You know that for all the fuckups they make, Microsoft must be doing some things right, even if those things are not what we/.ers would consider morally right.
Here we are, always saying how the switch from the old Office menus to OpenOffice would be so easy and wonderful. Microsoft hears this too. They laugh, because they know today OpenOffice does not have the functionality for most business uses.
But then someone in the room says "But it (OpenOffice) is getting better every day."
Microsoft's solution: Create a new UI to their Office suite BEFORE OpenOffice becomes close to feature parity.
So WHEN OpenOffice reaches feature parity, all the business users will now be used to the Ribbon, and OpenOffice will lose again, because then it WILL require retraining.
I use Office2007 at home (got it free from MS for attending their developer release party), and Office2003 at work (just upgraded from Office97 in the last year). I enjoy using 2007 more.
I also have a Dell E1505 with Vista and have had no issues. Sure copies were slow at first, but updates have sped that way up. It recognizes all my cameras and other hardware with no issues. I've used DVDDecrypter and AutoGK to make backup copies of movies for travel, both new (Transformers) and old, with no problems ripping, merging, or burning.
I know we are supposed to hate Microsoft here, but Vista is an improvement over XP and will continue to be refined, just like XP was refined in its release against W2K.
And the Ribbon....Microsoft's way to stay one step ahead of OpenOffice.
If OpenOffice does not reach feature parity with MSOffice BEFORE the masses convert to the Ribbon interface, they will once again be playing catchup in a game they have already lost.
and that is the crux of the issue, not just Facebook, but everywhere.
The data I create and store on my computer are MINE. I control access, determine what portion of my income will go to protection of said data, and its my ass for everything if someone steals this information. This event will be both a criminal and civil crime against me personally, that I am free to persue how I see fit.
The data I create and store on {insert favorite online service here} are NOT MINE. It is the property of some other entity. They control access, determine what portion of their income will go to protection of said data. When someone steals this information, from my point of view, liability may not matter, many entities are involved, and it may only be civil issue between myself and the next entity, be they human or corporate.
This goes from my last tax return to pictures of my wife and our friends. Both of those sets of data are shared on a need to know basis, after clearing several security hurdles. My security hurdles. I am judge and jury.
And, for those of you that are not from the USA, who sometimes see our almost obsessive desire for personal freedoms over the common efficiency of society as lunatic, this is what makes my America great. Freedom, personal freedom, however shaky and eroded they might be at this moment, is what makes America great.
Its why Google Apps will never conquer MSOffice or OpenOffice or locally installed and operated vi or EMACS if that's all I get locally. Because secure (as in stored locally, for my eyes only, and whom I see fit) is such a big #1 to an American that its so far above #2 and everything else that it gets dusty and sometimes we forget it is there. Until forgetting comes back to bite us in the ass.
Summary:
If you put the information in an IP packet unencrypted, or give it to someone to put into an IP packed unencrypted, it is there for the world to see forever.
So just accept that everything on Facebook, MySpace, Google Apps, whatever, is not yours anymore, whether you like it or not.
Nicholas Cage had a line in some movie, and I'm paraphrasing here, "There are only two people in the world I trust. One of them is me. The other one is NOT you".
From a Grateful Dead Family Album, in "The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll on the Road", Number 7: Anything that you do not understand is trying to fuck with you.
Remember those two lines the next time you post any information anywhere. You do not trust the other side, and if you do not understand everything about how they will use and protect your data, they are trying to fuck with you, and not in a good way.
Be careful with that. Li-ion, Li-poly start to die the moment they are manufactured and have a limited life span REGARDLESS of how many times you charge/discharge. IIRC its about 2 years max.
So the battery will die from old age even if you don't hit the maximum charge/discharge.
So a $4 battery that is 1.5 years old isn't really a bargin.
Maybe they aren't the be all end all of audiophile quality speakers, but I've had my 901's for years, never had any issues, the quality of sound is awesome, the direct/relecting design creates a sound field in which I with my 40 year old rock and roll fucked up ears can place instruments in a 3D space. Simply outstanding for the money invested.
Maybe Bose isn't the Ferrari of consumer speakers, they might not be the Porsche of consumer speakers; maybe they are only the Corvette of speakers.
