Each number last for 60 seconds, so if it is just about to change you wait and type in the next number (there is a visual counter on the left of the device)
The back end ACE server knows the previous and next numbers, so adjusts for any internal clock changes which can be present on the card. If you meet an RSA sales person at a trade show, they may well offer you a demo card, these are generally production cards which ended up with clock speeds outside the QA range so look good but are effectivly worthless.
You can steal a card, but unless you know the user name and the secret password / username they are still worthless. To log in you generally need a user name / 4 digit pin and the number on the screen, lose one and the finder generally has simply an interesting desk ornament.
Sure the fobs can be bought in bulk for $xxx. But for every usable fob you have to buy a corresponding ACE server licence, which does also add to the expense. You then have standard maintenance on the ACE servers which is a fixed percentage of the initial server costs.
The branding isn't that special, I think you can get it whenever you order more than 1000, most banks do this for their customers, it isn't a new thing for AOL.
The service is generally very good, The combination of what you know (secret PIN) with what you have (SecureID card) has rapidly become the industry standard. The $10 a year figure sounds like excellent value, I'll be chatting with my RSA salesperson this afternoon to see if we can get the same deal:-)
The battery does die, but normally after the lifetime of the token.
Every secureID token had a lifetime of three years, in the old security dynamics days these were printed on the back of the token, I'm not sure this is the case now they are RSA tokens.
Either way, each number is displayed once and once only. The limit on available numbers is reached before the battery dies, after which the token flashes pointlessly for a couple of extra years.
There are no user replaceable parts. You buy the token, we buy them in bulk at my work for $XXX (NDA I'm afraid) and they last for about three years. You also have to buy an ACE server licence for $XXX. Its an expensive business but RSA are an excellent company to work with and the ACE servers and Secure ID cards work with a huge number of services, for example I can log into my corporate network from my home Mac and Linux machines using the excellent Netlock VPN solutions and Secure ID, a choice I don't have at work.
I use a logitech 7 button mouse and all the functions are supported. In safari for example, the page back and forward buttons work fine, as does the scroll wheel the page up and down buttons and the switch application button. Almost all apps support the mouse wheel and the right button.
If you look at the configuration for entourage in OS 10.3 you will see that it supports 32 mouse buttons, a fair selection I would say.
What most people who critisise the one button apple approach fail to realise is that most apple apps. fully support using a second button, it is simply relaised by using a keyboard modifier. Therefore to emulate right click, you hold down the apple key with one hand and click the mouse with the other. I hated this when I first used the machine but now find it somewhat more intuative than two button operation, it serves to keep your fingures in a nice resting position and the mouse keyboard combination can be very effective, but your milage may vary. Almost all 2 and three button USB mice will plug in and work out the box, I sometimes use a HP mouse from my work PC on my home mac without any problems.
The standard apple keyboard has two additional USB ports on the right and left of the top of the keyboard. They can be used for one USB mouse and one additional device, but I tend to use a wireless mouse and use them for digital cameras, USB drives and bluetooth dongles. I use these a fair amount and haven't reached round the back of my mac for well over a year now.
However, I agree this would be an issue if you wanted to use a wireless mouse / keyboard combo. Anyone know if there is a wireless way to connect USB devices?
As a father of 2 boys I have to agree with this post. They are very different to their female peers, this seems to peak when they are young and become more similar when they older. My younger son wanted a kitchen for Christmas when he was two and we bought him one which he was very happy with. Some friends who has more defined ideas of what they wanted their little boy to be refused a request for the same present. My son has moved on to be obsessed with football, to the point of sleeping with one every night, whereas his freind is one of the most effeminate boys I know (but a very nice child all the same)
But back on topic, CS is a huge field and why can't we adapt parts to gender specifics. My wife is an excellent linguist and has a very good eye for design, I can't spell in one language yet my wife finds me wierd because I can memorise all our credit card numbers and write many lines of code without notes. I often ask her advice on UI design and she comes up with much better ideas than I ever could.
This is only one example and I don't want to generalise to an "All women are good at arty stuff and men write code" level of simplicity. However, if we recognise differences are gender specific perhaps we can tailor courses appropriatly to appeal to all, rather than "CS is just assembler and code" reductionism which may put many off.
The financial markets may be critisised for not investing in industry, but I would argue that our (UK) banks are very innovative when it comes to technology.
Like the US we have a huge ATM population and it is very rare for banks to charge for their use, I am always suprised when travelling to the US and see banks advertising "No $1.50 ATM fees", we don't have charges across any of the linked (LINK) network.
UK banks have great internet services in general and also offer a very wide range of financial products, you can find a way to invest in hedge funds in most UK high street banks, for example.
There are also several Internet only banks, EGG and Smile being the most successful examples. The banks here are also profitable, Royal Bank of Scotland has a larger market cap than AMEX and HSBC (headquarted in London) is often described as the world second largest (after CitiGroup/Travellers)
One interesting distinction between UK and US banks is the retail branch network. The linked article stated there are now far more US bank tellers than there were when ATMs were first introduced. With Major banks cutting branches wholesale I can't believe that is true in the UK, and technological innovation has to have played a part in this.
