It's getting insane in the UK too. I don't like watching films at home, and attend a cinema most weeks. My regular companion goes several times a week (our combined ages total 97: we are not the standard demographic). Between us we probably rack up ~150 attendances a year. For a variety of not very good reasons we haven't purchased an unlimited films for twelve quid a month pass, we don't have Orange phones and we don't go on Wednesdays: we we're paying rack rate.
The screens are rarely full. We've paid our way. And yet we're subjected, week in and week out, to endless tedious trails about the evils of piracy, the low quality of bootleg DVDs, the illegality of filming, etc, etc. We've paid out money: pretty much by definition, we're not your prime enemy for the copy trade. In the UK it's highly arguable if using a camcorder in a cinema is a criminal (rather than civil) offence, and the chances of going to gaol are approximately zero. So why hassle your audience, and piss them off?
And anyway, no-one pirates minority films. The main trade is in big blockbusters, which have merchandise associated. The bootleg gets children buying that just as well as the cinema.
An anecdote. I was at a folk festival, Thursday--Sunday. Most people arrived late Thursday afternoon. At a workshop on Friday, someone was able to use that `Spiderpig' thing from the Simpsons Movie as an exercise, and every child knew it. TSM opened on Thursday. Had everyone (a) as I did, attended one of the handful of cinemas that previewed it on Wednesday (b) walked in the rain into central Cambridge the previous evening or (c) seen a bootleg? Given the hideous middle-classery of the event, and the assumption the answer is (c), what does this say about the hearts and minds issue?
I teach IT is a high school in England and our IT manager recently decided to forego the £8,000 per year MS Office site license and go with open office. Now I'm certainly an advocate of open source software, but let me bring a few realities home to you:
When I was at school, there wasn't a O Level in typing. There was, however, RSA typing for dim girls. There was O Level Computer Studies, where you had to write some programs. Smart alek that I was, I did the seven in seven different languages (from memory, BASIC, JEAN, CECIL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, PLAN and Z80 assember).
Now, even high-achievers are taught to type, badly, and the use of features within a commercial product (``training'') is regarded as education. Such of it isn't typing is nonsensical anyway: Access as an exemplar of databases makes it like Codd never lived, for example.
The desperate twisting engaged in by the EU to make Galileo something other than a pathetic piece of French nationalism are fascinating. Does this provide any budget? No? It's going to get chopped, then.
Well, on the assumption that you're an American, one might say ``just like your President''.
But in that, the problem of Stalin's anger about the lack of a second front was a major political issue, and the consequences for Britain had there been no demonstration of good faith with the Russians during 1943 would have been serious. The Russian Army was, indeed, taking most of the brunt of the second world war at that point, in a town on the Volga.
If you think the iPod was successful besides anything but marketing, you are mind-f**king yourself.
[...]
Pick up a Creative Zen Vision M
[...]
I would rather they listen to engineers like myself
What you so casually dismiss as `marketing' is about positioning a product so that people other than `engineers like myself' can buy it. I've got my iPod rigged into the car so that the playlists appear as virtual CDs and the steering-wheel controls work for next track, previous track and so on. And, vitally importantly, the RDS EON TA still works to give me traffic reports, which is impossible with an FM transmitter. Better yet, when the traffic report finishes, the music or podcast picks up where it left off, because the iPod has been paused the while. That's the power of `marketing': enough people buy it that the ecosystem surrounding it is vibrant. Random product X can't do that, because the market simply isn't big enough.
Companies that listen to engineers sell to engineers, and that market just isn't big enough. Hardcore gamers, living in their mothers' basements demanding this week's exotic graphic cards? Not a market. People (or should that be `the person') who wants to play Ogg Vorbis? Who cares. The trick is producing products which most people want to buy, and then making them attractive to the remainder only is (a) it doesn't cost much and (b) it doesn't put off the mass market.
