That's the problem, though. It doesn't cost more to pump Google's traffic. It costs more to arbitrarily filter that traffic, since you have to buy more expensive equipment so that you can inspect the packets more. The reason for buying that equipment is so that you can extort all of the content providers into paying you so that you don't slow them down.
If it were truly a free market, then it wouldn't matter. As you imply, everyone would just dump Verizon to use a customer-friendly company. However, like in real life today, people use Verizon anyway, even though they would be better off with TCP over carrier pigeon than giving a red cent to Verizon. This is because there are near monopolies all over the place, with help from the government. People are largely too apathetic to fix the problem, since it might incur some small inconvenience. This is much like how people are generally too lazy to vote, or run for office, or boycott a bad vendor, etc.
The Internet today works because of mutual cooperation in passing packets. If we let some greedy bottom-feeder start charging arbitrarily for not disadvantaging you, then we undermine the way we do peering on all of the pipes out there. How can any business really compete if they have to pay protection money to 500 different ISPs, plus the tier 1 providers, plus who knows who... You'd never be able to start a new Internet business because of it. We all paid for our connections. Google pays for their upstream, and in return, their provider passes packets for other upstream participants.
This concept destroys the peer-to-peer concept that the Internet was built upon. We can all be content providers. We can all request arbitrary information from arbitrary parties. Without net neutrality, everyone is forced to pay every possible bandwidth provider for the privilege of not having them go out of their way to slow down your traffic.
The only people Google should be paying are the people providing them their upstream link. If Google is taxing their system too much, then they will be charged more. That is how it has always worked. That is *NOT* what these bandwidth providers want to do. Under this scheme, if Google is charged too much by Level3, and switches to XO, as an example, they still have their packets slowed down by Verizon, Level3, Comcast, and everyone else, unless they pay the packet extortion fee.
We went through a lot of hell to stop the telecoms from doing this with voice cross-connects. Now, the bastard are trying to pull the same stunts, but "over the Internet". Just like all of the junk patents the same are harassing the world with.
Because it is allowing companies to slow down service for those that don't pay. Under the current arrangement, everyone has equal access. With what the telcos and cable companies want to do, some company gets to pay them to be "high priority". This means that the higher-paying traffic bumps all the normal, non-paying, traffic, making everything else go slower.
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
Which makes more sense: the change of a species over time starting from single celled organisms or that some benevolent and omnipotent life form came to Earth and purposefully created life, exactly as it is today, for the benefit of man, and left no reason why this was?
Again, which makes more sense: the universe was put together by a higher being instantly and exactly as it is today, again, for the benefit of man, or the universe was created in some massive chaotic event that we don't understand yet, and came to exist as it is over the course of billions of years?
The systems and processes that we are able to observe directly follow similar courses to our model theories of evolution and the Big Bang. Over the tremendous time that the Universe has existed, things have tended to fall into general patterns, so this makes sense. Given enough time, any sustained complex system is going to have many patterns.
The Big Bang and Evolution may be wrong in details, or just may be wrong. It is highly likely that they hold at least truth in their general concepts, as those general processes are very simple and sensible. Religion depends on some higher order and secret plan that we are not privy to, all-powerful and all-knowing beings that are beyond our apparent ability to comprehend, arbitrary rules, fiction, and common sense, all wrapped into a package. There is history and a lot of good messages in religion, but they are not the end-all-be-all.
Atom bomb research begat nuclear fission energy production. While bomb research in fusion or anti-matter might get us another advance in energy production, thankfully we aren't going the way of bigger bombs. Today's goal is cheaper and more precise weapons payloads. This might be useful in propulsion, but not power generation.
Military research brings in a tremendous amount of consumer advancement. I agree that the loss of life is worth the quick advances, though.
I'm not entirely sure why you would ever want to do this. I can find many cases where OpenOffice doesn't work exactly like MS Office, or where it doesn't have some function that MS Office has. In many cases, you can implement the function, or find the function, in OpenOffice, and sometimes you can't. The point is that if I actively try to find excuses for OpenOffice not being good enough, then I can find them.
