visibility; corporate).
Regarding the "trust" it'd bring to GNU/Linux as a platform, allow me to play Devil's Advocate and say it would also bring out the foil hats: would a running a GoogleOS mean they have deep knowledge of your search and other online activities, but also of your application preferences and usage patterns, even the specifics of your local docs, log files, etc?
For my own use and reasons, I would not have an issue with this presuming this the Value of this (speculative) OS outweighed the privacy concerns AND said privacy concerns were fully documented and published.
It's all moot until something actually comes out of Google Labs for use by the public; presuming there even is "Goobuntu / Goonux / GNUgle" work going on, who's to say it's not intended for Internal Use Only?
(I see there's been quite a good, informed dialog sparked by this initial question while I've been thinking / writing / spell checking (silly me ...); forgive the -1 Redundancy)
The following is "screaming into an abyss," but what the hell:
Many posters use the "It Just Works" line re Macs and it's true, but it doesn't capture the whole picture and essence of the platform. That Apple controls the hardware and the software and can, therefore, control the quality of the system in its entirty - AND THEN DOES control the quality of the system in its entirty is huge.
I'm writing this on a Dell laptop running WinXP. Dell and Microsoft talk to each other, right? There should be very little going on from the hardware or OS PoV that both companies are unaware of, right? WELL THEN WHY DOES THIS THING SHIT THE BED EVERY TIME I REMOVE IT FROM THE DOCKING STATION? Even when I use "Unlock Computer" function they've so thoughtfully given me? Why are there continual problems waking this from sleep? Why is there tweakiness when I use an external monitor or projector? I have NONE of these issues with an 8-year old PowerBook and 2-year old iBook.
I'll work to stay away from analogs in the car world: of the comforting rumble of a BMW motor, the perfection with which the seats and mirrors can be adjusted or the way the breaks feel as compared to Nissan or a Saturn. I've driven all of those within a short timeframe of one another; all of them get me to the coffee shop. The difference in experience - with the BMW providing the best one - is more than simply a matter of It Just Working.
Side-by-side comparisons are important: I will never say "Machine X can do Z, while Machine Y cannot." Given time, anything is possible on any platform. I've had and have side-by-side machines running Linux (since Slackware 2.3 on a PS/2 [the MicroChAnnel kind]), OS/2, BeOS (when PPC was the only game in town) and Windows. I was a late-comer to the Mac, but my first one (running OS8.x) made so many things possible and easier w/r/t working with audio and video (even in a shared memory, cooperatively multitasking OS) that I didn't feel the need to continue yoking the other machines into doing what I wanted them to.
CAUTION: Generalization Ahead: The DIYers who can get the latest / cheapest motherboard, RAM modules, gpus, etc. are NOT likely the ones spending 12 hours cutting a good 116 seconds of video into a great 60 seconds of video. They're not likely the ones to spend a 65-hour week tweaking and testing an app that runs well for the widest possible audience. They don't likely need or want to spend a weekend working out song transitions, trying the latest softsynths, writing the Next Lame Novel, etc.
By this, I don't mean building / tweaking / performance tuning your workstation is not Fun and Real Work, but I do mean it's generally more an end unto itself (or unto gaming) rather than the means to another end (like a book, an application, a song or a film short). For people more interested in the latter, I recommend trying an elegant, powerful Macintosh - and to let Apple do most of the work for you beforehand.
I assert: MS Office is still the king of the hill.
Your assertion that Office currently remains King of the Hill does not refute mine that "good enough" alternatives will chip away at Office's marketshare if more of the compatibility issues become non-issues (e.g. via a complete implementation of OpenDocument by MicroSoft).
The second part of your assertion contains faulty logic:
I assert: ... Unless you want to say that something like OpenOffice has even noticeable market-share, at least one of your premises are wrong.
Current marketshare levels of the alternatives do not do not refute either of my premises; if marketshare levels of the alternatives were falling, you'd have a point. I do not believe that fewer people are installing and using OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, etc. now than they were last year, for example. More people seem to be discovering they can get the majority of their work done sans the King of the Hill.
As more users explore alternatives, and if MicroSoft fully adopts open standards to improve compatibility with these alternatives, these alternatives would be more attractive to more people. This was the point in my original response to the question "if Office is so superior, why does MS need to lock users in?"
