I've been a Firefox user since version 0.8, right after it (AFAIK) switched from being Phoenix/Firebird. At the time, I was a corporate IT staff using an unlicensed browser in an IE-Only world. I had long previous even given up using Netscape, simply because it was slower and not as nice as IE 5 or IE 6. In fact, the lack of a good browser was one hindrance to my personal adoption of Linux and later advocacy at the office.
Now, four years later (just about), I'm a solid Firefox user and only use IE through the IE tab function (when on Wintendo) and Wine/VMWare (under Linux). IE 7 doesn't even work as well as firefox, IMO, in most circumstances.
Yet, the corporate adoption problem still remains. I am now a division manager over IT development and deployment for a 1,200-person department in a large County organization. Our official policy is "IE-Only." Do I run Firefox? Yes. Do I have staff which runs firefox? Yes. Are they officially allowed to run Firefox from the CIO? No. The problem is - Firefox doesn't come bundled with Windows XP/Vista and therefore isn't even on the minds of most non-IT folks in my organization. As it is, recent applications I've overseen are more Firefox-compliant, but still run "better" with IE or at least the IE-tab.
You can forget about running Linux on the desktop where I work. The CIO thinks Linux is a four-letter-word. (They freak out whenever I trot out my new HP laptop which had Vista and was upgraded to openSUSE.)
In any case, the article has some good points - no Mozilla-developed.msi file for rapid deployment, no central support function from Mozilla(yes, we do yell at Steve B. once in a while), and no corporate push from Mozilla.
One thing it doesn't mention - the CIO's of the world which I know are generally not that tech-savvy. They've been out of the trenches for so long that they tend to lose sight of the "latest and greatest" while paying attention to those who have the most marketing dollars.
But surely the web-mail client shouldn't allow active content such as JavaScript or Flash to execute in the first place?
IIRC, many web apps don't consider.swf files to be "scriptable" as they are compiled. However, they are - effectively - scripts and can be run as such, similar to ECMAScript or VBScript.
Though I don't do P2P downloading of music samples anymore. (I consider the.mp3 format to be a sample of the music and not the original song, therefore not illegal or copy.) By the time I moved from Naptser to the Audigalaxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy) thing, I'd find myself disovering bands I'd never heard of.
In fact, I wouldn't even buy music if I hadn't heard the band through sharing.
The last 100 or so CD's I've bought have been only because I'd heard samples downloaded on the file sharing networks.
LOL! - Wintendo is a derisive term intended at the people who use Microsoft products for their ability to play games. Nothing to do with MS == Nintendo. (Though my son does play NESTicle on my wife's Win2K computer.)
I wonder how much (if anything) the Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/) project will influence the next gen Wintendo. I was talking to an MS engineer today (to whom I gave a SUSE 10.2 DVD) who is installing AD at our location.
He showed me that they apparently already have a VM of Singularity internally. (Of course, I couldn't get a copy...)
What is the deal with every single large distro out there incorporating 3d acelerated desktops and shining bells and whistles as the main features in all new releases? Sadly, this says mush about the state of computing today
I see you were flagged as a troll. It is too bad the/. scoring people don't see a valid post when it is staring them in the face.
Though I prefer Linux to Wintendo (and use it on my home machines) you have a point. Much of what has been hyped in the latest Linux distros is eye-candy effects. This is similar to my experience with Wintendo Vista. All eye-candy and no real useful features. I have tried Compiz - and went back to plain old KDE. I have also tried Vista and went and upgraded to SUSE 10.2.
Fortunately, there are those who are working on new desktop ideas which will probably see the light of day after the visionaries come out with the eye candy.
Of course, there are those out there who think X is still a big mistake.
As for my abilities, you can google me. I'm pretty much out there.
