b) use this to use your off minutes effectively. That means e.g. if you have 7 minutes till your next appointment comes in, glance at your inbox then to use that time effectively, and email is already sitting in it waiting.
I am certainly NOT propagating you jump every minute, and I should have made that clear, sorry.
Indeed. As CTO of a company that employs about 100 people I clearly see a division between:
a) the "old guys". They consider email a mail equivalent: you check it once a day and ask your secretary to reply. They see 'too much mail' as 'way too much noise'. These are CFO-types and older sales manager types.
b) The "e-kids". They are younger (typically 35) and consider email a bonus, and see it as akin to the telephone. I.e. it has become a real-time mechanism. They have developed mechanisms to handle the deluge, such as the following (which I am trying to get everyone to buy into)
- Filter into separate directories upon receipt
- Check each minute instead of once an hour (or worse)
- Show the TO line in the list view of received emails
- Live with the fact that sometimes you cannot answer each one immediately, or ever
- Use various email addresses to separate business from private
- Use email aliases and groups were they benefit the project
- concentrate on the half that needs doing quickly: spend 10-20% of your time on that. Spend remaining 80-90% of your time on strategy. Typically, half or more of the emails need not be answered at all.
- Keep received and sent email for three months, no longer (for legal reasons too btw).
- Use ASCII, not HTML
I send a weekly newsletter that always has a few tips, and often sit down with older or less sophisticated managers individually to teach them some of the tricks. That helps a lot, I find.
in France, and I guess, in most of Europe, your medical is secret. And a leakage is not taken lightly.
Here it's not quite like that - I'm in Canada, by the way. You cannot get insurance (eg a group plan) without AIDS tests, and you sign a form allowing the release of any of your conversations with your doctor to the insurance company and to your own company. People here are starting to know better than to tell their doctors anything.
This way, when you give someone your phone number you are giving them your social security noumber, tax number, medical identity, etc.
The problem with that is that it opens you up to two things: abuse and honest mistakes. Both for obvious reasons would be real problems.
Example. The credit agency in Canada seems to think I owe BMW money for a car. That is long gone (when the lease ended, I sold that car and bought a different make). Still, it's well neigh impossible to get that off the record. Now imagine everyone had that info!
And another example. I recently changed medical insuramce companies at work, and that needed an AIDS test. Negative, I am happy to say. But if it had not been: if all these systems had been tied together (as they will be soon, with one number) that information would quite easily have got back to the bank, or the employer, etc.
I think we need to be very careful indeed with systems that make it easier for people bad or good to track us and what we do.
Not responding to flamebait is a principle of mine, but I will make an exception as this is important.
It's partly religion, sure. I don't like being dictated to the way MS does. I am the CTO, not MS.
But *much* more than religion, it's practical reasons that underlie my wish to go to Linux when it's ready for desktop deployment.
For starters, Windows costs us a lot of money (and increasingly so). Add up 100+ instances of Windows, add Office and the other apps (graphics, etc) we use, and you see that's a lot of money. Cash is tight. The CFO murders me when I go to him for yet another upgrade - can't wait till the users start clamouring for Win/Office XT... there goes another 100k.
Another reason is tech support. Windows combined with inexperienced users is causing us a lot of tech support hassles. As you are well aware, install a few apps here and there and once or twice a year you really have to re-install Windows from scratch. A Linux desktop is easier to keep under control.
A third reason is the OS itself. Say a user comes to me and wants a particular function or behaviour: very often, a cron job running a shell script and perhaps some freely available OSS software, and it's all done. And it's more stable as an OS: no reboots, worst case you restart X.
Then there's the fact we KNOW what the Linux box does. On the win boxes, the behaviour (right from startup on!) is a mystery that we should not ask about. God knows what all those DLL's do. Etc. All that imposes a support cost taht is considerable. Onthe Linux boxes we know, and we can even alter their behaviour if we need. On the Win boxes, it's 'keep your hands off and reboot if it gives you any truouble'.
The list goes on.
I will grant you that with the current list of 'not there yet on the desktop' things I outlined in my original post, rightnow Windows IS still the right tool for the job. Which is why we run it on all our desktop machines (except the sysadmins). But I want that to change for the above reasons.
