Business Week also has a podcast where they talk with the author of the story to provide a litte more depth. It was a fairly entertaining discussion where they discuss a little of the history of how it all came about and the relationship between Steve Jobs and Disney.
Well, until you are able to make the jump to OOo, another open source program may be able to help with the PDF creation. PDF Creator installs itself as a print driver and makes life pretty nice (unless you need links embedded within word to transfer to PDF) and can be found on Source Forge. Maybe someday Word will decide to stop eating documents, but that's probably wishful thinking.
After working in the oil spill cleanup industry I seriously question the feasibility of this plane to be used in oil spills. Realistically there is one potential use and the is to use a dispersant. The use of a dispersant however is not a containment strategy but instead causes the oil molecules to bond with water which allow it to break down and prevent it from just pooling up on the surface. Typically a true containment strategy is a mix of containment boom and sorbents (cloth like materials that pick up only oil and not water). The main spills where the capacity of the 747 is likely to be utilized is something like the Prestige (Spain, 2002) or the Valdez. In both of these cases there was almost no chance that politically the oil would have been dispersed (recovery was the primary goal). So ultimately there may be a place for this plane in the use of oil spills however it is likely to be extremely limited.
A couple of key points to look at: Performance Measures, Licensing, and Quality of the OS Project.
Tie employee's performance to the long term success of the project and overall company performance. My initial concern when implementing an OS system like proposed is that employees bonuses and raises are tied to how many people they supported during the day or if the projects were setup on time. While both of these are valid, when first implementing OS there is usually a learning curve where these may suffer initially and then later on be significantly better than before. What happens is that during the implementation phase employees are penalized for doing as managers requested. Also, recognize that you are building knowledge in the company. The IT Directors should encourage this and find ways to tap into it.
You have already acknowledged the licensing however it may be worthwhile to put a brief outline of the different types of licenses and illustrate times where the IT Directors should check with the legal department to make sure they are in compliance. What comes to mind is that if a division creates a specialized financial program for a client the Director should know to check whether they have to release it under the GPL as well.
It should be noted in the package that not all open source packages are created equal. It may be worthwhile to create some standards as to the length of time a project has been active, have their been audits performed, how strong is community support (graph the number of developer discussions) and remind the Directors that open source is only a tool and in some cases may not be the best one.
Also worth noting is that they officially announced Xgrid, their clustering software. There had been a maililng list for it a couple of months ago that was later shutdown. From the press release it says:
"Xgrid makes it easy to turn your Mac cluster into a supercomputer," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new Xgrid software agents use Apple's breakthrough Rendezvous networking technology to automatically discover, connect and manage tasks across available systems in a Mac cluster."
The entire press release can be read here and in it they say they have posted a beta version of the software but I've yet to find it.
This is actually the same thing developed by the James Pattern and Ben Recht. I was just on the site a couple of days ago looking at it for an MIS class. This page however is the first time that I have seen some of the other unique applications such as the sandscape.
Now earlier in the comments fireboy1919 that it wouldn't work because people are unwilling to learn a new interface in addition to the ones they are already good at. I think for it to be successful it depends on the application of they system and playing off of its core competencies which are the ability to track more than one object on the surface at a time and the ability to take on any shape and size by adding more units to the interface. So where it becomes useful is in a group situation where many people can interact with the objects at the same time and they are not limited to the size of a monitor. In the audio example it is like a mixing board but what makes it special is that every object has a contextual menu and can change to the users needs.
I was in the oil and hazardous spill cleanup industry for a while and one of the things that surprised me was that when transporting pressurized containers with unknown contents private companies had to depressurize it (usually by having someone from the police department rifle it from a safe distance) while the state could move these unknown chemicals still pressurized. This was a big issue especially when dealing with methlabs. Now the big question is do these laws apply just to private industries or do they also affect the government's transportation of hazardous materials. Also, this will likely raise the costs of companies in this field many of whom are already financially unstable which brings up the issue of whether these should be completely private companies or if the service they provide is for the greater good and should be funded by government.
The recent problems with Apple's Mac OS X 10.2.8 update are a good example of a patch breaking things (ie. killing network connections). Now the problem I see with how updates are administered is that in many cases you can't select between a security update and a feature update. 10.2.8 addressed the OpenSSH, OpenSSL bugs that were recently reported on in addition to sendmail and a couple of others. At the same time, it installed new USB 2.0 drivers and NIC drivers for G4 desktops.
One solution I believe is to make every patch and update available separately. In addition provide an update tool with presets that choose only the latest security fixes or feature updates or all updates, and allow administer's to customize their own presets. You are then faced with the issue of dependencies however these can be easily addressed by warnings letting you know what additional software is required and will be installed.
