The article refers to the fact that many consumers who might buy a desk-top through the mail want to touch and examine a laptop before purchasing.
Think about how many laptops have too-small keys, mushy keyboards, and unusable pointing devices. At the same time, think about how much more limiting many LCD screens are with regard to brightness and angle-of-view-ability (yes, I know that's not really a word). I know that I don't want to buy a laptop I haven't first touched.
I went to an Apple store in a mall in Maryland not long ago an was amazed by the job it did at getting consumers comfortable with the product line. (While you could buy iPods and iPod accessories there, I think most of the PCs, laptops, and monitors had to be ordered.
If consumers could count on all the current Dell products being "touchable" at their local mall (at a kiosk) or even on a wall at their local Starbucks, I think they could continue to sell via web.
But from the tone of the article, it sounds like they are open to a slice of Comp-USA or Best Buy a la Apple and eMachines.
>> Am I the only one that thinks to themselves, "One of these days, some really smart person is going to come out with a new and better theory of reality that reveals all this quantum mechanics stuff to be a bunch of quackery."?
There already was one such really smart person, an authority in physics and mathematics, who closely examined the theories of quantum mechanics, and concluded they were nonsense. His name?
The comments thus far seem divided between contempt for community college/technical school level "hands on" training and frustration that many employers may not reward the critical thinking skills taught in college.
In fact, there are both too many software mechanics who do not understand the greater business problems that require solving, and too many paper tigers who did wonderfully in college but who struggle with delivering results in the real world.
I have been fortunate enough to benefit from both and I will encourage my children to do the same. Some of the best teachers I ever had were at the community college and technical school levels. They were professionals who often brought decades of real-world experience to the classroom.
At the same time, my graduate studies did indeed challenge me and force me to develop skills to see issues from multiple perspectives and solve issues using techniques from many different fields.
As a result, my career has not only been financially rewarding, (my employers have always rewarded my technical knowledge with $) but my everyday work consists of solving problems that keep me interested and excited to come to work (as my creative problem solving abilities tend to get me interesting work).
One post implied that as employers paid more money for the skills they need, that students would gravitate toward C.S. and similar important professions. If so, the message is taking decades to get get across.
An integrated approach is offered by Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA).
For more than 25 years, I have been hiring "interns" and graduates from Drexel. At Drexel, the normal 4 year B.S. program is elongated into 5 years of trimesters where one third of each year is spent working at a different employer.
By the time you hire a Drexel grad, they already have years of real-world experience lacking by many graduates of so-called prestigious universities. (No, I didn't attend Drexel, but I did sleep in one of their dorms for two semesters in 1977 while dating an E.E./C.S. major.)
To the best of my knowledge, despite Drexel's 30+ years of success with this approach none of the other local universities have adopted Drexel's approach. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and _universities_in_Philadelphia)
Know this: If you only do the trade-school-level stuff, you have to read and teach yourself the critical thinking stuff on your own. If you only attend university, you may emerge with an initial salary less than the tech-school graduate and take a few years before passing that person as you move up into management or more responsible staff and consulting positions.
The thread here seems to question (a) the value of Oracle and (b) why this would be good for Oracle's customers. Here are my 0.0002 cents:
My current client is a large insurance company. (More than $7 billion dollars of policies a year underwritten by a staff of more than 1,200 people.)
We have lots of Oracle, SQL/Server, and MS/Access applications all over the place. The Oracle data is generally available to everyone. We have more than 50 analysts who use a combination of Hyperion (formerly Brio) and SAS to model the data.
Oracle's additional configuration options enable our Oracle servers to support phenomenally more people than comparable gear running Access or SQL/Server. In addition, we have really good SAN devices that are backed up every night.
However, the limited number of Oracle DBA's mean that users must wait (sometimes forever) to get their application written in, or ported to, Oracle.
Where the SQL/Plus Oracle code is controlled, documented, and fully SOX compliant, the same is not always true for the Access and SQL/Server code.
As a result, the individual departments are forced to use Access and SQL/Server. Their applications do not talk to each other. The data in those applications are "hidden" from people in other departments.
SOoooo...... users develop "personal" and "departmental" applications in Access and SQL/Server which we in IT find and port to Oracle when we can.
MySQL apps are generally easier to port to Oracle than SQL/Server or Access. (Never mind the application layer. That is a different discussion for a different time.) I would love to provide MySQL to departments across the board on servers that are supportable by corporate IT. Then users could build their apps on-the fly, expect support from my team on an ongoing basis, and faster conversions to Oracle in the long run.
Could you be trolling me? I'll assume you are just sleep deprived and wish me to develop a sincere answer.
Of course I was not doing anything wrong. My point was that just by the VERBAL over-reaction of the security person; that I was made aware that I was indeed being watched; and so could assume that common thugs in the area would also know that this was a place being actively watched.
And so. . . not end the end caring about the over-reacting of Orwell's "big brother," I could thus continue on my merry way reassured.
The alternative is to live in Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago, and view every trip on public transportation as one where you necessarily assume a risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed that is more than twenty times the risk in London. (Yes I take those risks because actually thinking about those things never gives me anything but a headache, and facing up to the fact that so much in life is beyond my control might only depress me.)
"Waiter, may I please have an extra speaker with those fries?"
I'm a US resident who frequently takes public trains (we call them "light rail" and "subways") in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and in New York city. I've also had the occasion to ride the light rails in Chicago.
For the most part I was happy with those facilities for more than forty years, or until I got to take London's "tube" for about two weeks.
I remember standing on the platform waiting for my train and saw a billboard that I found amusing. I raised my camera to take a picture and in less than a second, a booming voice suitable for a remake of "The Ten Commandments," boomed, "PUT DOWN THE CAMERA. CAMERAS ARE PROHIBITED IN THE TUBE. YOU WILL BE DETAINED AND FINED IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY."
At first, I was shaken. Then, a little depressed. (Looking back, I can understand the comments to this post comparing Britain's surveillance to Soviet and early Vietnamese forms of oppression.)
But then, I felt reassured. There have been many times in my life when I took the subway in Philadelphia and New York in the middle of the night and felt fearful for my safety the entire trip. But after the warning, I never gave my safety another anxious thought while in London.
Later, I saw a sign with a picture of a long screwdriver. The sign reminded passengers that such objects were considered weapons in London and that violators could be arrested. I almost giggled. Where I come from, almost anyone you meet could be carrying a concealed weapon, licensed or not [and when I use the word weapon, I mean some type of gun]. (While many Americans feel safer with lots of armed people, I do not dispute the fact that Britain's murder rate is less than one tenth of ours. In 1996, police-recorded murders totaled 19,650 in the United States and 681 in England.)
Based on my experience, the effect of adding more speakers to the existing cameras might serve as a preventative measure and further reduce crime. Cameras might be great tools for solving crimes, but using the speakers can prevent crime in some cases.
I would be in favor of adding both camera and speakers in the US, espeically in our major cities and especially in areas of public transportation.
Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software. In its current condition, it allows us to run the KNOPPIX Japanese Edition on Windows (see Screenshots).
I've supported people with arthritic thumb joints and this is a real problem.
I love the concept of Mousekeys (Control Panel | Accessibility | Mouse tab | Enable).
The problem is in the execution. Even with the fastest settings (set both scrollbars to the maximum right setting and then use your CTRL button), both the initial cursor speed and the acceleration are abysmally slow.
The previously suggested Logic Marble Mouse is my favorite, but with a twist. Have your user try using their first finger to operate the left mouse button and their index finger to operate the marble.
This will entail zero motion of the thumb joint!
