But a less charismatic person could make different decisions that get Apple way more into the main stream.
Hmmm...nice boring competent people should make the decisions, eh? They could bring Apple into the mainstream?
Kind of like Scully did after Jobs left? Without Jobs around to stir things up, Apple lost its market differentiation. The Mac was a charming, user-friendly appliance-computer. Then came the Mac II and all its iterations. They were big boring beige boxes, as elegant as they were technically speaking. Scully wanted to make different Macs for all different occasions and markets, but they all ended up as....boring beige boxes. MacOS gained colour but ceased to otherwise innovate. It turned into something like what Dell is today--it sold dozens of slightly different but essentially the same boring beige boxes...and lord help you if you try to figure out what you bought--in the US is was a Quadra and in the US it was a Performa...or was it the other way around? Or was it one way sometimes and the other way other times? Even the model number after the name was often different...and they were differently named in schools than they were in retail stores but the same hardware.
Boring, confusing, Dell-like "Mainstream"...except without all that awful "PC Compatibility" which was the mainstram that would've counted.
Then Scully was punted in comes Spindler. To his credit he realised techincal innovation was required and took the bold step of changing architectures, but that isn't enough to lead--it was merely enough to survive. The "Dell style" Apple looked pretty mainstream but it bled market share horribly. Spindler decided Apple needed to be more like Microsoft: Lets focus on our insanely-great OS and license out the right to make clones! Woo hoo! Now, the boxes weren't only beige, they were EVEN MORE BORING! They looked EXACTLY like Wintel boxes now! Incognito Mac...how exciting!
Except the OS was no longer insanely great, and Copeland development was mired in technical introspection--there was "no taste"...no tantalising screenshots to entice fans...and Win95 loomed large--it was still craptacular, but from a UI perspective it raised the bar high enough such that its weaknesses weren't a disadvantage.
Seriously. Boring old businessmen are needed to RUN the company...to execute the ideas and decisions competently, but a company like Apple MUST be LED...and decisions must be made there...with charisma. Apple is not Lenovo, or Dell, or HP--established, stodgy, mainstream already. If it is led by stodgy management, it is very likely to disappear completely. I don't think it'll go bankrupt, but rather one of the above would buy it.
Apple is already "mainstream" enough--it uses mainstream Intel processors and overall has a mainstream architecture. It needs to have a "charismatic" image and its software needs to continue being an innovation leader because that is all that differentiates it. That is what Jobs provides and what his replacement would have to provide. Otherwise...well, lets just say int he future the "Apple line" of fine HP computers might still look fairly pretty and run the latest "Windows 8" well enough...but they just won't be the same anymore.
Which OSes are you referring to? Their OS has been stable since XP SP2 (2004) and before that XP pretty stable.
MSFT has had many OSes, the two most famous lines being based upon the MS-DOS and NT kernels. "Windows" can refer to the OS itself at various times, or to the GUI with which users interact. the 16-year timeframe can be taken a number of ways:
* MS-DOS based systems didn't become both user-friendly and acceptable stable until the release of Windows 98. MS-DOS v1.0 was released in 1982. Thus, it took 16 years to arrive at a good product.
* MSFT hired cutler to start developing the NT kernel in 1988, though the first release of an NT-based OS only happened about 4 years after that. SP2 for XP came out in 2004--that is 16 years of development to achieve a stable and somewhat secure OS (XP *with SP2* being the first stable AND secure OS--Win2k was quite stable but totally insecure).
* MS Windows as a GUI operating environment was released in 1985 as v1.0--a shell extension for MS-DOS. Through the years it was merged into both OS lines and underwent gradual improvement. Almost exactly 16 years later, in 2001, WinXP was initially released. XP was the first time MSFT merged its complete line of PC operating systems into the single NT architecture (from home PCs to PC-based servers), and is widely regarded as the most stable "major release" to date with service packs fixing most serious issues.
Conclusion: No matter how you look at it, MSFT seems to have a 16-year development cycle, from a practical standpoint.
I think the "16-year" rule should replace the "rule of 3" (ie. MSFT products are unusable until their third major release) as a yardstick for IT professionals to use in evaluating MSFT products;-)
They definitely don't need to fire anyone to get past an economic slump.
They don't HAVE to but they probably NEED to. Management NEEDS to meet the demands of the board of directors, and ultimately shareholders. That is the trade-off of being a public company--you get liquidity, access to capital and so forth but you have that little obligation there to those who have invested. MSFT has promised in its quarterly reports etc. to meet a certain level of fiscal performance, and though it could certainly survive without layoffs it probably would fall far short of that performance level if it didn't trim some fat.
If they had a surplus of good people, the best thing for them to do is put them all on projects with a 3-7 year horizon
If only the market was that far sighted, but it isn't. The market can't seem to see past the next fiscal year (nor does it seem to look back that far either). Multiple consecutive quarters of un-profitability (or even merely declining profits, if the market conditions were better) would decimate MSFT's market cap.
Then, you have to look at MSFT's track record with projects that far out. Vista certainly didn't live up to the original vision. When it was "longhorn" and promised technology got dropped left and right (WinFS et al) it was suggested that they'd finally appear in the next release after...and with Win7 there is nothing about them at all. At least there are no false promises but with Win7 shaping up to be little more than "Vista SE" it appears innovation is slowing to a crawl, at least in terms of deliverable products.
With the short-sighted mindset of investors in the stock market, and MSFT's track record of "innovation" lately, I don't think many would have confidence in MSFT if they took "surplus talent" and directed it at nebulous projects with no revenue-generating prospects for several years.
Some time in 2009 my electricity provider is supposed to launch a programme to allow its customers to lease from them a 20kW fuel cell generator. This generator would connect to your gas line and could meed all your needs for electricity and perhaps even heat. It is more efficient than your furnace and has cleaner emissions too.
Since most of the time you would not need ALL the electrical capacity of such a fuel cell system the next logical step would be to put a syncing transfer switch at the meter so each house could feed excess power back into the grid...then you could keep your house warm enough to keep the pipes thawed whe you are away during the day and the electricity could go back into the grid to power the offices, shopping malls, "electric car charging stations" etc;-)
I know internet blackouts have happened but they are short and very very rare, compared to electricity blackouts. That is because the internet is more distributed than power generation. Maybe if everyone generated a bit of power in their basements instead of relying on big central generating stations in the future the grid would be more robust and outages more self contained and less frequent.
Alas, I'm sure politics will continue to interfere with logical progression of technology.
I 100% agree! That's how most everyone along the coast does it durning hurricane season when they hit and take power out here.
The question wasn't how to meet the energy needs of a hurricane-triggered blackout in the gulf coast--the requirement was to be able to live with some degree of comfort through a blackout triggered by an ICE STORM in NEW YORK...you know, up there by CANADA?
This guy doesn't need to keep a room 10C cooler so he doesn't sweat--he needs to keep a WHOLE HOUSE 20C cooler so his pipes don't freeze and he can still have running water and flushing toilets! He cannot cook outside because his barbecue is FROZEN SHUT and under a pile of snow! He might have a microwave or electric oven and need more power than those little portable units can supply.
Your solution would not work in his situation. He also has a family with a small child and pets. That makes it harder to "rought it" as well. I'd say the real answer is probably closer to the more involved case than just getting a little unit meant for camping.
Your minimum is a bit more of a maximum actually--if you are merely looking for electricity you can get a little portable generator and use it to run small appliances (up to the size of a microwave).
However, some posters here seem to neglect the needs of cold-climate dwellers during blackouts. In extended outages you need to keep the house above freezing to prevent plumbing damage, and it is less-than-trivial to hook a furnace blower up to a portable generator as they aren't "plug-in" devices. Besides that, if you want to preserve all that expensive food in the chest freezer and refrigerator you need a pretty large "portable" unit anyways--one that won't trip or stall out when the pumps kick in and have fuel tanks to provide more than a couple hours of continuous service.
What is suggested in the parent post is along the lines of what is needed to provide a "standby" power service. However there are some details I'd quibble with--mostly because they are undersized.
A fair amount of 14- or 12-gauge wire (wire is expensive... go measure)
Wire IS expensive, so make sure you get what works. 14-and 12-gauge wire is meant for 15 or 20 amp branch circuits and is undersized for the requirements outlined in this article (to run a furnace, fridge, lights--at least when they start up). If you have an electric range or dryer you need to step up to 10 gauge (that is what feeds those circuits. If you follow Mike Holmes' philosophy I'd go one further and get a length of 8 gauge.
Also, you shouldn't use standard NMD90 wiring for outdoor applications--you should select something rated for outdoors/burial. Typically such wire has a grey outer insulation covering it instead f white or other colours.
With that heavy-gauge wire you can then run one "feed" to the house where you have installed a manual transfer swtch rated for at least 30A (typically the largest breaker in your panel already). Again, I'd go up to the next size--40A--just to make sure is all robust. The transfer switch would have to be connected on the other side "after" your main service breaker in the "bottom" portion of your panel (the power company doesn't generally permit people to do work in the top part of your panel for safety reasons--you cannot switch off that power yourself and you shouldn't work on a hot panel).
If you only got the small 14-gauge wire you'd have to have 2 or 3 runs into the house, each being its own circuit.
A generator. I suggest MINIMUM 3500 watts
This is undersized to provide reliable standby service in a blackout. If you were warming up dinner in a 1000W microwave while the furnace is running and the fridge starts up, your unit would trip. If you wanted to use an electric dryer you would not be able to do so reliably. In a cold climate, a family with small children will HAVE to do laundry after a few days.
To provide adequate standby service you need to be able to provide 5 kVA or more. 7500W generators could do that (don't assume unity power factor--power is NOT just the siple product of volts and amps when you have inductive loads like furnace motors and refrigerators starting up). My parent's farm has a standby unit rated for 15 kW. When it is in use you can do whatever you can do when the utility is working. Half of that should let you live comfortably and give you reliable service in extended blackouts.
A shed -- you can't put a gas generator indoors, generally speaking - very dangerous
In your garage is sufficient so long as exhaust is vented outside, though I think if you had an attached garage you should be extra careful.
I strongly suggest a strong table to mount the generator on for maintenance
More like footings secured to the floor with large bolts, with "engine mount" vibration-absorbing brackets to secure the unit. The unit must be quiet enough from the outside of the shed or garage to comply with noise bylaws. Such
Woz and Jobs formed an almost ideal partnership, with Woz creating sublime technical solutions and Jobs knowing how to work people to make them sell.
The industry and Apple itself have changed. I'm not sure Woz would fit in at Apple. If Woz was born a couple or few decades later he'd probably be more inclined towards an open architecture platform more like a PC-style system running something like Linux. Woz made engineering an art form--his designs were efficient, elegant works of art for those who appreciates them.
Alas, it wasn't only his accident that forced him to leave--had he not had the accident he would've left of his own accord anyways. By 1984 Apple was a 2-headed beast: There was the Apple II camp, with a simple and familiar but aging open system, and the Mac camp, who were revolutionaries tasked to design an "appliance" that was friendly but totally closed. Jobs made it clear the Mac camp was the "new apple" and that the "old apple" of the II line was a legacy destined to fade away.
In designing the Apple II platform, Woz made deliberate design decisions that were completely counter to what Jobs envisioned (with Raskin's inspiration) for the Mac. For example, The Apple I (and early Apple II IIRC) came with full hardware schematics so hobbyists and third parties could create hardware interfaces. The original Mac rivaled the Apple I and II for elegant, simple design but those inner workings were a closely held secret (especially the software/firmware on which so much of the original Mac's functionality relied).
It goes on from there: The Apple I was a bare board and the Apple II had a user-removable panel to access the mainboard and add cards. The Mac was completely sealed and cracking the case open voided the warranty. Woz deliberately added expansion slots to the Apple II because he saw the Apple I's lack of expansion slots as a shortcoming. Jobs issued a strict edict that expansion slots--especially internal slots but even external ones--were banned from the original Mac design.
Woz was essential to the company's early success for his engineering talent--he could make amazingly capable hardware that was amazingly simple and low cost. Jobs provided the motivating force to make it friendly. He insisted on an Apple II case with rounded corners with a colour similar to the inside of an apple. He presented challenges to Woz, who loved to take on challenges.
The thing is--there isn't a Woz-type engineer at Apple anymore, nor does there need to be. From an engineering standpoint, absolutely NOTHING Apple sells today is the least bit groundbreaking. The Mac is just a very attractive looking PC with DRM measures locking the software to it. The iPod is no more technically capable than the Zune or Archos or whatever.
