demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year
Note that this doesn't say install Windows on 25% less of the desktops. It says to spend 25% less on Microsoft software. Unlike others, I'm not going to imply that the Government is intending to pirate more copies, but instead suggest that initially they'll probably cut from other areas. Things like not purchasing Office at all (and using OpenOffice) or converting their file servers to Novell servers or dumping Exchange servers are much faster and easier ways to drastically cut spending on MS software. Heck, simply cutting out Office alone (assuming all PC's have Office and it's a legal copy on each one) will probably be more 50% of the money going to MS.
Now the goal here is to not depend on Microsoft, so eventually I'm sure they will migrate to either Linux or Mac or BSD or whatever, but off from Windows. But it doesn't have to be in the initial 25% reduction. Of course, it could be... nothing in the summary says that it won't be:).
Obviously I'm not the one that has this problem, but I go back to past emails every now and then. At work, it's a real pain to go back. We run an Exchange server on a hopelessly under-powered machine so searches take forever. I just got approved for a new machine, so I'm expecting great things (I'm going from a 333 P-II to a 2.8 GHz Xeon!! and from 26GB of total disk space to 219GB of total space). I'll finally have the horsepower and disk space to do things like indexing to increase search speed. But enough on that.
I have emails going back to mid 2003 on my home account and sometimes I go back to them just because I want a trip down memory lane or something (for example, I just looked at one of those old messages and saw the signature I used back then: "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.). Other times I'm looking for something specific. Either way, being able to search through all my email at one time is really helpful. There are still times when I wish I had archives that went back further than that because I know I emailed myself some files or something-or-another that I wish I had access to.
In some ways I miss the old days of the Mozilla suite, but in other ways I'm glad there's Firefox. For example, here at work a built in email client/chat client/news reader/kitchen sink (firefox doesn't have the kitchen sink, does it?) wouldn't be much use to me. I have to use Outlook for my email. So Firefox's browser only approach works well for me. But at home, where I use Firefox and Thunderbird having them all in one would be great. It sure would make install mail based plugins easier rather than having to download them and then load the extention manager in Thunderbird. And then my web browser could monitor my email and let me know when there's a new message like Netscape 4 did.
As an aside, I would love to have a calendar app that also had a web based portion that worked well (my email is on an IMAP server w/Squirrelmail so I can access the same messages home or on the road... if only there was a WAP plugin). OK, enough on that tangent.
So if I could only have it one way, I don't know which I'd choose. Though I'll probably be giving SeaMonkey a try soon enough (trouble is, I finally convinced my wife to use Firefox for everything but her work email [OWA]).
You could always try starting with Thunderbird today and use it for all new emails.
The problem with that, as I see it, is that searching old emails becomes problematic. At first, it's somewhat easy... I mean, if you need something fairly new you look in Thunderbird, if you need something from the archives, you look in Outlook (of course, that means you still have to have Outlook installed.... well that sucks). But it gets worse as time goes on. Fast forward two years down the road. You need to find something from the past, but was it 1.5 years ago or 2.5 year ago... sure, you could search both. Or you could have just stuck with Outlook. Which do you think would have been easier.
If you find that you need any old emails, you could move those ones as you find out that you need them.
That's about 10x the work of just keeping old emails in Outlook and new ones in Thunderbird. I mean, you probably don't know what it is you're even going to need from the archive. And now not only do you have to keep track of if the message you're looking for is 1.5 or 2.5 year old, but you also need to know if you moved it over already or not. Again, you can look both places, but it's still not ideal.
Of course you can have a slashdot proof site.... I mean, slashdot itself prooves that's it's possible to have a dynamic website that can support the kind of lead that slashdot receives. Not all of mozilla.org is slashdot proof however. Bugzilla used to take quite a beating whenever a buglink was posted on slashdot. To the point that they disabled direct links from slashdot (using the referer). Bugzilla has had a lot of performance enhancements since that time (both in the software and the hardware) so it may be able to stand up to a beating now, but I'm not sure... and they probably don't really want to test it:).
Why not an article that asks the same questions about medical technology? Does the fact that we have made advancements in heart repair, diagnostics, medicines and more somehow indicate that people today are weaker or dumber than those of ten years ago?
I don't have any links and I'm too lazy to go to Google right now and look for anything that supports this, but I've heard of people claiming that we are, in fact, weeker as a human race because of our constant fight against germs and bacteria. They say that our imune systems just haven't been getting the training it did in the past.