Hopefully it will help find a cure for many diseases which relate to the way proteins fold and interact. You are more than welcome to join my hotldap team:-).
I think my Linux box takes five minutes to boot, it has web servers and an LDAP server on it as well as firewalls etc. and I haven't optimised its boot time. My older Win 2K box takes well over 5 minutes to load up all the crud that is in the system tray (my fault I would stress, not Microsofts) and my XP machine takes around 5 minutes, with time being used up on mounting network drives and starting Lotus Notes etc.
If you have to start your machine every morning, that's a minimum of 5 minutes lost every morning which can ammount to over 2 working days per year assuming you work an average of 200 days a year.
But the machine is also running a number of background tasks, for example I have around 20 Mozilla mail filters running all the time Mozilla is open and sorting mail into folders based on email from my boss, email from specific project members etc. It is invaluable to me to be able to see how many of these there are as soon as I arrive for work on a morning (can can get up to 50 emails overnight, so wading through them manually to see the important ones can take a good 30 minutes)
Again, working from home or overnight I need the easy access to all the tools and documents I have on my box. Docs. are mirrored to shared drives but it is so easy to set up an X session to my box and call up the tools I need, even at 2 in the morning.
So as well as being a fairly standard office PC, I find my box is far more used as a personal server optimised for my way of working. Having a Linux box with server sytle uptimes certainly helps to that end.
You make some good points, I reply I would say that I am happy in running Linux in a corporate environment and find it far superior to Windows for what should be Windows strengths, office productivity applications.
To answer your points
i) Stability.
Here is the uptime from my PC from a few months ago (running SuSE 7.1)
I have an XP machine and it doesn't come close to these figures, it still seems to have Virtual Memory problems from time to time.
Sound works excellently for me, and I have two large LCD screens running flawlessly from my Matrox card, dual head actually being easier to set up and tune in KDE / X than Windows XP.
Open Office has come on laps and bounds recently, I have over 250 Powerpoint presentations on this PC and they all open flawlessly these days using OO 1.1.1. I actually prefer OO Writer and Presenter to the MS equivelent these days, only Excel is clearly better.
I use Mozilla for mail and web browsing, it often goes for 30 - 40 days between restarts. I currently have 744 emails on my IMAP server and 27,000 emails (3 years worth) in my local folders and Mozilla indexes and searches then very fast on this average PC.
Upgrading to SuSE 9.1 took me under 3 hours and I have done very little upgrading since. However, bear in mind that before that I had the 400 day uptime, and before that 293 days uptime and think about all the time saved by rebooting the PC once a year on average and you'll see where the performance benefits come from.
There are many more benefits but I'll finish with just one.
I use a Mac at home and Linux on the laptop when travelling. Often I will be called on to find an email thread from 18 months earlier. All I have to do now is connect to the corporate network, ssh into my PC and X back Mozilla, 3 years of work history are now in front of me, this has saved so much time on more occasions than I can remember.
I am certainly no longer a geek and wouldn't say Linux is the solution to everything, however in my corporate role involving email, web sites documents and powerpoint I would estimate I am 10 - 20% more productive using a Standard SuSE Linux build than if I used the Windows XP Microsoft Office equivelent, but as I said, your mileage may vary.
For one thing, Apple has always been open to incorporating other people's products, until very recently they included both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player (strange to see it called that on a Mac)
THey have also taken to unbundling some of these apps, if you want to get the latest version of iMovie, iPhoto etc and selling them as an iLife package. This means that you have to pay extra for them, but I guess that is the price you pay for non bundling, as I suspect Windows users in the EU are about to find out.
None of these are essential for the OS to function, if you want to run you mac without any of the iXXX apps and say, simply use terminal and X11, it should work fine. If you want to associate your default browser with Mozilla, mail with Thunderbird and Word docs with Microsoft Word it is very easy to do. I have noticed very few applications make 'land grabs' for my desktop in the way Windows applications can do (although I feel Real Player is much worse than Microsoft here, their Mac client is so much friendlier than the Windows equivelent)
"yep you can't argue with less than 3% of the market."
Hmm, no debt at all (see recent Slashdot story), over $4 Billion in the bank, successive profitable quarters, doesn't seem like failure to me.
There are hardware manufacturers who make have more market share but very few who make this kind of return on investment. BMW have around 3% market share but don't seem unduely worried about it, in fact it seem to please most BMW owners I know. Oh, and Apple have around 32% of the portable music player market.
Mozilla has consistently offered users the features, performance and innovation instrumental to the evolution of the Internet," said Curtis Sasaki, Vice President, Engineering, Desktop Solutions, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is committed to the Mozilla technology and is contributing significant engineering resources to move it forward. By the end of July, Sun will ship Mozilla for the Solaris Operating System and make Mozilla the standard browser for Mad Hatter, Sun's Linux-based desktop software stack, due later this year.
