There is a French Journalist Marie Monique ROBIN who wrote a book
on Monsanto and its GMO Products. There was a TV documentary done by the same person. I watched it.
I must say that if I am rather favorable to controlled GMO use, the way monsanto designs their product and their method are frightening. Even if the documentary has a strong anti-GMO bias, the objection (on food safety law and on incomplete studies) are more than troubling.
This is much worse than Microsoft. It may be necessary to investagate deeply in Monsanto's practices and sanction the abuse in order to save the very GMO technology. These guys are defnitly bad.
Ah, this is exactly the kind of situation that demonstrate how the network neutrality dogma is hurting. To have a per packet fair policy is just fine when existing infrastructure can wistand the load.
Now with the wonderfull IP / TCP whatever protocol, not beeing able to diffenciate traffic per user and per session end to end in the network lead the following situation: When the capacity is reduced (such incidents, maintenance, etc) or if traffic increases (chrismas, special events, etc.) where everybody get hurt instead of nicely rejecting the overflow and let the other users enjoy the network use.
I am a long time advocate of the demise of the so called "stupid network" in favor of an more advanced IP usage (V6? V7? V9?). where we could finally manage the bandwidth and the session per user end to end in the network. This would remove the need of "deep packet inspection" to do fair traffic shaping and reassure the privacy concerns. For ISPs, such an "intelligent IP network" would enable a sound capacity management.
Note that I do not caution any of the unfair tricks of US ISP that tend to favor their own content. Emmanuel
Adopting an open documented protocol is one thing but the next step is to make sure all four major IM networks, namely MSN, GoogleTalk, AOL but also Skype get interconnected.
This would mean that all users of those network could chat and exchange presence information seamlessy and regardless of the network they belong. Unfortunaltly this dream vision hurts the business model of those networks as they are largely based on audience and funding by ads. So the only sensible solution would be that this seamless service could be reserved for premium paying accounts.
I am not sure about user acceptance of the above provided that many people consider that IM service is free, regardless of the number of server and bandwidth used to provide the service.
Mmmm, difficult to take any side at the moment but this is yet another format war. I guess that it is urgent to make the two proposal converge otherwise we might get a waste of energy in dulicate standard maintenance and implementation.
Just a simple question: this post on ars technica describes a pretty cool example of web page uing HTML5. Can XHTML gurus tell us how this would be done using XHTML 1.1?
Without reigniting the OSI / IETF war, I tend to agree with the post above. TCP/IP is a good thing because it has been the default protocol unifier but still need to be fixed to become the UNIFIED protocol.
1- keepalive : IBM's SNA has an efficient keepalive mechanism. TCP has one but I never saw it working properly.
2- unified session based protocol : for banking and transctional applications, sessions is a must. In the Web world, we 'emulate' this using coockies or other feeble replacement. SIP would be a good candidate but one has to see SIP to be embedded in browsers and used in conjucntion to HTTP outside the telephony world.
3- bandwidth management and media transport: RSVP has never been implemented on a large scale. IP falls short to ATM in that matter. What the Internet World needs to acknowledge is that not every application can sit on a connectionless protocol (IP) drop the stupid dogma of being the stupid network. What we need is virtual circuits (VC) over IP that in turn open virtual circuits over layer 2 protocols
4- Private vs public network - IP V4 took the assumption that every IP address was ment to be public (the famous end to end networking dogma). The use of NAT and private addresses has been seen as a hack. We now know that private network are here to stay and the example of the SS7 signaling where private network and the way to interconnect them together are normalized provide a clear way. I am not sure that IP V6 learned the lessons.
The post focuses on a single detail: the author calls Ogg a "proprietary format". This is of course a regrettable and stupid comment as Ogg, Theora and Vorbis are not proprietary in any sense. But I suggest reading the whole paper which is an interesting and valid point of view. They are AGAINST the decision of the W3C to recommend those format for Web video. They use three arguments:
1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks.
The last one is partially valid also but I have to add a comment: First, Nokia has vested interest in codec developments itself (they have patents related to the AMR codec). Second one has to remind that they are phone manufacturers. It is clear that they are more at ease with the standard process developed by the ITU. And I understand them: they are not building software but they are embedding chips with hardware codec capabilities. If someone 'forks' the standard and the OSS community decides to create an alternative standard (see Torrent protocol), all the chips that they developped are toasted.
I don't get the argument that high speed networks are more error prone. Following this rationale, this would mean that our broadband or wifi network would be much less reliable than a good old modem.
