...most of the really exciting stuff is still quite far off.
Explorer rewriten from scratch.
I cannot say that it hasn't been a major rewrite, but I believe it is still not maanged code, and the real dramatic features will require quite a high end system. The improvements are quite dramatc if your rig has the power of course (icons that move and resize in real-time and in 3-d, windows that rotate in 3-d space to save screen real-estate, all the transparency and so forth). Seems like so much eye-candy though and my home rig doesn't have the horsepower. Besides, I'm more comfortable clicking my way around Nautilus now;-)
Monad. A real shell, which could possibly be much more powerfull than say bash+ standard Unix commands
Except that Monad is not going to be ready for Vista--it will not show up in any Microsoft product until the next major release of Windows Server (Server 2007 -- most likely the END of 2007). It does indeed look quite promising, and is fairly innovative in that it is supposed to be an "object oriented" shell. However, UNIX and Linux systems are more "open architecture" and there are quite a number of choices for shells. Linux's standard is BASH, but 2 years is a long way off, and by then maybe we Linux fans will be using a tricked out, Parrot/Perl6 based shell that kicks monad butt. Anyways, I think most Windows users don't realise the potential of a REAL shell typically provided on Linux or UNIX.
They're moving the graphics subsystems and all the bloody drivers in userland. That means it will be dead stable, period.
This is another "wait and see" thing. There is a huge legacy problem with Windows, and IMO for at least one more major version of Windows MS will probably have to allow old drivers intended to run in kernel-mode to operate for compatibility purposes. Application software can probably work fine through some sort of compatibility wrapper. I do believe the move will dramatically reduce BSODs and total system lockups, however I think that unstable legacy software and drivers will negatively affect stability--it's just that the crashes will be less catastrophic.
A hardware accelerated graphic system, ala Quartz.
If you want to see the true potential from this subsystem you'll need a massive graphics card (more massive hardware than for Quartz).
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
I agree wholeheartedly, MS has some impressive offerings...two to six years away. I've been privleged enough to have a closer look than most people however. Much of what is coming is already in Mac OS X, and with Linux, you don't have to sign an NDA or blow a whole paycheque or two on MSDN to look at the beta stuff. The fight to the top (or to stay on top) will certainly be exciting though.
but I wish I could use it to control which applications get to send data out.
I've configured a small PC made of leftover parts and a Linux installation to be my router/firewall. The ability to filter outbound traffic has been built into Linux for a long time (iptables, ipchains, etc) and there are applications like shorewall that help manage this. Best of all it is all free (and "Free").
I'm not a huge fan of most firewall solutions on Windows. I find them cumbersome, annoying and unstable. I HATE it when some nag-box comes up to tell me someone tried to access port x or ask me if program y can connect to the network. I know there are options to make things less obtrusive, but why make the most annoying configuration the default? I also seem to find that the more Symantec, Mcaffee, etc. software that is on a windows box, the crappier the performance. Might as well let the spyware and viruses run on there cuz the "cure" is almost as bad as the disease at times.
If I WERE to pick a firewall solution I could live with it would be something like Kerio, which semed to be the least annoying nd most simple to deal with...except maybe for the firewall bundled into Windows with XP SP2. I think Kerio would let you filter outbound traffic too, but I'm not 100% sure.
but they are certainly the loudest, the most outspoken and, yes, most of them are the early adopters
Isn't that the case with the "elites" in all media? They often tend to be the biggest loudmouths, and/or they usually have something new/unconventional to say or a new way of thinking. Think A-list actors that pose nude for PeTA or shock-jocks like Howard Stern...
For instance, less than 1/3 of all Simpy users use IE, and over 40% of them use Firefox
So what do the remaining 30 percent or so use for browsing? They must be REAL avant-guarde...
But does that make them the elite?
Well, yeah it often does. Early adopters have "first mover advantage". Those that pioneerred blogging are not the most established, and have the biggest following and thus the most influence...an elite by definition is someone with power or influence who is highly regarded (or very hated by those who lack power and influence).
I've been implementing a forum that never reloads.
Quite interesting, but I'd have my reservations with an all-AJAX forum. IMHO forums shouldn't break the REST behaviour of the traditional web model in very many places. I want the navigation buttons to work, and I want to be able to bookmark the URL and feel confident that when I visit that URL it will contain the posting that was there before. Yes, there are ways around this in AJAX but to fix what it inherently breaks takes more effort than I think should be required (I think those are the most important things to address--if you insist on AJAX make sure it takes care of the browser history/navigation and bookmark support).
As for minimising traffic, I've found I get the biggest "return on investment" (time and money-wise) by properly using CSS. Being an established standard, CSS suffers from fewer cross-browser issues, it degrades more gracefully and doesn't break important web behaviours. The CPU time to generate a well-formed HTML document that uses CSS for all its layout is not worth worrying about, and network traffic is reduced significantly because the CSS is cached, so the number of TCP/IP packets used to send the bare HTML document is not that much different from all the XmlHTTPRequest chatter.
That being said, your project looks very intriguing for other reasons. If your forum is more of a chatroom than a slash-style website then it could be very cool indeed--like MSN or Yahoo chatrooms with threads all updating in realtime. Perhaps you have features like that in mind. However it ends up, best of luck to you!
And if you want to print from gmail, it shouldn't be a print of the screen, but a specially built printable html page.
NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO!
I HATE this "printer-friendly-link" thing! There is already a print button on my toolbar and I'd rather not clutter my screen with a redundant icon/link.
Besides, such a practice is soooo pre-CSS last-decade...it belongs in the trashbin with those JPEG-jigsaw, bitmap-and-table layouts of yore. It is becoming more common to use an alternate stylesheet for print media that hides navigational elements, sets more printer-friendly colours and fonts and so on. That way you do not have to launch another window or move to another page, print then close a window or use the (hopefully functional) back button to resume browsing.
Please tell me you aren't one of those web deveopers that puts big flash-animated, zero-content splash pages and back-button-breaking scripting on their websites too...
It's easier to solve a problem if you know what caused the problem.
True enough. Problem is that humanity is a long way off from being mature and intelligent enough to determine exactly what sort of climate change to expect, much less the root cause of that change. Does human activity cause climate change? Absolutely. How much and in what way? We have no friggin clue and we wont in any of out lifetimes. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. Humanity's lack of maturity prevents us from putting aside politics and self-interest. We try but in the end out efforts are nearly futile. Our best effort to date many might say is the Kyoto accord and it is doomed to fail. And no, it isn't the fault of the Americans--even if the US signed on it would never work. Why? Because Kyoto is just another political/economic shell game. Developing nations are pretty much exempt from making an effort at reducing CO2 emissions (including 800-pound-gorilla China). I don't care what reasons are behind such exemptions--if we want to affect global change the whole globe must participate. Second of all, there is "selfishness" involved. It is easy enough for the likes of Germany and France to look down their noses at the US and trumpet their wonderful CO2 reductions: France just throws up more nuclear generation and Germany gets to count all those communist-era east-German soot-belching factories in their starting numbers. Then there are nations like Canada, where the infrastructure is already quite modern and efficient for the most part and the cold climate and sparse population make it more difficult to meet targets legitimately--most of those reductions will be met by playing the shell game and trading pollution credits. In the end it means no meaningful impact on climate change.
2. To paraphrase a favourite sci-fi author: "The universe is mind-bogglingly complex". Scientists know almost nothing about the direction of climate change. They have pretty little computer models that make predictions and they can make vague (and often conflicting) pronouncements about the earth heating up or more hurricanes or ice ages and whatnot. In the meantime the good people at Environment Canada cannot even predict the weather two days in advance with any reliability at all. How can we get the "immature public" to buy into a more climate-friendly lifestyle with that kind of track record? The weatherman tells them it'll snow in two days with the accuracy of a coin toss. Big, smart scientists with expensive supercomputers tell us the world is heating up...no wait we are going into an ice age (which was the prevailing theory in the 1970s)...no wait we are heating up (1980s to now)...no wait...the world will heat up a bit, but some places will be really dry and others really wet...no wait...we ARE going to have a sudden ice age...because of global warming melting ice and cooling the oceans....what the hell? Our smartest people cant quite wrap their brains around it much less the general public (I like most others are pretty much mentally retarded on the subject though most like to think theyknow something about it).
I'm sure someone will argue the merits of Kyoto (maybe there are some--I just don't see how it'll change the world meaningfully). Others will argue that science is proving itself now (gee, look at all the hurricanes we had this year--never mind the fact it was only one or two more than the previous record set many decades previously, before we had the technology to spot those that didn't make landfall near civilisation). Thing is, the pronouncements we make and the justifications for Kyotot-like manoeuvring are so vague it is like proving Nostradamus was right.
In the meantime, bandages and maybe a makeshift torniquet is all we have to keep us from bleeding to death in terms of climate change. I figure we should put more emphasis on more concrete, proven environmental factors--like living sustainably (use less energy--get rid of the big old SUVs. Get your lazy ass out of the captain's
...as you are not fully informed on certain points:
Is there anything out there equivalent to windows update? Windows wins this one
You are totally mistaken. I run OpenSuSE and the equivalent to Windows Update is called YOU (YaST Online Updater). I have it configured to be fully automated--it installs all critical updates on a weekly basis without my intervention (YaST sets up the cron job for you through a very simple interface--it can be done daily weekly or monthly).
YOU is superior to Windows Update because it can be used to update ALL the software in all the repositories you have selected to check. Unlike the inferior Windows Update, you have greater control and visibility of WHERE you wish to obtain your updates and WHEN you want them to happen...you could theoretically connect to properly configured repositories of third-party software packages to update via YOU. In Windows, the updater is a too-closed system...it is unable to update anything but the OS and related components....LINUX (at least OpenSuSE) wins THIS one...
This shouldn't be discussed under 'linux vs windows', this is more the case of 'linux software vs windows software'
I agree with you there--and the study in question really used flawed criteria in selecting software--one I call the "pointy-haired-boss methodology": select based on false, marketing-oriented metrics and buzzwords like "best of breed" and "market share leader" rather than on sound technical criteria. Furthermore the study authors dictated poor practices must be done in deploying the software--ie. you must do it "the windows way". No staging on a test system? No virtualisation? No proper testing before promotion to production? Just because Windows people don't to these things (or it is "cutting edge" for them) doesn't mean Linux shouldn't be hobbled with bad applications and admin practices. Besides, one admin DID get the dogs-breakfast working by doing something Windows admins rarely have the ability to do: he custom compiled modules to make it work.
I'd say that with the more mature, powerful and flexible options available on an open system that Linux wins here too...
This would be the comparison of genkernel and the rest of the beasts in the pack with "Files and Settings transfer wiZZard":). Linux wins this one.
Agreed. Also, don't even mention the headaches of changing HARDWARE on a Windows system--like when the capacitors blow on your mobo and the replacement is a revision B with a different onboard IDE/ATA chipset (all other things being equal)....wonderful BSOD-land and journey through the emergency repair console and emergency repair disks. You'd figure that if Windows got far enough to boot, load the startup screen and the first few drivers it wouldn't forget how to use the hard disk controller 1/2 way through the startup process. I've found that with Linux, if the HD boots then you can count on Linux getting to the login prompt much more reliably than with Windows.
I found Dr. Thompson to be very forthcoming and objective in his responses, and certainly not a "Microsoft shill". From his responses I think he was asked to deliver a specific study by Microsoft, and he followed the MS request as closely and objectively as possible. That said, I think that the scenarios he studied don't exactly match real-world practise. He did, however, seem to welcome and encourage scruitiny of his study and others before making critical decisions rather than taking action based on reading executive summaries.
