Unfortunately, something not considered is the cumulative affect of new technologies on the workforce. In the larger scheme of things, while a robot can do the work of 10 men it requires 2 men to maintain it and 20 men to build it.
Thus, *more* jobs are created as a result of technology.
In the area of IT specifically, new technologies will require new workforces to imagine and build them. Another new segment will include those who train customers on how to use them, and yet another new segment will be the workers who embrace them.
While the US certainly has economic issues, I'm not convinced in the long haul that jobs are going to be the crux of the problem. Unemployment has remained fairly steady, and wages have actually kept pace with inflation fairly well. The value of our dollar is the ultimate deciding factor, if we fall signficantly more in relation to other currency there will need to be a resurgance in the American manufacturing industry.
End users also need to be disabled from performing administrative tasks on their computers.
From my limited experience with spyware, by simply removing the user from the Administrator group you effectively cripple the majority of spyware tools. If you do not have access to modify the %SystemRoot% or make any changes to %ProgramFiles% you'll be a much safer user overall.
I would never logon to my box using root for daily activities. While spyware may be able to make modifications to the current user they will at least be unable to affect the overall system.
In any event, while I can still run a VESA-compliant driver at 800x600 it looks pretty tiny on my laptop display. I guess I'll have to patch things and proceed.
On the upside, FC3 detected just about everything else. My USB mouse worked properly as did the hard drive connected via firewire. The network install went flawlessly via NFS with the caveat that a text install was needed to work around the defective video.
Remember folks - this is still a preliminary release and should be considered Beta. You shouldn't install this on your primary workstation and expect everything to work.
Agreed. Your desktop environment should not be an all-encompassing solution. For example, just because I run Windows doesn't mean I want to use Internet Explorer to browse the web.
While freedesktop.org is a step in the right direction, I expect we need something more akin to the RedHat "Bluecurve" concept in order for Linux workstations to gain mainstream acceptance.
The desktop should be a uniform experience for the typical user. For example, when selecting "Start" (or whatever the main menu is) there should be a Text Editor situated in the Accessories folder. Actual implementation of the editor might be Emacs, vi, gedit or even Kate. Most users don't know the difference and would prefer a pre-selected grouping of apps based on their desktop environment.
So, Gnome users would get gedit and KDE users would get Kate.
Advanced users could run a utility to pick the application for that specific menu category. Windows has a similiar concept where groupings of menu options can be enabled/disabled (eg: Administrator tools menu can be toggled). While the freeform menu editor is a nice feature, for "average" (red: typical home users) it's just easier to have a preset menu selection that uses standard categorization.
Perhaps a project already exists that encompasses this kind of categorization?
If Globalsuperhypermetacorp can produce widgets for $1 when it use to cost $2, the last thing they want to do is lower the $10 SRP. Generally speaking, this is acceptable from a market perspective because there is more money flowing into the US economy.
Eventually, competition from overseas markets will drive the price down. Usually what happens is the outsourcing firm figures out how to do this on their own and realizes they can make more money by getting the "middle-man" out of the picture. This is the deathknell for the US company, and the overseas company then drives them out of business with a lower price for the same product.
While the big American company tries to lower its overhead, this is simply unfeasible since they cannot inherently sell the same widget for less than their overseas counterpart -- they depend on them to make it in the first place.
It's a vicious cycle. Entire US industries have been wiped out because of this.
I think the real question here is how viable is a US economy that is forced to perpetually reinvent itself?
Investors will lose confidence in this kind of market, and right now that's the only thing we have going for us. When foreign dollars stop pouring into American stocks, Greenspan will paint a much different picture of this.
I'm not advocating isolationism, but we should observe some common sense when it comes to our trade deficits. Let's start encouraging American businesses to produce things here, and eliminate the dumping of US jobs because of NAFTA. Keep our high-tech jobs by creating incentives for companies, it shouldn't be cheaper to have programmers in Bangladesh than Boston.
Like many of the posters in this thread, I have also tried WineX/Cedega a number of times in the past few years. While it does work for a few games, it's nowhere near the level needed for true gaming on the Linux platform.
My wife was using Cedega to play Zoo Tycoon last night in fact, I needed Linux to be up for some other work I was doing. Unfortunately, about 1 hr into the game it crashed for some unknown reason. Also, it didn't help that the text boxes were unledgable and all the dollar amounts were in a comma delimited format.