Also, I fail to see why EDGE technlogy would be less prone to radio interference and reverberation than UMTS. COuld the author please provide pointers of more factual articles about this point?
What is certain is that 3G has an advantage over GPRS as the later uses time slots that are unsued by voice call to transmit packets. Therefore, this technology was more or less piggybacking on the GSM system.
I don't know if EDGE retains the same principle but for sure, in 3G, data is now a first class citizen. This means that you got a good chance to retain your data connection if the nework becomes overloaded.
Re:The elephant in the room - with missing legs
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes,
But I believe the issue here is a resource issue. TB is a stable mail client software but it sits within its own world.
What it needs is more integration to third parties. I would suggest:
- compatibility with system address book (e.g. on Mac OS X) - ability to natively synchronize with mobiles phones in regards with contacts and appointment - ability to send / receive SMS and MMS from TB - compatibility with calandar, task back end from major CRM softwares (SugarOS).
I would aso suggest the partnership with an open source calendaring and task management server to propose a complete package. Finally, Exchange compatibilty could be addressed by building an extension based OpenChange http://www.openchange.org/
So again, the same question arises : who will have time, dedidication and money to do all this.
Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'enculé de ta mère !
Wow wow, that's a nice one. Now if you want to practice, have a look to our swiss neighbours, they've made a very nice video clip to advertise their new emergency number.
Mmmm the comment above reminds me of a discussion with a colleage that had a major in physics. He just finished a book about string theory that indeed supported this point of view:
The author (don't ask me the name, I am unable to remember) worked on early string theory himself. However, he later doubted his very work as no experimental proof could sustain it. He also mentioned the mathematical beauty of string theory and the fact that people became enamoured with it rather than looking for experimental proofs. This hypnotism lead a number of proeminent physiscist to accept this as the Truth and the author says that it is now very difficult not to "believe" in string theory in labs as you would be catalogued as outsider and therefor have more touble to get researtch funding.
Not beeing in the field, I would not be competent to judge this. However, fundamental physiscs is pretty intersting as an amateur.
One of this out of the boxes ideas was that he would introduce another limitation beside the c speed limit and the quantic physics uncertainties ( speed / position) : he states that space itself is not a continum but dimentions cannot be lower than the planck constant and that any system that is smaller to this dimensions is outside physics laws and cannot be understood because such a system would be below an event horison that would bar every attempts for any measurement.
Doing that he make the supposition that black may be systems where matters collapses below this limit and then could be the singularity that COULD trigger another big bang in another dimension.
Seems to be very wild to me but the ideas are fascinating.
> So now we get more tags in HTML. What are those good for? Why are we putting them in a single > language, rather than keeping things modular?
Because this is the point of view of a language specialist. Most of the web sites are made by people with only practical knowledge of Web technologies and HTML (classic) serves this purpose very well.
Unless you build graphical tools that handle XHTML in all its aspects, coding by hand XML and namespace and co can become pretty difficult and I am not aware that such tool exists.
With XHTML, W3C made the exact same mistake than with VXML and CCXML. In my view, we have to have a single language for signalling and voice rendering. They preferred to have two distinct languages with namespace. The result is poor and difficult to read. XML syntax is not fit for describing telecommonication services simply.
I really believe that one should make the difference between recreational e-mail and corporate and official/corporate e-mail. For the first kind, we do not need anything and e-mail needs to remain free. For the second, this is another story and corporate e-mail should be a charged service
In my view, each country should mandate and certify at least three or four companies like goodmail and international agreement would establish peering relationships between those certifiers
- companies and administration should only accept incoming certified e-mail except of course on support@mycompany.com or sales@mycompany.com. They could even receive a fraction of the money involved.
- by law any non certified e-mail should not have any legal or binding value.
- certifier should take technical measure to enfore sender identity and retain e-mail record (only the sender, receipient and subject trace) available by both sender and recipient for two years.
- certified mail should be encrypted and signed and it would be up to the certifiyer to provide signing keys for free in exchange for the charges collected.
- all ISP should propose at least 5 certified e-mail / month on their accounts bundled in the ADSL fee. Above, subscriber should be charged.
- web mail provider could provide such certified e-mail but would eventually pay the certifier.
- per mail price should be kept very low (a couple of cents)
- no single account or IP should be allowed to send more that 100000 / month
Ok, you do not like it? But its a real way to make spammer actually pay for the bandwith that they are wasting (reminder, more than 50% of e-mail)
You will not able to use your corporate e-mail to send silly jokes to your buddies outside the company? Use gmail instead.
