I think a classic case is middle management. Even 10 years a go a manager would have still had access to a secretary to help with typing, filing and administration. They would still have helped maintain a meeting schedule and other general jobs leaving a manager able to focus on management.
Now I have a hard time getting a meeting with my manager because he has to do his own fling, and typing (painful to see the 10wpm single finger on each hand method still being used today) and maintain his own schedule on a Blackberry.
But the "UI" interfaces are so simple, even a manager can use them 8)
Myself, at home on my own computer I love the wobbly cube-y 3d goodness of Xgl and love having transparent window shadows and windows that burn up when you close them. However at work, I still use good old X11 because it's faster, and for real speed, I still use the command line and SSH shells.
And syslog deamons, md5 sum checkers, etc all missing from Windows OS by default, and you know what, they dont even include MS Office in their flagship product!
Duh, all of those cool tools in linux are tools and utilities, not part of the OS proper. They just happen to be really useful when working with multiple OS's in complex environments. MS is not doing that, they only let windows server log to themselves. Hope you BOUGHT some other tool to collect their logs in a central place 8)
Full desktop servers. They are called Terminal Servers. Of course, I've been able to run X sessions over SSH forever on desktops and server, but there ya go. That why you might need Aero on a server.
I use my chipped xbox as a DVD player quite often. The Drive in that puppy sems to handle scratched a fuzzy DVD's much better then either of my high end sony players. I have ripped a couple of movies with DVD:RIP as the paranoia system sems to make a good copy off the disk even if my other players cant read it or end up skipping.
I do work for a couple of non profit orgainisations who often use volunteer for many positions within their structure, and most use their own home computers for working on club documents. We use Open Office and.odt.ods and now.odb file natively to remove hte chance of formatting screwups in translation, and recommend isthalling OO.o as it is free to download and use and works on all platforms. This way we dont have to worry about format changes, what OS someone is running etc. If we export for public use, we output.pdf.
Quicktime(with iTunes) is nearly as large as OO.o 2.3 (without Java) and I can send a CD to those who only have dial up, and it only takes a couple of minutes to install on Windows. We also use Scribus as our desktop publication engine and this reads in.odt natively. infact we have to convert.doc to.odt before they import so our preference is Oasis format documents is possible.
BTW at work we have had issues with some.xlsx files getting messed up when importing into Office 2K3 using the import filter, so don't go trusting the other OfficeOpen format either 8)
The problem is that everyone in the worlds needs it if they talk to an NZ server, so if only the NZ admins update, for 1 week (now) times they calculate could be wrong for compared to an unpatched system in the states doing the same calulation. An admin in NZ wouldn't know if the overseas system was patched or not. This could have an impact on a large multinational distributed organisation. I know it played hell with our RSA authentication token system.
The PCs will never get that cheap as you will need to keep buying more and more RAM to support the Vista bloat.
But hey, I'd look at one of these laptops with the relatively tiny 40GB flash HDD and go, hmm the ubuntu footprint is less than 8GB' Leaves plenty of room for data on that. Vista however with Office2007 blows out nearly 20GB. Hmm. Still wouldn't be a cheap PC though.
The thing is that downloading and installing OO.o in Windows is trivial.
I tend to treat it just like installing flash and acrobat on a new PC. Once it can reliably open.docx and.xlsx it make for a great swiss amy knife of an application (mainly as it will easily let me export in.pdf).
I have now written a small Base database for a club I work with. I've found the base front end to be primitve compared to Access, but the latest 2.3 version has really picked up the game somewhat. The biggest advantage for our club is that I don't have to expect the end users to have bought and paid for Office200x. If they don't have OO.o, I just point them to the website for download. Oh and then there is the ability to use postgre or mySQL database back end for the tables, and this works in any OS, unlike Access which would require an ODBC setup which is only Windows. I have no idea how this would be done even in Office for Mac.
If you want to plan for cross platform, then you have to stay away from Office. For the near term this means stay away from OOXML.
