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I might suggest not buying laptops from Best Buy and buying business notebooks instead of consumer oriented ones. Better choices
I have a nc8430 which is now discontinued but it is workstation class and doesn't generate too much heat. Yes it can get uncomfortable if I leave it on my laptop for six hours with the charger plugged in but if I'm off battery power all is well. It has held up rather well and it gets beat on pretty bad.
Others have suggested it though and I don't disagree, if you need a powerful workstation a desktop is a better and more ergonomic solution. I have to travel a lot and need the horsepower on the road so I'm rather stuck but it works out rather nicely for me. Pretty soon I'll have a tablet and my workstation notebook that will be used for the heavy lifting at my temporary desk setups while I use the tablet when I'm walking about the site since the place is saturated with wifi it's quite easy for me.
My next addition to my current laptop is this multi-monitor adapter, so I'll have pretty much everything I need in a very small and very portable package.
I also type more reliably than I write. I'll screw up certain letters as I'm handwriting. With a keyboard the lettering is consistent. The tablet support on Windows does an excellent job of guessing what letter I'm trying to right so the vast vast majority of the time it gets it right especially if the mistake is towards the end of a word which from my experience is exactly where I tend to make mistakes. Probably only because I do so little handwriting in my day to day life.
HP's tablet is similarly light in weight, I have no trouble handing it off to someone to write something on it or to show them something. Sure it's heavier than paper but that's just gonna be reality until we have some real materials revolution. It's not too heavy that you need wrists of iron though.
I'm going to guess you haven't actually used a modern tablet-PC with OneNote2007. HP's offering in particular uses a magnetic stylus so you can put your hand on the screen and write very reliably during into OneNote or any other application that requires lots of writing. If you accidentally mark it you just turn the stylus over and use it as an eraser automatically just like with a pencil. OneNote makes it easy to convert all your notes to text. You can even do it after the fact. Combined with Penflicks you have yourself a powerful interface that is surprisingly intuitive. My experience with it resulted in 100% accuracy when converting my crappy handwriting. That was of course after a half hour of training it.
Tablet-PCs aren't a failure by any means, specific implementations of them have, Microsoft sucks at producing hardware as I'm sure you already know. I doubt it's a surprise although I've never seen anything called a Microsoft Tablet-PC unless you're referring to the XP Tablet PC or Vista Tablet PC edition. Both are very high in quality with Vista being a rather large improvement in this regard.
Your argument also conveniently ignores the risk drug companies face even when developing off-brand products. The lower priced pill still has to go through all the regulatory testing. That will eat at the initial cost even if your procedures are streamlined a large portion of the process is paying for FDA regulation. Just because your drug is based on something out there doesn't mean you get to skip to the head of the line. Thankfully that thought process makes no sense and would scare the majority of people away from off-brand medication and they would have no way of making sure the pill was safe.
I'll also add that the production is already in China and in other countries as well. Production costs are separate from development costs. Just because you find a way to lower your production cost doesn't mean you magically get to ignore all the development costs. Sure you might save some money but the cost of coming to the market late which is the purpose of patents will make up the difference.
That is a no, you wouldn't have a problem. Worst case you have to reactivate. If you've done more than the 10 installs that Microsoft let's you activate over the web then you have to call to activate. In any case, still not a problem as they will still let you activate it.
Actually you completely missed my point entirely. Congratulations on your poor reading comprehension.
No matter how secure your browser is you will still find people that download and run malicious software. That was my entire point. It is irrelevant what platform the user is running because it's the same problem whenever a user is allowed to download and run software.
You just seem eager to write this off trying to rely on OS X being magically secure when it does have its problems. I knew about this problem all along and so did most people that have any kind of security background. If you give the user freedom expect them to screw it up.
As for the infection rate, that does indeed matter but a trojan on a Mac is just as capable of scanning a Mac for email addresses and propagating further using the same mechanism as it would on a Windows box. There is nothing in OS X that magically protects the user from themselves. I've seen Mac users blindly click and even type passwords when it pops up on their screen. This problem is not unique to Windows users so matter how much you would like to blame Microsoft for this particular fault.
Furthermore, IE7 and even IE6 don't automatically install software from websites. IE 7 in particular is much improved in regards to security which is why it broke so many web applications. IE 6 you had to manually turn off ActiveX installations but you always had the ability, even in IE 4.
