Scene: Papa and Junior driving to the sales lot in a well-polished Corvair PAPA:...and that's how your old man drove all the snakes out of Fairfield County. JUNIOR: Gee whiz, Pop.
Car hits a bump in the road, jostles a bit, and stalls. Papa pulls the car over and starts poking around under the hood. PAPA: (mumbles) Mother of God. (to Junior) Say, Junior, while we're at it, would you mind checking the tire pressure? The gauge is in the glove compartment. JUNIOR: (checks one tire) It says 18. Ain't it supposed to be 32? PAPA: What? Check it again. JUNIOR: It's 17 now. Hey, I see a nail in it too. I think the tire's going flat, Pop. PAPA: All right, get back in the car, we'd better hurry and get to Honest Abe's sales lot. Hopefully we won't roll over because of it. JUNIOR: Shoudn't we fix it before we sell it? PAPA: Well, I traded our spare tire for a taste of whiskey last month. Don't worry about it, I'll handle it when we get there.
Papa coaxes the car into starting and drives the rest of the way to Honest Abe's Used Cars, relying on neutral gear for the last downhill stretch. ABE: Glad to see you made it here, Mr. Jones. You're here to trade in the Corvair, candy-apple red, correct? PAPA: That's right, it's out back. Shall we go have a look at it? ABE: Naturally, we'll have time for that later. Here, fill out this stack of forms. I've looked up the standard resell value and written it down there. Cigarette? JUNIOR: Don't you want to see it before you buy it from us? Abe sighs PAPA: Don't trouble yourself with this, Junior, we're doing business. JUNIOR: But one of the tires has a leak. And I didn't even check the other three. Abe Stares blankly at Junior PAPA: To my knowledge, all of the other tires are fine. And I can't confirm that leak, I didn't see it myself. ABE: Well, my pricing book doesn't have columns for those things, so let's just stick with this contract we have here. JUNIOR: And it stalled on the way here. And he said something about rolling over. And we had to coast the last half-mile here in a straight line because of everything else that's wrong with it. PAPA: Boy, I can see I need to teach you the finer points of when to keep your mouth shut in polite company. Now, this here belt don't know the difference between family and foe... ABE: Care for a cigarette, Mr. Jones? Did I already offer? PAPA: Thank you, Abe. All right, there's my signature, yours is already there, pleasure doing business with you. JUNIOR: But Mr. Honest, don't you even care that the car works before you buy it? You can even see the nail in the tire! ABE: Care to explain to the boy, Mr. Jones? PAPA: (calming down) Junior, it doesn't matter whether there's a Corvair or two bicycles out back, so long as there's four wheels and some red paint. Abe is a buyer for the federal government.
Junior looks down at his shoes thoughtfully. Credits roll.
For an example of increasing complexity by attempting to reduce complexity, I give the Windows directory tree:
Try navigating your home directory using the mouse. Not My Documents or the Desktop, but the top-level folder created for each user on the system. The path is
C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\
, which is fine except for the spaces in the path and not too much of a pain to type. But how do you click to there? Clicking "up" from My Documents takes you to the Desktop, and there's no direct step from the Desktop to $HOME. Starting anywhere else in the filesystem in Windows Explorer, repeatedly clicking "up" always eventually leads up to the Desktop. So the structure is apparently:
Desktop -> My Computer -> C:\ -> Documents and Settings -> YourName -> Desktop (wtf) -> My Documents ->...
As an encore, how about those special folders that Windows Explorer says you don't really need to look at, e.g. Program Files...
I don't mean to Windows-bash, but this just strikes me as ridiculously counterproductive. They've actually made the system more awkward and less flexible, based on the assumption that users are too dumb to ever learn their way around a heirarchy of folders.
Seeing as how muscle doesn't do much unless it's connected to a bone, and bones add a significant amount of flavor to meat when it's cooked, I propose growing meat on some sort of minimal animal-like thing. Like a rat, for example: an insanely muscular rat, with haunches like hams. Then the flavor could be modified with further genetic engineering, to taste like prime rib or bacon-wrapped scallops. Delicious.
