That's a technical point, not a semantic point. Ignoring the basic functionality points (I hate those made-up 'statistics'), Office users use Office because it's what they're used to, and because there are often-valid fears of compatibility issues in files going from one to the other, particularly for those that do use the advanced features.
Except the workplace is what drives the suite. I remember when a lot of people were using WordPerfect at home simply because it was what they used at work, or they used MSWorks because they didn't have a computer at work. At school, we got a copy of Word 5.0 for the Mac, and I kind of liked it at the time, but I thought it was too bulky in comparison to the one I was using, which fit on a floppy disk (and for which I can't recall the name for the life of me... It was a Mac program, and had a logo of a sort of mythology figure with a muscular arm bent upward... GRAH!).
Anyway, Microsoft got a foothold, and started getting Office to be the dominant office suite. This led to people wanting Office at home because it meant using what they knew. I know people happily sticking with Office 97 at home because it works for them, but at the same time, I know an awful lot of people using later versions simply because it's used at work.
This isn't a technical problem, but a semantic problem.
Here's what I see is needed:
* Direct Office support in Linux, meaning either running Office natively or near-natively, or else an office suite that works exactly like Office (and this means in terms of save files, too). Yes, I'm aware of how difficult this is without Microsoft's file formats becoming more open. That doesn't negate its value. * Backend support for Office, meaning the ability to run Office on the desktop and not care what's on the groupware server. This is a more achievable goal, I think, because it's less difficult to make something that feels familiar than it is to make something familiar run natively.
(Looking over the site, OGo also seems to be somewhat immature at this point. It has some promise, including the Outlook plugins, but it seems to me to be a bit short of features at the moment. I'll keep an eye on this; perhaps my little group can eventually put something like this up in a dark corner of the network, and see if we can show how it stacks up against Exchange/Sharepoint. We might yet see an OpenLDAP Linux architecture in place with something like this.)
I don't think there's that far to go, really. The trouble is making that last bit of distance. However, Sisyphus says the same thing all the time (not that the Linux goal is quite as difficult as his).
Windows has, really, only one real edge: Office. I was using Linux as my primary desktop at work for a couple of months, and doing just fine, until Exchange 2003 rolled out, along with Office 2003, which will be tied into a SharePoint server, so I need that functionality, which I don't believe has been tied into any of the Linux desktop suites. CodeWeavers hasn't yet gotten Office 2003 to even install, let alone run, and even the earlier Office incarnations are a bit flaky.
Simply put, until such time as Office runs on Linux (preferably natively) or someone comes up with something better in terms of the high-end features, it just isn't going to be able to cover that last bit of distance.
There is growing grass-roots interest in my organization over Fedora; we now have it running full-time on a few security servers, and several people are playing with it as a desktop OS. They're finding that it works beautifully on most of our systems (a few of the newest laptops are showing some minor faults, mostly as a lack of driver support, but that's about par for Linux).
However, there's a very pro-Microsoft bent to the entire workplace, and I don't entirely blame them. They want to have the newest and most productive architecture in place as a demo to the rest of the entity, and that is turning into a Win2003 Active Directory domain with Exchange 2003, Sharepoint, SMS, and a host of other MS products. I was skeptical when I came on board that it would all work, but it actually does, and pretty well. It's almost scary.
Now, if I can just keep them from dumping the phpBB forum...
It's about supporting an alternate architecture that a lot of customers may not want to move to anyway, and devoting resources to supporting that architecture that could be put to better use elsewhere. Intel did the same thing with the Itanium, and look what happened there.
There's a guy at work that drinks something like four gallons of water a day, on the basis of "cleansing" his system. He works out a lot, too, but I still think that his consumption is excessive.
RTFA. The UltraSPARC line isn't being cancelled, just the UltraSPARC V, which is based on an entirely different core than the IV, and has nothing to do with what its successor would have used. They're avoiding supporting an architecture that will pop up and go away in the space of a few years, and minimizing the stress on their customers that might otherwise be facing changing from one chip architecture to another in a relatively short span of time.