And then why not offer to buy back the CD as second hand before shipping it to you, then they can resell it as traded in goods, with the price of the physical CD dropping each time. That way new releases will still have a "Premium" pricetag.
You get credit back on you account, and you buy more songs with it.
I remember a slashdot admin saying that on their stats, 60% of internet users would be running a browser other than IE, mainly becuase the audience tend to run all sorts of systems and even with Windows often don't settle for the default.
Trade-me here in NZ were doing a site refresh. They wanted to change the layout to that it looked better at 1024x768. But when they ran their numbers, they found a large population of users browsing with screen resolutions of 640x480 or 800x600, or many people just keeping trademe running in a smaller windows while they monitored an auction, not running at full screen size. So they had to make sure all sorts of systems would still work well, and support multiple browsers (this was still when IE had poor css support.)
Small gadgets are going to be primarily bought by geeks in the first instance, especially when they are new. If there are several devices or applications being released that do the same thing, you need to do something to stand out. Support all platforms I say!
I don't use skype because they cripped the client in linux (no file transfer and no video, and wont talk to other IMs) so I use Gizmo, full featured on Windows and Linux, regular updates on both platforms and can talk to some other jabber based IM's)
Both do the same thing, but I chose one for better platform support.
However, most will be happy with Skype as they can talk to their grandma overseas just fine.
Go figure
The one that annoyed me was when Novell were moving system to Open Enterprise server. NDS would work in Windows, on Netware and Linux, but the oneconsole portal, running in Apache and Tomcat, using java, only supported IE6! Huh? If I'm running 'nix server and I install E-Directory on my SLES 10 server, surely I should be able to admin the servers using Firefox?? I dont know if this is still the case though.
VMWare - Nice system, ESX has a service console that is based on Redhat. We use all sorts of unix like tech to manage these, we wrote bash scripts to fetch patches automatically, SSH to terminal to them securely and transfer files, NFS shares for sharing data for the service consoles, but the stuff that really makes ESX fly is Virtual Center. This requires a Windows server, running MS SQL server for the database and the VI client software is Windows only. No Mac or Linux client, no syslog daemon for central event logging. Obviously aimed at Windows administrators. But wait, we are now running more Linux servers as guests because they take much less memory to run then Windows servers doing the same job, and we needed some Linux technologies to assist in administration, they boot faster and are supported by VMWare. So now we have more Linux skills in our admin team. I'd like Virtual Center to have a linux client for their next release or be able to run on 'nix, then I wouldnt have to run Windows at all for my job.
As much as people say QT shouldn't be used because it's closed source, I think it's great as the same code works well in Windows, Linux and Mac. Why not have the VC run in Java? They already put a web engine on every host and on the VC server but it's not as nice or as fast to use as the full client.
My 2c rant.
Went to the site, agreed to the terms of service, selected a son, logged in proceeded tot eh checkout - Wrong geographical location.
Wankers.
Why am I in New Zealand banned from buying this content. I can buy the dammed CD from them and rip it when I get it!!!!!! It's not even like it costs them more to ship it to me??
I may now go from a loyal but irregular Amazon customer to go buy my books and CD's somewhere else.
Fkkn 'mericans. think they're the only ones on the internet.
This is exactly the same as that restricted and crippled desktop OS made by MS. Most people don't care and don't realise what they are being restricted to. It's just easy to run.
Thats fine, there are some people who the format restrictions on an ipod will never be an issue until they have to try and move overseas and realise they cant access their entire musc collection any more and will have to buy it again.
Why I think the ipod took off was a standard format for the hardware. Other vendors could make gear that would work with the pod and extend its' hardware features.
I cant even use the headphones for my palm Treo with my CD walkman, the plugs are completely different.
What made the PC format popular was the atx mainboard specification. Many vendors could then standardise on known locations for things like what sockets could be expected on a computer, where the screw holes in the board for mounting it would be etc.