The only other company mentioned are Red Hat, no mention of IBM there. Seriously, Mozilla and StarOffice are the two most imortant applications (alongside KDE) which allow me to run a Linux desktop in a Windows dominated corporate, and Sun have to be thanked for their investment in both.
I think there is a key difference between the KDE, Gnome implementations, Bigdesk for windows etc. and this patent.
Reading the patent document, the key point is that the users hits a key and all the desktops are scaled within the window using animation. So if I have a 3 x 3 virtual desktop and hit the desktop view button, my screen is shrunk to (say) the top left 9th of the screen and 8 other mini desktops become visible. If I select another desktop it zooms towards me filling the screen. They make a number of references to background images and I guess animating 9 different background images for the demo above would look very cool.
I haven't seen this implemented before. The nearest is Mac OS X.3 which allows all application windows to be minimised and switched between, I use it a lot and it is excellent, particularly if you have a number of quicktime movies or similar playing. As I recall, Apple patented this and I think this is Microsoft's answer
I think the author is missing one important point, which is market segments.
To explain, I work in a bank which for a long time has had a Microsoft Desktop focus and I have been using Linux on my PC for over 4 years now. Sometimes it has taken time to set up but I have always found the return on investment very justifiable.
When it came to choosing a home machine my criteria were different. As it will be used by my Wife and Children I wanted somthing that would play Dr Suuss games and integrate nicely with my Digital Camera and Video recorder. I also wanted something which would enable me to work from home from time to time and play with Unix.
My iMac with OS X has met my needs perfectly. It plays childrens games very well. It integrates perfectly with the video camera and stores and emails digital photographs perfectly. It connects to my corporate VPN (thanks Netlock) and I get a very good X client for free, so I can X back my PC apps. over broadband if neccecary. It has very good versions of PERL and OpenLDAP available from the command line (as an LDAP architect these things are important to me) and it looks good and nas NEVER crashed.
If I hadn't bought this machine, we would probably still have nothing but my office portble at home. AS it is it has formed a very important part of my family life, and I'm very happy with that. So we should always consider the possibility that Apple are opening up market segments that simply wouldn't buy a PC before.
One final comment, many years ago when I worked in PC support, Apples were the bane of my life and I would never have considered purchasing a machine based on OS9. OS X has completely changed my view of the company, and I know many other people who have bought new Apples for exactly the same reason.
This is a very valid point. Look at the correlation between the investors and the organisations thay list as partners, IBM Intel and SGI may be investors but they are also partner organisation, comitted to delivering solutions on the SuSE platform.
Would it be in any of their interests to have SuSE as a subsiduary of an American company, and in many areas a competitor. I would say not, Novell have no track record in delivering on companies they take over and are a US company. Rightly or wrongly, SuSE are winning business in Europe because of the perception they are a European company, not a US offshoot. As a company they take this very seriously, look at the number of languages (as in spoken rather than programmatic) SuSE and KDE (which SuSE fund) support, it is generally very high and includes all of Western and Eastern Europe as well as Support for Hebrew and Arabic languages (and very good braille support for that matter). The suspition may be that a US owner may not understand the importance of this.
Besides, the price is simply too low. I think IBM and Intel between them have pumped in over $100M and many of the venture capital firms more. This is a long term investment for them and the European focus is very important, to lose cash and being the number 1 player in the worlds second biggest software market is unlikely to happen. They also support more platforms than Red Hat, there is a supported SuSE build for the IBM OS390 mainframe which I don't think RH offer.
SuSE are a great company and we need a second successful commercial alternative Linux to Red Hat to allow some freedom of choice in big company data centers. They are also an important company funding many European OS efforts, as a European I hope both them and Red Hat succeed and encourage the best developments from both geographies.
You explain the Archimedes Principle very well, but the threat to the Gulf Stream, which is one of the most serious possible effects of global warming, has little to do with sea temperature reduction in Northern waters. It is a general trend to increasing quantities of fresh water of any temperature being produced as run off in Europe which could stop this salt pump / conveyor belt effect. This has happened at least twice before with the result of major temperature drops in Europe.
There is an excellent summary here. One interesting quote "[the gulf stream] carries over 3 trillion KW of heat to Europe - roughly 100 times the world's consumption of energy"
Chris Stone is an excellent guy for Novell to have as a VP, as well as being a well respected chair of the Open Group he also used to be base player for the band that became Aerosmith (he left 6 months before they had their first big hit).
However, I have to wonder about the wisdom of producing yet another Linux distribution, particularly one aimed at the desktop arena. Although you may not know it from the figures, many internaional companies have already standardised on SuSE or Red Hat for their Linux vendors and the name Novell still has some bad connertations in the Corporate world.