It sounds demented, but that's kind of the trend with our existing meat and poultry: Domestic chickens are much more muscular than wild or fighting chickens, and turkeys are also ridiculously proportioned. Look how small their heads are, it's sick. So if we apply modern genetic engineering to the problem, I think we could easily produce an animal that's almost the meat equivalent of a fruit.
There's a lot of weird shit floating around the Pacific Rim.
We occasionally see these things in the U.S., and while I've never had the balls (for fear of losing them) to try all the features of the pimp-my-throne when I see one, I know they have a certain cache' and are at least a significant presence in general. But beyond that, lemme tell you about the squatting pan. Terminal : Desktop:: Squatting pan : Toilet. It's just a shallow porcelain basin in the ground, with a drain and some inlet for water to flush.
Freaked the shit outta me... which I guess was the point.
Also: The TV world discovered within the past few years that a really good series can keep making money through DVD sales. TV episodes are no longer necessarily single-use throwaways, with the occasional summer rerunm -- a little extra effort now translates into another revenue stream even after the series is cancelled. Seems something like an HBO effect.
I'm picturing the guy has $5,000 to $10,000 in the bank. It's good to have a couple thousand in a savings account in case something happens, but beyond that, there needs to be a plan. It's also good to have some money to live off during those anxious few months right after graduation.
Student loans don't collect interest until 6 months after graduation, normally, and the interest rates are generally merciful. Plus, he'll most likely have a big income boost soon after graduation -- that's part of the point of getting the degree. It's usually best to take the full amount offered each quarter, live comfortably but reasonably, and pay all bills on time and in full each month. Good credit is crucial.
All the securities markets in the U.S. are doing weird things right now, so even diversified investments are a risk. Since graduation is a known amount of time away, and the money won't be needed until then, I recommend a Certificate of Deposit. That gets the risk-free rate, guaranteed. Day trading is almost always a terrible idea.
I don't know the details of the law you mentioned, but somewhere in the menagerie comprising savings accounts, money markets, IRAs, trusts, CDs, bonds, mutual funds, commodities, stocks, and so on, I'd imagine there's someplace you can put your leftover student loans other than your mattress.
And yes, millionaires do borrow, they just don't borrow to finance something with diminishing value (like a vacation). It takes money to make money.
Word. Why is anyone taking India's argument at face value? Computers are not new, and kids born since the 1970s in developed countries have grown up staring at screens for hours a day. And it should be fairly clear that computer literacy is a useful skill in the modern world. Most accredited universities (in the U.S., at least) require access to a computer as part of the curriculum.
The following explanations are plausible:
Pride. We think of India as a third-world country, but India is trying very hard to get rid of that reputation. Note that the HRD brought up that "no developed county has been chosen" for the progam -- this means that accepting the program groups India with the poorest of the world's poor. Now, some folks still cling to the notion of all Indians as half-naked, mud-caked peasants. That's not how India is. India has millions of citizens who would be considered middle-class or wealthy in the U.S -- in addition to a billion or so of the world's poorest. As with China (as we're finally realizing), India doesn't want to be pitied -- it wants to be feared.
Economic independence. As an offshoot of the previous point, India is interested in developing its own industries, rather than relying on the goodwill of MIT and other external sponsors (give a man a fish/teach a man to fish). And it's made a good start. The plan, then, is to keep developing high-tech industry, focus on helping the well-educated fraction of its population keep up with the developed world, and gradually build the foundation for a modern economy.
Business politics. Another poster mentioned that India is carefully courting Microsoft these days, among other major IT names -- and the OLPC program is very business-subversive. It runs Linux, it lasts for years longer than any existing laptop, it has a built-in wiki engine and other tools to let users create and share their own content, and is generally devised to prevent consumerism and vendor lock-in.
I don't know much 'bout how this particular scam works, but it seem like the approach they'd take is:
Buy a good number of shares of some low-volume stock
Send out the spam telling everyone else to buy it, too
Assume a large number of people take the bait
Wait a few hours, then sell like mad -- then maybe sell some more (i.e. short)
Profit!... ?
Now, even if only a few people take the bait, it still works anyway. And with that kind of obvious dumping going on, or even just that level of volatility, the stock's guaranteed to go down, and down some more. Even existing investors would probably get out when they see spammers messing with their investment.
