I think it is part of a clever ploy to DOS the onion. What better way to bring their server to a crashing halt than to embed a multimedia element directly into the summary?
This ranks right up there with the time kdawson linked to 84 gigabyte digital photo from the summary a couple years ago.
No, Mac users can use silverlight, and have been able to for quite some time. Linux users will be able to use it soon, although I don't know about licensing and patents.
So, from a user's perspective, this is irrelevant. The concern in this new technology is on the server side of things, and in Microsoft's market position. Silverlight's purpose in life is to dynamically load xml within the DOM tree, which should sound familiar since that is essentially what Ajax does. Ajax, however, has some short comings, for which the w3c developed the E4X standard.
However, given the high quality of web applications written in Ajax, Microsoft rightly assessed that E4X threatened their office and email monopolies, and therefore their OS monopoly, because such applications are platform-agnostic. It is no coincidence that MS really started to push Silverlight development shortly after Google started testing high quality Ajax-based office, email and collaboration software.
Therefore, IE, which is already pretty non-standards compliant in its javascript syntax, still does not support it at all, although all other major browsers have for years. By creating and promoting silverlight, MS is essentially embracing and extending to get control of dynamic web page standards away from the w3c. They will try to promote silverlight in as many places as possible, and hobble Ajax in IE. They will develop a series of neat free tools that make it easy to develop in silverlight. Once there is a critical mass of pages that use silverlight, they will start to make "improvements" to the standard but only integrate those changes into their Windows plugin. When that happens, all web users will once again be locked into Microsoft. It will MS will also have the bonus of also being able to integrate features that depend on asp, forcing their way into the server market.
If you don't believe MS would use a strategy like this, just ask yourself why there was an IE5.5 for Macs and no IE6 for Macs.
Thus, improvements in technology that should be happening around an open standards making body, indeed would happen faster and more effeciently in this standards making body, are going to go into the hands of one company at proceed at a much slower rate. It's a classic embrace/extend/extinguish. It is just sad that the US government is supporting this.
A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world. They like to point out that no open source program interfaces properly with its calendaring function, damning all these clients to hobbyist hell. It has become an obsession.
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
I'm not going to get sued by my local Catholic Diocese if I print nasty bits from the Bible Maybe not, but they sure will sue your ass if you call them pedophiles.
Where I live, Belgium, they are not considered a religion. Neither are they in Germany:
On November 11, 2004 the Administrative Court in Cologne ruled that the monitoring of SO Germany by the Office for the Protection of the Consitution is lawful. The Court underlined that there are clear indications that the SO pursues anticonstitutional activities directed at abolishing the human rights guaranteed in the Basic Constitutional Law (Grundgesetz). An appeal at the Higher Administrative Court in Münster is pending. This is, interestingly, also the only group that does not benefit from some of the basic advances of the European integration. For example, Scientologists have been excluded from the free circulation of workers since Van Duyn v Home Office in 1974.
It's probably cheaper for Ebay to simply acquiesce to the CoS demands than to meet them in court. Even if they win, they may never see their legal fees recovered. There is less risk involved in giving in, too: they loose almost nothing if they yank the items, but could potentially lose a fortune if they don't.
I have some karma to burn, so I am going to go off topic / troll here.
Will whoever modded the parent a troll please share his or her logic? I will admit that it is not brilliant, so offtopic, maybe, overrated, maybe, but troll? That's just an insult. Personally, I am happy to see a first post that is not an AC "fp bitches!" and I think the effort should be rewarded.
I meta moderate about every other day, and I almost always rate the troll mods as "unfair". I don't know if this has any effect, but just so you know.
I agree, but I would go so far as to say you are less vulnerable with encryption.
The highest level of attack that the article mentions is DOS by which attackers steal your keys and ransom them back to you. Indeed, this would be a bad day for the IT department and the affected departments of the company could lose days or even a week of productivity, which is damaging indeed.