Anyways, here is my "Coles Notes" version (Cliff Notes for those American readers out there):
1. Q: what assumptions did you make in your study and how did they affect the results?
A: Lot of verbage around "every organisation is different/this depends/that depends/etc"...eCommerce application with constatly changing needs (not a steadty-state system), 3rd party software installed, all critical updates applied, upgrade OS at end of study...etc.
2. Q: I'm an IT grunt...every MS-sponsored study I've read is total crap (doesn't reflect my experiences) and many others feel the same. Doesn't this make doing MS-sponsored studies a risk to your credibility?
A: Regardless of funding our studies are objective, peer-reviewed, etc. but you have to carefully read the study and its methodology to see how it matches your situation. More verbage about "it depends" etc...infers that Windows (or Linux) might be better for you.
3. Q: No fair! Linux admins were made to run multiple versions of db on one machine and other unwise/unsupported stuff and Windows users just had to use one DB and didn't have to do such stupid things! Real sysadmins in ay case would use vritual machines or staging hardware.
A: Study wasn't supposed to cover performing the same tasks--it was to make each platform meet the same end goals. We chose 3rd party packages based solely on market share and in the case of Linux thosed packages needed this sort of work done. In Dr. Thompson's opinion he agrees VM or other hardware would've been best but this still represents "more pain" than Windows.
(question 3 in MY opinion reveals a big reason why this study is flawed--see below)
4. Q: Did MS invent the metrics/methodology or did you come up with them?
A: MS did NOT come up with these--MS asks for a study on certain qualities/characteristics and we insist on independenly developing the study metrics and methodology. MS risks getting results that are not in their favour but it is their choice whether to release the study publically. If they don't they at least get value for their money in the form of suggestions to improve their offerings.
5. Q: Diebold makes crap voting machines but we never hear of serious issues with their ATMs. Why is that?
A: Saying Diebold voting machines "concern" him is a "serious understatement". Can't make an informed assesment on ATMs but they are probably more secure and reliable because they are carefully watched 24/7/365 by banks AND their customers to make sure they work right--functions and their results very visible. Voting machines are not scruitinised as thoroughly and are only looked at during elections. Advocates "checks and balances" and more openness and accountability (letting independent security experts have more access to the systems, etc).
6. Q: Why did you require more experience from Windows admins?
A: Oops..that was a typo as a reult of upping the experience reqs for ALL admins. Requirements were matched as closely as possible.
7. Q: study was so small--hw can you make any statements about the benefits of one over the other? How does your study really show "monolithic" windows is better than "modular" linux?
A: It doesn't--study like this cannot make "sweeping generalisations" about any platform--it studies reliability in a certain scenario. Should
Ever notice the names of industry lobby groups...
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...often convey meanings or philosophies exactly opposite of those actually espoused by the organisation?
The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.
It is indeed. Also note that they are strong proponents of software patents (which are totally inappropriate--the solution to any problems with software IP should be addressed with copyright reform) and have lobbied for the retention of Microsoft formats as standards in government. Apparently merely the ability of non-MS employees to see the specs without paying a boatload of money for the privlege is as open as any of us deserve.
The issue is really being badly distorted. No government in the world has brought forward legislation to shut closed source applications out of competition--the closest any policy comes to that ANYWHERE is to simply require that at least one open source alternative be included in a bid/selection process. State legislation mandating the use of officially open-standard file formats makes no mention of open source at all. Microsoft, Corel, Sun or any other corporation is still welcome to provide software to governments under such a policy. All it requires is that import and export filters be available to support proper file format standards. This INCREASES choice and makes industry competition MORE open and fair. One would think that an organisation named "initiative for SOFTWARE CHOICE" would embrace such a policy.
Instead, this supposedly "capitalist-friendly" advocate of "choice" is fighting hard to preserve strong IP laws and shut out open standards. This is neither democratic NOR capitalist. Ms. Wyne and her compatriots at the ISC are really against choice and are essentailly promoting communist/socialist ideas: they advocate the protection and promotion of business models that perpetually rely on protectionist government legislation, and attempt to block legislation that threatens the position of protected monopolies by exposing them to genuine competition.
Really, it isn't like the government is forcing Microsoft to hand over all the specs to Office file formats so the govenrnment can use taxpayer dollars to develop compatible software to distribute to every citizen for $0. THAT would be "communist" or "pre-Boston-tea-party". I'd like to know what MS is so afraid of. With their resources it would be trivial for MS to make OpenDocument filters for its Office applications. Are they so insecure about their products that they need special legislative conditions to assure their market position? I happen to think that apps like MS Word and PowerPoint are great in terms of features and usability that can compete on their own merits without lock-in. Yes the competition would be more challenging if it were more easily made compatible, but is there something wrong with Microsoft that they cannot survive without 80 percent of the price of their software being profit margin and even higher percentages in market share?
The "Initiative for Software Choice" indeed...the choice of software vendors to lock-in users as they please perhaps. It is certainly not about true choice.
On a slightly offtopic rant I'm rather sick of populated areas (typically blue states in the US) subsidizing rural ones (typically red states in the US).
Hmmm...descides being a rather incendiary comment it also demonstrates your complete ignorance of geography. Saskatchewan is rural, but is nether a state nor is it "red". Saskatchewan is probably best described as an "orange province" (Canada does not have states--it has provinces, and Saskatchewan has a "New Democratic" (NDP) government, and the colour representation of the NDP is orange). Saskatchewan politics is for the most part more "liberal left" than any given American "blue state".
Why should we have to pay more for our phone service/electricity/roads/etc, etc, etc just so you can afford yours?
Why? So you can afford to sit on your ass in a Manhattan McDonalds eating Big Macs, french fries and pop. That stuff all has to be grown, harvested and processed somewhere, and city dwellers seem to have very little tolerance for the typical farming activities (noisy dusty tractors, smelly feedlots, etc) required to provide urban conveniences. Perhaps we should plough under the whole of Central Park, fence it in barbed wire and plant wheat there. We could also mandate that all city buildings be equipped with thick sod roofs to accomodate potato growing operations. Also, every dwelling with a back yard in the city should be turned over to feed at least one head of cattle and every restaurant and supermarket should have finishing and slaughtering facilities on premesis.
If you like living in the middle of nowhere so much then be prepared to pay for it.
If you like living in you pleasant little sterile box in the city so much, with all your conveniences provided to you within minutes, then be prepared to pay for it. Selfish bastard.
All the heat coming off your gasoline engine is waste heat anyway. That represents inefficacy. So even if you had to run an electric heater the BEV is still better for the environment.
You have never experienced a Canadian Prairie winter have you? At temperatures approaching -30 there really is NO surplus heat energy coming from the engine. In my car, on such a cold winter day, the radiator fan never starts and the radiator thermostat valve does not open--all the circulating coolat goes through just the engine block and heater core--and at that the interior temperature is just comfortable with the temperature control at maximum.
I have an electric heater that I occasionally use in my garage when I'm working out there on winter dyas. The power consumption is massive and on very cold days it basically only warms up the immediate vicinity enough so my un-gloved hands do not get frostbitten. Electric heating element + electric fan motors = huge power drain. That would destroy the already barely-adequate range of contemporary electric vehicles (and given that rural dwellers drive mostly highway miles and wouldn't have the opportunity to make use of regenerative braking even 300 miles is a very optimistic number).
Besides all that, one of the more interesting ideas I've seen involves a BEV with an a trailer that you could hook up for long distance trips.
A trailer would weigh way too much and kill the drag coefficient of your vehicle, and basically provide next to no improvements in range. I also can't imagine a Prius-like vehicle towing a heavy trailer would handle very well or be very safe on icy roads.
How often would you need that functionality? Heck, I could get by 95% of the time if my BEV only had 100 miles of range
I think that not being able to use my vehicle 5 percent of the time would be quite annoying. FYI a resident of a rural area like perhaps Broadview or Whitewood might want to travel to somewhere like Regina on a monthly basis--that round trip is probably well over 300 miles--all highway too which would kill batteries faster. Unless such electric vehicles were so inexpensive that it could be aff
Would you accept that the US of A is a plutocratic/democratic republic?
I'd say that's a fair assessment--Americans form governments through elections (democratic process) that are heavilly influenced by money--especially coporate money (a plutocracy). The only real way to restrict the (usually corruptive) influence of wealth in government is through an informed, involved electorate. Unfortunately the American electorate is neither.
Not so sure about Canada, which is also in America.
As a Canadian I can tell you that the same is very true here, though in slightly different ways. In the US, those critical of the government point to the heavy influence the oil industry has in Washington. In Canada, that influence is provided by the information/entertainment industry. Besides having the govenrment-owned CBC network, the two major privately-owned canadian networks/media conglomerates (Bell-Sympatico-CTV and Global) are owned and run by very major supporters of the governing Liberal party (financially and through direct political involvement). I've found that despite being government owned and obviously socialist editorially that the CBC is probably a bit more critical/objective in its stories about the government even though the government owns it.
In Quebec in particular, most advertising agencies providing services to the government have been major donors to the Liberal party and have provided staff--on paid company time--to "volunteer" for Liberal campaigns. This behaviour goes quite a bit beyond even the deplorable bid-selection behaviour of the previous Mulroney government. If the uninformed have any doubts about the influence that the media and (dirty) money have on Canadian politics, take some time to look at the Gomery Inquiry report. Lobby money certainly does run Canada and the Canadian electorate is even less involved than their American counterparts.
As far as this new patent initiative by these major corporations, it is merely fortunate that they are acting in the best interests of consumers and innovation. We need a "movement" involved in patents equivalent to what GNU provides for copyright. Given the higher barrier to entry in the patent system it was much less likely to happen based on the efforts of a few dedicated individuals, and given the nature of our governments, even less likely that they would spearhead such an initiative.
Not only is the meaning of the name not apparent (etymology anyone?), but it's not even clear how it should be pronounced.
The PostgreSQL project was founded by UCB Professor Dr. Michael Stonebraker--the same person who founded the INGRES database project. At the time, the INGRES academic project was concluded and the product was commercialised and further developed by Computer Associates (I believe there was a non-commercial fork that still exists today). Since Stonebraker's new project was started to do "post-INGRES database research" the project came to be known as PostGRES.
Development on PostGRES was rapid and successful, and combined with the fact the source was pubically available it developed a growing following outside the university (it found a niche as a popular database for storing astronomical data among other things). Soon, the academic researchers were spending too much time supporting the project and the project was officially closed in the early-mid 90s (this was release 4.2...? Version 4.something anyways).
At this point the project forked just as its predecessor INGRES did years before. Stonebraker formed a company called Illustra to commercialise the product. Illustra was eventually acquired by Informix and what started as PostGRES became "Informix Online Dynamic Server". This is now a still-active IBM property.
The second fork came about as a product of two of Stonebraker's graduate students (Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen). There was still great interest in PostGRES and one of the biggest requests was to migrate from the nonstandard QUEL to SQL as the query language. Yu and Chen added this change and released Postgres95 (Illustra/Informix also moved to SQL but I believe Yu and Chen beat them to the punch, although Illustra was much more stable once it was released). The version number was reset to 1.0 but this is generally considered "Version 5".