So based on your anecdotal evidence, I'd say the spammers are selling and existing investors are running faster than Joe Baittaker is buying on the h0t t1p in his inbox.
Therefore, if I felt like living on the edge, I'd start keeping track of all the stocks that get spammed, waiting a few hours, and then shorting like the spammers. Then, once everyone on Slashdot catches on and starts doing the same, turn it into a game of paper-rock-scissors by buying again just before the call for everyone's short-sell. (Oh, the game can go on forever -- buying hedged options to catch the volatility in either direction, applying the spam effect to derivatives...)
My understanding of Joe Sixpack may be a little off the mark on this, but:
I've gotten the impression during the past couple years that Joe Sixpack is slowly becoming aware that Open Source and <blink> FREE </blink> are two different things. One is this geeky thing that's free, has powers that are foreign to the Windows/IE/Office97 world, seems to be powered by communists, and is too difficult for non-geeks to use. The other is full of viruses and little gnomes (sorry) who will steal your identity. Firefox, Wikipedia, and this fabled Linux thing are lumped into the first category with varying results; spam leads you to the second category.
The point is, OOo is currently a good fit for someone with an old computer who can't afford MS Office 2003, and who can't open open half the.doc files out there with their current version of Office -- provided the ad explains what OOo is honestly and clearly. The selling points are:
It's Open Source -- strong enough for a nerd, but made for real people.
It can read more formats than any other office suite, possibly including MS's latest and greatest.
Great PDF support, standard -- even MS Office doesn't have this.
Supports the ODF international standard -- again, MS Office probably won't have this for a long time.
The most portable suite available -- works on Windows XP/2000/Me/9x, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD (stretch the list of systems to emphasise how universal it is) and kinda on Macs, too.
Never lose a document to outdated formats again
Free download and support from www.OpenOffice.org [sprinkle logos around]
I agree that what we're seeing today isn't an ad, it's a cry for help. The ad that actually makes it to press should emphasise the facts in favor of the product -- the Firefox ad looked legit, with quotes to back it up; OOo should try the same approach. It has a devoted and sincere community, it's baggage- and cost-free, and it offers some things MS Office doesn't.
(RE classroom project: that would be good, but it seems like more of a holistic Linux effort -- OOo does not define the entire computer. A variant could be: let folks donate old, seemingly worthless computers; install a lightweight distro that can support OOo (if possible), and set up a new computer for the school that way. Then make sure there's support on hand to help everyone get comfortable with the new systems...)
I'm mostly using Write (=Word) and Calc (=Excel), with some Impress (=PowerPoint). The main problems are in importing screwy MS Office files and losing the arrangement of things, and exporting files that use OOo's enhancements. In general, OOo is noticeably less mature than MS Office, but more logically laid out in the details, and both points can trip it up when the suites interact. MS Office really is a very solid and complete suite; it's a serious challenge to try to upstage it that way Firefox did IE.
Write doesn't handle background and embedded images reliably. If the original Word document used strange techniques like a mishmash of text-wrapping and some automatic layout, or abuse of styles, it might all go to hell in Write. The bulletted and numbered lists behave a little differently, and the way to do certain things is not always obvious. The typesetting is also slightly different, so the last line of a page might jump to the top of the next page in the conversion. In addition, OOo has a very logical layout (eerily, as if programmers had designed it instead of marketers), so more things are easily adjustable, at the expense of Office's familiar defaults. Some of these adjustments will do mysterious things when loaded in Word again.
Calc's most obvious fault is in borders. Excel has the infuriating property of only giving 12 borders to work with -- a few thin ones to cover all sides, a double line underneath the cell, a thick line underneath or all around -- some useful options, but far from a complete set, leaving the user to grapple with the program in order to do something different. Calc gives a complete set of border arrangements, but lets the stylistic properties be set using styles in another dialog. Excel doesn't know how to handle this more elegant concept, so it displays the borders as dotted lines out of spite. Calc's less obvious flaw is that it doesn't necessarily handle macros and embedded scripts correctly. There's also one odd alignment option that's exclusive to Excel -- "center over selection," without merging the cells. Finally, the "Data Analysis" tools seem to be missing as well in Calc, though it's possible I just haven't found them yet.
