Gene Splicer PHD

This is where Bill shines. He's appealing to a business audience. Like my construction company client, that runs around with 3 or 4 cheap, Samsung tablets with WIndows 8 and Office on them. Using those tablets they can: - Open and edit and create punch lists (to do items) - Update drawings with annotations - Update change orders and budget items - Connect remotely to the server and work in their construction management software - Retrieve documents to the tablet via VPN, work on them and save them back to the network, or in a pinch, save them to Skydrive and move them later - Connect a printer to a USB port and print anything they need No compatibility problems with the file versions No problems with spyware No problems with users not being able to connect Fits with their licensing program with Microsoft Fits their training program - everyone's using the same software throughout the company. Fits their budget: - Cost to replace a tablet and bluetooth keyboard: $400. - Cost to replace a laptop: $900. Where these project managers would normally need to go sit in a construction trailer to do these tasks, they can now do them on the site, with their client there, with no delay. And frustration is way down, because the tablets are very task oriented now - the users have a very specific user experience that fits how they work. Do you need a tablet for work? Most people don't. Many people do. Do people need Office on tablets they're using at home? Probably not. Google Drive/Apps is just fine. But it doesn't fit an IT perspective to save work in a public cloud you don't own. Have you tried composing anything on a tablet without a keyboard? It's not great. It works, but it's not great. A surface Pro is a decent little tablet. HH5, I can't tell your position on these things. I think you don't like Microsoft. I think you don't like Android/Google. I think you don't like Apple. I feel like most of the time, you're mocking these companies for their products. So tell me: What do YOU want Microsoft to do? What do YOU want Apple to do? What do YOU want Google to do? How would YOU suggest they market their products, and who do YOU think they should be marketing them to? What's your expert opinion?

I think Claire may not have understood that the Bastille Day Party constituted such an ethical bomb for the family...

Thorn, you have a choice to make. If you go see Cloud Atlas without finishing the book, it will screw up the book for you. And you will be diverted by the changes and may lose some elements of the movie. If you finish the book first, you will be disappointed in the structure of the movie, because there's no way you could get that book on the screen without losing something of the book, but you will be able to get into the movie characters and the visuals are, of course, stunning. I love the movie. I wish I had finished the book before I saw it, though. Just my two cents. I am looking forward to Star Trek, and later in the year, to Ender's Game. Even though I really dislike Orson Scott Card.

I Like the Falcon Banner stories quite a bit.

Can't wait.....

Hi I'm Gene and I'm a mess

You can get Prey here: http://preyproject.com/ My iPad and iphone are running mail accounts hosted on my Exchange server, which has the remote-wipe capability, so it's done through my business account. If you're running icloud on an iphone or ipad, it has the same capability, but only if you're hosting the email through iCloud: http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2701.

My iPhone and iPad are both tied to my server, kinda like iCloud but corporate. I lost my iPad for a night - thought it got stolen but was just misplaced because that's how I roll. Anyway I used the "remote wipe" feature from my server. The iPad booted up and immediately went into "right out of the box" mode. If it had been stolen, they'd have had a brand new iPad with nothing on it. The iPhone has the same ability. My laptop does too, using a service called "prey". If the laptop doesn't check in every so often, I can remotely nuke it. Every phone, every smart device, should have this ability.

And yet, car companies don't change cars that much. They change the styling, sure, but you can't really change a car, can you? I mean, there's always a steering wheel. There are windshields, and windshield wipers. Turn signals, and the turn signal stalk. PRNDL. You can change the way a car looks and behaves to a degree, but you can't change the driver's seat very much without making it not-a-car, right? The Modern interface works well for consumers. It really does. I can embrace it - as much as I dislike it - for the right audience. That audience is not, by any stretch, the corporate/enterprise world. Change IS good for computers when you want to sell a lot of them, and get people upgrading and adopting new things. Corporate environments don't work that way. They just don't. hh5: Thurrot is a known Microsoft shill with a strong bent toward pronouncing controversial views that are geared toward getting page views for his articles. He's got a good in at Microsoft - primarily their marketing department. Any "leaks" have been carefully provided for him. Just consider the source there. So I predict that there will be two distinct versions of Windows 9 - one geared for corporate, and one geared for consumers, especially if they uphold the "no desktop" paradigm. It's necessary, and will continue to be necessary, in a corporate environment. If Windows 9 is truly only going to have the Modern interface, MS will lose a very large part of their market, and I just don't see that happening.