Ah, yes... The pure FUD had to be in here somewhere.
The slow loss of resources due to DLLs remaining in memory is something I will accept, but it seems that this is yet another thing that XP SP2 is changing as a default setting. (I went in to look at the entry the other day after reading about turning this off, and the registry entry was already there and set appropriately.) However, it's not a memory leak on the part of Windows, though there are certainly enough applications out there that have resource problems. The management utility that came with my Gigabyte motherboard, for example, recently racked up more than 101,000 handles when the highest the rest of the processes were using was about 1100. I turned the thing off, and my system got a touch snappier.
Not probably. Definitely. Neutron star density is in the range of 7x10^17 kg/m^3. His projectile diameter was also WAY off. With proper inputs (ignoring relativistic effects), the resulting crater is 18.25 light-days across, or about 80 times the average distance from the sun to Pluto (5.87 billion km).
Your Inputs:
Projectile Diameter: 3476000.00 m = 11401280.00 ft = 2158.60 miles
Projectile Density: 700000000000000000 kg/m^3
Impact Velocity: 300000.00 km/s = 186300.00 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 5515 kg/m^3
Target Type: Competent Rock or saturated soil
Energy:
6.93 x 10^53 Joules = 1.65 x 10^38 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 3.0 x 10^31years
Crater Size:
Transient Crater Diameter: 21373187144.60 km = 13272749216.79 miles
Final Crater Diameter: 473444047394.05 km = 294008753431.70 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The above statement is true because it's a bitch to calculate the appearance of the crater once it's structure has been sucked into a neutron star.:)
Let's look at some numbers. Say his costs for salary, benefits, computer, electricity, and whatever else came to $100,000 a year. If he did it in a month, that's $8500 (rounded cleanly) in personnel costs, plus a few hundred dollars in software licenses. Throw in a $25,000 server (hardware and software, plus some to spare), and for $33,500 (3.35% of the original quote and 1.12% of the final cost) and one-twelfth of the time alotted (one-thirty-sixth of the actual time taken), there's a functional system. With some work, I'm sure it could have been fairly easily ported over to SQL Server.
I see this in my own job at the county government level -- a whole lot of things taking much, much, much longer than they should. Someone makes a decision to go in one direction and someone else doesn't like it, so the 'wronged' person will do whatever it takes to sabotage things. Some of us bust our ass to get things done on time and under budget, and some people just have to make life difficult.
OK... So track the records into which a worker goes, and track the records entered into the new database by the worker. Use smartcards on a string that must be attached to the person or the person's clothes to make sure that the workstation is locked and can't be used when he/she steps away so that no one else can us the station to examine records on someone else's credentials.
I have several credit cards attached to my frequent flier program. I get a couple more e-mails and a couple more snail mails a month, but for no additional effort on my part (except for skimming through a couple of offers each month), I get a few thousand extra frequent flier miles each year. It's not enough for a free flight on its own, but it can push me over the edge if I'm close enough.
They have all kinds of information on me -- spending habits, information on where I live and where I travel -- but I entered into the contract willingly. I gave up a small part of my privacy in exchange for a benefit to me.
I've run into some cases where automated whitelists come into play with some friends that have changed ISPs, and really, I just didn't care to go through the hassle for it. In these cases, I had to go to some website, enter a code, wait for a confirmation e-mail, then respond, or something like that. I want to send an e-mail, not visit Fort Knox.
If the result of a publicity campaign results in an income for you, then that's commercial, and the courts can sort out the questionable cases. But no one -- absolutely no one -- has "7 or 8 million" friends or family members. That's spam (or perhaps the world's largest mailing list, which may well fall under commercial concerns if you're getting any money in the form of ads or donations to cover costs).
I think that I should be able to see the information pertaining to the people I'm buying from, comparing it to whatever information they provide, adding another layer of trust to the commercial model.
