True, but if someone needs gmail to do their government job, someone is not doing their job correctly.
The real problem with gmail, yahoo, msn or whatever is that it isn't the government's server, and there are lots of requirements for archiving and providing an audit trail for government business that gmail cannot (and shouldn't) provide.
IT is more than just putting up a webpage and sending messages, it is also insuring accountability and security. Free web mail is fine and even preferable for private stuff, but when it comes to government work we demand a certain accountability and security, and rightly so. Perhaps people do private messages at work, but this is damn hard to filter and in general on tax-payers time you have no right to be doing private correspondance on government payroll and equipment.
From the workers point of view it might seem a hassle, but try to look at it from the administrator's point of view. Those blocks are there for a reason, and the audit trail is there for a reason. Remove the audit trail and it would be close to impossible to make any sort of investigation on who stole the last 10,000 $ from the government till, and who influenced who in the last bid, and who approved what by which contacts.
People aren't perfect, company and government policies even less so, but there is often a reason for the policy even if it is implemented wrongly.
Go and hug your IT admin today, you'll find it easier to get your job done:)
I think Google will have to start segregating Android phones into different classes in order to provide a coherent user experience.
Not going to happen. They don't make any hardware, so their "recommendations for coherent user experience" will be pretty much ignored. Android will by its very nature fragment, just like linux does - you have different distributions according to different requirements (like ArchLinux vs Debian vs REL). On the moble platform it will even fragment further as the hardware is so completely different (after all most pc's are pretty much the same processor, in mobile it's not even clear).
One of the reasons that it is so hard to make commercial software for linux is that it is a constantly moving target. Even the kernel api's aren't fixed, never mind trying to figure out the different dependencies. Android will end up being even worse in my humble opinion. Even now many handset manufactures don't have anything consistent on Android, and install all sorts of crap. Having had a few ideas to make an Android app and seeing this has really been discouraging to be honest.
Not that my opinion matters anyhow. There will be people who can make money on the Android platform. I wish them luck.
Not long ago Apple released the source for Safari as one big repository. The Konqueror people complained that they couldn't apply the changes. Apple seen as an enemy of opensource, yet the source is still available on the net.
How is this situation different? Can someone enlighten me?
Google is so synonymous with search that almost every device uses it as default. Even Firefox uses google as default search page. Safari and Chrome as well.
Welcome to the dark ages, where people will now believe that even landing on the moon was a conspiracy (like 'magic') as even the very ambition to do such a thing has long decayed.
I bet more people watch Giligan Island's reruns than watched the shuttle take off. Humanity has reached a certain zenith and is now decaying into illiterate hordes who like the barbarians of Alaric can't even understand indoor plumbing.
Look at the public schools of today and it is absolutely frightening to think what these children will be doing in just 10 years.
Advertisers want facts to support the venue they are investing in. They want customers of a certain criteria, age group for example, or of related interests.
Google makes money by selling this data to the advertisers, either directly or indirectly by refining their ad algorithm according to this data.
In fact the only way Google makes money is by harvesting every bit of data they can find and attaching it to a certain product. It is what marketing and advertisers dream about, as knowledge about your customer is directly proportional to sales and profits.
If you think about it, the only true product that Google has is information about you, the person who uses their services. That is why everything is pretty much free as the only thing that has value to them is the information. Apple on the other hand is a completely different beast, it actually makes physical things that need to be produced and manufactured.
Track probably means shifting through logs to see the chain of connections from certain ip's/mac addresses, or if you like statistical analysis of logs to find the activity from certain ip's. It is a bit more than logging.
I'd recommend a study of what your firewall does to drop ssh connections after so many attempts. It is tracking the connection state from a certain ip.
Disk usage of the wrapper is hardly a fair measure. Link the size of the dynamic libraries loaded as well. You will see that the amount of memory to run xpdf is much larger than 76k.
Yet MPEG certainly has a vested interest, as after all they were founded to allow companies to use each other's tech without the threat of lawsuits. They would certainly countersue using their pool of patents.
