There were certainly African slaves in Britain in the late 16th century, and the Royal African Company held the monopoly of English-run slavers in the late 17th century. But of course, England had no real need as it still had serfdom.
Mail isn't the problem, as Outlook will read IMAP and POP3 mail. Calendaring is the stumbling block as Outlook won't read LDAP calendars without third party plugins. OpenOffice's Outlook clone would read Exchange calendaring if LDAP support was turned on in Exchange, but that is no longer part of OpenOffice and I'm not sure if LDAP works in Exchange anymore.
Google's recent direction has been interesting - their early expansion was about extending the context of search and using what people were looking for and talking about as intelligence, so Groups, News, Images, blogger.com and even Froogle made sense - the user got the service and Google got the click and did what they did with it. I think it's reasonable to assume that hasn't been a successful model for a few reasons. For example, there has little or no visible investment in Web 2.0 services like Flickr and del.icio.us, which are both prime examples of applications of the old model in that any commercial intelligence comes from measuring views and clicks and their context, so unless they're pitching a bid for last.fm at the moment (and the way that music based search results are being arranged suggests not) it's also reasonable to assume that search isn't being developed as a revenue earner. What has happened since the float, with things like Maps and Earth, is that the click has become a sponsored one, and, just like it was in the heady days of the dotcom boom, advertising is the revenue earner, except that this time, Google have the power to make it happen. One possibility for the buyout of dMark is audio enabled AdWords, soon to be followed by video AdWords once the bandwidth is generally available - combine that with Google Video and there's a platform for generating ad supported content, or television as we used to call it. The intelligence hasn't paid its way, and the company has had to look about a little frantically to find a new way to make money, but this is a direction that should please the shareholders and isn't particularily evil.
The reason for Gmail is the same for Google's acquisition of Blogger: they want to know what you're thinking, and they will sell it to whoever wants it. In return you, Joe Consumer, get the whole Google banana, plus mail, plus Blogger, for free. Plenty of people have voiced their concerns over Google's attitude to 'privacy' but Google is a business, and oddly enough, it has to make money, and it makes that money from the data that searches, blogs and now mail generate. TANSTAAFL very much applies.
Anyone who uses Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or *any* webmail) for confidential material is fooling themselves about its confidentiality, but as a mail service for shuffling data around it will be very useful, but Gmail is going to have cover itself and protect itself from being the biggest mp3, warez and pr0n distributor in the world.
Digital radio is finally taking off, with the major electrical chains offering receivers at almost realistic prices (around 75 for a table model) with the hope that enough will have been found under the tree the Christmas. 6Music and its companion raider of the BBC archives BBC7 have been major drivers in the digital radio takeup campaign, as the UK government is still working towards an end of analogue broadcasting in the VHF and UHF bands by 2010. Ironically, 6Music and BBC7 seem to have been more popular over the Internet outside the UK than on digital radio in the UK in the last year. Speaking as an early adopter with digital radio in the car, I can confirm that while the BBC's coverage has improved enormously over the past year, there are still many holes in the network. My parents, who live in a fairly large ex-industrial town in the north of England, can't even receive the digital Freeview TV service, and BBC digital radio literally disappears at the nearest motorway junction. On the other hand, Sky TV, which provides all the national digital radio channels through a satellite dish via TV has become an enormous success, and it seems likely that Murdoch will be the ultimate winner in the whole process.
Tony Blair doesn't love Microsoft, he loves big business, and he wants big business to benefit from every aspect of British life. Note that the Office of the e-Envoy isn't using an enthusiastic start-up for the pilots, it's using IBM, who have admittedly done good things for Linux and Open Source in the bigger scheme of things, but will be causing the e-Envoy's office to be overrun by enthusiastic but largely clueless (but chargeable) project managers. But it's big business, so it must be good.
as British SF goes, because apart from the shaky sets and dated effects (great at the time though) and some weak stories, it actually had an adult plot, well formed characters and genuine tension.
However, Paul Darrow has been pitching this around for a couple of years now (the original plan was for a movie, and then it became a pilot and now it seems to be a treatment) and I really hope he keeps behind the cameras as he seems to have become an old luvvie in the ensuing years.
Slightly off topic, and I know that Linux on Sparc is more or less dead, but this came up in conversation the other week: what's the biggest Sun machine or equivalent (in terms of number of CPUs, memory, disk) that anyone has got Linux/Sparc to run on?