Michael
PS I've been in IT management for years, thanks.;)
I am the CTO of a company trying (desperately) to switch some people to Linux (all our servers are already Linux boxen), and I think this *is* a big deal. Here's why.
Linux on the desktop is missing, in this order:
1. File Conversion
2. OLE - "cut and paste"
3. Apps ("Office")
4. Proper font support
5. Integration of user interface
6. Speed/efficiency.
7. Platform standards
Now notice, I am not the bad guys.. My home LAN has 7 Linux machines and one Win box. I desperately want to switch my company to OSS as fast as I can. I am hitting the above roadblocks - for a while. I'm pretty confident withing a few years we can overcome all this.
For now, though, IE on Windows looks a whole lot better than Konqueror/Netscape/Mozilla on KDE or Gnome, largely due to fonts. That's what my colleague the CFO notices - this is therefore a major announcement.
This is not unimportant. Prices drop and rapid adoption increases when a standard is worldwide (like 802.11b on 2.4 GHz).
The 5 GHz equivalent of 802.11b (.a) will be approved at the world radio freqeuency conference in 2003 (light speed for governments) - and I was already told by the British govt Radio Agency that the UK frequency will differ slightly from the US frequency. And that the 5 GHz standard wil be approved for commercial use (unlike the current 2.4 GHz standard).
That's just for one country, the UK. Imagine when all others (Japan, Europe, etc) also get in on the act. Result: nothing moves.
So, nice as all these new 'standards' are, I am afraid they will slow down wireless adoption.
I have GITS - great sound, great story. Looks more like Hong Kong than like a futuristic Japan.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was free of CDD encryption. Making it much easier to play on my Linux desktop. Any idea anyone if GITS 2 will also be CSS-free? I am certainly going to buy it, if it is.
a) By modifying equipment you may be breaking FCC rules (USA) or your local rules.
Additionally, in the UK, 802.11b is NOT apprived for commercial use. I spoke at length with the UK government Radio Agency last week to establish this (my company use 802.11b to connect remote advertising screens, but not in the UK where this is forbidden.)
"To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement."
Not surprising, on three counts!
First, obviously 'shoot em up'-games improve hand-eye coordination. ("Improve hand-eye coordination: that sounds better already, no?)
Leading me to point two: Japanese society generally disapproves of individualist pursuits such as gameplaying. The Japenese scientific establishment may well have the same biases. This conclusion will be popular. Back to 18-hour a day schooling, kids.
Third, The Guardian is a left-wing paper with a fairly strong anti-technology bias. So the fact it is reported here is suspicious too.
What I am trying to say is: interpret your news critically. This does not mean the article is untrue; it just means some extra work is needed before we all throw out our kids' Gameboys.
Michael
PS my two boys are playing a game as we speak. I have the impression it's a worthwhile pursuit. They are leadning to talk together, plan a course of action, and they are learning to use PCs. Oh and hand-eye coordination.
We differ only in small ways I think. I agree with most of what you say but do think much of the tech development is for us - sure, much of it is for copyright protection, but much of it is for us. Flat panel screens. Compact Flash and other memory formats. MPEG-2. Lithium Ion battery technology. Single-chip MPEG decoders. Etc. A huge list actually.
I mean both consumers (once they know how silly all this is) and (/.) developers. It took Philips some 10 years to develop the CD (I know, I worked there at the time), and Philips/Sony 5 years to develop the DVD. That is beyond us.
But it then took us not so very long to discover the joys of ripping MP3s from those CDs, and playing DVDs on any darn PC we want, etc. I am sitting here with a functional DVD player on the Linux machine, and I am listeining to "Deep Purple - Made In Japan" on MP3 as I type this. So I think we're not doing all that badly really.;)
Hey, I dislike the DMCA and the accompanying infringement on liberties as much as the next guy - probably more, as I am more aware of them. I travel a lot, and that's a no-no (DVD regions). I carry an MP3 player and that too is a no-no (even though I already own 90% of the music I play on vinyl. Eh, yes, vinyl). And I am sitting here behind a Linux PC, whose videolan (vlc) DVD software I have only just got to run, sort of.
