Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
If you're going to pick examples of how advanced Linux is, don't pick examples of something where the only amazing thing about it was how damn long it took to achieve.
Then the chances are you've never had particularly esoteric hardware.
Ubuntu - like most Linux distributions - works just great as long as you don't throw anything odd at it. Thing is, the definition of "odd" is perhaps a little more picky than it is with other operating systems. A few years ago, it was multi-monitor support. (Must be honest and say I haven't tried Ubuntu in a multi-monitor setup lately). I have no doubt that if it's not multi-monitor support today, there's something else that is considered fairly pedestrian in OS X or Windows that is still "odd" in Linux.
[the movie-makers] “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”
No kidding. We've seen evidence of that from lots of big corporations - particularly in the entertainment business - for ten years or more.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone replies to this post with some sort of evidence of that mindset being so heavily entrenched that goes back much further - decades or even centuries.
In which case, it probably would make more sense to the business as a whole to restructure Microsoft as a number of smaller businesses focussed on one core thing each, and if you're that desperate to retain some semblance of control, have them reporting to an umbrella company.
Thing is, that's a fairly radical restructuring. I'm not sure how you'd do it in a publicly-traded company.
Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
Obviously not, that's what delegation was invented for. At the same time, I think you do need someone - very probably just one person - at the top leading the software development.
I don't mean for one minute that they should be cutting code, but they should certainly be looking at the various products and asking "Are we doing this the best way possible? Are there obvious things wrong with that product that we should be fixing? How can we make it better?".
Really? Every other text editor I can think of deals with linebreaks sensibly, making an educated guess as to whether they're expressed as CRLF or just LF.
Though TBH I don't think notepad is a text editor. I think it's intended as a quick, dirty example to show "this is the kind of thing you can throw together very quickly using nothing but very basic MFC code".
Oh, I think there's conscious choice. I just don't think the thought process is "I need an office suite, what is the best available?".
I think the thought process is "I need to open the document Fred sent me, what software did Fred use?". Every once in a while you'll get someone using OpenOffice because their friendly neighbourhood IT guy said it should open it just as well and costs nothing - but sooner or later Fred will send something which doesn't open quite right in OpenOffice. You'd be amazed how much noise people will make about that one document - I'd say that free (as in beer) software probably gets proportionally more complaints along those lines than commercial software would.
IOW, people who've bought Microsoft Office and find it won't open a document think it's "just their computer being weird", people who are using OpenOffice think it's "the crappy free software, get what you pay for, mumble mumble".
It has been discussed already - if the class As that were allocated to corporates back when anybody with the money could buy a class A regardless of need were reclaimed, it wouldn't provide more than a few months of extra capacity.
No, but the next version of Excel may force you to... happened before.
I know. For some strange reason, people don't seem to get the hint. Probably because in many businesses there are frequent needs for quick solutions to relatively straightforward problems where it is patently ludicrous to involve an IT department which will almost invariably spend months developing some hugely over-engineered thing when in reality a simple little database which only one or two people will ever use is quite adequate.
Though it's still aggravating to be asked to support such things.
I would say it indicates that what the world needs is a RAD environment that allows you to build both the user interface and most if not all of the business logic using nothing but a GUI.
I'd add that usability is often a rather different discipline to software design, and for some reason usability experts don't seem to be too common in the F/OSS world. My guess is that they tried telling a few F/OSS developers how unusable their product was and are still in hospital.
I have my own list of pet peeves (such as "could care less"), but the fact is there's a good chance it'll go from being the phrase of choice among illiterate morons to something in common parlance within a generation. "Begs the question" is a phrase that I'd say is substantially further down that road, to the point where your explanation is probably less well known than the colloquial meaning of "raises the question".
Actually, I'd say that's true of any office suite. In a large enough company, you always wind up with someone in some department somewhere deciding they can avoid going through all the bureaucracy to get a proper system in by solving their problems with a spreadsheet, some VBA and a few formulas. Possibly some Access thrown in as well.
Six months later it's become critical to the business and the first you hear about it is when the person who threw it together's left the company and your helpdesk starts to get calls about it. I don't think you'd see a drastically different outcome if you were to substitute OO Calc for Excel.
Take away every iota of similar functionality and you'll wind up with an office suite that a lot of people simply will not touch with a bargepole. The people who will be making the noise are the people who have serious traction within the business, generally because they're either directly generating money (sales) or they count money and try to reduce the money going out (finance).
IT is seen as a sort of necessary evil within many companies, and trying to tell sales and finance that they can't put together their own little apps in a spreadsheet - particularly if you're not in an industry where you can point to a big scary regulator who explicitly bans such things - is a hiding to nothing.