The main reason I still use google is that the search results usually come up with what I was looking for, not what some advertiser wants to sell me.
Sometimes I'm still caught by surprise on a fresh IE7 install using its search window, trying to work out why the results of the searches I'm making suck, until I remember to change the default search engine.
It's not a tiny difference, it is a big difference. Go google!.
Do I think they should have the stranglehold on the worlds information, I hope not. That much power is too much even for an organisation that tries to be "not evil"
If they seeded the torrent themselves, or even compiled the file on the fly they could even imbed region appropriate ads.
I once heard SF channel or someone had previews of upcoming shows on their official site. I went there, signed up, subscribed via mail, confirmed my account (I'm in New Zealand, my email address was.co.nz, my IP address was an NZ one) all fine, I hit the first show, sit through the downloaded ad for a product I cant buy in NZ, then to be told, "we cant show you the content as you are not in the USA."
Fukken thanks, I just wasted 20 minutes of my life and the bandwith to watch freeken ad for something I can't buy and don't want anyway, and gave you my personal details for your marketing department, just to be told I cant even watch a preview for a show that I won't be able to see on my own TV here for another year or so.
Wow, way to kep your protential customers happy. NOT!
Back to bit torrent and downloaded the Erueka pilot in 20 minutes then watched it from the TV connected to my xbox.
Liked it and downloaded the rest of the season overnight. More lost sales? I don't think so as the product is not available in my region, so they have lost no revenue.
It still comes down to what you can do with the file once you have it. I don't have an ipod as my palm plays my MP3 just fine thanks (and.ogg which the ipod wont). The only thing I can't do is play songs downloaded from itunes. They will only play on my wifes windows PC, which is a big ol' tank that sits in my office at home. I would pay $1 for a song, as long as I could play it on my xbox, my gnu/linux laptop, the mp3 player in my car and on my phone.
If it's cheap and easy to download, then people wont bother to pirate.
All of MP3 proved the only thing adding cost to the songs downloaded is the stupid DRM which has to be maintained. And if the DRM provider changes format or shuts up shop or does not have an outlet in my country (thanks Microsoft for the zune and fairplay) then the collection is worthless.
Oh and thanks to the RIAA for killing my internet radio stations.
Damn right I'll download the files from torrent sites while these big players try to dictate what I will do with my own equipment.
I could believe this downsizing. Where I work we have nearly 90 servers for our 500 odd users, and the main reason for this is to have two of nearly everything so that while one is down for patching the other is taking the load.
It's all about the data. It doesn't matter what app cerated the file a long as the apps all open the file without error and let you work on it. Paintbrush Photoshop, Inkscape and GIMP can all open most jpg and png files.
The problem would go away overnight if MS deveoped a seamess filter for oasis document formats. Hey it's already a standard. Imagine how much money they'd save not having to push ooxml through standards hoops 8)
But self voting on ad content would be flawed too by savvy consumers. I'd vote no on all the toy ads on saturday morning tv and I skip most of the ads on stuff targeted at me as I almost never watch live tv anyway.
I aggree to some extent. I've started using SUSE 10.2 on my tablet and I also tried kubuntu on a laptop. Most of the apps from the suse repo's were much more up-to-date. scibus, openoffice, allhad more recent builds. The base kde environment felt much more complete, the yast tool makes setup simple. in ubuntu I was forever trying to rememember which app I just used to set something. lots of messing around installing apps I'd gotten used to. Also having the DVD meant much less downloading off my slow home internet connection.
I think more cores is good - on servers. I have a desktop PC (AMD X2 4200 with 2GB RAM) setup with SuseLinux 10.2 acting as an X11 terminal server) and the rest of my desktops are old clunkers. The fastest is a compaq n800c with 512MB RAM and is about 4 years old. I can run 2-3 users with full desktop sessions doing desktop publishing and document editing, running remote sessions on the server. I havn't tried more than 4 simultaneous sessions, but it works just as fast as a single user local on the console. (it also works fine over the internet using VNC or just tunnelling X over SSH).
