I know I do. 800 computers with office 2003 (upgraded from office XP in January) linked up to a handful of Windows Server 2000 boxes to store personal folders. Pretty painless setup and no more then an occasional user-error.
I have used OOo myself for about 3 years but not for many work related activities. We work with too many other businesses to switch away from Office because there just isn't enough compatibility between the two.
On top of that, on the low end comps we have, OOo 2.0 just doesn't run well. And previous versions of OOo were even less stable on the older computers we had.
Up until a year ago I was stuck with one office of very old comps. They were either P 233s with 32-64RAM, running NT4 with Office XP very commendably or P2 233s with 128RAM running WinXP with Office XP. The performance out of those boxes was crazy.
The money is not going to be made by the console, it'll be made by the games, so rather than go for maximum console sales, put the limitation in place to generate hype and now the console is part of the advertising scheme and ends up being a better value for MS.
And anyway, who cares? If you understand this is a ploy it will not really affect you (unless you really really really wanted a 360 on day one). But, I doubt they would do it without having reason to believe it would boost the console's appeal to some people. People that might not have realized tactics like this are used regularly. And those people need to read some books, like "How to Lie With Statistics," to gain some perspective on advertising in genenral.
"gimp" means beautiful or attractive, and has meant that for far longer than it's been used as slang for the handicapped. Presumably the makers of an image manipulation program had that meaning in mind.
Yes and a swastika is a harmless religious symbol and it has been for longer than it has been a symbol of hate. But, it doesn't get used by the general public or big business a whole lot these days because language is a part of culture and so it changes as the people and culture do.
It's also a good lesson for designing things even when you *know* the environment in which it will be used...that can change and it's best to work with standards rather than the easiest, but perhaps proprietary choice.
Thank you for posting this. That is very interesting and useful information and if this had been posted earlier this whole discussion would be about the benefits of planning ahead and how frantic the efforts are to accomodate the victims of Katrina.
It might have even been an outpouring of knowledgeable tech folks that could offer some assistance in fixing some of these problems.
It's nice to imagine the OSS community swooping in to save the day at a time like this, because the OSS community is people, citizens, aka the basis of our country and the (supposed) true holders of the power.
http://www.symphonyos.com/, uses the four corners for its popup menus, categorizing by corner in a fairly intuitive way.
Some of Opera's mouse gestures (back, forward, minimize, new and close) are very good muscle memory instances. Once you get used to it you stop thinking about it. One more reason I can never stop using Opera:-( It's like crack.
I was kind of suprised nothing like this was mentioned since these are cases where its a small (or even miniscule) group trying to use these newer ideas in HCI to push their market share.
Weird. A higher percentage of visits to my site are Opera then Firefox. Firefox is 6.2% and Opera is 6.7% so its only a tiny difference. And I don't know if that detects if a browser is Opera even when its set to identify as IE...
And you can also turn off the main browser buttons, add any buttons you want to the smaller set that appear in the tab, and the ad will change to a a wide, short ad that seems less obtrusive and only really has room for 1 or 2 lines of text.
I just got my registration code and it really didn't even make that big of a difference. The advertisement was only about 20 pixels tall to start with. And besides, I set LiteStep to never cover the task bar so that lets you hit F11 in opera to switch to full screen without covering it, and if its full screen you can open a new tab and the small set of controls and address bar appear to use, and there is no Ad. So most of my opera experience has been Ad free anyway.
Something else business can learn from is unbiased research, which would have been nice in the case of this article, which is basically a collection of this person's gut feelings on things.
I almost get a feeling of the old saying "Happy workers are good workers" which is definately not the case for all jobs (or even most jobs at this point).
I think instead of amateurs, the focus would be more on hobbyists (slightly different). A professional IT person may know nothing more than absolutely necessary and get the job done, but the innovation, free thinking, and creativity comes from people for whom IT is also a hobby. They can be professional, but often they are not. That hobbyist aspect is what makes a real difference IMO. If you can get a professional/hobbyist then you have someone that will at least have their eyes open for new and innovative things, even if they aren't on the clock and even if they don't put in the crazy amount of overtime.
And then when there are economic problems, the hobbyist gets fired because management doesn't understand IT anyway:P
how is paying for mac os x and installing it on an x86 computer you already own, copyright infringement?
They are protecting their image. If Mac OS X were allowed to run on all X86 computers the limited drivers and instability because of it would make Apple look bad.
