Not everyone. But it does matter to medium to large businesses. I work at a copany with 35 desktops and 4 servers. There is no way I would recommend purchasing ANY Windows device without a full licence for office.
License compliance is a pain in the butt. However it is worth it. I know that we will not be shut down by a BSA audit because a competetor or former employee would try to convince the BSA that we flagrantly disregard Microsoft's intellectual property rights. Or the rights of Adobe, AutoDesk or Intuit as well.
A completely valid point and one I'd not considered, clearly. I wonder, in these days of BYOD (and appreciating that many Enterprises don't support this approach) how stringently those rules are applied to personal devices. And what is the legal position for the employer if the employee, of their own choice, were to buy an RT device with Outlook on it and use it to connect to a corporate Exchange server?
You are not allowed to use Office commercially on Windows RT devices.
And of course, everyone complies with all of the limitations Microsoft applies to packages such as Home and Student which are never used for any commercial work ever. Aren't we all good:-)
not forgetting that Windows RT doesn't come with Outlook, so you can write a word document but cannot send it to anyone. Genius work Microsoft.
Interesting thoughts. The fact that Windows RT has a full featured email client that can send and receive attachments seems to address one of your concerns - Outlook is not the only way people read and send email. On top of that, Outlook is being added in the 8.1 release due later this year, which seems to address your other concern.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and on anything that is not touch-capable, Windows 8 is an abomination. On an RT, it's not actually that bad and the ability to plug in USB devices - memory sticks, hard disks, printers etc. is a big plus for me over any of the other devices on the market. I bought one as a cheap way to review pictures from my 7D, something which the Nexus 7 singularly failed to achieve without trying to drive me mad with its poor usability and abysmal performance.
Yes, office is a desktop suite and integration is very poor. Yes there rough edges and it's clearly not ready for prime time - look at the different routes to system settings for an example - though it's actually usable for all that. So to me it's not a complete dog and does have some use other than as a paperweight or door stop.
Unfortunately, telling you how shitty Oracle WebLogic support is would probably result in my being disciplined by my current employer, not Oracle WebLogic support before anyone asks.
Why doesn't nokia take a play from htc's book and start making their top phones run android? All of the investment into s60 and ovi aps is really just a sunk cost (actually it is better than a sunk cost since it will still keep producing on lower end phones).
Nokia has a knack for designing good phones--and they used to have great, simple, to the point software--but I find my s60 phone to be a somewhat clunky platform.
They are moving some of their high-end phones to Android, I believe, but have a massive phone base that runs s60 and and investment they'd need to write off I guess.
I find s60 to be not too bad, but it could do with some tidying up and optimisation.
I don't understand how people can label Nokia products as crap. Their line of smartphones are the best-selling ones in this country (which is easily one of the biggest markets in the world, and where people are quite the fetishists about mobile phones). Sure, Samsung and SonyEricsson have made their presence felt in recent times, but Nokia is still the preferred brand with people here, and the N8 promises to be quite the contender to other "hip" smartphones.
The problem Nokia have is that while the phones are good, the rest of the ecosystem stinks. The Ovi store is appalling, prices are ridiculous and the support organisation blows. £4.00 for a colour theme? Crap! I just bought the top selling iPad game this morning (Osmos) for £2.99.
I recently bought an iPad so got an E55 instead of a new iShiney 4 and it's a damned good phone. The GPS works well, Ovi Maps are generally better than Google, battery life is immense, I can make and receive calls on it (which has always been a flaw of the iPhone) and it's smaller and lighter so easier to carry. OK so series 60 has some horrendous flaws - stupid email app, connectivity selection and app store - but if they were addressed it would be a complete winner for me.
If Nokia are going to remain SmartPhone relevant, and they have the phones to do it, they really do need to sort out the stuff that surrounds the phone and hire someone that will just hit the software quality problems. I just can't see it somehow...
The requirement that priests remain celibate certainly both reduces the number of potential priests and also dramatically increases the chance that people who do join the priesthood will have unhealthy sexuality.
Would they be allowed to be in a same-sex marriage? That would really set the cat amongst the pigeons...
I got into Firefly late in the UK but as I understand it, the series opening two-parter which allowed all the characters to be introduced was not shown first. The first episode aired was "The Train Job" which is a good episode but gives no backstory and hence left a lot of potential viewers with a WFT? confusion level that was hard to recover from.