So I'm looking forward to desktops with more cores as I can share them with more people 8)
I don't know about you but the led on the tv and dvd are just annoing. If it is on, there is usually a picture on the screen or sound through the speakers. When it's off, there isn't. I think it should only light up if there is a fault.
Move the status indicators from the DVD player to the remote. I cant read that display on the player fom my couch anyway, and it has on screen icons whenever you press a button.
I love my amp in the lounge. When it is on, the power button is locked down and is flush with the face panel. The volume knob has a dot that points to the volume level number, and the remote just moves the knob. What else would you need?
The amp in my office however has a led display for volume, lights to tell me it has bass boost on, a light to tell me it is powered on (as if I can't hear its hiss on the speakers) and a light telling me which input source it's using. What a waste. I never look at these lights anyway, the amp is under my desk.
I've just installed Vista on my wife's PC, but I have my own login. All data is on a networked drive, and all my mail is in an imap server. For both systems the imap mail is downloaded into local folders. Office2007 puts it in a.pst, KMail put it in my system mail folders Vista Business - with Office 2007, drives mapped to cifs share on a samba server. Suse10.2, Beagle search and Kerry front end with KMail, shared data attached via mounted cifs share on a samba server.
I was looking for 2 things yesterday on the vista PC which I knew were in my mail or on the shared drive. 10 minutes of trying different keywords was not getting me the files I was looking for. The same keywords in beagle returned mail from the person I was looking for and three.pdf documents where the data I was looking for was. 10 second search.
Also beagle indexes the content of sites I've bookmarked and viewed in Konqueror and Firefox and indexes files stored on my network share. Vista only indexes history of IE and only local data. It will not index networked drives as far as I can tell.
Horses for courses.
One day I was off sick but there was a work project on that required the setup of a webserver to host a php based application. The project had a tight deadline, so I worked from my sick bed 8)
Get laptop and connect to internet: working over crappy DSL line, 2Mb top speed 8(
run ssh to get to a suse server I had installed earlier in the week for the project, (the server was also running some other services so could not be restarted during the working day)
Use Yast to install apache and php requiremements from up-to-date suse internet repository. Use vi to edit the apache config to create virtual server.
Use rsync to copy the php application to the server (for windows users, rsync is a little like FTP, but over an ssh connection, and can easily replicate a full folder structure). Test, debug, then secure access to only http, https and ssh. Approx 4 hrs for the whole job.
To do the same thing in Windows - Take Previously installed Windows 2K3 server, enable remote desktop access, oh hang on, that wasn't done initially so will have to call someone at the office to do it for me, Oh, and have to install whole citrix gateway infrastructure to support secure encrypted remote access.
Add software - IIS, hang on, no network repository for i386 directory, get someone at the office to stick in a CD, then restart.
Add php services to IIS - umm, haven't done that before so I don't know how hard it is to do.
Run Windows Update to patch - reboot (current installs I have done from Win2K3-R2 CD usually require at least 2 restarts to get fully up-to-date)
No easy way to copy the full application to the server (as no way I am opening up MS FTP to the internet without a proxy 8)) so tar or zip it up, mail to the client, get someone to copy tar file to the server, then login and extract it.
I think the point is here that the job would have been nearly impossible for me to do that day had the host been a Windows host with IIS. It would have requried the server to be restarted to patch and install software, and none of the secure remote access is available out of the box.
Apart from a kernel patch late last year, the web server has never been restarted. Apache has been restarted a few times, but it hands over connections to the new httpd as it shuts down so users don't really see an outage if it's done right.