Last "argument", more of a question really, how in the world do you make the logical leap that this demonstrates that OS X is "extremely secure?" As I said in my post, this has absolutely no baring on how secure OS X is as its a cross-platform problem. It is merely an illustration of the same problem encountered everywhere in every aspect of society. You can be driving the safest car in the world, if you drive like an idiot you will still eventually get into an accident. The two are loosely related so I understand the confusion but I would expect someone commenting on the security of a product to be familiar and demonstrate that familiarity and realize that this problem will continue to exist, that it was always there and has nothing to do with this specific exploit as there are hundreds of other examples which don't propagate on their own. I monitor my network activity and I'm aware of trojans that crop up and over my admittedly not too many years of experience I've seen it on many more than a single occasion on OS X, Windows, and even various Linux distros.
Until humans stop trusting one another which will be a horrible day this problem will exist. It can be mitigated through education but the risk will always exist.
I've got enough karma that I'm not worried about how I was moderated. Thank you for recognizing that I wasn't attacking anything.
My roommate is a med student, she prints full color slides all the time. I can admit that getting images to work correctly in Word is still something that needs improvement but there are a lot of options there when you right click on the photo and hit properties. Same thing when you place a Powerpoint object; you can adjust resizing so that it uses a higher quality resolution but as I recall it does rasterize the image/side to increase performance after the fact. This of course makes font size and selection rather important.
I've run into problems printing Powerpoint slides at 24x36 or larger sizes. At that level I actually end up using either Visio or just Photoshop since I can copy the entire slide out of Powerpoint and just paste it into Photoshop without any image degradation. Both Visio and Photoshop are better suited for printing as I'm sure you are aware.
Powerpoint definitely wasn't created with the idea of printing from the get go. The options have much improved with 2007 but the defaults still leave you with your description. You do have your choice of templates when you go to print through selecting index pages, combo pages, and a few other options. I don't claim to be a Powerpoint expert but I am a user and I've generally found there is always a way to do what you want even if it's not exactly intuitive. As I said from the get go though, it's not without its faults.
Trojans don't rely IE vulnerabilities to get email addresses after infection. They can do the exact same thing they do on Windows on an OS X box once infected.
It sounds like this trojan comes with a local privilege escalation vulnerability otherwise this also depends on users on Macs having root level access.
It was only a matter of time before someone would target it. Whether more and more people target it is a completely separate issue.
As a cross-platform user of all sorts of systems I generally prefer that things aren't targeted at all. I do enjoy the people saying OS X was inherently secure based on absolutely no knowledge of OS X's foundation finally being hit with the clue-by-four. Now they can actually start learning what it is they are spouting about and present intelligent arguments which are always better than empty ones.
Of course that may just be a tad bit optimistic on my part. No system connected to the outside world is 100% secure, does this in any way change my thoughts on OS X security? Nope, not at all because I always understood this problem as it exists on any platform which lets the user download and run software.
By default the slides are hi-res, someone was referring to an inability of Office to print using various quality. You can print in full quality. Your layout issue is not a problem as you can export the Powerpoint presentation to Word and do you layout however you see fit. The integration of the apps started in 97 and has only gotten better with each release. Embedding single slides or multiple slides in Word is no problem, same with worksheets and charts.
I think the problem in the past is that people looked at Powerpoint and thought they knew how to use it, same with Word, Excel, and Access. To their credit that was largely due to an interface design issue. With Office 2007 though that problem has flown the coupe and all these features are out in the open readily available to those that want them. It's remarkably friendly which is partially the reason I learned about all these features. Once I found them in 2007 I knew what to look for in 2003 and XP. Some of the features go all the way back to 97 although most definitely not all of them.
My dynamic database driven Excel sheets mail merging into Word would like to speak with you. Word and Excel are quite excellent and 2007 in particular is very friendly to use. The only problem I've encountered with it is finding where things moved to because I was already familiar with previous versions. People I've introduced it to that had no realistic prior experience found 2007 to be open and very simple despite it's extremely powerful feature set.
This same database driven Excel sheet can feed into a Powerpoint presentation dynamically displaying photos across 16 monitors. The suite is very powerful and most people don't even scratch the surface which is sad.
Keynote is newish competition but it's still not as featureful and doesn't integrate with as many other apps. Competition is a good thing so I encourage it's existence but it won't kill Powerpoint by any means, Google doesn't have a chance in this age when Powerpoint presentations include even videos with dynamic data sources. We use Access as a backend for a number of Powerpoint presentations at trade shows which loop and are interactive. Want more info about a car? No problem, just click on it and you get a concise description of what you want. Wait a couple of minutes and it'll start looping through cars again.
People here don't seem to get why Office is so used and popular. The individual apps are quite powerful, they aren't without their faults of course, but they also all integrate with one another.
Issue wasn't fixed cause it was never a problem. You can just print the index pages or print low-res full slides. It's worked this way since 97 and has improved through 2007 which now can save to PDF or XPS.
