Remember the grief Dan Quayle got a few years ago when he spelled it "potatoe" at a spelling bee? "Accepted" spellings change quite often. Both my parents learned "potatoe" and "tomatoe", but I learned it with no E at the end. (I don't know *why* that particular spelling changed, but it's a well-known example.)
Can a warrant be used to "confiscate" a blog posting? Meaning, make a copy of it and then remove the original? Interesting question.
It does seem far-fetched, but then, so do a lot of news items in the mainstream press in the past few years.
Yeah, and most of that stuff was BS also. Remember, it was the mainstream press that reported people were being raped and shot in stadium bathrooms during Hurricane Katrina... when all was said and done, what came of those reports? Oh yeah, they were all bullshit.
That's great, but the NEA union is ruining our country's schools right now, this instant. They have no problem stealing wages, and making contributions to candidates of their liking. (Oh yes, you can 'opt-out' but you can't follow a paper trail to ensure they actually respected your decision.)
They're great at getting older, crappier, teachers first choice and highest pay while new teachers work at almost slave labor. Of course, if the budget's slim, the new teachers go first so that crappy geography teacher who doesn't know where Spain is can teach another 4 years... God forbid job wages/security be judged by performance!
My parents were both teachers. I've gained a bitterness about unions that I don't think will ever go away, just from hearing their stories every night at the dinner table.
All VNC servers kind of suck. An ideal remote desktop system: 1) Would be encrypted by default. Yes, I know you can pipe VNC through SS-something and yada yada, but I'm not smart enough to do that, and frankly people shouldn't have to-- just encrypt it by default! 2) Send widget descriptions (1k) instead of images of widgets whenever possible to save bandwidth. 3) Locked, logged-out, or otherwise blanked the server system to prevent eavesdropping while connected remotely. 4) Had an option to transmit sound, at least alert sounds.
Note that Microsoft's Remote Desktop has all of these features. Right now, VNC has none of them. Let's catch up, eh?
What worries me most is that you continue this strange, paranoid, frankly almost conspiracy-theory notion that IBM only ship Notes to create consultancy opportunities, and that nobody else in the world could be so evil.
What's the other explanation for a product that's gone through numerous revisions and is still worse at email and calendaring than the version of Outlook Express shipped by Microsoft in Windows 98? How else do you explain that other than "IBM just doesn't care?"
Your reaction is WAY out of proportion to what is, effectively, a tool you had to use in your job.
It's by far the worst software tool I've ever had to use. By far. And I've used Sony software before.
It's even less normal for someone to think that a company hates them personally because of software they've selected, which you imply strongly in your last sentence.
No, I don't think they had me *personally*, I think they hate all Notes users. Again, if they didn't hate Notes users, they'd make some usability improvements. It's not like it's a big mystery how to make a groupware product usable; Microsoft's done it, Mozilla's done it, Novell's done it... why can't IBM?
An inherent value in software you can use without swearing at? Yes, I guess so. Does it equal or exceed the cost of the licenses and the manpower required to set up all those extra boxes mentioned above?
Yes. 90% of my support calls were people frustrated with Notes. Possibly more than 90%. To just dismiss software usability as having no value is exactly what pisses me off about the software industry. Enough with this high priesthood of technology bullshit promoted by IBM and open source users, and let's start making software people can actually USE.
You're also not counting the cost of the highly-paid Notes consultants you have to have come in to attempt to make Notes less shitty. They'll fail, of course, but you paid for them anyway and it should be on the balance sheet.
If you had implemented a basic business process in Notes in 1996, it would still work today. Yes, it would look very old as a design. But the backwards compatibility that Notes provides means that your app is going to work today.
Given. Everybody at the company will hate it. It'll work like shit and generate massive amounts of support calls. It'll probably have bugs which lead to data loss. But it will work.
If you'd implemented it with the Microsoft stack in 1996, how many times would you have had to re-write it into a new technology? How much does that cost each time? (Clues: At least three, and much more than Notes costs you.)
BS, you wouldn't have to re-write it once. Why would you have to? Access apps from 1996 still run fine, Excel spreadsheets from 1996 still run fine. The only "rewrite" I can think of is perhaps porting something to a different database server, but considering Notes doesn't even HAVE a relational database, that's kind of a unfair comparison.
Yes, if you compare real-world Notes to some mythical, magical universe in which Microsoft products have no backwards compatibility, then Notes ends up looking better. Wow! But here in the real world, that comparison doesn't apply.
And yet you think IBM sells Notes to drive a consultancy and development industry around it?
Which is more generous to IBM? You tell me: 1) Lotus Notes is shit because IBM has no clue what the hell they're doing and are at least two decades behind the usability curve. Also they hate Notes users. 2) Lotus Notes is shit on purpose, so IBM can sell consulting services.
