I have found this trend quite puzzling. I have bought several major items from Circuit City, and I'm quite happy with the price and the service I received. OTOH, I have bought some items from Best Buy, always felt like I had been slimed, and it is quite clear from the parent's links that Best Buy engages in lots of sleazy marketing tactics. So why is it that America likes to shop at Best Buy, and not at Circuit City?
No kidding:-) I said in a public forum about 4 years ago that botnets are the first and only successful example of commercial utility computing, where a vendor tries to rent out time on large compute clusters.
This works much better for botnet vendors than for Amazon EC2 or HP Utility Data Center, because the really valuable resource the botnets are renting is a routable IP address that hasn't been shut down yet. Computers are nearly free, but IP addresses that work are not.
Read my post again: it says, explicitly, "people in America", because I am well aware that Bell notably was not native to the US. America was very big on immigration then, and many if not most "Americans" were either immigrants or first generation Americans.
None the less, a lot of innovation happened in the US, well out of proportion to its size. That it was doen by people from many backgrounds shows us that it isn't genetic. That it happened a lot more in America than elsewhere says it could be something in the culture. Or maybe it is in the water:-)
The quibble about "USians" vs. "Americans" is absurd. Get over it; people from the US are referred to as "Americans" and people from Canada, Mexico, and Brazil are not, whether you or I like it or not. I am from Canada, and none of the Canadians around me ever had any desire to lay claim to the term "American":-)
Here's a clue: "America" (people in America) did invent the Internet By that you mean Al Gore, right?
No, as pointed out in my post and the hyperlink to the Wikipedia, I meant Vint Cerf et al. The Internet was actually a series of fundamental inventions, even though some children might not know that because the Internet is older than they are. More over, the story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet is false.
I'm sick of an American school system that produces children who are brought up to believe that America IS the world and anything that goes on outside is irrelevant. Children so stupid they think America invented the Internet, computer, motor car, light bulb, telephone etc ad infinitum....
Here's a clue: "America" (people in America) did invent the Internet, a substantial part of the computer, the light bulb, the telephone... not quite ad infinitum. America did not invent everything, not even a majority of things, but American inventors certainly did invent a huge fraction of things invented since 1776.
If you are going to throw an irrelevant troll rant, at least get your facts straight:-)
And the republicans are different... how, exactly? Please, be specific.
The Republicans didn't promise to do anything for the people, other than to continue persecution of Muslims and to ensure that men are not allowed to marry each other.
Not that I like the Republicans or anything, I'm just so very disappointed in the Democrats. Spineless wonders that can't seem to get over the idea that being "Republican Lite" is not a winning strategy.
This reads like spam from Verizon attacking a competitor with FUD. Guess what; I've had horrible customer service from Verizon:
I sign up for a broadband account.
They screw up the billing address, so the bills go to/dev/null instead of me.
When they don't get paid, they phone me and tell me that they need payment.
I pay them.
After I have paid them, they cut off my connection.
Then they charge me a reconnection fee.
So they screwed me twice for their mistake. I even took it to the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, and they still demanded that I pay their reconnection fee:-(
I am still on Verizon at that location because there is no alternative. As soon as there is an alternative, I am switching away from Verizon as fast as I can, to anyone, at any price, for any level of service. I will never use Verizon again for anything.
Meanwhile, at another location, I am using Comcast for broadband connectivity, and have had no issues with their customer service. I have even had some technical issues with them, and they have actually been kind-of helpful. The only thing I don't like about their service is blocking inbound port 25 because I like to run my own mail server, but I understand them wanting to reduce rampant spam relays.
So I think this whole story is just a bunch of Verizon-sponsored astro-turfing, trying to FUD against Comcast.
Is there a particular reason "mail" and "calendar" are tied together, or is it simply that "Microsoft does it that way", so everybody else is expected to follow suit, as they have with word processor + spreadsheet = "office software" (whatever that means)?