Much of Novells strategy today seems to be selling very high value (expensive) products based around XML and Web Services (see their Silverstream aquisition) to Fortune 500 / FTSE 100 companies. I know as an implemetor for their excellent DirXML Meta Directory in a 100,000 employee company.
To my mind they would be better forming an alliance of the sort that SuSE and Sun announced yeterday, where Sun support and Distribute SuSE Linux and SuSE use Sun's Java in all their distributions. Novell could add their tools to SuSE and Red Hat, such as Directory Clients and Xen Works clients, concentrate on selling their servers on the SuSE and Red Hat platforms they already support and bundle SuSE and RedHat desktops for Netware customers. This would give them client penetration and server sales opportunities without having to compete with the Linux vendors. They could also leverage the relationship these vendors have with Sun and IBM who would be happy as the Novell server components also run on Solaris and (I think) AIX. Thoughts?
I agree, Netscape 4 was rightly much miligned for its poor HTML rendering but there was much else to like about it, and the Roaming Profiles will be much missed.
This allowed you to store bookmarks, preferences, addresss books etc. in an LDAP server or (less often) a web server. You could then log in and retrieve them from anywhere.
LDAP support in Communicator 4 was generally excellent, and has generally disappeared from Mozilla apart from address lookup. I have some LDAP experience, if anyone is interested in resurrecting roaming profiles perhaps we could rebuild this service?
A number of people seem to be commenting on this article as if the songs stop working as soon as a user leaves the US. However, in this case the guy is saying he had to completly reinstall his powerbook and wanted to retrieve his DRM certificate to allow him to use the songs he had purchased, and Apple's policies wouldn't allow this.
So it is a major flaw, but one I suspect that is by accident rather than design. Apple has promised the music industry that it won't allow downloads of songs from outside the US, which this policy enforces. What I suspect that haven't done is work out a way to allow users to keep their existing account but not allow future downloads now they know you aren't in the right geography. They don't do intrusive testing, only when the user in this case informed them they were outside the US (and the service is VERY clear when you have to sign up that you have to be in the US, it's not really small print).
So Apple haven't been as comprehensive in their use case mapping as they should have been, and obviously didn't cover the 0.01% case of customers who move from the US but need to access their existing tunes, loses their key and has no backup. They have however, proved to the copyright owner that their regon specific policies are being enforced, which is the only thing which gives us access to this service at present. If you disagree with them, fine buy CDs, break the law or campaign for change but there are many of us happy with 99% of these terms of service who simply wish the service would be expanded to more geographies and platforms.
This may work for many people but has some drawbacks. An increasing number of email clients seem to default to HTML editing simply to allow people to add bold and italic to their messages, even if people never use this the message may have a HTML wrapper which would cause it to be rejected by automated filtering.
It also has disadvantages in corporate environments. I work using an IMAP mail account in a corporate which has standardised on Notes. I notice that recent messages from Notes are now rendering Notes specific formatting as HTML when the recipient is a non notes user. This is actually of great benefit as people tend to use Notes to add their comments in an alternate font colour. With HTML mail I can now finally see what they are saying accurately in my Mozilla Mail client, so this is a step towards open standards.
The key difference is that KMail does this on a per message basis, whereas in Mozilla this is set once in Preferences and I suspect the same is true in Evolution. Thus looking at a HTML message I just received I get the following in a box at the top of the message;
"Note: This is an HTML message. For security reasons, only the raw HTML code is shown. If you trust the sender of this message then you can activate formatted HTML display for this message by clicking here."
The HTML code follows and a single click turns it into a fully rendered message, or an alternate click consignes it to the trash can.
It may be possible to add this as a mozilla mail / thunderbird toolbar, and as Thunderbird takes off I hope we will see this type of quick prefs bar develop to the same extent they have been developed for the mozilla browser component.
I think the purpose is to vary the hidden text to fool anti-spam systems which rely on blocking mail based on signatures of the message body.
If you send 150,000 messages which say "Free Porn Here" systems such as Britemail are going to quickly generate one signature for the mail and block most of it. If however you have the following example (using the fictional HTML HIDE tag)
Free [HIDE] from your meeting at 10:30 [/HIDE] porn [HIDE} cate suggested meeting for coffee [/HIDE] here [HIDE] I will be in work late today [/HIDE}
The message is still displayed in the browser as "Free porn here". However, filters such as those used by Mac Mail and Mozilla may not pick it up as junk because the hidden words look like real email. If you change the hidden sentences every 100 emails then the signature based spam blocking systems won't pick it up as every signature is different and (in this example) you are using real words.
One of the best solutions to this I have seen is KMail, this displays HTML mail as text and you can click a button to then render as HTML. This doesn't stop the spam, but does give you the abaility not to see many images you rather wouldn't at 10am on a Monday morning and allows you to stop web bugs (HTML code in images which can be used to indicate successful message delivery).
