Serious companies (even small ones) have some web-based (or sometimes desktop) system with an actual database for this stuff. We stopped keeping company inventory and such as floating files years ago.
Yeah, and pretty much every one of these I've ever seen in actual use has employees using excel in tandem with it.
The 'system' is the master copy, but Excel is used to gather, organize, and massage the data before it goes in. And reports get exported to excel to be massaged and charted and so forth.
Accountants use accounting software. Even more so in corporate environments.
Same situation as inventory. Excel is frequently used to gather, massage, etc data before it gets entered.
Excel is used to combine and manipulate reports exports. Compare scenarios, do ad hoc projections. Accounting systems are great for accounting but I've never seen an accounting system that was flexible enough to replace excel for planning and reporting.
Once every few years, maybe? That's far from being standard.
I don't know you, or what you do. I don't personally launch excel all that often either at my job. Although I was plotting some data from miscallenous sources in miscellaneous foramts in it a lot last month, before we settled on things, and now we've mostly switched to R.
But that aside, I've never run into a business yet, that didn't have its admin people heavily using office alongside the accounting and CRM and other systems.
Using a browser is way more standard (I've used one for most of the points you mention above).
Last week our marketing guy hosted a webex seminar; the 3rd party company that actually hosted it sent us the list of attendees (email, name, phone, etc) in excel, along with whether they'd opted into receive the company newsletter.
So, that's the information flow from the 3rd party company. An XLS spreadsheet. From there...
We filtered in Excel, on those who'd opted in to the newsletter and imported that to the 3rd party web based system we use to manage mail outs.
We forwarded a copy of the whole thing to the sales team, who imported the new people as contacts. (And they matched it against an export from the CRM system in Excel to identify which needed to be added and which were already in the system).
The CEO wanted to see the list of attendees, and asked for a copy of the excel sheet to review.
We might do a physical mailout followup, and if so will send an excel sheet to the printers to handle the mail merge and envelope stuffing...
I don't know what amazing company you work for where all this information flow never hits an Office Suite, but this is how its done in the real world everywhere I've ever been.
The reason home and student licensing works on the desktop is that businesses will be motivated to buy the more expensive corporate version to get outlook.
That WONT work on a platform that effectively COMES WITH OUTLOOK.
What differentiates the home and student version from the corporate version on an ios device? Nothing.
She doesn't have to ally with the Russians, all she has to do is refuse to lift a finger to facilitate some trade dispute; decide to prioritize meetings with diplomats from other countries, not bother to pursue some treaty or other the US thinks is important for it to have an impact.
Seriously. These are senior politicians, not teenagers.
Right. Teenagers aren't as corrupt.:-p
In all seriousness though, they are human beings like the rest of us. They remember favors, and they remember those that have embarrassed them. They may set aside grudges when politically necessary but will absolutely act on them when ever they can 'get away with it'.
how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could then understand the use of "Darmok" in its multitude of possible varying contexts?
Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.
Its also likely that any two individuals who spent time together would develop their own reference frame.
So. these sound like personal feelings and not a rational evaluation
I don't know how you can presume to weigh in whether or not whether I like someone is "rational" or not.
You realize that, without a centralized system, the social model would not exist, right?
Good riddance. I can be social without "the social model". Because I was participating on forums before facebook. And IRC. And usenet. And email.
And I'd take skype proprietary encryption over [...]
Microsoft can and does monitor the chat. They collect demographics and scan for keywords and build profiles. The ads are targeted. It may as well not be encrypted at all.
Every system on the internet is potentially insecure. Your dedicated server may have hardware backdoors installed. Your crypto software may be leaking details. Your CPU may be flawed in specific computations.
"potentially". "may". "may". "may".... vs "is".
The fact is, you control very little on a modern stack.
But I can firewall the modern stack, and monitor traffic, and if its communicating somewhere it shouldn't be I can see it, and I can block it, and challenge it.
I'll take my chances with bugs in openssh etc where at least the effort is to try to ensure its secure, vs skype, which isn't even slightly secure from Microsoft.
Well, you can do it easily with both SIP over VPN or IAX2, and Asterisk. Now you just need to convince people to use your server and install all the required software for it.
That's a substantial undertaking, and pretty much the opposite of "easily". And I've never seen an SIP client that handles maintaining conversations with multiple groups of people anything like skype does.
As far as it goes, it would be pretty trivial to break skype into an email model. Let anyone who wants run skype servers, interconnected to the rest. I could choose my 'skype provider' or run my own instead of it being microsoft or nothing.
Communications between me and my skype provider and other users on my skype provider would be limited to that provider.
This is all largely a solved problem. We can have a skype system without a centralized monolith we all have to trust* at the center of it.
And they don't deserve any trust, because they are actively engaging in precisely the sorts of things I don't want -- shoving ads down my throat, and harvesting profile information. If they just charged me a couple bucks and delivered a client that was designed to work for me instead of try and obnoxiously sell me shit, and didn't monitor the communications then I'd actually be inclined to trust them, and wouldn't object to the fact that all all it has is "proprietary encryption" and a central server.