At the consumer level, Windows 8 isn't selling because people aren't buying PCs. People aren't buying PCs because they're buying tablets instead. Apple is finding OS 10.8 adoption to be quite slow, as well, and they're hit harder because in order to sell the OS, they have to sell the hardware, too. At the corporate level, many companies find it much cheaper to install Windows 7 on their old hardware (where it runs just fine on 3-5 year old machines) rather than buying new PCs. If they can get a year or two out of a simple OS upgrade rather than new hardware, it's a no brainer decision if you've got 2,000 PCs that can run just fine at $90 per license rather than replacing the boxes for $400. Corporate sales are where MS makes most of its money. Not consumer, "Home Edition" PCs. Corporate customers do not upgrade quickly. Many are still moving from XP to 7 (and they're only doing that because support for XP is now officially ended). Windows 8 is not even a glimmer of a thought for them, not for another two years at least. Office 2013 is not being adopted in corporate environments because unless you need cloud based/collaborative computing, there's no need. It doesn't offer anything to a corporate client that Office 2010, or for that matter Office 2007, already has. For single computers/small offices that use Office365 for collaboration, 2013 is a great office suite. Not so much if you don't need those features. And, I run Office 2013 under Windows 7. The difference in the user interface - it's look and feel - makes it look like utter crap in a Windows 7 environment. Corporate types don't like an ugly splotch of a flat interface in the middle of their Aero Glass environments. It's just butt ugly. and without the visual cues that Windows 8 has, is actually harder to navigate because the interface is so...flat. Windows 8 is quite clearly a consumer level OS. It's not targeted, at all, at corporate environments. Windows 8 on tablets is pretty sweet. It's also by its nature a limited market. It's limited by processor, screen resolution, and market share. Android/Apple have the tablet market tied up pretty well. Windows 8 adoption on tablets will be at least a couple of years in picking up steam. If the product lasts that long. MS may well kill it off. Windows 8 is part of a product roadmap, one that's probably looking 5 years out. It's got a clear goal - consumer based tablet/touch based devices, and getting in on a market that has quite clearly shifted away from desktop PCs. Corporate Windows 8 sales are really, really backburnered from a marketing perspective. I have an MS partnership, one that gives me access to sales brochures and marketing materials. The focus for 8 is not, by any stretch, the enterprise market. It's all about tablets, and touch, and small business sales. That means the next OS WILL have an enterprise focus, and that's where MS will focus next. Windows 9 will be the sweet spot on the roadmap. That's where MS will pull its head out of its ass about corporate sales, and where 8 will be tweaked to return the desktop and start menu (the hooks are already there, deep in the code, for Blue/aka Windows 8.1). It'd be really nice to think that MS is dead, dead dead because Office 2013 and Windows 8 are sucky. But they really do have a product roadmap, and when I look at those products from the enterprise side, rather than the consumer sales side, it's a pretty clear one.

