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[#] Sat Feb 19 2022 16:26:21 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Oh, and 2/3 of home windows users are just treating theirs as a
terminal. and 99% of ipad/android users..  Sure, there might be a

That's about the sum of it. This isn't 1997 anymore, where everyone is using the current version of MS Office locally installed on their desktop, and you'd better have pixel-perfect fidelity between every instance of it.

Nowadays, people are ok with less-than-perfect fidelity between MS Office and Google Docs. Heck, there isn't even perfect fidelity between MS Office on the desktop and MS Office on the web. People who are sending documents around expect that kind of thing now. Often they'll just send a share link to the Google or MS web-document that they originally created it on.

The days of desktop computers mattering are waning, and the whole industry knows it. People who are heavily into graphics or video or engineering design, they're still making heavy use of their local machines, but they are less than 1% of the population. You could make a better argument that video games are really the final frontier, and even that is changing fast.

For 99% of the users out there, the device they sit in front of, or place on their lap or hold in their hands, is little more than a web terminal. Scott McNealy was right. We have entered the era of Network Computing.

[#] Sun Feb 20 2022 08:39:52 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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But you've moved the goalposts. You said it was FUD... and I said, that wasn't the case... and then you moved the discussion to TODAY, and to personal use and to a lot of things outside the scope of the original statement and my response.   


I spent my career working for large companies that were standardized on MS products - and they often *attempted* Free office suites - and quickly ran back to MS Office - for the specific reasons, time and time again, that I outlined above. 
OpenOffice, Libre Office, Star Office - all of them were *inferior* to MS Office for most of the history of using Office Suites. 

I did note that has had a shift - and where it has shifted, Google's web suite is the reason for that... (none of the Open Office alternatives. They're as irrelevant in the face of Google's app suite as Microsoft...) Free office alternatives failed - and they largely failed not because of Microsoft FUD - but because the real world experience with free Office alternatives sucked. 





[#] Sun Feb 20 2022 13:40:41 EST from Nurb432

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I have converted several small companies.  No one felt they were getting an inferior tool.

Sun Feb 20 2022 08:39:52 AM EST from ParanoidDelusions


I spent my career working for large companies that were standardized on MS products - and they often *attempted* Free office suites - and quickly ran back to MS Office - for the specific reasons, time and time again, that I outlined above. 



[#] Sun Feb 20 2022 14:08:47 EST from darknetuser

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2022-02-18 09:36 from Nurb432
I donno, using the open formats available and staying away form
proprietary ones seemed to work just fine for me between all the
suites. All the people i personally talked to was more of the 'its
free, it cant be good, is it a virus?'  or 'its not office, and we
are supposed to use office' and of course ' what? '

( databases being the one exception )


Actually I have faced bigger issues sharing document files generated with Microsoft Office with users of different Microsoft Office versions, than sharing documents generated from open suites with Microsoft Office users.

[#] Sun Feb 20 2022 15:07:33 EST from Nurb432

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yes, i tend to agree on that one.  To be fair, after we moved to o365 at office i have not see that problem a lot in-house, but in previous versions, ya. every upgrade was a nightmare. 

Sun Feb 20 2022 02:08:47 PM EST from darknetuser
Actually I have faced bigger issues sharing document files generated with Microsoft Office with users of different Microsoft Office versions, than sharing documents generated from open suites with Microsoft Office users.

 



[#] Tue Feb 22 2022 09:24:03 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Also agree. PD is conflating two different things. When you have a document created in MS Office 97, for example, and it doesn't render with perfect fidelity in XYZ Office, the conclusion often drawn is "XYZ Office is an inferior product."
That's simply not true. As we often pointed out at the time, if most of the world used XYZ Office, and an outlier opened a document in MS Office that didn't render perfectly, the opposite conclusion would be drawn.

What we learned was that for most customers, the cost of that friction outweighed the cost of buying the incumbent software. Google changed the game by offering their office suite online, with collaborative editing and dead simple document distribution. This, it turns out, was such a big value proposition that users were willing to deal with less-than-perfect document interchange -- when they even bothered to interchange at all. It was such a good value that Microsoft was forced to make their own version, also with less than perfect fidelity, making the problem even worse.

And now, people no longer expect pixel-perfect document interchange, and when they need it, they wisely no longer use MS Office as an interchange format.

[#] Tue Feb 22 2022 11:56:23 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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I think I'm facing a biased panel here. 