Tell your user that like riding a bike, this may be a bit awkward at first, but with ten to fifteen minutes of practice, they should be able to move as quickly as they would like.
Good luck
-Leon
Leon Roomberg
www.roomberg.com
P.S.
(If anyone has a routine or solution to dramatically speed up mousekeys, feel free to email my junk address of xxxlroomberg2xxx@xxxnetscape.net without the "x"s. Please put "MOUSEKEYS" in the subject line so I don't trash your email. [And yes, I tried googling for an answer without success.])
U.S. creator frowns at Frenchman's trademark In this story:
* Threat to sue
* Born in '63 or '68?
* Recognition, not money
* Related stories and sites
July 7, 1998 Web posted at: 1:50 p.m. EDT (1750 GMT)
WORCESTER, Massachusetts (AP) -- Harvey Ball did not have a nice day recently when he learned a Frenchman had registered a trademark for the smiley face.
As just about everyone in Ball's central Massachusetts hometown knows, it was Ball who designed the ubiquitous symbol of good cheer in 1963 as part of an in- house happiness program for an insurance company.
Franklin Loufrani, a 55-year-old entrepreneur from France, first registered the symbol in 1971 and now holds the trademark in much of the world.
The trademark, noted with a small, circled letter "R" ( ® ), is on the Web page of London-based Smiley Licensing Corp. Loufrani is the president.
Threat to sue
Ball, 76, didn't find any of this out until a couple of months ago.
Then he got really steamed more recently when he learned that Loufrani has threatened to sue U.S. companies that manufacture or sell products with the smiley symbol in the 80 countries where Loufrani holds the trademark.
"So much for smiley and happiness," Ball huffs.
The joyful smiley-face icon has made its way over the years onto boxer shorts, London drug houses, Wal-Mart products and countless e-mail messages.
Born in '63 or '68?
Loufrani said he made up smiley while working at a French newspaper to illustrate positive stories after the student riots in 1968. Since registering the trademark, he has made millions.
The people of Worcester -- which bills itself "The Birthplace of the Smiley Face" -- side with Ball, however.
He said he first drew the perky yellow face in 1963 as part of a "friendship" campaign to ease tensions between employees after State Mutual Life Insurance Co. took over a small Ohio insurer.
Ball, a free-lance artist, was paid $45 to come up with a graphic. State Mutual printed 100 smiley buttons. A 1964 State Mutual publication shows company Vice President John Adams wearing one.
Soon requests for tens of thousands of buttons began pouring in. Finally, Ball said, the company stopped printing them in the late 1960s.
Recognition, not money
Ball never sought a trademark or copyright. He said he doesn't miss the millions he could have made on his creation. And he isn't planning legal action against Loufrani, who has a U.S. trademark, but only for a combination happy face and the word "smiley."
Ball just wants recognition as smiley's creator.
"Never in the history of mankind or art has any single piece of art gotten such widespread favor, pleasure, enjoyment, and nothing has ever been so simply done and so easily understood in art," he said.
The most elegant "web" app I have ever used had nothing to do with browsers. It was a self-contained PC application that downloaded information based on configuration menus.
With all of the data downloaded in background and a beautiful front-end, response time from screen-to-screen was sub-second and the web has been catching up ever since.
The product was called PointCast.com and it was an advertising-based medium at the very start of the dot-com boom. It also had the most beautiful stock portfolio display of any product I have used prior or since. (Don't bother with the current owner of the PointCast web site. It looks like some other completely unrelated web product startup took the name.)
PointCast tanked when companies started finally funding high-speed internet connections and investors lost their faith. After all, they reasoned, the web would become so fast that caching became completely old school.
Even, so, assume that you have a developed a personal page of favorite news, search, and research links. It doesn't have to be pretty, just personally relevant. (Mine is at http://www.roomberg.com/EveryDayPages.htm.) Now assume your PC goes out to the web in background when the PC is otherwise not being used and caches zillions of pages you have linked to. For 90% of the news and blogs you then need, wait time falls to zero. Only when you click a level too deep would you finally need to return to the world wide-but-slow web. Of course Akami (or somebody) might have to develop rules about how many levels deep such a program searched or the the web might actually finally be crushed when everyone's PC tries to repetitively "spider" their favorite site. You might set your PC to fetch PoinCast updates every morning, every hour, ever fifteen minutes, or for that matter, every minute.
In less than 10 years of intensive deployment of desktop, laptop, handheld, and communications technologies, annual US output increased from $65,299.06 to $89,278.35 per year. (Don't confuse that with personal income. This number is the total income for both all business corporations and sole proprietorships in the country.)
The bottom line: while you may personally FEEL like you are being pulled in too many directions and getting less done, (and for all I know, you personally MAY be spending 7.7 hours a day on/.,) , the overall population is producing almost 50% more goods and services with a workforce that is barely 10% larger. Now that's what any reasonable person would agree is a productivity INCREASE.
Even adjusted for inflation, the numbers are still way..way..way..UP.
If my numbers are off, I am open to correction and explanations.
The readers themselves have been (for me) one disappointment after another. In practice, as Jon Stewart so often says, "ehh... not so great."
First, they have tended to be inflexible. Many want you to use only their own proprietary file formats and won't even touch.txt,.pdf,.doc, or.rtf documents.
Second they have tended to be fragile, with delicate screens and power supplies. I once went through three EBooks in as many months and I am NOT brutal on hardware. (On of my WORKING laptops is eleven years old!)
Between Project Guttenberg (currently 17,000 free and legal downloadable books at www.guttenberg.org) and the vast returns when Googling one could read for centuries and never get bored.
For those who MUST have the latest, www.ebooks.com boasts their current inventory to be 45,000 titles, most between $5 and $20 (US).
What we REALLY need is a laptop/tablet with a 4" by 6" folded form factor (so it will fit in a jacket pocket). Price it between $499 and $699 and we will have a WINNER.
We could also use Bluetooth "sunglasses" that block out everything but the screen for reading at the beach/pool.
An optional hand-crank attachment to deal with dead batteries isn't a bad idea either. For Christmas, I bought my camper-fanatic brother-in-law a combination television/radio/lantern that hand cranks the power. Why not a PC?
If the thing is going to the beach, enclose it in a water-proof/sand-proof enclosure. I worked in the industrial hand-held industry eons ago (industrial meter reader, supermarket inventory devices, etc.) and they licked this problem in the 1980's.
Come to think of it, crank up an IPod with a 8" by 6" display that folds to 4" by 6" (Think bigger Nintendo DS) and the bugger could provide background music while reading. (I prefer classical during most reading, thank you.)
You have multiple workable solutions in this area. Here are the most common used by my clients:
1. Where clients are roaming one building with lots of bandwidth, install ALL apps on their network drives. Upon logging in from ANY PC in the organization, Office and every other app settings can come from the network. Actually, you have a choice of running the entire app from the network, or just critical settings.
If bandwidth is an issue, just put the settings on the LAN and the apps of the PCs.
If, (more likely) individual users keep messing with local settings and apps, fewer headaches may result by going 100% LAN.
2. Where remote connections are required, both Citrix and MS/Terminal server are great options.
My wife is 150 miles from her office and accesses MS Office and other apps all via Terminal Services.
In both of the above approaches, IT can also do nightly backups and scan for viruses, malware, and forbidden files.
If a user's PC crashes, just roll out a pre-configured desktop from the closet, boot, and the user can be quickly back in business.
In other words, drive C: is used only for caching and logging in to the network.
