No I do not think it is the largest. For example by the end of 2005 the 70,000 workstations used by the French Gendarmerie will use Open Office. This is the biggest French migration. The Gendamerie hope to save 2 million euros per year. 10,000 computers bought since 2004 will have OO preinstalled. The Gendarmerie say this saves 75 euros per PC for an MS Office license.
The Gendarmerie say it is not just a simple question of money. Managing Microsofts complicated license structure was becoming a nightmare for the Gendarmerie - reason alone for the migration.
The Gendarmerie is also redevloping in Java a number of standard VB macros written for word to automate form filling. The idea is to leave open a possible future migration to Linux. XML will be used as a storage format along with PDF and open document formats. Stephane Kimmerlin for MS France says it is not a victory for OO, the Gendarmerie only used a fraction of MS Office's features so didn't really need the power offered by MS Office.
In France the interior ministry will move 50,000 workstations to Open Office, the finance ministry is moving 8,000 PCs to OO, the public works ministry is looking to move 60,000 PCs to OO and Customs have migrated 16,000 PCs to OO and its use is mandatory since January 2005.
Hope that proves useful.
David
ps I've consulted for the French Education ministry for their Antares project - a Java based system for managing recruitment which used JBoss and also Weblogic.
> Imagine saying that to your manager, who then says, "Great. Let's get RedHat." Somewhere along the line, you have to make a tiny modification to support some odd piece of hardware, and suddenly your support contract is worth less than the paper it isn't printed on. What is he going to think of your Open Source when something essential breaks that you can't fix and Red Hat/won't/ fix?
Well as someone who has 20 years software development experience I would suggest that I would roll back my minor changes initially to get a working stable system without the support of hardware X then I would look at the fix I made and figure out why it doesn't work. This whole Microsoft argument is bunk - if I'm making changes to code then obviously I am the most competent person to support those changes, otherwise I wouldn't be making the changes in the first place.
I was in part thinking of Jenstar's blog. It would be nice if Google was a bit more transparent about these things but I suppose there is potentially so much money at stake with people trying to game the system.
Apologies for being a bit vague in my OP, it was late and I should have explained what I was thinking of more clearly. It is just whenever/. has one of these stories a number of the posts are based on what Google was doing way back when.
British Telecom Labs at Martlesham Heath are Haunted, well maybe. One of the engineers doing an all nighter reported seeing a group of airmen walking down the corridor, apart from the fact that airmen were a pretty rare occurence in the labs the thing that most freaked him out was that their legs dissapeared into the ground from the mid-thigh down.
We did some research. Martlesham Heath was a former WWII airbase. The building where the ghostly apparition was seen was the site aircrew mess - only, and here is the rub, the current building's floor level was 1 meter higher than the old building so the ghosts were still walking around on the old floor level.
Needless to say I never did overtime and my boss never asked.
But the flip side of what you say is that if your clicks do not convert to sales you get paid less per click and advertisers also pay Google less. Indeed some recent "information" (if such stuff really exists about Google) and as you imply in your post is that if you get SmartPriced for one site/page/group of pages in your Google account the rest of your sites can suffer. This is a bit of an aside but has had many "publishers" up in arms recently.
It is not an affliate scheme and the "flaw" you mentioned is a worry but moves some way to tying in clicks with real conversions which will in turn combat some forms of click fraud.
Back around the Gulf war Cringely made another observation about the duo which I like. He said Gates was like the Sultan of Kuwait, not wanting the boat rocked and milking the profits from his empire. Jobs was like Hussein, firing his revolver in the air in front of a crowd of fanatics and telling the rest of the world that they are "full of shit".
If you want a very good book about Apple up to the time of Sculley and Jobs' early years try to get hold of The Journey is the Reward by Jeffery Young. West of Eden, the End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose is also another good book at this time. Oh, and if you want a laff read Sculley's book Odyssey - a more talentless f*ck and bigger blowhard you could not wish to hire to ruin your business, the guy obviously only made it by marrying the boss's daughter. Sculley is all that is wrong with corporate America. The book must rank with "The Road Ahead" as the deranged ramblings of someone who just didn't get it.:-)
You forget the biggest point... if Apple went away who would Microsoft (and some Linux desktops in that they slavishly follow the M$ user interface) copy and get ideas from? Don't say they would hire the Apple engineers, M$ obviously doesn't provide the right environment for innovation and would stifle anyone they hire.