You won't be able to send more that 5 certified e-mail a month to corporate addresses from your personal e-mail ? How many e-mail are you actually sending to corporation from your private e-mail ?
I use MySQL 5.1.x for my business and when I started I found that this was a well supported engine and went ahead. Now that we've got more experience on it and scratched below the surface we will consider the switch (propably to Postgress). Here are my reasons:
- support for stored procedure is still in infancy. Expecially error handling. There is no way to raise a custom error and the compiler gives imprecises error messages. There is not trace mecanism to troubleshoot them.
- the availability of multiple storages back-end may appear as a feature but I believe this should be handled internally. Especially some critical features such as referential constraints are implemented on SOME back ends. This complicates the DBA job tremendously.
- the first back end to support ref. constraint is InnoDB. It has been acquired by Oracle. It is unclear what will happend. Can a GPL licence be withdrawn ?
- when writting a trigger, it is impossible to cancel a transaction. This remove almost all interest in triggers.
- the commercial licencing model requires you to pay every year. Although the price are low compared to other commercial DB, this is a major hindrance when someone want to embbed this engine into the produc.
Bascally, for non-critical internal application, MySQL is perfect. For advanced critival applications or sellable products, I have trouble to go that way.
The concept is pretty interesting although the article is disapointing (and illustrate the priciple using another slashdot lile lame care analogy).
However, even though we would design a workable technology from this idea, I expect huge resistance from router vendors but also from some Internet designer at IETF.
Embedding such an advanced function within the network would violate the dogma where Network needs to be kept stupid and most of the function are to be supported by terminals.
Of course, Internet is not the whole network and we could imagine that such a technology wouls develop on military and banking networks. This would mean to recognise de facto that Internet is not fit for all usages and will never be the Network of networks but one network among others.
Well, what you could do is use your IT skills to choose another field and gradually change your field.
- you could use you IT skills for a non profit organization (I know someone who is now helping such an NGO to setup telephony in Africa)
- you could pickup a smaller company in a non IT field, preferrably with a local business, help them with their IT problems and then gradually try to learn other fields.
- some bigger organization may have HR programs for such migration. In that situation, I beileive that the first step to go out of IT is to evolve toward position with more direct involvment with customers.
Anyway, try to cultivate your secondary skills and use IT as an entry key.
In the '90 governements were heavily involved in IT standardization though national comitees like ISO and so on. A big chunk of this disapeared although some standard comitees made significant contributions (ATM Forum, GSM by ETSI,...).
I agree with the author : we do need technical standards. But my own experience tend to make that standard making should be left to these tech commitees and I believe that a good government cannot lead but should keep looking into these matter with a certain conservatism, sane skepticism and an high level view and stick to the general guidelines like:
- are the various systems compatible with each other - is the privacy properly protected - are the performances and market price acceptables in regards with the service offered - is the information accessible and storable.
and also:
- look at format issue only if it is in General public interest - look at network protocol only for lower level layers
Then only when a stabdard is pretty stable, proven and sufficiently implemented can a goverment endorse it.
To me, the interoperability issue is really key and any governement should take action to make sure the industry take the necessary action to avoid standard fragmentation when the market is mature enough (not in the early stage). Namely bitching MS because its technology is not open enough is ridiculous. It would be far more interesting to force MS to support existing stable standards (MPEG4, HTML/CSS, ODF,...).
Properly meaning that those format and protocol should be used as easily as their proprieatary counterparts.
Ah yes, in our country this is election time too so polititian are making silly promises on financial resources that they don't have. As for India, according to what I have read, before broadband, road should be fixed as well as proper electrical network.
The parent post points out obvious flaws that prevent TB to be the same success as FF. I would add:
- closed address book with no proper import function. - on Mac OSX : no integration with system adressbook and system calendar as well as Keychain. - no contact and calendar synch with mobile device.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a French Journalist Marie Monique ROBIN who wrote a book on Monsanto and its GMO Products. There was a TV documentary done by the same person. I watched it.
I must say that if I am rather favorable to controlled GMO use, the way monsanto designs their product and their method are frightening. Even if the documentary has a strong anti-GMO bias, the objection (on food safety law and on incomplete studies) are more than troubling.
This is much worse than Microsoft. It may be necessary to investagate deeply in Monsanto's practices and sanction the abuse in order to save the very GMO technology. These guys are defnitly bad.
Ah, this is exactly the kind of situation that demonstrate how the network neutrality dogma is hurting. To have a per packet fair policy is just fine when existing infrastructure can wistand the load.