By going with option 2, I'm actually being MORE generous to IBM.
I think you've missed the real money - the consultancy and development market around Microsoft's multi-product and ever-changing stack!
In the magical, mystical world in which Microsoft-based software from 1996 no longer runs! Welcome to fairyland!
Again, I think you've let your feelings for Notes cloud your analysis of the issue. You'll have a very hard time trying to prove that IBM's groupware stack generates more consultancy and development than Microsoft's does, or anyone else's for that matter.
Right, for two reasons: 1) I don't care enough to research it, and I already know that one of the primary companies involved would lie when asked about Notes. (Hint: It's IBM! They've lied about the number of Notes licenses sold before. Sadly, I can't link to it because it looks like they finally updated the webpage where that particular lie resided.)
2) Whether or not IBM's products generate more consulting work then Microsoft products is entirely unrelated to my point. My point was that Notes is shit, specifically to generate consulting work. No matter how much consulting work IBM gets relative to Microsoft, that point still applies.
But the moment you enter the real world and the long term, it starts to get much more expensive.
You should try entering the real world, just for kicks.
Look, yes, the back-end is the greatest thing ever, and Domino surely cures cancer and makes the sun come out and makes the grass grow. Whoop-de-shit. What the users of the produc
Actually, that is the reason for the new userspace-ish driver model, IIRC. There's a whole new way to load drivers that gets them out of the kernel. The signed drivers are not checked for quality - you just buy a certificate.
That's contrary to what Microsoft employees have told me... drivers are tested for quality before the certificate is issued. I don't think it's in-depth human testing, but they go through automated testing at the least. Which, frankly, is about 50 times more testing than the hardware manufacturers give them before releasing to the public.
Wow. Now all you need to do is make 200 million people think and act exactly like you do, and you'll have the advertising industry quaking in its boots!
The only thing more obnoxious than ads on websites is the 45 people who crop up in every Slashdot discussing with their smug "I don't see ads, I use AdBlock!" bullshit we've already read 50,000 times.
One is in 64-bit Vista, where you can't use older drivers, period. All drivers have to be signed to fit into the whole trusted scheme.
The "DRM" around drivers was to improve stability, nothing else. Windows often gets a bad rap for problems that are the fault of terrible drivers from hardware makers. For example, if you've ever seen a bluescreen in Windows XP or Vista, it's the result of either a faulty piece of hardware or a faulty driver... the problem is that people don't say "oh nVidia writes such crappy drivers, they crash all the time!" Instead people say "wow, Windows XP crashes all the time!"
Microsoft's new policy is, "hey, let's have a looksee at these drivers before you subject our customers to them," and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The strange thing is, the type of people who complain about Microsoft's driver approval process are the exact same people who griped about Microsoft's instability in the past. It's like they're upset that Windows is unstable, then they're upset when Microsoft fixes the problem... which is it? (See also: complaining about poor security, then complaining about UAC.)
The conventional wisdom around here is that Vista was late partially because of the complexity associated with the DRM scheme.
The conventional wisdom around here is that the government wants to track you using RFID chips in your underwear. The conventional wisdom around here is that OpenOffice supports all the features of Microsoft Office and is less bloated. The conventional wisdom around here doesn't know jack.;)
This guy wrote a whole paper on it. His slides are more up-to-date. Basically, it boils down to: Vista makes your hardware more expensive (in order to support the end-to-end encryption), and the driver situation will be more chaotic with Vista.
I don't get what about Vista makes it necessary for me to buy hardware with "protected" content channels/interfaces. I own a Dell, sold with Windows Vista, and it has no protected interfaces whatsoever-- no HDMI, no proprietary anything. I just ordered a video card, compatible with Windows Vista, that also has no HDMI. In short, hasn't the industry already proved that guy's main point wrong? I admit I just skimmed, maybe I'm missing something.
I don't have anything to add, except to say it's nice to see a clear head on Slashdot for once. I'm so sick of all the teeth gnashing over the evil DRM demons and the, frankly, blatant lying about performance impacts on Vista from a horde of people who have never even used the OS.
Take this for example, you file your email message into a folder then delete it from your Inbox folder. In any sane email client, the copy you filed remains around. In Lotus Notes, the copy you made is deleted too! Despite the fact that you specifically (tried) to make a copy of it to save it. This happened continually where I worked.
Another one was the treatment of attachments. If you opened an attachment from an email, then closed that email, then make some edits, then saved it, Notes would instantly clean your Temp folder and your edits would be gone with no way of recovering them. The Notes engineers seem unaware of a feature called "multitasking" where you can do things with your Notes windows as you're editing the document in another application.
