OK, sure, I know you can use Evolution with the exchange connector, but that's not part of Open Office, and you have to pay $60.00 for the connector. I buy open license copies of MS office for that much; there is no additional (user) learning curve, and it comes with outlook.
Give me a free, open source equivalent and i'll take a look, but for now we've got to stick with MS Office.
Disruptive technologies have emerged throughout history making inferior technologies obsolete:
Written language -> cave drawing Sail boats -> manual row boats Ball point pen -> quill feather Automobile -> horse and buggy Tractor -> ox and plow
And on and on....
Why should this trend stop now with handwriting? Really, how many people actually hand write anything of substance? In school, I remember teachers that reduced grades on hand-written papers to encourage proficient typing skills.
Future disruptive technologies: Typing -> hand writing Internet -> newspapers Internet -> television Internet -> telephone Internet -> sex (just kidding on this one).
OK enough talk of PPC970, get it out the door. Damn, I've been hearing about this CPU for YEARS, enough talk, finish the CPU and go into production.
Motorola's 20% speed increase is like keeping a brain-dead patient on life support. The G4 needs to be relegated to notebooks. G3 needs to go away completely. The longer IBM/Apple wait on PPC 970, the more market they will lose to DELL/HP/Intel/AMD permanently.
I was an EE major (for three years) in college before switching to CS. The only circuit building experience I got was at my job, and my at home hobbies.
Can you imagine a CS major never implementing a quicksort? Sure, it's nice to know that an n log n sort is faster than an n squared sort, but what good is that knowledge if you can't code it?
I see alot of people here debating the monopolistic impacts of a single company running fiber to a house. Just because Verizon runs fiber to your house doesn't mean they have a monopoly on the data services comming into your house.
Go outside and count the number of cables comming into your home. The average home has three types:
Non-twisted copper pair (voice grade).
Coaxial cable (rg-59 or rg-6).
3 phase 220 power lines.
Data can be transmitted on all three types without fiber. The coaxial cable option will definitely give fiber a run for its money. The new DOCSIS 2.0 spec is 30 Mbps symetric!
I'm already getting 10Mbps/1Mbps across my cable connection without fiber to my home. By the time the telcos get their act together cable will have scaled to double or triple its current speeds. Granted, it's not as "cool" as saying you've got fiber, but i'll tell you i prefer surfing the web over my cable connection versus the fiber T1 at work.
There is always competition to supply where there is sufficent demand.
I had a SOYO motherboard with a phoneix bios. It was "phoenixNet" enabled....or some sillyness like that. The bios would put phoenixNet shortcuts on the desktop of a newly installed system! I can't tell you how many clients have called me asking about a "phoenixNet virus". To the uneducated user it looked like virus activity.
Luckily it only supported FAT and FAT32 file systems. NTFS and every unix filesystem i've ever used are not affected.
This is just wrong. A bios should not be this invasive. These guys are just asking for trouble.
You assume ISPs care about the customer experience. As a customer of MANY ISPs I can tell you they do not. Most ISPs are a monopoly (or near monopoly) in their particular service area. If you want a guaranteed level of service - pay up and buy an SLA.
Now, on the non-SLA side; right now ISPs are having a hard time selling all-you-can eat broadband. Those that buy it, are complaining about lousy performance due to p2p. There are two ways to fix the problem:
1. Change the service from all you can eat, to a restricted, a la carte type service. This is not likely since it will kill new sales of broadband service.
2. Increase backbone speeds to support the traffic and not excessively oversell the backbone. This is also unlikely since backbone bandwidth is expensive and agressive overselling is the only way to make money.
If ISPs want to really fix the problem, they need to pressure the tier 1 guys (uunet, sprintnet....etc) to lower their prices and fire up some of the dark fiber that is just sitting in the ground.
Broadband was built for p2p and other bandwidth intensive applications. That's why you buy a broadband connection!
ISPs can't have it both ways. They tout p2p and the ability to download large multimedia files quickly to drive sales of broadband connections and then start whining when people do the very things they market.
Bastards! The ISPs know that punters will not pay $50.00/mo. for faster email and web pages. They will, however, pay for the ability to download music, videos, and software quickly.
Large ISPs should start pressuring the major backbone providers to lower their rates. $1000/mo. for a T1 is inexcusable these days. These prices are equivalent to fiber prices 10 YEARS AGO! What else in tech has the same pricing as 10 years ago? Why should tier 1 ISPs think their businesses are entitled to that kind of price protection?
The large tier 1 ISPs are the problem, not end users.