Compare this to the risks of not running encryption. A similarly motivated and skilled attacker as discussed above could easily grab things like log ins just by monitoring your traffic. Once he finds that login with the proper credentials, not only can he execute a DOS as outlined above, but he can also potentially steal all of your client information, your internal financial information and implant rootkits on all your servers so as to be able to come back for more later. One of the best ways to lose your entire customer base is to tell them that they have to cancel their credit cards because you got their numbers stolen.
This kind of stuff has killed companies. No thanks, I'll keep my ssh and ssl.
It is hard to give you advice if you don't point us to the site. That said, I am trying to do the same thing for my company's site... it still has a long way to go.
The first thing I will tell you, though, is forget about trying to write it in html/php. Get a good, free content management system like typo3 or phpwebsite. Develop a good template and let the other employees fill in the content. That will save you a lot of time and enable your company's on line presence to continue to function once you leave/go on vacation.
As for what to put on your front page, why don't you just look at what other people in your niche are doing and try to improve on it?
Jane Q. Public, generally I really enjoy reading your posts, but I dare say you have gone off your rocker on this one.
Later, he may have been involved in some double-dealing. However, BEFORE he got involved in the car thing, he had his electrolysis device examined by some "experts" in the scientific community... AFTER trying to get them to pay attention for 15 years. His claims were never independently verified. Ever.
The examiners concluded that his device "apparently" worked as claimed. That is scientist speak for "If this works the way he says it does, then it works as claimed. However, this judgment is based solely on appearances because I have not been allowed to take it apart and really study it, so for all I know he has a second motor or power source hidden in there somewhere."
HE WAS EVEN AWARDED A PATENT. Now, as you know, the Patent Office requires strong evidence before it will award a patent to anything that might be considered "over unity" or "perpetual motion". This is the same patent office that gave Microsoft a patent on the double click. You have some evidence that it is hard to patent something?
Whether he engaged in fraud involving the device later is rather irrelevant. (Lots of people commit fraud involving legitimate technology... what, you hadn't noticed?) The court ruled that the fraud involved his claims that the device works. In other words, it didn't work even though he said it did.
But it still took 15 years before anybody would even take a look. There is a reason for that. This is his pattent:
Water molecules are broken down into hydrogen and oxygen gas atoms in a capacitive cell by a polarization and resonance process dependent upon the dielectric properties of water and water molecules. The gas atoms are thereafter ionized or otherwise energized and thermally combusted to release a degree of energy greater than that of combustion of the gas in ambient air.
I am not even a physicist and I can tell that this is pseudoscience. If I were an expert, I would not waste my time on this either.
You are absolutely correct. Adblock works by checking externally referenced content against a black list. This works because most ads these days are built with copy and paste html that a web developer just sticks into the page somewhere, either in an iframe or with javascript includes. Advertisers do this because it makes it very easy for any webmaster to stick an ad on their page, and it makes it easy for them to monitor how many ads have been displayed and where.
However, this method of blocking ads is easy to circumvent with server side scripting. All you have to do is write a script that fetches the content and images from the advertiser's servers and serves it as if it were coming from your site. It only takes 3 lines of php. Once this is done, the entire premise behind adblock will cease to work.
This technique is uncommon because it makes it slightly more difficult for webmasters to stick an ad on their page and it makes it more difficult for advertisers to track their ads. Distrowatch is the only site that I am aware of that uses a technique like this to display its ads: they are obviously aware of the fact that many of their users also use adblock. The only reason that ads like this have not become common is that adblock itself is uncommon. To be quite honest, it surprises me that slashdot doesn't do this. But don't worry, if adblock gains a wide user base, it will be circumvented overnight.
Being an all-MS shop is irrelevant because more and more companies are switching to server-side applications for their needs. It started with Content Management Systems and database front ends, and with google docs the public at large is beginning to get a glimpse of office on the server.
