Enterprise editions of Linux were actually demanded by, ermmm, enterprises. The first real version of these was SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and the idea was quickly adopted by Red Hat.
Most corporations are used to having an 18 month or so upgrade cycle between major releases of Solaris and AIX, and often skip a revision, so where I work we have had lots of Solaris 2.6, mainly skipped Solaris 7 (2.7) and are now finalising upgrading everything to 8. That because we have over 8000 Solaris servers. If you had to upgrade these every 3 months in line with the desktop Linux builds you you have a complete nightmare.
Therefore you have an 18 month upgrade cycle which dosn't preclude service packs every 3 months or more frequently in terms of security fixes. It just means that binary compatibility will be guarenteed for each release for the life of that version, unlike Suse 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 etc.
It takes major effort for a vendor to certify a product like Oracle on a Linux build and in return most companies pay them well for a support contract. If the trade off is that we use an Enterprise build and they guarentee to fix problems in a certain time frame, I am happy with that.
This dosen't mean products won't run, I am happily running Sun's excellent Directory Server 5.2 on this Linux box on SuSE Linux 8.2. My production boxes are all running an Enterprise Linux build though and they seem to be working well and will be fully supported should they break at 3 in the morning.
Most banks already log phone calls, what is being added is the requirements to archive email and IM messaging.
Do a quick search for "Basel 2" or "Basel ii" for more details on this. One very interesting quote I found is;
"The Institute of International Finance has projected a total investment of US$2.25 trillion over 5 years for the 30,000 banks that will be affected, on top of systemsâ(TM) budgets, implementation costs and training. With such a huge increase in costs, this may precipitate another round of banking consolidation, especially in Asia. Basel 2 will certainly reward banks with sophisticated management and systems â" they should be able to generate higher returns on equity, and have less capital required by the market and regulators."
"Since 1999, FaceTime has been delivering instant messaging (IM) solutions for the security, management and control of IM in the enterprise.
Our integrated enterprise IM management suite of products address the challenges of:
* Network and Information Security
* Regulatory and Corporate Compliance
* Call Center Customer Service
IM Auditor has been chosen by 32 of the largest 100 financial institutions and 7 of the 8 largest U.S. banks including Bank of America and Wachovia Securities to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements."
The one thing that wouldn't be addressed is encrypted clients suched as the recently discussed Nullsoft "Waste" IM client. However, with businesses increasingly becoming addicted to IM clients and Blackberry devices, this would be a far more palatable solution than banning IM completely.
It also includes links to non - american english dictionaries, I have been using the UK english one with some builds very happily.
The version for Mozilla 1.4 Beta is already there. I use Mozilla as my only mail client at work and have been using this for over a year without any major problems. If only it could test spelling in input boxes, I could even spell check my slashdot comments:-).
Actually this is something of a joke. The Church of England is very much the State Religion in the UK and is in many ways the most gentel form of religion after perhaps Bhuddism. Generaly, I don't think all or even the majority of it's congregation believe God exists, but they do all believe that if he did exist he would drink tea (compulsary after all services) and generally behave with a general sense of British fair play. I speak as someone who attends my local CofE church as my sun is due to start at the very good attached CofE school.
Wales has very different religion (hard to explain but very good at singing) whereas the North invented Methodism (kind of christian socialism with bans on drinking smoking and gambeling, dull in some ways but also indirectly related to both the co-op and building society movements in the UK, see also Quakers)
Scotland has the seperate Church of Scotland and a number of fairly hard line Protesant religious orders (the "wee-wee-frees", from the free prespitarian(sp???) church)
In Northern Ireland, the Protestant churches tend to be much more hard line in response to the centuries of battles with the Catholic population, who are in the majority across the whole physical island but a minority in the six counties of Northern Ireland. The UDF and many associated loyalist groups have grown out of these. It is doubtful you will find many CofE churches on the Shakhill Road or in Derry or Armagh.
Muslims are required to believe a number of "Christian" prophets, including both Jesus and John the baptist, and to study the books of these prophets. In my experience most Muslims are well versed in the Bible and Christian philosophy.
The idea of exterminating non-believers is certainly not central to the Muslim religion. There are words in the Quran that do not look favourably on other religions, but a look through the Bible can reveal similar harsh words.
The problem is that all major religious works can be interpreted in many ways. There is very little that the Church of England (with no known terrorist wing) has in common with the Lebanese Christian terrorists, equally most Muslims are as far removed from Al Quida.