As other people have said, that 8Gb of memory where Sun are concerned will make all the difference. I think it's just about got down to $1500 per gig or thereabouts.
I love Linux, but where I work, in the financial services industry, they're still trying to come to terms with the fact that mainframes might not be the bargain they were made out to be. They understand Sun and Solaris because like mainframes, it's reassuringly expensive. We're at the low end of the market Sun (and IBM) are fighting for now.
Who does say Linux on the desktop is dead? As far as I can see its takeup is just beginning, and as long as Microsoft persevere with an overpriced, overpowering 'standard', more organisations will consider it throughout the world.
According to their website The Sisters of Mercy still use ruggedised portable 486s running DOS 3.3 and Voyetra Sequencer Plus to power Doktor Avalanche for live shows. Sequencer Plus was first released in about 1987. They claim it's only crashed twice.
I have a Belkin WiFi gateway through which my half a dozen machines talk. If I control a remote machine using VNC a screen redraw causes the gateway to make quite a pronounced rustling sound as if you can hear the packets going through it.
While the government continue to insist that the card scheme would be an entitling service rather than a controlling one, it's clear that the intention is to bind the entitlement card to many aspects of life. In time it would be required to buy a house or a car, to apply for a passport or even book a holiday. The USP for a card management service is that the provider can develop the ultimate loyalty card, which is very attractive to the UK business community, which NewLabour is deeply in love with and will do almost anything for.
One of the other attractions to government is that such a system provides a national identity database such as which doesn't currently exist. I work for a company that is shortly to go live with a project for the UK Passport Office which will provide electoral registration information to support passport applications. In time this information will be extended to other government bodies which would not be able to share it between each other, so it's going to happen anyway.
As for biometric testing, the UK Goverment's approved suppliers are almost all terrible at what they do: congestion charging is about to be introduced in Central London and relies on a system that can read car number plates. Capita, the contractor who were hired to develop the system, managed to get it to read one in early December. It goes live in a fortnight, and it's currently 4/1 that it will be abandoned before the end of the year. Other companies such as EDS, Siemens and Schlumberger Sema will be in the running to manage the system. A search of The Register or Computing magazine's news pages will show that these are not companies to whom you would entrust your identity, biometrics or no.
The same applies to any non-free (as in beer) operating system. I've never managed a problem free migration between Solaris versions (through both OS upgrades and hardware upgrades). For that matter Sun will mature Solaris 2.6 eventually, and even IBM will not be able to support a Linux distribution based on a particular kernel for ever (although my experience of Big Blue suggests that they'll claim they will). Red Hat is still trying to build a business based on software that anyone has the source code to, and they have to take decisions to protect that business. Maturing support for a version of their distribution which is getting on for five years old is a method of maintaining their business.
I joined the Omnisky trial in the UK last year - it was a Visor and VisorPhone for £199 plus three months service on a very locked BT Cellnet mobile account. Omnisky canned their service after the trail (which was unsurprising - they couldn't work out a way to make it attractive even to us hardcore geeks). They kept their promise of unlocking the phone when the trial ended and I now run it on a Vodafone PAYG chip (not very often though - they're pretty expensive).
It's interesting to see that Cellnet (or mmO2 as they're now inexplicably called) are going to be providing service to the Treo in the UK - one hopes that they'll look into GPRS sooner rather than later as GSM is still way too expensive for this sort of machine. Having said, if they do a deal for Visorphone owners in the UK I'll probably try and stop finding ways of trying to gaffa my Nokia 8120 to my Palm Vx...
8.0 was (and is) a great release. I still use it, patched with KDE 2.2.2 and various other upgrades principally because I couldn't get 8.1 to install on my laptop either by CD or by HTTP install. I never found a solution for this at Mandrake and it's not like my laptop is anything strange (Acer Travelmate 524). I had no problem with older, sometimes weirder desktop machines.
My one worry for 8.2 is that it's going to get more commercially oriented. 8.1 was the first release by Mandrake as a listed company and the website has subtly changed in the past few months to encourage donations or buy something in return for code or services. No different from many other companies in the same situation these days but it feels like Mandrake are trying to enforce it more than others, quite possibly to the detriment of the quality of the product.
