It is easy to screw around when you have a laptop and the screen is faced away from teacher -- very easy to just look at some webpage. My favorite learning aid is a voice recorder. Then you don't have to pay much attention the first time, just show up -- invaluable for test review and the like, especially if teacher is a mumbler or poor speaker of English. Of course, the whole mode of instruction where a bunch of kids sit in front of teacher and write notes seems to be getting a bit antiquated.
The worst problems I have are with Powerpoint slides using OO Impress. For instance, it likes to mangle bullet points and never seems to get the sizes quite right. It also doesn't seem to handle all of the different ways that PP can imbed images and sometimes they don't show up at all.
That said, PDFs are a much friendlier way of distributing "slides" unless you need animations for some reason.
Note: Only logged because AC is giving me formkey errors.
This isn't a very well-informed question. Beowulf does not specify a particular platform.
From the Beowulf FAQ:
[Beowulf is] a kind of high-performance massively parallel computer built
primarily out of commodity hardware components, running a free-software
operating system like Linux or FreeBSD, interconnected by a private
high-speed network.
Please mod accordingly. Let's not waste Becker's time or one of the ten questions on ill-informed pablum refuted in the first question of an FAQ.
probably way too many but what the hey...
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Please describe the general process you follow for writing and testing ethernet drivers on linux.
A couple more specific questions...
1) What approach do you take in creating drivers for cards which have inaccurate or insufficient documentation?
2) What tools do you use for debugging and and/or "discovering" the workings of old/obscure/poorly documented hardware?
3) What skillset, i.e. languages, knowledge & tools, do you consider necessary to perform the kind of coding you routinely do (outside of hacker wizardry and C mastery)?
I am also wondering how you got started writing ethernet drivers and clustering software for linux. What lead you down this specific path rather than other aspects of kernel/OS development?
I don't understand why a more cyberpunkish series set here on earth a la Neuromancer wouldn't be a better, cooler, "darker" (whatever) concept. Suppose Fox already has this , but its kind of, well, cut-rate.
I'm surprised that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have not been mentioned. They are probably the two most influential early science fiction writers.
H.G....
Island of Doctor Moreau: Predicts genetic engineering.;)
War of the Worlds: Aliens, flying saucers and the like...not exactly a prediction, but it does cover some modern "interests," a la X-Files and, uh, Battlefield Earth (?).
Time Machine: Again, not a prediction but a current concern of many modern minds such as Stephen Hawking and popular culture like Timecop, Back to the Future and Quantum Leap.
The World Set Free: Predicted the nuclear bomb and the resulting arms race and stalemate.
Jules...
20,000 Leagues: Deep-sea submersibles!
Around the World in Eighty Days: Rapid transmit..hehe.
From the Earth to the Moon: Space travel.
Paris in the Twentieth Century: Never read it, but I heard some of the predictions are quite accurate.
Tbe problem stems from the basic lack of data tagging standardization on the internet. HTML is formative rather than indicative of the types of data that are present. While META keywords are useful, validation is a problem using this method, given the huge number of pages and the propensity of some webmasters to fill this section with irrelavent garbage.
The main power technique, at least on google, is utilizing quotes and AND/OR to limit search results. Rather than spewing a line of text, enclosing specific "phrases" often gives more accurate results.
Then again, I have been able to simply cut n' paste error messages into the groups.google.com form and immediately receive accurate, useful hits. I think that though the internet and webpages and generally disorganized and uncentralized, an outside entity can impose order given enough bandwidth, time, energy and intelligence. In the future, web services, probably based on CORBA and SOAP, will allow sites to return messages to searchers or indexing services, thus doing away with a lot of the mystery in the current system.
All that said, I have had excellent luck with google finding about 95% of all the information I have searched for in the past couple months, showing that a well-written spider and intelligent classification and rating can circumvent the problem of so much untagged, nebulous information.
The internet is something like the world's largest library where anyone can insert a book and random organizers may (if they wish!) go through and make lists, hashes and indexes of the information for their own card catalogs. Right now, each search service maintains its own separate list! The crawler is like a super-fast librarian who can puruse the book. The coming paradigm will be fewer, more accurate and useful catalogs along with books that "insert themselves" into these schemes intelligently and discretely after a validation of informational content.
I have been telecommuting for about a week now, and I love it. I was working in New York, and when I decided to leave and live with the parents for a while in Illinois to save money and escape from general East Coast craziness, my employer asked if I would like to stay on. They sent me home with two, slightly older Pentiums and have said they will pay for my cable modem access to boot.
Given that I no longer talk with the boss and warm the chair, I am feeling more pressure to produce now that I am located a thousand or more miles away. Think about it; one can often give the impression of doing work simply by being an active presence in the office. With telecommuting, the only way to show productivity is with e-mails, phone calls and actual files sent back and forth. I am anticipating that I will be called on to do more work in order to maintain my position.
