You mean the *style* of the start menu of the functionality? I like the XP start menu, but I use the 'classic' theme so it looks more like Windows 2000. This is really a personal preference as I don't really like the XP themes. But the functionality is there, including the "pin list", which is the really valuable thing.
The Vista start menu is far better though. I see KDE4 copied it almost verbatim, except that it took me five minutes to figure out how to run a damn program:)
Yes they are, and Microsoft has known this for a long time.
That's one of the differences between MS software and open source, for example. Microsofts's success lies on carefully picking defaults that cater to the majority of its users. Mostly that has worked for them through the years. Open source applications on the other hand suffer from a sort of tinker syndrome, with millions of possible choices. Of course for the kind of people that use things like KDE (yes I'm looking at you KDE), that's a big plus. Not so for the kind of people who use Office, for example. They just want the damn thing to work out of the box. They see their computers as appliances and the software in them as tools. We see them as cool devices that we spend time tinkering with. It's a cultural thing that FOSS largely does not understand yet.
In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).
The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.
Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.
And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.
Yeah. Way to innovate there, Redmon. Congratulations on entering the 1990s!
Outlook has supported threaded discussion views for email and post folders since the 2000 version. Here's a walk through for 2003. First hit on Google searching for 'outlook threaded view'
While threaded mode is useful for some things, there are other nice ways to visualize your stuff on Outlook that I like.
View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.
A quick switch to Message Timeline view is also extremely useful in those situations where someone says "it's an email from 03/12/70" or something like that and you want to look quickly at the entire sequence sorted by message rather than simply by date.
The "Show in groups" thing is priceless as a visual aide to stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.
I think Outlook is an example of Microsoft's better software efforts. It has its quirks and limitations of course, but overall it's far better than most other mail clients I've used in the past 15 years. And I'm not even considering Exchange integration here.
Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.
Ah, even better then. I seem to remember *some* Mozilla browser doing some spoofing (maybe SeaMonkey back in the day) or maybe I'm just confused because I had to spoof in order to make something work.
The Safari bit makes sense since it's the same as Konq AFAIK.
2001 called and said you can't use that tired old argument anymore. The default install of Firefox since 2.x (I believe) does not spoof IE in the user agent string. Firefox being the largest market share aside from any version of IE, the weight given to any other browser would be a statistical blip at best. In fact, if I remember correctly Konqueror in KDE3 and 4 actually spoofs Gecko by default. And Opera stopped spoofing MSIE after 6.x, IIRC.
Probably heavily locked-down desktops and even more heavily restricted internet access (basically none whatsoever; HTTP is allowed through a proxy that requires a username and password and doesn't allow access to the whole web).
Yes, voodoo magic.
This is quite possible to do in a company of such size because you can usually divide your staff into groups that match up quite well with their responsibilities and grant access accordingly, blocking everything else.
So you're saying that the folks in HR can browse porn, but the ones in IT can't?
When you're dealing with a much smaller organisation, the amount you can lock things down is generally much reduced
I don't see how that's the case. If you do it right you can scale your solution from 10 to 10,000 machines.
Sorry, but I don't think you understand how this works out there in the real world.
I'm very curious as to whether that shop you mentioned fits within Microsoft's "TCO" calculations.
I don't know what they do beyond any other company I've worked for/at. They run their own internal WU server, the corporate XP images have AV, IE8 is customized to use their proxy, a few company-specific apps installed, you have no admin rights and that's it. What in that list would you consider to be above and beyond what MS recommends, or particularly expensive? More to the point, which of those things would you not do if the roles were reversed and all these were Linux machines?
get harder to maintain compatibility, it starts to get more expensive to hire/train staff, and it starts being less user friendly.
Compatibility in what sense? And the hire/train thing is a no starter on either side. Their desktop folks have this stuff down to a science. User friendly? I don't get that. These are people who use Office and a web browser, that's it.
HOW much is spent per year by businesses in general (not your pet data point) cleaning up malware?
I'd imagine it's a lot, especially if you let it through to begin with. Duh?
I find the "IQ of a sponge" comment amusingly ironic.
I'm sorry you were modded troll, but maybe you didn't express your point correctly. Let me give it a try.
