Microsoft loses anti-trust appeal

[miro]

Comforting to know Bill can maybe get it wrong sometimes.

But the point remains. He threw so much money at it that it was almost impossible for it to fail. How many companies can say that ?

 

[BonzoDog]

That brings me to my next point. e-Patents = bad.

Michele

Agreed.

 

[BonzoDog]

Being an old mainframer (punch cards, paper tape and even plug boards) who has been through everything, I am horrified at the unlimited choice these days and the potential for disaster.
Now I see a large part of our IT spend disappearing on Security, systems that were menat to be flexible and easy to up date are a nightmare of spaghetti interfaces and every bozo around is coming up with new ideas to make it even more complicated. Yes it has got easier in some ways but it has ebcome far more complex, far more difficult to maintain and far more difficult to keep costs under control and still keep developing new systems.
I was horrified when some naive young manager suggested Open Source. Fer chrissakes things are bad enough. What we need are some good high level standards, somebody who can offer a degree of flexibility ona platform where devlopment and integration are relatively easy.
Those who do bill bashing are usually the techies or misplaced bureaucrats. before bill came along, users wre often treated with disadain, systems were deliberatley hard to use because you had to be good enogh to use them. Bill realised that there were real customers out there who wnated easy to use systems and he focussed on it. Yes and so did Jobs. Well done both of them. the argument though is not about what is ebst, it is for me and I guess most of business, how to ge theis Techy fuelled monster back under control. If we ever had it under control that is.
Sorry for the typos, I type faster than my brain and I have to go to a meeting to discuss another ridiculously out of cost project.

 

[Spinal]

Being an old mainframer (punch cards, paper tape and even plug boards) who has been through everything, I am horrified at the unlimited choice these days and the potential for disaster.
Now I see a large part of our IT spend disappearing on Security, systems that were menat to be flexible and easy to up date are a nightmare of spaghetti interfaces and every bozo around is coming up with new ideas to make it even more complicated. Yes it has got easier in some ways but it has ebcome far more complex, far more difficult to maintain and far more difficult to keep costs under control and still keep developing new systems.
I was horrified when some naive young manager suggested Open Source. Fer chrissakes things are bad enough. What we need are some good high level standards, somebody who can offer a degree of flexibility ona platform where devlopment and integration are relatively easy.
Those who do bill bashing are usually the techies or misplaced bureaucrats. before bill came along, users wre often treated with disadain, systems were deliberatley hard to use because you had to be good enogh to use them. Bill realised that there were real customers out there who wnated easy to use systems and he focussed on it. Yes and so did Jobs. Well done both of them. the argument though is not about what is ebst, it is for me and I guess most of business, how to ge theis Techy fuelled monster back under control. If we ever had it under control that is.
Sorry for the typos, I type faster than my brain and I have to go to a meeting to discuss another ridiculously out of cost project.

I'm a techie...

 

[miro]

Sorry for the typos, I type faster than my brain and I have to go to a meeting to discuss another ridiculously out of cost project.

Anti-Microsoft people are usually fringe dwellers like people from Arizona that claim to have been at the Roswell crash site.

I remember my friend had a brain wave and got this "one signature website" going. It cost 1000's of dollars, needed the master source code to be modified and had dozens of pages and took several months to construct. It ran PhP, needed an SQL service and required Apache to run.

When the developer went AWOL it was replaced with a hosting contract done online and 7 pages of HTML which did precisely the same thing. The replacement took place 36 hours before the domain expired (unknown at the time), cost exactly one bowl of pasta, 2 cups of tea and took 6 hours.

I sometimes think that Linux would have done very poorly indeed if it came from a centralised resource centre. The whole open "sauce" concept reminds me of dips at a party. If you are the last one to arrive you are essentially presented with a congealed smear that everyone has already had a go at.

I remember applying for a job where their entire model was based on MS and that was over the top. I managed to install a Sun server with Eudora for a corporate site with 100 users. It cost about 15% of the same Microsoft setup and it was up and running in a very short amount of time. It supported Apple and PC and didnt require and service packs to keep running and being Unix it also did not require any virus packages for the server.

