I expect my kids will beable to do that in a few years. Given the requirement to look at the robot and then build it from the pieces in box (without looking) is something that they can do now (ages 5 and 8). The first thing I told my wife after reading the story was "hey the kids qualify for college now." Now if they only were as good at doing their school work as they are memorizing all the attributes of all 151 Pokemon. I guess that will be in the next series of tests that Colorado College uses.
I agree that what you said it true, but I take a different perspective on it. College is a bunch of shit, intelligent people realize this and become very disinterested, thus lackluster grades.
I would have to agree that motivation is a factor. When I went to college, most people could be broken into two groups: the ones who were serious about it and the ones who had the attitude that college was for getting drunk and screwing around. For example, another guy in my dorm and I were on the same academic scholarship. Basically, we had to keep at least a 3.0 average with 15 credit hours a semester for a free-ride. While I certainly didn't study all the time, I made sure that school was top priority. Partying and having fun was the other guy's priority. Consequently, I kept my scholarship for 4 years and he lost it after the first year. We both tested about the same, but had different outcomes because of motivation.
Another example is my best friend from high school. He probably did C or maybe B work for most of primary and secondary school. When it came time for the military tests that were were given in HS (ASVAB??), he was #1 in the class and did A work in all of his coursework after HS. Why? Because he was motivated to do well and wasn't interested in the subjects in HS.
It looks like academic excellence isn't the number 1 priority anymore. It appears that having a 'diverse' (however you define it) college student body is more important. Are they going to water down the curricullum or change the tests so these students can take equally subjective tests for all their subjects? Which is more racist or insulting:
People from group X are not intelligent enough to pass the entrance requirements for _our_ institution.
In order for group X to be equally represented in the student body, entrance exams and grading schemes will be altered to insure the desired diversity mix*.
This sort of crap has already been done to the primary and secondary schools in this country and the resulting product is worse than before. The HS diploma is worthless, but the person with one has high self esteem. Do we want all educational institutions in this country equally shitty? To be fair, colleges should set high academic standards and apply them to everyone. If some groups don't do as well as others, then it is up to the educational institutions serving those groups to buckle down and work harder so that those individuals improve so that they can meet those standards, not change the standards. Not only does that send the message that they can't meet the standard, it diminishes the achievement of others.
I know this isn't entirely new at the college level. The president of my engineering college had the entrance requirements and the freshman level classes loosened up in order to attract and keep more female students (a common gripe was the 3:1 male:female ratio). The school brought in more people (and more tuition $$$) and kept more students. However, once they got to the sophomore and junior level classes which weren't made easier, they dropped out or transferred in droves. Colleges have also had exemptions if the student was in the top X% of their HS class or had been out of high school for a certain number of years. The former reminds me of a girl from a high school in PA that was admitted to a state college because she was #1 in her class even though she scored a 400 on the SAT (that's including the 200 pts given nowdays just for showing up). Other examples are the bending of the rules so that the athletic department can bring in the star athletes. I used to think that colleges and universities are for those that have proven that they can succeed academically and that community colleges, vo-techs, trade schools were for those that still want an education but couldn't make the higher standard. It must be a numbers game anymore with bean counters making sure there are a variety of warm bodies in the chairs.
* - This is bascially the text of a letter an inlaw said was sent home to his parents when his school was integrated in the 60s. He went from a C student to an A student overnight. It's sad to know that there was a chance to try to have everyone meet the same high standard, but instead the standards were lowered to insure that everyone would pass and feel good about it. No wonder why the US scores so low in achievement tests compared to other countries.
I'm from equally landlocked South Dakota and I sure as hell knew what a regatta was when I was in high school. I suppose you may have a point if all ones knowledge was just based on the immediate surroundings. But guess what? That's why we had vocabulary and spelling tests, required to READ books from the library and write reports on them, watch documentaries, etc. I guess that's not done anymore. One might even pick up a few things off the boob tube, but only if it's not on a channel like MTV.
I remember Toker. Some friends of mine would play that during study hall. I seem to remember that if the guy hit a seed it would make him cough or something. That game was forgotten as soon as the couple Franklin Apple clones. Then it was on to some 16 color pirate game.
Same here. Our high school had 5 or 6 of them and one even had a floppy drive. I spent tons of time playing around with the PETs. They were the reason the janitors had to kick me out of the computer lab at 7 or 8pm.
