http://www.math.uic.edu/~burgiel/Tetris/explanatio n.html
Has a great article about this. Essentially, in a truly random Tetris game, getting a long sequence of alternating Z and S pieces will make it impossible to complete the board; they're thicker in the middle than the sides, meaning you'll build up a little tower in the middle, no matter how good you are.
The page has links to a version of Tetris with only those pieces, if you want to try your luck on it.
Douglas Copeland coined the term "Generation X" in the book, I think of the same name. It's a funny bit of history, actually. He was asked to make an updated "Official Preppy Handbook" for the 90s, and he ended up writing a seminal book defining a generation. Or something. : ).
Before the Boomers were the Builders; they're the ones who rebuilt the country 30s-50s, meanwhile generating the Babies of the Baby Boom. Builders are characterized by absenteeism at home, prioritizing work / society over family / relational, etc.
I want this to be moved into orbit around earth, so that we can have two moons, like "Hook." Woo! That would be great. Who wants to fund the expedition? I'm sure we can profit from the new moon somehow. Like, countries could pay to keep it in or out of their orbit... How great would this be? Like "Grandpa, were you there when they added the second moon?" "Yes Deirdre, I was. In fact, I suggested it..."
Moon2.com. If only it were 1999, this would already be funded!!
I think many posters here are missing the point
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think many posters here are missing the point of this.
RSA wants people to crack these weaker crypto offerings; it makes their story better, not worse.
They know exactly how insecure RC5-64 is. They want other IT groups, industry groups and tech managers to know it. The easiest way to do that is to offer open challenges with cash prizes. It's never hard for RSA to up their bit-length to 4096, say, a year before 2048 RSA is broken, and someone collects their $200,000. It is hard to make PHBs understand that RC5-64 is not secure if nobody has broken it.
Secondly, Distributed.net clearly isn't doing it for the cash. I didn't do it for the cash, either. (Although I wouldn't have minded winning.) They're doing it because:
Breaking codes gives nerds their kicks.
Building a distributed computing architecture is a difficult and interesting problem.
With current technology, as RSA likes to demonstrate, the winners are the cryptographers, not the cryptologists (the code breakers.) Quantum computing may change that, and make the cryptologists the winners. Until then, RSA can happily give cash prizes for increasing length keys: the numbers are on their side.
Actually, I think the point of Dasher is that it's supposed to beat out systems like ERICA. The animated, suggested words system combined with boxes / sizes that indicate probability is supposed to make it continuously easy to type the most frequent words, based on what you normally type. This is akin to your keyboard changing it's arrangement so that the most common letters for your current word are always right next to your fingers.
Now, on a keyboard, that's no good, particularly since you can't look at the keyboard and the screen at the same time. The numbers at the Dasher site seem to indicate that it works pretty well when using your eyes, though.
This is a nice idea; the book Galatea 2.0 by Richard Powers explores some potential consequences of this idea very nicely. A learning system is first tutored by a romantic modernist English lit professor, and is later turned loose on data, writing and theory from like Derrida through the '90s. The resulting modern/post-modern transitional angst, cultural whiplash, etc. all circle around a Turing test between Galatea 2.0 and an English lit grad student. I'll leave it up to you to find out what happens, but hint: Powers doesn't think the Turing test is a very good test of intelligence.
Interesting. I note that Redhat is not listed among the exhibitors. Now that's a funny moment. Microsoft exhibits at Linux convention, while Redhat stays home.
The comments that Walter Hewlett is a whiny cry-baby who is costing shareholder's money are just total crap.
Read a bit about HP in, say, Good-to-Great, or other management books, and you'll understand that Carly Fiorina, current CEO of HP is a massive departure from the companies long term values, and it's showing in things like this purchase. I predict long term loss to shareholders from this merger -- it just doesn't make sense for HP. And the long-timers at HP knew it!
