Oh yes. Excellent news. Because nuclear power is the cleanest, most dependable, most regulated, and lowest impacting power source on the planet right now, lets shut it down for no realistic reason. "Spinal sublexations which cause ill health?" Ah, you're a chiropractor. Sooooo, your position is that mythical twisting of the vertebrae (Oh yes, sorry, chiropractors have co-opted the term 'subluxation' to mean whatever they think might be wrong, rather than an actual anatomical definition. Convenient)... which you say causes ill health, is due to radioactivity, that no one has ever sensed? That's quite a reach my friend.
The short version is nuclear power is the safest power we have. (Xref: http://climatesight.org/2011/03/15/nuclear-power-in-context/ ) That chart shows direct-impact deaths, and does not show the number of mine workers who die yearly mining coal, or the oil rig operators who die, or the VAST environmental impact directly from burning fossil fuels. In 40 years of nuclear power, there have been THREE nuclear plant failures. TMI, Chernobyl, and fukujima. TMI resulted in negligible radiation release. Chernobyl resulted in 64 confirmed deaths (though there is ENORMOUS variation in forecasts for 'potential deaths'), and Fukujima has, we've noted so far, had ONE death. One.
I can already hear the raising of the "But, it's Radiation! Radiation is BAD!" - yes, of course it is, but it must be taken in context. The levels talked about around these plants varies wildly, and your random "because we have nuke plants, people are getting more colds because of mythical undefineable spinal shift" is a textbook "Correlation proves Causation - a logical fallacy.
Psst. Locomotive is between 55 tons and 200 tons. Say a high speed rail has 1 locomotive and 10 cars, the cars are relatively light. Call it 50 tons. So that's about 1100 tons.
A 747 maxes out somewhere around 125 tons.
I'd rather have 1100 tons on the ground moving at 250mph than 125 tons 30,000ft in the air at 550mph that can be aimed anywhere, any place, and dropped on anyone's head.
You might want to read up on your Java Memory Management misconceptions. Java at no point specified that there wasn't going to be any memory management at all. Just that memory management for bad programmers was being handled automatically via garbage collection.
In reality, Java Memory Management is quite complex and widely misunderstood. Instead of just 'flat memory space that we just keep malloc()ing until we use it up', the memory manager has tiers of usage, that are used for immediate, short term, and long term storage.
Specific to your troll, though, is that in fact the programmer DOES NOT need to do memory management beyond the basics of "don't keep allocating resources and never release them" (specifically database and file handles). The JVM itself does all the management beyond that. This article and book refer to tuning the JVM and J2EE server, which run the programmers code. The programmer shouldn't give a fig how the container is tuned beyond common sense.
Need to get out more, bro. J2EE is enormously powerful for large scale applications, and is in use just about everywhere in industrial, government, and financial sectors. No, it's not applicable for the latest LAMP whack-site that folks crank out by the bjillions, but it has a very good place when designing extremely large scale multitiered interconnected apps.
Oh, and btw, servlets are part of the J2EE spec, so you might want to take that into account as well.
My big problem is that most folks don't really understand what J2EE is or how it's applicable. And I will freely admit that J2EE v1 and v2 were decent ideas implemented very badly. J2EE v3, with the removal of mounds of XML configuration, is quite a pleasure to work with, and provides a rich environment to build large scale clustered applications with the benefits of OOP design.
No, it's not for everything and everyone. But everytime I see someone wank on about the latest Ruby wonder that makes communication between applications possible (Gasp!) I have to go "er, you mean JMS? the messaging / queue management tool that's been in J2EE since the beginning? Gosh, yeah, Ruby sure is pushing the frontier of design, oo baby."
Seconded and thirded. I use DCU as well - and even though the interface looks like it's from 1996, it does let me pay bills online, have my history going back years, and syncs up with Mint.com and other sites.
So if it's not even close to true, instead of standing on the mountain going "THIS ISN'T TRUE! YOU ALL ARE IDIOTS!" whu don't you provide some concrete information about WHY it's not true?
I too am skeptical of the hysteria about the article, and I always look for collaborating information (more than everyone re-posting status updates "Facebook is at it again!")
To quote an old friend of mine. "Don't flame, inform!"
So? Where is your info?
Wow. Bitter much? The amount of misinformation, bad data, and just plain falsehoods in your post boggles the mind. Obviously you didn't do any research at all before posting. But I guess that's because you weren't in a classroom, the concept of 'learning on your own' has apparently escaped you.
Lets start from the basics here, and full disclosure. My son (10) is a student at Sudbury Valley School - that's one of those unschools that this entire article is about. He's been there 6 years. He has never had a math course, never had a social sciences course, has never sat through a lecture on American History.