Where security and performance start to get crazy, consider cheap or rack PCs dedicated to individual users. Whether you use MS's remote facility, PcAnywhere, Terminal Server, Citrix, etc., the idea is that the user can remotely access their computer-room PC from any desktop and even from home.
Before you pooh-pooh PcAnywhere as out-of-date, take some time to appreciate the multiple levels of authentication and encryption it offers.
You can add a bunch of technologies to the above mix. VM Ware (and similar OS shells) can isolate individual apps to individual copies of the OS. This is a great way to give users MS Office in one window and OO in another. You can also add any number of VPN, tunneling, encryption, and any number of software, hardware, and other authentication approaches depending on the requirements of your environment. I have been exposed to a number of military and pharma environments, and most can be supported using almost any of the remote approaches.
Cubes are put in place by management who want some level of separation between the "elite" and the rest of us. Management justify it by saying "we want to foster an interractive and friendly work environment to encourage productivity" but they have never had to work in cubes, and dont understand the loss of productivity that will occur when everyone is there.
I'm an exec in a small software company. (We currently have about 35 people, of which 25 are programmers.) All five execs have offices. Each of us have 25+ years of programming experience. We worked our way up into management and yes, we all started from cubes. (And by the way, four of the five of us, including me, still code 20+ hours a week.)
We are in the midst of a boom in our business and are hiring so many people that we are just plain out of space. We will have the option to double our space in about 2 years when the tenants on the floor below us have their leases expire and we can kick them out.
Until then, we are tearing down cube walls and combining people into working 3-people per cube. It is not pretty. Productivity is lost. People are not happy. We know this. So now, almost everyone has i-pods and the earpieces come out only when answering support calls or when meeting with peers to solve a problem. I know it is not fashionable on/. to empathize with management, but sometimes even the bastards are not being bastards.
I love it when someone thinks we can just snap our fingers and make a new office appear and old lease contract obligations disappear.
Then again, they all have good paying jobs and the programmers we are hiring tell us the salaries we are offering are generally as good or better than wherever they were coming from.
Maybe instead of hiring all of these "inconvenient" people, we should just finally take the plunge and outsource to... I don't know..... INDIA? (Boo! Bwa hahahahahah..... Whiners now curl up into the fetal position and start rapid thumb sucking.)
In two years, the staff will have either offices or tall (8') cubicles with walls and doors, if all goes as planned. Our current plan is to return to the 10% to 15% annualized growth we had for ONE HUNDRED CONSECUTIVE QUARTERS. (Yes, we really did.) At that time, we will also pick up an option on the floor two levels below us for future expansion.
However, god bless us and EXCUUUUUSE ME (apologies to Steve Martin,) if we get so lucky that our sales forecast is so wrong that we have to unexpectedly double our staff AGAIN and enable more people to afford homes, cars, and Legos(r) they pretend are for their children. If that happens, I will again empathize with people who may again lose their offices and even cubes. But not so much.
Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.
There are other approaches that can work even better depending on the application. I train my staff to start most of their document names with yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.
example: "2005.10.22.14.01 Department Budget Draft.xls"
By using the largest-to-smallest convention, everything sorts nice and neatly on display. (Don't tell them to sort on date column, that will change as the document is re-edited.)
It can also serve as a poor man's version control. I train them NOT to use "File Save." Instead, use SAVE AS and then update the time.
The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years
I support a CRM/Enterprise Industry Vertical System for a living. The product is based on the BASIS platform. (www.basis.com) Our customers (users) depend on their ability to execute complex SQL queries from MS Office (Excel, Access, Visio, and by the way, Cognos and Crystal as well,)against our system.
As MS has upgraded MS Office over the years, the DLLs involved in SQL querying have definitely changed. As a result, my support team has to configure BASIS ODBC drivers according to the version of MS Office being used.
This is painful and time consuming.
We are only now starting to get requests to support ODBC from OO and I'm not even sure where to start. Even after we figure out how to do this, we are scared of being put in the position of supporting different configurations for different versions. Yes, I know that this may be less of a problem in OO, but who can tell?
Part of my reality is that we can't dictate to our customers that they MUST upgrade to the latest MS Office (or OO) at any given time.
As a result, we wind up with a proliferation of possible combinations.
ODBC was originally thought of as a potential way for any (MS) application to communicate with any back-end database. Later, JDBC was supposed to succeed where ODBC fell short.
Today, this whole topic is FUGLY beyond belief and I know of no Source Forge or other project to finally accomplish this requirement.
The combination of XML and PDF have resolved about 90% of topics in terms of document sharing and printing. It is time someone came up with A BETTER IDEA for resolving the ODBC mess.
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows! My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible. When the office suite becomes a commodity, you'll see more defections.
While you don't need 100% compatibility (that would mean even trivial feature differences would forever doom OO adoption,), you still need broad compatibility on two levels: (a) document format and (b) interface.
The OO community seems to have recognized the shortcomings of OO compatibility with the.doc format. Each release seems to read and convert.rtf, (and.html, and.xml) a little bit better, but we've got a ways to go.
My personal "gold test" is where clients could send me an RFQ in Word.doc format (yes, that is how most RFQs arrive at my desk), that I can edit in OO, convert to a proposal, and send back in.rtf format. My documents have outlines in tables and tables in outlines and embedded pictures and Visio logic diagrams everywhere. (Yes, I am grudgingly open to converting those Visio diagrams to.jpgs if necessary.) Indexes, chapter sections, and table-of-contents generation are pretty much everywhere. In practice, some of the idiosyncrasies of OO mean I will spend TOO MUCH TIME fighting with the system to get everything displayed the way I want, and so I fall back to using MS Word as deadlines approach.
User interface in terms of user support is an area that gets little discussion in the community. I have ~300 customer companies who use my software. (An average of 10 "power users" per customer.) My software enables data exchange between itself and Excel and Word. As a result, my staff becomes an informal MS Office support resource as our customers don't want finger pointing. ("What do you mean I'm calling a about a Word problem, I'm using YOUR data!") Until there is some kind of toggle to enable OO menus to display closer to Word's, the differences in interface are such that my tech staff will revolt before being required to also support OO.
Failure to help MS Word users to make the transition to OO will only result in eventual failure of OO! I remember in the early years that Word could be configured with WordPerfect menus. They weren't perfect, but they were GOOD ENOUGH. That made transitioning to Word less stressful for both users and support people.
If you are going to protect your network, you need to protect from all currently known avenues of attack.
First the boring but necessary stuff (Topics 1-7). (Really important stuff follows in Topic 8):
1. We use Grisoft at the office (not free for commercial use, but it works and is relatively low cost). We make sure that EVERY server and PC has antivirus AND firewall. We also add Microsoft's anti-spyware to all Windows PCs. We also run ad-aware or spybot against all files about once a month.
2. The biggest source of badness comes from people bringing in stuff from home. We encourage everyone to run Grisoft and Zone alarm at home (both are free for home use.)
3. While everyone needs I.E. for Windows updates and running MS-centric web sites, we encourage EVERYONE to surf using Firefox and keep it updated.
4. Everyone is encouraged to update all Microsoft products with automatic settings where possible, and twice a month where not possible.
5. For users of Comcast's high speed internet, we have had good experiences with the anti-spyware and firewall they provide for free.
6. All of this still does not provide complete protection. We continually look for Outlook add-ins that will detect phishing and other bad emails. Nothing to recommend so far.
7. Linux and Unix boxes get isolated on their own network segments where possible.
NOW FOR THE REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF
For those PCs you MUST protect, consider these steps:
8a. Get Partition Magic (or other product) and divide your disk into C:, D:, and E.
