I'll get flamed for this, but I find his writing only mildly humorous at best. It is very lightweight reading, and most of it, especially the Dirk Gently stuff, seems to have been lifted from Dr. Who stories that aired when he was script editor. He wasn't credited with writing those scripts though.
His writing is like cotton candy, not bad, but certainly not filling. Very light and with a tendency to dissolve a few seconds after you get it.
I also stopped enjoying the non sequiter humor of Monty Python funny after I was about 15 years old. I can only watch about 5 minutes of it before it gets old.
After all, the man had the nerve to try and pass off the hoary old "cookie swap" story as actually happening to him. See http://www.snopes2.com/crime/safety/cookies.htm
"oh you can lose a few million this year, just be nice to everyone", until they put a dollar value on satisfied customers, they are going to continue to behave this way because WE make them
True, but for most companies it is a choice between "We can make 10 million and have a few customers hate us (but keep giving us money because we are the only game in town)" and "We can make 8 million and get good press and have the most satisfied customers."
Take a look at what was Redmond Linux, now Lycoris. Pretty decent install, except for 1 or 2 things. Nice, simplified setup when you are done. Not for Gnome lovers though.
You mention ghost. There's also Partition Magic's drive image program. There's also using any of the free cd-rom imaging programs to make an image of the final install. Slap that image on a harddrive and since you'll have the case open anyway, just put that hd in as a slave and copy the image over. There's a few things you can do since you'll have the case apart.
One thing you are factoring in is your time. You will be using it to do these upgrades. You know what you are paid and you know how long it will take you to do the upgrade. You do the math. 2 hours a machine can easily shave a hundred bucks off the price difference.
Yes, your time is a sunk cost for the company, but your time is valuable and could be spent on other projects which must now go without you.
Plus you've got the added cost of ordering multiple parts from different vendors, tracking these parts as they come in, etc.
I'm not saying you won't be able to save money, but be aware that there are these hidden costs as well.
Yep, mentioned them in my first post, but I didn't bother to link to the actual story about the ad rejection. TV stations will also, rarely, reject some political ads.
Crap. Hey, at least I can remember the Spanish lyrics Linda was going to try. Senor Plow no es macho, y solamente [I think, can't quite hear this word] un boracho. . .
Using click-throughs as a metric has been debunked over and over and over and over.
That may very well be. But I'm going by the article's statements and the letter that the article quoted from google. If you read the article, you may remember this quote from a letter sent to the author by google:
"Hello. I am the automated performance monitor for Google AdWords Select. My job is to keep average clickthrough rates at a high level, so that users can consistently count on AdWords ads to help them find products and services. The last 1,000 ad impressions I served to your campaign(s) received fewer than five clicks. When I see results like this, I significantly reduce the rate at which I show the ads so you can make changes to improve performance. (... ) Sincerely, The Google AdWords Automated Performance Monitor" i>
And from the article itself: Prices are determined according to the number of search requests and an average Cost-Per-Click.
Now I may be insane. And google may be insane. The author of the article may have completely lied about the contents of the letter he received. But I'm responding to what the article said.
And in fact, that's partly my point. Click throughs may not be the best way for google to charge. Why not charge by the number of times your ad is displayed? They certainly have the technology to do that. My theory, based on the letter the author received from google, is that google uses click throughs to guage how appropriate the ad is to the search the user conducted. The type of ads, I think, that google wants are those ads that are informative and answer the users question. In otherwords, useful ads. Do you remember the old Obsession cologne ads or Barney's Plow King commercial that parodied them? That commercial grabbed your attention. It made you remeber the product. But if you want to know about cologne or you want to know about getting your drive plowed, they are useless. On the other hand, check out a car commercial. On most of them you'll learn the warranty, the features, and maybe even the mpg. That's an informative ad if you are in the market for a car. I believe that what google wants are ads that are more like car commercials, informative, and less like Barney's Plow King commercial.