I agree with another poster that the fact that Outlook bundles mail and calendar is a major part of it. But I think there is another factor: disconnected operation. When you have a distributed application that needs to interact with mutiple people, and you can run the protocol over e-mail, then those people can interact with the traffic while off line. You can be on an airplane or something with no network, check your calendar, and schedule an appointment with a co-worker. Conversely, while you are on a plane, co-workers can make appointments with you, and it is all reconciled later when you connect and sync up your mail.
Disconnected operation is critical for enterprise calendaring, because the people who do the most calendaring are leaders like the CEO and VPs, meetings can't happen without them. Worse, these VIPs tend to travel more than most, so they demand disconnected operation for their most critical applications, such as calendaring.
Evolution, with a plug-in, can use the calendar features of Exchange. Unfortunately Evolution maintenance has suffered lately, and while I used to happily use it for calendaring, I have not been able tot get it to work within the last year.
One of my big problems with Hula was the refusal to embrace existing standards. They should have used Postfix instead of Netmail as the hub, and they should have built plugins for all the popular mail clients (Thunderbird, Mutt) instead of just Evolution.
Now we have the Bongo and Chandler projects. Both leave something to be desired in rate of progress. Hula was announced in 2005 and still is not usable, Chandler is almost a joke having been announced in 2001 and just now reaching Preview stage. They both leave something to be desired in features as well, mainly in the "works with $my_favoite_MUA" area. Is there a possibility of merging the projects? Or are the philosophies too different?
Paper calendars work great for scheduling with the rest of your family, because you all pass through the kitchen. But that does not scale to large enterprises, you know, like with more than 50 people. It does not scale to distributed organizations, where you don't share a kitchen. It does not connect appointment scheduling to nag 'bots that remind you to attend the meeting.
But I think this is the core reason why open source calendaring sucks: it is a problem that most open source community people don't have, and only really is a problem in large organizations.
Sadly, this has lead to open source completely failing to take over the mail server market. Linux & *BSD, Postfix, and Qmail all make great mail servers, and are used by many ISPs, but they are largely unused in enterprises, precisely because of the lack of calendaring. As a result, corporate mail servers are invariable Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Novell Groupwise.
Hula was an attempt to address this, but either due to Novell not doing it right or the community just not caring, it did not work out so well:-(
I would really like to see the open source community get this right. If we don't, then the mail server market will continue to be dominated by proprietary products.
Who ever moderated the parent as "troll" didn't think about it very hard. A simple "no" in answer to this question is actually quite accurate. That is sad, and there is a great deal more to be said on the matter, but it is the truth.
You seem to be referring to Kennewick Man. It is his genetics, rather than his supposed resemblance to Patrick Stewart:-) that shows that he is unrelated to contemporary Native Americans
The issue here is that the evidence shows that we're FAR FAR beyond where we usually peak between Ice Ages.
Please either justify or qualify this claim. Are there not archaeological finds that document palm trees in Alaska, grasslands and wildlife under what is now Siberian permafrost, etc.? This seems to suggest that our warm peaks have in fact been much warmer than we are now.
In fact, this historic temperature plot shows that our current temperature, while on the high end, is actually well below the temperature peaks reached 130K years ago, 250K years ago, and 340K years ago.
So while there is clearly cause for concern, I submit that your emphatic assertions that we are in unexplored territory and the GP is mad for questioning this are sheer bunk.
If you want your software to be internationalizable, then you are going to need all your interface text in external text files anyway. Just spellcheck that. Your programmers really shouldn't be embeddeding any message text in the software itself, so you can just use grep to search for " marks:)
Not to sound criticial, but writing 2 theses and 10 papers sounds like what most any student does in their first term in a typical year in high school. Hardly evidence of extended or advanced usage.
Perhaps "paper" and "thesis" do not mean what you think they mean. The papers are those published on major computer science conferences, and the theses were my masters and PhD theses (about 200 pages each).
... and would be a fool to throw that away for an approach that's narrow and implies vendor lock-in.