8b. C: gets windows and nothing else either than the occasional utility that is too brain-dead to work elsewhere. Make a bootable CD that contains a mirror of C:. Virus recovery of the OS becomes quick and easy.
8c. D: gets all of your application programs. This will be much bigger than C:, but fortunately many viruses ignore drives other than C:. D: gets backed up only when you add new application software.
8d. E: gets all of your DATA.. This includes all word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, Visio, and local data files. It also includes source code and programs if you are a coder. E: gets backed up to a CD or DVD EVERY NIGHT. If you need more room than fits on a CD or DVD, then consider partitioning your drive into multiple data drives. The goal here is to simplify the recovery process to the point where not only is backing up of relevant data easy, but so is disaster recovery.
8e. Now the most important part. At least once a week, bundle up all of your backup CDs and DVDs for any drive EXCEPT the most recent and mail to a remote office (or relative). Now you have protected your data against theft, fire, flood, or other local disaster.
I'm Way Way Way too Poor................ for a SIG.
what's so great about windows that linux or OSX can't do for you
Heavy sigh.
1. I support lots of engineers who live and breath using VISIO for everything from network design to database design to charts for insertion into their power points and engineering specs.
Yes, there are special purpose products (Oracle Designer, S2000, Rational Rose) that they also use if their particular jobs call for the huge learning curve of each, but a general-purpose tool is also needed that crosses specialized boundries. (I got them to try Kivio. They laughed at me.)
2. My knowledge workers (who themselves work at more than 300 client companies) exchange not only complex documents, but support each other in doing basic things like small database creation, marketing document creation, and generating mail-merged business letters and proposals. Working with others using MS-Office looks like a more or less permanent reality. They can call each other for help, but those who really know MS provide nothing but grief to the Open Office users.
Unless we can "toggle on" an MS-compatible menu, the learning curves for individual tasks are just to great for too many.
For those who forgot the late 80's and early 90's, MS did just this when wooing the Word Perfect. When a former Word Perfect user got stuck, they could toggle to a more familiar menu structure, do the occasional, yet irksome task, and then toggle back. Eventually they embraced MS Word, but at their on pace and in their own time.
3. Drivers, drivers, and drivers for laptops. The clients are buying laptops. The clients bring the laptops back to their offices and use them as desktops. They plug in every conceivable brand (and non-brand) of scanner, printer, camera, wireless card, WIRELESS PRINTER (more than a few from Canon), etc. I don't want to talk to these people because they don't want to wait, pay for custom programming, or have long and frustrating calls with vendors. Their solution to resolving Linux driver problems? Have their tech wipe the disk clean and install windows. I KID YOU NOT.
In the 1980s and 1990's, Apple thought they could hide by focusing only on Educational, Graphic Arts, and Music companies where everyone in one area used Apple and no one cared that the accountants in the back used DOS, then Windows. Today, even though Apple offers a superior product, businesses are generally ignoring Apple while traditional Apple turf was long ago mostly overrun by Windows.
If we are to ever deploy Linux and Linux S/W for Office Working Masses, it will have to act like a product designed for the Office Working Masses who already have 10 to 20 years working with MS products and who are surrounded by the need to work with others in the MS space.
Imagine if the nightly news reported 1 or 2 people killed by elephants in every broadcast of every night of the year.
Canada is banning Pit Bulls and considering banning Rottweilers (do the Google search yourself,) but would permit roaming Elephants?
"Microsoft is perhaps the most hated company in the history of business."
Are you kidding?
Survey the thousands upon thousands of citizens of India who either lost loved ones or are still living with the aftermath of Bhopal about what they think of Union Carbide.
Survey the thousands of people whose retirement was wiped out by the burnouts of Enron about how their medical bills may drive them into poverty.
Survey environmentalists around the planet about what they think of the parent company of the Exxon Valdez (and countless LARGER accidents" and the damage done to the environment.
The most hated? Maybe the company most expected to abuse their leadership position in the industry, but the most hated?
Maybe by many vocal slashdotters, but Microsoft doesn't hold a candle to how other companies have (intentionally or not) caused millions of people around the world to associate hate with a corporate entity.
Microsoft has done many baaaad things. But when it comes to causing environmental damage, wiping out people's savings, or just plain killing innocent people, they are just plain amateurs.
methinks thou just wants another reason to trash them
While in my perfect universe the implied contract between an ISP and customer should be that the ISP never censors my access, I'm not sure if that is the case in the real world.
Many of the posted comments seem to assume that either there is such a legal portion of the client-customer ISP relationship or that some kind of "common carrier" legal regulations make this so.
I'm not a lawyer in either the US or Canada, but have not heard the press state or imply this is so.
Other posts that have said "the ISP can do what they want and you are free to go elsewhere if you want" may, in fact, be correct.
If clearing the desktop is really what this is about....
I have zero room on my home-office desktop. Fans annoy me and I've got 4 PCs.
SOooo.....
I bought a Belkin 4-port switch (www.belkin.com) and ran the wires from my monitor/keyboard/mouse to my wiring closet next to my desk.
Open the closet door to plug in USB to unload digital camera or cut or load CDs and DVDs.
Close closet door to eliminate clutter and fan noise. (Heat buildup is easier to manage here. I'm installing a very quiet [1-sone] exhaust fan (www.homedepot.com) inside the closet to keep my stuff cool.)
A rack-mounted solution in the closet might be nice for the next four-to-six PCs, but current solutions are incredibly pricey.
I think the next challenge will be to create a tiny box that serves as a wireless multi-device USB port. That way, thumb drives, cameras, cell-phones, PDAs, external CD/DVD devices, and the occasional non-shared printer could still be used right from the desktop.
For my regular office (about 20 people using about 40 PCs), the rack-approach would only work if the remote USB idea was also addressed.
Does such a device (the USB thing, not the rack thing) already exist?
Based on the almost 2,000 comments already posted on this topic; and based on the abysmal variety of spellings and grammar on the resumes of people I am interviewing right now for a customer support and consulting position, there should be no doubt this is a real problem.
In the second half of the twentieth century, frustration with English's complexity led some to try and standardize on Esperanto as a substitution for English. (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Esperanto) However, as most people ignored Esperanto, maybe it's time to take another look at improving English.
We have ISO, ANSI, and bazillion other standards organizations covering everything from the definition of a gram to the grading of meats and vegetables. But there is no standards organization (to the best of my knowledge) for the standardization and improvement of the English language.
If there was, there would be an organization to negotiate which words could be migrated to more phonetically-based spellings.
Instead what we have are many publications (mostly dictionaries, encyclopedias, and style manuals) that record the language as it is and not as it could be.
Imagine Linux without Linus or Java without Sun. (Sorry... couldn't...resist... the... urge. Ignore the previous sentence.)
What would be needed would be the agreement of existing major publications and publishers to use new standards as they arose. Otherwise, the proposed changes will never happen and the language will continue to spiral in many directions.
As it is, the style manuals do little more than to get agreement as to whether new words like Web and Internet should or should not be capitalized. (Ho Hum.)
SOoo....... who wants to found the E.I.E.I.O? (English Improvement Eventually International Organization)
Slashdot Mirror
The article refers to the fact that many consumers who might buy a desk-top through the mail want to touch and examine a laptop before purchasing.
Think about how many laptops have too-small keys, mushy keyboards, and unusable pointing devices. At the same time, think about how much more limiting many LCD screens are with regard to brightness and angle-of-view-ability (yes, I know that's not really a word). I know that I don't want to buy a laptop I haven't first touched.