The problem is that hatred, misunderstanding and cynical governments can drive people of all religions into the arms of extreemist clerics. By coming out with statements like "Islam and Muslims, for whome the idea of exterminting all non-believers is CENTRAL to their religion." you are sadly perpetuating this processed, if people feel persecuted they may look to the wrong leaders for solace and understanding and reconciliation are always harder than preaching hate.
I was interested to read this article as I thought I would have a quick browse of Slashdot while taking a break from writing a huge system design document, which for the first time I am attemption to do in Open Office on Linux rather than Microsoft office. My observations are as follows;
The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.
The Excel replacement I don't think is nearly as mature. I generally use it to open other peoples Excel docuemnts on my Linux box and for this it works very well. However, when it comes to usability features for display, such as ease of splitting into panes, adding autosort or even easily hiding rows or columns it doesn't compare. All the advanced features, such as pivot tables, work much better in Excel.
Presenter and Draw are a mixed bag. I find Presenter now opens most powerpoint documents well enough to read on LInux but authoring is a different story. I tried to use draw this morning to produce a simple flowchart and it simply wasn't very intuative, doing tasks which are simple in Powerpoint such as adding text inside a shape wern't easy. Powerpoint (and all of MS office, for that matter) is very good at presenting the correct context sensative menu options when you right click on something, Star Office has some way to go in this regard.
However, my biggest problem with Star Office on Linux is font support. It simply dosen't seem to interface nicely with the other fonts installed on my Linux box, and reading all the documentation and newsgroups has helped, but it is still a chore. This is particularly apparent when converting Word or Powerpoint documents, quite frequently it will replace fairly common characters like full stops (periods) or quotes with a question mark, often making the supplied document unreadable. I find it strange that some very sophisticated conversion filters for graphics and embedded objects work well but these fail, if anyone could tell me if the book addresses these issues I would be interested to know. I have always found saving OO documents to Microsoft formats to work well.
So, in summary I am going to use OO on Linux as my primary document editor, which just leaves Windows for the occasional Powerpoint, and this book seems like a useful purchase to help with this.
Yes, this may be true for essential services such as electricity and water, but should providers have to subsidise rural areas from city profits, as happens across the world at present?
The problem seems to be that vendors are still stuck in a pricing model from the 1920's. With a decent geographic information system coupled to a pricing database, I sould be able to get my services at the cost it costs the provder to service me plus a standard profit percentage.
I am forever reading about medium sized towns in the UK which do not have access to broadband because the default supplier needs say 300 subscribers to make the service profitable but only 220 can be found to pay. If 150 were to pay double, and then the cost fell by half when over 300 subscribed, wouldn't more people be happy?
I do agree with the not for profit argument. However, this also seems to be driving innovation. People clubbing together to buy their own shared bandwidth and then working together to devise ways to distribute this seems to be the engine of growth and development in WiFi at present. Fairly soon the cable companies will have to take notice of this, so maybe the market rather than 1940's style regulation will prove the solution after all.
I would disagree. Living in the center of London, a huge number of costs are far higher based on increased demand for limited space. The obvious example is property prices, which are up to 10 times higher than in rural areas, but almost all my other services, from car insurance to school fees all suffer as a result.
Yet for some services, this centralisation should result in lower costs. For gas, electricity, water etc, a service provider can run one bundle of pipes, lines etc down the center of the road and serve around 1000 flats in my under one mile long road. Yet no economies are offered to me as opposed to someone living a rural hamlet where two miles of pipes may have to be run to serve 30 people.
Generally, this is due to some form of Government regulation or the fact the infrastructure was given away free when monopolies were privatised. No supplier ever seems to offer varying costs based on the real cost of maintaining the distance.
In London we seem to have a constant debate on how property prices are pricing essential service workers out of the capital. If we could halve the cost of utilities this may redress some of the balance. Equally, if people wanting to move to the country and work using broadband had to pay £200 per month instead of £25, this would make their calculations more economic. At the moment for new services, such as broadband, the choice seems to be have it at the standard price or we don't supply it at all. If we had genuinly flexible pricing we may then see rural professionals able to take up more of these services at an economic cost to the supplier. Even then, these costs would fall in time as supply and demand began to kick in.
" The browser 'war' was over when 'Communicator' 4 shipped, and was a bloated piece of crap."
To a certain point this is true, but this isn't the full story. Communicator 4 was an interesting product in the number of additional, non - html rendering features it shipped. One of these was live connect, which was a toolset for allowing plug - ins to interoperate, for example quicktime movies could be displayed within a VRML world. Another was inclusion of castanet software for Java Application multicast distribution, which also had a lot of promise at the time.