SmartPricing is a technology introduced by Google last year that enables advertisers to report conversion rates for ads and pay less, much less, for non-converting clicks. It is not perfect and publishers are not happy with it.
Advertisers can also choose sites they wish to advertise on, this stops their ads appearing on MFA or other scam sites.
One thing that Google has done is to only charge when a click results in some action on the advertiser's site - a sale, a signup for more information, that kind of thing. They do this by supplying advertisers with some code to insert on their "results pages". It seems like a lot of advertisers either haven't signed up for this or haven't been offered this option by Google. Anyway this seems like the way to go.
I don't know if you guys get up out of mom's basement much at night but I've noticed that Mars has been very close for a few days now.
If you are in Europe you can see it in the east very high in the sky... around 11pm, it is the big red star, fourth rock from the sun. You can resolve it to a small disk even with 10x binoculars although my neighbour has a huge telescope which I will have to see if I can borrow.
It may be closest at a certain time but it won't make much difference if you catch it a few hours or even days later, it is still very close.
> Currently it's very easy for Google to be non-evil -- Google search, Google maps, GMail are all low-consequence activities. Once real money is involved this will change.
I have done the same in my house, although we have far fewer bulbs than you. We have a mix of 75w equivalent (15w real consumption) and 60w equivalane (11w real consumption). There is a difference in quality. Zenith are good and we also have some by a no-name manufacturer. Both start up instantly and, as you say, no-one has noticed the difference although best not to have the bulbs exposed. We have some other bulbs - paid less than a Euro (1.20 dollar) and they turn on instantly but take 5 minutes to reach full brightness - they are used in the hall.
We also have some legacy halogen bulbs which seem quite efficient.
Really if you intend staying in your home 5+ years go fluorescent.
In Europe LED's are heavily used in traffic lights and some car / motor cycle rear lights and of course they have been a godsend to cyclists where power consumption has always been at a premimum (the UK government recently legalised them for bicycles). Oh... and of course Japanese hi-fi manufacturers love them!
thanks for taking the trouble to reply, as the mods say that is very informative. Damn those rootkits. I would suspect that the hardest trick to pull off is a raw dump of the fs but that is not very convient to manipulate.
I think the weakest link in most companies are idiot staff (like an ex-boss who brought more viruses into the company via his laptop than a Bombay hooker) and idiot sysadmins. In years of having a computer directly connected to the Internet I only got hit once when I installed a dodgy binary. I worked for France Telecom where we were not even given Internet access due to the risk of us bringing viruses etc onto the network. You know what, Sasser took out all our servers in the first wave and we were off-line for 2 days. Like, how did that happen? It seemed like the Sysadmins had configured the firewall to stop the staff getting out but allow worms in (by the way that is top secret so don't tell anyone;-).
> I haven't seen anything like it in the default installation for any Linux distros.
You could just tar the rfs or a selection of critical system files, copy to tape, untar and md5sum those files on a non-networked box you keep hanging around for the purpose. For a limited number of key servers this wouldn't be too onerous.
Now md5 hacks exist but a combination of creation date, filesize and md5 would be a fairly good fingerprint - or you could just diff against known good versions for a limited set of system files. The rootkit would need to hack your tar or other command or your tape driver or something to munge the files you are writing to tape.
All this would work fine on running systems. I could knock up a shell script to do this in 5 minutes. It really doesn't sound like rocket salad to me but hey what would I know? I'm just a model.
Maybe it is a case of emporor's new clothes but nothing in those screen shots has me jizzing my panties, not even close... but then I'm quite happy for the Operating System to keep as much out of my face as possible.
I'm not so sure Tristan. I worked in Africa, in the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in the fall of 1995 on a project to connect the African Development Bank to the Internet (384kbps vsat link). Okay the Ivory Coast has suffered some instability of late but in the main cities the people were quite computer litterate and well educated thanks to a French system their former "colonial masters" imposed on them.
At the time there was a lot of interest in Linux from the bank staff and some people I met from Africom - a local ISP. They thought it was a better choice compared to M$ as there was much more information available in the public domain about the system and the workings were more transparent.
The problem with Microsoft is that everthing comes with an agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
A laser? The versions of 123 I owned had a pinhole through the media - used to trash floppy heads.
No I do not think it is the largest. For example by the end of 2005 the 70,000 workstations used by the French Gendarmerie will use Open Office. This is the biggest French migration. The Gendamerie hope to save 2 million euros per year. 10,000 computers bought since 2004 will have OO preinstalled. The Gendarmerie say this saves 75 euros per PC for an MS Office license.
