Yeah, but does it have a better cultural scene than San Francisco?;-)
(Probably does for rock music...)
Anyway, the point is that people who value culture highly tend to live in San Francisco if they can, even if they work in Silicon Valley. (There are plenty of tech jobs in SF proper though, but generally more Internet stuff and less backbone stuff.)
And some people do exactly the opposite, because they prefer the sedate suburban lifestyle but want one of the great jobs in SF. The high-tech scene out here is really not about some monolithic suckling VC cabal attached to Stanford, it very much includes the East Bay (particularly Berkeley), SF proper (a center of Web and media innovation), South SF (world capital of biotech), and Silicon Valley, and then on down to San Jose (Adobe, etc) which isn't really part of Silicon Valley either.
I agree with most of your points though, but I'd add a caveat to #2: the Valley attracts a certain kind of smart person; San Francisco attracts a different kind, generally speaking. Fortunately, they're close enough together that there's a lot of cross-germination of ideas and sometimes of people, and of course one can commute (I've done it).
It's not a coincidence that things that veer more toward visual/cultural creativity are more SF-centered. For better or worse, it's the only really urban place in the greater Bay Area. If I were Yahoogle, I'd have a big fat content-related center South of Market.......oh wait, no need. Yahoo buys its content (companies) from SF, and Google doesn't care about that stuff (yet).
Another random thought: those of us who choose SF obviously don't care that much about the weather, but someone from SoCal might not be so thrilled about Silicon Valley's weather. I wore sweaters, and often a raincoat, all through the fall there.
Slovenia is a member of the EU, so whatever EU law says about these P2P issues is probably relevant as well.
Any of our Euro-dotters care to comment?
I have a feeling this is not a fully-harmonized area, EU-law-wise, since the good folks at the Pirate Bay continue to entertain us with their responses to legal threats.
That's a great point, but isn't limited to digital cameras per se. You can do the same thing with film (and that's been the subject of a few movies).
The digital angle mostly means it's much more convenient, and with Photoshop very convenient indeed. Plus the whole memory card angle, though in the kind of scenario under discussion here a film canister wouldn't be too hard to smuggle out of a sensitive location.
I was recently walking by a ground-floor open-plan office - architects, I think - and the guy closest to the window had his back to the window. Presumably to avoid distractions. Which of course meant his ginormous LCD monitors were facing the window...
I never install without tsearch2. It's amazing. Super flexible, super smart, and fast fast FAST.
I normally attach it to template1 and tune it to my environment, then just basically forget about it.
However, I must say it's one of PG's big failures of marketing that it hasn't been included in default installations. I know the PG folks are perfectionists, and I love them for it, but in winning users over you would do well to keep websites in mind, almost all of which need an FTI.
Anyway, if you don't know tsearch2, check it out. Great stuff.
For an example of what it might look like, check out any reasonably complex PDF in HTML format on Google.
You do actually have (usually) all you need there, information-wise, but it's not a lot of fun to look at and you can't do any fancy PDF things with it. But you do get it in an "open" format (HTML in this case, leaving aside whether G's converter is open or not), which has a lot of advantages.
That's more or less what I expect. Not that MS actually locks you in so tight you might lose your data, just tight enough that it will be loads more pleasant to work with their docs in *their* program than in anyone else's.
I think the obvious outcome of this and similar efforts will be that Microsoft puts all the actual content of Office documents in some sort of open format, and "extends" that format to support all the goodies such as fancy formatting, macros, Excel formulas, and so on. The extensions will be proprietary and for the most part not accessible to open-source programs, but the base content will be easy to get at.
Since Word is following Pages in its future approach to document formatting, a lot of those extras will be used by people who aren't necessarily trying to do anything fancy.
The end result will be that MS satisfies open format requirements, since you can get at the goods, but anybody who wants to work with the documents in real life will need Office. In other words, what we have today, with more documentation and more bureaucracy.
Keeping that stream of blog posts coming is a lot harder than most people think before they actually try it.
In that, blogging is no different than any other kind of content creation. Especially non-profit content creation.
What makes the difficulty surprising, I think, is how many people don't seem to have it. You look around in blogville and see all these people posting at least once a day, and a lot of them have large readerships. But if you look closely you find that a lot of these folks are doing one or more of:
Obsessively blogging about the (boring) details of their lives.
