Upon further thought, Windows can read ISO9660. So, format the card/stick/whatever with that, and include an installer for a driver that can also write ISO9660.
FYI, Linux (and other POSIX OSs) are able to mount an image of an IOS9660 filesystem as writable, so it should not be hard to enhance that driver to write/read an ISO9660 formatted card/stick/whatever.
Who is going to want a camera that can't upload pictures to windows because it's using a different file system?
Well, I see a lot of low cost cameras with USB interfaces that require a driver to be installed to pull the pictures off them. They come with the install CD and a lot of people I know just put in the CD and click OK to install when the "New Hardware Wizard" pops up -no complaint, just blindly put the CD in.
Unfortunately, these things do not work on Linux or Mac. Obviously, the designers decided to use some other, unspecified file system that is compatable only with the supplied driver.
So, the question then becomes, how to pursuade these device designers to use a FOSS file system?
...that will prove how incompetent and underhanded the music industry [is]
Incompetent? No. just that they see no need to actually verify that the content actually violates their copyrights. Besides, according to TFA, the agreement is that IRMA will supply lists of site they deem harmful to their business. Clearly, in their view, indy artists giving away music is harmful to the businesses of IRMA.
The entire push over the last few years to transferring processing load back onto the client is the wrong direction in my opinion,...
I agree.
While I see the motivation for doing so, I see far more websites needlessly using JS, Java or Flash, thus requiring enabling scripting for no good reason.
Why is it so hard to see that a secure browser could be done using existing operating systems?
My quess would be that is it more palatable to call something completely new more secure than anything we currently have than it would be to concede a competitor is more secure (even if you are not MS).
The media companies and governments are, by a process of digital evolution, driving anonymous communications into necessities and they become more prevelant with each generation.
I wish I could be as optimistic, though I do agree the need is getting greater.
Maybe the opportunity for the media companies EVER winning has now passed and they'll never be able to anymore... this isn't a problem they can solve by shutting down a server - they need something else. I don't know what. They certainly don't.
Actually, they do know. And they are working toward getting it. They want the internet to work like cable TV. That is, all content is hosted on servers they either control, or, effectively, license. It's just a matter of time before all the ISPs are fully aligned with this.
True, right now, ISPs are, more or less, required to allow P2P, but how long do you really thing it will be before they - and the media companies - persuade parliament/congress/whatever that it is better that content be hosted by "proper hosting businesses"?
Last and not least, USB is a terrible plug. You always have to try it both ways, you can't visually know if you have to plug it upwards or backwards. And even when you're in the correct direction, you have to approoach very precisely for it to plug correctly. How many of us really look at the plug when trying to insert it ?
Actually, a lot of people I know (including me) are quite adept at plugging in USB connectors without looking. On the other hand, some of the smallest connectors - even the round coaxial ones - can be very difficult to plug in without looking.
you could see plugs everywhere including in airplanes, providing unregulated voltage which will fit every usage up to about 65W per plug
Yes, a plug large enough for this amount of power should easily "blind plug".
Something new, called Selective Output Control has been approved. This seems to be related to the HDCP (presumably HD Content Protection) already used with HDMI devices and displays. As I understand it, it can be used to restrict what quality of signal is available to any given display or other device.
Of course, remains to be seen how the courts will treat this.
Depending on what in the Visio diagrams needs to be preserved, exporting to SVG, then importing to Dia has worked for me. Supposedly, Dia supports the newer VDX Visio file format, but all of my clients seem to only have older versions of Visio that don't support VDX
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up
Many of my clients have experienced the same problems between versions of MS Office. And yes, the resulting support problems are a nightmare.
My own observations about PowerPoint is that it enables far too many low quality presentations. Also, I see it used when a proper report is more appropriate.
While I understand that the idea behind such tools is to save money by eliminating the need for specialists, I think that presentations are one area where specialists are greatly under valued
(No, I am not a "presentation specialist". My time would be much better spent not doing presentations myself.)
In my experience, OO.o handles damaged MS Office files far better than MS Office does.
However, your users will howl less if a new version of MS Office screws up their documents than if anything else does.
Personally, I use OOo. When someone absolutely insists on a Word document, I save to.doc but don't tell them it isn't really Word. So far, no one has complained about problems opening them.
I've been using a Linksys WRT54 for 2 years, now, and have never had any problems with it. Before that, I used a d-Link DLG624 for 2 years and had frequent loss of connection requiring rebooting the router.
"Pork"? WTF??? Do you have any idea how many technological advances, especially in medicine, that have come from the space program?
Well, I do. But that does not change the fact that the program has some pork in it.
