or actually getting your software upgraded more often then once every 5 years.
Oh, I love this. When the new MS Office release is discussed, everyone is saying each new release is released just to force people to spend money on an upgrade. Some laughers actually suggested that Office97 was better than subsequent releases. For some reason, when MS doesn't upgrade as frequently, that's all wrong too.
...you really should lobby your local law makers to make that illegal. It's really an unneeded way to create accidents. Granted, almost all of those accidents will be minor fender benders, but still...
I'll give you Excel but keep in mind that Excel was one of Microsoft's first applications written well before the corruption.
Well, Excel was one in a long line of ripoffs of VisiCalc and was nothing special in the beginning. It didn't become really good until somwhere around Office97, and it's the last few versions that are outstanding.
With MS, there is no such thing as "before the corruption". They used to be a company that delivered crappy products, but some 12 years ago they started massive usability testing that improved some of the products immensely. That was what propelled Excel from an also-ran into the best and most used program it is today.
The usability improvements have also been very large on Windows, but, unfortunately, on an OS, stability and performance also counts, and there they have been less successful.
As for SQL Server, I was under the impression that both 2K and 2K5 were fairly large rewrites. Those are also good products where MS people deserve some credit. Nowadays, most DBs have administration tools that are usable, but Enterprise Manager really was one of the first of its kind, and miles ahead of Oracle.
Tell me again why it shouldn't make anyone's top 50 list of stupid business jargon?
Because, contrary to the saying, on that list it's not so lonely at the top. It's pretty darn crowded.
On a more serious note, BI isn't exactly "reporting", it's "reporting on an enterprise scale" (except for the fact that "enterprise" really is a word that deserves to be on that top 50 list).
I'm not sure if what you are trying to say is that the term doesn't exist since that Wikipedia artivcle didn't exist, or if you just made an honest mistake, but the correct link is here. (I haven't read it, so I don't know if the article is any good.)
It used to be called "reporting", but now it is actually possible to get it work in a way that adds value to real companies. Please note "possible", though. For every successful implementation there are as usual dozens of failed ones.
But the meaing and defnition is pretty widely accepted and agreed upon, and in common use. It shouldn't make anyone's top 50 list of stupid business jargon anymore.
But they still have at least 3 different initiative that I know of that provide similar functionality at different scales...
Actually, for BI solutions different scales almost certainly requires different products. This is also true for accounting, where SAP is not an option for a company with 30 employees, but that company's accounting system of choice isn't an option for a Fortune 100 company either.
That said, MS has a pretty bad track record here, so I'm not too convinced they will deliver well in any of their initiatives...
Sometimes you just have to wonder if GM actually invents anything on their own these days. Their own flagship products, cars and trucks have been in maintenance now for how long? 80 years?
Suggesting that the changes to the Office suit is just "maintenance" seems a bit disingenious. Much like cars today are much better than cars from 30 years ago, Office and Visual Studio have improved tremendously. (For Windows the results are less impressive, especially considering the resources they have spent.)
My feeling is that this is a swipe at Siebel/Oracle/SAP/whoever
This is more of a threat to "the big three" of BusinessObjects, Cognos and Hyperion. ProClarity is in the low end of the scale of BI vendors, but in a lot of instances that's a pretty good place to be.
Implementing good BI solutions is pretty darn hard, and comparable in effort, cost and possible benefits to implementing SAP. That means that it can be a life saver for a company, but more often it's a huge burden after a failed implementation.
Sometimes a better way is to do things on a smaller scale, and this is where low end BI solutions definitely have a place. Unlike accounting, which just creates a huge mess if every department has their own system, every department can have their own BI systems. It's not ideal, but too big a scope has killed many a project (and even some companies).
If MS integrates ProClarity, their new CRM effort and an accounting system (Axapta?) in a easy to setup and use way, they will get a huge grip on the market for "not quite enterprise systems" for small to mid sized companies. (Un?)fortunately, doing that will prove extremely difficult.
anyone have any idea what a 'performance management system' is? seriously, it feels like the 80's again with all this stupid management jargon.
It's not quite that bad. A proper name is "performance measurement", because that's what it is, and measuring performance makes a lot of sense.
A lot of the/. crowd will probably now come in to give horror stories about terrible measurement systems they have encountered as developers, so let me say that I agree that I haven't seen anything impressive there.
That said, there are a lot of businesses that can and will benefit from good performance measurement. Excellent examples are anything to do with logistics and bulk sales.
And finally, having the measures will not automatically cure all ills, but that's not the point. The point is the opposite: not having the measurements will almost certainly guarantee incorrect actions.
