It's why Wordpress is now the de facto standard for blogs. The extra features, addins, etc.. all developed because it was a simple, open source framework for coders to do it.
Movable Type isn't bad... it just lacks the expansion wordpress does.
The invention of the "Click and Run" technology as I had posted a while back, is probably the MOST important thing to come to Linux in a very long time. I understand the use of saying "Hey, use the repositories for software" but that's akin to tell users to get all their software from Windows Update.
Sometimes you just want to download some random application off the internet and install it, without using a make command or a./install command either.
As an aside, I run Ubuntu on my laptop next to me at work, and I'm fine with it... but it lacks the ease of use that OS X brings to it, or the familiarity of Windows.
Is *NOT* the operating system. We all know that Apple makes a better OS. Linux *could be* a better OS if it had some more polish (sorry/.ers).
You need to break the monopoly of financial and other business institutions relying on Excel and Microsoft Office. Don't tell me about Pages or Keynote or whatever other software there is. Sure, it's easy to use, very pretty... but Office is a product that Microsoft doesn't fuck around with, and produces (and I'm waiting for my hateful comments) -- AWESOMELY. It's the best software that Microsoft makes. Office 2007 is a great step forward in usability, stability, intelligence, and workflow. You can't interoperate your Pages information with your Keynote information, or vice versa. But in Excel, highlight some cells, copy, and dump it into a fully editable Word document. Then take a Visio diagram and dump it into the same Word Doc -- still editable. Collaborate easily on Sharepoint (now also part of Office). With Groove, you collaborate even further at the same time. And it's all stable, clean, and simple to use software with a powerful macro language (though I'm sure it's not the best) that allows you to automate and get information from different APIs (just walk into any financial institution and you'll see HUGE spreadsheets that download information out of Reuters and Bloomberg, email folks about updates, send updates to Blackberries formatted properly, etc).
Break THAT monopoly, and Windows won't even matter.
And don't mention Open Office. It's a joke compared to MS Office right now.
This is about the stupidest article I've read in a while.
What "holds back tech" is the lack of talent. Plain and simple. If you want to beat Microsoft, you have to out innovate them. Yes, they have a stranglehold on the desktop, but why? Because they have an open OS that is easy to program for, and has low development costs along with quick development..NET while far from perfect, is a pretty good building ground. Want to know why Mac gaming, or Linux gaming never took off? Ask John Carmack, who has espoused Microsoft as a very good platform on which to build his engines. And he can do it easily, and cheaply too.
And then you blame chip makers for focusing on chip speeds? Of course, THAT'S the problem! Too fast chips!
Every market, whether it be automobiles, fast food, or anything else responds to what the market will bear and want. It's why consumers buy more Japanese cars than American cars nowadays, simply because they last longer, are cheaper to maintain, and overall, have higher build quality and give better gas mileage. If Ford finally put out a car that wasn't a total piece of shit, don't you think people would buy it? But no.. the tried and true Honda Accord and Toyota Camry are amongst the best selling cars in the entire world. Because they make sure to hit the points that customers will need, and have been shown to want.
The IT world is NO DIFFERENT. You want to "break the stranglehold" on Microsoft? Then go make something better. Make an OS that has software around it that compliments another. Right now there is no equivalent to the Office and Windows combination. You can create a document in Windows, in Office. You put that on Sharepoint. Then you add.NET code to it. You can share it, and collaborate on it. All through Microsoft software. All reasonably seamlessly. And cheaply to boot. When there are BETTER ALTERNATIVES to the "whole package", then Microsoft will lose its foothold. But ask any financial institution what they need more than anything in their office, and the word back will be resoundingly "Excel." Breaking the stranglehold means offering something BETTER than Microsoft can offer. And right now, there is no better office suite than MS Office, not by a LONG SHOT. And the new version (2007) is actually VERY good, regardless of what the naysayers may have you believe.
I'm far from a Microsoft lover. I hate a lot of things about them, I think Vista is largely pointless, but not BAD. I think that it's too expensive. But in the end, my games play on Windows, not on a Mac, and not on Linux. I could go through the trouble of setting up Wine and getting games to work... but why would I bother? It works on Windows, and it's easy to do. When it's easy to do on Linux or a Mac, then you will see the paradigm shift. But not before then.