I'm disappointed in the shenanigans the poster to the Interesting People list described, and frankly, Ms. Fiorina, if you ever read this, I'm disappointed in you. Please stop telling people the HP way is one that makes office politics irrelevant! You just look like a jerk.
I live down the street from MIT, and there are tons of Wintel boxes there. Your EECS labs might have used Unix/Linux, etc, but many of the graduate school's labs I've been in are almost totally Wintel, with a couple of Suns in the corner for people who still use exmh to get their mail.
There have to be a few, powerful, tech savvy universities that have dealt with this before. What about MIT? Can someone here get this poor AC in touch with the right person at MIT? I'll bet some cash that MIT does not have the BSA's software on their student cluster PCs.
Also, my 2c on this: There are a few angles. Clearly, a private institution is innocent until proven guilty under US law. So, the scare tactics the BSA is using on your University take a couple of prongs:
For the legally not so savvy, it says "We'll sue if there's even a hint that you might not own some software! Put our software on your computers to keep us from suing."
For the legally more savvy, it says "We can make your life sufficiently annoying that it will be cheaper to just let us put this software on your system." Then we'll go away.
To address this for both audiences at your university, you'd like to be able to prove:
Your university is not, in fact, legally liable to the BSA, and that it in general isn't responsible for what people do with their personal computers.
It will be significantly more expensive to install the software they require, than it will be to get legal counsel to tell them to go away.
My guess is both those things are true: A nicely backed up presentation proving both those points would probably quelly our nightmares. Good luck! Post back and tell us what happened.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have steered my company through a number of legal discussions since the dotcom bust, and I'd say that this will never stand up in court. In breach of contract situations, Courts do not generally award damages greater than the actual cost of those damages. This makes it likely that you'll never, ever go to court on this stuff, unless the ISP is stupid enough to try and actually sue you.
The cost of the legal fees to go to court over this compared to the negative press, and the likely size of the judgment would mean they're never going to actually go to court with a small time "provide bandwidth to my street" type of person; they'll just cut off your service.
A contract is nice, but it's just a piece of paper. The courts decide what's reasonable. People and companies decide what they're willing to pay to find out what the courts will say about what's reasonable.
Great job, you guys! I've been waiting for the web to work out good micropay oriented subscription solutions since 1996. I'll gladly pay you my $20 / year, and I hope that you become millionaires -- seriously. If you can make it work, others will learn. And that means less ads for me.
I majored in theoretical math.
My major take away from the experience: get a math degree. Nobody will ever again worry that you aren't smart enough for a job at hand. I consulted right out of college with a fairly large consulting firm -- my econ classmates got hammered with 'brain teaser' questions in their interviews. I just needed to dress nicely and be polite; all you ever need to prove with a math degree is that you have reasonable people skills.
Sliced the other way, (i.e. what will make you happy?), here's my more detailed story.
I got an Sc.B in Theoretical math in 1997. About 1995, (end of my sophomore year), I realized that, although I was quite smart, and at an Ivy, in the top 20 for math, essentially, I wasn't going to be able to make it in the math academia world. This was not obvious to me in high school, (and I did some reasonably heavy math in high school through the UMTYMP program in Minnesota) but was obvious after meeting a few ultra-smart classmates, and talking to some professors.
Listen to those people who are telling you that you need to be at least in the top.01% (That's.0001 of people) to really make it as a mathematical academician. You might be one of those people; if so, it will probably be really clear to you sometime in college. If not, don't worry. For myself, I realized some portion of my brain was motivated by, and interested in money.
So, I ended up starting a company. I'm much happier than I would be struggling to get a job at a liberal arts college doing a teaching position for a job that I'm only 80% good at.
That's totally true, I didn't mean for it to be FUD, but I think you're right, it was. Please accept my apology, the point of my post was not to slam the openACS crowd.
Ouch! I didn't say it's unfit to sneeze on, and no, we don't feel marginalized. If you want to see the sort of work we've been doing, why don't you come by our site? www.ybos.net/kudos Or, you could talk to our clients, and see why they picked us.