Why I use > 655500 rows? I'm involved right now in a lawsuit which requires some ad-hoc data manipulation from a mainframe to be presented in a spreadsheet format. What I've been doing is getting a flatfile data dump from the mainframe, importing said file via DTS into SQL server, running a query to grab the data in a format I need using the criteria requested, and then importing the results of that into a spreadsheet for delivery to the opposing council. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but since my datasets can range up to over 500K rows, I need a rather large spreadsheet. What I do is run the query against sql, export the data to a text file (comma delimited) and then import into excel. It is the easiest option. I'd use OOo if I could, since I run Linux on my main workstations.
Here's one query I recently wrote, which extracts data from July. This particular query resulted in 434,000 records being returned. And yes - I wrote it by hand in Query Analyzer:
-- *** Created by Kai Ponte, 9/3/07 ***
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#T1') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE #T1
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#T2') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE #T2
SELECT era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber, era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS,
era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTS as 'Cashiered' --, era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[Description]
into #t1
FROM era_data.dbo.Documents with (nolock)
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventLog with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_logs.dbo.EventLog.ObjectID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventTypes with (nolock) ON era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTypeID = era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[ID]
WHERE (era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTypeID = 13 ) AND
(era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS >= CONVERT(DATETIME, '2007-07-01 00:00:00', 102)) AND
(era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS < CONVERT(DATETIME, '2007-08-01 00:00:00', 102)) AND
(era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode = 'R002') order by era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber
SELECT era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber, era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS,
era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTS as 'Indexed' --, era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[Description]
into #t2
FROM era_data.dbo.Documents with (nolock)
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventLog with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_logs.dbo.EventLog.ObjectID
INNER JOIN era_l
I don't see anything in the Wiki or the Review yet about them fixing the problem of only supporting 65,536 rows in Calc. Anybody have an idea about that?
Yes, I do use more than 65,500 rows in Excel on a weekly basis to manage reports for people.)
That's because the quality of teachers has gone down. with high demand, job security, pension plan, decent hours, many bad teachers are jumping at the chance to work in incredible areas with smart kids, such as Fairfax County. Though you are partially right about the need for teachers allowing less qualified ones to get through - especially during the bilingual push in the late '90s - this is no longer the case. My wife teaches at CSU Fullerton in the credential program. They are now able to be MUCH more selective in who they allow through the programs. They have realized they need a high-caliber of teacher at all times.
There is more of a push these days to fill kids with information instead of having them learn it.
Agreed. The NCLB push has caused the schools to focus on facts and figures - in order to achieve those vaunted 900-level API scores - instead of real subject learning and problem solving. I'm already seeing this in some of the kids I hire out of college.
Ooh, ooh, can i please answer this one?? what about when you are making decision like buying servers or hardware and figuring out which option is the best. I did actually answer that one in a previous post. I am faced with multiple-choice decisions every day. In many cases, however, the answer may be: a, b, c, d, e, any combination of the above, or none of the above and I need to make a new set of choices immediately.
Though I don't feel it's the teacher's responsibility to excite the student 100% on the topic or subject being taught, parents need to do their part instead of work 60 hours a week at a dead end job like most of these kids I deal with. And yes a corporate job making a 7 figure salary to me is dead end when you rarely see your family. Sigh - I wish more parents understood this. I see so many "day care" kids that it is pathetic. I purposely work 6:00 - 3:30 in order to ensure I am there to coach soccer, be a cub scout father, and be on the PTA. There IS no other priority to me or to my wife. I may work 60+ hours in a week, but I do so in a manner which is conducive to being available to my children whenever they need. Case in point, I just rescheduled an important meeting on 10/31 so that I can be sure and take my kindergartner to school that morning. Yes, the meeting was with some important lawyers on a lawsuit to which I'm an expert witness, but they can wait for my children.
Really, you've never had to pick one of five options? What kind of managing do you do?
Boy, tough crowd. Yes, I'm often - in fact, daily - faced with deciding between a number of unrelated and possibly disguised options for any given situation.
I'm never given a list of options on a ditto, however, and told to fill in the bubble knowing that only one is the right answer. In the options I'm presented - one, two, or more may be right or they may all be wrong and I'm forced to throw them all out and create (note that word) new options for myself.
