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KGB maps discovered in Jesus's coffin

Who got the most mail, this week?

Is the Google machine really going to challenge Microsoft on the desktop? You are not so sure:

Good write up overall. But something is missing.

Last 3(4?) companies I have worked for all had some sort of confidentiality agreement, IOW most of information I receive inside of company may not leave company/company intranet.

I have polled the web based idea with several managers, and all were (best described as) "afraid" of any issues of information being leaked to outside. There is no trade secrets/etc involved - it just companies (1) obliged under law to implement necessary safe guards for information to be not misused (that might be EU specific) and (2) often license technologies from other companies and obligation to use information solely under conditions of license. If one puts information on somebody's else server - one automatically loses capability to guarantee something.

Last but most important is: customer management. Last thing any business wants is to jeopardize customer relationship due to information leak to competitors. (Recall early years of Linux and how business was afraid even to mention that they use Linux inside - to avoid the wrath of Microsoft.) That being said, I frankly see little use of web-based suits in business at moment.

Ihar

P.S. Try to imagine simple case of "industrial espionage". Google hacked and confidential documents with customer list are copied and sold to competitors. Who's responsible for that? Google who has being hacked? Or business who had given its documents to Google? The answer is also very unclear.


I think you are missing one of the biggest reasons why Windows and Office continue to have a desktop dominance in business - and why therefore Google Apps is pretty doomed. I used to be Head of IT in some large organisations - up to 5000 people - so I have a reasonable idea about this.

Lets start with Office. The IT department will assess something like OpenOffice and figure out that it isn't bad at all.

Then they will start talking to users. Most people won't mind that the spreadsheet application isn't quite as good as Excel. Then they will make it to the finance department and they will say no - we have to use Excel. They will have very strong reasons to stick with the feature set of Excel - reasons you can't argue away by a few pounds less in license fees.

The same will happen elsewhere - the sales force will insist on having PowerPoint, Secretaries will point out that all the company letter formats for headed notepaper would need redoing - and you will find they don't quite work properly in OpenOffice.

In the end, you have to decide between a homogenous environment that costs a little more, or installing multiple apps. The latter costs more to support so you drop OpenOffice. Excel is always the killer app though - no-one does spreadsheets as well as Excel. I remember the first desktop environment I had to support (inherited from the previous head of IT) was Corel Office (Word Perfect etc.) - but we had had to integrate Excel with it (Lotus 123 wasn't good enough). Eventually we had to drop WordPerfect for Word, just to stay with Excel - despite the fact that at the time WordPerfect was the better App.

With Windows its the same. 90% of your users could use something else - like Linux. But the remaining 10% all need something that will only run on Windows - like Visio, or AutoCAD, or Visual Studio, etc. You are then stuck with either deploying a mixed environment (and suffering the support nightmare) or sticking with Windows.

The reason you are stuck with Windows and Office is simply because, at the moment, on the desktop, they are the only set up on which you can do everything you need to.

Unfortunately, in the long term, this is a self-fulfilling prophesy. People develop the new software for windows since that is the platform with 90%+ market share. People continue to use windows because that is the platform with all the new software on it.

Dave


Yay, the sale of the century: the KGB puts its maps up for sale:

This story about UK maps was interesting to me because I used to be a navigator in the U.S. Air Force, and I spent three years flying F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers around the U.K back in 1975-1978. I also have a Certificate of Advanced Study in GIS, computerised mapping, from the University of Denver.

Our USAF maps were clearly marked that they contained information from the British government, and they were to be destroyed upon disposal. The main reason was because of all the information about low-level flight hazards such as transmission lines and antennas. At that time, our military attack tactic was to fly low-level to try to stay under SAM radar. Since my base in East Anglia kept aircraft on 15-minute nuclear alert as a threat to Eastern Europe, we practiced flying approved low-level routes in England and France. We also flew a low-level route in the Netherlands until a guy in my squadron hit a civilian small plane and killed the civilian pilot.

On a side note, you can give a pilot a map but you can't make him use it. Another guy in my squadron was flying a low-level check ride near the Lake District when he ran into bad weather and started climbing and turning back. He hit a support cable for a 1200-foot TV antenna that was clearly marked on the map. The cable cut off about three feet of his right wing, but he managed to return to base and land safely. I doubt that he passed the check ride.

Phillip


You horrible cynics are not impressed by a boffin's attempts to ascribe advanced mathematical intuition to Islamic tile designers:

Absolute unadulterated wibble. Just what to expect when some clowns university thesis guides scientific 'fact'. The designs are the word allah, made into a pattern, as it is/was considered the only acceptable adornment for religious sites. I am no quasiblahblah mathematiciam but I guess if you repeat the same word in print, it will make a 'pattern'. Perhaps they should go for a guided tour of a mosque before publishing this gushing, childish bollocks. The guide would be only too pleased to explain this patterning, and he won't even be in a wheel chair with a robot voice. I really get fed up with these revisionist scientists and their grovelling bullshit; 'China invented food', ' Eskimos discovered the moon', leave it in the Sunday Sport where it belongs.

Graeme


When is a plane not a plane? When it's not been delivered yet. OK, not funny, but this was:

I can just imagine the phone call: UPS: "Where the hell are our A380s?" Airbus: "We shipped them last week. Haven't you received them yet? We emailed you a tracking reference..." <g>

Steve


Online retailer Ebuyer was caught borrowing content from a rival. In much the same way that Homer Simpson borrows lawn mowers from Ned Flanders:

Great story - it's about time this issue was highlighted. We run a number of websites including www.laptospdirect.co.uk and www.directtvs.co.uk (turnover of £75m) and have an ongoing problem with one of our competitors which provides continual frustration - they simply copy everything we do. I have tried the legal route but it is expensive and fruitless.

As well as copying our business ideas, the company pinched our staff, copied our systems and even tried to copy our logo. On a daily basis they keep coming back to copy our content. It is like being burgled but knowing they have the keys to keep coming back for more with no abilty to change the locks.The end result is tha the company is a mirror image of ourselves.

Whilst I welcome honest competition, the law to protect my business from rogue traders is very weak - it is primarily there to benefit consumers

Regards,

Nick Glynne Managing Director Easy Computers www.easycom.co.uk


Triskaidekaphobia is alive and well in airline logo design:

Oh no!!! Now the Chinese people can't fly on this airline, since "14" in Cantonese sounds like "Sure Death". Would you like to fly on the Sure Death airline?! 8-)

B0fh


Sheep, glorious sheep, all up on a website. Find the one you fancy most...

"Which means, of course, that they're almost certainly Australian" From a resourcing point of view they could also be Welsh :-)

Peter


This is to say thank you for your article on adultsheepfinder that you published last wednesday. We werent ready for the publicity actually our servers went down really quickly because of too many hits, but now everything seems to be back in order.

Thanks again we're glad you got the joke and helped share it.

Cheers

Keith Brosnan, AdultSheepFinder


Giant squid found in New Zealand waters. Calamari for everyone!

Have you noticed how the BBC always trots out the same size comparison graphic whenever there's a giant squid story? Obviously this will have to be altered when there are insufficient people around who remember how big a Routemaster bus was. Somehow comparing a giant squid to an extra long (and presumably burning) Bendy Bus just doesn't have the same impact...

Mike


And in relation to a story about Vista, we get a rare pat on the back:

I like that word 'embuggerance' - must make a mental note to use it in conversation!

Robin

Do that. We'll be back with more from you later in the week. ®

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