Yes, and OO.o/SO8 is nothing like either. Major learning curve there, too.
We can use the state funds we are provided and hire trainers to show our technophobic teachers how to use Microsoft Office. We've tried for two years and can't locate anyone who will provide the same level of training for an open-source solution.
My biggest hang-up is with Excel versus Calc. Excel makes some operations very easy that are time-consuming with Calc because it won't let you do things like perform operations on multiple separated cells. Also, the behavior of some keys (tab and enter) vary from Excel and make data entry more difficult than it could be.
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them? I think they provided a fair assessment of some of the major obstacles to open source. The school district I work for is clamoring for a switch to MSO from Star Office 8. Why? Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.
Or the amount of crap product comparisons will continue to be the same no matter how much its pointed out.
You don't think it can get worse? You don't think it would get worse if there weren't people crying foul at the current comparisons?
You can use legitimate comparisons to tout a product, you don't have to unfairly match them. Look at your average car commercial (fictional example):
Ford's new truck gets better gas mileage than Dodge. Ford's new truck has a bigger, more powerful engine than Chevy.
They just said it's better than Dodge and Chevy, but in two completely different ways. They do this all the time in marketing. If nothing else, AMD could talk up price points and power efficiency, two things they almost always have over Intel. Skewed benchmarks just make the company look inept and leave knowledgeable consumers feeling like AMD is insulting their intelligence.
If we don't point out every time they use blatantly unfair product comparisons, the amount of disinformation coming out of vendors will only increase. Even though very few people (just the fanboys) place any stock in AMD's or Intel's benchmarks, it's worth pointing out flaws like this to keep them as honest as we possibly can.
So building legacy compatibility into a new system is a bad thing? In those 6000 pages of specs, is there documentation so other developers can implement that legacy mode? That's what I don't see talked about, and what is really important.
It sounds as if MS is providing a way to move old documents from a number of formats into OOXML without losing their proprietary formatting. This yields more accurate conversions and will generally make people happy. The trouble will come if OOXML isn't quite so open if and when these tags are used. As I said, I've seen no indication that the implementation of the legacy tags is being kept secret.
They do it every day with closed source Windows products.
You're thinking like a developer, not a businessman. A businessman wants a turnkey solution that "just works". If his product works as advertised and he can support it well, they'll buy it.
I've had to kill and restart Firefox probably a half-dozen times in the two months since I last logged onto my Windows PC at the office. It hasn't forced me to restart yet.
Firefox has always been buggy in Windows. Remember the apostrophe bug? So far as I ever saw, that never happened in Linux. Whether it's malicious anti-MS "features" or genuine bugs I won't speculate. But we should hardly be pointing the finger at MS because a third-party app is poorly written and can make Windows unstable.
How we deal with any of that in my school district:
"Hey admin, can you throw a _______ image on the Ghost server? Thanks"
Then put a boot disk in floppy drive and push reset button. Come back in 15-20 minutes and take five minutes to name the PC, put it back on the domain, and (sometimes) install one or two pieces of software. It takes me all of ten minutes of actual work to fix the typical software issues we encounter. I personally support 400+ PCs, and run maybe 3-4 images a week including hard drive replacements and non-specific troubleshooting (I can't find a hardware issue so I blow away the installation to rule out software problems).
Most of the "problems" with Windows are easily enough dealt with with some decent anti-virus and regular updates. Regardless of your OS, any school IT department should have a solid content filter up both for the protection of the employees (preventing them from "accidentally" stumbling into porn sites easily) and their own duffs.
We explored Linux some time ago, and found that the learning curve was just too stiff and the transition would have been too drastic for us to make the switch in the near future. We simply don't have the time to learn it nor the inclination to take the risk. I tried very hard to make it feasible for a presentation to the non-technical people who would have the final call, it just couldn't quite get the results we needed.
Linux is still woefully inadequate for any organization that has significant investments in Windows-only software. There was just no practical way (that I could find) to make our six-figure educational apps work simply and reliably under Linux.