That may not necessarily be a bad thing, depending on your POV.
IME, one of the big things still holding F/OSS back is its cost. The old adage that you don't get something for nothing is still viewed as being true by a lot of people, and many companies believe (albeit erroneously) that having purchased Microsoft Office, they also get support for if it breaks - whereas with a F/OSS product you may or may not get useful support if it breaks.
Were Oracle to sell OpenOffice for, say, 30% less than Microsoft Office, it'd be cheap enough that it'd be taken seriously without being so cheap that a business will steer well clear for fear of support issues. Even if Oracle gives little back to the F/OSS world, they could do a lot to damage the view that the only viable desktop is Windows with Office.
Wow, if clicking on the image -> scale menu is "extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken", then I wonder how Photoshop does it? A telepathic interface, maybe? Photoshop knows instinctively what size I want the picture to be and reshapes it without any command from me?
Actually, that's not far from the truth. While you can resize to a specific size, IIRC Photoshop also allows you to specify how the image will be used and sets sensible defaults on the back of that. Not really much point to this in full-blown Photoshop - anyone using a legit copy should know about pixels and resolution - but in something like Photoshop Elements it makes a lot of sense.
Most people don't have a clue about resolution or pixels, they just want to save it so they can upload it to Facebook/flikr/(insert site here) quickly. This isn't, however, the kind of thing the Gimp developers have historically had much time for.
Don't know about Alfresco, but KnowledgeTree is only better than sharepoint at plain document management. If you want all the fancy "use it as the platform for simple web apps" stuff, you need to look elsewhere. Most Wiki software I've seen is great for making editable web pages, but lousy at being used as a platform for simple web apps. Closest I've seen to half-decent is TWiki, and it's nothing like as slick as sharepoint. No matter what you may think of it, that slickness sells.
Until such time as business people learn how to evaluate real IT talent and hand over IT decision making things will continue to frustrate.
Why would they want to do a silly thing like that? If they did that, they'd lose out on the free MP3 player, tablet, Mini and sports tickets!
(Though IME this is a lot rarer than most people think. I reckon it's far more likely that these PCs were all spec'd out several years ago when they genuinely did cost $1000, and the agreement with Dell states that they'll sell the same equipment at the same price for a period of a few years. The people making that decision think they're being clever - they're protected against price rises that way. Never mind the fact that I don't think computer equipment has ever risen in price for the same specifications in the whole of history.)
I don't think fixing bugs is quite the kind of thing he's talking about.
I think what he means is "I can have a Microsoft-based solution set up by any two-bit MCSE I can hire for peanuts very easily. Seriously, I can put out an advert and have more replies than I know what to do with from people who will work for relatively little. If the person I hire messes up - maybe they misconfigure something, maybe there's something odd that requires specific steps in order to work properly - I can have people queueing up outside my door to fix it within 24 hours. I just need to open the Yellow Pages and dial the first number I find in the relevant section.
I can't do that with Linux because there are nowhere near as many qualified, experienced admins. Let alone anyone who I can hire for peanuts. And don't tell me that one Linux admin can do the work of four MCSEs, I don't need the work of four MCSEs, I need the work of one."
1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there? 2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain? Businesses tend to be run fairly pragmatically - they want something that works, not a religion. All your "you are being held hostage by the file format!11oneone" stuff is something most business owners will take one look at and say to themselves "Let's look at this in context. A: it's never been a huge problem before - sure we've had to upgrade occasionally, but BFD and B: why on Earth would Microsoft make the next version completely incompatible with the old one, not even able to open the old file format? It makes no sense at all."
For the one percent of people who actually _need_ them.
For the other 99%, Open Office is fine.
When that one percent happens to exist in every company, and it's a department the company doesn't really want to hammer the productivity of even for a few days (such as sales or finance), OpenOffice is not fine.
What does puzzle me is that so many businesses go to great lengths to make sure they can't get entirely screwed over by one supplier - vehicle manufacturers always have at least two suppliers of every major component, for instance - but have gleefully bought into all sorts of computer systems and merrily tied themselves so tightly to one supplier that they are heavily in the brown smelly stuff if that supplier no longer supplies. It's not just Microsoft, it's been endemic since well before they gained their current stranglehold on the desktop.
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This is an issue at the block level, so no.
You're not alone. I did the exact same thing a few years ago, and I'm certain we're part of a growing trend.
Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
If you're going to pick examples of how advanced Linux is, don't pick examples of something where the only amazing thing about it was how damn long it took to achieve.
Then the chances are you've never had particularly esoteric hardware.