Lots of people here are defending users and blaming programmers for computer "crashes".
I'm a network administrator and I have to deal with these users every day. The typical user will define a computer "crash" as anything the computer does that the user did not intend. That situation may, or may not, be a "crash".
Yesterday I had a user complain that Appleworks crashed on her while she was working on a document. It turns out the program threw an "IO error" when she saved the document.
Guess what caused that error?......a bad FLOPPY! I asked her if she kept a duplicate of her document on the server, but she said she didn't. It seems her floppy disk was 3 years old and it had just given up the ghost.
She thinks the computer crashed. In actuality it hadn't. How can you blame the system architects/programmers for that?
Some programmers may be lazy, but that's nothing compared to the stupidity of some users.
A few years ago SGI decided that the Wintel market was where they had to be. Soon, they were peddling commodity Intel boxes running NT....and it was almost the death of the company.
I see Sun going down that road. Sun needs to learn from SGI's mistake. Their bread and butter was the high-end stuff. The stuff that makes scientists drool. These guys will pay anything for massive number-crunching ability. SGI realized this and decided to drop the low-profit commodity business.
Commodity Intel-Red Hat-Oracle boxes are NOT a way to build a profitable business.
Pure research is a luxury(although necessary in the long run). In financially tough times, research facilites focus on marketable technologies. Instead of persuing a thinking machine, MIT is persuing projects for the military. Details here Why? Money, plain and simple.
Ask anyone who worked for Bell labs in the late 70's and 80's. These types of environments fostered incredible research that didn't really turn into real products for 20 years. Today the bean counters yell and managment focuses on marketable products. It's just a sign of the times.
Ok I didn't really make my point clearly in the first post.
Everyone is quick to claim this project is a success. I'm taking a wait and see attitude. Sure, it's nice to see people spending money on a legal on-line music distribution system, but I wouldn't call it a success until most of the people that use other systems illegally migrate to paid systems like Apple's.
I still have a hard time believing people that use the windows based file trading systems for free will stop that practice in favor of a system that costs money and distributes the music in a more restrictive format.
All these apps require windows. I'm not saying there aren't ANY file trading apps for the Mac, but their selection is severely limited. I'll bet most of those files sold were sold to Mac users.
Legislators should not write laws regarding issues they know nothing about. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to every internet problem legislation? The internet is a global network. How, exactly, do you impose/enforce regional laws on a global network?
Issues like spam and pornography are technical issues, and can be solved with technical advancements. Legislation is not the most effective tool for this job; but some fancy AI programming might be.
That's like saying the auto industry is a dead industry.
Sure, the auto group doesn't have the 500% a year growth that it had in the early 1900's, but it is far from a dead industry.
It would be more acurate to say that the software business is not a GROWTH industry. Most of the software "capacity" has been filled. Now software is a "replacement" business. No new capacity, just expansion of existing capacity.
Have you thought about providing television and internet over coaxial cable? Cisco makes some nice cable gear here. As far as content, you can set up some c-band satellite dishes and distribute content via the same wire and get multiple revenues over one network....and it's capable of faster speeds than non-shielded/twisted copper.
A good NAT/firewall device will generate VERY random sequence numbers to prevent a hacker from guessing sequence numbers and hijacking your connection.
Cisco's PIX firewall does a very good job of randomizing sequence numbers. This would really give the AT&T method a hard time.
Check out this article it shows the randomness of some popular TCP sequence number generators.
Sure, clean needles are a harm reduction tactic, but the harm that is being reduced is the harm to the drug user. No matter how many drugs a user puts in their arm, it doesn't affect my health.
How exactly can we "harm reduce" the effects of hacking? These guys aren't hacking their own servers, they are hacking production boxes.
Here's a harm reduction suggestion. The register can pay to maintain honeypots to lure hackers away from real production boxes on the internet....but I doubt they have the time or money to pull that off.
Of course, if you use a honeypot while trying to protect yourself you might actually go to jail.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: Microsoft Outlook.
OK, sure, I know you can use Evolution with the exchange connector, but that's not part of Open Office, and you have to pay $60.00 for the connector. I buy open license copies of MS office for that much; there is no additional (user) learning curve, and it comes with outlook.
Give me a free, open source equivalent and i'll take a look, but for now we've got to stick with MS Office.
-ted
here
-ted
Disruptive technologies have emerged throughout history making inferior technologies obsolete:
Written language -> cave drawing
Sail boats -> manual row boats
Ball point pen -> quill feather
Automobile -> horse and buggy
Tractor -> ox and plow
And on and on....