The easy solution is to not do what you're talking about doing. There isn't a good reason to have an audio loop in the middle of a presentation that stops on some random future slide that you designate later. If you want to make the mistake of embedding audio in a presentation, and it happens to be a loop, then you could always embed the loop into each slide that you want it on. Honestly, a presentation is something you're supposed to be using as a visual aid to guide a speech or to illustrate specific items that you're discussing. I don't imagine your use will ever be a priority, since it actually makes it more difficult to conduct a presentation.
If you absolutely need such a thing, right now, then you could contribute the code, pay someone to contribute the code, or keep using MS Office.
I really believe that the better answer is to change your lesson plan to not do that, regardless of which above choice you happen to make. I will admit though, that I'm biased on that topic: I hate presentation with noise and pointless distractions, like slide transitions. I find it much more productive to think of a computer aided presentation as a glorified slide projector. It keeps you on topic and guides you towards giving a better speech.
The KX Audio Project drivers will fix the software related problems on Creative cards. I don't use their hardware any more, but those drivers were great when I did.
The particular app is mixed.NET and Win32. I have to run the program using Wine, but then there are.NET components that won't execute. It's very annoying, and the company is cozying up to MS, which really bothers me. The previous version was pure Win32, and that could be run with Wine no problem.
It would probably cost me $100,000 to migrate to another financial platform, though.
I run one of those two, and I can play back anything I've seen, with the exception of copy restricted WMV files. Honestly, the only home use I have for Windows is to play Supreme Commander, and hopefully that will be fixed soon. I'd be able to ditch Windows at work, but our finance system "upgraded" to a.NET client, and that just doesn't work on WINE. Of course, it also didn't work on the NT machines that I had at the time, either.
Ubuntu Feisty has GUI support for WEP and WPA out of box. Dapper and Edgy work with WEP out of box, and can be made to work with WPA by installing NetworkManager. I have to go into a command line to get a single thing to work on my machine; everything else was done by installing the right package from Add/Remove or Synaptic. The one change from the command line was to enable composite visuals in my X server, and most users wouldn't do that. (It was needed to play around with Compiz and Beryl.)
I can run most Windows games using Cedega or the current build of WINE, though that is not exactly a perfect situation. Most regular apps work with WINE or CrossOver Office, but hat is also an imperfect solution..NET junk doesn't work at all, but I hate having to use that stuff anyway due to the horrible performance that typically follows.
I agree that it all should just work from the start, but that doesn't happen with anything right now, except MacOS. That's a bit of a cheat on Apple's part, since they control the hardware platform, too.
A lot of government uses it. We use it in the municipality that I work for, and it does all the domain auth, file, and print serving for everything. The backend is OpenLDAP and is the authentication source for email and UNIX systems. You can do the same thing in the other direction, for the most part, if you want AD to be your auth source, but I haven't spent any time looking at it as of yet.
If you need Active Directory style functionality, take a look at Novell eDirectory and ZenWorks. There's a few other things out there that will give you management functionality, and software deployment, such as WPKG and Mandriva Pulse.
Also, using SAMBA doesn't mean that you *can't* be using Windows Server systems, or Active Directory. W2k3 server can still join a SAMBA controlled domain, and SAMBA can join and authenticate against an AD domain just fine. Domain trusts work, too.
Does any OS come with a decent file manager right now? Nautilus is rather crappy, Explorer (all versions) is outright trash, KDE has an OK file manager, as does OSX. I found that the only file manager I really like is Directory Opus, which is a Windows app.
Think about those features that you have listed, and consider whether they really matter. You can use a webcam or camera just fine in Win98 the same was as you probably would in XP: the vendor supplied software. Fast user switching doesn't work in a domain, and at home people generally just leave the machine logged in as one user. Remote assistance/remote desktop is nice in a corporate setting, where you could just use VNC anyway. System restore is usually useless, driver rollback only sometimes works, and prefetch doesn't work very well at much more than trashing your hard drive. The 64bit support is completely broken as far as compatibility goes. The fonts are nice, though some people have issues with eye strain.
The only thing that I actually like more about XP than 2000 is the boot time, which you didn't mention!:P
CompUSA regularly has sales that, when combined with their mail-in rebates, often end up being either a $0 sale, or a net gain for buying the item. I have certainly bought things from them that end up being free, and I have made a few dollars as well. They certainly couldn't decide later on to charge my card for more because they ended up giving me free RAM or giving me $5 for taking a mouse from them.