Wow, you just like to do everything the hard way. Just use a roaming profile like the rest of us laptop users. Your laptops dies you just use another laptop while you get a replacement. In the meantime you have all your files and if SMS is employed you also have all your applications within minutes of switching. More time might be necessary if for instance SMS has to install Office or some other large app but still, it's not near as inconvenient as you make it out to be.
Also, with HP specifically and I'm sure others as well you get the replacement the next day in advance of the bad hard drive and you'll have a tech some with it to install it for you. Then IT lays down the base image and you login, SMS takes care of all your applications and you're back on your full time laptop with minutes of downtime or possibly even less depending on your requirements.
I've tried it under a number of circumstances, with roaming profiles, mandatory profiles, and local profiles with folder redirection. All can be controlled effectively through group policy. There are few local escalation exploits but getting the code on to the box is quite difficult to begin with so it takes a good amount of skill just to get your foot in the door. It's not even that hard to setup or particular time consuming because you can do it to a base machine then create a security profile and apply it en masse.
The reason why Windows is so shoddy for home users is because it really does suit business needs well. Vista is Microsoft trying to swing it in the other direction, fortunately it's just more that you have to setup in group policy initially, you can still do it all en masse except that with Vista you have even more control over how group policy is applied.
The very important issue at hand is the fact that these security precautions are not the default, as you are I'm sure aware the default is wide open so that's still an issue and probably will continue to be an issue. There are a number of ways to apply group policy, some passive and just there to assist users, then there are some active security measures you have which can't be disabled and enforce an entirely different level of security.
Of course nothing is ever perfect but mandatory profiles do effectively eliminate any spyware or virus concerns for a machine.
You are completely incorrect, group policy is applied first unless it is the first time the machine is booting up after being joined to the domain. Otherwise, in my case at least, if you unplug the network cable you lose your desktop, my documents, and all your application settings until you plug the cable back in. The machine is completely useless for a standard user. When I login I have a local profile so I can always admin the machine.
That's even moot since the group policy is set to a locked state you depend on the login script to enable functionality, not disable it. As a result if you try to login without the cable plugged in it won't let you in since password caching is obviously disabled. Pull it after you login and bam, you've got a useless session as I described above. Windows is more flexible and secure than you give it credit for. Just like the Linux side of the equation, a good admin is a good admin. If they are lazy then of course there will be problems.
It's trivially easy to customize most any aspect of Windows through login scripts with elevated privileges. They are server-side so they can't be edited locally. I'd say both your standard distros and Windows are equally customizable from a UI standpoint. You don't even have to run explorer if you don't want. There are a number of shells available for Windows.
I haven't found anything that's not scriptable in any Windows environment, we even configured login scripts to configure Windows Messenger on mandatory profiles. When the sysadmin logs in all tweaks are disabled opening the system up for modification. It's not that hard to enforce either with smart cards or even simple password protection.
Where did you reckon that your Vista license expired after downgrading to XP? You in-fact do retain it and it works this way for almost all Microsoft products. Buy Exchange 2007 and you are perfectly well licensed for Exchange 2003, same with SQL server, MOM, SMS, ISA, hell every MS product.
In most cases it doesn't make sense to downgrade as you don't gain any of the new features, but you certainly can while you rewrite your inhouse apps to support Vista and over the years when you're ready you can then do an upgrade legally. If you bought OEM licenses then you are probably screwed as OEM licenses are bonded to hardware. You can role OEM licenses into a volume license though on the cheap and then you can use your licenses on new machines.
You're right in that Microsoft still has a monopoly and will for the foreseeable future. Doesn't stop me from using Debian as my MTA platform or SUSE ES for my Oracle back-end. If it's working for you then great, you chose the right tool. For the vast majority of people they can do their jobs effectively with Windows so don't expect people to just jump ship without a seriously compelling reason and the cost of licensing isn't going to be that compelling for most businesses that already have volume license agreements.
Could have fooled me, because of all of that, Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa began creating a light-rail system and required taxis that go to the airport to be alternatively fueled. Also, newer cars have better mileage than older cars.
That's the problem with all this talk about consumption, the number of gallons consumed is still rising but the number of people on the road is also rising and very rapidly spreading the increased cost of fuel across a larger population. You've also seen the cost of goods such as milk and bread go up in price because truckers have to charge more for delivery.
Combine that with inflation and the fact that the Canadian dollar, once a joke in the U.S. is now worth more and for good reason. Make no mistake, the cost of energy has had impacts all over the country and in pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Sure, I can afford it, I can afford it if it doubles again as well. Does that mean less consuming? Probably at that level I'll only drive when necessary for my income, but at that level I know my sister wouldn't be able to afford to drive as she is struggling as we speak. She only drives now when she absolutely has to.