There have been a number of instances where we've tried HARD to release our code in a venue where it will have good impact. I'd point you to the scramble that originated when we suggested to aD that we host CVS and bboards for ACS 3.4 about a year ago. People like Don and Ben were dismissive until they realized there was real demand for someone to continue to maintain that codebase. They then scrambled to have openACS take control. End result -- no result. Too confusing for aD, us and openACS to get something out the door.
We have the same problems any growing company does that's self funded -- we don't have unlimited resources to throw at community interaction, support, etc. When aD wanted to provide that community support, we released all our code through their channels. That's no longer a good venue to release our code, and so we're revamping our developer section to provide just this functionality to the community. But, it takes time.
If you want a copy of our most recent ACS, just drop me a line, or info at ybos dot net, someone will send you our source tree with enhancements. At any rate, there's no reason to be rude. I wasn't rude to you.
So, advice from the slashdot community?
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My company, ybos.net is pretty much the number one ACS-Tcl company right now. We picked up the ongoing development of Ars Digita's Tcl platform a year ago when they dropped it for java, and have continued to enhance it. According to f*cked company, the java port is going away now that RedHat has bought it.
Ironically we've done about six times more ACS work than ArsDigita has done this year, including beating them out for the Children's Hospital at Montefiore project, a really cool project which put our site, based on the ACS at every bed in the Children's Hospital, next to Plasma screens and wireless keyboards. We're stable, and growing, and have never had an employee leave the company since we started in 1998.
Also, we've been enhancing the ACS-Tcl steadily for the last year; it's a totally different project than what Ars Digita has for download -- more stable, faster, better features, etc. OpenACS is nice, but it's still all alpha code. And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully. They've been releasing OpenACS 4.X sites on Oracle this year.
I'm the president of ybos, and yesterday felt like I was living a case study at HBS. "You own a growing boutique firm. Your major partner/sometime competitor was just bought out by a billion dollar company. What do you do?"
The reason that one considers working with pointers unsafe is that, for example, in C, one uses the pointer to get at an actual location in memory, and do something with what is there.
Programmers frequently want to work quickly and directly with the actual bytes in RAM; for example a 10x10 integer array may be implemented in C for performance / algorithm reasons as a 1 dimensional array of 100 integers.
The problem occurs when the programmer writes their code to work through that array using pointer / address arithmetic. Perhaps the programmer is one byte off in their math, but only on the 100th integer. That is, they read the 101st number.
Maybe the 100th number is 99% of the time 0, and 1% of the time is 1 (I know, I'm mixing my bits and bytes, but, bear with me, please). The 101st number is just some random value in RAM. It might be 0, or it might be 1. It might be used by some other structure, it might not be used. YOU DON'T KNOW. However, the bug will only show up in the event that you use the number, and that the number is different than you expected. Those two don't happen so often. Ergo -> Jane programmer spends two weeks of her life tracking down a random crash triggered by a function that relies on that last value being 0 based on certain preconditions.
This isn't about computers crashing, it's about memory error bugs. I once wrote a ray tracer which got the colors terribly wrong once the light sources got too bright. After some checking, it turns out my light values weren't being capped at 8 bits. They were overwriting into the adjacent byte, and screwing up color values for pixels near them. Oops. Things like that don't _ever_ happen in Java, say.
"I can't imagine the tech demands of constant archiving of everything. I'd need to give half of my budget to EMC just to try to stay ahead."
This is partly because you don't use standards compliant systems. I have all my non-junk e-mail going back to 1994 saved, from a variety of HP, Solaris, Irix and Linux machines across maybe nine e-mails. It's all in instantly recognizable mbox format. If you are going to go with Netware, Win2k, etc. Then of course you are going to have these problems! The companies that make those systems make their profits selling new versions of software.