He is a talented Python programmer, plays the guitar, and reads about a dozen books a week. Why does he do these things? Because he enjoys them. He's also socially adept, polite, communicative, and inquisitive. He gets along with kids outside his age group - older and younger - because he's exposed to all ages, every day, at his school
I have to point out this boggling statement by you:
Do you know what happens when you let children run around, be inquisitive, ask questions, appreciate concepts, and open doors of wonderment in every topic? You get Arts students. Arts and Humanities students who know how to appreciate everything and know how to do absolutely nothing. People who can master the art of appearing intelligent whilst remaining shockingly ignorant. People whose ideas and tastes and practices are simply imitations of something that was actually original.
What a nauseatingly narrow minded and petty person you must be. "know how to do absolutely nothing" - such as, oh, I don't know. Paint? Do music? Dance? Act? Free an arts student from having to sit through a Biology class (required in every public school), and you know what they'll pursue? Art.
Sudbury Valley has produces scientists, teachers, politicians, and engineers. When a student finds something they're interested in, around age 11-13, they start focusing in on it, learning at their own pace, reading and studying, perhaps taking courses on their own. If they want to go onto college, they prepare in their own way.
Forcing a student to take courses they have no interest in does nothing except disillusion the student on the learning process.
(oh, by the way. My 10 year old son who never took a math course? Loves doing math problems with me. We do them when driving, because he finds them fun. My son loves going to school, and hates when he's home sick or has other obligations. How many children in the public school system absolutely CANNOT WAIT until the first day of school?)
Learn. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
What folks seem to be missing here is that the attraction to Exchange isn't that it's just a mail server. It's the calendaring, tightly coupled with the server that makes it work. Nothing else short of Google Apps has come close to working as well as Outlook + Exchange does.
Now, having said that, there's plenty of good work going on integrating other systems together (I personally run standard IMAP / SMTP for mail, and use Google Calendar for my calendaring). This works great, but is not 'exchange compatable'.
There are some other workarounds - An outlook 2007 client can be configured to publish it's calendar up into Google Calendar via some plugins - once you do that, Thunderbird + Lightning comes very very close to working the same as Outlook does, but it's not exactly an elegant solution.
We've hit hte same problem at one of my clients regarding Outlook 2007 - Evolution no longer works, and some of hte Linux folks are stuck.
The last bit is, as others have said, a vmware install of XP -just- running Outlook. It's not as horrible as you might think:)
I have no recollection of '150 million computers by the end of 2008' - so I'm questioning the validity of using this as an argument. Wikipages, google searches, etc - I'm not finding a cite for that number.
In my mind, that's a ridiculously over optimistic number, and the OLPC infrastructure could never support it. If that was actually a quote from an OLPC representative, can someone give me the cite?
Let me summarize the legions of faults in your arguments.
Electric cars reduce, but do not eliminate, these emissions, because while they are more efficient, the power has to come from somewhere, and right now that means a power plant
No one said the energy is free. And anyone who does is just flat out stupid. Of course the energy has to come from somewhere, but approaching things in absolutes as you have eliminates the gray areas that is the whole point of this process. Yes, 1kw consumed in an electric car has to be produced somewhere. However, 1kw produced by an internal combustion engine in a single car is FAR less efficient than 1kw out of 100,000 produced in a central plant. Any centralized power production facility, based on current technology, will be more efficient than individual producers.
Solar is very inefficient Congratulations for dismissing an entire industry based on one point. Yes, current solar cells, operating somewhere in the mid-teens efficiency wise, are inefficient converters. But they are CLEAN converters. They consume no energy in when in use, produce no by products, and do not require frequent maintenance. By those metrics, Photovoltaic cells are fantastic energy sources. There is an argument that production of the cells is 'dirty', but understand that production of a combustion engine, a nuclear power plant, or a hydroelectric dam is 'dirty' as well.
wind is costly and unsightly You must work for the idiots on Nantucket that are fighting against the Cape Wind project. Which is more unsightly, a silent windmill on a hill, or smog and dead plants and animals everywhere? Windmills are more expensive than buying a tank of gas at the pump, but they are enormously efficient, very low maintenance, and produce clean, no by-product energy. Unsightly? Then put them somewhere you don't want to see them, like out to sea or in isolated regions. Personally I find them very attractive and fascinating - far more beautiful than a coal plant pumping garbage into the atomosphere.