What Netscape forgot to do was continue to develop their HTML rendering engine, support for DHTML was erratic, their layers implemetation strange and wasn't accepted as the standard and even basic HTML was only displayed once the whole page had loaded and had to be reloaded every time the window was resized, truely awful.
However, Netscape then made some very, very awful decisions which essentially killed the browser off. They actually fixed the page draw and resize bug using their old code base 5 years ago but this was never released into the Netscape 4 releases, where the code was effectivly frozen for 3 years. The complete rewrite of the rendering engine as part of Mozilla showed progress after a year, but a decision was taken not to release at this stage, even into a Netscape 4 update, until the product was 100% ready with all the XUL etc. complete. To compound the misery, after about 4 years they lost their nerve and released Netscape 6 as a production product. This was much better than 4 but didn't deserve a point release of its own given the remaining bugs. Netscape 7 is actually quite nice but why use it over a mozilla spin off or a KHTML based browser (written by a very small team in a fraction of the time) is anyone's guess.
However, I miss where Netscape were going with Plug Ins. 5 years ago I worked at the Science Museum in London and we were looking very closely at VRML worlds and Quicktime VR movies of exhibits. A lot of this innovation seems to have disappered with the loss of the old Netscape. Nowadays I add Java and possibly Flash and I'm done. Although mozilla extensions are fantastic I can't see them completeing with the 200+ plugs ins we had in Netscape's hayday.
For those without Flash, or who want to see an alternative selection to print out, the WPO site itself has a page of them here.
These also seem vulnrable to brute force computation, although they are a lot harder than the Flash puzzles linked above. (the solutions are also provided:-) )
Actually I think sound came out earlier than that, I was born in the late sixties and destinctly remember hearing ABBA records in the 70's, and I have even heard reports that sound was recorded in the 50's and 60's.
There seem to be about 100 variations of this quote, although all the others managed not to confuse Sweden and Switzerland.
I found a 2001 article (Google Cache) on the variations of this quote which appeared in the press and internet. The quote is attributes to Charles Barkley.
"You know that times are stange when the best rapper in the world is white, the best golfer in the world is black, the Americas cup is held by landlocked Sweden, the French are accusing the Americans of arrogance and Germany is steadfstly refusing to go to war."
I agree with this decision. The reporting of this war has verged on pornography, with too many reporters getting excited about bombs and tanks and too little attention being paid to the human cost. They are right not to ban it, but right not to promote the joy of conflict at this time either.
While I agree with this, it is important to remember that this is only a first implementation which many navigation options could be built upon.
Consider KDE, at the moment I can browse my filesystem from the command line or by opening folders which correspond to the filesystem, the default one on my machine opens/home/alistair/ which has subdirectories corresponding to the classic "documents", "applications", "temp" etc.
Suppose we add additional folders. One could have subfolders of all document types on my system, so opening it would show folders called "docs", "xls", "jpg", "html" etc. These would list the documents irrespective of where they are found on the actual HFS system. Alternativly I could have folders by author, by date or by category and all could exist in parrallel.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been looking for a document which I know I edited in the previous week but can't remember if I saved it in StarOffice or Word format or in temp or documents or drafts. In the end I usually use find but it would be nice to simply navigate by clicking folders to see the status of all revisions on those days.
Because every folder is virtual, it should be easy to combine and refine the views on the fly. So if viewing by date you could highlight three folders and display their contents together as a new folder. If you like this view you could then save it as a desktop folder. Conversly, if a folder is too large, click a new view button which would sort its contents into virtual subfolders, for example to sort your ".doc" documents by author.
For too long browing filesystems in graphical interfaces has meant adding a visual metaphor to "ls" or "dir" and their associated options, and this combined with a graphic front end to "find" seems to do the trick on Windows, KDE, Gnome and (to a lesser extent) Mac OS X. This application gives us the option to move beyond this, full credit to the author.
Re:Arthur C. Clarkes Geostationary satellites
on
Science Fact From Fiction
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· Score: 5, Informative
For people who wish to read the report itself, the London Science Museum has images of the entire Wireless World article available here.
Personally, I think he got the most important points correct in anticipating the advantages of a Geostationary orbit. I suspect he suggested only three of them due to the huge cost of building them and he does show (correctly) that these three satellites would cover the major regions of "Africa and Europe", "China and Oceana" and "The Americas" (page three) while allowing point to point communication between the three satellites.
