I could name a Fortune 100 firm that's still using Netscape Communicator 4.75 as a standard browser and mail app. But I'm under NDA.
On the plus side, they just haven't decided which version of Mozilla to eventually use. On the down side, I asked a senior manager there how 'we' were handling bugzilla reports.. and lost track of the number of layers before you got to someone allowed to have a Bugzilla account and report bugs. I tested RC1 briefly, and it worked fine.
I feel really sorry for anyone using 4.7x as a mail client, especially as an IMAP client. My former employer will see about a 25% reduction in helpesk calls when 4.75 is retired.
That's a Classic app, not OS X native. I'm using Entourage for OS X, and it's proving to be a very good mail client and to do list. It's a very pretty app and I'd like to see what can be done in OS X by either the Outlook 200 team or the Entourage X team.
There's nothing wrong with Outlook 2001 if you're still using OS 9.1, but you want to move to Office X as soon as the budget allows - it's a damn good package.
Here you go. It takes a Windows 2000/NT 4.0 network to do it, and Active Directory is needed to get the hotfixes out.
You use a couple of utilities in combination to identify patches. hfnetchk.exe scans a network of 2K/4.0 machines and generates a report. qchain.exe allows you to apply multiple hotfixes without restarting; a batch file is created to apple each patch in sequence, with appropriate switches. Then you use ActiveDirectory to push the batch file out to be applied at the next login. I actually like doing it at logout , but I'd rather get everything applied asap instead of any aesthetic utility of applying a patch when the user is done and won't notice the extra restart.
For bonus points, you automate running hfnetchk, gathering hotfixe files, assembling qchain batch files, and pushing them out to the right machines in AD. Hint: a lot of this data is in, or can be represented as, XML. Emailed reports are good, html statistics are good. I'm not in a Win2K shop any more, but getting this running was going to be my blackbelt project. Thank you Osama and post 911 economic nuttiness.
It can be serious if an AOL install wipes out a work-related conenction. During my first stint on helldesk, for a major medical research university, I spoke to a woman who ran into this. her kids had installed AOL 5.0 on the home PC, selected it as the default, and it wiped out her other dialup configurations and we couldn't recreate them - it would no longer dial anything but AOL. For security purposes certain databases are only accessible to users dialed in to the campus modem pool (no VPN, they had enough trouble with modems). With only an AOL connection, she couldn't work remotely anymore.
She had one of the best cases against AOL I've heard of. Her kids can't be held to the waiver of liability and AOL did prevent her from connecting to anyone else than AOL. She suffered damage to her property and an inability to perform her work, plus she would have to have her PC repaired, possibly by an expensive house call (mine $ure are for Win98). All of this adds up to tangible losses caused by a company that isn't protected by a waiver of liability.
I told her there was a class action already underway, and that she was basically hosed until a tech can get to her machine.
Good thing she was on the research side, rather than the clinical side...
The QuickSliver G4s have 4 PCI slots. You lose a DIMM slot (leaving you with 3) but the arrangement of the motherboard dictates that sacrifice (picture on the link).
Go look at one if you're thinking about a new Unix desktop in the near future. It's really nice hardware.
At the dot-bomb I worked for, least twice a week I had to adjust someone's RealPlayer settings because WE have a T1 line, YOU can ask nicely for a 56 kbit slice. One T1 and 100 dot-com employees - shudder. Then there was the nanny-cam. Running in a minimized window. With the kid in daycare. At high quality. She must have lived real close to her uplink point because she was getting a fantastic upstream rate - at least 500kbit.
Then at another palce there was the friendly HR person. Having learned that an ally in HR is a Good Thing, and given that the IT Director didn't care because we had enough bandwidth, I helped her keep Limewire running smoothly. Sadly, Gnucleus (GPL'd) wasn't ready for an HR person back then. For that matter, even today it's still a geek's tool.
Post-It notes use a patented adhesive. The DMCA specifies a "technological method" of circumvention, soooo... Sure ! What the heck. Makes as much sense as a lot of the recent IP rulings.
ost of accounting thoses licences: open-source software are usually license-free, and therefore much less burdensome to track.
Editorial note: make that read "licensed free of cost". There is a license, there's just usually no cost. Support costs from the Open Source vendor may include a per-seat factor.
And if you have site licenses, the BSA will leave you alone. They might quibble over the number of desktops, but if all the stuff they care about is under a site license, there's no profit in auditing you.
What would y'all say if Real sued Apple for shipping with iTunes?
I'd ask them why the Mac version always lags behind the Windows version. I'd ask 'em where their OS X version is. In fact, until they ship an OS X version, they don't compete with iTunes anyway. Their Mac support sucked, even before iTunes 1.0.
Re:Apple's Mac OS X "Jaguar" Site
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Highlights from the page:
The new Sherlock and Address Book use the brushed-metal look from Quicktime Player. This is going to piss a lot of people off, others won't care.
