Posts by Charlie Clark 13381 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
That maybe what you think – I preferred the old StarOffice approach – but if you're running the kind of project to replace users' software, insisting to them that "this is better" won't make you many friends. Get them onside early and ensure you have budgetted for sufficient training and support. I believe that failing to do this was one (along with brown envelopes from Microsoft's offices in Unterhaching) of the reasons why migration in Munich failed.
Much I as applaud the sentiment, that shouldn't be the only or most important criterium for software that will largely be used by non-technical users. Good software is going to cost money to be maintained, so "free" shouldn't be the main criterium. Ideally, a range of options should be considered, and possibly even offered: it's possible, for example, that one department prefers system X because of its wizzy spreadsheet functions, while another wants the simplest thing out there.
My main point, however, is that scoping this without involving the users is just asking for trouble.
I might agree with you in principe, but experience and decades of studies of "change management" (Who moved my cheese?)suggest otherwise. As do some migrations from, and then back to Office, because things didn't work as expected.
SWMBO is happy enough with OpenOffice on her machine instead of MS Office, but then I get called for anything unfamiliar such as, I don't know, copying formatting from one cell to another…
I actually think that moving people from Outlook to something else for e-mail and calendars wouldn't be that hard, because Outlook seems to break every known (and some heretofore unknown) rule on usability, but they will want to be able share calendars and, the pointy-haired brigade will want to be able to delegate their inbox to their assistants, and I haven't yet seen a client/server solution for this that I think looks acceptable.
But back to Office and I'm unapologetic that I think that many people will object to the look and feel of LibreOffice and it's not worth the fight over this. And it's the look and feel that matter. Other solutions including SoftMaker and OnlyOffice are available where most people, apart from the Excel junkies (and I've had to look and work with the source of pivot tables!), and the Powerpoint brigade, would hardly notice the difference. The Excel lot can probably be persuaded to switch to Jupyter Notebooks without too much difficulty, but I don't think there's much hope for the coloured crayon brigade: B Ark, or round the back of the house for them; and then shots might be heard. What an awful clusterfuck of a program. Of course, anyone wanting Access gets taken straight to the BOFH's basement, to get a special introduction to the new version.
But users will still complain about not being able to find this or that. Personally, I'd say bite the bullet for something that more closely resembles what they know (and maybe even love) – say Softmaker Office – so you've got more time to work out how to replace the real officeoid (not proud of this): Exchange and Outlook because then users won't just complain, but go a viking!
I've moved a couple of private e-mail accounts to OpenXChange and the in-browser office suite is okay. Not ever really had to use Outlook and Exchage, I can't say how the "collaboration" – shared mailboxes and calendars work.
The costs of tariffs are paid for by the customers.
No-one is going to set up anything more than assembling and packaging in the US because, aside from the costs of all the factories, the US does not have the right kind of people to work in them. Skilled workforces take at least one generations to produce, but this assumes a degree of education superior to that of most American schools.
This does all look a lot like technology that no-one asked for and does nothing useful, but fanbois seem to love it and that's probably because you have to pay to use it!
Bluetooth lets us pair our phones with our Skoda Fabia, which lets us handle calls and play music, which is all you really need. However, because the navigation software is a bit crap (even though it's TomTom) with maps permanently outdated, I would like to be able to use Here from the phone as an alternative. Android Auto works in principle quite well but has two problems: the phone has in the past decided to close the application without warning – not good; it doesn't drive the dashboard display, which is much easier to read when driving. Might give it another go at some point but in the meantime, I'll stick to running it silently on the phone so that we can work our way around traffic jams a bit better!
BTW I don't think apps are restricted but they have to provide the right profile for the car's display.
I've no interest in a Windows machine and this would be for development anyway. This is actually an area where Linux sense, as long as I don't have to deal with any GUIs! I've got several RPis doing various things, so that's also an option. But, as you say, the Mac hardware seems to just run and run, which generally means less time tinkering with it.
I bought my MBP Intel 2020 in anticipation of Apple having to run through several iterations with the new silicon and OS to get things right. They've done some interesting stuff with the chips and memory and, for many, they produce the ideal machines whether it's for development or "creative" stuff and many people will stick with them a result. My next machine may well be a Mini, with the MBP reserved for travel and Windows VMs. But I haven't been in lockstep with their OSes for years: too many bugs in the new releases and too many API changes requiring new versions of the software.
Actually, I'm wondering why they're not adopting FreeBSD's approach for improved support for Docker. Furll virtualisation is hard and, while Swift has its fans in the IOS community, it's nothing like as road-tested for systems work as other languages. But maybe they're just using it to manage the GUI?
Price is one thing – I don't mind paying a bit more for good support – but you no longer get that from Cisco, so we're moving too. The last interaction was basically "we don't what happened, so it must have been your fault". Thanks for nothing! And things are only getting worse with the acquistions which tend to be followed by sacking developers and leaving the code to rot.
The actual storage of the metadata, to me, is an implementation detail, and whether you store it in the file system, or you store it in a catalog, or something like that is or a relational data store, is not as important as the APIs you use to interact with it."
Important here is the REST spec, which "behind the scenes" can keep information about metadata, where the files are.
This is back-to-front: REST is merely a communication protocol. Where you store your data is, for data analysis, far more important than the protocol. And, even if it's metadata, I see no good reason not to keep it in the database.
