At the very base level it is a web-based database of Contacts. It stores various information about these contacts, as well as the Account they belong to.
On top of this there are several different modules that can be used with these contacts. The Sales module allows the user to store and create activities, eg emails can be sent within CRM and can then have the replies to that email automatically tracked in the database. Appointments can be set up which automatically synchronise with Outlook. Various opportunities and leads can also be stored, classified, shared between teams, and reallocated to other members of the organisation.
Then there is the Service module which can track and organise various resources of the company, organise knowledge base articles, and manage service calls.
Then there is a marketing module which can be used to organise marketing campaigns, either quick campaigns like sending out a newsletter to a group of the client base, all the way up to organising major events with trackable invitations, which also ties into the resouce management of the Service module.
The major strengths of the platform is its customisability and its interoperability with the rest of office. New tables can be created by someone with a decent knowledge of the product (with no coding) and it can be customised further through the SDK inside VS.NET.
I have been working with MSCRM since 1.2 came out (for a MS partner company) doing installations and customisations and the product has matured a lot since then. CRM 1.2 was quite workable but some parts were a dog's breakfast, particularily the outlook client. CRM 3.0 has seen the outlook client improve by miles (you can run it either in outlook with off-line synchronisation capabilities or through the browser client) but still the platform had some annoying bugs. The latest update rollup has fixed most of these issues making it quite a robust package.
I've often read spiels like this about Eve, and I have attempted to get into the game several times based on them. Yet I feel there is something about this game I just don't get. Maybe I didn't get far enough into it to get to the interesting parts, because 90% of the time I felt like I was playing a screensaver. There just seems to be so much downtime in the game where you are not doing anything. So much so that one time in particular I managed to get quite a bit of work done on a programming project by just alt-tabbing when the game required no input from me. What am I missing?
"Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said he had not seen the details of Microsoft's giveaway but cautioned against assuming it was motivated only by pragmatism or a new spirit of cooperation."
I don't think there is much danger of that happening here;)
The more money the movie studios get, the more money that gets given to actors. More disposable income in an actors hand's means they will snort more coke. Buying more coke means drug dealers get more money, which means the cash goes into the black market. And if the government is to be believed, it will end up in the hands of terrorists.
Do your part for the War on Terror now, download some.avi files!
Bingo, you posted exactly the way I feel about AM2. I bought a 3200+ Athlon a year or so ago, with the intention that sometime after upgrading my Graphics card (which I have done) I would upgrade my CPU. Now that AM2 has been released, and moreso that the 939 chips have been ceremonially dumped, I do not feel as inclined to upgrade a machine which I now know is a dead-end architecture. I would prefer to save my money and upgrade to a Core 2 Duo system being that
a) Either way I will have to buy DDR2 ram and a new motherboard b) The Core 2 Duo performs better c) 939 chips are no longer being made d) As a bit of a fuck you to AMD for cutting short an upgrade path I thought would be longer than it is
Point d might be petty and cynical but fuck it, thats the way you vote in a capitalist society.
You need to look at factors such as advertising dollars when looking at a review objectively, as well. As an example, a friend of mine was managing a gaming store when one of the game company reps that was showing him their latest catalogue got a call on his mobile from one of the local gaming mags. The guy from the magazine informed him of their latest review of one of their games, and the score was not too flattering, something like 5/10. The rep said "Nah, pull the review then", which caused the mag to back-pedal and make a deal to give the game 7/10 but use the same text of the review.
Often you see big release games which don't live up to expectations in the public, one obvious example is Dues Ex 2. That game was an absolute turkey yet when it was released I saw several reviews calling it a classic with higher than 9/10 scores.
I was going to buy the latest Metallica album, then I realised that I could get all their film clips to be viewed in a blurry little window, with near-radio quality sound! Not to mention that a series of YouTube links doesn't take up valuable space on my CD rack! Chalk that up as one lost sale *cha-ching*
Now, when was the last time you upgraded your sound card? Probably never. Yet I do recall a time when decent sound was a big deal - I can still remember firs playing Doom with the chirping onboard speakers as a kid, and later being blown away when we got a new computer that had an actual sound card installed.