Compensating for a lack of other other social or creative outlets.
Expressing a natural graphomania (lawyer blogs anyone?).
Actually making money (or even a living) with their blogs.
If none of those apply to you, that leaves the not-so-simple task of regularly trying to write something interesting and suitable for at least amateur publication. Anyone who ever made a zine or a comic will tell you it's a very hard habit to get into. But with blogging, you have the hyper-productive blogs in front of you, and the blog companies telling you how easy it is, and you dive in expecting it to be cake.
And then there's the whole templates-and-hacking issue, at least if you don't want the blog to be ugly. Yep, lotsa work.
What if Oracle sees PostgreSQL as a potential threat and does not see MySQL as a potential threat?
Postgres is competitive with Oracle on features, integrity and performance for a whole lot of applications. It could, if marketed better, take a serious bite out of Oracle's mid-range business. (The really big things will always go to the big DB players for a variety of reasons.)
So far, MySQL, while extremely popular, isn't anything you would want to compare to ORA on much of anything besides price. That could change, but it won't necessarily, and Postgres will likely continue to be way ahead for serious applications.
OK, so here's my paranoid thought: what if Larry bought Inno specifically to keep MySQL going but limited? What if the plan in '06 is to renew the license but not give them any new InnoDB tricks?
The more people use MySQL, the more Oracle can list the deficiencies and say, "This is why you need a Professional RDBMS and not an OSS toy."
People who are not at all receptive to that argument are not likely to be Oracle customers any time soon anyway.
Very tinfoil-hat, but it does seem to me that Oracle is well served by having MySQL corner the bottom end of the market.
Too late for moderation, but in case you check your replies...
I figured out two very easy immediate technical solutions to blogspam. They aren't permanent solutions - if lots of people use them, the spammers can very quickly adapt. But as long as most folks (and software systems) are asleep at the wheel and either manually delete the spam or just turn off comments/trackbacks, these methods should work. (Working fine so far, but I've done the anti-spam thing enough to not count my chickens...)
For comment spam the deal is this: require javascript to get to your comments posting cgi, and *then* change the name of that cgi. (Since the current script name is likely in a spam database already.) You can check any entry's permalink on my blog (in my sig) and view source, it should be clear how this bit works. And yes, I have a fallback option for people without Javascript.
For trackback the deal is to deny pings with URLs in the excerpt body. Granted, that potentially denies a few legitimate pings, but I'm guessing it's a tiny, tiny minority, and it rejects with an appropriate error message so those people, if they care to check, will know what happened.
I realize the trackback fix is especially limited, and doesn't give you any fallback option, but I was getting hammered and just needed a quick fix. If I got lots of legit trackbacks instead of just spam, I might have at least had those log differently... or maybe not.
Anyway, these two things are working just fine for me, and they were trivial to set up.
I don't think it'll be that nail, but I do think the news will be pod/vodcasted (yes, with commercials).
The argument goes something like this: You've already broadcast the news show, and its value to you at that point is mostly as archival material. Immediately *after* the broadcast, you put it online for free distribution. This gets it in front of more eyes, expanding your audience and (maybe) helping your advertisers.
The main downside I see is that you lose a bit of control - you can't effectively squash something you've already broadcast if a whole bunch of people have it on their iPods. But this is a pretty moot point by now, what with TiVo and all that.
I think the use case is straightforward: instead of watching your favorite news show in front of the tube, you want it during what would otherwise be downtime, eg on your commute (if you're not driving). It's just extremely convenient timeshifting, and I can see it being very popular (and free-as-in-beer) for all kinds of programming that you wouldn't imagine being sold on DVD or re-run. For example, all the political commentary shows.
For the rest, there's the iTunes store or equivalent.
I actually do hope this takes off, mostly because I'd like to see independent video producers able to reach large audiences the way bloggers have done with text. And thus far, with no viPod, that hasn't happened. The production tools have been democratized, so has the distribution channel, but the consumption mode has largely been missing.
I agree that it looks spiffy, but I'd name another missing feature: PostgreSQL compatibility.
Leaving aside all ranting about PG's superiority, most folks should be able to agree that if you already have a working database server installed it's not desirable to install another just to support one product.
The PHP+MySQL mix actually seems like a good idea for starters - most shared-hosting packages will have this out of the box. But when you consider how simple the SQL is for something like a webmail client, it should be easy enough to also support PG.
