Having worked for a few different Fortune 500 companies, OSS is often a dirty word. Executives only trust big names they know.
We only buy Microsoft and Dell for most things. We just bought an expensive Sharepoint Server, when a simple wiki would have saved tons of money. We use Linux, Unix and Solaris only in implementations largely dictated to us by vendors.
I think it makes sense to save money by going to OpenOffice, but corporate America doesn't always make sense.
Microsoft sells student copies of MS Office dirt cheap. I've seen a few schools install OOo side-by-side with MS Office, and some invididual users make the switch, but until major companies cancel mass volume licensing of MS Office, I don't see MS breaking a sweat.
The fact that several large governments were talking about ditching MS Office (over open file standards) is what got MS to play ball. Now that they support ODF (and likely OOXML once they iron that out as well a bit) those government agencies are likely to stay with MS Office.
This isn't about OOo versus MS Office. I don't mind paying for software. I just want to make sure that when I save a file, people can open it and read it, especially me a few years down the road. Microsoft's closed, proprietary formats keep changing (forcing unnecessary upgrades) and they drop support for old formats after a while.
I'm just some bum writer who wants to open my old files, but what about actual important documents? Right now PDF sadly is about the only way to go and feel safe the document can be read down the road.
If you're not happy with OOo's Calc, that is irrelevant to this discussion. Microsoft is going to provide support for ODF, and honestly that is enough to make me happy. I just wish they were supporting 1.2 right off the bat, instead of starting with 1.1.
Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals.
People said CDs would never come down in price significantly to be as disposable as floppies. Blank DVDs would never come as close in price as blank CDs.
SSDs launched in the $2000 price mark from what I saw, and now can be had for less than $500. The price will likely decrease faster on SSDs than HDDs since SSDs are newer. The price gap will shrink enough that people will migrate for the benefits of SSDs.
Last year when I built my budget rig, I bought a dual core X2 3600+ for 35$ and the cheapest comparable offering Intel has was $150, and benchmarks showed basically the same performance between the two.
Intel has better performance at the top-end right now, but that doesn't mean they win performance-per-dollar.
I bought my Kingston 4 gig flash drive from them (Newegg.com) 6 months ago for $15 plus shipping, and I see it advertised all the time now for $15 with free shipping. So I'm not sure how a $32 version is Slashdot worthy in the least.
This isn't shocking in the least. The Army plays a glorified version of laser tag. Pilots use flight simulator software. Even in the low-budget Marine Corps, I fired on a virtual M16 course.
If the game requires the TPM chip to function, then ripping it out isn't an easy option, and I doubt there will be an easy BIOS option to disable the chip.
The answer will be like Xbox hacking, which is to flash the TPM chip with new code that allows games to communicate with the TPM chip, while allowing unsigned code to run.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess #103 is Apple itself, which shouldn't count. My ex-girlfriend's, ex-boyfriend's dad was some VP at Apple and has been working there since the 70's. I've only met the guy once, but he worked directly for Jobs and told me that Jobs went through the roof when he discovered that many internal Apple servers ran Windows on PC hardware. Jobs demanded it be replaced, but before OS X, Apple never had a decent server product. Even after the OS X migration, it made sense for Apple to use Windows internally for servers for some time. I'm guessing Jobs' mandate was universal, and they switched to all-Apple as much as they could, but they haven't always been.
It's ironic that Dell and Apple have switched places from 10 years ago where Apple was in trouble and Dell was riding high. Apple computers are price competitive if you compare them feature for feature; it's that Apple, for most part, focuses their efforts on higher end models and laptops which have better margins and avoided the pricing wars on the low end. What are you talking about? Apple is doing well as a company largely because they got into the music business. Apple PC sales are up, because the Apple brand is up, again because of their music venture. Corporations don't buy Apple computers largely.
And last time I checked, Dell wasn't in trouble. Vista bombed, but Dell said that they would continue to see XP even if Microsoft says they can't anymore. Dell was happily selling Windows 2000 licenses well after Microsoft said everyone must go XP. What Dell sells to the average home PC buyer, and what Dell servers their corporate (read: money-making, important customers) customers is another thing altogether.
And Apple computers are no where competitive price wise. Most Apple systems I look at are $800 more than their counterparts. When looking for a monitor last year, someone mentioned how great the True Cinema displays are. I looked at one, and the cheapest one they offered was like $500-$600. I got a better monitor for $169, which was a 19 inch widescreen LCD with 2 ms response time and a fantastic contrast ratio.
Saying that Apple is price competitive on PC hardware is just a bold-faced lie.
For Dell to remain, they have take some risks. Again, I'm not sure where you get this. When I worked for Harrahs, we had a contract that no matter what, we only purchased Dell hardware. We had all kinds of problems with their desktops. We had countless power supply and motherboard issues, and it didn't matter that they also over charged us. We were never going to look at anything else, because Dell is the big name.
I work for a newspaper company now, and it is the same story. We get tons of crappy Dell products, and we even replaced a bunch of working HP laser printers with crappy Dells, but we only buy Dell hardware, and likely always will.