True, he did predict huge manned stations powered by valves with people to replace the valves but it seems harsh to critisise him for not inventing Moores Law 20 years early. Much of the rest of the text is both valid and visionary. For some other examples of his work the site has a short information page here.
While browsing the site you may also want to look at the Quicktime VR movie of the inside of Apollo 10. The Science Museums Space Gallery has always been one of my favourites and this is a nice attept to put some of it online (plus I helped in the making of this a few years back:-) ).
Re:Groupware possibilities...
on
Largo Loving Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I fully agree with this. I run an LDAP infrastructure as you describe for a large multi national ( > 100,000 staff ) and after 3 years in production we now have over 100 applications taking and feeding employee and contractor data to it. The nice thing is that an incresing number of applications are now LDAP aware, from IMAP and POP mail server to around 9 different LDAP authentication modules for Apache, but increasingly products such as Notes and Network devices can use LDAP authentication, as can OSs such as Solaris.
Once you have a web authentication sorted out, it is then relativly simple to have a corporate directory on the web which allows users to keep their own details up to date, and once this is part of the company culture, you would be suprised as to the quality of this self service data. I have found that this then starts a "virtuous circle" of improving data quality, the more applications trust this data and feed from it, the more users are then reminded to keep the data up to date, the better the data quality becomes and hence the more applications use the data...
If you make your feed system email, then you even have an instant self service password system, since to update their details users can have a temporary password emailed to them, and you will always have their email address.
The return on investment can be fantastic, our most recent project was to replace the data maintained for 50,000 helpdesk users with the (mostly self service) data from the LDAP directory, and this is only one of many similar projects; so give it a go, you may be pleasenly suprised.
This isn't true, in fact it has to be in our interests that as many companies as possible are competing in this market place so the rather immature technology is further improved.
The key thing is not the number of vendors, but how single sign on systems and user repositories interoperate so that trust credentials are passed between system to enable single sign on between different vendors products.
The key initiative behind this is SAML the Security Assertion Markup Language. All the main vendors of SSO (RSA, IBM, Netegrity) are supporting this standard.
The major vendors had a bake off recently to test interoperability which I undersand went very well, with all 12 product successfully passing credentials between each other. I couldn't find much about it, other than a list of the participating vendors which can be seen here.
I just remember seeing it in "The Net" and pointing it out to my wife, who promptly replied with a response which means that I am still entitled to read "News for Nerds" sites...
In the movie "The Net" staring Sandra Bullock, the IP address of "23.75.345.200" is shown various times in the movie. Of course, it is impossible because "345" exceeds an 8-bit value (max=255). They should have used a 192.0.2.x address instead
I wonder if dotted quads > 255 are going to be the holywood equivelent of the annoying 555 area codes in US telephone numbers (interstingly, here in the UK Film and TV companies can get fake but genuine looking telephone numbers from OFTEL for showing on screen, so we don't have the same problem).
This seems to be having problems with the Linux build at present but two other projects linked from this page are Mycroft which has plug ins to allow you to search over 170 different search engines (check it out) and Easysearch which allows you to search google and others.
While exploring the mozdev site, check out Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus (both under Optimoz) and the Multizilla toolbar. These, for me, have made browsing fun and efficient once again.
If you are keen, there is an easy to follow tutorial on building your own toolbars at; Building a toolbar for Netscape 7 (applies to Mozilla too). I used this to write a toolbar to search our Corporate Directory, Intranet and Google, It took me three days to write from scratch but is now quite widely used.
You shouldn't have to install mouse gestures etc. as root, as long as you installed Mozilla as a non root user. This morning I downloaded mozilla and installed as myself, and then installed Multizilla, Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus, A spellchecker and my own toolbar, all as this local user.
Plug-ins such as Flash and Java can be restored as described above. Mozdev extensions such as mouse gestures tend to write their data to the ~mozillainstalldir~/chrome directory. You can try backing this up before the new install and then restoring it, it should work between 1.2 and 1.21 and is something I always do when installing a nightly release of Multizilla or similar.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I can't see this bug on either 1.2 or 1.21 on Windows or Linux. Running KDE is dual screen mode I normally set Mozilla to open one window for email on the right hand screen which I attach to all desktops and keep a web browser window open on the right hand screen, generally opening only one window since I discovered the wonderful Multizilla extension.
I do think the mozilla mail client is one of the most underrated part of the suite. It's IMAP compatability puts Notes and (to a lesser extent) Outlook and Outlook express to shame. The new filter after after the fact functionality is very useful, I have around 10,000 emails in an archived mailbox on my local machine which I have finally been able to quickly organise into useful categories. I even managed to find a UK english spellchecker for it the other day...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
or perhaps "Was ist Red Hat?" since us good Europeans selected SuSE rather than Red Hat in this instance.
