We have Lackey's side of the story and the plan that someone wanted to set up a pirate internet radio station there last year but now the fort is apparently for sale and Sealand is proposing a 'change of custodianship'. Does HavenCo have any customers?
Not in Iraq, but on a US military base. Last year I got pinged for a Solaris sysadmin job on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. I quite liked the idea as I thought I might be closer to my girlfriend in Taiwan. Then I read up about the place... ten hours flight to Singapore, a depopulated British dependency, apparently nothing to do but drink and sleep around, alleged extraordinary rendition facility... hmm, perhaps not. Still, the interview would have been interesting.
I have been trying to set myself up in business doing the stuff I know - enterprise systems using Sun hardware and transforming systems using OSS. For my sins I have ended working as a casual consultant to a handful of small businessmen and I can confirm that as far as they are concerned, IE is 'the Internet', and it's an uphill struggle to get them to use anything else. In the end I have resorted to making sure that their defences are kept up to date and trying to keep application interfaces simple and broadly compatible in anything that I develop for them, while nagging that they could do things better.
I don't if it's the case now, but the UK Inland Revenue's e-submission service only worked with IE on Windows when it was first launched. Even the certificates for it could only be loaded into IE for Windows. The solution was apparently provided by that well known software house... Dell.
Then LEARN. Frontpage is fast at prototyping but is now hideously out of date. For that matter Nvu is very good at generating basic page frameworks but it doesn't take very long to reach its limits once you get into the world of CSS. Having returned to web page design for the first time in seven or eight years I jumped on Nvu only to find that within hours I was back to a text editor and a CSS reference, and then, as I actually code for Firefox, added a day to make it work in IE - the other way around is not an option as I use Macs and Linux at home.
But that's the basic issue of Internet security. A browser that accesses the Internet shouldn't have open access to a client system or indeed peripherals. Unless you have a managed environment that is 100% controllable you should isolate anything that comes from outside until you are certain that it is safe. Microsoft even agree with this with the amount of security added to hardware installation in Vista. If you want a barcode reader, then use a barcode reader, don't hack about with ActiveX to make your browser a barcode reader, as that isn't the job it was designed for.
Ah, Boo.com... The attention to detail at that place was non-existent. An appalling flash interface that ran like treacle on most modern machines of the time. Free P&P that used couriers in London for delivery and return (and a lot of things were returned). Three, count them, three Sun E10000s at at least a quarter of a million quid a go. I was working at PSINet when the machines were being taken out. Perhaps by US standards it wasn't a massive disaster but it certainly pulled down the British dotcom industry with it.
As has been repeatedly pointed out about the UK government's (well, a handful of senior members') insistence on introducing a 'voluntary' ID card, it's going to be a windfall for IT consultants if the debacle of the NHS patient database project is anything to go by. I'm polishing my golden wheelbarrow as I type. Quite fancy six months or so in Oz too.
Death of Mac OS predicted, pictures at 11
on
Apple Joins BAPCo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember the first time that I saw suggestions that Mac OS had had its day. It was when the first news that Copland was struggling made its way out of Infinite Loop. A fairly well known and respected member of the UK computer journalism world suggested that as Apple were trying to port to PowerPC permanently, why not build the Copland architecture on Windows NT, whose kernel was fairly mature at the time and available for the PPC chipset. At the time it was fairly radical thinking but MS was in a far better technical position then that it is now. Of course, MS binned their PPC and Alpha support not long afterwards, NextStep became Rhapsody became Mac OS X, Linux matured to become a genuine alternative to big iron Unix and Windows found competition both on the desktop and in the datacentre again. In 2005 Steve Jobs announces that the next generation of Macs will run on Intel processors and almost immediately everyone assumes that this will mean Windows in some way. But with the apparent dissatisfaction within Microsoft over the progress of Vista, against the almost inevitable success of getting Windows XP to work on the Macintel platform, who is going to be the winner? OS X is far ahead of XP in usability, incorporated apps and security. Gnome has a better unified API, even if it struggles to create blue water between it and Windows and for me at least, consequently limits itself on the user experience. So why even consider Windows? Just because it works on Intel doesn't mean that is has to be the de facto OS for Intel machines. That's been broken all ready. Remember that the migration to Intel was based on the phrase 'just in case'. So what are Pages, Keynote, Aperture and the other Apple workflow apps for? The day that Mac OS 10.5 appears in a box for Intel PCs? That's a good 'just in case' scenario - just in case Microsoft take their ball home completely and don't release a Universal version of Office perhaps? Apple isn't down, and anyone who assumes that doesn't remember its history.