Dell just keeps signing more and more exclusive contracts all the time. Let me know when Apple signs even one deal with a Fortune 500 company to go all Apple hardware, because I guarantee you almost every one of those companies is Dell exclusive right now.
I don't know that I can define the above cultures very well, but corporations do have cultures, as do brands. When I worked for Harrahs, Inc. we never said gambling even though we owned casinos. We were about responsible entertainment. We also provided a clear formula to the customers for how much "gaming" meant how many reward points.
When we became Horseshoe, we were all about gambling, gambling and gambling. We couldn't say gambler enough. Our comping system because obtuse and complicated, and seemingly random. We actually comped less, but tried to create the image that anyone could be comped for anything. Employees were also treated better even though we basically had the same management staff all the way up to the GM of the casino, but brand and company cultures were different.
Compaq did in fact send out a similar email, and after the disastrous merger was complete, they also promised not to close down the facilities here in Omaha, despite announcing that they were going to outsource production facilities. Shortly after promising us that all of our jobs were safe, they laid everyone off.
They did stand up for human rights in fighting the Chinese government as long as they did. They are also the only search company that that says in the listings in the results are censored.
You're suggesting every company that does any business with China is evil, and by that standard, Google is far less evil than most.
In all fairness, every search company abides by China's laws. Google was the only company to fight them. That makes Google the least evil of the bunch.
How is Vista more secure? Training people to click Confirm all day long doesn't make a system more secure.
Does Vista still allow Remote Registry editing by hackers over the internet? Does Vista still have ActiveX? Does Vista still allow people to remotely run processes under a different user's credentials?
Vista also released a huge security vulnerability into the wild that can never be taken back. Insert a Vista install DVD into a computer and boot into it. With the recovery console you can have full access to a system's hard drive without administrator password now.
I know you can do the same with a Knoppix CD, but now the exploit is something more visible to the average user.
XP has a litany of standard features that 2000 doesn't, and it doesn't necessarily run any slower. A stock XP install does use a little more memory than 2000, but I've installed XP over 2000 and found that it ran faster in many cases.
I completely agree. I don't feel that Google's position is unquestionable, but it is certainly understandable. They either abide by the law in China, or pull out completely. China would likely prefer that Google pull out, as it would aid the Chinese economy and growth of Baidu. In that regard, I can certainly understand why Google feels it is better to create inroads.
Breaking Chinese law isn't much of an option for a mega-corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked for a few different Fortune 500 companies, OSS is often a dirty word. Executives only trust big names they know.
We only buy Microsoft and Dell for most things. We just bought an expensive Sharepoint Server, when a simple wiki would have saved tons of money. We use Linux, Unix and Solaris only in implementations largely dictated to us by vendors.
I think it makes sense to save money by going to OpenOffice, but corporate America doesn't always make sense.
Microsoft sells student copies of MS Office dirt cheap. I've seen a few schools install OOo side-by-side with MS Office, and some invididual users make the switch, but until major companies cancel mass volume licensing of MS Office, I don't see MS breaking a sweat.
The fact that several large governments were talking about ditching MS Office (over open file standards) is what got MS to play ball. Now that they support ODF (and likely OOXML once they iron that out as well a bit) those government agencies are likely to stay with MS Office.
This isn't about OOo versus MS Office. I don't mind paying for software. I just want to make sure that when I save a file, people can open it and read it, especially me a few years down the road. Microsoft's closed, proprietary formats keep changing (forcing unnecessary upgrades) and they drop support for old formats after a while.
I'm just some bum writer who wants to open my old files, but what about actual important documents? Right now PDF sadly is about the only way to go and feel safe the document can be read down the road.
If you're not happy with OOo's Calc, that is irrelevant to this discussion. Microsoft is going to provide support for ODF, and honestly that is enough to make me happy. I just wish they were supporting 1.2 right off the bat, instead of starting with 1.1.
Given that technology experts in most every country where extremely vocally opposed to OOXML to begin with, I'm shocked that ONLY three or four have filed appeals.
People said CDs would never come down in price significantly to be as disposable as floppies. Blank DVDs would never come as close in price as blank CDs.
SSDs launched in the $2000 price mark from what I saw, and now can be had for less than $500. The price will likely decrease faster on SSDs than HDDs since SSDs are newer. The price gap will shrink enough that people will migrate for the benefits of SSDs.
Last year when I built my budget rig, I bought a dual core X2 3600+ for 35$ and the cheapest comparable offering Intel has was $150, and benchmarks showed basically the same performance between the two.
Intel has better performance at the top-end right now, but that doesn't mean they win performance-per-dollar.
I bought my Kingston 4 gig flash drive from them (Newegg.com) 6 months ago for $15 plus shipping, and I see it advertised all the time now for $15 with free shipping. So I'm not sure how a $32 version is Slashdot worthy in the least.
This isn't shocking in the least. The Army plays a glorified version of laser tag. Pilots use flight simulator software. Even in the low-budget Marine Corps, I fired on a virtual M16 course.
If the game requires the TPM chip to function, then ripping it out isn't an easy option, and I doubt there will be an easy BIOS option to disable the chip.