As for click throughs, they may not be the best metric for web ads. The best metric would be far too intrusive. There would be a way to track what ads you saw and then what products you purchased in the next month. Since that information would be linked to me specifically, or at least my computer, I would find that very intrusive. As it is now, Pepsi has to put out a new ad, let's say Britney and Christina Aguilera singing a duet. This commercial tells you nothing about Pepsi except it is a drink. But if sales go up in the next month, then Pepsi can hypothesize that perhaps the B/C duet helped sales. Or simply a new campaign re-invigorated the drink, like slapping a #1 on a comic to temprorarily boost sales. Neilsen ratings can tell us that 15 million people were watching the show the ad appeared in. What I kind of suggested in my original post was that google could use the number of searches, say 20 million searches for "used cars" as a way of getting a rating for the ad. That leaves the job for the ads success on the marketing department of the company placing the ad. Which was what I suggested.
I'll say it again. The reason I think they don't do that is not necessarily because they think the clickthroughs are a good metric (a metric for what, exactly?) but because they think clickthroughs are a way to tell how informative an ad is.
An example: let's say you search for "snow removal rates". You see two ads: Barney's which is in black and white, has a globe breaking while a woman sings. Homer's has the Mr. Plow logo, a phone number and the fact that he is licensed and bonded (yes, I know he really wasn't, please play along). The theory I think google is working under is that give a choice, people will click the ad that they think will lead them to the answer they want. And that is probably a reasonable assumption. Unless you are bored, if you want information you are probably more likely to follow the link that will get you that information. And google wants to have ads that are useful and will give you what you want. So from their perspective, they think clickthroughs are a good metric for measuring people's attitudes abot the usefulness of a link.
And this is probably getting longer than the attention span of most slashdot readers, so I'll stop with a summary: Read the article, because your response seems to indicate you didn't. I think google wants useful ads, and they measure usefulness by the amount of clicks an ad gets under the assumption that people click links they think will lead them to the information they want.
Oh, yeah, and don't forget call Mr. Plow, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Plow.;)
The thing that strikes me most is how different this is from advertising on tv and radio. On tv, the ad rate is based on how many people watch the show, what its rating is. An ad during a popular prime-time show costs more money than an ad at 3 in the morning. But the tv companies don't care what you put in your ad. They are selling you one shot at reaching your audience. If you blow it, they don't care. They only time they care is if you try to show something like an ad from adbusters that might actually suggest that people not spend money they don't have on crap they don't need. But if you want to be silly, so what?
Because google gets paid not by the number of people that see the ad but by the number of people that follow it, their concern is with getting people to click the ad.
If google were to sell ads like tv (and who is to say they shouldn't), they would charge based on the number of searches you want to be linked to. If there are 1,000,000 searches on "soda pop" a day, then charge every one who wants an ad to show up then $100, and it is up to you to make your ad work within their guidelines.
In some ways, this makes more sense. Within the rules for google's text ads, why should they take the risk that your marketing drones can get out a decent ad. Because that is the risk they are assuming now. And that's why there is this automated system that checks click throughs.
From a business perspective, you want to accept as little risk as possible, especially for things you can't control.
The flip side of this coin is that google doesn't want the value of their ads to drop. No one who has been on the net for more than 5 minutes pays attention to the hit the monkey ads or the ads that rotate around slashdot. Why? Because they are often random and have little relationship to the page we are visiting or the reason for our visit. At least that's how it seems to me. I certainly don't visit/. to find news about InterSystems. But people who visit google are there looking for something.
So maybe google wants to make sure that the ads are relevant because it doesn't want to accept the risk that its ads will considered worthless, thus dropping the price they can charge for them.
Again, this is the reverse of the way it works on tv. Advertisers will drop a show because they don't want to be associated with its message. Look at the companies that pulled advertisements from Ellen because she came out. But when was the last time you heard of a show not accepting a willing advertiser with cash money? Besides the adbuster ads of course.
With google, we get the reverse. It's like having UPN saying no ads for depends diapers during Buffy:TVS because the ads are unrelated to the show and the ads will cause the value of the show to drop. They don't care if you think that a lot of young people will rush out and buy depends. As long as your check clears.
Is it right? FIIK. It's a balancing act between losing your good name and generating revenue efficiently.
Yes, you'll be out a few bucks for the cd's, but why not bring in a copy of red hat, mandrake, debian, whatever you want. Maybe two different distros to show the variety. Whatever distro you are comfortable with. Bring enough for everyone, that way everyone can walk out with the ability to do whatever you showed them.
Let them know about the local lug if there is one.