I didn't say you said it was perfect, it was a generalization about the Linux community.
Yes, you're begging me to try it again. No, I won't. Why not? Because the Linux community has cried wolf too damned many times. I already know that I'm going to install it, and something won't work, and I'll ask about it, and it'll be my fault because I didn't RTFM or I'm too stupid to own a computer, and I'll go back to my old OS (either Windows or OS X) in disgust. I don't need to go through this process again.
If it doesn't work out of the box, there may some solution you gotta find (I would recommend ubuntuforums.org for support), but isn't that generally the case with computers anyway?
Even if it were harder to implement that solution with Microsoft products (which I doubt), I think there is some inherent value in having software you can use without swearing at it all day or having it randomly lose data due to bone-headed design. Notes doesn't have to be some cutting-edge trendsetter, but having the same features of its competitor in a similarly easy-to-use fashion, would that kill them?
I believe the true purpose of Notes is, in fact, to suck so that IBM can sell you high-priced Notes consultants after they scam you into buying it to actually make it work.
The system was provided by the company. It was a Pentium IV 2.something ghz, with 512 MB of RAM. This was about 2 years ago, and although I'm sure you'll complain that this hardware was ancient even then, it: 1) Wasn't really, maybe towards the low end, but not even close to obsolete 2) Was actually top-of-the-line for my workplace (a hospital.) Most employees had much slower hardware, and Notes ran correspondingly slower on them.
Outlook on the same machines was fine. And I'm not talking about "Outlook started in 8 seconds and Notes in 10" this was "Notes starts in a minute, if you're lucky."
This might actually be a case of IBM not knowing their customers. I'm sure they develop it on quad-core Xeons with 8 GB RAM, but the problem is they then sell it to healthcare clients, who are notorious for having older hardware in circulation than most businesses.
The problem is that I don't use Linux *because* I was told exactly this a couple years ago. Ubuntu (back then) supported PPC Macs, and even though there are only something like 4 models of iBook, they utterly failed to make the wireless support on Ubuntu to work on my iBook. (It also didn't put the iBook to sleep when the lid closed, and had various other defects.)
Before then, I was told to try RedHat back around version 6.2, which specifically said in the documentation that it supported Soundblaster 128 sound cards. Lo and behold, once it was installed, no sound at all.
I've been jerked around too many times by Linux fans. I frankly don't believe you when you say everything's perfect now. It was "perfect" back when I tried RedHat, and it was "perfect" when I tried Ubuntu on my iBook.
The problem is while it may have "all the stuff that Windows has" it doesn't have it by default. For instance, drivers for wireless devices... they may all be there, but half of them require a long, arcane install process that's prone to error even for experienced users and hopeless for neophyte users. Or a feature like ShadowCopy, sure you can reproduce it using rsync and some symbolic links (or whatever people are using to reproduce it), but it's not something that's just automatically there and working when you install your computer. And I won't even talk about printer support; Firefox can't even print correctly on Windows, I can't imagine what kind of nightmarish artworks it creates on a printer in Linux.
Windows and OS X are definitely neck-and-neck. OS X does Aqua, and Windows has Aero in their next major release. Windows adds Shadow Copy, and OS X has Time Machine in its next release. This is good stuff, this is the kind of stuff Linux users are talking about when they say competition is good. But I've always seen Linux as kind of a distant third place, still struggling with some of the basic concepts that Windows and OS X mastered long ago. (For instance, copy and paste of data other than text is still iffy, while it's been a 100% solved problem on Windows and Macintosh since 1990 or so.)
Notes is far from a perfect piece of software, and has a considerable number of quirks, but it is by no means as bad as some make it out to be, and there is no other single application/platform which does all that it is capable of and IBM is trying (and succeeding) in improving many of the more criticized aspects.
Look, it might be capable of lassoing the moon and pulling it back to earth. But the simple fact of the matter is that IBM sells it as a groupware product, and it's terrible at groupware. Until that's repair, either by it getting good at groupware or by IBM re-branding it as something else, it's going to have a bad reputation. It's that simple.
Notes is a development platform and distributed database. It's not the fault of the program if your IT department makes you use it as an email tool without end-user customisations.
It's sold by IBM as a groupware product. It's default configuration when you install it from a fresh CD onto a fresh computer is a groupware product. The vast majority of its users use it solely as a groupware product.
Why should a groupware product by EVERY MEASURE require end-user customizations to be usable as a groupware product?
Seriously, where do you guys come from? Does IBM give you free crack or something to ignore the facts and bring up this point in every discussion about Notes? The thought that there are people out there who don't think Notes is a pile of crap bothers me.
Your machine or network is severely broken. It takes less than 2 seconds to open my Notes client, connect to the server, and display a view containing 4100 documents that are stored on the server.
