I realize your company may not make it easy to do so, or the other departments may not help but...
Have you considered, since you're the only one in your portion that asking them for help may useful?
I'm making a lot of assumptions about an ideal situation that may not apply to you, I realize that, so it may not be possible for you.
If it were though, you might find that you can save yourself a lot of time just by working with the other groups.
You could also very well create a new position for yourself, pull all 3 divisions together and save some money in IT and you might end up in charge of all of them. (if you want to do that, personally I still prefer to be in the trenches).
Either way, you may find that they've already done this research and found something that didn't work for them, but might work for you, OR might work for everyone if you all got together to do it, versus not being cost effective for one group to do it.
A company I worked for was bought out a long time ago, we basically continued to operate as 2 companies under one name for a long time. Then our IT department started pushing to integrate, taking the best parts of both companies and merging into a better structure overall. We ended up saving a lot of money.
Interestingly enough, our IT was killed off and released shortly after we suggested that moving the web servers that had a window view of wall street to somewhere that we could run them for 10 years for the same cost as single day in their current data center... So you may want to be careful what you suggest.
Another interesting twist was that shortly after we got 'released', the company was bought once again, by a company near Atlanta, which promptly closed all the offices on Manhattan, including the one that was chosen over us. Senior management from our original company passed along the word that the new buyers made it clear that stupid choices like killing our data center and keeping one in Manhattan is exactly why they were now going to be looking for new jobs themselves.
We were vindicated, but some of us were still unemployed unfortunately. Either way, it may still be worth your while to try.
Browsers taking advantage of 3d acceleration is something that should have been done a long time ago. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Images are just textures that can be thrown anywhere on the screen, multiple times, FAST in all sorts of weird and contorted ways, including shaders.
Firefox is well on its way to accomplishing this via the Cairo rendering back end which has hardware acceleration on some platforms.
Resizing the page, scrolling, zooming all sorts of things can be made incredibly fast. Scrolling for instance, render the whole (static portions) of the page to a texture (or multiple to keep them pixel for pixel accurate on larger screens) and then just move the viewport around on a rectangle textured with those textures.
Windows kind of does this on its own already but in XP that backing store isn't accelerated in the same way as Vista/Win7. I.E. The acceleration in XP is based on the cards 2d acceleration traits, which while at one time was fast as hell relatively, however gaming pushed the 3d side harder faster and 2d has been neglected for anything other than video playback for years. Thats where Vista and Win7 change things.
Instead of using the old driver model, the model was updated which required manufactures to facilitate new acceleration methods, the end result is basically that Vista and Win7 render using the 3d acceleration, shaders and all the other neat things that are now available on most graphics cards. Vista/Win7 makes them more of a requirement.
Now... being that some hardware acceleration features are now required by the driver model, IE developers can basically just write to directx (Or more likely WPF) which will throw everything at the card in ways that can be accelerated.
Basically, the reason they 'cant' do it on XP isn't a technical one, its a practical one. They pretty much know Vista/Win7 are going to have a certain level of hardware acceleration, taking the need for them to render it on the CPU and sending the render to the card, they send the drawing commands to the card and let it draw it for them. They just can't reliably expect that to be there in XP.
Yea, and pretty much any time some propritary software package is terminated, it is almost certainly available for sale to someone else so it can be taken over if its worth it to someone.
The reason it doesn't happen is because the projects that get cut are the ones that no one cares enough about to continue development.
The license of the software pretty much no effect on its ability survive, its worth to someone else does.
Or it could be that no one actually gave a shit about OpenSSO outside a very small group of people.
Its funny that everyone assume Oracle is being evil when a simple bit of common sense makes it pretty clear that its a waste of resources from pretty much every perspective to Oracle.
Unfortunately, the software only thing was the way Virtual PC (which is whats actually being used) until the most recent versions, where they went from software only to hardware only virtually over night for no readily apparent reason other than they could do it.
Yes, now Opera has grand total of around 400 or 500 users total, as opposed to the 6 people who actually used it before MS was forced to advertise them.
The forced upgrade comes because users depend on so much other MS software. You upgrade one thing and instantly just about everything else needs an upgrade or it won't work. Since MS integrates so tightly with its own code and rarely ever takes any consideration to forward/backward compat for interop between applications within the system it seems like the force upgrades. You can't just upgrade Word, you upgrade office, and then CRM, and then SBM (or whatever its called this year).
Of course, the same is true of all software really.