There's a vein in UK football management which would have you believe that actually winning matches isn't important, so long as various spurious proxies (possession, workrate, committment) are positive. Similarly products: it doesn't matter if it failed though bad design, bad manufacturing, bad support, bad pricing or bad hair: it failed. If the Creative Zen, whatever that might be, wasn't marketed as well as the iPod, that merely proves that Creative don't want to stay in business sufficiently much to do their jobs. Apple were completely fucked in the marketplace and had very little credibility when the (Mac-only) iPod launched, and yet they built a successful product. If it's so easy that you can sneer at it, why didn't Creative do the same?
I'm not for a second interested in doing marketing myself. But I'm not stupid enough to dismiss it as `just' marketing. There were any number of MP3 players five years ago. Only the iPod won out. That differentiation is the difference between success and being on life support (as Creative appear to be these days).
If Apple thinks people are going to 'give up' features to have the 'privilege' of using Apple products, then Apple is insane or delusional.
Indeed. It's absolutely clear that Apple are wrong to focus on the 80 side of the 80/20 rule, as we can see from the utter market failure of the iPod (``No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.'') versus the spectacular success of the Zune. And, come to that, the Nomad. Geeks want lots of features, even if they don't use them. Consumers want usability.
Anyroadup, I find Safari perfectly usable (and I've been using web browsers since Mosaic).
Then another ten to realise that touch(1) may allow changes to mtime and atime, but in doing so it sets ctime to the current time. That's not easily fixable in userland, because touch is just an interface to utime/utimes(2) and those system calls (a) don't take ctime as a parameter and (b) always set ctime. Obviously, hack around in the filesystem code and you can do what you want, or if you're brave simply have a userland program access the partition raw and wade around in the inodes. Or it might be worth trying just briefly setting the clock to your chosen value and then calling utime via touch, although frequent and random changes to the clock may leave other traces.
Microsoft isn't going to sue some open source hobbyist that doesn't really have much to sue for
But handily, the law got here first. The doctrine of laches means, amongst other things, that you can't always delay bringing an action until the target is fattened. If they claim now that Linux embodies implementations of M$ patents, they need to come up with a good reason as to why they didn't sue when they first became aware of the issue. And aware they apparently were, because the breadcrumb trail of Ballmer saying Linux is an IP risk is some years old. So, why didn't they sue then, rather than now? Now I think overall we'd all prefer that Microsoft didn't lose on something like this, because it doesn't settle the underlying issue. But a TKO still gets you the belt, and as patents only have 17 years of force the issue will go away of its own accord.
The other, simple problem is that if Microsoft sue a Linux company for patent infringement, IBM will look in its gander bag and see what it's got. And it's got a lot: one of the often-forgotten byways of the IBM/SCO action was IBM finding a bunch of patents to litigate against suggestions by SCO that they held patents over aspects of Linux. The issue died in SCO's mouth, because for every patent you've got, IBM have ten.
And also, remember, most software patents only have force in the USA. If the USA wants to rend its economy for a few years with the major technology companies slugging it out in court, please, we Europeans are only too glad to watch.
I think it was RMS --- all hail! --- who pointed out that anyone who uses the phrase ``intellectual property'' almost certainly has no idea what they are talking about. And the concept of the patent appears to pass a lot of people by. It's possible (I don't know) that MS copyrighted the design of the Windows Start Button. But your chances of fighting a copyright action over the word `start' are approximately zero.
It's possible that they had a trademark on `Start', except they're not using it as a trademark, nor marking it as such, nor defending actions (Trademarks are really `defend NOW or lose' items).
It's even vaguely possible that they patented the idea of having one button which accesses the primary menus of a system. But they'll lose on obviousness, prior art (the Mac Apple-logo button) and laches (the offences, if offences there were, have been happening since forever, and you can't delay an action until the transgressor has made enough money to make them worth suing).
But those are very different claims, with very different routes to court or settlement. And all of them would ultimately fail. Remember, the EU has not accepted software patents, nor is likely to; Blair is no longer around to suck up to Gates, and the other major EU players aren't as obviously in the thrall of American riches. Sarkozy will veto anything that weakens French companies in the face of US competition, for example, especially in his first few years, and Merkel isn't any more favourable.