If your enemies become neutral or allies, that's a bonus, but if your allies turn that's a nasty surprise.
Doubly nasty when they turn against you precisely because you were spying on them.
At least it won't be a surprise though... since you were spying on them, so you'll know its coming.
Allied countries should of course maintain tabs on each other, but it hardly needs to rise to the level of tapping your closest allies cell phones to be effective.
Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists?
You do realize the "terrorists" aren't some sort of "cartoon" villain right? They have pretty damned good reasons to be upset. Even I have sympathy for them.
What exactly do you think a 15-25 year old from Afghanistan has for a world view. Think about it. A 20 year old was FIVE years old when 9/11 took place. So for pretty much his entire living memory the US has been directly at war with them, killing their families, and friends.
How can one NOT have sympathy / empathy for their situation? If a foreign country had turned your homeland into a warzone for your entire life... you'd have to be willfully blind not to see where they were coming from.
"The veracity of this claim is inversely proportional to the veracity of your previous claim."
And?
"Try having a self-consistent view of reality for a change."
You corrected me. Its absurd to then systematically take the evolution of a set of beleifs and then triumphantly claim someone is internally inconsistent after convincing them to change their mind by contrasting the claim they started with to the one they ended with.
My view of reality is entirely consistent. Its just not the same view of reality I had an hour ago.
If only that were true, I can only conclude that you must be new here.
Your right of course that a shit ton of websites have been single platform / single browser over the years. But by and large the majority of the web has been cross-platform, and the situation today is better than its ever been.
Not completely incompatible, but would require a 3rd party holding keys that MS does not have access to. Difficult yes, but not impossible.
Impossible.
"[it] would require a 3rd party holding keys that MS does not have access to."
This is the part that can't work.
Think about it. You are accessing the content from a "web app" served by the very party you don't wish to trust. The web app gets its hand on the decryption key from the 3rd party, and can just send that up to the server.
Given that each time you visit the server you implicitly run the latest version of the web app, if they want your email they modify the webapp and wait for you to log in. And your sunk.
The only thing that would work would be if you had complete control over the web app, and self hosted it on your own servers. But that's equivalent to providing your own trusted mail client.
And if you are going to the trouble of hosting your own web based mail client, you may as well host your own mail too. (And then you keep their grubby hands of the headers / meta data too).
How about they build an encryption API right into their service? Encrypt the message locally before it ever goes to the network
What a great idea.
Oh, they don't want to do that. I see.
Probably because encrypting mail before it ever goes to the network and "webmail" you can check from anywhere with a web browser are fundamentally incompatible goals.
So Microsoft promises to not read your mail, while retaining the ability to easily do so whenever it's convenient for them. That makes me feel so much better.
That's as good as its ever going to get with hosted webmail. If you want better than that you need to handle the encryption yourself in the client, and the client needs to be something you fundamentally have control over and can trust.
Such a thing can certainly exist. E.g. PGP add-on for thunderbird maybe... but its 'ease of use' and convenience relative to 'hotmail' are worlds apart.
The point is that I agree with moving it to the left by default.
However, I agree with you entirely that it should be as easy as it ever was to put it back at the bottom. I agree with you entirely that the changes FORCED by unity are terrible.
I am ONLY arguing changing them changing default layout is sensible. And that implementing touch friendly stuff is sensible.
1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.
Yes, but by massively invading the privacy of people who genererally thought they were just sending messages to their friends instead of participating in this research. (sure the ToS and disclaimers were in place, and while they covered their legal asses, their ethics leave everything to be desired.)
2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.
How many pets have facebook accounts again? Actual people my ass.
3: They are excellent at geolocation.
In that people tell them where they are by various means (deliberate and inadvertently -- usually the latter, and then they know where you are.)
4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy"
er... no. Lots of people did that.
5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.
True? I assume. I wouldnt' know.
6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.
It works well for some stuff, yes.
7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.
Maybe. They are larger and motivated I'll give them that.
8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.
Sad but true.
9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
LOL. Check again. Several high profile hacks of various types.
10: FB is platform agnostic
??? Like pretty much any website. Ever.
So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.
Says anyone about any company on an upward trend.
And from the summary:
" they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'
I agree. I beleive facebook has the commitment and resources to solve the hard problems of VR. Namely: monetizing it effectively it with ads, and using the data of people using it to figure out how to sell them more crap.
"It's already been done for years, this isn't a foreign concept, have you not seen Office Home and Student for example?"
Its not relying on honesty or integrity or even DRM to prevent commercial use its relying on "missing a key application" nearly all business users require.
If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it
Understood, but there's little good reason for that. There should be several services with vast catalogs competing on service, and features, and all of them should have all the latest and most popular movies.
