I was asked to make a backup of all the data in the system because the company was considering alternate options due to the high cost of Salesforce. I'll admit that this wasn't very annoying to workaround but the feature just seems unfinished. Another amusing problem with Salesforce is that as an administrator I can't delete users. To avoid having pages full of deactivated accounts we had to resort to renaming the accounts of terminated employees.

If you have attachments that you're storing in their system and you want them exported they come to you as randomly named files. There is also a text file that acts like a hash table. You have to look up the code, then rename the file with the appropriate name/extension. When you have thousands of files, this gets really really annoying. The fix is a simple script to write, I'm just confused why Salesforce doesn't do it automatically. I've asked their support and never got an answer better than "that's the way it works".

Well I guess some people like it. But I wouldn't choose to use it even if it was free. I could write a book on all it's shortcomings. There's just too many things to list in comments here. The biggest shortcoming is their support. They're slow to respond and not very helpful unless you want to pay thousands of dollars for a training seminar. Their data export feature is amazingly primitive as well. But I'll stop bashing them here and let people decide on their own.

Opps, that was supposed to say expensive, extensive is something that it certainly isn't.

Whatever you do, don't follow the hype behind Salesforce. It's interface is lacking key features, in non-intuitive, and extremely extensive. I'm in the process of migrating my company off of it and onto either SugarCRM (open source) or a custom solution using Microsoft Sharepoint.

Piracy doesn't hurt sales as much as obscurity does.

Old System, 12 drives: http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d162/mondmustaphamond/Floyd/?action=view&current=Floyd_noLight2.jpg Upgraded system, 7 drives: http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d162/mondmustaphamond/Floyd/?action=view&current=Floyd_Reincarnated_w_description2_c.jpg

This may be true... but unfortunately, for Vista to be usable without driving a person crazy you must first disable the features that make it safe (ie. User Account Control). Luckily MS has fixed this annoyance to a fair degree with the UAC changes in Win7.

Hmmm, no third party codec support would be a big downside to Windows 7. Somehow though, I don't think it'll take too long before the guys over at Doom9.org are able to bypass it.

Over the past few years, every form of publishing has been talking about moving to paperless but for some reason I never thought of comics going that route. It's an interesting idea but I think each issue will need to be pretty cheap, no more than two bucks. With comics, having the hard copy is part of the joy. The tactile experience is one thing but there's also the collectors' value. I think if comics offered a digital distribution method I'd probably buy more of them and I'd be more likely to buy subscriptions but I think I'd still buy the hard copies of my favorites. This could actually be a good way for comics to grow their fanbase. By making it cheaper and easier to find new titles you enjoy, more people might get into the hobby of collecting them.

I completely agree. When the storage limits on digital music players were still small it made sense to avoid FLAC but it astonishes me how few modern players support it.

Heh, maybe I used the wrong terminology but after rounding the total vote count to 1.2 million. Colbert won 19.2% of the vote and Serenity garnered 15.9% of votes cast. That's just not a landslide.

40,000 votes is 3.3% of the total 1,200,000 votes

Don't forget that it wasn't 200,000 people voting for him, it's that people voted 200,000 times. Each person could vote once/perday/per IP. So one person could have easily voted dozens to hundreds of times depending on how fanatical they were.