Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.
Be that as it may, you won't get people to migrate off Office by saying "Your processes built around huge numbers of macros (which, for all its sins, broadly works) was developed in the wrong way in the first place, you must rip the whole lot out and start again".
Unless of course their company expanded their IT department to accommodate the plan and, of course, hired people who have experience doing such things. Just getting "Joe from IT" to build a thousand systems to save $100 per, is, as you say, delusional.
Expanded their IT department? What are you going to pay these extra people with, fairy dust?
One place where PGP has a genuine advantage is manageability. With Truecrypt, the best you can do to recover from someone forgetting their passphrase is to keep a copy of a rescue CD (which is generated at encryption time) and hope they never get curious enough to decrypt and re-encrypt their drive - a function which can't be locked down. If they do, new keys will be generated and the CD will be useless.
Oh yes, and you need to store that CD somewhere safely. One CD for every computer. In a university where there's thousands of computers, I'd be astonished if the tracking procedures were 100% foolproof.
PGP has a server-side component which takes care of all of that. No CDs required. Less secure? Arguably, yes. Someone who gained control over the server could decrypt any PC they wanted. But it offers considerably fewer opportunities to explain to someone senior that no, you can't recover their PC. Which is exactly the sort of feature that sells PGP, even if it is the sort of feature which potentially weakens the security.
Depends if they consider themselves journalists or simply a sort of online leak facility which journalists may wish to dig into.
If the latter, then yes they probably ought to be publishing with minimal editing.
If the former, the WHOLE FREAKIN' POINT of journalism is that there's an awful lot of unimportant guff to wade through to get to the story, you need to edit this out or you won't have a story.
In any event, it is unrealistic to expect to be able to embarrass major governments on such a large scale - even if you didn't do anything illegal yourself in order to cause the embarrassment - without any repercussions.
The main difference between the Western world and, say, the USSR, is that doing so is unlikely to see you thrown in a gulag and left there to rot.
The obvious thought that occurs to me is: with Wikileaks having so many varied ways to get information to them while ensuring it's untraceable, why don't they have similar facilities in place for dealing with money?
It does. Unfortunately for anything non-trivial, you need to install plugins. And plugins aren't generally integrated with the WYSIWYG interface, so you still wind up alienating non-technical people.
The mistake people make is to think of Outlook as a mail client.
It isn't.
It is a client for Exchange which provides a number of services, one of which is email. It may incidentally be used as a mail client, but this isn't its main purpose and in fact it's a pretty lousy mail client if that's all you're using it for.
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Just a little niggle here, but this is the kind of thing that F/OSS advocates bang on about while totally missing the point of the real world.
Nobody cares if OO.o will open ObscureFormat 2.1 (which was only ever used in one product, was last sold in 1992 and never even ran on anything more recent than Windows 3.x).
ObscureFormat 2.1 is the one that gets attention because some developer somewhere discovered some ancient document s/he wanted to open, and so wrote the code to import it. Which is great for that developer, but don't for one minute think of it as a selling point because it isn't.
What people care about is:
Does it open documents created in Office with little or no issue?
Can I save documents in a format that Fred down the street (who's already bought Office and isn't about to install something else, even if it is free) can open with little or no issue?
If the answer to either of these is no, they'll buy Office and damn the price. This is what helped get Microsoft a monopoly in the office products market, and it's what's kept users on the upgrade treadmill for fifteen years or more.
There may be a glimmer of truth to this. The Mac Pro is fairly obviously aimed at people who need a proper workstation (in the original sense of the word - a computer sat on their desk which is way more powerful than your average PC).
Thing is, your average PC has come so far that the market for proper workstations has dropped a fair chunk in the last ten years.
True, but arguably they're the exact same show but with a slightly different set and intro. (I've got the lot as a boxed set).
Sir Humphrey is still a devious, outwardly obsequious civil servant and Jim Hacker is still a likeable bumbling politician who spends much of the time blissfully unaware that his purpose in life is essentially to distract attention away from the civil servants who are actually running the country.
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
You've been modded funny, but there are actually a few examples where bullshit artists have taken the system to court and lost precisely because if they were to win, the resulting mess would be far more than any sane government would want to contemplate. IANAL, but AFAICT most judges take a fairly dim view of people trying to twist an interpretation of the law in a fashion that would be of great detriment to society.