-- not your local rental store (if you even still have one),
If a blockbuster movie was recently released on video, it would be there. Period. It didn't matter whether it was Paramount or Warner Brothers. They had 40 copies of it. I wouldn't have to go to one store to find the latest Warner Brothers release, and an entirely different store to see a Paramount movie. And give up and buy the VHS tape of a 3rd blockbuster movie that apparently didn't get a DVD release at all.
Netflix doesn't work at all like that. Major block buster movies just never show up at all. Others show up and disappear at random and usually without notice. Still others are available... but not on netflix.
If I go to the local video store I KNOW they'll have a a few copies of the new Star Trek Into Darkness. I KNOW they'll have a pile of copies of Frozen. With Netflix I don't know. It might be there, it might be there tomorrow... it might never show up at all. No video store would sit around with there thumbs up there asses consistently completely missing 3 out 4 of the biggest movies released in any given year.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar,
Heh, I've taken some well deserved jibes over that.
I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it.
I readily admit I -don't- care about those awards; I don't watch the ceremonies, and I don't care what wins. I do however enjoy good movies, and it bothers me that lots of movies just don't show up -- and were' not talking oddball little movies that I happen to like but weren't a big deal. And this is where the references to the awards comes from: we're talking about movies that are a BIG DEAL to the mass consumer...and these aren't reliably showing up.
Can you imagine your local video store not having any copies of any of the Oscar winners for best picture from the last 5 years? Or out of the blue have some of them on the shelf for a week or three and then gone again never to return?
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates
I understand that. But its ridiculous. Can you imagine if iTunes was like that? Albums just 'phasing' in and out of availability at random, most of the biggest and most popular, never showing up at all. I also understand its not netflix's fault, that these are the terms they're being dealt by the rights holders... but its STILL RIDICULOUS.
So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine.
I have netflix. I like netflix. I agree its fantastic value. But at the same time it falls so far short of what a video streaming service really SHOULD be. The catalog should be growing, not rotating, and the most popular titles coming out that people want to see should reliably and predictably show up.
That's how the torrent scene works. So its clearly technically doable. And its where I go when netflix doesn't have what I want.
Netflix reminds me of superchannel really... tons of new movies every month, usually a few months behind theatre and DVD release... but if you just have superchannel after a while you start to realize you haven't seen half the movies your friends are talking about. Because 3 out of 4 really big movies never show up at all.
Superchannel used to be great value 15 years ago -- lot of good movies -- cheaper and more convenient then renting (read the guide, plan when to watch, or set the VCR, good times)... but it was still perpetually disappointing too. As big movie after big movie... just didn't show up.
I only have it installed because some of my classes at school require me to, but I noticed that when I'm not doing these assignments, I have only used it to create my resume.
I've never met any sort of admin person who could function without office. They need excel and word for literally everything they do all day long.
AND anyone who interacts with an admin person needs to be able to read, and often write to those files.
An inventory manager might send someone an excel sheet of inventory that is missing and needs to be located. Or an asset list that needs to be completed. Or a table of phones that were stolen.
An accountant uses Excel in all kinds of ways, and those documents need to be disseminated to management.
What do you think your companies policy manuals were written in? The ISO quality manual? Material Safety Data Sheets? The log sheet to record when the bathrooms were cleaned? Device Master Records? Customs declarations paperwork? Grant applications? Investment Prospectus? Meeting minutes? New Employee Orientation packages? Legal Contracts? Stock Option Grants? SEC Filings? Press Releases? Performance Reviews?
How many of us need to fill out an excel or word document to submit a timesheet, prepare a customer a quote, submit an expense report, request vacation time, fill out an order, prepare a project budget, estimate a job?
That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane
Its mostly a show. I know it. You know it. They know it. I've left oversize bottles in my bags lots of times. Half the time they miss them.
Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.
The Greater Toronto Area is nearly 8% muslims. If a planes destination is somewhere predominantly muslim, its pretty easy to be on a plane where they're the overwhelming majority.
Odds are there are far more muslims on a given plane leaving Toronto than there are punters who forgot about the 3oz bottle limit.
And if those planes are going anywhere predominantly "muslim", most of the passenger list might well be muslim.
They aren't exactly "rare", and they're virtually all perfectly regular people. Students, businessmen, tourists. I say there more actual active serial killers in the USA then actual Islamic terrorists.
Yes, all companies are evil. Bigger companies have the capacity to do more evil.
And while I have no objection to the usual "build a real product, sell that product to customers, make money" business model, even if it leads to evil, Facebook (and social in general) have a business model i abhor. So there's that too.
And to top if off, I dislike Zuckerberg intensely as a person, have no respect for him, and wish to do nothing to enrich him, while there are any number of other CEOs who I have nothing personally against, even though i know there companies have done some nasty stuff (Microsoft, Sony... for example). And still many more CEOs who are perfectly normal guys that I get along with just fine.