Re:Surprised? No. Opportunity? Yes.
on
XP, Phone Home
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· Score: 2
You bought their software (Windows XP) and you accepted their EULA. I dont think you have much money to collect from Microsoft, sorry.
Has anyone challenged the EULA as an adhesion contract?
Yeah, but I think they are trying to be a for profit company. For which the rule is the reverse, never say you are out of money, and if you do have to beg for donations, stop as soon as possible or people will tag you with the big 'ol capital L.
They have too much to lose placing all their eggs in the desktop basket
They do now offer a minimal install that comes in at around 65 megs. Combine that with the maximum security level and you've got the beginnings of a decent server. They just need to market it better.
However, that's what Porters are for, and for things like Medical Records, test results and drugs, for confidentiality reasons as well as safety, only trained people are allowed to carry them
Looks like it is time to read the article. Oh look, it says they lock items in a safe. Now assuming that only authorized people have the key/combination (it didn't say what kind of a lock) a safe is pretty, well, safe. On the other hand, how many of the people receiving electronic records will put their login name and password on a sticky note on their monitor? The nice thing is that if I login to your computer with your name and passwords, it is pretty unlikely you'll know that I copied some documents. But if someone physically breaks the safe, you'll know immediately.
Seems to me a well designed electronic safe could be pretty efficient. You could have a card swipe on the lock and when you put records or other valuables in, you could select which key cards could open the safe. But that wasn't how this was described in the article. Swipe your card through to "arm" the safe. Robot uploads your information to the network. The network gives you a list of people to choose from based on your rights. You assign rights to people to unlock it. They get notified they've been given that right and you get notified of who, when, and where the documents were accessed.
konqueror/mozilla could have support for it in a release version within a month or two. And if IE supports it soon
The problem is backward compatibility. Not all of the people who come to our website are technically savvy enough to upgrade a browser (which is why MS was so insistent in bundling IE, you may remember) and those are savvy enough may not have the time, inclination or a fast pipe to get the next version of a browser in a reasonable time. So despite the fact that mozilla and ie could support it in a month, our users might not be able to until they get a new pc, which means a 4 year or so wait before it is worth it.
Is it really worth it do do the browser check for a graphic when an existing format will do what I want? No.
The people who do a lot of writing, and subsequently need more than wordpad or kate, need 3 basic features: wordcount and endnotes/footnotes, and spellcheck. Why? Because the people who do a lot of writing tend to be either students, academics, or professional writers.
If a wordprocessor can't do those 3 things it is useless to me.
it's like photocoping a magazine in the newsagents, then putting it back
Except here it costs at least 7 cents a page to photocopy. For magazines that isn't bad because you can skip the ads, but I've photocopied entire out of print books before and believe me, it isn't as cheap as getting the Dover Press version.
somebody else's trademarked product as your own product is absolutely grounds for a lawsuit
Yep. They're called knockoffs and it happens all the time. Now web pages are an interesting case. Let's say that I sell your a Rolllex brand watch. Rolex can come after me because I produced a knock off and diluted their trademark and mis-represented their product 'cause my Rolllex watches break after a day.
But let's say that I tell you that I own a Rolex watch and that it is a real piece of crap. When in fact I own a perfectly good Timex. Can Rolex sue me then? Well, maybe, maybe not. There have been a few cases where people posting opinions were required to remove those postings that disparaged their product.
Then there's a question of whether or not http headers constitute telling the end user what the os is. The vast majority of people don't care or know how to find out what os a site is running.
Actually, the filesystem as database, which has been around for a while, see beos, has the potential to be very big. That doesn't mean you wouldn't have to be able to use some of the same *nix tools and pipes, just that there would be more information available to describe a file.
It would be nice to have the following types of information associated with a file as part of the file system, for example:
--crc or md5 info to tell when a file was corrupt --detailed information about what executable should be used as the default to open the file --more detailed permissions, like in netware, as opposed to *nix very basic rwx --rollback features (think something along the lines of netware's salvage feature, a feature yet to be implemented in *nix or windows to the degree it is in netware --detailed information about files that access data in the file. For linked objects, for example, to know that when I change *this* graphic, it means that *that* document will be changed --user customization. If the file system is a database, why can't I make a table with new attributes that I want to track and use the filesystem's unique id for the file as a foreign key?
Sure, some of these features are implemented to a greater or lesser extent by programs today, but they are program specific, not built at the file system level and not as expandable.