Ubuntu - like most Linux distributions - works just great as long as you don't throw anything odd at it. Thing is, the definition of "odd" is perhaps a little more picky than it is with other operating systems. A few years ago, it was multi-monitor support. (Must be honest and say I haven't tried Ubuntu in a multi-monitor setup lately). I have no doubt that if it's not multi-monitor support today, there's something else that is considered fairly pedestrian in OS X or Windows that is still "odd" in Linux.
Which is just as well - it would have been an exceptionally painful birth for Mr. Hawking's mum if he had.
[the movie-makers] “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”
No kidding. We've seen evidence of that from lots of big corporations - particularly in the entertainment business - for ten years or more.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone replies to this post with some sort of evidence of that mindset being so heavily entrenched that goes back much further - decades or even centuries.
In which case, it probably would make more sense to the business as a whole to restructure Microsoft as a number of smaller businesses focussed on one core thing each, and if you're that desperate to retain some semblance of control, have them reporting to an umbrella company.
Thing is, that's a fairly radical restructuring. I'm not sure how you'd do it in a publicly-traded company.
Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
Obviously not, that's what delegation was invented for. At the same time, I think you do need someone - very probably just one person - at the top leading the software development.
I don't mean for one minute that they should be cutting code, but they should certainly be looking at the various products and asking "Are we doing this the best way possible? Are there obvious things wrong with that product that we should be fixing? How can we make it better?".
That's not actually an issue with notepad.
Really? Every other text editor I can think of deals with linebreaks sensibly, making an educated guess as to whether they're expressed as CRLF or just LF.
Though TBH I don't think notepad is a text editor. I think it's intended as a quick, dirty example to show "this is the kind of thing you can throw together very quickly using nothing but very basic MFC code".
Oh, I think there's conscious choice. I just don't think the thought process is "I need an office suite, what is the best available?".
I think the thought process is "I need to open the document Fred sent me, what software did Fred use?". Every once in a while you'll get someone using OpenOffice because their friendly neighbourhood IT guy said it should open it just as well and costs nothing - but sooner or later Fred will send something which doesn't open quite right in OpenOffice. You'd be amazed how much noise people will make about that one document - I'd say that free (as in beer) software probably gets proportionally more complaints along those lines than commercial software would.
IOW, people who've bought Microsoft Office and find it won't open a document think it's "just their computer being weird", people who are using OpenOffice think it's "the crappy free software, get what you pay for, mumble mumble".
It has been discussed already - if the class As that were allocated to corporates back when anybody with the money could buy a class A regardless of need were reclaimed, it wouldn't provide more than a few months of extra capacity.
No, but the next version of Excel may force you to... happened before.
I know. For some strange reason, people don't seem to get the hint. Probably because in many businesses there are frequent needs for quick solutions to relatively straightforward problems where it is patently ludicrous to involve an IT department which will almost invariably spend months developing some hugely over-engineered thing when in reality a simple little database which only one or two people will ever use is quite adequate.
Though it's still aggravating to be asked to support such things.
I would say it indicates that what the world needs is a RAD environment that allows you to build both the user interface and most if not all of the business logic using nothing but a GUI.
Agreed 100%.
I'd add that usability is often a rather different discipline to software design, and for some reason usability experts don't seem to be too common in the F/OSS world. My guess is that they tried telling a few F/OSS developers how unusable their product was and are still in hospital.
Language evolves, as any linguist will tell you.
I have my own list of pet peeves (such as "could care less"), but the fact is there's a good chance it'll go from being the phrase of choice among illiterate morons to something in common parlance within a generation. "Begs the question" is a phrase that I'd say is substantially further down that road, to the point where your explanation is probably less well known than the colloquial meaning of "raises the question".
Actually, I'd say that's true of any office suite. In a large enough company, you always wind up with someone in some department somewhere deciding they can avoid going through all the bureaucracy to get a proper system in by solving their problems with a spreadsheet, some VBA and a few formulas. Possibly some Access thrown in as well.
Six months later it's become critical to the business and the first you hear about it is when the person who threw it together's left the company and your helpdesk starts to get calls about it. I don't think you'd see a drastically different outcome if you were to substitute OO Calc for Excel.
Take away every iota of similar functionality and you'll wind up with an office suite that a lot of people simply will not touch with a bargepole. The people who will be making the noise are the people who have serious traction within the business, generally because they're either directly generating money (sales) or they count money and try to reduce the money going out (finance).
IT is seen as a sort of necessary evil within many companies, and trying to tell sales and finance that they can't put together their own little apps in a spreadsheet - particularly if you're not in an industry where you can point to a big scary regulator who explicitly bans such things - is a hiding to nothing.