Improving the stability and performance of Postgres95 at the pace demanded by its growing user base was too much for two busy grad students, so the international development team that exists today was formed to take on the task. The name Postgres95 was rather hated, as it dated the project and created an association with a rather undesirable product (and it made no sense to make such an association as Windows 95 is incapable of running any version of Postgres). The name was changed to PostgreSQL ("Postgres with SQL" as opposed to the original Postgres that used QUEL). The versioning resumed continuity with the original PostGRES project (so 95==5.x and the first PostgreSQL was version 6.0).
Pronounciation: Linux has suffered from this ambiguity as well and it has done nothing to limit its success. As for PostgreSQL it is most commonly pronounced "Postgress Cue Elle". I've heard people say "Postgressequel" as well though it seems that is about as well regarded as pronouncing Linux "Lie nucks".
Thaks to the PostgreSQL team for all your hard work...with every major release you blow me away with pleasant surprises well worth the dump and restore. This time around the integration of auto-vacuum is very nice, and the revamped user/role privlige system even more so.
Determining auto traffic based on cellphone use seems like quite a dumb idea to me. And if it actually worked that's a bit frightening.
People ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO JAW ON THEIR CELLPHONES WHILST DRIVING! I personally hate compulsive cellphone-drivers and I seldom use my phone in the car at all even as a passenger, and I never answer it while I'm driving. The danger of such behaviour seems obvious to me. I'd expect that automotive cellphone use will taper off as more people realise this and more juristictions make it illegal.
I question the ability of even the most sophisticated math to accurately determine the percentage of all drivers actively using their cellphones at any given time. Seriously, what is wrong with cameras or strategically-placed pressure-sensors on the road? Seems a whole lot less complicated and more effective. It makes me suspicious about the true intentions of such surveillence technology when it is touted over more common-sense alternatives.
...in federal politics--especially in North America.
I've always found US politics especially amusing in the blatant abuse of "omnibus" legislation. IIRC y'all decided you wanted more daylight savings time and so some sneaky lawyer-type snuck the statute into this gigantic omnibus energy bill--in amongst thousands of pages about everything from pollution regulation to northern oil exploration. By the time the public knew about it the decision was pretty much a done deal. Yes, some pinhead did a study saying that we'd be saving more daylight and thus use less energy in lighting the nation's offices. If you ask me, lumping together a whole bunch of crap with only the slightest bit of related points is completely asinine.
I figure that a lot of this MPAA/RIAA garbage wouldn't stand a chance on its own, however I envision some sort of "omnibus telecommunications bill" that will encompass anything that remotely has to do with communications. In amongst thousands of pages on everything from regulations on VoIP and encryption software to tougher punishments for electronic distribution of child pornography will be a law outlawing the record button on your VCR. That way, congressmen won't have to bother with the tedious work of voting ten thousand times, and those with a pocketfull of RIAAbucks can accuse their opponents of being "soft on child porn" or supporting "terrorists who want to hide behind encryption" if they vote against the omnibus bill because of the insideous Hollywood-lobbyist provisions.
After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry
On what planet do they implement your "industry standards"? It's certainly not Earth. I have all my financial records since 1993, and the Canadian Revenue Agency can demand up to seven years of records in its tax audits. Many people report that Office 2003 has a lot of trouble with Office 97-formatted documents. Hmmm....2003-1997=6... seems to me that Microsoft already falls short of Canadian government requirements. I'm guessing they fall short in most other juristictions as well.
5 years being a good company/product to deal with
The customers of my employer would beg to differ. We are contractually obligated to offer at least 15 years of compatibility, and some of our current products can and must still interoperate with data and devices produced by equipment we sold 20 years ago and earlier. Eight years is only "ancient" to gerbils my friend.
Those with your mindset are what peeves me off about the PC and consumer electronics industries, really. Microsoft is but the biggest offender of a large number as well--almost all proprietary software vendors share this fault. It takes more effort to preserve compatibility but it CAN be done effectively--just look at what is done in financial and industrial systems.
...you get what you pay for (whereas the opposite is true about "Libre" free software)
I work in the medical field, and a free 4GB-max "validated" Oracle database is a huge boon to a wide variety of medical ISV's.
I can't speak for regulations in the medical industry, but I have had to certify point-of-sale applications that involve communication with credit/debit-card authorisation systems. Trust me--it does not matter if you use Oracle or MSSQL or PostgreSQL as your database engine--you still have to pay the testing fees and do the battery of verification tests for your application before they permit you to connect to the live system.
The only way you'd avoid such an exercise would be if Oracle or others developed and certified the application themselves and you were just implementing it--an example would be if you wrote some mod-perl to call PayPal services. That would not need certification with banks because the transaction is carried out on Paypal's already-certified systems and you are merely calling the function. However, Paypal needed to do much more than use a certified database. Such certification of a database engine doesn't mean the application/solution is automatically good to go. Perhaps there are pre-certified modules in Oracle Financials, but don't count on this "lite" no-cost Oracle data engine being certified for anything of importance.
Validate it, clean up a few features (notably auto-vacuum and passable auto-tuning, maybe some multi-master replication), throw in a simple deployment for ORM or database indirection, and you've effectively moved that commoditization up one layer from the small website developer level.
With respect to PostgreSQL, it seems that it is developing at a relatively quick pace and I don't see how Sun's participation (or lack thereof) will have a notable effect on the development of the advanced features you mention such as multi-master replication, and the tuning abilities of PostgreSQL have improved noticeably in recent releases (and though the manual VACUUM is an annoyance to some, in all but a very few applications it wouldn't kill you to add a line to your crontab file). OTOH, this "validation" of which you speak is not likely to happen very easily. Compliance with industry regulation requires money even when all your developers are volunteers. Furthermore, every release of the product would have to be re-certified.
A "verified" version of PostgreSQL is more likely than mySQL IMHO, but I don't believe you'd ever see such a version freely available--more than likely it would only be available from Red Hat and/or Sun. And, since PostgreSQL is BSD and not GPL any source code changes required to meet regulations need not be made public. Red Hat may be more chartible in that respect, but given Sun's selective commitment to Free software I wouldn't count on it.
... a long overdue shift in priorities from raw clock speed to efficiency.
I have some systems here that are long overdue for an upgrade (4 and 6 years old--only thing that has been updated is hard drive and memory capacity). I do not need to upgrade to increase computational power or even capacity--I do not do gaming or intensive 3d rendering or anything and the computers in question are a couple of linux servers that host a few web sites, email accounts, a modest database server (less than 5 million records in a couple dozen tables of a handful of databases), file server. It is a small-office type setup and it hardly taxes the old hardware.
So why do I have to upgrade? The first reason I had was reliability. The Athlon-powered machine suffered a near-meltdown when the CPU fan failed not long ago and I suspect that there was some hardware damage as the machione started behaving flaky after the incident even though the new fan kept the machine cooler than ever. I disables some unused onboard peripherals in the BIOS (sound, serial ports etc) and the problem went away....hmmm doesn't look good.
However the second reason I have looked at is even more compelling than reliability, and that is POWER CONSUMPTION. Those old Intel and AMD processors run pretty hot and use a lot of power, and as servers they run 24/7/365. I was looking at my latest elecetricity bill and decided to do some calculations. I could realise MORE THAN $50 IN SAVINGS PER YEAR for every reduction of just 100 watts of power consumption. I came across one of those silly PC-modder articles of the nature that sometimes find themselves posted on/. Normally I just think "what's the point" when I read about people wasting their time defacing classic hardware ranging from Sega Megadrives to Atari 800s and Commodore PETs in order to make novelty PCs. But there was a common element in them: those tiny little Mini ITX boards VIA makes. They not only take very little space but it seemed they also had very modest power requirements.
I looked into it and found that even the lower-powered fanless boards could replace the web server/file server. Not only would it be compact and quiet, but the entire system would use less power than the CPU chip alone in the current machines (which exceed 60 watts each). If I replace the old machines with EPIA boards I could save in the hundreds per year!
IIRC both AMD and Intel are realising what VIA and Transmeta did years ago--that the clock-speed race is completely pointless now. Not only do both companies invest heavily in mobile technologies--that technology is finding its way into desktops and servers as well. About bloody time I think. It'd be great if this turns into a golf-score style contest of watts-per-flop race.
There is no evidence supporting your argument.
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
This is one area where Open Source has its weakness.
Cutting down and optimizing existing code is not nearly as glorious as adding new features.
Exactly how did you arrive at that conclusion, by pulling it out of your butt after reading this one article? There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that open source promotes feature-creep and bloat. In fact the opposite could be true.
Try to compare OO.o to previous versions of itself rather than just MS Office. On the same hardware you'll find OO.o starts faster and consumes less resources than previous versions. I've NEVER seen the same trend in MS Office or ANY Microsoft products--in fact major upgrades of ALL MS software have consumed more hard drive space and had the same or higher recommended system requirements. Yes, OO.o probably does still not compare well for efficiency compared to MS Office, but with each new release the gap closes. I'm betting that the next version of OO.o will be a bit more efficient, while the next release of MS Office will be less efficient.
Your assumption that adding features is the most "glorious" task and thus receives the most attention from F/OSS develoers is also somewhat flawed. Efficiency and clever solutions tend to be the greatest source of pride in terms of engineering, and I find that open source developers usually take a more engineering-like approach to their creations than commercial developers, where marketing is the biggest driving force. It seems to me that the FOSS culture is influenced by the open culture demonstrated by early PC hardware hackers like the original homebrew club. Anyone could (and did) make their creations do more. The ones who did more with less were the ones who had all the glory. Steve Wozniak's Apple I and II designs didn't get accolades because they had the most features--even in the late 70s you could get Altair/S100 bus video cards to provide "modern" I/O, colour graphics, sound, etc. Woz was heralded for providing those desirable features in elegant, very clever and hackable designs that used far less components and cost significantly less than competing designs.
As FOSS projects become more "free" it seems they become more efficient and more modular. The Mozilla foundation is a good example--they inherited a bloated, monolithic and unmaintainable closed-source project in Netscape Communicator. It didn't take the artitechts of Mozilla long to decide to scrap it all and make the code more modular and maintainalbe...and evenually that thinking extended from the architeture to the end applications, when a set of more lightweight applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird) has taken the spotlight over the big, feature-laden traditional Mozilla suite.
The OO.o project has a history similar to the Mozilla project, but the evolution of the project has folowed a somewhat different path. The OO.o project has roots in a closed-source office suite from Germany. Sun acquired it and subsequently opened the project. I personally dislike the architecture of OO.o as it is too monolithic for my tastes. My opinion may be biased by my first impressions of the first releases of OO.o...if left a bad taste in my mouth like when I tried to used Microsoft Works (you know, the taste you get when you throw up in your mouth a little bit...). I still hold out hope that those involved in the development of OO.o make a push towards "breaking things up" so that Writer, Calc, Impress, Database can be downloaded and used independently of each other like Firefox and Thunderbird. I think that because Sun is the sponsoring organisation and has such an influence in steeering the project that this will be tough though. I think the evapouration of Netscape corporation was really the best thing to happen to Mozilla--it has meant that the foundation has steered the developemnt of the Netscape product, where with OO.o it still seems to be the wrong way around--like StarOffice steers OO.o where Sun wants too much.
No. There has not been any indication that Vista will be sold in a "modular" fashion and allow the OS to run without a GUI (except in a limited way as is done presently with the Recovery Console). However, the next major release of Windows Server (based on the same Longhorn branch of code as Vista but planned for release quite some time after Vista is to debut) could be that modular MS operating system. Given that Vista is to be released in so many variants it has probably been modularised quite a bit already, so perhaps such a feat as GUI-less Vista could be achieved by hackers. Don't count on support or documentation from Microsoft.
