Not true. Windows 7 isn't that big a leap to adjust to,made even easier by people already using it at home.
You generally don't find non-IT staff thinking 'what's the easiest to use? I'd better go for linux'. Or, for that matter 'what's the cheapest? I'd better go with Apple'
Want your users to use Open Office instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them. Want your users to use Linux instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them. If it hasn't already happened, repeat until your 'savings' have disappeared and you've been fired.
Not the way things should be. But we're talking about the way things are in 90% of companies.
After playing for two days, I reached a stage where the game asked me if I wanted to purchase DLC. This was puzzling as I'd paid through Steam for the Digital edition which supposedly came with the DLC already.
After signing up to Steam and EA's support pages, I found that even though Steam entered the game code for you, the DLC code had to be entered seperately, despite not telling me this anywhere.
I complained to Steam, they said it was nothing to do with them - so I asked for a refund, as the experience had soured my taste for the game. Steam said no, I'd already played it for two days and was therefore ineligible. I reminded them that by UK law, I can return anything defective to the seller *or* the manufacturer - it's my choice by law. Steam replied that they weren't in the UK.
I never played the game again - in fact, I think I've paid for two games out of the dozen or so I've played since. But hey, I'm doing this because I'm a nasty pirate, not because I refuse to be ripped off again, right?
Spoken as someone that worked in Whitechapel for ten years, it's somewhere you move away from, not to. Trust me on this, the only people that think it's trendy to live somewhere like that are journalists
These people are going to have to upgrade if they want to even partially consider themselves safe.
This happens every single time - "I'm not upgrading from 98SE/ NT.40/ XP - my old system runs all my games fine and I'll never need to upgrade" - as if the OS world will stop and wait for them to figure it out.
Then the press report it as some sort of barometer about the next OS's popularity, before quietly shutting up a year later once most of the old OS boxes have been thrown away.
I'm just surprised that Slashdot apparently don't have enough news today - and doubly surprised that they use this kind of non-article filler.
I have a condition called otosclerosis - the membrane that the last ear-bone goes through to connect to the cochlea turns to bone. As a result, that last ear-bone stops moving = all three bones stop moving = you go deaf.
They drilled a hole in the membrane, and put a titanium-steel rod in place of the last bone.
The upshot? I can now hear again, but I have to fight the urge to find and kill Sarah Connor.
We're expected to shell out thousands to SSL 'companies' whose job it is to confirm what we already know. Especially the likes of GoDaddy, who wanted more info for my domain than I need to get a passport, bank account, driving license, pretty much anything else. The result? Bugger off, don't need it anyway. Now repeat into the millions.
It doesn't help that Exchange and IE both scream about SSL Certs - it's just one more thing people ignore.
I didn't personally hate 95 (when the alternative was DOS), or 98 (it fixed a lot of 95 probs) or the rest (except for ME, which was a knee-jerk reaction to the '2000 is crap' crowd).
What makes me laugh is that my first post was echoing the general feeling towards these OS's at the time, especially on sites similar to this one - and yet I get marked as a troll for reminding them, which gives a few clues as to the age of the slashdot moderators:-)
>ication? Win2k was a replacement for NT, not for Win98.
Oh absolutely - but many people went from 98 to 2000, not realising the difference under the hood - and no amount of explaining how much better it was seemed to work (hence lots of angry ignorant posts on the web along the lines of 'Well my machine runs 98SE much faster than 2000, so I'll be sticking with that and stuff Microsoft', as if MS were going to change their plans based on their opinion. Sort of like it is right now with XP/ Win7!
>And all the 9x/Me line sucked. You had to restart the computer three times a day to keep it at a relatively stable level.
If it were 1998, I would disagree. NT/ 2K needed lots more memory than 9x, so it wasn't an option for most people. Our first NT 3.1 machine had a massive *ten megabytes* of RAM.
95 was the first stab, 98 was better, 98SE was the best. ME, however, I have blanked from my mind:-)
Wow, I got marked down as a troll - justification please, slashdot - unless only fanboy comments are allowed...
Win2K was crap - for those that were used to 98. It was quite slow and didn't really come into its' own until XP (although it did introduce AD - and linux bods even now whinge that it's LDAP with bells on, ignoring the problem of having no mass-scalable alternative themselves, even ten years later). What's funny is that all the early adopters who went for 2000 had a much easier transition to XP - and so it has been with Vista/ 7.
NT3.51's engine actually came from DEC's VMS - do a crtl-alt-del, make it fullscreen and select processes - you're now looking at the VMS frontscreen from 25 years ago, so whenever anyone says that Windows is crap, you can point this out:-)
Win98 wasn't the best 9x, I'm afraid - you're forgetting 98SE:-)
Unless you're of the opinion that M$ are suddenly going to stop stealing all the best features and ideas (in exactly the same way as they always have for the past twenty years), or that all the Corps are suddenly going to invest in devs to port their apps off of IE...