Maybe it would save your company money to choose a system which does not build in 2 year obsolescence into its business plan.
Well, a working _real_ economy on a large scale is very difficult to do -- I haven't seen anyone do it right yet. All of these games have economic issues, but, so does the real world. I could imagine a day when MMORPGs hire an economist to manage the money supply.
I think the point is, as the games' economy becomes sufficiently sophisticated to interest gamers, the ramifications will become increasingly sophisticated.
Interestingly, this has been a problem since MUDs in the late 80s. For example, at one point, my brother started a large casino in a MUD, he programmed all the machines in Forth, etc. etc. After a few months he had something like 40% of the money supply of the entire world. They reset the money supply, but they didn't take away the casino..
Tonight at a reception held in my and my wife's honor, a Microsoft Office Developer, who is friends with me and my wife, and was eating my food, and drinking my drink said "Microsoft will never release an Office / Linux product."
I don't need my friend to tell me this.
Office helps consolidate Microsoft's desktop market share. Mac Office is just what the slashdot types are telling you -- a way to avoid antitrust regulations. Therefore,
Releasing Office for a competing operating system will only dilute Microsoft's operating system market share. This creates no additional clients; it just cannibalizes their OS sales. (Put simply, people will stop buying Windows, and keep buying Office. These are, by and large, people who were buying Windows and Office before.)
Essentially, you can look for Office / Linux the day Democrats are back in the white house, and Microsoft is split into OS and Application companies. Until then, you will have to download Star Office with the rest of the world.
Chuck is not going to be a useful visionary
on
Chuck Moore Holds Forth
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Chuck is an unabashed Forth zealot. I guess this is fine; I'm sure Forth is great. But, I get the feeling he is so focused on the details (Commenting that programs don't need to read text to do something useful? Hello? How was this slashdot interview pulled from a database and sent to my web browser?) that I feel like reading stuff from him will only be interesting if I want to know something about Forth. This, compared to Neal Stephenson, say.
I even get the impression that Chuck would be happy that I noticed this about him. It just makes me think that there will be no revolution coming from the Forth camp. Which, I hadn't really expected, anyway. But, I'll cross it off my list of possible revolution starters, anyway.
I'm going to help a relief organization in Mozambique this autumn, and have been talking to them about how to get their internet services up and running better than they are now. They have 1200 sites, most of which are in the bush, and two cellular modems which connect to the national ISP. A major problem they have is sending mass e-mails to interested supporters; frequently their ISP drops large numbers of the e-mails, and doesn't tell them about it.
Do you all know of any high speed options / LEO satellite / commercial companies that support businesses in Africa? I've been puzzling through how to get them better services, but I'm sure the collective wisdom of the slashdot community is greater than what I can turn up on my own.
Actually,
The script said "Gigawatts," it's just that nobody knew how to pronounce Giga back then. Funny, huh. (Funny if you're a geek, I guess. At least, it's funny to me.)
Well, I am genuinely interested in the opinions. I'll post a longer followup in the morning. In the meantime, make fun all you want, Puk. I'm getting more value from slashdot than my PR firm ever gave me. At least slashdot readers don't have to protect what they do so that we don't fire them.
I browse at plus 2, so I have no idea what comments are floating around below that level, but I don't mind your kvetching at all. I found it rather funny, in fact. : ).
Although I liked Bob better than Doug, (Doug was a bit too clever at redirecting questions toward blase positive sounding answers), I am interested that Bob considers opening Microsoft Word documents as a major desktop need.
I find that, even with utilities like antiword and abiword, I cannot really keep up with the MS-Office ratrace in a way that works perfectly for our customers. I would like to be able to edit these documents, annotate them, view excel spreadsheets and powerpoint files, etc. as well as just read word files.
Even for word files, the extra hassle of downloading the attachments, piping them through antiword, and then printing feels is not insignificant, compared to clicking to open in Outlook.Outlook is still a killer app for large businesses; the productivity plus scheduling capabilities are truly excellent.