I bet M$ would love the chance to force users to use a very narrow field of hardware. They could just program their OS specifically for it and not have to be compatible with tons of different stuff.
As far as sites that employ IE-specific technology, are concerned, these sites won't render properly anyway, unless Opera embeds an actual IE rendering layer, like the new Netscape is trying to do.
Actually if you use Opera 8.0 or higher with certain version of Outlook Web Access it gets blocked if it is set to anything but IE but functions without problem when it is set to identify as IE. I don't know what version of OWA my company uses so that's why I say certain version without specifying.
It's often not a matter of a site displaying wrong because it is designed for IE, but instead a site which just outright refuses to work unless you use IE, regardless of whether or not other browsers would work. That's problem I usually come across (with various work related pages mainly) and why I have to keep Opera set to identify as IE.
They probably just don't want to far behind. I don't think they were even in the top 5 or 10 companies last year as far as # of patents. I believe #1 belonged to IBM.
Even after this push they probably won't get as many patents as IBM, lol. They'll just get more news coverage of it because people are always looking for a reason to hate M$.
Indeed. I currently run WinXp on computers at my office with P2 233s and 128 megs of ram, a couple of P3 450s with 64 megs of ram and Win2k on a couple of P166s with 32 megs of ram. Most of which couldn't simply take the install of a Linux distro since they only have 3.2 gig HDs, which fits 2K or XP and a full install of MS Office 2003. This Linspire stuff is far from Lax.
Before that and even still on some 16 mb ram machines I used Win NT 4.0 SP6a with Office. For a business machine, or a home machine for someone that is mainly looking for web browsing, email and word processing, its hard to beat an OS that boots up to only 10-12 mb ram usage and only takes up 200 megs of hard drive space but can run up to Office XP, modern IE or Opera (never tried FF on it though) and can be installed on i386, PPC, Alpha, and MIPS all off the same CD.
I didn't know that, but it doesn't relate to what I was saying anyway so I'm not sure the point.
My point was this is a lawsuit over a person with a non-compete agreement. Its not like this would have happened if the person in question hadn't agreed to put himself in this position to start with.
"Google and Lee claim the Microsoft lawsuit is a `charade` meant to frighten other Microsoft workers from jumping to Google, according to court documents."
Do they mean its meant to frighten other Microsoft workers with non-compete agreements?
I don't understand the big deal. These things happen all the time. I guess its new to hear about these problems in the tech world? With radio personalities and musicians and other fields like that I hear its quite common.
I would bet some money the dude's got another non-compete agreement waiting for him at Google...
This is a serious problem. I entered a position where I was expected to handle small IT problems at a remote site, and have the main IT team administer the system from afar. I thought I was a true novice, and I assume compared to some of the real IT pros out there I definately am, but I ended up fixing so many stupid mistakes. I looked over the materials for classes and could see where they were getting this stuff.
In the end, the MS products we used were much better then I would have expected. Our main server has an uptime of about 19 months now (last downtime was when the other IT folks came to do upgrades and almost ruined my poor server x_x) We have old desktops (p2 266s with 128MB pc100 ram) run winxp with office xp very well (after extensively tweaking a setup and ghosting it) and older P233 with 64 megs of ram running win2k with Office XP, again very well and only with tiny tweaks.
When I started these computers were crawling, barely functional and doomed to be tossed despite them only being used as basic office boxes. The problem was part MS setting up XP to use way too many resources, but I think the bigger part was all the IT folks before me that didn't think it was right to tweak it to make it better. As far as they were concerned out-of-the-box was the only way the OS should run.
When I walked into this office I was cursing MS because I didn't understand what was really happening. MS made these products so wizard-packed that people didn't think they needed to think any more. I was close to bringing Linux into the picture before I realized this, but found there was a lot more possible then the book-taught so called pros thought.
At this point, I think MS's focus on making Vista a super happy funtime OS is going to further kill the abilities of MS-oriented IT folk as they become more and more dependent on stupid cartoon paperclips and wizards that turn 3 steps into 20.
This is a serious problem. I entered a position where I was expected to handle small IT problems at a remote site, and have the main IT team administer the system from afar. I thought I was a true novice, and I assume compared to some of the real IT pros out there I definately am, but I ended up fixing so many stupid mistakes. I looked over the materials for classes and could see where they were getting this stuff.