Microsoft does it. Apple does it. Linux distros are the worst at this. More people us MS so it comes up more often for them, its not that anyone or anything is actually different, there are just more people talking about MS because its more popular.
Wow, you live in a different world than me then because all the friends and family I know that got Vista asked me to give them XP back:/
Maybe you only know people who never owned a computer before Vista?
People hated it because change for nothing more than the sake of change pisses people off, and thats what Vista was to 99.99999999999999999999999% of the world if you exclude Microsoft.
This isn't for people in the modern age that transfer money to others.
This is for people in the modern age that still get checks from people who would rather avoid electronic methods for whatever reason.
Is transfering money over the phone the only way you can make a purchase in Europe and Africa? Whats that? You guys have checks too? No shit? So this is probably something that'll happen there too?
God, when will people like you realize that now days every place on Earth is more or less the same as ever other place on the Earth as far as level of technology for a given class of people.
Poor people will still be poor, rich will still be rich.
I'd really prefer that people like yourself wake up and realize that you really aren't any different than people elsewhere. You don't have anything that makes you better overall. You just have minor differences that more or less balance out in the end.
How do I know? There isn't a mass exodus of American's to Europe or vice versus.
And another important note: No one actually thinks Europeans are cool like they make it out in American movies or where ever you get that arrogance from. The entire rest of the world knows you're just as much of a douche bag as everyone else, the only ones who don't know it are Europeans:/
The Alterans (Ancients, the gate builders) left god knows how many stone structures around the universe and thousands in our galaxy alone that have survived 10 million years since they left.
It makes sense that they would do something like this rather than lay massive stone blocks to build those buildings.
Slashdot needs a rule preventing the posting of stories about stories.
Or at the very least, fucking preventing blogs about blogs about some story.
When did slashdot become a random blog aggregator instead of news for nerds?
If you get a submission from a user thats a link to a story about some other story, don't fucking post it. Make your own damn submission with the final site in it and stop giving out all the slashvertising and wasting our time.
making the printer compatible with moon dust, paying the way for an instant moonbase!
Not paying, PAVING.
God do you people even think about what you're typing or saying when you use phrases like this? Did it ever once occur to you to think about what you're saying and how much sense it makes?
The standard at work is XP and Office 2003, having messed about with Thunderbird & Sunbird recently, I'm pretty sure I can manage on those for email & calendaring at work
Then either you don't use calendaring very heavy and have been using Outlook as a mere email client. I develop plugins for email clients. I freaking HATE Outlook in just about every conceivable way. If I was a sales person or a manager who gets stuck with lots of meetings and high email traffic, Outlook would be my preferred email client.
Outlook is not an email client. Its not a calendaring application. Its a PIM, it does email as well and integrates it rather well even though its email system feels crappy and has horrible imap support (O2K7 and O2010 aren't bad for imap, too bad they ripped out the IE rendering engine). Thunderbird is an email client and its great at that. Sunbird is a calendar package, and its kind of shitty. The combination of the two is utterly ass-tastic.
If you want calendaring just ditch sunbird and use gmail or apps for your domain. Yes you can use Sunbird with it, but unless that has changed recently, that too is a shitty experience. Probably should have kept some phones with ActiveSync exchange support though since thats about the only way to sync calendars that doesn't suck total ass.
Its fine that you run the software you want to run, and if it works for you, thats great... but... If you're replacing Outlook with Thunderbird + Sunbird than you weren't really using Outlook for much more than an email client, which is probably its worst feature. Please don't go around suggesting to normal users to do the same.
You do realize that it installed stuff on your computer... right? Both the Java and ActiveX versions require it, you just change the definition of 'install' ever so slightly.
Both of them download and execute code native on your machine. You're defining install as what? Something that shows up in add/remove programs, cause you can change those things to 'installed' by adding a single registry key then.
I've got a Win3.1 'laptop' (okay, so its a luggable) sitting in my basement that will connect to the Internet and has no virus nor am I worried about it getting in it.
Its just as useful and safe to me as your ubuntu box since it doesn't run a single application that I want it to run, not only because of its OS but also because its turned off.
Yes, you've shown us that no one targets ubuntu because its practically useless to most of the world who prefers to run Windows so they can have the apps they are used to.
I've found that anti-virus software is almost always more annoying than malware. In almost every instance the performance cost of anti-virus software quickly out weight the time it takes me to restore from a backup image.