We could of our own free will send Prince $1 for each free CD he gives us!
Do RIAA execs throw chairs?
Disclaimer: I love Prince's work, have seen him live many times, and his guitar is amazing and every bit as good as Eddie Van Halen or Eric Clapton, who yes, I've also seen live.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I know this crowd will, but if a program can be written to REMOVE the name and email address, couldn't one be written to REPLACE it with whatever text you might like??
Now MP3 with the RIAA name and email address flooding P2P networks, that would seem humorous at first, but then i thought.......
It could be any other person or group....so doesn't that really mean that the data in the file would not be permissible as evidence. You'd have to prove that the file came from me, not that my name and email address were in the file.
Stripping out the name and email address out of a file that I own and do not share should not be illegal. Putting someone elses name and email address in it, that should be illegal:)
The posting of the file on a P2P network is a separate issue.
Seems an awful like the different implementations of the same idea.
Of course MS sucks and Linux rules because its/., but how is "training" AVC to know what is allowed to touch the kernel and what is not, any different from "training" UAC to know what is allowed to touch the kernel and what is not?
In America at least, we by nature forgive and forget. IANAL, but only when we feel we've been "made whole" does this occur. That the transgression before us has been repaired to our satisfaction.
Take Coke. We were told by the company that their newest was the greatest shit on earth and all other colas might as well pack it in. They even took away Coke. The Coke we all knew and loved. A Coke that all they had to do was not fuck it up.
And they fucked it up.
And there was outrage. More importantly, there were no sales of this New Coke. Yet people as I recall were selling two liters of old, or Classic Coke for hundreds of dollars.
And they saw this outrage and maybe cared, maybe not. But they saw the sales in those markets. And their New Coke had a short, painful life, and a quiet death. I don't even know if they promoted when the sliver stripe on the cans disappeared and Classic Coke was just Coke again.
Because they could. Because THEIR product does not have to evolve and is unique within their domain. They were smart enough, God help me, to realize that they had a great product in their domain, and their customers were willing to fight for it; all they had to do is not fuck it up.
THEY could say they fucked up, go back to the Classic taste we all loved, and sure, even drop the price if they wanted to to sweeten the deal a little, slight pun intended. And we would forgive them because they made us whole, we had our Coke again and the world was right.
Their product allowed for a fuck up of such massive proportions. A gig in management there must be sweet.
Sony assumes that the BRANDNAME "Playstation" carries all the attributes of a Classic Coke. No. Their product does have to evolve and becomes less and less unique by the day. They cannot just apologize, with their tails between their legs go back to what they had, drop the price a little, and make us all whole and happy with their product again.
Sony must make their "New Coke" fly.....and now they must try to repair the injury to their fans and make them whole again. A price drop alone cannot accomplish this, I wonder if anything they do really can. I wish them luck but I'm betting this will be another how not to succeed example in business classes across the globe in a few years.
Everyone who has a digital image of their spouse/(boy/girl)friend/(who or what)ever on their computer at this moment that they would not want stored on medium outside of the borders of their home, raise your hand.
I thought so!!!
End of discussion on storing all personal data online or the demise of the power of the local desktop.
One thing is for sure. Until, on KDE and GNOME and everybody else, every application installs to whatever the hell you want to call the Start button actually happen in a standard and logic fashion as does 99.999% of the the applications the Joe Gamer, Joe Sixpack, and Grandma and Grampa run and install on Windows, Linux will never compete with Windows whatever at that level.
Linux has to climb the hill. You don't get to change that just because don't like the current king of the hill.
C'mon, MS will NEVER create a Linux based Exchange server or a native Linux client.
The server will never happen because MS will never cede an inch in the server battle.
The client is already there in the form of Outlook Web Access. The latest release is sweet enough for any company to tell its Linux geeks to use that as their mail tool.
As a former employee of Pattie Dunn when she worked at Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors which became Barclays Global Investors, I always found Pattie to be a person who really cared about her employees and their personal lives.
She was always approachable, listened to your concerns no matter how high or low you were in her chain of command, and without sounding too sexist, had a great smile, a charming personality, and was the easiest on the eyes boss I've ever had.