Actually the L/km is a better way to figure the cost of a voyage. You would need so many liters of gas for each 100 km of the voyage, or just move the decimal two points to the left and multiply by the cost per liter and this number. With this care you will pay for every 100 km the price of a liter of petrol, but with my Opel it would be 8.3 * price per liter.
A liter is 1000 cubic centimetres. You can even visualize that as a cube 10 cm on a side.
Miles / Gallon is actually not intuitive at all. You only know that the bigger the better, but it is not more intuitive than that. To calculate the price of a voyage you would need to divide, which is also not so easy to do mentally.
"original institution was founded in the 5th century by the emperor Theodosius II."
(who was a Catholic Emperor, q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople )
Preslav Literary School likewise, just read the wikipedia article. It was found by Simeon I in around 893. The split between the Orthodox and the Catholics is about 200 years later, so this could nominally be called a Catholic university at least in origin.
The Ohrid Literary school was founded at about the same time.
The Schola Medica Salertana was actually from a monastery in the 9th century, and most of the graduates such as Gilles de Corbeil were actually clergy (he himself was a canon).
Thus it seems even your examples all are directly related to the Catholic Church. The first three were founded more or less due to Christological disputes, the fourth more from the development of medicine in the dispensary of a monastery.
Since the flash plugin does h264 they will still be paying license fee for the embedded plugin. They won't save a nickel on license fees, as they are already long over the cap, and will always be if they offer anything in h264.
" WebM does this while still having lots of room for improvement, plus the perfect storm of open source software: large corporate backers and many, many talented open source coders motivated by technical and philosophical reasons. I would bet WebM will beat h.264 handsomely in a couple of years in most technical tests you can throw at it."
So what you are advocating is basically vaporware....
Well we used to say that Sun's control over Java didn't mean much, but that is not so sure now that that has changed.
MPEG is at least recognized by ISO and there are also implications for not conforming to the spec.
However there is no clear path to enforcing the WebM spec. If someone decides to implement "enhancements" to the video spec (for instance mandating a video stream for ads), to whom will you appeal? Who will enforce that the spec is maintained?
Also the implementation of WebM is still very much beta, as they say on their own website:
"The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of WebM are more accurately measured today using the development tools in the VP8 SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming."
Thus we have a spec that is computationally more expensive, and only promises that it will get better. There is no guarantee that it will be. Even hardware implementations are not guaranteed to be better than h264 which is already a very well known entity.
Even if there are no royalty fees, the programming hours required to get your implementation at an equivalent computational footprint is expensive. Even more expensive than the royalty fees in many cases.
The specs are frozen, but by who? It is one thing if the organization that freezes a standard is an internationally recognized institution (ISO for example), another if it is just the decision of a publicly owned company.
Plus the spec is technically inferior in all aspects, and has close to no adoption with the people who actually MAKE video.
THe only thing this decision has made me do is cross off Chrome from the list of browsers worth considering. If they have a policy of REDUCING FUNCTIONALITY because of political concerns, they are not interested in providing a service but promoting a certain agenda.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm not going to waste my time on it. It is worth more than the miniscule license fees.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but if someone needs gmail to do their government job, someone is not doing their job correctly.
:)
The real problem with gmail, yahoo, msn or whatever is that it isn't the government's server, and there are lots of requirements for archiving and providing an audit trail for government business that gmail cannot (and shouldn't) provide.
IT is more than just putting up a webpage and sending messages, it is also insuring accountability and security. Free web mail is fine and even preferable for private stuff, but when it comes to government work we demand a certain accountability and security, and rightly so. Perhaps people do private messages at work, but this is damn hard to filter and in general on tax-payers time you have no right to be doing private correspondance on government payroll and equipment.
