...but I know it'll be hilariously funny to me when/if Google adds their name to the "everyone uses the OASIS OpenDocument Formats" list and furniture sales spike in Redmond, Washington shortly thereafter...
(I imagine Oracle will do so at some point as well in some of their applications, even if only because imagining the look on Bill Gates' and Steve Ballmer's faces when they do makes Larry Ellison cackle with insane glee.)
It's interesting -Microsoft has trouble convincing most people to upgrade because there's nothing in the new versions that people really want or care about - Office 97 does what most people need just fine. In order to convince people (rightly or by trickery) that they need to "upgrade", they need to make the new version sufficiently different to make people think it's got something that they don't have but that they might want.
At the same time, Microsoft has to convince people that switching to some other product is going to be really hard and require "retraining" because it's not exactly the same as their current Microsoft product.
So what can they do? I guess they decided to go ahead and screw up the interface severely enough to make it look new and shiny, in hopes that some of the "new, shiny" buzz they're making about Longhorn/"Microsoft Vista Miscellaneous Edition" will at least get a horde of enough early-adopters to jump on the bandwagon, start using the new non-backwards-compliant file format, and in so doing start "pestering" users of the older office programs to buy new "Office" licenses.
Wonder how quickly support for the "Special Microsoft" offshoot of the OASIS formats will be added to OpenOffice 2, or possibly as a BSD-licensed independent converter (since MS is attempting to forbid GPL-licensed projects from using the file format)?...
The problem is that the Mercator projection got really popular way back in the 1500's because of sea navigation. The funny distortion is there because when distorted that way, you can draw a straight line from one place to another and it will represent a constant compass bearing - so navigating from one place to another using a Mercator projection map is as simple as drawing the straight line, measuring the angle, and sticking to that bearing for the entire trip.
Because it got so popular, these days lots of people think that's what maps are supposed to look like, despite the fact that different maps should really be projected differently, depending on what they're for. (There are projections designed to minimize shape distortion, projections designed to minimize area distortion [i.e. the shapes might be wrong, but the area covered by a particular feature relative to another will be fairly accurate], projections designed to minimize distance distortion, and projections that are just easy to program for...and at least one or two projections designed for political purposes (c.f. the "Peters" projection)
It would definitely reduce the functionality of the laptop away from networks, but wouldn't necessarily make them useless. "Windows Server 2003" appears to support a redirected local drive which appears as a "share" on the terminal session. Users who are going to be away from a network but NEED to work on something can use that to copy the file to the local drive before they disconnect, and then re-upload when they reconnect later.
That would slightly compromise the "nothing stays on the local system" but at least data that gets pulled down to the local system has to be done EXPLICITLY rather than happening by default...
Or maybe die from multiple infections after we missed patch day or forgot to wear our firewall.
That'll only be a problem for ordinary people. Those who migrate instead to OpenSequence/FreeDNA genetics instead will be largely immune.
The only downside is that members of the BSA ("Biological Sequence Authority") keep changing the "mainstream" DNA in people's language centers so as to make it hard for ordinary people to communicate with OpenSequence people.
I've been wondering if it would be feasible to lock the laptops WAY down (bare minimum of applications to connect) and have people use "Terminal Services" to operate an internal computer rather than having everything installed on the "remote" computer.
Seems like it would be easier to control and avoid problems that way (and if you use NomachineNX, you can use the same "terminal" client for VNC and X11 logins as well...)
Nothing to stop them from Embrace...Extend...Extinguish either.
...which is exactly what their "open" Office 12 formats are intended to do. Identical concept (XML and media files in a.zip file) to the actually-open OASIS OpenDocument formats, but of course with Microsoft's own special "we have to do this for Office97 documents" incompatibilities and the "GPL-Forbidden" terms for their "patent" licenses.