But I think we must be a bit moderate in the discussion. It's not all bad! At least copyrighted media and windfall "fat cat" profits ensure lots of money spent on technical development and media development. And after all, you can sell anyone anything you like at any conditions you like, as long as you have a contract (and you are not a monopoly).
And most importantly: One great thing about the USA is that you can sue. It is easy enough, and you can win against vested interests. The existing liberties we have (you are allowed to tape a TV program onto your VCR) were brought about in the courts in the '60s and '70s.
It seems to me that the most important thing is to make people aware. I did a little unscientific poll last week, and asked 10 acquaintances who own a DVD player if they knew about the deliberate regionalisation that makes it impossible to, say, pick up a DVD in London and play it in Toronto. And guess what. Eight of them had no idea. Of those eight, four refused to believe me. Do the poll yourself and you will probably find the same ratios.
Then I asked them if they knew you are not normally allowed to play DVDs on a Linux machine. This time none of them knew.
As long as the industry manages to hide this stuff, we will never see free media. I do believe that as soon as Joe Public gets inconvenienced, DMCA or not, we will not see these infringements for long. So let's ge tthe word out there.
Home systems (like mine) DO need bind. I can cache lookups here and browse quickly, or wait forever for my @home name server to respond. BIG difference.
UNIX Small? I have a 512 MB system and starting Gnome it still needs to use swap space. 10 instances of nautilus, 11 MB each, are running right now. Call that small? My Win system is a paragon of minimalist excellence by comparison. Not knowcking *nix, but let's be realistic.
Michael
PS In the cases you mean, it's "its", not "it's".:)
It's done. I do it. There's 1200 (and "high speed" 9600 bps) TCP/IP gateways all over the place. See ampr.org for more details.
And boy, do I use it. When my cable access in Toronto goes down, and I am in Asia or at the office, I telnet to a nearby TCP/IP gateway, then telnet to my hambox node via packet!
And all my email goes out: the gateway is also a mail gateway. Anyway, see www.mvw.net/radio
Oh, and I connected to the ISS (Space station) for the first time recently.
The ampr. org (44.) has plenty of IP's left. So all hurry up and get your ham radio license!
Where is the PHP enterprise component architecture? What about clustering and failover? Where are the WSDL and UDDI implementations?
When I hear stuff like that, I think, "Uh oh, here come the consultants". I've been there: and believe me, the emperor has no clothes. This stuff is just what the term "FUD" was invented for. When someone quotes "enterprise component architecture" at me, and then adds "WSDL"and "UDDI", and then throws in a measure as Java jargon as the solution, I think: "there's no there there". Usually, this means the person saying this wants me to pay him a lot of money because he is so much smarter than I am.
We have OK clustering and failover solutions today. If anything is an obstacle there it is open source databases, not server/service platforms. WDSL? UDDI? Must it be those acronyms or will others do? I would like to hear what the real missing functionality is. A GUI and a few acronyms du jour buy me very little.
So web services are the next big thing? Maybe. But we thought the same about thin clients 5 years ago, or B2C's two years ago, or B2B's just last year. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Give me choice between an acronym consultant or a competent PHP programmer, and I will tell you who makes the biggest and fastest difference to my business's bottom line. And that counts nowadays. (Hint: it's not the consultant.)
That, and the obvious Java bias of the author, and his Sun links, makes me doubt the article even more. I put this one down as "In spite of his bias he may have a point but if so, I'd like to hear that point, not just hype.
One more response then... can't resist. Because you make a good point.
No, I would not be happier in a Socialist country - I've lived in some, like Iraq and Libya, and seen others, like China and (then) Eastern Europe. In socialist countries you do not get the right to go to court and establish "fair use". And that is exactly what Americans (no socialists they!) did in the 1960s, when technology first appeared that enabled people to tape records (and a bit later, TV shows). Nothing socialist in people trying to establish those rights.
These are not "inalienable rights". They are, however, rights established in the courts. And when rights suddenly disappear, yes, people get upset.
