Um...er....She Actually WON the voters' preference in the Election. It was the Electoral College that reversed that outcome! It's an anachronistic outrage that smaller-population states refuse to challenge, even in light of the Internet...which wasn't even a dream when the E.C. originally rode horseback to their Washington, D.C. meetings.

It needs to be abolished as archaic and unfair to voters. It's one of the reasons some adults refuse to vote...because their vote can be overridden by selected politicians!

I can understand why you're an Anonymous Coward! Your politics are upside-down!

Let me share a story: As a child, in Columbus Ohio, I had to walk one-mile each way between home and school, from 1946. I'd been admitted to First Grade at the age of 5, because my mother taught me to read, write and do simple math. That meant that I was always ahead of the class, so sat in back, so I wouldn't look so bored.

But, there was an upside: Every day, I could take a two-block detour and visit the local Public Library. So, every day, I'd leave two books I'd taken out the day before, and pick up two more to occupy myself in the back of the room the next school day. I read a lot of books, and learned a lot (and a lot more I've forgotten), as I worked my way through the Dewey Decimal system. And, one day, I carried Frederick Terman's "On Radio Engineering" to class...and was transfixed. There I was, at age 6, learning how my mom's radio worked! I went back home and tweaked the dials on the huge (vacuum tube) radio, finding out how the controls actually changed stations, and how tone controls could help me listen to far-away stations! It set me on a path of fascination with what became to be known as the field of "electronics." I worked in a TV Repair Shop at the age of 12, played with ZJ17 (GE) transistors at 15, went into the Air Force at age 19, and wrote a published article predicting the likelihood of the emergence of the "computer on a chip" some three months before Intel announced it.

Today, as I sit (age 78) in front of my computer, I never had the benefit of all those "electronic" substitutes for reading...to this very day, I look forward to reading my weekly edition of "New Scientist" (published in London), to stay abreast of information.

I don' need no STEENKIN' "video" from which to learn. What I did learn was how to DO IT MYSELF by soldering wires together, debugging the arrangement of electron flows until it worked, and then having the satisfaction of educating myself in the bargain.

There is joy in finding out, not having it explicitly explained. During my career, people have asked me, what 'College did you go to?' I have factually responded, "I've taught at several universities, I've been on faculty of a few...but I've never ATTENDED a College or University (save a few abortive attempts, lasting no more than a month before I became bored, relearning what I already knew.)

Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.

Just one old woman's view...

This one can! Thank the gods that you posted as AC!

I found this on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/...

I'm sure there are many more (Google Play, of course, assumes an Android device); I don't know what Apple may offer.

...income. 'Bots can't talk back...top-level executives like that...and the fact that they can fire a few more people, instead of paying them a decent salary.

I like to be able to CONVERSE with my food preparation humans. But, on the other hand, I don't believe Walmart is hot on good food, prepared by experts, to the customers' preferences, and tasty and nutritious to the buyer, either!

I invite you to prune my original post to make it better. --Carol Anne

I must demur. Opening up Domino/Notes to public attempts to "improve" it would lead to multiple spins-off that would never improve on the original. The issues that need to be addressed are HUMAN, not Technological; Managerial, not inherent in the software. Only some organizations are capable of profitably deploying the extant product...the failures of the product have, in my experience, largely trying to fit the product into a semi-dysfunctional (and/or rigid) institution and environment.

Domino/Notes has always been appropriate to those environments where management is willing to change to succeed, and that principle is appreciated by lower management. Corporations that are focused on making executives rich generally have not found Domino/Notes improved their prospects. Corporations focused on the satisfying CUSTOMER's needs have generally found Domino/Notes a way to enrich those goals, in my experience.

Inflexible corporations that tried to bend Domino/Notes to their existing business models generally failed, and I refused to consult to those companies, for I knew it to be a waste of time. Flexible corporations, eager to develop projects that improve customer's desires and needs, were good fits for Domino/Notes. You can't fix a broken corporate structure with software; the corporate must be agile and flexible for Domino/Notes to be a success...and that kind of corporation then succeeds as well in the bargain.

I have, over the years, searched in vain for a successful Domino/Notes deployment that transformed the human behaviors from self-centered to customer-centered. I'd be pleased to hear of any you may know of.

The other flaw was that the original remit was to build a flexible system that could be expanded with specific tools the organization needed to evolve for best results within their own unique environment. Most businesses are so broad in scope that the universality of the Notes client features were considered primary, groups (in the SlashDot emulation!) were second-tier, and most people never tried to develop anything more than simple utilities that could be added to Domino/Notes for maintenance-level tasks.