Theft is only when you deprive someone of their property without their permission. Amazon willingly agreed to a $0 sale and sent the merchandise to the customer.
Fraut is intentionally twisting the truth to trick someone into doing something, or giving something up. Amazon says "I will send this to you for free." and you say "OK!" is not tricking Amazon by lying to them. Amazon made the offer that led to the free DVDs on their own.
Mistakes in the consumers favor are a business cost. Mistakes against the customers favor are also a business cost (that you have to refund). If the price is marked at $5 and the register says $7.50, you owe the customer $2.50. If the price is marked as $5 and the register says $2.50, then the store lost $2.50. The customer could complain that the marked price was higher and demand to be charged, but the store can't force them to pay the higher price later.
The *right thing* to do is to shore up with Amazon and either pay the higher price or return the discs. It is not the *required* thing to do, though.
Actually, in this case you are. Amazon agreed to sell these box sets for a very small amount of money at the checkout. These people accepted the price, and the transaction was committed to the credit card. Amazon then sent the item out, after having charged the agreed upon price from the checkout. Amazon then realized they didn't like the price that they agreed to at the time of the transaction being committed, decided to make it a higher price, and issued a fraudulant charge to make up the higher price.
Amazon will get killed in court if they push this. Amazon simply *can't* charge the higher price, since the time of sale was for a lower price, and the receipts and invoices reflect that lower price. Most of those sales would not have been made if Amazon had been asking the higher price. Now, the right thing for these people to have done was report the discrepancy and try to pay the correct price. Barring that, they should agree to the new higher price or return the merchandise. Either way, the customers are under no obligation to do so at this point.
The mistake cost Amazon a lot of money, but it will be a lot less money than a large number of fraudulant charges, and associated lawsuits.
I appear to have the next revision of that keyboard. Same layout, except they screwed up the F-keys and make you hit an F-lock to have them actually work right. They added a calculator button, too, and that's much better than "Alt+F2 gnome-calculator".
That is the way MS is pushing for layouts. Do you notice that the Insert key isn't there? It's now a control key off of some other random key. Which key that is will change between just about every keyboard model.
Sure, we can keep the Caps Lock key in the wrong place, hell, even on dedicated key at all, but we get rid of the Insert key. Go figure.
The pike tolls were supposed to disappear a long time ago. The agreement when the road was built was that when the tolls paid for the costs to construct the road, that the tolls would be removed. They then decided that the Big Dig was part of the costs of construction for I90, so the tolls will likely never disappear, as we'll *never* be able to pay that off.
I agree about the state being silly, much of the time. Remember, this is the place where it's illegal to videotape cops on a public road. I also love it when the state cops stand on the side of the road with a radar gun, pointing at cars to try to pull them over. This is the same state that made the train cost more than alternate means, especially for someone west of Boston, like me. I lived in Milford for a while (about 10mins south of the pike, along 495), and it actually was faster *and* cheaper to insure a car, buy gas, pay the tolls to drive to Cambridge, and pay to park. At least before the fare hike, it was cost effective to commute by train.
Thinking back, we had a similar thing to this Boston bit happen in the town where I work. Some student brought a couple of.22 rounds to school in his coat. Apparently he'd been target shooting with his father the day before and forgot about them. Said rounds fell out of his pocket in the school and were noticed by staff. The school was then locked down and everything searched. This predictably got everyone out of school for most of the day. The administration went crazy over this, and when the kid that did it stepped forward (the next day), they had him brought up on charges and expelled. Predictably, spent casings were then found in other schools, as it was proven to get you out of class for the day, and easy to get your hands on.
I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this in Boston again, soon. People love to disrupt things for their own amusement, especially when it's cheap, easy, and hard to get caught doing.
Of course, with the police and such talking about nailing whoever did it to a cross, what a surprise that nobody stepped forward to quell the madness.
It was a stupid stunt, with a moronic response by the authorities. It also worked 100%, due to how moronic the response of the Boston authorities was. There's a difference between quickly closing down the immmediate area, investigating the sign while doing so, and then discontinuing the closures after the all clear, and what they did. They closed everything in a wide area, called in heavily armed units, caused considerable panic, and then gave the all clear while screaming about throwing whoever did it in the abyss. In other words, the decision makers acted like irrational mental cases screaming at the invisible monsters from space rather than calm intelligent people dealing with a potential dangerous situation.