Nuclear presents it's own problems In teh grand scheme of things, nuclear power is one of the most efficient, cleanest processes for producing energy (that uses at thermal variance process - heated steam to turn a turbine) on the planet. The by-products of used fuel can be managed and dealt with, becuase the by products are KNOWN quantities. What people dont' realize is that the junk a nuclear reactor generates is not far off from the garbage a coal plant puts into the atmosphere. The difference is the nuke plant has the by products contained and controlled, while coal and oil plants just throw them into the air. "Oh well, someone elses problem."
i am more interested in hydrogen This argument is one the Bushies and others push, without understanding the real problems. There is no hydrogen economy, and hydrogen fuel is ridiculously hard to manage in compressed or liquid form. Did you know you cant' put them in tanks? Nope, tanks corrode when you store hydrogen in them, they have to be very specific types of tanks that are ridiculously expensive and complicated. There is no infrastructure for delivering and fueling vehicles based on hydrogen, nor will there ever be one. Can you imagine the cost of replacing every gas pump with a hydrogen pump, every gasoline and oil tank with a hydrogen tank? Hydrogen is a great dream, but will never actually function until breakthroughs are made in hydrogen storage and transportation. Give up this dream and focus on what is possible now.
The number one obstacle in electric based vehicles is batteries. Full stop. And there has been so much work put into battery technology in the last 5 years, that the tiem of the electric car is here, and it's here to stay. Stop poopooing the technology that is proving itself to work (notice the fleets of priuses out there), and wishing for castles in the sky. Work with what's here and now.
In reality, this doesn't mean anything, because there's insufficient information in the linked article.
Microsoft, just like any other vendor on the planet, is free to submit anything they like into standards bodies, and ask that they be accepted or considered for use in the world. If Microsoft's new format is useful, fantastic, we all should start using it.
But if, and only if, that format comes free from the burden of licensing or copyright. We've seen how damaging these restrictions can be to simple file format (remember ARC? And all the fun that went on with GIF?) - If Microsoft is releasing an idea for folks to use and adopt? Excellent. If they're pushing an internal format that they hold a patent on, and are requesting other vendors to adopt it? Then it's simply Microsoft once again trying to dick over the industry. And I can't see how it can possibly work under those circumstances.
They don't have the big stick they used to. This is no longer 2000, where the corporate juggernaut simply needed to wave it's financial might and the net doth tremble before it. Microsoft has to tread carefully on an increasingly powerful free software world.
We'll see how this goes. Me, I'm waiting to hear more information.
'Javas slow decline in favor of...' oh please
on
2007 Java Predictions
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· Score: 3, Informative
The ONLY people who think Java is in decline in favor of Ruby or Python are the ivory tower academics who aren't actually developing large scale enterprise applications. Neither of these tools can manage true EE environment. Or if they can, the number of people who know how to build, maintain, and debug them is so tiny, it would be ludicrous to adapt a large installation to the platform.
An environment is only as useful as the tools that are available for it. And it only takes a quick glance around the net to realize how HUGE the Java community is.
Still not convinced? Lets take a look at Hotjobs. This is a pure keyword lookup, doing a little tuning to make sure we're not finding jeweler entries for 'ruby' :
'java' 8213 job results.
'python' 671 job results.
'ruby' 180 job results.
And just for giggles, lets throw some more searches:
'php' 1063 job results.
'c#' 2092 job results.
'c++' 5482 job results.
'perl' 3197 job results.
So, in support of the claim that Java is in 'slow decline', we have... java as the most requested programming language in the job market today.
Did I miss something here? Sun holds a press conference. In an environment that cannot even run on their machines or in their own operating system? They're basically saying "We're cool, we're tech 'leet, but our hardware and software are worthless!"
Why didn't they just hold it in Microsoft Netmeeting?
If that's just an 'implication', I'll eat my hat. It's pretty obvious that his going silent is the result of Apple putting the thumbscrews to him. He states that the ONLY reason he's saying something now is because he's talking about Intels drivers, not Apples. It's blatantly obvious that Apple's lawyers have come down on him like a ton of bricks, forcing him to be quiet until they get a patch out. This way no one can report about the 'insecurity' of the OSX platform - there are no exploits, see? As long as you're patched and up to date!
I'd hardly call this an antitrust issue. A microsoft product is referrign to a microsoft search engine. It's very easy to change it to use a different one. It's when Microsoft makes it impossible to use anything _BUT_ their own products that there's serious problems. Case in point is the inability to 'remove' IE at all, and Microsoft's assertion that it was impossible to do so (then later making versions of windows that have IE removed).
I think Google is starting to feel the pinch. They've tweaked the lumbering behemoth that is Microsoft, and Billy boy is fighting back the best way he can. Back room deals, silent contracts, and subtle manipulation of the market. Google should be more worried about Microsoft pushing their products into the colleges and large businesses, not what the default search engine on one box in one browser is.
Kontact does this, however Kontact cannot in fact edit anyone elses calendar but your own. It can send out meeting updates, which the remote client needs to interpret as a schedule change (this is actually how Exchange works under the covers).
I actually use Kontact for all my work, publishing an iCal ICS file up to a phpiCalendar server where my family and workmates can browse and see my schedule combined with others. However, the only one that can actually alter my calendar is me, so this comes under 'calendaring', rather than 'group scheduling.
