It does email, using the WORST user interface known to man. It does calendaring, but doesn't talk to anything outside of itself and allows nonsense entries, like meetings that start at 4:00 PM and end at 2:00 PM on the same day. You can also write really crappy database applications on it, which all have terrible interfaces because Notes doesn't provide the tools needed to create an even decent, much less good, interface.
In short, corporate types love it because it's buzzword compliant. Users *HATE* it with a passion because it's has a mutant interface from mars where the easiest tasks to do in other programs become ridiculously hard in Notes. Administrators are somewhat neutral, since it's about the same difficulty to admin as Exchange.
(For a bad UI example, listboxes don't let you sort by all fields if you click on them. You can sort email by user, date, etc, but you can't sort by subjectline... for no apparent reason. In some views, the scrollwheel on your mouse works fast, in some views it works slow, in others it doesn't work at all. To attach a file to a message, you have to first click on the body of the message, otherwise the attach button is greyed out. The address book presents you with two listboxes, one of names in the addy book and one of names in the email, but doesn't allow you to drag-and-drop between them. etc, etc. In short, the interface sucks... it's version 6.5.1 right now, and it still has MANY bugs that were present in version 4.5, when I started using it.
How could you pre-order a game system that doesn't even have an official retail price yet? Amazon.com isn't offering pre-orders, nor is Gamestop.com (as of a week ago, at least.)
You're just using this "pre-order" crap so you can lend weight to your point, which is that Microsoft made an announcement that there might be more than one version at launch, and now are making an announcement that there definately will be more than one version later on.
Try to do the Microsoft bashing without the blatent lies next time.
1) Well, the American games industry is pretty damn big, the biggest in the world. Not to mention, the Xbox is made by an American company. Not to mention, the other two consoles coming out are both from Japanese companies, so the American games are actually more rare in this market than the Japanese ones... so, yeah, they're all games that appeal to Americans. AMAZEMENT!
I think it's a great idea, since the industry has been dominated by Japanese companies for so long, to have some American console games again.
2) Who said the point of the Xbox 360 is to take over the Playstation's home market? This is the first I've heard of that.
Unless you have a Mac, in which case the TabBrowser Preferences extension will royally FUBAR your entire Firefox install, disabling menus, not letting you quit. Oh, yeah, the download link SAYS it works in MacOS X, but obviously the bastard lying programmer never even tried it.
Sorry for the harsh language, but that buggy-ass piece of shit extension soured my extension experience forever. It's even better that, apparently, Mozilla.org doesn't care if some of their plugins are mislabelled as supporting a platform when they, in fact, cause HUGE problems on that platform.
We need to invent that glowy crap on the back of every spaceship on TV and in the movies. The Millenium Falcon had no trouble landing and taking off from a planet without a fuel tank... you just turn on the glowy crap, and bam you're there. The starship Enterprise just makes the glowy crap flash really bright, and they're going faster than light itself! Even the Stargate uses glowy crap technology to bridge planets.
We just need to invent that glowy crap and everything else will fall into place.
Yes, but the statement "IE only runs on Windows" is still plain wrong, regardless of which features IE on Mac supports. I don't even know why you bothered to type that reply, since it doesn't change the grandparent's point in any way.
Dude, I'm not sure how things work on your planet but here on earth most mail merges get printed on sticky labels of the sort they sell in 8.5 x 11 inch sheets at a place like Staples. These are then affixed to envelopes.
Where I work, all our mail merged addresses are printed directly onto envelopes using IBM's Infoprint 1120 envelope feeder attachment. Of course you can use sticky labels as well, but either way, Word works fine... right? The original poster I'm debating with seems to think somehow that Word has problems doing mail merge, or produces substandard results.
Printing in the right dimensions from a decent web browser is easy to do using Cascading Style Sheets [w3.org].
Can you point me to a site that does that? I find that most CSS sites print very goofy, as if the browser was stripping the CSS before sending it to the printer. (Obviously, in theory CSS can do it, since you can specify page measurements all in inches, but I've never seen it happen in reality, nor have I see a webapp that prints envelopes like the original poster thinks exists.)
