Posts by Pandy06269 149 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
I, for one, cannot wait for this. I recently purchased Office 2008 for Mac not long after they announced the free upgrade offer, simply because the Apple iWork suite on the iPad is getting more attention than the Mac itself, which is really sad.
After using OFM for a week it was clear to see that Office is still leaps ahead of iWork. I hope 2011 is a worthwhile upgrade, although I'm a little disappointed that I'm going to have to pay for an upgrade to get Outlook, especially after they've removed Entourage (which is included in the lowest 2008 edition.)
Also there's an error in the article, 2nd paragraph - "...with anyone buying the 2009 version between now and then..." - it's actually 2008, not 2009.
No you don't - you get separate searches for each character you type.
So to search for anti-virus - you get 10 separate searches (if you're a quick typer you might not notice this):
a
an
ant
anti
anti-
anti-v
anti-vi
anti-vir
anti-viru
anti-virus
Now if a malware distributor optimises their dodgy site for the keyword "anti" - there's your problem. With a classic search this wouldn't matter because the keyword is the full "anti-virus". Even if they optimised for "anti-virus" they'd probably still be way down the rankings.
But with the instant search keywords are different now. Anti-virus companies don't (currently) optimise for "anti."
@AC 12:38: Sorry but I just burst out laughing when I read your post. You obviously don't see that many spam and phishing scams because if you did, you'd know that most start off with... "Dear user@domain.com" for PayPal scams and "Dear YourEbayUserId" for ebay scams.
Secondly, if the domain begins with "http://something.paypal.co.uk/..." it's still genuine unless PayPal have had their DNS hacked, and then even www.paypal.com would be suspect. It's definitely a scam if the address is "http://something.paypal.co.uk.another.domain.com/..." because then the parent domain is "domain.com" and not "paypal.co.uk."
Plus, if PayPal write in an e-mail "to read the agreement please type www.paypal.co.uk into your address bar" most half-decent e-mail clients will recognise "www.paypal.co.uk" - and hey presto, you have a link in your e-mail even if PayPal didn't put it in. That's then perfect for scammers who could put the link in, but with a completely different URL.
This is the main reason why I hate the Android store - it's so difficult to find a decent application because there's so much cr*p on the store.
It's got to the stage where the only way you can tell a half-decent app is if you have to pay for it, and how much it is. Free apps and those less than £2.99 tend to be very poor indeed.
I'm now very much looking forward to getting an iPhone because Apple's done all the filtering for me.
Although, I do have to disagree with them about Opera - I don't see why an app can't use its own rendering engine if it's better than WebKit.
Where did you get the info about no PST and Outlook only in the base version?
From the February 2010 press release:
"...the MacBU announced last August that Outlook for Mac is coming to Office 2011, replacing Entourage. ... Today we are also announcing that Outlook for Mac will import .PST files from Outlook for Windows — a top customer request"
Firstly the obvious mention of the PST import - "it WILL import .PST files". Secondly, they state that Outlook is replacing Entourage. Entourage was available as standard, so it stands to reason Outlook will be as well. Unless you know otherwise? If so please point it out.
iPad version? Please. (sarcastic.) Apple have put all their effort into getting iWork on the iPad, and no mention of the new version for their loyal Mac users who've been using Macs since before the idea of the iPad was even conceived. That's why I turned to MS and purchased Office 2008 a short time ago. I sincerely hope MS don't deflect their attention away from the Mac in favour of the iPad.
We had enough trouble changing one application across a ~700-strong user-base, let alone changing Windows, Office and the browser!
Surely you could have virtualised their existing desktops (VMware P2V or similar) then slowly phased them in by changing one thing at a time. Office 2003 to 2007/2010 and Windows XP to 7 are enough of a change *each* to send a regular user swimming up the creek, let alone inflicting that on them at the same time.
Sorry but if you'd even suggested doing all these changes at the same time where I work you'd have been thrown out the office and not let back in even if you had a better suggestion. I bet it killed all productivity for the first couple of days.
Also the identical VM installations - was it not even possible to create one VM with everything installed and then use that as a template? Even if you have 5 different configurations, that's still 45 less machines you've got to install from scratch.
"It's much the same as with car insurance. Normal insurance will cover you for travel to/from your place of work"
Actually a lot don't. When I was with Norwich Union, they covered "social, domestic and pleasure (excluding commuting.) I looked around at other insurance companies and found about 5 that listed the same in their policies. NU quoted me an extra £400 to cover business use (they didn't even offer SDP + commuting.)