, it is also a way for me to connect with friends and colleagues from past companies, and often discuss technical stuff and what's happening in the world
I dislike the social business model. I am not antisocial. I avoid businesses that go the "free service but we try and profile you and sell that to someone else" in favor of businesses that say "this is a service, we charge $X for it and you are the customer", and above those I favor businesses that say "here is the service, run it on your own servers, and we'll sell you support.
There are instant messaging, forum tools, and other collaborative systems out there using the latter models and I'm happy to use them.
A tool is a tool.
Right.
What matters which brand produces it?
Not the brand, but what the tool is and does. Is it a secure two way messenger that I have complete control over? Or is it is an insecure system hosted by a 3rd party who actively monitors everything I do with it to try and profile me? Developed by a company that is more interested in "monetizing it" with ads then just treating ME as the customer.
I don't mind Microsoft owning skype because its microsoft. I don't like Microsoft owning skype because they are very actively turning the product from something I was already unsatisfied with (insecure, 3rd party, no control) into something I despise (all that, plus advertising, and blatant content mining)
The only reason I still use it is because I find the voice quality, and call connection reliability to be higher than the alternatives I've tried, the ease of having multiple 'group chats' in progress, and the seamless ability to jump from group chat to group voice. If I could find something else that did it better and had a business model I liked more, I'd switch.
A slightly less absurdist set of statistics would be:
What percentage of the accidents involved the car stereo/radio being on? If the number were 1 in 3 what conclusion would you draw from ~that~?
Or what percentage of accidents involved cars with passengers? If the number were 1 in 4 should we ban passengers? Clearly they are causing accidents, distracting drivers.
Or is it the reverse? Since 3 out of 4 accidents in that event do not involve cars with passengers is it clear that passengers actually reduce the likelihood of accidents and we should mandate passengers, acting as a 2nd set of eyes and ears.
Meh, I'd still rather it be whatsapp than facebook. I perceived them to be much smaller, even if still fairly big.
But for what its worth I've never had a whatsapp account nor an instagram one, nor a facebook one. I find nearly all internet "social" to be a monumental waste of time bundled with massive privacy invasion and avoid it pretty thoroughly.
I do have a skype account though, and would love to find an alternative to that too. Because the ads bug me, and the attachment now to microsoft bugs me.
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service.
I agree.
I'm simply pointing out that DESPITE that being the case, netflix has HUGE gaps in its library that mandate one go outside of it to fill.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to.
'regular TV' isn't an on-demand movie provider. There is a reason I've bought VCRs, then DVD players, and spent countless thousands on movie purchases and rentals.:)
In the meantime, I do want to see all the 'best movies'; so netflix not having scads of what most people think are the 'best movies' is a pretty big deal. Its not some internet wierdo saying Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies is the best movie ever made, and then getting bent out of shape its not on netflix... we're talking about the most influential, and highly rated movies and netflix having a smattering of them, missing more than its got.
iTunes at launch had some glaring gaps in the catalog - the Beatles, for example; but over 90% of what everyone was looking for was there.
The same isn't true of netflix. And its not just "new" stuff that's missing, which would be understandable. The big blockbusters, even the old ones, are largely missing.
Don't get me wrong, netflix is great, and a fantastic value. But I'd be extremely unhappy with it if it was the only place I watched movies from.
When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane?
Last year in fact, but that was also the first, and so far only time I've watched it; which is true, in my case, at least, for most movies -- which makes the breadth of the available library all that much more important.
Wizard of Oz
Bad choice. That's probably my wife's favorite so that one happens at least once a year. We watched it most recently a few days prior to watching Oz the Great and Powerful (also unavailable on netflix)
Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Thanks for that. It truly demonstrates how little I pay to that particular set of awards.:) My point was to create criteria to generate a list a list of arguably 'good movies' and then compare that to what you can get on netflix. I selected 'awarded' movies to try and emphasize that the movies netflix is missing aren't merely my 'slashdot nerd eclectic tastes', but movies that would rank as 'must see' on a LOT of peoples lists... whether its the Oscars or Sundance or top ranked movies on sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes by critics or consumers.
You're claiming that the newer paradigms are better for large screens, but to support that you're actually agreeing that the new paradigms are designed to overcome problems on SMALL screens
The shift of the taskbar to the left is due to *wide* screens not *small* screens.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious companies (even small ones) have some web-based (or sometimes desktop) system with an actual database for this stuff. We stopped keeping company inventory and such as floating files years ago.
Yeah, and pretty much every one of these I've ever seen in actual use has employees using excel in tandem with it.
The 'system' is the master copy, but Excel is used to gather, organize, and massage the data before it goes in. And reports get exported to excel to be massaged and charted and so forth.
Accountants use accounting software. Even more so in corporate environments.
Same situation as inventory. Excel is frequently used to gather, massage, etc data before it gets entered.
Excel is used to combine and manipulate reports exports. Compare scenarios, do ad hoc projections. Accounting systems are great for accounting but I've never seen an accounting system that was flexible enough to replace excel for planning and reporting.