Actually deregulation is the reversal of a long-standing and sensible regulation that was one of the few things good about the FCC. Forcing competition on publicly paid for lines is a very good idea in my mind. If we hadn't sunk so much of our tax dollars into laying cable then I wouldn't have a problem with deregulation. Since we've spent billions and continue to spend billions I'm not interested fewer restrictions on powers which have proven time and time again capable of acting not in the best interests of their customers.
If they didn't have a natural monopoly things would be a lot simpler, since they do in the majority of places we need regulation to ensure there is continued growth. Look how slowly FiOS is being deployed to see an example of why deregulation is bad. The only reason there have been any deployments of it is because we've demanded it. Unfortunately like everything else it seems in the current administration there is no benchmark to measure success so you see a very slow adoption rate with continued tax-payer funding without the tax-payers seeing the benefit. Instead Verizon is posting enormous amounts of profit which they do have a right to make but they either need to pay back the tax-payers for assistance or they need to accept regulation.
There are several ISO's available on Gentoo's site, I seed them all because I've used them all. Obviously I'm not seeding portage which isn't possible although would be a novel idea. I do the same of Knoppix too, any that I've tried I'll seed the ISO that's provided. Of course I only do that at home where my bandwidth has a standard price per month.
I don't think most people are that conscious of it though in regards to Radiohead. It's still easier and much faster to get it from a torrent rather than traditional download technologies. It makes total sense and they should have just charged people for a tracker and use BT anyways which would have lowered their operational costs while providing the same service.
The real question should be, how much money did they make in profit? Was it worthwhile? Would minimizing bandwidth costs result in a net profit?
Actually, for a small business the licensing cost matters the least as the cost of good administrator is by far your biggest expense. As you go up the cost of licensing gets smaller because you're buying in larger quantity but the proportion of licensing to administration reduces as the business scales. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense to you. As the sole Administrator to an up-and-coming mid-sized business I can say as we've grown the cost of licensing makes it more of a challenge to get approval. When I give them retail pricing I have no hope of acquisition, so I inform my vendor of this and they offer a discount which I then present and away we go.
The company I work for currently is weird in a lot of ways, this is not one of them. 10k hardware is also on the small end of things. Realistically that's where it should be as you scale out instead of up but not all businesses lend themselves to that.
Perhaps this is why people pay SUSE and Red Hat for support? Ultimately costing a significant sum just like Windows licensing would end up costing them. There's no free lunch in this game.
Thanks for presenting a well-balanced perspective. I too have run into this kind of stuff, auditing on OS X seems a hell of a lot harder especially to make en masse changes to policy. Have you found a way to manage it? Most machines in our place are Windows based so its easy, the Linux boxes don't see end-users as they are back-end service providers like my Oracle installs so auditing is very basic and easy there.
The other responder covered your ignorance of the IIS metabase. Perhaps you should actually look something before commenting on it. It is very easy to read and very very easy to script configurations, it's even easy to synchronize configurations without having to write much of anything yourself. Of course you can, every function of IIS configuration can be scripted through WSH on old Windows and Powershell in newer setups.
I can also state that Oracle's configuration files are also XML and quite easy to read. Perhaps your experience with XML configuration files is limited if you feel that strongly against. I won't say it's the best solution but it's a hell of a lot better than you make it out to be. All of the.Net web services deployed in our organization are very easily managed as web.config is an XML based file as well and again quite easy to read.
It's too bad you have such blind hatred of something you clearly know little about. We use it for a good number of functions including exporting and importing data from disparate systems and it works great, is fast, and very friendly to troubleshoot when there is something wrong with coding. I'll also note how you fail to mention any better alternatives in your inflammatory rant.
I fail to see how XML is faulted for some poor implementations. Some programmers don't use it properly and muddy it up with incoherent tags but the same thing happens in regular config files as well, think Sendmail.
XML isn't the greatest thing ever invented but in this case it works extremely well so chill out, pop a Vicodin, drink a beer, do something to relax because clearly you're flustered by all this new fangled technology or at best, you've been surrounded by people that don't understand what XML is or how it is suited for configuration files.
I will also add that XML isn't new at all so shiny new toy jokes aside hop into this century and move on.
Are you implying 10gigabit iSCSI is because of people that don't want to deal with the complexity of 8gigabit fabric switches which cost twice as much and requires all new wiring. I think both most definitely have their places in any organization which actually requires a SAN.