I suspect Nurb is the closest to actually ever working in an Enterprise class Windows environment - and from what I've picked up from him - his workplace is pretty platform agnostic for end users and back-end. 

My work involved mostly corporate and healthcare enterprises that were anywhere from Medium to mega-sized corporations. 

We certainly had occasional issues with compatibility between versions of MS-Office suites - but they were all fairly easy to address. 

The pain with alternative FOSS office suites was an entirely different level. Application stability, interface stability, feature stability as well as document compatibility (face it, those MS platform compatibility issues between MS versions were introduced specifically to make FOSS alternative compatibility even *more* difficult. If you were having trouble with MS-to-MS version document format compatibility - you were having WORSE Free Office to MS Office compatibility problems. I'm calling BS on that argument...) 

I had IT guys who were hyped for the free Office options and the cost savings they could bring to the IT budget - and they inevitably turned on all of them. I saw every business try to adopt these solutions, and then abandon them, or limit them to very specific end-use models. The Free Office suites were horseshit. They never worked well for anyone except people who were committed to proving use models for LINUX as an alternative to Windows and Microsoft business platforms. 


It is like some Scott Addams cognitive bias study. The Free Office platforms had less of a chance of having the "Year of the Free Office Platform," moment than Linux had of having the "Year of the Linux Desktop," moment. 


Neither happened. The closest you got were iOS and Android devices threatening Windows dominance of desktop, local computing. The Cloud and Windows dominance of local computing now uneasily co-exist - and lots of SMBs and even some larger firms have transitioned to Google and AWS platforms as their primary platforms... 

Even then - both the last two businesses my wife has worked for - are primarily Windows shops. They have Citrix servers publishing Microsoft apps for remote access, and they use Google suites for interoffice documentation and communication... 

But what they don't have at all is users on Linux desktops running local FOSS Office suites. That was a bomb. Never happened - never really going to happen. 



 



[#] Tue Feb 22 2022 12:53:58 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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I find the deprecation of TrueCrypt with the recommendation to go to BitLocker very suspect. 

I understand TrueCrypt is compromised and flawed beyond repair - but I think that the failure of a replacement outside of the development of Big Tech like Apple and Microsoft speaks to the fact that there must be backdoors in these solutions. 


Literally, if you can get admin console - you can generate the bitlocker key in Windows. 

I don't feel a lot better about Linux volume encryption. I mean - there is something I prefer about having an encrypted volume that has a separately maintained password or decryption method. 

I don't believe every CIO in America is *in* on it - but I feel like the conventional wisdom that they're getting is from people who *are* in on it. Ultimately - the encryption is good enough to keep criminals and bad actors at bay - but not good enough to keep the WORST actors out of your shit if they really want to see it. 

The thing that puzzles me is that there isn't any dominant alternative that everyone in security recommends. They're all "use the built in tools for volume encryption in Linux/MacOS/Windows." 

Which is a dramatic change in the position of the security industry - and it all came about when TrueCrypt imploded. 




Fri Feb 18 2022 10:51:25 EST from Nurb432

"please leave your computer on all weekend" "you are scheduled to have McAfee encryption de-crypted, removed, then re-encrypted with bit-locker encryption." "if your computer no longer boots you will need to call the help desk for a decryption code"  "good luck'

 

Great.



 



[#] Tue Feb 22 2022 16:06:40 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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How much did Micro$oft pay you to write that?

[#] Thu Feb 24 2022 02:29:22 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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What are you talking about? I just said I did not trust Microsoft's Bitlocker solution. 




Tue Feb 22 2022 16:06:40 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
How much did Micro$oft pay you to write that?

 



[#] Fri Feb 25 2022 12:01:33 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Actually it was in response to your ridiculous assertion that MS Office is dominant because of technical superiority. I moved it over from another room.

[#] Fri Feb 25 2022 12:57:36 EST from Nurb432

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i wonder if bit-locker botched my office install. 

I'm going to end up having to rebuild my machine due to a botched application install. how teh hell does someone design a system like that? And why the hell do i have to reboot several times just from an app install? Should not need to do that, have they ever heard of caching? 

 

 



[#] Fri Feb 25 2022 16:30:16 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Windows is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed. You already know that.

[#] Fri Feb 25 2022 16:54:46 EST from Nurb432

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its 2022, you would think they could improve things..  at least a little..

Fri Feb 25 2022 04:30:16 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar
Windows is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed. You already know that.

