Ogg is a superior format to Real, WMV and MOV. I've often wondered myself why sites bend over backwards to provide multiple formats but don't supply ogg. It has better compression for the same bitrates.
I suspect the better compression is because OGG can use OSS compression which is superior to other commercial compression algorithms.
Since this has been in the HTML specification for long before that company exists I suspect they may have a tough time when it goes to court. But, I'm not a lawyer, so who knows.
I worked at a large telecommunications company and their policy was a little sneakier. You would go out to lunch. When you tried to swipe your badge to get back in, it wouldn't work. Security would show up at the door with a box in hand, escort you to your desk so you could get you personal belongings and then escort you out of the building.
It was policy and anyone who quit or was terminated has handled the same way.
There are railroad tracks going through my home town (Plymouth, NH). Growing up (in the 70's) it was an undesirable area. Now, it's the up-and-coming place. Granted, we don't have a lot of rail traffic going through - if we did it would probably be different. But, you don't see people moving to be next to the highway.
The biggest drawback currently to the railroad tracks is that they are used by snowmobilers in the winter, which creates infinitely more noise than the comforting sound of the railroad.
The train station was recently renovated and the whole depot area has been populated with new shops and a park. It's very encouraging.
True, there is no silver bullet for everything. But, as oil prices continue to rise, it will start making more sense to use rail for longer hauls.
Once that starts happening, the rail infrastructure will expand to reach more remote areas, related industries will spring up to handle the last mile which will enable even more to be shipped by rail and so on.
I've been wondering about why cargo rail hasn't made a comeback, too. The funny thing is, even in Germany, which has a great rail infrastructure, you are seeing more and more trucks on the road.
Apparently, the railroads couldn't handle the extra load and they are too bureaucratic to adapt to the higher demand. My hope is that the US is a little more adaptive. The savings in energy and environment would be huge and getting the trucks off the highway would improve the roads.
I agree completely that the bigger issue in corporations is the energy used by the end-user. When you add up all the desktops using 200+ watts plus local printers etc, it really adds up.
I think there is a real future for thin-clients and some sort of centralized resources in the future, at least for larger departments and corporations. The costs of maintaining 100's or 1000's of PC's with licenses, administration, maintainence and energy costs is huge. If you can reduce that by thin-clients and virtualized servers, you could save a lot.
From ZDNet:
"The recruitment company, Reed, for instance, has reduced its PC power use by 80 percent by replacing 4,500 PCs and 400 laptops with 'thin-client terminals'. "
Or, perhaps these companies are reluctant because they are worried that the government might eventually want to know more than just their energy usage.
Once the door is opened, then it's only a matter of "preventing terror" to demand access to the actual data being transacted and stored.
I decided to check my energy usage on my desktops (two) and my laptop. What amazed me was just how much wattage the Desktop was using when you add the monitor and external 2.1 speakers. It was around 220-250 watts.
What was even more amazing was that the laptop and router together were only using 35-40 watts. It's also interesting to watch the power usage go up temporarily when the CPU is exercised and then to see it drop immediately back down. How do they get a laptop with a 15.4 screen and speakers to use that little juice?
That is a really good point. MS is selling software to protect you from there own failures. If they know what is breaking into their products then they should really know how to prevent that at the product (OS) level.
Charging for additional software rather than fixing the broken product seems something that only a monopolist could do.
the steaming pile they know is better than the steaming pile they don't know.
Excellent choice of words!
Sometimes, though, I think new releases aren't always an improvement over the previous release (eg. FreeBSD 6). I think being out of date is a subjective statement, at least viewed from a quality perspective.
It's a good thing Windows is so friendly and intuitive to use. Why would anyone want to edit text file configs in Linux when they can just locate the key "jknb31r289cjk1289" and change it (obviously) to "9889cfjk12q9fcvfd"
Before anyone says "but ubuntu already does this", the problem is that currently you have no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks That is no longer true and hasn't been true for the last 3 or 4 years. I do all of my administrative tasks via a gui interface on Ubuntu.
In fact, some things can also be done via Web-browser, something MS hasn't caught on to yet. The beauty of the Web-browser is that you have the same comfort when you remotely administer a machine
The fact is, you have a CLI option, if you like that, but anything you need to do to use the PC can be done via GUI.