The answer will be like Xbox hacking, which is to flash the TPM chip with new code that allows games to communicate with the TPM chip, while allowing unsigned code to run.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess #103 is Apple itself, which shouldn't count. My ex-girlfriend's, ex-boyfriend's dad was some VP at Apple and has been working there since the 70's. I've only met the guy once, but he worked directly for Jobs and told me that Jobs went through the roof when he discovered that many internal Apple servers ran Windows on PC hardware. Jobs demanded it be replaced, but before OS X, Apple never had a decent server product. Even after the OS X migration, it made sense for Apple to use Windows internally for servers for some time. I'm guessing Jobs' mandate was universal, and they switched to all-Apple as much as they could, but they haven't always been.
And last time I checked, Dell wasn't in trouble. Vista bombed, but Dell said that they would continue to see XP even if Microsoft says they can't anymore. Dell was happily selling Windows 2000 licenses well after Microsoft said everyone must go XP. What Dell sells to the average home PC buyer, and what Dell servers their corporate (read: money-making, important customers) customers is another thing altogether.
And Apple computers are no where competitive price wise. Most Apple systems I look at are $800 more than their counterparts. When looking for a monitor last year, someone mentioned how great the True Cinema displays are. I looked at one, and the cheapest one they offered was like $500-$600. I got a better monitor for $169, which was a 19 inch widescreen LCD with 2 ms response time and a fantastic contrast ratio.
Saying that Apple is price competitive on PC hardware is just a bold-faced lie. For Dell to remain, they have take some risks. Again, I'm not sure where you get this. When I worked for Harrahs, we had a contract that no matter what, we only purchased Dell hardware. We had all kinds of problems with their desktops. We had countless power supply and motherboard issues, and it didn't matter that they also over charged us. We were never going to look at anything else, because Dell is the big name.
I work for a newspaper company now, and it is the same story. We get tons of crappy Dell products, and we even replaced a bunch of working HP laser printers with crappy Dells, but we only buy Dell hardware, and likely always will.
Dell just keeps signing more and more exclusive contracts all the time. Let me know when Apple signs even one deal with a Fortune 500 company to go all Apple hardware, because I guarantee you almost every one of those companies is Dell exclusive right now.
I don't know that I can define the above cultures very well, but corporations do have cultures, as do brands. When I worked for Harrahs, Inc. we never said gambling even though we owned casinos. We were about responsible entertainment. We also provided a clear formula to the customers for how much "gaming" meant how many reward points.
When we became Horseshoe, we were all about gambling, gambling and gambling. We couldn't say gambler enough. Our comping system because obtuse and complicated, and seemingly random. We actually comped less, but tried to create the image that anyone could be comped for anything. Employees were also treated better even though we basically had the same management staff all the way up to the GM of the casino, but brand and company cultures were different.
Compaq did in fact send out a similar email, and after the disastrous merger was complete, they also promised not to close down the facilities here in Omaha, despite announcing that they were going to outsource production facilities. Shortly after promising us that all of our jobs were safe, they laid everyone off.
They did stand up for human rights in fighting the Chinese government as long as they did. They are also the only search company that that says in the listings in the results are censored.
You're suggesting every company that does any business with China is evil, and by that standard, Google is far less evil than most.
In all fairness, every search company abides by China's laws. Google was the only company to fight them. That makes Google the least evil of the bunch.
How is Vista more secure? Training people to click Confirm all day long doesn't make a system more secure.
Does Vista still allow Remote Registry editing by hackers over the internet? Does Vista still have ActiveX? Does Vista still allow people to remotely run processes under a different user's credentials?
Vista also released a huge security vulnerability into the wild that can never be taken back. Insert a Vista install DVD into a computer and boot into it. With the recovery console you can have full access to a system's hard drive without administrator password now.
I know you can do the same with a Knoppix CD, but now the exploit is something more visible to the average user.
http://www.windowsxlive.net/index.php?id=16
We need a mod -1 Incorrect.
Please look up a few posts to see the litany of new features that XP provided. What you're saying simply isn't true.
Visual Themes, IMAPI support, more built-in apps like Windows Movie Maker, DirectX 9.0c, WIA, Power Management, Prefetcher, etc.
XP has a litany of standard features that 2000 doesn't, and it doesn't necessarily run any slower. A stock XP install does use a little more memory than 2000, but I've installed XP over 2000 and found that it ran faster in many cases.
If I hadn't already posted in this thread, I'd give you mod points.
I completely agree. I don't feel that Google's position is unquestionable, but it is certainly understandable. They either abide by the law in China, or pull out completely. China would likely prefer that Google pull out, as it would aid the Chinese economy and growth of Baidu. In that regard, I can certainly understand why Google feels it is better to create inroads.
Breaking Chinese law isn't much of an option for a mega-corporation.
Doom 1-3 go out the window, and Doom 4 is based on the uber-successful movie!
Thanks! I probably should have checked Wikipedia myself.
In all fairness, both parties trample on the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is usually fairly balanced between the two parties.
I'd also contend that most people in this country consider Republican a dirty word these days, not hippy or liberal.