Actually, more recently than my video card. I bought a Creative X-Fi Platinum and the difference in sound quality is just incredible, compared to the on-board sound of my motherboard. To test it out we put on a Victor Wooten DVD with my amp (a high quality 20 year old german hi-fi system amp) and PA speakers cranked, and the bass tones were so loud and rich that the windows were shaking, without a hint of distortion. Through my Sennheiser HD-25 headphones the sound is just as good. I do agree about technology peaking, I have been sceptical about Blu-ray and HD-DVD for that reason, but sound cards are not a good example IMHO.
Once upon a time musicians used to get paid on a performance basis, not just sit on their arses and let their virtual recorded selves float around entertaining people. Same for playwrights, which I guess were the equivalent of a visual entertainment medium such as a movie or TV show. These days the creation of entertainment is seen as the initial investment, then the box office, DVD sales, rights to show the product on TV/Radio, international sales etc etc are the long list of ways that a company will try to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of the product. This is the reason that Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld are still making buckets of cash to this day, even though they have produced very little recently.
What it boils down to is an entertainment-based economy is fraught with danger. You have to either make your product that high quality (whether being the content itself, or the quality of the recording) or in that much quantity that copying it is more of a hassle or cost than buying it. People shouldn't take it upon themselves to take that which they haven't paid for, but the reality is that they will, unless a series is too big to download, or it is so good that they want to have a high quality version of it rather than a compressed one.
These days a lot of people do it hard, and with rising costs of home-ownership, petrol prices, and employers wanting to squeeze every last drop of productivity for their dollar, if someone has a choice to buy extra clothes for their children or buy a DVD, the necessities will win out. It doesn't make it right to take your entertainment for free, but if your industry isn't in a position of creating products that people need then its the risk they take, sadly. This is a big problem for a country such as America which has a high proportion of IP exports. A lot of the manufacturing base has been pushed off-shore, and it relies on entertainment for quite a lot of dosh. The FTA with Australia reflects this, with a huge proportion of it dedicated to IP.
The solution? Personally I think it could be limiting the supply, rather than putting restrictions on the product. Take Steam for example, every game that people play through it has been paid for. Maybe the answer for movies will be to wait until internet is at the point that high-speed streaming is possible, then make it so on-demand is the only way you can watch the movie in your home. Once it is, sell each viewing for sub current rental prices, a few dollars maybe. Music is a tough one, because sound is a small amount of data per minute of content. Maybe online live streaming of big concerts, as well as the traditional live tours. This won't work for studio created no-talent pop stars, but thats a good thing;)
Trying to say how violent a game is by how many minutes of 'violence' there is a game without ANY weighting to the context or impact of said violence is ridiculous.
Agreed. By her method, Manhunt would be classified as less violent than Pacman because you spend most of the game sneaking around.
Does he really expect us to believe that there is any possible way he could play the game and then say, "Actually, I was wrong... this game is just fine for our kids"? I'm under the impression that his crusade will pick on the tiniest detail, completely oblivious to bias and context.
Damn I wish I had mod points. It would have been some nice irony to mark your post as Redundant. Now I've done it, I'll get marked as redundant myself now:(
Honestly, Microsoft, why did you bother getting the license if you are going to completely gut the entire game world? All you do is annoy those of us who love it...and for people who don't know it, well why would they care about the Shadowrun name being on the game in the first place?
AFAIK When FASA went bust MS picked up the computer game licenses for all their games. It was more a case of "well since we own the license, why not do something with it?".
Earthdawn would make such a good 3d RPG or MMO, the magic system especially is just begging for it. It's a pity that MS will probably never do it, or if they do, probably wouldn't do it right.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very base level it is a web-based database of Contacts. It stores various information about these contacts, as well as the Account they belong to.
;)
On top of this there are several different modules that can be used with these contacts. The Sales module allows the user to store and create activities, eg emails can be sent within CRM and can then have the replies to that email automatically tracked in the database. Appointments can be set up which automatically synchronise with Outlook. Various opportunities and leads can also be stored, classified, shared between teams, and reallocated to other members of the organisation.
Then there is the Service module which can track and organise various resources of the company, organise knowledge base articles, and manage service calls.
Then there is a marketing module which can be used to organise marketing campaigns, either quick campaigns like sending out a newsletter to a group of the client base, all the way up to organising major events with trackable invitations, which also ties into the resouce management of the Service module.