Apple is primarily a leading marketing and industrial design firm. It makes beautiful products and successfully convinces people they are "cool". That is "Jobs territory" and is why engineering talent at Apple is secondary. Departure of Jobs will be painful for Apple, and the degree of pain will depend on whether a handful of VP-level people with "design" and marketing talents will stick around. Even if everyone sticks around when Jobs retires it will be painful. Jobs didn't come up with any of the successful products Apple now sells--he didn't design them or even come up with the idea. Crucially, however, he had an eye for picking winners. If Scully were at the helm, he'd have shut down the iPod project because music players were not Apple's focus, and macs would have all the style of a Dell with none of the compatibility. If they pick a Jobs replacement that lacks his talent for picking winning ideas Apple will flounder for years.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. Like the typewriter, it will never go away totally, but it will be a niche. More and more, I notice people doing computing tasks on non-traditional hardware. I know facebook junkies who continually keep their status up-to-date and people who reply to emails in seconds, yet don't turn on their home PC for days (and are blocked on their work PCs). I know people with NAS devices in their basements that play music on various receivers in the house...and they aren't even nerds...and not one of the gadgets runs Windows (nor do they care). People visit internet services on their game consoles..most of which don't run Windows. My television has a network port and can connect to the 'net all on its own...and it doesn't run Windows.
Who needs a "year of the desktop" when the desktop has peaked and is facing eventual decline?
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it.
How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument? It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience". Sure, cars all have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and some other basic common elements but every different model puts the wiper controls in a different place, have completely different climate control layouts, some put the shifter on the floor and others on the steering column, they all have different wheel sizes and so on.
Same goes for restaurants. McDonalds is big and successful, and their dining experience is certainly familiar, but it is FAR from being dominant in its industry like MSFT is. In fact, in much of the world McDo is not even the leader in the market (for example, in Canada Tim Horton's is more than double the size of McDonalds). Nobody argues that no other company will succeed anywhere in the world against McDo because people want a "familiar dining experience" and it needs to be the closest restaurant to any given residence.
People are fundamentally the same regarding behaviour and tastes across industries. Familiarity is indeed a competitive advantage, but there are other concerns consumers have. In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux. It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust. In fact, that unfamiliarity was probably a GOOD thing, because people sometimes DO want a change, if it s a good change.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever.
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get. MSFT seems to have lost its tight gr
I assumed it was KumOpen (come open) backwards. I think the real acronym is even stupider than that.
The official acronym is very contrived so I'm sure it is a "backronym". I also suspect a group of tall-foreheads would deliberately come up with a project name with a suggestive reference like that either.
Google and Wikipedia provide the most likely possibilities for the origin:
Nepomuk is a town in the Czech Republic, in the "kraj" (province or region) called "Pilsen". given this fact, here are some posibilities to explain the name:
* Nepomuk is the birthplace of St. John of Nepomuk, who is considered "the protector from floods". Nepomuk (the project) is intended to aid users in dealing with "a flood" of information.
* Nepomuk was a Bohemian town before the establishment of the Czech Republic. Perhaps they named the project Nepomuk as an indirect reference to anti-establishment viewpoints and free exchange of information/property/etc. assoicated with Bohemian culture.
* Nepomuk is in a region bordering Germany, and this project is headed by a German group. Perhaps a German project lead was born or raised in nearby Nepomuk and named the project after his home town.
* Pilsen is where Pilsner-style beer was invented. Engineers like beer. Code-names are often named after objects of affection. Mmmm...beeer.
It has layers. At the outermost layer, on the scale of the WWW, "conveying meaning" as you describe is indeed futile. Cory Doctorow's "Metacrap" essay sums it up nicely (linked to in this discussion thread): People are dishonest, lazy and stupid when it comes to metadata...and when they aren't there is no way to impose standards that more than one person would agree to insofar as imparting meaning on data.
However even Doctorow admits metadata, at some level and taken in context, can be useful. "Laziness" may be one of the hallmarks of a good programmer, but it is "false laziness" in information management to throw out ANY idea of semantic markup.
There are good examples of useful, easily implemented semantic markup or meta-data. "Self-documenting code" is a prime example. Effective use of comments helps maintainability immensely. It also helps to give variables and functions names more useful than i, j, k (if not used as simple loop counters) or doSomething(). Does it help make your code more machine readable? Not at all--it doesn't make your compiler produce tighter binary code or whatever, but it is essential for maintainability, and it IS semantic markup.
In terms of WWW development, semantic markup need not delve deep into the true meaning of content. Web documents would be IMMENSELY more useful of they simply provided "semantic structure". There is very limited utility in a web page that is one big table element consisting of a JPEG Jigsaw of image links, or worse one big embedded flash object. Merely using (X)HTML properly can provide useful semantic structure: Stop using tables for layout, unless you are actually presenting a TABLE of data, and for all you CSS freaks out there, tables are your friends, STOP fashioning tabular data out of DIVs and SPANs--a calendar is a TABLE of dates--it's OK to use TABLEs! If you are making an ordered or unordered list then use OL or UL--that's what they're there for!
So, without resorting to meta tags--completely within the confines of a globally accepted standard--you now have a document with "structural semantics". You can now preform searches for a "table containing a column named 'x'" or an "image named 'y'" or "a heading containing the word 'z'" and you've done nothing but simply properly marked up your document with HTML.
Then you can start working your way to the outer layers to the point where enough people can come to a common ground. Once you've got PROPERLY marked up content with real structural semantics you can use class and rel and other attributes to provide more meaningful semantics. For example, don't use class="bigredbold" in a span simply for the purpose of applying CSS styles. Instead, use class="criticalerror". This is not part of any standard and doesn't help the machine parse any better, but the output of that parsed information can then be interpreted by humans much easier. There need not be rigid standards for this to be useful semantics.
THOSE are the layers where semantic markup can be powerful tools. Simple semantic content can evolve into a general consensus and even a standard: Microformats are a prime example. Facebook doesn't apply rigid semantic web standards to its photo album for example, but being able to simply tag people, places and events is very useful.
The biggest limiting factors of the "semantic web" revolve around "leaky abstractions" and the simple fact that the more people involved in interpretation of content the less they can completely agree on its meaning. This will ALWAYS limit how close you can get to the "outer layers" of semantics in content on the internet. However, at the desktop (or small workgroup) level, there is but one person that imparts meaning on personal data, and a limited audience of consumers. If a solid structure is provided to allow the user to apply their own meaning then the user can have their own personal semantic standards at the outer layers.
I think that is where something like Nepomuk could s
...without actually reading the contracts. No doubt there is some sort of service level agreement in place, but I remember seeing agreements for these sort of things (well, sort of--commercial internet connectivity and colocation agreements) make statements about uptime--you get reimbursed if there are 'x' minutes of outage. However if there are any throughput or bandwidth statements they are quite a lot of weasel statements about numbers indicating maximums, not typical, etc. If your speed slows to dial-up it may not count as an outage against the SLA clauses.
This is also NOT an "anti-net-neutrality" court ruling. Bell was practicing traffic shaping on its own Sympatico ISP service even before it started doing the same for its "wholesale" customers, and for a time it was actually giving PREFERENTIAL treatment to its own competitors over the same infrastructure!
Net-neutrality is treating all traffic from all sources the same. Bell is apparently doing this right now--throttling all traffic in the same manner. Had there been evidence that Bell was using traffic shaping to give its own services superior performance to those ISPs who resell services over the very same infrastructure then Bell would rightfully be in great big trouble--especially since in many markets the only way ISPs can provide DSL service is to use Bell's lines for "last mile" connectivity.
At this level, under this situation, it is not appropriate for the government to interfere. Rather, the CRTC should be fostering competition at the infrastructure level. There have been first steps made at the wireless level in terms of securing access to existing cellular infrastructure as well as holding public RF auctions.
It is challenging to provide a choice when dealing with who owns the buried cable, so we have to make sure there is fair access to those lines. I don't see Bell doing anything unfair here. Stupid and anti-consumer, perhaps, but not anti-competitive. Bell's internet service is already notoriously inferior to all other major ISPs by reputation. If service continues to deteriorate because Bell elects to shape traffic over investing in its infrastructure then there is basis for another complaint to CRTC (since Bell is a monopoly for many markets insofar as telephone line connectivity--still an essential service). However this particular case is not the place to look at the traffic shaping issue.
If they went for the simpler packaging what would be there to help stop theft in the shipping warehouse, or on the UPS loading dock.
Large signs posted throughout the warehouse reminding employers that the area is under surveillance and that ANY act of theft (even first offense), of ANY value, is punishable by IMMEDIATE dismissal.
I've done work for warehouse/distributor customers before (inventory management systems etc) and that is common practice. Most of them were in food/grocery. I saw an angry foreman quite visibly fire someone right there in the loading dock for being caught stealing a chocolate bar.
These people are paid quite generously for doing a job that doesn't even require a complete high school education. They are being compensated for being in a position of trust, and as such being fired on the spot for stealing a chocolate bar seems appropriate to me. Certainly more appropriate than encasing such merchandise in a heavy-gauge, welded-shut plastic capsule.
Turnover is as high as you'd expect for such a job and stringent theft policies, but it works very well indeed. And if you think it sounds harsh, some companies opt to invest in automation and rid themselves of many of those jobs entirely.
However, when I upgraded to a non-OEM machine of my own, and tried to install 8.04, I wasn't so lucky.
I think this is not an issue with Ubuntu 8.04 specifically, but instead with your new hardware.
I got a new system with an Intel motherboard that was introduced only this summer, after the release of 8.04. That version--and 7.10 before it--gave me no joy. There was no support for the new Intel graphics chipset and there were some other problems too. Not much blame can be put on Intel though; they had Linux drivers out publicly before the motherboards based upon the chipset were even available to the public! Linux being a more...errr...diverse ecosystem means it is a bit more challenging to package and distribute such divers (alas, my board did not include binary packages suitable for Ubuntu with the appropriate modules backported to the kernel in 8.04).
So, I've been running 8.10alpha5 (and upgrading as alphas and betas became available) and had more luck (still no digital audio out, but I may need to tune my system--and for a couple weeks I had to disable onboard NIC and use a cheapo spare to keep the e1000e driver from bricking it--ubuntu blacklisted it anyways and has since fixed it and I am using my onboard 1000bT again--but considering it is pre-release quality I cannot complain).
Trouble is, I spent way too much time messing with Linux before, and now I no longer have that patience.
Honestly, aside from using alpha and beta distros, it has been YEARS since I've had to "mess around" with Linux. As a matter of fact it is faster and easier to set up a "bare" PC with Ubuntu (or Fedora or SuSE for that matter) than it is with Windows. Ubuntu install is done faster, I can run a 3-D desktop just as well on literally half the machine Vista requires, updates and upgrades are easier and faster, there is NOTHING like "software repositories" for Windows--you always have to insert a damn disk or explicitly google and download an EXE or MSI and you cannot install applications with MSFT update--only upgrade. when I do a fresh install of Windows I ALWAYS need to run Windows update and reboot 2 or 3 times, and with new hardware you still need vendor drivers, sometimes event to get out of the initial install phase! Hell, I hardly have the patience for WINDOWS anymore!
As to your assertions about barriers to Linux adoption:
1 - there is no lack of standards, just resistance to universal adoption. There are many Debian-derived distros that use the same package format and can work against the same repositories. There is Fedors, RHEL, SuSE,Mandriva, etc that all use the same "standard" in RPM and related apt/synaptic style management and update tools, and above that is the LSB that not only specifies standard packaging and deployment practices, it outlines a cross-distro binary compatibility standard!
For some reason, for every complaint about lack of a single standard there is a chorus of calls against any and all attempt at establishing a formal or de-facto standard! Perhaps it is because in the MSFT and Apple worlds there is no choice because standards are so entrenched--to the point of lock-in. People that move to Linux right now LIKE the choice and don't want to lose it in the process of creating standards.
2 - I fail to see the point here. When people have problems with Windows the exact same thing happens--some Windows guru saying to do something way above a beginner's head, useless tech support, etc. The average joe still has to rely on forums (which are relatively useless for windows compared to Linux), second computers, or an expert friend or coworker. In fact, I think your argument here is quite false: If an average Joe user starts off with an Ubuntu system that is working, it continues to work and is LESS likely to just break with everyday use. Windows, however, seems to break much easier with normal use--installing and uninstalling, various upgrades that break other things and above all VIRUSES.