Setting up the home network, however, has been a pain in the @ss! We need to rewire the coax, so I can have an office in the non-flood-prone area of the house, plus I am still in need of a router. I miss the LAN, especially the two fast laser printers, my file shares and three machines of my own in different locations.
After Congress gave broadcasters public airwaves worth $70 billion -- or far more -- on the condition that they would return their analog spectrum to the public in a timely fashion, they now want to keep both, auction one off and pocket the proceeds!
Reeks of typical American corporate machinations.
1) Get something for the government for free / dirt cheap.
2) Go back on the contract / agreement.
3) Make bucketloads of cash.
4) Government (and taxpayers) suck it up
With analog TV, digital TV, satellite TV, cellphones, emergency services, police and fire communications, etc., we have a serious shortage of spectrum.
Rather than a a shortage of bandwidth, I think the true problem in the States is a lack of decent, informed, relatively unbiased regulation headed by the Fed and too many interested parties such as corporations with a lot of money and lawyers.
What's all this about the paperclip? You must be using Office 97, because I don't think I've seen him but once in 2000, and that was before I told him to begone permanently.
I like to malign Microsoft for their foul tactics and sometimes equally repugnant software just as much as most of you, but I believe the office suite is an excellent bundled software package. The Excel, Word and Outlook components are industry standards for their software types. Access, Frontpage and Powerpoint are closer to second-tier in my mind but have come in handy on a lot of occasions. Access is a decent, if highly outdated, desktop database package good for whipping up quick reports, testing SQL queries and creating simple vb forms. Powerpoint is probably the most highly used presentation software. Frontpage, well, let's not go into that.
What I like most is the built-in VBA scripting support in Microsoft Office; each application gets its own object model, sometimes several of them as in the case of MS Access. Since all Office apps implements a COM-based architecture, they can automate each other, so Excel can pipe data to Word, Access to Excel, ecetera. This comes in handy when creating reports, porting data or just performing general office chores.
Here is some sample pseudo-code to print a report from an Access database:
dim app
set app = new access.application
app.open("c:\my_database.mdb") // next line calls a module function
app.print_report(report_name)
app.close
I was not able to find out anything about support for scripting in StarOffice from this rather skimpy article, and I would be grateful if someone could enlighten me (escaping to shell, python or perl scripts doesn't count either). Modern applications, especially integrated suites, should be able to interoperate using each other's object models. Perhaps this is another reason for O2k's dominance.
Everyone should check out ad papers such as Loot (if you live in the NYC area) if they are scavenging for gear. I have seen others in the Midwest that come out weekly, and you can get great deals from people who are upgrading or just want to get rid of older equipment. Although I myself haven't bought components from these sources, I have seen pages and pages of ads for cheaply priced older equipment. And remember, you can always bargain them down. Another recent source has been all those dot com's going under!
A lot of my older gear breaks quickly, and sometimes I do it myself. The older hard drives tend to crash, and once that happens, what use is a diskless 386 with 8 mb ram? I tend to take them apart and make stacks of strange computer gear. Two Pentiums that I once had got themselves smashed by crashing everytime I tried to put on Red Hat Linux or Windows. The older and less "used" a system is, the more likely that it will be used in some sort of geeky "experimentation" like hooking it up to a stereo, phone, radio or other electrical gear or installing an obscure, barely tested Unix kernel or alternative OS. This makes it more likely that the poor, over-the-hill machine will meet its demise due to power surged fried circuits or nuked hard disk!
I've got a 486 laptop with a 5" screen. Now what am I going to use that for? Windows 3.1, whew-hew!
Keep some of the useful stuff like soundcards, NIC's, RAM, floppy and hard drives and trash the rest. Never know when that stuff might come in handy. With storage at an all-time low, I can't see too much value in keeping those 500 MB disk drives around; they're just going to crash and make you mad later, anyways. I'd say any motherboard below Pentium is not worth keeping unless you have a lot of patience, an older OS and/or a dedicated task for it to perform, such as routing or firewalling. Even then, the low cost of gear like a Linksys router kind of makes you want to buy something small, useful and well-engineered rather than use an old, clunky x86 with extra NIC's.
Regarding your first comment, I conceed that Oracle and SQL Server are certainly appropriate in an enterprise environment, but they are not usually the most cost-effective solution for small businesses that can do just fine with a solid rollout of Linux servers running Apache and an architecture written in perl, python and/or php, giving most of the functionality of the equivalent MS solution involving SQL Server or (I pity you) Access, ASP, visual basic and either NT or 2000 Server, and at a fraction of the cost. Also, I have found visual basic to be slower than python and perl at string-handling, among other tasks, in addition to not providing a full, appropriate function-set for building web apps without add-on libraries.