The point of public schools is to (attempt) to bring the entire populace up to some minimum level of education That's my point exactly! The schools are attemping to bring the populace - en mass - up to a "minimum" level. There's little room for those who want to go beyond and no change in the assembly line mentality of 100 years ago. Why don't we change the system to bring out the "maximum" level of education for each student??
I have a six-year-old in second grade and a four-year-old in kindergarten. The teachers are using the same boring techniques that didn't work when I was in school and are boring the crap out of my second grader. He's already turned off by learning every monday through friday and I have to reinvigorate him on the weekend with at-home projects.
It is unfortunate that the teaching system (of which my wife is a part) is stuck in a 19th century methodology of teaching the masses to act in unison. It is as if they're preparing these kids for the rote factory jobs of yesterday instead of the knowledge-critical jobs of today.
I've yet to find one instance in my work (IT manager over about 60 people in a large government agency with roughly 60 servers, 1,500 staff members and 18TB of data online) where I had to fill out a scantron form or decide which option was best - a, b, c, d, or all of the above.
As it is, I'm on the school site council, PTA and am constantly talking to the administration in my sons' school district. They just don't seem to want to 'get it.'
I hate to ask a stupid question, but I've had many cell phones and cannot remember ever updating the software on them. Even my blackberry hasn't ever updated. Why the iPhone? Are they trying to add right-click functionality?
I'm confused. The past three notebooks I've owned have all been immediately recognized as using WiFi cards with accompanying drivers.
Seriously, I think the article is trying to find a solution in the wrong area. If I want a laptop and I plan to use Linux (which I always do) then I plan to get a wifi card compatible with such. I have no idea how ndiswrapper works and have no plans to ever use it.
My most recent notebook - an HP/Compaq nw9440 - came with the option of a Broadcom or an Intel wireless card. I went with Intel for the simple fact that I know intel works.
Sure enough, wireless was up and running as soon as I installed SUSE 10.2 on the machine. (It initially came with Vista but I upgraded pretty quickly.)
The answer to WiFi is to ensure the manufacturers supply drivers - open source or not - to their chipsets, since they're no longer putting them in the firmware. Intel does. I believe Broadcom is now. Anybody else?
I really liked Star Wars, Empire and - to some degree - Return of the Jedi. They had quality storylines, the effects were not overdone and the acting was somewhat decent.
The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and even Revenge of the Sith were all plagued by bad storylines/writing, overdone effect that already look cheap and out-of-date, and barely passable acting.
In fact - for me - one of the main things which holds Star Wars up as an all-time classic is the 'low tech' aspect of the movie. It makes the movie look "timeless" unlike the other five. In other words, the movie won't look "aged" after another ten years. By comparison, the effects in TPM and the other new trilogy prequels look somewhat like 1960's-era Star Trek.
I still remember an experience about three years ago (while at San Bernardino County) where most of our 500+ Win2K/2K3 servers were hosed by some virus. Meanwhile my 12 SLES servers were humming along just fine.
I am upper management, and I advocate OSS whenever possible.
As a manager, I'm interested in two things - cost and productivity. If I can use a piece of software and get the job done faster and cheaper, I'll use it. End of story.
There are no other variables.
Now, as a technology geek - I have two 24" monitors on my desktop (running XP) and a 17" laptop (running SUSE) with me all the time - I want to use OSS because it is cool and because I despise Microsoft's business model. However, that philosophy will not fly with executives. They simply want to know how I'm going to save money and get stuff done faster. They don't give a sh-- about Linux vs. Microsoft.
One other thing. I personally have a $7M budget for FY 2007/2008. About $1.5M of that is for software services and supplies and another $2M is for hardware. That means the majority of my "expenses" are for personnel. Again, executive management wants to know how to make things cheaper / faster / better. If I need to spend more on personnel to get an incremental savings in software, it ain't gonna look good.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a Firefox user since version 0.8, right after it (AFAIK) switched from being Phoenix/Firebird. At the time, I was a corporate IT staff using an unlicensed browser in an IE-Only world. I had long previous even given up using Netscape, simply because it was slower and not as nice as IE 5 or IE 6. In fact, the lack of a good browser was one hindrance to my personal adoption of Linux and later advocacy at the office.
