I tried Palm's a couple of times - regular and wireless - and found them worthless. I am now using a Blackberry which wirelessly syncs with my mail, calendar and address book. I find I can't live without it. I have stopped taking my laptop on short trips. Once my staff and I worked out the idiosyncracies (I am a Fed CIO) I offered it to my executives - figuring they would prefer this to lugging a laptop on short trips. Most - but not all - love it. Now that the infrastructure is up I am extending the offer to other staff and the darn things fly out the door faster than we can get them in. Traditional PDAs never caught on like this - it is the wireless marriage to the one true killer app (enterprise email/calendar)that makes the difference.
It does get a little annoying to see everybody typing away at their little keyboards in meetings - but maybe that says something about the meetings.
As I read the article, it sounds like the whole point of the Grand Alliance was to get the various parties to agree on a standard. Whicj is exactly what they did. MIT and Dolby had competing approaches and MIT made a deal with Dolby to drop their's in favor of Dolby's for a Financial return. Zenith did the same thing. The MIT rep profitted, but he would have profitted if the MIT approach was selected. This would be a big deal if the group was supposed to be a bunch of unbiased technical wizzes choosing the best product, but it wasn't. This is like MS and IBM agreeing on a.NET approach.
Re:Build a better UFO and watch the jets scramble
on
Build Your Own UFO
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Years and years ago some friends built tissue hot air balloons powered by sterno in a light tin foil gondola/heater. They let em rip at night on the Chicago lake front north of a SAM site (long gone). The light glowing from the white tissue was a strange vision as they lifted out of view. On a lark they sent one up with a bunch of tin foil stips to reflect radar. A short time later a jet scrambled from one of the nearby bases.
Wouldn't they would lose their own code
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 1
It sounds like the only way this would work is they would have to destroy the original, comprehensible, source code. Otherwise, they would not be releasing all the source code behind their application. But if they did that, they wouldn't have a viable application to maintain. I am not a lawyer, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that if they kept the comprehensible code (for maintenance and enhancements) and released only the junk, they would be guilty of some sort of fraud/abuse.
I have about 200 contractors and 60 Federal employees working for me. We have everything from legacy Cobol programs, to COTS e-commerce packages, to custom Java Web apps (hum - the one I'm thinking about is open source since anyone can request our code), to a 4,000 seat LAN/WAN (yeah, sorry we are largely MS at the desktop, but we have lots of Unix application servers and some Linux in the infrastructure). We are hiring a few employees so we can try to keep up with the technology our contractors bring to us. Interestingly, quite a few of our skilled contractors are interested in coming to work for us because they love what they do for us, are having a lot of fun, and like the stability they perceive on the government side. Others find the concept of the long term commitment they believe goes with a decision to move in-house to be a negative. Different strokes for different folks. No nerf guns but the former CIO used to toss footballs at everyone who came in his door -- I'm more sedate, but I don't mind people tossing them at me.
Most software development is not done for commercial reasons (i.e. not to sell the software as a COTS). Most development is done to advance corporate and public systems in ways that don't give the using corporation a competetive advantage but simply improve some process (a financial system interface, a distributed print service). The developers do the work because they are directed to do so or because they are passionate about their work and see an opportunity to do something useful. Many of these developers and even their employers would have no problem releasing their work to help others - if it was easy for them to do so.
Some of these folks are passionate enough about their interests to initiate or join open source efforts. In some cases their employers officially support and sanction their efforts (IBM, Cisco, others). Call it ego, call it community, whatever the drive is it is powerful and could probably be harnessed much more broadly than we see today. The fact that more and more corporations are willing to support such contributions shows the possibilities.