Ink is going to make Wacom a lot of money. I know a few people who use a tablet in place of a mouse already. They'll be getting larger tablets for a larger writing surface. I might get a large tablet myself. This could be very good handwriting recognition, Apple is a couple of generations ahead of the best the Newton ever had, and late NewtonOS versions had very good recognition.
Mail.app is getting a semantics-based Spam-filter. This is a good way to get intelligent computing onto the desktop, and a very good use for the technology. I might switch from Mozilla to Mail just for this.
Fast Find puts a search box in Finder windows. It filters the directory lisitings based on the search text. Not groundbreaking, but nice. It's in the Address book too; or maybe it's the other way 'round.
iChat. Nice. I don't chat a lot, but there are an awful lot of AIM users out there.
Sherlock 3 is shown accessing Mapquest, and displaying the map right in Sherlock.
Rendevoux mixes the simplicity of an Appletalk network, with all the goodness of TCP/IP. Standards based. Nice. And about time.
Probably. But Enginerring is now an instant classic.
Re:Not quite as good as 9.x yet
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had a user who was stuck on on a machine that couldn't run 8.0. She loved the Platinum look so much she swiped the Appearance control panel from 8.0 and put it on 7.5.1. It worked just fine, even if I was confused when I saw the antique apparnetly running OS 8...
As I recall the timing, OS 8 came out early on in Amelio's reign (early in some CEO's reign anyway)and was basically issued as an apology (and stopgap) that the Copland project had been axed as a dismal failure. As Copland was technologically sophisticated and also a now-legendary example of vaporware, Apple had to ship a major-looking OS upgrade or face a mutiny in their customer base. OS 8 delivered little more than the Platinum look in terms of user-level features, but it came out and the Mac looked Different (Platinum was a huge visual improvement over 7.6) and the mob was sated. For a little while. Then they did 8.1 in fairly short order to add features and the "Modern" Mac was born.
There were supposedly some low-level changes in 8.0, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were. There was also an 8.01 bugfix for the few broken items in 8.0.
After that, they evolved 8.1 into 9.22. Along the way they added features, like Multiple Users and Location Manager, and improved the system under the hood. Meanwhile, the quest for OS 10 (now X) began with an evaluation of Be and NeXT as replacements for the ill-starred Copland and a Whole New MacOS...
The Dock is just another application in OS X. A search at VersionTracker shows four pages of results for "Dock". A half dozen of those items are replacement docks, most of the rest are "docklings" (little apps that display in the Dock and do things like show CPU activity or allow settings to be changed - neat stuff). So it's replaceable, or it can be turned off. I have mine on the right side of the screen, autohiding and pretty small. it doesn't get in the way over there and it's pretty useful.
Just a minor quibble. An iDisk is just a share mounted with WebDAV. Windows calls it Web Folders. Do either KDE or Gnome have WebDAV built into their file manager ?
In addition to support for WebDAV in the Finder, OS X has a mod_dav enabled copy of Apache. The link is to an O'Reilly article on setting up a WebDAV folder in OS X.
Emailing it can also be, in Mozilla for Windows: ctrl-a, ctrl-m, click body, ctrl-v, tab, type friend's email, tab, type subject, ctrl-enter. Other browser/Mail/OS combos will vary. And the site you just copied and pasted from has no idea that your friend got a copy.
I did that (with permission) with In the Beginning Was the Command Line . I do it with some articles now and again, sometimes I just save the emssage as a draft.
The copy, in Mozilla, is more than just the text. I copied the article into a message, Mozilla really didn't want to cope with an email that size, but it did it. The saved draft looked just like the page, naturally, with the banner ad playing and the links working.
But without Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege would have had to fill that niche. That said, Dungeon Siege is great fun and has a terrific interface. It could be said that it is derivative of Diablo 2, but I look at it as more of an evolutionary step forward in the genre.
And Neverwinter Nights will likely be another great step forward.
Slashdot Mirror
It's working !
I think we're done with gratuitous haiku for a while. But it's been nice to see poetry in use.
On the plus side, they just haven't decided which version of Mozilla to eventually use. On the down side, I asked a senior manager there how 'we' were handling bugzilla reports.. and lost track of the number of layers before you got to someone allowed to have a Bugzilla account and report bugs. I tested RC1 briefly, and it worked fine.
I feel really sorry for anyone using 4.7x as a mail client, especially as an IMAP client. My former employer will see about a 25% reduction in helpesk calls when 4.75 is retired.
There's nothing wrong with Outlook 2001 if you're still using OS 9.1, but you want to move to Office X as soon as the budget allows - it's a damn good package.