I've been hammering through this problem for the last 5 years, trying to find a group scheduling and calendaring application that has the capabilities of Exchange. It's important to note that there is a big difference between 'calendaring' apps (such as 30boxes and Yahoo Calendar and the like), and 'scheduling', where an interactive application can review a persons or groups schedule, and then add things to their calendar.
As far as I've been able to tell, nothing does the group scheduling other than Exchange in any decent form. The best most can do is publish ICS files into a public server, and then make them available for public browsing (say, via phpicalendar), or available for remote subscription (which Evolution, et al supports).
The golden calf for opensource would be an application that supports client-server group calendaring and scheduling, with PDA synchronizing, and multi-platform support. The only thing even remotely moving in this direction is CalDAV, which AFAICT, is moving at a glacial pace.
Until this problem is resolved, there is no defense against "Why don't we just use Exchange for this?"
RE: the sniping argument. What you said is totally accurate, but in reality doesn't work quite that way.
People like buying things for less than they're willing to pay. That one fact alone is why sniping works. "I'm -willing- to pay $50 for this item, but damn I'd be excited as git out to pay $35." - if that $35 bid holds, I'll be a lot more interested in getting the item than I would be if it were $50. That's why sniping works. The difference between 'willing' and 'excited about'.
If sniping were removed, this dynamic would change, and things would work as you suggest. Prices would walk up to the comfort level and stay there. I'm comfortable paying $50, you're comfortable paying $45. Things end, I win.
This is a huge plus for everyone involved. Much of eBay's usefulness as a remotely accessible database resource has been nullified due to these annoying charges. Without having a fee associated with access to their very own information, eBay is really opening up for third party developers to generate decent applications, rather than hav eto depend on scraping the HTML to get functionality. I've used JBidWatcher a lot for sniping, which relies on HTML scraping, and I'm glad we can move away from that.
And before folks start going on about sniping, eBays very own policies make sniping the -only- way to do business on ebay with any effectiveness. Becaused they won't implement the simple policy of extending an auction based on most recent bid (a very simple solution to the problem of sniping, and one that would be an elegant, simple, and beneficial solution to eveyrone), sniping is now 'de rigeur' for any auction.
You've answered one question - where the performance bump comes from on the second running. I'm all over that (this machine has 2gig of memory in it). But my point I'm trying to raise here is that there's so many factors that influence performance issues, that this fellow at ZDnet going "OO BLOATED! EXCEL GUT!" is really jumping, IMHO, to the wrong conclusion on the flimsiest of data.
One other little tidbit. From waht I'm understanding of the fellows tests, he's running OpenOffice under WINDOWS, and crowing that Excel takes only 3 seconds to load. One would point out that Excel has to load almost NOTHING to start, while OO needs to load it's entire environment to get started.
Oh, I tried to run Excel on my Linux box to compare results, but I can't seem to find a version available it. (:) for those without a sense of humor)
So this is an interesting thread, and I thought I'd take a look at my own situation. There's something odd going on here, and I'm not sure what it is in OpenOffice that does this.
I started OO on my Debian Linux (Sarge) Thinkpad T40 (my original article on this) while doing my normal workload (Evolution, IRC, etc etc). As soon as the main Frame appeared, I clicked the [X] close button to exit it - assuming that OO's main startup thread would have completed, and shutdown processes are pretty fast. My first timing:
dbs@hunter:~$ time openoffice
real 0m30.440s user 0m3.084s sys 0m0.216s
This is not a particularly fast laptop (1.4gig), but not bottom of thel ine either. That's not too bad to start up a whole office suite.
But, I decided to try a few other things, so from the same command line, I did it again. It came up VERY fast:
dbs@hunter:~$ time openoffice
real 0m3.475s user 0m3.104s sys 0m0.128s
Nothing in 'top' is showing memory cached or in use or anything. I know that Microsoft uses a 'quickloader' to keep things like Excel and Word in memory between uses, so there's a memory hit in favor of faster startup, but I wonder if OO does some sort of environment checkup on start each time, and remembers setting between restarts (in a gconf config entry maybe?)
Now, 10 minutes later, startup is still only 3 1/2 seconds or so.
There's so much mystery and hand-waving in Microsoft products, that benchmarks like what this guy is talking about are nigh on useless, and saying that OO is 'bloated' is playing to the knee-jerk folks who constnatly rail "BLOAT IS BAD!". Bloat means useless functions inside a product that have no end-user need, and are added to the size of an application in order to appeal to a very very narrow audience (or just due to bad design). I don't think OO is in this category at all.
As far as the filesize loading problems, I have yet to try this out, but I shall, and will report on what I find.