Just a thought, but configuring Windows for security might mean ripping out the guts of the operating system if you talk to some noted security experts . Microsoft products have recently shown major insecurities in their fundamental operation; IIS buffer overflow and unauthorized program execution errors in the code that accepts URL's is a fundamental flaw that Apache, AFAIK, has not been vulnerable to on even close to the same level or frequency.
I totally agree with your last point but does this necessarily come down to operating system choice? Desktop software surely limits Linux on that end, but for mid to low-demand internet applications, Linux is a superior, cheaper option. This site , widely considered by many developers as one of the best on the internet, was created using free tools such as perl and php, not Microsoft technologies.
Technological success (not economic, which is a whole other issue) is more a function of the quality of your software and the skill of the support/operating personnel. A Linux roll-out without proper support, money and forethought will certainly cause major problems, but ditto for Microsoft.
The Linux phenomenom, like most modern cultural movements, has been accompanied by an inordinate amount of hype, false promises and commercialism. This is no reason to dismiss it as a fad or placebo and discount the technical and economic reasons for its recent visibility in both the technical and popular consciousnesses.
Simply comparing the Microsoft platform with the closest Linux-based counterpart should give some indication of the reasons that Linux is seen in some circles as a viable alternative to the aforementioned platform.
The cost of Windows 2000 Server is upwards of $1000 dollars / copy plus the huge cost of additional programs such as the BackOffice suite and SQL Server Enterprise Edition. A Linux Server distribution costs you once and you can distribute that single copy to as many machines as you desire. In addition, quality tools such as PostgreSQL, php, perl, python and apache are not only free for the taking but enjoy a huge, worldwide development community of devoted users who churn out improvements, tips and free software.
The Windows code base is proprietary and closed source while Linux kernel code is open-sourced and modifiable under a fairly generous license.
If you have Windows, your operating systems support is generally beholden to one company that has been shown to be monopolistic, self-centered and concerned mostly with the profiteering rather than quality software. With Linux, there are options ranging from homegrown support and development to support by the first IT company, IBM and into small support-oriented shops such as Red Hat and VA Linux. In addition, one can choose from a range of different distributions according to organizational needs. Witness the recent adoption of Linux by animation studios as a platform for development.
The majority of Windows software is closed-source and expensive, while most Linux-ware is free and open-source.
Linux, configured correctly, is a relatively secure operating system, while Windows has been shown to have basic flaws in its security mechanisms.
So there is more than just some wordplay going-on. Linux seems to have certain advantages that the major competition lacks.
The record companies achieved their dominance through the exploitation of solid media, including tapes, records, CD's and eight-tracks. The digitization of music formats has now turned against them, as a copies are no longer second-rate, like a cassette of an LP, but replications of bit-level information with little to no signal degradation.
Even the implementation of schemes to scramble or degrade the signal for copies is ultimately futile. To paraphrase the opinion of Emmanuel Goldstein from his WBAI show, "If you can play it back, it is decoded, and you can copy it." It does not matter what level of encryption is implemented for digital music. The playback necessitates a conversion to an easily copyable form, i.e. sound waves, which can be reencoded in various ways, from placing a microphone next to the playback advice to copying the signal through some kind of analog receiver.
It is a similar situation for e-books. Once the content is viewable, it can be copied, even by retyping or photographing the resultant output. And as soon as a single "pirated" copy is made available, those with access can acquire it for free.
The size and scope of the music industry is a recent phenomenom. Only since the early 1950's were saleable recording considered a lucrative pursuit. The modern behemoths have only existed as such since the late 1960's. Now that they have lost control, we see them flailing about to prevent a loss in market-share and income that will inevitably increase with consumer broadband access and the power of the average desktop computer. After all, who would pay for "intellectual property" when they can receive an exact copy for free over a relatively anonymous file-sharing network?
Copyright and music industry pundits see this trend as an ominous sign of disrespect for music, capitalism, creativity and the hard-work of the creators. Recent trends are likely to improve the situation of the individual artists, who, with cheap, good audio software and fatpipe connections, will be able to distribute directly to consumers and bypass the whole music-industrial complex completely. For a few thousand dollars, a musician can have a decent home studio comprised of professional-level gear, VST audio software and sequencing/sampling packages such as Cubase, ProTools and Logic.
A modern musical group or musician sees something like 10-15% of their profits after all the industry-types take a cut. While some of this is due to the high cost of touring, much of it is for usage of company recording studios, garnering media attention and the production of saleable units such as CD's. Now that each musician or band can be their own cottage industry, we should see an increase in individual musicians' "paychecks" and a decrease in control by corporations. Especially once on-line cash schemes start to proliferate, the market for grassroots types to create their own individual music industries, channels and styles should become easier over time.
