Well, on a superficial level (I'm no sys admin, so I don't know from that perspective):
1) Pages are a hell of a lot easier to edit than Wikimedia wikis, and permissions are more finer-grained. (I can have permission to edit a checklist on a page but not the calendar on the same page, for example.)
2) You can directly access documents stored on Sharepoint through your standard Open/Save dialogs. You don't have to go through that stupid "download, edit, re-upload" dance you do with other wikis.
Microsoft doesn't generally pay dividends at all. I think a group of stockholders basically got snippy and talked Microsoft into paying dividends a few years ago, IIRC. Generally, though, they don't. (They're hardly alone, a ton of stocks don't pay dividends.)
As for suing a corporation for not making enough money, that's just ridiculous. If you don't like the way they're doing business, sell your shares and don't buy any new ones-- that's how you signal your opinion. If everybody sells their shares and doesn't buy new ones, the share price goes down and the company sink.
In any case, the investment in Online and Media is strategic. It's not expected to pay off the first day, or even the first decade... I know, for example, that the Xbox division's original plan was to be profitable in 5 years. Everybody knew going in that the Xbox wasn't going to bring in huge cash on day one, business just doesn't work that way. If you think it's a bad strategy, then sell your shares and signal your intent that way.
I posted this point above, but since we all hate Microsoft for being a monopoly, isn't it a *good thing* that they're working to prevent Google from being a monopoly?
Unless you swallow the "don't be evil" kool-aid, I guess.
The fact that you can use the web completely Google-free with Bing is really Microsoft's innovation. (Even Yahoo was using Google behind the scenes.) That's a good thing. Competition is a good thing. We should be encouraging competition.
Nah that was a white lie. I do keep reading if they're direct responses to me, usually. I just wanted to emphasize the point to this particular poster that I have no idea what point they were driving at because it's foundation is a lie.
But yah, the amount of bullshit that goes flying around here in the average topic is something else.
I'm going to make the horrible patriotic arguments that people around here hate, but... well here goes.
I'm actually really glad that one of the major game consoles is made by an American company again, and puts out almost entirely games aimed for an American audience. Before the Xbox came out, every console RPG involved metrosexuals with 12-foot-long swords, the Xbox instantly changed that from day 1 with Morrowind. Before the Xbox, virtually all shooters were third-person, I can't stand those games.
It doesn't hurt that both the original Xbox and Xbox 360 are *excellent* systems that both Sony and Nintendo are scrambling to catch up to. (Software-wise.)
Seriously, an American company hasn't had much of a say in console gaming since the freakin' Atari in 1983. What's happening now in the market is good and healthy, and even if Microsoft is losing money, I love them for it.
Now please mod me down for being too American and supporting Microsoft.
Since people here generally hate monopolies, would you prefer they stop all their online services and make Google into a monopoly? Or would you prefer that they continue fighting against Google, so that people have a non-Google alternative to things like web mail and search engines?
(Obviously I'm discounting Yahoo here, which may not be entirely fair, but I'm making a point.:)
Well, since Windows Vista and Windows 7 already support this, I'd say "fairly soon" is demonstrably false. Unless you're happy with "fairly soon" being "after everybody else has been doing it for several years."
Don't forget that this "beauty of open source" doesn't even get around to thinking about fixing the issue until a competing OS has had support for it for 3 entire years.
I'm with you, but on the other hand that doesn't mean they should just not give a shit about the quality of their end-product. We know from experience that they can edit and correct stories as corrections arise in the comments, but how often does that happen in practice? (Hardly ever.) Somewhere between a third and half of the stories posted here are either outright lies, or extremely misleading-- I may be exaggerating, but not by much-- and almost never are they corrected.
I don't think anybody's expecting the New York Times when they visit here, but some minimum level of competence would be nice. I don't fault anybody for complaining.
If your data only exists in one place, you *are* going to lose it sooner or later. If it hadn't been a RIAA claim against Google, maybe it would have been a botched server move, or a data center outage.
Make fucking backups. Test fucking backups regularly. Automate the process. Run it after every time you add a new post. There are no excuses, none.
If your site is worth anything at all to you, make sure you can move it instantly to another host... Blogger goes down? Move to WordPress. Move to Dreamhost. Whatever. But don't put all your eggs in one basket, get them all broken, and then gripe that the basket had frayed wires.
I always like to say that if people really want a Libertarian society, they're welcome to move to Liberia. I don't think they'd like it as much as they think they would.