One of the Nokia 5510's multitude of bangs and whistles is that it's not only an MP3 player but a recorder as well, from the inbuilt radio or line in. 64Mb should be plenty for a couple of hours of recording. There's a rumour that it can also be used as a phone as well.
Slashdot Mirror
and he could have been running Disney by now.
"You can have the office, Bill. I'll have the living room."
There were certainly African slaves in Britain in the late 16th century, and the Royal African Company held the monopoly of English-run slavers in the late 17th century. But of course, England had no real need as it still had serfdom.
Mail isn't the problem, as Outlook will read IMAP and POP3 mail. Calendaring is the stumbling block as Outlook won't read LDAP calendars without third party plugins. OpenOffice's Outlook clone would read Exchange calendaring if LDAP support was turned on in Exchange, but that is no longer part of OpenOffice and I'm not sure if LDAP works in Exchange anymore.
Apple-Disney becomes Dapple.
Then it buys Sun, and becomes Snapple-Dapple.
It's a turning into a long afternoon.
Google's recent direction has been interesting - their early expansion was about extending the context of search and using what people were looking for and talking about as intelligence, so Groups, News, Images, blogger.com and even Froogle made sense - the user got the service and Google got the click and did what they did with it. I think it's reasonable to assume that hasn't been a successful model for a few reasons. For example, there has little or no visible investment in Web 2.0 services like Flickr and del.icio.us, which are both prime examples of applications of the old model in that any commercial intelligence comes from measuring views and clicks and their context, so unless they're pitching a bid for last.fm at the moment (and the way that music based search results are being arranged suggests not) it's also reasonable to assume that search isn't being developed as a revenue earner. What has happened since the float, with things like Maps and Earth, is that the click has become a sponsored one, and, just like it was in the heady days of the dotcom boom, advertising is the revenue earner, except that this time, Google have the power to make it happen. One possibility for the buyout of dMark is audio enabled AdWords, soon to be followed by video AdWords once the bandwidth is generally available - combine that with Google Video and there's a platform for generating ad supported content, or television as we used to call it. The intelligence hasn't paid its way, and the company has had to look about a little frantically to find a new way to make money, but this is a direction that should please the shareholders and isn't particularily evil.
Anyone who uses Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or *any* webmail) for confidential material is fooling themselves about its confidentiality, but as a mail service for shuffling data around it will be very useful, but Gmail is going to have cover itself and protect itself from being the biggest mp3, warez and pr0n distributor in the world.
Digital radio is finally taking off, with the major electrical chains offering receivers at almost realistic prices (around 75 for a table model) with the hope that enough will have been found under the tree the Christmas. 6Music and its companion raider of the BBC archives BBC7 have been major drivers in the digital radio takeup campaign, as the UK government is still working towards an end of analogue broadcasting in the VHF and UHF bands by 2010. Ironically, 6Music and BBC7 seem to have been more popular over the Internet outside the UK than on digital radio in the UK in the last year. Speaking as an early adopter with digital radio in the car, I can confirm that while the BBC's coverage has improved enormously over the past year, there are still many holes in the network. My parents, who live in a fairly large ex-industrial town in the north of England, can't even receive the digital Freeview TV service, and BBC digital radio literally disappears at the nearest motorway junction. On the other hand, Sky TV, which provides all the national digital radio channels through a satellite dish via TV has become an enormous success, and it seems likely that Murdoch will be the ultimate winner in the whole process.
You get email from someone pretending to be Spamhaus in order to discredit them.
Tony Blair doesn't love Microsoft, he loves big business, and he wants big business to benefit from every aspect of British life. Note that the Office of the e-Envoy isn't using an enthusiastic start-up for the pilots, it's using IBM, who have admittedly done good things for Linux and Open Source in the bigger scheme of things, but will be causing the e-Envoy's office to be overrun by enthusiastic but largely clueless (but chargeable) project managers. But it's big business, so it must be good.
Pshaw. He was British, it came out of his head, so the invention was British. And besides, we know that BT invented hyperlinks.
However, Paul Darrow has been pitching this around for a couple of years now (the original plan was for a movie, and then it became a pilot and now it seems to be a treatment) and I really hope he keeps behind the cameras as he seems to have become an old luvvie in the ensuing years.
and is going to NZ to work on LOTR in a couple of weeks, so I guess this will be her platform.