Once every few years, maybe? That's far from being standard.
I don't know you, or what you do. I don't personally launch excel all that often either at my job. Although I was plotting some data from miscallenous sources in miscellaneous foramts in it a lot last month, before we settled on things, and now we've mostly switched to R.
But that aside, I've never run into a business yet, that didn't have its admin people heavily using office alongside the accounting and CRM and other systems.
Using a browser is way more standard (I've used one for most of the points you mention above).
Last week our marketing guy hosted a webex seminar; the 3rd party company that actually hosted it sent us the list of attendees (email, name, phone, etc) in excel, along with whether they'd opted into receive the company newsletter.
So, that's the information flow from the 3rd party company. An XLS spreadsheet. From there...
We filtered in Excel, on those who'd opted in to the newsletter and imported that to the 3rd party web based system we use to manage mail outs.
We forwarded a copy of the whole thing to the sales team, who imported the new people as contacts. (And they matched it against an export from the CRM system in Excel to identify which needed to be added and which were already in the system).
The CEO wanted to see the list of attendees, and asked for a copy of the excel sheet to review.
We might do a physical mailout followup, and if so will send an excel sheet to the printers to handle the mail merge and envelope stuffing...
I don't know what amazing company you work for where all this information flow never hits an Office Suite, but this is how its done in the real world everywhere I've ever been.
Which is precisely why you DONT get it.
The reason home and student licensing works on the desktop is that businesses will be motivated to buy the more expensive corporate version to get outlook.
That WONT work on a platform that effectively COMES WITH OUTLOOK.
What differentiates the home and student version from the corporate version on an ios device? Nothing.
She doesn't have to ally with the Russians, all she has to do is refuse to lift a finger to facilitate some trade dispute; decide to prioritize meetings with diplomats from other countries, not bother to pursue some treaty or other the US thinks is important for it to have an impact.
Seriously. These are senior politicians, not teenagers.
Right. Teenagers aren't as corrupt. :-p
In all seriousness though, they are human beings like the rest of us. They remember favors, and they remember those that have embarrassed them. They may set aside grudges when politically necessary but will absolutely act on them when ever they can 'get away with it'.
ios doesn't need outlook, it's already got contact, calendar, and email sync to exchange.
how the devil did those people ever learn to talk? How did they learn who Darmok was, so they they could then understand the use of "Darmok" in its multitude of possible varying contexts?
Re-enactments and recordings of those events in the form of TV, plays, and movies.
Its also likely that any two individuals who spent time together would develop their own reference frame.
So. these sound like personal feelings and not a rational evaluation
I don't know how you can presume to weigh in whether or not whether I like someone is "rational" or not.
You realize that, without a centralized system, the social model would not exist, right?
Good riddance. I can be social without "the social model". Because I was participating on forums before facebook. And IRC. And usenet. And email.
And I'd take skype proprietary encryption over [...]
Microsoft can and does monitor the chat. They collect demographics and scan for keywords and build profiles. The ads are targeted. It may as well not be encrypted at all.
Every system on the internet is potentially insecure. Your dedicated server may have hardware backdoors installed. Your crypto software may be leaking details. Your CPU may be flawed in specific computations.
"potentially". "may". "may". "may".... vs "is".
The fact is, you control very little on a modern stack.
But I can firewall the modern stack, and monitor traffic, and if its communicating somewhere it shouldn't be I can see it, and I can block it, and challenge it.
I'll take my chances with bugs in openssh etc where at least the effort is to try to ensure its secure, vs skype, which isn't even slightly secure from Microsoft.
Well, you can do it easily with both SIP over VPN or IAX2, and Asterisk. Now you just need to convince people to use your server and install all the required software for it.
That's a substantial undertaking, and pretty much the opposite of "easily". And I've never seen an SIP client that handles maintaining conversations with multiple groups of people anything like skype does.
As far as it goes, it would be pretty trivial to break skype into an email model. Let anyone who wants run skype servers, interconnected to the rest. I could choose my 'skype provider' or run my own instead of it being microsoft or nothing.
Communications between me and my skype provider and other users on my skype provider would be limited to that provider.
This is all largely a solved problem. We can have a skype system without a centralized monolith we all have to trust* at the center of it.
And they don't deserve any trust, because they are actively engaging in precisely the sorts of things I don't want -- shoving ads down my throat, and harvesting profile information. If they just charged me a couple bucks and delivered a client that was designed to work for me instead of try and obnoxiously sell me shit, and didn't monitor the communications then I'd actually be inclined to trust them, and wouldn't object to the fact that all all it has is "proprietary encryption" and a central server.
If your enemies become neutral or allies, that's a bonus, but if your allies turn that's a nasty surprise.
Doubly nasty when they turn against you precisely because you were spying on them.
At least it won't be a surprise though... since you were spying on them, so you'll know its coming.