Meanwhile Washington, just to the north, seems to manage Ok just on property tax + 6.5% base sales tax. (Each county raises the tax from that minimum, of course... mine works out to 8.6% while Seattle is like 8.8% for goods and 10% for food.)
Whenever I hear people complain about America's dwindling manufacturing base, I always wonder, do these people WANT to work in a factory?
Tens of thousands of people in Washington love working in Boeing factories.
Hell, I think I'd enjoy it too... wouldn't it be awesome to have been personally responsible for an aircraft that hundreds of thousands of people will fly? Seeing it perform over specifications in perfect safety for 30 years? I'd love that.
I mean, my current position lets me help people too, but nothing to that extent.
Wow it didn't take long for the H1B boogeyman to come out of the closet in this thread. "Immigrants are stealing our jobs!" is generally thought of as a blue-collar kind of complaint, but this just goes to show that every level of society believes the same stupid thing.
Not easy enough that I can count on it being universally available to the readers of my emails. If you only send emails to people you've met before, and have arranged certain software configurations with-- well, bully for you. But for the rest of it, it's still impractical.
1) Google doesn't read your email, it indexes the keywords in your emails.
2) I'd much rather have Google have access to it then somebody involved in the campus politics/social scene. At least Google has *no good reason* to read the emails... your local mail admin could (and probably would) look in inboxes to find out whether his girlfriend is cheating on him.
I'd like to support the grandparent. I have the exact same problems with Google's IMAP.
Nobody's claiming it affects *every* Gmail user, but it *is* a problem with the service. Maybe it's just one flakey server or data center, or maybe it's some specific behavior we're doing (or a specific client?) I dunno.
Yah but then you have all these expensive facilities to maintain.
I say we give each neighborhood a conch shell and a dead pig's head on a stick and let them go at it.
Re:behavioral problems have virtually disappeared
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So seriously, wake up, stop blaming yourself. Blame our culture for excluding those who are intellectual.
What does "intellectual" have anything to do with it? Unless you're just assuming that because someone is bullied, therefore they must be an "intellectual" person?
It has nothing to do with intellect, it has to do with social skills. If you didn't have the social skills, you're still going to be bullied-- and avoiding other people doesn't help improve your social skills, so in that measure I agree with the grandparent.
Or look at it this way, by your logic, Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons is only outcast because he's smarter than everybody else in the class, right? And don't tell me your school didn't have a Ralph Wiggum.
If I'm bad at bowling, I'll get low scores. If I don't practice bowling, I'll get worse at it. Now in this example, maybe I don't care about bowling-- that's fine. But if you don't care about social interaction, I can guarantee you're going to have a miserable, lonely life... you can't just avoid it and trust everything to turn out fine.
The problem is that Jabber isn't a superset of the features of all those IM clients. You can't consolidate them without losing features-- I like the stuff that Live Messenger does above-and-beyond the basic chat, for example, and I'm not willing to give it up.
Now that the US's economy is a mess, the dollar is weak and getting weaker and the Euro is fast taking the place the Dollar once had, the US needs to be sent a strong, loud and clear message that it's hay day is over and it's going to have to rely upon diplomacy, cooperation and fair play instead of idle threats and ham-fisted foreign policy towards it's allies.
Our economy is doing better than yours, EU-boy. Suck it down.
Hm. I'm down to Live Messenger, Steam, Xbox Live and Skype... I ditched AIM since gmail's web interface does that now, and I only had a couple friends on it anyway. I hardly ever use Steam, although my friends know to use it to get my attention if I'm playing a game. Xbox Live has a web interface, and I don't check it often enough to really care for a 24/7 app.
So that leaves Live Messenger, Steam and Skype running at any given time. Pain in the ass, but not unmanageable I guess.
Out of curiosity, does Britain currently have a fiber network similar to FIOS here in the US? (Not fiber-to-large-apartment-complexes, but fiber-to-individual-homes.)
Verizon in the US is currently installing one, and a lot of areas have coverage, but... well they're not even remotely close to 50% yet. I feel like I've been waiting for FIOS for a very, very long time-- I'm about to give up and just go to Comcast over the DSL I have now, but man the thought of giving Comcast any money rubs me the wrong way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, on a superficial level (I'm no sys admin, so I don't know from that perspective):
1) Pages are a hell of a lot easier to edit than Wikimedia wikis, and permissions are more finer-grained. (I can have permission to edit a checklist on a page but not the calendar on the same page, for example.)