Sorry for the typos and lack of proper syntax in some of the above; the ideas are still there. I was rushing in the final edit to get to the dinner table before my spouse declared it all "too cold to bother!" :-)

--Carol Anne (aka "Friday")

Already, the Slashdot post today has been overflowing with the complaints of the nay-sayers who never participated in a successful and productive deployment in an organization. I pity their glee.

Au Contraire, Mon Ami. Domino/Notes was...in the right hands, a very valuable tool for many companies and organizations. I had literally dozens of happy corporate clientele during my Domino/Notes consulting era, because with the right objectives and roll-out it made a powerful tool organizations (usually the larger of those) could use to improve revenues and lower costs. Some of those companies are still using it to this day, and will rue having the owner (and therefore, support, off-shored to India, where good products can sometimes go to die).

When it was deployed in haste, and everybody got it all at once in a large corporation, it was usually a catastrophe, largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes, and did a relatively poor job of inspiring the cadre of people like me who actually understood the possibilities (although they did give me a lot of leads that led to the success of my consultancy).

My strategy was simple: DO NOT ROLL IT OUT TO THE BUSINESS. Show them proof, from other companies, so that one small corner of the large corporation could grasp the benefits, and have it deployed properly, to fit a business need and show a benefit to both users and the corporation. It was NOT an "email system," although it had a eMail as part of its' core...a rather good one, that was easily adopted by novices.

My strategy, developed at DuPont (my first major client) was to find one business unit that was vital to corporate revenues, but having trouble, or excessive costs. An example: One division was hidebound with obsolete, incompatible array of products that people hated to use because it was easier to pick up the phone a make a call; that didn’t require a few days’ of learning time in a fast-moving organization. We replaced their incompatablities with ease of use through feature integration, and they suddenly turned to the new tools with glee. Another application was for all the far-flung Production Managers, who came back to Wilmington (Delaware, corporate HQ) to share solutions to production line efficiency...a couple of times a year. We gave those worldwide employees Notes clients and put the Server in Wilmington, and they began to solve problems more quickly and efficiently (often in days, instead of waiting months), and the results paid for the first years' adoption for the two original projects, including training and the usual unanticipated start-up costs, and showed a net profit. In the second year, other business unit managers were CLAMORING for the Domino/Notes solution; we sorted through them and declined about half, and the other half were successfully served. As of 1995, I know most of them were still being happily relied upon as a problem-solving aid.

The IBM purchase of Lotus was good for the investors, but IBM stopped evolving it when they bought it. There were the usual updates & versions, of course, (to keep the revenue flowing) but no real effort to broaden the market (e.g., to corporations with far-flung offices, or mid-sized companies verging on growth into the Big Leagues). Once all the major corporations to whom they catered were served, it was just a "maintenance" market, insofar as I could see.

It will be interesting to watch the acquiring company's sheparding of the product. Will they rely on updates and consulting to existing customers, or will they actually re-scale versions of the products for new markets that are emerging, rather than rely on the revenue from maintenance upgrades? There are large swathes of corporations in the $100M-to-$1B market that could be served, if they choose to revitalize the talent that is still out here, many of whom have long ago retired, and been replaced by people who still need to bridge the "Knowledge Gap" between extant technology and actual needs of booming mid-sized businesses.

It might be fun to get back in the fray, out here in California, if they choose to explore the latter option...and likely change the name to get rid of the taint produced by too many ineffectual deployments with mostly technological motivations, rather than a rich understanding of how successful companies got that way, and spawned innovation that could be tapped and equipped to keep building new customer bases that expanded their markets.

These were the peak years of much of my happy professional life: I spent several years flying 'round the world to the tune of about 100,000 miles/year (often more), learning how the best companies harnessed an oft-derided product and used it as a pry-bar to produce more and faster growth and success for themselves, their customers, and those customers’ customers!

--Carol Anne Ogdin
      Enjoying retirement in rural California!

Sure, just eight people in the business. ?

If I recall Disney started with about that number...but, they never achieved anything you'd respect, did they???

Gee, what an ignorant, blatant assertion...no doubt by a chair occupier in a large corporation.

Small businesses always need competent consulting (which only a few actually get) to help them achieve their goals in business. And, Large Businesses use them as a "check" on their staff, who are often not as up-to-date as is the qualified consul.

I only did it for 20 years, and only to Fortune 500 companies...and no CEO ever complained about my deliverables. It's the insecure programmers and "analysts" who need that regular paycheck and so don't dare to propose anything outside their self-imposed box.

--Carol Anne

It matters where in the world the need is. Without a City and State, I'd be in the dark trying to help.