Y'know, if the UAC would follow a few simply rules of planetary colonization, they wouldn't have such problems.
1) When your life depends on the structural integrity of your base/space station, keep it well lit. Dark corners and unlit passageways invite unobserved problems and make excellent hiding places for demonic hordes.
2) Emergency lighting is your friend. Self-contained lights that can run off batteries for days have existed since the 20th century. USE THEM.
3) Teach your space marines how to use a pistol and flashlight at the same time. Television actors pretending to be cops can do it, so can they.
4) Keep hidden compartments, passageways, and crawlspaces to a minimum. This will drastically reduce construction and maintenance costs by keeping the design simple, and make it far easier for a lone marine to save all of humanity.
5) Develop lockdown procedures. They're useful in the event of a sudden loss of pressure to prevent your entire base from leaking air out a single fracture. They can also come in handy when your absurd experiments fail and you find yourself surrounded by blood-thirsty monsters. Seal all the doors. Combine this with #4 so that they can't simply bypass the doors by crawling through unnecessarily large ventilation shafts or open ceilings.
Obviously. I mean, I'm only an IT worker at a school district who is married to a teacher with an education in psychology with a focus on child development. I know nothing at all about how kids' brains develop or the ability of young people to adopt technology.
Understanding consumer electronics these days is just knowing what products are available and how to operate their UIs. There's really very little understanding required to be able to operate any given media player or console. Kids can spout off the specs of some of these devices, but that doesn't mean they have any grasp on the underlying technologies.
I remember my friends going on and on about 16-bit graphics on the newest round of consoles. I also remember not a single one of them being able to explain to me what that meant or why it was good, except that 16-bit is better than 8-bit. Kids haven't changed since then, they still just know the hyped buzzwords and which button does what.
This works great in theory, until little Johnny spends the next three years whining because you bought console A and EVERYBODY ELSE has console B.
Parental controls cost practically nothing against the development of a new console. It shouldn't be an issue at all to require them as an option to be used or ignored as parents see fit.
There's a big difference between "online stuff" and parental controls.
Parents aren't going to have the time or inclination to fully explore social networking sites, but might want a primer from their kids so they can use them for whatever reason. I'm 29 and an admitted 'net junkie, but there is a LOT I simply can't keep up with myself that my college-aged friends can...they have the free time.
I'm fully aware that the average parent isn't as tech-savvy as they need to be, which is why I pointed out that parental controls are getting better and better about accommodating them. That's also why I suggested in a reply to someone else in this thread that the consoles should come with a booklet/paper/whatever specifically for explaining parental controls, what they do, and how to effectively use them...including a brief explanation of what is and is not a secure password.
Are you aware that the average parent that needs to be concerned with parental controls these days grew up with computers and programmable VCRs and such?
If you started your family at 25 (which is on the high side of average iirc) and you have a 13-year-old, then you were born around 1969 (give or take a year depending on when your and your kid's birthdays fall). Making you a teenager of the 80s. You know, back when the kids really *were* the only ones who knew how to program the VCR.
This argument of "parents don't get it anyway" is ancient, and it's increasingly inaccurate. Parental controls have become quite user-friendly when implemented correctly and most parents of young kids today are comfortable with technology. You must think parents of young teens are just ancient...they're in their mid-30s.
I should hope so, there's no sense in not having it.
So let the politicians make a law requiring that:
-any device primarily designed for playing games (to exclude PCs)
-with interchangable games (this excludes the Atari clones with preinstalled games but no cartridges, as you know what you're buying when you buy it)
-that can carry any rating other than E (this excludes the educational systems like Leapfrog and V-Smile)...be equipped with parental controls allowing parents to set a specific maximum rating allowed. It could also require that such a system support complex alphanumeric passwords--a maximum length of at least 12 characters would be sufficient--and come with a small pamphlet explaining the parental controls and explaining the need for a strong password, so that parents actually do have control over the electronic devices they purchased.