You see, your point about companies' rights is a good one, except for one point: in a cartel or monopoly situation, you have fewer rights, as the danger of abuse is greater. This was recognised (in the US courts, again!) at the turn of the century. And ask Microsoft if it still holds.
Fortunately, I do not think 'whiny zealots' describes the world's millions of MP3 users, so I guess we'll see change from the record companies, eventually.
Hopefully you will agree, though, that stopping people from playing the DVDs they bought on the computers they own (and the same for music) is not "freedom".
Michael
Fair points, but I think perhaps you are oversimplifying a tad.
We used to have these rights as consumers. Fair use, and all that. We used to be able to copy records to casettes. These rights are being taken away one by one.
"You have the option not to buy this" - You'd have to be a hermit to live without music or movies. In essence, this is a monopoly, certainly a cartel - and being well trained in economics as you appear to be, you will know that different rules apply there.
"IP" - the proceeds evidently majorly do not go to the actual artists, who should own the IP.
Here goes. When I buy a CD or a DVD, I feel I have the right to listen to it/watch it on any device I like. So, I repeat: I paid! Now I want to listen to my CDs on the MP3-player, and watch the DVDs on my PC. That's not contrary to IP rights. Yes, the industry is afraid of this.
I think that's certainly the main issue for me and many others here. We're not making a point. We simply want fair use of the IP we paid for.
Being both CTO of a small company (100+ employees on 3 continents) and husband of a non-technical wife:), I am desperately trying to do the same in our company, and at home. Seeing the roadblocks I am hitting may be interesting to some of you.
I see two types of objection to switching.
The "Necessary Condition" objections are mainly "Office", "Outlook", and "IE". Which is, alas, what everyone spends all day using. And until MS gets spilt up, this will not change. But also "that new accounting package", "my scanner", "our new CRM software", "our ERP project", and so on. And these are actually much harder to overcome. I think maybe we can identify a small group of users who do not use accounting, ERP, CRM etc. If we have to change all those, implementing Linux would actually cost us a lot of money.
Eh, before you say it:
StarOffice etc do not work well enough. Always some problems converting Word and Excel files.
VMware is slow, but it also defies the entire object (you still have to pay for an MS license)
Anyway, then there's the...
"Usability" objections. These are easy to fix in time - or they should be. But we are not there yet! I just spent a whole weekend setting up a new desktop machine for myself - Athlon 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, RedHat 7.1. I had to do a kernel upgrade before it would see my Envidia graphics card. I still cannot print to my samba printer. And having installed machines ([pre-]CP/M, DOS, Win, Novell, Linux) for 20 years, I am not new to PCs or to Linux, but I still cannot figure out how to rewrite the Gnome/Ximian menus! And the config tool core-dumps: I have had 20-odd core dumps in the first day alone. And the lack of "OLE" drives me mad - an experienced PC user spends his life cutting and pasting, and the lack of this in common Linux desktop environments are a real obstacle.
So now I am looking for small groups of "expert users". Our (mainly hardware-) engineers come to mind first. But I am looking hard for real interoperability so we can roll out across the company. My estimate: 2 years out. I hope I am wrong.
I've been trying to get it to work... without success. Whether I install from the tarball and add the plugin, or install the.rpm... all I see is a black screen. Except when playing my one non-protected DVD, "Ghost in the shell", which has now become my most watched DVD.:)
...and I am with you on this. I also work in the IT industry. I am pretty convinced I will still be in favour of free speech when I am 52, 62, etc.
Yes, you realise some stuff along the way. Maybe my opinions are even better considered now than they were 20 years ago. But that does not mean they have changed.
I don;t think this is FUD. This is a reaction to a decrease in what we can do.
I just bought a new Linux PC as my main desktop machine. Nice box: and it even has a DVD drive. Finally, I can watch the DVDs I bought (and paid for) in my office.
Not. I found a DVD player alright (xine), but all it will play is one DVD, that is not encrypted (ghost in the shell). I have watched it twice already.
Now I'd really like to watch the others that I bought. But the suits say I cannot. Worse, the American suits - I am neither American, nor living in the USA. And yet, I cannot find a downloadable player anywhere that works.