Now, four years later (just about), I'm a solid Firefox user and only use IE through the IE tab function (when on Wintendo) and Wine/VMWare (under Linux). IE 7 doesn't even work as well as firefox, IMO, in most circumstances.
Yet, the corporate adoption problem still remains. I am now a division manager over IT development and deployment for a 1,200-person department in a large County organization. Our official policy is "IE-Only." Do I run Firefox? Yes. Do I have staff which runs firefox? Yes. Are they officially allowed to run Firefox from the CIO? No. The problem is - Firefox doesn't come bundled with Windows XP/Vista and therefore isn't even on the minds of most non-IT folks in my organization. As it is, recent applications I've overseen are more Firefox-compliant, but still run "better" with IE or at least the IE-tab.
You can forget about running Linux on the desktop where I work. The CIO thinks Linux is a four-letter-word. (They freak out whenever I trot out my new HP laptop which had Vista and was upgraded to openSUSE.)
In any case, the article has some good points - no Mozilla-developed.msi file for rapid deployment, no central support function from Mozilla(yes, we do yell at Steve B. once in a while), and no corporate push from Mozilla.
One thing it doesn't mention - the CIO's of the world which I know are generally not that tech-savvy. They've been out of the trenches for so long that they tend to lose sight of the "latest and greatest" while paying attention to those who have the most marketing dollars.
Viruses are small and efficient.
IIRC, many web apps don't consider .swf files to be "scriptable" as they are compiled. However, they are - effectively - scripts and can be run as such, similar to ECMAScript or VBScript.
My son loves starfall. However, at the end of the stories - he continually rates them "not so good." He seems to like how they respond.
Funny - I don't remember being able to use a touchpad when I was five.
Wait - they didn't have touchpads on PC's when I was five.
Wait - they didn't have PC's when I was five...
Of course, my current favorite is Theseus and the Minotaur: http://www.logicmazes.com/theseus.html
Oh, back to work....
Though I don't do P2P downloading of music samples anymore. (I consider the .mp3 format to be a sample of the music and not the original song, therefore not illegal or copy.) By the time I moved from Naptser to the Audigalaxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy) thing, I'd find myself disovering bands I'd never heard of.
In fact, I wouldn't even buy music if I hadn't heard the band through sharing.
The last 100 or so CD's I've bought have been only because I'd heard samples downloaded on the file sharing networks.
I wonder how well it will do with the really cool vector games like Asteroids or BattleZone or Tempest or...
"what's your vector, Victor?"
LOL! - Wintendo is a derisive term intended at the people who use Microsoft products for their ability to play games. Nothing to do with MS == Nintendo. (Though my son does play NESTicle on my wife's Win2K computer.)
I wonder how much (if anything) the Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/) project will influence the next gen Wintendo. I was talking to an MS engineer today (to whom I gave a SUSE 10.2 DVD) who is installing AD at our location.
He showed me that they apparently already have a VM of Singularity internally. (Of course, I couldn't get a copy...)
I see you were flagged as a troll. It is too bad the /. scoring people don't see a valid post when it is staring them in the face.
Though I prefer Linux to Wintendo (and use it on my home machines) you have a point. Much of what has been hyped in the latest Linux distros is eye-candy effects. This is similar to my experience with Wintendo Vista. All eye-candy and no real useful features. I have tried Compiz - and went back to plain old KDE. I have also tried Vista and went and upgraded to SUSE 10.2.
Fortunately, there are those who are working on new desktop ideas which will probably see the light of day after the visionaries come out with the eye candy.
Of course, there are those out there who think X is still a big mistake.
I see that you like to stick your neck out there.
As for my abilities, you can google me. I'm pretty much out there.
