In terms of Outlook users, we found little by way of user resistance, in some cases it was like we slipped it into the customers drink (the ease with which we migrated people).
Unfortunately, things are not so easy when it comes to Office and Productivity suites. There are still little quirks of some software that *some* users will not let go of.
We've been gradually weening a few customers from Exchange etc over the last few months and continued development of Kontact/Kolab/OpenGroupware only helps us.
We get a real feeling of 'security' with open-souce groupware; we know where we stand and can get support/patches in a hurry if we know which buttons to press. In emergencies, we can even sub-contract developers to make patches for us!
The only thing that suprises me is that open-source groupware hasn't come further than it has in recent years.
I'd agree with that, my friends only discovered Firefox after suggested they check it out (they were having problems with IE); I hadn't tried it at that time.
They then came back to me raving about it so I tried it and was impressed;)
Not meaning to sound too ruff on Windows users (I know their IE browser is psuedo-integrated) but I find it hard to see why you'd want to continue using IE when there are so many other lovely browsers available that don't suffer as many vulnerabilities/ get patched so much faster.
Just one example: Firefox. Admittedly I don't use Firefox myself but a number of my Windows using friends have switched to this in recent months and they absolutely love it; even to the point of raving about it to me:)
So what is the real reason that so many Windows users don't find an alternative? Are they bone-idle or are they ignorant to the range of alternatives?
I think the point here is that they don't spend any time or money on irrelevancies such as fancy animations.
They probably gave one person who was not neccesarily a paid professional animator a few stock meshes and CAD diagrams and said "You've got a week before we need you back on the *real* R&D".
After all, animations such as these are mid-project and just aimed at the dimwits in the press who can't get their heads around these kinds of projects.
At this stage where funding will have been agreed a year ago, they won't glean any extra thru fancy animation so they spend no time/money/effort on it.
One last point is that all space agencies have been shy of realistic animations since they realised that the dimwit public sometimes take an animation as being the Real Thing(tm)
There are already some great players for Linux available (they've been around for ages) but they exist in a legal grey-area.
Remember, just because you bought the DVD and bought the hardware to play it back with doesn't mean you are neccesarily allowed to choose what software you use to play it back!
Do you suppose a private enterprise which develops this system themselves would be able to offer the 'Transhab' design back to NASA after they have tested it?
This could enable NASA to buy a Transhab module less the development cost.
Blair is nothing of the sort. He is a Prime-Minister or 'First' Minister. He does *not* have any legal right to make arbitrary decisions like a president does.
At best he has to agree emergency decisions with the civil service first.
It seems a bit daft that it still uses a vertical ATX power connecter, as once you have plugged it in, you will have the combined height of the plug and the curvature of the cable increasing the overall height.
Surely they could have come up with some means of side-mounting the ATX connector?
I'd just been thinking about the altitude required to 'see-over' the horizon to the other point. Does just 20m above sea level mean the Tangiers antenna must be very high up?
Now my maths is useless, but it says the Tarifa antenna at Castillo de Guzmán el Bueno is 20m above mean sea level and the Tangiers antenna position is unknown but 32,000m away.
From that can anyone work out the required height of the Tangiers antenna to have line of sight over the curvature of the Earth?
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
Apparently it was provided by a US media company. Unfortunately the Camera crews could be heard talking over the commentary although it did provide insight into the 'blank shots' of the sky; none of the camera crews could locate the aircraft!:)
The only good shots were WhiteKnight takeoff, the con-trail on 'light' and SpaceShipOne landing. Most of the rest of the flight was obscured by them being 'in the sun'.
I was listening to the radio relay on the bbc.co.uk live video feed.
On the way back (I think after completing the 'feather'), Mike reported a 'loud bang' and his chase plane, the Alpha-Jet reported that an aft fairing had buckled.
When they got back down they were saying that they suspect the loud bang was caused by that same panel.
With the vast amount of legitimate downloads made available using BitTorrent, I wouldn't say it has a 'bad reputation' at all.
BitTorrent has successfully been used to provide everything from ISOs for distros to large commercial game demos.
The use of BT for transmitting illegal warez etc has been minimal mainly because BT requires a larger number of people to be interested in the particular warez than most P2P software for a download to work.
Its worth remembering that the primary use of BT is to get large files out to large numbers of people as soon after a given date as possible (while using the minimum of initial bandwidth).
What the article is actually getting at tho is that the PVR can be used to easily start a BT download on another (perhaps headless) machine to which the TV/PVR is networked.
Its convenient and useful but hardly revolutionary in this case.
They're not going to withstand Mars' ambient radiation levels; hence the 'skin like lead' requirement.
Despite the Earth having low pressure/high alt regions, our radiation dosage is fairly consistent due to the layers of the upper atmosphere which protect us. - On Mars there is no such 'natural sunblock'.
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In terms of Outlook users, we found little by way of user resistance, in some cases it was like we slipped it into the customers drink (the ease with which we migrated people).
Unfortunately, things are not so easy when it comes to Office and Productivity suites. There are still little quirks of some software that *some* users will not let go of.
We've been gradually weening a few customers from Exchange etc over the last few months and continued development of Kontact/Kolab/OpenGroupware only helps us.
We get a real feeling of 'security' with open-souce groupware; we know where we stand and can get support/patches in a hurry if we know which buttons to press. In emergencies, we can even sub-contract developers to make patches for us!
The only thing that suprises me is that open-source groupware hasn't come further than it has in recent years.
I think you just answered your own question.
The most obvious route is to tax devices when they are retailed.
I have to say that this is definitely a case of taxing something for the sake of filling government coffers which is just plain wrong!
I downloaded all of my Fedora Core 2 ISOs with Bittorrent.