This isn't some high school ``he copied my homework'' thing: Microsoft would have to prove very carefully the nature, chronology, intent and effect of the purported copying. And all the evidence is that Ballmer and Gates aren't much smarter than ``he copied my homework''. Meawwhile IBM's Nazgul are quiet, careful, implacable, playing for the highest stakes and --- to mix a metaphor --- they will not stop. Ever. IBM cannot allow Microsoft to gain an inch on this, and they have a patent portfolio to make Microsoft's utterly irrelevant.
Patent portfolios are like nuclear weapons (I spent the weekend in Hiroshima, so the metaphor is live for me). When no-one uses them, they ensure a tense peace. But the first to use them offensively loses as badly as their target.
What did people use 20 years ago? UNIX workstations with colorful graphical user interfaces.
If I were Sun, I'd be fixing up a 3/160 running SunOS 3.0, both with SunTools and with X10 (yes, kids, what came before X11). I'd also be on EBay trying to buy a couple of Apollo machines running Domain/OS, an Ultrix DecStation II, a Symbolics (or LMI) LispM, a Texas Explorer or whatever that LispM addin for a Mac was called, a Whitechapel, a Perq, as many Xerox Daybreaks and Dorados as I could lay my hands on, maybe an IBM 6150 and so on. A CompSci department circa 1987 showing all the fruits of its research grants, in fact. I'd also be on the phone to Honeywell to see if they'd be interested in taking a few million for the MR11.0 Multics source code. Sun don't need the rights over it, just permission to read it.
The usual thing that daemons need to be root for is to allocate a port
And remember, daemons dropping privileges once started is relatively new. Up until five or ten years ago they all ran as root.
I'd take some convincing that IPv6 isn't precisely like GOSIP and X.400, even down to the purported enthusiasts being the US DoD and Asia. Were X.400 products usable? Yes, given some resources and effort --- I ran a production X.400(88) mailer --- but interworking was poorly tested. Although X.400 have some potential benefits that UUCP and SMTP didn't, in practice they were never deployed and the Internet community reacted quickly (MIME removed the benefits of structured bodyparts, and IMAP beat P7+ Message Stores). The rate of adoption of non-X.400 solutions was faster than the rate of adoption of the technology supposed to supplant it. And although DoD procurement had a bee in their bonnet, on the ground, the services wanted products that worked and they wanted them now.
All of this goes for IPv6. Yes, I'm sure that there's an Exchange implementation that runs on IPv6, with all the latest bits. Do you want to test it? What would the benefits be to your enterprise? Yes, I'm sure you could replace your current IPv4 backbone with one running IPv6? What benefits would it deliver to your enterprise? Yes, I'm sure there's a world of end users running IPv6 somewhere: but there's a world of people speaking Esperanto, too, just a very small one.
X.400 failed mostly because it required extra effort to deliver negative benefits: you can't talk to as many people as you can with SMTP. In what way is IPv6 different?
SO it's been more than 11 years since RFC1883, and there's been no non-toy deployment. Had IPv6 just been IPv4 with longer addresses, it might have been deployed, but they decided to add a load of extra features to complicate proceedings (the worst offender being mandating IpSec, which for practical purposes no-one uses for anything other than a minority of VPN clients). Normally a technology that has no major deployment after a decade is assumed to be dead: X.400 springs to mind, in many ways.
``Running out of IP numbers'' is like ``running out of oil'': it'll happen, but crying wolf didn't help the cause. It's claimed IPv6 is Big In Japan but, like popular beat combos, that means ``dead elsewhere''. And I"m sit in a hotel room in Tokyo happily IPv6-free, and i've just come from a building owned by one of the largest IT companies in Japan which was entirely IPv4.
IPv6 has been ``next year'' for the last ten years. It's still no-where. What'sdriving it now that wasn't driving it five years ago?
`` I bet you anything that someone in IT asked for money for the RAID''
Perhaps, although my experience is that IT people are incredibly bad at framing business cases in terms more compelling than my daughter's request for a mobile phone for her birthday: a few vague reasons, followed by a sulk when asked for specifics.