Slashdot Mirror
Ermmmm,
Each number last for 60 seconds, so if it is just about to change you wait and type in the next number (there is a visual counter on the left of the device)
The back end ACE server knows the previous and next numbers, so adjusts for any internal clock changes which can be present on the card. If you meet an RSA sales person at a trade show, they may well offer you a demo card, these are generally production cards which ended up with clock speeds outside the QA range so look good but are effectivly worthless.
You can steal a card, but unless you know the user name and the secret password / username they are still worthless. To log in you generally need a user name / 4 digit pin and the number on the screen, lose one and the finder generally has simply an interesting desk ornament.
I'm not so sure your maths is correct.
:-)
Sure the fobs can be bought in bulk for $xxx. But for every usable fob you have to buy a corresponding ACE server licence, which does also add to the expense. You then have standard maintenance on the ACE servers which is a fixed percentage of the initial server costs.
The branding isn't that special, I think you can get it whenever you order more than 1000, most banks do this for their customers, it isn't a new thing for AOL.
The service is generally very good, The combination of what you know (secret PIN) with what you have (SecureID card) has rapidly become the industry standard. The $10 a year figure sounds like excellent value, I'll be chatting with my RSA salesperson this afternoon to see if we can get the same deal
The battery does die, but normally after the lifetime of the token.
Every secureID token had a lifetime of three years, in the old security dynamics days these were printed on the back of the token, I'm not sure this is the case now they are RSA tokens.
Either way, each number is displayed once and once only. The limit on available numbers is reached before the battery dies, after which the token flashes pointlessly for a couple of extra years.
There are no user replaceable parts. You buy the token, we buy them in bulk at my work for $XXX (NDA I'm afraid) and they last for about three years. You also have to buy an ACE server licence for $XXX. Its an expensive business but RSA are an excellent company to work with and the ACE servers and Secure ID cards work with a huge number of services, for example I can log into my corporate network from my home Mac and Linux machines using the excellent Netlock VPN solutions and Secure ID, a choice I don't have at work.
I use a logitech 7 button mouse and all the functions are supported. In safari for example, the page back and forward buttons work fine, as does the scroll wheel the page up and down buttons and the switch application button. Almost all apps support the mouse wheel and the right button.
If you look at the configuration for entourage in OS 10.3 you will see that it supports 32 mouse buttons, a fair selection I would say.
What most people who critisise the one button apple approach fail to realise is that most apple apps. fully support using a second button, it is simply relaised by using a keyboard modifier. Therefore to emulate right click, you hold down the apple key with one hand and click the mouse with the other. I hated this when I first used the machine but now find it somewhat more intuative than two button operation, it serves to keep your fingures in a nice resting position and the mouse keyboard combination can be very effective, but your milage may vary. Almost all 2 and three button USB mice will plug in and work out the box, I sometimes use a HP mouse from my work PC on my home mac without any problems.
The standard apple keyboard has two additional USB ports on the right and left of the top of the keyboard. They can be used for one USB mouse and one additional device, but I tend to use a wireless mouse and use them for digital cameras, USB drives and bluetooth dongles. I use these a fair amount and haven't reached round the back of my mac for well over a year now.
However, I agree this would be an issue if you wanted to use a wireless mouse / keyboard combo. Anyone know if there is a wireless way to connect USB devices?
As a father of 2 boys I have to agree with this post. They are very different to their female peers, this seems to peak when they are young and become more similar when they older. My younger son wanted a kitchen for Christmas when he was two and we bought him one which he was very happy with. Some friends who has more defined ideas of what they wanted their little boy to be refused a request for the same present. My son has moved on to be obsessed with football, to the point of sleeping with one every night, whereas his freind is one of the most effeminate boys I know (but a very nice child all the same)
But back on topic, CS is a huge field and why can't we adapt parts to gender specifics. My wife is an excellent linguist and has a very good eye for design, I can't spell in one language yet my wife finds me wierd because I can memorise all our credit card numbers and write many lines of code without notes. I often ask her advice on UI design and she comes up with much better ideas than I ever could.
This is only one example and I don't want to generalise to an "All women are good at arty stuff and men write code" level of simplicity. However, if we recognise differences are gender specific perhaps we can tailor courses appropriatly to appeal to all, rather than "CS is just assembler and code" reductionism which may put many off.
The financial markets may be critisised for not investing in industry, but I would argue that our (UK) banks are very innovative when it comes to technology.
Like the US we have a huge ATM population and it is very rare for banks to charge for their use, I am always suprised when travelling to the US and see banks advertising "No $1.50 ATM fees", we don't have charges across any of the linked (LINK) network.
UK banks have great internet services in general and also offer a very wide range of financial products, you can find a way to invest in hedge funds in most UK high street banks, for example.
There are also several Internet only banks, EGG and Smile being the most successful examples. The banks here are also profitable, Royal Bank of Scotland has a larger market cap than AMEX and HSBC (headquarted in London) is often described as the world second largest (after CitiGroup/Travellers)
One interesting distinction between UK and US banks is the retail branch network. The linked article stated there are now far more US bank tellers than there were when ATMs were first introduced. With Major banks cutting branches wholesale I can't believe that is true in the UK, and technological innovation has to have played a part in this.