;)
Like a good lad, I kept my client open for a further 12 hours to help the torrent reach more users.
The Parent post was ironic humour; I think you missed it :/
I'd agree with that, my friends only discovered Firefox after suggested they check it out (they were having problems with IE); I hadn't tried it at that time.
;)
They then came back to me raving about it so I tried it and was impressed
Sorry to make a double reply.
I've just tested the load time of Firefox on my System (from dry - no-preloading).
I get a usable Firefox window in 3 seconds on a moderate 2400XP system with an ATA hdd.
Thats actually quicker than loading Konqueror for me.
I wonder if its an issue with the Windows port which causes longer load-times?
The bottom line is that IE is probably partially pre-loaded at all times, once again adding to the Windows overhead.
There is nothing to stop you running Firefox fully pre-loaded from boot-time.
Not meaning to sound too ruff on Windows users (I know their IE browser is psuedo-integrated) but I find it hard to see why you'd want to continue using IE when there are so many other lovely browsers available that don't suffer as many vulnerabilities/ get patched so much faster.
:)
Just one example: Firefox. Admittedly I don't use Firefox myself but a number of my Windows using friends have switched to this in recent months and they absolutely love it; even to the point of raving about it to me
So what is the real reason that so many Windows users don't find an alternative? Are they bone-idle or are they ignorant to the range of alternatives?
Perhaps it could be down to the pressure of 4km of ice causing sufficient heating at lower levels for freshwater to be liquid.
;)
But I'm no geologist (or physicist)
I think the point here is that they don't spend any time or money on irrelevancies such as fancy animations.
They probably gave one person who was not neccesarily a paid professional animator a few stock meshes and CAD diagrams and said "You've got a week before we need you back on the *real* R&D".
After all, animations such as these are mid-project and just aimed at the dimwits in the press who can't get their heads around these kinds of projects.
At this stage where funding will have been agreed a year ago, they won't glean any extra thru fancy animation so they spend no time/money/effort on it.
One last point is that all space agencies have been shy of realistic animations since they realised that the dimwit public sometimes take an animation as being the Real Thing(tm)
There are already some great players for Linux available (they've been around for ages) but they exist in a legal grey-area.
Remember, just because you bought the DVD and bought the hardware to play it back with doesn't mean you are neccesarily allowed to choose what software you use to play it back!
Do you suppose a private enterprise which develops this system themselves would be able to offer the 'Transhab' design back to NASA after they have tested it?
This could enable NASA to buy a Transhab module less the development cost.
The America / "The West" actually gets off its backside and builds it before China decides to.
Blair is nothing of the sort. He is a Prime-Minister or 'First' Minister. He does *not* have any legal right to make arbitrary decisions like a president does.
At best he has to agree emergency decisions with the civil service first.
The article calls this 'SLI' 'Scalable Linked Architecture'.
Indeed, it uses a top/bottom 50/50 split for rendering rather than per-line interleaving.
It seems a bit daft that it still uses a vertical ATX power connecter, as once you have plugged it in, you will have the combined height of the plug and the curvature of the cable increasing the overall height.
Surely they could have come up with some means of side-mounting the ATX connector?
I'd just been thinking about the altitude required to 'see-over' the horizon to the other point. Does just 20m above sea level mean the Tangiers antenna must be very high up?
Now my maths is useless, but it says the Tarifa antenna at Castillo de Guzmán el Bueno is 20m above mean sea level and the Tangiers antenna position is unknown but 32,000m away.
From that can anyone work out the required height of the Tangiers antenna to have line of sight over the curvature of the Earth?
EME would be a great trick to use if only the damn Moon would stay still! ;)
Also the ping would be a little high.
It's a shame they didn't test with data too to see what the baud-rate capability was (or if they did they don't give results).
I could answer no. 3:
The FAA is only licencing Mojave for sub-orbital space launches at the moment.
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
:)
Apparently it was provided by a US media company. Unfortunately the Camera crews could be heard talking over the commentary although it did provide insight into the 'blank shots' of the sky; none of the camera crews could locate the aircraft!
The only good shots were WhiteKnight takeoff, the con-trail on 'light' and SpaceShipOne landing. Most of the rest of the flight was obscured by them being 'in the sun'.
I was listening to the radio relay on the bbc.co.uk live video feed.
On the way back (I think after completing the 'feather'), Mike reported a 'loud bang' and his chase plane, the Alpha-Jet reported that an aft fairing had buckled.
When they got back down they were saying that they suspect the loud bang was caused by that same panel.
With the vast amount of legitimate downloads made available using BitTorrent, I wouldn't say it has a 'bad reputation' at all.
BitTorrent has successfully been used to provide everything from ISOs for distros to large commercial game demos.
The use of BT for transmitting illegal warez etc has been minimal mainly because BT requires a larger number of people to be interested in the particular warez than most P2P software for a download to work.
Its worth remembering that the primary use of BT is to get large files out to large numbers of people as soon after a given date as possible (while using the minimum of initial bandwidth).
What the article is actually getting at tho is that the PVR can be used to easily start a BT download on another (perhaps headless) machine to which the TV/PVR is networked.
Its convenient and useful but hardly revolutionary in this case.
They will not win the X-Prize tommorow and they most likely will not win it in the nearest future.
The X-Prize is for 2 manned launches with the equivalent of 3 persons mass within 2 weeks.
Tommorow's flight is 1 person and less ballast mass and AFAIK, scaled has no plans to launch again in the following 2 weeks.
They're not going to withstand Mars' ambient radiation levels; hence the 'skin like lead' requirement.
Despite the Earth having low pressure/high alt regions, our radiation dosage is fairly consistent due to the layers of the upper atmosphere which protect us. - On Mars there is no such 'natural sunblock'.