I see the current situation as one with vast opportunities. The current "troubles" will be followed by a huge proliferation in both the number and diversity of musical acts eager to distribute their products throughout the world, and I am all for it. If the dominance of the huge mega-bands and stars fades due to copyright-infringement and piracy and a leveling of the current "playing field," so be it. For me, these musical types are more a manifestation of the capitalist and image-oriented facets of popular culture than the expression of any genuine musical artistry or feeling.
I prefer a decent command-line interface within an ergonomic GUI, i.e. best of both worlds. Windows definitely benefits from the addition of this . The shortcomings of the Windows CLI never cease to astound me. For instance, a command-line is not very functional without a decent egrep-like tool, IMHO.
I can't stand articles on technical subjects that include gibberish about "cave men" and the like. Who-needs-it? Obviously, the author is padding for his lack of knowledge about the subject.
Measuring gain and not raw numbers means that some searches which reappear week to week would not show on the zeitgeist, even if they have the highest totals.
Let's say "star trek" had more queries than wimbleton, paula poundstone and jack lemmon combined, yet it had fewer than in the last measurement period. It wouldn't show on this "radar" at all.
I'm interested in the top searches, period (Inquiring minds want to know, dammit). All this tells me is that people's interests change like the wind, which I already knew. (Of course, queries about "the fast and the furious" are going to skyrocket, considering that no one even knew about it before the tv advertisements.)
Trying to learn a bit about Visual C++ today, so I'll print this out and read it later...
The US government already monitors radio communications with Echelon, and they have been tapping internet packet streams for 3 years (?) with Carnivore. I hear conflicting reports about the capabilities of the feds, but some of the recent arrests (esp. Eastern European and Russian hackers) make me believe that they can tap your communications where and whenever they want. I think contrary to what many people believe, these powers are used sparingly, although raids of the Hacker Crackdown variety probably occur more frequently than we think. They are just not reported as much as back in 89 or 90' (This is just speculation; anyone have verification?). The "strong arm of the law" has certainly extended into cyberspace even since the first big waves of "hacker paranoia" back in the mid to late eighties. As more laws are passed similar to the Communications Decency Act of 1996 or the one in 86 (couldn't find the name), law enforcers have more reasons to bust people. Also, since the internet is "uncharted territory" with little historical development of "police", many different agencies believe that they can take a piece; witness, in the US, the involvment of the feds (FBI, NSA), local officials, state officials and local law enforcement agents (such as the police and sheriffs) plus random prosecutors and lawyers from anywhere (Arizona, Illinois with William Cook). Because the internet, or least the environments created there, are "placeless", any meat agency feels that they can leverage a jurisdiction over some portion given sufficient reason. The Secret Service, for instance, often gets involved, because their only other official duty outside of protecting the prez is to fight crimes of commerce. Many computer crimes involve telephone and credit card fraud, this agency has been able to participate freely. Computer crime almost always "crosses state boundaries" (I guess the packets usually do!), so the federal investigative agencies usually have a pretense for involvment.
I dunno, is this just paranoia, or are there too many cops in America who are hell bent on forcing their personal agendas into every granny of our lives?
I guess it is pretty easy to do a Denial of Service attack, especially if you're 13!
What will MS offer in this new platform that people, businesses included, will actually want enough to pay for?
All the MS shops (4) that I worked at in the last two years used Access (almost exclusively) for their databasing. The more advanced features of Office 97 and 2000, i.e. automation, VBA support, macros, mostly went unused.
This tells me that people are still getting used to the idea of a relational database server such as SQL Server or even MySQL AND they're having trouble comprehending the inner workings of an integrated office suite. I think these same people, average users, will have an extremely tough time grasping the workings OR advantages of "objects in the clouds," let alone paying for their dubious and penny-draining services (whatever they may be).
People have more information and services than they need or know what to do with related to PC's: MP3 / CD playing / burning / copying, DVD playing / burning, file sharing, internet browsing, online shopping, office suites, thousands and thousands of open source programs, computer games, proprietary software for every purpose imagineable, data, web & app servers (many which are free), IRC, on-demand video and radio-streaming, lots and lots of free porn, huge pages of links and documents, and so on (add your favorite apps!). We already HAVE online shopping carts and the ability to buy things over the web, and not that many people use it.
Now these same corporations and users, awash in underutilized or even unused software and internet services / sites, are supposed to hand over their data and control of their applications to Microsoft who then charges them for it?
Where is the incentive?
MS is trying to push this new system without realizing that no one needs or wants it right now.