A number of people have replied giving their typical electricity bill.
The problem with this is that you can't compare on the basis of what a person's electricity bill is, because there are all sorts of lifestyle factors that impact the bill but aren't included when you hear "I pay £N/month". For instance, if you're in Texas, I'll assume you probably have air conditioning in your house and it frequently runs during the summer months? Not really necessary in the UK, since it seldom goes above 30 Celsius (about 86 Fahrenheit) and that's a very hot day for most of us.
Now, onto the useful stuff: price per kilowatt hour. My energy supplier is EDF, their current price chart is here (warning: PDF). Ignore the "excluding VAT" prices on the first page, every individual pays VAT.
I can't speak for the OP but my own experience has been:
- UI. Microsoft tried to cram a Windows-type UI complete with menus and a start menu into a tiny, low-res screen. The result is complicated and awkward to figure out.
- Usability. Related to UI, we all know how no PC operating system is 100% perfect, but you can usually get the results you need by either fiddling with settings or analysing what went wrong. Take that, remove the ability to easily analyse what went wrong and make the glitches intermittent.
Depending on the company (and the industry in which it operates), this may not be far from the truth. Some industries are so tightly regulated that letting unknown software onto your PCs - regardless of its purpose - is a Very Big No No.
It wouldn't be too far from the truth to describe the entire history of the PC in business as "putting computing power onto peoples desks and spending the next 20 years trying to regain the control that was lost as a result".
I'm the only person in the department that applies them to any of the servers.
"If it's not broken, why fix it?"
And I would argue that this is exactly the right attitude to take. Unless you have a damn good reason to make any change, you don't make it. Changes to a system are more often than not the cause of breakage.
While it's unusual for a firmware upgrade to actually break hardware, it's not unknown. How do you feel about the 5 minute downtime to reboot following such an update becoming four hours or more while you call out the field circus to replace parts when there was no good reason for the update in the first place?
Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a
on
The Hackintosh Guide
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· Score: 1
It did. Unfortunately very few applications were released for the PPC, but you could dick around with Windows all you liked.
Really not convinced PHP is the best example. It's led to more security holes than you can shake a stick at, and even today there are bits of the API that tend to break between releases.
Seriously? Security wasn't a key part of Linux/Unix?
Well, not with more modern security practises in mind.
The poster you're replying to is pretty much on the nail. Current best practise for setting up your systems for optimal security is "block everything, only allow through what you know to be good". This is why more-or-less every firewall on the market today has an implied "block all" rule which is quite often impossible to turn off.
It's also why it's generally considered a bad idea to block SQL injection attacks purely by scanning for and refusing to insert fields containing "bad" strings - you only need to forget one tiny thing and your security's blown wide open. Far better to write your code so it only allows known-good stuff through.
And yet with every modern operating system, we do the exact opposite. We execute more-or-less anything that's given to us and rely on some piece of software to detect the bad stuff, and as a result we're only ever one hitherto unknown security hole in away from the entire system being compromised. Windows is the most well-known example, with new holes being discovered fairly regularly, but there's no magic voodoo in Unix that would block most of these holes. The closest you get in Unix is that a non-root user can't mess with applications that are outside of their home directory, but that's little comfort when there hasn't been malware that depends on doing that in several years. This is why the Stuxnet worm has managed to spread as far as it has.
The closest we have to an answer is (or rather, looks a lot like) Trusted Computing, but with the ability for an individual or organisation - rather than the RIAA - to dictate what it is they trust.
Really? Because I find it amusing that anyone reckons they can create an operating system from scratch, capable of running Windows applications but not based on Windows, with a team of 50 developers in anything less than the time it would take for the work to become utterly pointless several times over.
The Wine project has been going in one form or another since 1993 and its support for Windows applications is still best described as "patchy". And the Wine project doesn't have to include an underlying operating system.
Seems more likely to me that the id of their tracking record table was a 32 bit signed integer which maxes out at 2,147,483,647 and when they say they "increased its data storage capacity" they just changed it to a larger data type.
Which just goes to show how well designed it was. Exactly how often do they need to track a negative number of people?
Slashdot Mirror
Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.
Be that as it may, you won't get people to migrate off Office by saying "Your processes built around huge numbers of macros (which, for all its sins, broadly works) was developed in the wrong way in the first place, you must rip the whole lot out and start again".