Is this really worth a top post on Slashdot, that The Onion wrote a funny piece? It's sort of their standard fare - in fact, I'm beginning to feel like The Onion is doing a better job at putting togethe rinteresting articles than slashdot is.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes. Excellent news. Because nuclear power is the cleanest, most dependable, most regulated, and lowest impacting power source on the planet right now, lets shut it down for no realistic reason. "Spinal sublexations which cause ill health?" Ah, you're a chiropractor. Sooooo, your position is that mythical twisting of the vertebrae (Oh yes, sorry, chiropractors have co-opted the term 'subluxation' to mean whatever they think might be wrong, rather than an actual anatomical definition. Convenient) ... which you say causes ill health, is due to radioactivity, that no one has ever sensed? That's quite a reach my friend.
The short version is nuclear power is the safest power we have. (Xref: http://climatesight.org/2011/03/15/nuclear-power-in-context/ ) That chart shows direct-impact deaths, and does not show the number of mine workers who die yearly mining coal, or the oil rig operators who die, or the VAST environmental impact directly from burning fossil fuels. In 40 years of nuclear power, there have been THREE nuclear plant failures. TMI, Chernobyl, and fukujima. TMI resulted in negligible radiation release. Chernobyl resulted in 64 confirmed deaths (though there is ENORMOUS variation in forecasts for 'potential deaths'), and Fukujima has, we've noted so far, had ONE death. One.
I can already hear the raising of the "But, it's Radiation! Radiation is BAD!" - yes, of course it is, but it must be taken in context. The levels talked about around these plants varies wildly, and your random "because we have nuke plants, people are getting more colds because of mythical undefineable spinal shift" is a textbook "Correlation proves Causation - a logical fallacy.
Psst. Locomotive is between 55 tons and 200 tons. Say a high speed rail has 1 locomotive and 10 cars, the cars are relatively light. Call it 50 tons. So that's about 1100 tons. A 747 maxes out somewhere around 125 tons. I'd rather have 1100 tons on the ground moving at 250mph than 125 tons 30,000ft in the air at 550mph that can be aimed anywhere, any place, and dropped on anyone's head.
You might want to read up on your Java Memory Management misconceptions. Java at no point specified that there wasn't going to be any memory management at all. Just that memory management for bad programmers was being handled automatically via garbage collection. In reality, Java Memory Management is quite complex and widely misunderstood. Instead of just 'flat memory space that we just keep malloc()ing until we use it up', the memory manager has tiers of usage, that are used for immediate, short term, and long term storage. Specific to your troll, though, is that in fact the programmer DOES NOT need to do memory management beyond the basics of "don't keep allocating resources and never release them" (specifically database and file handles). The JVM itself does all the management beyond that. This article and book refer to tuning the JVM and J2EE server, which run the programmers code. The programmer shouldn't give a fig how the container is tuned beyond common sense.
Need to get out more, bro. J2EE is enormously powerful for large scale applications, and is in use just about everywhere in industrial, government, and financial sectors. No, it's not applicable for the latest LAMP whack-site that folks crank out by the bjillions, but it has a very good place when designing extremely large scale multitiered interconnected apps. Oh, and btw, servlets are part of the J2EE spec, so you might want to take that into account as well. My big problem is that most folks don't really understand what J2EE is or how it's applicable. And I will freely admit that J2EE v1 and v2 were decent ideas implemented very badly. J2EE v3, with the removal of mounds of XML configuration, is quite a pleasure to work with, and provides a rich environment to build large scale clustered applications with the benefits of OOP design. No, it's not for everything and everyone. But everytime I see someone wank on about the latest Ruby wonder that makes communication between applications possible (Gasp!) I have to go "er, you mean JMS? the messaging / queue management tool that's been in J2EE since the beginning? Gosh, yeah, Ruby sure is pushing the frontier of design, oo baby."
Seconded and thirded. I use DCU as well - and even though the interface looks like it's from 1996, it does let me pay bills online, have my history going back years, and syncs up with Mint.com and other sites.
So if it's not even close to true, instead of standing on the mountain going "THIS ISN'T TRUE! YOU ALL ARE IDIOTS!" whu don't you provide some concrete information about WHY it's not true? I too am skeptical of the hysteria about the article, and I always look for collaborating information (more than everyone re-posting status updates "Facebook is at it again!") To quote an old friend of mine. "Don't flame, inform!" So? Where is your info?
Lets start from the basics here, and full disclosure. My son (10) is a student at Sudbury Valley School - that's one of those unschools that this entire article is about. He's been there 6 years. He has never had a math course, never had a social sciences course, has never sat through a lecture on American History.