I can only imagine what HP has put her through to cause such a change in her attitudes.
On the other hand, perhaps this is an example of what has happened to America in general.
"Truly a sight to behold. The man, beaten. The once great champ, now a study in moppishness. No longer the victory hungry stallion we've raced so many times before. But a pathetic, washed-up aged ex-champion. " (obscure Better Off Dead quote:) )
In our newfound GUI world, menu conventions are more important for wide acceptance.
When I install Firefox or OpenOffice in the *nix world, do I get a consistentantly added menu structure somewhere, anywhere? Of course not!
Hell, on Windows, OpenOffice adds exactly the menus I would expect, where I would expect them for the currently running window manager.
This is something that both Bill and Steve get a BIG leg up on the *nix world. You want to run on their OS, here is how you conform. Resistance is futile.
How hard would it be for all the Linux window managers to conform to an XML based menu system, that would consume the XML based application menu supplied by each application?
Gnome/KDE/whatever only have to write one consumer. Each can do what it needs to within its space.
Each application has to write one definition to get a consistent look/feel/structure across many *nix window managers, today and future.
I think the jury is in on consistent visual clues aiding in computer usage. If I can find the program using a consistent graphical menuing system, I can track down the program whatever its name!
Slashdot Mirror
You know that for all the fuckups they make, Microsoft must be doing some things right, even if those things are not what we
Here we are, always saying how the switch from the old Office menus to OpenOffice would be so easy and wonderful. Microsoft hears this too. They laugh, because they know today OpenOffice does not have the functionality for most business uses.
But then someone in the room says "But it (OpenOffice) is getting better every day."
Microsoft's solution: Create a new UI to their Office suite BEFORE OpenOffice becomes close to feature parity.
So WHEN OpenOffice reaches feature parity, all the business users will now be used to the Ribbon, and OpenOffice will lose again, because then it WILL require retraining.
I use Office2007 at home (got it free from MS for attending their developer release party), and Office2003 at work (just upgraded from Office97 in the last year). I enjoy using 2007 more.
I also have a Dell E1505 with Vista and have had no issues. Sure copies were slow at first, but updates have sped that way up. It recognizes all my cameras and other hardware with no issues. I've used DVDDecrypter and AutoGK to make backup copies of movies for travel, both new (Transformers) and old, with no problems ripping, merging, or burning.
I know we are supposed to hate Microsoft here, but Vista is an improvement over XP and will continue to be refined, just like XP was refined in its release against W2K.
And the Ribbon....Microsoft's way to stay one step ahead of OpenOffice.
If OpenOffice does not reach feature parity with MSOffice BEFORE the masses convert to the Ribbon interface, they will once again be playing catchup in a game they have already lost.
and that is the crux of the issue, not just Facebook, but everywhere.
The data I create and store on my computer are MINE. I control access, determine what portion of my income will go to protection of said data, and its my ass for everything if someone steals this information. This event will be both a criminal and civil crime against me personally, that I am free to persue how I see fit.
The data I create and store on {insert favorite online service here} are NOT MINE. It is the property of some other entity. They control access, determine what portion of their income will go to protection of said data. When someone steals this information, from my point of view, liability may not matter, many entities are involved, and it may only be civil issue between myself and the next entity, be they human or corporate.
This goes from my last tax return to pictures of my wife and our friends. Both of those sets of data are shared on a need to know basis, after clearing several security hurdles. My security hurdles. I am judge and jury.
And, for those of you that are not from the USA, who sometimes see our almost obsessive desire for personal freedoms over the common efficiency of society as lunatic, this is what makes my America great. Freedom, personal freedom, however shaky and eroded they might be at this moment, is what makes America great.
Its why Google Apps will never conquer MSOffice or OpenOffice or locally installed and operated vi or EMACS if that's all I get locally. Because secure (as in stored locally, for my eyes only, and whom I see fit) is such a big #1 to an American that its so far above #2 and everything else that it gets dusty and sometimes we forget it is there. Until forgetting comes back to bite us in the ass.
Summary:
If you put the information in an IP packet unencrypted, or give it to someone to put into an IP packed unencrypted, it is there for the world to see forever.