Searching for MBONE only turned up 3 hits on freshmeat, but http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multim edia/software is a site that has updated versions of some of the tools I used in 1994. It looks like a lot of them are covered by the Berkeley license, but there are some precompiled linux binaries.
I remember using MBONE tools to do video and audio in the office and over the internet with my SGI Indy in 1994. I compiled them from source I pulled down from some university site. Why isn't this stuff being used? Is multicast too much of a headache or not as responsive? If it uses less bandwidth than the proprietary streaming protocols, I'd rather use that.
If AZ does what this rep wants, the 'good ole days' of having to sneak into the dorms will return. The college that I went to (86-90) had all the men and women in separate dorms in which a member of the opposite sex had to be escorted in the building at all times and were not permitted after 10pm. In order to get to their room, the women had to go through three sets of locked doors that were always locked. The place was about like a fortress.
It didn't matter that much anyway. Since it was an engineering college, there were about 2x to 3x times as many men as women. Considering that there were more attractive girls in my high school class of 36 students than in my college freshman class, I'd say there wasn't that big of an urge to get in the dorm anyway. But for the ones that did, the main thing was to not make much noise to attract the attention of the RAs.
There was a reason the unofficial school motto was Sex Kills! Go to Tech and live forever!
This pisses me off to no end. IE does it right, Netscape does it WRONG.
Are you referring to sites that don't include the tags but do include the tags? Browsing malco's movie listings on their web site always looks screwed up in aol/ie and looks ok in netscape because of this. I've just gotten used to always using both sets of tags.
I use w3m and emacs/w3 everyday at work(e/w3 for at least 5 yrs). I am really impressed with w3m. IMHO, it blows lynx out of the water. While emacs/w3 is slower, I spend most of my time in emacs, so the integration is nice and I have been able to configure it to work with my company's proxy. I've tried to get w3m to work, and for some reason it doesn't.
I also believe that emacs/w3 will display images with XEmacs, but I'm not sure if it does with GNU Emacs. William Perry has done a great job!
I was looking forward to the trial and all the other lawsuits it would spawn if Caldera won. I guess Caldera decided that a sure $150 mil is better than a trial where M$ might be able to weasel out of by getting a jury that could be duped.
After legal fees, I wonder how much will go to linux development?
In Europe, country wide radio stations very popular and the automatic switch over is really helpful when driving distances longer than, say 40 miles.
Forty miles? The radio stations must not broadcast with much power. Heck, where I grew up it was at least 40 miles to a radio station (100+ to a good one) and we didn't have any problems picking up clear signals day or night. A station like WNAX could probably handle all of or at least most of a nation over there. At night, I've had relatives say that they can pick that station up over 1000 miles away.
Like ClearChannel Communications and Viacom aren't doing that already? What I wouldn't mind would be an option for it to switch to another station that's carrying the same syndicated programming, whether or not the station that it switches to is owned by the same radio network. Truck drivers would love that.
Apple already has some MacOS sw dev tools, examples, and documentation available available via ftp. I'm not sure how the MPW ide compares to CodeWarrior, but it's available for download. Check out Apple's Developer Tools section on their website.
I use linux for everything that I do, with the exception of a few applications that my employer has decided to standardize on (Notes, PeopleSoft). I have none of the problems you describe with Linux or Netscape. My Windows box at work crashes probably 5-10x the rate that Netscape on Linux has ever crashed for me. Again, I use it everyday for lots of different tasks. Not any different than using IE on Win9x or MacOS (other than I don't have to worry about linux tanking like Win9x), and hardly a nightmare.
On a side note, I see nothing wrong for moderating down trolls or generators of flamebait.
The mozilla team is a lot smaller too (heard reports that the IE team consists of several hundred) and netscape/aol isn't spending over $100 million a year on it (from the FOF). Considering that the Mozilla team is building something from scratch, I think they are doing rather well.
I don't mind the wait. Netscape 4.x, lynx, emacs-w3, and w3m all work fine for what I use browsers for. IMHO, AOL is basically waiting for the DOJ trial to make a decision. Since the Mozilla rendering engine has been made available as a ActiveX component, AOL could swap out the IE compontent for Mozilla for all its users without much of a problem. AOL already has automatic updates when the user logs on, so they could potentially switch all their users to the mozilla component in a few weeks, taking away the single biggest chunk of IE users away from MS.
