This really depends on whether the company sees itself primarily as an information company or a technology company. Lots of companies 'out there' are fundamentally information companies: where they add value is through the information they hold. Typical of these are financial sector companies, travel agencies, many (perhaps most) retailers. Where information is the business, looking after the information is the core business activity, and technology supports this.
Technology companies, in the wider economy, are relatively rare. They are the companies whose primary business is innovation, which add value through creating new kinds of things. Even the big, obvious 'technology companies' aren't really technology companies considered as a whole (although divisions within them may be): Sun, IBM, HP, for example, though they do develop new technology, fundamentally add value through their knowledge of their customer base and its needs; innovation supports this, it doesn't lead it. So here again I would expect the information function to be senior to the technology function.
It's in less established companies, or smaller specialist companies which concentrate on innovation, that I would expect the technology function to be genuinely senior to the information function.
WHen one of.com workers who are reading this comment gets fired, I want you to remember this article here on slashdot and how everyone thought it was so funny.
Guy, I'm sorry, but it is funny. That's the nature of humour: you laugh at the appalling things which you know perfectly well really could happen to you, because if you didn't laugh at them you'd have to weep.
If the US were no longer the "best" country, or "number 1", how long would it take us to notice?
On the evidence here I think it will take you a very long time - nearly as long as it's taken the English, in fact.
Seriously, if you want quality of life, freedom, and safety, try Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark or Switzerland. Iceland is also great but it's a little too cold. Any of them easily beat the US on all the measures you've given.
In short, my conclusion for now for our project (based on the knowledge of our user's abilities) is that Jabber just isn't there yet on the client front, on Linux. Maybe it will be in 6 months or more. For now, AIM is a great alternative, despite the worrys of AOL's control over the protocol.
I really don't agree. I was able to install gabber (the gnome client) by just adding one line to my sources.list and typing apt-get install gabber. I find it works just fine. I've tried to install the Konverse client but haven't yet had success with that. The Java Applet client also works fine on Linux; the pure Java Swagger client works, but isn't (as yet) nearly as polished as gabber or the Windows clients.
But Gabber just works[tm] and is easily up to the standards of the Windows clients. Recommended. The server is also extremely easy to get set up and running. This is often extemely important: if you're setting up a system for communication inside any commercial organisation, you really don't want your messages routed through someone else's server.
Oh, and, re your.sig, if you want to do XML and stylesheets and stuff with Apache or Jigsaw or WebLogic or more or less anything, really, you probably want Jacquard;-)
Yes, it's a shame that not everybody is a programmer. I'm not a programmer...
So get off your lazy fat arse and learn. Nobody was born a programmer, and while some programmers are much better than others, 90% of that is hard work and dedication.
What I meant is that the usual reason for anonymity is political persecution. Strong encryption pretty much solves that problem, a lot easier than Freenet.
Bollocks[TM]
Strong encryption does nothing to protect you against traffic analysis, and in a totalitarian state traffic analysis alone is going to be enough to convict you. You send email to someone who sends email to some known dissident? Case closed.
Freenet does defend against traffic analysis at least to a degree (how effective this is I'm not really certain). So for people in totalitarian states, Freenet together with things like the steganographic file system offers plausibly deniable access to data and plausibly deniable storage of data. How successful this would be as an information-sharing system for dissidents is hard to say, but provided people are allowed real control over real computers (and the ability to load and configure their own software without supervision), and so long as those computers are connected to packet-switched networks over which it's possible to route encrypted (or steganographic) packets, it looks as if it would be unstoppable.
Of course, as soon as people start being arrested merely for owning a computer with software the authorities haven't authorised, or merely for sending a packet the authorities don't understand over a network, this all falls to pieces.
...you see, the patent is SPECIFIC to online auctions (in fact, not even THAT general!)...
OK, here's a specific example from an on-line auction system I wrote in 1996. This is, to my knowledge, the thirteenth US software patent where I personally have written prior art. Having said that, of course, it was scarcely a novel idea when I used it.