The major strengths of the platform is its customisability and its interoperability with the rest of office. New tables can be created by someone with a decent knowledge of the product (with no coding) and it can be customised further through the SDK inside VS.NET.
I have been working with MSCRM since 1.2 came out (for a MS partner company) doing installations and customisations and the product has matured a lot since then. CRM 1.2 was quite workable but some parts were a dog's breakfast, particularily the outlook client. CRM 3.0 has seen the outlook client improve by miles (you can run it either in outlook with off-line synchronisation capabilities or through the browser client) but still the platform had some annoying bugs. The latest update rollup has fixed most of these issues making it quite a robust package.
Well, since you asked
I've often read spiels like this about Eve, and I have attempted to get into the game several times based on them. Yet I feel there is something about this game I just don't get. Maybe I didn't get far enough into it to get to the interesting parts, because 90% of the time I felt like I was playing a screensaver. There just seems to be so much downtime in the game where you are not doing anything. So much so that one time in particular I managed to get quite a bit of work done on a programming project by just alt-tabbing when the game required no input from me. What am I missing?
"Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said he had not seen the details of Microsoft's giveaway but cautioned against assuming it was motivated only by pragmatism or a new spirit of cooperation."
;)
I don't think there is much danger of that happening here
Is it just me or does this sound suspiciously like what Hitler was trying to achieve with his master race?
Mac users and PC users You work out which is which..
Hmmm... let me see... is it something to do with how many mouse buttons they are capable of using at once?
Reportedly, YouTube will retain its brand and all its 67 employees, including co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
They have just had 1.5 billion dollars land in their laps and they are staying in their old positions? Now that is dedication.
In Communist North Korea, Nuclear bombs test YOU!!!
The more money the movie studios get, the more money that gets given to actors. More disposable income in an actors hand's means they will snort more coke. Buying more coke means drug dealers get more money, which means the cash goes into the black market. And if the government is to be believed, it will end up in the hands of terrorists.
.avi files!
Do your part for the War on Terror now, download some
Bingo, you posted exactly the way I feel about AM2. I bought a 3200+ Athlon a year or so ago, with the intention that sometime after upgrading my Graphics card (which I have done) I would upgrade my CPU. Now that AM2 has been released, and moreso that the 939 chips have been ceremonially dumped, I do not feel as inclined to upgrade a machine which I now know is a dead-end architecture. I would prefer to save my money and upgrade to a Core 2 Duo system being that
a) Either way I will have to buy DDR2 ram and a new motherboard
b) The Core 2 Duo performs better
c) 939 chips are no longer being made
d) As a bit of a fuck you to AMD for cutting short an upgrade path I thought would be longer than it is
Point d might be petty and cynical but fuck it, thats the way you vote in a capitalist society.
You need to look at factors such as advertising dollars when looking at a review objectively, as well. As an example, a friend of mine was managing a gaming store when one of the game company reps that was showing him their latest catalogue got a call on his mobile from one of the local gaming mags. The guy from the magazine informed him of their latest review of one of their games, and the score was not too flattering, something like 5/10. The rep said "Nah, pull the review then", which caused the mag to back-pedal and make a deal to give the game 7/10 but use the same text of the review. Often you see big release games which don't live up to expectations in the public, one obvious example is Dues Ex 2. That game was an absolute turkey yet when it was released I saw several reviews calling it a classic with higher than 9/10 scores.
So now Vista has been compared to the Holocaust... Congratulations, your post just broke the Slashdot anti-MS record!
No choice isn't exactly true, you can choose Home or Professional.
;)
Or make your own customised install with nLite
I was going to buy the latest Metallica album, then I realised that I could get all their film clips to be viewed in a blurry little window, with near-radio quality sound! Not to mention that a series of YouTube links doesn't take up valuable space on my CD rack! Chalk that up as one lost sale *cha-ching*
Interesting side note regarding Steam... here in Australia the boxed copy of HL2 is AU$110 in EB Games, while on Steam it's a lot cheaper.
;)
There's your problem right there
Someone infect these machines with a virus that changes votes to Democrat. Those security holes would be fixed up quick-smart!
What? The particular game which I would have included if I made the list myself wasn't named? What an outrage!
fail to see why anyone is happy having rice with unintentional, random genetic changes (i.e. natural rice) and concerned over intentional changes.