If Redhat is truly competing in a market where applications drive OS purchase, I would like to hear more from Bob on how Redhat is supporting and developing these applications. It seems to me that companies like Eazel and Ximian are where the real value drivers are for Linux, according to his argument. Or even Corel (!).
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.math.uic.edu/~burgiel/Tetris/explanatio n.html
Has a great article about this. Essentially, in a truly random Tetris game, getting a long sequence of alternating Z and S pieces will make it impossible to complete the board; they're thicker in the middle than the sides, meaning you'll build up a little tower in the middle, no matter how good you are.
The page has links to a version of Tetris with only those pieces, if you want to try your luck on it.
Before the Boomers were the Builders; they're the ones who rebuilt the country 30s-50s, meanwhile generating the Babies of the Baby Boom. Builders are characterized by absenteeism at home, prioritizing work / society over family / relational, etc.
Moon2.com. If only it were 1999, this would already be funded!!
- They know exactly how insecure RC5-64 is. They want other IT groups, industry groups and tech managers to know it. The easiest way to do that is to offer open challenges with cash prizes. It's never hard for RSA to up their bit-length to 4096, say, a year before 2048 RSA is broken, and someone collects their $200,000. It is hard to make PHBs understand that RC5-64 is not secure if nobody has broken it.
Secondly, Distributed.net clearly isn't doing it for the cash. I didn't do it for the cash, either. (Although I wouldn't have minded winning.) They're doing it because:- Breaking codes gives nerds their kicks.
- Building a distributed computing architecture is a difficult and interesting problem.
With current technology, as RSA likes to demonstrate, the winners are the cryptographers, not the cryptologists (the code breakers.) Quantum computing may change that, and make the cryptologists the winners. Until then, RSA can happily give cash prizes for increasing length keys: the numbers are on their side.Now, on a keyboard, that's no good, particularly since you can't look at the keyboard and the screen at the same time. The numbers at the Dasher site seem to indicate that it works pretty well when using your eyes, though.
At any rate, lovely book.
Hell ... is ... getting ... chilly ...
(unlike Boston today.)
Read a bit about HP in, say, Good-to-Great, or other management books, and you'll understand that Carly Fiorina, current CEO of HP is a massive departure from the companies long term values, and it's showing in things like this purchase. I predict long term loss to shareholders from this merger -- it just doesn't make sense for HP. And the long-timers at HP knew it!
I'm disappointed in the shenanigans the poster to the Interesting People list described, and frankly, Ms. Fiorina, if you ever read this, I'm disappointed in you. Please stop telling people the HP way is one that makes office politics irrelevant! You just look like a jerk.
I live down the street from MIT, and there are tons of Wintel boxes there. Your EECS labs might have used Unix/Linux, etc, but many of the graduate school's labs I've been in are almost totally Wintel, with a couple of Suns in the corner for people who still use exmh to get their mail.
Also, my 2c on this: There are a few angles. Clearly, a private institution is innocent until proven guilty under US law. So, the scare tactics the BSA is using on your University take a couple of prongs:
- For the legally not so savvy, it says "We'll sue if there's even a hint that you might not own some software! Put our software on your computers to keep us from suing."
- For the legally more savvy, it says "We can make your life sufficiently annoying that it will be cheaper to just let us put this software on your system." Then we'll go away.
To address this for both audiences at your university, you'd like to be able to prove:- Your university is not, in fact, legally liable to the BSA, and that it in general isn't responsible for what people do with their personal computers.
- It will be significantly more expensive to install the software they require, than it will be to get legal counsel to tell them to go away.
My guess is both those things are true: A nicely backed up presentation proving both those points would probably quelly our nightmares. Good luck! Post back and tell us what happened.I'm not a lawyer, but I have steered my company through a number of legal discussions since the dotcom bust, and I'd say that this will never stand up in court. In breach of contract situations, Courts do not generally award damages greater than the actual cost of those damages. This makes it likely that you'll never, ever go to court on this stuff, unless the ISP is stupid enough to try and actually sue you.
