Also, Microsoft too have to show a return to shareholders. Their current share price is hardly stellar, and IIRC they don't pay good dividends.
37BN in the bank to a shareholder is dead money. If I'm a shareholder, I don't want to see people burning through my cash and not delivering. I want a return, and preferably soon.
There's definitely something to be said for getting started with a text editor first, really understanding from the ground up what you need to do. This means that you manually create stuff and learn what it's all for as you go.
Later, use things like vs.net to just make your life easier, but at least you'll understand what it's doing.
Also, the less help you get, the firmer your knowledge gets. You find that you get stuff better embedded, which means that your coding flows better.
I have a laptop and I also have a desktop, and use them appropriately.
Most of the time, and when I'm at home, I'm on my desktop. It's considerably more powerful, and it's been like Trigger's Broom, costing me an average of about £200 a year to keep up to a decent standard.
When I'm away, on the time or at a client site, I use my laptop. That's where it fits in. It's quite slow now, but that's because it's a big investment. They also suck at HDD speeds, and are a real problem if you spill coffee.
People in large corporations don't care. If they install OOo, they save a bunch of money from the corporate budget, that doesn't affect them. On the other hand, if it all goes horribly wrong, the finger points at them.
For small businesses, they want to deal with everyone else, who uses Word.
Personally, I'd love to hear good ideas to get people switching. I'll be sending clients PDFs and anyone who wants to sell to me is going to have to use OASIS documents. And that's for practical reasons. I'm tired of having a document corruption that I can't fix.
It seems to me that someone has to run the root domains. Right now, I'm of the opinion that given the choices of the UN or the USA, I'll take the USA. And I'm British.
I think that unmanned space probes at least have a low cost, and at least get some knowledge, unlike manned missions that have yielded nothing.
The big question with science is always the one of when something abstract becomes practical. The work done on splitting the atom could have been seen as useless, but led to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I don't want to deal with whether these were good or bad, but they certainly were practical.
If you really wanted to help solve the world's problems, the work needs to be done down here. More money put into engine research, battery life or fusion power would be a much better investment.
But why do the electronics manufacturers want to see Linux dead? That doesn't make sense
If I was an electronics manufacturer, the thing I'd want is as many operating systems as possible using my hardware to reduce the possibility of control being with one who could set the standards that I'd be forced to follow.
Hardware manufacturers, it seems to me are starting to open up to Linux. They know there's a market out there, and that if you are the only one in there, it's a good income.
The question of IT managers is a "grass roots" issue.
I remember the mantra of "no-one got fired for buying IBM". It changed.
The change doesn't happen from the big corporations. These are staffed by people who are a) spending other people's money b) wanting to keep their jobs. They have no incentive to save money. The people I'm meeting who are adopting OOo are small business guys, for whom £300 for an MS Office License is similar to an iPod in their pocket after tax (or getting their car serviced). It affects them at a personal level.
One of the problems with Word is just how giant a PITA it is for automating any sort of processing, whether reading or writing.
I often advocate using OOo to companies not for freeness reasons, but because you can see the documents. I sent some Word documents to some people the other day, and it looked just fine and dandy on my PC, but two of the five people I sent to couldn't read it. Which makes me think that there's maybe some sort of corruption. Of couse, I can't know what corruption that might be.
I'm going to start switching to PDF as bare minimum and preferably OpenDocument.
I must admit to getting a little geeked out when I think about how they did certain things in claymation, but to be honest, like all great art, I often forget it and just go with the story.
I think that claymation tells a story superbly, as you get so much more of a sense of reality. However, I also think that a film like The Wrong Trousers has a strong enough script to be done in other ways.
I also think that CG can be done superbly, like in the case of Pixar who are pushing the envelope.
I'll partly backup what the AC said. How did I first hear about Nirvana or Joy Division? From a multi-million dollar marketing blitz? No, from friends. Who heard it from friends.
You can see it all the time with movies. Something comes out of nowhere (like The Usual Suspects) and over time builds up a fan base.
Talented bands don't need record companies much, or certainly they don't need giant size media groups. They need a good manager and a good producer (or maybe even do both themselves).
What do I think might be the future? Much more of bands selling directly and being promoted by iTunes.
Not so much in terms of implementation, as skill. If I've got to reskill, it had better be so I can gain a performance advantage in terms of products delivered, not to just stand still, which is how I feel.
One real bummer was also that the sessions in ASP and ASP.NET were incompatible. If you had something with session based security, you couldn't just add an ASP.NET page. You had to rewrite it. We ended up rewriting a whole application into.net.
I'm looking seriously at open source, because it seems to me that things are much more about what people need, as opposed to what suits the supplier. That's not to say that things won't get dumped, but of course, you have the option to support it yourself, or find someone else to do it.