Calc's vestigal weakness is that it uses the same built-in functions as Excel. Look at the definitions of COUNTIF() and SUMIF(), and the way array functions work -- better to see them now and groan, rather than discover them on a deadline and cry. (I still use Calc for most of my real work, and touch up the borders in Excel when I need to send the file to somebody sensitive.)
Impress did impress me -- I found it easier to put together a presentation using it than Powerpoint. But when I checked my work in Powerpoint afterward, I saw that PowerPoint handled lists differently, sometimes collapsing the margins/indentation (treating the bulletpoints as images to wrap around, instead of indenting the whole list). I didn't do much fancy stuff, so there could easily be more hidden shortcomings -- but my presentation did look pretty sauve after I fixed the lists.
There are also a number of oddball Office-like programs, e.g. Visio, with various F/OSS equivalents that aren't part of OOo. It could be an interesting future project to assemble a most comprehensive office package that's a superset of OOo... but we'll leave that on the table for now. As a closing point, remember that PDF exporting is built into OOo, so you always have truly portable exit plan if it comes to that.
Given how common credit-card debt is... probably the $1,300 set.
Another $1K for a flipping sweet [boring_commodity] may not fly, but TVs, along with cars, are one of the areas where mainstream consumers will leap at the chance to get something flashy. When you have people over, they'll notice if you have a ridiculous TV on your wall. The fellas want to come to your house to watch the game. If you're really sick, you can position your uberTV by a big window so everyone outside can see what a big-time player you are.
If you like TV a lot, you'll probably like a lotta TV.
Of course, I remember DVD taking years to really become dominant, and that was absolutely logical: Our audio went from tapes to discs, so the same goes for video. HD-DVD, Blueray, the new hottness from Bell Labs -- these are incremental improvements, and everyone already has a DVD collection. I, for one, am going to wait and see before I buy in.
Yeah, I kind of agree, for a company that's small and decidedly not tech-savvy. My company made an attempt with Skype, with these results:
About half of the old codgers were cool with the VoIP side of it.
Less than 20% figured out the text-based chat mode. And these were engineers! One guy thought it had something to do with online dating.
Everyone still uses phones and the intercom system.
So, if you're willing to put some effort into training everyone on Jabber, go for it. Otherwise, just make sure everyone has a phone, and let the managers play with their BlackBerries if they have them. (Just my humble recommendation.)
In theory, it would be easier to port a Windows app to a Windows cluster. I don't see this catching on with scientific researchers at all, but in the financial world, they're just not as concerned about up-front costs if it fits their current computer system and works as a drop-in solution. A bank running Windows desktops and Windows servers could easily fall for it... I mean, go for it.
"Is the entire national-security / defense industry as rotten as it appears? I started digging into it as a result of the recent lame, unsubstantiated assertions of terrorist threats to America by President Bush, but the practice doesn't seem to start or end with him. Who knows, maybe it's pandemic in that entire segment of the federal government."
Re:Has the survey been credible in the past?
on
Apache down, IIS up
·
· Score: 1
Well, the numbers are true, but the reason for those numbers is really shady. Microsoft essentially gave free support for GoDaddy to switch an insane number of parked domains over to IIS, and the only reason for MS to do that that springs to mind is to tweak these numbers.
Microsoft has marketers, while Apache and open source in general have traditionally let statistics and comparisons speak for themselves. Did Apache's lead drop this much in a month just because IIS is so darn good? In this case, it doesn't appear the numbers really are speaking for themselves.
(I think Netcraft usually is reasonably credible and impartial, although seeing this abuse, perhaps it would be more illuminating if the published stats tracked bandwidth served, not number of domains.)
Just install Linux on it, geez. Do you really have that many legacy apps that can't be run with the current version of wine?
That's all well and good functionality-wise, but try telling a classic car enthusiast who keeps an antique Ford roadster running perfectly that it'd be much easier and cheaper to just get a new Toyota.
You know, I hear early Pintos are becoming a real collector's item these days.