Oh yes, good point about the quotas. But make sure that if you e-mail a person that they are over quota that the e-mail gets to them. Make your messages override the quota.
That would be nice for a webmail interface. Have like a stop light or something that is green until you get within 10% of your quota then when you hit your quota it turns red. Something nice and visual for constant feedback.
When we were on windows 3.x I wrote a wrapper for eudora that warned people when they had less than 5 megs free on their network drive. That worked very well. API changes and cheap harddrives have essentially made it useless now, but it was a nice feature.
Don't give them some heavily branded browser that is going to start a lot of junk every time you log in. Simpler is better. Don't install protocols they don't need. When I first got my cable modem, @home tried to install Microsoft Networking, a heavily branded browser and a bunch of other junk. Luckily my computer was still in transit so I just grabbed the modem and the numbers and didn't have to call them back. Why on earth would you want MS networking for a home computer to surf the net?
Do give them a minimal version of os requirement. If you tell them they need to have windows 95, and that you don't support win3.x, then you know they have a telnet client and will support that, for example.
Do require a minimum version of both ie and netscape. And then write your web pages to support both equally. Do provide unbranded versions of those browsers on cd and support the installation.
Do give them a web interface to their e-mail. Support that. And remember the minimal browser recommendation.
Do give them a real pop account so that those people that know what they are doing can set up their preferred e-mail client. Don't support those clients officially. This gives you control over the interface so your help people will always know what the customer is using.
For ftp, just pick a program you like. ws_ftpLE on the windows side and something on the mac.
Now the tough choices, newsgroups and chat. Since the chat clients are going back and forth on interoperability, you'll have to make 2 decisions. You'll have to decide if you are going to support a chat client. I'd personally say no, and here's why. Customers will want to use the client that all of their friends use, so if you tell them you won't support msn chat but will support icq, for example, you could lose customers. The alternative is to support the 3 or 4 major clients, and no more. The problem is that you'll have to keep up with lot's of different version which could be a problem. Of course, I don't do the icq/chat thing so take that with a grain of salt.
Which brings us to newsgroups. You need to decide if you are going to host them at all, just non-binaries or something in the middle. I'd say that the best reader for windows is Agent. So maybe you could get a licensing deal with them and spread the cost around. The alternative, outlook, doesn't enter into the picture because of security problems.
If you are in a large company, why are you using a non-standard development environment? Everyone should use the same development environment.
People who have complained seem to think it is strictly IT's decision as to what is supported, and to a degree it is, but don't forget management also wants to keep everyone on the same program. When you take time out from your work to install software that is non-standard for your company, then you decrease the time you spend doing your job. And if your software is incompatible with other software that people use, you increase the amount of time fixing those incompatibilities. Days have been lost fixing differences in complex documents that were saved in Word 95 and then converted to Word 2000. Just because someone wanted the latest version. Don't even get me started on the differences between WP and Word. Just installing a different printer can change document formatting, throwing long, complex documents off by pages. Management doesn't want that hassle anymore than IT does.
As I understand it, Mandrake has been keeping pace with the qt libraries. The next version will be 9.0 and use qt 3 and kde 3. The reason for putting out 8.2 was to sort of wrap up a lot of patches and some new control tools.
Personally, I think it was a way to really stress test the control center and new wizard features before blowing everyone out of the water with 9. If you look at the verion numbers, a lot of the Mandrake controls are right around 1. The ones I remember were at.96 or so. My guess is they will be version 1.0 with 9.0. Just a guess though.
Why didn't I see it coming? I didn't care. I didn't look through the benefits of being a clubmember because I didn't care about them. I've been downloading versions since 6, when they were still RedHat++. This was a way for me to pay for the free software I'd been getting. Still don't care about SO, nor am I ticked about the change in the plans.
If you go to: http://www.mandrakeclub.com/article.php?sid=1 3
You will see this as part of the announcement for commercial applications for MandrakeClub members:
"At this moment it isn't clear what will happen with the StarOffice. How badly do you need this application?"
This is dated March 8. Before they made the big membership drive, IIRC, or very close to it. Most of the responses below say that they don't care about SO. So, it looks like someone is spreading FUD about Mandrake and that Mandrake needs to be a little bit more thorough is updating its the marketing on its website.