As someone else said, Microsoft only make software. In the days of mainframe computing, software was an add-on, and the costs were more about an annual license, which meant gradual and steady change. Most 4GLs which existed for them saw little change, because they weren't constantly trying to get people to shell out for an upgrade.
For all the benefits of change, people should remember the cost of change. It took me a serious amount of time to go from knowing nothing about ASP.NET/C# to really knowing it. Any productivity improvements long-term have to be offset against that. Too often, I see the MS environment being that by the time you've soaked up the costs and become really mature in the technology, it's time to start again.
So, what's the best alternative? Ruby? PHP? Python? Any thoughts gratefully received.
Sit down with a 5 year old and ask them why they love Monster's Inc/The Incredibles/Finding Nemo/Toy Story 2.
You will not once hear them say "Oh yeah, the CG was great". That's what Dreamworks do, tell people about the CG, and no-one cares any more.
Maybe you should watch some great films that did nothing to progress technology, but just told a story and used the appropriate technology to tell it. Even something like Casablanca whose whole premise has no basis in fact, shot on a studio lot. Or Clerks which was done on a very low budget.
Already, almost no-one cares about the 1st 2 Star Wars prequels. They may have been technologically amazing, but content wise, they stank, and that's what matters.
And guess what? There happens to be quite a lot of chrome on cars. I'd tend to agree with the management.
Quite a lot of businesses may go for Vista that are currently on Win2k. In a sense, now that they see it's around the corner, a lot of people may suspend an XP upgrade until then.
That said, the switch to webapps is considerable, and will continue, while the OS and Office go nowhere.
Long term, in my opinion, the writing is on the wall for Microsoft.
Don't forget, those savings are owned by the company (and therefore their shareholders).
Imagine you are a large corporate shareholder, and say, 2 years in a row, Microsoft give you nothing - no dividend and no stock growth. Are you just going to sit there, or start asking some serious questions about why that pile of cash isn't working for you.
It's important to deal with real facts. There's plenty of evidence for global warming, but I'll ignore all the "Katrina/Tsunami was because of global warming".
There are too many people with an agenda, either the left-wing "let's return to a glorious simpler time" or the right-wing "la la la it's not happening".
What I'd like is a book written for the layman about climate science that explains why global warning would cause an ice age, including a full description of the models and the assumptions made.
Are the facts they are quoting wrong? Do you have some corrections? Post them in the discussion or correct on Wikipedia, but don't just try and attack the source.
A friend of mine was recently upgraded at work to O2003, and was pulling their hair out because they needed to change their default style and knew exactly how to do it in O2000, but it had been changed for 2003.
Once we figured it out, I couldn't see any good reason for changing the interface.
Slashdot Mirror
37BN in the bank to a shareholder is dead money. If I'm a shareholder, I don't want to see people burning through my cash and not delivering. I want a return, and preferably soon.
There's definitely something to be said for getting started with a text editor first, really understanding from the ground up what you need to do. This means that you manually create stuff and learn what it's all for as you go. Later, use things like vs.net to just make your life easier, but at least you'll understand what it's doing. Also, the less help you get, the firmer your knowledge gets. You find that you get stuff better embedded, which means that your coding flows better.
Most of the time, and when I'm at home, I'm on my desktop. It's considerably more powerful, and it's been like Trigger's Broom, costing me an average of about £200 a year to keep up to a decent standard.
When I'm away, on the time or at a client site, I use my laptop. That's where it fits in. It's quite slow now, but that's because it's a big investment. They also suck at HDD speeds, and are a real problem if you spill coffee.
I've bought a few CDs at high prices on Ebay that were deleted, and I can think of some old vinyl that never made it to CD that I'd pay to own.
Compatibility or
Because it's not my money
People in large corporations don't care. If they install OOo, they save a bunch of money from the corporate budget, that doesn't affect them. On the other hand, if it all goes horribly wrong, the finger points at them.
For small businesses, they want to deal with everyone else, who uses Word.
Personally, I'd love to hear good ideas to get people switching. I'll be sending clients PDFs and anyone who wants to sell to me is going to have to use OASIS documents. And that's for practical reasons. I'm tired of having a document corruption that I can't fix.
It seems to me that someone has to run the root domains. Right now, I'm of the opinion that given the choices of the UN or the USA, I'll take the USA. And I'm British.
The big question with science is always the one of when something abstract becomes practical. The work done on splitting the atom could have been seen as useless, but led to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. I don't want to deal with whether these were good or bad, but they certainly were practical.
If you really wanted to help solve the world's problems, the work needs to be done down here. More money put into engine research, battery life or fusion power would be a much better investment.
If I was an electronics manufacturer, the thing I'd want is as many operating systems as possible using my hardware to reduce the possibility of control being with one who could set the standards that I'd be forced to follow.
Hardware manufacturers, it seems to me are starting to open up to Linux. They know there's a market out there, and that if you are the only one in there, it's a good income.