In 1963, I joined the (now long-gone) first "service bureau" in the Country, C-E-I-R, strategically positioned in Arlington, VA, within walking distance of the Pentagon...their first major client. Our "Computer Center" had one IBM 709 (a big boxy group of racks, and 12 tape drives...disk drives hadn't yet been invented...and an adjacent IBM 1401.

To make the costly (then $800/hour) 709 more efficient, all written programs (in "assembly code" unique to the computer model, or FORTRAN, if you were lucky) were manually typed, line by line into "punch card" decks that were read and copied on the 1401 to magnetic tape reels, the reels than tagged with the project name, then carried to the other end of the room to be loaded from magnetic tape reels into IBM 709 memory for execution.

During that execution, the tape drives would whirl and the programs and starting data copied to the 709's memory. Memory capacity was, in today's terms, "vanishing small" but the program performed it's computations and produced results. It could be minutes, hours, or even (occasionally) days in duration. Then, the output of the program would be written to tape(s), and returned to the 1401 for printing of results. (One was always suspicious of quick results, because it inevitably meant that the program had a fatal "Bug" in it, which had to be diagnosed and repaired.) I've witnessed piles of printed outputs from some programs that stood taller than any person in the Center. Then, we'd likely find some gibberish in those piles of papers, necessitating finding and fixing the errant instructions on the original punched cards...and the process would be repeated until the results were deemed "bug free."

These were the fastest and sleekest way to produce meaningful results of the day. Of course, all those military projects were "Classified," so programmers and computer operators all had to have quite high-level security clearances...largely because the projects were all related to military strategy and/or predictions of likely outcomes of warfare under varying conditions. It also meant there was no sharing of programming techniques or skills outside the computer center or the clients' premises.

Then we got a magical new product: The faster, sleeker, more powerful IBM 7090, and more reliable upgrades.

But, for all that, it was an exciting time to be engaged in the design, development and coding of new mathematical algorithms (e.g., "Linear Programming", that could yield reports that shaped major decision-making in corporations and government agencies.

The cadre of programmers at C-E-I-R* even created the first (to my knowledge) shareware. It was called "CELIB"
(C-E-I-R Library, sometimes "CLIB"). It collected all the basic tools the programmer on an IBM 1401 needed to use, including stock tools for writing punched card data to tape, printing data from tape to the IBM 1402 printer, or even conducting Sorting of data in one order (e.g., by title) to another (e.g., by date). We all carried our "deck" and it's sparse manual around from project to project. It was published via IBM's SHARE project, where tools like these were made freely available to peers. On my first trip to Australia, I was amazed to see, 12 years after CELIB had been shared, that it was still in use, and had been adopted by a University in Sydney as their common convention for all IBM 1401 programmers, and was taught to students as an example of good coding style and practice.

Smaller, simpler projects (.e.g., inventory management for a chain of retail stores) were programmed for the IBM 1401, with it's arcane idea of variable-length words (an arbitrary number of adjacent 6-bit characters, marked off from one another by the "word mark", a special bit that separated groups of bits into meaningful characters. We did everything from help customers decide how a perishable product (like fruits and vegetables) should be priced to the consumer, to figuring out how many submarines the Pentagon should plan to buy in the next decade...and how they should be equipped, and even, what's the best strategy for a naval force to adopt given a challengers' resources, current weather, and known habits.

Programming the IBM 1401 was my introduction to the world of computers, and I often came to work in Monday morning, working through the night on projects...occasionally my own ideas...and all the way through 'til 5 pm Tuesday, then collapsed to bed early, the urge to create with these new expensive "toys" was so strong.

Now, more than 50 years later, my experience with a cellphone is clumsy and limited: It has been like I'd been driving a sleek sedan for the first 45 years...then replacing it with a motorcycle! But, all of it has been a learning journey...and, although retired, I still find ways to create in this marvelous environment, albeit on my small home Windows network of computers and peripherals.

So, to those committed souls reviving an aged computer model on which I learned my chops stirs in my personal satisfaction and happiness knowing that there are people still tilling that particular soil, so that others may learn just how endlessly fascinating has been this journey from Abacus to digital computer, to personal computers in our hand, to whatever new ideas will still spring forth in the near future.

It's always good to revere the past. It's what got us here!

* C-E-I-R: Council for Economic and Industry Research

...option not work for you in Firefox? I have that option set, and it appears to work for me. I have several other Firefox security settings turned ON (e.g., "Block cookies from unvisited websites", and "block popup windows"). (And, no, I won't show you the entire phalanx of Firefox settings I'm using :-) )

I'll admit that some people see all these options as daunting...but I'll wager they have a neighbor or colleague who can set it up for them...and show them how to propagate those settings to all other instances of Firefox in their home network.