 



[#] Sun Feb 27 2022 14:23:04 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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its 2022, you would think they could improve things..  at least a
little..

Nope. Can't be fixed. Here's why.

In the mid 1980s, Microsoft was in a hurry to get ahead of Apple in the GUI-based operating system game. They were working with IBM on OS/2 with Presentation Manager, and it looked promising. Ugly, but promising. But they were in a hurry, Apple was getting ahead, and they made the decision to move Presentation Manager over to MS-DOS and they called it "Windows".

It wasn't long before they needed more functionality, and they put it all into Windows, still sitting atop the shaky foundations of MS-DOS. This phase lasted for way too long. They should have stayed the course and finished OS/2. Even that wasn't the best way to go, though -- they could have put Presentation Manager on top of Xenix, captured the entire market, and probably even held it. Linux wouldn't even exist today if they did that. So they had Windows on MS-DOS, and they kept packing more and more "operating system" stuff into Win16, and later Win32, and the whole thing was just so lopsided and full of layering violations that it gained its legendary instability.

Fast forward to the early 1990s, and Dave Cutler brought forth the NT kernel.
Unsurprisingly, it shared a lot of design tenets with VMS, a well-tested and stable system with uptimes measured in years. Win32 was just one of several personalities layered on top of it, which is why Windows NT 3.51 was the most stable version of Windows ever released. But then ... they did it again.
They did all of their development in the Win32 layer, putting feature after feature of the operating system into the Win32 layer instead of the NT kernel.
It was an elegant, microkernel based, layered design ... and they screwed it up again.

And this is why Windows is incapable of being a good operating system. I suspect it has something to do with the organzation of Microsoft itself. Layering violations are baked into their corporate culture. The different groups inside the company develop within the parts they control. Compare to any unix system, *especially* the open source ones, where layering violations are mercilessly rejected by the community. It has to be that way, because everything is based on components with well-defined interfaces, usually maintained by separate groups. No one would have accepted a DNS resolver built into the X Window System, for example, but Windows is still basically built that way.

They could have done it right. They didn't. Now they can't -- not without basically starting over again. Windows is a developmental dead end.

[#] Sun Feb 27 2022 14:50:24 EST from Nurb432

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Back in the late 90s, i thought i had heard they were going to do that, start over.

Sun Feb 27 2022 02:23:04 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar
They could have done it right. They didn't. Now they can't -- not without basically starting over again. Windows is a developmental dead end.

 



[#] Sun Feb 27 2022 17:25:18 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Back in the late 90s, i thought i had heard they were going to do
that, start over.

They tried. They failed. They released Windows Vista instead.

Need I say more?

[#] Sun Feb 27 2022 17:28:08 EST from Nurb432

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lol



[#] Mon Feb 28 2022 16:53:32 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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I find it somewhat amusing that most of the private industry I've deal with in the last 10 years has moved to Google Office... by a significant margin. 

And yet you're stuck with a specific desire to have local MS Office clients installed - despite - you know... being on team Fuck Microsoft. :) 

 

Mon Feb 28 2022 10:23:37 EST from Nurb432

I guess i'm stuck with web office. "we need to reload your system due to a botched application install".  No thanks. too much trouble especially since i'm going to start using VDI soon.   They tried all the stuff i did first. I was hoping the desktop support team had a trick up their sleeves since they do this for a living, and i dont anymore.

There is one feature i do need from time to time, that isn't in web outlook.  But ill survive i guess.    Disappointing. 



 



[#] Wed Mar 02 2022 10:36:43 EST from nonservator

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"LTSC, Long-Term Servicing Channel (which was until 2017 branded as LTSB, Long-Term Servicing Branch), is a unique version of Windows 10 Enterprise. Unlike all the other versions of Windows 10, LTSC has zero bloatware and the least amount of telemetry (data being sent back to Microsoft). Officialy, it was marketed for devices that require stability and privacy (medical devices, banking machines, submarines) but is becoming so popular outside of its marketed use that Microsoft itself is actively trying to dissuade customers from buying it."
 
 
How to acquire: "The official way: There is none, anymore. Microsoft has discontinued the Volume Licensing program, and nobody posting here has been able to figure out how to buy 2021 LTSC as an individual. Many of us posting here would happily buy it if we could, but Microsoft simply won't sell it to us."
 
 
If you have to ask
 

you can't afford it/you're not allowed



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