In the end, the MS products we used were much better then I would have expected. Our main server has an uptime of about 19 months now (last downtime was when the other IT folks came to do upgrades and almost ruined my poor server x_x) We have old desktops (p2 266s with 128MB pc100 ram) run winxp with office xp very well (after extensively tweaking a setup and ghosting it) and older P233 with 64 megs of ram running win2k with Office XP, again very well and only with tiny tweaks.
When I started these computers were crawling, barely functional and doomed to be tossed despite them only being used as basic office boxes. The problem was part MS setting up XP to use way too many resources, but I think the bigger part was all the IT folks before me that didn't think it was right to tweak it to make it better. As far as they were concerned out-of-the-box was the only way the OS should run.
When I walked into this office I was cursing MS because I didn't understand what was really happening. MS made these products so wizard-packed that people didn't think they needed to think any more. I was close to bringing Linux into the picture before I realized this, but found there was a lot more possible then the book-taught so called pros thought.
At this point, I think MS's focus on making Vista a super happy funtime OS is going to further kill the abilities of MS-oriented IT folk as they become more and more dependent on stupid cartoon paperclips and wizards that turn 3 steps into 20.
"I wonder if MIPS has a choice. See AMD vs Intel ca. 1991"
Does this Chinese company have an agreement with MIPS to share all of their architecture details so that the Chinese company can produce these chips as a backup company for MIPS? Because that was the case with AMD vs Intel. AMD is allowed to make X86 processors without paying royalties to Intel because they were originally contracted as a backup manufacturer, but because of apparent bad business by Intel, they won a lawsuit that gave them the right to make X86 processors on their own.
"If we donate, and they reach the amount, will the data be open to everyone?
That is absolutely critical, I will not donate unless I can see the data."
That is exactly what I was thinking. I don't even have a need for the information, but it is so mysterious and geeky that I must have it!
1. Does this mean that users of the ASCII smiley will retroactively owe M$ a chunk of their soul?
2. Doesn't the creator of the 'Have a Nice Day' smiley have anything to say about this? I mean he invented the business of making money off of smileys...Unless he has already been hired by M$. Hmmmm, that could be. If they went after the pet rock inventor next it could be a problem. MS logos on pavers and skipping stones. Hmmm.
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This seems similar to the original XBox Media Center software. A friend of mine was running it on a heavily modded box and it was kind of nifty.
...Dreamcast 2.0.
I know I do. 800 computers with office 2003 (upgraded from office XP in January) linked up to a handful of Windows Server 2000 boxes to store personal folders. Pretty painless setup and no more then an occasional user-error.
I have used OOo myself for about 3 years but not for many work related activities. We work with too many other businesses to switch away from Office because there just isn't enough compatibility between the two.
On top of that, on the low end comps we have, OOo 2.0 just doesn't run well. And previous versions of OOo were even less stable on the older computers we had.
Up until a year ago I was stuck with one office of very old comps. They were either P 233s with 32-64RAM, running NT4 with Office XP very commendably or P2 233s with 128RAM running WinXP with Office XP. The performance out of those boxes was crazy.
I feel where you are coming from. I think I would have a lot of little uses for this but still it would be slow.
Scary thing is thinking about the new Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad Tablet PC. That costs over $2000 and has a 4200RPM HD.
The money is not going to be made by the console, it'll be made by the games, so rather than go for maximum console sales, put the limitation in place to generate hype and now the console is part of the advertising scheme and ends up being a better value for MS.
And anyway, who cares? If you understand this is a ploy it will not really affect you (unless you really really really wanted a 360 on day one). But, I doubt they would do it without having reason to believe it would boost the console's appeal to some people. People that might not have realized tactics like this are used regularly. And those people need to read some books, like "How to Lie With Statistics," to gain some perspective on advertising in genenral.
That is definately a valid point, I should have qualified my comment with a particular region or culture. My apologies.
"gimp" means beautiful or attractive, and has meant that for far longer than it's been used as slang for the handicapped. Presumably the makers of an image manipulation program had that meaning in mind.
Yes and a swastika is a harmless religious symbol and it has been for longer than it has been a symbol of hate. But, it doesn't get used by the general public or big business a whole lot these days because language is a part of culture and so it changes as the people and culture do.
It might have even been an outpouring of knowledgeable tech folks that could offer some assistance in fixing some of these problems.