Such a bill could also call for more thorough parental controls that allow filtering by specific content classifications (violence, sexuality, et cetera) in the next generation of consoles. This way a parent who thought their child could handle sexuality at one rating level and violence at another could set up specific filters according to their child and possibly open the system up to allow a few more games.
Most parents I know think they are at war with the schools because schools (an extension of the government) are trying undermine them as parents and raise the kids however they see fit. They whine and complain when the schools assign a lot of homework because "we don't have time to do anything as a family".
Of course, all they do as a family is eat fast food while watching TV before the kids lock themselves in their rooms for the evening so that Susie can show her boobs to boys on the internet while Johnny takes emo pictures and writes in his blog about how his parents hate him because they won't buy him the BMW he wants.
I've got no issue with a law requiring that consoles have parental controls so that parents can decide what rating level is appropriate for their kids and lock out the rest. That way they can control content without having to avoid consoles entirely.
I don't see anyone whining about the V-chip, so what would be the problem with a ratings filter on consoles?
Sure, and what happens the first time something goes wrong and the plane crew is incapacitated? Prior to 9/11, it was a far greater worry that the cockpit door would be locked when something went wrong than the idea of someone storming the cockpit with boxcutters.
In hindsight, we also should have trained pilots not to so easily relinquish control of the plane. Instead it was generally thought that hijackers should be allowed to take over the plane because they normally just landed somewhere and made demands.
Experience had taught us to expect completely different circumstances than we had on 9/11.
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Yes, and OO.o/SO8 is nothing like either. Major learning curve there, too.
We can use the state funds we are provided and hire trainers to show our technophobic teachers how to use Microsoft Office. We've tried for two years and can't locate anyone who will provide the same level of training for an open-source solution.
Excel, Access, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Publisher are all just word processors? What about all the back-end collaboration tools?
If you think MSO and OO.o are "just word processors", just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.
My biggest hang-up is with Excel versus Calc. Excel makes some operations very easy that are time-consuming with Calc because it won't let you do things like perform operations on multiple separated cells. Also, the behavior of some keys (tab and enter) vary from Excel and make data entry more difficult than it could be.
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them? I think they provided a fair assessment of some of the major obstacles to open source. The school district I work for is clamoring for a switch to MSO from Star Office 8. Why? Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.
You don't think it can get worse? You don't think it would get worse if there weren't people crying foul at the current comparisons?
You can use legitimate comparisons to tout a product, you don't have to unfairly match them. Look at your average car commercial (fictional example):
Ford's new truck gets better gas mileage than Dodge.
Ford's new truck has a bigger, more powerful engine than Chevy.
They just said it's better than Dodge and Chevy, but in two completely different ways. They do this all the time in marketing. If nothing else, AMD could talk up price points and power efficiency, two things they almost always have over Intel. Skewed benchmarks just make the company look inept and leave knowledgeable consumers feeling like AMD is insulting their intelligence.
If we don't point out every time they use blatantly unfair product comparisons, the amount of disinformation coming out of vendors will only increase. Even though very few people (just the fanboys) place any stock in AMD's or Intel's benchmarks, it's worth pointing out flaws like this to keep them as honest as we possibly can.
Comic books should be taken as serious a form of art expression as any book, painting or sculpture
You mean like a romance novel or a painting of a Campbell's Soup can or a urinal on a pedestal?
So building legacy compatibility into a new system is a bad thing? In those 6000 pages of specs, is there documentation so other developers can implement that legacy mode? That's what I don't see talked about, and what is really important.
It sounds as if MS is providing a way to move old documents from a number of formats into OOXML without losing their proprietary formatting. This yields more accurate conversions and will generally make people happy. The trouble will come if OOXML isn't quite so open if and when these tags are used. As I said, I've seen no indication that the implementation of the legacy tags is being kept secret.
Those of us with perfectly good phones who aren't willing to pay $500 for something that doesn't really bring much new to the table.