I just decided to ftp into the mozilla site and no slowdowns at all, in fact I was getting 384k a second. I'd recommend it if anybody is having difficulties. This is while the link on the web site is completely unable to connect. It's just interesting to notice that the bottleneck is on the http server rather than bandwidth.
Regarding mac's and exchange there is software by Snerdware that integrates Exchange into your address book and soon ical. I haven't used it but it yet but it looks pretty interesting as a bridge. One major downside in a corporate environment is that it looks like it will have to be installed on every machine rather than being server based. Email can then be handled with the imap connectors turned on and you will have most of the connectivity to exchange.
I've thought about this for a while. By putting a transmitter out near the channel buoy and a notifier that users should try connecting at that point they can point people to navigational charts, highlight hazards that may not be on charts, show weather and tides, point them to the appropriate guest slip and handle payment for that slip. Ultimately, the idea is to create a portal specific to the needs of the maritime community.
The big issues then arise is that do you really want people running the boat and operating a laptop at the same time. This could be combatted somewhat by building text-to-speech tools on the web site so it says everything I mentoned.
One thought I had towards funding the cost of the program is by the school selling book / reading packets of copyrighted materials that they cannot distribute freely. Include with that a cd-rom with the lecture videos when and other materials on the site.
The only concern I have regarding this model is that it provides an incentive to require copyrighted material even if it is inferior. One way of addressing this is to not profit from copyrighted materials but focus the profit on the cost of packaging materials. This results in lower profits but hopefully cheaper distribution which would benefit lower income people.
You've had me thinking on this one for a bit now. On the latest archive of Your Mac Life about 1:17:00 into it Steve Wozniak discusses his latest devices. Some of the interesting points he made were that the devices did use the 900mHz range had a throughput of 1000 baud and an average in city range of 1-2 miles although they said with clear distance they hit 117 miles.
Also an interesting tidbit is to work with the interference of other devices theirs scan for the existing background noise and then pull and read the signals that are different. Not that it doesn't mean they are using participating I didn't see Wheels of Zues on the list of members. My intuition says that there was a recognized need for low throughput wireless devices with the batter life for implementing in everyday devices.
I'm not as familiar with it but it is also worth looking towards Microsoft's watches that they demoed a couple of months ago. If memory serves correct they used FM frequencies and encoded into them but the part I remember was an interview on the screen savers with the guy who developed the encoding method who said they reached the theoretical bandwidth limit on encoding into the FM frequencies.
Announced today, Adobe had optimized photoshop for the G5 processor. The details are vague but you can read them on the Press Release. Now I have to say that I love the G5 for everything it is but I'll stay imparitial about it until the first units are in the hands of people who can test it with applications similar to what I run.
I just had a thought that would probably reduce the number of duplicates significantly. At the point where the author hits submit, the story checks all of the links in the article and then does a comparison of those against the complete story archive. At that point if the article has a duplicate it will find it and let them know.
A problem with this method is what may happen with this story. After the editors typically link directly to the story they also link to the referring domain. A way around this is that if there is more than one link in the story then any link to a base level site (ie. www.arstechnica.com) is ignored and the links focus into the sites pages and folders are paid attention to.
I may later play around with a couple of searches of the database to see how well this method works, but I think it would improve things significantly.
Odds are that it will be an announcement and preview of the new OS, not the actual release of 10.3. The only factor that may come in is if apple says it will give a discount or coupon to people who purchase a new mac after that date.
If it were me, I'd get the new mac now just so I could begin using it. Is $129 (just a guestimate from previous costs) really worth not having the ibook for two months.
And the Reason is in the FAQ but just in case here it is once again:
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Last average I heard for google was around 10,000 low cost servers. Therefore it isn't that big of deal if 100 or so servers go down. There is a really good.mp3 interview with Jim Reese, the Chief Operations Engineer available. It may be a little old but still a good listen.
This brings back a good old memory of Ray Petit, the inventor of CLOVER. He was one of my boy scout leaders who introduced us to HAM Radio. Easily one of the nicest people I've ever had the chance to meet. I remember in the late 80's him telling me about actually hitting the 9600 bps and how great it was. I know that last part was kind of off-topic but here is a good link to learn more about CLOVER.
I work for a mid sized company but I know the web site is very out of date and has incredibly poor content. In my mind I can pinpoint this to one thing. The inability for the people who write content to get it to the site.
I know for fact there is more than enough good stories and photographs in the organization that can be published but most of the technicians who would write it (or at least the first draft) don't have the time to learn a web design program. The solution I believe is a good content management system. I've been looking into Typo3 and a couple of other content management systems. I believe once we make it easy to update then content will be less likely to be obselete.