Allied countries should of course maintain tabs on each other, but it hardly needs to rise to the level of tapping your closest allies cell phones to be effective.
Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists?
You do realize the "terrorists" aren't some sort of "cartoon" villain right? They have pretty damned good reasons to be upset. Even I have sympathy for them.
What exactly do you think a 15-25 year old from Afghanistan has for a world view. Think about it. A 20 year old was FIVE years old when 9/11 took place. So for pretty much his entire living memory the US has been directly at war with them, killing their families, and friends.
How can one NOT have sympathy / empathy for their situation? If a foreign country had turned your homeland into a warzone for your entire life... you'd have to be willfully blind not to see where they were coming from.
"The veracity of this claim is inversely proportional to the veracity of your previous claim."
And?
"Try having a self-consistent view of reality for a change."
You corrected me. Its absurd to then systematically take the evolution of a set of beleifs and then triumphantly claim someone is internally inconsistent after convincing them to change their mind by contrasting the claim they started with to the one they ended with.
My view of reality is entirely consistent. Its just not the same view of reality I had an hour ago.
If only that were true, I can only conclude that you must be new here.
Your right of course that a shit ton of websites have been single platform / single browser over the years. But by and large the majority of the web has been cross-platform, and the situation today is better than its ever been.
Not completely incompatible, but would require a 3rd party holding keys that MS does not have access to. Difficult yes, but not impossible.
Impossible.
"[it] would require a 3rd party holding keys that MS does not have access to."
This is the part that can't work.
Think about it. You are accessing the content from a "web app" served by the very party you don't wish to trust. The web app gets its hand on the decryption key from the 3rd party, and can just send that up to the server.
Given that each time you visit the server you implicitly run the latest version of the web app, if they want your email they modify the webapp and wait for you to log in. And your sunk.
The only thing that would work would be if you had complete control over the web app, and self hosted it on your own servers. But that's equivalent to providing your own trusted mail client.
And if you are going to the trouble of hosting your own web based mail client, you may as well host your own mail too. (And then you keep their grubby hands of the headers / meta data too).
How about they build an encryption API right into their service? Encrypt the message locally before it ever goes to the network
What a great idea.
Oh, they don't want to do that. I see.
Probably because encrypting mail before it ever goes to the network and "webmail" you can check from anywhere with a web browser are fundamentally incompatible goals.
So Microsoft promises to not read your mail, while retaining the ability to easily do so whenever it's convenient for them. That makes me feel so much better.
That's as good as its ever going to get with hosted webmail. If you want better than that you need to handle the encryption yourself in the client, and the client needs to be something you fundamentally have control over and can trust.
Such a thing can certainly exist. E.g. PGP add-on for thunderbird maybe... but its 'ease of use' and convenience relative to 'hotmail' are worlds apart.
The point is that I agree with moving it to the left by default.
However, I agree with you entirely that it should be as easy as it ever was to put it back at the bottom. I agree with you entirely that the changes FORCED by unity are terrible.
I am ONLY arguing changing them changing default layout is sensible. And that implementing touch friendly stuff is sensible.
But forcing it? 100% Idiotic.
1: They have done more for biometric security and automated facial recognition than virtually any other company out there.
Yes, but by massively invading the privacy of people who genererally thought they were just sending messages to their friends instead of participating in this research. (sure the ToS and disclaimers were in place, and while they covered their legal asses, their ethics leave everything to be desired.)
2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.
How many pets have facebook accounts again? Actual people my ass.
3: They are excellent at geolocation.
In that people tell them where they are by various means (deliberate and inadvertently -- usually the latter, and then they know where you are.)
4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy"
er... no. Lots of people did that.
5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.
True? I assume. I wouldnt' know.
6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what. I've used it to propagate info for a non-profit gathering... and attendance doubled.
It works well for some stuff, yes.
7: FB is one of the few enterprises that can actually get btrfs from an early beta state to a finished product that can handle production data. Without Facebook, btrfs would probably spend another five years being semi-ignored.
Maybe. They are larger and motivated I'll give them that.
8: FB is one of the few Internet based companies, who, a year after IPO, has stock prices higher than they were when hitting the market and still solid.
Sad but true.
9: FB has very tight security. You never see a note about Facebook being hacked, and in security, no news is good news.
LOL. Check again. Several high profile hacks of various types.
10: FB is platform agnostic
???
Like pretty much any website. Ever.
So, even though people bag FB, it is one of the smartest-run businesses on the face of the planet.
Says anyone about any company on an upward trend.
And from the summary:
" they have the engineering, resources and long-term commitment 'to solve the hard problems of VR.'
I agree. I beleive facebook has the commitment and resources to solve the hard problems of VR. Namely: monetizing it effectively it with ads, and using the data of people using it to figure out how to sell them more crap.
Mozilla owns the Firefox brand, not the code. Hence Iceweasel etc.
"It's already been done for years, this isn't a foreign concept, have you not seen Office Home and Student for example?"