Why I use > 655500 rows? I'm involved right now in a lawsuit which requires some ad-hoc data manipulation from a mainframe to be presented in a spreadsheet format. What I've been doing is getting a flatfile data dump from the mainframe, importing said file via DTS into SQL server, running a query to grab the data in a format I need using the criteria requested, and then importing the results of that into a spreadsheet for delivery to the opposing council. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but since my datasets can range up to over 500K rows, I need a rather large spreadsheet. What I do is run the query against sql, export the data to a text file (comma delimited) and then import into excel. It is the easiest option. I'd use OOo if I could, since I run Linux on my main workstations.
Here's one query I recently wrote, which extracts data from July. This particular query resulted in 434,000 records being returned. And yes - I wrote it by hand in Query Analyzer:
-- *** Created by Kai Ponte, 9/3/07 ***
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#T1') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE #T1
IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#T2') IS NOT NULL
DROP TABLE #T2
SELECT era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber, era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS,
era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTS as 'Cashiered' --, era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[Description]
into #t1
FROM era_data.dbo.Documents with (nolock)
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventLog with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_logs.dbo.EventLog.ObjectID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventTypes with (nolock) ON era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTypeID = era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[ID]
WHERE (era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTypeID = 13 ) AND
(era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS >= CONVERT(DATETIME, '2007-07-01 00:00:00', 102)) AND
(era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS < CONVERT(DATETIME, '2007-08-01 00:00:00', 102)) AND
(era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode = 'R002') order by era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber
SELECT era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedDocumentNumber, era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.TitleCode, era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.RecordedTS,
era_logs.dbo.EventLog.EventTS as 'Indexed' --, era_logs.dbo.EventTypes.[Description]
into #t2
FROM era_data.dbo.Documents with (nolock)
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.DocumentTitles.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_data.dbo.RecordedDocuments.DocumentID
INNER JOIN era_logs.dbo.EventLog with (nolock) ON era_data.dbo.Documents.DocumentID = era_logs.dbo.EventLog.ObjectID
INNER JOIN era_l
I don't see anything in the Wiki or the Review yet about them fixing the problem of only supporting 65,536 rows in Calc. Anybody have an idea about that?
Yes, I do use more than 65,500 rows in Excel on a weekly basis to manage reports for people.)
When did that happen?
Agreed. The NCLB push has caused the schools to focus on facts and figures - in order to achieve those vaunted 900-level API scores - instead of real subject learning and problem solving. I'm already seeing this in some of the kids I hire out of college.
Ooh, ooh, can i please answer this one?? what about when you are making decision like buying servers or hardware and figuring out which option is the best. I did actually answer that one in a previous post. I am faced with multiple-choice decisions every day. In many cases, however, the answer may be: a, b, c, d, e, any combination of the above, or none of the above and I need to make a new set of choices immediately. Though I don't feel it's the teacher's responsibility to excite the student 100% on the topic or subject being taught, parents need to do their part instead of work 60 hours a week at a dead end job like most of these kids I deal with. And yes a corporate job making a 7 figure salary to me is dead end when you rarely see your family. Sigh - I wish more parents understood this. I see so many "day care" kids that it is pathetic. I purposely work 6:00 - 3:30 in order to ensure I am there to coach soccer, be a cub scout father, and be on the PTA. There IS no other priority to me or to my wife. I may work 60+ hours in a week, but I do so in a manner which is conducive to being available to my children whenever they need. Case in point, I just rescheduled an important meeting on 10/31 so that I can be sure and take my kindergartner to school that morning. Yes, the meeting was with some important lawyers on a lawsuit to which I'm an expert witness, but they can wait for my children.Boy, tough crowd. Yes, I'm often - in fact, daily - faced with deciding between a number of unrelated and possibly disguised options for any given situation.
I'm never given a list of options on a ditto, however, and told to fill in the bubble knowing that only one is the right answer. In the options I'm presented - one, two, or more may be right or they may all be wrong and I'm forced to throw them all out and create (note that word) new options for myself.
Your point?