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I'll get flamed for this, but I find his writing only mildly humorous at best. It is very lightweight reading, and most of it, especially the Dirk Gently stuff, seems to have been lifted from Dr. Who stories that aired when he was script editor. He wasn't credited with writing those scripts though.
His writing is like cotton candy, not bad, but certainly not filling. Very light and with a tendency to dissolve a few seconds after you get it.
I also stopped enjoying the non sequiter humor of Monty Python funny after I was about 15 years old. I can only watch about 5 minutes of it before it gets old.
After all, the man had the nerve to try and pass off the hoary old "cookie swap" story as actually happening to him. See http://www.snopes2.com/crime/safety/cookies.htm
"oh you can lose a few million this year, just be nice to everyone", until they put a dollar value on satisfied customers, they are going to continue to behave this way because WE make them
True, but for most companies it is a choice between "We can make 10 million and have a few customers hate us (but keep giving us money because we are the only game in town)" and "We can make 8 million and get good press and have the most satisfied customers."
Take a look at what was Redmond Linux, now Lycoris. Pretty decent install, except for 1 or 2 things. Nice, simplified setup when you are done. Not for Gnome lovers though.
You mention ghost. There's also Partition Magic's drive image program. There's also using any of the free cd-rom imaging programs to make an image of the final install. Slap that image on a harddrive and since you'll have the case open anyway, just put that hd in as a slave and copy the image over. There's a few things you can do since you'll have the case apart.
One thing you are factoring in is your time. You will be using it to do these upgrades. You know what you are paid and you know how long it will take you to do the upgrade. You do the math. 2 hours a machine can easily shave a hundred bucks off the price difference.
Yes, your time is a sunk cost for the company, but your time is valuable and could be spent on other projects which must now go without you.
Plus you've got the added cost of ordering multiple parts from different vendors, tracking these parts as they come in, etc.
I'm not saying you won't be able to save money, but be aware that there are these hidden costs as well.
Sweet Jebus! That writing won an award?
Yep, mentioned them in my first post, but I didn't bother to link to the actual story about the ad rejection. TV stations will also, rarely, reject some political ads.
Crap. Hey, at least I can remember the Spanish lyrics Linda was going to try. Senor Plow no es macho, y solamente [I think, can't quite hear this word] un boracho. . .
That may very well be. But I'm going by the article's statements and the letter that the article quoted from google. If you read the article, you may remember this quote from a letter sent to the author by google:
"Hello. ... )
I am the automated performance monitor for Google AdWords Select. My job is to keep average clickthrough rates at a high level, so that users can consistently count on AdWords ads to help them find products and services.
The last 1,000 ad impressions I served to your campaign(s) received fewer than five clicks. When I see results like this, I significantly reduce the rate at which I show the ads so you can make changes to improve performance.
(
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Automated Performance Monitor" i>
And from the article itself: Prices are determined according to the number of search requests and an average Cost-Per-Click.
Now I may be insane. And google may be insane. The author of the article may have completely lied about the contents of the letter he received. But I'm responding to what the article said.
And in fact, that's partly my point. Click throughs may not be the best way for google to charge. Why not charge by the number of times your ad is displayed? They certainly have the technology to do that. My theory, based on the letter the author received from google, is that google uses click throughs to guage how appropriate the ad is to the search the user conducted. The type of ads, I think, that google wants are those ads that are informative and answer the users question. In otherwords, useful ads. Do you remember the old Obsession cologne ads or Barney's Plow King commercial that parodied them? That commercial grabbed your attention. It made you remeber the product. But if you want to know about cologne or you want to know about getting your drive plowed, they are useless. On the other hand, check out a car commercial. On most of them you'll learn the warranty, the features, and maybe even the mpg. That's an informative ad if you are in the market for a car. I believe that what google wants are ads that are more like car commercials, informative, and less like Barney's Plow King commercial.