You are up against the most common of IT contract players, the "do the work and we screw you" IT contract service. There are many, and I've been burned by them. They prey on small companies and independents that believe you don't have the ability to force them to pay. And to take their contracted fee, which is usually way less than you'd get on a contract you secured on your own. They are wrong. You can get them to pay. You need a lawyer to put some pressure on that contractor, and you may, depending on the contract, may be able to file a lien. Or get as close to it without actually filing one, but the idea is to pressure the end-user about your non-payment. The lawyer needs to send a letter, on letterhead, to the contractor demanding payment. A copy of this letter should also be sent to the legal department of the end-user. You are notifying them that one of their contractors isn't playing fair. This will hopefully, depending on the nature of the contract and the relationship between the contractor and the end-user, put pressure on the contractor to pay you. The idea, again, is to use the end-user to force payment. So, get out your documentation. You documented every site visit, your mileage, your hours. Get that all in a summary format that you can send along to others. If you have documentation that you were on site, and have signatures from on-site staff stating you were there and correctly performed the work, include that. Include any documents you received from the contractor about your site visits, when you were expected, etc, and if there are signed timesheets or work documents you submitted - even online - get that together too. And of course, include your invoices. Basically, you need copies of any documentation like emails, etc that corroborate your work. If you can't afford a lawyer, use a collection service that will work for a cut of the payment. That will be steep - something like 25%, but it's better than nothing. In the meantime, dig out your contact list and go get some work. Don't let them get you down, you've got things to do.

I follow John Scalzi around. He's smart and a great writer. He posted this on his blog. It may be of some benefit to you writer-types. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/10/new-writers-ebook-publishers-and-the-power-to-negotiate/ Carry on.

Most Adobe updates come from Java exploits of the terrible code in Adobe Reader. Which is why you get Adobe updates and Java updates right around the same time - Oracle patches the java engine, and then Adobe patches their lousy implementation of it. Which they have to do, because no one ever patches java on their own - you see that little orange notfication in your system tray or get the pop up that "a new version of Java is available"? Yeah, it's the most ignored notification ever. Protip of the week: always update Java. And when you do, pay attention to the screens and uncheck the "Ask Toolbar" installer. I really like the silent update capability in Chrome...

Can you get quickoffice? It's 20 bucks for the iPad version and creates documents in either .doc or.docx format. I haven't used it here (not an author) but it seems to work really well with PC/Mac versions of Word.

The PDF reader I use most is google chrome. Yeah, it's a browser but it ain't adobe.

I'm not buying it. Looks great, but the DRM is excessively restrictive, the city sizes are very small, and it looks like, from the info I've read, that expanding a city will cost you. And then there are the bugs that a apparently force you to refresh a city back to a saved state, which is "dirt". Simcity 2000 for the continuing win...

I'd love to go to 2012, and I have it running in a sandbox domain on a VM (I'm a huge fan of hyper-v, and the 2012 implementation of it is pretty awesome) but my customers are pretty much old-school Server 2003/2008 shops. That limits my ability and means I have to find ways to work around the Windows 8 issues that arise because the domain level is lower than the client, and group policy issues and blah blah blah. There really does need to be backward compatibility with this stuff. Two of my customers are just now getting their XP machines off the domain, and rolling out Windows 7. They just don't stay current, these stodgy old law firms. IE 10 suffers from one huge, gaping flaw: it's not user extensible. I can't write an addon for it without jumping through lots of hoops. Greasemonkey isn't compatible, you have to use workarounds like Trixie. Compatibility mode only works sometimes. Also, try getting your grandmother to understand the concept of spawning an IE 8 browser in a virtual instance. Users don't get the concept, and the process of spawning the browser is clunky, from an end user perspective (for example, try to save something in a virtual process to your C drive - it "looks different" and is therefore scary). I could go on, and on...

I visit reddit a lot, but have customized it to get rid of all the noise and weirdness (the reddit.com/r/askhistorians subreddit is a spectacular resource if yo're into history). Also Metafilter. And Google. BBC for news, Being a techie, I really like stackexchange and serverfault.