I haven't read the newest documentation, so I could be wrong
Since I am not a Microsoft employee and I assume that is the case for you as well, we are both in the same boat until Vista is actualy shipping. Although the feature list of Vista is more established and it is well into Beta, anything could change right up until the hour it is released to manufacturing. And given Monad is in truth even further out, its capabilities are even more in flux.
A shell is nice but, can you change all the settings from the command line? The fact that most of your settings are stored in the registry, makes things a lot harder to do from the command line.
Very valid concern regarding the Windows platform. You can indeed do most of what you need to do in Windows through a command line if you are a guru, however without Monad Windows command-line capabilities are extremely weak. Regedit can be used at the command line, however it is quite cumbersome--especially if you must browse the registry. The whole concept of the registry puzzles me actually--here is this obsfucated, hidden, monolithic configuration file that holds all this important system information and if it were to be corrupted it could potentially make the machine unusable. In order to manage it, MS spent the time to greate this regedit program to decode the registry and present it as...a filesystem-like tree structure. Good Lord, what the hell for? When MS was addressing the problem of.ini files ten years ago what happened to the KISS principle? They did a good thing when they invented the "Program Files" folder and instructed developers to install their program folders there. Why didn't they just make another directory called "System Settings" and specify a standard.ini file format at that point?
If that sounds almost like a UN*X/etc directory then you'd be right--it's worked for aeons so why complicate things by re-inventing the wheel? The concept was sound it just needed fine tuning. Then MS wouldn't have had to make a special utility to manage system settings at all if it didn't want to.
Fortunately MS has seen the light and it appears that they are trying to quietly re-invent Windows in the image of UN*X. Of course, they won't admit their mistakes and copy UN*X/Linux design outright--they are re-architecting Windows using the same concepts but their own dialects (and in some cases they are making improvements to those concepts). This means that Microsoft can claim to be "innovating" instead of fixing bad design decisions. Some examples of the direction MS is going:
* Monad--an "object oriented shell" that brings a modern image to a very old idea. MS is acknoledging that the command line really IS a good adia and not obsolete, and that it was a mistake to neglect its command line shell. The object oriented approach and consistent interface is a modern solution to a problem originally solved in part with pipes in UN*X. Python provides an object-oriented shell on that platform now--but MS just polished the idea a bit and made the whole shell solution more unified.
* XML-based config files. You won't ever hear Microsoft admit it, but the system registry is a flawed concept and the implementation in Windows was so bad it was a significant source of relaibility and security problems. If you look hard enough in MSDN literature and in blogs, you will find that MS is quietly pushing developers to eliminate their dependency on the registry in favour of.config XML files stored in the same folder as the application's executable. MS is deprecating any tools they had to deal with the registry in favour of this method of managing system settings.
* Microsoft has been slowly expanding developer options for creating GUI-less applications (services and console apps). Prior to VS.NET (right up to version 6) to do so required using C or employing awful, unsupported hacks (anyone who has tried writing a VB6 console app or service knows what I'm talking about--the required hooks into low-level Windows APIs make the result so ugly you are best advised to give up and use C anyways). Now MS has the CLR and.NET libraries that make it much easier to do GUIless application developent and allow you to do it in many different languages (although if you look at VB.NET it is more of a CLR dialect than a distinct language anymore--esentially C# without semicolons and a handful of BASIC
It's not the bubbly that is appealing, it's the ease of use. WHy would I want to use a shell to configure a server?
If you have to ask yourself that question then you don't have a lot of experience administering servers--or have only been tasked with administering a very small number of servers.
GUIs make desktop computers easier to use. You don't want to mess around typing arcane commands to write a letter to your mum or balance a chequebook or play a game (hmm..brings back memories of the 1980s and typing LOAD"MYPGM",8,1:RUN" to use the computers at school). The needs addressed on a desktop are quite a bit different than those addressed by servers, and 90% of desktop users are not IT professionals--and (hopefully) all sysadmins are capable professionals.
If you had to administer a large-ish system consisting of many servers the you'd realise how much of a hindrance a GUI can be on a server--and a poorly architected system such as Windows as it exists today makes the situation worse.
* Firstly, using hardware resources to drive a rich GUI on servers that quite often are not even equipped with monitors seems a bit wasteful and pointless to me.
* Second, GUI-based interfaces are just not scalable--they're engineered to operate on PERSONAL computers. Remote access to GUI-based servers is orders of magnitude more complex than command-line style systems--I'd take SSH over Terminal Services any day.
* Also, once you know the command line doing shell scripts to automate administration tasks is easier, faster and more powerful--I don't know of a single GUI "wizard" that is faster or more powerful than VI and a bunch of text files...which brings me to another issue: when a GUI is the only option to configure your systems then you have to rely on a special application to get your job done. If that application breaks or is otherwise unavailable you are screwed. If for some reason I cannot use GConf on my Linux box I can revert to any text editor, whereas if I cannot use REGEDIT on Windows I have no other option (editing the BINARY registry data by hand is not a workable solution so some application to interpret it is required).
To me, clinging to shells and texteditors, sometimes looks like an attempt to keep things mystical/magical/voodoo like just to make sure you get payed a smart buck to operate these servers.
That stems from a lack of understanding. Most casual Windows users do not understand Regedit or any other system-admin tools even though they are completely graphical. To me (someone with a background in electronics desgin), pointing and clicking in some special sequence looks even more like "voodoo" than the command-line as it is so divorced from the underlying system that I can't be sure exactly what the computer is doing behind the scenes. People like me are sometimes uncomfortable when stuff like that is obscured.
Unix types are like me--they are so accustomed to knowing what happens "under the hood" that they lose confidence in a system when the hood is welded shut and they have no way of confirming everything is right. That is the biggest challenge Windows has in winning converts from UNIX. It's like Microsoft is going to China and telling everyone they have to learn English, and when some of them compalin they are toald by Microsoft advocates that English is much easier than Chinese and you should support such "progress". What about "services for UNIX" you say? Well, that is like a "mostly" complete Chinese-to-English dictionary. Not only does it add to the cost of conversion--it is mostly intended to engourage migration away from the "old ways".
Why should the administration of servers and adatabases remain behind in an evolving software world?
Why should administrators have to contend with a one-size-fits-all user interface that serves every purpose at least marginally but serves no purpose particularly well? You are assuming a command-line is "less-evolved" but many would beg to differ. Some people
Their never-ending efforts to shut down municipal efforts, to preserve their monopolies, and to create a "delivery system" rather than a "networking system" (4MBits down, 256kbits up, anyone?) are a blight on our great (if, sadly, not as great as once it was) nation.
While corporate lobbying is certainly stifling technological innovation in general terms, I'm not sure that the specific problem you imply (blocking of municipal efforts to establish broadband service) is the problem.
In Canada, we have even more challenging ditance and environmental challenges to overcome and we seem to be quite a bit further ahead in providing broadband connectivity without relying heavily on government-sponsored initiatives--and we too have to deal with monopolistic corporations (ie. there is only one company that provides cable for the entire city, and local phone service is a monopoly)--thankfully each type of broadband competes with the others.
I actually have my reservations about municipal or other governments taking big initiatives to provide broadband access--just because if what I've seen of such attempts. Such projects either suffer large cost and schedule overruns and end up more expensive than offerings from private companies (despite the lack of profit motive). Alberta SuperNet for example was far from well-executed. Also, in the end you often just end up with another monopoly (same crap different pile, just government wags protecting their turf instead of coporate wags).
Waaaay back when telephone was all government-run here long-distance was obscenely expensive, you either had to rent or buy your phone from the government telephone company, and you couldn't wire up your own phone extensions (and if they found out you didn't go through the government telephone company you were extra-billed--essentially "fined"). If you lived outside any city limits you were very often on a party line and couldn't use touch-tone phones. Rapid investment in the antiquated infrastructure of the telephone system didn't truly come about where I lived until the government telephone company was privatised. Sad thing is, they were still a monopoly and it was still an improvement. Now with rapid economic growth the problems with monopoly service are showing again as people wait over a month after moving into their new homes to get a land line.
The problem isn't with who owns the service--it is with the lack of competition and level playing field. If you replace a corporate monopoly with a government monopoly, in the long term the problems will either never go away or will eventually reappear.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
This is a pretty lame excuse, especially given Canada's progress in telecommunications--and nobody should use the excuse that 70% of the population is in a strip 100 miles wide along the Canada-US border either, becasue there are still 10 million people that are not, and even the remainder that are in that strip, are in a strip that stretches the entire continent.
Sparse population should actually be a motivating factor rather than a hindrance--since so many people can't just walk a few blocks to a cyber-cafe as they might do in Japan there is great motivation in developing communications technologies to bring signals to the home. That was the case in Canada anyways--a country that is 10 percent of the US population and economic might managed to become a leader in areas lite sattelite communications technology and fibre optics. The Alouette I was the third sattelite ever to be launched into space after Sputnik I and Explorer I, and though the specifications called for a 1-year lifespan it lasted ten years. For several years starting in the 1970s Alberta, Canada was home to the worlds longest usable fibre-optic communications line (and the first ever meant for commercial use). These sorts of feats happened BECAUSE of sparse popula
- Find common brain-farts such as reduplicated words. [...] - Point out incongruities and neologisms, which some people might not know aren't cultured english, such as excessive verbing of nouns.
Subtle but hilarious humour. In any case, spelling and grammar checking for/. posts might favourably reduce the number of off-topic grammar-Nazi posts that plague discussion threads. Thankfully such posts are somewhat on topic for THIS article, however it would be nice to have more discussion on the merits of new release of AbiWord vs OO Writer. IMHO the "GNOME" office applications (AbiWord and GNUmeric) are too often overlooked by the community even though they are quite impressive applications.
Grammar checking is a welcome feature, but there is one that I would love to see--solid suppport for writing and reading OpenDocument format. I haven't been keeping up with AbiWord development (the aging version I have suits me fine for how often I need it) but at that time AbiWord developers were quite non-committal. Since OpenDocument is now a proposed industry standard and not merely the format for a rival project I hope they've reconsidered their position.
"No trespassing" signs are not a requirement
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PCs Posted No Trespass
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...if it was it would be pretty ridiculous.
If I accidentally forget to lock the door of my residence when I have to leave to run a quick errand, and I return to unexpectedly find a stranger rummaging through my refrigerator it is criminal trespass. Said stranger need not enter by force or cause damage to be convicted of a crime, and I don't have to put a "no trespassing" sign on my front door to make it a crime. It is obviously a private domicile and "no trespassing" is implied.
Spyware is the electronic equivalent of the above. Providing explicit notification should only be required when a given property could easily be mistaken for public property--and the same applies to computers. Spyware vendors should expect that it is a certainty that their distribution methods will target computers that are "private property" and that they must clearly and explicitly ask permission to interfere with that property.
What is GConf? Well, it's a nice implmentation of a registry.:)
Well it is *conceptually* nice anyways (some find the implementation could be improved), because it isn't really a registry in the same sense as the one Windows has. GConf makes use of a collection of non-binary files and it just happens to be an application where they can be centrally managed. On Windows, some crackhead thought it would be a great idea to invent a central, hidden, binary file to store all the config settings for the OS and all applications rather than fix the flaws in the.ini file concept (ie. standardising the format and location of these files). Since MS now advocates XML-based.config files over using the registry it seems they've fired the crackhead or he successfully completed rehab.