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I might suggest not buying laptops from Best Buy and buying business notebooks instead of consumer oriented ones. Better choices
I have a nc8430 which is now discontinued but it is workstation class and doesn't generate too much heat. Yes it can get uncomfortable if I leave it on my laptop for six hours with the charger plugged in but if I'm off battery power all is well. It has held up rather well and it gets beat on pretty bad.
Others have suggested it though and I don't disagree, if you need a powerful workstation a desktop is a better and more ergonomic solution. I have to travel a lot and need the horsepower on the road so I'm rather stuck but it works out rather nicely for me. Pretty soon I'll have a tablet and my workstation notebook that will be used for the heavy lifting at my temporary desk setups while I use the tablet when I'm walking about the site since the place is saturated with wifi it's quite easy for me.
My next addition to my current laptop is this multi-monitor adapter, so I'll have pretty much everything I need in a very small and very portable package.
I also type more reliably than I write. I'll screw up certain letters as I'm handwriting. With a keyboard the lettering is consistent. The tablet support on Windows does an excellent job of guessing what letter I'm trying to right so the vast vast majority of the time it gets it right especially if the mistake is towards the end of a word which from my experience is exactly where I tend to make mistakes. Probably only because I do so little handwriting in my day to day life.
HP's tablet is similarly light in weight, I have no trouble handing it off to someone to write something on it or to show them something. Sure it's heavier than paper but that's just gonna be reality until we have some real materials revolution. It's not too heavy that you need wrists of iron though.
I'm going to guess you haven't actually used a modern tablet-PC with OneNote2007. HP's offering in particular uses a magnetic stylus so you can put your hand on the screen and write very reliably during into OneNote or any other application that requires lots of writing. If you accidentally mark it you just turn the stylus over and use it as an eraser automatically just like with a pencil. OneNote makes it easy to convert all your notes to text. You can even do it after the fact. Combined with Penflicks you have yourself a powerful interface that is surprisingly intuitive. My experience with it resulted in 100% accuracy when converting my crappy handwriting. That was of course after a half hour of training it.
Tablet-PCs aren't a failure by any means, specific implementations of them have, Microsoft sucks at producing hardware as I'm sure you already know. I doubt it's a surprise although I've never seen anything called a Microsoft Tablet-PC unless you're referring to the XP Tablet PC or Vista Tablet PC edition. Both are very high in quality with Vista being a rather large improvement in this regard.
Your argument also conveniently ignores the risk drug companies face even when developing off-brand products. The lower priced pill still has to go through all the regulatory testing. That will eat at the initial cost even if your procedures are streamlined a large portion of the process is paying for FDA regulation. Just because your drug is based on something out there doesn't mean you get to skip to the head of the line. Thankfully that thought process makes no sense and would scare the majority of people away from off-brand medication and they would have no way of making sure the pill was safe.
I'll also add that the production is already in China and in other countries as well. Production costs are separate from development costs. Just because you find a way to lower your production cost doesn't mean you magically get to ignore all the development costs. Sure you might save some money but the cost of coming to the market late which is the purpose of patents will make up the difference.
That is a no, you wouldn't have a problem. Worst case you have to reactivate. If you've done more than the 10 installs that Microsoft let's you activate over the web then you have to call to activate. In any case, still not a problem as they will still let you activate it.
Actually you completely missed my point entirely. Congratulations on your poor reading comprehension.
No matter how secure your browser is you will still find people that download and run malicious software. That was my entire point. It is irrelevant what platform the user is running because it's the same problem whenever a user is allowed to download and run software.
You just seem eager to write this off trying to rely on OS X being magically secure when it does have its problems. I knew about this problem all along and so did most people that have any kind of security background. If you give the user freedom expect them to screw it up.
As for the infection rate, that does indeed matter but a trojan on a Mac is just as capable of scanning a Mac for email addresses and propagating further using the same mechanism as it would on a Windows box. There is nothing in OS X that magically protects the user from themselves. I've seen Mac users blindly click and even type passwords when it pops up on their screen. This problem is not unique to Windows users so matter how much you would like to blame Microsoft for this particular fault.
Furthermore, IE7 and even IE6 don't automatically install software from websites. IE 7 in particular is much improved in regards to security which is why it broke so many web applications. IE 6 you had to manually turn off ActiveX installations but you always had the ability, even in IE 4.
Last "argument", more of a question really, how in the world do you make the logical leap that this demonstrates that OS X is "extremely secure?" As I said in my post, this has absolutely no baring on how secure OS X is as its a cross-platform problem. It is merely an illustration of the same problem encountered everywhere in every aspect of society. You can be driving the safest car in the world, if you drive like an idiot you will still eventually get into an accident. The two are loosely related so I understand the confusion but I would expect someone commenting on the security of a product to be familiar and demonstrate that familiarity and realize that this problem will continue to exist, that it was always there and has nothing to do with this specific exploit as there are hundreds of other examples which don't propagate on their own. I monitor my network activity and I'm aware of trojans that crop up and over my admittedly not too many years of experience I've seen it on many more than a single occasion on OS X, Windows, and even various Linux distros.