I went to an Apple store in a mall in Maryland not long ago an was amazed by the job it did at getting consumers comfortable with the product line. (While you could buy iPods and iPod accessories there, I think most of the PCs, laptops, and monitors had to be ordered.
If consumers could count on all the current Dell products being "touchable" at their local mall (at a kiosk) or even on a wall at their local Starbucks, I think they could continue to sell via web.
But from the tone of the article, it sounds like they are open to a slice of Comp-USA or Best Buy a la Apple and eMachines.
There already was one such really smart person, an authority in physics and mathematics, who closely examined the theories of quantum mechanics, and concluded they were nonsense. His name?
Albert Einstein.
Go read his bio.
Best Buy has two "public" sites. One for consumers and one for "business."
The consumer site is www.bestbuy.com.
The "business" site is www.bestbuybusiness.com.
The only thing an individual consumer has to do is provide an email address and a business name and they have access to the "business" site.
I went shopping for a "Plantronics MHS123 - headset" on www.bestbuy.com. $29.99 plus shipping is quoted.
I then went to www.bestbuybusiness.com and bought the EXACT SAME PRODUCT for $17.67 plus shipping.
Draw your own conclusions...
The comments thus far seem divided between contempt for community college/technical school level "hands on" training and frustration that many employers may not reward the critical thinking skills taught in college.
d _universities_in_Philadelphia)
In fact, there are both too many software mechanics who do not understand the greater business problems that require solving, and too many paper tigers who did wonderfully in college but who struggle with delivering results in the real world.
I have been fortunate enough to benefit from both and I will encourage my children to do the same. Some of the best teachers I ever had were at the community college and technical school levels. They were professionals who often brought decades of real-world experience to the classroom.
At the same time, my graduate studies did indeed challenge me and force me to develop skills to see issues from multiple perspectives and solve issues using techniques from many different fields.
As a result, my career has not only been financially rewarding, (my employers have always rewarded my technical knowledge with $) but my everyday work consists of solving problems that keep me interested and excited to come to work (as my creative problem solving abilities tend to get me interesting work).
One post implied that as employers paid more money for the skills they need, that students would gravitate toward C.S. and similar important professions. If so, the message is taking decades to get get across.
An integrated approach is offered by Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA).
For more than 25 years, I have been hiring "interns" and graduates from Drexel. At Drexel, the normal 4 year B.S. program is elongated into 5 years of trimesters where one third of each year is spent working at a different employer.
By the time you hire a Drexel grad, they already have years of real-world experience lacking by many graduates of so-called prestigious universities. (No, I didn't attend Drexel, but I did sleep in one of their dorms for two semesters in 1977 while dating an E.E./C.S. major.)
To the best of my knowledge, despite Drexel's 30+ years of success with this approach none of the other local universities have adopted Drexel's approach. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_an
Know this: If you only do the trade-school-level stuff, you have to read and teach yourself the critical thinking stuff on your own. If you only attend university, you may emerge with an initial salary less than the tech-school graduate and take a few years before passing that person as you move up into management or more responsible staff and consulting positions.
Consider both.
The thread here seems to question (a) the value of Oracle and (b) why this would be good for Oracle's customers. Here are my 0.0002 cents:
My current client is a large insurance company. (More than $7 billion dollars of policies a year underwritten by a staff of more than 1,200 people.)
We have lots of Oracle, SQL/Server, and MS/Access applications all over the place. The Oracle data is generally available to everyone. We have more than 50 analysts who use a combination of Hyperion (formerly Brio) and SAS to model the data.
Oracle's additional configuration options enable our Oracle servers to support phenomenally more people than comparable gear running Access or SQL/Server. In addition, we have really good SAN devices that are backed up every night.
However, the limited number of Oracle DBA's mean that users must wait (sometimes forever) to get their application written in, or ported to, Oracle.
Where the SQL/Plus Oracle code is controlled, documented, and fully SOX compliant, the same is not always true for the Access and SQL/Server code.
As a result, the individual departments are forced to use Access and SQL/Server. Their applications do not talk to each other. The data in those applications are "hidden" from people in other departments.
SOoooo...... users develop "personal" and "departmental" applications in Access and SQL/Server which we in IT find and port to Oracle when we can.
MySQL apps are generally easier to port to Oracle than SQL/Server or Access. (Never mind the application layer. That is a different discussion for a different time.) I would love to provide MySQL to departments across the board on servers that are supportable by corporate IT. Then users could build their apps on-the fly, expect support from my team on an ongoing basis, and faster conversions to Oracle in the long run.
Wouldn't that be sweet.
Of course I was not doing anything wrong. My point was that just by the VERBAL over-reaction of the security person; that I was made aware that I was indeed being watched; and so could assume that common thugs in the area would also know that this was a place being actively watched.
And so. . . not end the end caring about the over-reacting of Orwell's "big brother," I could thus continue on my merry way reassured.
The alternative is to live in Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago, and view every trip on public transportation as one where you necessarily assume a risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed that is more than twenty times the risk in London. (Yes I take those risks because actually thinking about those things never gives me anything but a headache, and facing up to the fact that so much in life is beyond my control might only depress me.)
"Waiter, may I please have an extra speaker with those fries?"
For the most part I was happy with those facilities for more than forty years, or until I got to take London's "tube" for about two weeks.
I remember standing on the platform waiting for my train and saw a billboard that I found amusing. I raised my camera to take a picture and in less than a second, a booming voice suitable for a remake of "The Ten Commandments," boomed, "PUT DOWN THE CAMERA. CAMERAS ARE PROHIBITED IN THE TUBE. YOU WILL BE DETAINED AND FINED IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY."
At first, I was shaken. Then, a little depressed. (Looking back, I can understand the comments to this post comparing Britain's surveillance to Soviet and early Vietnamese forms of oppression.)
But then, I felt reassured. There have been many times in my life when I took the subway in Philadelphia and New York in the middle of the night and felt fearful for my safety the entire trip. But after the warning, I never gave my safety another anxious thought while in London.
Later, I saw a sign with a picture of a long screwdriver. The sign reminded passengers that such objects were considered weapons in London and that violators could be arrested. I almost giggled. Where I come from, almost anyone you meet could be carrying a concealed weapon, licensed or not [and when I use the word weapon, I mean some type of gun]. (While many Americans feel safer with lots of armed people, I do not dispute the fact that Britain's murder rate is less than one tenth of ours. In 1996, police-recorded murders totaled 19,650 in the United States and 681 in England.)
Based on my experience, the effect of adding more speakers to the existing cameras might serve as a preventative measure and further reduce crime. Cameras might be great tools for solving crimes, but using the speakers can prevent crime in some cases.
I would be in favor of adding both camera and speakers in the US, espeically in our major cities and especially in areas of public transportation.
Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software. In its current condition, it allows us to run the KNOPPIX Japanese Edition on Windows (see Screenshots).
I've supported people with arthritic thumb joints and this is a real problem.
I love the concept of Mousekeys (Control Panel | Accessibility | Mouse tab | Enable).
The problem is in the execution. Even with the fastest settings (set both scrollbars to the maximum right setting and then use your CTRL button), both the initial cursor speed and the acceleration are abysmally slow.
The previously suggested Logic Marble Mouse is my favorite, but with a twist. Have your user try using their first finger to operate the left mouse button and their index finger to operate the marble.
This will entail zero motion of the thumb joint!
Tell your user that like riding a bike, this may be a bit awkward at first, but with ten to fifteen minutes of practice, they should be able to move as quickly as they would like.