Of course. But the question was what I would put emphasis on for Linux, and my point is that the FOSS community has failed to produce an obvious winner in the DTP space. I don't want FrameMaker per se, I want an open source DTP that is just as good or better. Several other responders pointed me at Scribus I'll have to go check it out.
Linux has achieved near parity with Windows in a lot of places. I've been a Linux desktop user since 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, I always used some kind of Windows emulation to run Microsoft Office and FrameMaker, because there is no Linux equivalent. Since 2005, OpenOffice has become sufficiently powerful, compatible, and stable, that I have not felt the need, at all, for Microsoft Office, and so I have completely given up using Windows emulators.
However, Linux is still sorely lacking in 2 key application areas:
Really good DTP. FrameMaker rocks. Adobe had a Frame version for Linux in beta for a year, and then withdrew it:-( Yes, I know about LaTeX, I wrote 2 theses and 10 papers in LaTeX, and it is not an adequate replacement. Linux needs either a port of FrameMaker, or a clone. OO Writer is an easy-to-use word processor, not a DTP, it is like the difference between a hand saw and a lumber mill.
Good webcast software. On Windows, WebEx is the clear winner, and they have a solid product. Delivering a demo to remote viewers of a desktop application is no problem. Doing the same thing in Linux is problematic, at best. Instead of one really good product, we have several bad ones. Mostly they just lack maturity, but that still means that I have to spend a lot on plane fare to give effective Linux desktop demos.
Cool! I did not know about this, it is great that someone is trying this model. However, I see that Boxbe is using a server-oriented model so they can basically filter spam and legitimate mail sent to yourname@boxbe.com. I imagine a more P2P solution, where the SpamAss agent on any mail server would use a server company like Boxbe as a payment clearing service, and filtering is done on whatever MTA you are using.
I care, because I am already getting lots of spam at my well-known address at crispincowan.com and would like to filter it. A solution that requires users to change their e-mail address is not a great solution for a lot of users.
A core principle in figuring out any kind of shady shenanigans is to follow the money. The problem with Goodmail, and with Microsoft's pay-to-play fee, is that the money is being paid to the wrong party. Paying the fee to the mailbox-hosting ISP cannot help but create a corrupting conflict of interest, making this a bribe. Nasty spam will be allowed through if the vendor has the $$$ to pay, and legitimate bulk mail that people have opted into will be blocked, if the news letter is not coming from a moneyed source.
Instead, consider a P2P scheme where the postage is paid directly from the sender to the receiver, where the receiver themselves can white-list a sender as not having to pay. It would produce these kinds of effects:
For most personal onesey twosey mail, sending volume approximately equals receiving volume, so the postage payment is mostly a wash, with chatty people paying quiet people a modest amount on average.
For opt-in news letters and mailing lists, the receiver would be expected to white-list the source, e.g. I would white-list my subscription to Bugtraq.
Spammers and "legitimate" bulk mail advertisers alike would have to pay in proportion to the volume of mail they get delivered (non-delivered mail doesn't pay the postage).
There's a bunch of interesting things that can be done with this model:
Postage is just an offer to pay, which only causes actual payment if the receiver redeems the postage.
Postage can be nothing more than a GPG certificate attached to the mail, validated by the receiver's MTA or MUA.
Receivers can dial the amount of postage they require to accept an e-mail. They could set it to a static value, e.g. "at least 2 cents or I'm not interested", or they could even use SpamAssassin to dynamically set the postage, e.g. "at least 10 cents * the spamass score" so that highly spammy mail requires much more postage than plaintext free of spam phrases.
Gold miners can set up spam trap mail addresses that do nothing but accept postage and throw the mail away. This is abusive to spammers who are paying to have their mail delivered. Cry me a river:-)
So yes, magnets pushing on magnets, but VERY QUICKLY. That makes it more believable, right?
No, that does not make it more believable. Either it is a clever hack to extract energy from fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field (which I don't believe) or it is just a scam. That stuff about changing magnetic fields "faster than the universe can notice" is pure babble, it does not explain how you could generate energy.