It would also be nice, for me anyway, if it worked with POP and didn't require IMAP, though I do realize that raises a lot of issues and, again, is probably not relevant to people with standard out-of-the-box hosting configs.
(Yes, I know - it's open source, I can add this stuff myself. Maybe I will, maybe someone else will...)
Assuming this actually works (and actually exists), it looks suspiciously like... a Bluetooth Adapter! And it looks a lot like you're just using the phone as a headphone/mic combo, and the central contact list just means you have to use your PC, not your phone, to dial.
If your computer has built-in Bluetooth, is there any software out there to get Skype talking to your handset? Isn't that something Skype is likely to offer?
I don't know much about Anime culture per se, but I think this is a pretty enlightened move.
With promotional freebies, distributing via BitTorrent gets you free publicity and lowers your distribution costs to practically nothing. Furthermore, doing it through your own trackers is likely to give you realistic download statistics, which are very valuable in themselves. (And why go to, say, Pirate Bay if the publisher itself is seeding?)
For commercial products you'd rather sell, there's also something to be said for BitTorrent distribution. If you know that a significant portion of your customers are going to trade the files on P2P anyway, and you realize there's *nothing* you can do to stop it, why not get some love by seeding the things yourself?
Of course that doesn't get you to the magic "3. Profit!" all by itself, but at least you get something back from a process that's inevitable anyway.
That leaves the question of how to turn that good will into a buck (or Yen), which I admit is not easy. But as it stands Hollywood isn't even interested in trying, so it's nice to see someone inching down a new path.
"Folksonomy" apparently refers to keyword-based organization and tagging and such.
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
I'm assuming you have the right to republish the Word documents. I'm also assuming you have no control over how many Word-specific formatting features are used by the authors.
What I would do in your shoes is set up a (mostly) automated system to convert the Word files to PDF. You can buy Acrobat or you can go with a third-party, printer-driver-style converter, but in the end you'll probably save more headaches just using Acrobat.
Once you have a document in PDF, you can use any of the numerous (free and commercial) tools to convert that to HTML, text, whatever - all much more reliably than from Word directly. It's not perfect, but it's probably the closest you'll get.
Plus, you can post the PDFs themselves for download in case someone wants them - and at least Google will still happily index your PDFs.
Yes, you'll probably have to live with some NT variant to get that part done (though it might work with OSX) - but it's most likely your fastest path to *quality* conversions.
What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think.
You have a point, but the above quote says a lot too. Even for someone who presumably has some interest in history and international politics (you are playing Civilization), these conflicts are just vague blips on your radar.
The Chechens in Chechnya don't have it easy, and the kind of sick extremist terrorism that gave us the school bombing in Russia is the only thing you (sort of) remember.
This is unfortunately a pretty typical attitude when the conflict is far away. Is it any wonder everyone wants The Bomb?
By the way, until Prague is relocated far to the east, you can get an overview at WikiPedia.
I once worked at a place that strongly encouraged healthy lifestyles among its employees, and of course didn't allow smoking in any of the buildings.
But they weren't tyrannical about it, and knew that we're all adults here and some people may smoke, or be really fat, or whatever else, and to get the benefits of real diversity you have to accept that too.
The "smoking sections" (concrete ashtrays) were just respectfully far enough away from the building exits that nobody would accidentally walk out of the airconditioning and into a cloud of exhaled smoke.
It worked fine for everyone. The smokers could have their smoke breaks without feeling persecuted or spending forever to get into a "safe zone," and the nonsmokers wouldn't be bothered.
It was considered good form to only smoke by the *back* entrances during business hours, in case any militant anti-smoking customers happened to show up. (Health care company, blabla.)
I don't think it's hard to find balance in these situations without inconveniencing the smokers so much that a 5-10min break turns into 30. But then, there is a certain amount of zealotry to factor in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but does it have a better cultural scene than San Francisco? ;-)
(Probably does for rock music...)
Anyway, the point is that people who value culture highly tend to live in San Francisco if they can, even if they work in Silicon Valley. (There are plenty of tech jobs in SF proper though, but generally more Internet stuff and less backbone stuff.)