And this is why a universal ID system just can't work.
It can and it does work. The internet has a unique identifier for any given computer that is online at any given time. Yes, there is NAT and things that mean that many many machines have IPs like 192.168.1.1 but they are still uniquely addressable via the combination of IP addresses in the route to the machine (ie. the public IP used by the NAT router plus the local IP of the computer). MAC addresses and IPv6 addresses are numerous enough to uniquely identify users too. Further layers of apps/protocols/etc make these unique identifiers more user-friendly.
But how do I hide it from the web provider I log in to?
You don't. You choose a trustworthy provider. for some people that means BEING YOUR OWN PROVIDER--which is technically very possible with OpenID. Why would you need to hid your own information from yourself?
Also, isn't the present dog's breakfast of different authentication systems WORSE than OpenID? You give all this personal info, in varying formats, to multitudes of different entities and it is absolutely impossible to knwo where it is going. There are two sides to the traceability potentials in OpenID--and the flipside is that YOU can trace YOUR OWN info by providing your own identity. Proprietary systems or even big OpenID provider-only outfits like MSFT take that ability away.
You are now dependent on 2 provider's being up at the same time
No matter how OpenID is implemented that is ALWAYS how it works...THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT. You CANNOT have decentralised universal authentication schemes without the authentication provider plus an application provider being available. It's no different from Active Directory but on an internet-wide scale--you lose the ability to authorise if you lose contact with the AD server, even inf the DB server is on-line, but still AD/LDAP/Kerberos/whatever central directory service is considered essential in enterprise environments. Why are people find the concept to be a bad idea on the 'net?
And this still doesn't provide any simplification like using the same ID to login everywhere
You are totally wrong. It simplifies a whole bunch of stuff. You keep your identity information with one provider of your choice--even yourself. You only need to remember one password (or two, if you have a backup identity) even if you had different aliases on every site (and login aliases would be easier to remember than passwords, and safe to reuse everywhere). OpenID-style authentication could be used to manage name, address, e-commerce info without having to re-enter it everywhere--you only have to deal with the provider (again, it could be yourself) which would make it practical to control who gets access to what info (so requests from openID consumers could be denied to sensitive info if they are not white-listed)
OpenID is more than having a single, simple login name used everywhere--that is the one place you are right. It is easy to uniquely identify every internet user, but not practical to make it easily human readable. That is not really what OpenID is out there to solve--simple aliases/avatars are more of an "application level" domain issue, not a "service/utility level" issue as authentication and authorisation are.
If I was in charge of the Right Brigade, I would change the nexus from some server-in-the-sky to your PC storing/providing authentication. I know that's crazy-talk, being responsible for your own identity and everything. Just call me old-fashioned.
Absolutely not..it is quite forward thinking IMHO. I think that the concept behind OpenID is exactly what the 'net needs, because it enables exactly that--the barrier is technically pretty low to provide your openID yourself--on your very own system! The fact that such a thing is considered "crazy talk" seems sad to me. Something that acts as a "server" should not be considered "too technical" or "for experts only"--such thinking is almost criminal, and ISPs should not be allowed to keep customers from having ports listening on the 'net (there is not technical reason to block servers...NONE. My ISP doesn't and it provides MUCH better service quality than the main big cable/telco companies that do such nonsense).
To really "fix the 'net" I think the best slution would be to foster the belief in "personal server appliances". People would have servers like they have TVs or stereos or telephones (or it could BE the TV or a stereo system component or telephone). Your personal server would provide your personal services (OpenID, mail server, personal web profile).
Sadly we are going the opposite way. It is very sad, this push for "cloud computing" the way cloud computing is implemented now. It is a throwback to the pre-Altair days of "cathedrals" and big intimidating building-sized systems run by a big corporation's lab-coated employees.
Don't get me wrong--I like the idea of seamlessly accessing data from everywhere from a big "cloud of systems"--it's just that the way it is done now is the wrong way. Google, Amazon, Microsoft...they all make these "artificial clouds" housed in big glass boxes where you set up your virtual hosts--they've hijacked the "cloud" term and used it for consolidation instead of distribution, which is the spirit in which the internet came to be.
This trend of big companies setting up OpenID provider services but not consuming is caveman thinking--or at least very anti-internet. If you are to implement openID support in your infrastructure, the proper thing to do would be to become a consumer FIRST. This just shows that MSFT hasn't changed at all--from the time BillG wrote his anti-piracy manifesto until today--they are fighting the true spirit of what open, personal computing was trying to be.
I want to be able to just login with my simple username Skapare [blogspot.com], not some site name.
That isn't the job of OpenID--that is the job of the OpenID consumer as far as I can tell. You wouldn't WANT OpenIDs to be simple like yahoo or twitter or DNS, because you cannot guarantee uniqueness and name squatters will just take all the simple ones and you have the same old problem again.
Proper implementation of OpenIDs would map the more complicated but unique URI-style ID to your site alias, and like any proper forum site does with email addresses your openID would be hidden from view for privacy reasons (so you don't get spammers and general marketing scum crawling forums to scrape your ID off of them and create a profile on you).
This way you can create a site-based avatar but have the same credentials globally. Also, a good OpenID consumer would provide for one-to-many mapping, so that one actual user on the site could log in with any number of credentials. That way, if your OpenID provider leaves you in the lurch (say MSFT botches up their service to discourage people from using it and uses that as justification to shut the service down) the OpenID consumer can fall back to an alternative (even its own auth scheme instead of openID).
When you log into such an OpenID compliant site it would work similar to Ubuntu's login--you would get a prompt for your user ID, then when you submit it would go away to see what ID provider/scheme you use then forward you to the proper authentication provider's site for the password (or whatever method they use to verify your ID). The site-specific profile determines the default, or you can override the default by entering the desired OpenID instead of your "simple alias".
Canada is general left leaning and pretty much small "l" liberal. Canada historically votes for a Federal Liberal party.
This is not correct. Canada is in general centrist and pretty much CAPITAL L Liberal. the Liberal party is Liberal in brand name only--there isn't much in the way of a longstanding political ideology in the Liberal party, which is the most likely reason why it has enjoyed power 2/3 of the nation's history. It is also the ONE AND ONLY political party that has existed continuously since confederation--another reason it historically has held power for most years.
The left is more fractured than ever with the NDP, Federal Liberals, and the Green party all spitting the vote.
Repeat after me: THE LIBERALS ARE NOT A LEFT WING PARTY. Nor, technically, are the Greens (they are supposed to be "agnostic" in that respect--policy is supposed to be shaped by environmental impact not traditional ideology) though they've positioned themselves quite leftward under May's leadership.
Dion took the Liberals leftward as that is his personal leanings, and it is what he figures was a good strategy to counter the Conservatives. Trudeau also took the Liberals quite leftward to seize power as the 1960s came to a close (it is also important to note that Liberals needed the help of an informal coalition with the socialist NDP to hold power during some of Trudeau's early years as PM).
The Liberals persist because they are historically the "Seinfeld" party (a political movement about nothing). Their ideology changes with the times. Prior to Trudeau Liberals weren't noted for being all that left, and Paul Martin's ideology wouldn't be that far off what many current Conservatives espouse.
The only way Canada will get a left leaning government again is if they unite themselves OR change to a method of proportional representation.
No, the only way Canada will get a left leaning government is if Canadian voters become left leaning themselves. By and large they are NOT. Some parts of Canada are (the "rust belt" in S Ontario where our cars are built, among other parts of Eastern Canada) and some are quite right wing (most of Western Canada). So, we get a government in the "mushy middle" (the Conservatives are really only nominally conservative if you really investigate how they've governed).
Trust me, if the Liberals merged with the NDP and bacame more stridently socialist they'd fare no better than the Reform party-not at all. They'd become regionally concentrated, they'd get no more than 1/2 of Ontario and would lose what little ground they have in the west. To win in the highly partisan, first-past-the-post system that is what happens to any governing party in Canada. The creation of the Conservative party and abandonment of some meaningful principles and ideologies of both camps in that merger was what made them a viable option to the corrupt Liberals in 2006. In 2008, Dion took the party leftward and look what happened--they lost ground more.
Now, if we had PR and other institutional reforms that would make minority govt's more functional we would indeed elect more left wing members, but make no mistake, we wouldn't become a socialist nation. We'd probably have stronger ideological parties--a stronger NDP and the re-emergence of a something like the Reform party. Canada would oscillate between coalition governments consisting of "centrist" non-ideological party teaming up with a right OR a left party.
Look at the popular vote. NDP and greens combined can at best muster up support in the 25 percent range. Despite Dion's left leanings, it would still be a reach to find even 1/2 of Liberal voters identifying as "left wing" or socialist (1/2 of liberal support would consitute around 14 percent). So, it would be a stretch to say that a left wing gov't would represent Canada better as it would--OPTIMISTICALLY--represent the around the same number of voters as the Conservative
This statement belies an ignorance of the issue here in Canada. It seems to me a good portion of the debate is around media and culture and content than technology. It isn't a big issue at the moment, but I'd say it is more broad based and proportionally larger issue here than in the US, largely because of the cultural/"Canadian Identity" factor--the concern is that it is too "DMCA Like" through bullying from American "mafIAA" cartel groups. In the US, sovereignty risk is measured on dependency on foreign oil. Canada, a net exporter of oil with a trade surplus that is geographically huge but sparsely populated, has other concerns--namely around out cultural identity (being seen as more than a de-facto 51st state of the globally dominant next door neighbour). Though it is a minor issue on the political landscape, that environment makes C-61 more visible than it would be in the US.
This entire/. article, in fact, belies the ignorance that/. editors have of Canadian politics. Bill C-61 is not a product of a partisan/ideological movement within Canada. It is in fact the RE-introduction of a LIBERAL bill from the previous parliament (C-60) that died on the order table when the Liberals lost a confidence vote triggering the 2006 election. Not only was C-60 fundamentally similar to C-61, it was in fact slightly WORSE and MORE like the DMCA than C-61 was. Not only did the Liberals introduce "DMCA-Lite" into Parliament for debate with C-60.
C-60/61 was NOT about some "right wing" ideology and electing Liberals would've done next to NOTHING to reduce the likelihood of a re-emergence of a DMCA-like copyright bill. Previous (Liberal) governments made the decision to sign onto WIPO treaties and it is the obligations under that international treaty that C-60, and later C-61, owed their existence. The Liberals leadership has been silent on the issue and opposition to C-61 by Liberals was not only not universal, it was in the minority--less than 10 percent of Liberal candidates voiced any sort of objection to it.
The problem here is that the only partisan opposition to C-61 is from the socialist New Democrats and the Green party, which is a minor player in Canadian politics and seems firmly in the grip of socialist-minded interests as well, despite trying to distance itself from "left-right" positioning in the past. My history of political involvement began with the Reform party and continues on to some degree with the present governing Conservatives, yet I am opposed to Bill C-61. At a grass roots level, I can tell you that support for C-61 amongst Conservative voters is FAR from universal--quite far in fact. The present day Conservative party is an amalgamation of two now-defunct parties, and those from the Reform-Alliance part of that amalgamation include a sizable amount of "libertarian-minded" types and that party's policy was populist-driven (it positioned itself to the right not because Manning's or council's personal direction but because the party was formally founded in Alberta where people tend to be of that mindset, and such most members were from the west.
Though the formation of the new Conservative party helped unify opposition and break the Liberal stranglehold on parliament (where Cretien's Liberals were able to obtain majority status with nearly the same vote the Conservatives got last week in their minority win) it meant we lost what was a distinct choice in the Reform-Alliance option. That party has a real avenue for ground-floor supporters to shape policy that failed to get notice outside its base in Western Canada. Opposition to C-61 would've been a logical policy plank (as the bill countered the Reform position on defending individual rights) and a possibility (because policies in that party were directly influenced by the votes of individual members at constituency meetings).
It is important to note that Prentice (the minister that introduced C-61) h
Of course, cherry picking to find offensive things in the Quar'an isn't any better than quote mining the Bible.
...then you proceed to drive the point home like a railway spike to the head by picking a bushel of cherries yourself. Point taken...repeatedly.
Of course, the worst you'll be subjected to from about five-9's of all Christians is some load complaining and people being personally offended. By and large, Christianity is a highly tolerant faith.
If you took random quotes from, for example, Operating Thetan III, and posted them here you might very well face legal action from the Church of Scientology (regardless of what commentary you had interspersed with the quotes). Though quotations represent "fair dealing" to most, I'm sure they'd feel their IP has been violated as well as being offended personally and so they would litigate.