I also seem to recall hearing that some older Indians (as in Native Americans) used to complain that their people were getting weaker from the white man's influance. One complaint they had in particular were that shoes were causing the bottoms of their feet to become soft when the used to be callased and tough.
But pretty much everything in this post is hearsay.:)
Now, if the ID advocates had their way, we would have just said, "Hey, God makes bees fly. Since I already know the real reason, there's no real reason to keep studying it."
/me puts on a flame retardant suit
I firmly believe that God did, in fact, make bees fly. He gave them wings and the ability to use them. He did the same for other flying insects. He also gave wings of a different type to birds... including special ones for the hummingbird. That doesn't in any way shape or form mean that we can't figure out how they do it. If we didn't study some form of defying gravity, we wouldn't have airplanes. I don't know about you, but when I'm going from Michigan to Florida, I sure appreaciate those steal birds.
Heck, some guy from GM made my Jimmy stop when I press the brake pedal but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the mechanic that studied how it was done and what to do to fix it in the event that it doesn't work as intended!
As I read the rest of the article I noticed that there those things, too... In fact, doing a search on "fi" only yeilded a couple of hits in the blurb, the 'File' (with a capital F), and then comments... so ya, definately all the cases of 'fi' in the book excerpt are MIA.
I had that thought, too... then I realized that this was really targeted at Windows users who are open to a free office suite. I mean, the average Linux user wouldn't need a CD with openoffice on it because it came pre-installed on their distro. And the power linux user downloaded the source, modified it, then compiled it. So it just makes sense to show pictures that the majority of the books readers are going to be seeing.
I can certainly see your point, but I also think that getting it on the shelves at a book store is really important. Especially if it come with a CD that contains the installation files. As strange as it may seem, I think more people would be willing to grab a book and office suite for $50 and actually use them then a book and operating system (also including the same office suite) for that same $50. I'd imagine that many people would find something like this on the shelf and Barnes and Noble (or whatever bookstore) that would never think to go to openoffice.org or even so much as search google for free office suite.
I haven't read the while thing yet, but in the first few paragraphs I seem to be noticing that the "fi" pattern is missing.... words like "ofce" (office) and "nd" (find) seem to appear more than once... at least I noticed ofce twice;).
I'm far from an expert, but I'm pretty sure that mear possesion of marijuana in a quantity that suggests personal use is not a fellony offense. Selling it, however, is. This is actually true of the vast majority of drugs, not just marijuana.
And I think I'm gonna have to agree with the grand parent that not allowing a convited felon to vote or own guns is not against the Constitution. Keep in mind that the Constitution as origanally ratified did not even allow woman or blacks to vote. But, hey, blacks did get some consessions... I mean, when it came to population counts each one got to count a 3/5's of a person!
Not true. I'm a member of the United States Army Military Police Corp and would like to take this oprotunity to point out that my user ID, while far from impressive, is about 1/4 what yours is!
You just have to put more bricks under the mobile home... then you'll have a two story and can hang out underneath it... not really a basement, but it's a lot easier than digging:).
Actually, both vehicle armor and body armor effect the temperature. When a standard 1025 or m998 HMMWV is uparmored, the thin (in the case of a 998, cloth) door is replaced with a heavy steel door. All the glass is replaced with thik balistic glass and the windows are MUCH smaller. I actually always found it stange the the uparmored side window that was probably only about 6" by 6" (could be wrong on that... never mesured it) was about twice as thick as the balistic windshield!
Also, the AC that they're currently putting on uparmored HMMWVs is a bolt-on unit that really doesn't work all that well. The 1114 model (built already uparmored) has air conditioning built into it, but even that doesn't work all that well.
Why, oh, why would anybody waste a mod point on marking the parent post offtopic? Is it directly related to Google Launching a Mobile Mail client? No. It is, however, still about Mobile email.... so that means of the 4 words in the title my post actually was on topic to 2 of them... that's half of the title!
It's not like I posted about how much Microsoft sucks or something... oh, wait, that probably would have been modded up! Sometimes I forget that this is the new slashdot where any old idiot (to include myself) can get mod points.
Standard IANAL and to be honest I haven't been following this case closely, but isn't it all about pushing email to a mobile device? If so, then as long as Google doesn't offer a "give us your mobile number and we'll SMS you when you get a new message" feature they should be OK.