Fox then moved the show times around pitching it against a lot of other high-audience draw shows (I'm not sure what, it was a long time ago but football springs to mind) and making it hard for people to know when to sit down and watch it. That and it was less about the action and more about the people and the interactions which made it less appealing to a certain audience.
And that was it, no audience figures to speak of so cancelled before it got started. Personally I think the average quality of the shows they did make is exceptional and that Serenity could have benefited from an actual advertising campaign but didn't get one and that's all history.
OOps, should have read the article, and not just posted before reading. This is Avengers, the Marvel Comic series, not The Avengers, the 1961-1969 British TV series.
Bugger, I already had a picture in my mind of a Joss Whedon Steed and sidekick so the fact that it it's not those Avengers comes as something of a disappointment. I think he does quirky humour well enough that he'd have mad a decent fist of it, unlike the abomination that is the 1998 version.
Yup. I'd go as far as saying readability is more important than correctness; fixing or improving easy to understand programs is trivial compared to trying to decipher spaghetti code. You write code for other people, and that other people might be you a few years from now.
Can I hold out for testable as well as readable? Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended, or as you intend it to when you change it, shouldn't be underestimated.
I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked
Actually, blu-ray is getting more secure as time goes on. The current crop of releases have been secure for at least the past few months and I think Slysoft (authors of AnyDVD, the guys who generally lead the way in these matters) have said they won't have a working crack until something like Feb next year.
Ah, thanks for that. I suspect it's not a problem that's going to bother many who don't ravel with a portable device but it does suggest why Apple haven't dived in. If their user base is going to have problems getting content onto their iPhones from their shiny new blu-ray disks then it's something they want to manage properly.
I think you're quite right that this is a big hurdle to adoption. Right now blu-ray is being driven by the massive number of HDTVs being sold - even average people are preferring 1080p "FullHD" sets here in the UK - but that doesn't do anything when it comes to portable video devices.
That includes me. I just replaced my old Sony flat screen with a Viera and only have standard definition content coming through it. It's still better than I thought it would be but I keep looking at blu-ray players and wondering... But I really don't want to go back to the old days of VHS with one player in the front-room and nothing else:(
There's not much point in having a HD portable media player as screen sizes are generally smaller plus lighting conditions are never ideal on the move. I reckon they should implement a mechanism for allowing people to make SD rips of BDs or even put a one-time code in each box for a non-DRM SD download, ideally an x264 mkv with a full selection of DVD quality audio streams & subtitles. It'd be a great incentive to buy new rather than used but it'd take far too much common sense than the film industry has these days.
As you say, it would be too much like common sense but it would solve all my problems with the format.
I've been thinking about blu-ray adoption and there's a bit of a different hurdle it needs to get over at the moment, as I see it. In my house, we have four laptops, each of which can play DVDs but only one can play blu-ray. Now, yes, I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked, but it's my wife's laptop and she's not going to stand for a lot of that kind of use/abuse of her pride and joy. And even then, her laptop's a year ol spec machine but it can't play a DVD without the lights dimming in he house.
My point is that when DVD replaced VHS, it was usually supplanting one device in the house. Blu-ray is replacing and "obsoleting" potentially many devices. In the case of laptops, until we cycle through and replace all of them with blu-ray capable versions, it's a bit like going back to VHS - one place in the house were we can watch content. OK, so there are usb Blu-ray players on the market but that kind of defeats the object of having a laptop you can carry around and stick a dvd in any time you want, as my daughter does.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that Blu-ray's not going to be successful but I do think there are some other obstacles to its acceptance that didn't affect the VHS to DVD switch.
But setting that aside, if there are bugs in Windows drivers and there aren't in OS X drivers because there are fewer of them and the combinations are easier to test, doesn't that just prove the point?
No bugs in OS X drivers? Please, don't be absurd.
My bad, speaking personally I've not experienced any but then I've no tended to stick complex additional hardware on the iBook/MacBook and MacBook pros that I've owned.
Searching for "buggy osx driver" produces plenty of hits; Apple doesn't have some magic wand to prevent bugs.
Well of course not.
And of course searching for buggy anything in Vista is going to return a lot of hits -- the Vista user base is far larger than the Mac user base, and people only post when there is a complaint, not when things work perfectly.
