Intelligent use of proxy servers for most services (I am a biased in favor of proxying in general) could help alot. When 500 users click on cnn.com in the morning only 1 copy of the page will actually need to be fetched. The majority of users go to a few sites often (Hotmail/Yahoo, CNN, etc.) unlike admin types who will probably be sucking down ISO images and big source downloads. For basic web browsing, 2KB/sec per user or so should be ok, if slow.
This is baloney, having GPLd software as part of your base OS install does not require that every part of the base OS be GPLd. And code linked against the LGPL does is not required to be GPLd either. Many proprietary operating systems include the GNU toolkit, like BeOS (I wish they all did, I really dislike commercial UNIX unless I can get bash, gcc, etc.)
It would probably read more correctly if he had said "Mac OS is a best-of-breed desktop environment for personal computers". Obviously the core kernel of MacOS is utter crap, that's why they are moving to Mach/BSD, to bring the OS kernel into the 90's.
As it has ben mentioned before, Cocoa is just the next version of the OpenStep libraries of which GNUStep is an implementation. Development on the GNUStep libraries is slowly plodding along, they could use our help. When they are finished, Mac OS X Cocoa apps should be only a recompile away, if you can convince the Author to go through the effort.
While neurons carry current, using chemical electrolytes, I don't believe that you can induce a current in a neuron via EM radiation. If that were true than everytime you were subjected to EM radiation or a high magnetic field you would start shooting lightning bolts around, and I haven't seen this yet.
SLP (Service Locator Protocol) seems to already be a good way to detect and locate services automatically on a network. It is a defined standard in RFC2608 and is used as the basis many networking technologies already (NetWare 5, MS W2K) and can be easily and consistantly configured to support any service type imaginable (it uses URI/URLs as its encoding system). There is already two SLP libraries for Linux, one from Sun under the SCSL and one from Caldera under the GPL.
Actually, in my limited research, this looks like a really neat way to generally advertise services. You would be able to create something like the Network Neighborhood or an NDS tree (Using SLP and LDAP together) for UNIX. Being able to plug into a network and instantly find out exactally what hosts have what services available without any configuration on your part (info for master DA server can be sent via DHCP) without all the messiness that the SMB browser protocol has (SMB, against all odds, is actually considered a protocol! Ha!) is a Really Good Feature(tm).
Of course, people were saying the same things a year ago, "Ask me in a year, I bet we will be deploying Linux on the Desktop." Of course it hasn't happened yet, and won't happen if people don't start doing it today. Be a leader, not a follower.
While I would agree that many users have problems even when switching between Office versions, I think that moving to software that is less of a moving target is a good idea.
I also have an anecdote to share. I tried to move my users from Win95 to WinNT on a shared machine that was used by all individuals at my organization (a local service desk). Just the differences between Win9x and NT was enough to cause consternation for my users, even though they were using the same Office 97 and Outlook 98! Most of their "problems" were unfounded, but it goes to show that when users learn their tasks by rote even the smallest change can throw a monkey wrench in operations. AFAIK no actual operations were negatively effected but there was some hostillity from the users to me on the changes.
You have many good points here, and I believe that I have a solution to your problems.
I, personally, am learning LaTeX for writing documents. It makes pretty much everything I learned in typing class obsolete as it does all formatting for you based on the document type. There is little need to diddle with spacing, fonts, etc. because it does it all for you (and produces very pleasing, professional output to boot)
In the Windows world there is always WordPerfect. Where I work we load WP O2K in addition to MS O2K (We are a school and can afford it at the discount prices we get). Most users I talk to prefer WordPerfect to MS Word and the #1 reason is "Reveal Codes". Word hides so much functionality from the user that it becomes difficult to impossible to fix when things go wrong.
To tie these two examples together, the WordPerfect file format hasn't changed in 5 years while TeX has been frozen (it is considered perfect, without bugs) for quite some time. By going with a longer-term standard you can avoid the upgrade roller coaster. You can pick something that works for you, that you can support and that you have the time to build a proficiency in. I, personally, deeply regret the time I have wasted hacking away, unproductively, at Windows and DOS systems when I could have been learing Linux and UNIX. UNIX hasn't fundamentally changed in 20 years, the knowledge you have gained previously would still be relevant today, there is no need for the constant upgrade-and-training cycle that permeates the Windows world.