That's why I'm now with Direct Line - cheaper anyway, and business use is included as standard.
I got a Google HTC phone on a 24 month contract after 4 years of being with Vodafone.
They wanted £75 to upgrade the phone and I got to keep my existing plan - 600 minutes, 500 texts and *limited* internet use for £40 a month - goodie! *raised eyebrows*
I complained considering my partner (new customer) had recently took out a contract with more minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited internet for £10 cheaper.
Vodafone very promptly offered me the same deal and the phone for £25 which I considered a bargain (and iPhones had such cr*p tariffs even a little over a year ago) because I'd told them in no uncertain times I could get a better deal elsewhere as a new customer.
Now I desperately want an iPhone, Vodafone have stopped pushing out Android updates so I've had to use a Cyanogen ROM to get the latest and greatest Android, it runs as slow as a dog with no legs (even before the change to the ROM) and is actually a bit embarassing when you see everyone with their shiny iPhones which are 100 times more popular.
I agree with you both of you guys though, when it comes to renewal time in about 8 months I shall be changing to a £10-£20 SIM-only deal and saving my hard earned cash to buy an iPhone direct from Apple - SIM free.
Whenever I mention paid software someone, somewhere, inevitably says "why don't you just use X... it's free."
Yes but, as you point out, when you've found your way around a confusing menu of options, a user-interface that's so badly laid out the developers must never have used the application, and bugs - sometimes the price tag is worth it for the increase in productivity.
To re-inforce this point, I'll use MySQL Workbench. It's free. I wanted to create a database. It took me 10 minutes, and a Google search to find out how to do this. Of course the developers thought it was so obvious - you just connect to your database using Query (not Admin as you would think), then see where you've got those tabs for each database? Right-click on one of those. Then click "Create Database."
OF COURSE! You add a database using an option that's on the right-click of an existing database - why didn't I think of that before? And you use a tool for querying existing databases to create a new one, not administering the server.
I bought a piece of commercial software a little while later where it's the first option on the main menu - "create database."
£70 for iWork is a bargain compared to the bloated cr*p that is OpenOffice. And Alastair - don't forget to add "time spent converting documents to PDF to send to people because OpenOffice documents don't always look right in MS Office."
Apple's address book app in OSX does sync with Gmail - I have a HTC Magic Googlephone - it syncs my contacts to Gmail, then my Mac syncs its contacts with Gmail.
If I add a contact using my phone or my Mac, it's on the other device within a few minutes.
Look in the Preferences in Address Book.
Yes you can turn of ROAMING cellular data on the 3GS (i.e. when you're not on your home network - i.e. abroad) but you cannot turn of cellular data completely on your home network.
I've just checked on my Android-powered HTC Magic, and the only way I can completely disable data is to delete all the APN details - like the 3GS, I can turn off data while roaming.
So apparently IE9 won't run on XP.
Businesses and UK Government are struggling to make any plans to move away from IE6, or to upgrade their aging PCs to Windows 7 so they can run Office 2007/2010 without seeing a massive drop in performance.
They're even less likely to want to upgrade "just for the browser" when they have IE6 which works*.
We need web / system developers to take a stand, and to explain to their bosses that still supporting IE6 is fatal and they'd be much more productive if they even switched to IE7 as a minimum. If systems didn't work in IE6, then there would be an excellent use case to upgrade.
As for the "test for features, not browser versions" - good developers know what features each browser version supports. Unless end-users have the ability to turn off HTML5, for example, or we developers have a reliable way of testing for features (that works across ALL browsers) this is an irrelevant statement.
[* Yes I know it doesn't, but try explaining that to non-techy types.]
"The researchers said that to the best of their knowledge they are the first to demonstrate a way to detect private browsing mode"
And how exactly does this matter to the website? Why would a website want to know if a user was browsing in private mode? It's more useless than detecting if a user has Javascript or cookies disabled.
A good waste of cash if you ask me.
So Vodafone... I've been a loyal customer since 2005, upgraded at every opportunity, and took on a shiny new HTC Magic in July last year. You promptly *ahem* upgraded it to Android 1.6 in October.
Now two major releases of Android later, and I still have no new shiny Android. Who knows what my phone is vulnerable to? I haven't had an update in almost a year. My Windows PC would die if I did that to it.
Anyone know how if/how Android 2.2 could run on the Magic?