It's nice to imagine the OSS community swooping in to save the day at a time like this, because the OSS community is people, citizens, aka the basis of our country and the (supposed) true holders of the power.
But losing it at home is just to depressing to to cope with :-(
http://www.symphonyos.com/, uses the four corners for its popup menus, categorizing by corner in a fairly intuitive way.
:-( It's like crack.
Some of Opera's mouse gestures (back, forward, minimize, new and close) are very good muscle memory instances. Once you get used to it you stop thinking about it. One more reason I can never stop using Opera
I was kind of suprised nothing like this was mentioned since these are cases where its a small (or even miniscule) group trying to use these newer ideas in HCI to push their market share.
I just can't avoid the nagging feeling that we will eventually be smoten for pulling crap like this...
Weird. A higher percentage of visits to my site are Opera then Firefox. Firefox is 6.2% and Opera is 6.7% so its only a tiny difference. And I don't know if that detects if a browser is Opera even when its set to identify as IE...
And you can also turn off the main browser buttons, add any buttons you want to the smaller set that appear in the tab, and the ad will change to a a wide, short ad that seems less obtrusive and only really has room for 1 or 2 lines of text.
I just got my registration code and it really didn't even make that big of a difference. The advertisement was only about 20 pixels tall to start with. And besides, I set LiteStep to never cover the task bar so that lets you hit F11 in opera to switch to full screen without covering it, and if its full screen you can open a new tab and the small set of controls and address bar appear to use, and there is no Ad. So most of my opera experience has been Ad free anyway.
Something else business can learn from is unbiased research, which would have been nice in the case of this article, which is basically a collection of this person's gut feelings on things.
:P
I almost get a feeling of the old saying "Happy workers are good workers" which is definately not the case for all jobs (or even most jobs at this point).
I think instead of amateurs, the focus would be more on hobbyists (slightly different). A professional IT person may know nothing more than absolutely necessary and get the job done, but the innovation, free thinking, and creativity comes from people for whom IT is also a hobby. They can be professional, but often they are not. That hobbyist aspect is what makes a real difference IMO. If you can get a professional/hobbyist then you have someone that will at least have their eyes open for new and innovative things, even if they aren't on the clock and even if they don't put in the crazy amount of overtime.
And then when there are economic problems, the hobbyist gets fired because management doesn't understand IT anyway
They are protecting their image. If Mac OS X were allowed to run on all X86 computers the limited drivers and instability because of it would make Apple look bad. I bet M$ would love the chance to force users to use a very narrow field of hardware. They could just program their OS specifically for it and not have to be compatible with tons of different stuff.
Actually if you use Opera 8.0 or higher with certain version of Outlook Web Access it gets blocked if it is set to anything but IE but functions without problem when it is set to identify as IE. I don't know what version of OWA my company uses so that's why I say certain version without specifying.
It's often not a matter of a site displaying wrong because it is designed for IE, but instead a site which just outright refuses to work unless you use IE, regardless of whether or not other browsers would work. That's problem I usually come across (with various work related pages mainly) and why I have to keep Opera set to identify as IE.
They probably just don't want to far behind. I don't think they were even in the top 5 or 10 companies last year as far as # of patents. I believe #1 belonged to IBM. Even after this push they probably won't get as many patents as IBM, lol. They'll just get more news coverage of it because people are always looking for a reason to hate M$.
Indeed. I currently run WinXp on computers at my office with P2 233s and 128 megs of ram, a couple of P3 450s with 64 megs of ram and Win2k on a couple of P166s with 32 megs of ram. Most of which couldn't simply take the install of a Linux distro since they only have 3.2 gig HDs, which fits 2K or XP and a full install of MS Office 2003. This Linspire stuff is far from Lax.
Before that and even still on some 16 mb ram machines I used Win NT 4.0 SP6a with Office. For a business machine, or a home machine for someone that is mainly looking for web browsing, email and word processing, its hard to beat an OS that boots up to only 10-12 mb ram usage and only takes up 200 megs of hard drive space but can run up to Office XP, modern IE or Opera (never tried FF on it though) and can be installed on i386, PPC, Alpha, and MIPS all off the same CD.
I didn't know that, but it doesn't relate to what I was saying anyway so I'm not sure the point. My point was this is a lawsuit over a person with a non-compete agreement. Its not like this would have happened if the person in question hadn't agreed to put himself in this position to start with.