I don't suppose Sun is a six figure company but they have been enouraging the use of Java Desktop and have at least standardised on OpenOffice (and the ODS file format) with Java Enterprise Desktop wherever possible. Again it's more leverage than opposition, especially as Sun now formally support Windows on the Opteron machines.
If Microsoft are working on interoperability, then isn't a large part of that about sharing files and printing? And isn't the main component of that SMB/CIFS? And isn't that down to Samba, a reverse engineered implementation of Windows SMB/CIFS, reverse engineered because Microsoft won't release the API? What is that sound I hear? Parry sirrah, it is the CluePhone.
Well, 40 is approaching at great speed for me and I finally believe that I have the wearwithall to start my own business. I know I couldn't have done it before.
I'm currently a contractor working for large IT company (1) on a greenfield project in Leeds in the UK. A little less than two years ago I quit working for large IT company (2), where I had been TUPEd in from my previous employer (UK employment regulations that basically state if a company outsources services, the service company cannot lay off the company's staff). In the last year large IT company (2) have laid off a considerable percentage of their technical staff, including many of those people who were transferred in from other companies. Large IT company (1) outsourced their field support staff to large IT company (3) and considerably reduced their permanent technical staff. In the meantime, both large IT company (1) and (2) now have to employ contractors to run their services. This is primarily an accounting ploy, but indicates the lack of thought prevelant in the upper reaches of management, who seem to believe that the actual nuts and bolts of building systems is done by magic. All three companies are respected names in IT but all want to be management companies and as such seem to have forgotten what the core of their business is. A frequent consequence of this is that customers rapidly tire of the lack of expertise and support available to them and decide to insource their services again, and people like me go and help them do that. Add to that the multitude of government projects that are ongoing, quite possibly for ever, or until a different party gets elected, and there's plently of work to be going on with. In the meantime, all three large IT companies keep landing big contracts, find they don't have the staff and have to hire people like me to keep going. What's wrong with this picture?
A bit from column A, a bit from column B. The online world is full of people who think their pearls of wisdom are of value either fiscally or in terms of their reputation. They all almost inevitably overvalue both.
By the way, if this gets republished anywhere, I'll sue.
It has to be reasonably big for ergonomic comfort - you couldn't surf, let alone do distance learning classes or whatever on a cellphone for any length of time. I do agree that apart fromit does sound very much like the Blue Angel PDA, and that can run Linux now.
Compared to what is going on in the rest of the computer industry, everything that has come out of Microsoft recently has indicated an appalling lack of innovation in Redmond, just a need to keep pushing on with selling Windows licenses in different ways.
I'm writing this under Windows XP as I haven't got around to installing Ubuntu on this laptop (tonight hopefully, although I think I will have to keep an XP partition for Nero), but apart from the OS, I am not using one MS application. Firefox, Gaim, Skype and OpenOffice.org 2 do all I need them to do at work as well as and possibly better than their MS counterparts, and what's more, I can run the same desktop on Linux or OS X (my needs are simple and few, but what do you do when you aren't running World of Warcraft?).
Microsoft will never lose their market domination, but they are starting to deserve it less and less, and the more people who can be convinced that its position is not a right will hopefully mean that it will actually do something other than snipe at the slowly building competition.
Because this isn't a solution for a casual user. People who buy Macs buy them because they like Macs. The people who have risen to this challenge have done this because they like a challenge.
Having had to (unnecessarily as it turned out - maybe I should RTFM sometimes) look at compatability between my cheapish Fujitsu-Siemens lappy (64 bit chipset so let's only support WinXPHome - way to go guys) and Airport Express, I discovered that the Airport architecture is based on Broadcom chipsets so drivers shouldn't be impossible. If the worst comes to the worst, a cheap PCMCIA card or, perish the thought, a USB dongle, will do the job.
There is probably a filter for Office97 docs somewhere in the depths of MS support. I know I had it with Office 2000, and I'm fairly certain that Office:Mac will read them with no problem. Although I'm still waiting for the day that there is a native version of Ooo for OS X.
Seeing as Sony have never officially supported anything but Windows for any of their computer hardware, and have never released the APIs for them either, I can't take that seriously. What it *could* be is a method of demonstrating one of the virtualisation technologies included in the P3, say a virtual PC, without the overhead of a Windows license. Of course, if anyone can prove me wrong, I'm happy to stand corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
We have Lackey's side of the story and the plan that someone wanted to set up a pirate internet radio station there last year but now the fort is apparently for sale and Sealand is proposing a 'change of custodianship'. Does HavenCo have any customers?