From the workers point of view it might seem a hassle, but try to look at it from the administrator's point of view. Those blocks are there for a reason, and the audit trail is there for a reason. Remove the audit trail and it would be close to impossible to make any sort of investigation on who stole the last 10,000 $ from the government till, and who influenced who in the last bid, and who approved what by which contacts.
People aren't perfect, company and government policies even less so, but there is often a reason for the policy even if it is implemented wrongly.
Go and hug your IT admin today, you'll find it easier to get your job done
DARPA is certainly a product of the cold war, as it was a response to Sputnik.
The internet is a direct descendant of Arpanet, again a cold war project sponsored by DARPA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Even the wikipedia article mentions this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Actually Guiness has quite a history of practical application of mathematics.
Namely, the Student distribution (or t-distribution), known to any statistics student, was developed by Gosset of Guiness brewery.
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
I think Google will have to start segregating Android phones into different classes in order to provide a coherent user experience.
Not going to happen. They don't make any hardware, so their "recommendations for coherent user experience" will be pretty much ignored. Android will by its very nature fragment, just like linux does - you have different distributions according to different requirements (like ArchLinux vs Debian vs REL). On the moble platform it will even fragment further as the hardware is so completely different (after all most pc's are pretty much the same processor, in mobile it's not even clear).
One of the reasons that it is so hard to make commercial software for linux is that it is a constantly moving target. Even the kernel api's aren't fixed, never mind trying to figure out the different dependencies. Android will end up being even worse in my humble opinion. Even now many handset manufactures don't have anything consistent on Android, and install all sorts of crap. Having had a few ideas to make an Android app and seeing this has really been discouraging to be honest.
Not that my opinion matters anyhow. There will be people who can make money on the Android platform. I wish them luck.
Not long ago Apple released the source for Safari as one big repository. The Konqueror people complained that they couldn't apply the changes. Apple seen as an enemy of opensource, yet the source is still available on the net.
How is this situation different? Can someone enlighten me?
Google is so synonymous with search that almost every device uses it as default. Even Firefox uses google as default search page. Safari and Chrome as well.
Most people don't change their defaults. They use what is installed.
Welcome to the dark ages, where people will now believe that even landing on the moon was a conspiracy (like 'magic') as even the very ambition to do such a thing has long decayed.
I bet more people watch Giligan Island's reruns than watched the shuttle take off. Humanity has reached a certain zenith and is now decaying into illiterate hordes who like the barbarians of Alaric can't even understand indoor plumbing.
Look at the public schools of today and it is absolutely frightening to think what these children will be doing in just 10 years.
Free software costs more than expected.
Amazingly, work is not free.
Not exactly news, but a good reminder of reality.
Google checkout uses your google email address. How is that anonymized?
Advertisers want facts to support the venue they are investing in. They want customers of a certain criteria, age group for example, or of related interests.
Google makes money by selling this data to the advertisers, either directly or indirectly by refining their ad algorithm according to this data.
In fact the only way Google makes money is by harvesting every bit of data they can find and attaching it to a certain product. It is what marketing and advertisers dream about, as knowledge about your customer is directly proportional to sales and profits.
If you think about it, the only true product that Google has is information about you, the person who uses their services. That is why everything is pretty much free as the only thing that has value to them is the information. Apple on the other hand is a completely different beast, it actually makes physical things that need to be produced and manufactured.
Track probably means shifting through logs to see the chain of connections from certain ip's/mac addresses, or if you like statistical analysis of logs to find the activity from certain ip's. It is a bit more than logging.
I'd recommend a study of what your firewall does to drop ssh connections after so many attempts. It is tracking the connection state from a certain ip.
Disk usage of the wrapper is hardly a fair measure. Link the size of the dynamic libraries loaded as well. You will see that the amount of memory to run xpdf is much larger than 76k.
Depends on your system of course.
Don't know about you, but I would prefer to do business with company B. They would at least get my money.
YMMV of course.
Yet MPEG certainly has a vested interest, as after all they were founded to allow companies to use each other's tech without the threat of lawsuits. They would certainly countersue using their pool of patents.