To generate energy, you have to either
Extract it from some other form of potential or kinetic energy, such as tides flowing around the ocean, or water high up on a mountain. That energy is not "free" either; the tides are driven by the rotation of the earth relative to the sun and the moon; when you use tital energy you slow down the rotation of the earth by an infinitesimal amount. When you extract energy from falling water, you are capturing energy that was put there by the sun powering the evaporation of the sea and raining it down on mountain tops.
Annihilate some matter and turn it into energy, which is what happens in fission, fusion, or matter/anti-matter reactions.
There is a fairly popular conspiracy theory that Microsoft Research exists to take the best & brightest research minds off the street, denying them to other companies and startups that might threaten Microsoft.
Like all conspiracy theories, this cannot be confirmed:-) It can be falsified, if/when we see results from MSR appearing in Microsoft products.
Caveat: lack of falsification does not mean it is confirmed. Intending to get products from a research group does not mean you will get successful technology transfer. Otherwise we would have seen Xerox making ass loads of money from windowing workstations, local area networks, and laser printers:-)
Curious as it may seem, historically the best method for technology transfer is for innovators to leave the organization and found a startup, let the free market determine whether it was a good idea, and then buy back the successful companies. If this was not actually the case, then large $$$ research labs like MSR, and IBM and AT&T research before them, would have crushed the venture capital/startup business. Building an organizational structure that supports and nurtures innovation turns out to be very difficult.
True, and that's why I haven't bought a machine from them:-) but it is true that they have been doing this for some time. They are a small reseller, and they are essentially charging you for the service of them installing your Linux and debugging the driver issues.
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I have found this trend quite puzzling. I have bought several major items from Circuit City, and I'm quite happy with the price and the service I received. OTOH, I have bought some items from Best Buy, always felt like I had been slimed, and it is quite clear from the parent's links that Best Buy engages in lots of sleazy marketing tactics. So why is it that America likes to shop at Best Buy, and not at Circuit City?
No kidding :-) I said in a public forum about 4 years ago that botnets are the first and only successful example of commercial utility computing, where a vendor tries to rent out time on large compute clusters.
This works much better for botnet vendors than for Amazon EC2 or HP Utility Data Center, because the really valuable resource the botnets are renting is a routable IP address that hasn't been shut down yet. Computers are nearly free, but IP addresses that work are not.
Read my post again: it says, explicitly, "people in America", because I am well aware that Bell notably was not native to the US. America was very big on immigration then, and many if not most "Americans" were either immigrants or first generation Americans.
None the less, a lot of innovation happened in the US, well out of proportion to its size. That it was doen by people from many backgrounds shows us that it isn't genetic. That it happened a lot more in America than elsewhere says it could be something in the culture. Or maybe it is in the water :-)
The quibble about "USians" vs. "Americans" is absurd. Get over it; people from the US are referred to as "Americans" and people from Canada, Mexico, and Brazil are not, whether you or I like it or not. I am from Canada, and none of the Canadians around me ever had any desire to lay claim to the term "American" :-)
No, as pointed out in my post and the hyperlink to the Wikipedia, I meant Vint Cerf et al. The Internet was actually a series of fundamental inventions, even though some children might not know that because the Internet is older than they are. More over, the story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet is false.
Here's a clue: "America" (people in America) did invent the Internet, a substantial part of the computer, the light bulb, the telephone ... not quite ad infinitum. America did not invent everything, not even a majority of things, but American inventors certainly did invent a huge fraction of things invented since 1776.
If you are going to throw an irrelevant troll rant, at least get your facts straight :-)
The Republicans didn't promise to do anything for the people, other than to continue persecution of Muslims and to ensure that men are not allowed to marry each other.
Not that I like the Republicans or anything, I'm just so very disappointed in the Democrats. Spineless wonders that can't seem to get over the idea that being "Republican Lite" is not a winning strategy.