And this next generation of applications is going to be OS-agnostic-- you can run WAMP just as easily as LAMP, and you can view an html-based application on any browser on any type of desktop/kiosk/cell phone/... . That is really all that IBM and many others want: interoperability so that customers can choose the solution that is best regardless of who everybody else has chosen.
They want this, of course, because their systems are better and they know that companies will move to them.
A year ago, the small business where I work was all client-side, and therefore predominantly MS. We used Access for our database needs, Outlook for e-mail, frontpage for the website, etc.
When I was brought on board to do the IT, the first thing I did was build a new website based on a phpwebsite, a php/sql based content management system. While we are still in transition because the content needs to be verified (two of the three languages on the site are still made in front page), I expect that the final switch will come in about two weeks.
My current project is to convert our internal databases to mysql with a web based front-end written, again, in php. After that, we will convert our email/calendaring to a web based interface, either on some open source platform that we host ourselves or in google mail for domains.
The advantages are obvious. If we open a branch office, the employees there will be able to access our database or change our web page in exactly the same manner as local employees. Our website is higher quality and lower maintenance. We have traveling employees who will no longer need to have reports faxed or emailed to them from the office. All of our solutions are extensible if we should ever want to add functionalities. We will save on hardware because now a $200 thin client will do all of the work that we needed actual desktops for before.
That is not to say that we are anti-MS, strictly speaking. For example, we use MS Word because, frankly, it is the best for our needs: we need dictionaries in many languages, and those for google docs or open source applications suck terribly for languages other than English; it has obvious compatibility advantages in the short term. However, the number of applications that we run on desktops are diminishing, as are the things that tie us to any one operating system. In fact, with CXOffice, even our remaining Office apps can run on a couple of different OSs. Ironically, the only thing that ties us to Windows is not a Microsoft application; it's made by Adobe.
As you so aptly pointed out, all of our new applications are platform agnostic: I could run them on Solaris, Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX, you name it. I imagine that large companies are much further along in this process than we are, meaning that the corporate world will soon no longer be pumping cash into Microsoft. Everybody knows that home users are a very low-profit market, but soon they will be the only market for desktop applications. So, unless Microsoft can pump out a bunch of high-quality, low cost server side applications really quickly, they're screwed.
Come on. Civil servants get paid for a service, just like the rest of us. I have worked for many a phb in the private sector who came up with crazy stuff to justify their jobs.
If you are living paycheck to paycheck, that is nobody's fault but your own. My wife and I do just fine in pretty low-paid private sector jobs that rarely last more than a year before layoffs. Wanna know how? We live within our means. We lived in a small, rented apartment and saved money to buy a small apartment (which we have now done) without going into debt. In a few years, we should be able to afford a small house without unmanageable debt. Instead of buying two cars, we bought one small, fuel efficient car used vehicle and whoever doesn't need it on a given day takes public transit. I salvage old computers and refurbish them and run FOSS instead of buying the newest super duper quad-core duo 4GB ram with Photoshop superpro.. We prepare most of our meals at home.
So yeah, we're poor, but we have liquid assets that we can live off of for at least two years in the event of another layoff, a roof over our heads and food on the table. We could have more stuff if we made that choice, but then we would be in debt up to our ears like you.
Don't blame public servants if you can't figure this out.
Why do we have this "it's fun to waste shit" culture? That phone could have been used for years. Instead he stuck it in a blender and set it on fire. Now all the bad stuff in the battery is released into the atmosphere or a landfill somewhere, and all those chemical processes required to manufacture that thing are for nothing.
The law is not protectionist. Protectionism means that you do not allow foreign goods onto a local market. Since a French company, Alapage got in trouble for doing the same thing, you cannot classify this as protectionism.
And the agricultural policy is not French, it is a competence of the EU. The US does the same thing with its farm subsidies. Make no mistake, without regulation, the free market does not magically make agricultural production better, it impoverishes farmers and leads to huge fluctuations in prices and chronic shortages. The EU and the US (two of the world's most free-market oriented organizations) have subsidies for farmers because history has proven their necessity over and over.