Even if there was an OpenSource ERP package, a big cost of the implementation are the consultants and/or training of in-house staff. In my experience, Once the implementation is complete and your interfaces to your other systems are stable, you spend your time customizing the delivered package based on your users' needs, appling the patches that were released while you were trying to get the product installed and get ready for the next upgrade.
I think Linux has the tools that could be to build an erp system: databases, C, perl, PHP, Zope, etc. The biggest obstacle I think would be keeping the business logic current. For example, a human resource/payroll system is usually updated a few times in a year to keep up with all the tax and regulatory changes in each state, county, and city. There are several reports that are required by each state for a myriad of reasons, paycheck garnishment rules and codes, overtime rules, insurance benefits guidelines, etc. All of which are usually different from state to state. Given all of this, I can see why such companies exist. They have the legal people keeping track of all of these issues and the programming staff to implement them. I would guess that if there ever was an open source ERP package, it would be created by a company with the goal of selling the service and support to their customers just like SAP, PeopleSoft, etc. already do.
PeopleSoft does mention Linux in their release notes about hardware requirements for the upcoming PeopleSoft 8.0. However, it is only offically supported as a database platform. So if you have Oracle, Informix, DB2 or any other PeopleSoft supported ANSI SQL database, it will work.
The only thing that I can see holding it back from being the application server is the correct version of MicroFocus Cobol. Bea Systems has a current version of Tuxedo for linux, although Jolt for linux would help for those implementing PeopleSoft WebClient apps. I also think the maker of the SQR product (it's been recently aquired so I can't remember the new company's name) has a recent version for linux. There is a development version of MicroFocus, but I believe PS needs the 'Net Express'(??) version that is available on Solaris or AIX.
From the user's perspective, PeopleSoft is Windows only. PeopleTools is Win32 and the WebClient Java apps while being 100% pure Java, are only supported on IE or Netscape on Windows with the Sun Java Plug-in. They aren't supported on any other platform. Their other web-based product uses HTML 3, but requires NT, IIS, and ASP on the server end.
I really wish I could run PeopleSoft on Linux. I hate it when Windows crashes when I'm working on a PS upgrade. PeopleSoft and Lotus Notes are the only reasons I need a Windows machine at all. It would be interesting to try their software with Wine. Anyone know if Wine works with ODBC?
I looked into Windows programming not long after win3 came out. If I remember correctly, MS' and IBM's SDKs were in the hundreds of dollars (one SDK at the time ran $2k, but I can't remember what it was). I never heard of MS giving away their SDK for free to developers (a nice way to brib^H^H^H^H seed the marketplace at the expense of competitors). I guess I should go to these big conferences instead of staying home. No big loss though. A friend of mine discovered that MS C at the time didn't free up memory properly, so he replace the MS malloc/free with the ones from the K&R book. I figured that if something simple like that was screwed up, who knows what else was fscked up. I've never regretted sticking to just Unix.
So what's the Irish punt worth these days? I seem to remember it being about $1.40. Those prices seem quite high, but like my wife said, with the weather and prices, it's not much different than Seattle. So are the housing prices somewhat even across the nation or are you just quoting Dublin prices?
The weather doesn't bother me much. I suppose if I can live where the temps range from -30 to 43C during the year and can be bone dry one year and downright soggy the next, I should be able to handle Ireland. I don't drink, so beer & pubs are not a concern. Extremely non ethnically diverse. Depending on your point of view, that can be good or bad....I personally rather have that than a place where anything and everything becomes a racial issue whether is really is or not.
The results are being skewed based on the browser platform. With netscape for linux, I only see the choices for a few seconds before they disappear. With lynx, I can only see the results but not vote. I will try it out on a Mac, but I'm guessing this probably only functional with IE.
And some people wonder why MS control over something like the internet would be dangerous. Could you imagine if this was for something important like, online elections? This ballot requires MSIE 8 on Windows 2002, minimum requirement 1G of Ram and a 1200MHz Itanium processor.
I used GNATS a few years ago on some Unix boxes for bug reporting and help desk-like work. It did the job better than the windows based help desk software that we paid for, but the unix folks found lacking (gotta love free software). At the time it had a Tcl/Tk gui interface, but it also apparently has a www interface too. Check out http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/gn ats.html for some GNATS resources. According to that page, the FSF, FreeBSD, and Apache projects use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect my kids will beable to do that in a few years. Given the requirement to look at the robot and then build it from the pieces in box (without looking) is something that they can do now (ages 5 and 8). The first thing I told my wife after reading the story was "hey the kids qualify for college now." Now if they only were as good at doing their school work as they are memorizing all the attributes of all 151 Pokemon. I guess that will be in the next series of tests that Colorado College uses.