One of the companies I consult for has something like 30,000 desktops. They were not affected by Conficker in any way shape or form. In fact, I think they were bitten by the "anna kournikova" thing back in 2000 or 2001, and never again had any problems with worms or viruses.
How is this possible? I don't know. Maybe some common sense was involved.
But the premise of this article is that this company - and indeed, every other company in the planet that uses Windows but doesn't have these problems - should factor into their operation of Windows a "hidden" cost that simply does not apply to them.
That's clever, isn't it? It's a great argument, assuming you have the IQ of a sponge to begin with.
To make the comparison fair, maybe a comparison (pardoning the redundancy) between the companies that don't patch and have no meaningful data security policies in place and those who do would be indicated. I say that because Conficker went live in November of last year, and the out of band patch was available in October. A replay of the other ones where a patch has existed well before the exploit was seen in the wild - in fact in the case of (I think Slammer) the exploit was based on what the patch was fixing.
This is especially meaningful in the case of companies who have control over their users' PCs, rather than home users that need to be bothered with letting Windows Update run in the background and help them patch their boxes occasionally. We all know how much of a bother that can be.
That used to be true the last time Taco released an aggregate analysis of the Slashdot Apache logs. Which was in 2002, IIRC. I doubt it's 80% nowadays, considering other FOSS-centric sites that release their traffic numbers tend to figure about 50/50 in some cases. They are also highly Firefox-biased (I don't mean that negatively) with some being 90%+ of all visitors over IE and everything else.
But I hope they're being very careful with these things. Excited Chrichton-like sci-fi visions notwithstanding, we could easily get ourselves into a lot of trouble with things like these. And I'm not thinking about dinosaurs, but rather things like our collective genomes losing resistance to things that are supposed to have disappeared from our ecosystems.
Another device crippled by another half-baked service scheme that oozed off the completely broken US communications ecosystem.
I am in complete awe of how backwards the US is compared to Europe and Asia in this regard. It's just weird.
Before I get excited about things like these (and I do want to) or even consider buying one (and I do want to), they need to fix the basic problems, not just make better gadgets and hope everyone stays ignorant as to how bad they have it compared with the rest of the world.
Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.
Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:
This certainly is an interesting statement. There is nothing I can point to that is false here. Everything here is 100% accurate. However, it seems to be reckless in how it neglects the most relevant facts, namely that the proposals did not make it into ODF 1.2 at Microsoft's sole election.
For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.
Yep, second the Astraweb recommendation. I was going to post about them as well. I started using them a few years ago when a move from one city to another left me with an ISP whose retention of some of the comp.* groups was terrible. And you can't beat the speed.
Actually I never rode a school bus... But if my school had had them, the magic marker solution would have probably crossed the feverish imagination of the evil proctors:)
Why not develop a car normal people will actually buy and use? This is interesting but I don't think we have the luxury of trickle-down innovation at this point, seriously. Just start building the damn things in an industrial scale so a sizable portion of vehicle-bound humanity can start moving to them, FFS!
No, at the time the C++ Builder design-time environment in the IDE was far superior to the VC++ one. It actually approached VB in terms of functionality and ease of use.
A forms designer was ever high in the list of priorities for the VC++ team. At one point in the WinDNA/COM craze of the late 90s and early 00s (especially after ATL was first released and COM support was added to the compiler) some of the Microsoft TAMs were even recommending clients build GUIs in VB and actual application logic with VC++ [1].
[1] I'll refrain from repeating what I said to one of them when they tried to sell me that bit of nonsense. Let's just say it involved threats of physical violence and their mom, in that order.
Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.
VB had the advantage of being far more approachable from a beginners standpoint, and I think Borland underestimated two things: the market for third party components (which was *huge* with VB) and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases. The first few versions of Delphi were not exactly database friendly, while VB4 was Jet/SQL Server ready out of the box through DAO (and later OLEDB/ADO). Interop with Access also didn't hurt one bit, of course... though that gave way to some of the worst departmental apps in the history of mankind.