And some people do exactly the opposite, because they prefer the sedate suburban lifestyle but want one of the great jobs in SF. The high-tech scene out here is really not about some monolithic suckling VC cabal attached to Stanford, it very much includes the East Bay (particularly Berkeley), SF proper (a center of Web and media innovation), South SF (world capital of biotech), and Silicon Valley, and then on down to San Jose (Adobe, etc) which isn't really part of Silicon Valley either.
Berkeley is hardly part of Silicon Valley.
...oh wait, no need. Yahoo buys its content (companies) from SF, and Google doesn't care about that stuff (yet).
I agree with most of your points though, but I'd add a caveat to #2: the Valley attracts a certain kind of smart person; San Francisco attracts a different kind, generally speaking. Fortunately, they're close enough together that there's a lot of cross-germination of ideas and sometimes of people, and of course one can commute (I've done it).
It's not a coincidence that things that veer more toward visual/cultural creativity are more SF-centered. For better or worse, it's the only really urban place in the greater Bay Area. If I were Yahoogle, I'd have a big fat content-related center South of Market....
Another random thought: those of us who choose SF obviously don't care that much about the weather, but someone from SoCal might not be so thrilled about Silicon Valley's weather. I wore sweaters, and often a raincoat, all through the fall there.
Slovenia is a member of the EU, so whatever EU law says about these P2P issues is probably relevant as well.
Any of our Euro-dotters care to comment?
I have a feeling this is not a fully-harmonized area, EU-law-wise, since the good folks at the Pirate Bay continue to entertain us with their responses to legal threats.
Oh hell, anybody here speak Slovenian?
That's a great point, but isn't limited to digital cameras per se. You can do the same thing with film (and that's been the subject of a few movies).
The digital angle mostly means it's much more convenient, and with Photoshop very convenient indeed. Plus the whole memory card angle, though in the kind of scenario under discussion here a film canister wouldn't be too hard to smuggle out of a sensitive location.
I was recently walking by a ground-floor open-plan office - architects, I think - and the guy closest to the window had his back to the window. Presumably to avoid distractions. Which of course meant his ginormous LCD monitors were facing the window...
I never install without tsearch2. It's amazing. Super flexible, super smart, and fast fast FAST.
I normally attach it to template1 and tune it to my environment, then just basically forget about it.
However, I must say it's one of PG's big failures of marketing that it hasn't been included in default installations. I know the PG folks are perfectionists, and I love them for it, but in winning users over you would do well to keep websites in mind, almost all of which need an FTI.
Anyway, if you don't know tsearch2, check it out. Great stuff.
Web Two Point Oh
Get your AJAX-enabled startup right there!
For an example of what it might look like, check out any reasonably complex PDF in HTML format on Google.
You do actually have (usually) all you need there, information-wise, but it's not a lot of fun to look at and you can't do any fancy PDF things with it. But you do get it in an "open" format (HTML in this case, leaving aside whether G's converter is open or not), which has a lot of advantages.
That's more or less what I expect. Not that MS actually locks you in so tight you might lose your data, just tight enough that it will be loads more pleasant to work with their docs in *their* program than in anyone else's.
I think the obvious outcome of this and similar efforts will be that Microsoft puts all the actual content of Office documents in some sort of open format, and "extends" that format to support all the goodies such as fancy formatting, macros, Excel formulas, and so on. The extensions will be proprietary and for the most part not accessible to open-source programs, but the base content will be easy to get at.
Since Word is following Pages in its future approach to document formatting, a lot of those extras will be used by people who aren't necessarily trying to do anything fancy.
The end result will be that MS satisfies open format requirements, since you can get at the goods, but anybody who wants to work with the documents in real life will need Office. In other words, what we have today, with more documentation and more bureaucracy.
I'm a database designer and have had similar experiences... and my skin crawls just reading your post.
:-)
OK, so how about some examples? At least one, in the spirit of the Daily WTF
Keeping that stream of blog posts coming is a lot harder than most people think before they actually try it.
In that, blogging is no different than any other kind of content creation. Especially non-profit content creation.
What makes the difficulty surprising, I think, is how many people don't seem to have it. You look around in blogville and see all these people posting at least once a day, and a lot of them have large readerships. But if you look closely you find that a lot of these folks are doing one or more of:
If none of those apply to you, that leaves the not-so-simple task of regularly trying to write something interesting and suitable for at least amateur publication. Anyone who ever made a zine or a comic will tell you it's a very hard habit to get into. But with blogging, you have the hyper-productive blogs in front of you, and the blog companies telling you how easy it is, and you dive in expecting it to be cake.