Enterprise editions of Linux were actually demanded by, ermmm, enterprises. The first real version of these was SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and the idea was quickly adopted by Red Hat.
Most corporations are used to having an 18 month or so upgrade cycle between major releases of Solaris and AIX, and often skip a revision, so where I work we have had lots of Solaris 2.6, mainly skipped Solaris 7 (2.7) and are now finalising upgrading everything to 8. That because we have over 8000 Solaris servers. If you had to upgrade these every 3 months in line with the desktop Linux builds you you have a complete nightmare.
Therefore you have an 18 month upgrade cycle which dosn't preclude service packs every 3 months or more frequently in terms of security fixes. It just means that binary compatibility will be guarenteed for each release for the life of that version, unlike Suse 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 etc.
It takes major effort for a vendor to certify a product like Oracle on a Linux build and in return most companies pay them well for a support contract. If the trade off is that we use an Enterprise build and they guarentee to fix problems in a certain time frame, I am happy with that.
This dosen't mean products won't run, I am happily running Sun's excellent Directory Server 5.2 on this Linux box on SuSE Linux 8.2. My production boxes are all running an Enterprise Linux build though and they seem to be working well and will be fully supported should they break at 3 in the morning.
Most banks already log phone calls, what is being added is the requirements to archive email and IM messaging.
Do a quick search for "Basel 2" or "Basel ii" for more details on this. One very interesting quote I found is;
"The Institute of International Finance has projected a total investment of US$2.25 trillion over 5 years for the 30,000 banks that will be affected, on top of systemsâ(TM) budgets, implementation costs and training. With such a huge increase in costs, this may precipitate another round of banking consolidation, especially in Asia. Basel 2 will certainly reward banks with sophisticated management and systems â" they should be able to generate higher returns on equity, and have less capital required by the market and regulators."
From the facetime.com website;
"Since 1999, FaceTime has been delivering instant messaging (IM) solutions for the security, management and control of IM in the enterprise.
Our integrated enterprise IM management suite of products address the challenges of:
* Network and Information Security
* Regulatory and Corporate Compliance
* Call Center Customer Service
IM Auditor has been chosen by 32 of the largest 100 financial institutions and 7 of the 8 largest U.S. banks including Bank of America and Wachovia Securities to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements."
The one thing that wouldn't be addressed is encrypted clients suched as the recently discussed Nullsoft "Waste" IM client. However, with businesses increasingly becoming addicted to IM clients and Blackberry devices, this would be a far more palatable solution than banning IM completely.
You can download a spellchecker for Mozilla here;
:-).
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
It also includes links to non - american english dictionaries, I have been using the UK english one with some builds very happily.
The version for Mozilla 1.4 Beta is already there. I use Mozilla as my only mail client at work and have been using this for over a year without any major problems. If only it could test spelling in input boxes, I could even spell check my slashdot comments
Actually this is something of a joke. The Church of England is very much the State Religion in the UK and is in many ways the most gentel form of religion after perhaps Bhuddism. Generaly, I don't think all or even the majority of it's congregation believe God exists, but they do all believe that if he did exist he would drink tea (compulsary after all services) and generally behave with a general sense of British fair play. I speak as someone who attends my local CofE church as my sun is due to start at the very good attached CofE school.
Wales has very different religion (hard to explain but very good at singing) whereas the North invented Methodism (kind of christian socialism with bans on drinking smoking and gambeling, dull in some ways but also indirectly related to both the co-op and building society movements in the UK, see also Quakers)
Scotland has the seperate Church of Scotland and a number of fairly hard line Protesant religious orders (the "wee-wee-frees", from the free prespitarian(sp???) church)
In Northern Ireland, the Protestant churches tend to be much more hard line in response to the centuries of battles with the Catholic population, who are in the majority across the whole physical island but a minority in the six counties of Northern Ireland. The UDF and many associated loyalist groups have grown out of these. It is doubtful you will find many CofE churches on the Shakhill Road or in Derry or Armagh.
Muslims are required to believe a number of "Christian" prophets, including both Jesus and John the baptist, and to study the books of these prophets. In my experience most Muslims are well versed in the Bible and Christian philosophy.
The idea of exterminating non-believers is certainly not central to the Muslim religion. There are words in the Quran that do not look favourably on other religions, but a look through the Bible can reveal similar harsh words.
