
too much choice
People find too much choice confusing...
Microsoft solution... here is 30 choices..!!
You can`t make this up.
91 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
What about the support calls for the Ribbon interface ? where are the costs there. I've been using Microsoft office for 15 years and I still spend too much time looking for something in Office 2007.
I've now moved the organisation over to OpenOffice and due to the limited feature needs of 90% of staff and apart for the first couple of weeks, no one even notices that they're not using a microsoft product. They just use what they're given. We left the finance bods with MS Office and eveyone else gets open office. The savings are considerable.
Its understandable that MS consider OO.org / google docs and other productivity suits as competitors... because they are. If MS were not paying attention to competitors in what is certainly their biggest cash cow, Steve-O would go far and beyond chair throwing.
I miss Office 97 ;-) and Bill.
I love and also dislike aspects of this.
Love the thought process behind making modular components that could be replaced. In the new carbon economy, we'll all have do what we did in the past and repair what is broken , not throw it away. This is an excellent solution to a problem that will face us all in the not to distant future.
Dislike the fact that it's based on wireless, even at extreme limited range up in the 100'sGHz, I always immediately start thinking 'Spooks' can eve's drop with super high powered gear. That being said , maybe they can already....
In principle, I like the idea of a net censor.
Anything that blocks access to all kiddie porn is A.OK in my book, I've just downloaded the ACMA black list and gone through it and overall , its a great starting point.
Where the Australian's end up looking like the Chinese 'Great Firewall' is as soon as they block something outside of what the majority would accept as the 'public good'.
Going through the list I can see legitimate gambling companies which are household names in the UK, lots of casino games and Poker. Now this is just protecting the Australian state run gambling which generates revenue for the country.
By blocking anything outside of (quite rightly) illegal porn, the net censorship mechanism is deemed as state 'thought' control and the population will naturally fight this. ( there is a valid debate for zero censorship of net access - but lets face it , wouldn't we all like to see an end to child exploitation ?? )
If they wanted to get this filter system in without complaints from its citizens, they should have just filtered the illegal porn stuff only and then started blocking whatever they wanted 18months later, when everyone was used to the technology.
Blocking legitimate international companies is just anti-competitive and has no place to be part of the net filter mechanism.
Can't wait for someone to miss something small and make Titan explode.
What do you say after you've blown up a moon ...
'I forgot that Oxygen would re-act with 'Chemical X' and start a chain re-action that resulted in the explosion of Titan', after the moon had exploded, there was a correction in the orbits of all solar system bodies, causing the earth to edge nearer the sun and accelerate the global warming problem. We've got 6 months to live.
Oops !
Nice article.
Best line = 'Unlike Android, Windows Mobile costs money. And it's rubbish.'
Microsoft are worried, and they should be. 6.5 is pants, I doubt 7 will be any better. Android is free and pretty solid. This is really non-news. Everyone can make an android phone, even me. So why not the people that spent the time to develop and release it ?
I'm pretty excited about a common mobile platform, its about time. Android will be that glue.
Why bother creating another Linux based OS, when there is Android ? , The beauty of Android is that we'll end up with Mobile phone operating environment convergence ( with the exception of iPhone )
I don't understand why Samsung would go to the effort to re-invent the wheel, when there is already a free and rapidly developing environment ?
I completely agree. Right now, cloud services are the equivalent to a brand new version of operating system from Microsoft. It looks shiny, promises much , but there's no way you'll install until everyone else has discovered 85% of the problems.
As with all new economies of scale, there will be problems, there always will, but over time, most will be mitigated and naturally as Pascal says you're not going to store hyper critical data there, but, and this is a big but, for most businesses, in time, this is where they will ultimately host mission critical systems.Business and CFO's will demand it. The mind set of sysAdmins will simply have to change from 'how do I protect my own personal farm, to, what kind of fabric layer encryption I am using in the cloud to protect my data and how to I replicate that.
I agree with both, its not ready yet , far from, as demonstrated by both Google and Amazon, but you'll have to accept that it will get better over time , security issues will be addressed and the economics of running on the cloud will ultimately lead to its adoption , like it or not.
I find it interesting the number of people who complain when a cloud service craps out, then the obligatory phrase ' That'll teach you to put your eggs in one basket...' appears...
In reality, how is this different to running your service, in a single data centre, on your own servers, with your own comms gears, firewalls , Anti-DDOS appliance, edge routers, software licences and support contracts.
No matter how much failover gear you've got, when someone launches a large scale DDOS at your site, you're still going down until the upstream ISP can sink hole the offending traffic.
Most sites are single points of failure and how many in reality can afford real time replication between two data centre's and double the hardware/software/support/hosting/bandwidth.
Personally, I'm not a cloud user yet, still hosting on own hardware, but when these cloud services have been running for a while longer and they sort out real time support issues, they should afford us business users with the kind of scalability and resilience that we simply could not afford ourselves. I think the cloud will be the data centre for the next few decades, the days of buying your own gear are numbered.
