Has anybody made an app you can run that just pops up a dialog telling you if your computer supports it or not? That would be really, really handy-- I'm curious about my own computer.
They did with Vista. The Vista Compatibility sticker has the same requirements.
Of course, a lot of hardware makers just ignore the sticker and slack off on drivers anyway. And older hardware? Just give up now-- there's no program in place to encourage companies to add Vista/7/64-bit driver support to hardware put out before Vista's release, which is a real pain.
I have a perfectly good Canon Lide 20 USB scanner that's useless to me.
That exact issue, and another unrelated problem (Ubuntu loudly beeping instead of playing the proper alert sound) was the reason I dumped Linux on my laptop. The best I found is that it could kind of cope if you plugged in the monitor, then rebooted it-- I didn't find anyway of making it just work when you plugged the monitor in (or removed it) like every other OS does.
Yah, people on this site never fucking forget ANYTHING. Every time I see some jackass bring up BOB, a product that was on shelves like 2 months, 15 years ago-- well, I want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork. Or theirs, really.
So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end.
The two things are not mutually-exclusive, you know.
Also, what people say is "absolute crap" is Lotus Notes. And it *is* absolute crap, so, you know. You seem to be talking about Domino, instead... Domino may or may not be any good (I don't have the experience to judge), but as long as the part that the general public sees is Lotus Notes, then they're going to call it crap.
And yah it's holding its own against Microsoft. God only knows why-- my assumption has always been because IBM sells directly to the CxOs of a company, and those people don't actually use email.
You can do that in, for example, Filemaker (if you hate Microsoft) in less time than with Notes, and your users won't hate you for it. And (unless they've changed recently) it's cross-platform.
Or if you're ok with Microsoft, try an Access front-end tied with a MS SQL back-end. You're not going to be able to beat that combination with Notes, and as an added bonus MS SQL isn't shitty.
And, seriously,.net is so damned easy now that there's nothing wrong with using it for RAD, and, again, your users won't hate you for it. Take a look at LINQ, for example-- a friend of mine is fond of saying that LINQ is so easy it's almost cheating.
It's a big world out there. And Notes is setting a pretty damned low bar.
Everybody knows you can put multiple labels on a single item. You can't, however, have a single item in multiple folders unless you make a copy of it. Nobody should need "training" for this, because everybody already knows it.
The language IBM uses for describing the behavior is completely wrong. That's IBM's bug, not a problem with the customer.
So this leads me to believe that either your Notes configuration was poorly managed, or this was so many years ago as to be irrelevant to any current discussions of Notes.
Oh fuck off.
I always hear this from Notes supporters. "Your configuration was poorly-managed." Did it ever occur to you that maybe the fact that SO MANY people here have problems means that ALMOST ALL Notes configurations are "poorly-managed?" Why do you think that is?
For the record, this was bog-standard Lotus Notes 6.5. Definitely newer than 2003. And definitely allowed creating meetings that ended before they began.
Did it ever occur to you that, if it was possible for Notes to have a really good UI (and I'm not saying that it is), maybe IBM should SELL it that way instead of selling the broken piece of shit they currently do?
And that's just the UI issues! What's your excuse for "out of office" messages taking hours and hours to actually take effect? What's your excuse for Notes making "aliases" to messages instead of copying them, when you drag them into a folder, so that when you delete the copy in your in-box BOTH copies disappear? What's your excuse for Notes running a tenth as fast and taking three times the memory of Outlook? What's your excuse for Notes costing TWICE AS MUCH PER SEAT as Outlook?
I honestly do not understand how anybody can defend Notes. My only theory is that they've never actually *used* Outlook. Ask around your office. I dare you to find a single person who likes using Notes.
The whole point of Notes is to sell your company shitty software that *requires* consultants like you to make usable. Wouldn't the world be a better place if they just bought decent groupware software in the first fucking place?
The people espousing the hate actually, you know, USE THE PRODUCT.
I had to support the ball of shit. It loved to crash Palms by making calendar items that ended before they began. Notes had been around approx. 20 years at the time, and it never occurred to anybody at Lotus that, hm, maybe you shouldn't be able to make a meeting end before it begins because that makes NO FUCKING SENSE. But no, Notes was perfectly ok with it, and our poor Palms suffered as a result.
And that's just one tiny example of how Lotus Notes made my IT life hell. I spent more time answering Notes complaints than all other complaints combined.
Well, I just assume because the vast majority of people here who bash the US for extremely trivial things are Europeans.
And the problem isn't being able to do the math while buzzed-- although that is more difficult than you'd think-- the problem is that you have no confidence that your math is correct while drunk.
Well no, no it's not. Please stop spreading the fear, uncertainty, and doubt on Microsoft's behalf if you know better, please educate yourself more if you don't.
It's not FUD if it's true.