Oh, yeah, I also have a dev server with the same apache config. When I make a change I test it in dev, then copy over the conf file before restarting. Anyone know how to copy IIS settings from one server to another? Please let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a classic case is middle management. Even 10 years a go a manager would have still had access to a secretary to help with typing, filing and administration. They would still have helped maintain a meeting schedule and other general jobs leaving a manager able to focus on management. Now I have a hard time getting a meeting with my manager because he has to do his own fling, and typing (painful to see the 10wpm single finger on each hand method still being used today) and maintain his own schedule on a Blackberry. But the "UI" interfaces are so simple, even a manager can use them 8) Myself, at home on my own computer I love the wobbly cube-y 3d goodness of Xgl and love having transparent window shadows and windows that burn up when you close them. However at work, I still use good old X11 because it's faster, and for real speed, I still use the command line and SSH shells.
And syslog deamons, md5 sum checkers, etc all missing from Windows OS by default, and you know what, they dont even include MS Office in their flagship product! Duh, all of those cool tools in linux are tools and utilities, not part of the OS proper. They just happen to be really useful when working with multiple OS's in complex environments. MS is not doing that, they only let windows server log to themselves. Hope you BOUGHT some other tool to collect their logs in a central place 8)
Full desktop servers. They are called Terminal Servers. Of course, I've been able to run X sessions over SSH forever on desktops and server, but there ya go. That why you might need Aero on a server.
I use my chipped xbox as a DVD player quite often. The Drive in that puppy sems to handle scratched a fuzzy DVD's much better then either of my high end sony players. I have ripped a couple of movies with DVD:RIP as the paranoia system sems to make a good copy off the disk even if my other players cant read it or end up skipping.
Google search: free .odt viewer
Result : http://www.softmaker.net/down/TMViewerSetup.exe
Wow, it only took 10 seconds.
I do work for a couple of non profit orgainisations who often use volunteer for many positions within their structure, and most use their own home computers for working on club documents. We use Open Office and .odt .ods and now .odb file natively to remove hte chance of formatting screwups in translation, and recommend isthalling OO.o as it is free to download and use and works on all platforms. This way we dont have to worry about format changes, what OS someone is running etc. If we export for public use, we output .pdf.
Quicktime(with iTunes) is nearly as large as OO.o 2.3 (without Java) and I can send a CD to those who only have dial up, and it only takes a couple of minutes to install on Windows. We also use Scribus as our desktop publication engine and this reads in .odt natively. infact we have to convert .doc to .odt before they import so our preference is Oasis format documents is possible.
BTW at work we have had issues with some .xlsx files getting messed up when importing into Office 2K3 using the import filter, so don't go trusting the other OfficeOpen format either 8)
The problem is that everyone in the worlds needs it if they talk to an NZ server, so if only the NZ admins update, for 1 week (now) times they calculate could be wrong for compared to an unpatched system in the states doing the same calulation. An admin in NZ wouldn't know if the overseas system was patched or not. This could have an impact on a large multinational distributed organisation. I know it played hell with our RSA authentication token system.
The PCs will never get that cheap as you will need to keep buying more and more RAM to support the Vista bloat. But hey, I'd look at one of these laptops with the relatively tiny 40GB flash HDD and go, hmm the ubuntu footprint is less than 8GB' Leaves plenty of room for data on that. Vista however with Office2007 blows out nearly 20GB. Hmm. Still wouldn't be a cheap PC though.
The thing is that downloading and installing OO.o in Windows is trivial. I tend to treat it just like installing flash and acrobat on a new PC. Once it can reliably open .docx and .xlsx it make for a great swiss amy knife of an application (mainly as it will easily let me export in .pdf).
I have now written a small Base database for a club I work with. I've found the base front end to be primitve compared to Access, but the latest 2.3 version has really picked up the game somewhat. The biggest advantage for our club is that I don't have to expect the end users to have bought and paid for Office200x. If they don't have OO.o, I just point them to the website for download. Oh and then there is the ability to use postgre or mySQL database back end for the tables, and this works in any OS, unlike Access which would require an ODBC setup which is only Windows. I have no idea how this would be done even in Office for Mac.
