Windows 8

[Rendakor]

Unfortunately it's true. Like I said though; if you have a usable university email account you can always try to hit Dreamspark and see if your campus has some sort of deal with MS. I think they imply that they try to see if you're staff or if you're enrolled currently, but I call bullshit on that since it can't be automated.

I have no interest in Win 8, so no ulterior motives here, but isn't it possible to set up a fake university account? Or use someone's who has no desire to buy Windows? Or enroll into some free clases for a student-pass (that's great for the ego too, so much better than being a waitress!).

Just asking!

If you're going to be shady about it why wouldn't you just, uh, acquire it via the Internet instead of going to all that hassle?

[Fabricated]

Well borrowing someone's uni account and purchasing a cheap legit license for something that they'll never use is shady, but at least in the end you have a legit license and not one subject to randomly being turned off or loaded with Russian trojans.

[ghost]

Shit, if you're going to get Windows off of the net you'd be better off getting Mint or some other easy to use Linux distro.

[Miasma]

I just had to install a copy of this so that I can reproduce IE 10 errors and wow do I hate it, thankfully it's just sitting on a VM and I don't have to actually use the damn thing.  Trying to do the most basic actions was like pulling teeth.  Everything you need to actually get to is hidden under the pretense of a "clean" UI, which it still doesn't manage to achieve.

I will definitely skip this iteration, if any game comes out that requires a Windows 8 only version of direct X I won't be playing it.

[tgr]

Given that supposedly the current win8 only DX has features which game developers don't really need, I don't think that'll be a major problem.

[Engels]

I'm forcing myself to use this at work, but with a decent machine; Core2Duo with 4 gigs of ram and dedicated video card. Its not utter shite with decent hardware. I can't imagine running it in VM Ware tho.

[calapine]

Given that supposedly the current win8 only DX has features which game developers don't really need, I don't think that'll be a major problem.

Considering the latest news say Windows 8 currently has a 1.72% share of the desktop OS market I don't see Win8-only games happening any time soon.

[Engels]

Also, and only tangentially related, Outlook 2013 can't do IMAP worth a damn. Just a caveat emptor. Stick to 2010.

[Fabricated]

If you're using straight up IMAP boxes just use Thunderbird or whatever.

[Engels]

If you're using straight up IMAP boxes just use Thunderbird or whatever.

Tell that to the entire staff at my uni department who's been using Outlook since the early oughts. Over the years I've converted two people to Thunderbird out of 16 or so. The rest of them look at me like I've asked them to paint Warhammer figurines.

[Chimpy]

The OMG WHITE EVERYWHERE color scheme in 2013 would bother me more than shitty IMAP compatibility, to be honest.

[Fabricated]

If you're using straight up IMAP boxes just use Thunderbird or whatever.

Tell that to the entire staff at my uni department who's been using Outlook since the early oughts. Over the years I've converted two people to Thunderbird out of 16 or so. The rest of them look at me like I've asked them to paint Warhammer figurines.

The way we do this is that we don't give them a choice. If you chose an IMAP account on our own servers over an exchange account on the university's exchange server, you're not using Outlook to IMAP to it because we're not going to support it when it doesn't fucking work right.

[Ingmar]

The only difference I'm aware of in Outlook 2013 IMAP is that you can't download only headers. What issues are you seeing?

[Chimpy]

Now that we are on a unified Exchange infrastructure for all faculty and staff for campus no one wants to go back to anything else. The sheer joy for everyone in being able to use the meeting maker to schedule a meeting and have it work trumps everything. Even with the teething problems and goofups with the move to Lync no one wants to ever go back to the centrex lines either. You can pry Lync from their cold, dead hands.

[Yegolev]

That's pretty slick, really.  Lync to bother someone via IM, then "let me show you my desktop" and sometimes "let me call you AND YELL AT YOU".

[Ingmar]

We do the same thing with WebEx Connect, which would also be directly integrated with our phones if we could get the money pried free to put in Cisco VOIP.

[Fabricated]

Our business offices use Lync and seem to like it. Sharepoint is the other big thing that everyone seems to want to have, but to be honest like 90% of the things that have sharepoints really really don't need a sharepoint and the functionality (along with time) is wasted.

[Ingmar]

Yeah, Sharepoint is really powerful but 99% of what people do with it, they could do in a Google Site without paying for all the extra power they're not using.

[Zetor]

We use a lot of different web conferencing tools at work.
WebEx - neat for holding remote training sessions with the mini webcams, different color markers for 'writing on the screen', etc. Haven't really used it outside of that context.
GotoMeeting - probably the best one so far, except for the entire subscription bit.
Lync 2010 - one of our partners holds conferences over these. Slow and bulky as fuck, and the plugin to share the desktop doesn't work on our teleconference laptops. We just send the presentations to the partner, and have them share it / change slides when needed. Has a certain charm  

As for sharepoint, the only thing we use it for is real-time collaborative editing of word documents (which is pretty important when you have 3-4 people working on the same research paper or security evaluation report). I don't think there's any other way to do that, is there? (edit: anything with the word 'cloud' in it is not an option due to confidentiality / NDAs)

[Chimpy]

I thought Office 2010 Professional Plus is supposed to have the collaborative functions built-in, but I have not seen that work in practice yet. (Maybe it is that you need Sharepoint + Professional Plus to get that functionality?)