And remember, having your users learn a little about their computer is not a bad thing, it can make them more productive in the long run--and we should be more concerned with the long run than the day-to-day annoyances a change would bring.
Re:Stupid questions: Gravity?
on
Orbitsville
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· Score: 1
Just to be clear, I thought Dyson is the name of the person who first thought up the idea of surrounding a star with a shell to harvest 100% of the radiated energy. The engineering problem would be immense, almost more so than the ammount of materials required to build such a thing (x number of large planets would need to be crushed into material, etc). Probably the only way, other than "aliens built it" to get the semblance of gravity, that is uniform all over its surface, is to make it really thick, this would take the mass of thousands or millions of planets to achieve and would probably cause problems of its own. The other alternitive is something like in Ringworld, which could be easily spun, or only living perpendicular to the rotational axis.
It does seem like a good system but I would just make sure that there are solid legal protections for basic rights. Otherwise all you get is mob-rule where the masses trample over the little guy.
As annother counterpoint, what about criminals who travel? Unless criminal records are replicated centrally a person could just move and take advantage of the next town. My dad (who is a cop) always complains about personal license plates for this reason, many cops get killed because they cannot quickly ID a plate and don't know that they might be dealing with an escaped convict, drug smuggler, etc.
Hmmm. ..I just had a thought, how would something like Freenet or Gnutella work for distributing criminal records in a decentralized manner? Maybe with PKI to authenticate that the records come from a genuine source? Hmmmm.
Any centralized law enforcement organization has the possibility of being corrupted.
And any centralized psych training agency has the possibility of corrupting the masses with propaganda, not to mention the probability of abuse. Maybe this is not how you meant to sound but this is like the Stasi, with everybody informing on everybody else, or the WAVE that Pinkerton is trying to get accepted.
Is there a subtitled version of this available yet? AFAIK the only US version is a dub by Streamline video which has really bad voice acting (at least for D himself).
I would also recommend "Demon City Shinjuku", "Wicked City", "Twilight of the Dark Master" (this is short). I recently finished the Lain series and it is seriously cool, only about 1 stinker episode (where they try, unsuccessfully, to explain everything) and have just stated working on Blue Seed as well as Neon Genesis Evangelon.
Anime is great, have fun and I hope you have a really good video store nearby (props to Four Star video in Madison WI).
People mention law enforcement, as though it was some kind of Holy Grail. Sorry, but if law enforcement officers are so incompetent that they have to rely on the villains handing them the evidence, they've no business enforcing anything. Take a child abuser - the typical sort of target the Law Enforcement agencies are claiming to want to catch. If a person is capable of abusing a child, both they and the child will stand out a mile. It is impossible for abusers to act like other people.
(This is NOT the same as the "profiling" gumph that Pinkerton threw out. It is possible to be different and yet have a strong empathy for other people. It is NOT possible for an abuser, thief, axe-wielding maniac, etc, to have that same empathy. If they had, they couldn't do what they do.)
While I agree with many of your previous points I have to take exception to this. Many very disturbed people can appear reasonable and normal to others, rapists and child molesters don't have signs on their back that say "I'm a craaazzy kook, arrest me!". These people dont't "stand out a mile", and that's the problem. I don't see any way to wholesale detect disturbed criminals without institutional, lifelong, government psych profiling which is obviously about the worst possible solution (WRT privacy, and potential for abuse). In any case how would you be able to determine the difference between a criminal and someone who is just different? It seems to me that the only acceptable way to deal with crime is after the fact, don't try to prevent crime, just worry about catching the criminals after the fact and making sure that they will be removed from civilized society until they can learn to play by civilized rules. To do otherwise is to have "Thoughtcrime", where you can be penilized for thinking deviant thoughts instead of the acid test of actually having to act on those criminal impulses.