If you want to get the project back under control just terminate it. Start again some other time, this is unless you are over a barrel now and have already killed the old system. In this era where servers cost almost nothing I dont understand why IT staff launch new systems before testing them. I understand that it is entirely possible to build a network on a desk and run all the apps before inflicting the staff with them. I must be old fashioned because I started with 4 pc's, a hub and lots of coffee, TechNet and 6 months.

Personally I wouldnt touch any developer who doesnt use TechNet.

 

[recycled]

Maharishi University of Management is located at 1000 N 4th St., Fairfield, IA
52557 USA

Has anyone heard of this place?
I have just been invited as an It professional to under go a .NET course leading to mscs.
is it one of them on-line crappy ones.
All my universities have all had bricks and mortars

 

[BonzoDog]

I'm a techie...

I used techie in a pejorative sense which was too much of a generalisation. I'm a techie too, if you take that as my training and background. I still roll my sleeves up from time to time and get involved. I am surrounded by many mature techies who make a great contribution. So in generalising I criticised a large group of worthy people rather than the propellor head nutters who think it is fun to fool around hacking. I was probably wrong too to use it critically against many of the bright youngsters, fresh out of uni, who do not have the dimensions of experience tomake judgements that I would consider appropriate.
I am frustrated by the explosion in technologies and the difficulty of how one applies this to a business. More and more of our effort goes into decision making, more and more into security and less and less into adding value. Thus budgets have to increase just to stand still and they go up by orders of magnitude just to expand.
New technologies offer brilliant functionality but usually another layer of complexity and it gets exponentially more difficult. Meanwhile everybody is frustrated by the costs. Hence the next phase is out sourcing, something that I don't like, don't believe in and do not believe has any great advantage in either the short term or the long term but when faced with teh cost equations one has little defence.

 

[Spinal]

I used techie in a pejorative sense which was too much of a generalisation. I'm a techie too, if you take that as my training and background. I still roll my sleeves up from time to time and get involved. I am surrounded by many mature techies who make a great contribution. So in generalising I criticised a large group of worthy people rather than the propellor head nutters who think it is fun to fool around hacking. I was probably wrong too to use it critically against many of the bright youngsters, fresh out of uni, who do not have the dimensions of experience tomake judgements that I would consider appropriate.
I am frustrated by the explosion in technologies and the difficulty of how one applies this to a business. More and more of our effort goes into decision making, more and more into security and less and less into adding value. Thus budgets have to increase just to stand still and they go up by orders of magnitude just to expand.
New technologies offer brilliant functionality but usually another layer of complexity and it gets exponentially more difficult. Meanwhile everybody is frustrated by the costs. Hence the next phase is out sourcing, something that I don't like, don't believe in and do not believe has any great advantage in either the short term or the long term but when faced with teh cost equations one has little defence.

I know, I just wanted to "poke" you

Even though I'm fresh (ish) out of college (a year now) and again in college (next Wednesday, though only part time) I fully agree with your last line. Another thing I've found is that new technologies don't always add WANTED functionalities.

People tend to resist change, no-matter what the change is! Two years ago (before I was employed here) the IT department, along with the directors decided to "kill" AppleWorks in favour of Microsoft Office. They had their reasons, which I won't get into. Now, two years on, after two years of people knowing that AppleWorks was no longer supported and that all AppleWorks documents had to be re-saved in a Word-leggible format (along with several trainings on this, and monthly reminders) we have removed AppleWorks from the list of software that gets installed when we clone the machines...

Guess what happened yesterday? I had an irrate user who said she "lost all her files" and that she thought it was a very low hit that we removed AppleWorks after-hours while she wasn't at work!

I was fairly lucky, when she came into my office my boss was here to discuss next years budget, so they had a shouting match and I kind of hid in the background... but it was truly infuriating! Not only did I stay overtime (which I'm not paid for) so I could update the machines without telling everyone "you can't use your computers from 9:00 to 10:30 tomorrow" but she kept going on and on about how emails are not "written documents" and she wanted all notifications by hard-copy handed to her!

I've kind of gone OT, and lost my initial thread, so I'll go back. Though the swap to Office was an "upgrade"; and all the stops were carried out to ensure that everyone understood what this meant - it felt very much like a "forced" decision, and definetly not one that went down well!

Michele