[KallDrexx]

We use sharepoint as an a wiki, but we also didn't have to deal with the hassle of setting it up since all of our company's stuff is through a Office 365 subscription.

The new sharepoint actually isn't bad for a wiki.

[Yegolev]

I probably need to qualify anything I say about our stuff by pointing out that I work for the largest IT corp in the world.  Anyway, it's just peachy to me when everything is part of the same suite/manufacturer.  I'd expect that interoperability of various MS components will be some amount easier than if we were using disparate products.  Example, rooms.hp.com works very great, but lately whenever I ask if someone wants me to set up a virtual room they usually say "just use Lync to share desktop"... and they are right.  Using HPVR with Outlook requires a tool installed into Outlook, and if that decides to be shitty, I'll have a tougher time working that out.  Of course not everyone has Lync, and HPVR runs in a browser.

[Chimpy]

Doesn't the lync attendant run in a browser (with silverlight)?

[Zetor]

Or (in our case) it doesn't. 

[Ingmar]

We use a lot of different web conferencing tools at work.
WebEx - neat for holding remote training sessions with the mini webcams, different color markers for 'writing on the screen', etc. Haven't really used it outside of that context.
GotoMeeting - probably the best one so far, except for the entire subscription bit.
Lync 2010 - one of our partners holds conferences over these. Slow and bulky as fuck, and the plugin to share the desktop doesn't work on our teleconference laptops. We just send the presentations to the partner, and have them share it / change slides when needed. Has a certain charm  

As for sharepoint, the only thing we use it for is real-time collaborative editing of word documents (which is pretty important when you have 3-4 people working on the same research paper or security evaluation report). I don't think there's any other way to do that, is there? (edit: anything with the word 'cloud' in it is not an option due to confidentiality / NDAs)

Google Docs is IMO even better for the real-time collaboration stuff if you can get past needing to use Office specifically (fine for Word, not fine for Excel) but if cloud is a dirty word for you then obviously it won't work. They can't match Excel yet and won't for years though, so Excel services in Sharepoint is pretty unmatched in that respect.

[Yegolev]

Doesn't the lync attendant run in a browser (with silverlight)?

Possibly but I've never had to think about it.  If I'm sharing with clients I just use a HP virtual room, and I have my own teleconference line.  My new laptop will likely do PC-VOIP but also haven't tried that, even in Lync.

Of course Excel is the main problem with Google Docs/Drive.  For Word it doesn't matter because the main function is easy enough: make readable document.  What also is terrible is the Drive spreadsheet on mobile.  Yeesh.  I suppose those who use other things like PowerPoint and Project and Visio will have similar concerns.

It's funny how the word cloud is so mutable.  I described my early design thoughts on changing the backup infrastructure shell scripts to "cloud-based" and got some smiles and nods.  The word "cloud" is like IT ketchup.

[tgr]

And for that reason alone I loathe and despise the term.

5 years ago one application was "a hosted application". We released a new version of another piece software using the same way of structuring it as the application hosted 5 years ago. Suddenly, it's "in the cloud".

[Numtini]

My favorite was a web site host who claimed their service was better because it was "in the cloud."

[Ironwood]

[Lantyssa]

I offer secure web hosting for $100/mo.  It's safe because it doesn't rely on that cloud technology.

[Yegolev]

I like where this thread is going.  Of course, I've learned to stop worrying.

[Merusk]

And carry a towel.

[Kageru]

Windows 8 nerd rage.

The tech market is just a disaster at the moment. Ultra-books are basically macbook air clones and way too expensive, and they don't need touch. Microsoft is using it's monopoly power to push windows 8 but a tablet is pretty much either casual computing or a big brother to the mobile phone. A tiny fraction of these people want office on their tablet. Meanwhile the OS makes no sense for the areas where microsoft is used. And they've done a pretty good job of annoying the OEM's even though it's unlikely those people will find a spine and do anything about it like foster alternatives.

The desktop market is as much in contraction because there is no convincing need to upgrade. The ageing consoles are holding back games, software is being driven by the mobile market making existing desktops more than powerful enough, intel is focused on mobile chips not desktop progression and windows 8 is a desktop downgrade. Microsoft is massively discounting it (apparently the price rises substantially soon) and still no one cares. They'll sell a lot of copies because they have a monopoly position on desktops and have stopped selling windows 7 but that's not a virtue of the product.

[Numtini]

The desktop market is as much in contraction because there is no convincing need to upgrade.

I had someone bring a PC into my office today complaining it was "slow." I have no idea what they did with it, but when I booted it and looked at the specs, my first thought was "I raided in EQ2 with this exact chip, wtf you can't run Word on it?!"

[Kageru]

Well the old joke there were two sorts of applications that chew up all the ram and every CPU cycle, high end games and the new version of word (barring the tiny niche that actually do grind a PC doing real work).

But I'm not sure office++ is really motivating people. I get the feeling it ran out of features people care about some time ago.