The problem is that all major religious works can be interpreted in many ways. There is very little that the Church of England (with no known terrorist wing) has in common with the Lebanese Christian terrorists, equally most Muslims are as far removed from Al Quida.
The problem is that hatred, misunderstanding and cynical governments can drive people of all religions into the arms of extreemist clerics. By coming out with statements like "Islam and Muslims, for whome the idea of exterminting all non-believers is CENTRAL to their religion." you are sadly perpetuating this processed, if people feel persecuted they may look to the wrong leaders for solace and understanding and reconciliation are always harder than preaching hate.
I was interested to read this article as I thought I would have a quick browse of Slashdot while taking a break from writing a huge system design document, which for the first time I am attemption to do in Open Office on Linux rather than Microsoft office. My observations are as follows;
The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.
The Excel replacement I don't think is nearly as mature. I generally use it to open other peoples Excel docuemnts on my Linux box and for this it works very well. However, when it comes to usability features for display, such as ease of splitting into panes, adding autosort or even easily hiding rows or columns it doesn't compare. All the advanced features, such as pivot tables, work much better in Excel.
Presenter and Draw are a mixed bag. I find Presenter now opens most powerpoint documents well enough to read on LInux but authoring is a different story. I tried to use draw this morning to produce a simple flowchart and it simply wasn't very intuative, doing tasks which are simple in Powerpoint such as adding text inside a shape wern't easy. Powerpoint (and all of MS office, for that matter) is very good at presenting the correct context sensative menu options when you right click on something, Star Office has some way to go in this regard.
However, my biggest problem with Star Office on Linux is font support. It simply dosen't seem to interface nicely with the other fonts installed on my Linux box, and reading all the documentation and newsgroups has helped, but it is still a chore. This is particularly apparent when converting Word or Powerpoint documents, quite frequently it will replace fairly common characters like full stops (periods) or quotes with a question mark, often making the supplied document unreadable. I find it strange that some very sophisticated conversion filters for graphics and embedded objects work well but these fail, if anyone could tell me if the book addresses these issues I would be interested to know. I have always found saving OO documents to Microsoft formats to work well.
So, in summary I am going to use OO on Linux as my primary document editor, which just leaves Windows for the occasional Powerpoint, and this book seems like a useful purchase to help with this.
Yes, this may be true for essential services such as electricity and water, but should providers have to subsidise rural areas from city profits, as happens across the world at present?
The problem seems to be that vendors are still stuck in a pricing model from the 1920's. With a decent geographic information system coupled to a pricing database, I sould be able to get my services at the cost it costs the provder to service me plus a standard profit percentage.
I am forever reading about medium sized towns in the UK which do not have access to broadband because the default supplier needs say 300 subscribers to make the service profitable but only 220 can be found to pay. If 150 were to pay double, and then the cost fell by half when over 300 subscribed, wouldn't more people be happy?
I do agree with the not for profit argument. However, this also seems to be driving innovation. People clubbing together to buy their own shared bandwidth and then working together to devise ways to distribute this seems to be the engine of growth and development in WiFi at present. Fairly soon the cable companies will have to take notice of this, so maybe the market rather than 1940's style regulation will prove the solution after all.
I would disagree. Living in the center of London, a huge number of costs are far higher based on increased demand for limited space. The obvious example is property prices, which are up to 10 times higher than in rural areas, but almost all my other services, from car insurance to school fees all suffer as a result.
Yet for some services, this centralisation should result in lower costs. For gas, electricity, water etc, a service provider can run one bundle of pipes, lines etc down the center of the road and serve around 1000 flats in my under one mile long road. Yet no economies are offered to me as opposed to someone living a rural hamlet where two miles of pipes may have to be run to serve 30 people.
Generally, this is due to some form of Government regulation or the fact the infrastructure was given away free when monopolies were privatised. No supplier ever seems to offer varying costs based on the real cost of maintaining the distance.
In London we seem to have a constant debate on how property prices are pricing essential service workers out of the capital. If we could halve the cost of utilities this may redress some of the balance. Equally, if people wanting to move to the country and work using broadband had to pay £200 per month instead of £25, this would make their calculations more economic. At the moment for new services, such as broadband, the choice seems to be have it at the standard price or we don't supply it at all. If we had genuinly flexible pricing we may then see rural professionals able to take up more of these services at an economic cost to the supplier. Even then, these costs would fall in time as supply and demand began to kick in.
" The browser 'war' was over when 'Communicator' 4 shipped, and was a bloated piece of crap."