Good luck
-Leon Leon Roomberg www.roomberg.com
P.S. (If anyone has a routine or solution to dramatically speed up mousekeys, feel free to email my junk address of xxxlroomberg2xxx@xxxnetscape.net without the "x"s. Please put "MOUSEKEYS" in the subject line so I don't trash your email. [And yes, I tried googling for an answer without success.])
http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/07/fringe.smiley.face.o ff/
U.S. creator frowns at Frenchman's trademark
In this story:
* Threat to sue
* Born in '63 or '68?
* Recognition, not money
* Related stories and sites
July 7, 1998
Web posted at: 1:50 p.m. EDT (1750 GMT)
WORCESTER, Massachusetts (AP) -- Harvey Ball did not have a nice day recently when he learned a Frenchman had registered a trademark for the smiley face.
As just about everyone in Ball's central Massachusetts hometown knows, it was Ball who designed the ubiquitous symbol of good cheer in 1963 as part of an in- house happiness program for an insurance company.
Franklin Loufrani, a 55-year-old entrepreneur from France, first registered the symbol in 1971 and now holds the trademark in much of the world.
The trademark, noted with a small, circled letter "R" ( ® ), is on the Web page of London-based Smiley Licensing Corp. Loufrani is the president.
Threat to sue
Ball, 76, didn't find any of this out until a couple of months ago.
Then he got really steamed more recently when he learned that Loufrani has threatened to sue U.S. companies that manufacture or sell products with the smiley symbol in the 80 countries where Loufrani holds the trademark.
"So much for smiley and happiness," Ball huffs.
The joyful smiley-face icon has made its way over the years onto boxer shorts, London drug houses, Wal-Mart products and countless e-mail messages.
Born in '63 or '68?
Loufrani said he made up smiley while working at a French newspaper to illustrate positive stories after the student riots in 1968. Since registering the trademark, he has made millions.
The people of Worcester -- which bills itself "The Birthplace of the Smiley Face" -- side with Ball, however.
He said he first drew the perky yellow face in 1963 as part of a "friendship" campaign to ease tensions between employees after State Mutual Life Insurance Co. took over a small Ohio insurer.
Ball, a free-lance artist, was paid $45 to come up with a graphic. State Mutual printed 100 smiley buttons. A 1964 State Mutual publication shows company Vice President John Adams wearing one.
Soon requests for tens of thousands of buttons began pouring in. Finally, Ball said, the company stopped printing them in the late 1960s.
Recognition, not money
Ball never sought a trademark or copyright. He said he doesn't miss the millions he could have made on his creation. And he isn't planning legal action against Loufrani, who has a U.S. trademark, but only for a combination happy face and the word "smiley."
Ball just wants recognition as smiley's creator.
"Never in the history of mankind or art has any single piece of art gotten such widespread favor, pleasure, enjoyment, and nothing has ever been so simply done and so easily understood in art," he said.
Loufrani, reached in London, had no comment.
With all of the data downloaded in background and a beautiful front-end, response time from screen-to-screen was sub-second and the web has been catching up ever since.
The product was called PointCast.com and it was an advertising-based medium at the very start of the dot-com boom. It also had the most beautiful stock portfolio display of any product I have used prior or since. (Don't bother with the current owner of the PointCast web site. It looks like some other completely unrelated web product startup took the name.)
PointCast tanked when companies started finally funding high-speed internet connections and investors lost their faith. After all, they reasoned, the web would become so fast that caching became completely old school.
Even, so, assume that you have a developed a personal page of favorite news, search, and research links. It doesn't have to be pretty, just personally relevant. (Mine is at http://www.roomberg.com/EveryDayPages.htm.) Now assume your PC goes out to the web in background when the PC is otherwise not being used and caches zillions of pages you have linked to. For 90% of the news and blogs you then need, wait time falls to zero. Only when you click a level too deep would you finally need to return to the world wide-but-slow web. Of course Akami (or somebody) might have to develop rules about how many levels deep such a program searched or the the web might actually finally be crushed when everyone's PC tries to repetitively "spider" their favorite site. You might set your PC to fetch PoinCast updates every morning, every hour, ever fifteen minutes, or for that matter, every minute.
OMG! PointCast is back.
An entire /. discussion about how adding technology to our lives has reduced our productivity? Throw me a bone!
9 9.063 8.065 9.065 2.199 2.328 27.793 24.693 94.502 78.35
/.,) , the overall population is producing almost 50% more goods and services with a workforce that is barely 10% larger. Now that's what any reasonable person would agree is a productivity INCREASE.
Greenspan is retired mere nanoseconds before we ignore the facts all around us?
Consider the following chart:
Year____US GDP________________Workers________GDP per Worker
1996____7,816,820,000,000____119,708,000____$65,2
1997____8,304,330,000,000____122,776,000____$67,6
1998____8,746,980,000,000____125,930,000____$69,4
1999____9,268,430,000,000____128,993,000____$71,8
2000____9,816,970,000,000____131,785,000____$74,4
2001____10,127,900,000,000____131,826,000____$76,
2002____10,469,600,000,000____130,341,000____$80,
2003____10,971,200,000,000____129,999,000____$84,
2004____11,734,300,000,000____131,435,000____$89,
In less than 10 years of intensive deployment of desktop, laptop, handheld, and communications technologies, annual US output increased from $65,299.06 to $89,278.35 per year. (Don't confuse that with personal income. This number is the total income for both all business corporations and sole proprietorships in the country.)
The bottom line: while you may personally FEEL like you are being pulled in too many directions and getting less done, (and for all I know, you personally MAY be spending 7.7 hours a day on
Even adjusted for inflation, the numbers are still way..way..way..UP.
If my numbers are off, I am open to correction and explanations.
Until then, quitcherwhining..
I've been following eBooks for years now.
.txt, .pdf, .doc, or .rtf documents.
I used to own a Franklin EBook.
In concept, they should be great.
The readers themselves have been (for me) one disappointment after another.
In practice, as Jon Stewart so often says, "ehh... not so great."
First, they have tended to be inflexible. Many want you to use only their own proprietary file formats and won't even touch
Second they have tended to be fragile, with delicate screens and power supplies. I once went through three EBooks in as many months and I am NOT brutal on hardware. (On of my WORKING laptops is eleven years old!)
Between Project Guttenberg (currently 17,000 free and legal downloadable books at www.guttenberg.org) and the vast returns when Googling one could read for centuries and never get bored.
For those who MUST have the latest, www.ebooks.com boasts their current inventory to be 45,000 titles, most between $5 and $20 (US).
What we REALLY need is a laptop/tablet with a 4" by 6" folded form factor (so it will fit in a jacket pocket). Price it between $499 and $699 and we will have a WINNER.
We could also use Bluetooth "sunglasses" that block out everything but the screen for reading at the beach/pool.
An optional hand-crank attachment to deal with dead batteries isn't a bad idea either. For Christmas, I bought my camper-fanatic brother-in-law a combination television/radio/lantern that hand cranks the power. Why not a PC?
If the thing is going to the beach, enclose it in a water-proof/sand-proof enclosure. I worked in the industrial hand-held industry eons ago (industrial meter reader, supermarket inventory devices, etc.) and they licked this problem in the 1980's.
Come to think of it, crank up an IPod with a 8" by 6" display that folds to 4" by 6" (Think bigger Nintendo DS) and the bugger could provide background music while reading. (I prefer classical during most reading, thank you.)
I can still hope......
You have multiple workable solutions in this area. Here are the most common used by my clients:
1. Where clients are roaming one building with lots of bandwidth, install ALL apps on their network drives. Upon logging in from ANY PC in the organization, Office and every other app settings can come from the network. Actually, you have a choice of running the entire app from the network, or just critical settings.