If you want to plan for cross platform, then you have to stay away from Office. For the near term this means stay away from OOXML.
And then why not offer to buy back the CD as second hand before shipping it to you, then they can resell it as traded in goods, with the price of the physical CD dropping each time. That way new releases will still have a "Premium" pricetag. You get credit back on you account, and you buy more songs with it.
I remember a slashdot admin saying that on their stats, 60% of internet users would be running a browser other than IE, mainly becuase the audience tend to run all sorts of systems and even with Windows often don't settle for the default. Trade-me here in NZ were doing a site refresh. They wanted to change the layout to that it looked better at 1024x768. But when they ran their numbers, they found a large population of users browsing with screen resolutions of 640x480 or 800x600, or many people just keeping trademe running in a smaller windows while they monitored an auction, not running at full screen size. So they had to make sure all sorts of systems would still work well, and support multiple browsers (this was still when IE had poor css support.) Small gadgets are going to be primarily bought by geeks in the first instance, especially when they are new. If there are several devices or applications being released that do the same thing, you need to do something to stand out. Support all platforms I say! I don't use skype because they cripped the client in linux (no file transfer and no video, and wont talk to other IMs) so I use Gizmo, full featured on Windows and Linux, regular updates on both platforms and can talk to some other jabber based IM's) Both do the same thing, but I chose one for better platform support. However, most will be happy with Skype as they can talk to their grandma overseas just fine. Go figure
The one that annoyed me was when Novell were moving system to Open Enterprise server. NDS would work in Windows, on Netware and Linux, but the oneconsole portal, running in Apache and Tomcat, using java, only supported IE6! Huh? If I'm running 'nix server and I install E-Directory on my SLES 10 server, surely I should be able to admin the servers using Firefox?? I dont know if this is still the case though. VMWare - Nice system, ESX has a service console that is based on Redhat. We use all sorts of unix like tech to manage these, we wrote bash scripts to fetch patches automatically, SSH to terminal to them securely and transfer files, NFS shares for sharing data for the service consoles, but the stuff that really makes ESX fly is Virtual Center. This requires a Windows server, running MS SQL server for the database and the VI client software is Windows only. No Mac or Linux client, no syslog daemon for central event logging. Obviously aimed at Windows administrators. But wait, we are now running more Linux servers as guests because they take much less memory to run then Windows servers doing the same job, and we needed some Linux technologies to assist in administration, they boot faster and are supported by VMWare. So now we have more Linux skills in our admin team. I'd like Virtual Center to have a linux client for their next release or be able to run on 'nix, then I wouldnt have to run Windows at all for my job. As much as people say QT shouldn't be used because it's closed source, I think it's great as the same code works well in Windows, Linux and Mac. Why not have the VC run in Java? They already put a web engine on every host and on the VC server but it's not as nice or as fast to use as the full client. My 2c rant.
Went to the site, agreed to the terms of service, selected a son, logged in proceeded tot eh checkout - Wrong geographical location. Wankers. Why am I in New Zealand banned from buying this content. I can buy the dammed CD from them and rip it when I get it!!!!!! It's not even like it costs them more to ship it to me?? I may now go from a loyal but irregular Amazon customer to go buy my books and CD's somewhere else. Fkkn 'mericans. think they're the only ones on the internet.
This is exactly the same as that restricted and crippled desktop OS made by MS. Most people don't care and don't realise what they are being restricted to. It's just easy to run. Thats fine, there are some people who the format restrictions on an ipod will never be an issue until they have to try and move overseas and realise they cant access their entire musc collection any more and will have to buy it again. Why I think the ipod took off was a standard format for the hardware. Other vendors could make gear that would work with the pod and extend its' hardware features. I cant even use the headphones for my palm Treo with my CD walkman, the plugs are completely different. What made the PC format popular was the atx mainboard specification. Many vendors could then standardise on known locations for things like what sockets could be expected on a computer, where the screw holes in the board for mounting it would be etc.