Well, aside from the obvious but publically denied reasons ("we'll do everything we can with our current monopoly powers to keep from having to compete or losing our monopoly power."), Microsoft CLAIMS that, although they ARE an OASIS member, they refused to work with everyone else because, to put it simply, the OASIS format wasn't going to be designed specifically to store older Microsoft Office document data. Personally, I take that to imply that their "new" format is going to have a lot of "<CDATA>(insert binary data from Word 97 here)</CDATA>" sort of stuff in it when you convert to "Office 12" formats from older versions of "Microsoft Office", ruining the whole point of having portable, interoperable formats.
And if this is not going to be the case, what "special features" could they possibly need to store the converted documents in this supposedly "open" format of theirs?
Oddly enough, Brian Jones et al were all trumpeting about how "easy" it would be for anyone to convert documents from MS's "special" Almost-but-not-quite-OASIS format because it would be XML. And yet they then complain that they won't support the true OASIS standard? If it's that easy, why not? Is there ANY way this could be anything but petty "taking their ball and going home" behavior?
I still find it funny and sickening at the same time that their excuse for not using the OASIS standard really just boils down to "it wasn't designed to store 'Office 97' format documents"...
Caches that are buried. If a shovel, trowel or other 'pointy' object is used to dig, whether in order to hide or to find the cache, then it is not appropriate.
Not just the "geocache.com" listings either, in case it isn't obvious to anyone - "burying" a cache (partially or otherwise - basically anything that requires cutting into the ground) seems to be universally considered, at the very least, "bad etiquette" (and is quite probably illegal on a lot of public land). Cache placement should disturb the area as little as possible.
Aside from Navicache I THINK there are a few other geocaching location sites out there as well, though I haven't looked recently. (I'm quite happy thus far with Navicache). I'd be very interested, though, to know what anyone thinks of any of the other sites aside from the obvious "geocache.com" site as well.
The interface is described in This thread in the Navicache forums. Just pass it the relevant information in the query and you get back an XML file with the data. When it first came out, I had to write a script to parse and import it, but it looks like the current GPSBabel understands the layout of the file natively, if you have space to dump the entire batch into your GPS unit. I grabbed the entire set some time ago, and now just periodically fetch "caches added or updated since" the last time I updated.
As for the GNIS reference data (the USGS-published database of populated places, natural features, radio towers, etc.), they can be downloaded state-by-state from here. For those living or just visiting outside of the US, another US agency also publishes a somewhat less comprehensive but still useful set of location data for various features downloadable from here, and, finally, if you want to play with street map data in the US, the US Census Bureau publishes the "TIGER/Line" data - at least when the census bureau site is accessible...
All of those latter data sources are in the public domain, being publications of the US Government, so they are Legally Free. (Perhaps an odd contrast for a government frequently accused of being bought-and-paid-for by wealthy corporations to the detriment of its citizens - whereas most countries thought of as less at the beck and call of businesses seem to all charge a fortune for this kind of data...) I find them handy for generating my own maps.
I personally was seriously turned off by the terms of service of the commercial "geocache.com"[1] (complete with the traditional "all your copyright are belong to us" provisions and "only premium subscribers can see this cache data" sections, and the proprietary fit (my potentially uninformed interpretation) they seem to have thrown about Their data being plotted for geocachers at Buxley's Maps site, but the sport itself is a huge amount of fun.
Although they don't yet have as many cache sites in their database as the "geocache.com" site, Navicache does have worldwide coverage and a much friendlier attitude (more of a "you are providing the cache data, it belongs to YOU" kind of attitude, and more like a "gift shop" business model than geocache.com's "tollbooth" one).
As far as equipment: A "Garmin Etrex Legend" (eventually to be replaced with something else - the Garmin's okay but I want one that I can more easily 'hack' to make it operate my own maps, etc.) and a laptop running Slackware with GPSDrive - the waypoint database of which is loaded with the entire Navicache.com set plus the USGS GNIS data for reference.
[1]They're not doing anything ILLEGAL or anything. It's just that I almost get the feeling that they feel they "own" the whole sport and the rights to it. They have every right to their "tollbooth-style" business model - it just feels like the wrong attitude to me when the sport is really maintained by the enthusiasts themselves, so I don't use them personally.