IIRC wasn't the music done by Bobby Prince, didn't he sell a CD with the Doom music played on a high end Roland synth? I have MIDI recordings of the Doom and Descent soundtracks, they rock on my GUS. Music really can make a game, I look forward to what they create. BTW: What ever happended to the Wolfenstein 2000 project?
Please, get a grip. Maybe instead of pissing on "the perfects" you should do something for yourself. There are many people who work to make computing tools accessable to the disabled (of which, missing only one eye sucks but isn't too bad). We work so that technology like the WWW is fully available to people with no sight, no motor skills, etc.
More to the point, most 3D technology will work fine in your case, you just won't get the 3D effect. In this case the image when viewed by one eye is blurred but CRT, LCD and other technologies aren't going away anytime soon. Please do not be alarmed and fearful.
Who is "The Islamic Faith", and can I hire him as a wedding singer? This statement makes about as much sense as yours, the Islamic faith isn't just one person, it would be like stating that all Americans are Timothy McVeigh.
Of course there are several manufacturers of x86 hardware, so a comparason between a high-quality Sun box and a low-end x86 box is meaningless. How about a comparason of an x86 server, like VA or Compaq, that has much higher quality components against a Sun. Apples-to-apples.
Administration doesn't have to be too difficult either, there are several tools to help in managing large numbers of UNIX type systems, like PIKT and rdist, that can replicate files and configurations througout a mass of machines.
Maybe it would be more efficient to have a few very large boxes (E10K, S80, S/390, SGI O2K) but I don't think they started with the megabucks to burn, this gives them a cheap, scalable paradigm (solution, I meant solution!) that seems to work for them.
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if that were true. I wasted many years of my life fucking around with DOS/Windows peecee (think urine) OS's when I should have been learning UNIX. How much more useful a computer is to me now that I have such nifty, general purpose, GNU tools with a programmable shell environment. It pains me to think of how more efficient I would be if I had learned bash, vi, awk, etc. as my first and primary environment. Oh, well, better late than never.
Hey A.C., didn'y you make this exact same comment in the previous GNOME 1.2 announcement? Cut-and-paste some text and get modded up? Someone was asleep at the wheel when they read this one.
And of course you are wrong, again, CDE was based on an HP window manager c. 1988, which is what Windows 3.x look/feel was based on. I use KDE (With Blackbox WM at home) and much of the KPanel is stolen directly from CDE, not Win9x. Look at the pager, screenlock and use of multiple hierarchal windows, classic CDE. It is even possible to make it work in a Mac fashion with the Kmenu and app menus pinned to the top of the screen.
Well in Sneakers the big bad Mafia guy is using Excel 4 on Windows 3.1 to balance the books. I just finished watching the Anime series Lain (Highly excellant, IMHO) and some of the screenshots look like NeXT boxen but the main Navi OS is called "Copeland". Of course there was the 3D file browser from Irix that was shown in Jurassic Park (Yes that actually shipped with old versions of Irix). That's all I can think of right now.
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Intelligent use of proxy servers for most services (I am a biased in favor of proxying in general) could help alot. When 500 users click on cnn.com in the morning only 1 copy of the page will actually need to be fetched. The majority of users go to a few sites often (Hotmail/Yahoo, CNN, etc.) unlike admin types who will probably be sucking down ISO images and big source downloads. For basic web browsing, 2KB/sec per user or so should be ok, if slow.
This is baloney, having GPLd software as part of your base OS install does not require that every part of the base OS be GPLd. And code linked against the LGPL does is not required to be GPLd either. Many proprietary operating systems include the GNU toolkit, like BeOS (I wish they all did, I really dislike commercial UNIX unless I can get bash, gcc, etc.)
It would probably read more correctly if he had said "Mac OS is a best-of-breed desktop environment for personal computers". Obviously the core kernel of MacOS is utter crap, that's why they are moving to Mach/BSD, to bring the OS kernel into the 90's.
As it has ben mentioned before, Cocoa is just the next version of the OpenStep libraries of which GNUStep is an implementation. Development on the GNUStep libraries is slowly plodding along, they could use our help. When they are finished, Mac OS X Cocoa apps should be only a recompile away, if you can convince the Author to go through the effort.