I agree that what you said it true, but I take a different perspective on it. College is a bunch of shit, intelligent people realize this and become very disinterested, thus lackluster grades.
I would have to agree that motivation is a factor. When I went to college, most people could be broken into two groups: the ones who were serious about it and the ones who had the attitude that college was for getting drunk and screwing around. For example, another guy in my dorm and I were on the same academic scholarship. Basically, we had to keep at least a 3.0 average with 15 credit hours a semester for a free-ride. While I certainly didn't study all the time, I made sure that school was top priority. Partying and having fun was the other guy's priority. Consequently, I kept my scholarship for 4 years and he lost it after the first year. We both tested about the same, but had different outcomes because of motivation.
Another example is my best friend from high school. He probably did C or maybe B work for most of primary and secondary school. When it came time for the military tests that were were given in HS (ASVAB??), he was #1 in the class and did A work in all of his coursework after HS. Why? Because he was motivated to do well and wasn't interested in the subjects in HS.
It looks like academic excellence isn't the number 1 priority anymore. It appears that having a 'diverse' (however you define it) college student body is more important. Are they going to water down the curricullum or change the tests so these students can take equally subjective tests for all their subjects? Which is more racist or insulting:
This sort of crap has already been done to the primary and secondary schools in this country and the resulting product is worse than before. The HS diploma is worthless, but the person with one has high self esteem. Do we want all educational institutions in this country equally shitty? To be fair, colleges should set high academic standards and apply them to everyone. If some groups don't do as well as others, then it is up to the educational institutions serving those groups to buckle down and work harder so that those individuals improve so that they can meet those standards, not change the standards. Not only does that send the message that they can't meet the standard, it diminishes the achievement of others.
I know this isn't entirely new at the college level. The president of my engineering college had the entrance requirements and the freshman level classes loosened up in order to attract and keep more female students (a common gripe was the 3:1 male:female ratio). The school brought in more people (and more tuition $$$) and kept more students. However, once they got to the sophomore and junior level classes which weren't made easier, they dropped out or transferred in droves. Colleges have also had exemptions if the student was in the top X% of their HS class or had been out of high school for a certain number of years. The former reminds me of a girl from a high school in PA that was admitted to a state college because she was #1 in her class even though she scored a 400 on the SAT (that's including the 200 pts given nowdays just for showing up). Other examples are the bending of the rules so that the athletic department can bring in the star athletes. I used to think that colleges and universities are for those that have proven that they can succeed academically and that community colleges, vo-techs, trade schools were for those that still want an education but couldn't make the higher standard. It must be a numbers game anymore with bean counters making sure there are a variety of warm bodies in the chairs.
* - This is bascially the text of a letter an inlaw said was sent home to his parents when his school was integrated in the 60s. He went from a C student to an A student overnight. It's sad to know that there was a chance to try to have everyone meet the same high standard, but instead the standards were lowered to insure that everyone would pass and feel good about it. No wonder why the US scores so low in achievement tests compared to other countries.
I'm from equally landlocked South Dakota and I sure as hell knew what a regatta was when I was in high school. I suppose you may have a point if all ones knowledge was just based on the immediate surroundings. But guess what? That's why we had vocabulary and spelling tests, required to READ books from the library and write reports on them, watch documentaries, etc. I guess that's not done anymore. One might even pick up a few things off the boob tube, but only if it's not on a channel like MTV.
I remember Toker. Some friends of mine would play that during study hall. I seem to remember that if the guy hit a seed it would make him cough or something. That game was forgotten as soon as the couple Franklin Apple clones. Then it was on to some 16 color pirate game.
Same here. Our high school had 5 or 6 of them and one even had a floppy drive. I spent tons of time playing around with the PETs. They were the reason the janitors had to kick me out of the computer lab at 7 or 8pm.
Searching for MBONE only turned up 3 hits on freshmeat, but http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multim edia/software is a site that has updated versions of some of the tools I used in 1994. It looks like a lot of them are covered by the Berkeley license, but there are some precompiled linux binaries.