He is a talented Python programmer, plays the guitar, and reads about a dozen books a week. Why does he do these things? Because he enjoys them. He's also socially adept, polite, communicative, and inquisitive. He gets along with kids outside his age group - older and younger - because he's exposed to all ages, every day, at his school
I have to point out this boggling statement by you:
Do you know what happens when you let children run around, be inquisitive, ask questions, appreciate concepts, and open doors of wonderment in every topic? You get Arts students. Arts and Humanities students who know how to appreciate everything and know how to do absolutely nothing. People who can master the art of appearing intelligent whilst remaining shockingly ignorant. People whose ideas and tastes and practices are simply imitations of something that was actually original.
What a nauseatingly narrow minded and petty person you must be. "know how to do absolutely nothing" - such as, oh, I don't know. Paint? Do music? Dance? Act? Free an arts student from having to sit through a Biology class (required in every public school), and you know what they'll pursue? Art.
Sudbury Valley has produces scientists, teachers, politicians, and engineers. When a student finds something they're interested in, around age 11-13, they start focusing in on it, learning at their own pace, reading and studying, perhaps taking courses on their own. If they want to go onto college, they prepare in their own way.
Forcing a student to take courses they have no interest in does nothing except disillusion the student on the learning process.
(oh, by the way. My 10 year old son who never took a math course? Loves doing math problems with me. We do them when driving, because he finds them fun. My son loves going to school, and hates when he's home sick or has other obligations. How many children in the public school system absolutely CANNOT WAIT until the first day of school?)
Learn. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
What folks seem to be missing here is that the attraction to Exchange isn't that it's just a mail server. It's the calendaring, tightly coupled with the server that makes it work. Nothing else short of Google Apps has come close to working as well as Outlook + Exchange does.
Now, having said that, there's plenty of good work going on integrating other systems together (I personally run standard IMAP / SMTP for mail, and use Google Calendar for my calendaring). This works great, but is not 'exchange compatable'.
There are some other workarounds - An outlook 2007 client can be configured to publish it's calendar up into Google Calendar via some plugins - once you do that, Thunderbird + Lightning comes very very close to working the same as Outlook does, but it's not exactly an elegant solution.
We've hit hte same problem at one of my clients regarding Outlook 2007 - Evolution no longer works, and some of hte Linux folks are stuck.
The last bit is, as others have said, a vmware install of XP -just- running Outlook. It's not as horrible as you might think :)
I have no recollection of '150 million computers by the end of 2008' - so I'm questioning the validity of using this as an argument. Wikipages, google searches, etc - I'm not finding a cite for that number.
In my mind, that's a ridiculously over optimistic number, and the OLPC infrastructure could never support it. If that was actually a quote from an OLPC representative, can someone give me the cite?
You, sir, are a misinformed, ignorant fool.
Let me summarize the legions of faults in your arguments.
Electric cars reduce, but do not eliminate, these emissions, because while they are more efficient, the power has to come from somewhere, and right now that means a power plant
No one said the energy is free. And anyone who does is just flat out stupid. Of course the energy has to come from somewhere, but approaching things in absolutes as you have eliminates the gray areas that is the whole point of this process. Yes, 1kw consumed in an electric car has to be produced somewhere. However, 1kw produced by an internal combustion engine in a single car is FAR less efficient than 1kw out of 100,000 produced in a central plant. Any centralized power production facility, based on current technology, will be more efficient than individual producers.
Solar is very inefficient
Congratulations for dismissing an entire industry based on one point. Yes, current solar cells, operating somewhere in the mid-teens efficiency wise, are inefficient converters. But they are CLEAN converters. They consume no energy in when in use, produce no by products, and do not require frequent maintenance. By those metrics, Photovoltaic cells are fantastic energy sources. There is an argument that production of the cells is 'dirty', but understand that production of a combustion engine, a nuclear power plant, or a hydroelectric dam is 'dirty' as well.
wind is costly and unsightly
You must work for the idiots on Nantucket that are fighting against the Cape Wind project. Which is more unsightly, a silent windmill on a hill, or smog and dead plants and animals everywhere? Windmills are more expensive than buying a tank of gas at the pump, but they are enormously efficient, very low maintenance, and produce clean, no by-product energy. Unsightly? Then put them somewhere you don't want to see them, like out to sea or in isolated regions. Personally I find them very attractive and fascinating - far more beautiful than a coal plant pumping garbage into the atomosphere.