While neurons carry current, using chemical electrolytes, I don't believe that you can induce a current in a neuron via EM radiation. If that were true than everytime you were subjected to EM radiation or a high magnetic field you would start shooting lightning bolts around, and I haven't seen this yet.
SLP (Service Locator Protocol) seems to already be a good way to detect and locate services automatically on a network. It is a defined standard in RFC2608 and is used as the basis many networking technologies already (NetWare 5, MS W2K) and can be easily and consistantly configured to support any service type imaginable (it uses URI/URLs as its encoding system). There is already two SLP libraries for Linux, one from Sun under the SCSL and one from Caldera under the GPL.
Actually, in my limited research, this looks like a really neat way to generally advertise services. You would be able to create something like the Network Neighborhood or an NDS tree (Using SLP and LDAP together) for UNIX. Being able to plug into a network and instantly find out exactally what hosts have what services available without any configuration on your part (info for master DA server can be sent via DHCP) without all the messiness that the SMB browser protocol has (SMB, against all odds, is actually considered a protocol! Ha!) is a Really Good Feature(tm).
That's the rub, isn't it? Like your first taste of crack, getting in is easy, getting out is annother story entirely.
"Styles" are a damn good idea, that's why people should use LaTeX!
This brings up a good point, long term productivity should outweigh the short term resistance to change and learning curve.
Of course, people were saying the same things a year ago, "Ask me in a year, I bet we will be deploying Linux on the Desktop." Of course it hasn't happened yet, and won't happen if people don't start doing it today. Be a leader, not a follower.
While I would agree that many users have problems even when switching between Office versions, I think that moving to software that is less of a moving target is a good idea.
I also have an anecdote to share. I tried to move my users from Win95 to WinNT on a shared machine that was used by all individuals at my organization (a local service desk). Just the differences between Win9x and NT was enough to cause consternation for my users, even though they were using the same Office 97 and Outlook 98! Most of their "problems" were unfounded, but it goes to show that when users learn their tasks by rote even the smallest change can throw a monkey wrench in operations. AFAIK no actual operations were negatively effected but there was some hostillity from the users to me on the changes.
Just my $0.02 US
You have many good points here, and I believe that I have a solution to your problems.
And remember, having your users learn a little about their computer is not a bad thing, it can make them more productive in the long run--and we should be more concerned with the long run than the day-to-day annoyances a change would bring.
Just to be clear, I thought Dyson is the name of the person who first thought up the idea of surrounding a star with a shell to harvest 100% of the radiated energy. The engineering problem would be immense, almost more so than the ammount of materials required to build such a thing (x number of large planets would need to be crushed into material, etc). Probably the only way, other than "aliens built it" to get the semblance of gravity, that is uniform all over its surface, is to make it really thick, this would take the mass of thousands or millions of planets to achieve and would probably cause problems of its own. The other alternitive is something like in Ringworld, which could be easily spun, or only living perpendicular to the rotational axis.
It does seem like a good system but I would just make sure that there are solid legal protections for basic rights. Otherwise all you get is mob-rule where the masses trample over the little guy.
As annother counterpoint, what about criminals who travel? Unless criminal records are replicated centrally a person could just move and take advantage of the next town. My dad (who is a cop) always complains about personal license plates for this reason, many cops get killed because they cannot quickly ID a plate and don't know that they might be dealing with an escaped convict, drug smuggler, etc.
Hmmm. . .I just had a thought, how would something like Freenet or Gnutella work for distributing criminal records in a decentralized manner? Maybe with PKI to authenticate that the records come from a genuine source? Hmmmm.
And any centralized psych training agency has the possibility of corrupting the masses with propaganda, not to mention the probability of abuse. Maybe this is not how you meant to sound but this is like the Stasi, with everybody informing on everybody else, or the WAVE that Pinkerton is trying to get accepted.
Is there a subtitled version of this available yet? AFAIK the only US version is a dub by Streamline video which has really bad voice acting (at least for D himself).
I would also recommend "Demon City Shinjuku", "Wicked City", "Twilight of the Dark Master" (this is short). I recently finished the Lain series and it is seriously cool, only about 1 stinker episode (where they try, unsuccessfully, to explain everything) and have just stated working on Blue Seed as well as Neon Genesis Evangelon.