The Gendarmerie say it is not just a simple question of money. Managing Microsofts complicated license structure was becoming a nightmare for the Gendarmerie - reason alone for the migration.
The Gendarmerie is also redevloping in Java a number of standard VB macros written for word to automate form filling. The idea is to leave open a possible future migration to Linux. XML will be used as a storage format along with PDF and open document formats. Stephane Kimmerlin for MS France says it is not a victory for OO, the Gendarmerie only used a fraction of MS Office's features so didn't really need the power offered by MS Office.
In France the interior ministry will move 50,000 workstations to Open Office, the finance ministry is moving 8,000 PCs to OO, the public works ministry is looking to move 60,000 PCs to OO and Customs have migrated 16,000 PCs to OO and its use is mandatory since January 2005.
Hope that proves useful.
David
ps I've consulted for the French Education ministry for their Antares project - a Java based system for managing recruitment which used JBoss and also Weblogic.
> Imagine saying that to your manager, who then says, "Great. Let's get RedHat." Somewhere along the line, you have to make a tiny modification to support some odd piece of hardware, and suddenly your support contract is worth less than the paper it isn't printed on. What is he going to think of your Open Source when something essential breaks that you can't fix and Red Hat /won't/ fix?
Well as someone who has 20 years software development experience I would suggest that I would roll back my minor changes initially to get a working stable system without the support of hardware X then I would look at the fix I made and figure out why it doesn't work. This whole Microsoft argument is bunk - if I'm making changes to code then obviously I am the most competent person to support those changes, otherwise I wouldn't be making the changes in the first place.
I was in part thinking of Jenstar's blog. It would be nice if Google was a bit more transparent about these things but I suppose there is potentially so much money at stake with people trying to game the system.
/. has one of these stories a number of the posts are based on what Google was doing way back when.
Apologies for being a bit vague in my OP, it was late and I should have explained what I was thinking of more clearly. It is just whenever
British Telecom Labs at Martlesham Heath are Haunted, well maybe. One of the engineers doing an all nighter reported seeing a group of airmen walking down the corridor, apart from the fact that airmen were a pretty rare occurence in the labs the thing that most freaked him out was that their legs dissapeared into the ground from the mid-thigh down.
We did some research. Martlesham Heath was a former WWII airbase. The building where the ghostly apparition was seen was the site aircrew mess - only, and here is the rub, the current building's floor level was 1 meter higher than the old building so the ghosts were still walking around on the old floor level.
Needless to say I never did overtime and my boss never asked.
But the flip side of what you say is that if your clicks do not convert to sales you get paid less per click and advertisers also pay Google less. Indeed some recent "information" (if such stuff really exists about Google) and as you imply in your post is that if you get SmartPriced for one site/page/group of pages in your Google account the rest of your sites can suffer. This is a bit of an aside but has had many "publishers" up in arms recently.
It is not an affliate scheme and the "flaw" you mentioned is a worry but moves some way to tying in clicks with real conversions which will in turn combat some forms of click fraud.
If you want a very good book about Apple up to the time of Sculley and Jobs' early years try to get hold of The Journey is the Reward by Jeffery Young. West of Eden, the End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose is also another good book at this time. Oh, and if you want a laff read Sculley's book Odyssey - a more talentless f*ck and bigger blowhard you could not wish to hire to ruin your business, the guy obviously only made it by marrying the boss's daughter. Sculley is all that is wrong with corporate America. The book must rank with "The Road Ahead" as the deranged ramblings of someone who just didn't get it. :-)
You forget the biggest point... if Apple went away who would Microsoft (and some Linux desktops in that they slavishly follow the M$ user interface) copy and get ideas from? Don't say they would hire the Apple engineers, M$ obviously doesn't provide the right environment for innovation and would stifle anyone they hire.
SmartPricing is a technology introduced by Google last year that enables advertisers to report conversion rates for ads and pay less, much less, for non-converting clicks. It is not perfect and publishers are not happy with it.
Advertisers can also choose sites they wish to advertise on, this stops their ads appearing on MFA or other scam sites.
Read about Google's SmartPricing
One thing that Google has done is to only charge when a click results in some action on the advertiser's site - a sale, a signup for more information, that kind of thing. They do this by supplying advertisers with some code to insert on their "results pages". It seems like a lot of advertisers either haven't signed up for this or haven't been offered this option by Google. Anyway this seems like the way to go.