How would you feel if accurate information were required solely for those entities using the domain to conduct commercial matters, primarily sales but also for tech support and other such uses? This way, you could have your personal site at myname.tld with hidden or false information, but you would have to have proper contact information in place for mysalessite.com.
That's because of the difficulty of adopting many of the changes. Filtering at the SMTP server does nothing to save the bandwidth already used in the transmission of the e-mail messages in the first place. Blacklists and whitelists both have been shown to be problematic at best for most instances.
Spam filters are not the easiest thing in the world for most people to deal with. Sure, your average Slashdot junkie can install not only a Bayesian filter for his favorite e-mail client, but may well also have another filter sitting outside the e-mail client, and have his own configured on the server. But that's not even remotely common, and you have to factor in the fear of false positives. I've used a handful of solutions with varying success, from blacklists to Bayesian filters to peer-to-peer concepts like Cloudmark Spamnet. *I* can deal with the false positives, but non-techs I know get frustrated because the perceived promise is a complete removal of spam, which doesn't happen, with no false positives, which doesn't happen. It matters little at the moment whether or not they are told to expect a few things to slip in either direction. The simple fear of missing some critical e-mail is pretty hard to get past, and leaves most people grudgingly content with seeing 1000 spam messages rather than possibly having a critical message marked as spam. Is it logical? Not especially, but it's still often the truth.
Recent clients have taken to not loading images or code from websites without specific permission. I think this is a big step because it means that addresses are not so easily validated, but I wonder how long it will last before spammers simply send off even more messages to cover the discrepancy.
So what's the proper step? Most of the work lays with Microsoft. I think Microsoft is making an enormous leap with the new automatic firewall in XP SP2, as well as the semi-obnoxious messages about not having virus software installed. The two combined should help to decrease the number of systems constantly re-infected by the recent strains that look for existing infected systems to exploit, and by getting more people to use AV software. I think one other huge step could be taken by retrofitting the other supported e-mail clients (Outlook 2000 and XP, and Outlook Express 5.x and 6.x) with the download-prevention features in Outlook 2003. Even though I admit above that it might be a short-term solution, it's still workable for at least that time, and might whittle down the volume of addresses at least a little bit.
A nice big list of people is far less important than a nice list of big people, which is what Microsoft gets here. With Sun getting access, another significant OS vendor is now able to use the protocols. This may end up spreading a bit, as other Unix vendors will want to interoperate with Solaris boxes that are connected to MS domains, meaning that we may see HP-UX or AIX, or even something like IRIX, following along.
Maybe we'll even get lucky and Sun will be able to publish enough information that an easily-used layer could be written for Linux.
Maybe for you. I'm in the process of instituting my own, personal, completely unshared homing pigeon network. Mega bandwidth, and you can't have any of it, either. Nyah.
Files (or file segments) could be matched up using hashes that ensure that the proper files are sought and grabbed. MD5 could provide the primary file hash, and then a faster hash could be used for individual segments. The hash could be calculated at the beginning of the segment transfer as part of the handshake process, then stored on the client box for comparison once the segment transfer is complete. If the hash matches, then it's saved and the system continues. If not, the segment is dropped and a new source is found, with an option to simply ignore anything from that host, either for that specific file or globally, at the user's option.
PDTP networks could have synchronized user accounts (assuming the networks aren't too large) for priviledged file access, with periodic synchronization with other members upon account changes. Content might be another matter, but if a file hasn't completed transfer, then perhaps it would simply not be marked as available for open transfer.
I travel through that part of SoCal every few months; can you pinpoint where in particular it ends? That would be a neat thing to point out to others riding in the car.
It's also terribly overworked. One of the items coming up for review in next year's federal budget is a significant increase in the number of patent reviewers, and I believe also a raise for the existing reviewers to help keep them from jumping ship and aiding companies in filing patents in such a way as to be able to slip by the remaining patent reviewers.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a technical point, not a semantic point. Ignoring the basic functionality points (I hate those made-up 'statistics'), Office users use Office because it's what they're used to, and because there are often-valid fears of compatibility issues in files going from one to the other, particularly for those that do use the advanced features.