Anime is great, have fun and I hope you have a really good video store nearby (props to Four Star video in Madison WI).
While I agree with many of your previous points I have to take exception to this. Many very disturbed people can appear reasonable and normal to others, rapists and child molesters don't have signs on their back that say "I'm a craaazzy kook, arrest me!". These people dont't "stand out a mile", and that's the problem. I don't see any way to wholesale detect disturbed criminals without institutional, lifelong, government psych profiling which is obviously about the worst possible solution (WRT privacy, and potential for abuse). In any case how would you be able to determine the difference between a criminal and someone who is just different? It seems to me that the only acceptable way to deal with crime is after the fact, don't try to prevent crime, just worry about catching the criminals after the fact and making sure that they will be removed from civilized society until they can learn to play by civilized rules. To do otherwise is to have "Thoughtcrime", where you can be penilized for thinking deviant thoughts instead of the acid test of actually having to act on those criminal impulses.
IIRC wasn't the music done by Bobby Prince, didn't he sell a CD with the Doom music played on a high end Roland synth? I have MIDI recordings of the Doom and Descent soundtracks, they rock on my GUS. Music really can make a game, I look forward to what they create. BTW: What ever happended to the Wolfenstein 2000 project?
Please, get a grip. Maybe instead of pissing on "the perfects" you should do something for yourself. There are many people who work to make computing tools accessable to the disabled (of which, missing only one eye sucks but isn't too bad). We work so that technology like the WWW is fully available to people with no sight, no motor skills, etc.
More to the point, most 3D technology will work fine in your case, you just won't get the 3D effect. In this case the image when viewed by one eye is blurred but CRT, LCD and other technologies aren't going away anytime soon. Please do not be alarmed and fearful.
Who is "The Islamic Faith", and can I hire him as a wedding singer? This statement makes about as much sense as yours, the Islamic faith isn't just one person, it would be like stating that all Americans are Timothy McVeigh.
Of course there are several manufacturers of x86 hardware, so a comparason between a high-quality Sun box and a low-end x86 box is meaningless. How about a comparason of an x86 server, like VA or Compaq, that has much higher quality components against a Sun. Apples-to-apples.
Administration doesn't have to be too difficult either, there are several tools to help in managing large numbers of UNIX type systems, like PIKT and rdist, that can replicate files and configurations througout a mass of machines.
Maybe it would be more efficient to have a few very large boxes (E10K, S80, S/390, SGI O2K) but I don't think they started with the megabucks to burn, this gives them a cheap, scalable paradigm (solution, I meant solution!) that seems to work for them.
Evil fake Bruce (.) strikes again.
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if that were true. I wasted many years of my life fucking around with DOS/Windows peecee (think urine) OS's when I should have been learning UNIX. How much more useful a computer is to me now that I have such nifty, general purpose, GNU tools with a programmable shell environment. It pains me to think of how more efficient I would be if I had learned bash, vi, awk, etc. as my first and primary environment. Oh, well, better late than never.
Hey A.C., didn'y you make this exact same comment in the previous GNOME 1.2 announcement? Cut-and-paste some text and get modded up? Someone was asleep at the wheel when they read this one.
And of course you are wrong, again, CDE was based on an HP window manager c. 1988, which is what Windows 3.x look/feel was based on. I use KDE (With Blackbox WM at home) and much of the KPanel is stolen directly from CDE, not Win9x. Look at the pager, screenlock and use of multiple hierarchal windows, classic CDE. It is even possible to make it work in a Mac fashion with the Kmenu and app menus pinned to the top of the screen.
Well in Sneakers the big bad Mafia guy is using Excel 4 on Windows 3.1 to balance the books. I just finished watching the Anime series Lain (Highly excellant, IMHO) and some of the screenshots look like NeXT boxen but the main Navi OS is called "Copeland". Of course there was the 3D file browser from Irix that was shown in Jurassic Park (Yes that actually shipped with old versions of Irix). That's all I can think of right now.