Cool factor: 10
Usefulness factor: 5 (it really doesn't do much more than my RAZR V3xx)
Budget fact: -1
Burn karma burn!
Would that be called IP over mail? Or post? Post sounds better.
IPOP: the wave of the past.
They do it every day with closed source Windows products.
You're thinking like a developer, not a businessman. A businessman wants a turnkey solution that "just works". If his product works as advertised and he can support it well, they'll buy it.
I've had to kill and restart Firefox probably a half-dozen times in the two months since I last logged onto my Windows PC at the office. It hasn't forced me to restart yet.
Firefox has always been buggy in Windows. Remember the apostrophe bug? So far as I ever saw, that never happened in Linux. Whether it's malicious anti-MS "features" or genuine bugs I won't speculate. But we should hardly be pointing the finger at MS because a third-party app is poorly written and can make Windows unstable.
How we deal with any of that in my school district:
"Hey admin, can you throw a _______ image on the Ghost server? Thanks"
Then put a boot disk in floppy drive and push reset button. Come back in 15-20 minutes and take five minutes to name the PC, put it back on the domain, and (sometimes) install one or two pieces of software. It takes me all of ten minutes of actual work to fix the typical software issues we encounter. I personally support 400+ PCs, and run maybe 3-4 images a week including hard drive replacements and non-specific troubleshooting (I can't find a hardware issue so I blow away the installation to rule out software problems).
Most of the "problems" with Windows are easily enough dealt with with some decent anti-virus and regular updates. Regardless of your OS, any school IT department should have a solid content filter up both for the protection of the employees (preventing them from "accidentally" stumbling into porn sites easily) and their own duffs.
We explored Linux some time ago, and found that the learning curve was just too stiff and the transition would have been too drastic for us to make the switch in the near future. We simply don't have the time to learn it nor the inclination to take the risk. I tried very hard to make it feasible for a presentation to the non-technical people who would have the final call, it just couldn't quite get the results we needed.
Linux is still woefully inadequate for any organization that has significant investments in Windows-only software. There was just no practical way (that I could find) to make our six-figure educational apps work simply and reliably under Linux.
Y'know, if the UAC would follow a few simply rules of planetary colonization, they wouldn't have such problems.
1) When your life depends on the structural integrity of your base/space station, keep it well lit. Dark corners and unlit passageways invite unobserved problems and make excellent hiding places for demonic hordes.
2) Emergency lighting is your friend. Self-contained lights that can run off batteries for days have existed since the 20th century. USE THEM.
3) Teach your space marines how to use a pistol and flashlight at the same time. Television actors pretending to be cops can do it, so can they.
4) Keep hidden compartments, passageways, and crawlspaces to a minimum. This will drastically reduce construction and maintenance costs by keeping the design simple, and make it far easier for a lone marine to save all of humanity.
5) Develop lockdown procedures. They're useful in the event of a sudden loss of pressure to prevent your entire base from leaking air out a single fracture. They can also come in handy when your absurd experiments fail and you find yourself surrounded by blood-thirsty monsters. Seal all the doors. Combine this with #4 so that they can't simply bypass the doors by crawling through unnecessarily large ventilation shafts or open ceilings.
A Martian bug in space, no less.
Read more of the thread, I laid out a decent (but probably incomplete) definition of the systems that this would apply to.
"How else would you keep someone from booting their PS3 into Linux"
Good point. By allowing parents the ability to prevent unrated disks from being run, perhaps.
Obviously. I mean, I'm only an IT worker at a school district who is married to a teacher with an education in psychology with a focus on child development. I know nothing at all about how kids' brains develop or the ability of young people to adopt technology.
Understanding consumer electronics these days is just knowing what products are available and how to operate their UIs. There's really very little understanding required to be able to operate any given media player or console. Kids can spout off the specs of some of these devices, but that doesn't mean they have any grasp on the underlying technologies.