Not all default accounts that the system sets the initial end user up with are full root-level accounts which require no further authentication to modify any and all system files for the user or any processes that happen to launch under that user's credentials.
Yah; I'm talking about the *current* version of Windows, not the version that shipped almost a decade ago. Comparing 2009 Linux to 2001 Windows, now that's some FUD!
Not all OSes are closed-source that tout the notion of security-via-obscurity. Yes, I know that's one of the red herrings that Microsofties try to claim that gives Linux a security edge due to its smaller portion of desktop marketshare, but nothing is more obscure than source code that only a handful of people can see and understand its flaws. Microsoft seems to think that this is somehow more secure than open source code that has all of its flaws bared to the light of day since it was in development. But Microsoft's closed-source philosophy is obviously quite a failed model in light of how many people are able to discover flaws in it and exploit it anyway, leaving Microsoft either denying there's a problem or rushing out a fix. Sucks to be you if you're one of the people who gets infected after some ne'er-do-well discovers a flaw but before the programmers at Microsoft figure out how to fix it, because they're the only ones who can fix it for you under almost all circumstances.
As far as I can tell, this long, poorly-written rant equates to "open source is better for security." I don't see any actual evidence presented, though.
Not all OSes deny you the ability to patch your computer against security vulnerabilities and other flaws that have been discovered since it was released simply because you didn't pay for them or they merely *think* you didn't pay for them.
Except you can patch Windows versions, even if they aren't activated. More FUD!
Linux does a much better job at isolating system space from userspace.
How so? Saying don't make it so.
Look, obviously you foam-at-the-mouth hate Microsoft. Fine. You're welcome to your opinions. But if you're going to complain about FUD, it might make you look like less of a moron if your response didn't contain metric assloads of FUD. Just FYI for next time.
Out of curiosity, how do you know? If you had a virus, what in your system would reveal that?
Note: I'm being somewhat rhetorical here, as it's quite possible you're one of the Linux users who constantly check your firewall logs and such to actually ensure their computer isn't doing anything undesirable. I'm not even suggesting Linux is insecure, other than to say it's just as open to viruses as any other OS.
I just like commenting on the fact that the vast majority of Linux users who claim they have no viruses don't actually check whether they do or not.
You can also set Deny permissions of the files the virus is trying to start at boot, once you figure out what those are. NTFS permissions are adhered to *extremely* early in the boot process, so this technique is really, really effective-- the hardest part becomes figuring out which specific files contain the virus.
Brother, for example, makes home-class laser printers designed to last and which talk in open protocols. (Not sure about PostScript, but my ancient Brother 1440 definitely does bog-standard PCL.) I'd highly recommend buying whatever the modern equivalent of a Brother 1440 is, that printer's a brick and I love mine to death.
Just because you're not aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Previously, the Apple hate was technical in nature: "Oh, Macs don't have pre-emptive multitasking, Macs don't have protected memory, Macs don't have any CLI-- they must be toys you can't use for actual work!"
(Which completely ignored the fact that back then, Apple's UI was *so much* better than Windows, Mac users were much more productive despite the lack of those OS features. Not as much now that Microsoft's UI people have more-or-less caught-up, and Apple's been making their OS less usable each version. Besides, it wasn't as if early Windows versions with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory were immune to crashing or locking-up. But I digress...)
Anyway, with OS X, all those old arguments have been torn away, so now the new generation of Apple haters have to focus on other things-- and their complaints have become, well, really petty-seeming. At least to me.
Come to think of it, though, I used to know a Mac hater who's biggest criticism of the OS was that it rounded the corners of the screen instead of leaving them square. I can't imagine anything more petty than that.
Eh, you're probably right, even though I have Slashdot set not to give me D2, it always seems to "sneak in" somehow. God this site is fucking buggy.
Apologies. I thought you were doing like the guy further up the thread and setting your post to the typewriter font. (Which is also unreadable on iPhones.) I should have replied to his post.
Try viewing his post on an iPhone. I don't have a PC handy so I have no clue what it's supposed to look like. And if it's not a CSS rule makig the font unreadable, that's an even bigger WTF.
The real point is, just hit reply and start typing. Slashdot looks shitty enough without posters tinkering with the fonts.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell does (at least, for all the machines I've bought from them.) That's why I buy Dell, or try to.
Quick answer: The Slashdot headline is plain wrong.
Please keep that in mind before asking questions on this site, since the Slashdot summary is wrong or misleading probably 30-40% of the time.
Has anybody made an app you can run that just pops up a dialog telling you if your computer supports it or not? That would be really, really handy-- I'm curious about my own computer.
They did with Vista. The Vista Compatibility sticker has the same requirements.
Of course, a lot of hardware makers just ignore the sticker and slack off on drivers anyway. And older hardware? Just give up now-- there's no program in place to encourage companies to add Vista/7/64-bit driver support to hardware put out before Vista's release, which is a real pain.