This reads like spam from Verizon attacking a competitor with FUD. Guess what; I've had horrible customer service from Verizon:
So they screwed me twice for their mistake. I even took it to the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, and they still demanded that I pay their reconnection fee :-(
I am still on Verizon at that location because there is no alternative. As soon as there is an alternative, I am switching away from Verizon as fast as I can, to anyone, at any price, for any level of service. I will never use Verizon again for anything.
Meanwhile, at another location, I am using Comcast for broadband connectivity, and have had no issues with their customer service. I have even had some technical issues with them, and they have actually been kind-of helpful. The only thing I don't like about their service is blocking inbound port 25 because I like to run my own mail server, but I understand them wanting to reduce rampant spam relays.
So I think this whole story is just a bunch of Verizon-sponsored astro-turfing, trying to FUD against Comcast.
I agree with another poster that the fact that Outlook bundles mail and calendar is a major part of it. But I think there is another factor: disconnected operation. When you have a distributed application that needs to interact with mutiple people, and you can run the protocol over e-mail, then those people can interact with the traffic while off line. You can be on an airplane or something with no network, check your calendar, and schedule an appointment with a co-worker. Conversely, while you are on a plane, co-workers can make appointments with you, and it is all reconciled later when you connect and sync up your mail.
Disconnected operation is critical for enterprise calendaring, because the people who do the most calendaring are leaders like the CEO and VPs, meetings can't happen without them. Worse, these VIPs tend to travel more than most, so they demand disconnected operation for their most critical applications, such as calendaring.
Evolution, with a plug-in, can use the calendar features of Exchange. Unfortunately Evolution maintenance has suffered lately, and while I used to happily use it for calendaring, I have not been able tot get it to work within the last year.
One of my big problems with Hula was the refusal to embrace existing standards. They should have used Postfix instead of Netmail as the hub, and they should have built plugins for all the popular mail clients (Thunderbird, Mutt) instead of just Evolution.
Now we have the Bongo and Chandler projects. Both leave something to be desired in rate of progress. Hula was announced in 2005 and still is not usable, Chandler is almost a joke having been announced in 2001 and just now reaching Preview stage. They both leave something to be desired in features as well, mainly in the "works with $my_favoite_MUA" area. Is there a possibility of merging the projects? Or are the philosophies too different?
That is so painfully wrong.
Paper calendars work great for scheduling with the rest of your family, because you all pass through the kitchen. But that does not scale to large enterprises, you know, like with more than 50 people. It does not scale to distributed organizations, where you don't share a kitchen. It does not connect appointment scheduling to nag 'bots that remind you to attend the meeting.
But I think this is the core reason why open source calendaring sucks: it is a problem that most open source community people don't have, and only really is a problem in large organizations.
Sadly, this has lead to open source completely failing to take over the mail server market. Linux & *BSD, Postfix, and Qmail all make great mail servers, and are used by many ISPs, but they are largely unused in enterprises, precisely because of the lack of calendaring. As a result, corporate mail servers are invariable Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, or Novell Groupwise.
Hula was an attempt to address this, but either due to Novell not doing it right or the community just not caring, it did not work out so well :-(
I would really like to see the open source community get this right. If we don't, then the mail server market will continue to be dominated by proprietary products.
Who ever moderated the parent as "troll" didn't think about it very hard. A simple "no" in answer to this question is actually quite accurate. That is sad, and there is a great deal more to be said on the matter, but it is the truth.
You seem to be referring to Kennewick Man. It is his genetics, rather than his supposed resemblance to Patrick Stewart :-) that shows that he is unrelated to contemporary Native Americans
. CrispinPlease either justify or qualify this claim. Are there not archaeological finds that document palm trees in Alaska, grasslands and wildlife under what is now Siberian permafrost, etc.? This seems to suggest that our warm peaks have in fact been much warmer than we are now.
In fact, this historic temperature plot shows that our current temperature, while on the high end, is actually well below the temperature peaks reached 130K years ago, 250K years ago, and 340K years ago.
So while there is clearly cause for concern, I submit that your emphatic assertions that we are in unexplored territory and the GP is mad for questioning this are sheer bunk.