To a certain point this is true, but this isn't the full story. Communicator 4 was an interesting product in the number of additional, non - html rendering features it shipped. One of these was live connect, which was a toolset for allowing plug - ins to interoperate, for example quicktime movies could be displayed within a VRML world. Another was inclusion of castanet software for Java Application multicast distribution, which also had a lot of promise at the time.
What Netscape forgot to do was continue to develop their HTML rendering engine, support for DHTML was erratic, their layers implemetation strange and wasn't accepted as the standard and even basic HTML was only displayed once the whole page had loaded and had to be reloaded every time the window was resized, truely awful.
However, Netscape then made some very, very awful decisions which essentially killed the browser off. They actually fixed the page draw and resize bug using their old code base 5 years ago but this was never released into the Netscape 4 releases, where the code was effectivly frozen for 3 years. The complete rewrite of the rendering engine as part of Mozilla showed progress after a year, but a decision was taken not to release at this stage, even into a Netscape 4 update, until the product was 100% ready with all the XUL etc. complete. To compound the misery, after about 4 years they lost their nerve and released Netscape 6 as a production product. This was much better than 4 but didn't deserve a point release of its own given the remaining bugs. Netscape 7 is actually quite nice but why use it over a mozilla spin off or a KHTML based browser (written by a very small team in a fraction of the time) is anyone's guess.
However, I miss where Netscape were going with Plug Ins. 5 years ago I worked at the Science Museum in London and we were looking very closely at VRML worlds and Quicktime VR movies of exhibits. A lot of this innovation seems to have disappered with the loss of the old Netscape. Nowadays I add Java and possibly Flash and I'm done. Although mozilla extensions are fantastic I can't see them completeing with the 200+ plugs ins we had in Netscape's hayday.
For those without Flash, or who want to see an alternative selection to print out, the WPO site itself has a page of them here.
:-) )
These also seem vulnrable to brute force computation, although they are a lot harder than the Flash puzzles linked above. (the solutions are also provided
Actually I think sound came out earlier than that, I was born in the late sixties and destinctly remember hearing ABBA records in the 70's, and I have even heard reports that sound was recorded in the 50's and 60's.
There seem to be about 100 variations of this quote, although all the others managed not to confuse Sweden and Switzerland.
I found a 2001 article (Google Cache) on the variations of this quote which appeared in the press and internet. The quote is attributes to Charles Barkley.
My mistake, sorry.
By way of apology here is a link to a mildly amusing Picture of President Bush.
A quote I saw the other day
"You know that times are stange when the best rapper in the world is white, the best golfer in the world is black, the Americas cup is held by landlocked Sweden, the French are accusing the Americans of arrogance and Germany is steadfstly refusing to go to war."
I agree with this decision. The reporting of this war has verged on pornography, with too many reporters getting excited about bombs and tanks and too little attention being paid to the human cost. They are right not to ban it, but right not to promote the joy of conflict at this time either.
Consider KDE, at the moment I can browse my filesystem from the command line or by opening folders which correspond to the filesystem, the default one on my machine opens /home/alistair/ which has subdirectories corresponding to the classic "documents", "applications", "temp" etc.
Suppose we add additional folders. One could have subfolders of all document types on my system, so opening it would show folders called "docs", "xls", "jpg", "html" etc. These would list the documents irrespective of where they are found on the actual HFS system. Alternativly I could have folders by author, by date or by category and all could exist in parrallel.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been looking for a document which I know I edited in the previous week but can't remember if I saved it in StarOffice or Word format or in temp or documents or drafts. In the end I usually use find but it would be nice to simply navigate by clicking folders to see the status of all revisions on those days.
Because every folder is virtual, it should be easy to combine and refine the views on the fly. So if viewing by date you could highlight three folders and display their contents together as a new folder. If you like this view you could then save it as a desktop folder.
Conversly, if a folder is too large, click a new view button which would sort its contents into virtual subfolders, for example to sort your ".doc" documents by author.
For too long browing filesystems in graphical interfaces has meant adding a visual metaphor to "ls" or "dir" and their associated options, and this combined with a graphic front end to "find" seems to do the trick on Windows, KDE, Gnome and (to a lesser extent) Mac OS X. This application gives us the option to move beyond this, full credit to the author.
Personally, I think he got the most important points correct in anticipating the advantages of a Geostationary orbit. I suspect he suggested only three of them due to the huge cost of building them and he does show (correctly) that these three satellites would cover the major regions of "Africa and Europe", "China and Oceana" and "The Americas" (page three) while allowing point to point communication between the three satellites.