This says that as of April 2006, the site had the following OS breakdown:
WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT W2003 Linux Mac
74.0% 11.2% 1.8% 0.3% 1.9% 3.3% 3.6%
Obviously this is not a totally valid study for the Internet as a whole (it also says 25% of the browsers in April were Firefox), but if we say the W3Schools demographic is about the same as the Firefox demographic, and also consider the user base for Win98 is dropping by about.2% per month, then the developers really shouldn't feel too guilty about not adding new features for Win98 users after v2.0.
On a related note, is there another free browser out there that specifically tries to be compatible with as many EOL'd OSes as possible?
1) Even if we're not sueing each other any more than we were 5 years ago, we're having more fun than ever talking about the insanity of it. For example, this article, and everything on Fark.
2) The US has always had anti-authoritarian tendancies, a certain lawlessness from the frontier days. I think we're using lawyers to fill the void void of authority. Either a society agrees to a set of rules and everyone generally obeys them, or we agree to disagree and duke out everything in court.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was something more like this:
...and that's how your old man drove all the snakes out of Fairfield County.
Scene: Papa and Junior driving to the sales lot in a well-polished Corvair
PAPA:
JUNIOR: Gee whiz, Pop.
Car hits a bump in the road, jostles a bit, and stalls. Papa pulls the car over and starts poking around under the hood.
PAPA: (mumbles) Mother of God. (to Junior) Say, Junior, while we're at it, would you mind checking the tire pressure? The gauge is in the glove compartment.
JUNIOR: (checks one tire) It says 18. Ain't it supposed to be 32?
PAPA: What? Check it again.
JUNIOR: It's 17 now. Hey, I see a nail in it too. I think the tire's going flat, Pop.
PAPA: All right, get back in the car, we'd better hurry and get to Honest Abe's sales lot. Hopefully we won't roll over because of it.
JUNIOR: Shoudn't we fix it before we sell it?
PAPA: Well, I traded our spare tire for a taste of whiskey last month. Don't worry about it, I'll handle it when we get there.
Papa coaxes the car into starting and drives the rest of the way to Honest Abe's Used Cars, relying on neutral gear for the last downhill stretch.
ABE: Glad to see you made it here, Mr. Jones. You're here to trade in the Corvair, candy-apple red, correct?
PAPA: That's right, it's out back. Shall we go have a look at it?
ABE: Naturally, we'll have time for that later. Here, fill out this stack of forms. I've looked up the standard resell value and written it down there. Cigarette?
JUNIOR: Don't you want to see it before you buy it from us?
Abe sighs
PAPA: Don't trouble yourself with this, Junior, we're doing business.
JUNIOR: But one of the tires has a leak. And I didn't even check the other three.
Abe Stares blankly at Junior
PAPA: To my knowledge, all of the other tires are fine. And I can't confirm that leak, I didn't see it myself.
ABE: Well, my pricing book doesn't have columns for those things, so let's just stick with this contract we have here.
JUNIOR: And it stalled on the way here. And he said something about rolling over. And we had to coast the last half-mile here in a straight line because of everything else that's wrong with it.
PAPA: Boy, I can see I need to teach you the finer points of when to keep your mouth shut in polite company. Now, this here belt don't know the difference between family and foe...
ABE: Care for a cigarette, Mr. Jones? Did I already offer?
PAPA: Thank you, Abe. All right, there's my signature, yours is already there, pleasure doing business with you.
JUNIOR: But Mr. Honest, don't you even care that the car works before you buy it? You can even see the nail in the tire!
ABE: Care to explain to the boy, Mr. Jones?
PAPA: (calming down) Junior, it doesn't matter whether there's a Corvair or two bicycles out back, so long as there's four wheels and some red paint. Abe is a buyer for the federal government.
Junior looks down at his shoes thoughtfully. Credits roll.
Try navigating your home directory using the mouse. Not My Documents or the Desktop, but the top-level folder created for each user on the system. The path is , which is fine except for the spaces in the path and not too much of a pain to type. But how do you click to there? Clicking "up" from My Documents takes you to the Desktop, and there's no direct step from the Desktop to $HOME. Starting anywhere else in the filesystem in Windows Explorer, repeatedly clicking "up" always eventually leads up to the Desktop. So the structure is apparently:As an encore, how about those special folders that Windows Explorer says you don't really need to look at, e.g. Program Files...