I'm running Win8 on a 5 year old laptop. It's made a big difference in speed. I am missing graphics drivers, which means Win8 is attempting to use a default driver that crashes and reloads the GUI every once in a while. I don't use the "modern" interface, I have Start8 installed, which puts my desktop right where it should be - the first thing I see when I start the machine is the desktop. There are annoyances in Win8 vs 7 that I don't like (the search capability no longer searches everything at once - I have to tell it to look for an app or a file, etc, I don't like the way network connections are handled (it pops up the silliest sidebar, blah blah blah). Office 2013 is okay.It's not as good as 2010. I don't like having "skydrive" as my default save location, Outlook is noticeably slower and buggier - it crashes often, and I don't like the way the programs look. The "flat" look is fine for a browser and some OS elements, but it just looks bad in Office - it's like they went too far with the new design. I don't like one-note always popping up the "sidenote" app - I don't use it, I don't want it, and any time I open onenote - there it is again. This laptop is joined to a domain, to my server. The domain does not like Windows 8 and Windows 8 hates the domain. There's no simple way to deploy apps to it - you have to use the app store, which is a terrible idea for a work environment. Having my live.com ID tied to the laptop has caused unending problems with the domain, because it means I can't be signed on to both at the same time - it's one or the other, and that's very bad when I need to access domain assets and need to hit skydrive - it just dies dramatically when that happens. So I end up signing out of the domain most of the time. I am left to conclude that Windows 8 is not ready for a corporate environment, and when my customers get PCs with Windows 8 on them, I'm downgrading the license to Windows 7 right away. IE-10 isn't fully baked, yet, it's compatibility with older sites is broken. it simply won't work with older/corporate web apps (like Microsoft Dynamics CRM or some web consoles that I use frequently). And it crashes, usually because of add ons that continually re-enable themselves indiscriminately. Here's my point: Windows 8 is very much a "1.0" release. It needs a service pack or two to fix some of the issues. And until it's got some maturity, I can't and won't recommend it to anyone. Aside from the UI issues, it's just not done yet.

Well, I hope someone can pin down the reason for this travesty. Certainly, the IOC loses points for this one, although, to be technical, fault may lie elsewhere. I know there's definitely control exercised by sponsors, but a reversal may be in the works... TRY THE VEAL! DON'T FORGET TO TIP YOUR WAITRESS!

Don't know about the first one, but the second one is "Down a Darkened Path" by Ronyx. It's at his site here: www.themustardjar.com

Oh I don't know better, all I know is the tone and the words you used in your post. From that, I got the perception that you resented all those people taking up your space. Was I wrong?

Matt: I agree with you that the post-new years gym rush is a pain in the ass. It's really inconvenient for people that use the facilities regularly to have to deal with the awful people that want to lose some weight. Or for those terrible people that get in line in front of you at the drug store to get some nicotine gum so they can maybe quit smoking. Or when you can't contact someone for a while because they went into rehab to quit drinking. If all these losers would just give up and kill themselves the world would be a better place for the rest of us. Wouldn't it? OR: Maybe, just maybe, 90% of the people that are taking up your airspace will be out of your space soon. Maybe, just maybe, all they think they need to lose is a few pounds, and a good hard 30 days at the gym is all they need. Maybe, just maybe, if you threw an encouraging word their way, rather than a condescending sneer at them for taking up your gym time, more of those 90% would succeed, and you wouldn't have to look at all those fatties that pollute your view of the world. Maybe if you pulled someone aside that was using the equipment incorrectly and gave them some tips, or told someone that left the equipment wet that they should wipe it down when they're done and maybe shared some gym etiquette with them, your horrible January would improve. And you might even make a friend. AND: If 10% of the people that make a resolution to lose weight actually follow through and stick to a regimen, good for them. In the meantime, if you don't like the way your gym is occupied by these fat pigs for the month of January, maybe you should just go for a run instead of a workout and not subject yourself to the torture. I'll never step on anyone's desire to improve themselves. It may not have occurred to you that some of the people that you are insulting in this rant are actually reading this message board, and you're completely killing the motivation. Good for you. And poor you.

Sure, it's all fun and games and then you come down. The desolation, the regret...

Went to one not that long ago. Lots of men sitting around, staring at Grindr and other glowing rectangles. Lots of Facebook/texting too. Young guys mostly. I got the impression they were there to meet friends/Grindr hook ups and then move on to the better gig down the road. There has to be more to it than THAT. As the night wore on, the scrolling got faster and the look in their eyes was more desperate. The older guys were creeping on the younger guys too - I felt a bit embarrassed by my age-mates. All in all, I shoulda just played Xbox instead.