For example, somewhere, I read that the Orion crew vehicle is something like 50% larger than NASA's experts (including the astronauts) wanted. This was because the likely major contractors lobbied for a larger vehicle. This, of course, meant that the Ares launch vehicle has to be larger, too.
I am not saying the program is pork, only that it contains some pork.
The argument has always been that full-blown DTP is too difficult for the office grunt. But look at how complicated Word is now ?!
Actually, at 3 clients, the choice of word processor was a DTP app, specifically, FrameMaker. (a, now, defunct competitor to PageMaker, Quark and other pro DTP apps). While it was a lot more expensive than MS Word, it was a lot easier to use, whether for simple documents or complex. It just worked. Meanwhile, people I know, who work with MS Word everyday for years, cursed at Word to get done some of the things I was able to do in FrameMaker easily with only occasional use.
Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why, probably because of complicated deployment, lack of group policy support, and lack of support for traditional office extensions, macros, etc.
I've installed OOo on Windows. I've installed many other applications on Windows. I don't see what makes OOo complicated to deploy. Please elaborate.
As for group policy, yes, I can see where such organization level configuration of options could be helpful.
As for traditional MS Office extensions, the IT people of many of my clients would actually like to be rid of those extensions. True, they can block such extensions, but users demand them even when not needed. To be able to say, "Sorry, that's not available" is easier than saying "Sorry, that's against policy." Nontechnical management is very good at getting the executives (who are also non-technical) to approve exceptions to policy based on technical concerns.
The problem with the auto industry is that they're selling $40,000 rip-off SUVs and still not making a profit.
Um, enough of my clients are in the automotive industry that I can tell you that those $40K SUVs are (were) a lot more profitable than the cars they make. (The pickup trucks (like the Ford F series) were even more profitable.) They (and the pickup trucks) were also very popular in the US market.
Some of my friends purchased SUVs even as recently as a year ago. They now admit they never actually needed such a vehicle and are regretting the decision. Now they are stuck with them because they can't sell them for enough to even pay off the financing, lot alone afford a car.
Even with all the free money the banks have been given, no one will loan any of it to the struggling automakers.
There are a lot of businesses (and people) that banks are not loaning money to. Despite the stink the politicians are making, the auto makers are not as much of a special case as we are being told it is.
The main reason the auto makers are even somewhat special is the huge number of jobs, direct, indirect and even marginally unrelated.
You might ask what and how unrelated jobs are effected. I'm an engineer. I work mostly for non-automotive manufacturing clients and a fair number of non-manufacturing clients. My skills are portable across industries.
When the dollar hits the table, even the dimmest HR drone will pass through an applicant willing to work for half (or less) of a "properly qualified" candidate. Even now, I'm already seeing my billing rate being undercut by refugees from the automotive industry.
And so are many, many others like me. And we will be just as screwed as the automotive engineers.
Yes, the automotive industry needs to be completely revamped. But if anyone is going to bleed as a result, the first in line should be the executives - from the highest downward.
why does the RIAA have to pay this ISP? Part of the value that the ISP provides to customers is the ability to pirate music. Therefore, the ISP should be paying for this.
Hmm.. Looking at my contract with my ISP, running a server is not allowed. P2P is a form of a server, therefore, also not allowed.
It also prohibits illegal activities.
Finally, it states that termination of service due to violating the terms of the contract does not relieve the subscriber of the obligation to pay the service fees.
Ergo, my ISP already has plenty of incentive to find excuses to disconnect subscribers: Money for service not rendered. (Same goes for the other ISPs available to me.)
Out of curiosity, are these P2P apps UDP based? But even so, can't the ISPs block subscriber-to-subscriber IP traffic? At least between their own subscribers?
Is there any way that you can distribute computers based on academic performance? It might seem like bribery in a sense, but in this case it just might make sense. Better performing students would obviously make good use of having a laptop and being more productive
One could argue that the lower performing students are more in need of the PCs.
Also, there are many job-oriented computer skills to be learned by even the academic under performers. Depriving these kids will only serve to create more under-skilled job hunters.
Finally, but what measure of "academic performance"? Teach evaluation? Be ready for a lot of upset parents. Standardised tests? Sadly, many excellent students score below their actual level on these tests.
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Upon further thought, Windows can read ISO9660. So, format the card/stick/whatever with that, and include an installer for a driver that can also write ISO9660.
FYI, Linux (and other POSIX OSs) are able to mount an image of an IOS9660 filesystem as writable, so it should not be hard to enhance that driver to write/read an ISO9660 formatted card/stick/whatever.
Would not even need FAT32. FAT16 would handle it just fine.
