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Entry tags:
MBA Assignments & Exams, Rolemaster Playtesting, MS-Windows 7
Last week received results for my first two MBA assignments; Management Perspectives 67.5% (meh), Financial Management 88% (woot!). In the former, my marks were lower because I left out perspectives such as "Porter's Five Forces", the "McKinsey 7-S model" and so forth. If this sounds like management-babble that's because it is. I am somewhat horrified by how intellectually lightweight management theory actually is. There is a lot of influence from the latest popular psychology and material from actually practising managers who seem to owe their position more to luck, gender and school connections. In any case, exams are next week I've I've started putting together study notes from the course material. For my next two courses (and thus completing the Grad Cert level) I'll probably be taking Marketing (which should be a doddle with my background) and Managing Information Systems, which should be more challenging.
With the release of a playtester version of Rolemaster Cyradon I've been running scenarios with the three groups that I do regular face-to-face gaming with. Cyradon is pretty much generic fantasy, in many ways reminiscent of Rolemaster's old default game-world, ShadowWorld. That means there is a science-fantasy background in the distant past (thus one can integrate components of SpaceMaster), plus a reduced number from the standard set of fantasy 'races'; elves, dwarves, gnomes and lizard-men are all present. There is a group that physically resembles orcs, the gryx, but with a more peaceful outlook. Added to the mix are gryphons as potential PCs. The system is, well Rolemaster with some slight modifications, with both the benefits and problems of that game. Character generation still takes too long, the skill system is simple, combat is colourful with random deadliness, and the magic system certainly requires experienced players.
On Friday night went to an MS-Windows "7" (more marketing nonsense; it's actually NT v6.1.7) launch party (parody available) that was hosted at our work. A substantial number of our rusted-on pro-Linux systems team were present and, in all honesty, I cannot see any real advantages to Microsoft's latest release. Yes, it's better that Windows Vista, but that's hardly a great achievement. Big selling features supposedly include virtual folders, some user interface changes, and keyboard shortcuts - none of which are exactly great (or particularly new) improvements. It would be interesting to see if Windows 7 is still tied to DRM as its predecessor. Overall, there is no good reason to upgrade from Windows XP especially at the price tag that Windows "7" comes with; and I suspect the market will respond in kind.
With the release of a playtester version of Rolemaster Cyradon I've been running scenarios with the three groups that I do regular face-to-face gaming with. Cyradon is pretty much generic fantasy, in many ways reminiscent of Rolemaster's old default game-world, ShadowWorld. That means there is a science-fantasy background in the distant past (thus one can integrate components of SpaceMaster), plus a reduced number from the standard set of fantasy 'races'; elves, dwarves, gnomes and lizard-men are all present. There is a group that physically resembles orcs, the gryx, but with a more peaceful outlook. Added to the mix are gryphons as potential PCs. The system is, well Rolemaster with some slight modifications, with both the benefits and problems of that game. Character generation still takes too long, the skill system is simple, combat is colourful with random deadliness, and the magic system certainly requires experienced players.
On Friday night went to an MS-Windows "7" (more marketing nonsense; it's actually NT v6.1.7) launch party (parody available) that was hosted at our work. A substantial number of our rusted-on pro-Linux systems team were present and, in all honesty, I cannot see any real advantages to Microsoft's latest release. Yes, it's better that Windows Vista, but that's hardly a great achievement. Big selling features supposedly include virtual folders, some user interface changes, and keyboard shortcuts - none of which are exactly great (or particularly new) improvements. It would be interesting to see if Windows 7 is still tied to DRM as its predecessor. Overall, there is no good reason to upgrade from Windows XP especially at the price tag that Windows "7" comes with; and I suspect the market will respond in kind.
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Yep, in the longer term, their software business model is cactus. They have ReactOS breathing down their neck to replace Windows (ReactOS development will really ramp up when their OS goes into and comes out of beta) and OpenOffice already replaces MS Office in the home office for lots of people :).
Microsoft have been putting a lot of effort and money into their search engine, games platforms and handheld media players though, so they've at least got a Plan B.
Which increasingly are the personal computer of choice for a lot of people!
They're definitely a significant platform, but, they're really an additional platform rather than a replacement one. I can't picture office workers writing and printing their reports from their iPhones ;)
Hmmm.. I wonder what game Google is going to play in all this.
They have the potential to give Apple a scare with Android if Apple doesn't do something serious about their monumentally broken apps approval process. They're definitely the standard Microsoft wants to beat with its Bing search engine.
AJAX apps are fine and all for what they are, but, I can't see their mooted cloud/web-OS winning on the desktop. It has the smell of dot-com boom scale marketing hype.
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Fully fledged OSs don't have that luxury, thus any improvements will be quite incremental.
Microsoft have been putting a lot of effort and money into their search engine, games platforms and handheld media players though, so they've at least got a Plan B.
*nods* This is true. They have also started to move in the HPC world, now making up fully 0.5% of the top 500 supercomputers.
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New switchers will probably complain about the differences, but, I've always found it pleasant that the controls are pretty much the same as ever. My first exposure to it was StarOffice 3, and I love it that I haven't been forced to relearn a completely new office app UI every few years.
One thing I'm really hoping is that the OO.org crowd avoid any switch to using ribbons instead of menus for Vista/Seven. Firefox have been making noises suggesting that may be in their future :(
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I don't use spreadsheets to that level, so it's never affected me there.
They're right about OO being a bit of a hog though: it's been that way ever since StarOffice 4 when StarDivision merged what were previously a group of separate apps into one. (It probably paid resource use benefits to power users, but, casual users tend to only fire up one tool at once and loading up a huge wad of stuff they're not going to use hits performance.)
All that said, it's still a mystery why it's not doing a lot better, considering it's free (as in beer) and MS Office is quite expensive. Perhaps it's all the various educational institutions and businesses who explicitly require Word ${VER} compatible documents and lots of people not realising OO has a "Save as..." feature.
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Frankly very few people use a spreadsheet where you'll see the differences between Excel and OO. But there are differences, but at a level where if you use that feature you need to be aware of what you are doing.
I have found file incompatibility no worse than between different versions of M$ Office but that's not saying much.
If M$ had adopted the Open Document Format then none of this would be a problem, but being a monopolist they didn't, the file format is one of their defences against fair competition.
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I suspect that may be the result of your own hardware catching up. I haven't upgraded my box for a few years and OO feels just as sluggish as ever (no change either way).
Frankly very few people use a spreadsheet where you'll see the differences between Excel and OO. But there are differences, but at a level where if you use that feature you need to be aware of what you are doing.
Casual spreadsheet users like you and I won't notice much difference. It's the power users in larger business settings who get hit by it most.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a loyal OO user from the early days and still find it surprising it's not taken over the home user and small business space, but, I can see why it's not the bees knees for everyone.
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I am not at all sure I am a casual spreadsheet user.
How do you know if you're a casual or power user?
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We may have to chalk this up to different experiences then, unless either of us cares enough to dig for comparative benchmark statistics.
How do you know if you're a casual or power user?
Hard to say with specifics, as I'm not a spreadsheets power user myself. I use them to tally rows of data and so on, but, that's about it. I guess the key question would be: Do you write spreadsheets for other people to use in a professional environment as a part of your job?