At any rate, Java and XML-based services are already a few years ahead of Microsoft's C++, COM, VB and C# platform (C#, BTW, has 36 of Java's 50 keywords). AFAIK, Sun-1 is in late beta testing. Ever read Java Developer's Journal or XML Journal? Both have literally been discussing the implementation details of distributed web apps for years whilst MS is belatedly proclaiming, "Hey, no more pointers!" to its C++ developer's, most of whom switched to either VB or Java a while ago. In a few years, Java will be relatively mature with many of the current kinks worked out. Either that or it will evolve into something else. MS will just be trying to launch their new "Hailstorm."
(BTW, what the hell kind of name is that? Hailstorms are bad; they dent cars and hurt people. Who wants a software platform that causes harm?)
I just don't see this thing taking off. Windows 2000 sold substantially fewer copies than expected; XP will likely do even worse. Who the hell is going to be dumb enough to buy into MS's new Master Plan: not the developer's, that's for sure, and not average home or corporate users, either.
With the XBox,.NET and Hailstorm initiatives, I think we'll see MS burning through its cash reserves in failing bids to dominate once again. Should be fun to watch!
Slashdot Mirror
It is easy to screw around when you have a laptop and the screen is faced away from teacher -- very easy to just look at some webpage. My favorite learning aid is a voice recorder. Then you don't have to pay much attention the first time, just show up -- invaluable for test review and the like, especially if teacher is a mumbler or poor speaker of English. Of course, the whole mode of instruction where a bunch of kids sit in front of teacher and write notes seems to be getting a bit antiquated.
The worst problems I have are with Powerpoint slides using OO Impress. For instance, it likes to mangle bullet points and never seems to get the sizes quite right. It also doesn't seem to handle all of the different ways that PP can imbed images and sometimes they don't show up at all.
That said, PDFs are a much friendlier way of distributing "slides" unless you need animations for some reason.
How exactly are the spammers supposed to know the real ages of JuicyLou2456@hotmail.com, 34tMikeCunt@earthlink.net, etc. (et al) ?
Note: Only logged because AC is giving me formkey errors.
This isn't a very well-informed question. Beowulf does not specify a particular platform.
From the Beowulf FAQ:
[Beowulf is] a kind of high-performance massively parallel computer built primarily out of commodity hardware components, running a free-software operating system like Linux or FreeBSD, interconnected by a private high-speed network.
Please mod accordingly. Let's not waste Becker's time or one of the ten questions on ill-informed pablum refuted in the first question of an FAQ.
Please describe the general process you follow for writing and testing ethernet drivers on linux.
A couple more specific questions...
1) What approach do you take in creating drivers for cards which have inaccurate or insufficient documentation?
2) What tools do you use for debugging and and/or "discovering" the workings of old/obscure/poorly documented hardware?
3) What skillset, i.e. languages, knowledge & tools, do you consider necessary to perform the kind of coding you routinely do (outside of hacker wizardry and C mastery)?
I am also wondering how you got started writing ethernet drivers and clustering software for linux. What lead you down this specific path rather than other aspects of kernel/OS development?
JM
Here is the Linux Device Drivers book online, for free, in all its glory. Start hacking!
I don't understand why a more cyberpunkish series set here on earth a la Neuromancer wouldn't be a better, cooler, "darker" (whatever) concept. Suppose Fox already has this , but its kind of, well, cut-rate.
Doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen on tv before . I'm amazed by this guy's ingenuity.
I'm surprised that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have not been mentioned. They are probably the two most influential early science fiction writers.
;)
H.G....
Island of Doctor Moreau: Predicts genetic engineering.
War of the Worlds: Aliens, flying saucers and the like...not exactly a prediction, but it does cover some modern "interests," a la X-Files and, uh, Battlefield Earth (?).
Time Machine: Again, not a prediction but a current concern of many modern minds such as Stephen Hawking and popular culture like Timecop, Back to the Future and Quantum Leap.
The World Set Free: Predicted the nuclear bomb and the resulting arms race and stalemate.
Jules...
20,000 Leagues: Deep-sea submersibles!
Around the World in Eighty Days: Rapid transmit..hehe.
From the Earth to the Moon: Space travel.
Paris in the Twentieth Century: Never read it, but I heard some of the predictions are quite accurate.
The main power technique, at least on google, is utilizing quotes and AND/OR to limit search results. Rather than spewing a line of text, enclosing specific "phrases" often gives more accurate results.
Then again, I have been able to simply cut n' paste error messages into the groups.google.com form and immediately receive accurate, useful hits. I think that though the internet and webpages and generally disorganized and uncentralized, an outside entity can impose order given enough bandwidth, time, energy and intelligence. In the future, web services, probably based on CORBA and SOAP, will allow sites to return messages to searchers or indexing services, thus doing away with a lot of the mystery in the current system.
All that said, I have had excellent luck with google finding about 95% of all the information I have searched for in the past couple months, showing that a well-written spider and intelligent classification and rating can circumvent the problem of so much untagged, nebulous information.