Now that I think about it, isn't this what those "U3" USB devices do?
Who is going to want a camera that can't upload pictures to windows because it's using a different file system?
Well, I see a lot of low cost cameras with USB interfaces that require a driver to be installed to pull the pictures off them. They come with the install CD and a lot of people I know just put in the CD and click OK to install when the "New Hardware Wizard" pops up -no complaint, just blindly put the CD in.
Unfortunately, these things do not work on Linux or Mac. Obviously, the designers decided to use some other, unspecified file system that is compatable only with the supplied driver.
So, the question then becomes, how to pursuade these device designers to use a FOSS file system?
...that will prove how incompetent and underhanded the music industry [is]
Incompetent? No. just that they see no need to actually verify that the content actually violates their copyrights. Besides, according to TFA, the agreement is that IRMA will supply lists of site they deem harmful to their business. Clearly, in their view, indy artists giving away music is harmful to the businesses of IRMA.
...since they've taken it upon themselves to determine what is or isn't legal.
No. They are just accepting IRMA's determinations.
The entire push over the last few years to transferring processing load back onto the client is the wrong direction in my opinion, ...
I agree.
While I see the motivation for doing so, I see far more websites needlessly using JS, Java or Flash, thus requiring enabling scripting for no good reason.
Why is it so hard to see that a secure browser could be done using existing operating systems?
My quess would be that is it more palatable to call something completely new more secure than anything we currently have than it would be to concede a competitor is more secure (even if you are not MS).
But Netscape / Mozilla didn't continue this.
The media companies and governments are, by a process of digital evolution, driving anonymous communications into necessities and they become more prevelant with each generation.
I wish I could be as optimistic, though I do agree the need is getting greater.
Maybe the opportunity for the media companies EVER winning has now passed and they'll never be able to anymore ... this isn't a problem they can solve by shutting down a server - they need something else. I don't know what. They certainly don't.
Actually, they do know. And they are working toward getting it. They want the internet to work like cable TV. That is, all content is hosted on servers they either control, or, effectively, license. It's just a matter of time before all the ISPs are fully aligned with this.
True, right now, ISPs are, more or less, required to allow P2P, but how long do you really thing it will be before they - and the media companies - persuade parliament/congress/whatever that it is better that content be hosted by "proper hosting businesses"?
I'd say that there are lots of optimizations that the FF/Linux dev team left out.
I have tried the SwiftFox build of FireFox and it does seem to be faster. However, SF is only up to ver 3.0.4pre1.
Nevertheless, I think that optimizations are a prime target.
Last and not least, USB is a terrible plug. You always have to try it both ways, you can't visually know if you have to plug it upwards or backwards. And even when you're in the correct direction, you have to approoach very precisely for it to plug correctly. How many of us really look at the plug when trying to insert it ?
Actually, a lot of people I know (including me) are quite adept at plugging in USB connectors without looking. On the other hand, some of the smallest connectors - even the round coaxial ones - can be very difficult to plug in without looking.
you could see plugs everywhere including in airplanes, providing unregulated voltage which will fit every usage up to about 65W per plug
Yes, a plug large enough for this amount of power should easily "blind plug".
Something new, called Selective Output Control has been approved. This seems to be related to the HDCP (presumably HD Content Protection) already used with HDMI devices and displays. As I understand it, it can be used to restrict what quality of signal is available to any given display or other device.
Of course, remains to be seen how the courts will treat this.
Depending on what in the Visio diagrams needs to be preserved, exporting to SVG, then importing to Dia has worked for me. Supposedly, Dia supports the newer VDX Visio file format, but all of my clients seem to only have older versions of Visio that don't support VDX
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up
Many of my clients have experienced the same problems between versions of MS Office. And yes, the resulting support problems are a nightmare.
My own observations about PowerPoint is that it enables far too many low quality presentations. Also, I see it used when a proper report is more appropriate.
While I understand that the idea behind such tools is to save money by eliminating the need for specialists, I think that presentations are one area where specialists are greatly under valued
(No, I am not a "presentation specialist". My time would be much better spent not doing presentations myself.)
In my experience, OO.o handles damaged MS Office files far better than MS Office does.
However, your users will howl less if a new version of MS Office screws up their documents than if anything else does.
Personally, I use OOo. When someone absolutely insists on a Word document, I save to .doc but don't tell them it isn't really Word. So far, no one has complained about problems opening them.
Simple solution -- quit buying crappy (i.e. Linksys) routers.
I've been using a Linksys WRT54 for 2 years, now, and have never had any problems with it. Before that, I used a d-Link DLG624 for 2 years and had frequent loss of connection requiring rebooting the router.