I have a perfectly good Canon Lide 20 USB scanner that's useless to me.
That exact issue, and another unrelated problem (Ubuntu loudly beeping instead of playing the proper alert sound) was the reason I dumped Linux on my laptop. The best I found is that it could kind of cope if you plugged in the monitor, then rebooted it-- I didn't find anyway of making it just work when you plugged the monitor in (or removed it) like every other OS does.
Do you want to talk about Microsoft BOB?
Yah, people on this site never fucking forget ANYTHING. Every time I see some jackass bring up BOB, a product that was on shelves like 2 months, 15 years ago-- well, I want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork. Or theirs, really.
Ok, but why would that result in infinite recursion? Correct or not, that code still exposes a bug.
You just posted on a website running Slash.
Is that supposed to impress us? Slashdot is by far the most buggy and unstable website I visit.
So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end.
The two things are not mutually-exclusive, you know.
Also, what people say is "absolute crap" is Lotus Notes. And it *is* absolute crap, so, you know. You seem to be talking about Domino, instead... Domino may or may not be any good (I don't have the experience to judge), but as long as the part that the general public sees is Lotus Notes, then they're going to call it crap.
And yah it's holding its own against Microsoft. God only knows why-- my assumption has always been because IBM sells directly to the CxOs of a company, and those people don't actually use email.
Bullshit.
You can do that in, for example, Filemaker (if you hate Microsoft) in less time than with Notes, and your users won't hate you for it. And (unless they've changed recently) it's cross-platform.
Or if you're ok with Microsoft, try an Access front-end tied with a MS SQL back-end. You're not going to be able to beat that combination with Notes, and as an added bonus MS SQL isn't shitty.
And, seriously, .net is so damned easy now that there's nothing wrong with using it for RAD, and, again, your users won't hate you for it. Take a look at LINQ, for example-- a friend of mine is fond of saying that LINQ is so easy it's almost cheating.
It's a big world out there. And Notes is setting a pretty damned low bar.
No, it's because Google CALLS THEM LABELS!!!!
Everybody knows you can put multiple labels on a single item. You can't, however, have a single item in multiple folders unless you make a copy of it. Nobody should need "training" for this, because everybody already knows it.
The language IBM uses for describing the behavior is completely wrong. That's IBM's bug, not a problem with the customer.
So this leads me to believe that either your Notes configuration was poorly managed, or this was so many years ago as to be irrelevant to any current discussions of Notes.
Oh fuck off.
I always hear this from Notes supporters. "Your configuration was poorly-managed." Did it ever occur to you that maybe the fact that SO MANY people here have problems means that ALMOST ALL Notes configurations are "poorly-managed?" Why do you think that is?
For the record, this was bog-standard Lotus Notes 6.5. Definitely newer than 2003. And definitely allowed creating meetings that ended before they began.
Did it ever occur to you that, if it was possible for Notes to have a really good UI (and I'm not saying that it is), maybe IBM should SELL it that way instead of selling the broken piece of shit they currently do?
And that's just the UI issues! What's your excuse for "out of office" messages taking hours and hours to actually take effect? What's your excuse for Notes making "aliases" to messages instead of copying them, when you drag them into a folder, so that when you delete the copy in your in-box BOTH copies disappear? What's your excuse for Notes running a tenth as fast and taking three times the memory of Outlook? What's your excuse for Notes costing TWICE AS MUCH PER SEAT as Outlook?
I honestly do not understand how anybody can defend Notes. My only theory is that they've never actually *used* Outlook. Ask around your office. I dare you to find a single person who likes using Notes.
The whole point of Notes is to sell your company shitty software that *requires* consultants like you to make usable. Wouldn't the world be a better place if they just bought decent groupware software in the first fucking place?
The people espousing the hate actually, you know, USE THE PRODUCT.
I had to support the ball of shit. It loved to crash Palms by making calendar items that ended before they began. Notes had been around approx. 20 years at the time, and it never occurred to anybody at Lotus that, hm, maybe you shouldn't be able to make a meeting end before it begins because that makes NO FUCKING SENSE. But no, Notes was perfectly ok with it, and our poor Palms suffered as a result.
And that's just one tiny example of how Lotus Notes made my IT life hell. I spent more time answering Notes complaints than all other complaints combined.
You're looking at the "your burrito is waiting" icon.
The "new mail" icon looks like a woman wearing fruit on her head. Duh.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
There's Services For Unix from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&DisplayLang=en
Disclaimer: Windows 7 isn't listed on the compatibility list, so I can't guarantee it'll work. Should though.
Well, I just assume because the vast majority of people here who bash the US for extremely trivial things are Europeans.
And the problem isn't being able to do the math while buzzed-- although that is more difficult than you'd think-- the problem is that you have no confidence that your math is correct while drunk.