2) You can directly access documents stored on Sharepoint through your standard Open/Save dialogs. You don't have to go through that stupid "download, edit, re-upload" dance you do with other wikis.
Microsoft doesn't generally pay dividends at all. I think a group of stockholders basically got snippy and talked Microsoft into paying dividends a few years ago, IIRC. Generally, though, they don't. (They're hardly alone, a ton of stocks don't pay dividends.)
As for suing a corporation for not making enough money, that's just ridiculous. If you don't like the way they're doing business, sell your shares and don't buy any new ones-- that's how you signal your opinion. If everybody sells their shares and doesn't buy new ones, the share price goes down and the company sink.
In any case, the investment in Online and Media is strategic. It's not expected to pay off the first day, or even the first decade... I know, for example, that the Xbox division's original plan was to be profitable in 5 years. Everybody knew going in that the Xbox wasn't going to bring in huge cash on day one, business just doesn't work that way. If you think it's a bad strategy, then sell your shares and signal your intent that way.
I posted this point above, but since we all hate Microsoft for being a monopoly, isn't it a *good thing* that they're working to prevent Google from being a monopoly?
Unless you swallow the "don't be evil" kool-aid, I guess.
The fact that you can use the web completely Google-free with Bing is really Microsoft's innovation. (Even Yahoo was using Google behind the scenes.) That's a good thing. Competition is a good thing. We should be encouraging competition.
Nah that was a white lie. I do keep reading if they're direct responses to me, usually. I just wanted to emphasize the point to this particular poster that I have no idea what point they were driving at because it's foundation is a lie.
But yah, the amount of bullshit that goes flying around here in the average topic is something else.
I'm going to make the horrible patriotic arguments that people around here hate, but... well here goes.
I'm actually really glad that one of the major game consoles is made by an American company again, and puts out almost entirely games aimed for an American audience. Before the Xbox came out, every console RPG involved metrosexuals with 12-foot-long swords, the Xbox instantly changed that from day 1 with Morrowind. Before the Xbox, virtually all shooters were third-person, I can't stand those games.
It doesn't hurt that both the original Xbox and Xbox 360 are *excellent* systems that both Sony and Nintendo are scrambling to catch up to. (Software-wise.)
Seriously, an American company hasn't had much of a say in console gaming since the freakin' Atari in 1983. What's happening now in the market is good and healthy, and even if Microsoft is losing money, I love them for it.
Now please mod me down for being too American and supporting Microsoft.
Since people here generally hate monopolies, would you prefer they stop all their online services and make Google into a monopoly? Or would you prefer that they continue fighting against Google, so that people have a non-Google alternative to things like web mail and search engines?
(Obviously I'm discounting Yahoo here, which may not be entirely fair, but I'm making a point. :)
New Windows version (with new/changed API's and stuff like UAC) require a new Office version
Liar.
I stop reading posts when I come across a blatant and easily-debunked lie.
Well, since Windows Vista and Windows 7 already support this, I'd say "fairly soon" is demonstrably false. Unless you're happy with "fairly soon" being "after everybody else has been doing it for several years."
Don't forget that this "beauty of open source" doesn't even get around to thinking about fixing the issue until a competing OS has had support for it for 3 entire years.
I'm with you, but on the other hand that doesn't mean they should just not give a shit about the quality of their end-product. We know from experience that they can edit and correct stories as corrections arise in the comments, but how often does that happen in practice? (Hardly ever.) Somewhere between a third and half of the stories posted here are either outright lies, or extremely misleading-- I may be exaggerating, but not by much-- and almost never are they corrected.
Look, any site that posts this article: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257 without a single correct simply Does. Not. Give. A. Shit.
I don't think anybody's expecting the New York Times when they visit here, but some minimum level of competence would be nice. I don't fault anybody for complaining.
If your data only exists in one place, you *are* going to lose it sooner or later. If it hadn't been a RIAA claim against Google, maybe it would have been a botched server move, or a data center outage.
Make fucking backups. Test fucking backups regularly. Automate the process. Run it after every time you add a new post. There are no excuses, none.
If your site is worth anything at all to you, make sure you can move it instantly to another host... Blogger goes down? Move to WordPress. Move to Dreamhost. Whatever. But don't put all your eggs in one basket, get them all broken, and then gripe that the basket had frayed wires.