None...but if they divert some of the money they spend on, say, hiring Psychics(tm) hiring a programmer (or for that matter just "someone skilled with computers") THAT person may be helped by it, and can certainly develop some simple "how to find where Firefox puts stuff" training for them.
Well, yes, you got me - I was being lazy and using "X" to refer to the X.org project(s) specifically (I would have specified X11 if I meant the protocol itself). By "one gigantic project" I just meant the fact that I hadn't seen any news about the modularization being worked on or done, though I know that seems to be the target following the upcoming release. (I notice another replier saying that Ubuntu has the modularized version already, which is the first I'd heard of it, and is very good news I think.)
And other than not being able to SEE the changes very easily (except when I get brave and try compiling the current CVS - I want my blazing fast S3 Savage4 3D acceleration, dagnabbit! Well, okay, not "blazing fast", but I'll take what I can get on this laptop.) I don't really have any COMPLAINTS - X.org's stuff (other than the aforementioned Savage4 3D - which is supposed to be fixed in the upcoming release) works quite well for me. I do hope/wish they will/would finish getting modularization done though. It'd be a lot easier on me if I could just configure ; make ; make install on the X server itself without all the rest of the ponderous "make World" nonsense...
Too many people wanting too many different things and nothing gets done. And what does get done is usually only half-assed in its implementation.
As far as X is concerned, I personally have some hope that the eventual modularization of the X system MIGHT help with this. Right now, X is still one gigantic project and therefore (I presume) run by one gigantic virtual committee of developers. If they can manage to modularize it, it might at least reduce the size of the committees to separate groups of people who are at least all working on the same "module".
X development right now still FEELS extremely slow (from the point of view of someone completely outside of the loop - there could easily be a huge amount of work going on but nobody outside of X developers knows about it). I get the impression that the modularization project, should it ever succeed, may go a long way towards improving that, too, since the "modules" would no longer have to wait until the entire ponderous mass is ready for a release once every year or two...
[...] the person maintaining the mail server is no more or less important than the person who makes sure the air conditioner is working correctly.
Despite the fact that most companies seem to treat their IT staff as little more than "compu-janitors", somehow I think most major companies would panic a lot more if their email went down than if they had to put up with hot offices for a few days.
I've been trying to escape IT for years, and this attitude is the primary reason. Being a good IT person is a lot like being a famous sewer worker ("Look at the horrible pile of crap! We'd better call so-and-so, he's the only person who can shovel THIS out!") Or perhaps like being a proctologist, except without the high pay and prestige of being a medical professional.
My problem is, finishing college (long story) requires having both time AND money at the same time. The rate of income from my IT work would just about cover the exorbitant college costs here in the US if I had time left after the 50+ hour work weeks for it, and of course if I were to quit I'd have plenty of time but no way of covering living costs (I'm not young enough to leech off of my parents for years - and even if I wanted to try it anyway, I think my wife would disapprove).
Unfortunately, it's difficult to take science lab classes over the web, so that's not an option either. (I'm not looking for an MBA or something - I DO enjoy using computers to solve interesting problems, I just don't like my job always devolving into "compu-janitor" when people find out how good at it I am.)
And now I'm starting to rant, so I'll stop. I suspect, though, that I'm far from the only person who feels this way.
The most common reason I hear for why we just HAVE to give so many people, e.g., CD-burners is "they need to take data home to work on it..."
I keep wondering - wouldn't it be simpler to set up a "Windows Terminal Server" and have remote employees use THAT instead? That way, the only data leaving the company are (presumably encrypted) screen updates and key presses (yes, you CAN transfer files directly through the same mechanism, but how often would you legitimately need to if you can operate your "official" company computer from wherever you are instead of working off of some spyware-infested "home" computer directly?)