If bandwidth is an issue, just put the settings on the LAN and the apps of the PCs.
If, (more likely) individual users keep messing with local settings and apps, fewer headaches may result by going 100% LAN.
2. Where remote connections are required, both Citrix and MS/Terminal server are great options.
My wife is 150 miles from her office and accesses MS Office and other apps all via Terminal Services.
In both of the above approaches, IT can also do nightly backups and scan for viruses, malware, and forbidden files.
If a user's PC crashes, just roll out a pre-configured desktop from the closet, boot, and the user can be quickly back in business.
In other words, drive C: is used only for caching and logging in to the network.
Where security and performance start to get crazy, consider cheap or rack PCs dedicated to individual users. Whether you use MS's remote facility, PcAnywhere, Terminal Server, Citrix, etc., the idea is that the user can remotely access their computer-room PC from any desktop and even from home.
Before you pooh-pooh PcAnywhere as out-of-date, take some time to appreciate the multiple levels of authentication and encryption it offers.
You can add a bunch of technologies to the above mix. VM Ware (and similar OS shells) can isolate individual apps to individual copies of the OS. This is a great way to give users MS Office in one window and OO in another. You can also add any number of VPN, tunneling, encryption, and any number of software, hardware, and other authentication approaches depending on the requirements of your environment. I have been exposed to a number of military and pharma environments, and most can be supported using almost any of the remote approaches.
I'm an exec in a small software company. (We currently have about 35 people, of which 25 are programmers.) All five execs have offices. Each of us have 25+ years of programming experience. We worked our way up into management and yes, we all started from cubes. (And by the way, four of the five of us, including me, still code 20+ hours a week.)
We are in the midst of a boom in our business and are hiring so many people that we are just plain out of space. We will have the option to double our space in about 2 years when the tenants on the floor below us have their leases expire and we can kick them out.
Until then, we are tearing down cube walls and combining people into working 3-people per cube. It is not pretty. Productivity is lost. People are not happy. We know this. So now, almost everyone has i-pods and the earpieces come out only when answering support calls or when meeting with peers to solve a problem. I know it is not fashionable on /. to empathize with management, but sometimes even the bastards are not being bastards.
I love it when someone thinks we can just snap our fingers and make a new office appear and old lease contract obligations disappear.
Then again, they all have good paying jobs and the programmers we are hiring tell us the salaries we are offering are generally as good or better than wherever they were coming from.
Maybe instead of hiring all of these "inconvenient" people, we should just finally take the plunge and outsource to... I don't know..... INDIA? (Boo! Bwa hahahahahah..... Whiners now curl up into the fetal position and start rapid thumb sucking.)
In two years, the staff will have either offices or tall (8') cubicles with walls and doors, if all goes as planned. Our current plan is to return to the 10% to 15% annualized growth we had for ONE HUNDRED CONSECUTIVE QUARTERS. (Yes, we really did.) At that time, we will also pick up an option on the floor two levels below us for future expansion.
However, god bless us and EXCUUUUUSE ME (apologies to Steve Martin,) if we get so lucky that our sales forecast is so wrong that we have to unexpectedly double our staff AGAIN and enable more people to afford homes, cars, and Legos(r) they pretend are for their children. If that happens, I will again empathize with people who may again lose their offices and even cubes. But not so much.
I guess my ID is not managerialslime for nothing.
Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.
There are other approaches that can work even better depending on the application. I train my staff to start most of their document names with yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.
example: "2005.10.22.14.01 Department Budget Draft.xls"
By using the largest-to-smallest convention, everything sorts nice and neatly on display. (Don't tell them to sort on date column, that will change as the document is re-edited.)
It can also serve as a poor man's version control. I train them NOT to use "File Save." Instead, use SAVE AS and then update the time.
The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years
I support a CRM/Enterprise Industry Vertical System for a living. The product is based on the BASIS platform. (www.basis.com) Our customers (users) depend on their ability to execute complex SQL queries from MS Office (Excel, Access, Visio, and by the way, Cognos and Crystal as well,)against our system.
As MS has upgraded MS Office over the years, the DLLs involved in SQL querying have definitely changed. As a result, my support team has to configure BASIS ODBC drivers according to the version of MS Office being used.
This is painful and time consuming.
We are only now starting to get requests to support ODBC from OO and I'm not even sure where to start. Even after we figure out how to do this, we are scared of being put in the position of supporting different configurations for different versions. Yes, I know that this may be less of a problem in OO, but who can tell?
Part of my reality is that we can't dictate to our customers that they MUST upgrade to the latest MS Office (or OO) at any given time.
As a result, we wind up with a proliferation of possible combinations.
ODBC was originally thought of as a potential way for any (MS) application to communicate with any back-end database. Later, JDBC was supposed to succeed where ODBC fell short.
Today, this whole topic is FUGLY beyond belief and I know of no Source Forge or other project to finally accomplish this requirement.
The combination of XML and PDF have resolved about 90% of topics in terms of document sharing and printing. It is time someone came up with A BETTER IDEA for resolving the ODBC mess.
While you don't need 100% compatibility (that would mean even trivial feature differences would forever doom OO adoption,), you still need broad compatibility on two levels: (a) document format and (b) interface.
The OO community seems to have recognized the shortcomings of OO compatibility with the .doc format. Each release seems to read and convert .rtf, (and .html, and .xml) a little bit better, but we've got a ways to go.
My personal "gold test" is where clients could send me an RFQ in Word .doc format (yes, that is how most RFQs arrive at my desk), that I can edit in OO, convert to a proposal, and send back in .rtf format. My documents have outlines in tables and tables in outlines and embedded pictures and Visio logic diagrams everywhere. (Yes, I am grudgingly open to converting those Visio diagrams to .jpgs if necessary.) Indexes, chapter sections, and table-of-contents generation are pretty much everywhere. In practice, some of the idiosyncrasies of OO mean I will spend TOO MUCH TIME fighting with the system to get everything displayed the way I want, and so I fall back to using MS Word as deadlines approach.
User interface in terms of user support is an area that gets little discussion in the community. I have ~300 customer companies who use my software. (An average of 10 "power users" per customer.) My software enables data exchange between itself and Excel and Word. As a result, my staff becomes an informal MS Office support resource as our customers don't want finger pointing. ("What do you mean I'm calling a about a Word problem, I'm using YOUR data!") Until there is some kind of toggle to enable OO menus to display closer to Word's, the differences in interface are such that my tech staff will revolt before being required to also support OO.
Failure to help MS Word users to make the transition to OO will only result in eventual failure of OO! I remember in the early years that Word could be configured with WordPerfect menus. They weren't perfect, but they were GOOD ENOUGH. That made transitioning to Word less stressful for both users and support people.
Yup.................Still to poor for a sig.
First the boring but necessary stuff (Topics 1-7). (Really important stuff follows in Topic 8):
1. We use Grisoft at the office (not free for commercial use, but it works and is relatively low cost). We make sure that EVERY server and PC has antivirus AND firewall. We also add Microsoft's anti-spyware to all Windows PCs. We also run ad-aware or spybot against all files about once a month.
2. The biggest source of badness comes from people bringing in stuff from home. We encourage everyone to run Grisoft and Zone alarm at home (both are free for home use.)
3. While everyone needs I.E. for Windows updates and running MS-centric web sites, we encourage EVERYONE to surf using Firefox and keep it updated.
4. Everyone is encouraged to update all Microsoft products with automatic settings where possible, and twice a month where not possible.
5. For users of Comcast's high speed internet, we have had good experiences with the anti-spyware and firewall they provide for free.