Unless of course their company expanded their IT department to accommodate the plan and, of course, hired people who have experience doing such things. Just getting "Joe from IT" to build a thousand systems to save $100 per, is, as you say, delusional.
Expanded their IT department? What are you going to pay these extra people with, fairy dust?
One place where PGP has a genuine advantage is manageability. With Truecrypt, the best you can do to recover from someone forgetting their passphrase is to keep a copy of a rescue CD (which is generated at encryption time) and hope they never get curious enough to decrypt and re-encrypt their drive - a function which can't be locked down. If they do, new keys will be generated and the CD will be useless.
Oh yes, and you need to store that CD somewhere safely. One CD for every computer. In a university where there's thousands of computers, I'd be astonished if the tracking procedures were 100% foolproof.
PGP has a server-side component which takes care of all of that. No CDs required. Less secure? Arguably, yes. Someone who gained control over the server could decrypt any PC they wanted. But it offers considerably fewer opportunities to explain to someone senior that no, you can't recover their PC. Which is exactly the sort of feature that sells PGP, even if it is the sort of feature which potentially weakens the security.
Depends if they consider themselves journalists or simply a sort of online leak facility which journalists may wish to dig into.
If the latter, then yes they probably ought to be publishing with minimal editing.
If the former, the WHOLE FREAKIN' POINT of journalism is that there's an awful lot of unimportant guff to wade through to get to the story, you need to edit this out or you won't have a story.
I'm guessing you weren't on AA Flight 11 nine or so years ago.
No, and neither were you.
In any event, it is unrealistic to expect to be able to embarrass major governments on such a large scale - even if you didn't do anything illegal yourself in order to cause the embarrassment - without any repercussions.
The main difference between the Western world and, say, the USSR, is that doing so is unlikely to see you thrown in a gulag and left there to rot.
The obvious thought that occurs to me is: with Wikileaks having so many varied ways to get information to them while ensuring it's untraceable, why don't they have similar facilities in place for dealing with money?
It does. Unfortunately for anything non-trivial, you need to install plugins. And plugins aren't generally integrated with the WYSIWYG interface, so you still wind up alienating non-technical people.
The mistake people make is to think of Outlook as a mail client.
It isn't.
It is a client for Exchange which provides a number of services, one of which is email. It may incidentally be used as a mail client, but this isn't its main purpose and in fact it's a pretty lousy mail client if that's all you're using it for.
Thunderbird is a replacement for Outlook like Wordpad is a replacement for Microsoft Word.
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Just a little niggle here, but this is the kind of thing that F/OSS advocates bang on about while totally missing the point of the real world.
Nobody cares if OO.o will open ObscureFormat 2.1 (which was only ever used in one product, was last sold in 1992 and never even ran on anything more recent than Windows 3.x).
ObscureFormat 2.1 is the one that gets attention because some developer somewhere discovered some ancient document s/he wanted to open, and so wrote the code to import it. Which is great for that developer, but don't for one minute think of it as a selling point because it isn't.
What people care about is:
If the answer to either of these is no, they'll buy Office and damn the price. This is what helped get Microsoft a monopoly in the office products market, and it's what's kept users on the upgrade treadmill for fifteen years or more.
There may be a glimmer of truth to this. The Mac Pro is fairly obviously aimed at people who need a proper workstation (in the original sense of the word - a computer sat on their desk which is way more powerful than your average PC).
Thing is, your average PC has come so far that the market for proper workstations has dropped a fair chunk in the last ten years.
Why didn't you go for something like an iMac?
True, but arguably they're the exact same show but with a slightly different set and intro. (I've got the lot as a boxed set).
Sir Humphrey is still a devious, outwardly obsequious civil servant and Jim Hacker is still a likeable bumbling politician who spends much of the time blissfully unaware that his purpose in life is essentially to distract attention away from the civil servants who are actually running the country.
Oh, you've seen Yes Minister?
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
You've been modded funny, but there are actually a few examples where bullshit artists have taken the system to court and lost precisely because if they were to win, the resulting mess would be far more than any sane government would want to contemplate. IANAL, but AFAICT most judges take a fairly dim view of people trying to twist an interpretation of the law in a fashion that would be of great detriment to society.