Until humans stop trusting one another which will be a horrible day this problem will exist. It can be mitigated through education but the risk will always exist.
I couldn't agree more. Darwin is everywhere and on everything. There are bad drivers of the safest cars out there that still get in accidents.
I've got enough karma that I'm not worried about how I was moderated. Thank you for recognizing that I wasn't attacking anything.
My roommate is a med student, she prints full color slides all the time. I can admit that getting images to work correctly in Word is still something that needs improvement but there are a lot of options there when you right click on the photo and hit properties. Same thing when you place a Powerpoint object; you can adjust resizing so that it uses a higher quality resolution but as I recall it does rasterize the image/side to increase performance after the fact. This of course makes font size and selection rather important.
I've run into problems printing Powerpoint slides at 24x36 or larger sizes. At that level I actually end up using either Visio or just Photoshop since I can copy the entire slide out of Powerpoint and just paste it into Photoshop without any image degradation. Both Visio and Photoshop are better suited for printing as I'm sure you are aware.
Powerpoint definitely wasn't created with the idea of printing from the get go. The options have much improved with 2007 but the defaults still leave you with your description. You do have your choice of templates when you go to print through selecting index pages, combo pages, and a few other options. I don't claim to be a Powerpoint expert but I am a user and I've generally found there is always a way to do what you want even if it's not exactly intuitive. As I said from the get go though, it's not without its faults.
Trojans don't rely IE vulnerabilities to get email addresses after infection. They can do the exact same thing they do on Windows on an OS X box once infected.
It sounds like this trojan comes with a local privilege escalation vulnerability otherwise this also depends on users on Macs having root level access.
It was only a matter of time before someone would target it. Whether more and more people target it is a completely separate issue.
As a cross-platform user of all sorts of systems I generally prefer that things aren't targeted at all. I do enjoy the people saying OS X was inherently secure based on absolutely no knowledge of OS X's foundation finally being hit with the clue-by-four. Now they can actually start learning what it is they are spouting about and present intelligent arguments which are always better than empty ones.
Of course that may just be a tad bit optimistic on my part. No system connected to the outside world is 100% secure, does this in any way change my thoughts on OS X security? Nope, not at all because I always understood this problem as it exists on any platform which lets the user download and run software.
By default the slides are hi-res, someone was referring to an inability of Office to print using various quality. You can print in full quality. Your layout issue is not a problem as you can export the Powerpoint presentation to Word and do you layout however you see fit. The integration of the apps started in 97 and has only gotten better with each release. Embedding single slides or multiple slides in Word is no problem, same with worksheets and charts.
I think the problem in the past is that people looked at Powerpoint and thought they knew how to use it, same with Word, Excel, and Access. To their credit that was largely due to an interface design issue. With Office 2007 though that problem has flown the coupe and all these features are out in the open readily available to those that want them. It's remarkably friendly which is partially the reason I learned about all these features. Once I found them in 2007 I knew what to look for in 2003 and XP. Some of the features go all the way back to 97 although most definitely not all of them.
My dynamic database driven Excel sheets mail merging into Word would like to speak with you. Word and Excel are quite excellent and 2007 in particular is very friendly to use. The only problem I've encountered with it is finding where things moved to because I was already familiar with previous versions. People I've introduced it to that had no realistic prior experience found 2007 to be open and very simple despite it's extremely powerful feature set.
This same database driven Excel sheet can feed into a Powerpoint presentation dynamically displaying photos across 16 monitors. The suite is very powerful and most people don't even scratch the surface which is sad.
Keynote is newish competition but it's still not as featureful and doesn't integrate with as many other apps. Competition is a good thing so I encourage it's existence but it won't kill Powerpoint by any means, Google doesn't have a chance in this age when Powerpoint presentations include even videos with dynamic data sources. We use Access as a backend for a number of Powerpoint presentations at trade shows which loop and are interactive. Want more info about a car? No problem, just click on it and you get a concise description of what you want. Wait a couple of minutes and it'll start looping through cars again.
People here don't seem to get why Office is so used and popular. The individual apps are quite powerful, they aren't without their faults of course, but they also all integrate with one another.
Issue wasn't fixed cause it was never a problem. You can just print the index pages or print low-res full slides. It's worked this way since 97 and has improved through 2007 which now can save to PDF or XPS.