Emulators don't win platforms -- software wins platforms. When OS/2 tried to win users with a Windows emulator, the viability of a native OS/2 wordprocessor was obviated by the mere presence of this emulation tier.
Honestly - someone should take something like SDL and start building a suite of commercial games for all the major platforms.
While it's certainly cheaper to pickup 20 Dell PC's for $500 each, an integrated 12-way workstation may signify the beginning of a new desktop computing standard.
When the IBM AT first came out, $10k was the ballpark for what was a single processor at a few mhz. Now we have a dozen procs running at a few ghz in a federated workstation environment.
The application of this should not be understated. While SETI might seem like fools gold, the proliferation of this kind of computing horsepower could dramatically decrease the time needed to find life. Realistic simulations (eg: explosions) require a rack of specialized equipment that this platform obsoletes, imagine what a LANL scientist could do with this.
Just as the Sparc was the impetus for the modern PC "workstation", a 12-way personal supercomputer would open the door for a new level of desktop performance. Imagine a 16-way Dell "personal" workstation for $5k -- it's not impossible to imagine.
I can't agree more with Dvorak's frustration, this has been an ever increasing problem with MS applications in general.
After installing Office on my new Windows workstation, I couldn't do anything without reinserting the original media. The selection to Run Everything from my hard drive was made during the install -- obviously the installer chose to ignore this option. What really interests me is how the install is happening when I am only a lowly user on my local machine. Obviously, the Office installer makes it convenient for anyone to make a modification to the installation. Is this a security risk or is that just my impression?
A quick check of the directory options indicates that lowly users don't have write access. So what exactly is Office installing and where?
Equally signficantly, the user interfaces are complicated and repleat with unnecessary embelishments. I do not want a "Getting Started" box to soak up half my screen every time I launch Word. When I'm ready to write a document a blank page is perfectly acceptable, and the reason I'm launching Word is so that I can write a document. Also, I have no interest in "searching the web" from inside Word, it's perfectly acceptable that I need to start Firefox to do this.
It doesn't help that my company has standardized on MS Word, but I am using OpenOffice for documents whenever possible. It's just easier, my wordprocessor needs are nothing like what MS Word wants to offer me.
As another poster points out, the primary thinking here is to help recover SUNW which is currently hovering at the lower end of the 52 week trading cycle. It hasn't bottomed out yet, but the trend doesn't look too promising -- so, ride some good tech news from Microsoft ($3 per share dividend! Whoohooo!) and hope for the best.
There is some reality here, however. The best example I can think of is McDonalds -vs- Burger King. While you could just start up your own fast food burger chain, one of the existing brands has considerable name recognition. Sun can leverage this to expand its customer base, once consumers have accepted a brand it's very difficult to convince them that another brand is better, just as good, etc.
Remember, the Linux user with programming expertise and a rich technology background is different from the average computer user. While tech-savvy Linux affecianados can easily move to new distributions, the "average" user isn't going to have this advantage.
With that said, the brand recognition of Novell is somewhat limited. If Sun really wants to increase the value of the company they should look at acquiring the industry leader -- RedHat in this case.
Keep in mind that Google has additional avenues of business available to them. Not only have they built some phenominal search technology, but they have also demonstrated the versatility of Linux and the GooOS at maintaining a vast sea of computing hardware.
In the future it may be a Google-inspired operating system that we run for our enterprise computing tasks. The Google Search Appliance is a targeted business to test the culmination of this technology as a consumer product.
Time will tell, but I suspect this is a more robust company than the dot-bombs of the mid 90's. As always, skip the IPO and pickup stock after the initial boom cycle has given way to bust. Don't forget to read the prospectus and do the math to figure out what the company is *really* worth.
A free MS-Linux offering isn't a bad idea, but Microsoft would have to first demonstrate a profit channel for other products on Linux.
For example, if they could show a market for MS Office for Linux then it would make sense to expand further onto this platform. In all honesty, the presence of MS on Linux is immaterial, open source is still going to change the way we work with computers. The only detriment it would have is MS will emerge as irrelavant within the next decade, not an insignificant problem but also not one which open source should remain concerned about.
Not to be the devils advocate, but Microsoft has offered excellent detailed profile management via perfmon for quite some time now. You can inspect disk IO per-processes, memory per-processes, page faults, etc. etc.