Slashdot Mirror
...most of the really exciting stuff is still quite far off.
;-)
Explorer rewriten from scratch.
I cannot say that it hasn't been a major rewrite, but I believe it is still not maanged code, and the real dramatic features will require quite a high end system. The improvements are quite dramatc if your rig has the power of course (icons that move and resize in real-time and in 3-d, windows that rotate in 3-d space to save screen real-estate, all the transparency and so forth). Seems like so much eye-candy though and my home rig doesn't have the horsepower. Besides, I'm more comfortable clicking my way around Nautilus now
Monad. A real shell, which could possibly be much more powerfull than say bash+ standard Unix commands
Except that Monad is not going to be ready for Vista--it will not show up in any Microsoft product until the next major release of Windows Server (Server 2007 -- most likely the END of 2007). It does indeed look quite promising, and is fairly innovative in that it is supposed to be an "object oriented" shell. However, UNIX and Linux systems are more "open architecture" and there are quite a number of choices for shells. Linux's standard is BASH, but 2 years is a long way off, and by then maybe we Linux fans will be using a tricked out, Parrot/Perl6 based shell that kicks monad butt. Anyways, I think most Windows users don't realise the potential of a REAL shell typically provided on Linux or UNIX.
They're moving the graphics subsystems and all the bloody drivers in userland. That means it will be dead stable, period.
This is another "wait and see" thing. There is a huge legacy problem with Windows, and IMO for at least one more major version of Windows MS will probably have to allow old drivers intended to run in kernel-mode to operate for compatibility purposes. Application software can probably work fine through some sort of compatibility wrapper. I do believe the move will dramatically reduce BSODs and total system lockups, however I think that unstable legacy software and drivers will negatively affect stability--it's just that the crashes will be less catastrophic.
A hardware accelerated graphic system, ala Quartz.
If you want to see the true potential from this subsystem you'll need a massive graphics card (more massive hardware than for Quartz).
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
I agree wholeheartedly, MS has some impressive offerings...two to six years away. I've been privleged enough to have a closer look than most people however. Much of what is coming is already in Mac OS X, and with Linux, you don't have to sign an NDA or blow a whole paycheque or two on MSDN to look at the beta stuff. The fight to the top (or to stay on top) will certainly be exciting though.
but I wish I could use it to control which applications get to send data out.
I've configured a small PC made of leftover parts and a Linux installation to be my router/firewall. The ability to filter outbound traffic has been built into Linux for a long time (iptables, ipchains, etc) and there are applications like shorewall that help manage this. Best of all it is all free (and "Free").
I'm not a huge fan of most firewall solutions on Windows. I find them cumbersome, annoying and unstable. I HATE it when some nag-box comes up to tell me someone tried to access port x or ask me if program y can connect to the network. I know there are options to make things less obtrusive, but why make the most annoying configuration the default? I also seem to find that the more Symantec, Mcaffee, etc. software that is on a windows box, the crappier the performance. Might as well let the spyware and viruses run on there cuz the "cure" is almost as bad as the disease at times.
If I WERE to pick a firewall solution I could live with it would be something like Kerio, which semed to be the least annoying nd most simple to deal with...except maybe for the firewall bundled into Windows with XP SP2. I think Kerio would let you filter outbound traffic too, but I'm not 100% sure.
but they are certainly the loudest, the most outspoken and, yes, most of them are the early adopters
Isn't that the case with the "elites" in all media? They often tend to be the biggest loudmouths, and/or they usually have something new/unconventional to say or a new way of thinking. Think A-list actors that pose nude for PeTA or shock-jocks like Howard Stern...
For instance, less than 1/3 of all Simpy users use IE, and over 40% of them use Firefox
So what do the remaining 30 percent or so use for browsing? They must be REAL avant-guarde...
But does that make them the elite?
Well, yeah it often does. Early adopters have "first mover advantage". Those that pioneerred blogging are not the most established, and have the biggest following and thus the most influence...an elite by definition is someone with power or influence who is highly regarded (or very hated by those who lack power and influence).
I've been implementing a forum that never reloads.
Quite interesting, but I'd have my reservations with an all-AJAX forum. IMHO forums shouldn't break the REST behaviour of the traditional web model in very many places. I want the navigation buttons to work, and I want to be able to bookmark the URL and feel confident that when I visit that URL it will contain the posting that was there before. Yes, there are ways around this in AJAX but to fix what it inherently breaks takes more effort than I think should be required (I think those are the most important things to address--if you insist on AJAX make sure it takes care of the browser history/navigation and bookmark support).
As for minimising traffic, I've found I get the biggest "return on investment" (time and money-wise) by properly using CSS. Being an established standard, CSS suffers from fewer cross-browser issues, it degrades more gracefully and doesn't break important web behaviours. The CPU time to generate a well-formed HTML document that uses CSS for all its layout is not worth worrying about, and network traffic is reduced significantly because the CSS is cached, so the number of TCP/IP packets used to send the bare HTML document is not that much different from all the XmlHTTPRequest chatter.
That being said, your project looks very intriguing for other reasons. If your forum is more of a chatroom than a slash-style website then it could be very cool indeed--like MSN or Yahoo chatrooms with threads all updating in realtime. Perhaps you have features like that in mind. However it ends up, best of luck to you!
..to add to my list:
And if you want to print from gmail, it shouldn't be a print of the screen, but a specially built printable html page.
NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO!
I HATE this "printer-friendly-link" thing! There is already a print button on my toolbar and I'd rather not clutter my screen with a redundant icon/link.
Besides, such a practice is soooo pre-CSS last-decade...it belongs in the trashbin with those JPEG-jigsaw, bitmap-and-table layouts of yore. It is becoming more common to use an alternate stylesheet for print media that hides navigational elements, sets more printer-friendly colours and fonts and so on. That way you do not have to launch another window or move to another page, print then close a window or use the (hopefully functional) back button to resume browsing.
Please tell me you aren't one of those web deveopers that puts big flash-animated, zero-content splash pages and back-button-breaking scripting on their websites too...
It's easier to solve a problem if you know what caused the problem.
True enough. Problem is that humanity is a long way off from being mature and intelligent enough to determine exactly what sort of climate change to expect, much less the root cause of that change. Does human activity cause climate change? Absolutely. How much and in what way? We have no friggin clue and we wont in any of out lifetimes. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. Humanity's lack of maturity prevents us from putting aside politics and self-interest. We try but in the end out efforts are nearly futile. Our best effort to date many might say is the Kyoto accord and it is doomed to fail. And no, it isn't the fault of the Americans--even if the US signed on it would never work. Why? Because Kyoto is just another political/economic shell game. Developing nations are pretty much exempt from making an effort at reducing CO2 emissions (including 800-pound-gorilla China). I don't care what reasons are behind such exemptions--if we want to affect global change the whole globe must participate. Second of all, there is "selfishness" involved. It is easy enough for the likes of Germany and France to look down their noses at the US and trumpet their wonderful CO2 reductions: France just throws up more nuclear generation and Germany gets to count all those communist-era east-German soot-belching factories in their starting numbers. Then there are nations like Canada, where the infrastructure is already quite modern and efficient for the most part and the cold climate and sparse population make it more difficult to meet targets legitimately--most of those reductions will be met by playing the shell game and trading pollution credits. In the end it means no meaningful impact on climate change.
2. To paraphrase a favourite sci-fi author: "The universe is mind-bogglingly complex". Scientists know almost nothing about the direction of climate change. They have pretty little computer models that make predictions and they can make vague (and often conflicting) pronouncements about the earth heating up or more hurricanes or ice ages and whatnot. In the meantime the good people at Environment Canada cannot even predict the weather two days in advance with any reliability at all. How can we get the "immature public" to buy into a more climate-friendly lifestyle with that kind of track record? The weatherman tells them it'll snow in two days with the accuracy of a coin toss. Big, smart scientists with expensive supercomputers tell us the world is heating up...no wait we are going into an ice age (which was the prevailing theory in the 1970s)...no wait we are heating up (1980s to now)...no wait...the world will heat up a bit, but some places will be really dry and others really wet...no wait...we ARE going to have a sudden ice age...because of global warming melting ice and cooling the oceans....what the hell? Our smartest people cant quite wrap their brains around it much less the general public (I like most others are pretty much mentally retarded on the subject though most like to think theyknow something about it).
I'm sure someone will argue the merits of Kyoto (maybe there are some--I just don't see how it'll change the world meaningfully). Others will argue that science is proving itself now (gee, look at all the hurricanes we had this year--never mind the fact it was only one or two more than the previous record set many decades previously, before we had the technology to spot those that didn't make landfall near civilisation). Thing is, the pronouncements we make and the justifications for Kyotot-like manoeuvring are so vague it is like proving Nostradamus was right.
In the meantime, bandages and maybe a makeshift torniquet is all we have to keep us from bleeding to death in terms of climate change. I figure we should put more emphasis on more concrete, proven environmental factors--like living sustainably (use less energy--get rid of the big old SUVs. Get your lazy ass out of the captain's
...as you are not fully informed on certain points:
...LINUX (at least OpenSuSE) wins THIS one...
:). Linux wins this one.
Is there anything out there equivalent to windows update? Windows wins this one
You are totally mistaken. I run OpenSuSE and the equivalent to Windows Update is called YOU (YaST Online Updater). I have it configured to be fully automated--it installs all critical updates on a weekly basis without my intervention (YaST sets up the cron job for you through a very simple interface--it can be done daily weekly or monthly).
YOU is superior to Windows Update because it can be used to update ALL the software in all the repositories you have selected to check. Unlike the inferior Windows Update, you have greater control and visibility of WHERE you wish to obtain your updates and WHEN you want them to happen...you could theoretically connect to properly configured repositories of third-party software packages to update via YOU. In Windows, the updater is a too-closed system...it is unable to update anything but the OS and related components.
This shouldn't be discussed under 'linux vs windows', this is more the case of 'linux software vs windows software'
I agree with you there--and the study in question really used flawed criteria in selecting software--one I call the "pointy-haired-boss methodology": select based on false, marketing-oriented metrics and buzzwords like "best of breed" and "market share leader" rather than on sound technical criteria. Furthermore the study authors dictated poor practices must be done in deploying the software--ie. you must do it "the windows way". No staging on a test system? No virtualisation? No proper testing before promotion to production? Just because Windows people don't to these things (or it is "cutting edge" for them) doesn't mean Linux shouldn't be hobbled with bad applications and admin practices. Besides, one admin DID get the dogs-breakfast working by doing something Windows admins rarely have the ability to do: he custom compiled modules to make it work.
I'd say that with the more mature, powerful and flexible options available on an open system that Linux wins here too...
This would be the comparison of genkernel and the rest of the beasts in the pack with "Files and Settings transfer wiZZard"
Agreed. Also, don't even mention the headaches of changing HARDWARE on a Windows system--like when the capacitors blow on your mobo and the replacement is a revision B with a different onboard IDE/ATA chipset (all other things being equal)....wonderful BSOD-land and journey through the emergency repair console and emergency repair disks. You'd figure that if Windows got far enough to boot, load the startup screen and the first few drivers it wouldn't forget how to use the hard disk controller 1/2 way through the startup process. I've found that with Linux, if the HD boots then you can count on Linux getting to the login prompt much more reliably than with Windows.