Speaking of running your own IMAP server with SquirrelMail, have you come up with any WAP type access? I started it writing a plugin once, but only got as far as making the login.php script redirect to the WAP plugin's login page. I think I may have gotten a user name and password box, but I never did get to the point of making the login page.... ummm, log in.
Now that's very interesting.... they could do a "behind the scenes" converstion of AIM screen names and ICQ number to be Jabber ID's.... @aim.com and @icq.com. It should be able to be done in such a way that somebody who used Jabber wouldn't need Trillian or even an AIM screen name/password of their own to talk to somebody on one of those two networks. That would certainly make it really hard for Microsoft or Yahoo! to ignore. ICQ and Google Talk combined probably don't have half the number of users of MSN messenger, but the simple fact that there was network collaberation would force Microsoft at least to put their money where their mouth is (early on in the MSN messenger project, they said they wanted s2s interoperability). If that happened, it'd only leave Yahoo! out in the cold and I don't see them trying to make it on their own when all the other services let you talk to other users.
Sorry if this seems incoherant.... I typed as the thoughts were in my head and sometimes that can be a scary place.
Value veries greatly depending on the situation. Simply knowing how many troops are stationed at a particular FOB in Iraq or when the supply convoy will be coming in are very valuable pieces of information to an Iraqi who wishes to stage an attack on US forces. Often that information can be found on somebody blog!! So while I'm sure the nuclear launch codes aren't accessible on the 'net, there could be plenty of valuable information that can be pieced together.
And you can't say that now because Linux is also capable of running on a piece of hardware? Does your OS work better on said device than Linux or not... because if the answer is "yes" then it shouldn't matter if linux can be ported to said device. The only reason it should matter is if your OS is inferior to Linux and you're hoping to get defacto acceptance.
So what you're saying is that your best efforts have failed miserably to bring somebody with an opposing viewpoint around to your way of thinking and you're hoping dolphins are smarter than you?
OK, I had this really neat ASCII art ballot all drawn out but slashdot's lameness filter sucks so hardcore that I couldn't post it. I'm done trying to get around the lamenss filter to post something that was on topic and informative so I'm gonna make this lame post instead.
I was trying to show the ballot for Fruitport, MI which is similar to this in that it provides both electronic tallies and paper ballots while being simple enough to use that it can work in a town named "Fruitport":)
Slashdot Mirror
This is slashdot, so I didn't RTFA, but TFS says:
Note that this doesn't say install Windows on 25% less of the desktops. It says to spend 25% less on Microsoft software. Unlike others, I'm not going to imply that the Government is intending to pirate more copies, but instead suggest that initially they'll probably cut from other areas. Things like not purchasing Office at all (and using OpenOffice) or converting their file servers to Novell servers or dumping Exchange servers are much faster and easier ways to drastically cut spending on MS software. Heck, simply cutting out Office alone (assuming all PC's have Office and it's a legal copy on each one) will probably be more 50% of the money going to MS.
Now the goal here is to not depend on Microsoft, so eventually I'm sure they will migrate to either Linux or Mac or BSD or whatever, but off from Windows. But it doesn't have to be in the initial 25% reduction. Of course, it could be... nothing in the summary says that it won't be
Obviously I'm not the one that has this problem, but I go back to past emails every now and then. At work, it's a real pain to go back. We run an Exchange server on a hopelessly under-powered machine so searches take forever. I just got approved for a new machine, so I'm expecting great things (I'm going from a 333 P-II to a 2.8 GHz Xeon!! and from 26GB of total disk space to 219GB of total space). I'll finally have the horsepower and disk space to do things like indexing to increase search speed. But enough on that.
I have emails going back to mid 2003 on my home account and sometimes I go back to them just because I want a trip down memory lane or something (for example, I just looked at one of those old messages and saw the signature I used back then: "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange
Server next.). Other times I'm looking for something specific. Either way, being able to search through all my email at one time is really helpful. There are still times when I wish I had archives that went back further than that because I know I emailed myself some files or something-or-another that I wish I had access to.
But then again, I am a pack-rat.
In some ways I miss the old days of the Mozilla suite, but in other ways I'm glad there's Firefox. For example, here at work a built in email client/chat client/news reader/kitchen sink (firefox doesn't have the kitchen sink, does it?) wouldn't be much use to me. I have to use Outlook for my email. So Firefox's browser only approach works well for me. But at home, where I use Firefox and Thunderbird having them all in one would be great. It sure would make install mail based plugins easier rather than having to download them and then load the extention manager in Thunderbird. And then my web browser could monitor my email and let me know when there's a new message like Netscape 4 did.