Now, it gets even worse...if you made such a post with similar quotes from the Qur'an you may be the subject of a Fatwa advocating the termination of your life.
Aside from perhaps a very small minority of nutbar cultists I know of no self-professed Christian that would advocate the death of anyone over commentary such as yours, yet many very prominent Muslim clerics and thousands of their followers to this day would feel more than justified in killing you on site if you presented a raft of quotes from their holy texts in such a manner. I know such extreme fundamentalists constitute a minority in the Islamic world, but to non-Muslims it can sometimes seem that too little is done to distance the mainstream faith from such perverted views. Thus, most non-Muslims aren't all that convinced that it is a "peaceful" faith.
If (no...WHEN) some movie, song, performance or work of art were to make use of Christian scripture in a less-than-tasteful manner, no doubt some Christian leaders would call for boycotts, ask distributors to change or pull the content or whatever. And, quite rightly they would be laughed off, ignored or rebuffed by the creators of those works. Honestly, why should Islam be treated so specially because of even trivial "blasphemous" use of their scripture? Why is it that cartoonists who have Jesus in a smackdown with Santa Claus on international TV (priceless South Park) is protected speech that should be defended vigourously, but to reproduce a simple doodle from a newspaper purported to represent Muhammed is considered tasteless, offensive and disrespectful to the point that advertisers will boycott and clerics call for Jihad? Just what was said to these distributors to make them delay release and issue a massive recall? This would NEVER happen if the Lord's Prayer was used in a context Christians didn't like--even if it was the Pope himself who protested.
Sometimes I wonder if the most devout don't take the Bible/Torah or Qur'an out of context as much as detractors such as yourself do. It sure explains how in this day and age we still have to deal with this kind of crap.
You don't have to be a financial expert to know that just ain't right.
No, it ain't right at all, but I'm curious to know how you'd make it right. Would you somehow force big companies to hand over their obligatory pound of flesh (ie. treat the symptom/apply a bandage) or would you fix America? The US is full of people, companies and governments that spend far beyond their means. Why were people caught offguard with this credit crunch? It is any surprise at all when some loser fast food restaurant assistant manager could get a no-down, 40 our mortgage to buy a $500k by simply showing some banker their last paycheque stub? Do that enough and the bubble's going to pop, and millions of people will find themselves with negative equity.
If you (a company, or any person) has money, would YOU entrust it to the flaky US economy right now, where dodgy investment banks embedded all these bad loans into CDOs and other byzantine asset-backed paper to hide their tracks, got levereged at 100 to 1 or more, and fostered a sense of entitlement in the populace, where everyone deserved to own a home?
If you NEED money, would you be able to get it in the US, even if your credit rating is good and you have the income to easily make payments? In the US, Toyota's sales fell around 30% in the last quarter and in Canada they went UP a couple percent. Canada is right next door, inflation is similar, unemployment is similar, average salaries are slightly LOWER--cars are no less affordable in Canada and the economy is slowing there too, so what is the difference? There is no credit squeeze and the Canadian economy is still reasonably capitalised, and the banks are still profitable. There aren't 30 percent les people in the US suddenly unable to afford to have a new car--it's that the US banks are so messed up they cannot make loans (or are afraid to).
When companies like Facebook start setting up offshore offices to do business, avoiding tax expenses is merely one main factor--they are avoiding expenses for reasons beyond greed; sometimes they are freeing up money for reinvestment. If a company cannot borrow to expand (as is the case in the US right now) they will find any way to cut costs to free up that money. They will also set up corporate subsidiaries offshore to make it easier to raise capital in THOSE markets when they can't at home.
There is a similar situation in Canada's history too actually; Commodore was founded by a Canadian immigrant and headquartered in Toronto. In the 1970s, it moved from making and selling typewriters and filing cabinets to electronics, and most of its sales by then shifted to the US market. The economy if Canada--and the US--was struggling, and like now the US$ suffered devaluation against the CA$, and inflation was going up while the overall economy was near recession.
In the 1970s, Canada had a socialist government under Trudeau. It was very interventionist and treated economic symptoms directly; it introduced laws limiting how fast both retail prices AND worker's pay could be raised to control inflation, it spent like a drunken sailor on welfare/social programmes and created FIRA to restrict foreign ownership of Canadian operations.
Almost everything the government did chased Commodore out of Canada. Commodore was suffering because the CA$ was worth more than a US$, making its calculators more expensive in the US, and on top of that like other companies from MITS with its Altair to Coleco's Telstar, it was having supplier problems (shortage of chips). Commodore decided to address both problems by buying and merging with MOS technology, so that it could be "vertically integrated" (be its own supplier of chips). The acquisition of MOS and restructuring meant too much foreign ownership, and taxes were going up, and the business climate in Canada was too hostile.
As a result, Commodore set up corporate HQ in the Bahamas and moved its operational facilities into MOS' Pennsylvania campus, and not long after Commodore enter
It sounds like a goof â" especially coming from a company that pledged to raise the bar on patent quality
Taking this approach with patents could be a strategy similar to how the FSF and EFF approach copyright. Stallman was offended by how copyright was being used to rob software of its freedom, so he developed a license enforced by copyright that could protect software freedom. EFF will, to the best of its abilities, enforce open licenses using copyright law to ensure those who incorporate copyrighted Free software is used as intended.
Perhaps IBM has this in mind when patenting a process to find areas of "white space" and locate opportunities for patent applications. IBM is known to be in support of reforms to the patent system to increase quality of submissions, and it has declared for some of its patents that Free software communities would not be subject to royalties, licensing or injunctions. It is a promising track record and hopefully it reflects what they would do with patents issued as a result of their new "invention".
Filing a patent application is probably the most iron-clad "prior-art" that one could provide, so anything that would make it easier for "good guys" to file patents would probably help. I do wish, however, that tactics like those used by "big corporate" IBM were being employed by the EFF or some neutral foundation or other organisation. Big corporate legal depts. are not altruistic and always act in the self interest of the company to some degree. The best idea would be to establish an "anti-troll" corporation as a foundation that would accumulate patents and offer them up under a Free-software-like license.
One of the major problems is that open source software like OpenOffice.org and most Linux distributions are seriously lacking good UI design and usability
A rather specious argument if you ask me. Though there is still a lot of room for improvement in the Linux desktop, I believe it has progressed to the point that Linux desktops meet or exceed Windows in terms of usability. I've been running a GNOME environment under Ubuntu for some time now and notice that a great effort towards a consistent user interface amongst the "g" applications. The points of departure usually centre around the use of Qt/KDE apps within a GNOME environment or vice versa.
Contrast this with the MSFT experience which is a paragon of INconsistency. MSFT has a very poor track record in this matter--they expend a huge effort in developing the interface for Office OR Windows OR IE but don't appear to have any consistent overall vision to speak of. MSFT irks me on many levels when they out out a jazzy new release of Office that sticks out from the rest of the entire OS with new widgets and whatnot and make it look totally foreign to the rest of the desktop environment...until the next release of the OS appears a year or two later when the OS subsumes the control libraries from Office...and with every release it gets worse. Office 2007 and its wretched "ribbon" and the way it looks like ass on XP makes it the most unpleasant Office to use ever.
If you want simple and usable and fast, do yourself a favour--cobble together a basic GNOME desktop on Linux and toss in AbiWord and GNUMeric...fast, simple, consistent and can meet all the basic needs of typical users.
But I think taking legal action to force them to use free software is the wrong approch.
IT ISN'T ABOUT FORCING ANYTHING ON ANYONE. This is ALL ABOUT FOLLOWING THE RULES. This is taxpayer money being used to provide public infrastructure and by law MUST go to competitive bid! Lazy government buyers are using a "weasel clause" to avoid doing their jobs, arguing that there are no alternatives WITHOUT EVEN TRYING TO LOOK FOR THEM. I think a persuasive case can be made that Vista and Office 2007 are most definitely NOT the "more usable alternative" much less the cheapest. Government shouldn't be FORCED to use any selection, but they SHOULD be compelled to consider all submitted alternatives and make a proper effort to look for alternatives.
I think the right approach is for the open source communities to improve their development methods and spend more time designing usable and attractive software.
This is bollocks too. Both GNOME and KDE have expended a lot of effort to establish HIGs and compliance with one of a small handful of HIGs are high priority items on many projects. MSFT has "User experience guidelines"...that change with every edition of Windows and are ignored by Office developers in many cases.
This is a case of politics and laziness and backward thinking. Public servants do not stick out their necks for fear of being noticed, they do not do work that they aren't forced to do, and there is a built-in disincentive for bottom-level management to lower costs and increase efficiency. If a lower-level manager or front-line staff suggest something innovative and cost saving, a mid-level guy will shoot them down. If they do it anyways, they risk dismissal for "not going through proper channels".
Why is this? Because mid-level managers up to deputy ministers are allocated budgets largely based upon a) how many reports they have (people on staff) and b) the prevous year's expenditures. If they do extra work to get a competitive bid, and end up choosing Linux and it acutally works very WELL and they don't use up their budget and admins workload goes down, they've got a problem. Their budget is reduced and new hires are canceled or maybe there is a layoff or two. Then they have less direct reports than anticipated and are in charge of less
The problem is that solid state drives suffer from bit rot as others have described here.
That is why a traditional hard drive, or even better optical media, would be preferred. When not used and kept out of the elements (most notably very extreme temperatures or intense full-spectrum light from the sun) a CD or DVD would last far longer than 25 years.
Also, after 25 years it is doubtful that any PC or laptop will work.
I have a 24 year old Coleco ADAM that still works (this from a product that had a high failure rate when it was introduced in 1983, but that was due to firmware bugs and printer problems). I also have an 8-bit Atari computer manufactured 25 years ago that also turns on. I use neither very often at all--they've sat for periods of years between some uses as they sit in storage normally.
The CMOS battery will likely leak all over the place
Lithium batteries are quite durable and though they probably won't last 25 years they wouldn't destroy components. Since they'd likely discharge you might as well remove them entirely; most machines do not need the battery at all to boot up into some sort of workable state.
and the electrolytic capacitors will not work very well after 25 years (electrolytic capacitors also do poorly when they are unused for long periods of time)
Electrolytic capacitors do have a limited life. Crappy Chinese ones last 5 years and maybe less. The capacitors in old home PCs from the 80s were generally sourced from Japan and have a much longer lifespan. Also your contention that unused capacitors don't last as long is wrong; under heavy use, when temperature increases, they ware out faster. These days you can also get electrolytic capacitors that employ solid conductive polymers for the electrolytic layer--they are dry to start with so they don't dry out, and lifespan can approach 30 years under normal use. Such capacitors when unused would degrade very little in storage. These days such capacitors are more commonplace. Capacitors degrade fairly gradually when they're not defective--the majority slowly become open circuits, and they are used in fairly forgiving places such as DC power regulation, not in timing, clock, RF, etc.
The key is to include the media and a carefully selected player. It need not be a notebook--it could be just the drive itself with a USB connection, or a little DVD player. If you're really worried/paranoid you can crack it open to see if wet capacitors are used and replace them with solids. Anyways, capacitors don't change fast enough, they are a lump of something with 2 wires. I'm sure such components could be replaced easily (unlike ASICs and firmware and whatnot).
People make it sounds like a capsule being sent into space or encased in cement for centuries. It'll only be 25 years! We use CDs today and they existed 25 years ago, and IDE devices have been made for over 20 years and todays PATA connectors are compatible right back to the start. RS232-to-USB adapters exist to let you talk to devices from the 1970s. If you go spelunking on the 'net long enough you can find all sorts of specs and protocols. I talk to computer systems that exceed 20 years old quite often through work, where computers/processors sometimes see 30 years of use.
It is probably quite enough to just include the media and a bit of docs on the encoding methods/file formats (ISO9660 with JPEG and MPEG2, etc...), but for convenience you could put in a USB drive or a simple player or PC like the eee. That takes care of the hard stuff--figuring out how to use a 4-line serial bus with widely published specs and the like is trivial. The drive is the potential gotcha here--try to find 8" or even 5.25" drives is hard, but hacking up the means to connect to one that you've got is still easy today.
Slashdot Mirror
But a less charismatic person could make different decisions that get Apple way more into the main stream.
Hmmm...nice boring competent people should make the decisions, eh? They could bring Apple into the mainstream?
