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Comment Waning! (Score 3, Interesting) 249

The company I work for has a number of workstations close to that of the one represented in TFA, in the 5 digits. Instead of forcing such a radical change down everyone's throat, they went about it step by step, over several years, and it's still ongoing.

They started by gradually replacing several critical programs with web apps or frontends, killing off IE6 with "please use firefox" prompts for good measure. This part was met with only some token resistance by the users, mostly because of a couple of glitches that where promptly fixed. After the first couple of months, general opinion was that the change was very positive, especially because of how cumbersome and hard to use the old apps (some over 10-20 years old) where.

The next phase was replacing Office, and it came with a huge backlash. The chief complaints where not so much about OpenOffice funcionality (along with some "it's *UGLY*!"), but about compatibility with MS generated documents. As of yet, it has been impossible to take MSOffice away from the "higher-ups", as any single minor UI or functionality change is bitched about as if it was a sign of the Apocalypse. Coupled with the long standing tradition of "sending down" 2-slide ppts, it was a huge mess.
It's somewhat better now, as PDF has become the standard for operational documents, and xls or docs are glossed over to make sure nothing's horribly broken.

Some areas (notably, reporting and analysis of KPIs) still rely heavily on excel features. Work is being done on that front, not so much because of the OSS push, but mainly because of the nightmare levels of voodoo in macro and VBA scripting involved. One hears talk of chicken blood and other dark rituals several times a week, which is how frequently something breaks.

There's also a couple of critical windows-specific programs that haven't yet been replaced, but when that's done in another year or so, pretty much any OS is a viable pick. Though definitely not an easy change, it can be done in small steps and with minimal disruption. YMMV, mostly on how dependent you are on MsOffice...

Sony

Submission + - Norway to SONY :WTF? (reghardware.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After receiving an inordinate amount of complaints regarding SONY's decision to remove the OtherOS feature from customer's PS3 consoles, Norway's Consumer Council is tasked with determining whether SONY has breached the boundaries or "reasonable change".

Comment Re:Too many lawsuits (Score 1) 165

I long for the day a judge starts lumping patent infringement lawsuits together. It'd be the end of the current Patent Cold War, with the assured destruction of all the major players. They'd either move away from patenting altogether or die out, either way letting the rest of us free to work on building a better world...
Hardware

Submission + - Sharp previews Galapagos 10.8" and 5.5" tablets (thinq.co.uk)

Blacklaw writes: Sharp has offered a sneak peak at an upcoming eReader line it's dubbed Galapagos — and while specs haven't been discussed, the hardware already looks pretty stylish.
Breaking from the mould of E Ink electrophoretic displays favoured by the majority of eReaders on the market, Sharp's Galapagos line will take the form of a 5.5-inch 'mobile type' and a 10.8-inch 'home type' with full-colour, high-resolution LCD screens.

Submission + - The ancient computers powering the space race (silicon.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Think that the exploration of space is a high tech business? Silicon.com has this story about the technology dating back to the Apollo moon landings that is still used by Nasa mission control for comms and the 1980s 386 processors that keep the International Space Station aloft.

Submission + - Google and Eric Schmidt convicted of defamation (geek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A court in Paris has convicted both Google and Eric Schmidt of defamation due to two search suggestions that were displayed in the Google search engine.

When you type in search terms using Google search it tries to guess what you are searching for and presents a list of suggestions. In this case, when the plaintiff’s name was entered the suggestions included the words “rapist” and “satanist”.

The plaintiff has since been convicted of a crime relating to corruption of a minor, but at the time the search was carried out such a conviction had not been finalized. It was argued that by suggesting such terms before the conviction was made, Google was committing an act of defamation.

Government

Submission + - US Pres. Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority (foxnews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The White House plans to deliver a bill to Congress next year that will require internet based communication services that use encryption to be capable of decrypting messages to comply with federal wiretap orders. The bill will go beyond CALEA to apply to services such as Blackberry email. Even though RIM has stated that it does not currently have an ability to decrypt messages via a master key or back door, the bill may require them to. Regarding this development, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology commented on the proposal saying, "They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function."

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