First chance I get I'm going to an iPhone. At least Apple keep their kit up-to-date.
Why is everyone so up in arms about this?
In Blighty, it's only like the difference between paying your TV licence and getting the service ad-free (i.e. BBC) or getting a free service with ads (i.e. ITV, Channel 4, five.)
As long as it remains this choice of "free-with-ads" or "pay", and not "pay-with-ads", I'm happy - I'll pay every time. It's still cheaper than buying a Windows upgrade.
I've spent 2 hours on the phone over the past 2 days, and lost a day off work thanks to BT's incompetence who couldn't even send an engineer out within a 5 hour appointment slot that they booked over 3 weeks ago.
They have since dispatched an engineer to my property this morning without informing me, only to find there's no-one in - had they sent him at the correct date and time, there would have been.
Well done Dave. Have one on me, a fellow BT-incompetence sufferer.
I'm a software developer myself, and I completely agree with this movement. If I bought a car that had a safety issue (think: Toyota) they're not going to blame me, are they? They'll recall it and fix the issue.
Granted, if my car got stolen I couldn't hold the manufacturer responsible if I left the doors unlocked. But if I did lock the car, and the locks didn't work because of a manufacturing fault, then yes, they're responsible.
It's no different for developers. If the users made the software insecure (e.g. by using a crap password) then that's not the developer's fault. But if the users are using strong passwords and following all other "good security practice" but information still leaks because of a flaw in the code, then that's the developer's fault.
"Once they gathered about 8,800 malformed messages from the targeted device, they fed the data into an 81-machine cluster of 2.4 GHz Pentium-4 systems running a custom-designed algorithm. They applied the technique to an embedded hardware device consisting of a Sparc processor running a Linux operating system and were able to extract its 1024-bit private key in 104 hours."
Now that sounds like something that can be done by every hacker out there. My servers are that insecure that anyone can spend enough time fiddling with their power supplies to extract 8,800 messages without anyone knowing. Said attacker also has an 81-machine cluster of 2.4GHz P4 servers that they can use for 104 hours. Oh, and did I mention they've also got the same custom-designed algorithm as these "researchers"?
I'm thinking someone's trying to find a way to make their "research grant" money go to good use, and failing miserably in my books.
Yes, once the fix is out I'll upgrade, but only because it's good practice to stay up-to-date; not because I'm worried of an immediate attack risk.
... truly, excellent. Well thought out, great criticism backed up by solid evidence...
... not.
If it was an OS nobody wanted, they wouldn't have built a company (Canonical) that depends solely on it.
If it was an OS nobody wanted, there would be so few users that it wouldn't be worth putting together the Ubuntu music store, or even putting together another version of Ubuntu.
Nobody really knows the artists available because it's not a public beta yet - as somebody suggested, have a look at 7digital's website before passing judgement.
As for passing judgement on the OS, I bet you've never even tried it. If that's the case that's fine, just don't assume everybody else has the same opinion.
I bought StarOffice (the commerical version of OpenOffice) 9 this time last year for about £60.
I purchased a Mac in September and bought iWork for about £60.
Even the student version of 2007 was only £80 - now it's gone up by another £30.
I've never ever bought MS Office and with prices nearly 7 times more expensive than its competition, I never will.
Stunned. But in all seriousness, I wonder how many companies will stump up the license fee because they either believe there's nothing else better, or they don't believe something does the job unless you pay for it.
Yeah, I remember this too, but as Google have managed to register this domain perhaps it's the registrar (not registry) level that enforces that.
This is still the case - Google is becoming more and more like M$ every day - they can now add "violating the RFCs to suit own own purpose" to the "reasons we're like Microsoft" list.
From RFC1035:
"The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must
start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some
restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less."
(Label is any component of the domain name - e.g. www, google, and com in www.google.com.
Linus of course. Google's chrome OS or Android mobile OS won't touch the hundreds and thousands of servers running Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Novell distributions of Linux, not to mention the lesser-known ones like Mandriva and Slack. Tablets and mobiles don't run the Internet, they only use it.
Novell and Redhat have both built highly profitable businesses from Linux (the kernel on it's own is not an OS.)
Google do not run "a huge portion of the internet's operating system." If you're talking about the Google web server, only 2% of requests to the million busiest websites in January was to GWS. 67% went to Apache, and 17% to Microsoft.
It'll be a long, long time before we have to worry about the Google IOS.*
*Internet Operating System
"Why not write the whole facebook in C++?"