The default install of Notes has never run that fast on any computer ever built and you know it. Don't bullshit us. It takes more than 2 seconds to show the splash screen. Hell, Outlook is craploads faster than Notes and it can't do that in anywhere close to 2 seconds.
1) You're running Notes 4 or something on modern hardware. 2) You've stripped down your Notes entirely so it does nothing but load this folder of 4100 documents. 3) You're running some kind of helper application that keeps Notes resident in memory, so it doesn't actually have to load anything.
Go grab your Notes CD, do a DEFAULT INSTALL on your hardware, set up a standard user account using the standard welcome screen, then tell me how long it takes to boot.
1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.
No, it gives us a good indicator of how much IBM hates their customers. Lotus Notes 6 came out, what, 2002? It didn't support running on a limited-user account. At all. It didn't support a feature that had been in Windows since Windows NT3 in 1993. You couldn't install it on a limited-user account, you couldn't use it on a limited-user account. The fact that a full *decade* after Microsoft introduced the feature, IBM didn't support it... that tells us a lot about Notes.
Can you still create a meeting in the calendar that ends before it begins? Notes doesn't even have the most basic error-checking. Can you still get horrible vague and useless dialogs like "Error: this object doesn't support this message" coming up at seemingly random times? (So vague it's impossible to actually debug the error. Which object? Which message? Which user action caused you to try to run the mystery method on the mystery object?)
IBM doesn't care about usability, it doesn't give half a shit about users. IBM sells a turd, maybe version 8 is a fresher turd but it's still a turd, and offers their services to polish it at $300/hour. That's the scam. (And all the polishing on earth won't make it behave like a normal Windows app or at a non-glacial pace.)
Look, Notes 8 might be better. The fact that they decided to solve their usability problems by adding in yet ANOTHER layer of abstraction tells me that IBM's stuck in the same old mindset. They fix a few usability problems, at at the cost of only 100 more seconds of boot-time and 300 MB more ram! Yay! Let's cheer on IBM! Meanwhile, Outlook does everything Notes does better with half the memory, and it boots nearly instantly. Oh, and it costs less. The only thing that would convince me to try Notes again is IBM rewriting it from scratch.
From what I have allways heard and read - also in this thread - Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange. A nighmare to maintain and operate, close to SAP in it's fatness and stuck in the early ninties in terms of usability.
You forgot to mention it's more expensive than Outlook/Exchange per-seat. Almost twice as much, as of a couple years ago. Oh, and no portable PDAs or cellphones support it natively, meaning you have to buy more expensive licenses from IBM to sync your execs. And it crashes at least twice as much as Outlook, except when Notes crashes you have to reboot your entire computer to restart it. And out-of-office messages take something around 4 hours to get turned on, and another 4 hours to get turned back off. And it's possible to create and share calendar items that end before they begin, which instantly crashes any PDA/cellphone you're trying to sync with it. It took until version 6 to get a marker to know when you've replied to an email, and it still doesn't support a mousewheel on all scrollbars. It's mail sorting is confusing and un-intuitive and leads to a lot of lost mail. (It doesn't copy a message when you move it to a folder, it makes a reference to the original. So if you delete the original message, all your filed messages disappear as well.)
And if you complain about it's terrible, terrible groupware performance, the robots at IBM just repeat like parrots: "It's not a groupware product! It's not a groupware product!" This is despite it defaulting to being a groupware product and being sold as a groupware product and 95% of users using it solely as a groupware product. Thus they have a free "out" for anybody who complains about anything.
I had to support that beast of a program once. Now I ask if they use Lotus Notes in the interview, and if they say "yes," I walk out. The program is that bad.
But your comment implies there are other groupware products out there...? Is Novell's GroupWise still around, because that's the only solution I can think of other than Outlook/Notes. So being "right behind" Outlook isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Look, I know this is Slashdot, but anybody who's used both programs has to admit that Outlook isn't just a little better than Notes, it's miles above the competition. For one thing, Outlook actually works.)
Sure, right now it's just a barcode. But it would not take much to change that barcode to a Universally Unique IDentifier, readable from multiple, integrated systems.
So... what? Who cares? What impact does that have in my life?
This is the problem with paranoid conspiracy theories. They go on and on about what "can" be done, and how information "can" be linked together, but they never talk about the "so what?" I used to have a pot-head buddy who loved to tell me about the secret caches the Illuminadi would keep buried in specially-marked cemeteries. Which was great, until I asked him: "so what?" Even if it was true, what does that actually mean for us? He never had an answer.
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Remember the grief Dan Quayle got a few years ago when he spelled it "potatoe" at a spelling bee? "Accepted" spellings change quite often. Both my parents learned "potatoe" and "tomatoe", but I learned it with no E at the end. (I don't know *why* that particular spelling changed, but it's a well-known example.)