6. All of this still does not provide complete protection. We continually look for Outlook add-ins that will detect phishing and other bad emails. Nothing to recommend so far.
7. Linux and Unix boxes get isolated on their own network segments where possible.
NOW FOR THE REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF
For those PCs you MUST protect, consider these steps: 8a. Get Partition Magic (or other product) and divide your disk into C:, D:, and E.
8b. C: gets windows and nothing else either than the occasional utility that is too brain-dead to work elsewhere. Make a bootable CD that contains a mirror of C:. Virus recovery of the OS becomes quick and easy.
8c. D: gets all of your application programs. This will be much bigger than C:, but fortunately many viruses ignore drives other than C:. D: gets backed up only when you add new application software.
8d. E: gets all of your DATA.. This includes all word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, Visio, and local data files. It also includes source code and programs if you are a coder. E: gets backed up to a CD or DVD EVERY NIGHT. If you need more room than fits on a CD or DVD, then consider partitioning your drive into multiple data drives. The goal here is to simplify the recovery process to the point where not only is backing up of relevant data easy, but so is disaster recovery.
8e. Now the most important part. At least once a week, bundle up all of your backup CDs and DVDs for any drive EXCEPT the most recent and mail to a remote office (or relative). Now you have protected your data against theft, fire, flood, or other local disaster.
I'm Way Way Way too Poor ................ for a SIG.
Heavy sigh.
1. I support lots of engineers who live and breath using VISIO for everything from network design to database design to charts for insertion into their power points and engineering specs.
Yes, there are special purpose products (Oracle Designer, S2000, Rational Rose) that they also use if their particular jobs call for the huge learning curve of each, but a general-purpose tool is also needed that crosses specialized boundries. (I got them to try Kivio. They laughed at me.)
2. My knowledge workers (who themselves work at more than 300 client companies) exchange not only complex documents, but support each other in doing basic things like small database creation, marketing document creation, and generating mail-merged business letters and proposals. Working with others using MS-Office looks like a more or less permanent reality. They can call each other for help, but those who really know MS provide nothing but grief to the Open Office users.
Unless we can "toggle on" an MS-compatible menu, the learning curves for individual tasks are just to great for too many.
For those who forgot the late 80's and early 90's, MS did just this when wooing the Word Perfect. When a former Word Perfect user got stuck, they could toggle to a more familiar menu structure, do the occasional, yet irksome task, and then toggle back. Eventually they embraced MS Word, but at their on pace and in their own time.
3. Drivers, drivers, and drivers for laptops. The clients are buying laptops. The clients bring the laptops back to their offices and use them as desktops. They plug in every conceivable brand (and non-brand) of scanner, printer, camera, wireless card, WIRELESS PRINTER (more than a few from Canon), etc. I don't want to talk to these people because they don't want to wait, pay for custom programming, or have long and frustrating calls with vendors. Their solution to resolving Linux driver problems? Have their tech wipe the disk clean and install windows. I KID YOU NOT.
In the 1980s and 1990's, Apple thought they could hide by focusing only on Educational, Graphic Arts, and Music companies where everyone in one area used Apple and no one cared that the accountants in the back used DOS, then Windows. Today, even though Apple offers a superior product, businesses are generally ignoring Apple while traditional Apple turf was long ago mostly overrun by Windows.
If we are to ever deploy Linux and Linux S/W for Office Working Masses, it will have to act like a product designed for the Office Working Masses who already have 10 to 20 years working with MS products and who are surrounded by the need to work with others in the MS space.
(http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/0
I saw the National Geographic special on the subject recently and the terror experienced by villagers when 100 or more of these beasts invades their fields is incredible.
More articles at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/20628
and
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld
The decision by the Canadian "Wilds" park that electrified fences were not a reliable deterrent to elephants was an intelligent one.
Imagine if the nightly news reported 1 or 2 people killed by elephants in every broadcast of every night of the year.
Canada is banning Pit Bulls and considering banning Rottweilers (do the Google search yourself,) but would permit roaming Elephants?
I think not.
Are you kidding?
Survey the thousands upon thousands of citizens of India who either lost loved ones or are still living with the aftermath of Bhopal about what they think of Union Carbide.
Survey the thousands of people whose retirement was wiped out by the burnouts of Enron about how their medical bills may drive them into poverty.
Survey environmentalists around the planet about what they think of the parent company of the Exxon Valdez (and countless LARGER accidents" and the damage done to the environment.
The most hated? Maybe the company most expected to abuse their leadership position in the industry, but the most hated?
Maybe by many vocal slashdotters, but Microsoft doesn't hold a candle to how other companies have (intentionally or not) caused millions of people around the world to associate hate with a corporate entity.
Microsoft has done many baaaad things. But when it comes to causing environmental damage, wiping out people's savings, or just plain killing innocent people, they are just plain amateurs.
methinks thou just wants another reason to trash them
But do they?
While in my perfect universe the implied contract between an ISP and customer should be that the ISP never censors my access, I'm not sure if that is the case in the real world.
Many of the posted comments seem to assume that either there is such a legal portion of the client-customer ISP relationship or that some kind of "common carrier" legal regulations make this so.
I'm not a lawyer in either the US or Canada, but have not heard the press state or imply this is so.
Other posts that have said "the ISP can do what they want and you are free to go elsewhere if you want" may, in fact, be correct.
Who here knows applicable Canadian law?
----- Still too poor for a sig.
I have zero room on my home-office desktop. Fans annoy me and I've got 4 PCs.
SOooo.....
I bought a Belkin 4-port switch (www.belkin.com) and ran the wires from my monitor/keyboard/mouse to my wiring closet next to my desk.
Open the closet door to plug in USB to unload digital camera or cut or load CDs and DVDs.
Close closet door to eliminate clutter and fan noise. (Heat buildup is easier to manage here. I'm installing a very quiet [1-sone] exhaust fan (www.homedepot.com) inside the closet to keep my stuff cool.)
A rack-mounted solution in the closet might be nice for the next four-to-six PCs, but current solutions are incredibly pricey.
I think the next challenge will be to create a tiny box that serves as a wireless multi-device USB port. That way, thumb drives, cameras, cell-phones, PDAs, external CD/DVD devices, and the occasional non-shared printer could still be used right from the desktop.
For my regular office (about 20 people using about 40 PCs), the rack-approach would only work if the remote USB idea was also addressed.
Does such a device (the USB thing, not the rack thing) already exist?
---
Too lazy to type a sig.
In the second half of the twentieth century, frustration with English's complexity led some to try and standardize on Esperanto as a substitution for English. (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Esperanto) However, as most people ignored Esperanto, maybe it's time to take another look at improving English.
We have ISO, ANSI, and bazillion other standards organizations covering everything from the definition of a gram to the grading of meats and vegetables. But there is no standards organization (to the best of my knowledge) for the standardization and improvement of the English language.
If there was, there would be an organization to negotiate which words could be migrated to more phonetically-based spellings.
Instead what we have are many publications (mostly dictionaries, encyclopedias, and style manuals) that record the language as it is and not as it could be.
Imagine Linux without Linus or Java without Sun. (Sorry... couldn't ...resist... the... urge. Ignore the previous sentence.)
What would be needed would be the agreement of existing major publications and publishers to use new standards as they arose. Otherwise, the proposed changes will never happen and the language will continue to spiral in many directions.
As it is, the style manuals do little more than to get agreement as to whether new words like Web and Internet should or should not be capitalized. (Ho Hum.)
SOoo....... who wants to found the E.I.E.I.O? (English Improvement Eventually International Organization)
(I'm only partially kidding.)