And then there's the whole templates-and-hacking issue, at least if you don't want the blog to be ugly. Yep, lotsa work.
Don't you mean the iJobs Nano?
I just had a strange and scary thought.
What if Oracle sees PostgreSQL as a potential threat and does not see MySQL as a potential threat?
Postgres is competitive with Oracle on features, integrity and performance for a whole lot of applications. It could, if marketed better, take a serious bite out of Oracle's mid-range business. (The really big things will always go to the big DB players for a variety of reasons.)
So far, MySQL, while extremely popular, isn't anything you would want to compare to ORA on much of anything besides price. That could change, but it won't necessarily, and Postgres will likely continue to be way ahead for serious applications.
OK, so here's my paranoid thought: what if Larry bought Inno specifically to keep MySQL going but limited? What if the plan in '06 is to renew the license but not give them any new InnoDB tricks?
The more people use MySQL, the more Oracle can list the deficiencies and say, "This is why you need a Professional RDBMS and not an OSS toy."
People who are not at all receptive to that argument are not likely to be Oracle customers any time soon anyway.
Very tinfoil-hat, but it does seem to me that Oracle is well served by having MySQL corner the bottom end of the market.
You know the drill: IANAL, but I am a law student.
You should just put that in your sig. Seriously.
Too late for moderation, but in case you check your replies...
2 2/000117.html
I figured out two very easy immediate technical solutions to blogspam. They aren't permanent solutions - if lots of people use them, the spammers can very quickly adapt. But as long as most folks (and software systems) are asleep at the wheel and either manually delete the spam or just turn off comments/trackbacks, these methods should work. (Working fine so far, but I've done the anti-spam thing enough to not count my chickens...)
For comment spam the deal is this: require javascript to get to your comments posting cgi, and *then* change the name of that cgi. (Since the current script name is likely in a spam database already.) You can check any entry's permalink on my blog (in my sig) and view source, it should be clear how this bit works. And yes, I have a fallback option for people without Javascript.
For trackback the deal is to deny pings with URLs in the excerpt body. Granted, that potentially denies a few legitimate pings, but I'm guessing it's a tiny, tiny minority, and it rejects with an appropriate error message so those people, if they care to check, will know what happened.
More on that here, with directions for MovableType: http://www.frostopolis.com/flog/archives/2005/10/
I realize the trackback fix is especially limited, and doesn't give you any fallback option, but I was getting hammered and just needed a quick fix. If I got lots of legit trackbacks instead of just spam, I might have at least had those log differently... or maybe not.
Anyway, these two things are working just fine for me, and they were trivial to set up.
Notable exception:
Art Levinson of Genentech. A serious scientist and a serious CEO.
Stock chart.
I don't think it'll be that nail, but I do think the news will be pod/vodcasted (yes, with commercials).
1 3/000107.html
The argument goes something like this: You've already broadcast the news show, and its value to you at that point is mostly as archival material. Immediately *after* the broadcast, you put it online for free distribution. This gets it in front of more eyes, expanding your audience and (maybe) helping your advertisers.
The main downside I see is that you lose a bit of control - you can't effectively squash something you've already broadcast if a whole bunch of people have it on their iPods. But this is a pretty moot point by now, what with TiVo and all that.
I think the use case is straightforward: instead of watching your favorite news show in front of the tube, you want it during what would otherwise be downtime, eg on your commute (if you're not driving). It's just extremely convenient timeshifting, and I can see it being very popular (and free-as-in-beer) for all kinds of programming that you wouldn't imagine being sold on DVD or re-run. For example, all the political commentary shows.
For the rest, there's the iTunes store or equivalent.
More such speculation here: http://www.frostopolis.com/flog/archives/2005/10/
I actually do hope this takes off, mostly because I'd like to see independent video producers able to reach large audiences the way bloggers have done with text. And thus far, with no viPod, that hasn't happened. The production tools have been democratized, so has the distribution channel, but the consumption mode has largely been missing.
I agree that it looks spiffy, but I'd name another missing feature: PostgreSQL compatibility.
Leaving aside all ranting about PG's superiority, most folks should be able to agree that if you already have a working database server installed it's not desirable to install another just to support one product.