Because C++ is not a HTML-oriented language. PHP was always designed from the ground up to handle HTML. The fact it can run on the command-line is a side-effect.
"PHP interpreter is *really* crap. No news here."
Where's your evidence? The reason Facebook are getting a 50% speed increase is because instead of PHP compiling the code down to C++ on *every* request, it's only doing it once, then just running the already-compiled application.
They've effectively turned an interpreted language into a compiled language - and everyone knows compiled apps run quicker than interpreted apps.
Even PHP obfuscator/encoders only optimise the code for the PHP compiler, it still has to be interpreted.
"They could get at least another 50% by writing in native C++"
Then they'd also have to interface with every module they use that's available in PHP (memcache, the HTML functionality, cookies, MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL Server access etc etc.) Plus an Apache module to understand what the C++ app is telling it - redirects, cookies etc.
"But, of course, PHP "programmers" are twice as easy to find and half the cost of C++ programmers"
Totally agree with this.
I believe because Vista was such a sham, they're supporting XP installations (probably on netbooks) until 2014, which means they have to support IE6 until then, too.
So I agree, while they're urging customers to move away from XP and upgrade to 7, they still have to support those where it's not possible to due to hardware constraints. People who have just bought a shiny new netbook with XP won't be fond of the idea of buying a new one just to be able to upgrade to Win7.
Don't forget that Google also has a web hosting platform - Google Pages I think it's called. That 13m sites undoubtedly includes sites on their Pages service, just like IIS includes sites hosted on Windows Live.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some ad-tracking code snuck into the sites on Pages though...
There's a lesson to be learnt here - don't trust Google for anything business-critical.
I have an error with my Google Checkout account - I didn't accept an updated license agreement until the day after the deadline. Since then, I haven't been able to get at any of the integration tools (like the error console) because it tells me my account isn't a merchant account - even though it will let me view and update customer orders.
I reported it to Google Checkout support at the start of December, and got a message back saying their technical team are working on it.
I've now sent them 3 e-mails chasing the issue - the last one I didn't even get a response.
Their support sucks big time and is an epic fail for me. I'm now looking at an alternative like Sage Pay or (gasp) PayPal.
The fact they don't give telephone support is just shocking when they're marketing Apps as the MS-alternative.
"My only hope is they are not bought out by another big player, as they may stop development: my company has recently started spending cash with the intention of putting XenServer into a production environment!"
I'm just in the process of setting up a hosting platform for a new business and I was really excited about going with Xen. However when I did my research and found out they'd been bought out by Citrix, I feared the same thing and decided not to go with it.
My main concern is the free license. You have to renew it every year, and if it expires, you cannot reboot any virtual machines because they'll fail to come back on - so what if Citrix stop issuing free licenses, or get taken over and the new company stops issuing them? When I was trialling it, it took me 2 hours to find the registration page to get a free license; they don't make it obvious at all!
I'm now going with KVM on Ubuntu, which also sports live migration and is being backed by Redhat as their main virtualisation solution for enterprise contracts.
The day the merger was announced I started making plans to move my systems away from Solaris. Oracle already have Enterprise Linux, what will they gain from maintaining two very similar OSs?
I can see them moving the good stuff from Solaris (like ZFS and SMF) into their EL distribution and scrapping it.
The last thing IT shops is to be left with an OS that's unsupported and no longer developed - which is why we're now 100% Ubuntu, and probably better off for it.
I wholely agree with Matt - I'm using XP at work right now but my main computer at home is a Mac and yes it's the best I've ever had - I'm not going back to a PC that can only run Windows.
But I also run Windows 7 on occasion on that Mac, and I also have two Ubuntu VMs on the Mac, and 8 Ubuntu servers at work - I use the best OS to suit the job.
So, Gil, what does that make me?
Of course they are... Microsoft are a software company - it's their main form of revenue.
Apple are a hardware company, they don't sell the OS separately so don't make any revenue from OS sales (only upgrades.) The only way you can buy OSX is to buy an Apple computer, so if you're using OSX on a non-Apple product you've obtained it illegally.
Working perfectly fine here WITHOUT the update. I don't know why this is even newsworthy, and even less why the need for the *finally* in the title, as Macs have run Windows 7 perfectly happily since the day it was released (and probably before.)
I'll be installing the update tonight just because I like to keep up-to-date, not because my Windows 7 isn't working.
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