Activity for February 18

Review - Ubuntu
10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Alpha 2 (Jan 16, 2010)

It's alpha. Not a beta or release candidate. In other words, you're expected to have problems and provide reasonable feedback to developers. You're also expected to look out for problems with new features.

As it is, you should either try 9.10 (latest stable) or wait a few months for the beta.

That said, this is very usable alpha release, with a lot of helpful docs to navigate around issues. The developer response is stellar (with crahs bugs resolved in the course of two - three days). It's also much more stable than alpha release of 9.10. Kudos to Ubuntu for Launchpad and various measures allowing to get out of most problems (it's really hard to reach unrecoverable state under this system).

Summarizing: you get points for trying this release. Just do set your expectations appropriately.

Regards,
Ruemere

Regards,
Ruemere
Review - Notepad++
5.6.1 (Dec 9, 2009)

Good, getting better.

To dhry:
There is a difference between missing functionality (lack of support for https:// addresses) and a bug (a feature not working in the intended way). Your rating method is very subjective and therefore of little worth.
Some of the annoyances you have reported (highlighting issues, for example) are extremely limited in scope and may be beyond author's ability to address (supporting syntax of a language you are not familiar with is a major pain - the author is probably using highlighters files provided by someone else). Also, at least with regard to highlighters, it's not difficult to fix (.xml at worst) and... best of all, AutoHotkey does not seem to be on the list of supported languages in stable releases.

So, kindly either do it yourself or switch to a different editor - it will save you a lot of grief.

Regards,
Ruemere
Review - Opera for Windows
10.01 Build 1844 Final (Oct 28, 2009)

Beta versions use different folders than stable versions. You haven't lost anything, merely changed installation paths.

Regards,
Ruemere
Review - Ubuntu
9.10 (Karmic Koala) Release Candidate (Oct 23, 2009)

High quality release. Even better than 9.04. Stellar support.
Very recommended.

Regards,
Ruemere
Review - Opera for Windows
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Aug 21, 2009)

Works fine across all platforms. Offers enhanced usability. Requires some learning due to number of options available. Polished interface (on the par with Google Chrome, better than Firefox 3.5.2, light years ahead of IE 8) - please note, that "polished interface" means - easy to navigate, responsive, able to handle large amount of pages.

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. Please ignore the troll, Phat Esther, below. Saving multiple links works fine (Click + symbol, add Links panel, select all links with Ctrl or Shift, choose Save to Download Folder, enjoy).
Comment - Five security backdoors every small business should shut
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Feb 18, 2011 - 7:01 AM)

Precisely. Monitoring, education and internal security are the keys to keep both you and your users happy. Policy of absolute denial results in significant overhead for policy implementors - it's an arms race between you and malware authors, and you are much better off with users on your side.

Regards,
Ruemere
Comment - LibreOffice 3.3: Fast, fun and functional
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Feb 8, 2011 - 7:36 AM)

LibreOffice is a little step forward from Oracle's product. It is a bit more stable (I've managed to crash Oracle's version) and just a tiny bit more polished.
In comparison to Microsoft alternative, it offers more features to people who want to produce higher quality documents albeit at a price - it takes more help and forum reading to achieve certain results. Note: Microsoft with the release of 2007 and 2010 made it actually harder for casual users to use styles.
Unfortunately, there are certain bugs in 3.3 (both OO and LO) which may make user's life harder (like VSLOOKUP having issues with finding values containing brackets, or styles being misapplied in certain niche cases).

With regard to macro support, both LibreOffice and OpenOffice are not as well documented as Microsoft Office, and so going beyond basic macros is more difficult, especially if you want to convert Microsoft documents.

Overall, it's a very solid product, and while one may find it challenging to learn, it is quite rewarding to use. Personally, when I work with long documents (books, manuals), I find LibreOffice (and its Oracle's counterpart) to be much customizable (keyboard shortcuts, layout features) than Microsoft's products (at least 2003 and 2007, 2010 may be a pleasant surprise once I get to work with it on a more regular basis).

Regards,
Ruemere
Comment - Somasegar gets it, do you?
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Dec 20, 2010 - 2:16 AM)

Passing the load to the GPU hardware is more about delegating work than optimization. Incidentally, I'm sure you've heard the stories about certain game overheating CPUs thanks to this "optimization".

I'd like to see IE9 doing this on FreeBSD, Mac, Windows Xp, Windows 2000, Ubuntu, Fedora and other systems.

Regards,
Ruemere
Comment - Office 2010 belly flops in early retail sales dive
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Jul 16, 2010 - 5:58 AM)

Deployment of a new version involves actual deployment (manhours), application testing prior to deployment (for example, sharepoint integration, SAP integration, digital certificates), policy design and testing, data import and export (Excel 2007 math problems, anyone?).

It's far from being just a matter of SA renewal.

Regards,
Ruemere
Comment - Office 2010 belly flops in early retail sales dive
10.00 Build 1723 Beta (Jul 16, 2010 - 5:53 AM)

To RollDatKernelMyBrotha: thank you for pointing shorter way (3 menus). We've been influenced by 2007 too much, I guess.

To frankwick: yes, there are fewer menu levels than 2007. There are still more than under 2003 (though, to be precise, Outlook 2003 boasted no fewer than 5 or 7 levels of dialogs/menus for certain tasks...).

To frankwick (animations): this is a tricky subject related to principles of interface design. Basically, animated changes (like opening of animated menu or copy progress bar which periodically lightens and darkens in addition to typical vertical progress) and sudden (immediate) changes are perceived in a different way by a user.
Use of animated changes makes the user more involved in the process - it's easier to capture attention using short animation prior to opening menu, for example. However, using constant animations (i.e. emphasizing every little detail) both shortens attention span and, in case of several things happening at once, results in producing a distraction instead of attention-getter.

Still, it's not much of a problem until you begin to multitask... and when you have several application windows to monitor (or work on). Then these small distractions begin to pile up. In the course of several hours of work, you may begin to hate these little thingies with passion.

And this is one of many reasons I do not like 2007 (and 2010).

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. It's not a "she".