I keep 20TB on RAID5, and replicate it daily to a RAID5 array that has no components or software above the spindle level in common (Solaris/EMC and Pillar Data). The data we really care about is on RAID 0+1, in some cases with three-way mirroring. We take it out to tape, in case the filesystem pukes over all the copies or the RAID controller decides to go bonkers. We're about to put ten miles between the two file servers. At no point have I had much pushback from management over the money, once the risks and rewards are explained. Too often, IT people convince themselves that some Dilbert-esque stereotype of a manager is going to say no, and therefore make their case in a passive-agressive style that will make anyone say no.
Surely, the bot net operators have already gotten around that on cable networks and those companies that do this. All they have to do is make the bot mail through the company smtp.
It means you have logs, however. And company mail servers can be run in a far more ``shoot first, ask questions afterwards'' mode because there are far fewer reasons for `abnormal' traffic: for example, a user sending high volumes of messages has fewer legitimate reasns.
I run the whole internal network on RFC1918, with access in an out via proxy servers. The handful, and it is a handful, of machines that need untrammeled access to the Internet get put on a distinct VLAN with extensive IDS. This isn't fool-proof: one could imagine a bot that uses CONNECT to the http proxy to build a control channel and then spams out through the main mail servers. But once spotted, I'd have extensive logs to see what had happened. If it became prevalent, I'd run spam assassin outbound as well as inbound.
Will they? I don't recall the full complexities of 32-bit applications on 64-bit kernels on NT, but I'm assuming the main motivation would be to have over 4GB of RAM. And I have to ask: for the mainstream Office/IE user, would they be able to see any benefit in moving from 2GB to 4GB, nevermind beyond? They can have not just their entire working set, but every byte of data they access over the course of a day in RAM, and they can do that in 2GB. There are niche users who can use this sort of workstation bang, but for the vast majority of users, they just don't need it.
Actually, Cadbury `Dairy Milk' has problems with EU definitions because of its high level of vegetable fat, so I suspect the same's true of the USA. As someone born, bred and now;living again on the Bournville Village Trust, I should be careful, but Cadbury's chocolate --- although very nice --- doesn't meet the purists' criteria. Of course, it's an interesting question as to what you do if people actually prefer the ``inferior'' product: a similar argument exists over wine, when the French claim the wildly popular and successful wines of other countries are somehow not as good, even though people like them more. If you think that vegetable fat in milk chocoate, or tend to be sexually stimulated by the number 85%, then British chocolate isn't your kiddy. Mind you, I _am_ a chocolate snob, and I think US milk chocolate is largely too sweet and too brittle, needing some of the sugar replacing with vegetable fat! That `mouth feel' that Dairy Milk has that, say, Lindt milk chocolate doesn't is the fat.
Depends on how many staff you have. Every ten-fold increase in staff means you need an extra digit on the combination just to stand still. BT currently use a system that has a swipe-card and a PIN for each employee, and the lock is programmed with the swipe-cards that it will accept: that has the benefit that the safety of the PIN doesn't decline with staff-count.
Fear that the other side would use it kept Window (now called chaff: ribbons of foil tuned roughly to the wavelength of the opponents' radar system) from use by the RAF for close to a year during the second world war. Sometimes, the balance is such that the benefit to the other side would outweigh the benefit to your own side.
The huge advantage that Apple's model has is building the metadata database on the source computer. In the Apple model, the on-device menu of music is built on a fast computer with oodles of RAM and a fast disk, from a database containing all the information. For iTunes users, when you import a track into iTunes, the metadata goes into iTunes as well. When you sync the music onto the iPod, the last move it to construct the byte-image of iTuneDB and copy that to the device. That contains all the metadata, so when the time comes to display menus and titles it's all in one place. If, like me, you have home-brew software based on gnuPOD, you can for entertainment create tracks which have one set of metadata in iTuneDB and another in the ID3 tags: the ID3 tags are completely ignored. My homebrew solution uses a MySQL database for the same purpose.
In the ``drag and drop'' model, the device has to build that database itself, presumably by reading the ID3 tags. That's a nightmare. To build it incrementally is incredibly hard. To build it from scratch every time involves reading the tags out of potentially tens of thousands of files, grinding it into a database of some sort and writing it to disk. On a ~100MHz low-power CPU with a small amount of RAM, out of either flash or a slow microdisk. That'll take forever. And the moment you say ``ah, but there's this application you can run on the host computer'' then you're back essentially with the iTunes model. And that's before we consider the living hell that is parsing ID3 tags consistently, writing to FAT32 filesystems safely and all the rest of the tasks an iPod doesn't have to do.