Ermm, I think that's the point, the Lightbulb could be credited to a Brit, the telephone to Germany or Scotland and the Car to France / Germany.
Humerous and informative IMHO, but maybe you were just trolling.
II don't waste resources. My PC runs folding at home, the URL is
.
:-).
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/
Hopefully it will help find a cure for many diseases which relate to the way proteins fold and interact. You are more than welcome to join my hotldap team
I think my Linux box takes five minutes to boot, it has web servers and an LDAP server on it as well as firewalls etc. and I haven't optimised its boot time. My older Win 2K box takes well over 5 minutes to load up all the crud that is in the system tray (my fault I would stress, not Microsofts) and my XP machine takes around 5 minutes, with time being used up on mounting network drives and starting Lotus Notes etc.
If you have to start your machine every morning, that's a minimum of 5 minutes lost every morning which can ammount to over 2 working days per year assuming you work an average of 200 days a year.
But the machine is also running a number of background tasks, for example I have around 20 Mozilla mail filters running all the time Mozilla is open and sorting mail into folders based on email from my boss, email from specific project members etc. It is invaluable to me to be able to see how many of these there are as soon as I arrive for work on a morning (can can get up to 50 emails overnight, so wading through them manually to see the important ones can take a good 30 minutes)
Again, working from home or overnight I need the easy access to all the tools and documents I have on my box. Docs. are mirrored to shared drives but it is so easy to set up an X session to my box and call up the tools I need, even at 2 in the morning.
So as well as being a fairly standard office PC, I find my box is far more used as a personal server optimised for my way of working. Having a Linux box with server sytle uptimes certainly helps to that end.
I made the same mistake, I saw the 3% figure for speed improvement and didn't waste time downloading it.
Had the release notes clearly stated "This new release is CRAP LOADS faster than release 0.x" then I would have downloaded it in a heartbeat.
Honestly, the quality of technical documentation these days....
You make some good points, I reply I would say that I am happy in running Linux in a corporate environment and find it far superior to Windows for what should be Windows strengths, office productivity applications.
To answer your points
i) Stability.
Here is the uptime from my PC from a few months ago (running SuSE 7.1)
alistair@omlette:~> uptime
5:31pm up 393 days, 2:06, 9 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
I have an XP machine and it doesn't come close to these figures, it still seems to have Virtual Memory problems from time to time.
Sound works excellently for me, and I have two large LCD screens running flawlessly from my Matrox card, dual head actually being easier to set up and tune in KDE / X than Windows XP.
Open Office has come on laps and bounds recently, I have over 250 Powerpoint presentations on this PC and they all open flawlessly these days using OO 1.1.1. I actually prefer OO Writer and Presenter to the MS equivelent these days, only Excel is clearly better.
I use Mozilla for mail and web browsing, it often goes for 30 - 40 days between restarts. I currently have 744 emails on my IMAP server and 27,000 emails (3 years worth) in my local folders and Mozilla indexes and searches then very fast on this average PC.
Upgrading to SuSE 9.1 took me under 3 hours and I have done very little upgrading since. However, bear in mind that before that I had the 400 day uptime, and before that 293 days uptime and think about all the time saved by rebooting the PC once a year on average and you'll see where the performance benefits come from.
There are many more benefits but I'll finish with just one.
I use a Mac at home and Linux on the laptop when travelling. Often I will be called on to find an email thread from 18 months earlier. All I have to do now is connect to the corporate network, ssh into my PC and X back Mozilla, 3 years of work history are now in front of me, this has saved so much time on more occasions than I can remember.
I am certainly no longer a geek and wouldn't say Linux is the solution to everything, however in my corporate role involving email, web sites documents and powerpoint I would estimate I am 10 - 20% more productive using a Standard SuSE Linux build than if I used the Windows XP Microsoft Office equivelent, but as I said, your mileage may vary.
For one thing, Apple has always been open to incorporating other people's products, until very recently they included both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player (strange to see it called that on a Mac)
THey have also taken to unbundling some of these apps, if you want to get the latest version of iMovie, iPhoto etc and selling them as an iLife package. This means that you have to pay extra for them, but I guess that is the price you pay for non bundling, as I suspect Windows users in the EU are about to find out.
None of these are essential for the OS to function, if you want to run you mac without any of the iXXX apps and say, simply use terminal and X11, it should work fine. If you want to associate your default browser with Mozilla, mail with Thunderbird and Word docs with Microsoft Word it is very easy to do. I have noticed very few applications make 'land grabs' for my desktop in the way Windows applications can do (although I feel Real Player is much worse than Microsoft here, their Mac client is so much friendlier than the Windows equivelent)
"yep you can't argue with less than 3% of the market."
Hmm, no debt at all (see recent Slashdot story), over $4 Billion in the bank, successive profitable quarters, doesn't seem like failure to me.