On a related note, anyone know how well the NoMachineNX RDP proxy would handle this sort of thing? Sure seems like it would be better than a more heavy-handed "VPN" connection that seems popular right now if it works effectively. Rumor is that it works reasonably well even on dial-up links, but I'm having trouble puzzling out how to set up to do RDP proxying from the various documents I've found so far.
For cases where someone really does need to make a CD of data to send to someone legitimately, perhaps a centrally located CDR "printer" with a web interface (perhaps something like this? Though I'd swear I'd seen more recent implementations of this concept using PHP) that users would send the files they need burned to, and the central box would make a record of what was being burned. (Ought to make the auditors happier, anyway).
Google maps has been working pretty well for me for the last month or so. For some reason I don't get the intial "default" map of the US that I get in Firefox when I connect, but otherwise typing in addresses, GPS coordinates, etc into the search bar and/or getting directions seems to be working for me reasonably well in Konqueror.
If you add "fc=1" to your query it'll bypass that obnoxious "you aren't using a 'supported' browser!" warning, too (e.g. "http://maps.google.com/?fc=1").
YMMV - I'm a compulsive updater of KDE and I'm running a recent SVN build.
[...] 'loose' as a spelling for 'lose'[...] So how do you spell the past tense?
Ess You See Kay Ee Dee.
The "loose/lose" and "should of" instead of "should have" are probably the only two that really irk me, for some reason. I generally don't even blink at "definately" or even the "there/their/they're" mixups most of the time, but "loose" just triggers a downright irrational irritation in me...
(For the record: "lose" means the opposite of "win", or alternatively "to unintentionally not have possession of something any more". "Loose", on the other hand, as a verb, means to intentionally let go of something. You "Loose the hounds" when you allow them to attack a burglar. You "Lose the Hounds" if the burglar runs off with them first...)
(I will now sit back and allow even better grammar fascists to correct my corrections...)
Slashdot Mirror
<mod type="flamebait">That's what they get for not using QTopia instead</mod>
(insert smiley here for the humor-impaired...)
...but I know it'll be hilariously funny to me when/if Google adds their name to the "everyone uses the OASIS OpenDocument Formats" list and furniture sales spike in Redmond, Washington shortly thereafter...
(I imagine Oracle will do so at some point as well in some of their applications, even if only because imagining the look on Bill Gates' and Steve Ballmer's faces when they do makes Larry Ellison cackle with insane glee.)
It's interesting -Microsoft has trouble convincing most people to upgrade because there's nothing in the new versions that people really want or care about - Office 97 does what most people need just fine. In order to convince people (rightly or by trickery) that they need to "upgrade", they need to make the new version sufficiently different to make people think it's got something that they don't have but that they might want.
At the same time, Microsoft has to convince people that switching to some other product is going to be really hard and require "retraining" because it's not exactly the same as their current Microsoft product.
So what can they do? I guess they decided to go ahead and screw up the interface severely enough to make it look new and shiny, in hopes that some of the "new, shiny" buzz they're making about Longhorn/"Microsoft Vista Miscellaneous Edition" will at least get a horde of enough early-adopters to jump on the bandwagon, start using the new non-backwards-compliant file format, and in so doing start "pestering" users of the older office programs to buy new "Office" licenses.
Wonder how quickly support for the "Special Microsoft" offshoot of the OASIS formats will be added to OpenOffice 2, or possibly as a BSD-licensed independent converter (since MS is attempting to forbid GPL-licensed projects from using the file format)?...
...It's how you project it.
The problem is that the Mercator projection got really popular way back in the 1500's because of sea navigation. The funny distortion is there because when distorted that way, you can draw a straight line from one place to another and it will represent a constant compass bearing - so navigating from one place to another using a Mercator projection map is as simple as drawing the straight line, measuring the angle, and sticking to that bearing for the entire trip.