Can a warrant be used to "confiscate" a blog posting? Meaning, make a copy of it and then remove the original? Interesting question.
It does seem far-fetched, but then, so do a lot of news items in the mainstream press in the past few years.
Yeah, and most of that stuff was BS also. Remember, it was the mainstream press that reported people were being raped and shot in stadium bathrooms during Hurricane Katrina... when all was said and done, what came of those reports? Oh yeah, they were all bullshit.
That's great, but the NEA union is ruining our country's schools right now, this instant. They have no problem stealing wages, and making contributions to candidates of their liking. (Oh yes, you can 'opt-out' but you can't follow a paper trail to ensure they actually respected your decision.)
They're great at getting older, crappier, teachers first choice and highest pay while new teachers work at almost slave labor. Of course, if the budget's slim, the new teachers go first so that crappy geography teacher who doesn't know where Spain is can teach another 4 years... God forbid job wages/security be judged by performance!
My parents were both teachers. I've gained a bitterness about unions that I don't think will ever go away, just from hearing their stories every night at the dinner table.
How does the FBI "censor" a blog posting? I'm calling BS on this story, at least until that detail is cleared up.
All VNC servers kind of suck. An ideal remote desktop system:
1) Would be encrypted by default. Yes, I know you can pipe VNC through SS-something and yada yada, but I'm not smart enough to do that, and frankly people shouldn't have to-- just encrypt it by default!
2) Send widget descriptions (1k) instead of images of widgets whenever possible to save bandwidth.
3) Locked, logged-out, or otherwise blanked the server system to prevent eavesdropping while connected remotely.
4) Had an option to transmit sound, at least alert sounds.
Note that Microsoft's Remote Desktop has all of these features. Right now, VNC has none of them. Let's catch up, eh?
What worries me most is that you continue this strange, paranoid, frankly almost conspiracy-theory notion that IBM only ship Notes to create consultancy opportunities, and that nobody else in the world could be so evil.
What's the other explanation for a product that's gone through numerous revisions and is still worse at email and calendaring than the version of Outlook Express shipped by Microsoft in Windows 98? How else do you explain that other than "IBM just doesn't care?"
Your reaction is WAY out of proportion to what is, effectively, a tool you had to use in your job.
It's by far the worst software tool I've ever had to use. By far. And I've used Sony software before.
It's even less normal for someone to think that a company hates them personally because of software they've selected, which you imply strongly in your last sentence.
No, I don't think they had me *personally*, I think they hate all Notes users. Again, if they didn't hate Notes users, they'd make some usability improvements. It's not like it's a big mystery how to make a groupware product usable; Microsoft's done it, Mozilla's done it, Novell's done it... why can't IBM?
An inherent value in software you can use without swearing at? Yes, I guess so. Does it equal or exceed the cost of the licenses and the manpower required to set up all those extra boxes mentioned above?
Yes. 90% of my support calls were people frustrated with Notes. Possibly more than 90%. To just dismiss software usability as having no value is exactly what pisses me off about the software industry. Enough with this high priesthood of technology bullshit promoted by IBM and open source users, and let's start making software people can actually USE.
You're also not counting the cost of the highly-paid Notes consultants you have to have come in to attempt to make Notes less shitty. They'll fail, of course, but you paid for them anyway and it should be on the balance sheet.
If you had implemented a basic business process in Notes in 1996, it would still work today. Yes, it would look very old as a design. But the backwards compatibility that Notes provides means that your app is going to work today.
Given. Everybody at the company will hate it. It'll work like shit and generate massive amounts of support calls. It'll probably have bugs which lead to data loss. But it will work.
If you'd implemented it with the Microsoft stack in 1996, how many times would you have had to re-write it into a new technology? How much does that cost each time? (Clues: At least three, and much more than Notes costs you.)
BS, you wouldn't have to re-write it once. Why would you have to? Access apps from 1996 still run fine, Excel spreadsheets from 1996 still run fine. The only "rewrite" I can think of is perhaps porting something to a different database server, but considering Notes doesn't even HAVE a relational database, that's kind of a unfair comparison.
Yes, if you compare real-world Notes to some mythical, magical universe in which Microsoft products have no backwards compatibility, then Notes ends up looking better. Wow! But here in the real world, that comparison doesn't apply.
And yet you think IBM sells Notes to drive a consultancy and development industry around it?
Which is more generous to IBM? You tell me:
1) Lotus Notes is shit because IBM has no clue what the hell they're doing and are at least two decades behind the usability curve. Also they hate Notes users.
2) Lotus Notes is shit on purpose, so IBM can sell consulting services.