I found Dr. Thompson to be very forthcoming and objective in his responses, and certainly not a "Microsoft shill". From his responses I think he was asked to deliver a specific study by Microsoft, and he followed the MS request as closely and objectively as possible. That said, I think that the scenarios he studied don't exactly match real-world practise. He did, however, seem to welcome and encourage scruitiny of his study and others before making critical decisions rather than taking action based on reading executive summaries.
Anyways, here is my "Coles Notes" version (Cliff Notes for those American readers out there):
1. Q: what assumptions did you make in your study and how did they affect the results?
A: Lot of verbage around "every organisation is different/this depends/that depends/etc"...eCommerce application with constatly changing needs (not a steadty-state system), 3rd party software installed, all critical updates applied, upgrade OS at end of study...etc.
2. Q: I'm an IT grunt...every MS-sponsored study I've read is total crap (doesn't reflect my experiences) and many others feel the same. Doesn't this make doing MS-sponsored studies a risk to your credibility?
A: Regardless of funding our studies are objective, peer-reviewed, etc. but you have to carefully read the study and its methodology to see how it matches your situation. More verbage about "it depends" etc...infers that Windows (or Linux) might be better for you.
3. Q: No fair! Linux admins were made to run multiple versions of db on one machine and other unwise/unsupported stuff and Windows users just had to use one DB and didn't have to do such stupid things! Real sysadmins in ay case would use vritual machines or staging hardware.
A: Study wasn't supposed to cover performing the same tasks--it was to make each platform meet the same end goals. We chose 3rd party packages based solely on market share and in the case of Linux thosed packages needed this sort of work done. In Dr. Thompson's opinion he agrees VM or other hardware would've been best but this still represents "more pain" than Windows.
(question 3 in MY opinion reveals a big reason why this study is flawed--see below)
4. Q: Did MS invent the metrics/methodology or did you come up with them?
A: MS did NOT come up with these--MS asks for a study on certain qualities/characteristics and we insist on independenly developing the study metrics and methodology. MS risks getting results that are not in their favour but it is their choice whether to release the study publically. If they don't they at least get value for their money in the form of suggestions to improve their offerings.
5. Q: Diebold makes crap voting machines but we never hear of serious issues with their ATMs. Why is that?
A: Saying Diebold voting machines "concern" him is a "serious understatement". Can't make an informed assesment on ATMs but they are probably more secure and reliable because they are carefully watched 24/7/365 by banks AND their customers to make sure they work right--functions and their results very visible. Voting machines are not scruitinised as thoroughly and are only looked at during elections. Advocates "checks and balances" and more openness and accountability (letting independent security experts have more access to the systems, etc).
6. Q: Why did you require more experience from Windows admins?
A: Oops..that was a typo as a reult of upping the experience reqs for ALL admins. Requirements were matched as closely as possible.
7. Q: study was so small--hw can you make any statements about the benefits of one over the other? How does your study really show "monolithic" windows is better than "modular" linux?
A: It doesn't--study like this cannot make "sweeping generalisations" about any platform--it studies reliability in a certain scenario. Should
...often convey meanings or philosophies exactly opposite of those actually espoused by the organisation?
The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.
It is indeed. Also note that they are strong proponents of software patents (which are totally inappropriate--the solution to any problems with software IP should be addressed with copyright reform) and have lobbied for the retention of Microsoft formats as standards in government. Apparently merely the ability of non-MS employees to see the specs without paying a boatload of money for the privlege is as open as any of us deserve.
The issue is really being badly distorted. No government in the world has brought forward legislation to shut closed source applications out of competition--the closest any policy comes to that ANYWHERE is to simply require that at least one open source alternative be included in a bid/selection process. State legislation mandating the use of officially open-standard file formats makes no mention of open source at all. Microsoft, Corel, Sun or any other corporation is still welcome to provide software to governments under such a policy. All it requires is that import and export filters be available to support proper file format standards. This INCREASES choice and makes industry competition MORE open and fair. One would think that an organisation named "initiative for SOFTWARE CHOICE" would embrace such a policy.
Instead, this supposedly "capitalist-friendly" advocate of "choice" is fighting hard to preserve strong IP laws and shut out open standards. This is neither democratic NOR capitalist. Ms. Wyne and her compatriots at the ISC are really against choice and are essentailly promoting communist/socialist ideas: they advocate the protection and promotion of business models that perpetually rely on protectionist government legislation, and attempt to block legislation that threatens the position of protected monopolies by exposing them to genuine competition.
Really, it isn't like the government is forcing Microsoft to hand over all the specs to Office file formats so the govenrnment can use taxpayer dollars to develop compatible software to distribute to every citizen for $0. THAT would be "communist" or "pre-Boston-tea-party". I'd like to know what MS is so afraid of. With their resources it would be trivial for MS to make OpenDocument filters for its Office applications. Are they so insecure about their products that they need special legislative conditions to assure their market position? I happen to think that apps like MS Word and PowerPoint are great in terms of features and usability that can compete on their own merits without lock-in. Yes the competition would be more challenging if it were more easily made compatible, but is there something wrong with Microsoft that they cannot survive without 80 percent of the price of their software being profit margin and even higher percentages in market share?
The "Initiative for Software Choice" indeed...the choice of software vendors to lock-in users as they please perhaps. It is certainly not about true choice.
On a slightly offtopic rant I'm rather sick of populated areas (typically blue states in the US) subsidizing rural ones (typically red states in the US).
Hmmm...descides being a rather incendiary comment it also demonstrates your complete ignorance of geography. Saskatchewan is rural, but is nether a state nor is it "red". Saskatchewan is probably best described as an "orange province" (Canada does not have states--it has provinces, and Saskatchewan has a "New Democratic" (NDP) government, and the colour representation of the NDP is orange). Saskatchewan politics is for the most part more "liberal left" than any given American "blue state".
Why should we have to pay more for our phone service/electricity/roads/etc, etc, etc just so you can afford yours?
Why? So you can afford to sit on your ass in a Manhattan McDonalds eating Big Macs, french fries and pop. That stuff all has to be grown, harvested and processed somewhere, and city dwellers seem to have very little tolerance for the typical farming activities (noisy dusty tractors, smelly feedlots, etc) required to provide urban conveniences. Perhaps we should plough under the whole of Central Park, fence it in barbed wire and plant wheat there. We could also mandate that all city buildings be equipped with thick sod roofs to accomodate potato growing operations. Also, every dwelling with a back yard in the city should be turned over to feed at least one head of cattle and every restaurant and supermarket should have finishing and slaughtering facilities on premesis.
If you like living in the middle of nowhere so much then be prepared to pay for it.
If you like living in you pleasant little sterile box in the city so much, with all your conveniences provided to you within minutes, then be prepared to pay for it. Selfish bastard.
All the heat coming off your gasoline engine is waste heat anyway. That represents inefficacy. So even if you had to run an electric heater the BEV is still better for the environment.
You have never experienced a Canadian Prairie winter have you? At temperatures approaching -30 there really is NO surplus heat energy coming from the engine. In my car, on such a cold winter day, the radiator fan never starts and the radiator thermostat valve does not open--all the circulating coolat goes through just the engine block and heater core--and at that the interior temperature is just comfortable with the temperature control at maximum.
I have an electric heater that I occasionally use in my garage when I'm working out there on winter dyas. The power consumption is massive and on very cold days it basically only warms up the immediate vicinity enough so my un-gloved hands do not get frostbitten. Electric heating element + electric fan motors = huge power drain. That would destroy the already barely-adequate range of contemporary electric vehicles (and given that rural dwellers drive mostly highway miles and wouldn't have the opportunity to make use of regenerative braking even 300 miles is a very optimistic number).
Besides all that, one of the more interesting ideas I've seen involves a BEV with an a trailer that you could hook up for long distance trips.
A trailer would weigh way too much and kill the drag coefficient of your vehicle, and basically provide next to no improvements in range. I also can't imagine a Prius-like vehicle towing a heavy trailer would handle very well or be very safe on icy roads.
How often would you need that functionality? Heck, I could get by 95% of the time if my BEV only had 100 miles of range
I think that not being able to use my vehicle 5 percent of the time would be quite annoying. FYI a resident of a rural area like perhaps Broadview or Whitewood might want to travel to somewhere like Regina on a monthly basis--that round trip is probably well over 300 miles--all highway too which would kill batteries faster. Unless such electric vehicles were so inexpensive that it could be aff
Would you accept that the US of A is a plutocratic/democratic republic?
I'd say that's a fair assessment--Americans form governments through elections (democratic process) that are heavilly influenced by money--especially coporate money (a plutocracy). The only real way to restrict the (usually corruptive) influence of wealth in government is through an informed, involved electorate. Unfortunately the American electorate is neither.
Not so sure about Canada, which is also in America.
As a Canadian I can tell you that the same is very true here, though in slightly different ways. In the US, those critical of the government point to the heavy influence the oil industry has in Washington. In Canada, that influence is provided by the information/entertainment industry. Besides having the govenrment-owned CBC network, the two major privately-owned canadian networks/media conglomerates (Bell-Sympatico-CTV and Global) are owned and run by very major supporters of the governing Liberal party (financially and through direct political involvement). I've found that despite being government owned and obviously socialist editorially that the CBC is probably a bit more critical/objective in its stories about the government even though the government owns it.
In Quebec in particular, most advertising agencies providing services to the government have been major donors to the Liberal party and have provided staff--on paid company time--to "volunteer" for Liberal campaigns. This behaviour goes quite a bit beyond even the deplorable bid-selection behaviour of the previous Mulroney government. If the uninformed have any doubts about the influence that the media and (dirty) money have on Canadian politics, take some time to look at the Gomery Inquiry report. Lobby money certainly does run Canada and the Canadian electorate is even less involved than their American counterparts.
As far as this new patent initiative by these major corporations, it is merely fortunate that they are acting in the best interests of consumers and innovation. We need a "movement" involved in patents equivalent to what GNU provides for copyright. Given the higher barrier to entry in the patent system it was much less likely to happen based on the efforts of a few dedicated individuals, and given the nature of our governments, even less likely that they would spearhead such an initiative.
Not only is the meaning of the name not apparent (etymology anyone?), but it's not even clear how it should be pronounced.
The PostgreSQL project was founded by UCB Professor Dr. Michael Stonebraker--the same person who founded the INGRES database project. At the time, the INGRES academic project was concluded and the product was commercialised and further developed by Computer Associates (I believe there was a non-commercial fork that still exists today). Since Stonebraker's new project was started to do "post-INGRES database research" the project came to be known as PostGRES.
Development on PostGRES was rapid and successful, and combined with the fact the source was pubically available it developed a growing following outside the university (it found a niche as a popular database for storing astronomical data among other things). Soon, the academic researchers were spending too much time supporting the project and the project was officially closed in the early-mid 90s (this was release 4.2...? Version 4.something anyways).
At this point the project forked just as its predecessor INGRES did years before. Stonebraker formed a company called Illustra to commercialise the product. Illustra was eventually acquired by Informix and what started as PostGRES became "Informix Online Dynamic Server". This is now a still-active IBM property.
The second fork came about as a product of two of Stonebraker's graduate students (Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen). There was still great interest in PostGRES and one of the biggest requests was to migrate from the nonstandard QUEL to SQL as the query language. Yu and Chen added this change and released Postgres95 (Illustra/Informix also moved to SQL but I believe Yu and Chen beat them to the punch, although Illustra was much more stable once it was released). The version number was reset to 1.0 but this is generally considered "Version 5".