It's a bit of a misnomer to characterize dtrace as the first application for doing this, although I will say it's among the first that I have seen that is scriptable (a huge advantage when troubleshooting problems remotely).
This may be the deathknell for most small startups in the VoIP sector. Only the megaconglomerates (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC) will be able to compete in this kind of arena.
Very unfortunate. I had hoped to jump onboard the VoIP bandwagon in the near future (once my area code is available), but the cost benefit could be going out the window.
Isn't this just going to enable an industry to profit from the stygma of being "sexually explicit"?
This is the same thing that Rated X did for the adult movie industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm relieved to see something finally being done about this but I think a stronger message should have been sent. Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving. Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?
For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.
This is an astute observation. My initial impression of TrailBlazer is that the thumbnail history can provide visual cues for navigating your browser history and that users will respond favorably to this because these pages will look familiar. Once there are a lot of pages (500-1000) it becomes more difficult for a user to spot the page they are looking for.
The application needs to provide a way to highlight pages that had significance. In other words, if you spend long enough on a particular page then it is fully colorized; otherwise, the page is slightly greyed out.
This is great stuff, btw. It's nice to see an application that was designed to solve a stated problem, there is clearly a niche here for a capability to help users manage historic web browsing better.
Features are almost completely ignored. The fact is, my OpenOffice does more of what I need to do than MS Office. I can author documents and when I'm done publish them as PDF (File - Export As PDF...).
Can MS Office do that? Sure, I can install a "PDF Printer" and some third party utilities, but out of the box OO can create a PDF suitable for sharing with anyone on any platform.
The argument that you're suddenly incompatible with everyone else is specious. To be perfectly honest, one of the most incompatible applications out there is MS Word. If you're going to share Word docs with anyone, you better make sure they are running the same version of Word; otherwise, YMMV.
Organizations currently standardized on Word are perfectly capable of re-standardizing on something else (like OpenOffice). OO is another option for any sized company out there, if a migration is a barrier for entry then the same statement can easily be made for the next version of Microsoft Office.
If MS wants to win, they'll need to do a better job here. This is pure marketing glitz, and to be perfectly honest most of the major tech companies (HP, Sun, and Microsoft) have been especially guilty of doing this as-of-late. I think we're on the verge of another tech bubble.
This is a good point, IMHO. I think the tide might turn against a commodity softare marketplace as more age groups express a hobbiest interest in computer software and operating systems.
At that point, the barrier to entry for a non-commercial non-bundled software solution becomes quite small. With better than 75% of the population well educated on computer technologies, pretty soon everyone will feel comfortable downloading & installing an operating system.
My original message was alluding to IPsec, and widespread adoption of something like IPv6 would take care of this altogether.
"Automatic encryption of all traffic by the communication subsystem may be called for, however, to ensure something else ? that a misbehaving user or application program does not deliberately transmit information that should not be exposed."
It's worth nothing that your link does not discount the viability of packet level encryption at the network layer, only that it should be considered optional.
To go along with that, the next generation "start fresh" design usually suffers from the second-system effect. Take a look at OS/360 to understand how that plays out.
I'm not sure this kind of re-work of IP is really what we need. The system can already provide the kind of dynamic re-routing that you might need in a changing environment, and at different layers of the OSI model you can introduce delivery validation & confirmation. The wireless argument is a valid one, but maybe we should focus on new standards for that.
Finally, one thing that is missing from the discussion is security. If we make any enhancement to IP, this would seem the most likely candidate (ie: packet-level encryption at the transport layer).
What if a page from the Microsoft book is borrowed here.
Let's produced updated versions of popular packages (Samba, Mozilla, gcc, etc.) that check the platform name via uname(),/proc or somesuch; and report the program as unable to continue if a SCO operating system is found.
This would at least prohibit SCO from circulating newer versions without making modification to the code themselves. Of course, if they did this they would have to do so publically or would themselves be in violation of GPL.
"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. If you would like a license from Microsoft, you need to contact Microsoft directly."
You must include this disclaimer in any implementation, I'm a little hazy on the implications of this verbage. It looks like anyone can implement Microsoft Caller ID for Email, but for those who want to use it there may be a license you need to acquire directly from MS (presumably at cost).
While I like the fact that MS is making an effort to build something that works with existing email system, at this point I'm convinced that users are sufficiently frustrated that they are willing to consider a new mail transfer protocol altogether.