I'll get my coat.
As it means that there will be no restriction on VOIP applications on any handset with an internet connection , thus eroding the massive margins made on calls and roaming.
This will probably force up contract prices , but lower monthly bills as the majority of calls will be made using the providers data contract.
I'm sure they'll still continue to make wods of cash, just the nature of the game will change. They should embrace this, The market would get a jump start in the already saturated west with all the new VOIP applications. Businesses would love it.
Once a new tax is introduced at a nice attractive not-going-to-upset-too-many-people price of say 50p per month , is that after it becomes common place and people are used to seeing this on their bill, come the next budget and the next, this value will go up and up.
I'm all for raising money to pay for major infrastructure investments that will ultimately benefit the society at large, but with this government, you just know that over time , this will just be identified as another revenue stream and the money will be diverted.
Just force people to work for their social welfare benefits , that ought to solve most of the debt. Holes need digging for all this new fibre ...
What M$ fail to understand is that there is no killer app , no real reason to upgrade.
People use OS's to run applications , the OS isn't the application. Apple hit this on the head with a ' here is the OS , it costs X ( forgive the pun ! ) , no versions , no up-sell , just the OS....
XP, for all its failings , is now a pretty stable OS and it runs the applications , the purpose of the OS , everything talks to it , hardware compatibility is tight and it works..
To get people to move to 7, will have to come from making XP no longer available and forcing it upon the consumer / corporate, as they are not going to move voluntarily.
Finally , they've got the price points all wrong..... Who is going to pay 200 EUR/GBE /USD , when the machine costs the same ?
It really is time for everyone to wake up, ask the question 'what do I do with my PC' and look at LINUX / Open Office.
For the record , I like the look and feel of 7, but do feel M$ have missed the point with pricing/versions.
Name one person who upgraded from XP home -> Pro
No one will upgrade , what for ? , 99% of people will just stick to what they bought on the machine.
One single version would have been nice , two at a push . but who here isn't confused already by the 50 versions , did they learn nothing about vi$ta
Surely a couple test runs to the moon would be required before even thinking about Mars.
Yes , we've been to the moon 40 years ago , but a lot of stuff has changed and this will have to be a fully international mission ( metric & inches ? ), actually, come to think it , can the world even afford to be thinking about this now , or would this be considered 'Stimulus'.
Mars.. Yes , but lets get some practice in first with something a little closer and continue to send robots to the red planet until such time we 1) know what we're doing and 2) the pro's and con's of financing such a project and understanding the potential global benefit are fully understood.
Final point.. The movie 'Mission to Mars' still ranks among the worlds worst ever made.
As someone who hires IT people and being a proper techie myself, I was beginning to tire of the self inflated worth, ego stropping, god complex, this new generation of IT engineers was breeding. Correcting the market was always going to be necessary, else all IT projects would have been too expensive to do in the west.
Salaries need to reflect actual ability and that needs to be measured by depth in knowledge. This market correction will weed out most of the chuff, who suddenly, well since last October, stopped strutting around like alpha males and are suddenly realising they are dispensable / replaceable and had better up their game if they wish to maintain a career in this industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a small percentage of top people will get culled, but these are the ones who will find new work quickly, as has always been in IT, there is always a requirement for really good engineers.
To be honest, the OS on a netbook is incidental, basic word processing, web browsing, presentation, IM etc, and if you're a tech professional, network tools , all available on Linux, with a nice zippy and 'free' environment.
What we need is to educate / advertise to the masses that you simply don't need Windows any more on this class of device, not because the world doesn't need windows , it does, however , M$ need to understand that what they are charging for their Desktop OS's is now way off the market value.
Charm offensive would be nice , just look at apple , offering a $29 upgrade from the previous OS. If M$ did that every single machine sold with Vi$ta would be upgraded overnight and they would make an instant profit.
But as usual, for all the money and talented staff , they miss the point again.
Shame. 7 is pretty good , but for now at least , my netbook will remain dual boot XP and Ubuntu.
Resolution too low for anything useful, only real world application is super wide screen p0rn in your hotel room.
These pico projectors all sound great in theory , but the fundamental downside ( Besides tiny Res ) is the intensity of the image , the room has to be absolutely pitch black before you'll see anything, perfect for meetings where you cant see what you're writing......
So , I go back to the porn in the hotel room market , should be quite sizable..
The idea is fantastic , but we'll have to wait a few generations for anything bright enough with text we can read.
I've already got a G-Drive , its called GmailFS and as long as any single file is under 20MB, it works a charm. It runs on the Penguin or BarmyBalmerOS and has 7GB ( and counting .. ) of cloud storage. ( Only complaint is that it is not represented as a drive letter on a wintendo system )