You use a couple of utilities in combination to identify patches. hfnetchk.exe scans a network of 2K/4.0 machines and generates a report. qchain.exe allows you to apply multiple hotfixes without restarting; a batch file is created to apple each patch in sequence, with appropriate switches. Then you use ActiveDirectory to push the batch file out to be applied at the next login. I actually like doing it at logout , but I'd rather get everything applied asap instead of any aesthetic utility of applying a patch when the user is done and won't notice the extra restart.
For bonus points, you automate running hfnetchk, gathering hotfixe files, assembling qchain batch files, and pushing them out to the right machines in AD. Hint: a lot of this data is in, or can be represented as, XML. Emailed reports are good, html statistics are good. I'm not in a Win2K shop any more, but getting this running was going to be my blackbelt project. Thank you Osama and post 911 economic nuttiness.
She had one of the best cases against AOL I've heard of. Her kids can't be held to the waiver of liability and AOL did prevent her from connecting to anyone else than AOL. She suffered damage to her property and an inability to perform her work, plus she would have to have her PC repaired, possibly by an expensive house call (mine $ure are for Win98). All of this adds up to tangible losses caused by a company that isn't protected by a waiver of liability.
I told her there was a class action already underway, and that she was basically hosed until a tech can get to her machine.
Good thing she was on the research side, rather than the clinical side...
Go look at one if you're thinking about a new Unix desktop in the near future. It's really nice hardware.
Three Firewire ports, one front and two back. Will an Xserve fit into the same racks with audio equipment ?
Then there was the nanny-cam. Running in a minimized window. With the kid in daycare. At high quality. She must have lived real close to her uplink point because she was getting a fantastic upstream rate - at least 500kbit.
Then at another palce there was the friendly HR person. Having learned that an ally in HR is a Good Thing, and given that the IT Director didn't care because we had enough bandwidth, I helped her keep Limewire running smoothly. Sadly, Gnucleus (GPL'd) wasn't ready for an HR person back then. For that matter, even today it's still a geek's tool.
Post-It notes use a patented adhesive. The DMCA specifies a "technological method" of circumvention, soooo... Sure ! What the heck. Makes as much sense as a lot of the recent IP rulings.
There's probably an ultrasecret club with $1000 membership dues that gets access to the stealth webcams.
Better. I collect spammer phone numbers. Anybody want a copy of my list ?
Editorial note: make that read "licensed free of cost". There is a license, there's just usually no cost. Support costs from the Open Source vendor may include a per-seat factor.
And if you have site licenses, the BSA will leave you alone. They might quibble over the number of desktops, but if all the stuff they care about is under a site license, there's no profit in auditing you.
If Apple had 95% marketshare on the desktop, this would be happening to them.
I'd ask them why the Mac version always lags behind the Windows version. I'd ask 'em where their OS X version is. In fact, until they ship an OS X version, they don't compete with iTunes anyway. Their Mac support sucked, even before iTunes 1.0.
Probably. But Enginerring is now an instant classic.
As I recall the timing, OS 8 came out early on in Amelio's reign (early in some CEO's reign anyway)and was basically issued as an apology (and stopgap) that the Copland project had been axed as a dismal failure. As Copland was technologically sophisticated and also a now-legendary example of vaporware, Apple had to ship a major-looking OS upgrade or face a mutiny in their customer base. OS 8 delivered little more than the Platinum look in terms of user-level features, but it came out and the Mac looked Different (Platinum was a huge visual improvement over 7.6) and the mob was sated. For a little while. Then they did 8.1 in fairly short order to add features and the "Modern" Mac was born.
There were supposedly some low-level changes in 8.0, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were. There was also an 8.01 bugfix for the few broken items in 8.0.
After that, they evolved 8.1 into 9.22. Along the way they added features, like Multiple Users and Location Manager, and improved the system under the hood. Meanwhile, the quest for OS 10 (now X) began with an evaluation of Be and NeXT as replacements for the ill-starred Copland and a Whole New MacOS...
The Dock is just another application in OS X. A search at VersionTracker shows four pages of results for "Dock". A half dozen of those items are replacement docks, most of the rest are "docklings" (little apps that display in the Dock and do things like show CPU activity or allow settings to be changed - neat stuff). So it's replaceable, or it can be turned off. I have mine on the right side of the screen, autohiding and pretty small. it doesn't get in the way over there and it's pretty useful.
Because he's the Bill you pay !!!
In addition to support for WebDAV in the Finder, OS X has a mod_dav enabled copy of Apache. The link is to an O'Reilly article on setting up a WebDAV folder in OS X.
I did that (with permission) with In the Beginning Was the Command Line . I do it with some articles now and again, sometimes I just save the emssage as a draft.
The copy, in Mozilla, is more than just the text. I copied the article into a message, Mozilla really didn't want to cope with an email that size, but it did it. The saved draft looked just like the page, naturally, with the banner ad playing and the links working.
And just when I finally got around to downloading the Dungeon Siege demo. Which is good enough I may well have to buy the game to keep playing.
And Neverwinter Nights will likely be another great step forward.