Something with a public key / private key scheme using a certifier comes to mind, which would not only provide identity but also deal with encryption of messages to provide confidentiality.
Everything is good as long as they stay with an x86 derivative. The PocketPC is a debacle resulting from multiple CPU's (MIPS, ARM, ARMV4, etc.), everything is grand on CE until your interop assembly can't find the DLL it's looking for.
As Microsoft replaces these DLL's with managed code things will get better, but we are still many generations away from this.
I diverge. My real response here is to comment on the questionable utility of this kind of device. My desk drawer is littered with technological titanics, including a Palm VII, RIM and the Apple Newton. None of these "portable" devices could really serve the role as a PDA for me, they were just too big & clunky.
Meanwhile, my little Samsung cellphone has an address book & calander -- it has proven itself as the most ideal information device. A heavier PDA like this would not entice me, if I needed something like this I would simply bring my laptop with me.
It's a neat geek toy but I'm not sure these devices are truly practical.
"Also new is the ability to import PDF files into KWord and make changes to the document. Support for Microsoft document- formats has improved as well."
Haven't tried it yet, but this feature definitely peaks my interest.
The Uzi Nissan v Nissan case is quite different. Uzi had Nissan Computers which is not the same business as Nissan Motor Corp, so when soliciting customers one would generally recognize that these are different Nissan's. Furthermore, the domain name matched his last name exactly; therefore, he was not trying to impersonate Nissan Motors or make fun of them in any way.
The Uzi case was definitely about the corporate monoliths trying to bully the little guy. Another reasonably good example is Unicom but fortunately the company wasn't big enough to win.
I feel sorry for Uzi, he was doing business with his name and big corporate interest bullied him out of his domain. Mike Rowe, on the other hand, was poking fun at a company and doing business in a similiar area -- consumers would be unable to identify the difference between these two names.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, something not considered is the cumulative affect of new technologies on the workforce. In the larger scheme of things, while a robot can do the work of 10 men it requires 2 men to maintain it and 20 men to build it.
Thus, *more* jobs are created as a result of technology.
In the area of IT specifically, new technologies will require new workforces to imagine and build them. Another new segment will include those who train customers on how to use them, and yet another new segment will be the workers who embrace them.
While the US certainly has economic issues, I'm not convinced in the long haul that jobs are going to be the crux of the problem. Unemployment has remained fairly steady, and wages have actually kept pace with inflation fairly well. The value of our dollar is the ultimate deciding factor, if we fall signficantly more in relation to other currency there will need to be a resurgance in the American manufacturing industry.
End users also need to be disabled from performing administrative tasks on their computers.
From my limited experience with spyware, by simply removing the user from the Administrator group you effectively cripple the majority of spyware tools. If you do not have access to modify the %SystemRoot% or make any changes to %ProgramFiles% you'll be a much safer user overall.
I would never logon to my box using root for daily activities. While spyware may be able to make modifications to the current user they will at least be unable to affect the overall system.
Well, I made the mistake of throwing FC3 on my Sony Vaio laptop over the weekend. Unfortunately, this seems to apply to me:
= 10 84
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id
In any event, while I can still run a VESA-compliant driver at 800x600 it looks pretty tiny on my laptop display. I guess I'll have to patch things and proceed.
On the upside, FC3 detected just about everything else. My USB mouse worked properly as did the hard drive connected via firewire. The network install went flawlessly via NFS with the caveat that a text install was needed to work around the defective video.
Remember folks - this is still a preliminary release and should be considered Beta. You shouldn't install this on your primary workstation and expect everything to work.
Agreed. Your desktop environment should not be an all-encompassing solution. For example, just because I run Windows doesn't mean I want to use Internet Explorer to browse the web.
While freedesktop.org is a step in the right direction, I expect we need something more akin to the RedHat "Bluecurve" concept in order for Linux workstations to gain mainstream acceptance.
The desktop should be a uniform experience for the typical user. For example, when selecting "Start" (or whatever the main menu is) there should be a Text Editor situated in the Accessories folder. Actual implementation of the editor might be Emacs, vi, gedit or even Kate. Most users don't know the difference and would prefer a pre-selected grouping of apps based on their desktop environment.
So, Gnome users would get gedit and KDE users would get Kate.
Advanced users could run a utility to pick the application for that specific menu category. Windows has a similiar concept where groupings of menu options can be enabled/disabled (eg: Administrator tools menu can be toggled). While the freeform menu editor is a nice feature, for "average" (red: typical home users) it's just easier to have a preset menu selection that uses standard categorization.