I don't know if you guys get up out of mom's basement much at night but I've noticed that Mars has been very close for a few days now.
If you are in Europe you can see it in the east very high in the sky... around 11pm, it is the big red star, fourth rock from the sun. You can resolve it to a small disk even with 10x binoculars although my neighbour has a huge telescope which I will have to see if I can borrow.
It may be closest at a certain time but it won't make much difference if you catch it a few hours or even days later, it is still very close.
Step 1: Functional demo
Step 2: Dramatic increases in stability
Step 3: More user friendly and natural interface
Step 4: Performance optimization.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profits!
> Currently it's very easy for Google to be non-evil -- Google search, Google maps, GMail are all low-consequence activities. Once real money is involved this will change.
You mean like AdSense and AdWords?
Google's recent patent covers just this area, obviously they don't eat their own sh*t.
I have done the same in my house, although we have far fewer bulbs than you. We have a mix of 75w equivalent (15w real consumption) and 60w equivalane (11w real consumption). There is a difference in quality. Zenith are good and we also have some by a no-name manufacturer. Both start up instantly and, as you say, no-one has noticed the difference although best not to have the bulbs exposed. We have some other bulbs - paid less than a Euro (1.20 dollar) and they turn on instantly but take 5 minutes to reach full brightness - they are used in the hall.
We also have some legacy halogen bulbs which seem quite efficient.
Really if you intend staying in your home 5+ years go fluorescent.
In Europe LED's are heavily used in traffic lights and some car / motor cycle rear lights and of course they have been a godsend to cyclists where power consumption has always been at a premimum (the UK government recently legalised them for bicycles). Oh... and of course Japanese hi-fi manufacturers love them!
thanks for taking the trouble to reply, as the mods say that is very informative. Damn those rootkits. I would suspect that the hardest trick to pull off is a raw dump of the fs but that is not very convient to manipulate.
;-).
I think the weakest link in most companies are idiot staff (like an ex-boss who brought more viruses into the company via his laptop than a Bombay hooker) and idiot sysadmins. In years of having a computer directly connected to the Internet I only got hit once when I installed a dodgy binary. I worked for France Telecom where we were not even given Internet access due to the risk of us bringing viruses etc onto the network. You know what, Sasser took out all our servers in the first wave and we were off-line for 2 days. Like, how did that happen? It seemed like the Sysadmins had configured the firewall to stop the staff getting out but allow worms in (by the way that is top secret so don't tell anyone
You could just tar the rfs or a selection of critical system files, copy to tape, untar and md5sum those files on a non-networked box you keep hanging around for the purpose. For a limited number of key servers this wouldn't be too onerous.
Now md5 hacks exist but a combination of creation date, filesize and md5 would be a fairly good fingerprint - or you could just diff against known good versions for a limited set of system files. The rootkit would need to hack your tar or other command or your tape driver or something to munge the files you are writing to tape.
All this would work fine on running systems. I could knock up a shell script to do this in 5 minutes. It really doesn't sound like rocket salad to me but hey what would I know? I'm just a model.
md5ing a system with the md5 program on the system under test sounds like poor practise to me.
Maybe it is a case of emporor's new clothes but nothing in those screen shots has me jizzing my panties, not even close... but then I'm quite happy for the Operating System to keep as much out of my face as possible.
>> Why not store all your media in a single location? That's a much simpler solution.
> because whichever p2p software by default stores it in one place, and something else stores it in another
awe c'on you just want to search for all that pr0n before you take your computer into Circuit City for an upgrade!
I'm not so sure Tristan. I worked in Africa, in the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in the fall of 1995 on a project to connect the African Development Bank to the Internet (384kbps vsat link). Okay the Ivory Coast has suffered some instability of late but in the main cities the people were quite computer litterate and well educated thanks to a French system their former "colonial masters" imposed on them.
At the time there was a lot of interest in Linux from the bank staff and some people I met from Africom - a local ISP. They thought it was a better choice compared to M$ as there was much more information available in the public domain about the system and the workings were more transparent.
The problem with Microsoft is that everthing comes with an agenda.
> Google is warning they may lose their '@gmail.com' addresses in the future. All new signups from the UK will be assigned '@googlemail.com' addresses
That will be good, all the GBs of spam I get each day will take a while to track me down.
> I once had a Lada does that count ?
no because it is a Fiat 124 or something
> I assume the reason why the workers received oxygen was to assist with the heavy labor they had to do.
more likely they are all smoking 100 day unfiltered cigarettes supplied by BAT industries