Content Management Systems are right now the best place I can start introducing open source software at my work. We've looked at Microsoft's Content Management Server which is highly over priced for our needs and its hard to argue with the documentation and self-help community that open source software provides. I know there are other content management systems out there but the point is that for content to stay current publishing capabilities must be pushed to the people who will author it.
I was talking with a buddy of mine about the possibility of putting a wireless card in the iPods and then going to a club with them. The dj would then be able to pick and mix music off of people in the club. Similar to the iTunes demo but with a little more flare.
Just briefly I had the opportunity to meet George Dyson (a really nice down to earth guy). If the name sounds at all familiar, his sister is Ester Dyson (used to be chairperson of ICANN) and father is Freeman Dyson (a well known theoretical physicist). From what I've heard, George was always the odd one out in the family taking his own path. He used to live in a great looking tree house on the north end of Vancouver Island and then went on to research and build baidarkas (an Aleut Kayak).He has a great book on the kayaks called "Baidarka" which in the first half covers the history of the their development and Aleuts interaction with Russian traders and then moves on to cover the vessels themselves and his work.
He then went on to research and write a book on A.I. titled "Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence". In addition to the original theories about using nuclear explosions to propel space ships, his father had the concept of building a huge structure around a star that people would live on the inside of and the star would provide the energy. You may remember this from a Star Trek Next Generation where they brought back Scotty, it was the Dyson Sphere. A final interesting tidbit is that George Dyson's grandfather Sir George Dyson was an English composer and founder of the National Federation of Music Societies.
Overall, it's an interesting family with some incredible minds in it. The BBC has a short piece on his AI book and on the left hand column is a real audio interview with George. There are also plenty of other links on google if you plug in his name.
In addition to setting certain restrictions on user rights is the possibility of remote installs overnight. I remember reading that the Apple Stores which allow anyone to play on their computers push the entire disk image to the computers every night. This way it ensures they are all the same afterwards and everyone has the same experience. I am not familiar with the open source options available here but I believe google uses something similar to maintain their machines. Some searching should give some options and maybe someone with more knowledge can point in the right direction if this is a feasible solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Business Week also has a podcast where they talk with the author of the story to provide a litte more depth. It was a fairly entertaining discussion where they discuss a little of the history of how it all came about and the relationship between Steve Jobs and Disney.
Well, until you are able to make the jump to OOo, another open source program may be able to help with the PDF creation. PDF Creator installs itself as a print driver and makes life pretty nice (unless you need links embedded within word to transfer to PDF) and can be found on Source Forge. Maybe someday Word will decide to stop eating documents, but that's probably wishful thinking.
After working in the oil spill cleanup industry I seriously question the feasibility of this plane to be used in oil spills. Realistically there is one potential use and the is to use a dispersant. The use of a dispersant however is not a containment strategy but instead causes the oil molecules to bond with water which allow it to break down and prevent it from just pooling up on the surface. Typically a true containment strategy is a mix of containment boom and sorbents (cloth like materials that pick up only oil and not water). The main spills where the capacity of the 747 is likely to be utilized is something like the Prestige (Spain, 2002) or the Valdez. In both of these cases there was almost no chance that politically the oil would have been dispersed (recovery was the primary goal). So ultimately there may be a place for this plane in the use of oil spills however it is likely to be extremely limited.
A couple of key points to look at: Performance Measures, Licensing, and Quality of the OS Project.
Tie employee's performance to the long term success of the project and overall company performance. My initial concern when implementing an OS system like proposed is that employees bonuses and raises are tied to how many people they supported during the day or if the projects were setup on time. While both of these are valid, when first implementing OS there is usually a learning curve where these may suffer initially and then later on be significantly better than before. What happens is that during the implementation phase employees are penalized for doing as managers requested. Also, recognize that you are building knowledge in the company. The IT Directors should encourage this and find ways to tap into it.
You have already acknowledged the licensing however it may be worthwhile to put a brief outline of the different types of licenses and illustrate times where the IT Directors should check with the legal department to make sure they are in compliance. What comes to mind is that if a division creates a specialized financial program for a client the Director should know to check whether they have to release it under the GPL as well.
It should be noted in the package that not all open source packages are created equal. It may be worthwhile to create some standards as to the length of time a project has been active, have their been audits performed, how strong is community support (graph the number of developer discussions) and remind the Directors that open source is only a tool and in some cases may not be the best one.
Just an update, I found the link to the xgrid preview. It is available here.