Not in Iraq, but on a US military base. Last year I got pinged for a Solaris sysadmin job on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. I quite liked the idea as I thought I might be closer to my girlfriend in Taiwan. Then I read up about the place... ten hours flight to Singapore, a depopulated British dependency, apparently nothing to do but drink and sleep around, alleged extraordinary rendition facility... hmm, perhaps not. Still, the interview would have been interesting.
It innovates nothing but new ways of taking money from computer users while frustrating them in what they want to do. /2p
I have been trying to set myself up in business doing the stuff I know - enterprise systems using Sun hardware and transforming systems using OSS. For my sins I have ended working as a casual consultant to a handful of small businessmen and I can confirm that as far as they are concerned, IE is 'the Internet', and it's an uphill struggle to get them to use anything else. In the end I have resorted to making sure that their defences are kept up to date and trying to keep application interfaces simple and broadly compatible in anything that I develop for them, while nagging that they could do things better.
I don't if it's the case now, but the UK Inland Revenue's e-submission service only worked with IE on Windows when it was first launched. Even the certificates for it could only be loaded into IE for Windows. The solution was apparently provided by that well known software house... Dell.
Then LEARN. Frontpage is fast at prototyping but is now hideously out of date. For that matter Nvu is very good at generating basic page frameworks but it doesn't take very long to reach its limits once you get into the world of CSS. Having returned to web page design for the first time in seven or eight years I jumped on Nvu only to find that within hours I was back to a text editor and a CSS reference, and then, as I actually code for Firefox, added a day to make it work in IE - the other way around is not an option as I use Macs and Linux at home.
But that's the basic issue of Internet security. A browser that accesses the Internet shouldn't have open access to a client system or indeed peripherals. Unless you have a managed environment that is 100% controllable you should isolate anything that comes from outside until you are certain that it is safe. Microsoft even agree with this with the amount of security added to hardware installation in Vista. If you want a barcode reader, then use a barcode reader, don't hack about with ActiveX to make your browser a barcode reader, as that isn't the job it was designed for.
Ah, Boo.com... The attention to detail at that place was non-existent. An appalling flash interface that ran like treacle on most modern machines of the time. Free P&P that used couriers in London for delivery and return (and a lot of things were returned). Three, count them, three Sun E10000s at at least a quarter of a million quid a go. I was working at PSINet when the machines were being taken out. Perhaps by US standards it wasn't a massive disaster but it certainly pulled down the British dotcom industry with it.
As has been repeatedly pointed out about the UK government's (well, a handful of senior members') insistence on introducing a 'voluntary' ID card, it's going to be a windfall for IT consultants if the debacle of the NHS patient database project is anything to go by. I'm polishing my golden wheelbarrow as I type. Quite fancy six months or so in Oz too.
I remember the first time that I saw suggestions that Mac OS had had its day. It was when the first news that Copland was struggling made its way out of Infinite Loop. A fairly well known and respected member of the UK computer journalism world suggested that as Apple were trying to port to PowerPC permanently, why not build the Copland architecture on Windows NT, whose kernel was fairly mature at the time and available for the PPC chipset. At the time it was fairly radical thinking but MS was in a far better technical position then that it is now. Of course, MS binned their PPC and Alpha support not long afterwards, NextStep became Rhapsody became Mac OS X, Linux matured to become a genuine alternative to big iron Unix and Windows found competition both on the desktop and in the datacentre again.
In 2005 Steve Jobs announces that the next generation of Macs will run on Intel processors and almost immediately everyone assumes that this will mean Windows in some way. But with the apparent dissatisfaction within Microsoft over the progress of Vista, against the almost inevitable success of getting Windows XP to work on the Macintel platform, who is going to be the winner? OS X is far ahead of XP in usability, incorporated apps and security. Gnome has a better unified API, even if it struggles to create blue water between it and Windows and for me at least, consequently limits itself on the user experience. So why even consider Windows? Just because it works on Intel doesn't mean that is has to be the de facto OS for Intel machines. That's been broken all ready.
Remember that the migration to Intel was based on the phrase 'just in case'. So what are Pages, Keynote, Aperture and the other Apple workflow apps for? The day that Mac OS 10.5 appears in a box for Intel PCs? That's a good 'just in case' scenario - just in case Microsoft take their ball home completely and don't release a Universal version of Office perhaps? Apple isn't down, and anyone who assumes that doesn't remember its history.
Don't you just hand over to the team in Singapore? When a fan fails they call a chap in Paris to call the on-call site engineer. Oh.