I've found this to be true of any software package (commercial or otherwise) that does on access scanning, which without on-access scanning theres no point to use the software for me since our servers can handle background scheduled scans using clam.
I guess you could say I use clam running on FreeBSD accessing files via SMBFS on my Windows machines.
With the exception of the BootCamp partition I have for gaming, my personal Windows instances are all VMs with lots of snapshots that I can roll back to should I come to a problem. Its just easier for me to use snapshots and virtual machines than to deal with av software. I have a method of creating new snapshot thats relatively safe (restore to a known good snapshot, install updates/known safe new software, immediately shut down and take a snapshot to work from in the future.
AV would be easier, but all the time I spend waiting on compiles because the retarded AV software has to scan ever binary I make and probably is retarded enough to scan all the source files each access to just makes it too inefficient for my tastes.
Then you wait for the police officer to explain why the wreck behind your car happened and why he or she is going to have to tell someone their mom/dad/husband/wife is dead.
Theres more to it than just pulling over. You get OFF THE ROAD. That doesn't mean sit on the shoulder of the road with your lights on some someone drivers right into the backend of you thinking they can follow you.
You've obviously never experienced a 'wall of water' where at 55-60 the car in front of you literally disappears instantly as it enters the rain its so thick. If that person just 'pulls over' instantly, theres a really good chance you're eating their bumper for dinner.
Stop lights are at the top/left, Go on the bottom/right.
Now, color has no added value, whats your excuse now?
You shouldn't be allowed to drive since you are ignorant of such basic and vital information to someone such as yourself (I'm presuming you're color blind, otherwise you're just ranting about someone else's problem, which you don't actually understand).
I would presume other countries have a standard probably much like this, perhaps a different order or something instead, but I'm sure its there.
You're looking at color as the only indicator, which would be pretty silly and not likely to be something they do for important information. <blink> to the rescue!
Slashdot Mirror
I realize your company may not make it easy to do so, or the other departments may not help but ...
Have you considered, since you're the only one in your portion that asking them for help may useful?
I'm making a lot of assumptions about an ideal situation that may not apply to you, I realize that, so it may not be possible for you.
If it were though, you might find that you can save yourself a lot of time just by working with the other groups.
You could also very well create a new position for yourself, pull all 3 divisions together and save some money in IT and you might end up in charge of all of them. (if you want to do that, personally I still prefer to be in the trenches).
Either way, you may find that they've already done this research and found something that didn't work for them, but might work for you, OR might work for everyone if you all got together to do it, versus not being cost effective for one group to do it.
A company I worked for was bought out a long time ago, we basically continued to operate as 2 companies under one name for a long time. Then our IT department started pushing to integrate, taking the best parts of both companies and merging into a better structure overall. We ended up saving a lot of money.
Interestingly enough, our IT was killed off and released shortly after we suggested that moving the web servers that had a window view of wall street to somewhere that we could run them for 10 years for the same cost as single day in their current data center ... So you may want to be careful what you suggest.
Another interesting twist was that shortly after we got 'released', the company was bought once again, by a company near Atlanta, which promptly closed all the offices on Manhattan, including the one that was chosen over us. Senior management from our original company passed along the word that the new buyers made it clear that stupid choices like killing our data center and keeping one in Manhattan is exactly why they were now going to be looking for new jobs themselves.
We were vindicated, but some of us were still unemployed unfortunately. Either way, it may still be worth your while to try.
Browsers taking advantage of 3d acceleration is something that should have been done a long time ago. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Images are just textures that can be thrown anywhere on the screen, multiple times, FAST in all sorts of weird and contorted ways, including shaders.
Firefox is well on its way to accomplishing this via the Cairo rendering back end which has hardware acceleration on some platforms.
Resizing the page, scrolling, zooming all sorts of things can be made incredibly fast. Scrolling for instance, render the whole (static portions) of the page to a texture (or multiple to keep them pixel for pixel accurate on larger screens) and then just move the viewport around on a rectangle textured with those textures.
Windows kind of does this on its own already but in XP that backing store isn't accelerated in the same way as Vista/Win7. I.E. The acceleration in XP is based on the cards 2d acceleration traits, which while at one time was fast as hell relatively, however gaming pushed the 3d side harder faster and 2d has been neglected for anything other than video playback for years. Thats where Vista and Win7 change things.
Instead of using the old driver model, the model was updated which required manufactures to facilitate new acceleration methods, the end result is basically that Vista and Win7 render using the 3d acceleration, shaders and all the other neat things that are now available on most graphics cards. Vista/Win7 makes them more of a requirement.
