What do OpenOffice users use for e-mail and calendering? Outlook is probably the killer app for us in terms of Office.

It's certainly a concern now that H&B OEM licences are no longer available (see other thread). I used to just buy a licence with the PC and no-one cared about the cost. Simple and cheap.

I'm now torn between open licences or O365 being the way forward.

That video's a bit Spinal Tap.

American English is so common in the UK and Hong Kong that I sometimes use it myself over proper English. I doubt anyone would be at a disadvantage using American English in the UK, and definitely not in Hong Kong. Most of the people I work with can't spell anyway, so wouldn't even notice.

The fact is, American English is the standard language of the world. Even my kids use it as they watch so much American telly. I'm constantly having to tell my kids not to use the word 'lame' because it's so American.

It did annoy me slightly when a couple of people on Spiceworks suggested we should all start spelling virtualisation with a 'z' because that was the standard spelling though. Countries have gone to war over less!

It annoys me. I used to buy OEM versions of H&B 2010. They were dead easy to manage and dirt cheap. I then switched to Key Cards but it's a massive pain. It's almost unmanageable, so I've given up.

So I've now switched to O365. Even that's a pain to manage compared with the old retail/OEM versions.

@scottalanmiller I don't call $432 to rent something for 3 years versus $169 to own it forever "a pretty natural price increase". It's a huge price increase.

@scottalanmiller said:

Although to be fair, I've spent nearly a decade working for London and in big business financial IT, they worked many more hours than the Americans

It never used to be like that. Life in the City of London was pretty cushy until the mid-80s when the Americans arrived and introduced American banking culture.

Oh, OK. I hadn't heard. They're still selling the Surface 2 online.

Well kinda.

Microsoft researchers say using password managers is bad.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/microsoft-stop-using-strong-passwords-everywhere

I store my Keepass database on OneDrive. So hackers would have to hack into Microsoft and hack into my database. I just think this is extremely unlikely but what do I know?

They also say you should use the same password for multiple sites. This is also going against current popular opinion. My Adobe account was hacked, but didn't bother me because I used a separate e-mail address and a separate password. I'd have been worried otherwise.

I know password management has been discussed to death on here and Spiceworks, but don't you think it's odd that Microsoft is apparently telling people not to use the likes of Keepass and Lastpass. Unless they're being misquoted by the article. The full research paper is here It's not an easy read! If anyone wants to read it and provide a synopsis on ML that would be great.

@scottalanmiller said:

Files from the outside "should" be PDF. And that doesn't have to do with MS Office or LibreOffice. The office formats are for collaboration, PDFs are for sharing. One is an editing format and the other is a publishing format for when something is finalized.

According to who?

Do many companies actually use LibreOffice? I couldn't imagine not using Office at work. It's not like it's expensive. I could maybe live without Word, but definitely not Excel.

@scottalanmiller said:

A professional day is 10+ in the US (that's a real term.)

Wow. Really? As far as I can tell no-one at NTG does any work at all, you all just hang out on ML all day long? I don't think over 50 hours of work a week is productive over the long term - it just leads to burn-out and low productivity. I have no evidence to back this claim up though.

@scottalanmiller said:

I'm not sure how you are differentiating the Surface Pro from iPad here. One is a PC and one is ARM, is that all that you mean? Windows tablets are purely PC based now, they dropped the RT (ARM) platform and it does not exist anymore.

Have they killed ARM or RT or both?

I think that's just an extension of their existing Amazon Prime Kindle lending library. It looks like the same number of available books - 600,000. That isn't actually that many. Very few of the books I buy are available on this deal.

The article is a little confusing because it's talking about laptops and tablets in the same article. Cheap Windows laptops like the new HP Steam are competing with Chromebooks, although only on price as there are things I like about Chromebooks that can't be replicated on Windows notebooks. And I have no interest in Windows RT.

@scottalanmiller said:

200 hours isn't that much programming. It's a lot for a single piece of equipment at a single shop, of course. But just five weeks of work.

Seven weeks. This is Europe not America

I'm sure there's ways and means. I just took umbrage at you suggesting that buying hardware controlled by Windows OS was silly, really bad or lacking due diligence.

We use these. The software on our current machines is XP only and heavily customised. We could upgrade, but we've been quoted 200 hours of programming at 60 euros/hour. For a small manufacturer, spending 12 grand on something that has no impact on the bottom line and merely mitigates the risk of running XP is a tough call. Market conditions are extremely tough from European manufacturers at the moment. Our competitors are in the same boat since they use the same machines, although many of them are much bigger organisations with much bigger budgets. If you think programming your own software under Solaris is the answer I'm not sure you have much experience of the realities of small manufacturing.

Sounds like you guys need to work on your communication channels

I've never heard of a hiring manager blacklisting people just because of some education they did. That sucks.

Do people want to know this stuff? In 2006 I was listening to Britney Spears on Spotify, watching a funny cat video on YouTube and arguing with somebody about England's best midfielder on some forum. In 2007 I was....largely doing the same...In 2008 ditto....

I don't wanna know!

@Dashrender said:

most if not all of us should be reimaging the computers as soon as they hit our floor - ditch that OEM installed crap!

I've never done that, and have never really understood the reasoning behind it. I can see that creating a custom image might save time if you're setting up dozens of PCs at a time, but like a lot of SMEs I tend to only buy PCs a handful at time, if that. I've had headaches in the past installing the correct drivers after doing a vanilla OS install, whereas the pre-installed OEM image always includes the correct drivers.

I also buy from the bottom end of HP's business PC range. I don't think these models count as enterprise hardware. The range has a much shorter lifecycle, for example, so a model purchased today might be replaced with a different model in 6 months time with different components, making it impractical to use standard images.

So, as usual, I'm probably the odd one out on ML. Well, it's worked for me

@scottalanmiller said:

obviously inspired by many conversations that were had today elsewhere.

What conversations were these?

I think what you call “Anecdotal Dismissal of Risk.” is generally referred to as the outcome bias