By going with option 2, I'm actually being MORE generous to IBM.
I think you've missed the real money - the consultancy and development market around Microsoft's multi-product and ever-changing stack!
In the magical, mystical world in which Microsoft-based software from 1996 no longer runs! Welcome to fairyland!
Again, I think you've let your feelings for Notes cloud your analysis of the issue. You'll have a very hard time trying to prove that IBM's groupware stack generates more consultancy and development than Microsoft's does, or anyone else's for that matter.
Right, for two reasons:
1) I don't care enough to research it, and I already know that one of the primary companies involved would lie when asked about Notes. (Hint: It's IBM! They've lied about the number of Notes licenses sold before. Sadly, I can't link to it because it looks like they finally updated the webpage where that particular lie resided.)
2) Whether or not IBM's products generate more consulting work then Microsoft products is entirely unrelated to my point. My point was that Notes is shit, specifically to generate consulting work. No matter how much consulting work IBM gets relative to Microsoft, that point still applies.
But the moment you enter the real world and the long term, it starts to get much more expensive.
You should try entering the real world, just for kicks.
Look, yes, the back-end is the greatest thing ever, and Domino surely cures cancer and makes the sun come out and makes the grass grow. Whoop-de-shit. What the users of the produc
Actually, that is the reason for the new userspace-ish driver model, IIRC. There's a whole new way to load drivers that gets them out of the kernel. The signed drivers are not checked for quality - you just buy a certificate.
That's contrary to what Microsoft employees have told me... drivers are tested for quality before the certificate is issued. I don't think it's in-depth human testing, but they go through automated testing at the least. Which, frankly, is about 50 times more testing than the hardware manufacturers give them before releasing to the public.
Wow. Now all you need to do is make 200 million people think and act exactly like you do, and you'll have the advertising industry quaking in its boots!
The only thing more obnoxious than ads on websites is the 45 people who crop up in every Slashdot discussing with their smug "I don't see ads, I use AdBlock!" bullshit we've already read 50,000 times.
Give it a fucking rest.
One is in 64-bit Vista, where you can't use older drivers, period. All drivers have to be signed to fit into the whole trusted scheme.
;)
The "DRM" around drivers was to improve stability, nothing else. Windows often gets a bad rap for problems that are the fault of terrible drivers from hardware makers. For example, if you've ever seen a bluescreen in Windows XP or Vista, it's the result of either a faulty piece of hardware or a faulty driver... the problem is that people don't say "oh nVidia writes such crappy drivers, they crash all the time!" Instead people say "wow, Windows XP crashes all the time!"
Microsoft's new policy is, "hey, let's have a looksee at these drivers before you subject our customers to them," and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The strange thing is, the type of people who complain about Microsoft's driver approval process are the exact same people who griped about Microsoft's instability in the past. It's like they're upset that Windows is unstable, then they're upset when Microsoft fixes the problem... which is it? (See also: complaining about poor security, then complaining about UAC.)
The conventional wisdom around here is that Vista was late partially because of the complexity associated with the DRM scheme.
The conventional wisdom around here is that the government wants to track you using RFID chips in your underwear. The conventional wisdom around here is that OpenOffice supports all the features of Microsoft Office and is less bloated. The conventional wisdom around here doesn't know jack.
This guy wrote a whole paper on it. His slides are more up-to-date. Basically, it boils down to: Vista makes your hardware more expensive (in order to support the end-to-end encryption), and the driver situation will be more chaotic with Vista.
I don't get what about Vista makes it necessary for me to buy hardware with "protected" content channels/interfaces. I own a Dell, sold with Windows Vista, and it has no protected interfaces whatsoever-- no HDMI, no proprietary anything. I just ordered a video card, compatible with Windows Vista, that also has no HDMI. In short, hasn't the industry already proved that guy's main point wrong? I admit I just skimmed, maybe I'm missing something.
I don't have anything to add, except to say it's nice to see a clear head on Slashdot for once. I'm so sick of all the teeth gnashing over the evil DRM demons and the, frankly, blatant lying about performance impacts on Vista from a horde of people who have never even used the OS.
All of them.
Take this for example, you file your email message into a folder then delete it from your Inbox folder. In any sane email client, the copy you filed remains around. In Lotus Notes, the copy you made is deleted too! Despite the fact that you specifically (tried) to make a copy of it to save it. This happened continually where I worked.
Another one was the treatment of attachments. If you opened an attachment from an email, then closed that email, then make some edits, then saved it, Notes would instantly clean your Temp folder and your edits would be gone with no way of recovering them. The Notes engineers seem unaware of a feature called "multitasking" where you can do things with your Notes windows as you're editing the document in another application.
I didn't say you said it was perfect, it was a generalization about the Linux community.