CrispinWhat "rare"? This looks like clones of old science fiction magazine Analog/Astounding covers.
Crispintrivial post to unmoderate my moderation because the damned moderator interface sux0rs
If you want your software to be internationalizable, then you are going to need all your interface text in external text files anyway. Just spellcheck that. Your programmers really shouldn't be embeddeding any message text in the software itself, so you can just use grep to search for " marks :)
Perhaps "paper" and "thesis" do not mean what you think they mean. The papers are those published on major computer science conferences, and the theses were my masters and PhD theses (about 200 pages each).
... and would be a fool to throw that away for an approach that's narrow and implies vendor lock-in.Of course. But the question was what I would put emphasis on for Linux, and my point is that the FOSS community has failed to produce an obvious winner in the DTP space. I don't want FrameMaker per se, I want an open source DTP that is just as good or better. Several other responders pointed me at Scribus I'll have to go check it out.
Linux has achieved near parity with Windows in a lot of places. I've been a Linux desktop user since 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, I always used some kind of Windows emulation to run Microsoft Office and FrameMaker, because there is no Linux equivalent. Since 2005, OpenOffice has become sufficiently powerful, compatible, and stable, that I have not felt the need, at all, for Microsoft Office, and so I have completely given up using Windows emulators.
However, Linux is still sorely lacking in 2 key application areas:
So make it work as a plug-in for SpamAssassin, and then you have something :-)
Cool! I did not know about this, it is great that someone is trying this model. However, I see that Boxbe is using a server-oriented model so they can basically filter spam and legitimate mail sent to yourname@boxbe.com. I imagine a more P2P solution, where the SpamAss agent on any mail server would use a server company like Boxbe as a payment clearing service, and filtering is done on whatever MTA you are using.
I care, because I am already getting lots of spam at my well-known address at crispincowan.com and would like to filter it. A solution that requires users to change their e-mail address is not a great solution for a lot of users.
A core principle in figuring out any kind of shady shenanigans is to follow the money. The problem with Goodmail, and with Microsoft's pay-to-play fee, is that the money is being paid to the wrong party. Paying the fee to the mailbox-hosting ISP cannot help but create a corrupting conflict of interest, making this a bribe. Nasty spam will be allowed through if the vendor has the $$$ to pay, and legitimate bulk mail that people have opted into will be blocked, if the news letter is not coming from a moneyed source.
Instead, consider a P2P scheme where the postage is paid directly from the sender to the receiver, where the receiver themselves can white-list a sender as not having to pay. It would produce these kinds of effects:
There's a bunch of interesting things that can be done with this model:
No, that does not make it more believable. Either it is a clever hack to extract energy from fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field (which I don't believe) or it is just a scam. That stuff about changing magnetic fields "faster than the universe can notice" is pure babble, it does not explain how you could generate energy.
To generate energy, you have to either
Just don't mix your matter and antimatter cold :-)
There is a fairly popular conspiracy theory that Microsoft Research exists to take the best & brightest research minds off the street, denying them to other companies and startups that might threaten Microsoft.
Like all conspiracy theories, this cannot be confirmed :-) It can be falsified, if/when we see results from MSR appearing in Microsoft products.
Caveat: lack of falsification does not mean it is confirmed. Intending to get products from a research group does not mean you will get successful technology transfer. Otherwise we would have seen Xerox making ass loads of money from windowing workstations, local area networks, and laser printers :-)
Curious as it may seem, historically the best method for technology transfer is for innovators to leave the organization and found a startup, let the free market determine whether it was a good idea, and then buy back the successful companies. If this was not actually the case, then large $$$ research labs like MSR, and IBM and AT&T research before them, would have crushed the venture capital/startup business. Building an organizational structure that supports and nurtures innovation turns out to be very difficult.
True, and that's why I haven't bought a machine from them :-) but it is true that they have been doing this for some time. They are a small reseller, and they are essentially charging you for the service of them installing your Linux and debugging the driver issues.