Except the workplace is what drives the suite. I remember when a lot of people were using WordPerfect at home simply because it was what they used at work, or they used MSWorks because they didn't have a computer at work. At school, we got a copy of Word 5.0 for the Mac, and I kind of liked it at the time, but I thought it was too bulky in comparison to the one I was using, which fit on a floppy disk (and for which I can't recall the name for the life of me... It was a Mac program, and had a logo of a sort of mythology figure with a muscular arm bent upward... GRAH!).
Anyway, Microsoft got a foothold, and started getting Office to be the dominant office suite. This led to people wanting Office at home because it meant using what they knew. I know people happily sticking with Office 97 at home because it works for them, but at the same time, I know an awful lot of people using later versions simply because it's used at work.
Problem: OpenGroupware is not Exchange.
This isn't a technical problem, but a semantic problem.
Here's what I see is needed:
* Direct Office support in Linux, meaning either running Office natively or near-natively, or else an office suite that works exactly like Office (and this means in terms of save files, too). Yes, I'm aware of how difficult this is without Microsoft's file formats becoming more open. That doesn't negate its value.
* Backend support for Office, meaning the ability to run Office on the desktop and not care what's on the groupware server. This is a more achievable goal, I think, because it's less difficult to make something that feels familiar than it is to make something familiar run natively.
(Looking over the site, OGo also seems to be somewhat immature at this point. It has some promise, including the Outlook plugins, but it seems to me to be a bit short of features at the moment. I'll keep an eye on this; perhaps my little group can eventually put something like this up in a dark corner of the network, and see if we can show how it stacks up against Exchange/Sharepoint. We might yet see an OpenLDAP Linux architecture in place with something like this.)
I don't think there's that far to go, really. The trouble is making that last bit of distance. However, Sisyphus says the same thing all the time (not that the Linux goal is quite as difficult as his).
Windows has, really, only one real edge: Office. I was using Linux as my primary desktop at work for a couple of months, and doing just fine, until Exchange 2003 rolled out, along with Office 2003, which will be tied into a SharePoint server, so I need that functionality, which I don't believe has been tied into any of the Linux desktop suites. CodeWeavers hasn't yet gotten Office 2003 to even install, let alone run, and even the earlier Office incarnations are a bit flaky.
Simply put, until such time as Office runs on Linux (preferably natively) or someone comes up with something better in terms of the high-end features, it just isn't going to be able to cover that last bit of distance.
There is growing grass-roots interest in my organization over Fedora; we now have it running full-time on a few security servers, and several people are playing with it as a desktop OS. They're finding that it works beautifully on most of our systems (a few of the newest laptops are showing some minor faults, mostly as a lack of driver support, but that's about par for Linux).
However, there's a very pro-Microsoft bent to the entire workplace, and I don't entirely blame them. They want to have the newest and most productive architecture in place as a demo to the rest of the entity, and that is turning into a Win2003 Active Directory domain with Exchange 2003, Sharepoint, SMS, and a host of other MS products. I was skeptical when I came on board that it would all work, but it actually does, and pretty well. It's almost scary.
Now, if I can just keep them from dumping the phpBB forum...
It's about supporting an alternate architecture that a lot of customers may not want to move to anyway, and devoting resources to supporting that architecture that could be put to better use elsewhere. Intel did the same thing with the Itanium, and look what happened there.
There's a guy at work that drinks something like four gallons of water a day, on the basis of "cleansing" his system. He works out a lot, too, but I still think that his consumption is excessive.
RTFA. The UltraSPARC line isn't being cancelled, just the UltraSPARC V, which is based on an entirely different core than the IV, and has nothing to do with what its successor would have used. They're avoiding supporting an architecture that will pop up and go away in the space of a few years, and minimizing the stress on their customers that might otherwise be facing changing from one chip architecture to another in a relatively short span of time.
Ah, yes... The pure FUD had to be in here somewhere.