By the way, the anti-dumping laws (this means selling products below price) in French laws are a result of the transposition of EU directives into national laws. Such directives exist to ensure the free market can prosper and they are the same across Europe. Given the nature of the European economy right now (hint: it's really good compared to everybody else), such initiatives must be doing something right.
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries... are essential. So, the publications of the ACM and IEEE as well as the vast databases of print journals that have been digitized that most schools and universities have access to are all superficial? You are committing two errors with that statement:
You are using that misquote to build a straw man argument.
Allow me to explain:
The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace:
or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries Clearly, I am not talking about the libraries per se, I am talking about the ability to read and understand complex and credible sources.
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information:
there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet,but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem [is] here....
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it. To clarify, obviously whether you read on a screen or a dead tree is irrelevant beyond personal preference. Digitizing can in fact really help the diffusion of information. However, the ability to actually read the material is what is at stake here and that is the skill I am talking about. I still maintain that this is necessary to go beyond the superficial.
Well, I'm just doing my master, but for my work (International Relations), they both have their value. Let's say that you are writing about the Nixon's establishment of diplomatic relations with China. You can use google and wikipedia to get an overview of opinions on the subject in the initial stages of your research, and then for fact checking later (when did the Ping-Pong team return to the States again?). Indeed, the skill to do this kind of searching is wide both spread and indispensable in modern academia.
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
Let me tell you a story, a true one as it happens. Its about how I became a leftie. Very interesting post. However, you never said how you lost your right hand...
Your low-end guitar and mediocre playing won't be able to match even the worst recording of the artists you've mentioned. You entirely missed his point, didn't you?
Music is subjective. In other words, it is in the head of the listener. By learning to play, you gain an appreciation (ie, subjectively construct meaning) for that piece of music that you cannot approach by simply hearing another artist's rendition, even if performed live and unplugged right in front of you.
It's not about matching the "quality" of the "sound", its about appreciating the music. In that sense, me singing in the shower not only "matches" the best recordings of whatever musician, it vastly surpasses that recording.
Seriously, the "I don't have a TV" crowd don't even realize how ignorant they are. I have a bone to pick with that statement. I don't have a TV. It is not because I think I am better than anyone else, it is just that I find other forms of entertainment (such as reading slashdot) more compelling. Not "better", just better for me. I don't foist my choices on anyone.
However, I really don't appreciate you lumping people like me in with the asshole you were responding to, especially not in this context. That is an accusation similar to "all Republicans hate poor people" or "all Democrats want to make everybody the same." It just is not true. There are ideologue assholes in both camps, but the majority of people in either camp are good people with a certain set of personal views.
I may be ignorant of the ABC prime time lineup, but that does not make me ignorant of the issues of life and the world in general.
Consider the off-site location here. A burst water pipe or fire... OK, across campus. Maybe to another part of the city or even across the bridge into Oakland or somewhere else in the Bay area... not a four hour drive across the state. That was done because of the earthquake risk.
As for whether people hedging against earthquakes (as the law required us to do, I emphasize) makes it a valid concern, well I suppose that you are right and that it probably doesn't. I don't agree with you in this case, but I can't really argue against you. However, it is still a valid market, which is what this is really about, isn't it? If the law requires everybody who handles a certain type of data to protect it against a certain possible situation, planners have got to plan for it whether it is valid concern or not.
Slashdot Mirror
No, in this thread the fp was also the fg.
I think it is part of a clever ploy to DOS the onion. What better way to bring their server to a crashing halt than to embed a multimedia element directly into the summary?
/.'ed for me.
This ranks right up there with the time kdawson linked to 84 gigabyte digital photo from the summary a couple years ago.
Or at least, the video appears
No, Mac users can use silverlight, and have been able to for quite some time. Linux users will be able to use it soon, although I don't know about licensing and patents.