So are you saying that there's no stability problems with Vista and the large number of apparent problems are all down to the large number of users?
Actually, I can't remember the last time I've had a hardware driver crash Windows. Have bugs, yes, but not destabilize the O/S. I don't know if you can chalk that up to driver certification or not.
So you don't classify buggy drivers leading to reduced or unreliable functionality as problematic as long as they don't destabilise Windows itself? How buggy does a driver have to be before your system becomes unusable.
But setting that aside, if there are bugs in Windows drivers and there aren't in OS X drivers because there are fewer of them and the combinations are easier to test, doesn't that just prove the point?
Sorry, but you're just simply wrong. Hardware is a question of drivers. Now, you could make an argument that *approved* hardware from Apple would be more reliable, but opening the hardware doesn't affect what they do at a feature level at all.
Which doesn't explain why all of Microsoft's driver certification programmes seem to have done little to enhance the stability of Windows. In absolute terms of course, not relative.
And I for one am happy with this. It's bad enough building fission plants as cheap as you can but when you generate power using a process that doesn't kick off until you each a couple of million kelvin, well I don't want that work going to some cheapskate corner-cutting contractor.
Agreed. Although google does index Torrent search sites which probably makes their position somewhat ambiguous.
Before sites like youtorrent and torrentz sprung up for indexing torrent sites, it wasn't uncommon for people to use search strings like filetype:torrent "Star Wars" and find plenty of torrents for what they need. Yers, it was only due to searching Google that I even now that places like torrentspy actually exist.
The difference is of course google could defend themself in court, and would take down the links if asked. They also don't go out of their way to index copyrighted material by name/category the way some sites do. Yes, they could. But I do worry about how these judgements could be taken to extremes particularly by an industry that is apparently fighting for its existence.
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Not everyone. But it does matter to medium to large businesses. I work at a copany with 35 desktops and 4 servers. There is no way I would recommend purchasing ANY Windows device without a full licence for office.
License compliance is a pain in the butt. However it is worth it. I know that we will not be shut down by a BSA audit because a competetor or former employee would try to convince the BSA that we flagrantly disregard Microsoft's intellectual property rights. Or the rights of Adobe, AutoDesk or Intuit as well.
A completely valid point and one I'd not considered, clearly. I wonder, in these days of BYOD (and appreciating that many Enterprises don't support this approach) how stringently those rules are applied to personal devices. And what is the legal position for the employer if the employee, of their own choice, were to buy an RT device with Outlook on it and use it to connect to a corporate Exchange server?
You are not allowed to use Office commercially on Windows RT devices.
And of course, everyone complies with all of the limitations Microsoft applies to packages such as Home and Student which are never used for any commercial work ever. Aren't we all good :-)
not forgetting that Windows RT doesn't come with Outlook, so you can write a word document but cannot send it to anyone. Genius work Microsoft.
Interesting thoughts. The fact that Windows RT has a full featured email client that can send and receive attachments seems to address one of your concerns - Outlook is not the only way people read and send email. On top of that, Outlook is being added in the 8.1 release due later this year, which seems to address your other concern.
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and on anything that is not touch-capable, Windows 8 is an abomination. On an RT, it's not actually that bad and the ability to plug in USB devices - memory sticks, hard disks, printers etc. is a big plus for me over any of the other devices on the market. I bought one as a cheap way to review pictures from my 7D, something which the Nexus 7 singularly failed to achieve without trying to drive me mad with its poor usability and abysmal performance.
Yes, office is a desktop suite and integration is very poor. Yes there rough edges and it's clearly not ready for prime time - look at the different routes to system settings for an example - though it's actually usable for all that. So to me it's not a complete dog and does have some use other than as a paperweight or door stop.
Oh yes, The Crow Road. A very fine murder, mystery, comedy romance thaI haven't read for far too long.
Unfortunately, telling you how shitty Oracle WebLogic support is would probably result in my being disciplined by my current employer, not Oracle WebLogic support before anyone asks.
I thought it could but couldn't be sure.
Do you honestly not know that th iPad with iOS 4 can play music while browsing?
Why doesn't nokia take a play from htc's book and start making their top phones run android? All of the investment into s60 and ovi aps is really just a sunk cost (actually it is better than a sunk cost since it will still keep producing on lower end phones).