I remember using MBONE tools to do video and audio in the office and over the internet with my SGI Indy in 1994. I compiled them from source I pulled down from some university site. Why isn't this stuff being used? Is multicast too much of a headache or not as responsive? If it uses less bandwidth than the proprietary streaming protocols, I'd rather use that.
If AZ does what this rep wants, the 'good ole days' of having to sneak into the dorms will return. The college that I went to (86-90) had all the men and women in separate dorms in which a member of the opposite sex had to be escorted in the building at all times and were not permitted after 10pm. In order to get to their room, the women had to go through three sets of locked doors that were always locked. The place was about like a fortress.
It didn't matter that much anyway. Since it was an engineering college, there were about 2x to 3x times as many men as women. Considering that there were more attractive girls in my high school class of 36 students than in my college freshman class, I'd say there wasn't that big of an urge to get in the dorm anyway. But for the ones that did, the main thing was to not make much noise to attract the attention of the RAs.
There was a reason the unofficial school motto was Sex Kills! Go to Tech and live forever!
grrr...slashdot stripped some formatting...what I meant was sites that don't use the tr tags but do use the /tr tags.
Offtopic: why do the & lt/gt characters get processed and displayed for preview mode, but not after the post has been submitted?
This pisses me off to no end. IE does it right, Netscape does it WRONG.
Are you referring to sites that don't include the tags but do include the tags? Browsing malco's movie listings on their web site always looks screwed up in aol/ie and looks ok in netscape because of this. I've just gotten used to always using both sets of tags.
I use w3m and emacs/w3 everyday at work(e/w3 for at least 5 yrs). I am really impressed with w3m. IMHO, it blows lynx out of the water. While emacs/w3 is slower, I spend most of my time in emacs, so the integration is nice and I have been able to configure it to work with my company's proxy. I've tried to get w3m to work, and for some reason it doesn't.
I also believe that emacs/w3 will display images with XEmacs, but I'm not sure if it does with GNU Emacs. William Perry has done a great job!
Didn't MS invest $150 mil in Apple to avoid some legal issues? It must be the most money M$ Legal Dept can take out of petty cash.
I was looking forward to the trial and all the other lawsuits it would spawn if Caldera won. I guess Caldera decided that a sure $150 mil is better than a trial where M$ might be able to weasel out of by getting a jury that could be duped.
After legal fees, I wonder how much will go to linux development?
In Europe, country wide radio stations very popular and the automatic switch over is really helpful when driving distances longer than, say 40 miles.
Forty miles? The radio stations must not broadcast with much power. Heck, where I grew up it was at least 40 miles to a radio station (100+ to a good one) and we didn't have any problems picking up clear signals day or night. A station like WNAX could probably handle all of or at least most of a nation over there. At night, I've had relatives say that they can pick that station up over 1000 miles away.
Like ClearChannel Communications and Viacom aren't doing that already? What I wouldn't mind would be an option for it to switch to another station that's carrying the same syndicated programming, whether or not the station that it switches to is owned by the same radio network. Truck drivers would love that.
Apple already has some MacOS sw dev tools, examples, and documentation available available via ftp. I'm not sure how the MPW ide compares to CodeWarrior, but it's available for download. Check out Apple's Developer Tools section on their website.
I use linux for everything that I do, with the exception of a few applications that my employer has decided to standardize on (Notes, PeopleSoft). I have none of the problems you describe with Linux or Netscape. My Windows box at work crashes probably 5-10x the rate that Netscape on Linux has ever crashed for me. Again, I use it everyday for lots of different tasks. Not any different than using IE on Win9x or MacOS (other than I don't have to worry about linux tanking like Win9x), and hardly a nightmare.
On a side note, I see nothing wrong for moderating down trolls or generators of flamebait.
The mozilla team is a lot smaller too (heard reports that the IE team consists of several hundred) and netscape/aol isn't spending over $100 million a year on it (from the FOF). Considering that the Mozilla team is building something from scratch, I think they are doing rather well.
I don't mind the wait. Netscape 4.x, lynx, emacs-w3, and w3m all work fine for what I use browsers for. IMHO, AOL is basically waiting for the DOJ trial to make a decision. Since the Mozilla rendering engine has been made available as a ActiveX component, AOL could swap out the IE compontent for Mozilla for all its users without much of a problem. AOL already has automatic updates when the user logs on, so they could potentially switch all their users to the mozilla component in a few weeks, taking away the single biggest chunk of IE users away from MS.