The internet is something like the world's largest library where anyone can insert a book and random organizers may (if they wish!) go through and make lists, hashes and indexes of the information for their own card catalogs. Right now, each search service maintains its own separate list! The crawler is like a super-fast librarian who can puruse the book. The coming paradigm will be fewer, more accurate and useful catalogs along with books that "insert themselves" into these schemes intelligently and discretely after a validation of informational content.
-Make them deliver Dominoes pizzas in South Central.
-Have them work as an "expeditor" for either an Applebee's or a Denny's in a medium-sized Midwestern college town.
-Work as one of those weird New York street vendors selling unidenfied meat on a stick.
-Feed all Detroit's homeless with one Swanson's TV dinner.
The possibilities are endless.
Given that I no longer talk with the boss and warm the chair, I am feeling more pressure to produce now that I am located a thousand or more miles away. Think about it; one can often give the impression of doing work simply by being an active presence in the office. With telecommuting, the only way to show productivity is with e-mails, phone calls and actual files sent back and forth. I am anticipating that I will be called on to do more work in order to maintain my position.
Setting up the home network, however, has been a pain in the @ss! We need to rewire the coax, so I can have an office in the non-flood-prone area of the house, plus I am still in need of a router. I miss the LAN, especially the two fast laser printers, my file shares and three machines of my own in different locations.
1) Get something for the government for free / dirt cheap.
2) Go back on the contract / agreement.
3) Make bucketloads of cash.
4) Government (and taxpayers) suck it up
Rather than a a shortage of bandwidth, I think the true problem in the States is a lack of decent, informed, relatively unbiased regulation headed by the Fed and too many interested parties such as corporations with a lot of money and lawyers.
I like to malign Microsoft for their foul tactics and sometimes equally repugnant software just as much as most of you, but I believe the office suite is an excellent bundled software package. The Excel, Word and Outlook components are industry standards for their software types. Access, Frontpage and Powerpoint are closer to second-tier in my mind but have come in handy on a lot of occasions. Access is a decent, if highly outdated, desktop database package good for whipping up quick reports, testing SQL queries and creating simple vb forms. Powerpoint is probably the most highly used presentation software. Frontpage, well, let's not go into that.
What I like most is the built-in VBA scripting support in Microsoft Office; each application gets its own object model, sometimes several of them as in the case of MS Access. Since all Office apps implements a COM-based architecture, they can automate each other, so Excel can pipe data to Word, Access to Excel, ecetera. This comes in handy when creating reports, porting data or just performing general office chores.
Here is some sample pseudo-code to print a report from an Access database:
// next line calls a module function
dim app
set app = new access.application
app.open("c:\my_database.mdb")
app.print_report(report_name)
app.close
I was not able to find out anything about support for scripting in StarOffice from this rather skimpy article, and I would be grateful if someone could enlighten me (escaping to shell, python or perl scripts doesn't count either). Modern applications, especially integrated suites, should be able to interoperate using each other's object models. Perhaps this is another reason for O2k's dominance.
A lot of my older gear breaks quickly, and sometimes I do it myself. The older hard drives tend to crash, and once that happens, what use is a diskless 386 with 8 mb ram? I tend to take them apart and make stacks of strange computer gear. Two Pentiums that I once had got themselves smashed by crashing everytime I tried to put on Red Hat Linux or Windows. The older and less "used" a system is, the more likely that it will be used in some sort of geeky "experimentation" like hooking it up to a stereo, phone, radio or other electrical gear or installing an obscure, barely tested Unix kernel or alternative OS. This makes it more likely that the poor, over-the-hill machine will meet its demise due to power surged fried circuits or nuked hard disk!
I've got a 486 laptop with a 5" screen. Now what am I going to use that for? Windows 3.1, whew-hew!
Keep some of the useful stuff like soundcards, NIC's, RAM, floppy and hard drives and trash the rest. Never know when that stuff might come in handy. With storage at an all-time low, I can't see too much value in keeping those 500 MB disk drives around; they're just going to crash and make you mad later, anyways. I'd say any motherboard below Pentium is not worth keeping unless you have a lot of patience, an older OS and/or a dedicated task for it to perform, such as routing or firewalling. Even then, the low cost of gear like a Linksys router kind of makes you want to buy something small, useful and well-engineered rather than use an old, clunky x86 with extra NIC's.
Just a thought, but configuring Windows for security might mean ripping out the guts of the operating system if you talk to some noted security experts . Microsoft products have recently shown major insecurities in their fundamental operation; IIS buffer overflow and unauthorized program execution errors in the code that accepts URL's is a fundamental flaw that Apache, AFAIK, has not been vulnerable to on even close to the same level or frequency.