Nokia has a knack for designing good phones--and they used to have great, simple, to the point software--but I find my s60 phone to be a somewhat clunky platform.
They are moving some of their high-end phones to Android, I believe, but have a massive phone base that runs s60 and and investment they'd need to write off I guess.
I find s60 to be not too bad, but it could do with some tidying up and optimisation.
I don't understand how people can label Nokia products as crap. Their line of smartphones are the best-selling ones in this country (which is easily one of the biggest markets in the world, and where people are quite the fetishists about mobile phones). Sure, Samsung and SonyEricsson have made their presence felt in recent times, but Nokia is still the preferred brand with people here, and the N8 promises to be quite the contender to other "hip" smartphones.
The problem Nokia have is that while the phones are good, the rest of the ecosystem stinks. The Ovi store is appalling, prices are ridiculous and the support organisation blows. £4.00 for a colour theme? Crap! I just bought the top selling iPad game this morning (Osmos) for £2.99.
I recently bought an iPad so got an E55 instead of a new iShiney 4 and it's a damned good phone. The GPS works well, Ovi Maps are generally better than Google, battery life is immense, I can make and receive calls on it (which has always been a flaw of the iPhone) and it's smaller and lighter so easier to carry. OK so series 60 has some horrendous flaws - stupid email app, connectivity selection and app store - but if they were addressed it would be a complete winner for me.
If Nokia are going to remain SmartPhone relevant, and they have the phones to do it, they really do need to sort out the stuff that surrounds the phone and hire someone that will just hit the software quality problems. I just can't see it somehow...
Can you connect an iPad to a projector? I didn't think it had much in the way of connectors.
There's an adaptor for an iPad to VGA connection - http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC552ZM/A?fnode=MTc0MjU4NjE&mco=MTczMTA1MTE
The requirement that priests remain celibate certainly both reduces the number of potential priests and also dramatically increases the chance that people who do join the priesthood will have unhealthy sexuality.
Would they be allowed to be in a same-sex marriage? That would really set the cat amongst the pigeons...
I got into Firefly late in the UK but as I understand it, the series opening two-parter which allowed all the characters to be introduced was not shown first. The first episode aired was "The Train Job" which is a good episode but gives no backstory and hence left a lot of potential viewers with a WFT? confusion level that was hard to recover from.
Fox then moved the show times around pitching it against a lot of other high-audience draw shows (I'm not sure what, it was a long time ago but football springs to mind) and making it hard for people to know when to sit down and watch it. That and it was less about the action and more about the people and the interactions which made it less appealing to a certain audience.
And that was it, no audience figures to speak of so cancelled before it got started. Personally I think the average quality of the shows they did make is exceptional and that Serenity could have benefited from an actual advertising campaign but didn't get one and that's all history.
OOps, should have read the article, and not just posted before reading. This is Avengers, the Marvel Comic series, not The Avengers, the 1961-1969 British TV series.
Bugger, I already had a picture in my mind of a Joss Whedon Steed and sidekick so the fact that it it's not those Avengers comes as something of a disappointment. I think he does quirky humour well enough that he'd have mad a decent fist of it, unlike the abomination that is the 1998 version.
For a second there I thought you mean Linda Lovelace. But then read the bit about the apple.
yeah, maybe someone should ask why management isn't wearing department specific garments that say "management" on them.
What do you think a tie actually is?
A garrotte in training?
Yup. I'd go as far as saying readability is more important than correctness; fixing or improving easy to understand programs is trivial compared to trying to decipher spaghetti code. You write code for other people, and that other people might be you a few years from now.
Can I hold out for testable as well as readable? Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended, or as you intend it to when you change it, shouldn't be underestimated.
I thought those were just a myth!
You inthenthitive clod! How dare you take the pith out of my lithp!
I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked
Actually, blu-ray is getting more secure as time goes on. The current crop of releases have been secure for at least the past few months and I think Slysoft (authors of AnyDVD, the guys who generally lead the way in these matters) have said they won't have a working crack until something like Feb next year.
Ah, thanks for that. I suspect it's not a problem that's going to bother many who don't ravel with a portable device but it does suggest why Apple haven't dived in. If their user base is going to have problems getting content onto their iPhones from their shiny new blu-ray disks then it's something they want to manage properly.