As an aside, I would love to have a calendar app that also had a web based portion that worked well (my email is on an IMAP server w/Squirrelmail so I can access the same messages home or on the road... if only there was a WAP plugin). OK, enough on that tangent.
So if I could only have it one way, I don't know which I'd choose. Though I'll probably be giving SeaMonkey a try soon enough (trouble is, I finally convinced my wife to use Firefox for everything but her work email [OWA]).
The problem with that, as I see it, is that searching old emails becomes problematic. At first, it's somewhat easy... I mean, if you need something fairly new you look in Thunderbird, if you need something from the archives, you look in Outlook (of course, that means you still have to have Outlook installed.... well that sucks). But it gets worse as time goes on. Fast forward two years down the road. You need to find something from the past, but was it 1.5 years ago or 2.5 year ago... sure, you could search both. Or you could have just stuck with Outlook. Which do you think would have been easier.
That's about 10x the work of just keeping old emails in Outlook and new ones in Thunderbird. I mean, you probably don't know what it is you're even going to need from the archive. And now not only do you have to keep track of if the message you're looking for is 1.5 or 2.5 year old, but you also need to know if you moved it over already or not. Again, you can look both places, but it's still not ideal.
You mean something like SeaMonkey?
Of course you can have a slashdot proof site.... I mean, slashdot itself prooves that's it's possible to have a dynamic website that can support the kind of lead that slashdot receives. Not all of mozilla.org is slashdot proof however. Bugzilla used to take quite a beating whenever a buglink was posted on slashdot. To the point that they disabled direct links from slashdot (using the referer). Bugzilla has had a lot of performance enhancements since that time (both in the software and the hardware) so it may be able to stand up to a beating now, but I'm not sure... and they probably don't really want to test it :).
I don't have any links and I'm too lazy to go to Google right now and look for anything that supports this, but I've heard of people claiming that we are, in fact, weeker as a human race because of our constant fight against germs and bacteria. They say that our imune systems just haven't been getting the training it did in the past.
I also seem to recall hearing that some older Indians (as in Native Americans) used to complain that their people were getting weaker from the white man's influance. One complaint they had in particular were that shoes were causing the bottoms of their feet to become soft when the used to be callased and tough.
But pretty much everything in this post is hearsay.
I firmly believe that God did, in fact, make bees fly. He gave them wings and the ability to use them. He did the same for other flying insects. He also gave wings of a different type to birds... including special ones for the hummingbird. That doesn't in any way shape or form mean that we can't figure out how they do it. If we didn't study some form of defying gravity, we wouldn't have airplanes. I don't know about you, but when I'm going from Michigan to Florida, I sure appreaciate those steal birds.
Heck, some guy from GM made my Jimmy stop when I press the brake pedal but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the mechanic that studied how it was done and what to do to fix it in the event that it doesn't work as intended!
As I read the rest of the article I noticed that there those things, too... In fact, doing a search on "fi" only yeilded a couple of hits in the blurb, the 'File' (with a capital F), and then comments... so ya, definately all the cases of 'fi' in the book excerpt are MIA.
I had that thought, too... then I realized that this was really targeted at Windows users who are open to a free office suite. I mean, the average Linux user wouldn't need a CD with openoffice on it because it came pre-installed on their distro. And the power linux user downloaded the source, modified it, then compiled it. So it just makes sense to show pictures that the majority of the books readers are going to be seeing.
I can certainly see your point, but I also think that getting it on the shelves at a book store is really important. Especially if it come with a CD that contains the installation files. As strange as it may seem, I think more people would be willing to grab a book and office suite for $50 and actually use them then a book and operating system (also including the same office suite) for that same $50. I'd imagine that many people would find something like this on the shelf and Barnes and Noble (or whatever bookstore) that would never think to go to openoffice.org or even so much as search google for free office suite.
I haven't read the while thing yet, but in the first few paragraphs I seem to be noticing that the "fi" pattern is missing.... words like "ofce" (office) and "nd" (find) seem to appear more than once... at least I noticed ofce twice ;).
I'm far from an expert, but I'm pretty sure that mear possesion of marijuana in a quantity that suggests personal use is not a fellony offense. Selling it, however, is. This is actually true of the vast majority of drugs, not just marijuana.