Its not relying on honesty or integrity or even DRM to prevent commercial use its relying on "missing a key application" nearly all business users require.
"Office Home and Student" lacks Outlook.
If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it
Understood, but there's little good reason for that. There should be several services with vast catalogs competing on service, and features, and all of them should have all the latest and most popular movies.
-- not your local rental store (if you even still have one),
If a blockbuster movie was recently released on video, it would be there. Period. It didn't matter whether it was Paramount or Warner Brothers. They had 40 copies of it. I wouldn't have to go to one store to find the latest Warner Brothers release, and an entirely different store to see a Paramount movie. And give up and buy the VHS tape of a 3rd blockbuster movie that apparently didn't get a DVD release at all.
Netflix doesn't work at all like that. Major block buster movies just never show up at all. Others show up and disappear at random and usually without notice. Still others are available... but not on netflix.
If I go to the local video store I KNOW they'll have a a few copies of the new Star Trek Into Darkness. I KNOW they'll have a pile of copies of Frozen. With Netflix I don't know. It might be there, it might be there tomorrow... it might never show up at all. No video store would sit around with there thumbs up there asses consistently completely missing 3 out 4 of the biggest movies released in any given year.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar,
Heh, I've taken some well deserved jibes over that.
I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it.
I readily admit I -don't- care about those awards; I don't watch the ceremonies, and I don't care what wins. I do however enjoy good movies, and it bothers me that lots of movies just don't show up -- and were' not talking oddball little movies that I happen to like but weren't a big deal. And this is where the references to the awards comes from: we're talking about movies that are a BIG DEAL to the mass consumer...and these aren't reliably showing up.
Can you imagine your local video store not having any copies of any of the Oscar winners for best picture from the last 5 years? Or out of the blue have some of them on the shelf for a week or three and then gone again never to return?
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates
I understand that. But its ridiculous. Can you imagine if iTunes was like that? Albums just 'phasing' in and out of availability at random, most of the biggest and most popular, never showing up at all. I also understand its not netflix's fault, that these are the terms they're being dealt by the rights holders... but its STILL RIDICULOUS.
So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine.
I have netflix. I like netflix. I agree its fantastic value. But at the same time it falls so far short of what a video streaming service really SHOULD be. The catalog should be growing, not rotating, and the most popular titles coming out that people want to see should reliably and predictably show up.
That's how the torrent scene works. So its clearly technically doable. And its where I go when netflix doesn't have what I want.
Netflix reminds me of superchannel really... tons of new movies every month, usually a few months behind theatre and DVD release... but if you just have superchannel after a while you start to realize you haven't seen half the movies your friends are talking about. Because 3 out of 4 really big movies never show up at all.
Superchannel used to be great value 15 years ago -- lot of good movies -- cheaper and more convenient then renting (read the guide, plan when to watch, or set the VCR, good times)... but it was still perpetually disappointing too. As big movie after big movie... just didn't show up.
That's netflix.
I only have it installed because some of my classes at school require me to, but I noticed that when I'm not doing these assignments, I have only used it to create my resume.
I've never met any sort of admin person who could function without office. They need excel and word for literally everything they do all day long.
AND anyone who interacts with an admin person needs to be able to read, and often write to those files.
An inventory manager might send someone an excel sheet of inventory that is missing and needs to be located. Or an asset list that needs to be completed. Or a table of phones that were stolen.
An accountant uses Excel in all kinds of ways, and those documents need to be disseminated to management.
What do you think your companies policy manuals were written in? The ISO quality manual? Material Safety Data Sheets? The log sheet to record when the bathrooms were cleaned? Device Master Records? Customs declarations paperwork? Grant applications? Investment Prospectus? Meeting minutes? New Employee Orientation packages? Legal Contracts? Stock Option Grants? SEC Filings? Press Releases? Performance Reviews?
How many of us need to fill out an excel or word document to submit a timesheet, prepare a customer a quote, submit an expense report, request vacation time, fill out an order, prepare a project budget, estimate a job?
I have only used it to create my resume.
Yeah, not everybody is you.
That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane
Its mostly a show. I know it. You know it. They know it. I've left oversize bottles in my bags lots of times. Half the time they miss them.
Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.
The Greater Toronto Area is nearly 8% muslims. If a planes destination is somewhere predominantly muslim, its pretty easy to be on a plane where they're the overwhelming majority.
Odds are there are far more muslims on a given plane leaving Toronto than there are punters who forgot about the 3oz bottle limit.
And if those planes are going anywhere predominantly "muslim", most of the passenger list might well be muslim.
They aren't exactly "rare", and they're virtually all perfectly regular people. Students, businessmen, tourists. I say there more actual active serial killers in the USA then actual Islamic terrorists.
all companies are evil in some way or another.
Yes, all companies are evil. Bigger companies have the capacity to do more evil.