Also worth noting is that they officially announced Xgrid, their clustering software. There had been a maililng list for it a couple of months ago that was later shutdown. From the press release it says:
"Xgrid makes it easy to turn your Mac cluster into a supercomputer," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new Xgrid software agents use Apple's breakthrough Rendezvous networking technology to automatically discover, connect and manage tasks across available systems in a Mac cluster."
The entire press release can be read here and in it they say they have posted a beta version of the software but I've yet to find it.
This is actually the same thing developed by the James Pattern and Ben Recht. I was just on the site a couple of days ago looking at it for an MIS class. This page however is the first time that I have seen some of the other unique applications such as the sandscape.
Now earlier in the comments fireboy1919 that it wouldn't work because people are unwilling to learn a new interface in addition to the ones they are already good at. I think for it to be successful it depends on the application of they system and playing off of its core competencies which are the ability to track more than one object on the surface at a time and the ability to take on any shape and size by adding more units to the interface. So where it becomes useful is in a group situation where many people can interact with the objects at the same time and they are not limited to the size of a monitor. In the audio example it is like a mixing board but what makes it special is that every object has a contextual menu and can change to the users needs.
I was in the oil and hazardous spill cleanup industry for a while and one of the things that surprised me was that when transporting pressurized containers with unknown contents private companies had to depressurize it (usually by having someone from the police department rifle it from a safe distance) while the state could move these unknown chemicals still pressurized. This was a big issue especially when dealing with methlabs. Now the big question is do these laws apply just to private industries or do they also affect the government's transportation of hazardous materials. Also, this will likely raise the costs of companies in this field many of whom are already financially unstable which brings up the issue of whether these should be completely private companies or if the service they provide is for the greater good and should be funded by government.
The recent problems with Apple's Mac OS X 10.2.8 update are a good example of a patch breaking things (ie. killing network connections). Now the problem I see with how updates are administered is that in many cases you can't select between a security update and a feature update. 10.2.8 addressed the OpenSSH, OpenSSL bugs that were recently reported on in addition to sendmail and a couple of others. At the same time, it installed new USB 2.0 drivers and NIC drivers for G4 desktops.
One solution I believe is to make every patch and update available separately. In addition provide an update tool with presets that choose only the latest security fixes or feature updates or all updates, and allow administer's to customize their own presets. You are then faced with the issue of dependencies however these can be easily addressed by warnings letting you know what additional software is required and will be installed.
I just decided to ftp into the mozilla site and no slowdowns at all, in fact I was getting 384k a second. I'd recommend it if anybody is having difficulties. This is while the link on the web site is completely unable to connect. It's just interesting to notice that the bottleneck is on the http server rather than bandwidth.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/
Regarding mac's and exchange there is software by Snerdware that integrates Exchange into your address book and soon ical. I haven't used it but it yet but it looks pretty interesting as a bridge. One major downside in a corporate environment is that it looks like it will have to be installed on every machine rather than being server based. Email can then be handled with the imap connectors turned on and you will have most of the connectivity to exchange.
Feel free to read the comments from when this article was posted to slashdot in August.
I've thought about this for a while. By putting a transmitter out near the channel buoy and a notifier that users should try connecting at that point they can point people to navigational charts, highlight hazards that may not be on charts, show weather and tides, point them to the appropriate guest slip and handle payment for that slip. Ultimately, the idea is to create a portal specific to the needs of the maritime community.
The big issues then arise is that do you really want people running the boat and operating a laptop at the same time. This could be combatted somewhat by building text-to-speech tools on the web site so it says everything I mentoned.
One thought I had towards funding the cost of the program is by the school selling book / reading packets of copyrighted materials that they cannot distribute freely. Include with that a cd-rom with the lecture videos when and other materials on the site.
The only concern I have regarding this model is that it provides an incentive to require copyrighted material even if it is inferior. One way of addressing this is to not profit from copyrighted materials but focus the profit on the cost of packaging materials. This results in lower profits but hopefully cheaper distribution which would benefit lower income people.
You've had me thinking on this one for a bit now. On the latest archive of Your Mac Life about 1:17:00 into it Steve Wozniak discusses his latest devices. Some of the interesting points he made were that the devices did use the 900mHz range had a throughput of 1000 baud and an average in city range of 1-2 miles although they said with clear distance they hit 117 miles.
Also an interesting tidbit is to work with the interference of other devices theirs scan for the existing background noise and then pull and read the signals that are different. Not that it doesn't mean they are using participating I didn't see Wheels of Zues on the list of members. My intuition says that there was a recognized need for low throughput wireless devices with the batter life for implementing in everyday devices.