Because it got so popular, these days lots of people think that's what maps are supposed to look like, despite the fact that different maps should really be projected differently, depending on what they're for. (There are projections designed to minimize shape distortion, projections designed to minimize area distortion [i.e. the shapes might be wrong, but the area covered by a particular feature relative to another will be fairly accurate], projections designed to minimize distance distortion, and projections that are just easy to program for...and at least one or two projections designed for political purposes (c.f. the "Peters" projection)
(O'Reilly's "Mapping Hacks" book has a pretty good discussion of the subject. Also check out Mark Monmier's "How to Lie with Maps".)
DING! Your wish is granted!
At least, my copy of the 1.5beta1 has this...
It would definitely reduce the functionality of the laptop away from networks, but wouldn't necessarily make them useless. "Windows Server 2003" appears to support a redirected local drive which appears as a "share" on the terminal session. Users who are going to be away from a network but NEED to work on something can use that to copy the file to the local drive before they disconnect, and then re-upload when they reconnect later.
That would slightly compromise the "nothing stays on the local system" but at least data that gets pulled down to the local system has to be done EXPLICITLY rather than happening by default...
That'll only be a problem for ordinary people. Those who migrate instead to OpenSequence/FreeDNA genetics instead will be largely immune.
The only downside is that members of the BSA ("Biological Sequence Authority") keep changing the "mainstream" DNA in people's language centers so as to make it hard for ordinary people to communicate with OpenSequence people.
I've been wondering if it would be feasible to lock the laptops WAY down (bare minimum of applications to connect) and have people use "Terminal Services" to operate an internal computer rather than having everything installed on the "remote" computer.
Seems like it would be easier to control and avoid problems that way (and if you use NomachineNX, you can use the same "terminal" client for VNC and X11 logins as well...)
...which is exactly what their "open" Office 12 formats are intended to do. Identical concept (XML and media files in a .zip file) to the actually-open OASIS OpenDocument formats, but of course with Microsoft's own special "we have to do this for Office97 documents" incompatibilities and the "GPL-Forbidden" terms for their "patent" licenses.
Well, aside from the obvious but publically denied reasons ("we'll do everything we can with our current monopoly powers to keep from having to compete or losing our monopoly power."), Microsoft CLAIMS that, although they ARE an OASIS member, they refused to work with everyone else because, to put it simply, the OASIS format wasn't going to be designed specifically to store older Microsoft Office document data. Personally, I take that to imply that their "new" format is going to have a lot of "<CDATA>(insert binary data from Word 97 here)</CDATA>" sort of stuff in it when you convert to "Office 12" formats from older versions of "Microsoft Office", ruining the whole point of having portable, interoperable formats.
And if this is not going to be the case, what "special features" could they possibly need to store the converted documents in this supposedly "open" format of theirs?
Oddly enough, Brian Jones et al were all trumpeting about how "easy" it would be for anyone to convert documents from MS's "special" Almost-but-not-quite-OASIS format because it would be XML. And yet they then complain that they won't support the true OASIS standard? If it's that easy, why not? Is there ANY way this could be anything but petty "taking their ball and going home" behavior?
I still find it funny and sickening at the same time that their excuse for not using the OASIS standard really just boils down to "it wasn't designed to store 'Office 97' format documents"...
Not just the "geocache.com" listings either, in case it isn't obvious to anyone - "burying" a cache (partially or otherwise - basically anything that requires cutting into the ground) seems to be universally considered, at the very least, "bad etiquette" (and is quite probably illegal on a lot of public land). Cache placement should disturb the area as little as possible.
("Remember, you should not have to needlessly bush-whack into an area to place your cache, and others should not have to bush-whack to find it and burying a cache on public managed lands is forbidden and against geocaching etiquette (not to mention plain old common sense!)."
Aside from Navicache I THINK there are a few other geocaching location sites out there as well, though I haven't looked recently. (I'm quite happy thus far with Navicache). I'd be very interested, though, to know what anyone thinks of any of the other sites aside from the obvious "geocache.com" site as well.
The interface is described in This thread in the Navicache forums. Just pass it the relevant information in the query and you get back an XML file with the data. When it first came out, I had to write a script to parse and import it, but it looks like the current GPSBabel understands the layout of the file natively, if you have space to dump the entire batch into your GPS unit. I grabbed the entire set some time ago, and now just periodically fetch "caches added or updated since" the last time I updated.