I don't mean to Windows-bash, but this just strikes me as ridiculously counterproductive. They've actually made the system more awkward and less flexible, based on the assumption that users are too dumb to ever learn their way around a heirarchy of folders.
Seeing as how muscle doesn't do much unless it's connected to a bone, and bones add a significant amount of flavor to meat when it's cooked, I propose growing meat on some sort of minimal animal-like thing. Like a rat, for example: an insanely muscular rat, with haunches like hams. Then the flavor could be modified with further genetic engineering, to taste like prime rib or bacon-wrapped scallops. Delicious.
It sounds demented, but that's kind of the trend with our existing meat and poultry: Domestic chickens are much more muscular than wild or fighting chickens, and turkeys are also ridiculously proportioned. Look how small their heads are, it's sick. So if we apply modern genetic engineering to the problem, I think we could easily produce an animal that's almost the meat equivalent of a fruit.
You're thinking of "trade-secrety" -- that's when a proprietary format is supposedly open, but poorly documented so as to be not-quite-usable.
Example: OpenOffice.org sometimes beefs on a Word document because of the format's tradesecretiness.
There's a lot of weird shit floating around the Pacific Rim.
We occasionally see these things in the U.S., and while I've never had the balls (for fear of losing them) to try all the features of the pimp-my-throne when I see one, I know they have a certain cache' and are at least a significant presence in general. But beyond that, lemme tell you about the squatting pan. Terminal : Desktop :: Squatting pan : Toilet. It's just a shallow porcelain basin in the ground, with a drain and some inlet for water to flush.
Freaked the shit outta me... which I guess was the point.
Also: The TV world discovered within the past few years that a really good series can keep making money through DVD sales. TV episodes are no longer necessarily single-use throwaways, with the occasional summer rerunm -- a little extra effort now translates into another revenue stream even after the series is cancelled. Seems something like an HBO effect.
I'm picturing the guy has $5,000 to $10,000 in the bank. It's good to have a couple thousand in a savings account in case something happens, but beyond that, there needs to be a plan. It's also good to have some money to live off during those anxious few months right after graduation.
Student loans don't collect interest until 6 months after graduation, normally, and the interest rates are generally merciful. Plus, he'll most likely have a big income boost soon after graduation -- that's part of the point of getting the degree. It's usually best to take the full amount offered each quarter, live comfortably but reasonably, and pay all bills on time and in full each month. Good credit is crucial.
All the securities markets in the U.S. are doing weird things right now, so even diversified investments are a risk. Since graduation is a known amount of time away, and the money won't be needed until then, I recommend a Certificate of Deposit. That gets the risk-free rate, guaranteed. Day trading is almost always a terrible idea.
I don't know the details of the law you mentioned, but somewhere in the menagerie comprising savings accounts, money markets, IRAs, trusts, CDs, bonds, mutual funds, commodities, stocks, and so on, I'd imagine there's someplace you can put your leftover student loans other than your mattress.
And yes, millionaires do borrow, they just don't borrow to finance something with diminishing value (like a vacation). It takes money to make money.
Word. Why is anyone taking India's argument at face value? Computers are not new, and kids born since the 1970s in developed countries have grown up staring at screens for hours a day. And it should be fairly clear that computer literacy is a useful skill in the modern world. Most accredited universities (in the U.S., at least) require access to a computer as part of the curriculum.
The following explanations are plausible:
Imagine what they could do with...
(wait for it...)
...a Beowulf cluster of these things.
I don't know much 'bout how this particular scam works, but it seem like the approach they'd take is:
Now, even if only a few people take the bait, it still works anyway. And with that kind of obvious dumping going on, or even just that level of volatility, the stock's guaranteed to go down, and down some more. Even existing investors would probably get out when they see spammers messing with their investment.
So based on your anecdotal evidence, I'd say the spammers are selling and existing investors are running faster than Joe Baittaker is buying on the h0t t1p in his inbox.
Therefore, if I felt like living on the edge, I'd start keeping track of all the stocks that get spammed, waiting a few hours, and then shorting like the spammers. Then, once everyone on Slashdot catches on and starts doing the same, turn it into a game of paper-rock-scissors by buying again just before the call for everyone's short-sell. (Oh, the game can go on forever -- buying hedged options to catch the volatility in either direction, applying the spam effect to derivatives...)