The slow loss of resources due to DLLs remaining in memory is something I will accept, but it seems that this is yet another thing that XP SP2 is changing as a default setting. (I went in to look at the entry the other day after reading about turning this off, and the registry entry was already there and set appropriately.) However, it's not a memory leak on the part of Windows, though there are certainly enough applications out there that have resource problems. The management utility that came with my Gigabyte motherboard, for example, recently racked up more than 101,000 handles when the highest the rest of the processes were using was about 1100. I turned the thing off, and my system got a touch snappier.
Woo! One more and I get a free pocket protector!
Not probably. Definitely. Neutron star density is in the range of 7x10^17 kg/m^3. His projectile diameter was also WAY off. With proper inputs (ignoring relativistic effects), the resulting crater is 18.25 light-days across, or about 80 times the average distance from the sun to Pluto (5.87 billion km).
:)
Your Inputs:
Projectile Diameter: 3476000.00 m = 11401280.00 ft = 2158.60 miles
Projectile Density: 700000000000000000 kg/m^3
Impact Velocity: 300000.00 km/s = 186300.00 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 5515 kg/m^3
Target Type: Competent Rock or saturated soil
Energy:
6.93 x 10^53 Joules = 1.65 x 10^38 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth is 3.0 x 10^31years
Crater Size:
Transient Crater Diameter: 21373187144.60 km = 13272749216.79 miles
Final Crater Diameter: 473444047394.05 km = 294008753431.70 miles
The crater formed is a complex crater.
The above statement is true because it's a bitch to calculate the appearance of the crater once it's structure has been sucked into a neutron star.
How do these two packages compare?
If that's what it takes, why not?
Let's look at some numbers. Say his costs for salary, benefits, computer, electricity, and whatever else came to $100,000 a year. If he did it in a month, that's $8500 (rounded cleanly) in personnel costs, plus a few hundred dollars in software licenses. Throw in a $25,000 server (hardware and software, plus some to spare), and for $33,500 (3.35% of the original quote and 1.12% of the final cost) and one-twelfth of the time alotted (one-thirty-sixth of the actual time taken), there's a functional system. With some work, I'm sure it could have been fairly easily ported over to SQL Server.
I see this in my own job at the county government level -- a whole lot of things taking much, much, much longer than they should. Someone makes a decision to go in one direction and someone else doesn't like it, so the 'wronged' person will do whatever it takes to sabotage things. Some of us bust our ass to get things done on time and under budget, and some people just have to make life difficult.
OK... So track the records into which a worker goes, and track the records entered into the new database by the worker. Use smartcards on a string that must be attached to the person or the person's clothes to make sure that the workstation is locked and can't be used when he/she steps away so that no one else can us the station to examine records on someone else's credentials.
It's really not that hard.
Thank you.
I have several credit cards attached to my frequent flier program. I get a couple more e-mails and a couple more snail mails a month, but for no additional effort on my part (except for skimming through a couple of offers each month), I get a few thousand extra frequent flier miles each year. It's not enough for a free flight on its own, but it can push me over the edge if I'm close enough.
They have all kinds of information on me -- spending habits, information on where I live and where I travel -- but I entered into the contract willingly. I gave up a small part of my privacy in exchange for a benefit to me.
I've run into some cases where automated whitelists come into play with some friends that have changed ISPs, and really, I just didn't care to go through the hassle for it. In these cases, I had to go to some website, enter a code, wait for a confirmation e-mail, then respond, or something like that. I want to send an e-mail, not visit Fort Knox.
That's an absurd technicality, and you know it.
If the result of a publicity campaign results in an income for you, then that's commercial, and the courts can sort out the questionable cases. But no one -- absolutely no one -- has "7 or 8 million" friends or family members. That's spam (or perhaps the world's largest mailing list, which may well fall under commercial concerns if you're getting any money in the form of ads or donations to cover costs).
I think that I should be able to see the information pertaining to the people I'm buying from, comparing it to whatever information they provide, adding another layer of trust to the commercial model.