Perhaps a project already exists that encompasses this kind of categorization?
If Globalsuperhypermetacorp can produce widgets for $1 when it use to cost $2, the last thing they want to do is lower the $10 SRP. Generally speaking, this is acceptable from a market perspective because there is more money flowing into the US economy.
Eventually, competition from overseas markets will drive the price down. Usually what happens is the outsourcing firm figures out how to do this on their own and realizes they can make more money by getting the "middle-man" out of the picture. This is the deathknell for the US company, and the overseas company then drives them out of business with a lower price for the same product.
While the big American company tries to lower its overhead, this is simply unfeasible since they cannot inherently sell the same widget for less than their overseas counterpart -- they depend on them to make it in the first place.
It's a vicious cycle. Entire US industries have been wiped out because of this.
I think the real question here is how viable is a US economy that is forced to perpetually reinvent itself?
Investors will lose confidence in this kind of market, and right now that's the only thing we have going for us. When foreign dollars stop pouring into American stocks, Greenspan will paint a much different picture of this.
I'm not advocating isolationism, but we should observe some common sense when it comes to our trade deficits. Let's start encouraging American businesses to produce things here, and eliminate the dumping of US jobs because of NAFTA. Keep our high-tech jobs by creating incentives for companies, it shouldn't be cheaper to have programmers in Bangladesh than Boston.
Like many of the posters in this thread, I have also tried WineX/Cedega a number of times in the past few years. While it does work for a few games, it's nowhere near the level needed for true gaming on the Linux platform.
My wife was using Cedega to play Zoo Tycoon last night in fact, I needed Linux to be up for some other work I was doing. Unfortunately, about 1 hr into the game it crashed for some unknown reason. Also, it didn't help that the text boxes were unledgable and all the dollar amounts were in a comma delimited format.
Emulators don't win platforms -- software wins platforms. When OS/2 tried to win users with a Windows emulator, the viability of a native OS/2 wordprocessor was obviated by the mere presence of this emulation tier.
Honestly - someone should take something like SDL and start building a suite of commercial games for all the major platforms.
While it's certainly cheaper to pickup 20 Dell PC's for $500 each, an integrated 12-way workstation may signify the beginning of a new desktop computing standard.
When the IBM AT first came out, $10k was the ballpark for what was a single processor at a few mhz. Now we have a dozen procs running at a few ghz in a federated workstation environment.
The application of this should not be understated. While SETI might seem like fools gold, the proliferation of this kind of computing horsepower could dramatically decrease the time needed to find life. Realistic simulations (eg: explosions) require a rack of specialized equipment that this platform obsoletes, imagine what a LANL scientist could do with this.
Just as the Sparc was the impetus for the modern PC "workstation", a 12-way personal supercomputer would open the door for a new level of desktop performance. Imagine a 16-way Dell "personal" workstation for $5k -- it's not impossible to imagine.
I can't agree more with Dvorak's frustration, this has been an ever increasing problem with MS applications in general.
After installing Office on my new Windows workstation, I couldn't do anything without reinserting the original media. The selection to Run Everything from my hard drive was made during the install -- obviously the installer chose to ignore this option. What really interests me is how the install is happening when I am only a lowly user on my local machine. Obviously, the Office installer makes it convenient for anyone to make a modification to the installation. Is this a security risk or is that just my impression?
A quick check of the directory options indicates that lowly users don't have write access. So what exactly is Office installing and where?
Equally signficantly, the user interfaces are complicated and repleat with unnecessary embelishments. I do not want a "Getting Started" box to soak up half my screen every time I launch Word. When I'm ready to write a document a blank page is perfectly acceptable, and the reason I'm launching Word is so that I can write a document. Also, I have no interest in "searching the web" from inside Word, it's perfectly acceptable that I need to start Firefox to do this.
It doesn't help that my company has standardized on MS Word, but I am using OpenOffice for documents whenever possible. It's just easier, my wordprocessor needs are nothing like what MS Word wants to offer me.
As another poster points out, the primary thinking here is to help recover SUNW which is currently hovering at the lower end of the 52 week trading cycle. It hasn't bottomed out yet, but the trend doesn't look too promising -- so, ride some good tech news from Microsoft ($3 per share dividend! Whoohooo!) and hope for the best.