The Duck approach is generating a lot of enthusiasm from those looking to move away from US-based lock-in.
Right, which is why you have something like Intel's old tick-tock approach: new products will grow revenues, gradual improvements will help margins. For a simple example: when Steve Jobs was pushing the I-Phone, he didn't start with the numbers, he started with the desire to create and dominate a new category. Over the last decade, Intel has got out of pretty much every category with the greatest growth potential (because initially small). It had an ARM licence and could quite easily have become∞ not only the dominant manufacturer, but possibly even designer. But Xeons for data centres were what were required for the bottom line, so they ran the unit down and sold it. As for the rest, it sounds a lot like the pharma model which favours buying companies up rather than inhouse development and relying on extremely high margins to keep the model going.
You're drawing sweeping conclusions from incomplete information. Whether it's true or not – and I personally think there was a lot more to the attacks than we know – the Russians will spin as a handful of Ukrainian terrorists. Cue rounding up "foreign-looking" lorry drivers, confessions obtained by torture and one-way tickets to the front for Compost Duty™
But everyone involved will have know the risks and gone along willingly, as is standard for covert ops on enemy territory. Destroying these planes will reduce Russia's own ability to attack civilian targets in Ukraine and might even help bring the war to an end sooner.
And US consumers are used to paying through the nose for everything: phones, internet access, healthcare, flights, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any market segment that isn't dominated by just a few companies thus able to set higher prices.
I don't see why it would be anti-trust: companies are free to charge whatever they like for their products and this isn't about collusion. International companies already use differential pricing to maximise sales in markets but also pay attention to prevent arbitrage eroding margins in neighbouring ones. For a while, US companies tried to prevent their products being sold in one EU countriy being sold to residents in another, where the products were generally more expensive. They lost all court actions and the surprisingly efficient cross-border traders (no, not Amazon) did the rest.
This isn't pain-sharing but profit optimisation. If shiny things now cost significantly more in the US than in other countries, a huge black market will open up to take advantage of the inefficiency. I'll have some of that says an unnamed manufacturer of Cupertino and raises prices in other countries. However, this is likely to put it at a competitive disadvantage in those countries where other manufacturers don't follow suit.
I'd like to see you get those plants built in that time and on budget! Renewables without feed-in tariffs are now more competitive than nuclear in many places, most of the time and it has a great advantage of providing power now. What we have neglected to work on are grid stabilisation and long-term backup/swing capacity for when we have too little or too much renewables. If we'd spent a fraction of the public money that has been spent on nuclear on these, we might have more practicable solutions than what's currently available.
That doesn't matter and there is a long history demonstrating successive administrations belief in their ability to pick winners and the sunk cost fallacy (though also a worrying numbers of promising projects pulled for differen reasons), meaning that SpaceX is moving towards the Gold standard of US military industrial problems: cost plus development.
Well, I guess there are the sovereign wealth funds… but normal capital markets are definitely a little more conservative now. An awful lot of AI funding in the US is coming directly from the cashflow of the main beneficiaries: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et el.
I think Musk would normally struggle a bit to get more cash without ceding control, but he's got the deals with NASA and the DoD as a sweetener and, no doubt, it's merely a matter of time until the FAA becomes part of the DOGE corporation and he launch as many explosions as he likes. Of course, this might encourage the smart money to move to the competition.
Yes, it is getting much harder to raise capital because capital costs have ridden both due to higher interest rates – Musk was really able to play the system in the years of free money – but, more importantly in the US, due to rising bond yields.
Other companies have to learn to work with greater financial discipline. Though I'm confident that SpaceX has engineers who will solve the problems over time, Musk's insistence on a rapid launch schedule could well prove counterproductive.
Saul Goodman.
I'm not sure that many lawyers will worry too much about being associated with Trump, but the government simply offers too few business opportunities, and, until Dummy goes after tort law, there's simply too much money to be made out of such cases. Civil liberties work is often just a stepping stone to juicy class action suits.
That would credit Trump with far too much strategic thinking. After he was handed the "get out of jail free card" by the supreme court, he's been encouraged to see quite how extensive executive authority is. The Project 2025 goons are, of course, cock-a-hoop over all the chaos he's causing because they want to break the "checks and balances" system. But they're happy to see the powers of states, the courts, etc. limited and replace the judges via the usual means, whilst they rig things like higher education in general and law schools in particular, and selection processes so that there'll be more "sheriffs" than judges.
The devices are mainly assembled in China from components made all over the world. So, even assuming it was possible to build a suitable factory and find the necessarily skilled workers over a couple of years, this would hardly affect the higher prices due to imported components.
But America needs to import tariffed goods to build and equip factories and it doesn't have sufficient people to do this let alone the skilled ones to work in them.
We're already well beyond the bounds of legality. US law makes it clear that Congress is responsible for all trade negotiations. In its turn, Congress gave presidents the power to set policy during poorly defined situations of "national emergency", which is the excuse Trump is using to justify the current shitshow. However, there are already several lawsuits in the works that challenge the legality of at least some of these decisions.
Politically, it could be smart for Trump to lose some of the cases: he could walk away and say he'd like to do more but his hands are tied. But he takes such decisions personally and would waste more energy and government resources going after both plaintiffs and the courts.
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