I totally agree with your last point but does this necessarily come down to operating system choice? Desktop software surely limits Linux on that end, but for mid to low-demand internet applications, Linux is a superior, cheaper option. This site , widely considered by many developers as one of the best on the internet, was created using free tools such as perl and php, not Microsoft technologies.
Technological success (not economic, which is a whole other issue) is more a function of the quality of your software and the skill of the support/operating personnel. A Linux roll-out without proper support, money and forethought will certainly cause major problems, but ditto for Microsoft.
Simply comparing the Microsoft platform with the closest Linux-based counterpart should give some indication of the reasons that Linux is seen in some circles as a viable alternative to the aforementioned platform.
The cost of Windows 2000 Server is upwards of $1000 dollars / copy plus the huge cost of additional programs such as the BackOffice suite and SQL Server Enterprise Edition. A Linux Server distribution costs you once and you can distribute that single copy to as many machines as you desire. In addition, quality tools such as PostgreSQL, php, perl, python and apache are not only free for the taking but enjoy a huge, worldwide development community of devoted users who churn out improvements, tips and free software.
The Windows code base is proprietary and closed source while Linux kernel code is open-sourced and modifiable under a fairly generous license.
If you have Windows, your operating systems support is generally beholden to one company that has been shown to be monopolistic, self-centered and concerned mostly with the profiteering rather than quality software. With Linux, there are options ranging from homegrown support and development to support by the first IT company, IBM and into small support-oriented shops such as Red Hat and VA Linux. In addition, one can choose from a range of different distributions according to organizational needs. Witness the recent adoption of Linux by animation studios as a platform for development.
The majority of Windows software is closed-source and expensive, while most Linux-ware is free and open-source.
Linux, configured correctly, is a relatively secure operating system, while Windows has been shown to have basic flaws in its security mechanisms.
So there is more than just some wordplay going-on. Linux seems to have certain advantages that the major competition lacks.
Even the implementation of schemes to scramble or degrade the signal for copies is ultimately futile. To paraphrase the opinion of Emmanuel Goldstein from his WBAI show, "If you can play it back, it is decoded, and you can copy it." It does not matter what level of encryption is implemented for digital music. The playback necessitates a conversion to an easily copyable form, i.e. sound waves, which can be reencoded in various ways, from placing a microphone next to the playback advice to copying the signal through some kind of analog receiver.
It is a similar situation for e-books. Once the content is viewable, it can be copied, even by retyping or photographing the resultant output. And as soon as a single "pirated" copy is made available, those with access can acquire it for free.
The size and scope of the music industry is a recent phenomenom. Only since the early 1950's were saleable recording considered a lucrative pursuit. The modern behemoths have only existed as such since the late 1960's. Now that they have lost control, we see them flailing about to prevent a loss in market-share and income that will inevitably increase with consumer broadband access and the power of the average desktop computer. After all, who would pay for "intellectual property" when they can receive an exact copy for free over a relatively anonymous file-sharing network?
Copyright and music industry pundits see this trend as an ominous sign of disrespect for music, capitalism, creativity and the hard-work of the creators. Recent trends are likely to improve the situation of the individual artists, who, with cheap, good audio software and fatpipe connections, will be able to distribute directly to consumers and bypass the whole music-industrial complex completely. For a few thousand dollars, a musician can have a decent home studio comprised of professional-level gear, VST audio software and sequencing/sampling packages such as Cubase, ProTools and Logic.
A modern musical group or musician sees something like 10-15% of their profits after all the industry-types take a cut. While some of this is due to the high cost of touring, much of it is for usage of company recording studios, garnering media attention and the production of saleable units such as CD's. Now that each musician or band can be their own cottage industry, we should see an increase in individual musicians' "paychecks" and a decrease in control by corporations. Especially once on-line cash schemes start to proliferate, the market for grassroots types to create their own individual music industries, channels and styles should become easier over time.
I see the current situation as one with vast opportunities. The current "troubles" will be followed by a huge proliferation in both the number and diversity of musical acts eager to distribute their products throughout the world, and I am all for it. If the dominance of the huge mega-bands and stars fades due to copyright-infringement and piracy and a leveling of the current "playing field," so be it. For me, these musical types are more a manifestation of the capitalist and image-oriented facets of popular culture than the expression of any genuine musical artistry or feeling.
So what's new? Microsoft products are constantly getting maimed . Just type iis or windows into the search box here , for starters.
I prefer a decent command-line interface within an ergonomic GUI, i.e. best of both worlds. Windows definitely benefits from the addition of this . The shortcomings of the Windows CLI never cease to astound me. For instance, a command-line is not very functional without a decent egrep-like tool, IMHO.
I can't stand articles on technical subjects that include gibberish about "cave men" and the like. Who-needs-it? Obviously, the author is padding for his lack of knowledge about the subject.