I don't suppose Sun is a six figure company but they have been enouraging the use of Java Desktop and have at least standardised on OpenOffice (and the ODS file format) with Java Enterprise Desktop wherever possible. Again it's more leverage than opposition, especially as Sun now formally support Windows on the Opteron machines.
That someone at Google is browsing Yahoo! just a little too much?
If Microsoft are working on interoperability, then isn't a large part of that about sharing files and printing? And isn't the main component of that SMB/CIFS? And isn't that down to Samba, a reverse engineered implementation of Windows SMB/CIFS, reverse engineered because Microsoft won't release the API? What is that sound I hear? Parry sirrah, it is the CluePhone.
Well, 40 is approaching at great speed for me and I finally believe that I have the wearwithall to start my own business. I know I couldn't have done it before.
I'm currently a contractor working for large IT company (1) on a greenfield project in Leeds in the UK. A little less than two years ago I quit working for large IT company (2), where I had been TUPEd in from my previous employer (UK employment regulations that basically state if a company outsources services, the service company cannot lay off the company's staff). In the last year large IT company (2) have laid off a considerable percentage of their technical staff, including many of those people who were transferred in from other companies. Large IT company (1) outsourced their field support staff to large IT company (3) and considerably reduced their permanent technical staff. In the meantime, both large IT company (1) and (2) now have to employ contractors to run their services. This is primarily an accounting ploy, but indicates the lack of thought prevelant in the upper reaches of management, who seem to believe that the actual nuts and bolts of building systems is done by magic. All three companies are respected names in IT but all want to be management companies and as such seem to have forgotten what the core of their business is.
A frequent consequence of this is that customers rapidly tire of the lack of expertise and support available to them and decide to insource their services again, and people like me go and help them do that.
Add to that the multitude of government projects that are ongoing, quite possibly for ever, or until a different party gets elected, and there's plently of work to be going on with.
In the meantime, all three large IT companies keep landing big contracts, find they don't have the staff and have to hire people like me to keep going.
What's wrong with this picture?
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
A bit from column A, a bit from column B. The online world is full of people who think their pearls of wisdom are of value either fiscally or in terms of their reputation. They all almost inevitably overvalue both.
By the way, if this gets republished anywhere, I'll sue.
It has to be reasonably big for ergonomic comfort - you couldn't surf, let alone do distance learning classes or whatever on a cellphone for any length of time. I do agree that apart fromit does sound very much like the Blue Angel PDA, and that can run Linux now.
Compared to what is going on in the rest of the computer industry, everything that has come out of Microsoft recently has indicated an appalling lack of innovation in Redmond, just a need to keep pushing on with selling Windows licenses in different ways.
I'm writing this under Windows XP as I haven't got around to installing Ubuntu on this laptop (tonight hopefully, although I think I will have to keep an XP partition for Nero), but apart from the OS, I am not using one MS application. Firefox, Gaim, Skype and OpenOffice.org 2 do all I need them to do at work as well as and possibly better than their MS counterparts, and what's more, I can run the same desktop on Linux or OS X (my needs are simple and few, but what do you do when you aren't running World of Warcraft?).
Microsoft will never lose their market domination, but they are starting to deserve it less and less, and the more people who can be convinced that its position is not a right will hopefully mean that it will actually do something other than snipe at the slowly building competition.
Because this isn't a solution for a casual user. People who buy Macs buy them because they like Macs. The people who have risen to this challenge have done this because they like a challenge.
Having had to (unnecessarily as it turned out - maybe I should RTFM sometimes) look at compatability between my cheapish Fujitsu-Siemens lappy (64 bit chipset so let's only support WinXPHome - way to go guys) and Airport Express, I discovered that the Airport architecture is based on Broadcom chipsets so drivers shouldn't be impossible. If the worst comes to the worst, a cheap PCMCIA card or, perish the thought, a USB dongle, will do the job.
There is probably a filter for Office97 docs somewhere in the depths of MS support. I know I had it with Office 2000, and I'm fairly certain that Office:Mac will read them with no problem. Although I'm still waiting for the day that there is a native version of Ooo for OS X.
Seeing as Sony have never officially supported anything but Windows for any of their computer hardware, and have never released the APIs for them either, I can't take that seriously. What it *could* be is a method of demonstrating one of the virtualisation technologies included in the P3, say a virtual PC, without the overhead of a Windows license. Of course, if anyone can prove me wrong, I'm happy to stand corrected.
They have more Linux on their shelves than they do OS X. But it just stays there.