I think the Delphi saga is yet another case of a Microsoft competitor with an arguably superior product but completely clueless as to how it should have been marketed and at whom.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the *style* of the start menu of the functionality? I like the XP start menu, but I use the 'classic' theme so it looks more like Windows 2000. This is really a personal preference as I don't really like the XP themes. But the functionality is there, including the "pin list", which is the really valuable thing.
The Vista start menu is far better though. I see KDE4 copied it almost verbatim, except that it took me five minutes to figure out how to run a damn program :)
Innovation and all that.
Yes they are, and Microsoft has known this for a long time.
That's one of the differences between MS software and open source, for example. Microsofts's success lies on carefully picking defaults that cater to the majority of its users. Mostly that has worked for them through the years. Open source applications on the other hand suffer from a sort of tinker syndrome, with millions of possible choices. Of course for the kind of people that use things like KDE (yes I'm looking at you KDE), that's a big plus. Not so for the kind of people who use Office, for example. They just want the damn thing to work out of the box. They see their computers as appliances and the software in them as tools. We see them as cool devices that we spend time tinkering with. It's a cultural thing that FOSS largely does not understand yet.
twitter? Is that you? :)
In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).
The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.
Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.
And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.
Outlook has supported threaded discussion views for email and post folders since the 2000 version. Here's a walk through for 2003. First hit on Google searching for 'outlook threaded view'
While threaded mode is useful for some things, there are other nice ways to visualize your stuff on Outlook that I like.
View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.
A quick switch to Message Timeline view is also extremely useful in those situations where someone says "it's an email from 03/12/70" or something like that and you want to look quickly at the entire sequence sorted by message rather than simply by date.
The "Show in groups" thing is priceless as a visual aide to stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.
I think Outlook is an example of Microsoft's better software efforts. It has its quirks and limitations of course, but overall it's far better than most other mail clients I've used in the past 15 years. And I'm not even considering Exchange integration here.
Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.
Ah, even better then. I seem to remember *some* Mozilla browser doing some spoofing (maybe SeaMonkey back in the day) or maybe I'm just confused because I had to spoof in order to make something work.
The Safari bit makes sense since it's the same as Konq AFAIK.
2001 called and said you can't use that tired old argument anymore. The default install of Firefox since 2.x (I believe) does not spoof IE in the user agent string. Firefox being the largest market share aside from any version of IE, the weight given to any other browser would be a statistical blip at best. In fact, if I remember correctly Konqueror in KDE3 and 4 actually spoofs Gecko by default. And Opera stopped spoofing MSIE after 6.x, IIRC.
Yes, voodoo magic.
So you're saying that the folks in HR can browse porn, but the ones in IT can't?
I don't see how that's the case. If you do it right you can scale your solution from 10 to 10,000 machines.
Sorry, but I don't think you understand how this works out there in the real world.
I don't know what they do beyond any other company I've worked for/at. They run their own internal WU server, the corporate XP images have AV, IE8 is customized to use their proxy, a few company-specific apps installed, you have no admin rights and that's it. What in that list would you consider to be above and beyond what MS recommends, or particularly expensive? More to the point, which of those things would you not do if the roles were reversed and all these were Linux machines?
Compatibility in what sense? And the hire/train thing is a no starter on either side. Their desktop folks have this stuff down to a science. User friendly? I don't get that. These are people who use Office and a web browser, that's it.
I'd imagine it's a lot, especially if you let it through to begin with. Duh?
Oh, that wasn't for you.
I'm sorry you were modded troll, but maybe you didn't express your point correctly. Let me give it a try.
One of the companies I consult for has something like 30,000 desktops. They were not affected by Conficker in any way shape or form. In fact, I think they were bitten by the "anna kournikova" thing back in 2000 or 2001, and never again had any problems with worms or viruses.
How is this possible? I don't know. Maybe some common sense was involved.
But the premise of this article is that this company - and indeed, every other company in the planet that uses Windows but doesn't have these problems - should factor into their operation of Windows a "hidden" cost that simply does not apply to them.
That's clever, isn't it? It's a great argument, assuming you have the IQ of a sponge to begin with.