I can't imagine wanting to watch 30 minutes of video, but "For The Birds" to give me a little laugh on the train? Maybe.
I remember the mantra of "no-one got fired for buying IBM". It changed.
The change doesn't happen from the big corporations. These are staffed by people who are a) spending other people's money b) wanting to keep their jobs. They have no incentive to save money. The people I'm meeting who are adopting OOo are small business guys, for whom £300 for an MS Office License is similar to an iPod in their pocket after tax (or getting their car serviced). It affects them at a personal level.
I often advocate using OOo to companies not for freeness reasons, but because you can see the documents. I sent some Word documents to some people the other day, and it looked just fine and dandy on my PC, but two of the five people I sent to couldn't read it. Which makes me think that there's maybe some sort of corruption. Of couse, I can't know what corruption that might be.
I'm going to start switching to PDF as bare minimum and preferably OpenDocument.
I think that claymation tells a story superbly, as you get so much more of a sense of reality. However, I also think that a film like The Wrong Trousers has a strong enough script to be done in other ways.
I also think that CG can be done superbly, like in the case of Pixar who are pushing the envelope.
What happens if shareholders get nothing in a year? No price rise, no dividend? You think they'll just watch money going out of the bank?
You can see it all the time with movies. Something comes out of nowhere (like The Usual Suspects) and over time builds up a fan base.
Talented bands don't need record companies much, or certainly they don't need giant size media groups. They need a good manager and a good producer (or maybe even do both themselves).
What do I think might be the future? Much more of bands selling directly and being promoted by iTunes.
Not so much in terms of implementation, as skill. If I've got to reskill, it had better be so I can gain a performance advantage in terms of products delivered, not to just stand still, which is how I feel.
One real bummer was also that the sessions in ASP and ASP.NET were incompatible. If you had something with session based security, you couldn't just add an ASP.NET page. You had to rewrite it. We ended up rewriting a whole application into .net.
I'm looking seriously at open source, because it seems to me that things are much more about what people need, as opposed to what suits the supplier. That's not to say that things won't get dumped, but of course, you have the option to support it yourself, or find someone else to do it.
As someone else said, Microsoft only make software. In the days of mainframe computing, software was an add-on, and the costs were more about an annual license, which meant gradual and steady change. Most 4GLs which existed for them saw little change, because they weren't constantly trying to get people to shell out for an upgrade.
For all the benefits of change, people should remember the cost of change. It took me a serious amount of time to go from knowing nothing about ASP.NET/C# to really knowing it. Any productivity improvements long-term have to be offset against that. Too often, I see the MS environment being that by the time you've soaked up the costs and become really mature in the technology, it's time to start again.
So, what's the best alternative? Ruby? PHP? Python? Any thoughts gratefully received.
That said, Pixar could now put a handwritten piece of paper on the screen for 30 seconds saying "Cars. Pixar. Summer 2006" and I'd be there.
Sit down with a 5 year old and ask them why they love Monster's Inc/The Incredibles/Finding Nemo/Toy Story 2.
You will not once hear them say "Oh yeah, the CG was great". That's what Dreamworks do, tell people about the CG, and no-one cares any more.
Maybe you should watch some great films that did nothing to progress technology, but just told a story and used the appropriate technology to tell it. Even something like Casablanca whose whole premise has no basis in fact, shot on a studio lot. Or Clerks which was done on a very low budget.
Already, almost no-one cares about the 1st 2 Star Wars prequels. They may have been technologically amazing, but content wise, they stank, and that's what matters.
And guess what? There happens to be quite a lot of chrome on cars. I'd tend to agree with the management.
That said, the switch to webapps is considerable, and will continue, while the OS and Office go nowhere.
Long term, in my opinion, the writing is on the wall for Microsoft.
Imagine you are a large corporate shareholder, and say, 2 years in a row, Microsoft give you nothing - no dividend and no stock growth. Are you just going to sit there, or start asking some serious questions about why that pile of cash isn't working for you.
The billions in the bank could move very quickly.
It's important to deal with real facts. There's plenty of evidence for global warming, but I'll ignore all the "Katrina/Tsunami was because of global warming".
There are too many people with an agenda, either the left-wing "let's return to a glorious simpler time" or the right-wing "la la la it's not happening".
What I'd like is a book written for the layman about climate science that explains why global warning would cause an ice age, including a full description of the models and the assumptions made.
Are the facts they are quoting wrong? Do you have some corrections? Post them in the discussion or correct on Wikipedia, but don't just try and attack the source.
Does this mean that we can all go and get Hummers now, seeing that it's inevitable?
Once we figured it out, I couldn't see any good reason for changing the interface.
To me, there's a clear difference between deliberately trying to piggy back on someone's name, and co-incidence.
Not all French are like that (none of the family I know are). However, they have often expressed a similar opinion to yours.