Another issue: my DVDs are also a mixture of regions 1, 2 and 3! I know the suits will say that this is bad of me, but I live in Canada and work in Hong Kong and London (UK). So naturally I do not restict my buying behaviour to the time that I am home.
It's not FUD. Sowing FUD is "creating unreasonable fear of what might happen". This is annoyance at what HAS happened..
Slashdot Mirror
I should clarify. I was in a hurry.
Yes, check each minute BUT:
a) turn off the sound!
b) use this to use your off minutes effectively. That means e.g. if you have 7 minutes till your next appointment comes in, glance at your inbox then to use that time effectively, and email is already sitting in it waiting.
I am certainly NOT propagating you jump every minute, and I should have made that clear, sorry.
Michael
Indeed. As CTO of a company that employs about 100 people I clearly see a division between:
a) the "old guys". They consider email a mail equivalent: you check it once a day and ask your secretary to reply. They see 'too much mail' as 'way too much noise'. These are CFO-types and older sales manager types.
b) The "e-kids". They are younger (typically 35) and consider email a bonus, and see it as akin to the telephone. I.e. it has become a real-time mechanism. They have developed mechanisms to handle the deluge, such as the following (which I am trying to get everyone to buy into)
- Filter into separate directories upon receipt
- Check each minute instead of once an hour (or worse)
- Show the TO line in the list view of received emails
- Live with the fact that sometimes you cannot answer each one immediately, or ever
- Use various email addresses to separate business from private
- Use email aliases and groups were they benefit the project
- concentrate on the half that needs doing quickly: spend 10-20% of your time on that. Spend remaining 80-90% of your time on strategy. Typically, half or more of the emails need not be answered at all.
- Keep received and sent email for three months, no longer (for legal reasons too btw).
- Use ASCII, not HTML
I send a weekly newsletter that always has a few tips, and often sit down with older or less sophisticated managers individually to teach them some of the tricks. That helps a lot, I find.
Michael
in France, and I guess, in most of Europe, your medical is secret. And a leakage is not taken lightly.
Here it's not quite like that - I'm in Canada, by the way. You cannot get insurance (eg a group plan) without AIDS tests, and you sign a form allowing the release of any of your conversations with your doctor to the insurance company and to your own company. People here are starting to know better than to tell their doctors anything.
Michael
This way, when you give someone your phone number you are giving them your social security noumber, tax number, medical identity, etc.
The problem with that is that it opens you up to two things: abuse and honest mistakes. Both for obvious reasons would be real problems.
Example. The credit agency in Canada seems to think I owe BMW money for a car. That is long gone (when the lease ended, I sold that car and bought a different make). Still, it's well neigh impossible to get that off the record. Now imagine everyone had that info!
And another example. I recently changed medical insuramce companies at work, and that needed an AIDS test. Negative, I am happy to say. But if it had not been: if all these systems had been tied together (as they will be soon, with one number) that information would quite easily have got back to the bank, or the employer, etc.
I think we need to be very careful indeed with systems that make it easier for people bad or good to track us and what we do.
Not responding to flamebait is a principle of mine, but I will make an exception as this is important.
;)
It's partly religion, sure. I don't like being dictated to the way MS does. I am the CTO, not MS.
But *much* more than religion, it's practical reasons that underlie my wish to go to Linux when it's ready for desktop deployment.
For starters, Windows costs us a lot of money (and increasingly so). Add up 100+ instances of Windows, add Office and the other apps (graphics, etc) we use, and you see that's a lot of money. Cash is tight. The CFO murders me when I go to him for yet another upgrade - can't wait till the users start clamouring for Win/Office XT... there goes another 100k.
Another reason is tech support. Windows combined with inexperienced users is causing us a lot of tech support hassles. As you are well aware, install a few apps here and there and once or twice a year you really have to re-install Windows from scratch. A Linux desktop is easier to keep under control.
A third reason is the OS itself. Say a user comes to me and wants a particular function or behaviour: very often, a cron job running a shell script and perhaps some freely available OSS software, and it's all done. And it's more stable as an OS: no reboots, worst case you restart X.