So... you can't back up your words. Since you can't find a link, which would only take a few seconds on Google if such a product existed (I looked also; I couldn't find anything except tips on Word, Excel and Act mail merges), and since you talk about handcoding an application (surely tons more expensive than using Word and Excel out-of-the-box for only the cost of Office), I hereby declare you're full of crap.
I get plenty of mail from Tricare that is in no way printed using mail merge in Word
How do you know? Unless you work at Tricare, I don't see how you could comment on how they do their mail merges.
In any case, you're probably right... for large companies, I bet that writing a mail merge program for their specific use would be beneficial. But there's nothing wrong with doing it in Word... it works, it's stable, and the results look just as good as any other computer document, and better than a lot. And it prints on envelopes easily, regular envelopes that are cheaper than windowed ones.
Did you read the linked page? Nobody should reasonably expect the coffee to be so hot as to cause third degree burns in a matter of seconds. Not to mention, McDonalds had been warned, SEVERAL TIMES, by public health agencies to lower the temperature of their coffee when served.
But why am I bothering to explain it to you? Go back and read the link, and you'll see that, while there are many frivilous lawsuits, that isn't one of them.
I worked at a theater when Saving Private Ryan was released, and God I would have loved to have the authority to do that. My guess would be that:
1) Either that specific theater chain had a policy to ID for all R-rated (or higher) movies, (this is becoming more and more widespread) or:
2) Because South Park is a "cartoon" and a lot of kids were buying tickets, that theater in particular took it upon themselves to check ID for South Park. Good for them.
Like I said, I talked to my manager about doing that for Saving Private Ryan, after I saw a 5-year-old girl rushing from the theater in tears, but I wasn't allowed becase of "corporate policy."
A lot of people don't really seem to "get" the rating system. I'm sure those are the same people who are complaining and calling out for censorship.
Who can blame them? Look how successful Rockstar Games has been making the most objectionable games they can think of. Let's see, the infamous GTA series, of course, Manhunt, the game where you kill people in creative and disgusting ways, and now they're developing a game where you play a school bully and beat the crap out of kids.
Part of me wants to go to Rockstar's developer staff and yell out, "GROW THE HELL UP! You're making the whole industry look bad, you idiots!" And part of me wants to applaud them for finding such a good solid revenue stream.
Getting back to how Access is a retarded POS, find me a DBA with a good knowledge of data structures and orthoganol design who will agree with you about Access. If you can, then I'll gladly show you an MS zealot.
I think that pretty much any DBA would agree that Access is, indeed, a database. I'm making no claims about how good or bad it is, I'm just saying that it IS a database, despite your claiming otherwise. (I don't know what your criteria is for something to be a database, but by any reasonable criteria, Access fits.)
You didn't say Access was a "retarded POS" in the original message, you said Access was not a database. Go back and look it up. And don't try to make yourself look less foolish by trying to retroactively edit your message.
Off the top of my head? Go ahead and pick a webapp that automatically generates emails. Mail doesn't get sent out on it's own; you can configure any of those to print out a stack of form letters without having to deal with mail merge in Word.
The huh? How does this answer my challenge in any way? Most mail merges are for normal USPS mail. Are you saying that a webapp will somehow print envelopes for USPS mailing? I don't even want to think about what kind of weird-ass javascipt or other hackery is needed to make web browsers print correctly on envelopes.
How about maybe linking to one of these webapps instead of just vaguely suggesting they exist? What if I'm in a healthcare business who can't send patient information over the web, what then?
What kind of fine distinction are you making here? As far as I'm concerned, when I'm sitting in front of Access, I'm working on a database. For the original poster to say it's NOT a database is, I dunno, some kind of delusion.
(The original poster didn't say it was not a "database management system", whatever the hell that is, he said it was not a database.)
Maybe, but that doesn't mean OpenOffice doesn't suck. Even the brain-dead can learn to drive a Geo Metro, but Geo Metros still suck. Understand now? Gooood.
What's a better way to do mass mailings other than Word's mail merge? Seriously, what is your happy easy solution that's better and everybody loves it?
And in what way is Access NOT a database? Do you even know what the word "database" means? Hell, Access wouldn't even have to be relational to be a database. (It is relational; but that's not required to be a DB.)