Thanks! Now, here's the table normalized to show which countries are disproportionately spammy:
Country: %spam %use SpamFactor
Poland___3.6___1.0___3.6
Spain____4.8___1.6___3.0
S.Korea__7.5___3.2___2.3
France___5.2___2.4___2.2
China____20.0__10.7__1.9
Taiwan___1.7___1.3___1.3
Brazil___3.1___2.4___1.3
USA______23.2__18.9__1.2
Italy____3.0___2.7___1.1
Germany__2.5___4.5___0.6
UK_______1.8___3.5___0.5
Japan____1.6___8.0___0.2
Slashdot to Sophos: You forgot to mention Poland.
My understanding of Joe Sixpack may be a little off the mark on this, but:
I've gotten the impression during the past couple years that Joe Sixpack is slowly becoming aware that Open Source and <blink> FREE </blink> are two different things. One is this geeky thing that's free, has powers that are foreign to the Windows/IE/Office97 world, seems to be powered by communists, and is too difficult for non-geeks to use. The other is full of viruses and little gnomes (sorry) who will steal your identity. Firefox, Wikipedia, and this fabled Linux thing are lumped into the first category with varying results; spam leads you to the second category.
The point is, OOo is currently a good fit for someone with an old computer who can't afford MS Office 2003, and who can't open open half the .doc files out there with their current version of Office -- provided the ad explains what OOo is honestly and clearly. The selling points are:
I agree that what we're seeing today isn't an ad, it's a cry for help. The ad that actually makes it to press should emphasise the facts in favor of the product -- the Firefox ad looked legit, with quotes to back it up; OOo should try the same approach. It has a devoted and sincere community, it's baggage- and cost-free, and it offers some things MS Office doesn't.
(RE classroom project: that would be good, but it seems like more of a holistic Linux effort -- OOo does not define the entire computer. A variant could be: let folks donate old, seemingly worthless computers; install a lightweight distro that can support OOo (if possible), and set up a new computer for the school that way. Then make sure there's support on hand to help everyone get comfortable with the new systems...)
I'm mostly using Write (=Word) and Calc (=Excel), with some Impress (=PowerPoint). The main problems are in importing screwy MS Office files and losing the arrangement of things, and exporting files that use OOo's enhancements. In general, OOo is noticeably less mature than MS Office, but more logically laid out in the details, and both points can trip it up when the suites interact. MS Office really is a very solid and complete suite; it's a serious challenge to try to upstage it that way Firefox did IE.
Write doesn't handle background and embedded images reliably. If the original Word document used strange techniques like a mishmash of text-wrapping and some automatic layout, or abuse of styles, it might all go to hell in Write. The bulletted and numbered lists behave a little differently, and the way to do certain things is not always obvious. The typesetting is also slightly different, so the last line of a page might jump to the top of the next page in the conversion. In addition, OOo has a very logical layout (eerily, as if programmers had designed it instead of marketers), so more things are easily adjustable, at the expense of Office's familiar defaults. Some of these adjustments will do mysterious things when loaded in Word again.
Calc's most obvious fault is in borders. Excel has the infuriating property of only giving 12 borders to work with -- a few thin ones to cover all sides, a double line underneath the cell, a thick line underneath or all around -- some useful options, but far from a complete set, leaving the user to grapple with the program in order to do something different. Calc gives a complete set of border arrangements, but lets the stylistic properties be set using styles in another dialog. Excel doesn't know how to handle this more elegant concept, so it displays the borders as dotted lines out of spite. Calc's less obvious flaw is that it doesn't necessarily handle macros and embedded scripts correctly. There's also one odd alignment option that's exclusive to Excel -- "center over selection," without merging the cells. Finally, the "Data Analysis" tools seem to be missing as well in Calc, though it's possible I just haven't found them yet.
Calc's vestigal weakness is that it uses the same built-in functions as Excel. Look at the definitions of COUNTIF() and SUMIF(), and the way array functions work -- better to see them now and groan, rather than discover them on a deadline and cry. (I still use Calc for most of my real work, and touch up the borders in Excel when I need to send the file to somebody sensitive.)