Then there's the fact we KNOW what the Linux box does. On the win boxes, the behaviour (right from startup on!) is a mystery that we should not ask about. God knows what all those DLL's do. Etc. All that imposes a support cost taht is considerable. Onthe Linux boxes we know, and we can even alter their behaviour if we need. On the Win boxes, it's 'keep your hands off and reboot if it gives you any truouble'.
The list goes on.
I will grant you that with the current list of 'not there yet on the desktop' things I outlined in my original post, rightnow Windows IS still the right tool for the job. Which is why we run it on all our desktop machines (except the sysadmins). But I want that to change for the above reasons.
Michael
PS I've been in IT management for years, thanks.
I am the CTO of a company trying (desperately) to switch some people to Linux (all our servers are already Linux boxen), and I think this *is* a big deal. Here's why.
Linux on the desktop is missing, in this order:
1. File Conversion
2. OLE - "cut and paste"
3. Apps ("Office")
4. Proper font support
5. Integration of user interface
6. Speed/efficiency.
7. Platform standards
Now notice, I am not the bad guys.. My home LAN has 7 Linux machines and one Win box. I desperately want to switch my company to OSS as fast as I can. I am hitting the above roadblocks - for a while. I'm pretty confident withing a few years we can overcome all this.
For now, though, IE on Windows looks a whole lot better than Konqueror/Netscape/Mozilla on KDE or Gnome, largely due to fonts. That's what my colleague the CFO notices - this is therefore a major announcement.
Michael
...and IF it is approved outside the US as well!
This is not unimportant. Prices drop and rapid adoption increases when a standard is worldwide (like 802.11b on 2.4 GHz).
The 5 GHz equivalent of 802.11b (.a) will be approved at the world radio freqeuency conference in 2003 (light speed for governments) - and I was already told by the British govt Radio Agency
that the UK frequency will differ slightly from the US frequency. And that the 5 GHz standard wil be approved for commercial use (unlike the current 2.4 GHz standard).
That's just for one country, the UK. Imagine when all others (Japan, Europe, etc) also get in on the act. Result: nothing moves.
So, nice as all these new 'standards' are, I am afraid they will slow down wireless adoption.
I have GITS - great sound, great story. Looks more like Hong Kong than like a futuristic Japan.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was free of CDD encryption. Making it much easier to play on my Linux desktop. Any idea anyone if GITS 2 will also be CSS-free? I am certainly going to buy it, if it is.
Michael
Careful though.
a) By modifying equipment you may be breaking FCC rules (USA) or your local rules.
Additionally, in the UK, 802.11b is NOT apprived for commercial use. I spoke at length with the UK government Radio Agency last week to establish this (my company use 802.11b to connect remote advertising screens, but not in the UK where this is forbidden.)
Michael
"To the surprise of brain-mapping expert Professor Ryuta Kawashima and his team at Tohoku University in Japan, it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement."
Not surprising, on three counts!
First, obviously 'shoot em up'-games improve hand-eye coordination. ("Improve hand-eye coordination: that sounds better already, no?)
Leading me to point two: Japanese society generally disapproves of individualist pursuits such as gameplaying. The Japenese scientific establishment may well have the same biases. This conclusion will be popular. Back to 18-hour a day schooling, kids.
Third, The Guardian is a left-wing paper with a fairly strong anti-technology bias. So the fact it is reported here is suspicious too.
What I am trying to say is: interpret your news critically. This does not mean the article is untrue; it just means some extra work is needed before we all throw out our kids' Gameboys.
Michael
PS my two boys are playing a game as we speak. I have the impression it's a worthwhile pursuit. They are leadning to talk together, plan a course of action, and they are learning to use PCs. Oh and hand-eye coordination.
We differ only in small ways I think. I agree with most of what you say but do think much of the tech development is for us - sure, much of it is for copyright protection, but much of it is for us. Flat panel screens. Compact Flash and other memory formats. MPEG-2. Lithium Ion battery technology. Single-chip MPEG decoders. Etc. A huge list actually.
Michael
Ah. That's where WE come in.
;)
I mean both consumers (once they know how silly all this is) and (/.) developers. It took Philips some 10 years to develop the CD (I know, I worked there at the time), and Philips/Sony 5 years to develop the DVD. That is beyond us.