Well no, no it's not. Please stop spreading the fear, uncertainty, and doubt on Microsoft's behalf if you know better, please educate yourself more if you don't.
It's not FUD if it's true.
Not all default accounts that the system sets the initial end user up with are full root-level accounts which require no further authentication to modify any and all system files for the user or any processes that happen to launch under that user's credentials.
Yah; I'm talking about the *current* version of Windows, not the version that shipped almost a decade ago. Comparing 2009 Linux to 2001 Windows, now that's some FUD!
Not all OSes are closed-source that tout the notion of security-via-obscurity. Yes, I know that's one of the red herrings that Microsofties try to claim that gives Linux a security edge due to its smaller portion of desktop marketshare, but nothing is more obscure than source code that only a handful of people can see and understand its flaws. Microsoft seems to think that this is somehow more secure than open source code that has all of its flaws bared to the light of day since it was in development. But Microsoft's closed-source philosophy is obviously quite a failed model in light of how many people are able to discover flaws in it and exploit it anyway, leaving Microsoft either denying there's a problem or rushing out a fix. Sucks to be you if you're one of the people who gets infected after some ne'er-do-well discovers a flaw but before the programmers at Microsoft figure out how to fix it, because they're the only ones who can fix it for you under almost all circumstances.
As far as I can tell, this long, poorly-written rant equates to "open source is better for security." I don't see any actual evidence presented, though.
Not all OSes deny you the ability to patch your computer against security vulnerabilities and other flaws that have been discovered since it was released simply because you didn't pay for them or they merely *think* you didn't pay for them.
Except you can patch Windows versions, even if they aren't activated. More FUD!
Linux does a much better job at isolating system space from userspace.
How so? Saying don't make it so.
Look, obviously you foam-at-the-mouth hate Microsoft. Fine. You're welcome to your opinions. But if you're going to complain about FUD, it might make you look like less of a moron if your response didn't contain metric assloads of FUD. Just FYI for next time.
He posted his phone number on Twitter?! Heh. Gutsy.
No viruses. Not one,
Out of curiosity, how do you know? If you had a virus, what in your system would reveal that?
Note: I'm being somewhat rhetorical here, as it's quite possible you're one of the Linux users who constantly check your firewall logs and such to actually ensure their computer isn't doing anything undesirable. I'm not even suggesting Linux is insecure, other than to say it's just as open to viruses as any other OS.
I just like commenting on the fact that the vast majority of Linux users who claim they have no viruses don't actually check whether they do or not.
You can also set Deny permissions of the files the virus is trying to start at boot, once you figure out what those are. NTFS permissions are adhered to *extremely* early in the boot process, so this technique is really, really effective-- the hardest part becomes figuring out which specific files contain the virus.
I wrote a blog post on how to use this technique to get rid of Vundo on an XP machine: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/how-to-really-get-rid-of-the-vundo-aka-virtumonde-virtumondo-ms-juan/ No reason this wouldn't work on tons of other viruses/malware out there as well.
Bullshit.
Brother, for example, makes home-class laser printers designed to last and which talk in open protocols. (Not sure about PostScript, but my ancient Brother 1440 definitely does bog-standard PCL.) I'd highly recommend buying whatever the modern equivalent of a Brother 1440 is, that printer's a brick and I love mine to death.
Just because you're not aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Previously, the Apple hate was technical in nature: "Oh, Macs don't have pre-emptive multitasking, Macs don't have protected memory, Macs don't have any CLI-- they must be toys you can't use for actual work!"
(Which completely ignored the fact that back then, Apple's UI was *so much* better than Windows, Mac users were much more productive despite the lack of those OS features. Not as much now that Microsoft's UI people have more-or-less caught-up, and Apple's been making their OS less usable each version. Besides, it wasn't as if early Windows versions with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory were immune to crashing or locking-up. But I digress...)
Anyway, with OS X, all those old arguments have been torn away, so now the new generation of Apple haters have to focus on other things-- and their complaints have become, well, really petty-seeming. At least to me.
Come to think of it, though, I used to know a Mac hater who's biggest criticism of the OS was that it rounded the corners of the screen instead of leaving them square. I can't imagine anything more petty than that.
Eh, you're probably right, even though I have Slashdot set not to give me D2, it always seems to "sneak in" somehow. God this site is fucking buggy.
Apologies. I thought you were doing like the guy further up the thread and setting your post to the typewriter font. (Which is also unreadable on iPhones.) I should have replied to his post.
Try viewing his post on an iPhone. I don't have a PC handy so I have no clue what it's supposed to look like. And if it's not a CSS rule makig the font unreadable, that's an even bigger WTF.
The real point is, just hit reply and start typing. Slashdot looks shitty enough without posters tinkering with the fonts.