There is some reality here, however. The best example I can think of is McDonalds -vs- Burger King. While you could just start up your own fast food burger chain, one of the existing brands has considerable name recognition. Sun can leverage this to expand its customer base, once consumers have accepted a brand it's very difficult to convince them that another brand is better, just as good, etc.
Remember, the Linux user with programming expertise and a rich technology background is different from the average computer user. While tech-savvy Linux affecianados can easily move to new distributions, the "average" user isn't going to have this advantage.
With that said, the brand recognition of Novell is somewhat limited. If Sun really wants to increase the value of the company they should look at acquiring the industry leader -- RedHat in this case.
Keep in mind that Google has additional avenues of business available to them. Not only have they built some phenominal search technology, but they have also demonstrated the versatility of Linux and the GooOS at maintaining a vast sea of computing hardware.
In the future it may be a Google-inspired operating system that we run for our enterprise computing tasks. The Google Search Appliance is a targeted business to test the culmination of this technology as a consumer product.
Time will tell, but I suspect this is a more robust company than the dot-bombs of the mid 90's. As always, skip the IPO and pickup stock after the initial boom cycle has given way to bust. Don't forget to read the prospectus and do the math to figure out what the company is *really* worth.
They did, it was called Xenix.
A free MS-Linux offering isn't a bad idea, but Microsoft would have to first demonstrate a profit channel for other products on Linux.
For example, if they could show a market for MS Office for Linux then it would make sense to expand further onto this platform. In all honesty, the presence of MS on Linux is immaterial, open source is still going to change the way we work with computers. The only detriment it would have is MS will emerge as irrelavant within the next decade, not an insignificant problem but also not one which open source should remain concerned about.
Not to be the devils advocate, but Microsoft has offered excellent detailed profile management via perfmon for quite some time now. You can inspect disk IO per-processes, memory per-processes, page faults, etc. etc.
It's a bit of a misnomer to characterize dtrace as the first application for doing this, although I will say it's among the first that I have seen that is scriptable (a huge advantage when troubleshooting problems remotely).
This may be the deathknell for most small startups in the VoIP sector. Only the megaconglomerates (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, SBC) will be able to compete in this kind of arena.
Very unfortunate. I had hoped to jump onboard the VoIP bandwagon in the near future (once my area code is available), but the cost benefit could be going out the window.
Isn't this just going to enable an industry to profit from the stygma of being "sexually explicit"?
This is the same thing that Rated X did for the adult movie industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm relieved to see something finally being done about this but I think a stronger message should have been sent. Simply put, the email is unsolicited which means the recipient has no way to prevent the mail from arriving. Do you honestly think that curious teenagers who receive a sexually explicit content email (and it's labeled as such) aren't going to take a gander at it?
For that matter, I don't want my 10 year old having to sift through this stuff either. Sure, spam filters can do excellent work now but it's still not 100%.
This is an astute observation. My initial impression of TrailBlazer is that the thumbnail history can provide visual cues for navigating your browser history and that users will respond favorably to this because these pages will look familiar. Once there are a lot of pages (500-1000) it becomes more difficult for a user to spot the page they are looking for.
The application needs to provide a way to highlight pages that had significance. In other words, if you spend long enough on a particular page then it is fully colorized; otherwise, the page is slightly greyed out.
This is great stuff, btw. It's nice to see an application that was designed to solve a stated problem, there is clearly a niche here for a capability to help users manage historic web browsing better.
Features are almost completely ignored. The fact is, my OpenOffice does more of what I need to do than MS Office. I can author documents and when I'm done publish them as PDF (File - Export As PDF...).
Can MS Office do that? Sure, I can install a "PDF Printer" and some third party utilities, but out of the box OO can create a PDF suitable for sharing with anyone on any platform.
The argument that you're suddenly incompatible with everyone else is specious. To be perfectly honest, one of the most incompatible applications out there is MS Word. If you're going to share Word docs with anyone, you better make sure they are running the same version of Word; otherwise, YMMV.
Organizations currently standardized on Word are perfectly capable of re-standardizing on something else (like OpenOffice). OO is another option for any sized company out there, if a migration is a barrier for entry then the same statement can easily be made for the next version of Microsoft Office.
If MS wants to win, they'll need to do a better job here. This is pure marketing glitz, and to be perfectly honest most of the major tech companies (HP, Sun, and Microsoft) have been especially guilty of doing this as-of-late. I think we're on the verge of another tech bubble.