To make the comparison fair, maybe a comparison (pardoning the redundancy) between the companies that don't patch and have no meaningful data security policies in place and those who do would be indicated. I say that because Conficker went live in November of last year, and the out of band patch was available in October. A replay of the other ones where a patch has existed well before the exploit was seen in the wild - in fact in the case of (I think Slammer) the exploit was based on what the patch was fixing.
This is especially meaningful in the case of companies who have control over their users' PCs, rather than home users that need to be bothered with letting Windows Update run in the background and help them patch their boxes occasionally. We all know how much of a bother that can be.
There we go.
That used to be true the last time Taco released an aggregate analysis of the Slashdot Apache logs. Which was in 2002, IIRC. I doubt it's 80% nowadays, considering other FOSS-centric sites that release their traffic numbers tend to figure about 50/50 in some cases. They are also highly Firefox-biased (I don't mean that negatively) with some being 90%+ of all visitors over IE and everything else.
But I hope they're being very careful with these things. Excited Chrichton-like sci-fi visions notwithstanding, we could easily get ourselves into a lot of trouble with things like these. And I'm not thinking about dinosaurs, but rather things like our collective genomes losing resistance to things that are supposed to have disappeared from our ecosystems.
Another device crippled by another half-baked service scheme that oozed off the completely broken US communications ecosystem.
I am in complete awe of how backwards the US is compared to Europe and Asia in this regard. It's just weird.
Before I get excited about things like these (and I do want to) or even consider buying one (and I do want to), they need to fix the basic problems, not just make better gadgets and hope everyone stays ignorant as to how bad they have it compared with the rest of the world.
Which makes Rob Weir what, exactly?
http://www.robweir.com/blog/rob.html
Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.
Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and elsewhere to paint Microsoft and everything they do in a negative light. I'd suggest these people either suck it up now, or stop whining about how Wikipedia is being gamed and use their considerable energy and time to work the website's bureaucracy. $Deity knows they're going to need it. I loved this part of that Groklaw article:
For anyone involved with OOXML on the Microsoft side, this is sweet revenge. Hoisted by their own petard and so on. I think it's funny as hell.
Yep, second the Astraweb recommendation. I was going to post about them as well. I started using them a few years ago when a move from one city to another left me with an ISP whose retention of some of the comp.* groups was terrible. And you can't beat the speed.
Actually I never rode a school bus... But if my school had had them, the magic marker solution would have probably crossed the feverish imagination of the evil proctors :)
Bah, when I was a kid they painted the bus number and route with magic marker on our foreheads. No one ever got on the wrong bus. Ever.
I don't know about Java, but I've been playing with Google's V8 and that sucker is fast, at least on Windows.
Why not develop a car normal people will actually buy and use? This is interesting but I don't think we have the luxury of trickle-down innovation at this point, seriously. Just start building the damn things in an industrial scale so a sizable portion of vehicle-bound humanity can start moving to them, FFS!
As long as this doesn't victimize legitimate users. That's where the whole anti-piracy thing usually breaks down.
I know. Too bad they insisted on making me use the BDE or Oracle instead of interoperating correctly with Jet/SQL Server and Sybase. That came later.
No, at the time the C++ Builder design-time environment in the IDE was far superior to the VC++ one. It actually approached VB in terms of functionality and ease of use.
A forms designer was ever high in the list of priorities for the VC++ team. At one point in the WinDNA/COM craze of the late 90s and early 00s (especially after ATL was first released and COM support was added to the compiler) some of the Microsoft TAMs were even recommending clients build GUIs in VB and actual application logic with VC++ [1].
[1] I'll refrain from repeating what I said to one of them when they tried to sell me that bit of nonsense. Let's just say it involved threats of physical violence and their mom, in that order.
Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.
VB had the advantage of being far more approachable from a beginners standpoint, and I think Borland underestimated two things: the market for third party components (which was *huge* with VB) and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases. The first few versions of Delphi were not exactly database friendly, while VB4 was Jet/SQL Server ready out of the box through DAO (and later OLEDB/ADO). Interop with Access also didn't hurt one bit, of course... though that gave way to some of the worst departmental apps in the history of mankind.
I think the Delphi saga is yet another case of a Microsoft competitor with an arguably superior product but completely clueless as to how it should have been marketed and at whom.