100% Microsoft shop people don't tend to push first release MS products. I feel for you if they try to push Vista on you before at least Q3/Q4 when SP1 is supposed to be out. There is a *lot* of software that is broken on Vista right now, driver availability is poor, and it just isn't really finished yet. If history repeats, then things will get better over the next few service packs. I'd imagine that you'll be able to have about the same user experience with it as you would with XP or 2000 by spring '08.
You're right about those kinds of people being common, but they aren't usually *running* IT. I'm surprised that you don't have someone that does libraries across your state. Individual libraries don't seem to often have their own IT staff. FWIW, XP was pushed by the home market, primarily. Businesses didn't care to migrate unless MS managed to get a political connection to someone over the head of IT, or the change would somehow improve their bottom line.
You don't seem to have much experience with business/enterprise IT. Many of them are still using Windows 2000, since XP offered them no additional functionality worthy of changing the operating environment. There are a considerable number of shops that just started, or just finished moving to XP. It will likely be after 2010 before these places start moving to Vista, and that's only if it doesn't flop in the marketplace like WinME.
As a point, I'm just finishing upgrading all of my stations to XP now. One of my peers doesn't plan to be finished with that process for another two years. Neither of us have any plans to move to Vista at this time. It won't provide us with anything that we don't already have working, but it *WILL* introduce known, and unknown, problems into the environment. Until support has ended, there is little incentive to migrate.
Interesting enough, the reason that I updated to XP was that 2000 is now off normal support, and onto the additional cost extended support. The reason that I finally 100% dropped NT4 (and had to replace the machines) was that it didn't do.NET, and one of my critical applications developed a dependancy on it, unfortunately. This is typical in a business environment.
What you have run into at work is more likely the "IT expert" that only has ever used Windows. They ignore all alternatives, or dismiss them as more expensive, or impossible to support. Your library system has no need for SQL Server, and it is extreme overkill. As an example, I know someone that just set up a library catalog system for a school district, and the requirements for their application were Apache and MySQL or PostgreSQL. They don't likely catalog as many pieces as you do, but it's still tens of thousands of items.
OpenDocument isn't really doing the same thing as PDF. ODF is content with formatting controls that is geared towards WYSIWYG. As a result, it has many of the same problems that Microsoft formats have with formatting changing based on drivers.
PDF is a layout format. You do you document in a layout language, such as LaTeX, or a formatting system, like OpenOffice. Then you save your document to PDF as if you were publishing it. Changes should be made to the original document, and then re-exported as a PDF. You wouldn't send a PDF to someone, have them add some content, save it as a PDF, and send it back.
OfficeXML is sort of like OpenDocument, but impossible to implement properly, mired in copyrights and patents, platform specific, and poorly documented. It doesn't do any of what a PDF does. Worse yet, if you code to the "specification" that Microsoft has made available, you still can't read and format the original document without their help.
So, there isn't good reason to merge PDF and ODF, since they do very different things. You would be better off trying to get people to use the right tool for the job, rather than messing about with difficult conversions and such. We should use layout systems for doing work, and word processors for writing letters and memos.
FWIW, my Nextel i560 lived through all of that, as do the i530 models that I have out there every day. My current Sprint/Nextel ic502 has been going strong, too. I have a few other milspec 810F certified phones in service that have been dropped out of a car at highway speed, run over by a truck, thrown, submerged, exposed to temperatures regularly ranging from -5*F to 80*F repeatedly, and more. None of them have developed any problems, as of yet.
You could also by a DVD player from any of a large number of SouthEast Asia based companies that don't implement region locking, MacroVision, and customer skip lockout flags. I bought an Apex 600-A years ago for just that reason.
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That's the problem, though. It doesn't cost more to pump Google's traffic. It costs more to arbitrarily filter that traffic, since you have to buy more expensive equipment so that you can inspect the packets more. The reason for buying that equipment is so that you can extort all of the content providers into paying you so that you don't slow them down.