That's a misleading claim -- OSX was developed and delivered on the POWER architecture well before it came out for X86. And even then, most applications were severely butchered or didn't work at all.
But then again, at less than 5% of the installed PC base, I think it was a risk Apple could take.
Microsoft simply doesn't have that option, and backwards compatibility is a HUGE factor when designing next-gen OSes. It also limits the amount of what they can produce, but now with virtualization technologies arising quickly.. I'm excited to see what the future of computing holds -- whether it's Apple, Linux, or Microsoft.
The key to breaking Microsoft isn't on Windows by the way... it's on Office. Financial institutions won't leave office, they run the world's markets, and every large broker uses Excel as their primary source of money making. And as long as "the market" drives forward, Office will be the one monopoly that will almost never break. That's just my opinion anyway, after working for 10 years in the financial sector (in IT though!)
I'm running Vista now (it's free from work, so I decided to install Business edition), and I have no real issues with it. It's a memory hog and whatever else, but I just have to laugh and say, "how quickly we forget".
Almost all of these complaints were exactly the same when XP was released. Memory, drivers, utility, etc... Vista runs all my games (which is why I have it) without a hitch, even the old DOSBoxed ones. I know we will have Mac fanboys up and down the aisles here so my probability of being modded down is higher, but so much software written for OS9 doesn't work on OSX any more at all. At least I can say that four OS versions later (95, 98, 2000, XP) and software CONTINUES to work (maybe not all of it) well... that's not too terrible either. I'm not saying Vista is "the shit" either -- I much prefer my Macbook for the OS use, but when I want to play my games, old and new... I can run them on Vista without a hitch.
I'll wait for SP1 to see how well Vista fares in the future, but as it stands right now, I haven't had a BSOD or a crash in over a month, and my games play fast and furious, though I do lose a few frames per second since the drivers just aren't as good for Vista yet.
Is that the desktop doesn't refresh at all. If I download a file via Firefox, it dumps it to the desktop. Nothing actually appears until I use spotlight to search for the file. It's really, really annoying.
Problem with that is (and speaking as a Windows sysadmin), you can't manage one of the most important things well within 2008 -- and that's IIS. It's not an easy task to manage and regulate an IIS site without the GUI. If they have MMC access available to it, so I can do it remotely though, it should be fine but I don't recall that as an option for IIS.
We will see though. I'm a big fan of Server 2003, and I think 2008 addresses some really good points.
But how much more are we going to milk this stuff?
Let it die, let new sci-fi pave the way. The problem is we have such hardcore lovers that want Star Wars EVERYTHING that we miss out on what could be really great stuff.
Case in point: Firefly.
That's a series I would have loved to see continue.
Who's talking about "standards"? I'm talking about using a common format that works across players. There are few players that support AAC other than iPods, everybody else uses MP3.
I'm just saying use what is popular and 'standard', in so far as the most commonly used format on an -- MP3 PLAYER.
That they won't offer anything other than AAC. Which means for those of us with "other" types of players, the iTunes Music Store is completely useless.
I have an iPod as well as a few other devices, and frankly, I will continue to buy CDs or go through Amazon that has MP3 format available. Yes, it's not Ogg but not all devices support that. Every device supports MP3, and so the popular format that Amazon releases is the one I'll by. I will usually save money anyway.
I do wish Amazon had a better front-end to search their MP3s though... this way I can re-download them incase I lose them.
There's no SP1 yet. I know that's the case here, and I'm the senior sysadmin for about 3500 seats. There are some pluses to Vista like Bitlocker for our laptops, amongst other things. We have been doing compatibility testing with Vista for some time now, and have found the vast majority of our applications work okay, only a handful do not. Those handful of users will be refreshed with XP if the software isn't upgraded by then, and if it is, they will run Vista. Everybody runs a 2 year refresh cycle from their start date, so that's how we refresh PCs.