Yes, you're begging me to try it again. No, I won't. Why not? Because the Linux community has cried wolf too damned many times. I already know that I'm going to install it, and something won't work, and I'll ask about it, and it'll be my fault because I didn't RTFM or I'm too stupid to own a computer, and I'll go back to my old OS (either Windows or OS X) in disgust. I don't need to go through this process again.
If it doesn't work out of the box, there may some solution you gotta find (I would recommend ubuntuforums.org for support), but isn't that generally the case with computers anyway?
No. Only Linux computers.
Even if it were harder to implement that solution with Microsoft products (which I doubt), I think there is some inherent value in having software you can use without swearing at it all day or having it randomly lose data due to bone-headed design. Notes doesn't have to be some cutting-edge trendsetter, but having the same features of its competitor in a similarly easy-to-use fashion, would that kill them?
I believe the true purpose of Notes is, in fact, to suck so that IBM can sell you high-priced Notes consultants after they scam you into buying it to actually make it work.
The system was provided by the company. It was a Pentium IV 2.something ghz, with 512 MB of RAM. This was about 2 years ago, and although I'm sure you'll complain that this hardware was ancient even then, it:
1) Wasn't really, maybe towards the low end, but not even close to obsolete
2) Was actually top-of-the-line for my workplace (a hospital.) Most employees had much slower hardware, and Notes ran correspondingly slower on them.
Outlook on the same machines was fine. And I'm not talking about "Outlook started in 8 seconds and Notes in 10" this was "Notes starts in a minute, if you're lucky."
This might actually be a case of IBM not knowing their customers. I'm sure they develop it on quad-core Xeons with 8 GB RAM, but the problem is they then sell it to healthcare clients, who are notorious for having older hardware in circulation than most businesses.
In any case, I still don't buy 2 seconds.
The problem is that I don't use Linux *because* I was told exactly this a couple years ago. Ubuntu (back then) supported PPC Macs, and even though there are only something like 4 models of iBook, they utterly failed to make the wireless support on Ubuntu to work on my iBook. (It also didn't put the iBook to sleep when the lid closed, and had various other defects.)
Before then, I was told to try RedHat back around version 6.2, which specifically said in the documentation that it supported Soundblaster 128 sound cards. Lo and behold, once it was installed, no sound at all.
I've been jerked around too many times by Linux fans. I frankly don't believe you when you say everything's perfect now. It was "perfect" back when I tried RedHat, and it was "perfect" when I tried Ubuntu on my iBook.
The problem is while it may have "all the stuff that Windows has" it doesn't have it by default. For instance, drivers for wireless devices... they may all be there, but half of them require a long, arcane install process that's prone to error even for experienced users and hopeless for neophyte users. Or a feature like ShadowCopy, sure you can reproduce it using rsync and some symbolic links (or whatever people are using to reproduce it), but it's not something that's just automatically there and working when you install your computer. And I won't even talk about printer support; Firefox can't even print correctly on Windows, I can't imagine what kind of nightmarish artworks it creates on a printer in Linux.
Windows and OS X are definitely neck-and-neck. OS X does Aqua, and Windows has Aero in their next major release. Windows adds Shadow Copy, and OS X has Time Machine in its next release. This is good stuff, this is the kind of stuff Linux users are talking about when they say competition is good. But I've always seen Linux as kind of a distant third place, still struggling with some of the basic concepts that Windows and OS X mastered long ago. (For instance, copy and paste of data other than text is still iffy, while it's been a 100% solved problem on Windows and Macintosh since 1990 or so.)
This just means if they find a bug they will fix it if they can reproduce on those platforms.
:)
The Notes team fixing bugs? THAT should be the news item, if it ever happens.
Notes is far from a perfect piece of software, and has a considerable number of quirks, but it is by no means as bad as some make it out to be, and there is no other single application/platform which does all that it is capable of and IBM is trying (and succeeding) in improving many of the more criticized aspects.
Look, it might be capable of lassoing the moon and pulling it back to earth. But the simple fact of the matter is that IBM sells it as a groupware product, and it's terrible at groupware. Until that's repair, either by it getting good at groupware or by IBM re-branding it as something else, it's going to have a bad reputation. It's that simple.
Notes is a development platform and distributed database. It's not the fault of the program if your IT department makes you use it as an email tool without end-user customisations.
It's sold by IBM as a groupware product. It's default configuration when you install it from a fresh CD onto a fresh computer is a groupware product. The vast majority of its users use it solely as a groupware product.
Why should a groupware product by EVERY MEASURE require end-user customizations to be usable as a groupware product?
Seriously, where do you guys come from? Does IBM give you free crack or something to ignore the facts and bring up this point in every discussion about Notes? The thought that there are people out there who don't think Notes is a pile of crap bothers me.