As for click throughs, they may not be the best metric for web ads. The best metric would be far too intrusive. There would be a way to track what ads you saw and then what products you purchased in the next month. Since that information would be linked to me specifically, or at least my computer, I would find that very intrusive. As it is now, Pepsi has to put out a new ad, let's say Britney and Christina Aguilera singing a duet. This commercial tells you nothing about Pepsi except it is a drink. But if sales go up in the next month, then Pepsi can hypothesize that perhaps the B/C duet helped sales. Or simply a new campaign re-invigorated the drink, like slapping a #1 on a comic to temprorarily boost sales. Neilsen ratings can tell us that 15 million people were watching the show the ad appeared in. What I kind of suggested in my original post was that google could use the number of searches, say 20 million searches for "used cars" as a way of getting a rating for the ad. That leaves the job for the ads success on the marketing department of the company placing the ad. Which was what I suggested.
I'll say it again. The reason I think they don't do that is not necessarily because they think the clickthroughs are a good metric (a metric for what, exactly?) but because they think clickthroughs are a way to tell how informative an ad is.
An example: let's say you search for "snow removal rates". You see two ads: Barney's which is in black and white, has a globe breaking while a woman sings. Homer's has the Mr. Plow logo, a phone number and the fact that he is licensed and bonded (yes, I know he really wasn't, please play along). The theory I think google is working under is that give a choice, people will click the ad that they think will lead them to the answer they want. And that is probably a reasonable assumption. Unless you are bored, if you want information you are probably more likely to follow the link that will get you that information. And google wants to have ads that are useful and will give you what you want. So from their perspective, they think clickthroughs are a good metric for measuring people's attitudes abot the usefulness of a link.
And this is probably getting longer than the attention span of most slashdot readers, so I'll stop with a summary: Read the article, because your response seems to indicate you didn't. I think google wants useful ads, and they measure usefulness by the amount of clicks an ad gets under the assumption that people click links they think will lead them to the information they want.
Oh, yeah, and don't forget call Mr. Plow, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Plow. ;)
The thing that strikes me most is how different this is from advertising on tv and radio. On tv, the ad rate is based on how many people watch the show, what its rating is. An ad during a popular prime-time show costs more money than an ad at 3 in the morning. But the tv companies don't care what you put in your ad. They are selling you one shot at reaching your audience. If you blow it, they don't care. They only time they care is if you try to show something like an ad from adbusters that might actually suggest that people not spend money they don't have on crap they don't need. But if you want to be silly, so what?
/. to find news about InterSystems. But people who visit google are there looking for something.
Because google gets paid not by the number of people that see the ad but by the number of people that follow it, their concern is with getting people to click the ad.
If google were to sell ads like tv (and who is to say they shouldn't), they would charge based on the number of searches you want to be linked to. If there are 1,000,000 searches on "soda pop" a day, then charge every one who wants an ad to show up then $100, and it is up to you to make your ad work within their guidelines.
In some ways, this makes more sense. Within the rules for google's text ads, why should they take the risk that your marketing drones can get out a decent ad. Because that is the risk they are assuming now. And that's why there is this automated system that checks click throughs.
From a business perspective, you want to accept as little risk as possible, especially for things you can't control.
The flip side of this coin is that google doesn't want the value of their ads to drop. No one who has been on the net for more than 5 minutes pays attention to the hit the monkey ads or the ads that rotate around slashdot. Why? Because they are often random and have little relationship to the page we are visiting or the reason for our visit. At least that's how it seems to me. I certainly don't visit
So maybe google wants to make sure that the ads are relevant because it doesn't want to accept the risk that its ads will considered worthless, thus dropping the price they can charge for them.
Again, this is the reverse of the way it works on tv. Advertisers will drop a show because they don't want to be associated with its message. Look at the companies that pulled advertisements from Ellen because she came out. But when was the last time you heard of a show not accepting a willing advertiser with cash money? Besides the adbuster ads of course.
With google, we get the reverse. It's like having UPN saying no ads for depends diapers during Buffy:TVS because the ads are unrelated to the show and the ads will cause the value of the show to drop. They don't care if you think that a lot of young people will rush out and buy depends. As long as your check clears.
Is it right? FIIK. It's a balancing act between losing your good name and generating revenue efficiently.
Yes, you'll be out a few bucks for the cd's, but why not bring in a copy of red hat, mandrake, debian, whatever you want. Maybe two different distros to show the variety. Whatever distro you are comfortable with. Bring enough for everyone, that way everyone can walk out with the ability to do whatever you showed them.
Let them know about the local lug if there is one.
You bought their software (Windows XP) and you accepted their EULA. I dont think you have much money to collect from Microsoft, sorry.