The main reason I still use google is that the search results usually come up with what I was looking for, not what some advertiser wants to sell me. Sometimes I'm still caught by surprise on a fresh IE7 install using its search window, trying to work out why the results of the searches I'm making suck, until I remember to change the default search engine. It's not a tiny difference, it is a big difference. Go google!. Do I think they should have the stranglehold on the worlds information, I hope not. That much power is too much even for an organisation that tries to be "not evil"
If they seeded the torrent themselves, or even compiled the file on the fly they could even imbed region appropriate ads. I once heard SF channel or someone had previews of upcoming shows on their official site. I went there, signed up, subscribed via mail, confirmed my account (I'm in New Zealand, my email address was .co.nz, my IP address was an NZ one) all fine, I hit the first show, sit through the downloaded ad for a product I cant buy in NZ, then to be told, "we cant show you the content as you are not in the USA."
Fukken thanks, I just wasted 20 minutes of my life and the bandwith to watch freeken ad for something I can't buy and don't want anyway, and gave you my personal details for your marketing department, just to be told I cant even watch a preview for a show that I won't be able to see on my own TV here for another year or so.
Wow, way to kep your protential customers happy. NOT!
Back to bit torrent and downloaded the Erueka pilot in 20 minutes then watched it from the TV connected to my xbox.
Liked it and downloaded the rest of the season overnight. More lost sales? I don't think so as the product is not available in my region, so they have lost no revenue.
It still comes down to what you can do with the file once you have it. I don't have an ipod as my palm plays my MP3 just fine thanks (and .ogg which the ipod wont). The only thing I can't do is play songs downloaded from itunes. They will only play on my wifes windows PC, which is a big ol' tank that sits in my office at home. I would pay $1 for a song, as long as I could play it on my xbox, my gnu/linux laptop, the mp3 player in my car and on my phone.
If it's cheap and easy to download, then people wont bother to pirate.
All of MP3 proved the only thing adding cost to the songs downloaded is the stupid DRM which has to be maintained. And if the DRM provider changes format or shuts up shop or does not have an outlet in my country (thanks Microsoft for the zune and fairplay) then the collection is worthless.
Oh and thanks to the RIAA for killing my internet radio stations.
Damn right I'll download the files from torrent sites while these big players try to dictate what I will do with my own equipment.
I could believe this downsizing. Where I work we have nearly 90 servers for our 500 odd users, and the main reason for this is to have two of nearly everything so that while one is down for patching the other is taking the load.
It's all about the data. It doesn't matter what app cerated the file a long as the apps all open the file without error and let you work on it. Paintbrush Photoshop, Inkscape and GIMP can all open most jpg and png files. The problem would go away overnight if MS deveoped a seamess filter for oasis document formats. Hey it's already a standard. Imagine how much money they'd save not having to push ooxml through standards hoops 8)
But self voting on ad content would be flawed too by savvy consumers. I'd vote no on all the toy ads on saturday morning tv and I skip most of the ads on stuff targeted at me as I almost never watch live tv anyway.
I aggree to some extent. I've started using SUSE 10.2 on my tablet and I also tried kubuntu on a laptop. Most of the apps from the suse repo's were much more up-to-date. scibus, openoffice, allhad more recent builds. The base kde environment felt much more complete, the yast tool makes setup simple. in ubuntu I was forever trying to rememember which app I just used to set something. lots of messing around installing apps I'd gotten used to. Also having the DVD meant much less downloading off my slow home internet connection.