And don't forget, that editing the registry on a Windows box makes the Unix/Linux CLI look like child's play.
I remember hearing about Linux in 1991, Slackware. I tried it and man did it suck. But hang in there suckers, one day WILL be the day of the herd. This coming from someone who tried Linux in 1991. Perhaps you should try something from this millennium before commenting.
You could just say that "Linux will never be ready for the desktop" and be done with it. It's a lot more honest than simply giving up because 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.
Wankers. I use it for my desktop. We use it for 40 desktops in our company. Seems to work very well there. And, if I compare it to the support required for the ~10 Windows boxes we have, it seems Windows is not quite yet ready for the desktop.
The honest answer is: it depends on what you want to do with your desktop.
How in the hell would you sell paid support for an OS that goes out of date every 6 months?
Keep in mind that some "enterprise" customers are still perfectly happy with Windows 2000. They don't want Fedora and Fedora doesn't want them. Therefore seperate branding makes perfect sense. I have Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on my latest-and-greatest-hardware desktop. I have an older laptop on which I put 6.06 a few years ago. It is still not out-of-date. 8.04 has some new features but 6.06 is still supported and updated regularly.
Alot of people consider Windows XP better than Vista. Do you consider XP out of date when millions of people still use it?
Thanks for the references. I did notice, for example, that the Windows API reference is for 3.1.
I don't trust MS to make a full attempt to be compatible. It is in their interest to maintain incompatibility between Office and competitors. Every manager will make a decision based on being compatible with what Office produces. And it doesn't matter whose fault it is, if it isn't compatible, managers will err on the side of caution and go with the MS product.
So MS bought a compatibility ruling to allow its 8000 page specification to become a "standard". With very suspicious actions on the part of Norway, Denmark and Germany...
So all MS has to do in the future is to make MS Office just slightly incompatible with the specification so that Open Office and others can't always correctly read MS documents and voila, the incompatibility remains. We are just where we were before with proprietary formats. MS will insist they are compatible and the it's the others who have not implemented their version correctly.
In fact, I recently read a report that office 2007 does not correctly follow the OOXML specification.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the commandment "Thou shall not kill" ?
It appears that even MS is having trouble implementing OOXML. Most experts agree that the OOXML spec is not implementable.
Ogg is a superior format to Real, WMV and MOV. I've often wondered myself why sites bend over backwards to provide multiple formats but don't supply ogg. It has better compression for the same bitrates.
I suspect the better compression is because OGG can use OSS compression which is superior to other commercial compression algorithms.
Since this has been in the HTML specification for long before that company exists I suspect they may have a tough time when it goes to court. But, I'm not a lawyer, so who knows.
I worked at a large telecommunications company and their policy was a little sneakier. You would go out to lunch. When you tried to swipe your badge to get back in, it wouldn't work. Security would show up at the door with a box in hand, escort you to your desk so you could get you personal belongings and then escort you out of the building.
It was policy and anyone who quit or was terminated has handled the same way.
There are railroad tracks going through my home town (Plymouth, NH). Growing up (in the 70's) it was an undesirable area. Now, it's the up-and-coming place. Granted, we don't have a lot of rail traffic going through - if we did it would probably be different. But, you don't see people moving to be next to the highway.
The biggest drawback currently to the railroad tracks is that they are used by snowmobilers in the winter, which creates infinitely more noise than the comforting sound of the railroad.
The train station was recently renovated and the whole depot area has been populated with new shops and a park. It's very encouraging.
True, there is no silver bullet for everything. But, as oil prices continue to rise, it will start making more sense to use rail for longer hauls.
Once that starts happening, the rail infrastructure will expand to reach more remote areas, related industries will spring up to handle the last mile which will enable even more to be shipped by rail and so on.
I've been wondering about why cargo rail hasn't made a comeback, too. The funny thing is, even in Germany, which has a great rail infrastructure, you are seeing more and more trucks on the road.
Apparently, the railroads couldn't handle the extra load and they are too bureaucratic to adapt to the higher demand. My hope is that the US is a little more adaptive. The savings in energy and environment would be huge and getting the trucks off the highway would improve the roads.