This will more than likely become another (quarter-heartedly) Embrace and Extend instance.
S
Like my mother always said, "It's all fun and games until the government-trained killer aquatic mammals wind up in the hands of your country's enemies."
(Man, that was pretty prescient of her ...)
So long, and thanks for screwing up AvantSlash (again) with your CSS ...
S
You ask many questions, Mr. Sparkle.
Agreed that that's part of it. And, as we slip down that slope where there are hardware- and OS-level mechanisms determining what we can and cannot view, hear and run, let's please thank the heavens and stars for GNU, the FSF and the thousands of players who've given us the ability to circumvent these things.
I personally don't get too up in arms about "some DRM." I think, e.g., FairPlay is pretty fair for consumers. Currently.
I no longer hear (m)any rants about CPU IDs. It's not because it's no longer there - it's because - per the parent post - we're desensitized.
From my PoV, a little governing of our digital Freedoms is acceptable if it means there's incentive for entities to build and offer good services. I thank heavens for the eternal vigilance we're all provided by the likes of GNU and FSF because they're the ones who've made possible the tools that can help us decide for ourselves when others decide to clamp down too tightly (and that threshold will differ for diferent individuals).
Learned a decent amount about OS internals. Certainly led me and others down "enlightened paths" later in life (from an OS PoV).
getting verklempt ...
Knew ye well, OS/2. Rest in Peace.
that's cool -
I'd built some apps running on an OS/2 "pc server" running in a back closet during my time at IBM. Almost 4 years later, it was still going with my (or any other dev afaik) touching it.
The publishing house I work for - 37 consumer titles and a bunch of B-to-B - is in the process of migrating EVERYONE away from Quark and their workflow Publishing System to InDesign and k4. I don't think we were the first or the last. That's gotta hurt.
our migration is by no means solely "away from Quark": it's been good, but InDesign / K4 is apparently pretty compelling.
i.e. One or more folks are in charge of Kids' birthday videos, one or more in charge of original animation, and 10,313 are in charge of the various porn categories.
They are "trained," "paid" based on performance, and are moderated (e.g. if copyrighted works slip through on their watch, they are somehow penalized).
The verification bottleneck opens up significantly without Google's staff of Full Time Employees expanding exponentially.
The Google Network ...
to your point, however, some % of that 58% are likely deleting cookies when e.g. AdAware or Yahoo! antispy is telling them to clean up this "tracking info."
Regardless, it's a Good Thing users are doing this.
Yes, it will be DRM-encumbered and feature at least its fair share of shite: either get over it or don't avail of the service.
More signal, please, and less noise.
I've spent less time with MSFT products than most (OS/2 -> BeOS/Linux -> FreeBSD and now predominantly OS X [with GNU tools all along for the past ~10 years]) and am no apologist, but give the friggin service a chance - OR DON'T - but having a way to easily* pay for, download and play worthwhile video content could very well be ... worthwhile.
Peace, lux, and thanks -
* - "easily" meaning I don't spend hours / days / weeks building, tweaking and searching for content i can "steal" / use without paying for / however you feel good about stating it.
Nahh ... they're talking about POWERBOOKS here: the Mini is still for grannies, designers and other "undesirables"
/me jealous
Heh -
?
Now, onto "Guilt" :
There's something of an existing "social contract" that says "in return for [Product or Service X], I will provide [Compensation Y]." The contract is a multilateral one: you can disagree with what constitutes a [Product or Service X]; you may rail against the rate or form of [Compensation Y], but until the sides agree to change the terms and conditions, you are operating outside the confines of the current contract.
This is where, for some people, Guilt can enter the picture.
Now, I'm off to take ownership of my neighbor's Lamborghini - The entire concept of receivingpayment for fine Italian sportscars was unheard of before the advent of the piston engine ...
Much like the scheme presented in the article, please remember that the "free" file sharing networks requires a broad base of participants to make them run. The utility of the "free" networks improves or deteriorates based on the numbers of people engaged in the activity of sharing freely:
even at US$.99, I would bet there has been an affect on the quality/quantity/availability of music on the "free" sharing networks. Presumably, that would deteriorate further if "legitimate" online services appealed to an even broader audience (as some or all of that broader audience would likely participate less in the "free" networks).