And I think I'm gonna have to agree with the grand parent that not allowing a convited felon to vote or own guns is not against the Constitution. Keep in mind that the Constitution as origanally ratified did not even allow woman or blacks to vote. But, hey, blacks did get some consessions... I mean, when it came to population counts each one got to count a 3/5's of a person!
Not true. I'm a member of the United States Army Military Police Corp and would like to take this oprotunity to point out that my user ID, while far from impressive, is about 1/4 what yours is!
Or was that supposed to be a joke or something...
You just have to put more bricks under the mobile home... then you'll have a two story and can hang out underneath it... not really a basement, but it's a lot easier than digging
Actually, both vehicle armor and body armor effect the temperature. When a standard 1025 or m998 HMMWV is uparmored, the thin (in the case of a 998, cloth) door is replaced with a heavy steel door. All the glass is replaced with thik balistic glass and the windows are MUCH smaller. I actually always found it stange the the uparmored side window that was probably only about 6" by 6" (could be wrong on that... never mesured it) was about twice as thick as the balistic windshield!
Also, the AC that they're currently putting on uparmored HMMWVs is a bolt-on unit that really doesn't work all that well. The 1114 model (built already uparmored) has air conditioning built into it, but even that doesn't work all that well.
Why, oh, why would anybody waste a mod point on marking the parent post offtopic? Is it directly related to Google Launching a Mobile Mail client? No. It is, however, still about Mobile email.... so that means of the 4 words in the title my post actually was on topic to 2 of them... that's half of the title!
It's not like I posted about how much Microsoft sucks or something... oh, wait, that probably would have been modded up! Sometimes I forget that this is the new slashdot where any old idiot (to include myself) can get mod points.
Standard IANAL and to be honest I haven't been following this case closely, but isn't it all about pushing email to a mobile device? If so, then as long as Google doesn't offer a "give us your mobile number and we'll SMS you when you get a new message" feature they should be OK.
Speaking of running your own IMAP server with SquirrelMail, have you come up with any WAP type access? I started it writing a plugin once, but only got as far as making the login.php script redirect to the WAP plugin's login page. I think I may have gotten a user name and password box, but I never did get to the point of making the login page.... ummm, log in.
Now that's very interesting.... they could do a "behind the scenes" converstion of AIM screen names and ICQ number to be Jabber ID's.... @aim.com and @icq.com. It should be able to be done in such a way that somebody who used Jabber wouldn't need Trillian or even an AIM screen name/password of their own to talk to somebody on one of those two networks. That would certainly make it really hard for Microsoft or Yahoo! to ignore. ICQ and Google Talk combined probably don't have half the number of users of MSN messenger, but the simple fact that there was network collaberation would force Microsoft at least to put their money where their mouth is (early on in the MSN messenger project, they said they wanted s2s interoperability). If that happened, it'd only leave Yahoo! out in the cold and I don't see them trying to make it on their own when all the other services let you talk to other users.
Sorry if this seems incoherant.... I typed as the thoughts were in my head and sometimes that can be a scary place.
They haven't responded yet because they haven't officially been served notice of the case...
Value veries greatly depending on the situation. Simply knowing how many troops are stationed at a particular FOB in Iraq or when the supply convoy will be coming in are very valuable pieces of information to an Iraqi who wishes to stage an attack on US forces. Often that information can be found on somebody blog!! So while I'm sure the nuclear launch codes aren't accessible on the 'net, there could be plenty of valuable information that can be pieced together.
And you can't say that now because Linux is also capable of running on a piece of hardware? Does your OS work better on said device than Linux or not... because if the answer is "yes" then it shouldn't matter if linux can be ported to said device. The only reason it should matter is if your OS is inferior to Linux and you're hoping to get defacto acceptance.
So what you're saying is that your best efforts have failed miserably to bring somebody with an opposing viewpoint around to your way of thinking and you're hoping dolphins are smarter than you?
OK, I had this really neat ASCII art ballot all drawn out but slashdot's lameness filter sucks so hardcore that I couldn't post it. I'm done trying to get around the lamenss filter to post something that was on topic and informative so I'm gonna make this lame post instead.
:)
I was trying to show the ballot for Fruitport, MI which is similar to this in that it provides both electronic tallies and paper ballots while being simple enough to use that it can work in a town named "Fruitport"