I agree completely that the bigger issue in corporations is the energy used by the end-user. When you add up all the desktops using 200+ watts plus local printers etc, it really adds up.
I think there is a real future for thin-clients and some sort of centralized resources in the future, at least for larger departments and corporations. The costs of maintaining 100's or 1000's of PC's with licenses, administration, maintainence and energy costs is huge. If you can reduce that by thin-clients and virtualized servers, you could save a lot.
From ZDNet:
"The recruitment company, Reed, for instance, has reduced its PC power use by 80 percent by replacing 4,500 PCs and 400 laptops with 'thin-client terminals'. "
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-200543.html
Or, perhaps these companies are reluctant because they are worried that the government might eventually want to know more than just their energy usage.
Once the door is opened, then it's only a matter of "preventing terror" to demand access to the actual data being transacted and stored.
I decided to check my energy usage on my desktops (two) and my laptop. What amazed me was just how much wattage the Desktop was using when you add the monitor and external 2.1 speakers. It was around 220-250 watts.
What was even more amazing was that the laptop and router together were only using 35-40 watts. It's also interesting to watch the power usage go up temporarily when the CPU is exercised and then to see it drop immediately back down. How do they get a laptop with a 15.4 screen and speakers to use that little juice?
That is a really good point. MS is selling software to protect you from there own failures. If they know what is breaking into their products then they should really know how to prevent that at the product (OS) level.
Charging for additional software rather than fixing the broken product seems something that only a monopolist could do.
Excellent post.
My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, many other countries seem to be heading in that same direction.
Putting a hole in the US dollar would properly reflect the declining dollar value against other currencies.
Excellent choice of words!
Sometimes, though, I think new releases aren't always an improvement over the previous release (eg. FreeBSD 6). I think being out of date is a subjective statement, at least viewed from a quality perspective.
It's a good thing Windows is so friendly and intuitive to use. Why would anyone want to edit text file configs in Linux when they can just locate the key "jknb31r289cjk1289" and change it (obviously) to "9889cfjk12q9fcvfd"
Excellent!In fact, some things can also be done via Web-browser, something MS hasn't caught on to yet. The beauty of the Web-browser is that you have the same comfort when you remotely administer a machine
The fact is, you have a CLI option, if you like that, but anything you need to do to use the PC can be done via GUI.
And don't forget, that editing the registry on a Windows box makes the Unix/Linux CLI look like child's play.
I remember hearing about Linux in 1991, Slackware. I tried it and man did it suck. But hang in there suckers, one day WILL be the day of the herd. This coming from someone who tried Linux in 1991. Perhaps you should try something from this millennium before commenting.
It's a lot more honest than simply giving up because 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.
Wankers. I use it for my desktop. We use it for 40 desktops in our company. Seems to work very well there. And, if I compare it to the support required for the ~10 Windows boxes we have, it seems Windows is not quite yet ready for the desktop.
The honest answer is: it depends on what you want to do with your desktop.
Keep in mind that some "enterprise" customers are still perfectly happy with Windows 2000. They don't want Fedora and Fedora doesn't want them. Therefore seperate branding makes perfect sense. I have Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on my latest-and-greatest-hardware desktop. I have an older laptop on which I put 6.06 a few years ago. It is still not out-of-date. 8.04 has some new features but 6.06 is still supported and updated regularly.
Alot of people consider Windows XP better than Vista. Do you consider XP out of date when millions of people still use it?
Thanks for the references. I did notice, for example, that the Windows API reference is for 3.1.
I don't trust MS to make a full attempt to be compatible. It is in their interest to maintain incompatibility between Office and competitors. Every manager will make a decision based on being compatible with what Office produces. And it doesn't matter whose fault it is, if it isn't compatible, managers will err on the side of caution and go with the MS product.
So MS bought a compatibility ruling to allow its 8000 page specification to become a "standard". With very suspicious actions on the part of Norway, Denmark and Germany...
So all MS has to do in the future is to make MS Office just slightly incompatible with the specification so that Open Office and others can't always correctly read MS documents and voila, the incompatibility remains. We are just where we were before with proprietary formats. MS will insist they are compatible and the it's the others who have not implemented their version correctly.
In fact, I recently read a report that office 2007 does not correctly follow the OOXML specification.