So, from a user's perspective, this is irrelevant. The concern in this new technology is on the server side of things, and in Microsoft's market position. Silverlight's purpose in life is to dynamically load xml within the DOM tree, which should sound familiar since that is essentially what Ajax does. Ajax, however, has some short comings, for which the w3c developed the E4X standard.
However, given the high quality of web applications written in Ajax, Microsoft rightly assessed that E4X threatened their office and email monopolies, and therefore their OS monopoly, because such applications are platform-agnostic. It is no coincidence that MS really started to push Silverlight development shortly after Google started testing high quality Ajax-based office, email and collaboration software.
Therefore, IE, which is already pretty non-standards compliant in its javascript syntax, still does not support it at all, although all other major browsers have for years. By creating and promoting silverlight, MS is essentially embracing and extending to get control of dynamic web page standards away from the w3c. They will try to promote silverlight in as many places as possible, and hobble Ajax in IE. They will develop a series of neat free tools that make it easy to develop in silverlight. Once there is a critical mass of pages that use silverlight, they will start to make "improvements" to the standard but only integrate those changes into their Windows plugin. When that happens, all web users will once again be locked into Microsoft. It will MS will also have the bonus of also being able to integrate features that depend on asp, forcing their way into the server market.
If you don't believe MS would use a strategy like this, just ask yourself why there was an IE5.5 for Macs and no IE6 for Macs.
Thus, improvements in technology that should be happening around an open standards making body, indeed would happen faster and more effeciently in this standards making body, are going to go into the hands of one company at proceed at a much slower rate. It's a classic embrace/extend/extinguish. It is just sad that the US government is supporting this.
According to my server logs, about 11% of the public uses Vista. Here is a screen of my XiTi report, complete with pie chart.
A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world. They like to point out that no open source program interfaces properly with its calendaring function, damning all these clients to hobbyist hell. It has become an obsession.
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
It's probably cheaper for Ebay to simply acquiesce to the CoS demands than to meet them in court. Even if they win, they may never see their legal fees recovered. There is less risk involved in giving in, too: they loose almost nothing if they yank the items, but could potentially lose a fortune if they don't.
The Scientologists are just that scary.
I have some karma to burn, so I am going to go off topic / troll here.
Will whoever modded the parent a troll please share his or her logic? I will admit that it is not brilliant, so offtopic, maybe, overrated, maybe, but troll? That's just an insult. Personally, I am happy to see a first post that is not an AC "fp bitches!" and I think the effort should be rewarded.
I meta moderate about every other day, and I almost always rate the troll mods as "unfair". I don't know if this has any effect, but just so you know.
I agree, but I would go so far as to say you are less vulnerable with encryption.
The highest level of attack that the article mentions is DOS by which attackers steal your keys and ransom them back to you. Indeed, this would be a bad day for the IT department and the affected departments of the company could lose days or even a week of productivity, which is damaging indeed.
Compare this to the risks of not running encryption. A similarly motivated and skilled attacker as discussed above could easily grab things like log ins just by monitoring your traffic. Once he finds that login with the proper credentials, not only can he execute a DOS as outlined above, but he can also potentially steal all of your client information, your internal financial information and implant rootkits on all your servers so as to be able to come back for more later. One of the best ways to lose your entire customer base is to tell them that they have to cancel their credit cards because you got their numbers stolen.
This kind of stuff has killed companies. No thanks, I'll keep my ssh and ssl.
It is hard to give you advice if you don't point us to the site. That said, I am trying to do the same thing for my company's site... it still has a long way to go.
The first thing I will tell you, though, is forget about trying to write it in html/php. Get a good, free content management system like typo3 or phpwebsite. Develop a good template and let the other employees fill in the content. That will save you a lot of time and enable your company's on line presence to continue to function once you leave/go on vacation.
As for what to put on your front page, why don't you just look at what other people in your niche are doing and try to improve on it?
You are absolutely correct. Adblock works by checking externally referenced content against a black list. This works because most ads these days are built with copy and paste html that a web developer just sticks into the page somewhere, either in an iframe or with javascript includes. Advertisers do this because it makes it very easy for any webmaster to stick an ad on their page, and it makes it easy for them to monitor how many ads have been displayed and where.