I just think OO.o lacks a focus. As other Slashdot members had said earlier, it seems to be over engineered and not thought out enough in a 'direction.' An engineer says "Java is a good idea to have" so they add Java... and bring other woes.
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another. You cannot invent a similar animal as a MS Office, and then go your own direction even if it's smarter. You have to adopt the platform, and make it your own. That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.
Open Office (and I haven't checked out the latest version) comes in and says that it's a replacement for MS Office... but it does things its own way. Some shortcut keys are similar, but a lot of stuff is different. It's usable for sure, especially for/. users, but for the average Joe who has used Office everywhere else, OO.o is a different animal. And it's uglier and slower.
Make it pretty, make it similar... then build upon it. Not before. Just my thought anyway... maybe Sun will take it to heart. I don't see any benefit or disadvantage to having more control in the community hands, because like they say.. too many cooks spoil the broth. And we will have a LOT of cooks all trying to make feature decisions, instead of a focused core of people that guide the direction of a project.
And I could be wrong, so please take it with a grain of salt.
Carmack has always been a fan of Microsoft's development tools and platform. He finds it easy to build and develop his engines for Xbox 360 and the PC using these tools. I'm unsurprised that now he's on the Direct X platform, for similar reasons.
Maybe it just costs too much money to develop platforms on OpenGL? I could be wrong, but I am inferring that from Carmack's own statements earlier. Perhaps somebody could verify my thoughts, or negate them?
Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market.. maybe they are just trying to offer the best of both worlds, while maintaining the competitive nature of Sun and their own history, against the 'brand' of Linux that actually makes no money whatsoever. IBM makes money, Novell makes money.. Linux as a brand doesn't really make money at all, does it?
But people are going to be paid to write good articles about products, instead of advertising. Your beloved Engadgets and Gizmodos will write articles saying "THIS THING IS AWESOME", paid for by the manufacturer. They won't be making any ground with traditional advertising since we are blocking it all. Tivo removes the ads as well.
So you are going to have to make a choice... do you want simple ads on the side that accompany your article or TV show, or ones that are embedded into them, and influence them? You can't have it both ways, and at some point marketing/ad companies will realize they are losing money because of Firefox and try alternative methods of syndicating their content. Probably at our expense.
Why will people adopt ODF, when the software used to support that format, pretty much sucks compared to the competition?
Office is WIDELY used, and it *is* the standard. If you want to break adoption of the MS standard, you have to produce products that are better. Open Office is great for students and such, but in ANY financial institution, Excel is a *requirement*. Break the stranglehold on Excel, and the format will follow. Until then, corporations are going to keep using the format that allows them to keep using Excel, without having to 'convert' thousands of spreadsheets they have worked so tirelessly on.
ODF already has a habit of garbling the VBA code in a LOT of Excel files -- no business in this world will touch it with a ten foot pole. And since MS Office is a surprisingly good piece of software, IBM has their work cut out for them. Maybe next format war, they can win... this one they won't. And it's not because MS is paying off vendors to support them, but rather because it makes more business sense to stick with what works -- and that is Microsoft Office, not Open Office, which sucks horribly in comparison.
with BP every day. They are the only major oil company to seem to "get" that oil won't last forever. They have invested money into solar technologies (walk into Home Depot), lowered their own emissions requirements to meet standards that don't even exist yet, and now are shown to be investing heavily into alternative "bio" fuels. Exxon and the like seem content to just pulling oil from the ground and putting it into pumps.
Just a simple thought. They are still an "evil oil company" thus far as I can see... but at least they have vision for the future and aren't thinking oil will last forever as the Bush administration thinks it will.
Slashdot Mirror
It's why Wordpress is now the de facto standard for blogs. The extra features, addins, etc.. all developed because it was a simple, open source framework for coders to do it.
Movable Type isn't bad... it just lacks the expansion wordpress does.
about the sheer idiocy of people in government.
Never ceases to amaze me.
Ease of use, mainly.
./install command either.
The invention of the "Click and Run" technology as I had posted a while back, is probably the MOST important thing to come to Linux in a very long time. I understand the use of saying "Hey, use the repositories for software" but that's akin to tell users to get all their software from Windows Update.