Now with the wonderfull IP / TCP whatever protocol, not beeing able to diffenciate traffic per user and per session end to end in the network lead the following situation: When the capacity is reduced (such incidents, maintenance, etc) or if traffic increases (chrismas, special events, etc.) where everybody get hurt instead of nicely rejecting the overflow and let the other users enjoy the network use.
I am a long time advocate of the demise of the so called "stupid network" in favor of an more advanced IP usage (V6? V7? V9?). where we could finally manage the bandwidth and the session per user end to end in the network. This would remove the need of "deep packet inspection" to do fair traffic shaping and reassure the privacy concerns. For ISPs, such an "intelligent IP network" would enable a sound capacity management.
Note that I do not caution any of the unfair tricks of US ISP that tend to favor their own content.
Emmanuel
I guess that they have been censored.
I guess that SRV record would make the trick.
Adopting an open documented protocol is one thing but the next step is to make sure all four major IM networks, namely MSN, GoogleTalk, AOL but also Skype get interconnected.
This would mean that all users of those network could chat and exchange presence information seamlessy and regardless of the network they belong. Unfortunaltly this dream vision hurts the business model of those networks as they are largely based on audience and funding by ads. So the only sensible solution would be that this seamless service could be reserved for premium paying accounts.
I am not sure about user acceptance of the above provided that many people consider that IM service is free, regardless of the number of server and bandwidth used to provide the service.
In France, the ISP Free telecom offers the possibility [fr] to migrate to IP V6 already.
Mmmm, difficult to take any side at the moment but this is yet another format war. I guess that it is urgent to make the two proposal converge otherwise we might get a waste of energy in dulicate standard maintenance and implementation.
Just a simple question: this post on ars technica describes a pretty cool example of web page uing HTML5. Can XHTML gurus tell us how this would be done using XHTML 1.1?
Without reigniting the OSI / IETF war, I tend to agree with the post above. TCP/IP is a good thing because it has been the default protocol unifier but still need to be fixed to become the UNIFIED protocol.
1- keepalive : IBM's SNA has an efficient keepalive mechanism. TCP has one but I never saw it working properly.
2- unified session based protocol : for banking and transctional applications, sessions is a must. In the Web world, we 'emulate' this using coockies or other feeble replacement. SIP would be a good candidate but one has to see SIP to be embedded in browsers and used in conjucntion to HTTP outside the telephony world.
3- bandwidth management and media transport: RSVP has never been implemented on a large scale. IP falls short to ATM in that matter. What the Internet World needs to acknowledge is that not every application can sit on a connectionless protocol (IP) drop the stupid dogma of being the stupid network. What we need is virtual circuits (VC) over IP that in turn open virtual circuits over layer 2 protocols
4- Private vs public network - IP V4 took the assumption that every IP address was ment to be public (the famous end to end networking dogma). The use of NAT and private addresses has been seen as a hack. We now know that private network are here to stay and the example of the SS7 signaling where private network and the way to interconnect them together are normalized provide a clear way. I am not sure that IP V6 learned the lessons.
Emmanuel
The post focuses on a single detail: the author calls Ogg a "proprietary format". This is of course a regrettable and stupid comment as Ogg, Theora and Vorbis are not proprietary in any sense. But I suggest reading the whole paper which is an interesting and valid point of view. They are AGAINST the decision of the W3C to recommend those format for Web video. They use three arguments:
1. Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
2. De facto standard of the Web is Flash video and H.264 encapsulated in either FLV or MPEG 4 file formats. This one valid and reversing the trend seems difficult to imagine.
3. They believe are not at ease with the process of the organisations behind ogg / vorbis / theora development and fear standard forks.
The last one is partially valid also but I have to add a comment: First, Nokia has vested interest in codec developments itself (they have patents related to the AMR codec). Second one has to remind that they are phone manufacturers. It is clear that they are more at ease with the standard process developed by the ITU. And I understand them: they are not building software but they are embedding chips with hardware codec capabilities. If someone 'forks' the standard and the OSS community decides to create an alternative standard (see Torrent protocol), all the chips that they developped are toasted.
Emmanuel
Good point for the processor issue.
I don't get the argument that high speed networks are more error prone. Following this rationale, this would mean that our broadband or wifi network would be much less reliable than a good old modem.
Also, I fail to see why EDGE technlogy would be less prone to radio interference and reverberation than UMTS. COuld the author please provide pointers of more factual articles about this point?