Oracle Collaboration Server for calendering, plus Cyrus IMAP for mail. Provides a full service to Outlook users, other IMAP client users (with either a web client or a native OSX/Linux/Solaris/Windows client for the calendaring). Pretty cheap, certainly as compared to Exchange. We like it.
Constructing a poll on a topic as politicised as this is incredibly hard. As another/.er points out, it's a proxy for `are you a godless liberal or a True American', and unless the poll is taken in secret any area in which morons with a belief in creationism are prevalent will over report a belief in creationism. Once the opinion is taken in secret, the game changes, as those anti-abortion politicians in whichever state it was with the proposed law found out: people may support you when their neighbours can hear, but not when they're in private. Moreover, knowledge of how accepted an idea is in scientific discourse is hard to judge for anyone who doesn't follow the topic reasonably closely: as I suspect the vast majority of the world goes about their daily business without worrying about the current status of punctuated equilibrium versus gradualism, why would they care?
Anyway, enough of this. I want someone to help me evolve the long, thin, incredibly strong fingers I'm going to need to open up ther case of the Mac Mini to my right and slot in the replacement disk drive.
New Doctor Who was great tonight, by the way. Rose was great, but you're all going to love Martha Jones. Except for the creationists, of course, who are going to hate The Doctor kissing (whisper it) a black woman.
Slashdot Mirror
It's getting insane in the UK too. I don't like watching films at home, and attend a cinema most weeks. My regular companion goes several times a week (our combined ages total 97: we are not the standard demographic). Between us we probably rack up ~150 attendances a year. For a variety of not very good reasons we haven't purchased an unlimited films for twelve quid a month pass, we don't have Orange phones and we don't go on Wednesdays: we we're paying rack rate.
The screens are rarely full. We've paid our way. And yet we're subjected, week in and week out, to endless tedious trails about the evils of piracy, the low quality of bootleg DVDs, the illegality of filming, etc, etc. We've paid out money: pretty much by definition, we're not your prime enemy for the copy trade. In the UK it's highly arguable if using a camcorder in a cinema is a criminal (rather than civil) offence, and the chances of going to gaol are approximately zero. So why hassle your audience, and piss them off?
And anyway, no-one pirates minority films. The main trade is in big blockbusters, which have merchandise associated. The bootleg gets children buying that just as well as the cinema.
An anecdote. I was at a folk festival, Thursday--Sunday. Most people arrived late Thursday afternoon. At a workshop on Friday, someone was able to use that `Spiderpig' thing from the Simpsons Movie as an exercise, and every child knew it. TSM opened on Thursday. Had everyone (a) as I did, attended one of the handful of cinemas that previewed it on Wednesday (b) walked in the rain into central Cambridge the previous evening or (c) seen a bootleg? Given the hideous middle-classery of the event, and the assumption the answer is (c), what does this say about the hearts and minds issue?
Now, even high-achievers are taught to type, badly, and the use of features within a commercial product (``training'') is regarded as education. Such of it isn't typing is nonsensical anyway: Access as an exemplar of databases makes it like Codd never lived, for example.
The desperate twisting engaged in by the EU to make Galileo something other than a pathetic piece of French nationalism are fascinating. Does this provide any budget? No? It's going to get chopped, then.
Well, on the assumption that you're an American, one might say ``just like your President''. But in that, the problem of Stalin's anger about the lack of a second front was a major political issue, and the consequences for Britain had there been no demonstration of good faith with the Russians during 1943 would have been serious. The Russian Army was, indeed, taking most of the brunt of the second world war at that point, in a town on the Volga.
ian
Companies that listen to engineers sell to engineers, and that market just isn't big enough. Hardcore gamers, living in their mothers' basements demanding this week's exotic graphic cards? Not a market. People (or should that be `the person') who wants to play Ogg Vorbis? Who cares. The trick is producing products which most people want to buy, and then making them attractive to the remainder only is (a) it doesn't cost much and (b) it doesn't put off the mass market.