I have a six-year-old in second grade and a four-year-old in kindergarten. The teachers are using the same boring techniques that didn't work when I was in school and are boring the crap out of my second grader. He's already turned off by learning every monday through friday and I have to reinvigorate him on the weekend with at-home projects.
It is unfortunate that the teaching system (of which my wife is a part) is stuck in a 19th century methodology of teaching the masses to act in unison. It is as if they're preparing these kids for the rote factory jobs of yesterday instead of the knowledge-critical jobs of today.
I've yet to find one instance in my work (IT manager over about 60 people in a large government agency with roughly 60 servers, 1,500 staff members and 18TB of data online) where I had to fill out a scantron form or decide which option was best - a, b, c, d, or all of the above.
As it is, I'm on the school site council, PTA and am constantly talking to the administration in my sons' school district. They just don't seem to want to 'get it.'
I hate to ask a stupid question, but I've had many cell phones and cannot remember ever updating the software on them. Even my blackberry hasn't ever updated. Why the iPhone? Are they trying to add right-click functionality?
I'm confused. The past three notebooks I've owned have all been immediately recognized as using WiFi cards with accompanying drivers.
Seriously, I think the article is trying to find a solution in the wrong area. If I want a laptop and I plan to use Linux (which I always do) then I plan to get a wifi card compatible with such. I have no idea how ndiswrapper works and have no plans to ever use it.
My most recent notebook - an HP/Compaq nw9440 - came with the option of a Broadcom or an Intel wireless card. I went with Intel for the simple fact that I know intel works.
Sure enough, wireless was up and running as soon as I installed SUSE 10.2 on the machine. (It initially came with Vista but I upgraded pretty quickly.)
The answer to WiFi is to ensure the manufacturers supply drivers - open source or not - to their chipsets, since they're no longer putting them in the firmware. Intel does. I believe Broadcom is now. Anybody else?
End of story.
Um, no.
I really liked Star Wars, Empire and - to some degree - Return of the Jedi. They had quality storylines, the effects were not overdone and the acting was somewhat decent.
The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and even Revenge of the Sith were all plagued by bad storylines/writing, overdone effect that already look cheap and out-of-date, and barely passable acting.
In fact - for me - one of the main things which holds Star Wars up as an all-time classic is the 'low tech' aspect of the movie. It makes the movie look "timeless" unlike the other five. In other words, the movie won't look "aged" after another ten years. By comparison, the effects in TPM and the other new trilogy prequels look somewhat like 1960's-era Star Trek.
Live long and prosper.
I still don't see these newfangled CD Devices going anywhere. As long as I can still get my Fame Soundtrack and Toto songs on cassette, I'll be happy.
How come I don't see any references to NetBIOS in the stack?
Fortunately, I'm only logged into those sites as a 15-year-old girl from Kansas with a dog named Toto.
At least I don't think they can get to me!
You're preaching to the choir!
I still remember an experience about three years ago (while at San Bernardino County) where most of our 500+ Win2K/2K3 servers were hosed by some virus. Meanwhile my 12 SLES servers were humming along just fine.
In any case, I'm introducing it slowly.
I am upper management, and I advocate OSS whenever possible.
As a manager, I'm interested in two things - cost and productivity. If I can use a piece of software and get the job done faster and cheaper, I'll use it. End of story.
There are no other variables.
Now, as a technology geek - I have two 24" monitors on my desktop (running XP) and a 17" laptop (running SUSE) with me all the time - I want to use OSS because it is cool and because I despise Microsoft's business model. However, that philosophy will not fly with executives. They simply want to know how I'm going to save money and get stuff done faster. They don't give a sh-- about Linux vs. Microsoft.
One other thing. I personally have a $7M budget for FY 2007/2008. About $1.5M of that is for software services and supplies and another $2M is for hardware. That means the majority of my "expenses" are for personnel. Again, executive management wants to know how to make things cheaper / faster / better. If I need to spend more on personnel to get an incremental savings in software, it ain't gonna look good.