So just accept that everything on Facebook, MySpace, Google Apps, whatever, is not yours anymore, whether you like it or not.
Nicholas Cage had a line in some movie, and I'm paraphrasing here, "There are only two people in the world I trust. One of them is me. The other one is NOT you".
From a Grateful Dead Family Album, in "The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll on the Road", Number 7: Anything that you do not understand is trying to fuck with you.
Remember those two lines the next time you post any information anywhere. You do not trust the other side, and if you do not understand everything about how they will use and protect your data, they are trying to fuck with you, and not in a good way.
Cooking is an art...
Baking is a science...
Cooking you work with it as you go until you get what you want....
Baking you follow the instructions EXACTLY or you don't get what you want....
all my contacts and sensitive data in the hands of my cell service provider.
"Oh you want to leave, I'm sorry but our backups failed and your data is gone..."
"Oh you decided to stay, guess what, we've found that backup...."
Be careful with that. Li-ion, Li-poly start to die the moment they are manufactured and have a limited life span REGARDLESS of how many times you charge/discharge. IIRC its about 2 years max.
So the battery will die from old age even if you don't hit the maximum charge/discharge.
So a $4 battery that is 1.5 years old isn't really a bargin.
Enough about Bose already.
Maybe they aren't the be all end all of audiophile quality speakers, but I've had my 901's for years, never had any issues, the quality of sound is awesome, the direct/relecting design creates a sound field in which I with my 40 year old rock and roll fucked up ears can place instruments in a 3D space. Simply outstanding for the money invested.
Maybe Bose isn't the Ferrari of consumer speakers, they might not be the Porsche of consumer speakers; maybe they are only the Corvette of speakers.
Corvettes are kick ass fun to drive.
Prince live is James Brown and Jimi Hendrix put together.
Now maybe he is only 75% of what James is and only 75% of what Jimi was, but I'll take that over most of the other "artists" out on tour today.
It might not be your taste, but damn if he don't get the booty shakin'!!!
We could of our own free will send Prince $1 for each free CD he gives us!
Do RIAA execs throw chairs?
Disclaimer: I love Prince's work, have seen him live many times, and his guitar is amazing and every bit as good as Eddie Van Halen or Eric Clapton, who yes, I've also seen live.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I know this crowd will, but if a program can be written to REMOVE the name and email address, couldn't one be written to REPLACE it with whatever text you might like??
Now MP3 with the RIAA name and email address flooding P2P networks, that would seem humorous at first, but then i thought.......
It could be any other person or group....so doesn't that really mean that the data in the file would not be permissible as evidence. You'd have to prove that the file came from me, not that my name and email address were in the file.
Stripping out the name and email address out of a file that I own and do not share should not be illegal. Putting someone elses name and email address in it, that should be illegal:)
The posting of the file on a P2P network is a separate issue.
How we store our music collections is changing, from a single unit of storage, like a CD, to massive storage of many units (flash, hard drive).
The single unit of storage as a method of delivery only is a dinosaur waiting for the meteor.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Seems an awful like the different implementations of the same idea.
/., but how is "training" AVC to know what is allowed to touch the kernel and what is not, any different from "training" UAC to know what is allowed to touch the kernel and what is not?
Of course MS sucks and Linux rules because its
Let the flaming begin
I know, its just a furry hole, but I like it....
These days its just a shaved hole, and I still like it.....
someone, anyone, can make it look and feel like Eclipse, but with EMACS macros!
That I would love.
In America at least, we by nature forgive and forget. IANAL, but only when we feel we've been "made whole" does this occur. That the transgression before us has been repaired to our satisfaction.
Take Coke. We were told by the company that their newest was the greatest shit on earth and all other colas might as well pack it in. They even took away Coke. The Coke we all knew and loved. A Coke that all they had to do was not fuck it up.
And they fucked it up.
And there was outrage. More importantly, there were no sales of this New Coke. Yet people as I recall were selling two liters of old, or Classic Coke for hundreds of dollars.
And they saw this outrage and maybe cared, maybe not. But they saw the sales in those markets. And their New Coke had a short, painful life, and a quiet death. I don't even know if they promoted when the sliver stripe on the cans disappeared and Classic Coke was just Coke again.