There's a vein in UK football management which would have you believe that actually winning matches isn't important, so long as various spurious proxies (possession, workrate, committment) are positive. Similarly products: it doesn't matter if it failed though bad design, bad manufacturing, bad support, bad pricing or bad hair: it failed. If the Creative Zen, whatever that might be, wasn't marketed as well as the iPod, that merely proves that Creative don't want to stay in business sufficiently much to do their jobs. Apple were completely fucked in the marketplace and had very little credibility when the (Mac-only) iPod launched, and yet they built a successful product. If it's so easy that you can sneer at it, why didn't Creative do the same?
I'm not for a second interested in doing marketing myself. But I'm not stupid enough to dismiss it as `just' marketing. There were any number of MP3 players five years ago. Only the iPod won out. That differentiation is the difference between success and being on life support (as Creative appear to be these days).
Anyone seen Rio around lately?
Anyroadup, I find Safari perfectly usable (and I've been using web browsers since Mosaic).
ian
The other, simple problem is that if Microsoft sue a Linux company for patent infringement, IBM will look in its gander bag and see what it's got. And it's got a lot: one of the often-forgotten byways of the IBM/SCO action was IBM finding a bunch of patents to litigate against suggestions by SCO that they held patents over aspects of Linux. The issue died in SCO's mouth, because for every patent you've got, IBM have ten.
And also, remember, most software patents only have force in the USA. If the USA wants to rend its economy for a few years with the major technology companies slugging it out in court, please, we Europeans are only too glad to watch.
ian
ian
It's possible that they had a trademark on `Start', except they're not using it as a trademark, nor marking it as such, nor defending actions (Trademarks are really `defend NOW or lose' items).
It's even vaguely possible that they patented the idea of having one button which accesses the primary menus of a system. But they'll lose on obviousness, prior art (the Mac Apple-logo button) and laches (the offences, if offences there were, have been happening since forever, and you can't delay an action until the transgressor has made enough money to make them worth suing).
But those are very different claims, with very different routes to court or settlement. And all of them would ultimately fail. Remember, the EU has not accepted software patents, nor is likely to; Blair is no longer around to suck up to Gates, and the other major EU players aren't as obviously in the thrall of American riches. Sarkozy will veto anything that weakens French companies in the face of US competition, for example, especially in his first few years, and Merkel isn't any more favourable.
This isn't some high school ``he copied my homework'' thing: Microsoft would have to prove very carefully the nature, chronology, intent and effect of the purported copying. And all the evidence is that Ballmer and Gates aren't much smarter than ``he copied my homework''. Meawwhile IBM's Nazgul are quiet, careful, implacable, playing for the highest stakes and --- to mix a metaphor --- they will not stop. Ever. IBM cannot allow Microsoft to gain an inch on this, and they have a patent portfolio to make Microsoft's utterly irrelevant.
Patent portfolios are like nuclear weapons (I spent the weekend in Hiroshima, so the metaphor is live for me). When no-one uses them, they ensure a tense peace. But the first to use them offensively loses as badly as their target.
ian
ian
ian
All of this goes for IPv6. Yes, I'm sure that there's an Exchange implementation that runs on IPv6, with all the latest bits. Do you want to test it? What would the benefits be to your enterprise? Yes, I'm sure you could replace your current IPv4 backbone with one running IPv6? What benefits would it deliver to your enterprise? Yes, I'm sure there's a world of end users running IPv6 somewhere: but there's a world of people speaking Esperanto, too, just a very small one.
X.400 failed mostly because it required extra effort to deliver negative benefits: you can't talk to as many people as you can with SMTP. In what way is IPv6 different?
ian
``Running out of IP numbers'' is like ``running out of oil'': it'll happen, but crying wolf didn't help the cause. It's claimed IPv6 is Big In Japan but, like popular beat combos, that means ``dead elsewhere''. And I"m sit in a hotel room in Tokyo happily IPv6-free, and i've just come from a building owned by one of the largest IT companies in Japan which was entirely IPv4.