Getting ingress and egress filtering in place was a big issue in as we came up on the Y2K turnover. There was a lot of fear of DDoS attacks and most Federal agencies (including mine) adopted the practice and encouraged our ISPs to do the same. We recognized that it would not eliminate the problem, but figured it would help weed out some of the most flagrant abuses. This effort got a lot of support in Government and private industry and I would have expected most ISPs to have adopted the practice by now.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried Palm's a couple of times - regular and wireless - and found them worthless. I am now using a Blackberry which wirelessly syncs with my mail, calendar and address book. I find I can't live without it. I have stopped taking my laptop on short trips. Once my staff and I worked out the idiosyncracies (I am a Fed CIO) I offered it to my executives - figuring they would prefer this to lugging a laptop on short trips. Most - but not all - love it. Now that the infrastructure is up I am extending the offer to other staff and the darn things fly out the door faster than we can get them in. Traditional PDAs never caught on like this - it is the wireless marriage to the one true killer app (enterprise email/calendar)that makes the difference.
It does get a little annoying to see everybody typing away at their little keyboards in meetings - but maybe that says something about the meetings.
Don
As I read the article, it sounds like the whole point of the Grand Alliance was to get the various parties to agree on a standard. Whicj is exactly what they did. MIT and Dolby had competing approaches and MIT made a deal with Dolby to drop their's in favor of Dolby's for a Financial return. Zenith did the same thing. The MIT rep profitted, but he would have profitted if the MIT approach was selected. This would be a big deal if the group was supposed to be a bunch of unbiased technical wizzes choosing the best product, but it wasn't. This is like MS and IBM agreeing on a .NET approach.
Years and years ago some friends built tissue hot air balloons powered by sterno in a light tin foil gondola/heater. They let em rip at night on the Chicago lake front north of a SAM site (long gone). The light glowing from the white tissue was a strange vision as they lifted out of view. On a lark they sent one up with a bunch of tin foil stips to reflect radar. A short time later a jet scrambled from one of the nearby bases.
Come on editors - why rated as funny?
It sounds like the only way this would work is they would have to destroy the original, comprehensible, source code. Otherwise, they would not be releasing all the source code behind their application. But if they did that, they wouldn't have a viable application to maintain. I am not a lawyer, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that if they kept the comprehensible code (for maintenance and enhancements) and released only the junk, they would be guilty of some sort of fraud/abuse.
I have about 200 contractors and 60 Federal employees working for me. We have everything from legacy Cobol programs, to COTS e-commerce packages, to custom Java Web apps (hum - the one I'm thinking about is open source since anyone can request our code), to a 4,000 seat LAN/WAN (yeah, sorry we are largely MS at the desktop, but we have lots of Unix application servers and some Linux in the infrastructure). We are hiring a few employees so we can try to keep up with the technology our contractors bring to us. Interestingly, quite a few of our skilled contractors are interested in coming to work for us because they love what they do for us, are having a lot of fun, and like the stability they perceive on the government side. Others find the concept of the long term commitment they believe goes with a decision to move in-house to be a negative. Different strokes for different folks. No nerf guns but the former CIO used to toss footballs at everyone who came in his door -- I'm more sedate, but I don't mind people tossing them at me.
Most software development is not done for commercial reasons (i.e. not to sell the software as a COTS). Most development is done to advance corporate and public systems in ways that don't give the using corporation a competetive advantage but simply improve some process (a financial system interface, a distributed print service). The developers do the work because they are directed to do so or because they are passionate about their work and see an opportunity to do something useful. Many of these developers and even their employers would have no problem releasing their work to help others - if it was easy for them to do so.
Some of these folks are passionate enough about their interests to initiate or join open source efforts. In some cases their employers officially support and sanction their efforts (IBM, Cisco, others). Call it ego, call it community, whatever the drive is it is powerful and could probably be harnessed much more broadly than we see today. The fact that more and more corporations are willing to support such contributions shows the possibilities.
Getting ingress and egress filtering in place was a big issue in as we came up on the Y2K turnover. There was a lot of fear of DDoS attacks and most Federal agencies (including mine) adopted the practice and encouraged our ISPs to do the same. We recognized that it would not eliminate the problem, but figured it would help weed out some of the most flagrant abuses. This effort got a lot of support in Government and private industry and I would have expected most ISPs to have adopted the practice by now.
Wouldn't some of the cracking programs have these strings coded in?