Now ... being that some hardware acceleration features are now required by the driver model, IE developers can basically just write to directx (Or more likely WPF) which will throw everything at the card in ways that can be accelerated.
Basically, the reason they 'cant' do it on XP isn't a technical one, its a practical one. They pretty much know Vista/Win7 are going to have a certain level of hardware acceleration, taking the need for them to render it on the CPU and sending the render to the card, they send the drawing commands to the card and let it draw it for them. They just can't reliably expect that to be there in XP.
Facebook is only top traffic dog because of all the scam bots constantly creating new accounts, scaming others, and stealing information via games.
Take all the scammers away, you could run it off a cable modem!
Of course, you're utterly wrong. Facebook has more traffic than Google SEARCH but throw in all the other services and its knocked back down.
All of those things will be true in 2-5 years when the Facebook fad is replaced by something else too, just like the people who still use MySpace.
Reality: Its a fad, theres nothing to do but wait.
Yea, and pretty much any time some propritary software package is terminated, it is almost certainly available for sale to someone else so it can be taken over if its worth it to someone.
The reason it doesn't happen is because the projects that get cut are the ones that no one cares enough about to continue development.
The license of the software pretty much no effect on its ability survive, its worth to someone else does.
Or it could be that no one actually gave a shit about OpenSSO outside a very small group of people.
Its funny that everyone assume Oracle is being evil when a simple bit of common sense makes it pretty clear that its a waste of resources from pretty much every perspective to Oracle.
Unfortunately, the software only thing was the way Virtual PC (which is whats actually being used) until the most recent versions, where they went from software only to hardware only virtually over night for no readily apparent reason other than they could do it.
Yes, now Opera has grand total of around 400 or 500 users total, as opposed to the 6 people who actually used it before MS was forced to advertise them.
Not true.
10.0 - 10.3 Ran on PPC only, 10.6 will not.
Only 4 and 5 will run on both processor architectures but all versions have dropped support for older hardware as they came along.
You do realize the information on those pages is clearly inaccurate and out of date ... right?
The forced upgrade comes because users depend on so much other MS software. You upgrade one thing and instantly just about everything else needs an upgrade or it won't work. Since MS integrates so tightly with its own code and rarely ever takes any consideration to forward/backward compat for interop between applications within the system it seems like the force upgrades. You can't just upgrade Word, you upgrade office, and then CRM, and then SBM (or whatever its called this year).
Of course, the same is true of all software really.
Microsoft does it. Apple does it. Linux distros are the worst at this. More people us MS so it comes up more often for them, its not that anyone or anything is actually different, there are just more people talking about MS because its more popular.
Wow, you live in a different world than me then because all the friends and family I know that got Vista asked me to give them XP back :/
Maybe you only know people who never owned a computer before Vista?
People hated it because change for nothing more than the sake of change pisses people off, and thats what Vista was to 99.99999999999999999999999% of the world if you exclude Microsoft.
You must still be using checks, why else are you going to the bank now days?
Way to douche it up.
This isn't for people in the modern age that transfer money to others.
This is for people in the modern age that still get checks from people who would rather avoid electronic methods for whatever reason.
Is transfering money over the phone the only way you can make a purchase in Europe and Africa? Whats that? You guys have checks too? No shit? So this is probably something that'll happen there too?
God, when will people like you realize that now days every place on Earth is more or less the same as ever other place on the Earth as far as level of technology for a given class of people.
Poor people will still be poor, rich will still be rich.
I'd really prefer that people like yourself wake up and realize that you really aren't any different than people elsewhere. You don't have anything that makes you better overall. You just have minor differences that more or less balance out in the end.
How do I know? There isn't a mass exodus of American's to Europe or vice versus.
And another important note: No one actually thinks Europeans are cool like they make it out in American movies or where ever you get that arrogance from. The entire rest of the world knows you're just as much of a douche bag as everyone else, the only ones who don't know it are Europeans :/
You expect a lawyer to be faithful to their word?
Idiot.
Shrug, this isn't new.
The Alterans (Ancients, the gate builders) left god knows how many stone structures around the universe and thousands in our galaxy alone that have survived 10 million years since they left.
It makes sense that they would do something like this rather than lay massive stone blocks to build those buildings.
Slashdot needs a rule preventing the posting of stories about stories.