I'm not as familiar with it but it is also worth looking towards Microsoft's watches that they demoed a couple of months ago. If memory serves correct they used FM frequencies and encoded into them but the part I remember was an interview on the screen savers with the guy who developed the encoding method who said they reached the theoretical bandwidth limit on encoding into the FM frequencies.
Announced today, Adobe had optimized photoshop for the G5 processor. The details are vague but you can read them on the Press Release. Now I have to say that I love the G5 for everything it is but I'll stay imparitial about it until the first units are in the hands of people who can test it with applications similar to what I run.
I just had a thought that would probably reduce the number of duplicates significantly. At the point where the author hits submit, the story checks all of the links in the article and then does a comparison of those against the complete story archive. At that point if the article has a duplicate it will find it and let them know.
A problem with this method is what may happen with this story. After the editors typically link directly to the story they also link to the referring domain. A way around this is that if there is more than one link in the story then any link to a base level site (ie. www.arstechnica.com) is ignored and the links focus into the sites pages and folders are paid attention to.
I may later play around with a couple of searches of the database to see how well this method works, but I think it would improve things significantly.
Odds are that it will be an announcement and preview of the new OS, not the actual release of 10.3. The only factor that may come in is if apple says it will give a discount or coupon to people who purchase a new mac after that date.
If it were me, I'd get the new mac now just so I could begin using it. Is $129 (just a guestimate from previous costs) really worth not having the ibook for two months.
And the Reason is in the FAQ but just in case here it is once again:
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Last average I heard for google was around 10,000 low cost servers. Therefore it isn't that big of deal if 100 or so servers go down. There is a really good .mp3 interview with Jim Reese, the Chief Operations Engineer available. It may be a little old but still a good listen.
This brings back a good old memory of Ray Petit, the inventor of CLOVER. He was one of my boy scout leaders who introduced us to HAM Radio. Easily one of the nicest people I've ever had the chance to meet. I remember in the late 80's him telling me about actually hitting the 9600 bps and how great it was. I know that last part was kind of off-topic but here is a good link to learn more about CLOVER.
I work for a mid sized company but I know the web site is very out of date and has incredibly poor content. In my mind I can pinpoint this to one thing. The inability for the people who write content to get it to the site.
I know for fact there is more than enough good stories and photographs in the organization that can be published but most of the technicians who would write it (or at least the first draft) don't have the time to learn a web design program. The solution I believe is a good content management system. I've been looking into Typo3 and a couple of other content management systems. I believe once we make it easy to update then content will be less likely to be obselete.
Content Management Systems are right now the best place I can start introducing open source software at my work. We've looked at Microsoft's Content Management Server which is highly over priced for our needs and its hard to argue with the documentation and self-help community that open source software provides. I know there are other content management systems out there but the point is that for content to stay current publishing capabilities must be pushed to the people who will author it.
I was talking with a buddy of mine about the possibility of putting a wireless card in the iPods and then going to a club with them. The dj would then be able to pick and mix music off of people in the club. Similar to the iTunes demo but with a little more flare.
Just briefly I had the opportunity to meet George Dyson (a really nice down to earth guy). If the name sounds at all familiar, his sister is Ester Dyson (used to be chairperson of ICANN) and father is Freeman Dyson (a well known theoretical physicist). From what I've heard, George was always the odd one out in the family taking his own path. He used to live in a great looking tree house on the north end of Vancouver Island and then went on to research and build baidarkas (an Aleut Kayak).He has a great book on the kayaks called "Baidarka" which in the first half covers the history of the their development and Aleuts interaction with Russian traders and then moves on to cover the vessels themselves and his work.
He then went on to research and write a book on A.I. titled "Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence". In addition to the original theories about using nuclear explosions to propel space ships, his father had the concept of building a huge structure around a star that people would live on the inside of and the star would provide the energy. You may remember this from a Star Trek Next Generation where they brought back Scotty, it was the Dyson Sphere. A final interesting tidbit is that George Dyson's grandfather Sir George Dyson was an English composer and founder of the National Federation of Music Societies.
Overall, it's an interesting family with some incredible minds in it. The BBC has a short piece on his AI book and on the left hand column is a real audio interview with George. There are also plenty of other links on google if you plug in his name.
In addition to setting certain restrictions on user rights is the possibility of remote installs overnight. I remember reading that the Apple Stores which allow anyone to play on their computers push the entire disk image to the computers every night. This way it ensures they are all the same afterwards and everyone has the same experience. I am not familiar with the open source options available here but I believe google uses something similar to maintain their machines. Some searching should give some options and maybe someone with more knowledge can point in the right direction if this is a feasible solution.