Kind of like Scully did after Jobs left? Without Jobs around to stir things up, Apple lost its market differentiation. The Mac was a charming, user-friendly appliance-computer. Then came the Mac II and all its iterations. They were big boring beige boxes, as elegant as they were technically speaking. Scully wanted to make different Macs for all different occasions and markets, but they all ended up as....boring beige boxes. MacOS gained colour but ceased to otherwise innovate. It turned into something like what Dell is today--it sold dozens of slightly different but essentially the same boring beige boxes...and lord help you if you try to figure out what you bought--in the US is was a Quadra and in the US it was a Performa...or was it the other way around? Or was it one way sometimes and the other way other times? Even the model number after the name was often different...and they were differently named in schools than they were in retail stores but the same hardware.
Boring, confusing, Dell-like "Mainstream"...except without all that awful "PC Compatibility" which was the mainstram that would've counted.
Then Scully was punted in comes Spindler. To his credit he realised techincal innovation was required and took the bold step of changing architectures, but that isn't enough to lead--it was merely enough to survive. The "Dell style" Apple looked pretty mainstream but it bled market share horribly. Spindler decided Apple needed to be more like Microsoft: Lets focus on our insanely-great OS and license out the right to make clones! Woo hoo! Now, the boxes weren't only beige, they were EVEN MORE BORING! They looked EXACTLY like Wintel boxes now! Incognito Mac...how exciting!
Except the OS was no longer insanely great, and Copeland development was mired in technical introspection--there was "no taste"...no tantalising screenshots to entice fans...and Win95 loomed large--it was still craptacular, but from a UI perspective it raised the bar high enough such that its weaknesses weren't a disadvantage.
Seriously. Boring old businessmen are needed to RUN the company...to execute the ideas and decisions competently, but a company like Apple MUST be LED...and decisions must be made there...with charisma. Apple is not Lenovo, or Dell, or HP--established, stodgy, mainstream already. If it is led by stodgy management, it is very likely to disappear completely. I don't think it'll go bankrupt, but rather one of the above would buy it.
Apple is already "mainstream" enough--it uses mainstream Intel processors and overall has a mainstream architecture. It needs to have a "charismatic" image and its software needs to continue being an innovation leader because that is all that differentiates it. That is what Jobs provides and what his replacement would have to provide. Otherwise...well, lets just say int he future the "Apple line" of fine HP computers might still look fairly pretty and run the latest "Windows 8" well enough...but they just won't be the same anymore.
Which OSes are you referring to? Their OS has been stable since XP SP2 (2004) and before that XP pretty stable.
MSFT has had many OSes, the two most famous lines being based upon the MS-DOS and NT kernels. "Windows" can refer to the OS itself at various times, or to the GUI with which users interact. the 16-year timeframe can be taken a number of ways:
* MS-DOS based systems didn't become both user-friendly and acceptable stable until the release of Windows 98. MS-DOS v1.0 was released in 1982. Thus, it took 16 years to arrive at a good product.
* MSFT hired cutler to start developing the NT kernel in 1988, though the first release of an NT-based OS only happened about 4 years after that. SP2 for XP came out in 2004--that is 16 years of development to achieve a stable and somewhat secure OS (XP *with SP2* being the first stable AND secure OS--Win2k was quite stable but totally insecure).
* MS Windows as a GUI operating environment was released in 1985 as v1.0--a shell extension for MS-DOS. Through the years it was merged into both OS lines and underwent gradual improvement. Almost exactly 16 years later, in 2001, WinXP was initially released. XP was the first time MSFT merged its complete line of PC operating systems into the single NT architecture (from home PCs to PC-based servers), and is widely regarded as the most stable "major release" to date with service packs fixing most serious issues.
Conclusion: No matter how you look at it, MSFT seems to have a 16-year development cycle, from a practical standpoint.
I think the "16-year" rule should replace the "rule of 3" (ie. MSFT products are unusable until their third major release) as a yardstick for IT professionals to use in evaluating MSFT products ;-)
They definitely don't need to fire anyone to get past an economic slump.
They don't HAVE to but they probably NEED to. Management NEEDS to meet the demands of the board of directors, and ultimately shareholders. That is the trade-off of being a public company--you get liquidity, access to capital and so forth but you have that little obligation there to those who have invested. MSFT has promised in its quarterly reports etc. to meet a certain level of fiscal performance, and though it could certainly survive without layoffs it probably would fall far short of that performance level if it didn't trim some fat.
If they had a surplus of good people, the best thing for them to do is put them all on projects with a 3-7 year horizon
If only the market was that far sighted, but it isn't. The market can't seem to see past the next fiscal year (nor does it seem to look back that far either). Multiple consecutive quarters of un-profitability (or even merely declining profits, if the market conditions were better) would decimate MSFT's market cap.
Then, you have to look at MSFT's track record with projects that far out. Vista certainly didn't live up to the original vision. When it was "longhorn" and promised technology got dropped left and right (WinFS et al) it was suggested that they'd finally appear in the next release after...and with Win7 there is nothing about them at all. At least there are no false promises but with Win7 shaping up to be little more than "Vista SE" it appears innovation is slowing to a crawl, at least in terms of deliverable products.
With the short-sighted mindset of investors in the stock market, and MSFT's track record of "innovation" lately, I don't think many would have confidence in MSFT if they took "surplus talent" and directed it at nebulous projects with no revenue-generating prospects for several years.
Some time in 2009 my electricity provider is supposed to launch a programme to allow its customers to lease from them a 20kW fuel cell generator. This generator would connect to your gas line and could meed all your needs for electricity and perhaps even heat. It is more efficient than your furnace and has cleaner emissions too.
Since most of the time you would not need ALL the electrical capacity of such a fuel cell system the next logical step would be to put a syncing transfer switch at the meter so each house could feed excess power back into the grid...then you could keep your house warm enough to keep the pipes thawed whe you are away during the day and the electricity could go back into the grid to power the offices, shopping malls, "electric car charging stations" etc ;-)
I know internet blackouts have happened but they are short and very very rare, compared to electricity blackouts. That is because the internet is more distributed than power generation. Maybe if everyone generated a bit of power in their basements instead of relying on big central generating stations in the future the grid would be more robust and outages more self contained and less frequent.
Alas, I'm sure politics will continue to interfere with logical progression of technology.
This coming from the can't-feel-my-toes department? Put it outside!
I prefer my milk in liquid form. It is hard to enjoy your cornflakes when the milk is solid.
Milk tends to be best kept somewhat below rom temperature as well. Kinda keeps it from getting rancid.
I 100% agree! That's how most everyone along the coast does it durning hurricane season when they hit and take power out here.
The question wasn't how to meet the energy needs of a hurricane-triggered blackout in the gulf coast--the requirement was to be able to live with some degree of comfort through a blackout triggered by an ICE STORM in NEW YORK...you know, up there by CANADA?
This guy doesn't need to keep a room 10C cooler so he doesn't sweat--he needs to keep a WHOLE HOUSE 20C cooler so his pipes don't freeze and he can still have running water and flushing toilets! He cannot cook outside because his barbecue is FROZEN SHUT and under a pile of snow! He might have a microwave or electric oven and need more power than those little portable units can supply.
Your solution would not work in his situation. He also has a family with a small child and pets. That makes it harder to "rought it" as well. I'd say the real answer is probably closer to the more involved case than just getting a little unit meant for camping.
Your minimum is a bit more of a maximum actually--if you are merely looking for electricity you can get a little portable generator and use it to run small appliances (up to the size of a microwave).
However, some posters here seem to neglect the needs of cold-climate dwellers during blackouts. In extended outages you need to keep the house above freezing to prevent plumbing damage, and it is less-than-trivial to hook a furnace blower up to a portable generator as they aren't "plug-in" devices. Besides that, if you want to preserve all that expensive food in the chest freezer and refrigerator you need a pretty large "portable" unit anyways--one that won't trip or stall out when the pumps kick in and have fuel tanks to provide more than a couple hours of continuous service.
What is suggested in the parent post is along the lines of what is needed to provide a "standby" power service. However there are some details I'd quibble with--mostly because they are undersized.
A fair amount of 14- or 12-gauge wire (wire is expensive... go measure)
Wire IS expensive, so make sure you get what works. 14-and 12-gauge wire is meant for 15 or 20 amp branch circuits and is undersized for the requirements outlined in this article (to run a furnace, fridge, lights--at least when they start up). If you have an electric range or dryer you need to step up to 10 gauge (that is what feeds those circuits. If you follow Mike Holmes' philosophy I'd go one further and get a length of 8 gauge.
Also, you shouldn't use standard NMD90 wiring for outdoor applications--you should select something rated for outdoors/burial. Typically such wire has a grey outer insulation covering it instead f white or other colours.
With that heavy-gauge wire you can then run one "feed" to the house where you have installed a manual transfer swtch rated for at least 30A (typically the largest breaker in your panel already). Again, I'd go up to the next size--40A--just to make sure is all robust. The transfer switch would have to be connected on the other side "after" your main service breaker in the "bottom" portion of your panel (the power company doesn't generally permit people to do work in the top part of your panel for safety reasons--you cannot switch off that power yourself and you shouldn't work on a hot panel).
If you only got the small 14-gauge wire you'd have to have 2 or 3 runs into the house, each being its own circuit.
A generator. I suggest MINIMUM 3500 watts
This is undersized to provide reliable standby service in a blackout. If you were warming up dinner in a 1000W microwave while the furnace is running and the fridge starts up, your unit would trip. If you wanted to use an electric dryer you would not be able to do so reliably. In a cold climate, a family with small children will HAVE to do laundry after a few days.
To provide adequate standby service you need to be able to provide 5 kVA or more. 7500W generators could do that (don't assume unity power factor--power is NOT just the siple product of volts and amps when you have inductive loads like furnace motors and refrigerators starting up). My parent's farm has a standby unit rated for 15 kW. When it is in use you can do whatever you can do when the utility is working. Half of that should let you live comfortably and give you reliable service in extended blackouts.
A shed -- you can't put a gas generator indoors, generally speaking - very dangerous
In your garage is sufficient so long as exhaust is vented outside, though I think if you had an attached garage you should be extra careful.
I strongly suggest a strong table to mount the generator on for maintenance
More like footings secured to the floor with large bolts, with "engine mount" vibration-absorbing brackets to secure the unit. The unit must be quiet enough from the outside of the shed or garage to comply with noise bylaws. Such
Woz and Jobs formed an almost ideal partnership, with Woz creating sublime technical solutions and Jobs knowing how to work people to make them sell.
The industry and Apple itself have changed. I'm not sure Woz would fit in at Apple. If Woz was born a couple or few decades later he'd probably be more inclined towards an open architecture platform more like a PC-style system running something like Linux. Woz made engineering an art form--his designs were efficient, elegant works of art for those who appreciates them.
Alas, it wasn't only his accident that forced him to leave--had he not had the accident he would've left of his own accord anyways. By 1984 Apple was a 2-headed beast: There was the Apple II camp, with a simple and familiar but aging open system, and the Mac camp, who were revolutionaries tasked to design an "appliance" that was friendly but totally closed. Jobs made it clear the Mac camp was the "new apple" and that the "old apple" of the II line was a legacy destined to fade away.
In designing the Apple II platform, Woz made deliberate design decisions that were completely counter to what Jobs envisioned (with Raskin's inspiration) for the Mac. For example, The Apple I (and early Apple II IIRC) came with full hardware schematics so hobbyists and third parties could create hardware interfaces. The original Mac rivaled the Apple I and II for elegant, simple design but those inner workings were a closely held secret (especially the software/firmware on which so much of the original Mac's functionality relied).
It goes on from there: The Apple I was a bare board and the Apple II had a user-removable panel to access the mainboard and add cards. The Mac was completely sealed and cracking the case open voided the warranty. Woz deliberately added expansion slots to the Apple II because he saw the Apple I's lack of expansion slots as a shortcoming. Jobs issued a strict edict that expansion slots--especially internal slots but even external ones--were banned from the original Mac design.
Woz was essential to the company's early success for his engineering talent--he could make amazingly capable hardware that was amazingly simple and low cost. Jobs provided the motivating force to make it friendly. He insisted on an Apple II case with rounded corners with a colour similar to the inside of an apple. He presented challenges to Woz, who loved to take on challenges.
The thing is--there isn't a Woz-type engineer at Apple anymore, nor does there need to be. From an engineering standpoint, absolutely NOTHING Apple sells today is the least bit groundbreaking. The Mac is just a very attractive looking PC with DRM measures locking the software to it. The iPod is no more technically capable than the Zune or Archos or whatever.