What is certain is that 3G has an advantage over GPRS as the later uses time slots that are unsued by voice call to transmit packets. Therefore, this technology was more or less piggybacking on the GSM system.
I don't know if EDGE retains the same principle but for sure, in 3G, data is now a first class citizen. This means that you got a good chance to retain your data connection if the nework becomes overloaded.
Like http://www.openchange.org/ ?
Yes,
But I believe the issue here is a resource issue. TB is a stable mail client software but it sits within its own world.
What it needs is more integration to third parties. I would suggest:
- compatibility with system address book (e.g. on Mac OS X)
- ability to natively synchronize with mobiles phones in regards with contacts and appointment
- ability to send / receive SMS and MMS from TB
- compatibility with calandar, task back end from major CRM softwares (SugarOS).
I would aso suggest the partnership with an open source calendaring and task management server to propose a complete package. Finally, Exchange compatibilty could be addressed by building an extension based OpenChange http://www.openchange.org/
So again, the same question arises : who will have time, dedidication and money to do all this.
Emmanuel
Wow wow, that's a nice one. Now if you want to practice, have a look to our swiss neighbours, they've made a very nice video clip to advertise their new emergency number.
Mmmm the comment above reminds me of a discussion with a colleage that had a major in physics.
He just finished a book about string theory that indeed supported this point of view:
The author (don't ask me the name, I am unable to remember) worked on early string theory himself. However, he later doubted his very work as no experimental proof could sustain it. He also mentioned the mathematical beauty of string theory and the fact that people became enamoured with it rather than looking for experimental proofs. This hypnotism lead a number of proeminent physiscist to accept this as the Truth and the author says that it is now very difficult not to "believe" in string theory in labs as you would be catalogued as outsider and therefor have more touble to get researtch funding.
Not beeing in the field, I would not be competent to judge this. However, fundamental physiscs is pretty intersting as an amateur.
One of this out of the boxes ideas was that he would introduce another limitation beside the c speed limit and the quantic physics uncertainties ( speed / position) : he states that space itself is not a continum but dimentions cannot be lower than the planck constant and that any system that is smaller to this dimensions is outside physics laws and cannot be understood because such a system would be below an event horison that would bar every attempts for any measurement.
Doing that he make the supposition that black may be systems where matters collapses below this limit and then could be the singularity that COULD trigger another big bang in another dimension.
Seems to be very wild to me but the ideas are fascinating.
> So now we get more tags in HTML. What are those good for? Why are we putting them in a single
> language, rather than keeping things modular?
Because this is the point of view of a language specialist. Most of the web sites are made by people with only practical knowledge of Web technologies and HTML (classic) serves this purpose very well.
Unless you build graphical tools that handle XHTML in all its aspects, coding by hand XML and namespace and co can become pretty difficult and I am not aware that such tool exists.
With XHTML, W3C made the exact same mistake than with VXML and CCXML. In my view, we have to have a single language for signalling and voice rendering. They preferred to have two distinct languages with namespace. The result is poor and difficult to read. XML syntax is not fit for describing telecommonication services simply.
The demand from Apple that European Operators does not want to give in is simple: Revenue sharing on subscriber voice / data traffic charge.
I take the risk to be modded down but:
I really believe that one should make the difference between recreational e-mail and corporate and official/corporate e-mail. For the first kind, we do not need anything and e-mail needs to remain free. For the second, this is another story and corporate e-mail should be a charged service
In my view, each country should mandate and certify at least three or four companies like goodmail and international agreement would establish peering relationships between those certifiers
- companies and administration should only accept incoming certified e-mail except of course on support@mycompany.com or sales@mycompany.com. They could even receive a fraction of the money involved.
- by law any non certified e-mail should not have any legal or binding value.
- certifier should take technical measure to enfore sender identity and retain e-mail record (only the sender, receipient and subject trace) available by both sender and recipient for two years.
- certified mail should be encrypted and signed and it would be up to the certifiyer to provide signing keys for free in exchange for the charges collected.
- all ISP should propose at least 5 certified e-mail / month on their accounts bundled in the ADSL fee. Above, subscriber should be charged.
- web mail provider could provide such certified e-mail but would eventually pay the certifier.
- per mail price should be kept very low (a couple of cents)
- no single account or IP should be allowed to send more that 100000 / month
Ok, you do not like it? But its a real way to make spammer actually pay for the bandwith that they are wasting (reminder, more than 50% of e-mail)
You will not able to use your corporate e-mail to send silly jokes to your buddies outside the company? Use gmail instead.