The PHP+MySQL mix actually seems like a good idea for starters - most shared-hosting packages will have this out of the box. But when you consider how simple the SQL is for something like a webmail client, it should be easy enough to also support PG.
It would also be nice, for me anyway, if it worked with POP and didn't require IMAP, though I do realize that raises a lot of issues and, again, is probably not relevant to people with standard out-of-the-box hosting configs.
(Yes, I know - it's open source, I can add this stuff myself. Maybe I will, maybe someone else will...)
Assuming this actually works (and actually exists), it looks suspiciously like... a Bluetooth Adapter! And it looks a lot like you're just using the phone as a headphone/mic combo, and the central contact list just means you have to use your PC, not your phone, to dial.
If your computer has built-in Bluetooth, is there any software out there to get Skype talking to your handset? Isn't that something Skype is likely to offer?
I don't know much about Anime culture per se, but I think this is a pretty enlightened move.
With promotional freebies, distributing via BitTorrent gets you free publicity and lowers your distribution costs to practically nothing. Furthermore, doing it through your own trackers is likely to give you realistic download statistics, which are very valuable in themselves. (And why go to, say, Pirate Bay if the publisher itself is seeding?)
For commercial products you'd rather sell, there's also something to be said for BitTorrent distribution. If you know that a significant portion of your customers are going to trade the files on P2P anyway, and you realize there's *nothing* you can do to stop it, why not get some love by seeding the things yourself?
Of course that doesn't get you to the magic "3. Profit!" all by itself, but at least you get something back from a process that's inevitable anyway.
That leaves the question of how to turn that good will into a buck (or Yen), which I admit is not easy. But as it stands Hollywood isn't even interested in trying, so it's nice to see someone inching down a new path.
Leaving aside any questions about monopolies and anti-virus software and so on....
Why doesn't Microsoft release a scanner/fixer/patch combination when this sort of thing hits?
I know there are a lot of actual "whys" but it seems like the logical thing to do...
Ah, blogospheric neologisms...
"Folksonomy" apparently refers to keyword-based organization and tagging and such.
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
From the Wikipedia entry.
I'm assuming you have the right to republish the Word documents. I'm also assuming you have no control over how many Word-specific formatting features are used by the authors.
What I would do in your shoes is set up a (mostly) automated system to convert the Word files to PDF. You can buy Acrobat or you can go with a third-party, printer-driver-style converter, but in the end you'll probably save more headaches just using Acrobat.
Once you have a document in PDF, you can use any of the numerous (free and commercial) tools to convert that to HTML, text, whatever - all much more reliably than from Word directly. It's not perfect, but it's probably the closest you'll get.
Plus, you can post the PDFs themselves for download in case someone wants them - and at least Google will still happily index your PDFs.
Yes, you'll probably have to live with some NT variant to get that part done (though it might work with OSX) - but it's most likely your fastest path to *quality* conversions.
What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think.
You have a point, but the above quote says a lot too. Even for someone who presumably has some interest in history and international politics (you are playing Civilization), these conflicts are just vague blips on your radar.
The Chechens in Chechnya don't have it easy, and the kind of sick extremist terrorism that gave us the school bombing in Russia is the only thing you (sort of) remember.
This is unfortunately a pretty typical attitude when the conflict is far away. Is it any wonder everyone wants The Bomb?
By the way, until Prague is relocated far to the east, you can get an overview at WikiPedia.
I once worked at a place that strongly encouraged healthy lifestyles among its employees, and of course didn't allow smoking in any of the buildings.
But they weren't tyrannical about it, and knew that we're all adults here and some people may smoke, or be really fat, or whatever else, and to get the benefits of real diversity you have to accept that too.
The "smoking sections" (concrete ashtrays) were just respectfully far enough away from the building exits that nobody would accidentally walk out of the airconditioning and into a cloud of exhaled smoke.
It worked fine for everyone. The smokers could have their smoke breaks without feeling persecuted or spending forever to get into a "safe zone," and the nonsmokers wouldn't be bothered.
It was considered good form to only smoke by the *back* entrances during business hours, in case any militant anti-smoking customers happened to show up. (Health care company, blabla.)
I don't think it's hard to find balance in these situations without inconveniencing the smokers so much that a 5-10min break turns into 30. But then, there is a certain amount of zealotry to factor in.