There are hardware manufacturers who make have more market share but very few who make this kind of return on investment. BMW have around 3% market share but don't seem unduely worried about it, in fact it seem to please most BMW owners I know. Oh, and Apple have around 32% of the portable music player market.
The only other company mentioned are Red Hat, no mention of IBM there. Seriously, Mozilla and StarOffice are the two most imortant applications (alongside KDE) which allow me to run a Linux desktop in a Windows dominated corporate, and Sun have to be thanked for their investment in both.
I think there is a key difference between the KDE, Gnome implementations, Bigdesk for windows etc. and this patent.
Reading the patent document, the key point is that the users hits a key and all the desktops are scaled within the window using animation. So if I have a 3 x 3 virtual desktop and hit the desktop view button, my screen is shrunk to (say) the top left 9th of the screen and 8 other mini desktops become visible. If I select another desktop it zooms towards me filling the screen. They make a number of references to background images and I guess animating 9 different background images for the demo above would look very cool.
I haven't seen this implemented before. The nearest is Mac OS X.3 which allows all application windows to be minimised and switched between, I use it a lot and it is excellent, particularly if you have a number of quicktime movies or similar playing. As I recall, Apple patented this and I think this is Microsoft's answer
I think the author is missing one important point, which is market segments.
To explain, I work in a bank which for a long time has had a Microsoft Desktop focus and I have been using Linux on my PC for over 4 years now. Sometimes it has taken time to set up but I have always found the return on investment very justifiable.
When it came to choosing a home machine my criteria were different. As it will be used by my Wife and Children I wanted somthing that would play Dr Suuss games and integrate nicely with my Digital Camera and Video recorder. I also wanted something which would enable me to work from home from time to time and play with Unix.
My iMac with OS X has met my needs perfectly. It plays childrens games very well. It integrates perfectly with the video camera and stores and emails digital photographs perfectly. It connects to my corporate VPN (thanks Netlock) and I get a very good X client for free, so I can X back my PC apps. over broadband if neccecary. It has very good versions of PERL and OpenLDAP available from the command line (as an LDAP architect these things are important to me) and it looks good and nas NEVER crashed.
If I hadn't bought this machine, we would probably still have nothing but my office portble at home. AS it is it has formed a very important part of my family life, and I'm very happy with that. So we should always consider the possibility that Apple are opening up market segments that simply wouldn't buy a PC before.
One final comment, many years ago when I worked in PC support, Apples were the bane of my life and I would never have considered purchasing a machine based on OS9. OS X has completely changed my view of the company, and I know many other people who have bought new Apples for exactly the same reason.
This is a very valid point. Look at the correlation between the investors and the organisations thay list as partners, IBM Intel and SGI may be investors but they are also partner organisation, comitted to delivering solutions on the SuSE platform.
Would it be in any of their interests to have SuSE as a subsiduary of an American company, and in many areas a competitor. I would say not, Novell have no track record in delivering on companies they take over and are a US company. Rightly or wrongly, SuSE are winning business in Europe because of the perception they are a European company, not a US offshoot. As a company they take this very seriously, look at the number of languages (as in spoken rather than programmatic) SuSE and KDE (which SuSE fund) support, it is generally very high and includes all of Western and Eastern Europe as well as Support for Hebrew and Arabic languages (and very good braille support for that matter). The suspition may be that a US owner may not understand the importance of this.
Besides, the price is simply too low. I think IBM and Intel between them have pumped in over $100M and many of the venture capital firms more. This is a long term investment for them and the European focus is very important, to lose cash and being the number 1 player in the worlds second biggest software market is unlikely to happen. They also support more platforms than Red Hat, there is a supported SuSE build for the IBM OS390 mainframe which I don't think RH offer.
SuSE are a great company and we need a second successful commercial alternative Linux to Red Hat to allow some freedom of choice in big company data centers. They are also an important company funding many European OS efforts, as a European I hope both them and Red Hat succeed and encourage the best developments from both geographies.
You explain the Archimedes Principle very well, but the threat to the Gulf Stream, which is one of the most serious possible effects of global warming, has little to do with sea temperature reduction in Northern waters. It is a general trend to increasing quantities of fresh water of any temperature being produced as run off in Europe which could stop this salt pump / conveyor belt effect. This has happened at least twice before with the result of major temperature drops in Europe.
There is an excellent summary here. One interesting quote "[the gulf stream] carries over 3 trillion KW of heat to Europe - roughly 100 times the world's consumption of energy"
Chris Stone is an excellent guy for Novell to have as a VP, as well as being a well respected chair of the Open Group he also used to be base player for the band that became Aerosmith (he left 6 months before they had their first big hit).
However, I have to wonder about the wisdom of producing yet another Linux distribution, particularly one aimed at the desktop arena. Although you may not know it from the figures, many internaional companies have already standardised on SuSE or Red Hat for their Linux vendors and the name Novell still has some bad connertations in the Corporate world.