How is the green party not a middle in the road party when 44% of the parliament seats are currently held by parties that the 40% social democratic party find even more difficult to cooperate with, than with the greens?
Sorry, but how does that follow? All it takes is for the Greens to be closer to the socialists than what the right wing parties are. This means that their cooperation signify only closeness, not direction.
By your logic, the left party would also be a middle of the road party, which they clearly are not.
I absolutely agree with everything you say. But I don't think you answered my question.
I was arguning that saying "x% of the population does y, so it shouldn't be illegal" is nonsensical. If you want to allow higher speeds because it is more important to come home quickly than alive, you are welcome. This *is* obviously important to everyone, or speed limits would be 15 mph and almost no one would die in traffic. So somewhere there is a trade off between time and lives (or maybe not, such as on the Autobahn in Germany, but even they have speed limits outside of some designated highways.)
Similarily, if 20% of the population pirate music, that's a crappy reason to legalize it. That doesn't imply that there are no other reasons to legalize it, of course.
You can't, no one can, and no one will EVER be able. Chaos rules. Therefor, meteorology is of limited use.
This is completely wrong on so many counts. Knowing about the weather saves millions of lives and improves our everyday world tremendously. Without it, you couldn't run energy systems. Or airlines the way they run today. Or hundreds of other things.
My question is not to advocate the teaching of intelligent design, it is to say that science stick to covering ground where it is USEFUL, and to do otherwise undermines the rest of science.
Except no one has any clue about what is useful in advance! Take astronomy as a great example. What good is all that star gazing to anyone? Well, without it Einstein wouldn't have had any data to suggest that Newtonian physics were incorrect, and today, a hundred years later, there are huge amounts of technologies that use relativity.
Besides, people just want to know stuff because, well, it's a human drive. Do you suggest that we should scrap history in school as well? No one can change it, so what use is it?
Evolution is an interesting story, but is it useful? If you can't predict speciation, you can't control it, so at the end of the day you have a story about the origins of life but can't do anything with it. How's that really any different from the FSM?
Studying evolution taught as a lot about genetics and diseases. Without it we would not have had GMO's. Maybe you think that's a good thing, but you can't deny the fact that it matters.
I am saying that there needs to be some other label for evolution besides "science", because it's not.
No, you need to make up a word for "science that I can currently think of a use for". We all have science, we know what it is and what it isn't. Just because you think it would be nice if it meant something else doesn't make it so.
They may not have gotten everything, but they did get an incredible lot, and in particular in areas where they are in the minority opinion.
They did get the congestion fees in Stockholm. It's their energy politics that are being implemented. The four biggest parties in Sweden are more or less pro nuclear power, the three smallest against it, and they run the show there.
If they were a middle of the road party, it would be OK for them to have the amount of influence they have, but unfortunately they are not.
The limit is.02, which basically means you can't have one beer and safely drive a half an hour later.
Actually, it's not the law that makes you unable to drink a beer and drive as well as before, it's the alcohol. The law just makes it illegal to drive while being impaired.
No, one beer won't turn you into the worst driver on earth, but it *will* turn you into a worse driver than you would otherwise be. That should be enough to keep you off the streets, IMHO. (On the other hand, I do admit to not having a driver's license...)
Arguably China is currently undergoing an economic revolution, at least in part, because its weak intellectual property laws allow it to copy western technology with few consequencies. Although I'm sure that will change as soon as they have something worth copying.
Weak IP laws are a great way for a backwards country to catch up. There are a bunch of examples of that throughout history, China being a current and good one.
The question is what would happen if it was abolished in the leading countries. That's not at all as obvious.
Finally, the comments have mixed patents and copyright in this thread, which just confuses everyone. It's not at all a given that they should be treated alike (obviously, since they are treated differently today).
It won't happen. 4% nationwide is a huge barrier, and it's a rare thing indeed for a party to be able to.
Agreed on the first party. However, no less than three times in the last 20 years have we seen new parties enter the parliament in Sweden, so it certainly can be done. However, the electorate they pander to must be broader.
These parties made it previously: The green party (green fundementalists), the christian democrats (religious fundamentalists), "new democracy" (racists). All three areas are broad enough to attract large groups of voters. Thus the "feministic initiative", FI (feministic fundamentalists) has at least some chance.
As a side note on Swedish politics: the FI party is lead by an alcoholic former leader for the communist party who was caught cheating with her taxes. If she manages to enter parliament on her latest platform, all of the stupid, ignorant and biased things americans say about Swedes will suddenly be true...
You *can* read into that that they disapprove of the Pirate Bay. On the other hand, Rickard also mentions that non-commercial sharing should never be prohibited by copyright, and that criminalising (more than) 20% of your voters is a bad idea - not just for politicians, but also for society as a whole.