If it were truly a free market, then it wouldn't matter. As you imply, everyone would just dump Verizon to use a customer-friendly company. However, like in real life today, people use Verizon anyway, even though they would be better off with TCP over carrier pigeon than giving a red cent to Verizon. This is because there are near monopolies all over the place, with help from the government. People are largely too apathetic to fix the problem, since it might incur some small inconvenience. This is much like how people are generally too lazy to vote, or run for office, or boycott a bad vendor, etc.
The Internet today works because of mutual cooperation in passing packets. If we let some greedy bottom-feeder start charging arbitrarily for not disadvantaging you, then we undermine the way we do peering on all of the pipes out there. How can any business really compete if they have to pay protection money to 500 different ISPs, plus the tier 1 providers, plus who knows who... You'd never be able to start a new Internet business because of it. We all paid for our connections. Google pays for their upstream, and in return, their provider passes packets for other upstream participants.
This concept destroys the peer-to-peer concept that the Internet was built upon. We can all be content providers. We can all request arbitrary information from arbitrary parties. Without net neutrality, everyone is forced to pay every possible bandwidth provider for the privilege of not having them go out of their way to slow down your traffic.
The only people Google should be paying are the people providing them their upstream link. If Google is taxing their system too much, then they will be charged more. That is how it has always worked. That is *NOT* what these bandwidth providers want to do. Under this scheme, if Google is charged too much by Level3, and switches to XO, as an example, they still have their packets slowed down by Verizon, Level3, Comcast, and everyone else, unless they pay the packet extortion fee.
We went through a lot of hell to stop the telecoms from doing this with voice cross-connects. Now, the bastard are trying to pull the same stunts, but "over the Internet". Just like all of the junk patents the same are harassing the world with.
Because it is allowing companies to slow down service for those that don't pay. Under the current arrangement, everyone has equal access. With what the telcos and cable companies want to do, some company gets to pay them to be "high priority". This means that the higher-paying traffic bumps all the normal, non-paying, traffic, making everything else go slower.
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
It's more a matter of logic and plausibility.
Which makes more sense: the change of a species over time starting from single celled organisms or that some benevolent and omnipotent life form came to Earth and purposefully created life, exactly as it is today, for the benefit of man, and left no reason why this was?
Again, which makes more sense: the universe was put together by a higher being instantly and exactly as it is today, again, for the benefit of man, or the universe was created in some massive chaotic event that we don't understand yet, and came to exist as it is over the course of billions of years?
The systems and processes that we are able to observe directly follow similar courses to our model theories of evolution and the Big Bang. Over the tremendous time that the Universe has existed, things have tended to fall into general patterns, so this makes sense. Given enough time, any sustained complex system is going to have many patterns.
The Big Bang and Evolution may be wrong in details, or just may be wrong. It is highly likely that they hold at least truth in their general concepts, as those general processes are very simple and sensible. Religion depends on some higher order and secret plan that we are not privy to, all-powerful and all-knowing beings that are beyond our apparent ability to comprehend, arbitrary rules, fiction, and common sense, all wrapped into a package. There is history and a lot of good messages in religion, but they are not the end-all-be-all.
Atom bomb research begat nuclear fission energy production. While bomb research in fusion or anti-matter might get us another advance in energy production, thankfully we aren't going the way of bigger bombs. Today's goal is cheaper and more precise weapons payloads. This might be useful in propulsion, but not power generation.
Military research brings in a tremendous amount of consumer advancement. I agree that the loss of life is worth the quick advances, though.
I'm not entirely sure why you would ever want to do this. I can find many cases where OpenOffice doesn't work exactly like MS Office, or where it doesn't have some function that MS Office has. In many cases, you can implement the function, or find the function, in OpenOffice, and sometimes you can't. The point is that if I actively try to find excuses for OpenOffice not being good enough, then I can find them.
The easy solution is to not do what you're talking about doing. There isn't a good reason to have an audio loop in the middle of a presentation that stops on some random future slide that you designate later. If you want to make the mistake of embedding audio in a presentation, and it happens to be a loop, then you could always embed the loop into each slide that you want it on. Honestly, a presentation is something you're supposed to be using as a visual aid to guide a speech or to illustrate specific items that you're discussing. I don't imagine your use will ever be a priority, since it actually makes it more difficult to conduct a presentation.