This is a good point, IMHO. I think the tide might turn against a commodity softare marketplace as more age groups express a hobbiest interest in computer software and operating systems.
At that point, the barrier to entry for a non-commercial non-bundled software solution becomes quite small. With better than 75% of the population well educated on computer technologies, pretty soon everyone will feel comfortable downloading & installing an operating system.
Partly my fault as well, my original posting never bothered to mention that I was _assuming_ encryption would still be person to person.
You are perfectly correct, if encryption was done universally from node-to-node then it would be trivial to defeat.
The more I think about it, with the dynamic re-routing capabilities native to IPv6 and IPsec support we really don't need another protocol.
My original message was alluding to IPsec, and widespread adoption of something like IPv6 would take care of this altogether.
"Automatic encryption of all traffic by the communication subsystem may be called for, however, to ensure something else ? that a misbehaving user or application program does not deliberately transmit information that should not be exposed."
It's worth nothing that your link does not discount the viability of packet level encryption at the network layer, only that it should be considered optional.
To go along with that, the next generation "start fresh" design usually suffers from the second-system effect. Take a look at OS/360 to understand how that plays out.
I'm not sure this kind of re-work of IP is really what we need. The system can already provide the kind of dynamic re-routing that you might need in a changing environment, and at different layers of the OSI model you can introduce delivery validation & confirmation. The wireless argument is a valid one, but maybe we should focus on new standards for that.
Finally, one thing that is missing from the discussion is security. If we make any enhancement to IP, this would seem the most likely candidate (ie: packet-level encryption at the transport layer).
What if a page from the Microsoft book is borrowed here.
/proc or somesuch; and report the program as unable to continue if a SCO operating system is found.
Let's produced updated versions of popular packages (Samba, Mozilla, gcc, etc.) that check the platform name via uname(),
This would at least prohibit SCO from circulating newer versions without making modification to the code themselves. Of course, if they did this they would have to do so publically or would themselves be in violation of GPL.
"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. If you would like a license from Microsoft, you need to contact Microsoft directly."
You must include this disclaimer in any implementation, I'm a little hazy on the implications of this verbage. It looks like anyone can implement Microsoft Caller ID for Email, but for those who want to use it there may be a license you need to acquire directly from MS (presumably at cost).
While I like the fact that MS is making an effort to build something that works with existing email system, at this point I'm convinced that users are sufficiently frustrated that they are willing to consider a new mail transfer protocol altogether.
Something with a public key / private key scheme using a certifier comes to mind, which would not only provide identity but also deal with encryption of messages to provide confidentiality.
Everything is good as long as they stay with an x86 derivative. The PocketPC is a debacle resulting from multiple CPU's (MIPS, ARM, ARMV4, etc.), everything is grand on CE until your interop assembly can't find the DLL it's looking for.
As Microsoft replaces these DLL's with managed code things will get better, but we are still many generations away from this.
I diverge. My real response here is to comment on the questionable utility of this kind of device. My desk drawer is littered with technological titanics, including a Palm VII, RIM and the Apple Newton. None of these "portable" devices could really serve the role as a PDA for me, they were just too big & clunky.
Meanwhile, my little Samsung cellphone has an address book & calander -- it has proven itself as the most ideal information device. A heavier PDA like this would not entice me, if I needed something like this I would simply bring my laptop with me.
It's a neat geek toy but I'm not sure these devices are truly practical.
"Also new is the ability to import PDF files into KWord and make changes to the document. Support for Microsoft document- formats has improved as well."
Haven't tried it yet, but this feature definitely peaks my interest.
The Uzi Nissan v Nissan case is quite different. Uzi had Nissan Computers which is not the same business as Nissan Motor Corp, so when soliciting customers one would generally recognize that these are different Nissan's. Furthermore, the domain name matched his last name exactly; therefore, he was not trying to impersonate Nissan Motors or make fun of them in any way.
The Uzi case was definitely about the corporate monoliths trying to bully the little guy. Another reasonably good example is Unicom but fortunately the company wasn't big enough to win.
I feel sorry for Uzi, he was doing business with his name and big corporate interest bullied him out of his domain. Mike Rowe, on the other hand, was poking fun at a company and doing business in a similiar area -- consumers would be unable to identify the difference between these two names.