I have never understood that argument. More people in Sweden are speeding while drivning their cars than are pirating stuff while using their computers. Would that be a good reason to abolish speed limits?
This is of course complete and utter baloney. Would you, dear Sir, be so kind as to tell me what the weather will be three weeks from now?
Of course you can't, which just goes to show that metheorology is a fraud, whereas "Intelligent Weather" (IW) should be taught in schools.
Just because a system is chaotic (in the scientific sense that small changes in input creates large changes in output, not in the general "disorganised" sense) doesn't mean scientific theories describing it is "crap".
Slashdot Mirror
I really think we should all switch to saying "natural oil" and "fossil gas".
Oh, I love this. When the new MS Office release is discussed, everyone is saying each new release is released just to force people to spend money on an upgrade. Some laughers actually suggested that Office97 was better than subsequent releases. For some reason, when MS doesn't upgrade as frequently, that's all wrong too.
I love the smell of bias in the morning...
Well, Excel was one in a long line of ripoffs of VisiCalc and was nothing special in the beginning. It didn't become really good until somwhere around Office97, and it's the last few versions that are outstanding.
With MS, there is no such thing as "before the corruption". They used to be a company that delivered crappy products, but some 12 years ago they started massive usability testing that improved some of the products immensely. That was what propelled Excel from an also-ran into the best and most used program it is today.
The usability improvements have also been very large on Windows, but, unfortunately, on an OS, stability and performance also counts, and there they have been less successful.
As for SQL Server, I was under the impression that both 2K and 2K5 were fairly large rewrites. Those are also good products where MS people deserve some credit. Nowadays, most DBs have administration tools that are usable, but Enterprise Manager really was one of the first of its kind, and miles ahead of Oracle.
Because, contrary to the saying, on that list it's not so lonely at the top. It's pretty darn crowded.
On a more serious note, BI isn't exactly "reporting", it's "reporting on an enterprise scale" (except for the fact that "enterprise" really is a word that deserves to be on that top 50 list).
I'm not sure if what you are trying to say is that the term doesn't exist since that Wikipedia artivcle didn't exist, or if you just made an honest mistake, but the correct link is here. (I haven't read it, so I don't know if the article is any good.)
It used to be called "reporting", but now it is actually possible to get it work in a way that adds value to real companies. Please note "possible", though. For every successful implementation there are as usual dozens of failed ones.
But the meaing and defnition is pretty widely accepted and agreed upon, and in common use. It shouldn't make anyone's top 50 list of stupid business jargon anymore.
Actually, for BI solutions different scales almost certainly requires different products. This is also true for accounting, where SAP is not an option for a company with 30 employees, but that company's accounting system of choice isn't an option for a Fortune 100 company either.
That said, MS has a pretty bad track record here, so I'm not too convinced they will deliver well in any of their initiatives...
Suggesting that the changes to the Office suit is just "maintenance" seems a bit disingenious. Much like cars today are much better than cars from 30 years ago, Office and Visual Studio have improved tremendously. (For Windows the results are less impressive, especially considering the resources they have spent.)
Patently false. Excel is the best piece of software ever written for the mass market. And as others noted, SQL Server 2K/2K5 both are good as well.
This is more of a threat to "the big three" of BusinessObjects, Cognos and Hyperion. ProClarity is in the low end of the scale of BI vendors, but in a lot of instances that's a pretty good place to be.
Implementing good BI solutions is pretty darn hard, and comparable in effort, cost and possible benefits to implementing SAP. That means that it can be a life saver for a company, but more often it's a huge burden after a failed implementation.
Sometimes a better way is to do things on a smaller scale, and this is where low end BI solutions definitely have a place. Unlike accounting, which just creates a huge mess if every department has their own system, every department can have their own BI systems. It's not ideal, but too big a scope has killed many a project (and even some companies).
If MS integrates ProClarity, their new CRM effort and an accounting system (Axapta?) in a easy to setup and use way, they will get a huge grip on the market for "not quite enterprise systems" for small to mid sized companies. (Un?)fortunately, doing that will prove extremely difficult.
It's not quite that bad. A proper name is "performance measurement", because that's what it is, and measuring performance makes a lot of sense.
A lot of the /. crowd will probably now come in to give horror stories about terrible measurement systems they have encountered as developers, so let me say that I agree that I haven't seen anything impressive there.
That said, there are a lot of businesses that can and will benefit from good performance measurement. Excellent examples are anything to do with logistics and bulk sales.
And finally, having the measures will not automatically cure all ills, but that's not the point. The point is the opposite: not having the measurements will almost certainly guarantee incorrect actions.