Nuclear presents it's own problems
In teh grand scheme of things, nuclear power is one of the most efficient, cleanest processes for producing energy (that uses at thermal variance process - heated steam to turn a turbine) on the planet. The by-products of used fuel can be managed and dealt with, becuase the by products are KNOWN quantities. What people dont' realize is that the junk a nuclear reactor generates is not far off from the garbage a coal plant puts into the atmosphere. The difference is the nuke plant has the by products contained and controlled, while coal and oil plants just throw them into the air. "Oh well, someone elses problem."
i am more interested in hydrogen
This argument is one the Bushies and others push, without understanding the real problems. There is no hydrogen economy, and hydrogen fuel is ridiculously hard to manage in compressed or liquid form. Did you know you cant' put them in tanks? Nope, tanks corrode when you store hydrogen in them, they have to be very specific types of tanks that are ridiculously expensive and complicated. There is no infrastructure for delivering and fueling vehicles based on hydrogen, nor will there ever be one. Can you imagine the cost of replacing every gas pump with a hydrogen pump, every gasoline and oil tank with a hydrogen tank? Hydrogen is a great dream, but will never actually function until breakthroughs are made in hydrogen storage and transportation. Give up this dream and focus on what is possible now.
The number one obstacle in electric based vehicles is batteries. Full stop. And there has been so much work put into battery technology in the last 5 years, that the tiem of the electric car is here, and it's here to stay. Stop poopooing the technology that is proving itself to work (notice the fleets of priuses out there), and wishing for castles in the sky. Work with what's here and now.
The demo is offline because folks were spamming it. The product page has screenshots on it though.
Drop me emailif you want to see the live demo.
Take a look at http://www.stonekeep.com/keystone.php
:)
Opensource, non-alpha, many many users active, still being supported and worked on.
(Obdisclaimer. I wrote it.
And the same folks who didn't line up to buy Zune 1.0 will run right out and not line up for the next one.
And the next one. And the next one. And the next one.
In reality, this doesn't mean anything, because there's insufficient information in the linked article.
Microsoft, just like any other vendor on the planet, is free to submit anything they like into standards bodies, and ask that they be accepted or considered for use in the world. If Microsoft's new format is useful, fantastic, we all should start using it.
But if, and only if, that format comes free from the burden of licensing or copyright. We've seen how damaging these restrictions can be to simple file format (remember ARC? And all the fun that went on with GIF?) - If Microsoft is releasing an idea for folks to use and adopt? Excellent. If they're pushing an internal format that they hold a patent on, and are requesting other vendors to adopt it? Then it's simply Microsoft once again trying to dick over the industry. And I can't see how it can possibly work under those circumstances.
They don't have the big stick they used to. This is no longer 2000, where the corporate juggernaut simply needed to wave it's financial might and the net doth tremble before it. Microsoft has to tread carefully on an increasingly powerful free software world.
We'll see how this goes. Me, I'm waiting to hear more information.
An environment is only as useful as the tools that are available for it. And it only takes a quick glance around the net to realize how HUGE the Java community is.
Still not convinced? Lets take a look at Hotjobs. This is a pure keyword lookup, doing a little tuning to make sure we're not finding jeweler entries for 'ruby' :
And just for giggles, lets throw some more searches:
So, in support of the claim that Java is in 'slow decline', we have... java as the most requested programming language in the job market today.
Did I miss something here? Sun holds a press conference. In an environment that cannot even run on their machines or in their own operating system? They're basically saying "We're cool, we're tech 'leet, but our hardware and software are worthless!"
Why didn't they just hold it in Microsoft Netmeeting?
If that's just an 'implication', I'll eat my hat. It's pretty obvious that his going silent is the result of Apple putting the thumbscrews to him. He states that the ONLY reason he's saying something now is because he's talking about Intels drivers, not Apples. It's blatantly obvious that Apple's lawyers have come down on him like a ton of bricks, forcing him to be quiet until they get a patch out. This way no one can report about the 'insecurity' of the OSX platform - there are no exploits, see? As long as you're patched and up to date!
I'd hardly call this an antitrust issue. A microsoft product is referrign to a microsoft search engine. It's very easy to change it to use a different one. It's when Microsoft makes it impossible to use anything _BUT_ their own products that there's serious problems. Case in point is the inability to 'remove' IE at all, and Microsoft's assertion that it was impossible to do so (then later making versions of windows that have IE removed).
I think Google is starting to feel the pinch. They've tweaked the lumbering behemoth that is Microsoft, and Billy boy is fighting back the best way he can. Back room deals, silent contracts, and subtle manipulation of the market. Google should be more worried about Microsoft pushing their products into the colleges and large businesses, not what the default search engine on one box in one browser is.
Kontact does this, however Kontact cannot in fact edit anyone elses calendar but your own. It can send out meeting updates, which the remote client needs to interpret as a schedule change (this is actually how Exchange works under the covers).
I actually use Kontact for all my work, publishing an iCal ICS file up to a phpiCalendar server where my family and workmates can browse and see my schedule combined with others. However, the only one that can actually alter my calendar is me, so this comes under 'calendaring', rather than 'group scheduling.