Measuring gain and not raw numbers means that some searches which reappear week to week would not show on the zeitgeist, even if they have the highest totals.
Let's say "star trek" had more queries than wimbleton, paula poundstone and jack lemmon combined, yet it had fewer than in the last measurement period. It wouldn't show on this "radar" at all.
I'm interested in the top searches, period (Inquiring minds want to know, dammit). All this tells me is that people's interests change like the wind, which I already knew. (Of course, queries about "the fast and the furious" are going to skyrocket, considering that no one even knew about it before the tv advertisements.)
Trying to learn a bit about Visual C++ today, so I'll print this out and read it later...
The US government already monitors radio communications with Echelon, and they have been tapping internet packet streams for 3 years (?) with Carnivore. I hear conflicting reports about the capabilities of the feds, but some of the recent arrests (esp. Eastern European and Russian hackers) make me believe that they can tap your communications where and whenever they want. I think contrary to what many people believe, these powers are used sparingly, although raids of the Hacker Crackdown variety probably occur more frequently than we think. They are just not reported as much as back in 89 or 90' (This is just speculation; anyone have verification?). The "strong arm of the law" has certainly extended into cyberspace even since the first big waves of "hacker paranoia" back in the mid to late eighties. As more laws are passed similar to the Communications Decency Act of 1996 or the one in 86 (couldn't find the name), law enforcers have more reasons to bust people. Also, since the internet is "uncharted territory" with little historical development of "police", many different agencies believe that they can take a piece; witness, in the US, the involvment of the feds (FBI, NSA), local officials, state officials and local law enforcement agents (such as the police and sheriffs) plus random prosecutors and lawyers from anywhere (Arizona, Illinois with William Cook). Because the internet, or least the environments created there, are "placeless", any meat agency feels that they can leverage a jurisdiction over some portion given sufficient reason. The Secret Service, for instance, often gets involved, because their only other official duty outside of protecting the prez is to fight crimes of commerce. Many computer crimes involve telephone and credit card fraud, this agency has been able to participate freely. Computer crime almost always "crosses state boundaries" (I guess the packets usually do!), so the federal investigative agencies usually have a pretense for involvment.
I dunno, is this just paranoia, or are there too many cops in America who are hell bent on forcing their personal agendas into every granny of our lives?
I guess it is pretty easy to do a Denial of Service attack, especially if you're 13!
What will MS offer in this new platform that people, businesses included, will actually want enough to pay for? All the MS shops (4) that I worked at in the last two years used Access (almost exclusively) for their databasing. The more advanced features of Office 97 and 2000, i.e. automation, VBA support, macros, mostly went unused. This tells me that people are still getting used to the idea of a relational database server such as SQL Server or even MySQL AND they're having trouble comprehending the inner workings of an integrated office suite. I think these same people, average users, will have an extremely tough time grasping the workings OR advantages of "objects in the clouds," let alone paying for their dubious and penny-draining services (whatever they may be). People have more information and services than they need or know what to do with related to PC's: MP3 / CD playing / burning / copying, DVD playing / burning, file sharing, internet browsing, online shopping, office suites, thousands and thousands of open source programs, computer games, proprietary software for every purpose imagineable, data, web & app servers (many which are free), IRC, on-demand video and radio-streaming, lots and lots of free porn, huge pages of links and documents, and so on (add your favorite apps!). We already HAVE online shopping carts and the ability to buy things over the web, and not that many people use it. Now these same corporations and users, awash in underutilized or even unused software and internet services / sites, are supposed to hand over their data and control of their applications to Microsoft who then charges them for it? Where is the incentive? MS is trying to push this new system without realizing that no one needs or wants it right now. At any rate, Java and XML-based services are already a few years ahead of Microsoft's C++, COM, VB and C# platform (C#, BTW, has 36 of Java's 50 keywords). AFAIK, Sun-1 is in late beta testing. Ever read Java Developer's Journal or XML Journal? Both have literally been discussing the implementation details of distributed web apps for years whilst MS is belatedly proclaiming, "Hey, no more pointers!" to its C++ developer's, most of whom switched to either VB or Java a while ago. In a few years, Java will be relatively mature with many of the current kinks worked out. Either that or it will evolve into something else. MS will just be trying to launch their new "Hailstorm." (BTW, what the hell kind of name is that? Hailstorms are bad; they dent cars and hurt people. Who wants a software platform that causes harm?) I just don't see this thing taking off. Windows 2000 sold substantially fewer copies than expected; XP will likely do even worse. Who the hell is going to be dumb enough to buy into MS's new Master Plan: not the developer's, that's for sure, and not average home or corporate users, either. With the XBox, .NET and Hailstorm initiatives, I think we'll see MS burning through its cash reserves in failing bids to dominate once again. Should be fun to watch!
y = x + [your product here]