And while I have no objection to the usual "build a real product, sell that product to customers, make money" business model, even if it leads to evil, Facebook (and social in general) have a business model i abhor. So there's that too.
And to top if off, I dislike Zuckerberg intensely as a person, have no respect for him, and wish to do nothing to enrich him, while there are any number of other CEOs who I have nothing personally against, even though i know there companies have done some nasty stuff (Microsoft, Sony... for example). And still many more CEOs who are perfectly normal guys that I get along with just fine.
, it is also a way for me to connect with friends and colleagues from past companies, and often discuss technical stuff and what's happening in the world
I dislike the social business model. I am not antisocial. I avoid businesses that go the "free service but we try and profile you and sell that to someone else" in favor of businesses that say "this is a service, we charge $X for it and you are the customer", and above those I favor businesses that say "here is the service, run it on your own servers, and we'll sell you support.
There are instant messaging, forum tools, and other collaborative systems out there using the latter models and I'm happy to use them.
A tool is a tool.
Right.
What matters which brand produces it?
Not the brand, but what the tool is and does. Is it a secure two way messenger that I have complete control over? Or is it is an insecure system hosted by a 3rd party who actively monitors everything I do with it to try and profile me? Developed by a company that is more interested in "monetizing it" with ads then just treating ME as the customer.
I don't mind Microsoft owning skype because its microsoft. I don't like Microsoft owning skype because they are very actively turning the product from something I was already unsatisfied with (insecure, 3rd party, no control) into something I despise (all that, plus advertising, and blatant content mining)
The only reason I still use it is because I find the voice quality, and call connection reliability to be higher than the alternatives I've tried, the ease of having multiple 'group chats' in progress, and the seamless ability to jump from group chat to group voice. If I could find something else that did it better and had a business model I liked more, I'd switch.
A slightly less absurdist set of statistics would be:
What percentage of the accidents involved the car stereo/radio being on? If the number were 1 in 3 what conclusion would you draw from ~that~?
Or what percentage of accidents involved cars with passengers? If the number were 1 in 4 should we ban passengers? Clearly they are causing accidents, distracting drivers.
Or is it the reverse? Since 3 out of 4 accidents in that event do not involve cars with passengers is it clear that passengers actually reduce the likelihood of accidents and we should mandate passengers, acting as a 2nd set of eyes and ears.
When I search for them:
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is unavailable to stream "
"The Motorcycle Diaries is unavailable to stream "
I'd post screenshots if you really doubt me... maybe they are available where you are?
Meh, I'd still rather it be whatsapp than facebook. I perceived them to be much smaller, even if still fairly big.
But for what its worth I've never had a whatsapp account nor an instagram one, nor a facebook one. I find nearly all internet "social" to be a monumental waste of time bundled with massive privacy invasion and avoid it pretty thoroughly.
I do have a skype account though, and would love to find an alternative to that too. Because the ads bug me, and the attachment now to microsoft bugs me.
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service.
I agree.
I'm simply pointing out that DESPITE that being the case, netflix has HUGE gaps in its library that mandate one go outside of it to fill.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to.
'regular TV' isn't an on-demand movie provider. There is a reason I've bought VCRs, then DVD players, and spent countless thousands on movie purchases and rentals. :)
In the meantime, I do want to see all the 'best movies'; so netflix not having scads of what most people think are the 'best movies' is a pretty big deal. Its not some internet wierdo saying Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies is the best movie ever made, and then getting bent out of shape its not on netflix... we're talking about the most influential, and highly rated movies and netflix having a smattering of them, missing more than its got.
iTunes at launch had some glaring gaps in the catalog - the Beatles, for example; but over 90% of what everyone was looking for was there.
The same isn't true of netflix. And its not just "new" stuff that's missing, which would be understandable. The big blockbusters, even the old ones, are largely missing.
Don't get me wrong, netflix is great, and a fantastic value. But I'd be extremely unhappy with it if it was the only place I watched movies from.
When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane?
Last year in fact, but that was also the first, and so far only time I've watched it; which is true, in my case, at least, for most movies -- which makes the breadth of the available library all that much more important.
Wizard of Oz
Bad choice. That's probably my wife's favorite so that one happens at least once a year. We watched it most recently a few days prior to watching Oz the Great and Powerful (also unavailable on netflix)
Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Thanks for that. It truly demonstrates how little I pay to that particular set of awards. :) My point was to create criteria to generate a list a list of arguably 'good movies' and then compare that to what you can get on netflix. I selected 'awarded' movies to try and emphasize that the movies netflix is missing aren't merely my 'slashdot nerd eclectic tastes', but movies that would rank as 'must see' on a LOT of peoples lists... whether its the Oscars or Sundance or top ranked movies on sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes by critics or consumers.
You're claiming that the newer paradigms are better for large screens, but to support that you're actually agreeing that the new paradigms are designed to overcome problems on SMALL screens
The shift of the taskbar to the left is due to *wide* screens not *small* screens.