I always like to say that if people really want a Libertarian society, they're welcome to move to Liberia. I don't think they'd like it as much as they think they would.
Meanwhile Washington, just to the north, seems to manage Ok just on property tax + 6.5% base sales tax. (Each county raises the tax from that minimum, of course... mine works out to 8.6% while Seattle is like 8.8% for goods and 10% for food.)
California is definitely doing something wrong.
Whenever I hear people complain about America's dwindling manufacturing base, I always wonder, do these people WANT to work in a factory?
Tens of thousands of people in Washington love working in Boeing factories.
Hell, I think I'd enjoy it too... wouldn't it be awesome to have been personally responsible for an aircraft that hundreds of thousands of people will fly? Seeing it perform over specifications in perfect safety for 30 years? I'd love that.
I mean, my current position lets me help people too, but nothing to that extent.
Wow it didn't take long for the H1B boogeyman to come out of the closet in this thread. "Immigrants are stealing our jobs!" is generally thought of as a blue-collar kind of complaint, but this just goes to show that every level of society believes the same stupid thing.
FireGPG and others make encrypting webmail easy,
Not easy enough that I can count on it being universally available to the readers of my emails. If you only send emails to people you've met before, and have arranged certain software configurations with-- well, bully for you. But for the rest of it, it's still impractical.
1) Google doesn't read your email, it indexes the keywords in your emails.
2) I'd much rather have Google have access to it then somebody involved in the campus politics/social scene. At least Google has *no good reason* to read the emails... your local mail admin could (and probably would) look in inboxes to find out whether his girlfriend is cheating on him.
I'd like to support the grandparent. I have the exact same problems with Google's IMAP.
Nobody's claiming it affects *every* Gmail user, but it *is* a problem with the service. Maybe it's just one flakey server or data center, or maybe it's some specific behavior we're doing (or a specific client?) I dunno.
1 in 5 is widespread? We have a better ratio than that in Seattle.
Yah but then you have all these expensive facilities to maintain.
I say we give each neighborhood a conch shell and a dead pig's head on a stick and let them go at it.
So seriously, wake up, stop blaming yourself. Blame our culture for excluding those who are intellectual.
What does "intellectual" have anything to do with it? Unless you're just assuming that because someone is bullied, therefore they must be an "intellectual" person?
It has nothing to do with intellect, it has to do with social skills. If you didn't have the social skills, you're still going to be bullied-- and avoiding other people doesn't help improve your social skills, so in that measure I agree with the grandparent.
Or look at it this way, by your logic, Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons is only outcast because he's smarter than everybody else in the class, right? And don't tell me your school didn't have a Ralph Wiggum.
If I'm bad at bowling, I'll get low scores. If I don't practice bowling, I'll get worse at it. Now in this example, maybe I don't care about bowling-- that's fine. But if you don't care about social interaction, I can guarantee you're going to have a miserable, lonely life... you can't just avoid it and trust everything to turn out fine.
The problem is that Jabber isn't a superset of the features of all those IM clients. You can't consolidate them without losing features-- I like the stuff that Live Messenger does above-and-beyond the basic chat, for example, and I'm not willing to give it up.
Now that the US's economy is a mess, the dollar is weak and getting weaker and the Euro is fast taking the place the Dollar once had, the US needs to be sent a strong, loud and clear message that it's hay day is over and it's going to have to rely upon diplomacy, cooperation and fair play instead of idle threats and ham-fisted foreign policy towards it's allies.
Our economy is doing better than yours, EU-boy. Suck it down.
Hm. I'm down to Live Messenger, Steam, Xbox Live and Skype... I ditched AIM since gmail's web interface does that now, and I only had a couple friends on it anyway. I hardly ever use Steam, although my friends know to use it to get my attention if I'm playing a game. Xbox Live has a web interface, and I don't check it often enough to really care for a 24/7 app.
So that leaves Live Messenger, Steam and Skype running at any given time. Pain in the ass, but not unmanageable I guess.
Out of curiosity, does Britain currently have a fiber network similar to FIOS here in the US? (Not fiber-to-large-apartment-complexes, but fiber-to-individual-homes.)
Verizon in the US is currently installing one, and a lot of areas have coverage, but ... well they're not even remotely close to 50% yet. I feel like I've been waiting for FIOS for a very, very long time-- I'm about to give up and just go to Comcast over the DSL I have now, but man the thought of giving Comcast any money rubs me the wrong way.