Impress did impress me -- I found it easier to put together a presentation using it than Powerpoint. But when I checked my work in Powerpoint afterward, I saw that PowerPoint handled lists differently, sometimes collapsing the margins/indentation (treating the bulletpoints as images to wrap around, instead of indenting the whole list). I didn't do much fancy stuff, so there could easily be more hidden shortcomings -- but my presentation did look pretty sauve after I fixed the lists.
There are also a number of oddball Office-like programs, e.g. Visio, with various F/OSS equivalents that aren't part of OOo. It could be an interesting future project to assemble a most comprehensive office package that's a superset of OOo... but we'll leave that on the table for now. As a closing point, remember that PDF exporting is built into OOo, so you always have truly portable exit plan if it comes to that.
Given how common credit-card debt is... probably the $1,300 set.
Another $1K for a flipping sweet [boring_commodity] may not fly, but TVs, along with cars, are one of the areas where mainstream consumers will leap at the chance to get something flashy. When you have people over, they'll notice if you have a ridiculous TV on your wall. The fellas want to come to your house to watch the game. If you're really sick, you can position your uberTV by a big window so everyone outside can see what a big-time player you are.
If you like TV a lot, you'll probably like a lotta TV.
Of course, I remember DVD taking years to really become dominant, and that was absolutely logical: Our audio went from tapes to discs, so the same goes for video. HD-DVD, Blueray, the new hottness from Bell Labs -- these are incremental improvements, and everyone already has a DVD collection. I, for one, am going to wait and see before I buy in.
Or the Associated Press, Modern Language Association, APA, Merriam-Webster and Chicago Manual of Style.
(Even more hardcore: Per AP style, I still capitalize "Internet" -- being a nerd can mean many things.)
Yeah, I kind of agree, for a company that's small and decidedly not tech-savvy. My company made an attempt with Skype, with these results:
So, if you're willing to put some effort into training everyone on Jabber, go for it. Otherwise, just make sure everyone has a phone, and let the managers play with their BlackBerries if they have them. (Just my humble recommendation.)
In theory, it would be easier to port a Windows app to a Windows cluster. I don't see this catching on with scientific researchers at all, but in the financial world, they're just not as concerned about up-front costs if it fits their current computer system and works as a drop-in solution. A bank running Windows desktops and Windows servers could easily fall for it... I mean, go for it.
That's funny, I think mine got this update on June 1!
Naw, just plain ol' mud. (2nd paragraph)
Well, the numbers are true, but the reason for those numbers is really shady. Microsoft essentially gave free support for GoDaddy to switch an insane number of parked domains over to IIS, and the only reason for MS to do that that springs to mind is to tweak these numbers.
Microsoft has marketers, while Apache and open source in general have traditionally let statistics and comparisons speak for themselves. Did Apache's lead drop this much in a month just because IIS is so darn good? In this case, it doesn't appear the numbers really are speaking for themselves.
(I think Netcraft usually is reasonably credible and impartial, although seeing this abuse, perhaps it would be more illuminating if the published stats tracked bandwidth served, not number of domains.)
Now, if only we could do something about mud...
You know, I hear early Pintos are becoming a real collector's item these days.
(I kid!)
Current numbers:
W3Schools Browser Stats
This says that as of April 2006, the site had the following OS breakdown:WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT W2003 Linux Mac
74.0% 11.2% 1.8% 0.3% 1.9% 3.3% 3.6%
Obviously this is not a totally valid study for the Internet as a whole (it also says 25% of the browsers in April were Firefox), but if we say the W3Schools demographic is about the same as the Firefox demographic, and also consider the user base for Win98 is dropping by about .2% per month, then the developers really shouldn't feel too guilty about not adding new features for Win98 users after v2.0.
On a related note, is there another free browser out there that specifically tries to be compatible with as many EOL'd OSes as possible?
Two theories:
1) Even if we're not sueing each other any more than we were 5 years ago, we're having more fun than ever talking about the insanity of it. For example, this article, and everything on Fark.
2) The US has always had anti-authoritarian tendancies, a certain lawlessness from the frontier days. I think we're using lawyers to fill the void void of authority. Either a society agrees to a set of rules and everyone generally obeys them, or we agree to disagree and duke out everything in court.