Sometimes you just want to download some random application off the internet and install it, without using a make command or a
As an aside, I run Ubuntu on my laptop next to me at work, and I'm fine with it... but it lacks the ease of use that OS X brings to it, or the familiarity of Windows.
Canada gets some more value out of their money, and suddenly, they think they can beat us at everything?
Nobody is as corrupt as US Politicians, I mean hell... we came up with Net Neutrality. Beat that Canada!
Is *NOT* the operating system. We all know that Apple makes a better OS. Linux *could be* a better OS if it had some more polish (sorry /.ers).
You need to break the monopoly of financial and other business institutions relying on Excel and Microsoft Office. Don't tell me about Pages or Keynote or whatever other software there is. Sure, it's easy to use, very pretty... but Office is a product that Microsoft doesn't fuck around with, and produces (and I'm waiting for my hateful comments) -- AWESOMELY. It's the best software that Microsoft makes. Office 2007 is a great step forward in usability, stability, intelligence, and workflow. You can't interoperate your Pages information with your Keynote information, or vice versa. But in Excel, highlight some cells, copy, and dump it into a fully editable Word document. Then take a Visio diagram and dump it into the same Word Doc -- still editable. Collaborate easily on Sharepoint (now also part of Office). With Groove, you collaborate even further at the same time. And it's all stable, clean, and simple to use software with a powerful macro language (though I'm sure it's not the best) that allows you to automate and get information from different APIs (just walk into any financial institution and you'll see HUGE spreadsheets that download information out of Reuters and Bloomberg, email folks about updates, send updates to Blackberries formatted properly, etc).
Break THAT monopoly, and Windows won't even matter.
And don't mention Open Office. It's a joke compared to MS Office right now.
This is about the stupidest article I've read in a while.
.NET while far from perfect, is a pretty good building ground. Want to know why Mac gaming, or Linux gaming never took off? Ask John Carmack, who has espoused Microsoft as a very good platform on which to build his engines. And he can do it easily, and cheaply too.
.NET code to it. You can share it, and collaborate on it. All through Microsoft software. All reasonably seamlessly. And cheaply to boot. When there are BETTER ALTERNATIVES to the "whole package", then Microsoft will lose its foothold. But ask any financial institution what they need more than anything in their office, and the word back will be resoundingly "Excel." Breaking the stranglehold means offering something BETTER than Microsoft can offer. And right now, there is no better office suite than MS Office, not by a LONG SHOT. And the new version (2007) is actually VERY good, regardless of what the naysayers may have you believe.
What "holds back tech" is the lack of talent. Plain and simple. If you want to beat Microsoft, you have to out innovate them. Yes, they have a stranglehold on the desktop, but why? Because they have an open OS that is easy to program for, and has low development costs along with quick development.
And then you blame chip makers for focusing on chip speeds? Of course, THAT'S the problem! Too fast chips!
Every market, whether it be automobiles, fast food, or anything else responds to what the market will bear and want. It's why consumers buy more Japanese cars than American cars nowadays, simply because they last longer, are cheaper to maintain, and overall, have higher build quality and give better gas mileage. If Ford finally put out a car that wasn't a total piece of shit, don't you think people would buy it? But no.. the tried and true Honda Accord and Toyota Camry are amongst the best selling cars in the entire world. Because they make sure to hit the points that customers will need, and have been shown to want.
The IT world is NO DIFFERENT. You want to "break the stranglehold" on Microsoft? Then go make something better. Make an OS that has software around it that compliments another. Right now there is no equivalent to the Office and Windows combination. You can create a document in Windows, in Office. You put that on Sharepoint. Then you add
I'm far from a Microsoft lover. I hate a lot of things about them, I think Vista is largely pointless, but not BAD. I think that it's too expensive. But in the end, my games play on Windows, not on a Mac, and not on Linux. I could go through the trouble of setting up Wine and getting games to work... but why would I bother? It works on Windows, and it's easy to do. When it's easy to do on Linux or a Mac, then you will see the paradigm shift. But not before then.