I think more cores is good - on servers. I have a desktop PC (AMD X2 4200 with 2GB RAM) setup with SuseLinux 10.2 acting as an X11 terminal server) and the rest of my desktops are old clunkers. The fastest is a compaq n800c with 512MB RAM and is about 4 years old. I can run 2-3 users with full desktop sessions doing desktop publishing and document editing, running remote sessions on the server. I havn't tried more than 4 simultaneous sessions, but it works just as fast as a single user local on the console. (it also works fine over the internet using VNC or just tunnelling X over SSH). So I'm looking forward to desktops with more cores as I can share them with more people 8)
I don't know about you but the led on the tv and dvd are just annoing. If it is on, there is usually a picture on the screen or sound through the speakers. When it's off, there isn't. I think it should only light up if there is a fault. Move the status indicators from the DVD player to the remote. I cant read that display on the player fom my couch anyway, and it has on screen icons whenever you press a button. I love my amp in the lounge. When it is on, the power button is locked down and is flush with the face panel. The volume knob has a dot that points to the volume level number, and the remote just moves the knob. What else would you need? The amp in my office however has a led display for volume, lights to tell me it has bass boost on, a light to tell me it is powered on (as if I can't hear its hiss on the speakers) and a light telling me which input source it's using. What a waste. I never look at these lights anyway, the amp is under my desk.
Both are shite compared to Beagle on linux 8)
.pst, KMail put it in my system mail folders
.pdf documents where the data I was looking for was. 10 second search.
I've just installed Vista on my wife's PC, but I have my own login. All data is on a networked drive, and all my mail is in an imap server. For both systems the imap mail is downloaded into local folders. Office2007 puts it in a
Vista Business - with Office 2007, drives mapped to cifs share on a samba server.
Suse10.2, Beagle search and Kerry front end with KMail, shared data attached via mounted cifs share on a samba server.
I was looking for 2 things yesterday on the vista PC which I knew were in my mail or on the shared drive. 10 minutes of trying different keywords was not getting me the files I was looking for.
The same keywords in beagle returned mail from the person I was looking for and three
Also beagle indexes the content of sites I've bookmarked and viewed in Konqueror and Firefox and indexes files stored on my network share. Vista only indexes history of IE and only local data. It will not index networked drives as far as I can tell.
Horses for courses. One day I was off sick but there was a work project on that required the setup of a webserver to host a php based application. The project had a tight deadline, so I worked from my sick bed 8) Get laptop and connect to internet: working over crappy DSL line, 2Mb top speed 8( run ssh to get to a suse server I had installed earlier in the week for the project, (the server was also running some other services so could not be restarted during the working day) Use Yast to install apache and php requiremements from up-to-date suse internet repository. Use vi to edit the apache config to create virtual server. Use rsync to copy the php application to the server (for windows users, rsync is a little like FTP, but over an ssh connection, and can easily replicate a full folder structure). Test, debug, then secure access to only http, https and ssh. Approx 4 hrs for the whole job. To do the same thing in Windows - Take Previously installed Windows 2K3 server, enable remote desktop access, oh hang on, that wasn't done initially so will have to call someone at the office to do it for me, Oh, and have to install whole citrix gateway infrastructure to support secure encrypted remote access. Add software - IIS, hang on, no network repository for i386 directory, get someone at the office to stick in a CD, then restart. Add php services to IIS - umm, haven't done that before so I don't know how hard it is to do. Run Windows Update to patch - reboot (current installs I have done from Win2K3-R2 CD usually require at least 2 restarts to get fully up-to-date) No easy way to copy the full application to the server (as no way I am opening up MS FTP to the internet without a proxy 8)) so tar or zip it up, mail to the client, get someone to copy tar file to the server, then login and extract it. I think the point is here that the job would have been nearly impossible for me to do that day had the host been a Windows host with IIS. It would have requried the server to be restarted to patch and install software, and none of the secure remote access is available out of the box. Apart from a kernel patch late last year, the web server has never been restarted. Apache has been restarted a few times, but it hands over connections to the new httpd as it shuts down so users don't really see an outage if it's done right. Oh, yeah, I also have a dev server with the same apache config. When I make a change I test it in dev, then copy over the conf file before restarting. Anyone know how to copy IIS settings from one server to another? Please let me know.