Improving the stability and performance of Postgres95 at the pace demanded by its growing user base was too much for two busy grad students, so the international development team that exists today was formed to take on the task. The name Postgres95 was rather hated, as it dated the project and created an association with a rather undesirable product (and it made no sense to make such an association as Windows 95 is incapable of running any version of Postgres). The name was changed to PostgreSQL ("Postgres with SQL" as opposed to the original Postgres that used QUEL). The versioning resumed continuity with the original PostGRES project (so 95==5.x and the first PostgreSQL was version 6.0).
Pronounciation: Linux has suffered from this ambiguity as well and it has done nothing to limit its success. As for PostgreSQL it is most commonly pronounced "Postgress Cue Elle". I've heard people say "Postgressequel" as well though it seems that is about as well regarded as pronouncing Linux "Lie nucks".
Thaks to the PostgreSQL team for all your hard work...with every major release you blow me away with pleasant surprises well worth the dump and restore. This time around the integration of auto-vacuum is very nice, and the revamped user/role privlige system even more so.
Determining auto traffic based on cellphone use seems like quite a dumb idea to me. And if it actually worked that's a bit frightening.
People ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO JAW ON THEIR CELLPHONES WHILST DRIVING! I personally hate compulsive cellphone-drivers and I seldom use my phone in the car at all even as a passenger, and I never answer it while I'm driving. The danger of such behaviour seems obvious to me. I'd expect that automotive cellphone use will taper off as more people realise this and more juristictions make it illegal.
I question the ability of even the most sophisticated math to accurately determine the percentage of all drivers actively using their cellphones at any given time. Seriously, what is wrong with cameras or strategically-placed pressure-sensors on the road? Seems a whole lot less complicated and more effective. It makes me suspicious about the true intentions of such surveillence technology when it is touted over more common-sense alternatives.
...in federal politics--especially in North America.
I've always found US politics especially amusing in the blatant abuse of "omnibus" legislation. IIRC y'all decided you wanted more daylight savings time and so some sneaky lawyer-type snuck the statute into this gigantic omnibus energy bill--in amongst thousands of pages about everything from pollution regulation to northern oil exploration. By the time the public knew about it the decision was pretty much a done deal. Yes, some pinhead did a study saying that we'd be saving more daylight and thus use less energy in lighting the nation's offices. If you ask me, lumping together a whole bunch of crap with only the slightest bit of related points is completely asinine.
I figure that a lot of this MPAA/RIAA garbage wouldn't stand a chance on its own, however I envision some sort of "omnibus telecommunications bill" that will encompass anything that remotely has to do with communications. In amongst thousands of pages on everything from regulations on VoIP and encryption software to tougher punishments for electronic distribution of child pornography will be a law outlawing the record button on your VCR. That way, congressmen won't have to bother with the tedious work of voting ten thousand times, and those with a pocketfull of RIAAbucks can accuse their opponents of being "soft on child porn" or supporting "terrorists who want to hide behind encryption" if they vote against the omnibus bill because of the insideous Hollywood-lobbyist provisions.
After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry
On what planet do they implement your "industry standards"? It's certainly not Earth. I have all my financial records since 1993, and the Canadian Revenue Agency can demand up to seven years of records in its tax audits. Many people report that Office 2003 has a lot of trouble with Office 97-formatted documents. Hmmm....2003-1997=6... seems to me that Microsoft already falls short of Canadian government requirements. I'm guessing they fall short in most other juristictions as well.
5 years being a good company/product to deal with
The customers of my employer would beg to differ. We are contractually obligated to offer at least 15 years of compatibility, and some of our current products can and must still interoperate with data and devices produced by equipment we sold 20 years ago and earlier. Eight years is only "ancient" to gerbils my friend.
Those with your mindset are what peeves me off about the PC and consumer electronics industries, really. Microsoft is but the biggest offender of a large number as well--almost all proprietary software vendors share this fault. It takes more effort to preserve compatibility but it CAN be done effectively--just look at what is done in financial and industrial systems.
...you get what you pay for (whereas the opposite is true about "Libre" free software)
I work in the medical field, and a free 4GB-max "validated" Oracle database is a huge boon to a wide variety of medical ISV's.
I can't speak for regulations in the medical industry, but I have had to certify point-of-sale applications that involve communication with credit/debit-card authorisation systems. Trust me--it does not matter if you use Oracle or MSSQL or PostgreSQL as your database engine--you still have to pay the testing fees and do the battery of verification tests for your application before they permit you to connect to the live system.
The only way you'd avoid such an exercise would be if Oracle or others developed and certified the application themselves and you were just implementing it--an example would be if you wrote some mod-perl to call PayPal services. That would not need certification with banks because the transaction is carried out on Paypal's already-certified systems and you are merely calling the function. However, Paypal needed to do much more than use a certified database. Such certification of a database engine doesn't mean the application/solution is automatically good to go. Perhaps there are pre-certified modules in Oracle Financials, but don't count on this "lite" no-cost Oracle data engine being certified for anything of importance.
Validate it, clean up a few features (notably auto-vacuum and passable auto-tuning, maybe some multi-master replication), throw in a simple deployment for ORM or database indirection, and you've effectively moved that commoditization up one layer from the small website developer level.
With respect to PostgreSQL, it seems that it is developing at a relatively quick pace and I don't see how Sun's participation (or lack thereof) will have a notable effect on the development of the advanced features you mention such as multi-master replication, and the tuning abilities of PostgreSQL have improved noticeably in recent releases (and though the manual VACUUM is an annoyance to some, in all but a very few applications it wouldn't kill you to add a line to your crontab file). OTOH, this "validation" of which you speak is not likely to happen very easily. Compliance with industry regulation requires money even when all your developers are volunteers. Furthermore, every release of the product would have to be re-certified.
A "verified" version of PostgreSQL is more likely than mySQL IMHO, but I don't believe you'd ever see such a version freely available--more than likely it would only be available from Red Hat and/or Sun. And, since PostgreSQL is BSD and not GPL any source code changes required to meet regulations need not be made public. Red Hat may be more chartible in that respect, but given Sun's selective commitment to Free software I wouldn't count on it.
... a long overdue shift in priorities from raw clock speed to efficiency.
/. Normally I just think "what's the point" when I read about people wasting their time defacing classic hardware ranging from Sega Megadrives to Atari 800s and Commodore PETs in order to make novelty PCs. But there was a common element in them: those tiny little Mini ITX boards VIA makes. They not only take very little space but it seemed they also had very modest power requirements.
I have some systems here that are long overdue for an upgrade (4 and 6 years old--only thing that has been updated is hard drive and memory capacity). I do not need to upgrade to increase computational power or even capacity--I do not do gaming or intensive 3d rendering or anything and the computers in question are a couple of linux servers that host a few web sites, email accounts, a modest database server (less than 5 million records in a couple dozen tables of a handful of databases), file server. It is a small-office type setup and it hardly taxes the old hardware.
So why do I have to upgrade? The first reason I had was reliability. The Athlon-powered machine suffered a near-meltdown when the CPU fan failed not long ago and I suspect that there was some hardware damage as the machione started behaving flaky after the incident even though the new fan kept the machine cooler than ever. I disables some unused onboard peripherals in the BIOS (sound, serial ports etc) and the problem went away....hmmm doesn't look good.
However the second reason I have looked at is even more compelling than reliability, and that is POWER CONSUMPTION. Those old Intel and AMD processors run pretty hot and use a lot of power, and as servers they run 24/7/365. I was looking at my latest elecetricity bill and decided to do some calculations. I could realise MORE THAN $50 IN SAVINGS PER YEAR for every reduction of just 100 watts of power consumption. I came across one of those silly PC-modder articles of the nature that sometimes find themselves posted on
I looked into it and found that even the lower-powered fanless boards could replace the web server/file server. Not only would it be compact and quiet, but the entire system would use less power than the CPU chip alone in the current machines (which exceed 60 watts each). If I replace the old machines with EPIA boards I could save in the hundreds per year!
IIRC both AMD and Intel are realising what VIA and Transmeta did years ago--that the clock-speed race is completely pointless now. Not only do both companies invest heavily in mobile technologies--that technology is finding its way into desktops and servers as well. About bloody time I think. It'd be great if this turns into a golf-score style contest of watts-per-flop race.
This is one area where Open Source has its weakness.
Cutting down and optimizing existing code is not nearly as glorious as adding new features.
Exactly how did you arrive at that conclusion, by pulling it out of your butt after reading this one article? There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that open source promotes feature-creep and bloat. In fact the opposite could be true.
Try to compare OO.o to previous versions of itself rather than just MS Office. On the same hardware you'll find OO.o starts faster and consumes less resources than previous versions. I've NEVER seen the same trend in MS Office or ANY Microsoft products--in fact major upgrades of ALL MS software have consumed more hard drive space and had the same or higher recommended system requirements. Yes, OO.o probably does still not compare well for efficiency compared to MS Office, but with each new release the gap closes. I'm betting that the next version of OO.o will be a bit more efficient, while the next release of MS Office will be less efficient.
Your assumption that adding features is the most "glorious" task and thus receives the most attention from F/OSS develoers is also somewhat flawed. Efficiency and clever solutions tend to be the greatest source of pride in terms of engineering, and I find that open source developers usually take a more engineering-like approach to their creations than commercial developers, where marketing is the biggest driving force. It seems to me that the FOSS culture is influenced by the open culture demonstrated by early PC hardware hackers like the original homebrew club. Anyone could (and did) make their creations do more. The ones who did more with less were the ones who had all the glory. Steve Wozniak's Apple I and II designs didn't get accolades because they had the most features--even in the late 70s you could get Altair/S100 bus video cards to provide "modern" I/O, colour graphics, sound, etc. Woz was heralded for providing those desirable features in elegant, very clever and hackable designs that used far less components and cost significantly less than competing designs.
As FOSS projects become more "free" it seems they become more efficient and more modular. The Mozilla foundation is a good example--they inherited a bloated, monolithic and unmaintainable closed-source project in Netscape Communicator. It didn't take the artitechts of Mozilla long to decide to scrap it all and make the code more modular and maintainalbe...and evenually that thinking extended from the architeture to the end applications, when a set of more lightweight applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird) has taken the spotlight over the big, feature-laden traditional Mozilla suite.
The OO.o project has a history similar to the Mozilla project, but the evolution of the project has folowed a somewhat different path. The OO.o project has roots in a closed-source office suite from Germany. Sun acquired it and subsequently opened the project. I personally dislike the architecture of OO.o as it is too monolithic for my tastes. My opinion may be biased by my first impressions of the first releases of OO.o...if left a bad taste in my mouth like when I tried to used Microsoft Works (you know, the taste you get when you throw up in your mouth a little bit...). I still hold out hope that those involved in the development of OO.o make a push towards "breaking things up" so that Writer, Calc, Impress, Database can be downloaded and used independently of each other like Firefox and Thunderbird. I think that because Sun is the sponsoring organisation and has such an influence in steeering the project that this will be tough though. I think the evapouration of Netscape corporation was really the best thing to happen to Mozilla--it has meant that the foundation has steered the developemnt of the Netscape product, where with OO.o it still seems to be the wrong way around--like StarOffice steers OO.o where Sun wants too much.
In any case, there is another benefit to F/OSS:
Isn't this part of the blurb for Vista right now?
No. There has not been any indication that Vista will be sold in a "modular" fashion and allow the OS to run without a GUI (except in a limited way as is done presently with the Recovery Console). However, the next major release of Windows Server (based on the same Longhorn branch of code as Vista but planned for release quite some time after Vista is to debut) could be that modular MS operating system. Given that Vista is to be released in so many variants it has probably been modularised quite a bit already, so perhaps such a feat as GUI-less Vista could be achieved by hackers. Don't count on support or documentation from Microsoft.