Sure you're a cop and you work in the IT field, but you're also a open source zealot and it shows.
Even if the poster meant that... how is it insightful? The same post has appeared on every gaming story on Slashdot... it's not new, it's not insightful, and my response is always, "well, if you don't like it, don't buy it."
So, to the original submitter: "If you don't like it, don't buy it." No need to be a jackass to these guys working on the engine by basically saying, before it's even playable, that they don't give a crap about gameplay.
Could a moderator please explain to me what makes this post "insightful?" What "insight" is being conveyed here? That the poster doesn't like fancy graphics? A clone of the same posting that's been appearing on every game-related story since the topic was added?
What does it matter? Even if I did everything in my power to consume nothing and reuse everything, if I had a solar powered house, biked to work, stopped using this computer and my air conditioner, gave away my TV and other electronics, hung my clothes to dry, etc etc... it's not like anybody in China cares. They'll still pollute just as much, and use up all that oil/carbon cycle I saved, so why bother? If the choice is between me or them, I choose me.
2) Is that the path of the source, or the destination it can't find?
In any case, in my problem that message was utterly useless, because the "path" was "~\windows_drivers\something.ini" and the path I was expecting to see was (gasp!) "~\windows_drivers\something.ini". The problem is that "~" means something different in a root terminal than it does in every other terminal... interestingly, Apple's fixed that problem, but Ubuntu hasn't yet.
The point is that RealBasic has a nice mature evolved interface where a kid can drag a button to the window, write a bit of code, and BAM they have a working application. As far as I'm aware, you can't do that in any Java IDEs with near the same simplicity as in RB. I hope that other Slashdot posters consider the *entire* problem domain instead of only "which language syntax is better?"
Slashdot Mirror
It does email, using the WORST user interface known to man. It does calendaring, but doesn't talk to anything outside of itself and allows nonsense entries, like meetings that start at 4:00 PM and end at 2:00 PM on the same day. You can also write really crappy database applications on it, which all have terrible interfaces because Notes doesn't provide the tools needed to create an even decent, much less good, interface.
In short, corporate types love it because it's buzzword compliant. Users *HATE* it with a passion because it's has a mutant interface from mars where the easiest tasks to do in other programs become ridiculously hard in Notes. Administrators are somewhat neutral, since it's about the same difficulty to admin as Exchange.
(For a bad UI example, listboxes don't let you sort by all fields if you click on them. You can sort email by user, date, etc, but you can't sort by subjectline... for no apparent reason. In some views, the scrollwheel on your mouse works fast, in some views it works slow, in others it doesn't work at all. To attach a file to a message, you have to first click on the body of the message, otherwise the attach button is greyed out. The address book presents you with two listboxes, one of names in the addy book and one of names in the email, but doesn't allow you to drag-and-drop between them. etc, etc. In short, the interface sucks... it's version 6.5.1 right now, and it still has MANY bugs that were present in version 4.5, when I started using it.
Kameo isn't a sequel. Neither is Ninety-Nine Nights. Did you even *read* the list?
Bullshit.
How could you pre-order a game system that doesn't even have an official retail price yet? Amazon.com isn't offering pre-orders, nor is Gamestop.com (as of a week ago, at least.)
You're just using this "pre-order" crap so you can lend weight to your point, which is that Microsoft made an announcement that there might be more than one version at launch, and now are making an announcement that there definately will be more than one version later on.
Try to do the Microsoft bashing without the blatent lies next time.
1) Well, the American games industry is pretty damn big, the biggest in the world. Not to mention, the Xbox is made by an American company. Not to mention, the other two consoles coming out are both from Japanese companies, so the American games are actually more rare in this market than the Japanese ones... so, yeah, they're all games that appeal to Americans. AMAZEMENT!
I think it's a great idea, since the industry has been dominated by Japanese companies for so long, to have some American console games again.
2) Who said the point of the Xbox 360 is to take over the Playstation's home market? This is the first I've heard of that.
Unless you have a Mac, in which case the TabBrowser Preferences extension will royally FUBAR your entire Firefox install, disabling menus, not letting you quit. Oh, yeah, the download link SAYS it works in MacOS X, but obviously the bastard lying programmer never even tried it.