The cost of the legal fees to go to court over this compared to the negative press, and the likely size of the judgment would mean they're never going to actually go to court with a small time "provide bandwidth to my street" type of person; they'll just cut off your service.
A contract is nice, but it's just a piece of paper. The courts decide what's reasonable. People and companies decide what they're willing to pay to find out what the courts will say about what's reasonable.
Great job, you guys! I've been waiting for the web to work out good micropay oriented subscription solutions since 1996. I'll gladly pay you my $20 / year, and I hope that you become millionaires -- seriously. If you can make it work, others will learn. And that means less ads for me.
Sliced the other way, (i.e. what will make you happy?), here's my more detailed story. I got an Sc.B in Theoretical math in 1997. About 1995, (end of my sophomore year), I realized that, although I was quite smart, and at an Ivy, in the top 20 for math, essentially, I wasn't going to be able to make it in the math academia world. This was not obvious to me in high school, (and I did some reasonably heavy math in high school through the UMTYMP program in Minnesota) but was obvious after meeting a few ultra-smart classmates, and talking to some professors.
Listen to those people who are telling you that you need to be at least in the top .01% (That's .0001 of people) to really make it as a mathematical academician. You might be one of those people; if so, it will probably be really clear to you sometime in college. If not, don't worry. For myself, I realized some portion of my brain was motivated by, and interested in money.
So, I ended up starting a company. I'm much happier than I would be struggling to get a job at a liberal arts college doing a teaching position for a job that I'm only 80% good at.
That's totally true, I didn't mean for it to be FUD, but I think you're right, it was. Please accept my apology, the point of my post was not to slam the openACS crowd.
There have been a number of instances where we've tried HARD to release our code in a venue where it will have good impact. I'd point you to the scramble that originated when we suggested to aD that we host CVS and bboards for ACS 3.4 about a year ago. People like Don and Ben were dismissive until they realized there was real demand for someone to continue to maintain that codebase. They then scrambled to have openACS take control. End result -- no result. Too confusing for aD, us and openACS to get something out the door.
We have the same problems any growing company does that's self funded -- we don't have unlimited resources to throw at community interaction, support, etc. When aD wanted to provide that community support, we released all our code through their channels. That's no longer a good venue to release our code, and so we're revamping our developer section to provide just this functionality to the community. But, it takes time.
If you want a copy of our most recent ACS, just drop me a line, or info at ybos dot net, someone will send you our source tree with enhancements. At any rate, there's no reason to be rude. I wasn't rude to you.
Ironically we've done about six times more ACS work than ArsDigita has done this year, including beating them out for the Children's Hospital at Montefiore project, a really cool project which put our site, based on the ACS at every bed in the Children's Hospital, next to Plasma screens and wireless keyboards. We're stable, and growing, and have never had an employee leave the company since we started in 1998.
Also, we've been enhancing the ACS-Tcl steadily for the last year; it's a totally different project than what Ars Digita has for download -- more stable, faster, better features, etc. OpenACS is nice, but it's still all alpha code. And if you think their 4.X product works with Postgres, you haven't read very carefully. They've been releasing OpenACS 4.X sites on Oracle this year.
I'm the president of ybos, and yesterday felt like I was living a case study at HBS. "You own a growing boutique firm. Your major partner/sometime competitor was just bought out by a billion dollar company. What do you do?"
The problem occurs when the programmer writes their code to work through that array using pointer / address arithmetic. Perhaps the programmer is one byte off in their math, but only on the 100th integer. That is, they read the 101st number.