However, this method of blocking ads is easy to circumvent with server side scripting. All you have to do is write a script that fetches the content and images from the advertiser's servers and serves it as if it were coming from your site. It only takes 3 lines of php. Once this is done, the entire premise behind adblock will cease to work.
This technique is uncommon because it makes it slightly more difficult for webmasters to stick an ad on their page and it makes it more difficult for advertisers to track their ads. Distrowatch is the only site that I am aware of that uses a technique like this to display its ads: they are obviously aware of the fact that many of their users also use adblock. The only reason that ads like this have not become common is that adblock itself is uncommon. To be quite honest, it surprises me that slashdot doesn't do this. But don't worry, if adblock gains a wide user base, it will be circumvented overnight.
Being an all-MS shop is irrelevant because more and more companies are switching to server-side applications for their needs. It started with Content Management Systems and database front ends, and with google docs the public at large is beginning to get a glimpse of office on the server.
And this next generation of applications is going to be OS-agnostic-- you can run WAMP just as easily as LAMP, and you can view an html-based application on any browser on any type of desktop/kiosk/cell phone/... . That is really all that IBM and many others want: interoperability so that customers can choose the solution that is best regardless of who everybody else has chosen.
They want this, of course, because their systems are better and they know that companies will move to them.
Agreed.
A year ago, the small business where I work was all client-side, and therefore predominantly MS. We used Access for our database needs, Outlook for e-mail, frontpage for the website, etc.
When I was brought on board to do the IT, the first thing I did was build a new website based on a phpwebsite, a php/sql based content management system. While we are still in transition because the content needs to be verified (two of the three languages on the site are still made in front page), I expect that the final switch will come in about two weeks.
My current project is to convert our internal databases to mysql with a web based front-end written, again, in php. After that, we will convert our email/calendaring to a web based interface, either on some open source platform that we host ourselves or in google mail for domains.
The advantages are obvious. If we open a branch office, the employees there will be able to access our database or change our web page in exactly the same manner as local employees. Our website is higher quality and lower maintenance. We have traveling employees who will no longer need to have reports faxed or emailed to them from the office. All of our solutions are extensible if we should ever want to add functionalities. We will save on hardware because now a $200 thin client will do all of the work that we needed actual desktops for before.
That is not to say that we are anti-MS, strictly speaking. For example, we use MS Word because, frankly, it is the best for our needs: we need dictionaries in many languages, and those for google docs or open source applications suck terribly for languages other than English; it has obvious compatibility advantages in the short term. However, the number of applications that we run on desktops are diminishing, as are the things that tie us to any one operating system. In fact, with CXOffice, even our remaining Office apps can run on a couple of different OSs. Ironically, the only thing that ties us to Windows is not a Microsoft application; it's made by Adobe.
As you so aptly pointed out, all of our new applications are platform agnostic: I could run them on Solaris, Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX, you name it. I imagine that large companies are much further along in this process than we are, meaning that the corporate world will soon no longer be pumping cash into Microsoft. Everybody knows that home users are a very low-profit market, but soon they will be the only market for desktop applications. So, unless Microsoft can pump out a bunch of high-quality, low cost server side applications really quickly, they're screwed.
Come on. Civil servants get paid for a service, just like the rest of us. I have worked for many a phb in the private sector who came up with crazy stuff to justify their jobs.
If you are living paycheck to paycheck, that is nobody's fault but your own. My wife and I do just fine in pretty low-paid private sector jobs that rarely last more than a year before layoffs. Wanna know how? We live within our means. We lived in a small, rented apartment and saved money to buy a small apartment (which we have now done) without going into debt. In a few years, we should be able to afford a small house without unmanageable debt. Instead of buying two cars, we bought one small, fuel efficient car used vehicle and whoever doesn't need it on a given day takes public transit. I salvage old computers and refurbish them and run FOSS instead of buying the newest super duper quad-core duo 4GB ram with Photoshop superpro.. We prepare most of our meals at home.