Sorry for the harsh language, but that buggy-ass piece of shit extension soured my extension experience forever. It's even better that, apparently, Mozilla.org doesn't care if some of their plugins are mislabelled as supporting a platform when they, in fact, cause HUGE problems on that platform.
SOME IBM programs have good code, perhaps. But IBM's currently in charge of Lotus Notes, and that program's a piece of crap.
We need to invent that glowy crap on the back of every spaceship on TV and in the movies. The Millenium Falcon had no trouble landing and taking off from a planet without a fuel tank... you just turn on the glowy crap, and bam you're there. The starship Enterprise just makes the glowy crap flash really bright, and they're going faster than light itself! Even the Stargate uses glowy crap technology to bridge planets.
We just need to invent that glowy crap and everything else will fall into place.
Watching Buck Rogers again on Sci Fi Network (they show it at like 1:00 AM on Fridays, use your Tivo), the main thing I want to see are:
1) Cute little robots who go "bede-bede-bede-bede" and
2) Princess Ardala's costumes becoming the new fashion trend.
Here's a shout-out to Z-Term on my MacOS 7.1 computer. It's still available, if you want it:
http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/
Yes, but the statement "IE only runs on Windows" is still plain wrong, regardless of which features IE on Mac supports. I don't even know why you bothered to type that reply, since it doesn't change the grandparent's point in any way.
Dude, I'm not sure how things work on your planet but here on earth most mail merges get printed on sticky labels of the sort they sell in 8.5 x 11 inch sheets at a place like Staples. These are then affixed to envelopes.
Where I work, all our mail merged addresses are printed directly onto envelopes using IBM's Infoprint 1120 envelope feeder attachment. Of course you can use sticky labels as well, but either way, Word works fine... right? The original poster I'm debating with seems to think somehow that Word has problems doing mail merge, or produces substandard results.
Printing in the right dimensions from a decent web browser is easy to do using Cascading Style Sheets [w3.org].
Can you point me to a site that does that? I find that most CSS sites print very goofy, as if the browser was stripping the CSS before sending it to the printer. (Obviously, in theory CSS can do it, since you can specify page measurements all in inches, but I've never seen it happen in reality, nor have I see a webapp that prints envelopes like the original poster thinks exists.)
So... you can't back up your words. Since you can't find a link, which would only take a few seconds on Google if such a product existed (I looked also; I couldn't find anything except tips on Word, Excel and Act mail merges), and since you talk about handcoding an application (surely tons more expensive than using Word and Excel out-of-the-box for only the cost of Office), I hereby declare you're full of crap.
I get plenty of mail from Tricare that is in no way printed using mail merge in Word
How do you know? Unless you work at Tricare, I don't see how you could comment on how they do their mail merges.
In any case, you're probably right... for large companies, I bet that writing a mail merge program for their specific use would be beneficial. But there's nothing wrong with doing it in Word... it works, it's stable, and the results look just as good as any other computer document, and better than a lot. And it prints on envelopes easily, regular envelopes that are cheaper than windowed ones.
Insightful? Hey Moderators, this isn't even on topic, much less insightful!
Did you read the linked page? Nobody should reasonably expect the coffee to be so hot as to cause third degree burns in a matter of seconds. Not to mention, McDonalds had been warned, SEVERAL TIMES, by public health agencies to lower the temperature of their coffee when served.
But why am I bothering to explain it to you? Go back and read the link, and you'll see that, while there are many frivilous lawsuits, that isn't one of them.
I worked at a theater when Saving Private Ryan was released, and God I would have loved to have the authority to do that. My guess would be that:
1) Either that specific theater chain had a policy to ID for all R-rated (or higher) movies, (this is becoming more and more widespread) or:
2) Because South Park is a "cartoon" and a lot of kids were buying tickets, that theater in particular took it upon themselves to check ID for South Park. Good for them.
Like I said, I talked to my manager about doing that for Saving Private Ryan, after I saw a 5-year-old girl rushing from the theater in tears, but I wasn't allowed becase of "corporate policy."
A lot of people don't really seem to "get" the rating system. I'm sure those are the same people who are complaining and calling out for censorship.