Slightly off topic, and I know that Linux on Sparc is more or less dead, but this came up in conversation the other week: what's the biggest Sun machine or equivalent (in terms of number of CPUs, memory, disk) that anyone has got Linux/Sparc to run on?
As other people have said, that 8Gb of memory where Sun are concerned will make all the difference. I think it's just about got down to $1500 per gig or thereabouts.
I love Linux, but where I work, in the financial services industry, they're still trying to come to terms with the fact that mainframes might not be the bargain they were made out to be. They understand Sun and Solaris because like mainframes, it's reassuringly expensive. We're at the low end of the market Sun (and IBM) are fighting for now.
Who does say Linux on the desktop is dead? As far as I can see its takeup is just beginning, and as long as Microsoft persevere with an overpriced, overpowering 'standard', more organisations will consider it throughout the world.
According to their website The Sisters of Mercy still use ruggedised portable 486s running DOS 3.3 and Voyetra Sequencer Plus to power Doktor Avalanche for live shows. Sequencer Plus was first released in about 1987. They claim it's only crashed twice.
I have a Belkin WiFi gateway through which my half a dozen machines talk. If I control a remote machine using VNC a screen redraw causes the gateway to make quite a pronounced rustling sound as if you can hear the packets going through it.
One of the other attractions to government is that such a system provides a national identity database such as which doesn't currently exist. I work for a company that is shortly to go live with a project for the UK Passport Office which will provide electoral registration information to support passport applications. In time this information will be extended to other government bodies which would not be able to share it between each other, so it's going to happen anyway.
As for biometric testing, the UK Goverment's approved suppliers are almost all terrible at what they do: congestion charging is about to be introduced in Central London and relies on a system that can read car number plates. Capita, the contractor who were hired to develop the system, managed to get it to read one in early December. It goes live in a fortnight, and it's currently 4/1 that it will be abandoned before the end of the year. Other companies such as EDS, Siemens and Schlumberger Sema will be in the running to manage the system. A search of The Register or Computing magazine's news pages will show that these are not companies to whom you would entrust your identity, biometrics or no.
The same applies to any non-free (as in beer) operating system. I've never managed a problem free migration between Solaris versions (through both OS upgrades and hardware upgrades). For that matter Sun will mature Solaris 2.6 eventually, and even IBM will not be able to support a Linux distribution based on a particular kernel for ever (although my experience of Big Blue suggests that they'll claim they will). Red Hat is still trying to build a business based on software that anyone has the source code to, and they have to take decisions to protect that business. Maturing support for a version of their distribution which is getting on for five years old is a method of maintaining their business.
Jeez man! Get digital! You just missed Buffy the Musical as well.
I joined the Omnisky trial in the UK last year - it was a Visor and VisorPhone for £199 plus three months service on a very locked BT Cellnet mobile account. Omnisky canned their service after the trail (which was unsurprising - they couldn't work out a way to make it attractive even to us hardcore geeks). They kept their promise of unlocking the phone when the trial ended and I now run it on a Vodafone PAYG chip (not very often though - they're pretty expensive).
It's interesting to see that Cellnet (or mmO2 as they're now inexplicably called) are going to be providing service to the Treo in the UK - one hopes that they'll look into GPRS sooner rather than later as GSM is still way too expensive for this sort of machine. Having said, if they do a deal for Visorphone owners in the UK I'll probably try and stop finding ways of trying to gaffa my Nokia 8120 to my Palm Vx...
Everyone who thinks that this is a bad thing had better stop using Google now.
Think caches. Big caches...
8.0 was (and is) a great release. I still use it, patched with KDE 2.2.2 and various other upgrades principally because I couldn't get 8.1 to install on my laptop either by CD or by HTTP install. I never found a solution for this at Mandrake and it's not like my laptop is anything strange (Acer Travelmate 524). I had no problem with older, sometimes weirder desktop machines.
My one worry for 8.2 is that it's going to get more commercially oriented. 8.1 was the first release by Mandrake as a listed company and the website has subtly changed in the past few months to encourage donations or buy something in return for code or services. No different from many other companies in the same situation these days but it feels like Mandrake are trying to enforce it more than others, quite possibly to the detriment of the quality of the product.
One of the Nokia 5510's multitude of bangs and whistles is that it's not only an MP3 player but a recorder as well, from the inbuilt radio or line in. 64Mb should be plenty for a couple of hours of recording. There's a rumour that it can also be used as a phone as well.