So yeah, we're poor, but we have liquid assets that we can live off of for at least two years in the event of another layoff, a roof over our heads and food on the table. We could have more stuff if we made that choice, but then we would be in debt up to our ears like you.
Don't blame public servants if you can't figure this out.
Why do we have this "it's fun to waste shit" culture? That phone could have been used for years. Instead he stuck it in a blender and set it on fire. Now all the bad stuff in the battery is released into the atmosphere or a landfill somewhere, and all those chemical processes required to manufacture that thing are for nothing.
I swear, sometimes I am ashamed of my country.
The law is not protectionist. Protectionism means that you do not allow foreign goods onto a local market. Since a French company, Alapage got in trouble for doing the same thing, you cannot classify this as protectionism.
And the agricultural policy is not French, it is a competence of the EU. The US does the same thing with its farm subsidies. Make no mistake, without regulation, the free market does not magically make agricultural production better, it impoverishes farmers and leads to huge fluctuations in prices and chronic shortages. The EU and the US (two of the world's most free-market oriented organizations) have subsidies for farmers because history has proven their necessity over and over.
By the way, the anti-dumping laws (this means selling products below price) in French laws are a result of the transposition of EU directives into national laws. Such directives exist to ensure the free market can prosper and they are the same across Europe. Given the nature of the European economy right now (hint: it's really good compared to everybody else), such initiatives must be doing something right.
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You are taking my statement out of context.
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You are using that misquote to build a straw man argument.
Allow me to explain:The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace: or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries Clearly, I am not talking about the libraries per se, I am talking about the ability to read and understand complex and credible sources.
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information: there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet,but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem [is] here.
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it. To clarify, obviously whether you read on a screen or a dead tree is irrelevant beyond personal preference. Digitizing can in fact really help the diffusion of information. However, the ability to actually read the material is what is at stake here and that is the skill I am talking about. I still maintain that this is necessary to go beyond the superficial.
Anyway, have a good one.
-mat
Well, I'm just doing my master, but for my work (International Relations), they both have their value. Let's say that you are writing about the Nixon's establishment of diplomatic relations with China. You can use google and wikipedia to get an overview of opinions on the subject in the initial stages of your research, and then for fact checking later (when did the Ping-Pong team return to the States again?). Indeed, the skill to do this kind of searching is wide both spread and indispensable in modern academia.
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
Music is subjective. In other words, it is in the head of the listener. By learning to play, you gain an appreciation (ie, subjectively construct meaning) for that piece of music that you cannot approach by simply hearing another artist's rendition, even if performed live and unplugged right in front of you.
It's not about matching the "quality" of the "sound", its about appreciating the music. In that sense, me singing in the shower not only "matches" the best recordings of whatever musician, it vastly surpasses that recording.
However, I really don't appreciate you lumping people like me in with the asshole you were responding to, especially not in this context. That is an accusation similar to "all Republicans hate poor people" or "all Democrats want to make everybody the same." It just is not true. There are ideologue assholes in both camps, but the majority of people in either camp are good people with a certain set of personal views.
I may be ignorant of the ABC prime time lineup, but that does not make me ignorant of the issues of life and the world in general.
Consider the off-site location here. A burst water pipe or fire... OK, across campus. Maybe to another part of the city or even across the bridge into Oakland or somewhere else in the Bay area... not a four hour drive across the state. That was done because of the earthquake risk.
As for whether people hedging against earthquakes (as the law required us to do, I emphasize) makes it a valid concern, well I suppose that you are right and that it probably doesn't. I don't agree with you in this case, but I can't really argue against you. However, it is still a valid market, which is what this is really about, isn't it? If the law requires everybody who handles a certain type of data to protect it against a certain possible situation, planners have got to plan for it whether it is valid concern or not.