Maybe the 100th number is 99% of the time 0, and 1% of the time is 1 (I know, I'm mixing my bits and bytes, but, bear with me, please). The 101st number is just some random value in RAM. It might be 0, or it might be 1. It might be used by some other structure, it might not be used. YOU DON'T KNOW. However, the bug will only show up in the event that you use the number, and that the number is different than you expected. Those two don't happen so often. Ergo -> Jane programmer spends two weeks of her life tracking down a random crash triggered by a function that relies on that last value being 0 based on certain preconditions.
This isn't about computers crashing, it's about memory error bugs. I once wrote a ray tracer which got the colors terribly wrong once the light sources got too bright. After some checking, it turns out my light values weren't being capped at 8 bits. They were overwriting into the adjacent byte, and screwing up color values for pixels near them. Oops. Things like that don't _ever_ happen in Java, say.
"I can't imagine the tech demands of constant archiving of everything. I'd need to give half of my budget to EMC just to try to stay ahead."
This is partly because you don't use standards compliant systems. I have all my non-junk e-mail going back to 1994 saved, from a variety of HP, Solaris, Irix and Linux machines across maybe nine e-mails. It's all in instantly recognizable mbox format. If you are going to go with Netware, Win2k, etc. Then of course you are going to have these problems! The companies that make those systems make their profits selling new versions of software.
Maybe it would save your company money to choose a system which does not build in 2 year obsolescence into its business plan.
Well, a working _real_ economy on a large scale is very difficult to do -- I haven't seen anyone do it right yet. All of these games have economic issues, but, so does the real world. I could imagine a day when MMORPGs hire an economist to manage the money supply.
I think the point is, as the games' economy becomes sufficiently sophisticated to interest gamers, the ramifications will become increasingly sophisticated.
Interestingly, this has been a problem since MUDs in the late 80s. For example, at one point, my brother started a large casino in a MUD, he programmed all the machines in Forth, etc. etc. After a few months he had something like 40% of the money supply of the entire world. They reset the money supply, but they didn't take away the casino..
I don't need my friend to tell me this.
Essentially, you can look for Office / Linux the day Democrats are back in the white house, and Microsoft is split into OS and Application companies. Until then, you will have to download Star Office with the rest of the world.
I even get the impression that Chuck would be happy that I noticed this about him. It just makes me think that there will be no revolution coming from the Forth camp. Which, I hadn't really expected, anyway. But, I'll cross it off my list of possible revolution starters, anyway.
I'm going to help a relief organization in Mozambique this autumn, and have been talking to them about how to get their internet services up and running better than they are now. They have 1200 sites, most of which are in the bush, and two cellular modems which connect to the national ISP. A major problem they have is sending mass e-mails to interested supporters; frequently their ISP drops large numbers of the e-mails, and doesn't tell them about it.
Do you all know of any high speed options / LEO satellite / commercial companies that support businesses in Africa? I've been puzzling through how to get them better services, but I'm sure the collective wisdom of the slashdot community is greater than what I can turn up on my own.
Actually, The script said "Gigawatts," it's just that nobody knew how to pronounce Giga back then. Funny, huh. (Funny if you're a geek, I guess. At least, it's funny to me.)
I browse at plus 2, so I have no idea what comments are floating around below that level, but I don't mind your kvetching at all. I found it rather funny, in fact. : ).
I find that, even with utilities like antiword and abiword, I cannot really keep up with the MS-Office ratrace in a way that works perfectly for our customers. I would like to be able to edit these documents, annotate them, view excel spreadsheets and powerpoint files, etc. as well as just read word files.
Even for word files, the extra hassle of downloading the attachments, piping them through antiword, and then printing feels is not insignificant, compared to clicking to open in Outlook.Outlook is still a killer app for large businesses; the productivity plus scheduling capabilities are truly excellent.
If Redhat is truly competing in a market where applications drive OS purchase, I would like to hear more from Bob on how Redhat is supporting and developing these applications. It seems to me that companies like Eazel and Ximian are where the real value drivers are for Linux, according to his argument. Or even Corel (!).