If you absolutely need such a thing, right now, then you could contribute the code, pay someone to contribute the code, or keep using MS Office.
I really believe that the better answer is to change your lesson plan to not do that, regardless of which above choice you happen to make. I will admit though, that I'm biased on that topic: I hate presentation with noise and pointless distractions, like slide transitions. I find it much more productive to think of a computer aided presentation as a glorified slide projector. It keeps you on topic and guides you towards giving a better speech.
The KX Audio Project drivers will fix the software related problems on Creative cards. I don't use their hardware any more, but those drivers were great when I did.
The particular app is mixed .NET and Win32. I have to run the program using Wine, but then there are .NET components that won't execute. It's very annoying, and the company is cozying up to MS, which really bothers me. The previous version was pure Win32, and that could be run with Wine no problem.
It would probably cost me $100,000 to migrate to another financial platform, though.
You should look at Automatix or EasyUbuntu.
.NET client, and that just doesn't work on WINE. Of course, it also didn't work on the NT machines that I had at the time, either.
I run one of those two, and I can play back anything I've seen, with the exception of copy restricted WMV files. Honestly, the only home use I have for Windows is to play Supreme Commander, and hopefully that will be fixed soon. I'd be able to ditch Windows at work, but our finance system "upgraded" to a
Ubuntu Feisty has GUI support for WEP and WPA out of box. Dapper and Edgy work with WEP out of box, and can be made to work with WPA by installing NetworkManager. I have to go into a command line to get a single thing to work on my machine; everything else was done by installing the right package from Add/Remove or Synaptic. The one change from the command line was to enable composite visuals in my X server, and most users wouldn't do that. (It was needed to play around with Compiz and Beryl.)
.NET junk doesn't work at all, but I hate having to use that stuff anyway due to the horrible performance that typically follows.
I can run most Windows games using Cedega or the current build of WINE, though that is not exactly a perfect situation. Most regular apps work with WINE or CrossOver Office, but hat is also an imperfect solution.
I agree that it all should just work from the start, but that doesn't happen with anything right now, except MacOS. That's a bit of a cheat on Apple's part, since they control the hardware platform, too.
A lot of government uses it. We use it in the municipality that I work for, and it does all the domain auth, file, and print serving for everything. The backend is OpenLDAP and is the authentication source for email and UNIX systems. You can do the same thing in the other direction, for the most part, if you want AD to be your auth source, but I haven't spent any time looking at it as of yet.
If you need Active Directory style functionality, take a look at Novell eDirectory and ZenWorks. There's a few other things out there that will give you management functionality, and software deployment, such as WPKG and Mandriva Pulse.
Also, using SAMBA doesn't mean that you *can't* be using Windows Server systems, or Active Directory. W2k3 server can still join a SAMBA controlled domain, and SAMBA can join and authenticate against an AD domain just fine. Domain trusts work, too.
Does any OS come with a decent file manager right now? Nautilus is rather crappy, Explorer (all versions) is outright trash, KDE has an OK file manager, as does OSX. I found that the only file manager I really like is Directory Opus, which is a Windows app.
Think about those features that you have listed, and consider whether they really matter. You can use a webcam or camera just fine in Win98 the same was as you probably would in XP: the vendor supplied software. Fast user switching doesn't work in a domain, and at home people generally just leave the machine logged in as one user. Remote assistance/remote desktop is nice in a corporate setting, where you could just use VNC anyway. System restore is usually useless, driver rollback only sometimes works, and prefetch doesn't work very well at much more than trashing your hard drive. The 64bit support is completely broken as far as compatibility goes. The fonts are nice, though some people have issues with eye strain.
:P
The only thing that I actually like more about XP than 2000 is the boot time, which you didn't mention!
CompUSA regularly has sales that, when combined with their mail-in rebates, often end up being either a $0 sale, or a net gain for buying the item. I have certainly bought things from them that end up being free, and I have made a few dollars as well. They certainly couldn't decide later on to charge my card for more because they ended up giving me free RAM or giving me $5 for taking a mouse from them.
Theft is only when you deprive someone of their property without their permission. Amazon willingly agreed to a $0 sale and sent the merchandise to the customer.