I haven't read the newest documentation, so I could be wrong
Since I am not a Microsoft employee and I assume that is the case for you as well, we are both in the same boat until Vista is actualy shipping. Although the feature list of Vista is more established and it is well into Beta, anything could change right up until the hour it is released to manufacturing. And given Monad is in truth even further out, its capabilities are even more in flux.
A shell is nice but, can you change all the settings from the command line? The fact that most of your settings are stored in the registry, makes things a lot harder to do from the command line.
.ini files ten years ago what happened to the KISS principle? They did a good thing when they invented the "Program Files" folder and instructed developers to install their program folders there. Why didn't they just make another directory called "System Settings" and specify a standard .ini file format at that point?
/etc directory then you'd be right--it's worked for aeons so why complicate things by re-inventing the wheel? The concept was sound it just needed fine tuning. Then MS wouldn't have had to make a special utility to manage system settings at all if it didn't want to.
.config XML files stored in the same folder as the application's executable. MS is deprecating any tools they had to deal with the registry in favour of this method of managing system settings.
.NET libraries that make it much easier to do GUIless application developent and allow you to do it in many different languages (although if you look at VB.NET it is more of a CLR dialect than a distinct language anymore--esentially C# without semicolons and a handful of BASIC
Very valid concern regarding the Windows platform. You can indeed do most of what you need to do in Windows through a command line if you are a guru, however without Monad Windows command-line capabilities are extremely weak. Regedit can be used at the command line, however it is quite cumbersome--especially if you must browse the registry. The whole concept of the registry puzzles me actually--here is this obsfucated, hidden, monolithic configuration file that holds all this important system information and if it were to be corrupted it could potentially make the machine unusable. In order to manage it, MS spent the time to greate this regedit program to decode the registry and present it as...a filesystem-like tree structure. Good Lord, what the hell for? When MS was addressing the problem of
If that sounds almost like a UN*X
Fortunately MS has seen the light and it appears that they are trying to quietly re-invent Windows in the image of UN*X. Of course, they won't admit their mistakes and copy UN*X/Linux design outright--they are re-architecting Windows using the same concepts but their own dialects (and in some cases they are making improvements to those concepts). This means that Microsoft can claim to be "innovating" instead of fixing bad design decisions. Some examples of the direction MS is going:
* Monad--an "object oriented shell" that brings a modern image to a very old idea. MS is acknoledging that the command line really IS a good adia and not obsolete, and that it was a mistake to neglect its command line shell. The object oriented approach and consistent interface is a modern solution to a problem originally solved in part with pipes in UN*X. Python provides an object-oriented shell on that platform now--but MS just polished the idea a bit and made the whole shell solution more unified.
* XML-based config files. You won't ever hear Microsoft admit it, but the system registry is a flawed concept and the implementation in Windows was so bad it was a significant source of relaibility and security problems. If you look hard enough in MSDN literature and in blogs, you will find that MS is quietly pushing developers to eliminate their dependency on the registry in favour of
* Microsoft has been slowly expanding developer options for creating GUI-less applications (services and console apps). Prior to VS.NET (right up to version 6) to do so required using C or employing awful, unsupported hacks (anyone who has tried writing a VB6 console app or service knows what I'm talking about--the required hooks into low-level Windows APIs make the result so ugly you are best advised to give up and use C anyways). Now MS has the CLR and
It's not the bubbly that is appealing, it's the ease of use. WHy would I want to use a shell to configure a server?
If you have to ask yourself that question then you don't have a lot of experience administering servers--or have only been tasked with administering a very small number of servers.
GUIs make desktop computers easier to use. You don't want to mess around typing arcane commands to write a letter to your mum or balance a chequebook or play a game (hmm..brings back memories of the 1980s and typing LOAD"MYPGM",8,1:RUN" to use the computers at school). The needs addressed on a desktop are quite a bit different than those addressed by servers, and 90% of desktop users are not IT professionals--and (hopefully) all sysadmins are capable professionals.
If you had to administer a large-ish system consisting of many servers the you'd realise how much of a hindrance a GUI can be on a server--and a poorly architected system such as Windows as it exists today makes the situation worse.
* Firstly, using hardware resources to drive a rich GUI on servers that quite often are not even equipped with monitors seems a bit wasteful and pointless to me.
* Second, GUI-based interfaces are just not scalable--they're engineered to operate on PERSONAL computers. Remote access to GUI-based servers is orders of magnitude more complex than command-line style systems--I'd take SSH over Terminal Services any day.
* Also, once you know the command line doing shell scripts to automate administration tasks is easier, faster and more powerful--I don't know of a single GUI "wizard" that is faster or more powerful than VI and a bunch of text files...which brings me to another issue: when a GUI is the only option to configure your systems then you have to rely on a special application to get your job done. If that application breaks or is otherwise unavailable you are screwed. If for some reason I cannot use GConf on my Linux box I can revert to any text editor, whereas if I cannot use REGEDIT on Windows I have no other option (editing the BINARY registry data by hand is not a workable solution so some application to interpret it is required).
To me, clinging to shells and texteditors, sometimes looks like an attempt to keep things mystical/magical/voodoo like just to make sure you get payed a smart buck to operate these servers.
That stems from a lack of understanding. Most casual Windows users do not understand Regedit or any other system-admin tools even though they are completely graphical. To me (someone with a background in electronics desgin), pointing and clicking in some special sequence looks even more like "voodoo" than the command-line as it is so divorced from the underlying system that I can't be sure exactly what the computer is doing behind the scenes. People like me are sometimes uncomfortable when stuff like that is obscured.
Unix types are like me--they are so accustomed to knowing what happens "under the hood" that they lose confidence in a system when the hood is welded shut and they have no way of confirming everything is right. That is the biggest challenge Windows has in winning converts from UNIX. It's like Microsoft is going to China and telling everyone they have to learn English, and when some of them compalin they are toald by Microsoft advocates that English is much easier than Chinese and you should support such "progress". What about "services for UNIX" you say? Well, that is like a "mostly" complete Chinese-to-English dictionary. Not only does it add to the cost of conversion--it is mostly intended to engourage migration away from the "old ways".
Why should the administration of servers and adatabases remain behind in an evolving software world?
Why should administrators have to contend with a one-size-fits-all user interface that serves every purpose at least marginally but serves no purpose particularly well? You are assuming a command-line is "less-evolved" but many would beg to differ. Some people
Their never-ending efforts to shut down municipal efforts, to preserve their monopolies, and to create a "delivery system" rather than a "networking system" (4MBits down, 256kbits up, anyone?) are a blight on our great (if, sadly, not as great as once it was) nation.
While corporate lobbying is certainly stifling technological innovation in general terms, I'm not sure that the specific problem you imply (blocking of municipal efforts to establish broadband service) is the problem.
In Canada, we have even more challenging ditance and environmental challenges to overcome and we seem to be quite a bit further ahead in providing broadband connectivity without relying heavily on government-sponsored initiatives--and we too have to deal with monopolistic corporations (ie. there is only one company that provides cable for the entire city, and local phone service is a monopoly)--thankfully each type of broadband competes with the others.
I actually have my reservations about municipal or other governments taking big initiatives to provide broadband access--just because if what I've seen of such attempts. Such projects either suffer large cost and schedule overruns and end up more expensive than offerings from private companies (despite the lack of profit motive). Alberta SuperNet for example was far from well-executed. Also, in the end you often just end up with another monopoly (same crap different pile, just government wags protecting their turf instead of coporate wags).
Waaaay back when telephone was all government-run here long-distance was obscenely expensive, you either had to rent or buy your phone from the government telephone company, and you couldn't wire up your own phone extensions (and if they found out you didn't go through the government telephone company you were extra-billed--essentially "fined"). If you lived outside any city limits you were very often on a party line and couldn't use touch-tone phones. Rapid investment in the antiquated infrastructure of the telephone system didn't truly come about where I lived until the government telephone company was privatised. Sad thing is, they were still a monopoly and it was still an improvement. Now with rapid economic growth the problems with monopoly service are showing again as people wait over a month after moving into their new homes to get a land line.
The problem isn't with who owns the service--it is with the lack of competition and level playing field. If you replace a corporate monopoly with a government monopoly, in the long term the problems will either never go away or will eventually reappear.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
This is a pretty lame excuse, especially given Canada's progress in telecommunications--and nobody should use the excuse that 70% of the population is in a strip 100 miles wide along the Canada-US border either, becasue there are still 10 million people that are not, and even the remainder that are in that strip, are in a strip that stretches the entire continent.
Sparse population should actually be a motivating factor rather than a hindrance--since so many people can't just walk a few blocks to a cyber-cafe as they might do in Japan there is great motivation in developing communications technologies to bring signals to the home. That was the case in Canada anyways--a country that is 10 percent of the US population and economic might managed to become a leader in areas lite sattelite communications technology and fibre optics. The Alouette I was the third sattelite ever to be launched into space after Sputnik I and Explorer I, and though the specifications called for a 1-year lifespan it lasted ten years. For several years starting in the 1970s Alberta, Canada was home to the worlds longest usable fibre-optic communications line (and the first ever meant for commercial use). These sorts of feats happened BECAUSE of sparse popula
- Find common brain-farts such as reduplicated words.
/. posts might favourably reduce the number of off-topic grammar-Nazi posts that plague discussion threads. Thankfully such posts are somewhat on topic for THIS article, however it would be nice to have more discussion on the merits of new release of AbiWord vs OO Writer. IMHO the "GNOME" office applications (AbiWord and GNUmeric) are too often overlooked by the community even though they are quite impressive applications.
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- Point out incongruities and neologisms, which some people might not know aren't cultured english, such as excessive verbing of nouns.
Subtle but hilarious humour. In any case, spelling and grammar checking for
Grammar checking is a welcome feature, but there is one that I would love to see--solid suppport for writing and reading OpenDocument format. I haven't been keeping up with AbiWord development (the aging version I have suits me fine for how often I need it) but at that time AbiWord developers were quite non-committal. Since OpenDocument is now a proposed industry standard and not merely the format for a rival project I hope they've reconsidered their position.
...if it was it would be pretty ridiculous.
If I accidentally forget to lock the door of my residence when I have to leave to run a quick errand, and I return to unexpectedly find a stranger rummaging through my refrigerator it is criminal trespass. Said stranger need not enter by force or cause damage to be convicted of a crime, and I don't have to put a "no trespassing" sign on my front door to make it a crime. It is obviously a private domicile and "no trespassing" is implied.
Spyware is the electronic equivalent of the above. Providing explicit notification should only be required when a given property could easily be mistaken for public property--and the same applies to computers. Spyware vendors should expect that it is a certainty that their distribution methods will target computers that are "private property" and that they must clearly and explicitly ask permission to interfere with that property.
What is GConf? Well, it's a nice implmentation of a registry. :)
.ini file concept (ie. standardising the format and location of these files). Since MS now advocates XML-based .config files over using the registry it seems they've fired the crackhead or he successfully completed rehab.
Well it is *conceptually* nice anyways (some find the implementation could be improved), because it isn't really a registry in the same sense as the one Windows has. GConf makes use of a collection of non-binary files and it just happens to be an application where they can be centrally managed. On Windows, some crackhead thought it would be a great idea to invent a central, hidden, binary file to store all the config settings for the OS and all applications rather than fix the flaws in the