I remember my friends going on and on about 16-bit graphics on the newest round of consoles. I also remember not a single one of them being able to explain to me what that meant or why it was good, except that 16-bit is better than 8-bit. Kids haven't changed since then, they still just know the hyped buzzwords and which button does what.
This works great in theory, until little Johnny spends the next three years whining because you bought console A and EVERYBODY ELSE has console B.
Parental controls cost practically nothing against the development of a new console. It shouldn't be an issue at all to require them as an option to be used or ignored as parents see fit.
There's a big difference between "online stuff" and parental controls.
Parents aren't going to have the time or inclination to fully explore social networking sites, but might want a primer from their kids so they can use them for whatever reason. I'm 29 and an admitted 'net junkie, but there is a LOT I simply can't keep up with myself that my college-aged friends can...they have the free time.
I'm fully aware that the average parent isn't as tech-savvy as they need to be, which is why I pointed out that parental controls are getting better and better about accommodating them. That's also why I suggested in a reply to someone else in this thread that the consoles should come with a booklet/paper/whatever specifically for explaining parental controls, what they do, and how to effectively use them...including a brief explanation of what is and is not a secure password.
Are you aware that the average parent that needs to be concerned with parental controls these days grew up with computers and programmable VCRs and such?
If you started your family at 25 (which is on the high side of average iirc) and you have a 13-year-old, then you were born around 1969 (give or take a year depending on when your and your kid's birthdays fall). Making you a teenager of the 80s. You know, back when the kids really *were* the only ones who knew how to program the VCR.
This argument of "parents don't get it anyway" is ancient, and it's increasingly inaccurate. Parental controls have become quite user-friendly when implemented correctly and most parents of young kids today are comfortable with technology. You must think parents of young teens are just ancient...they're in their mid-30s.
I should hope so, there's no sense in not having it.
...be equipped with parental controls allowing parents to set a specific maximum rating allowed. It could also require that such a system support complex alphanumeric passwords--a maximum length of at least 12 characters would be sufficient--and come with a small pamphlet explaining the parental controls and explaining the need for a strong password, so that parents actually do have control over the electronic devices they purchased.
So let the politicians make a law requiring that:
-any device primarily designed for playing games (to exclude PCs)
-with interchangable games (this excludes the Atari clones with preinstalled games but no cartridges, as you know what you're buying when you buy it)
-that can carry any rating other than E (this excludes the educational systems like Leapfrog and V-Smile)
Such a bill could also call for more thorough parental controls that allow filtering by specific content classifications (violence, sexuality, et cetera) in the next generation of consoles. This way a parent who thought their child could handle sexuality at one rating level and violence at another could set up specific filters according to their child and possibly open the system up to allow a few more games.
You don't know the same parents I do.
Most parents I know think they are at war with the schools because schools (an extension of the government) are trying undermine them as parents and raise the kids however they see fit. They whine and complain when the schools assign a lot of homework because "we don't have time to do anything as a family".
Of course, all they do as a family is eat fast food while watching TV before the kids lock themselves in their rooms for the evening so that Susie can show her boobs to boys on the internet while Johnny takes emo pictures and writes in his blog about how his parents hate him because they won't buy him the BMW he wants.
I've got no issue with a law requiring that consoles have parental controls so that parents can decide what rating level is appropriate for their kids and lock out the rest. That way they can control content without having to avoid consoles entirely.
I don't see anyone whining about the V-chip, so what would be the problem with a ratings filter on consoles?
Now with dimmer, more narrow flashlight beam!
Sure, and what happens the first time something goes wrong and the plane crew is incapacitated? Prior to 9/11, it was a far greater worry that the cockpit door would be locked when something went wrong than the idea of someone storming the cockpit with boxcutters.
In hindsight, we also should have trained pilots not to so easily relinquish control of the plane. Instead it was generally thought that hijackers should be allowed to take over the plane because they normally just landed somewhere and made demands.
Experience had taught us to expect completely different circumstances than we had on 9/11.