How would you feel if accurate information were required solely for those entities using the domain to conduct commercial matters, primarily sales but also for tech support and other such uses? This way, you could have your personal site at myname.tld with hidden or false information, but you would have to have proper contact information in place for mysalessite.com.
That's because of the difficulty of adopting many of the changes. Filtering at the SMTP server does nothing to save the bandwidth already used in the transmission of the e-mail messages in the first place. Blacklists and whitelists both have been shown to be problematic at best for most instances.
Spam filters are not the easiest thing in the world for most people to deal with. Sure, your average Slashdot junkie can install not only a Bayesian filter for his favorite e-mail client, but may well also have another filter sitting outside the e-mail client, and have his own configured on the server. But that's not even remotely common, and you have to factor in the fear of false positives. I've used a handful of solutions with varying success, from blacklists to Bayesian filters to peer-to-peer concepts like Cloudmark Spamnet. *I* can deal with the false positives, but non-techs I know get frustrated because the perceived promise is a complete removal of spam, which doesn't happen, with no false positives, which doesn't happen. It matters little at the moment whether or not they are told to expect a few things to slip in either direction. The simple fear of missing some critical e-mail is pretty hard to get past, and leaves most people grudgingly content with seeing 1000 spam messages rather than possibly having a critical message marked as spam. Is it logical? Not especially, but it's still often the truth.
Recent clients have taken to not loading images or code from websites without specific permission. I think this is a big step because it means that addresses are not so easily validated, but I wonder how long it will last before spammers simply send off even more messages to cover the discrepancy.
So what's the proper step? Most of the work lays with Microsoft. I think Microsoft is making an enormous leap with the new automatic firewall in XP SP2, as well as the semi-obnoxious messages about not having virus software installed. The two combined should help to decrease the number of systems constantly re-infected by the recent strains that look for existing infected systems to exploit, and by getting more people to use AV software. I think one other huge step could be taken by retrofitting the other supported e-mail clients (Outlook 2000 and XP, and Outlook Express 5.x and 6.x) with the download-prevention features in Outlook 2003. Even though I admit above that it might be a short-term solution, it's still workable for at least that time, and might whittle down the volume of addresses at least a little bit.
A nice big list of people is far less important than a nice list of big people, which is what Microsoft gets here. With Sun getting access, another significant OS vendor is now able to use the protocols. This may end up spreading a bit, as other Unix vendors will want to interoperate with Solaris boxes that are connected to MS domains, meaning that we may see HP-UX or AIX, or even something like IRIX, following along.
Maybe we'll even get lucky and Sun will be able to publish enough information that an easily-used layer could be written for Linux.
Maybe for you. I'm in the process of instituting my own, personal, completely unshared homing pigeon network. Mega bandwidth, and you can't have any of it, either. Nyah.
Files (or file segments) could be matched up using hashes that ensure that the proper files are sought and grabbed. MD5 could provide the primary file hash, and then a faster hash could be used for individual segments. The hash could be calculated at the beginning of the segment transfer as part of the handshake process, then stored on the client box for comparison once the segment transfer is complete. If the hash matches, then it's saved and the system continues. If not, the segment is dropped and a new source is found, with an option to simply ignore anything from that host, either for that specific file or globally, at the user's option.
PDTP networks could have synchronized user accounts (assuming the networks aren't too large) for priviledged file access, with periodic synchronization with other members upon account changes. Content might be another matter, but if a file hasn't completed transfer, then perhaps it would simply not be marked as available for open transfer.
Currently at v0.1.0, awaiting Something Big in Perl 6, it would seem.
I travel through that part of SoCal every few months; can you pinpoint where in particular it ends? That would be a neat thing to point out to others riding in the car.
I dunno. I fit a lot more data on some of the newer DLTs than I do on an equivalent-volume stack of optical media.
It's also terribly overworked. One of the items coming up for review in next year's federal budget is a significant increase in the number of patent reviewers, and I believe also a raise for the existing reviewers to help keep them from jumping ship and aiding companies in filing patents in such a way as to be able to slip by the remaining patent reviewers.