I've been hammering through this problem for the last 5 years, trying to find a group scheduling and calendaring application that has the capabilities of Exchange. It's important to note that there is a big difference between 'calendaring' apps (such as 30boxes and Yahoo Calendar and the like), and 'scheduling', where an interactive application can review a persons or groups schedule, and then add things to their calendar.
As far as I've been able to tell, nothing does the group scheduling other than Exchange in any decent form. The best most can do is publish ICS files into a public server, and then make them available for public browsing (say, via phpicalendar), or available for remote subscription (which Evolution, et al supports).
The golden calf for opensource would be an application that supports client-server group calendaring and scheduling, with PDA synchronizing, and multi-platform support. The only thing even remotely moving in this direction is CalDAV, which AFAICT, is moving at a glacial pace.
Until this problem is resolved, there is no defense against "Why don't we just use Exchange for this?"
RE: the sniping argument. What you said is totally accurate, but in reality doesn't work quite that way.
People like buying things for less than they're willing to pay. That one fact alone is why sniping works. "I'm -willing- to pay $50 for this item, but damn I'd be excited as git out to pay $35." - if that $35 bid holds, I'll be a lot more interested in getting the item than I would be if it were $50. That's why sniping works. The difference between 'willing' and 'excited about'.
If sniping were removed, this dynamic would change, and things would work as you suggest. Prices would walk up to the comfort level and stay there. I'm comfortable paying $50, you're comfortable paying $45. Things end, I win.
This is a huge plus for everyone involved. Much of eBay's usefulness as a remotely accessible database resource has been nullified due to these annoying charges. Without having a fee associated with access to their very own information, eBay is really opening up for third party developers to generate decent applications, rather than hav eto depend on scraping the HTML to get functionality. I've used JBidWatcher a lot for sniping, which relies on HTML scraping, and I'm glad we can move away from that.
And before folks start going on about sniping, eBays very own policies make sniping the -only- way to do business on ebay with any effectiveness. Becaused they won't implement the simple policy of extending an auction based on most recent bid (a very simple solution to the problem of sniping, and one that would be an elegant, simple, and beneficial solution to eveyrone), sniping is now 'de rigeur' for any auction.
Jeez, tone down the abuse bits a few notches, eh?
You've answered one question - where the performance bump comes from on the second running. I'm all over that (this machine has 2gig of memory in it). But my point I'm trying to raise here is that there's so many factors that influence performance issues, that this fellow at ZDnet going "OO BLOATED! EXCEL GUT!" is really jumping, IMHO, to the wrong conclusion on the flimsiest of data.
One other little tidbit. From waht I'm understanding of the fellows tests, he's running OpenOffice under WINDOWS, and crowing that Excel takes only 3 seconds to load. One would point out that Excel has to load almost NOTHING to start, while OO needs to load it's entire environment to get started.
Oh, I tried to run Excel on my Linux box to compare results, but I can't seem to find a version available it. (:) for those without a sense of humor)
So this is an interesting thread, and I thought I'd take a look at my own situation. There's something odd going on here, and I'm not sure what it is in OpenOffice that does this.
I started OO on my Debian Linux (Sarge) Thinkpad T40 (my original article on this) while doing my normal workload (Evolution, IRC, etc etc). As soon as the main Frame appeared, I clicked the [X] close button to exit it - assuming that OO's main startup thread would have completed, and shutdown processes are pretty fast. My first timing:
dbs@hunter:~$ time openoffice
real 0m30.440s
user 0m3.084s
sys 0m0.216s
This is not a particularly fast laptop (1.4gig), but not bottom of thel ine either. That's not too bad to start up a whole office suite.
But, I decided to try a few other things, so from the same command line, I did it again. It came up VERY fast:
dbs@hunter:~$ time openoffice
real 0m3.475s
user 0m3.104s
sys 0m0.128s
Nothing in 'top' is showing memory cached or in use or anything. I know that Microsoft uses a 'quickloader' to keep things like Excel and Word in memory between uses, so there's a memory hit in favor of faster startup, but I wonder if OO does some sort of environment checkup on start each time, and remembers setting between restarts (in a gconf config entry maybe?)
Now, 10 minutes later, startup is still only 3 1/2 seconds or so.
There's so much mystery and hand-waving in Microsoft products, that benchmarks like what this guy is talking about are nigh on useless, and saying that OO is 'bloated' is playing to the knee-jerk folks who constnatly rail "BLOAT IS BAD!". Bloat means useless functions inside a product that have no end-user need, and are added to the size of an application in order to appeal to a very very narrow audience (or just due to bad design). I don't think OO is in this category at all.
As far as the filesize loading problems, I have yet to try this out, but I shall, and will report on what I find.
Is this really worth a top post on Slashdot, that The Onion wrote a funny piece? It's sort of their standard fare - in fact, I'm beginning to feel like The Onion is doing a better job at putting togethe rinteresting articles than slashdot is.
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