You won't be able to send more that 5 certified e-mail a month to corporate addresses from your personal e-mail ? How many e-mail are you actually sending to corporation from your private e-mail ?
I use MySQL 5.1.x for my business and when I started I found that this was a well supported engine and went ahead. Now that we've got more experience on it and scratched below the surface we will consider the switch (propably to Postgress). Here are my reasons:
- support for stored procedure is still in infancy. Expecially error handling. There is no way to raise a custom error and the compiler gives imprecises error messages. There is not trace mecanism to troubleshoot them.
- the availability of multiple storages back-end may appear as a feature but I believe this should be handled internally. Especially some critical features such as referential constraints are implemented on SOME back ends. This complicates the DBA job tremendously.
- the first back end to support ref. constraint is InnoDB. It has been acquired by Oracle. It is unclear what will happend. Can a GPL licence be withdrawn ?
- when writting a trigger, it is impossible to cancel a transaction. This remove almost all interest in triggers.
- the commercial licencing model requires you to pay every year. Although the price are low compared to other commercial DB, this is a major hindrance when someone want to embbed this engine into the produc.
Bascally, for non-critical internal application, MySQL is perfect. For advanced critival applications or sellable products, I have trouble to go that way.
The concept is pretty interesting although the article is disapointing (and illustrate the priciple using another slashdot lile lame care analogy).
However, even though we would design a workable technology from this idea, I expect huge resistance from router vendors but also from some Internet designer at IETF.
Embedding such an advanced function within the network would violate the dogma where Network needs to be kept stupid and most of the function are to be supported by terminals.
Of course, Internet is not the whole network and we could imagine that such a technology wouls develop on military and banking networks. This would mean to recognise de facto that Internet is not fit for all usages and will never be the Network of networks but one network among others.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
I actually UNISTALLED Acrobat reader from one of my laptop after having intalled this one. Perfect replacement so far and not bloated at all.
Well, what you could do is use your IT skills to choose another field and gradually change your field.
- you could use you IT skills for a non profit organization (I know someone who is now helping such an NGO to setup telephony in Africa)
- you could pickup a smaller company in a non IT field, preferrably with a local business, help them with their IT problems and then gradually try to learn other fields.
- some bigger organization may have HR programs for such migration. In that situation, I beileive that the first step to go out of IT is to evolve toward position with more direct involvment with customers.
Anyway, try to cultivate your secondary skills and use IT as an entry key.
MMmm vast topic.
...).
...).
In the '90 governements were heavily involved in IT standardization though national comitees like ISO and so on. A big chunk of this disapeared although some standard comitees made significant contributions (ATM Forum, GSM by ETSI,
I agree with the author : we do need technical standards. But my own experience tend to make that standard making should be left to these tech commitees and I believe that a good government cannot lead but should keep looking into these matter with a certain conservatism, sane skepticism and an high level view and stick to the general guidelines like:
- are the various systems compatible with each other
- is the privacy properly protected
- are the performances and market price acceptables in regards with the service offered
- is the information accessible and storable.
and also:
- look at format issue only if it is in General public interest
- look at network protocol only for lower level layers
Then only when a stabdard is pretty stable, proven and sufficiently implemented can a goverment endorse it.
To me, the interoperability issue is really key and any governement should take action to make sure the industry take the necessary action to avoid standard fragmentation when the market is mature enough (not in the early stage). Namely bitching MS because its technology is not open enough is ridiculous. It would be far more interesting to force MS to support existing stable standards (MPEG4, HTML/CSS, ODF,
Properly meaning that those format and protocol should be used as easily as their proprieatary counterparts.
-
Ah yes, in our country this is election time too so polititian are making silly promises on financial resources that they don't have. As for India, according to what I have read, before broadband, road should be fixed as well as proper electrical network.
Who has moderated the parent as flamebait ?
The parent post points out obvious flaws that prevent TB to be the same success as FF.
I would add:
- closed address book with no proper import function.
- on Mac OSX : no integration with system adressbook and system calendar as well as Keychain.
- no contact and calendar synch with mobile device.
Note : I am a TB user.
I use Thunderbird both at work and at home.
This release contains probably a lot of improvment under th hood but what really misses is:
For Mac OS X users like me, I would add:
This would be a proper 2.0 release.
I would also suggest also to write or improve extentions connecting TB with proeminents CRM software (Salesforce, Surgar CRM, ...).
PS: I tried Sunbird but was not convinced.