Wow, you just like to do everything the hard way. Just use a roaming profile like the rest of us laptop users. Your laptops dies you just use another laptop while you get a replacement. In the meantime you have all your files and if SMS is employed you also have all your applications within minutes of switching. More time might be necessary if for instance SMS has to install Office or some other large app but still, it's not near as inconvenient as you make it out to be.
Also, with HP specifically and I'm sure others as well you get the replacement the next day in advance of the bad hard drive and you'll have a tech some with it to install it for you. Then IT lays down the base image and you login, SMS takes care of all your applications and you're back on your full time laptop with minutes of downtime or possibly even less depending on your requirements.
I've tried it under a number of circumstances, with roaming profiles, mandatory profiles, and local profiles with folder redirection. All can be controlled effectively through group policy. There are few local escalation exploits but getting the code on to the box is quite difficult to begin with so it takes a good amount of skill just to get your foot in the door. It's not even that hard to setup or particular time consuming because you can do it to a base machine then create a security profile and apply it en masse.
The reason why Windows is so shoddy for home users is because it really does suit business needs well. Vista is Microsoft trying to swing it in the other direction, fortunately it's just more that you have to setup in group policy initially, you can still do it all en masse except that with Vista you have even more control over how group policy is applied.
The very important issue at hand is the fact that these security precautions are not the default, as you are I'm sure aware the default is wide open so that's still an issue and probably will continue to be an issue. There are a number of ways to apply group policy, some passive and just there to assist users, then there are some active security measures you have which can't be disabled and enforce an entirely different level of security.
Of course nothing is ever perfect but mandatory profiles do effectively eliminate any spyware or virus concerns for a machine.
You are completely incorrect, group policy is applied first unless it is the first time the machine is booting up after being joined to the domain. Otherwise, in my case at least, if you unplug the network cable you lose your desktop, my documents, and all your application settings until you plug the cable back in. The machine is completely useless for a standard user. When I login I have a local profile so I can always admin the machine.
That's even moot since the group policy is set to a locked state you depend on the login script to enable functionality, not disable it. As a result if you try to login without the cable plugged in it won't let you in since password caching is obviously disabled. Pull it after you login and bam, you've got a useless session as I described above. Windows is more flexible and secure than you give it credit for. Just like the Linux side of the equation, a good admin is a good admin. If they are lazy then of course there will be problems.
It's trivially easy to customize most any aspect of Windows through login scripts with elevated privileges. They are server-side so they can't be edited locally. I'd say both your standard distros and Windows are equally customizable from a UI standpoint. You don't even have to run explorer if you don't want. There are a number of shells available for Windows.
I haven't found anything that's not scriptable in any Windows environment, we even configured login scripts to configure Windows Messenger on mandatory profiles. When the sysadmin logs in all tweaks are disabled opening the system up for modification. It's not that hard to enforce either with smart cards or even simple password protection.
Where did you reckon that your Vista license expired after downgrading to XP? You in-fact do retain it and it works this way for almost all Microsoft products. Buy Exchange 2007 and you are perfectly well licensed for Exchange 2003, same with SQL server, MOM, SMS, ISA, hell every MS product.
In most cases it doesn't make sense to downgrade as you don't gain any of the new features, but you certainly can while you rewrite your inhouse apps to support Vista and over the years when you're ready you can then do an upgrade legally. If you bought OEM licenses then you are probably screwed as OEM licenses are bonded to hardware. You can role OEM licenses into a volume license though on the cheap and then you can use your licenses on new machines.
You're right in that Microsoft still has a monopoly and will for the foreseeable future. Doesn't stop me from using Debian as my MTA platform or SUSE ES for my Oracle back-end. If it's working for you then great, you chose the right tool. For the vast majority of people they can do their jobs effectively with Windows so don't expect people to just jump ship without a seriously compelling reason and the cost of licensing isn't going to be that compelling for most businesses that already have volume license agreements.
Could have fooled me, because of all of that, Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa began creating a light-rail system and required taxis that go to the airport to be alternatively fueled. Also, newer cars have better mileage than older cars.
That's the problem with all this talk about consumption, the number of gallons consumed is still rising but the number of people on the road is also rising and very rapidly spreading the increased cost of fuel across a larger population. You've also seen the cost of goods such as milk and bread go up in price because truckers have to charge more for delivery.
Combine that with inflation and the fact that the Canadian dollar, once a joke in the U.S. is now worth more and for good reason. Make no mistake, the cost of energy has had impacts all over the country and in pretty much every aspect of our lives.