True, he did predict huge manned stations powered by valves with people to replace the valves but it seems harsh to critisise him for not inventing Moores Law 20 years early. Much of the rest of the text is both valid and visionary. For some other examples of his work the site has a short information page here.
While browsing the site you may also want to look at the Quicktime VR movie of the inside of Apollo 10. The Science Museums Space Gallery has always been one of my favourites and this is a nice attept to put some of it online (plus I helped in the making of this a few years back
I fully agree with this. I run an LDAP infrastructure as you describe for a large multi national ( > 100,000 staff ) and after 3 years in production we now have over 100 applications taking and feeding employee and contractor data to it. The nice thing is that an incresing number of applications are now LDAP aware, from IMAP and POP mail server to around 9 different LDAP authentication modules for Apache, but increasingly products such as Notes and Network devices can use LDAP authentication, as can OSs such as Solaris.
Once you have a web authentication sorted out, it is then relativly simple to have a corporate directory on the web which allows users to keep their own details up to date, and once this is part of the company culture, you would be suprised as to the quality of this self service data. I have found that this then starts a "virtuous circle" of improving data quality, the more applications trust this data and feed from it, the more users are then reminded to keep the data up to date, the better the data quality becomes and hence the more applications use the data...
If you make your feed system email, then you even have an instant self service password system, since to update their details users can have a temporary password emailed to them, and you will always have their email address.
The return on investment can be fantastic, our most recent project was to replace the data maintained for 50,000 helpdesk users with the (mostly self service) data from the LDAP directory, and this is only one of many similar projects; so give it a go, you may be pleasenly suprised.
This isn't true, in fact it has to be in our interests that as many companies as possible are competing in this market place so the rather immature technology is further improved.
The key thing is not the number of vendors, but how single sign on systems and user repositories interoperate so that trust credentials are passed between system to enable single sign on between different vendors products.
The key initiative behind this is SAML the Security Assertion Markup Language. All the main vendors of SSO (RSA, IBM, Netegrity) are supporting this standard.
The major vendors had a bake off recently to test interoperability which I undersand went very well, with all 12 product successfully passing credentials between each other. I couldn't find much about it, other than a list of the participating vendors which can be seen here.
Well spotted, I apologise, the actual URL is
http://www.slipups.com/items/2513.html
I just remember seeing it in "The Net" and pointing it out to my wife, who promptly replied with a response which means that I am still entitled to read "News for Nerds" sites...
I wonder if dotted quads > 255 are going to be the holywood equivelent of the annoying 555 area codes in US telephone numbers (interstingly, here in the UK Film and TV companies can get fake but genuine looking telephone numbers from OFTEL for showing on screen, so we don't have the same problem).
There is an excellent browser toolbar for mozilla which emulates the googlebar at;
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
This seems to be having problems with the Linux build at present but two other projects linked from this page are Mycroft which has plug ins to allow you to search over 170 different search engines (check it out) and Easysearch which allows you to search google and others.
While exploring the mozdev site, check out Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus (both under Optimoz) and the Multizilla toolbar. These, for me, have made browsing fun and efficient once again.
If you are keen, there is an easy to follow tutorial on building your own toolbars at;
Building a toolbar for Netscape 7 (applies to Mozilla too). I used this to write a toolbar to search our Corporate Directory, Intranet and Google, It took me three days to write from scratch but is now quite widely used.
You shouldn't have to install mouse gestures etc. as root, as long as you installed Mozilla as a non root user. This morning I downloaded mozilla and installed as myself, and then installed Multizilla, Mouse Gestures, Pie Menus, A spellchecker and my own toolbar, all as this local user.
Plug-ins such as Flash and Java can be restored as described above. Mozdev extensions such as mouse gestures tend to write their data to the ~mozillainstalldir~/chrome directory. You can try backing this up before the new install and then restoring it, it should work between 1.2 and 1.21 and is something I always do when installing a nightly release of Multizilla or similar.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I can't see this bug on either 1.2 or 1.21 on Windows or Linux. Running KDE is dual screen mode I normally set Mozilla to open one window for email on the right hand screen which I attach to all desktops and keep a web browser window open on the right hand screen, generally opening only one window since I discovered the wonderful Multizilla extension.
... :-)
I do think the mozilla mail client is one of the most underrated part of the suite. It's IMAP compatability puts Notes and (to a lesser extent) Outlook and Outlook express to shame. The new filter after after the fact functionality is very useful, I have around 10,000 emails in an archived mailbox on my local machine which I have finally been able to quickly organise into useful categories. I even managed to find a UK english spellchecker for it the other day