Because they could. Because THEIR product does not have to evolve and is unique within their domain. They were smart enough, God help me, to realize that they had a great product in their domain, and their customers were willing to fight for it; all they had to do is not fuck it up.
THEY could say they fucked up, go back to the Classic taste we all loved, and sure, even drop the price if they wanted to to sweeten the deal a little, slight pun intended. And we would forgive them because they made us whole, we had our Coke again and the world was right.
Their product allowed for a fuck up of such massive proportions. A gig in management there must be sweet.
Sony assumes that the BRANDNAME "Playstation" carries all the attributes of a Classic Coke. No. Their product does have to evolve and becomes less and less unique by the day. They cannot just apologize, with their tails between their legs go back to what they had, drop the price a little, and make us all whole and happy with their product again.
Sony must make their "New Coke" fly.....and now they must try to repair the injury to their fans and make them whole again. A price drop alone cannot accomplish this, I wonder if anything they do really can. I wish them luck but I'm betting this will be another how not to succeed example in business classes across the globe in a few years.
we have BBR???
Can I launch the rockets from the DDR dancepad???
The Wii Remote.
Will be on all the next gen consoles. Why? Nintendo?
More horsepower.
Will be on all the next gen consoles. Why? The nature of the beast.
MS and Sony were racing up the same road. MS glaces over and sees Nintendo beating them both on a different road.
MS will merge the roads (embrace), have the new remote with their better graphics (extend).
Now, what comes after embrace and extend in MS speak???
If they really want to "embrace and extend" they'll have to include a WiiRemote.
Use some of that horsepower to include the new interface, and I'm in!!!
Everyone who has a digital image of their spouse/(boy/girl)friend/(who or what)ever on their computer at this moment that they would not want stored on medium outside of the borders of their home, raise your hand.
I thought so!!!
End of discussion on storing all personal data online or the demise of the power of the local desktop.
One thing is for sure. Until, on KDE and GNOME and everybody else, every application installs to whatever the hell you want to call the Start button actually happen in a standard and logic fashion as does 99.999% of the the applications the Joe Gamer, Joe Sixpack, and Grandma and Grampa run and install on Windows, Linux will never compete with Windows whatever at that level.
Linux has to climb the hill. You don't get to change that just because don't like the current king of the hill.
C'mon, MS will NEVER create a Linux based Exchange server or a native Linux client.
The server will never happen because MS will never cede an inch in the server battle.
The client is already there in the form of Outlook Web Access. The latest release is sweet enough for any company to tell its Linux geeks to use that as their mail tool.
As a former employee of Pattie Dunn when she worked at Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors which became Barclays Global Investors, I always found Pattie to be a person who really cared about her employees and their personal lives. She was always approachable, listened to your concerns no matter how high or low you were in her chain of command, and without sounding too sexist, had a great smile, a charming personality, and was the easiest on the eyes boss I've ever had. I can only imagine what HP has put her through to cause such a change in her attitudes. On the other hand, perhaps this is an example of what has happened to America in general. "Truly a sight to behold. The man, beaten. The once great champ, now a study in moppishness. No longer the victory hungry stallion we've raced so many times before. But a pathetic, washed-up aged ex-champion. " (obscure Better Off Dead quote :) )
You of course know that this is an obscure "Repo Man" reference, do you not???
In our newfound GUI world, menu conventions are more important for wide acceptance.
When I install Firefox or OpenOffice in the *nix world, do I get a consistentantly added menu structure somewhere, anywhere? Of course not!
Hell, on Windows, OpenOffice adds exactly the menus I would expect, where I would expect them for the currently running window manager.
This is something that both Bill and Steve get a BIG leg up on the *nix world. You want to run on their OS, here is how you conform. Resistance is futile.
How hard would it be for all the Linux window managers to conform to an XML based menu system, that would consume the XML based application menu supplied by each application?
Gnome/KDE/whatever only have to write one consumer. Each can do what it needs to within its space.
Each application has to write one definition to get a consistent look/feel/structure across many *nix window managers, today and future.
I think the jury is in on consistent visual clues aiding in computer usage. If I can find the program using a consistent graphical menuing system, I can track down the program whatever its name!
A decade of reading, my very first post!!!