A number of people have replied giving their typical electricity bill.
The problem with this is that you can't compare on the basis of what a person's electricity bill is, because there are all sorts of lifestyle factors that impact the bill but aren't included when you hear "I pay £N/month". For instance, if you're in Texas, I'll assume you probably have air conditioning in your house and it frequently runs during the summer months? Not really necessary in the UK, since it seldom goes above 30 Celsius (about 86 Fahrenheit) and that's a very hot day for most of us.
Now, onto the useful stuff: price per kilowatt hour. My energy supplier is EDF, their current price chart is here (warning: PDF). Ignore the "excluding VAT" prices on the first page, every individual pays VAT.
I can't speak for the OP but my own experience has been:
- UI. Microsoft tried to cram a Windows-type UI complete with menus and a start menu into a tiny, low-res screen. The result is complicated and awkward to figure out.
- Usability. Related to UI, we all know how no PC operating system is 100% perfect, but you can usually get the results you need by either fiddling with settings or analysing what went wrong. Take that, remove the ability to easily analyse what went wrong and make the glitches intermittent.
Depending on the company (and the industry in which it operates), this may not be far from the truth. Some industries are so tightly regulated that letting unknown software onto your PCs - regardless of its purpose - is a Very Big No No.
It wouldn't be too far from the truth to describe the entire history of the PC in business as "putting computing power onto peoples desks and spending the next 20 years trying to regain the control that was lost as a result".
I'm the only person in the department that applies them to any of the servers.
"If it's not broken, why fix it?"
And I would argue that this is exactly the right attitude to take. Unless you have a damn good reason to make any change, you don't make it. Changes to a system are more often than not the cause of breakage.
While it's unusual for a firmware upgrade to actually break hardware, it's not unknown. How do you feel about the 5 minute downtime to reboot following such an update becoming four hours or more while you call out the field circus to replace parts when there was no good reason for the update in the first place?
It did. Unfortunately very few applications were released for the PPC, but you could dick around with Windows all you liked.
Really not convinced PHP is the best example. It's led to more security holes than you can shake a stick at, and even today there are bits of the API that tend to break between releases.
Seriously? Security wasn't a key part of Linux/Unix?
Well, not with more modern security practises in mind.
The poster you're replying to is pretty much on the nail. Current best practise for setting up your systems for optimal security is "block everything, only allow through what you know to be good". This is why more-or-less every firewall on the market today has an implied "block all" rule which is quite often impossible to turn off.
It's also why it's generally considered a bad idea to block SQL injection attacks purely by scanning for and refusing to insert fields containing "bad" strings - you only need to forget one tiny thing and your security's blown wide open. Far better to write your code so it only allows known-good stuff through.
And yet with every modern operating system, we do the exact opposite. We execute more-or-less anything that's given to us and rely on some piece of software to detect the bad stuff, and as a result we're only ever one hitherto unknown security hole in away from the entire system being compromised. Windows is the most well-known example, with new holes being discovered fairly regularly, but there's no magic voodoo in Unix that would block most of these holes. The closest you get in Unix is that a non-root user can't mess with applications that are outside of their home directory, but that's little comfort when there hasn't been malware that depends on doing that in several years. This is why the Stuxnet worm has managed to spread as far as it has.
The closest we have to an answer is (or rather, looks a lot like) Trusted Computing, but with the ability for an individual or organisation - rather than the RIAA - to dictate what it is they trust.
Really? Because I find it amusing that anyone reckons they can create an operating system from scratch, capable of running Windows applications but not based on Windows, with a team of 50 developers in anything less than the time it would take for the work to become utterly pointless several times over.
The Wine project has been going in one form or another since 1993 and its support for Windows applications is still best described as "patchy". And the Wine project doesn't have to include an underlying operating system.
...the country that doesn't quite grasp the Streisand effect.
Doesn't quite care would, I fancy, be slightly more accurate.
What post production work? This is a novel, not a technical reference, so there's no need for things like tables and diagrams.
I was of the understanding that most novelists don't get a huge amount of say in the post-production layout.
Seems more likely to me that the id of their tracking record table was a 32 bit signed integer which maxes out at 2,147,483,647 and when they say they "increased its data storage capacity" they just changed it to a larger data type.
Which just goes to show how well designed it was. Exactly how often do they need to track a negative number of people?