But it then took us not so very long to discover the joys of ripping MP3s from those CDs, and playing DVDs on any darn PC we want, etc. I am sitting here with a functional DVD player on the Linux machine, and I am listeining to "Deep Purple - Made In Japan" on MP3 as I type this. So I think we're not doing all that badly really.
Michael
But I think we must be a bit moderate in the discussion. It's not all bad! At least copyrighted media and windfall "fat cat" profits ensure lots of money spent on technical development and media development. And after all, you can sell anyone anything you like at any conditions you like, as long as you have a contract (and you are not a monopoly).
And most importantly: One great thing about the USA is that you can sue. It is easy enough, and you can win against vested interests. The existing liberties we have (you are allowed to tape a TV program onto your VCR) were brought about in the courts in the '60s and '70s.
It seems to me that the most important thing is to make people aware. I did a little unscientific poll last week, and asked 10 acquaintances who own a DVD player if they knew about the deliberate regionalisation that makes it impossible to, say, pick up a DVD in London and play it in Toronto. And guess what. Eight of them had no idea. Of those eight, four refused to believe me. Do the poll yourself and you will probably find the same ratios.
Then I asked them if they knew you are not normally allowed to play DVDs on a Linux machine. This time none of them knew.
As long as the industry manages to hide this stuff, we will never see free media. I do believe that as soon as Joe Public gets inconvenienced, DMCA or not, we will not see these infringements for long. So let's ge tthe word out there.
Michael
Home systems (like mine) DO need bind. I can cache lookups here and browse quickly, or wait forever for my @home name server to respond. BIG difference.
UNIX Small? I have a 512 MB system and starting Gnome it still needs to use swap space. 10 instances of nautilus, 11 MB each, are running right now. Call that small? My Win system is a paragon of minimalist excellence by comparison. Not knowcking *nix, but let's be realistic.
Michael PS In the cases you mean, it's "its", not "it's". :)
- It is 1200/9600 bps, not Bps.
- Amateur radio may only be used for personal hobby-related purposes. That's quite a regulatory restriction.
Still, as said, it gets me telnetting in, and it gets my (non business) email out, free of charge and free of providers.Michael
And boy, do I use it. When my cable access in Toronto goes down, and I am in Asia or at the office, I telnet to a nearby TCP/IP gateway, then telnet to my hambox node via packet!
And all my email goes out: the gateway is also a mail gateway. Anyway, see www.mvw.net/radio
Oh, and I connected to the ISS (Space station) for the first time recently.
The ampr. org (44.) has plenty of IP's left. So all hurry up and get your ham radio license!
Michael
When I hear stuff like that, I think, "Uh oh, here come the consultants". I've been there: and believe me, the emperor has no clothes. This stuff is just what the term "FUD" was invented for. When someone quotes "enterprise component architecture" at me, and then adds "WSDL"and "UDDI", and then throws in a measure as Java jargon as the solution, I think: "there's no there there". Usually, this means the person saying this wants me to pay him a lot of money because he is so much smarter than I am.
We have OK clustering and failover solutions today. If anything is an obstacle there it is open source databases, not server/service platforms. WDSL? UDDI? Must it be those acronyms or will others do? I would like to hear what the real missing functionality is. A GUI and a few acronyms du jour buy me very little.
So web services are the next big thing? Maybe. But we thought the same about thin clients 5 years ago, or B2C's two years ago, or B2B's just last year. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Give me choice between an acronym consultant or a competent PHP programmer, and I will tell you who makes the biggest and fastest difference to my business's bottom line. And that counts nowadays. (Hint: it's not the consultant.)
That, and the obvious Java bias of the author, and his Sun links, makes me doubt the article even more. I put this one down as "In spite of his bias he may have a point but if so, I'd like to hear that point, not just hype.
Michael
No, I would not be happier in a Socialist country - I've lived in some, like Iraq and Libya, and seen others, like China and (then) Eastern Europe. In socialist countries you do not get the right to go to court and establish "fair use". And that is exactly what Americans (no socialists they!) did in the 1960s, when technology first appeared that enabled people to tape records (and a bit later, TV shows). Nothing socialist in people trying to establish those rights.