Not exactly true. MPEG-LA would have a vested interest in defending their patent pool, and thus could countersue.
Users of Ogg/Thedora have no such protection.
The whole reason that MPEG-LA came into existence was exactly to allow companies to use each other's tech without the specter of lawsuits.
Actually the L/km is a better way to figure the cost of a voyage. You would need so many liters of gas for each 100 km of the voyage, or just move the decimal two points to the left and multiply by the cost per liter and this number. With this care you will pay for every 100 km the price of a liter of petrol, but with my Opel it would be 8.3 * price per liter.
:)
A liter is 1000 cubic centimetres. You can even visualize that as a cube 10 cm on a side.
Miles / Gallon is actually not intuitive at all. You only know that the bigger the better, but it is not more intuitive than that. To calculate the price of a voyage you would need to divide, which is also not so easy to do mentally.
You mileage may vary of course
University of Constantinople
"original institution was founded in the 5th century by the emperor Theodosius II."
(who was a Catholic Emperor, q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople )
Preslav Literary School likewise, just read the wikipedia article. It was found by Simeon I in around 893. The split between the Orthodox and the Catholics is about 200 years later, so this could nominally be called a Catholic university at least in origin.
The Ohrid Literary school was founded at about the same time.
The Schola Medica Salertana was actually from a monastery in the 9th century, and most of the graduates such as Gilles de Corbeil were actually clergy (he himself was a canon).
Thus it seems even your examples all are directly related to the Catholic Church. The first three were founded more or less due to Christological disputes, the fourth more from the development of medicine in the dispensary of a monastery.
"It was not the Catholic Church that created Universities, it was Islam and the Greek Church"
That my dear friend is complete nonsense. Name one university in Europe that wasn't founded and built by the Catholic Church.
Since the flash plugin does h264 they will still be paying license fee for the embedded plugin. They won't save a nickel on license fees, as they are already long over the cap, and will always be if they offer anything in h264.
" WebM does this while still having lots of room for improvement, plus the perfect storm of open source software: large corporate backers and many, many talented open source coders motivated by technical and philosophical reasons. I would bet WebM will beat h.264 handsomely in a couple of years in most technical tests you can throw at it."
So what you are advocating is basically vaporware....
Open Source doesn't necessary imply that the programmer's time is free.
It might just cost more time and money to implement an open format that it is to pay the fees.
I see no advantage for Google in this at all, nor for the web in general.
Open format is not the same thing as an open standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format
Well we used to say that Sun's control over Java didn't mean much, but that is not so sure now that that has changed.
MPEG is at least recognized by ISO and there are also implications for not conforming to the spec.
However there is no clear path to enforcing the WebM spec. If someone decides to implement "enhancements" to the video spec (for instance mandating a video stream for ads), to whom will you appeal? Who will enforce that the spec is maintained?
Also the implementation of WebM is still very much beta, as they say on their own website:
"The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of WebM are more accurately measured today using the development tools in the VP8 SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming."
Thus we have a spec that is computationally more expensive, and only promises that it will get better. There is no guarantee that it will be. Even hardware implementations are not guaranteed to be better than h264 which is already a very well known entity.
Even if there are no royalty fees, the programming hours required to get your implementation at an equivalent computational footprint is expensive. Even more expensive than the royalty fees in many cases.
The specs are frozen, but by who? It is one thing if the organization that freezes a standard is an internationally recognized institution (ISO for example), another if it is just the decision of a publicly owned company.
Plus the spec is technically inferior in all aspects, and has close to no adoption with the people who actually MAKE video.
THe only thing this decision has made me do is cross off Chrome from the list of browsers worth considering. If they have a policy of REDUCING FUNCTIONALITY because of political concerns, they are not interested in providing a service but promoting a certain agenda.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm not going to waste my time on it. It is worth more than the miniscule license fees.
Also WebM is not even an open standard. It is controlled by Google. It is even less open that flash is.