I think you're quite right that this is a big hurdle to adoption. Right now blu-ray is being driven by the massive number of HDTVs being sold - even average people are preferring 1080p "FullHD" sets here in the UK - but that doesn't do anything when it comes to portable video devices.
That includes me. I just replaced my old Sony flat screen with a Viera and only have standard definition content coming through it. It's still better than I thought it would be but I keep looking at blu-ray players and wondering... But I really don't want to go back to the old days of VHS with one player in the front-room and nothing else :(
There's not much point in having a HD portable media player as screen sizes are generally smaller plus lighting conditions are never ideal on the move. I reckon they should implement a mechanism for allowing people to make SD rips of BDs or even put a one-time code in each box for a non-DRM SD download, ideally an x264 mkv with a full selection of DVD quality audio streams & subtitles. It'd be a great incentive to buy new rather than used but it'd take far too much common sense than the film industry has these days.
As you say, it would be too much like common sense but it would solve all my problems with the format.
I've been thinking about blu-ray adoption and there's a bit of a different hurdle it needs to get over at the moment, as I see it. In my house, we have four laptops, each of which can play DVDs but only one can play blu-ray. Now, yes, I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked, but it's my wife's laptop and she's not going to stand for a lot of that kind of use/abuse of her pride and joy. And even then, her laptop's a year ol spec machine but it can't play a DVD without the lights dimming in he house.
My point is that when DVD replaced VHS, it was usually supplanting one device in the house. Blu-ray is replacing and "obsoleting" potentially many devices. In the case of laptops, until we cycle through and replace all of them with blu-ray capable versions, it's a bit like going back to VHS - one place in the house were we can watch content. OK, so there are usb Blu-ray players on the market but that kind of defeats the object of having a laptop you can carry around and stick a dvd in any time you want, as my daughter does.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that Blu-ray's not going to be successful but I do think there are some other obstacles to its acceptance that didn't affect the VHS to DVD switch.
But setting that aside, if there are bugs in Windows drivers and there aren't in OS X drivers because there are fewer of them and the combinations are easier to test, doesn't that just prove the point?
No bugs in OS X drivers? Please, don't be absurd.
My bad, speaking personally I've not experienced any but then I've no tended to stick complex additional hardware on the iBook/MacBook and MacBook pros that I've owned.
Searching for "buggy osx driver" produces plenty of hits; Apple doesn't have some magic wand to prevent bugs.
Well of course not.
And of course searching for buggy anything in Vista is going to return a lot of hits -- the Vista user base is far larger than the Mac user base, and people only post when there is a complaint, not when things work perfectly.
So are you saying that there's no stability problems with Vista and the large number of apparent problems are all down to the large number of users?
Which doesn't explain why all of Microsoft's driver certification programmes seem to have done little to enhance the stability of Windows.
Do you have a study that proves this?
This is slashdot, we don't do studies. But out of interest, putting buggy,vista and drivers into google returns half a million hits. This is an interesting one - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html
Actually, I can't remember the last time I've had a hardware driver crash Windows. Have bugs, yes, but not destabilize the O/S. I don't know if you can chalk that up to driver certification or not.
So you don't classify buggy drivers leading to reduced or unreliable functionality as problematic as long as they don't destabilise Windows itself? How buggy does a driver have to be before your system becomes unusable.
But setting that aside, if there are bugs in Windows drivers and there aren't in OS X drivers because there are fewer of them and the combinations are easier to test, doesn't that just prove the point?
Sorry, but you're just simply wrong. Hardware is a question of drivers. Now, you could make an argument that *approved* hardware from Apple would be more reliable, but opening the hardware doesn't affect what they do at a feature level at all.
Which doesn't explain why all of Microsoft's driver certification programmes seem to have done little to enhance the stability of Windows. In absolute terms of course, not relative.
There is no such thing as helium atoms.
Eh?
And I for one am happy with this. It's bad enough building fission plants as cheap as you can but when you generate power using a process that doesn't kick off until you each a couple of million kelvin, well I don't want that work going to some cheapskate corner-cutting contractor.
The difference is of course google could defend themself in court, and would take down the links if asked. They also don't go out of their way to index copyrighted material by name/category the way some sites do. Yes, they could. But I do worry about how these judgements could be taken to extremes particularly by an industry that is apparently fighting for its existence.