Sure, I can afford it, I can afford it if it doubles again as well. Does that mean less consuming? Probably at that level I'll only drive when necessary for my income, but at that level I know my sister wouldn't be able to afford to drive as she is struggling as we speak. She only drives now when she absolutely has to.
Actually deregulation is the reversal of a long-standing and sensible regulation that was one of the few things good about the FCC. Forcing competition on publicly paid for lines is a very good idea in my mind. If we hadn't sunk so much of our tax dollars into laying cable then I wouldn't have a problem with deregulation. Since we've spent billions and continue to spend billions I'm not interested fewer restrictions on powers which have proven time and time again capable of acting not in the best interests of their customers.
If they didn't have a natural monopoly things would be a lot simpler, since they do in the majority of places we need regulation to ensure there is continued growth. Look how slowly FiOS is being deployed to see an example of why deregulation is bad. The only reason there have been any deployments of it is because we've demanded it. Unfortunately like everything else it seems in the current administration there is no benchmark to measure success so you see a very slow adoption rate with continued tax-payer funding without the tax-payers seeing the benefit. Instead Verizon is posting enormous amounts of profit which they do have a right to make but they either need to pay back the tax-payers for assistance or they need to accept regulation.
There are several ISO's available on Gentoo's site, I seed them all because I've used them all. Obviously I'm not seeding portage which isn't possible although would be a novel idea. I do the same of Knoppix too, any that I've tried I'll seed the ISO that's provided. Of course I only do that at home where my bandwidth has a standard price per month.
I'm seeding Ubuntu and Gentoo this very moment.
I don't think most people are that conscious of it though in regards to Radiohead. It's still easier and much faster to get it from a torrent rather than traditional download technologies. It makes total sense and they should have just charged people for a tracker and use BT anyways which would have lowered their operational costs while providing the same service.
The real question should be, how much money did they make in profit? Was it worthwhile? Would minimizing bandwidth costs result in a net profit?
Actually, for a small business the licensing cost matters the least as the cost of good administrator is by far your biggest expense. As you go up the cost of licensing gets smaller because you're buying in larger quantity but the proportion of licensing to administration reduces as the business scales. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense to you. As the sole Administrator to an up-and-coming mid-sized business I can say as we've grown the cost of licensing makes it more of a challenge to get approval. When I give them retail pricing I have no hope of acquisition, so I inform my vendor of this and they offer a discount which I then present and away we go.
The company I work for currently is weird in a lot of ways, this is not one of them. 10k hardware is also on the small end of things. Realistically that's where it should be as you scale out instead of up but not all businesses lend themselves to that.
Perhaps this is why people pay SUSE and Red Hat for support? Ultimately costing a significant sum just like Windows licensing would end up costing them. There's no free lunch in this game.
Thanks for presenting a well-balanced perspective. I too have run into this kind of stuff, auditing on OS X seems a hell of a lot harder especially to make en masse changes to policy. Have you found a way to manage it? Most machines in our place are Windows based so its easy, the Linux boxes don't see end-users as they are back-end service providers like my Oracle installs so auditing is very basic and easy there.
The other responder covered your ignorance of the IIS metabase. Perhaps you should actually look something before commenting on it. It is very easy to read and very very easy to script configurations, it's even easy to synchronize configurations without having to write much of anything yourself. Of course you can, every function of IIS configuration can be scripted through WSH on old Windows and Powershell in newer setups.
I can also state that Oracle's configuration files are also XML and quite easy to read. Perhaps your experience with XML configuration files is limited if you feel that strongly against. I won't say it's the best solution but it's a hell of a lot better than you make it out to be. All of the .Net web services deployed in our organization are very easily managed as web.config is an XML based file as well and again quite easy to read.
It's too bad you have such blind hatred of something you clearly know little about. We use it for a good number of functions including exporting and importing data from disparate systems and it works great, is fast, and very friendly to troubleshoot when there is something wrong with coding. I'll also note how you fail to mention any better alternatives in your inflammatory rant.
I fail to see how XML is faulted for some poor implementations. Some programmers don't use it properly and muddy it up with incoherent tags but the same thing happens in regular config files as well, think Sendmail.
XML isn't the greatest thing ever invented but in this case it works extremely well so chill out, pop a Vicodin, drink a beer, do something to relax because clearly you're flustered by all this new fangled technology or at best, you've been surrounded by people that don't understand what XML is or how it is suited for configuration files.
I will also add that XML isn't new at all so shiny new toy jokes aside hop into this century and move on.
Are you implying 10gigabit iSCSI is because of people that don't want to deal with the complexity of 8gigabit fabric switches which cost twice as much and requires all new wiring. I think both most definitely have their places in any organization which actually requires a SAN.