1. MS Office can't reliably open MS Office documents with the same formatting either
Maybe not with 100% reliability, but it can do so with substantially more reliability than OpenOffice.
That may not necessarily be a bad thing, depending on your POV.
IME, one of the big things still holding F/OSS back is its cost. The old adage that you don't get something for nothing is still viewed as being true by a lot of people, and many companies believe (albeit erroneously) that having purchased Microsoft Office, they also get support for if it breaks - whereas with a F/OSS product you may or may not get useful support if it breaks.
Were Oracle to sell OpenOffice for, say, 30% less than Microsoft Office, it'd be cheap enough that it'd be taken seriously without being so cheap that a business will steer well clear for fear of support issues. Even if Oracle gives little back to the F/OSS world, they could do a lot to damage the view that the only viable desktop is Windows with Office.
Wow, if clicking on the image -> scale menu is "extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken", then I wonder how Photoshop does it? A telepathic interface, maybe? Photoshop knows instinctively what size I want the picture to be and reshapes it without any command from me?
Actually, that's not far from the truth. While you can resize to a specific size, IIRC Photoshop also allows you to specify how the image will be used and sets sensible defaults on the back of that. Not really much point to this in full-blown Photoshop - anyone using a legit copy should know about pixels and resolution - but in something like Photoshop Elements it makes a lot of sense.
Most people don't have a clue about resolution or pixels, they just want to save it so they can upload it to Facebook/flikr/(insert site here) quickly. This isn't, however, the kind of thing the Gimp developers have historically had much time for.
Don't know about Alfresco, but KnowledgeTree is only better than sharepoint at plain document management. If you want all the fancy "use it as the platform for simple web apps" stuff, you need to look elsewhere. Most Wiki software I've seen is great for making editable web pages, but lousy at being used as a platform for simple web apps. Closest I've seen to half-decent is TWiki, and it's nothing like as slick as sharepoint. No matter what you may think of it, that slickness sells.
Now maybe they meant only Russia but it doesn't take much to read that statement as applying globally. An ambiguity I'm sure they didn't mind.
Maybe you would, but I'd consider that to mean "some countries, but the US isn't one of them so don't get your hopes up".
Until such time as business people learn how to evaluate real IT talent and hand over IT decision making things will continue to frustrate.
Why would they want to do a silly thing like that? If they did that, they'd lose out on the free MP3 player, tablet, Mini and sports tickets!
(Though IME this is a lot rarer than most people think. I reckon it's far more likely that these PCs were all spec'd out several years ago when they genuinely did cost $1000, and the agreement with Dell states that they'll sell the same equipment at the same price for a period of a few years. The people making that decision think they're being clever - they're protected against price rises that way. Never mind the fact that I don't think computer equipment has ever risen in price for the same specifications in the whole of history.)
I don't think fixing bugs is quite the kind of thing he's talking about.
I think what he means is "I can have a Microsoft-based solution set up by any two-bit MCSE I can hire for peanuts very easily. Seriously, I can put out an advert and have more replies than I know what to do with from people who will work for relatively little. If the person I hire messes up - maybe they misconfigure something, maybe there's something odd that requires specific steps in order to work properly - I can have people queueing up outside my door to fix it within 24 hours. I just need to open the Yellow Pages and dial the first number I find in the relevant section.
I can't do that with Linux because there are nowhere near as many qualified, experienced admins. Let alone anyone who I can hire for peanuts. And don't tell me that one Linux admin can do the work of four MCSEs, I don't need the work of four MCSEs, I need the work of one."
Two things to bear in mind:
1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there?
2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain? Businesses tend to be run fairly pragmatically - they want something that works, not a religion. All your "you are being held hostage by the file format!11oneone" stuff is something most business owners will take one look at and say to themselves "Let's look at this in context. A: it's never been a huge problem before - sure we've had to upgrade occasionally, but BFD and B: why on Earth would Microsoft make the next version completely incompatible with the old one, not even able to open the old file format? It makes no sense at all."
For the one percent of people who actually _need_ them.
For the other 99%, Open Office is fine.
When that one percent happens to exist in every company, and it's a department the company doesn't really want to hammer the productivity of even for a few days (such as sales or finance), OpenOffice is not fine.
What does puzzle me is that so many businesses go to great lengths to make sure they can't get entirely screwed over by one supplier - vehicle manufacturers always have at least two suppliers of every major component, for instance - but have gleefully bought into all sorts of computer systems and merrily tied themselves so tightly to one supplier that they are heavily in the brown smelly stuff if that supplier no longer supplies. It's not just Microsoft, it's been endemic since well before they gained their current stranglehold on the desktop.