Fraut is intentionally twisting the truth to trick someone into doing something, or giving something up. Amazon says "I will send this to you for free." and you say "OK!" is not tricking Amazon by lying to them. Amazon made the offer that led to the free DVDs on their own.
Mistakes in the consumers favor are a business cost. Mistakes against the customers favor are also a business cost (that you have to refund). If the price is marked at $5 and the register says $7.50, you owe the customer $2.50. If the price is marked as $5 and the register says $2.50, then the store lost $2.50. The customer could complain that the marked price was higher and demand to be charged, but the store can't force them to pay the higher price later.
The *right thing* to do is to shore up with Amazon and either pay the higher price or return the discs. It is not the *required* thing to do, though.
Actually, in this case you are. Amazon agreed to sell these box sets for a very small amount of money at the checkout. These people accepted the price, and the transaction was committed to the credit card. Amazon then sent the item out, after having charged the agreed upon price from the checkout. Amazon then realized they didn't like the price that they agreed to at the time of the transaction being committed, decided to make it a higher price, and issued a fraudulant charge to make up the higher price.
Amazon will get killed in court if they push this. Amazon simply *can't* charge the higher price, since the time of sale was for a lower price, and the receipts and invoices reflect that lower price. Most of those sales would not have been made if Amazon had been asking the higher price. Now, the right thing for these people to have done was report the discrepancy and try to pay the correct price. Barring that, they should agree to the new higher price or return the merchandise. Either way, the customers are under no obligation to do so at this point.
The mistake cost Amazon a lot of money, but it will be a lot less money than a large number of fraudulant charges, and associated lawsuits.
I appear to have the next revision of that keyboard. Same layout, except they screwed up the F-keys and make you hit an F-lock to have them actually work right. They added a calculator button, too, and that's much better than "Alt+F2 gnome-calculator".
I know it isn't the point, but take a look at the keyboard in these pictures:
o ard/images/officekeyboard.JPGp g
http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/officexpkeyb
http://home.uchicago.edu/~iyjung/bigpictures/48.j
That is the way MS is pushing for layouts. Do you notice that the Insert key isn't there? It's now a control key off of some other random key. Which key that is will change between just about every keyboard model.
Sure, we can keep the Caps Lock key in the wrong place, hell, even on dedicated key at all, but we get rid of the Insert key. Go figure.
Novell ZenWorks is a wonderful thing! It does Windows *and* Linux administration just as well as Windows does Windows.
The pike tolls were supposed to disappear a long time ago. The agreement when the road was built was that when the tolls paid for the costs to construct the road, that the tolls would be removed. They then decided that the Big Dig was part of the costs of construction for I90, so the tolls will likely never disappear, as we'll *never* be able to pay that off.
.22 rounds to school in his coat. Apparently he'd been target shooting with his father the day before and forgot about them. Said rounds fell out of his pocket in the school and were noticed by staff. The school was then locked down and everything searched. This predictably got everyone out of school for most of the day. The administration went crazy over this, and when the kid that did it stepped forward (the next day), they had him brought up on charges and expelled. Predictably, spent casings were then found in other schools, as it was proven to get you out of class for the day, and easy to get your hands on.
I agree about the state being silly, much of the time. Remember, this is the place where it's illegal to videotape cops on a public road. I also love it when the state cops stand on the side of the road with a radar gun, pointing at cars to try to pull them over. This is the same state that made the train cost more than alternate means, especially for someone west of Boston, like me. I lived in Milford for a while (about 10mins south of the pike, along 495), and it actually was faster *and* cheaper to insure a car, buy gas, pay the tolls to drive to Cambridge, and pay to park. At least before the fare hike, it was cost effective to commute by train.
Thinking back, we had a similar thing to this Boston bit happen in the town where I work. Some student brought a couple of
I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this in Boston again, soon. People love to disrupt things for their own amusement, especially when it's cheap, easy, and hard to get caught doing.
Of course, with the police and such talking about nailing whoever did it to a cross, what a surprise that nobody stepped forward to quell the madness.