As for the GNIS reference data (the USGS-published database of populated places, natural features, radio towers, etc.), they can be downloaded state-by-state from here. For those living or just visiting outside of the US, another US agency also publishes a somewhat less comprehensive but still useful set of location data for various features downloadable from here, and, finally, if you want to play with street map data in the US, the US Census Bureau publishes the "TIGER/Line" data - at least when the census bureau site is accessible...
All of those latter data sources are in the public domain, being publications of the US Government, so they are Legally Free. (Perhaps an odd contrast for a government frequently accused of being bought-and-paid-for by wealthy corporations to the detriment of its citizens - whereas most countries thought of as less at the beck and call of businesses seem to all charge a fortune for this kind of data...) I find them handy for generating my own maps.
I personally was seriously turned off by the terms of service of the commercial "geocache.com"[1] (complete with the traditional "all your copyright are belong to us" provisions and "only premium subscribers can see this cache data" sections, and the proprietary fit (my potentially uninformed interpretation) they seem to have thrown about Their data being plotted for geocachers at Buxley's Maps site, but the sport itself is a huge amount of fun.
Although they don't yet have as many cache sites in their database as the "geocache.com" site, Navicache does have worldwide coverage and a much friendlier attitude (more of a "you are providing the cache data, it belongs to YOU" kind of attitude, and more like a "gift shop" business model than geocache.com's "tollbooth" one).
As far as equipment: A "Garmin Etrex Legend" (eventually to be replaced with something else - the Garmin's okay but I want one that I can more easily 'hack' to make it operate my own maps, etc.) and a laptop running Slackware with GPSDrive - the waypoint database of which is loaded with the entire Navicache.com set plus the USGS GNIS data for reference.
[1]They're not doing anything ILLEGAL or anything. It's just that I almost get the feeling that they feel they "own" the whole sport and the rights to it. They have every right to their "tollbooth-style" business model - it just feels like the wrong attitude to me when the sport is really maintained by the enthusiasts themselves, so I don't use them personally.
None...but if they divert some of the money they spend on, say, hiring Psychics(tm) hiring a programmer (or for that matter just "someone skilled with computers") THAT person may be helped by it, and can certainly develop some simple "how to find where Firefox puts stuff" training for them.
Well, yes, you got me - I was being lazy and using "X" to refer to the X.org project(s) specifically (I would have specified X11 if I meant the protocol itself). By "one gigantic project" I just meant the fact that I hadn't seen any news about the modularization being worked on or done, though I know that seems to be the target following the upcoming release. (I notice another replier saying that Ubuntu has the modularized version already, which is the first I'd heard of it, and is very good news I think.)
And other than not being able to SEE the changes very easily (except when I get brave and try compiling the current CVS - I want my blazing fast S3 Savage4 3D acceleration, dagnabbit! Well, okay, not "blazing fast", but I'll take what I can get on this laptop.) I don't really have any COMPLAINTS - X.org's stuff (other than the aforementioned Savage4 3D - which is supposed to be fixed in the upcoming release) works quite well for me. I do hope/wish they will/would finish getting modularization done though. It'd be a lot easier on me if I could just configure ; make ; make install on the X server itself without all the rest of the ponderous "make World" nonsense...
As far as X is concerned, I personally have some hope that the eventual modularization of the X system MIGHT help with this. Right now, X is still one gigantic project and therefore (I presume) run by one gigantic virtual committee of developers. If they can manage to modularize it, it might at least reduce the size of the committees to separate groups of people who are at least all working on the same "module".
X development right now still FEELS extremely slow (from the point of view of someone completely outside of the loop - there could easily be a huge amount of work going on but nobody outside of X developers knows about it). I get the impression that the modularization project, should it ever succeed, may go a long way towards improving that, too, since the "modules" would no longer have to wait until the entire ponderous mass is ready for a release once every year or two...