"Google and Lee claim the Microsoft lawsuit is a `charade` meant to frighten other Microsoft workers from jumping to Google, according to court documents."
Do they mean its meant to frighten other Microsoft workers with non-compete agreements?
I don't understand the big deal. These things happen all the time. I guess its new to hear about these problems in the tech world? With radio personalities and musicians and other fields like that I hear its quite common.
I would bet some money the dude's got another non-compete agreement waiting for him at Google...
This is a serious problem. I entered a position where I was expected to handle small IT problems at a remote site, and have the main IT team administer the system from afar. I thought I was a true novice, and I assume compared to some of the real IT pros out there I definately am, but I ended up fixing so many stupid mistakes. I looked over the materials for classes and could see where they were getting this stuff. In the end, the MS products we used were much better then I would have expected. Our main server has an uptime of about 19 months now (last downtime was when the other IT folks came to do upgrades and almost ruined my poor server x_x) We have old desktops (p2 266s with 128MB pc100 ram) run winxp with office xp very well (after extensively tweaking a setup and ghosting it) and older P233 with 64 megs of ram running win2k with Office XP, again very well and only with tiny tweaks. When I started these computers were crawling, barely functional and doomed to be tossed despite them only being used as basic office boxes. The problem was part MS setting up XP to use way too many resources, but I think the bigger part was all the IT folks before me that didn't think it was right to tweak it to make it better. As far as they were concerned out-of-the-box was the only way the OS should run. When I walked into this office I was cursing MS because I didn't understand what was really happening. MS made these products so wizard-packed that people didn't think they needed to think any more. I was close to bringing Linux into the picture before I realized this, but found there was a lot more possible then the book-taught so called pros thought. At this point, I think MS's focus on making Vista a super happy funtime OS is going to further kill the abilities of MS-oriented IT folk as they become more and more dependent on stupid cartoon paperclips and wizards that turn 3 steps into 20.
This is a serious problem. I entered a position where I was expected to handle small IT problems at a remote site, and have the main IT team administer the system from afar. I thought I was a true novice, and I assume compared to some of the real IT pros out there I definately am, but I ended up fixing so many stupid mistakes. I looked over the materials for classes and could see where they were getting this stuff.
In the end, the MS products we used were much better then I would have expected. Our main server has an uptime of about 19 months now (last downtime was when the other IT folks came to do upgrades and almost ruined my poor server x_x) We have old desktops (p2 266s with 128MB pc100 ram) run winxp with office xp very well (after extensively tweaking a setup and ghosting it) and older P233 with 64 megs of ram running win2k with Office XP, again very well and only with tiny tweaks.
When I started these computers were crawling, barely functional and doomed to be tossed despite them only being used as basic office boxes. The problem was part MS setting up XP to use way too many resources, but I think the bigger part was all the IT folks before me that didn't think it was right to tweak it to make it better. As far as they were concerned out-of-the-box was the only way the OS should run.
When I walked into this office I was cursing MS because I didn't understand what was really happening. MS made these products so wizard-packed that people didn't think they needed to think any more. I was close to bringing Linux into the picture before I realized this, but found there was a lot more possible then the book-taught so called pros thought.
At this point, I think MS's focus on making Vista a super happy funtime OS is going to further kill the abilities of MS-oriented IT folk as they become more and more dependent on stupid cartoon paperclips and wizards that turn 3 steps into 20.
"I wonder if MIPS has a choice. See AMD vs Intel ca. 1991"
Does this Chinese company have an agreement with MIPS to share all of their architecture details so that the Chinese company can produce these chips as a backup company for MIPS? Because that was the case with AMD vs Intel. AMD is allowed to make X86 processors without paying royalties to Intel because they were originally contracted as a backup manufacturer, but because of apparent bad business by Intel, they won a lawsuit that gave them the right to make X86 processors on their own.
"If we donate, and they reach the amount, will the data be open to everyone? That is absolutely critical, I will not donate unless I can see the data."
That is exactly what I was thinking. I don't even have a need for the information, but it is so mysterious and geeky that I must have it!
1. Does this mean that users of the ASCII smiley will retroactively owe M$ a chunk of their soul? 2. Doesn't the creator of the 'Have a Nice Day' smiley have anything to say about this? I mean he invented the business of making money off of smileys...Unless he has already been hired by M$. Hmmmm, that could be. If they went after the pet rock inventor next it could be a problem. MS logos on pavers and skipping stones. Hmmm.