Unintentional, random genetic changes aren't covered by a patent.
Quickly becoming a meme:
Only a terrorist wouldn't use Windows.
One man's linux zealot is another man's freedom fighter?
Now, when was the last time you upgraded your sound card? Probably never. Yet I do recall a time when decent sound was a big deal - I can still remember firs playing Doom with the chirping onboard speakers as a kid, and later being blown away when we got a new computer that had an actual sound card installed.
Actually, more recently than my video card. I bought a Creative X-Fi Platinum and the difference in sound quality is just incredible, compared to the on-board sound of my motherboard. To test it out we put on a Victor Wooten DVD with my amp (a high quality 20 year old german hi-fi system amp) and PA speakers cranked, and the bass tones were so loud and rich that the windows were shaking, without a hint of distortion. Through my Sennheiser HD-25 headphones the sound is just as good. I do agree about technology peaking, I have been sceptical about Blu-ray and HD-DVD for that reason, but sound cards are not a good example IMHO.
Once upon a time musicians used to get paid on a performance basis, not just sit on their arses and let their virtual recorded selves float around entertaining people. Same for playwrights, which I guess were the equivalent of a visual entertainment medium such as a movie or TV show. These days the creation of entertainment is seen as the initial investment, then the box office, DVD sales, rights to show the product on TV/Radio, international sales etc etc are the long list of ways that a company will try to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of the product. This is the reason that Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld are still making buckets of cash to this day, even though they have produced very little recently.
;)
What it boils down to is an entertainment-based economy is fraught with danger. You have to either make your product that high quality (whether being the content itself, or the quality of the recording) or in that much quantity that copying it is more of a hassle or cost than buying it. People shouldn't take it upon themselves to take that which they haven't paid for, but the reality is that they will, unless a series is too big to download, or it is so good that they want to have a high quality version of it rather than a compressed one.
These days a lot of people do it hard, and with rising costs of home-ownership, petrol prices, and employers wanting to squeeze every last drop of productivity for their dollar, if someone has a choice to buy extra clothes for their children or buy a DVD, the necessities will win out. It doesn't make it right to take your entertainment for free, but if your industry isn't in a position of creating products that people need then its the risk they take, sadly. This is a big problem for a country such as America which has a high proportion of IP exports. A lot of the manufacturing base has been pushed off-shore, and it relies on entertainment for quite a lot of dosh. The FTA with Australia reflects this, with a huge proportion of it dedicated to IP.
The solution? Personally I think it could be limiting the supply, rather than putting restrictions on the product. Take Steam for example, every game that people play through it has been paid for. Maybe the answer for movies will be to wait until internet is at the point that high-speed streaming is possible, then make it so on-demand is the only way you can watch the movie in your home. Once it is, sell each viewing for sub current rental prices, a few dollars maybe. Music is a tough one, because sound is a small amount of data per minute of content. Maybe online live streaming of big concerts, as well as the traditional live tours. This won't work for studio created no-talent pop stars, but thats a good thing
Trying to say how violent a game is by how many minutes of 'violence' there is a game without ANY weighting to the context or impact of said violence is ridiculous.
Agreed. By her method, Manhunt would be classified as less violent than Pacman because you spend most of the game sneaking around.
Does he really expect us to believe that there is any possible way he could play the game and then say, "Actually, I was wrong... this game is just fine for our kids"? I'm under the impression that his crusade will pick on the tiniest detail, completely oblivious to bias and context.
Damn I wish I had mod points. It would have been some nice irony to mark your post as Redundant. Now I've done it, I'll get marked as redundant myself now :(
Honestly, Microsoft, why did you bother getting the license if you are going to completely gut the entire game world? All you do is annoy those of us who love it...and for people who don't know it, well why would they care about the Shadowrun name being on the game in the first place?
AFAIK When FASA went bust MS picked up the computer game licenses for all their games. It was more a case of "well since we own the license, why not do something with it?".
Earthdawn would make such a good 3d RPG or MMO, the magic system especially is just begging for it. It's a pity that MS will probably never do it, or if they do, probably wouldn't do it right.
Oh man, a program that will let me run code in administrator mode... that would be sooooo sweet *cough*