That's a misleading claim -- OSX was developed and delivered on the POWER architecture well before it came out for X86. And even then, most applications were severely butchered or didn't work at all.
But then again, at less than 5% of the installed PC base, I think it was a risk Apple could take.
Microsoft simply doesn't have that option, and backwards compatibility is a HUGE factor when designing next-gen OSes. It also limits the amount of what they can produce, but now with virtualization technologies arising quickly.. I'm excited to see what the future of computing holds -- whether it's Apple, Linux, or Microsoft.
The key to breaking Microsoft isn't on Windows by the way... it's on Office. Financial institutions won't leave office, they run the world's markets, and every large broker uses Excel as their primary source of money making. And as long as "the market" drives forward, Office will be the one monopoly that will almost never break. That's just my opinion anyway, after working for 10 years in the financial sector (in IT though!)
I'm running Vista now (it's free from work, so I decided to install Business edition), and I have no real issues with it. It's a memory hog and whatever else, but I just have to laugh and say, "how quickly we forget".
Almost all of these complaints were exactly the same when XP was released. Memory, drivers, utility, etc... Vista runs all my games (which is why I have it) without a hitch, even the old DOSBoxed ones. I know we will have Mac fanboys up and down the aisles here so my probability of being modded down is higher, but so much software written for OS9 doesn't work on OSX any more at all. At least I can say that four OS versions later (95, 98, 2000, XP) and software CONTINUES to work (maybe not all of it) well... that's not too terrible either. I'm not saying Vista is "the shit" either -- I much prefer my Macbook for the OS use, but when I want to play my games, old and new... I can run them on Vista without a hitch.
I'll wait for SP1 to see how well Vista fares in the future, but as it stands right now, I haven't had a BSOD or a crash in over a month, and my games play fast and furious, though I do lose a few frames per second since the drivers just aren't as good for Vista yet.
I'll be patient, and remember my history.
Is that the desktop doesn't refresh at all. If I download a file via Firefox, it dumps it to the desktop. Nothing actually appears until I use spotlight to search for the file. It's really, really annoying.
Problem with that is (and speaking as a Windows sysadmin), you can't manage one of the most important things well within 2008 -- and that's IIS. It's not an easy task to manage and regulate an IIS site without the GUI. If they have MMC access available to it, so I can do it remotely though, it should be fine but I don't recall that as an option for IIS.
We will see though. I'm a big fan of Server 2003, and I think 2008 addresses some really good points.
But how much more are we going to milk this stuff?
Let it die, let new sci-fi pave the way. The problem is we have such hardcore lovers that want Star Wars EVERYTHING that we miss out on what could be really great stuff.
Case in point: Firefly.
That's a series I would have loved to see continue.
Who's talking about "standards"? I'm talking about using a common format that works across players. There are few players that support AAC other than iPods, everybody else uses MP3.
I'm just saying use what is popular and 'standard', in so far as the most commonly used format on an -- MP3 PLAYER.
That they won't offer anything other than AAC. Which means for those of us with "other" types of players, the iTunes Music Store is completely useless.
I have an iPod as well as a few other devices, and frankly, I will continue to buy CDs or go through Amazon that has MP3 format available. Yes, it's not Ogg but not all devices support that. Every device supports MP3, and so the popular format that Amazon releases is the one I'll by. I will usually save money anyway.
I do wish Amazon had a better front-end to search their MP3s though... this way I can re-download them incase I lose them.
Screw up FOX News as badly as she screwed HP, we would be in good business!
There's no SP1 yet. I know that's the case here, and I'm the senior sysadmin for about 3500 seats. There are some pluses to Vista like Bitlocker for our laptops, amongst other things. We have been doing compatibility testing with Vista for some time now, and have found the vast majority of our applications work okay, only a handful do not. Those handful of users will be refreshed with XP if the software isn't upgraded by then, and if it is, they will run Vista. Everybody runs a 2 year refresh cycle from their start date, so that's how we refresh PCs.
it consists of blaring Chris Crocker's YouTube performance at loud volumes through very big speakers.
Open Office is that, right?
/. users, but for the average Joe who has used Office everywhere else, OO.o is a different animal. And it's uglier and slower.