Why should this trend stop now with handwriting? Really, how many people actually hand write anything of substance? In school, I remember teachers that reduced grades on hand-written papers to encourage proficient typing skills.
Future disruptive technologies:
Typing -> hand writing
Internet -> newspapers
Internet -> television
Internet -> telephone
Internet -> sex (just kidding on this one).
-ted
OK enough talk of PPC970, get it out the door. Damn, I've been hearing about this CPU for YEARS, enough talk, finish the CPU and go into production.
Motorola's 20% speed increase is like keeping a brain-dead patient on life support. The G4 needs to be relegated to notebooks. G3 needs to go away completely. The longer IBM/Apple wait on PPC 970, the more market they will lose to DELL/HP/Intel/AMD permanently.
-ted
I was an EE major (for three years) in college before switching to CS. The only circuit building experience I got was at my job, and my at home hobbies.
Can you imagine a CS major never implementing a quicksort? Sure, it's nice to know that an n log n sort is faster than an n squared sort, but what good is that knowledge if you can't code it?
-ted
I see alot of people here debating the monopolistic impacts of a single company running fiber to a house. Just because Verizon runs fiber to your house doesn't mean they have a monopoly on the data services comming into your house.
Go outside and count the number of cables comming into your home. The average home has three types:
Non-twisted copper pair (voice grade).
Coaxial cable (rg-59 or rg-6).
3 phase 220 power lines.
Data can be transmitted on all three types without fiber. The coaxial cable option will definitely give fiber a run for its money. The new DOCSIS 2.0 spec is 30 Mbps symetric!
I'm already getting 10Mbps/1Mbps across my cable connection without fiber to my home. By the time the telcos get their act together cable will have scaled to double or triple its current speeds. Granted, it's not as "cool" as saying you've got fiber, but i'll tell you i prefer surfing the web over my cable connection versus the fiber T1 at work.
There is always competition to supply where there is sufficent demand.
-ted
Doesn't the great firewall of China support NAT/PAT?
-ted
I guess that's why the DOCSIS 2.0 spec supports 30 Mbps symetric.
-ted
I had a SOYO motherboard with a phoneix bios. It was "phoenixNet" enabled....or some sillyness like that. The bios would put phoenixNet shortcuts on the desktop of a newly installed system! I can't tell you how many clients have called me asking about a "phoenixNet virus". To the uneducated user it looked like virus activity.
Luckily it only supported FAT and FAT32 file systems. NTFS and every unix filesystem i've ever used are not affected.
This is just wrong. A bios should not be this invasive. These guys are just asking for trouble.
-ted
Your logic has one critical flaw:
You assume ISPs care about the customer experience. As a customer of MANY ISPs I can tell you they do not. Most ISPs are a monopoly (or near monopoly) in their particular service area. If you want a guaranteed level of service - pay up and buy an SLA.
Now, on the non-SLA side; right now ISPs are having a hard time selling all-you-can eat broadband. Those that buy it, are complaining about lousy performance due to p2p. There are two ways to fix the problem:
1. Change the service from all you can eat, to a restricted, a la carte type service. This is not likely since it will kill new sales of broadband service.
2. Increase backbone speeds to support the traffic and not excessively oversell the backbone. This is also unlikely since backbone bandwidth is expensive and agressive overselling is the only way to make money.
If ISPs want to really fix the problem, they need to pressure the tier 1 guys (uunet, sprintnet....etc) to lower their prices and fire up some of the dark fiber that is just sitting in the ground.
-ted
Broadband was built for p2p and other bandwidth intensive applications. That's why you buy a broadband connection!
ISPs can't have it both ways. They tout p2p and the ability to download large multimedia files quickly to drive sales of broadband connections and then start whining when people do the very things they market.
Bastards! The ISPs know that punters will not pay $50.00/mo. for faster email and web pages. They will, however, pay for the ability to download music, videos, and software quickly.
Large ISPs should start pressuring the major backbone providers to lower their rates. $1000/mo. for a T1 is inexcusable these days. These prices are equivalent to fiber prices 10 YEARS AGO! What else in tech has the same pricing as 10 years ago? Why should tier 1 ISPs think their businesses are entitled to that kind of price protection?
The large tier 1 ISPs are the problem, not end users.
-ted
I'm using this now, and it works great!
Get it here.
-ted
Lots of people here are defending users and blaming programmers for computer "crashes".