You only have to google to see that the 1000/Full thing (and the Windows autotuning problem) is down to there being *no standards*. It can be caused by different firmware, mixed hardware, different NIC's, the list is quite long.
'Red Hat is growing as a business' But their userbase isn't. Novell have bought Corel and a bunch of other companies - does that mean they're growing too?
'Software does not age' Uh-huh. So I guess firewalls, spam, etc. which combined would destroy Win95 would do so simply because 95 was rubbish to begin with?
'Software is easy to copy' Yeah, and assembler is easy to write. It's *installation* that you'll fall over on. Or will a non-computer person find cracking Win7 that easy? It's like saying a car is easy to steal as long as you don't drive it.
Open Source You fail to deal with the cost of after-sales support, as well as increased costs for administration and total cost for mass-implementation. A good example is Active Directory - it's been around for 10 years, and yet for most of those years the Linux community spent more time complaining that 'it was only LDAP with bells on' while totally failing to provide an equivalent (or for a long while, integration). And now here we are, all having to use Windows/ AD because there simply is nothing else that will integrate systems so completely. So, if you *don't* use Windows, you can kiss goodbye to Single Sign-on, Enterprise encryption, Direct Access, Central Management, Federated Services...the list is quite long.
I also remember the knives coming out for RedHat when they dared to do something as revolutionary as automatic updating - and if something that simple can cause a furore, I'm not going to waste my time or business waiting for the OSS community to stop playing 'I have the best distro' when I can spend a lot less in terms of TCO and use what is almost the universal standard (as opposed to paying support staff twice as much to support an OS that has way less than 10% market share).
And Apple had 'years of business' - when they weren't sacking their CEO, buying their next OS off of him and then re-employing him anyway, *after* MS had bailed them out in order to preserve some pretence of competition.
No, I see OSS as having a lot, lot further to go before it's seen as real competition - and that's before we get to the desktop arena, where it has almost no chance at all.
Slashdot Mirror
More accurately would be "All because someone paid me to"
After all, there are only so many ways you can reinvent Simon.
If you ask me what Simon is, that's just an example of how young you are. Or how old I am!
Not true. Windows 7 isn't that big a leap to adjust to,made even easier by people already using it at home.
You generally don't find non-IT staff thinking 'what's the easiest to use? I'd better go for linux'. Or, for that matter 'what's the cheapest? I'd better go with Apple'
Want your users to use Open Office instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them.
Want your users to use Linux instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them.
If it hasn't already happened, repeat until your 'savings' have disappeared and you've been fired.
Not the way things should be. But we're talking about the way things are in 90% of companies.
Just like when people will realise The Sims is pointless, Tagamotchi's are pointless, and ipods are a rip off, right?
After playing for two days, I reached a stage where the game asked me if I wanted to purchase DLC. This was puzzling as I'd paid through Steam for the Digital edition which supposedly came with the DLC already.
After signing up to Steam and EA's support pages, I found that even though Steam entered the game code for you, the DLC code had to be entered seperately, despite not telling me this anywhere.
I complained to Steam, they said it was nothing to do with them - so I asked for a refund, as the experience had soured my taste for the game. Steam said no, I'd already played it for two days and was therefore ineligible. I reminded them that by UK law, I can return anything defective to the seller *or* the manufacturer - it's my choice by law. Steam replied that they weren't in the UK.
I never played the game again - in fact, I think I've paid for two games out of the dozen or so I've played since. But hey, I'm doing this because I'm a nasty pirate, not because I refuse to be ripped off again, right?
Spoken as someone that worked in Whitechapel for ten years, it's somewhere you move away from, not to. Trust me on this, the only people that think it's trendy to live somewhere like that are journalists
Which is useful as a yardstick to avoid, otherwise you're copy&pasting with your brain
These people are going to have to upgrade if they want to even partially consider themselves safe.
This happens every single time - "I'm not upgrading from 98SE/ NT.40/ XP - my old system runs all my games fine and I'll never need to upgrade" - as if the OS world will stop and wait for them to figure it out.
Then the press report it as some sort of barometer about the next OS's popularity, before quietly shutting up a year later once most of the old OS boxes have been thrown away.
I'm just surprised that Slashdot apparently don't have enough news today - and doubly surprised that they use this kind of non-article filler.
That doesn't even qualify for a score of funny?
Now I remember why my time on reddit outstrips time on slashdot by a factor of three these days....
I have a condition called otosclerosis - the membrane that the last ear-bone goes through to connect to the cochlea turns to bone. As a result, that last ear-bone stops moving = all three bones stop moving = you go deaf.
They drilled a hole in the membrane, and put a titanium-steel rod in place of the last bone.
The upshot? I can now hear again, but I have to fight the urge to find and kill Sarah Connor.
I'm not a burglar either - I was just breaking into your house and messing it up to show you how unsecure the locks are.