Or at the very least, fucking preventing blogs about blogs about some story.
When did slashdot become a random blog aggregator instead of news for nerds?
If you get a submission from a user thats a link to a story about some other story, don't fucking post it. Make your own damn submission with the final site in it and stop giving out all the slashvertising and wasting our time.
Not paying, PAVING.
God do you people even think about what you're typing or saying when you use phrases like this? Did it ever once occur to you to think about what you're saying and how much sense it makes?
Then either you don't use calendaring very heavy and have been using Outlook as a mere email client. I develop plugins for email clients. I freaking HATE Outlook in just about every conceivable way. If I was a sales person or a manager who gets stuck with lots of meetings and high email traffic, Outlook would be my preferred email client.
Outlook is not an email client. Its not a calendaring application. Its a PIM, it does email as well and integrates it rather well even though its email system feels crappy and has horrible imap support (O2K7 and O2010 aren't bad for imap, too bad they ripped out the IE rendering engine). Thunderbird is an email client and its great at that. Sunbird is a calendar package, and its kind of shitty. The combination of the two is utterly ass-tastic.
If you want calendaring just ditch sunbird and use gmail or apps for your domain. Yes you can use Sunbird with it, but unless that has changed recently, that too is a shitty experience. Probably should have kept some phones with ActiveSync exchange support though since thats about the only way to sync calendars that doesn't suck total ass.
Its fine that you run the software you want to run, and if it works for you, thats great ... but ... If you're replacing Outlook with Thunderbird + Sunbird than you weren't really using Outlook for much more than an email client, which is probably its worst feature. Please don't go around suggesting to normal users to do the same.
You do realize that it installed stuff on your computer ... right? Both the Java and ActiveX versions require it, you just change the definition of 'install' ever so slightly.
Both of them download and execute code native on your machine. You're defining install as what? Something that shows up in add/remove programs, cause you can change those things to 'installed' by adding a single registry key then.
I've got a Win3.1 'laptop' (okay, so its a luggable) sitting in my basement that will connect to the Internet and has no virus nor am I worried about it getting in it.
Its just as useful and safe to me as your ubuntu box since it doesn't run a single application that I want it to run, not only because of its
OS but also because its turned off.
Yes, you've shown us that no one targets ubuntu because its practically useless to most of the world who prefers to run Windows so they can have the apps they are used to.
Will you guys EVER figure it out?
I've found that anti-virus software is almost always more annoying than malware. In almost every instance the performance cost of anti-virus software quickly out weight the time it takes me to restore from a backup image.
I've found this to be true of any software package (commercial or otherwise) that does on access scanning, which without on-access scanning theres no point to use the software for me since our servers can handle background scheduled scans using clam.
I guess you could say I use clam running on FreeBSD accessing files via SMBFS on my Windows machines.
With the exception of the BootCamp partition I have for gaming, my personal Windows instances are all VMs with lots of snapshots that I can roll back to should I come to a problem. Its just easier for me to use snapshots and virtual machines than to deal with av software. I have a method of creating new snapshot thats relatively safe (restore to a known good snapshot, install updates/known safe new software, immediately shut down and take a snapshot to work from in the future.
AV would be easier, but all the time I spend waiting on compiles because the retarded AV software has to scan ever binary I make and probably is retarded enough to scan all the source files each access to just makes it too inefficient for my tastes.
Its more likely to be a red windshield in the death cases.
Then you wait for the police officer to explain why the wreck behind your car happened and why he or she is going to have to tell someone their mom/dad/husband/wife is dead.
Theres more to it than just pulling over. You get OFF THE ROAD. That doesn't mean sit on the shoulder of the road with your lights on some someone drivers right into the backend of you thinking they can follow you.
You've obviously never experienced a 'wall of water' where at 55-60 the car in front of you literally disappears instantly as it enters the rain its so thick. If that person just 'pulls over' instantly, theres a really good chance you're eating their bumper for dinner.
Assuming you are American ...
Stop lights are at the top/left, Go on the bottom/right.
Now, color has no added value, whats your excuse now?
You shouldn't be allowed to drive since you are ignorant of such basic and vital information to someone such as yourself (I'm presuming you're color blind, otherwise you're just ranting about someone else's problem, which you don't actually understand).
I would presume other countries have a standard probably much like this, perhaps a different order or something instead, but I'm sure its there.
You're looking at color as the only indicator, which would be pretty silly and not likely to be something they do for important information. <blink> to the rescue!