These are not "inalienable rights". They are, however, rights established in the courts. And when rights suddenly disappear, yes, people get upset.
You see, your point about companies' rights is a good one, except for one point: in a cartel or monopoly situation, you have fewer rights, as the danger of abuse is greater. This was recognised (in the US courts, again!) at the turn of the century. And ask Microsoft if it still holds.
Fortunately, I do not think 'whiny zealots' describes the world's millions of MP3 users, so I guess we'll see change from the record companies, eventually.
Michael
Hopefully you will agree, though, that stopping people from playing the DVDs they bought on the computers they own (and the same for music) is not "freedom". Michael
- We used to have these rights as consumers. Fair use, and all that. We used to be able to copy records to casettes. These rights are being taken away one by one.
- "You have the option not to buy this" - You'd have to be a hermit to live without music or movies. In essence, this is a monopoly, certainly a cartel - and being well trained in economics as you appear to be, you will know that different rules apply there.
- "IP" - the proceeds evidently majorly do not go to the actual artists, who should own the IP.
MichaelHere goes. When I buy a CD or a DVD, I feel I have the right to listen to it/watch it on any device I like. So, I repeat: I paid! Now I want to listen to my CDs on the MP3-player, and watch the DVDs on my PC. That's not contrary to IP rights. Yes, the industry is afraid of this.
I think that's certainly the main issue for me and many others here. We're not making a point. We simply want fair use of the IP we paid for.
Michael
I see two types of objection to switching.
The "Necessary Condition" objections are mainly "Office", "Outlook", and "IE". Which is, alas, what everyone spends all day using. And until MS gets spilt up, this will not change. But also "that new accounting package", "my scanner", "our new CRM software", "our ERP project", and so on. And these are actually much harder to overcome. I think maybe we can identify a small group of users who do not use accounting, ERP, CRM etc. If we have to change all those, implementing Linux would actually cost us a lot of money.
Eh, before you say it:
StarOffice etc do not work well enough. Always some problems converting Word and Excel files.
VMware is slow, but it also defies the entire object (you still have to pay for an MS license)
Anyway, then there's the...
"Usability" objections. These are easy to fix in time - or they should be. But we are not there yet! I just spent a whole weekend setting up a new desktop machine for myself - Athlon 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, RedHat 7.1. I had to do a kernel upgrade before it would see my Envidia graphics card. I still cannot print to my samba printer. And having installed machines ([pre-]CP/M, DOS, Win, Novell, Linux) for 20 years, I am not new to PCs or to Linux, but I still cannot figure out how to rewrite the Gnome/Ximian menus! And the config tool core-dumps: I have had 20-odd core dumps in the first day alone. And the lack of "OLE" drives me mad - an experienced PC user spends his life cutting and pasting, and the lack of this in common Linux desktop environments are a real obstacle.
So now I am looking for small groups of "expert users". Our (mainly hardware-) engineers come to mind first. But I am looking hard for real interoperability so we can roll out across the company. My estimate: 2 years out. I hope I am wrong.
-Michael
Yes, you realise some stuff along the way. Maybe my opinions are even better considered now than they were 20 years ago. But that does not mean they have changed.
Michael
I just bought a new Linux PC as my main desktop machine. Nice box: and it even has a DVD drive. Finally, I can watch the DVDs I bought (and paid for) in my office.
Not. I found a DVD player alright (xine), but all it will play is one DVD, that is not encrypted (ghost in the shell). I have watched it twice already.
Now I'd really like to watch the others that I bought. But the suits say I cannot. Worse, the American suits - I am neither American, nor living in the USA. And yet, I cannot find a downloadable player anywhere that works.
Another issue: my DVDs are also a mixture of regions 1, 2 and 3! I know the suits will say that this is bad of me, but I live in Canada and work in Hong Kong and London (UK). So naturally I do not restict my buying behaviour to the time that I am home.
It's not FUD. Sowing FUD is "creating unreasonable fear of what might happen". This is annoyance at what HAS happened..
Michael