Your machine or network is severely broken. It takes less than 2 seconds to open my Notes client, connect to the server, and display a view containing 4100 documents that are stored on the server.
The default install of Notes has never run that fast on any computer ever built and you know it. Don't bullshit us. It takes more than 2 seconds to show the splash screen. Hell, Outlook is craploads faster than Notes and it can't do that in anywhere close to 2 seconds.
1) You're running Notes 4 or something on modern hardware.
2) You've stripped down your Notes entirely so it does nothing but load this folder of 4100 documents.
3) You're running some kind of helper application that keeps Notes resident in memory, so it doesn't actually have to load anything.
Go grab your Notes CD, do a DEFAULT INSTALL on your hardware, set up a standard user account using the standard welcome screen, then tell me how long it takes to boot.
1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.
No, it gives us a good indicator of how much IBM hates their customers. Lotus Notes 6 came out, what, 2002? It didn't support running on a limited-user account. At all. It didn't support a feature that had been in Windows since Windows NT3 in 1993. You couldn't install it on a limited-user account, you couldn't use it on a limited-user account. The fact that a full *decade* after Microsoft introduced the feature, IBM didn't support it... that tells us a lot about Notes.
Can you still create a meeting in the calendar that ends before it begins? Notes doesn't even have the most basic error-checking. Can you still get horrible vague and useless dialogs like "Error: this object doesn't support this message" coming up at seemingly random times? (So vague it's impossible to actually debug the error. Which object? Which message? Which user action caused you to try to run the mystery method on the mystery object?)
IBM doesn't care about usability, it doesn't give half a shit about users. IBM sells a turd, maybe version 8 is a fresher turd but it's still a turd, and offers their services to polish it at $300/hour. That's the scam. (And all the polishing on earth won't make it behave like a normal Windows app or at a non-glacial pace.)
Look, Notes 8 might be better. The fact that they decided to solve their usability problems by adding in yet ANOTHER layer of abstraction tells me that IBM's stuck in the same old mindset. They fix a few usability problems, at at the cost of only 100 more seconds of boot-time and 300 MB more ram! Yay! Let's cheer on IBM! Meanwhile, Outlook does everything Notes does better with half the memory, and it boots nearly instantly. Oh, and it costs less. The only thing that would convince me to try Notes again is IBM rewriting it from scratch.
From what I have allways heard and read - also in this thread - Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange. A nighmare to maintain and operate, close to SAP in it's fatness and stuck in the early ninties in terms of usability.
You forgot to mention it's more expensive than Outlook/Exchange per-seat. Almost twice as much, as of a couple years ago. Oh, and no portable PDAs or cellphones support it natively, meaning you have to buy more expensive licenses from IBM to sync your execs. And it crashes at least twice as much as Outlook, except when Notes crashes you have to reboot your entire computer to restart it. And out-of-office messages take something around 4 hours to get turned on, and another 4 hours to get turned back off. And it's possible to create and share calendar items that end before they begin, which instantly crashes any PDA/cellphone you're trying to sync with it. It took until version 6 to get a marker to know when you've replied to an email, and it still doesn't support a mousewheel on all scrollbars. It's mail sorting is confusing and un-intuitive and leads to a lot of lost mail. (It doesn't copy a message when you move it to a folder, it makes a reference to the original. So if you delete the original message, all your filed messages disappear as well.)
And if you complain about it's terrible, terrible groupware performance, the robots at IBM just repeat like parrots: "It's not a groupware product! It's not a groupware product!" This is despite it defaulting to being a groupware product and being sold as a groupware product and 95% of users using it solely as a groupware product. Thus they have a free "out" for anybody who complains about anything.
I had to support that beast of a program once. Now I ask if they use Lotus Notes in the interview, and if they say "yes," I walk out. The program is that bad.
But your comment implies there are other groupware products out there...? Is Novell's GroupWise still around, because that's the only solution I can think of other than Outlook/Notes. So being "right behind" Outlook isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Look, I know this is Slashdot, but anybody who's used both programs has to admit that Outlook isn't just a little better than Notes, it's miles above the competition. For one thing, Outlook actually works.)
Sure, right now it's just a barcode. But it would not take much to change that barcode to a Universally Unique IDentifier, readable from multiple, integrated systems.
So... what? Who cares? What impact does that have in my life?
This is the problem with paranoid conspiracy theories. They go on and on about what "can" be done, and how information "can" be linked together, but they never talk about the "so what?" I used to have a pot-head buddy who loved to tell me about the secret caches the Illuminadi would keep buried in specially-marked cemeteries. Which was great, until I asked him: "so what?" Even if it was true, what does that actually mean for us? He never had an answer.