Apple is primarily a leading marketing and industrial design firm. It makes beautiful products and successfully convinces people they are "cool". That is "Jobs territory" and is why engineering talent at Apple is secondary. Departure of Jobs will be painful for Apple, and the degree of pain will depend on whether a handful of VP-level people with "design" and marketing talents will stick around. Even if everyone sticks around when Jobs retires it will be painful. Jobs didn't come up with any of the successful products Apple now sells--he didn't design them or even come up with the idea. Crucially, however, he had an eye for picking winners. If Scully were at the helm, he'd have shut down the iPod project because music players were not Apple's focus, and macs would have all the style of a Dell with none of the compatibility. If they pick a Jobs replacement that lacks his talent for picking winning ideas Apple will flounder for years.
...but not because of the reasons you think.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. Like the typewriter, it will never go away totally, but it will be a niche. More and more, I notice people doing computing tasks on non-traditional hardware. I know facebook junkies who continually keep their status up-to-date and people who reply to emails in seconds, yet don't turn on their home PC for days (and are blocked on their work PCs). I know people with NAS devices in their basements that play music on various receivers in the house...and they aren't even nerds...and not one of the gadgets runs Windows (nor do they care). People visit internet services on their game consoles..most of which don't run Windows. My television has a network port and can connect to the 'net all on its own...and it doesn't run Windows.
Who needs a "year of the desktop" when the desktop has peaked and is facing eventual decline?
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it.
How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument? It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience". Sure, cars all have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and some other basic common elements but every different model puts the wiper controls in a different place, have completely different climate control layouts, some put the shifter on the floor and others on the steering column, they all have different wheel sizes and so on.
Same goes for restaurants. McDonalds is big and successful, and their dining experience is certainly familiar, but it is FAR from being dominant in its industry like MSFT is. In fact, in much of the world McDo is not even the leader in the market (for example, in Canada Tim Horton's is more than double the size of McDonalds). Nobody argues that no other company will succeed anywhere in the world against McDo because people want a "familiar dining experience" and it needs to be the closest restaurant to any given residence.
People are fundamentally the same regarding behaviour and tastes across industries. Familiarity is indeed a competitive advantage, but there are other concerns consumers have. In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux. It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust. In fact, that unfamiliarity was probably a GOOD thing, because people sometimes DO want a change, if it s a good change.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever.
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get. MSFT seems to have lost its tight gr
I assumed it was KumOpen (come open) backwards. I think the real acronym is even stupider than that.
The official acronym is very contrived so I'm sure it is a "backronym". I also suspect a group of tall-foreheads would deliberately come up with a project name with a suggestive reference like that either.
Google and Wikipedia provide the most likely possibilities for the origin:
Nepomuk is a town in the Czech Republic, in the "kraj" (province or region) called "Pilsen". given this fact, here are some posibilities to explain the name:
* Nepomuk is the birthplace of St. John of Nepomuk, who is considered "the protector from floods". Nepomuk (the project) is intended to aid users in dealing with "a flood" of information.
* Nepomuk was a Bohemian town before the establishment of the Czech Republic. Perhaps they named the project Nepomuk as an indirect reference to anti-establishment viewpoints and free exchange of information/property/etc. assoicated with Bohemian culture.
* Nepomuk is in a region bordering Germany, and this project is headed by a German group. Perhaps a German project lead was born or raised in nearby Nepomuk and named the project after his home town.
* Pilsen is where Pilsner-style beer was invented. Engineers like beer. Code-names are often named after objects of affection. Mmmm...beeer.
...or a parfait...whatever.
It has layers. At the outermost layer, on the scale of the WWW, "conveying meaning" as you describe is indeed futile. Cory Doctorow's "Metacrap" essay sums it up nicely (linked to in this discussion thread): People are dishonest, lazy and stupid when it comes to metadata...and when they aren't there is no way to impose standards that more than one person would agree to insofar as imparting meaning on data.
However even Doctorow admits metadata, at some level and taken in context, can be useful. "Laziness" may be one of the hallmarks of a good programmer, but it is "false laziness" in information management to throw out ANY idea of semantic markup.
There are good examples of useful, easily implemented semantic markup or meta-data. "Self-documenting code" is a prime example. Effective use of comments helps maintainability immensely. It also helps to give variables and functions names more useful than i, j, k (if not used as simple loop counters) or doSomething(). Does it help make your code more machine readable? Not at all--it doesn't make your compiler produce tighter binary code or whatever, but it is essential for maintainability, and it IS semantic markup.
In terms of WWW development, semantic markup need not delve deep into the true meaning of content. Web documents would be IMMENSELY more useful of they simply provided "semantic structure". There is very limited utility in a web page that is one big table element consisting of a JPEG Jigsaw of image links, or worse one big embedded flash object. Merely using (X)HTML properly can provide useful semantic structure: Stop using tables for layout, unless you are actually presenting a TABLE of data, and for all you CSS freaks out there, tables are your friends, STOP fashioning tabular data out of DIVs and SPANs--a calendar is a TABLE of dates--it's OK to use TABLEs! If you are making an ordered or unordered list then use OL or UL--that's what they're there for!
So, without resorting to meta tags--completely within the confines of a globally accepted standard--you now have a document with "structural semantics". You can now preform searches for a "table containing a column named 'x'" or an "image named 'y'" or "a heading containing the word 'z'" and you've done nothing but simply properly marked up your document with HTML.
Then you can start working your way to the outer layers to the point where enough people can come to a common ground. Once you've got PROPERLY marked up content with real structural semantics you can use class and rel and other attributes to provide more meaningful semantics. For example, don't use class="bigredbold" in a span simply for the purpose of applying CSS styles. Instead, use class="criticalerror". This is not part of any standard and doesn't help the machine parse any better, but the output of that parsed information can then be interpreted by humans much easier. There need not be rigid standards for this to be useful semantics.
THOSE are the layers where semantic markup can be powerful tools. Simple semantic content can evolve into a general consensus and even a standard: Microformats are a prime example. Facebook doesn't apply rigid semantic web standards to its photo album for example, but being able to simply tag people, places and events is very useful.
The biggest limiting factors of the "semantic web" revolve around "leaky abstractions" and the simple fact that the more people involved in interpretation of content the less they can completely agree on its meaning. This will ALWAYS limit how close you can get to the "outer layers" of semantics in content on the internet. However, at the desktop (or small workgroup) level, there is but one person that imparts meaning on personal data, and a limited audience of consumers. If a solid structure is provided to allow the user to apply their own meaning then the user can have their own personal semantic standards at the outer layers.
I think that is where something like Nepomuk could s
...without actually reading the contracts. No doubt there is some sort of service level agreement in place, but I remember seeing agreements for these sort of things (well, sort of--commercial internet connectivity and colocation agreements) make statements about uptime--you get reimbursed if there are 'x' minutes of outage. However if there are any throughput or bandwidth statements they are quite a lot of weasel statements about numbers indicating maximums, not typical, etc. If your speed slows to dial-up it may not count as an outage against the SLA clauses.
This is also NOT an "anti-net-neutrality" court ruling. Bell was practicing traffic shaping on its own Sympatico ISP service even before it started doing the same for its "wholesale" customers, and for a time it was actually giving PREFERENTIAL treatment to its own competitors over the same infrastructure!
Net-neutrality is treating all traffic from all sources the same. Bell is apparently doing this right now--throttling all traffic in the same manner. Had there been evidence that Bell was using traffic shaping to give its own services superior performance to those ISPs who resell services over the very same infrastructure then Bell would rightfully be in great big trouble--especially since in many markets the only way ISPs can provide DSL service is to use Bell's lines for "last mile" connectivity.
At this level, under this situation, it is not appropriate for the government to interfere. Rather, the CRTC should be fostering competition at the infrastructure level. There have been first steps made at the wireless level in terms of securing access to existing cellular infrastructure as well as holding public RF auctions.
It is challenging to provide a choice when dealing with who owns the buried cable, so we have to make sure there is fair access to those lines. I don't see Bell doing anything unfair here. Stupid and anti-consumer, perhaps, but not anti-competitive. Bell's internet service is already notoriously inferior to all other major ISPs by reputation. If service continues to deteriorate because Bell elects to shape traffic over investing in its infrastructure then there is basis for another complaint to CRTC (since Bell is a monopoly for many markets insofar as telephone line connectivity--still an essential service). However this particular case is not the place to look at the traffic shaping issue.
If they went for the simpler packaging what would be there to help stop theft in the shipping warehouse, or on the UPS loading dock.
Large signs posted throughout the warehouse reminding employers that the area is under surveillance and that ANY act of theft (even first offense), of ANY value, is punishable by IMMEDIATE dismissal.
I've done work for warehouse/distributor customers before (inventory management systems etc) and that is common practice. Most of them were in food/grocery. I saw an angry foreman quite visibly fire someone right there in the loading dock for being caught stealing a chocolate bar.
These people are paid quite generously for doing a job that doesn't even require a complete high school education. They are being compensated for being in a position of trust, and as such being fired on the spot for stealing a chocolate bar seems appropriate to me. Certainly more appropriate than encasing such merchandise in a heavy-gauge, welded-shut plastic capsule.
Turnover is as high as you'd expect for such a job and stringent theft policies, but it works very well indeed. And if you think it sounds harsh, some companies opt to invest in automation and rid themselves of many of those jobs entirely.
However, when I upgraded to a non-OEM machine of my own, and tried to install 8.04, I wasn't so lucky.
I think this is not an issue with Ubuntu 8.04 specifically, but instead with your new hardware.
I got a new system with an Intel motherboard that was introduced only this summer, after the release of 8.04. That version--and 7.10 before it--gave me no joy. There was no support for the new Intel graphics chipset and there were some other problems too. Not much blame can be put on Intel though; they had Linux drivers out publicly before the motherboards based upon the chipset were even available to the public! Linux being a more...errr...diverse ecosystem means it is a bit more challenging to package and distribute such divers (alas, my board did not include binary packages suitable for Ubuntu with the appropriate modules backported to the kernel in 8.04).
So, I've been running 8.10alpha5 (and upgrading as alphas and betas became available) and had more luck (still no digital audio out, but I may need to tune my system--and for a couple weeks I had to disable onboard NIC and use a cheapo spare to keep the e1000e driver from bricking it--ubuntu blacklisted it anyways and has since fixed it and I am using my onboard 1000bT again--but considering it is pre-release quality I cannot complain).
Trouble is, I spent way too much time messing with Linux before, and now I no longer have that patience.
Honestly, aside from using alpha and beta distros, it has been YEARS since I've had to "mess around" with Linux. As a matter of fact it is faster and easier to set up a "bare" PC with Ubuntu (or Fedora or SuSE for that matter) than it is with Windows. Ubuntu install is done faster, I can run a 3-D desktop just as well on literally half the machine Vista requires, updates and upgrades are easier and faster, there is NOTHING like "software repositories" for Windows--you always have to insert a damn disk or explicitly google and download an EXE or MSI and you cannot install applications with MSFT update--only upgrade. when I do a fresh install of Windows I ALWAYS need to run Windows update and reboot 2 or 3 times, and with new hardware you still need vendor drivers, sometimes event to get out of the initial install phase! Hell, I hardly have the patience for WINDOWS anymore!
As to your assertions about barriers to Linux adoption:
1 - there is no lack of standards, just resistance to universal adoption. There are many Debian-derived distros that use the same package format and can work against the same repositories. There is Fedors, RHEL, SuSE,Mandriva, etc that all use the same "standard" in RPM and related apt/synaptic style management and update tools, and above that is the LSB that not only specifies standard packaging and deployment practices, it outlines a cross-distro binary compatibility standard!
For some reason, for every complaint about lack of a single standard there is a chorus of calls against any and all attempt at establishing a formal or de-facto standard! Perhaps it is because in the MSFT and Apple worlds there is no choice because standards are so entrenched--to the point of lock-in. People that move to Linux right now LIKE the choice and don't want to lose it in the process of creating standards.
2 - I fail to see the point here. When people have problems with Windows the exact same thing happens--some Windows guru saying to do something way above a beginner's head, useless tech support, etc. The average joe still has to rely on forums (which are relatively useless for windows compared to Linux), second computers, or an expert friend or coworker. In fact, I think your argument here is quite false: If an average Joe user starts off with an Ubuntu system that is working, it continues to work and is LESS likely to just break with everyday use. Windows, however, seems to break much easier with normal use--installing and uninstalling, various upgrades that break other things and above all VIRUSES.