Who can blame them? Look how successful Rockstar Games has been making the most objectionable games they can think of. Let's see, the infamous GTA series, of course, Manhunt, the game where you kill people in creative and disgusting ways, and now they're developing a game where you play a school bully and beat the crap out of kids.
Part of me wants to go to Rockstar's developer staff and yell out, "GROW THE HELL UP! You're making the whole industry look bad, you idiots!" And part of me wants to applaud them for finding such a good solid revenue stream.
Getting back to how Access is a retarded POS, find me a DBA with a good knowledge of data structures and orthoganol design who will agree with you about Access. If you can, then I'll gladly show you an MS zealot.
I think that pretty much any DBA would agree that Access is, indeed, a database. I'm making no claims about how good or bad it is, I'm just saying that it IS a database, despite your claiming otherwise. (I don't know what your criteria is for something to be a database, but by any reasonable criteria, Access fits.)
You didn't say Access was a "retarded POS" in the original message, you said Access was not a database. Go back and look it up. And don't try to make yourself look less foolish by trying to retroactively edit your message.
Off the top of my head? Go ahead and pick a webapp that automatically generates emails. Mail doesn't get sent out on it's own; you can configure any of those to print out a stack of form letters without having to deal with mail merge in Word.
The huh? How does this answer my challenge in any way? Most mail merges are for normal USPS mail. Are you saying that a webapp will somehow print envelopes for USPS mailing? I don't even want to think about what kind of weird-ass javascipt or other hackery is needed to make web browsers print correctly on envelopes.
How about maybe linking to one of these webapps instead of just vaguely suggesting they exist? What if I'm in a healthcare business who can't send patient information over the web, what then?
What kind of fine distinction are you making here? As far as I'm concerned, when I'm sitting in front of Access, I'm working on a database. For the original poster to say it's NOT a database is, I dunno, some kind of delusion.
(The original poster didn't say it was not a "database management system", whatever the hell that is, he said it was not a database.)
Maybe, but that doesn't mean OpenOffice doesn't suck. Even the brain-dead can learn to drive a Geo Metro, but Geo Metros still suck. Understand now? Gooood.
I'm holding you to this one:
What's a better way to do mass mailings other than Word's mail merge? Seriously, what is your happy easy solution that's better and everybody loves it?
And in what way is Access NOT a database? Do you even know what the word "database" means? Hell, Access wouldn't even have to be relational to be a database. (It is relational; but that's not required to be a DB.)
Sure you're a cop and you work in the IT field, but you're also a open source zealot and it shows.
Even if the poster meant that... how is it insightful? The same post has appeared on every gaming story on Slashdot... it's not new, it's not insightful, and my response is always, "well, if you don't like it, don't buy it."
So, to the original submitter: "If you don't like it, don't buy it." No need to be a jackass to these guys working on the engine by basically saying, before it's even playable, that they don't give a crap about gameplay.
Could a moderator please explain to me what makes this post "insightful?" What "insight" is being conveyed here? That the poster doesn't like fancy graphics? A clone of the same posting that's been appearing on every game-related story since the topic was added?
What does it matter? Even if I did everything in my power to consume nothing and reuse everything, if I had a solar powered house, biked to work, stopped using this computer and my air conditioner, gave away my TV and other electronics, hung my clothes to dry, etc etc... it's not like anybody in China cares. They'll still pollute just as much, and use up all that oil/carbon cycle I saved, so why bother? If the choice is between me or them, I choose me.
Well, two issues here:
1) What does "cannot stat" mean?
2) Is that the path of the source, or the destination it can't find?
In any case, in my problem that message was utterly useless, because the "path" was "~\windows_drivers\something.ini" and the path I was expecting to see was (gasp!) "~\windows_drivers\something.ini". The problem is that "~" means something different in a root terminal than it does in every other terminal... interestingly, Apple's fixed that problem, but Ubuntu hasn't yet.
The point is that RealBasic has a nice mature evolved interface where a kid can drag a button to the window, write a bit of code, and BAM they have a working application. As far as I'm aware, you can't do that in any Java IDEs with near the same simplicity as in RB. I hope that other Slashdot posters consider the *entire* problem domain instead of only "which language syntax is better?"