31–40 of 120 posts
A desktop OS my mother can use. Sorry Ubuntu. You've sudo apt-got my-heart but, well, reality isn't coextensive with our aspirations.
For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfor…
PowerPoint and publisher are the two office apps that seem to be hardest to replace. But they're both ripe for web-based alternatives.
A desktop OS my mother can use. Sorry Ubuntu. You've sudo apt-got my-heart but, well, reality isn't coextensive with our aspirations.
I've been thinking about setting my mom up with Jolicloud ( http://www.jolicloud.com/ ), which I believe is based on Ubuntu. She has an HP netbook with an 8GB SSD, and WinXP gives her "running out of space" warnings all the time. She doesn't download anything, but her pagefile.sys file quickly grew to 2GB. After limiting the size of the pagefile, clearing a bunch of other temp files, and uninstalling everything I cou…
And, for developers, there's a market to sell applications to. When's the last time you saw someone making a living selling software to Linux consumers? (Web based products are an important exception to this rule, of course, but not everything can work well from a browser.) And as a bonus developers get to use the best IDE available anywhere.
These are just the needs I've had, for which I've actively looked for software on Linux to fill. Every single time the software available has been pathetic compared to the professional offering.
It's hard work getting that final level of polish on a piece of software that brings it from "it kinda works" to "it works really well." That's what's typically missing from open source apps: The push to make something really easy to use and solid. Frankly not enough professional applications reach that stage, but the ones I mention above all do.
Firefox is one of the few apps in the open source community to really reach that level of polish. Google Chrome is another. Thunderbird is another. There are a dozen other free programs I use, but none of them really feels polished -- they're good enough to get the job done, but only just. And if more things happen "in the cloud," that may be all people need in the future.
But until "the cloud" is brought to my house on fiber at gigabit speeds, I'd like to keep doing my video editing on a local system, thank you. And until it's less expensive to get a WiMax or 4G or whatever-new-technology wireless connection, I'd like the computing to stay in my laptop as well.
Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some incredible stuff integrating Pivot, Silverlight, and Sharepoint. Sure it's enterprise and not Web 2.0 social web, but its the type of stuff that makes CIO cough up millions of dollars.
We've looked at Open Office and Google Apps in years past and they were literally at MS Office 2000 level. If all you want to do is write a memo, Word, OpenOffice, GoogleDocs, or Notepad will work fine.
When you're in a real enterprise with real enterprise needs, the features in Office that you think no one uses, are a huge win businesses. And once you're using Office, BizTalk and Sharepoint just bring everything together.
And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used.
We should be clear. Windows has never been the only OS choice. IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance. And while pundits, who generally aren't in the enterprise, think that world can move away from Office. I think just the opposite. The new features, that aren't of general use to Joe Schmoe, make it more invaluable for the enterprise.
Personally, I don't think that any OS is even close to being what Windows is. Maybe Macs are the closest and I believe they got a few things down better than Windows, but this alternative isn't free either. As for Linux I have tried different linux OSes and I see only use for them in server environments. None of them have made me want to lose Windows completely because they weren't as plug and play as Windows is. Ano…
Eclipse also has some neat plugins like eclimd that let you run genuine vim inside the IDE.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about setting my mom up with Jolicloud ( http://www.jolicloud.com/ ), which I believe is based on Ubuntu. She has an HP netbook with an 8GB SSD, and WinXP gives her "running out of space" warnings all the time. She doesn't download anything, but her pagefile.sys file quickly grew to 2GB. After limiting the size of the pagefile, clearing a bunch of other temp files, and uninstalling everything I cou…
Do it. I put jolicloud on my aspire one. So much quicker. Having tried ubuntu though I'm not sure whether I'd just put that on next time and ignore jolicloud's social wrapping.
I'd be worried if I was Microsoft. I'd be worried too: Windows Mobile - Android IIS - Apache .NET - PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, etc SQL Server - MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc
Exchange - gmail I see this comparison so often, but it really is apples and oranges. I love gmail and use it daily, but it isn't a replacement for Exchange. First, gmail is just a client... you have no control over the server aspect with Google. That is fine for a lot of small businesses, but for most mid to large companies that isn't an option. Does Exchange cost a lot of money? Yes, but with that you get a first c…
I just don't get this insistance on control over utility servers. If we take sensitive businesses out of the equation there's really no argument for it. How many times has gmail been down for me? Never. What about exchange/lotus notes? At least once a month. And even when they work they're shit.