magical1 - Slashdot User

Ballmer Admits Google Apps Are Biting Into MS Office 293

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 17, 2008 @09:58PM from the legacy-of-clippy dept.

twitter points out coverage of a discussion between Steve Ballmer and two Gartner analysts in which the Microsoft CEO admits that Google Apps is enjoying an advantage over Office by users who want to share their documents. He points to Office Live as their response to Google, and adds, "Google has the lead, but, if we're good at advertising, we'll compete with them in the consumer business." Whether or not they're good at advertising is still in question, if their recent attempts are any indication. Ballmer also made statements indicating some sort of arrangement with Yahoo! could still be in the works, but Microsoft was quick to step on that idea. Regarding Windows Vista, he said Microsoft was prepared for people to skip it altogether, and that Microsoft would be "ready" when it was time to deploy Windows 7.

6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night 67

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 04, 2008 @02:09AM from the very-large-yet-very-small dept.

Lumenary7204 writes "The Register has a story about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that will be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will 'open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.' The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope's 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab in Tucson."

Stargate Worlds Beta Begins Oct. 15th 84

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 04, 2008 @01:06AM from the work-in-progress dept.

Kotaku reports that the closed beta for Stargate Worlds, an MMO based on the popular Stargate television shows, will begin on October 15th. Registration is open at the game's website. Gamespy has some new screenshots available, and a Youtube channel has been opened for videos about the game. We discussed the early plans for Stargate Worlds a couple years ago.

Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML 208

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 04, 2008 @12:04AM from the take-this-job-and-shove-it dept.

tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"

Comment a little history of kamloops and where it has gone (Score 1) 288

by magical1 on Monday June 11, 2007 @03:22AM (#19462931) Attached to: A School District's Education in Free Software

Although its been quite some time since I was a student at the local highschool, I am so glad they have come so far! around 20 years ago they started with a room of clone pc's hooked up via arcnet and to a single novell network. They let the students run it because no one in the district (at that time) supported it .... I was lucky enough to be one of those student.s It was great but a bit chaotic but I had a lot of fun using novell.. even playing around with lanassist (I loved rebooting peoples machines and gettin em in trouble;) ... and damn I loved snipes! I'm sure its got to hold some records for advanced multiplayer support... (at least I dont know of many games ahead of that that can be played specifically on a LAN) What sucked back then is if something broke you had to wait for a technician to come fix it and they were usually slow and didn't seem to know much ... I think they were more people used to fixing adding machines and photocopiers, and shook there head when It came to stone age networking ... since we only had to call them for hardware problems tho, it was fine (I could figure out anything else) .. My Last year tho at school they decided not to allow students "supervisor" access to the network and therefore I kinda decided to rebel a bit, and they really laxed in security, cause rather than using novells menu system they decided to use directaccess and they set the privelages as rw but no delete, but any idiot would realize you could just copy a file over the menu file and voilla it was down! .. heh The other funny thing is they bought cheap clones and because a few of them broke down they bitched at the supplier and some stupid person vowed never to use clone equipment ever again, and from then on had to buy IBM only ... now that rule is gone but they still buy SEANIX computers which IMO are the worst computers built in canada (unless things have changed drastically) ... I am glad to see tho that they have gone to linux, and I really think the thin approach is a great one!

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