Even if there was an OpenSource ERP package, a big cost of the implementation are the consultants and/or training of in-house staff. In my experience, Once the implementation is complete and your interfaces to your other systems are stable, you spend your time customizing the delivered package based on your users' needs, appling the patches that were released while you were trying to get the product installed and get ready for the next upgrade.
I think Linux has the tools that could be to build an erp system: databases, C, perl, PHP, Zope, etc. The biggest obstacle I think would be keeping the business logic current. For example, a human resource/payroll system is usually updated a few times in a year to keep up with all the tax and regulatory changes in each state, county, and city. There are several reports that are required by each state for a myriad of reasons, paycheck garnishment rules and codes, overtime rules, insurance benefits guidelines, etc. All of which are usually different from state to state. Given all of this, I can see why such companies exist. They have the legal people keeping track of all of these issues and the programming staff to implement them. I would guess that if there ever was an open source ERP package, it would be created by a company with the goal of selling the service and support to their customers just like SAP, PeopleSoft, etc. already do.
PeopleSoft does mention Linux in their release notes about hardware requirements for the upcoming PeopleSoft 8.0. However, it is only offically supported as a database platform. So if you have Oracle, Informix, DB2 or any other PeopleSoft supported ANSI SQL database, it will work.
The only thing that I can see holding it back from being the application server is the correct version of MicroFocus Cobol. Bea Systems has a current version of Tuxedo for linux, although Jolt for linux would help for those implementing PeopleSoft WebClient apps. I also think the maker of the SQR product (it's been recently aquired so I can't remember the new company's name) has a recent version for linux. There is a development version of MicroFocus, but I believe PS needs the 'Net Express'(??) version that is available on Solaris or AIX.
From the user's perspective, PeopleSoft is Windows only. PeopleTools is Win32 and the WebClient Java apps while being 100% pure Java, are only supported on IE or Netscape on Windows with the Sun Java Plug-in. They aren't supported on any other platform. Their other web-based product uses HTML 3, but requires NT, IIS, and ASP on the server end.
I really wish I could run PeopleSoft on Linux. I hate it when Windows crashes when I'm working on a PS upgrade. PeopleSoft and Lotus Notes are the only reasons I need a Windows machine at all. It would be interesting to try their software with Wine. Anyone know if Wine works with ODBC?
I looked into Windows programming not long after win3 came out. If I remember correctly, MS' and IBM's SDKs were in the hundreds of dollars (one SDK at the time ran $2k, but I can't remember what it was). I never heard of MS giving away their SDK for free to developers (a nice way to brib^H^H^H^H seed the marketplace at the expense of competitors). I guess I should go to these big conferences instead of staying home. No big loss though. A friend of mine discovered that MS C at the time didn't free up memory properly, so he replace the MS malloc/free with the ones from the K&R book. I figured that if something simple like that was screwed up, who knows what else was fscked up. I've never regretted sticking to just Unix.
So what's the Irish punt worth these days? I seem to remember it being about $1.40. Those prices seem quite high, but like my wife said, with the weather and prices, it's not much different than Seattle. So are the housing prices somewhat even across the nation or are you just quoting Dublin prices?
The weather doesn't bother me much. I suppose if I can live where the temps range from -30 to 43C during the year and can be bone dry one year and downright soggy the next, I should be able to handle Ireland. I don't drink, so beer & pubs are not a concern. Extremely non ethnically diverse. Depending on your point of view, that can be good or bad....I personally rather have that than a place where anything and everything becomes a racial issue whether is really is or not.
The results are being skewed based on the browser platform. With netscape for linux, I only see the choices for a few seconds before they disappear. With lynx, I can only see the results but not vote. I will try it out on a Mac, but I'm guessing this probably only functional with IE.
And some people wonder why MS control over something like the internet would be dangerous. Could you imagine if this was for something important like, online elections? This ballot requires MSIE 8 on Windows 2002, minimum requirement 1G of Ram and a 1200MHz Itanium processor.
I used GNATS a few years ago on some Unix boxes for bug reporting and help desk-like work. It did the job better than the windows based help desk software that we paid for, but the unix folks found lacking (gotta love free software). At the time it had a Tcl/Tk gui interface, but it also apparently has a www interface too. Check out http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/gn ats.html for some GNATS resources. According to that page, the FSF, FreeBSD, and Apache projects use it.