Has anyone challenged the EULA as an adhesion contract?
Yeah, but I think they are trying to be a for profit company. For which the rule is the reverse, never say you are out of money, and if you do have to beg for donations, stop as soon as possible or people will tag you with the big 'ol capital L.
They have too much to lose placing all their eggs in the desktop basket
They do now offer a minimal install that comes in at around 65 megs. Combine that with the maximum security level and you've got the beginnings of a decent server. They just need to market it better.
However, that's what Porters are for, and for things like Medical Records, test results and drugs, for confidentiality reasons as well as safety, only trained people are allowed to carry them
;)
Looks like it is time to read the article. Oh look, it says they lock items in a safe. Now assuming that only authorized people have the key/combination (it didn't say what kind of a lock) a safe is pretty, well, safe. On the other hand, how many of the people receiving electronic records will put their login name and password on a sticky note on their monitor? The nice thing is that if I login to your computer with your name and passwords, it is pretty unlikely you'll know that I copied some documents. But if someone physically breaks the safe, you'll know immediately.
Seems to me a well designed electronic safe could be pretty efficient. You could have a card swipe on the lock and when you put records or other valuables in, you could select which key cards could open the safe. But that wasn't how this was described in the article. Swipe your card through to "arm" the safe. Robot uploads your information to the network. The network gives you a list of people to choose from based on your rights. You assign rights to people to unlock it. They get notified they've been given that right and you get notified of who, when, and where the documents were accessed.
But that's version 2.0 of these guys.
konqueror/mozilla could have support for it in a release version within a month or two. And if IE supports it soon
The problem is backward compatibility. Not all of the people who come to our website are technically savvy enough to upgrade a browser (which is why MS was so insistent in bundling IE, you may remember) and those are savvy enough may not have the time, inclination or a fast pipe to get the next version of a browser in a reasonable time. So despite the fact that mozilla and ie could support it in a month, our users might not be able to until they get a new pc, which means a 4 year or so wait before it is worth it.
Is it really worth it do do the browser check for a graphic when an existing format will do what I want? No.
The people who do a lot of writing, and subsequently need more than wordpad or kate, need 3 basic features: wordcount and endnotes/footnotes, and spellcheck. Why? Because the people who do a lot of writing tend to be either students, academics, or professional writers.
If a wordprocessor can't do those 3 things it is useless to me.
it's like photocoping a magazine in the newsagents, then putting it back
Except here it costs at least 7 cents a page to photocopy. For magazines that isn't bad because you can skip the ads, but I've photocopied entire out of print books before and believe me, it isn't as cheap as getting the Dover Press version.
somebody else's trademarked product as your own product is absolutely grounds for a lawsuit
Yep. They're called knockoffs and it happens all the time. Now web pages are an interesting case. Let's say that I sell your a Rolllex brand watch. Rolex can come after me because I produced a knock off and diluted their trademark and mis-represented their product 'cause my Rolllex watches break after a day.
But let's say that I tell you that I own a Rolex watch and that it is a real piece of crap. When in fact I own a perfectly good Timex. Can Rolex sue me then? Well, maybe, maybe not. There have been a few cases where people posting opinions were required to remove those postings that disparaged their product.
Then there's a question of whether or not http headers constitute telling the end user what the os is. The vast majority of people don't care or know how to find out what os a site is running.
Just a thought or two.
Actually, the filesystem as database, which has been around for a while, see beos, has the potential to be very big. That doesn't mean you wouldn't have to be able to use some of the same *nix tools and pipes, just that there would be more information available to describe a file.
It would be nice to have the following types of information associated with a file as part of the file system, for example:
--crc or md5 info to tell when a file was corrupt
--detailed information about what executable should be used as the default to open the file
--more detailed permissions, like in netware, as opposed to *nix very basic rwx
--rollback features (think something along the lines of netware's salvage feature, a feature yet to be implemented in *nix or windows to the degree it is in netware
--detailed information about files that access data in the file. For linked objects, for example, to know that when I change *this* graphic, it means that *that* document will be changed
--user customization. If the file system is a database, why can't I make a table with new attributes that I want to track and use the filesystem's unique id for the file as a foreign key?
Sure, some of these features are implemented to a greater or lesser extent by programs today, but they are program specific, not built at the file system level and not as expandable.
Just some thoughts off the top of my head.