I'm a network administrator and I have to deal with these users every day. The typical user will define a computer "crash" as anything the computer does that the user did not intend. That situation may, or may not, be a "crash".
Yesterday I had a user complain that Appleworks crashed on her while she was working on a document. It turns out the program threw an "IO error" when she saved the document.
Guess what caused that error?......a bad FLOPPY! I asked her if she kept a duplicate of her document on the server, but she said she didn't. It seems her floppy disk was 3 years old and it had just given up the ghost.
She thinks the computer crashed. In actuality it hadn't. How can you blame the system architects/programmers for that?
Some programmers may be lazy, but that's nothing compared to the stupidity of some users.
-ted
A few years ago SGI decided that the Wintel market was where they had to be. Soon, they were peddling commodity Intel boxes running NT....and it was almost the death of the company.
I see Sun going down that road. Sun needs to learn from SGI's mistake. Their bread and butter was the high-end stuff. The stuff that makes scientists drool. These guys will pay anything for massive number-crunching ability. SGI realized this and decided to drop the low-profit commodity business.
Commodity Intel-Red Hat-Oracle boxes are NOT a way to build a profitable business.
-ted
Put generators on all excercise equipment to capture some of the expended energy and put it back on the grid.
-ted
Pure research is a luxury(although necessary in the long run). In financially tough times, research facilites focus on marketable technologies. Instead of persuing a thinking machine, MIT is persuing projects for the military. Details here Why? Money, plain and simple.
Ask anyone who worked for Bell labs in the late 70's and 80's. These types of environments fostered incredible research that didn't really turn into real products for 20 years. Today the bean counters yell and managment focuses on marketable products. It's just a sign of the times.
-ted
Ok I didn't really make my point clearly in the first post.
Everyone is quick to claim this project is a success. I'm taking a wait and see attitude. Sure, it's nice to see people spending money on a legal on-line music distribution system, but I wouldn't call it a success until most of the people that use other systems illegally migrate to paid systems like Apple's.
I still have a hard time believing people that use the windows based file trading systems for free will stop that practice in favor of a system that costs money and distributes the music in a more restrictive format.
-ted
How many P2P apps are there for Mac users?
Grokster?....nope
Kazaa?....nada
Morpheus?....nope
All these apps require windows. I'm not saying there aren't ANY file trading apps for the Mac, but their selection is severely limited. I'll bet most of those files sold were sold to Mac users.
-ted
Legislators should not write laws regarding issues they know nothing about. Why is the knee-jerk reaction to every internet problem legislation? The internet is a global network. How, exactly, do you impose/enforce regional laws on a global network?
Issues like spam and pornography are technical issues, and can be solved with technical advancements. Legislation is not the most effective tool for this job; but some fancy AI programming might be.
-ted
When my ISP updates their entire backbone, and replaces the Cisco 2500 series router they gave us.
In other words - probably never.
-ted
That's like saying the auto industry is a dead industry.
Sure, the auto group doesn't have the 500% a year growth that it had in the early 1900's, but it is far from a dead industry.
It would be more acurate to say that the software business is not a GROWTH industry. Most of the software "capacity" has been filled. Now software is a "replacement" business. No new capacity, just expansion of existing capacity.
-ted
Have you thought about providing television and internet over coaxial cable? Cisco makes some nice cable gear here. As far as content, you can set up some c-band satellite dishes and distribute content via the same wire and get multiple revenues over one network....and it's capable of faster speeds than non-shielded/twisted copper.
-ted
A good NAT/firewall device will generate VERY random sequence numbers to prevent a hacker from guessing sequence numbers and hijacking your connection.
Cisco's PIX firewall does a very good job of randomizing sequence numbers. This would really give the AT&T method a hard time.
Check out this article it shows the randomness of some popular TCP sequence number generators.
-ted
Damn, I didn't even have to think of it...the author suggested a work around:
It would be possible to defeat this detection technique by creating a NAT gateway that didn't decrement the IP TTL
I wonder how long it will take Cisco to update my PIX software with this feature...
-ted
Sure, clean needles are a harm reduction tactic, but the harm that is being reduced is the harm to the drug user. No matter how many drugs a user puts in their arm, it doesn't affect my health.
.
How exactly can we "harm reduce" the effects of hacking? These guys aren't hacking their own servers, they are hacking production boxes.
Here's a harm reduction suggestion. The register can pay to maintain honeypots to lure hackers away from real production boxes on the internet....but I doubt they have the time or money to pull that off.
Of course, if you use a honeypot while trying to protect yourself you might actually go to jail
-ted