"Blue"? So THAT'S what color it was before they painted it black and mounted all those little sparkly LED's up in the ceiling...
Despite the fact that most companies seem to treat their IT staff as little more than "compu-janitors", somehow I think most major companies would panic a lot more if their email went down than if they had to put up with hot offices for a few days.
I've been trying to escape IT for years, and this attitude is the primary reason. Being a good IT person is a lot like being a famous sewer worker ("Look at the horrible pile of crap! We'd better call so-and-so, he's the only person who can shovel THIS out!") Or perhaps like being a proctologist, except without the high pay and prestige of being a medical professional.
My problem is, finishing college (long story) requires having both time AND money at the same time. The rate of income from my IT work would just about cover the exorbitant college costs here in the US if I had time left after the 50+ hour work weeks for it, and of course if I were to quit I'd have plenty of time but no way of covering living costs (I'm not young enough to leech off of my parents for years - and even if I wanted to try it anyway, I think my wife would disapprove).
Unfortunately, it's difficult to take science lab classes over the web, so that's not an option either. (I'm not looking for an MBA or something - I DO enjoy using computers to solve interesting problems, I just don't like my job always devolving into "compu-janitor" when people find out how good at it I am.)
And now I'm starting to rant, so I'll stop. I suspect, though, that I'm far from the only person who feels this way.
The most common reason I hear for why we just HAVE to give so many people, e.g., CD-burners is "they need to take data home to work on it..."
I keep wondering - wouldn't it be simpler to set up a "Windows Terminal Server" and have remote employees use THAT instead? That way, the only data leaving the company are (presumably encrypted) screen updates and key presses (yes, you CAN transfer files directly through the same mechanism, but how often would you legitimately need to if you can operate your "official" company computer from wherever you are instead of working off of some spyware-infested "home" computer directly?)
On a related note, anyone know how well the NoMachineNX RDP proxy would handle this sort of thing? Sure seems like it would be better than a more heavy-handed "VPN" connection that seems popular right now if it works effectively. Rumor is that it works reasonably well even on dial-up links, but I'm having trouble puzzling out how to set up to do RDP proxying from the various documents I've found so far.
For cases where someone really does need to make a CD of data to send to someone legitimately, perhaps a centrally located CDR "printer" with a web interface (perhaps something like this? Though I'd swear I'd seen more recent implementations of this concept using PHP) that users would send the files they need burned to, and the central box would make a record of what was being burned. (Ought to make the auditors happier, anyway).
Just my own thoughts on the problem.
Google maps has been working pretty well for me for the last month or so. For some reason I don't get the intial "default" map of the US that I get in Firefox when I connect, but otherwise typing in addresses, GPS coordinates, etc into the search bar and/or getting directions seems to be working for me reasonably well in Konqueror.
If you add "fc=1" to your query it'll bypass that obnoxious "you aren't using a 'supported' browser!" warning, too (e.g. "http://maps.google.com/?fc=1").
YMMV - I'm a compulsive updater of KDE and I'm running a recent SVN build.
Word is that if that happens, France will retaliate by NOT renaming "American Cheese"...
Ess You See Kay Ee Dee.
The "loose/lose" and "should of" instead of "should have" are probably the only two that really irk me, for some reason. I generally don't even blink at "definately" or even the "there/their/they're" mixups most of the time, but "loose" just triggers a downright irrational irritation in me...
(For the record: "lose" means the opposite of "win", or alternatively "to unintentionally not have possession of something any more". "Loose", on the other hand, as a verb, means to intentionally let go of something. You "Loose the hounds" when you allow them to attack a burglar. You "Lose the Hounds" if the burglar runs off with them first...)
(I will now sit back and allow even better grammar fascists to correct my corrections...)
I think you meant "grammar".
Sheesh! I'm going to loose my mind reading all of these things that people should of known how to write properly! Their driving me nuts!
(Yes...that WAS on purpose...)