Many of these systems to track offenders don't have adequate procedures in place to take into account false or mistaken entries.
Could be, but more importantly, no one wants to be responsible for removing entries from those lists.
"Pork"? WTF??? Do you have any idea how many technological advances, especially in medicine, that have come from the space program?
Well, I do. But that does not change the fact that the program has some pork in it.
For example, somewhere, I read that the Orion crew vehicle is something like 50% larger than NASA's experts (including the astronauts) wanted. This was because the likely major contractors lobbied for a larger vehicle. This, of course, meant that the Ares launch vehicle has to be larger, too.
I am not saying the program is pork, only that it contains some pork.
The argument has always been that full-blown DTP is too difficult for the office grunt. But look at how complicated Word is now ?!
Actually, at 3 clients, the choice of word processor was a DTP app, specifically, FrameMaker. (a, now, defunct competitor to PageMaker, Quark and other pro DTP apps). While it was a lot more expensive than MS Word, it was a lot easier to use, whether for simple documents or complex. It just worked. Meanwhile, people I know, who work with MS Word everyday for years, cursed at Word to get done some of the things I was able to do in FrameMaker easily with only occasional use.
Larger companies don't seem to be interested, but i have no idea why, probably because of complicated deployment, lack of group policy support, and lack of support for traditional office extensions, macros, etc.
I've installed OOo on Windows. I've installed many other applications on Windows. I don't see what makes OOo complicated to deploy. Please elaborate.
As for group policy, yes, I can see where such organization level configuration of options could be helpful.
As for traditional MS Office extensions, the IT people of many of my clients would actually like to be rid of those extensions. True, they can block such extensions, but users demand them even when not needed. To be able to say, "Sorry, that's not available" is easier than saying "Sorry, that's against policy." Nontechnical management is very good at getting the executives (who are also non-technical) to approve exceptions to policy based on technical concerns.
The problem with the auto industry is that they're selling $40,000 rip-off SUVs and still not making a profit.
Um, enough of my clients are in the automotive industry that I can tell you that those $40K SUVs are (were) a lot more profitable than the cars they make. (The pickup trucks (like the Ford F series) were even more profitable.) They (and the pickup trucks) were also very popular in the US market.
Some of my friends purchased SUVs even as recently as a year ago. They now admit they never actually needed such a vehicle and are regretting the decision. Now they are stuck with them because they can't sell them for enough to even pay off the financing, lot alone afford a car.
Even with all the free money the banks have been given, no one will loan any of it to the struggling automakers.
There are a lot of businesses (and people) that banks are not loaning money to. Despite the stink the politicians are making, the auto makers are not as much of a special case as we are being told it is.
The main reason the auto makers are even somewhat special is the huge number of jobs, direct, indirect and even marginally unrelated.
You might ask what and how unrelated jobs are effected. I'm an engineer. I work mostly for non-automotive manufacturing clients and a fair number of non-manufacturing clients. My skills are portable across industries.
When the dollar hits the table, even the dimmest HR drone will pass through an applicant willing to work for half (or less) of a "properly qualified" candidate. Even now, I'm already seeing my billing rate being undercut by refugees from the automotive industry.
And so are many, many others like me. And we will be just as screwed as the automotive engineers.
Yes, the automotive industry needs to be completely revamped. But if anyone is going to bleed as a result, the first in line should be the executives - from the highest downward.
why does the RIAA have to pay this ISP? Part of the value that the ISP provides to customers is the ability to pirate music. Therefore, the ISP should be paying for this.
Hmm.. Looking at my contract with my ISP, running a server is not allowed. P2P is a form of a server, therefore, also not allowed.
It also prohibits illegal activities.
Finally, it states that termination of service due to violating the terms of the contract does not relieve the subscriber of the obligation to pay the service fees.
Ergo, my ISP already has plenty of incentive to find excuses to disconnect subscribers: Money for service not rendered. (Same goes for the other ISPs available to me.)
Out of curiosity, are these P2P apps UDP based? But even so, can't the ISPs block subscriber-to-subscriber IP traffic? At least between their own subscribers?
Is there any way that you can distribute computers based on academic performance? It might seem like bribery in a sense, but in this case it just might make sense. Better performing students would obviously make good use of having a laptop and being more productive
One could argue that the lower performing students are more in need of the PCs.
Also, there are many job-oriented computer skills to be learned by even the academic under performers. Depriving these kids will only serve to create more under-skilled job hunters.
Finally, but what measure of "academic performance"? Teach evaluation? Be ready for a lot of upset parents. Standardised tests? Sadly, many excellent students score below their actual level on these tests.