We're expected to shell out thousands to SSL 'companies' whose job it is to confirm what we already know. Especially the likes of GoDaddy, who wanted more info for my domain than I need to get a passport, bank account, driving license, pretty much anything else. The result? Bugger off, don't need it anyway. Now repeat into the millions.
It doesn't help that Exchange and IE both scream about SSL Certs - it's just one more thing people ignore.
Yay, thanks for that!
I didn't personally hate 95 (when the alternative was DOS), or 98 (it fixed a lot of 95 probs) or the rest (except for ME, which was a knee-jerk reaction to the '2000 is crap' crowd).
What makes me laugh is that my first post was echoing the general feeling towards these OS's at the time, especially on sites similar to this one - and yet I get marked as a troll for reminding them, which gives a few clues as to the age of the slashdot moderators :-)
>ication? Win2k was a replacement for NT, not for Win98.
Oh absolutely - but many people went from 98 to 2000, not realising the difference under the hood - and no amount of explaining how much better it was seemed to work (hence lots of angry ignorant posts on the web along the lines of 'Well my machine runs 98SE much faster than 2000, so I'll be sticking with that and stuff Microsoft', as if MS were going to change their plans based on their opinion. Sort of like it is right now with XP/ Win7!
>And all the 9x/Me line sucked. You had to restart the computer three times a day to keep it at a relatively stable level.
If it were 1998, I would disagree. NT/ 2K needed lots more memory than 9x, so it wasn't an option for most people. Our first NT 3.1 machine had a massive *ten megabytes* of RAM.
95 was the first stab, 98 was better, 98SE was the best. ME, however, I have blanked from my mind :-)
Wow, I got marked down as a troll - justification please, slashdot - unless only fanboy comments are allowed...
Win2K was crap - for those that were used to 98. It was quite slow and didn't really come into its' own until XP (although it did introduce AD - and linux bods even now whinge that it's LDAP with bells on, ignoring the problem of having no mass-scalable alternative themselves, even ten years later). What's funny is that all the early adopters who went for 2000 had a much easier transition to XP - and so it has been with Vista/ 7.
NT3.51's engine actually came from DEC's VMS - do a crtl-alt-del, make it fullscreen and select processes - you're now looking at the VMS frontscreen from 25 years ago, so whenever anyone says that Windows is crap, you can point this out :-)
Win98 wasn't the best 9x, I'm afraid - you're forgetting 98SE :-)
MS always take two goes to make a new OS - but apparently, this is somehow news
...with the very first 'oops-didn't-you-scroll-down-and-look-at-the-other-checkboxes' installer system
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8485669.stm
Slashdot has gone down in my estimations, if the best source they can find is CNN :-(
Unless you're of the opinion that M$ are suddenly going to stop stealing all the best features and ideas (in exactly the same way as they always have for the past twenty years), or that all the Corps are suddenly going to invest in devs to port their apps off of IE...
....if I wasn't *too old*...
....and they'll have 1% of the Windows userbase!
What bugs me is that Linux seems to get 10 - 20% of media coverage, and yet has such a tiny desktop penetration....
And you learnt that where?
You only have to google to see that the 1000/Full thing (and the Windows autotuning problem) is down to there being *no standards*. It can be caused by different firmware, mixed hardware, different NIC's, the list is quite long.
There's so much here to deal with...
'Red Hat is growing as a business'
But their userbase isn't. Novell have bought Corel and a bunch of other companies - does that mean they're growing too?
'Software does not age'
Uh-huh. So I guess firewalls, spam, etc. which combined would destroy Win95 would do so simply because 95 was rubbish to begin with?
'Software is easy to copy'
Yeah, and assembler is easy to write. It's *installation* that you'll fall over on. Or will a non-computer person find cracking Win7 that easy? It's like saying a car is easy to steal as long as you don't drive it.
Open Source
You fail to deal with the cost of after-sales support, as well as increased costs for administration and total cost for mass-implementation. A good example is Active Directory - it's been around for 10 years, and yet for most of those years the Linux community spent more time complaining that 'it was only LDAP with bells on' while totally failing to provide an equivalent (or for a long while, integration). And now here we are, all having to use Windows/ AD because there simply is nothing else that will integrate systems so completely. So, if you *don't* use Windows, you can kiss goodbye to Single Sign-on, Enterprise encryption, Direct Access, Central Management, Federated Services...the list is quite long.
I also remember the knives coming out for RedHat when they dared to do something as revolutionary as automatic updating - and if something that simple can cause a furore, I'm not going to waste my time or business waiting for the OSS community to stop playing 'I have the best distro' when I can spend a lot less in terms of TCO and use what is almost the universal standard (as opposed to paying support staff twice as much to support an OS that has way less than 10% market share).
And Apple had 'years of business' - when they weren't sacking their CEO, buying their next OS off of him and then re-employing him anyway, *after* MS had bailed them out in order to preserve some pretence of competition.
No, I see OSS as having a lot, lot further to go before it's seen as real competition - and that's before we get to the desktop arena, where it has almost no chance at all.