Sorry, but how does that follow? All it takes is for the Greens to be closer to the socialists than what the right wing parties are. This means that their cooperation signify only closeness, not direction.
By your logic, the left party would also be a middle of the road party, which they clearly are not.
I was arguning that saying "x% of the population does y, so it shouldn't be illegal" is nonsensical. If you want to allow higher speeds because it is more important to come home quickly than alive, you are welcome. This *is* obviously important to everyone, or speed limits would be 15 mph and almost no one would die in traffic. So somewhere there is a trade off between time and lives (or maybe not, such as on the Autobahn in Germany, but even they have speed limits outside of some designated highways.)
Similarily, if 20% of the population pirate music, that's a crappy reason to legalize it. That doesn't imply that there are no other reasons to legalize it, of course.
This is completely wrong on so many counts. Knowing about the weather saves millions of lives and improves our everyday world tremendously. Without it, you couldn't run energy systems. Or airlines the way they run today. Or hundreds of other things.
My question is not to advocate the teaching of intelligent design, it is to say that science stick to covering ground where it is USEFUL, and to do otherwise undermines the rest of science.
Except no one has any clue about what is useful in advance! Take astronomy as a great example. What good is all that star gazing to anyone? Well, without it Einstein wouldn't have had any data to suggest that Newtonian physics were incorrect, and today, a hundred years later, there are huge amounts of technologies that use relativity.
Besides, people just want to know stuff because, well, it's a human drive. Do you suggest that we should scrap history in school as well? No one can change it, so what use is it?
Evolution is an interesting story, but is it useful? If you can't predict speciation, you can't control it, so at the end of the day you have a story about the origins of life but can't do anything with it. How's that really any different from the FSM?
Studying evolution taught as a lot about genetics and diseases. Without it we would not have had GMO's. Maybe you think that's a good thing, but you can't deny the fact that it matters.
I am saying that there needs to be some other label for evolution besides "science", because it's not.
No, you need to make up a word for "science that I can currently think of a use for". We all have science, we know what it is and what it isn't. Just because you think it would be nice if it meant something else doesn't make it so.
They may not have gotten everything, but they did get an incredible lot, and in particular in areas where they are in the minority opinion.
They did get the congestion fees in Stockholm. It's their energy politics that are being implemented. The four biggest parties in Sweden are more or less pro nuclear power, the three smallest against it, and they run the show there.
If they were a middle of the road party, it would be OK for them to have the amount of influence they have, but unfortunately they are not.
Actually, it's not the law that makes you unable to drink a beer and drive as well as before, it's the alcohol. The law just makes it illegal to drive while being impaired.
No, one beer won't turn you into the worst driver on earth, but it *will* turn you into a worse driver than you would otherwise be. That should be enough to keep you off the streets, IMHO. (On the other hand, I do admit to not having a driver's license...)
Weak IP laws are a great way for a backwards country to catch up. There are a bunch of examples of that throughout history, China being a current and good one.
The question is what would happen if it was abolished in the leading countries. That's not at all as obvious.
Finally, the comments have mixed patents and copyright in this thread, which just confuses everyone. It's not at all a given that they should be treated alike (obviously, since they are treated differently today).
As a very specific example, it's doubtful if Allen could afford Gates' charity projects.
Interesting. I think. Perhaps next time try posting in English. Then other people will be able to read and comment on your opinions. Thanks!
(Oh, no, why did I ask that? Since the numbers came from OP's ass, his correct response will be a goatse. Ugh!)
Agreed on the first party. However, no less than three times in the last 20 years have we seen new parties enter the parliament in Sweden, so it certainly can be done. However, the electorate they pander to must be broader.
These parties made it previously: The green party (green fundementalists), the christian democrats (religious fundamentalists), "new democracy" (racists). All three areas are broad enough to attract large groups of voters. Thus the "feministic initiative", FI (feministic fundamentalists) has at least some chance.
As a side note on Swedish politics: the FI party is lead by an alcoholic former leader for the communist party who was caught cheating with her taxes. If she manages to enter parliament on her latest platform, all of the stupid, ignorant and biased things americans say about Swedes will suddenly be true...
I have never understood that argument. More people in Sweden are speeding while drivning their cars than are pirating stuff while using their computers. Would that be a good reason to abolish speed limits?
Of course you can't, which just goes to show that metheorology is a fraud, whereas "Intelligent Weather" (IW) should be taught in schools.
Just because a system is chaotic (in the scientific sense that small changes in input creates large changes in output, not in the general "disorganised" sense) doesn't mean scientific theories describing it is "crap".
So now we know that at least one person who cares about pirating is a skilled hacker. Somehow, I'm not surprised...