Oh yes, good point about the quotas. But make sure that if you e-mail a person that they are over quota that the e-mail gets to them. Make your messages override the quota.
That would be nice for a webmail interface. Have like a stop light or something that is green until you get within 10% of your quota then when you hit your quota it turns red. Something nice and visual for constant feedback.
When we were on windows 3.x I wrote a wrapper for eudora that warned people when they had less than 5 megs free on their network drive. That worked very well. API changes and cheap harddrives have essentially made it useless now, but it was a nice feature.
Don't give them some heavily branded browser that is going to start a lot of junk every time you log in. Simpler is better. Don't install protocols they don't need. When I first got my cable modem, @home tried to install Microsoft Networking, a heavily branded browser and a bunch of other junk. Luckily my computer was still in transit so I just grabbed the modem and the numbers and didn't have to call them back. Why on earth would you want MS networking for a home computer to surf the net?
Do give them a minimal version of os requirement. If you tell them they need to have windows 95, and that you don't support win3.x, then you know they have a telnet client and will support that, for example.
Do require a minimum version of both ie and netscape. And then write your web pages to support both equally. Do provide unbranded versions of those browsers on cd and support the installation.
Do give them a web interface to their e-mail. Support that. And remember the minimal browser recommendation.
Do give them a real pop account so that those people that know what they are doing can set up their preferred e-mail client. Don't support those clients officially. This gives you control over the interface so your help people will always know what the customer is using.
For ftp, just pick a program you like. ws_ftpLE on the windows side and something on the mac.
Now the tough choices, newsgroups and chat. Since the chat clients are going back and forth on interoperability, you'll have to make 2 decisions. You'll have to decide if you are going to support a chat client. I'd personally say no, and here's why. Customers will want to use the client that all of their friends use, so if you tell them you won't support msn chat but will support icq, for example, you could lose customers. The alternative is to support the 3 or 4 major clients, and no more. The problem is that you'll have to keep up with lot's of different version which could be a problem. Of course, I don't do the icq/chat thing so take that with a grain of salt.
Which brings us to newsgroups. You need to decide if you are going to host them at all, just non-binaries or something in the middle. I'd say that the best reader for windows is Agent. So maybe you could get a licensing deal with them and spread the cost around. The alternative, outlook, doesn't enter into the picture because of security problems.
But that's just my thoughts.
If you are in a large company, why are you using a non-standard development environment? Everyone should use the same development environment.
People who have complained seem to think it is strictly IT's decision as to what is supported, and to a degree it is, but don't forget management also wants to keep everyone on the same program. When you take time out from your work to install software that is non-standard for your company, then you decrease the time you spend doing your job. And if your software is incompatible with other software that people use, you increase the amount of time fixing those incompatibilities. Days have been lost fixing differences in complex documents that were saved in Word 95 and then converted to Word 2000. Just because someone wanted the latest version. Don't even get me started on the differences between WP and Word. Just installing a different printer can change document formatting, throwing long, complex documents off by pages. Management doesn't want that hassle anymore than IT does.
As I understand it, Mandrake has been keeping pace with the qt libraries. The next version will be 9.0 and use qt 3 and kde 3. The reason for putting out 8.2 was to sort of wrap up a lot of patches and some new control tools.
.96 or so. My guess is they will be version 1.0 with 9.0. Just a guess though.
Personally, I think it was a way to really stress test the control center and new wizard features before blowing everyone out of the water with 9. If you look at the verion numbers, a lot of the Mandrake controls are right around 1. The ones I remember were at
Why didn't I see it coming? I didn't care. I didn't look through the benefits of being a clubmember because I didn't care about them. I've been downloading versions since 6, when they were still RedHat++. This was a way for me to pay for the free software I'd been getting. Still don't care about SO, nor am I ticked about the change in the plans.
If you go to:1 3
http://www.mandrakeclub.com/article.php?sid=
You will see this as part of the announcement for commercial applications for MandrakeClub members:
"At this moment it isn't clear what will happen with the StarOffice. How badly do you need this application?"
This is dated March 8. Before they made the big membership drive, IIRC, or very close to it. Most of the responses below say that they don't care about SO. So, it looks like someone is spreading FUD about Mandrake and that Mandrake needs to be a little bit more thorough is updating its the marketing on its website.