I guess Iguana was too obvious.
Perhaps Novel would take issue with a moniker similar to the one used on their distribution for many years now.
And this is why a universal ID system just can't work.
It can and it does work. The internet has a unique identifier for any given computer that is online at any given time. Yes, there is NAT and things that mean that many many machines have IPs like 192.168.1.1 but they are still uniquely addressable via the combination of IP addresses in the route to the machine (ie. the public IP used by the NAT router plus the local IP of the computer). MAC addresses and IPv6 addresses are numerous enough to uniquely identify users too. Further layers of apps/protocols/etc make these unique identifiers more user-friendly.
But how do I hide it from the web provider I log in to?
You don't. You choose a trustworthy provider. for some people that means BEING YOUR OWN PROVIDER--which is technically very possible with OpenID. Why would you need to hid your own information from yourself?
Also, isn't the present dog's breakfast of different authentication systems WORSE than OpenID? You give all this personal info, in varying formats, to multitudes of different entities and it is absolutely impossible to knwo where it is going. There are two sides to the traceability potentials in OpenID--and the flipside is that YOU can trace YOUR OWN info by providing your own identity. Proprietary systems or even big OpenID provider-only outfits like MSFT take that ability away.
You are now dependent on 2 provider's being up at the same time
No matter how OpenID is implemented that is ALWAYS how it works...THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT. You CANNOT have decentralised universal authentication schemes without the authentication provider plus an application provider being available. It's no different from Active Directory but on an internet-wide scale--you lose the ability to authorise if you lose contact with the AD server, even inf the DB server is on-line, but still AD/LDAP/Kerberos/whatever central directory service is considered essential in enterprise environments. Why are people find the concept to be a bad idea on the 'net?
And this still doesn't provide any simplification like using the same ID to login everywhere
You are totally wrong. It simplifies a whole bunch of stuff. You keep your identity information with one provider of your choice--even yourself. You only need to remember one password (or two, if you have a backup identity) even if you had different aliases on every site (and login aliases would be easier to remember than passwords, and safe to reuse everywhere). OpenID-style authentication could be used to manage name, address, e-commerce info without having to re-enter it everywhere--you only have to deal with the provider (again, it could be yourself) which would make it practical to control who gets access to what info (so requests from openID consumers could be denied to sensitive info if they are not white-listed)
OpenID is more than having a single, simple login name used everywhere--that is the one place you are right. It is easy to uniquely identify every internet user, but not practical to make it easily human readable. That is not really what OpenID is out there to solve--simple aliases/avatars are more of an "application level" domain issue, not a "service/utility level" issue as authentication and authorisation are.
If I was in charge of the Right Brigade, I would change the nexus from some server-in-the-sky to your PC storing/providing authentication. I know that's crazy-talk, being responsible for your own identity and everything. Just call me old-fashioned.
Absolutely not..it is quite forward thinking IMHO. I think that the concept behind OpenID is exactly what the 'net needs, because it enables exactly that--the barrier is technically pretty low to provide your openID yourself--on your very own system! The fact that such a thing is considered "crazy talk" seems sad to me. Something that acts as a "server" should not be considered "too technical" or "for experts only"--such thinking is almost criminal, and ISPs should not be allowed to keep customers from having ports listening on the 'net (there is not technical reason to block servers...NONE. My ISP doesn't and it provides MUCH better service quality than the main big cable/telco companies that do such nonsense).
To really "fix the 'net" I think the best slution would be to foster the belief in "personal server appliances". People would have servers like they have TVs or stereos or telephones (or it could BE the TV or a stereo system component or telephone). Your personal server would provide your personal services (OpenID, mail server, personal web profile).
Sadly we are going the opposite way. It is very sad, this push for "cloud computing" the way cloud computing is implemented now. It is a throwback to the pre-Altair days of "cathedrals" and big intimidating building-sized systems run by a big corporation's lab-coated employees.
Don't get me wrong--I like the idea of seamlessly accessing data from everywhere from a big "cloud of systems"--it's just that the way it is done now is the wrong way. Google, Amazon, Microsoft...they all make these "artificial clouds" housed in big glass boxes where you set up your virtual hosts--they've hijacked the "cloud" term and used it for consolidation instead of distribution, which is the spirit in which the internet came to be.
This trend of big companies setting up OpenID provider services but not consuming is caveman thinking--or at least very anti-internet. If you are to implement openID support in your infrastructure, the proper thing to do would be to become a consumer FIRST. This just shows that MSFT hasn't changed at all--from the time BillG wrote his anti-piracy manifesto until today--they are fighting the true spirit of what open, personal computing was trying to be.
I want to be able to just login with my simple username Skapare [blogspot.com], not some site name.
That isn't the job of OpenID--that is the job of the OpenID consumer as far as I can tell. You wouldn't WANT OpenIDs to be simple like yahoo or twitter or DNS, because you cannot guarantee uniqueness and name squatters will just take all the simple ones and you have the same old problem again.
Proper implementation of OpenIDs would map the more complicated but unique URI-style ID to your site alias, and like any proper forum site does with email addresses your openID would be hidden from view for privacy reasons (so you don't get spammers and general marketing scum crawling forums to scrape your ID off of them and create a profile on you).
This way you can create a site-based avatar but have the same credentials globally. Also, a good OpenID consumer would provide for one-to-many mapping, so that one actual user on the site could log in with any number of credentials. That way, if your OpenID provider leaves you in the lurch (say MSFT botches up their service to discourage people from using it and uses that as justification to shut the service down) the OpenID consumer can fall back to an alternative (even its own auth scheme instead of openID).
When you log into such an OpenID compliant site it would work similar to Ubuntu's login--you would get a prompt for your user ID, then when you submit it would go away to see what ID provider/scheme you use then forward you to the proper authentication provider's site for the password (or whatever method they use to verify your ID). The site-specific profile determines the default, or you can override the default by entering the desired OpenID instead of your "simple alias".
Canada is general left leaning and pretty much small "l" liberal. Canada historically votes for a Federal Liberal party.
This is not correct. Canada is in general centrist and pretty much CAPITAL L Liberal. the Liberal party is Liberal in brand name only--there isn't much in the way of a longstanding political ideology in the Liberal party, which is the most likely reason why it has enjoyed power 2/3 of the nation's history. It is also the ONE AND ONLY political party that has existed continuously since confederation--another reason it historically has held power for most years.
The left is more fractured than ever with the NDP, Federal Liberals, and the Green party all spitting the vote.
Repeat after me: THE LIBERALS ARE NOT A LEFT WING PARTY. Nor, technically, are the Greens (they are supposed to be "agnostic" in that respect--policy is supposed to be shaped by environmental impact not traditional ideology) though they've positioned themselves quite leftward under May's leadership.
Dion took the Liberals leftward as that is his personal leanings, and it is what he figures was a good strategy to counter the Conservatives. Trudeau also took the Liberals quite leftward to seize power as the 1960s came to a close (it is also important to note that Liberals needed the help of an informal coalition with the socialist NDP to hold power during some of Trudeau's early years as PM).
The Liberals persist because they are historically the "Seinfeld" party (a political movement about nothing). Their ideology changes with the times. Prior to Trudeau Liberals weren't noted for being all that left, and Paul Martin's ideology wouldn't be that far off what many current Conservatives espouse.
The only way Canada will get a left leaning government again is if they unite themselves OR change to a method of proportional representation.
No, the only way Canada will get a left leaning government is if Canadian voters become left leaning themselves. By and large they are NOT. Some parts of Canada are (the "rust belt" in S Ontario where our cars are built, among other parts of Eastern Canada) and some are quite right wing (most of Western Canada). So, we get a government in the "mushy middle" (the Conservatives are really only nominally conservative if you really investigate how they've governed).
Trust me, if the Liberals merged with the NDP and bacame more stridently socialist they'd fare no better than the Reform party-not at all. They'd become regionally concentrated, they'd get no more than 1/2 of Ontario and would lose what little ground they have in the west. To win in the highly partisan, first-past-the-post system that is what happens to any governing party in Canada. The creation of the Conservative party and abandonment of some meaningful principles and ideologies of both camps in that merger was what made them a viable option to the corrupt Liberals in 2006. In 2008, Dion took the party leftward and look what happened--they lost ground more.
Now, if we had PR and other institutional reforms that would make minority govt's more functional we would indeed elect more left wing members, but make no mistake, we wouldn't become a socialist nation. We'd probably have stronger ideological parties--a stronger NDP and the re-emergence of a something like the Reform party. Canada would oscillate between coalition governments consisting of "centrist" non-ideological party teaming up with a right OR a left party.
Look at the popular vote. NDP and greens combined can at best muster up support in the 25 percent range. Despite Dion's left leanings, it would still be a reach to find even 1/2 of Liberal voters identifying as "left wing" or socialist (1/2 of liberal support would consitute around 14 percent). So, it would be a stretch to say that a left wing gov't would represent Canada better as it would--OPTIMISTICALLY--represent the around the same number of voters as the Conservative
Very few outside of geeks care about the DMCA.
This statement belies an ignorance of the issue here in Canada. It seems to me a good portion of the debate is around media and culture and content than technology. It isn't a big issue at the moment, but I'd say it is more broad based and proportionally larger issue here than in the US, largely because of the cultural/"Canadian Identity" factor--the concern is that it is too "DMCA Like" through bullying from American "mafIAA" cartel groups. In the US, sovereignty risk is measured on dependency on foreign oil. Canada, a net exporter of oil with a trade surplus that is geographically huge but sparsely populated, has other concerns--namely around out cultural identity (being seen as more than a de-facto 51st state of the globally dominant next door neighbour). Though it is a minor issue on the political landscape, that environment makes C-61 more visible than it would be in the US.
This entire /. article, in fact, belies the ignorance that /. editors have of Canadian politics. Bill C-61 is not a product of a partisan/ideological movement within Canada. It is in fact the RE-introduction of a LIBERAL bill from the previous parliament (C-60) that died on the order table when the Liberals lost a confidence vote triggering the 2006 election. Not only was C-60 fundamentally similar to C-61, it was in fact slightly WORSE and MORE like the DMCA than C-61 was. Not only did the Liberals introduce "DMCA-Lite" into Parliament for debate with C-60.
C-60/61 was NOT about some "right wing" ideology and electing Liberals would've done next to NOTHING to reduce the likelihood of a re-emergence of a DMCA-like copyright bill. Previous (Liberal) governments made the decision to sign onto WIPO treaties and it is the obligations under that international treaty that C-60, and later C-61, owed their existence. The Liberals leadership has been silent on the issue and opposition to C-61 by Liberals was not only not universal, it was in the minority--less than 10 percent of Liberal candidates voiced any sort of objection to it.
The problem here is that the only partisan opposition to C-61 is from the socialist New Democrats and the Green party, which is a minor player in Canadian politics and seems firmly in the grip of socialist-minded interests as well, despite trying to distance itself from "left-right" positioning in the past. My history of political involvement began with the Reform party and continues on to some degree with the present governing Conservatives, yet I am opposed to Bill C-61. At a grass roots level, I can tell you that support for C-61 amongst Conservative voters is FAR from universal--quite far in fact. The present day Conservative party is an amalgamation of two now-defunct parties, and those from the Reform-Alliance part of that amalgamation include a sizable amount of "libertarian-minded" types and that party's policy was populist-driven (it positioned itself to the right not because Manning's or council's personal direction but because the party was formally founded in Alberta where people tend to be of that mindset, and such most members were from the west.
Though the formation of the new Conservative party helped unify opposition and break the Liberal stranglehold on parliament (where Cretien's Liberals were able to obtain majority status with nearly the same vote the Conservatives got last week in their minority win) it meant we lost what was a distinct choice in the Reform-Alliance option. That party has a real avenue for ground-floor supporters to shape policy that failed to get notice outside its base in Western Canada. Opposition to C-61 would've been a logical policy plank (as the bill countered the Reform position on defending individual rights) and a possibility (because policies in that party were directly influenced by the votes of individual members at constituency meetings).
It is important to note that Prentice (the minister that introduced C-61) h
Of course, cherry picking to find offensive things in the Quar'an isn't any better than quote mining the Bible.
...then you proceed to drive the point home like a railway spike to the head by picking a bushel of cherries yourself. Point taken...repeatedly.
Of course, the worst you'll be subjected to from about five-9's of all Christians is some load complaining and people being personally offended. By and large, Christianity is a highly tolerant faith.