I just think OO.o lacks a focus. As other Slashdot members had said earlier, it seems to be over engineered and not thought out enough in a 'direction.' An engineer says "Java is a good idea to have" so they add Java... and bring other woes.
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them). Open Office lacks the 'polish' that a Microsoft Office delivers. This isn't about document format wars folks -- it's about the sheer usability of one platform over another. You cannot invent a similar animal as a MS Office, and then go your own direction even if it's smarter. You have to adopt the platform, and make it your own. That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.
Open Office (and I haven't checked out the latest version) comes in and says that it's a replacement for MS Office... but it does things its own way. Some shortcut keys are similar, but a lot of stuff is different. It's usable for sure, especially for
Make it pretty, make it similar... then build upon it. Not before. Just my thought anyway... maybe Sun will take it to heart. I don't see any benefit or disadvantage to having more control in the community hands, because like they say.. too many cooks spoil the broth. And we will have a LOT of cooks all trying to make feature decisions, instead of a focused core of people that guide the direction of a project.
And I could be wrong, so please take it with a grain of salt.
Carmack has always been a fan of Microsoft's development tools and platform. He finds it easy to build and develop his engines for Xbox 360 and the PC using these tools. I'm unsurprised that now he's on the Direct X platform, for similar reasons.
Maybe it just costs too much money to develop platforms on OpenGL? I could be wrong, but I am inferring that from Carmack's own statements earlier. Perhaps somebody could verify my thoughts, or negate them?
wireless sync "push" email for my CALENDAR, mail, and contacts to my mobile phone.
That's all I want. Otherwise, the calendar and mail systems out there are perfectly good and well and take care of us without issue.
Maybe you just suck at computers.
My Vista PC hums along just as nicely as my Ubuntu machine, although I do reboot Vista more often.
to use the tag so often used inappropriately.
"haha"
Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market.. maybe they are just trying to offer the best of both worlds, while maintaining the competitive nature of Sun and their own history, against the 'brand' of Linux that actually makes no money whatsoever. IBM makes money, Novell makes money.. Linux as a brand doesn't really make money at all, does it?
and it's why I don't use AdBlock...
But people are going to be paid to write good articles about products, instead of advertising. Your beloved Engadgets and Gizmodos will write articles saying "THIS THING IS AWESOME", paid for by the manufacturer. They won't be making any ground with traditional advertising since we are blocking it all. Tivo removes the ads as well.
So you are going to have to make a choice... do you want simple ads on the side that accompany your article or TV show, or ones that are embedded into them, and influence them? You can't have it both ways, and at some point marketing/ad companies will realize they are losing money because of Firefox and try alternative methods of syndicating their content. Probably at our expense.
Why will people adopt ODF, when the software used to support that format, pretty much sucks compared to the competition?
Office is WIDELY used, and it *is* the standard. If you want to break adoption of the MS standard, you have to produce products that are better. Open Office is great for students and such, but in ANY financial institution, Excel is a *requirement*. Break the stranglehold on Excel, and the format will follow. Until then, corporations are going to keep using the format that allows them to keep using Excel, without having to 'convert' thousands of spreadsheets they have worked so tirelessly on.
ODF already has a habit of garbling the VBA code in a LOT of Excel files -- no business in this world will touch it with a ten foot pole. And since MS Office is a surprisingly good piece of software, IBM has their work cut out for them. Maybe next format war, they can win... this one they won't. And it's not because MS is paying off vendors to support them, but rather because it makes more business sense to stick with what works -- and that is Microsoft Office, not Open Office, which sucks horribly in comparison.
with BP every day. They are the only major oil company to seem to "get" that oil won't last forever. They have invested money into solar technologies (walk into Home Depot), lowered their own emissions requirements to meet standards that don't even exist yet, and now are shown to be investing heavily into alternative "bio" fuels. Exxon and the like seem content to just pulling oil from the ground and putting it into pumps.
Just a simple thought. They are still an "evil oil company" thus far as I can see... but at least they have vision for the future and aren't thinking oil will last forever as the Bush administration thinks it will.