It was a stupid stunt, with a moronic response by the authorities. It also worked 100%, due to how moronic the response of the Boston authorities was. There's a difference between quickly closing down the immmediate area, investigating the sign while doing so, and then discontinuing the closures after the all clear, and what they did. They closed everything in a wide area, called in heavily armed units, caused considerable panic, and then gave the all clear while screaming about throwing whoever did it in the abyss. In other words, the decision makers acted like irrational mental cases screaming at the invisible monsters from space rather than calm intelligent people dealing with a potential dangerous situation.
100% Microsoft shop people don't tend to push first release MS products. I feel for you if they try to push Vista on you before at least Q3/Q4 when SP1 is supposed to be out. There is a *lot* of software that is broken on Vista right now, driver availability is poor, and it just isn't really finished yet. If history repeats, then things will get better over the next few service packs. I'd imagine that you'll be able to have about the same user experience with it as you would with XP or 2000 by spring '08.
You're right about those kinds of people being common, but they aren't usually *running* IT. I'm surprised that you don't have someone that does libraries across your state. Individual libraries don't seem to often have their own IT staff. FWIW, XP was pushed by the home market, primarily. Businesses didn't care to migrate unless MS managed to get a political connection to someone over the head of IT, or the change would somehow improve their bottom line.
You don't seem to have much experience with business/enterprise IT. Many of them are still using Windows 2000, since XP offered them no additional functionality worthy of changing the operating environment. There are a considerable number of shops that just started, or just finished moving to XP. It will likely be after 2010 before these places start moving to Vista, and that's only if it doesn't flop in the marketplace like WinME.
.NET, and one of my critical applications developed a dependancy on it, unfortunately. This is typical in a business environment.
As a point, I'm just finishing upgrading all of my stations to XP now. One of my peers doesn't plan to be finished with that process for another two years. Neither of us have any plans to move to Vista at this time. It won't provide us with anything that we don't already have working, but it *WILL* introduce known, and unknown, problems into the environment. Until support has ended, there is little incentive to migrate.
Interesting enough, the reason that I updated to XP was that 2000 is now off normal support, and onto the additional cost extended support. The reason that I finally 100% dropped NT4 (and had to replace the machines) was that it didn't do
What you have run into at work is more likely the "IT expert" that only has ever used Windows. They ignore all alternatives, or dismiss them as more expensive, or impossible to support. Your library system has no need for SQL Server, and it is extreme overkill. As an example, I know someone that just set up a library catalog system for a school district, and the requirements for their application were Apache and MySQL or PostgreSQL. They don't likely catalog as many pieces as you do, but it's still tens of thousands of items.
OpenDocument isn't really doing the same thing as PDF. ODF is content with formatting controls that is geared towards WYSIWYG. As a result, it has many of the same problems that Microsoft formats have with formatting changing based on drivers.
PDF is a layout format. You do you document in a layout language, such as LaTeX, or a formatting system, like OpenOffice. Then you save your document to PDF as if you were publishing it. Changes should be made to the original document, and then re-exported as a PDF. You wouldn't send a PDF to someone, have them add some content, save it as a PDF, and send it back.
OfficeXML is sort of like OpenDocument, but impossible to implement properly, mired in copyrights and patents, platform specific, and poorly documented. It doesn't do any of what a PDF does. Worse yet, if you code to the "specification" that Microsoft has made available, you still can't read and format the original document without their help.
So, there isn't good reason to merge PDF and ODF, since they do very different things. You would be better off trying to get people to use the right tool for the job, rather than messing about with difficult conversions and such. We should use layout systems for doing work, and word processors for writing letters and memos.
FWIW, my Nextel i560 lived through all of that, as do the i530 models that I have out there every day. My current Sprint/Nextel ic502 has been going strong, too. I have a few other milspec 810F certified phones in service that have been dropped out of a car at highway speed, run over by a truck, thrown, submerged, exposed to temperatures regularly ranging from -5*F to 80*F repeatedly, and more. None of them have developed any problems, as of yet.
Daemon Tools still seems to work fine for me, as does a mounted image and Cedega.
Here are a few choices:
http://www.mythtv.org/
http://xinehq.de/
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
You could also by a DVD player from any of a large number of SouthEast Asia based companies that don't implement region locking, MacroVision, and customer skip lockout flags. I bought an Apex 600-A years ago for just that reason.