If you took random quotes from, for example, Operating Thetan III, and posted them here you might very well face legal action from the Church of Scientology (regardless of what commentary you had interspersed with the quotes). Though quotations represent "fair dealing" to most, I'm sure they'd feel their IP has been violated as well as being offended personally and so they would litigate.
Now, it gets even worse...if you made such a post with similar quotes from the Qur'an you may be the subject of a Fatwa advocating the termination of your life.
Aside from perhaps a very small minority of nutbar cultists I know of no self-professed Christian that would advocate the death of anyone over commentary such as yours, yet many very prominent Muslim clerics and thousands of their followers to this day would feel more than justified in killing you on site if you presented a raft of quotes from their holy texts in such a manner. I know such extreme fundamentalists constitute a minority in the Islamic world, but to non-Muslims it can sometimes seem that too little is done to distance the mainstream faith from such perverted views. Thus, most non-Muslims aren't all that convinced that it is a "peaceful" faith.
If (no...WHEN) some movie, song, performance or work of art were to make use of Christian scripture in a less-than-tasteful manner, no doubt some Christian leaders would call for boycotts, ask distributors to change or pull the content or whatever. And, quite rightly they would be laughed off, ignored or rebuffed by the creators of those works. Honestly, why should Islam be treated so specially because of even trivial "blasphemous" use of their scripture? Why is it that cartoonists who have Jesus in a smackdown with Santa Claus on international TV (priceless South Park) is protected speech that should be defended vigourously, but to reproduce a simple doodle from a newspaper purported to represent Muhammed is considered tasteless, offensive and disrespectful to the point that advertisers will boycott and clerics call for Jihad? Just what was said to these distributors to make them delay release and issue a massive recall? This would NEVER happen if the Lord's Prayer was used in a context Christians didn't like--even if it was the Pope himself who protested.
Sometimes I wonder if the most devout don't take the Bible/Torah or Qur'an out of context as much as detractors such as yourself do. It sure explains how in this day and age we still have to deal with this kind of crap.
You don't have to be a financial expert to know that just ain't right.
No, it ain't right at all, but I'm curious to know how you'd make it right. Would you somehow force big companies to hand over their obligatory pound of flesh (ie. treat the symptom/apply a bandage) or would you fix America? The US is full of people, companies and governments that spend far beyond their means. Why were people caught offguard with this credit crunch? It is any surprise at all when some loser fast food restaurant assistant manager could get a no-down, 40 our mortgage to buy a $500k by simply showing some banker their last paycheque stub? Do that enough and the bubble's going to pop, and millions of people will find themselves with negative equity.
If you (a company, or any person) has money, would YOU entrust it to the flaky US economy right now, where dodgy investment banks embedded all these bad loans into CDOs and other byzantine asset-backed paper to hide their tracks, got levereged at 100 to 1 or more, and fostered a sense of entitlement in the populace, where everyone deserved to own a home?
If you NEED money, would you be able to get it in the US, even if your credit rating is good and you have the income to easily make payments? In the US, Toyota's sales fell around 30% in the last quarter and in Canada they went UP a couple percent. Canada is right next door, inflation is similar, unemployment is similar, average salaries are slightly LOWER--cars are no less affordable in Canada and the economy is slowing there too, so what is the difference? There is no credit squeeze and the Canadian economy is still reasonably capitalised, and the banks are still profitable. There aren't 30 percent les people in the US suddenly unable to afford to have a new car--it's that the US banks are so messed up they cannot make loans (or are afraid to).
When companies like Facebook start setting up offshore offices to do business, avoiding tax expenses is merely one main factor--they are avoiding expenses for reasons beyond greed; sometimes they are freeing up money for reinvestment. If a company cannot borrow to expand (as is the case in the US right now) they will find any way to cut costs to free up that money. They will also set up corporate subsidiaries offshore to make it easier to raise capital in THOSE markets when they can't at home.
There is a similar situation in Canada's history too actually; Commodore was founded by a Canadian immigrant and headquartered in Toronto. In the 1970s, it moved from making and selling typewriters and filing cabinets to electronics, and most of its sales by then shifted to the US market. The economy if Canada--and the US--was struggling, and like now the US$ suffered devaluation against the CA$, and inflation was going up while the overall economy was near recession.
In the 1970s, Canada had a socialist government under Trudeau. It was very interventionist and treated economic symptoms directly; it introduced laws limiting how fast both retail prices AND worker's pay could be raised to control inflation, it spent like a drunken sailor on welfare/social programmes and created FIRA to restrict foreign ownership of Canadian operations.
Almost everything the government did chased Commodore out of Canada. Commodore was suffering because the CA$ was worth more than a US$, making its calculators more expensive in the US, and on top of that like other companies from MITS with its Altair to Coleco's Telstar, it was having supplier problems (shortage of chips). Commodore decided to address both problems by buying and merging with MOS technology, so that it could be "vertically integrated" (be its own supplier of chips). The acquisition of MOS and restructuring meant too much foreign ownership, and taxes were going up, and the business climate in Canada was too hostile.
As a result, Commodore set up corporate HQ in the Bahamas and moved its operational facilities into MOS' Pennsylvania campus, and not long after Commodore enter
It sounds like a goof â" especially coming from a company that pledged to raise the bar on patent quality
Taking this approach with patents could be a strategy similar to how the FSF and EFF approach copyright. Stallman was offended by how copyright was being used to rob software of its freedom, so he developed a license enforced by copyright that could protect software freedom. EFF will, to the best of its abilities, enforce open licenses using copyright law to ensure those who incorporate copyrighted Free software is used as intended.
Perhaps IBM has this in mind when patenting a process to find areas of "white space" and locate opportunities for patent applications. IBM is known to be in support of reforms to the patent system to increase quality of submissions, and it has declared for some of its patents that Free software communities would not be subject to royalties, licensing or injunctions. It is a promising track record and hopefully it reflects what they would do with patents issued as a result of their new "invention".
Filing a patent application is probably the most iron-clad "prior-art" that one could provide, so anything that would make it easier for "good guys" to file patents would probably help. I do wish, however, that tactics like those used by "big corporate" IBM were being employed by the EFF or some neutral foundation or other organisation. Big corporate legal depts. are not altruistic and always act in the self interest of the company to some degree. The best idea would be to establish an "anti-troll" corporation as a foundation that would accumulate patents and offer them up under a Free-software-like license.
Sometimes fire really is best fought with fire...
One of the major problems is that open source software like OpenOffice.org and most Linux distributions are seriously lacking good UI design and usability
A rather specious argument if you ask me. Though there is still a lot of room for improvement in the Linux desktop, I believe it has progressed to the point that Linux desktops meet or exceed Windows in terms of usability. I've been running a GNOME environment under Ubuntu for some time now and notice that a great effort towards a consistent user interface amongst the "g" applications. The points of departure usually centre around the use of Qt/KDE apps within a GNOME environment or vice versa.
Contrast this with the MSFT experience which is a paragon of INconsistency. MSFT has a very poor track record in this matter--they expend a huge effort in developing the interface for Office OR Windows OR IE but don't appear to have any consistent overall vision to speak of. MSFT irks me on many levels when they out out a jazzy new release of Office that sticks out from the rest of the entire OS with new widgets and whatnot and make it look totally foreign to the rest of the desktop environment...until the next release of the OS appears a year or two later when the OS subsumes the control libraries from Office...and with every release it gets worse. Office 2007 and its wretched "ribbon" and the way it looks like ass on XP makes it the most unpleasant Office to use ever.
If you want simple and usable and fast, do yourself a favour--cobble together a basic GNOME desktop on Linux and toss in AbiWord and GNUMeric...fast, simple, consistent and can meet all the basic needs of typical users.
But I think taking legal action to force them to use free software is the wrong approch.
IT ISN'T ABOUT FORCING ANYTHING ON ANYONE. This is ALL ABOUT FOLLOWING THE RULES. This is taxpayer money being used to provide public infrastructure and by law MUST go to competitive bid! Lazy government buyers are using a "weasel clause" to avoid doing their jobs, arguing that there are no alternatives WITHOUT EVEN TRYING TO LOOK FOR THEM. I think a persuasive case can be made that Vista and Office 2007 are most definitely NOT the "more usable alternative" much less the cheapest. Government shouldn't be FORCED to use any selection, but they SHOULD be compelled to consider all submitted alternatives and make a proper effort to look for alternatives.
I think the right approach is for the open source communities to improve their development methods and spend more time designing usable and attractive software.
This is bollocks too. Both GNOME and KDE have expended a lot of effort to establish HIGs and compliance with one of a small handful of HIGs are high priority items on many projects. MSFT has "User experience guidelines"...that change with every edition of Windows and are ignored by Office developers in many cases.
This is a case of politics and laziness and backward thinking. Public servants do not stick out their necks for fear of being noticed, they do not do work that they aren't forced to do, and there is a built-in disincentive for bottom-level management to lower costs and increase efficiency. If a lower-level manager or front-line staff suggest something innovative and cost saving, a mid-level guy will shoot them down. If they do it anyways, they risk dismissal for "not going through proper channels".
Why is this? Because mid-level managers up to deputy ministers are allocated budgets largely based upon a) how many reports they have (people on staff) and b) the prevous year's expenditures. If they do extra work to get a competitive bid, and end up choosing Linux and it acutally works very WELL and they don't use up their budget and admins workload goes down, they've got a problem. Their budget is reduced and new hires are canceled or maybe there is a layoff or two. Then they have less direct reports than anticipated and are in charge of less
The problem is that solid state drives suffer from bit rot as others have described here.
That is why a traditional hard drive, or even better optical media, would be preferred. When not used and kept out of the elements (most notably very extreme temperatures or intense full-spectrum light from the sun) a CD or DVD would last far longer than 25 years.
Also, after 25 years it is doubtful that any PC or laptop will work.
I have a 24 year old Coleco ADAM that still works (this from a product that had a high failure rate when it was introduced in 1983, but that was due to firmware bugs and printer problems). I also have an 8-bit Atari computer manufactured 25 years ago that also turns on. I use neither very often at all--they've sat for periods of years between some uses as they sit in storage normally.
The CMOS battery will likely leak all over the place
Lithium batteries are quite durable and though they probably won't last 25 years they wouldn't destroy components. Since they'd likely discharge you might as well remove them entirely; most machines do not need the battery at all to boot up into some sort of workable state.
and the electrolytic capacitors will not work very well after 25 years (electrolytic capacitors also do poorly when they are unused for long periods of time)
Electrolytic capacitors do have a limited life. Crappy Chinese ones last 5 years and maybe less. The capacitors in old home PCs from the 80s were generally sourced from Japan and have a much longer lifespan. Also your contention that unused capacitors don't last as long is wrong; under heavy use, when temperature increases, they ware out faster. These days you can also get electrolytic capacitors that employ solid conductive polymers for the electrolytic layer--they are dry to start with so they don't dry out, and lifespan can approach 30 years under normal use. Such capacitors when unused would degrade very little in storage. These days such capacitors are more commonplace. Capacitors degrade fairly gradually when they're not defective--the majority slowly become open circuits, and they are used in fairly forgiving places such as DC power regulation, not in timing, clock, RF, etc.
The key is to include the media and a carefully selected player. It need not be a notebook--it could be just the drive itself with a USB connection, or a little DVD player. If you're really worried/paranoid you can crack it open to see if wet capacitors are used and replace them with solids. Anyways, capacitors don't change fast enough, they are a lump of something with 2 wires. I'm sure such components could be replaced easily (unlike ASICs and firmware and whatnot).
People make it sounds like a capsule being sent into space or encased in cement for centuries. It'll only be 25 years! We use CDs today and they existed 25 years ago, and IDE devices have been made for over 20 years and todays PATA connectors are compatible right back to the start. RS232-to-USB adapters exist to let you talk to devices from the 1970s. If you go spelunking on the 'net long enough you can find all sorts of specs and protocols. I talk to computer systems that exceed 20 years old quite often through work, where computers/processors sometimes see 30 years of use.
It is probably quite enough to just include the media and a bit of docs on the encoding methods/file formats (ISO9660 with JPEG and MPEG2, etc...), but for convenience you could put in a USB drive or a simple player or PC like the eee. That takes care of the hard stuff--figuring out how to use a 4-line serial bus with widely published specs and the like is trivial. The drive is the potential gotcha here--try to find 8" or even 5.25" drives is hard, but hacking up the means to connect to one that you've got is still easy today.