Much of Novells strategy today seems to be selling very high value (expensive) products based around XML and Web Services (see their Silverstream aquisition) to Fortune 500 / FTSE 100 companies. I know as an implemetor for their excellent DirXML Meta Directory in a 100,000 employee company.
To my mind they would be better forming an alliance of the sort that SuSE and Sun announced yeterday, where Sun support and Distribute SuSE Linux and SuSE use Sun's Java in all their distributions. Novell could add their tools to SuSE and Red Hat, such as Directory Clients and Xen Works clients, concentrate on selling their servers on the SuSE and Red Hat platforms they already support and bundle SuSE and RedHat desktops for Netware customers. This would give them client penetration and server sales opportunities without having to compete with the Linux vendors. They could also leverage the relationship these vendors have with Sun and IBM who would be happy as the Novell server components also run on Solaris and (I think) AIX. Thoughts?
I agree, Netscape 4 was rightly much miligned for its poor HTML rendering but there was much else to like about it, and the Roaming Profiles will be much missed.
This allowed you to store bookmarks, preferences, addresss books etc. in an LDAP server or (less often) a web server. You could then log in and retrieve them from anywhere.
LDAP support in Communicator 4 was generally excellent, and has generally disappeared from Mozilla apart from address lookup. I have some LDAP experience, if anyone is interested in resurrecting roaming profiles perhaps we could rebuild this service?
A number of people seem to be commenting on this article as if the songs stop working as soon as a user leaves the US. However, in this case the guy is saying he had to completly reinstall his powerbook and wanted to retrieve his DRM certificate to allow him to use the songs he had purchased, and Apple's policies wouldn't allow this.
So it is a major flaw, but one I suspect that is by accident rather than design. Apple has promised the music industry that it won't allow downloads of songs from outside the US, which this policy enforces. What I suspect that haven't done is work out a way to allow users to keep their existing account but not allow future downloads now they know you aren't in the right geography. They don't do intrusive testing, only when the user in this case informed them they were outside the US (and the service is VERY clear when you have to sign up that you have to be in the US, it's not really small print).
So Apple haven't been as comprehensive in their use case mapping as they should have been, and obviously didn't cover the 0.01% case of customers who move from the US but need to access their existing tunes, loses their key and has no backup. They have however, proved to the copyright owner that their regon specific policies are being enforced, which is the only thing which gives us access to this service at present. If you disagree with them, fine buy CDs, break the law or campaign for change but there are many of us happy with 99% of these terms of service who simply wish the service would be expanded to more geographies and platforms.
This may work for many people but has some drawbacks. An increasing number of email clients seem to default to HTML editing simply to allow people to add bold and italic to their messages, even if people never use this the message may have a HTML wrapper which would cause it to be rejected by automated filtering.
It also has disadvantages in corporate environments. I work using an IMAP mail account in a corporate which has standardised on Notes. I notice that recent messages from Notes are now rendering Notes specific formatting as HTML when the recipient is a non notes user. This is actually of great benefit as people tend to use Notes to add their comments in an alternate font colour. With HTML mail I can now finally see what they are saying accurately in my Mozilla Mail client, so this is a step towards open standards.
The key difference is that KMail does this on a per message basis, whereas in Mozilla this is set once in Preferences and I suspect the same is true in Evolution. Thus looking at a HTML message I just received I get the following in a box at the top of the message;
"Note: This is an HTML message. For security reasons, only the raw HTML code is shown. If you trust the sender of this message then you can activate formatted HTML display for this message by clicking here."
The HTML code follows and a single click turns it into a fully rendered message, or an alternate click consignes it to the trash can.
It may be possible to add this as a mozilla mail / thunderbird toolbar, and as Thunderbird takes off I hope we will see this type of quick prefs bar develop to the same extent they have been developed for the mozilla browser component.
I think the purpose is to vary the hidden text to fool anti-spam systems which rely on blocking mail based on signatures of the message body.
If you send 150,000 messages which say "Free Porn Here" systems such as Britemail are going to quickly generate one signature for the mail and block most of it. If however you have the following example (using the fictional HTML HIDE tag)
Free [HIDE] from your meeting at 10:30 [/HIDE] porn [HIDE} cate suggested meeting for coffee [/HIDE] here [HIDE] I will be in work late today [/HIDE}
The message is still displayed in the browser as "Free porn here". However, filters such as those used by Mac Mail and Mozilla may not pick it up as junk because the hidden words look like real email. If you change the hidden sentences every 100 emails then the signature based spam blocking systems won't pick it up as every signature is different and (in this example) you are using real words.
One of the best solutions to this I have seen is KMail, this displays HTML mail as text and you can click a button to then render as HTML. This doesn't stop the spam, but does give you the abaility not to see many images you rather wouldn't at 10am on a Monday morning and allows you to stop web bugs (HTML code in images which can be used to indicate successful message delivery).