IPv6 has been ``next year'' for the last ten years. It's still no-where. What'sdriving it now that wasn't driving it five years ago?
ian
Perhaps, although my experience is that IT people are incredibly bad at framing business cases in terms more compelling than my daughter's request for a mobile phone for her birthday: a few vague reasons, followed by a sulk when asked for specifics.
I keep 20TB on RAID5, and replicate it daily to a RAID5 array that has no components or software above the spindle level in common (Solaris/EMC and Pillar Data). The data we really care about is on RAID 0+1, in some cases with three-way mirroring. We take it out to tape, in case the filesystem pukes over all the copies or the RAID controller decides to go bonkers. We're about to put ten miles between the two file servers. At no point have I had much pushback from management over the money, once the risks and rewards are explained. Too often, IT people convince themselves that some Dilbert-esque stereotype of a manager is going to say no, and therefore make their case in a passive-agressive style that will make anyone say no.
ian
I run the whole internal network on RFC1918, with access in an out via proxy servers. The handful, and it is a handful, of machines that need untrammeled access to the Internet get put on a distinct VLAN with extensive IDS. This isn't fool-proof: one could imagine a bot that uses CONNECT to the http proxy to build a control channel and then spams out through the main mail servers. But once spotted, I'd have extensive logs to see what had happened. If it became prevalent, I'd run spam assassin outbound as well as inbound.
ian
Actually, Cadbury `Dairy Milk' has problems with EU definitions because of its high level of vegetable fat, so I suspect the same's true of the USA. As someone born, bred and now ;living again on the Bournville Village Trust, I should be careful, but Cadbury's chocolate --- although very nice --- doesn't meet the purists' criteria. Of course, it's an interesting question as to what you do if people actually prefer the ``inferior'' product: a similar argument exists over wine, when the French claim the wildly popular and successful wines of other countries are somehow not as good, even though people like them more. If you think that vegetable fat in milk chocoate, or tend to be sexually stimulated by the number 85%, then British chocolate isn't your kiddy. Mind you, I _am_ a chocolate snob, and I think US milk chocolate is largely too sweet and too brittle, needing some of the sugar replacing with vegetable fat! That `mouth feel' that Dairy Milk has that, say, Lindt milk chocolate doesn't is the fat.
Depends on how many staff you have. Every ten-fold increase in staff means you need an extra digit on the combination just to stand still. BT currently use a system that has a swipe-card and a PIN for each employee, and the lock is programmed with the swipe-cards that it will accept: that has the benefit that the safety of the PIN doesn't decline with staff-count.
Fear that the other side would use it kept Window (now called chaff: ribbons of foil tuned roughly to the wavelength of the opponents' radar system) from use by the RAF for close to a year during the second world war. Sometimes, the balance is such that the benefit to the other side would outweigh the benefit to your own side.
In the ``drag and drop'' model, the device has to build that database itself, presumably by reading the ID3 tags. That's a nightmare. To build it incrementally is incredibly hard. To build it from scratch every time involves reading the tags out of potentially tens of thousands of files, grinding it into a database of some sort and writing it to disk. On a ~100MHz low-power CPU with a small amount of RAM, out of either flash or a slow microdisk. That'll take forever. And the moment you say ``ah, but there's this application you can run on the host computer'' then you're back essentially with the iTunes model. And that's before we consider the living hell that is parsing ID3 tags consistently, writing to FAT32 filesystems safely and all the rest of the tasks an iPod doesn't have to do.
ian
Oracle Collaboration Server for calendering, plus Cyrus IMAP for mail. Provides a full service to Outlook users, other IMAP client users (with either a web client or a native OSX/Linux/Solaris/Windows client for the calendaring). Pretty cheap, certainly as compared to Exchange. We like it.
Anyway, enough of this. I want someone to help me evolve the long, thin, incredibly strong fingers I'm going to need to open up ther case of the Mac Mini to my right and slot in the replacement disk drive.
New Doctor Who was great tonight, by the way. Rose was great, but you're all going to love Martha Jones. Except for the creationists, of course, who are going to hate The Doctor kissing (whisper it) a black woman.