First thing to say is that IBM already does contribute a lot into OSS, and I for one am grateful. The Apache XML components, Xalan and Xerces, for example. And Alphaworks, although not open source, is a tremendous ideas resource. If you haven't already used it, do.
OK, so what do we need from them? Open Source software is built on open standards, depends on open standards. We've seen software vendors 'embrace and extend' standards to the point that they've ceased to be open (can anyone say 'Kerberos'?)
The biggest christmas present any of the big comupting companies could give the Open Source community is a cast-iron, board-level committment to support and comply with open standards wherever appropriate, and most significantly of all, never to 'extend' an open standard without making those extensions freely available under the same terms as thr original standard.
I would love to use Linux but I when none of the installs will even detect and install my Genius Netmouse pro, even with generic drivers.. well sheez..
I think you're missing the point. If you're too dumn to install Linux, that isn't a problem for Linux. It isn't a problem for you either, if Windows does what you want. If Windows doesn't do what you want, then you're going to be motivated to go out and make something that does, work for you. Too lazy? Too dumb? No problem. Use Windows.
Why would you 'love to use Linux'?
Because you think it's l33t k3wl?
Because there is some particular killer application you need which runs under Linux but which doesn't run under Windows?
Or because it's just the natural environment which feels as comfortable to you as an old sweathshirt?
Face it, guy, if you can't make your mouse work, that's your problem, not Linux's.
If Joe Public's Mom and Pop want an appliance operating system, there are commercial companies out there who will supply one. It's necessary and natural that the Linux community builds the operating system the Linux community wants, because we build it by scratching our own itches.
If Linux gets dumbed down to the point that it's the operating system Joe Public wants, then it won't be the operating system we want, so we'll all drift away to the Hurd or Inferno or something, and there will be no-one left to put volunteer effort into maintaining Linux.
The benefit of volunteer effort in maintenances is not so much that you get a lot of work done, but that you get a lot of committed work done. Things people do in their own time they do well, they do with pride; it's that which (IMHO) gives Open Source software its quality edge, far more than the peer review effect. If the volunteers all drifted away to another OS project, it's probable that the commercial Linux companies could still continue to develop the OS. But it would be developed by wage-slaves driven by marketing agendas, and pretty soon it would have no quality advantage over Uncle Bill's finest.
Linux is good at what it does because the people who know enough to make it what it is care enough about what it does to make it do what it does. If Windows did what we need, Linux wouldn't exist. If Linux did what the Windows audience needs, we would need something different.
It's silly to think of Linux as competing with Windows. The two operating systems address radically different audiences. This is inevitable and a good thing. Let's not dumb down Linux!
I'm responsible for a package (a servlet toolkit called Jacquard) which is released under BSD-style licence. Recently, I needed to add some regular expression functionality, and initially used the GNU RegExp classes. But because of licence problems I stripped them out and replaced them with the Apache Jakarta RegExp classes.
Now I need to add file upload capability; there is a file upload component out there, but the license is weird and definitely not compatible with what I'm doing. So I'm going to have to reinvent that wheel, and I'm going to have to do it 'clean room' even though I know that there are a lot of tricky little tweaks which someone else has already sorted out...
There's no doubt that open source licensing is a bit of a mess. I've a great deal of respect for RMS; we wouldn't be anywhere like where we are now without him. But at the same time after a lot of thought I've decided that the BSD-style licence is best for what I'm doing, because I want my work to be useful to the widest possible number of people and that explicitly includes people working in shops where they aren't realistically going to be allowed to publish their mods.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that life would be a lot simpler, and we would get a lot more innovation done, if the Intellectual Property laws (including copyright) were just scrapped. And yes, I do earn my living doing this.
A lot of what's been written is extremely sensible.
In particular, the KISS principle applies to Web design: the simpler a site design is, the more likely it is to work well on a wide range of devices. This doesn't mean it needs to be ugly -- careful use of stylesheets can produce an elegant, colourful, well laid out design from very simple markup.
However, on one point I'd like to disagree strongly with what's been posted above: I really don't like the use of PDF. It's an exceedingly inflexible format -- after all, inflexibility is precisely what it's designed for. It is most unlikely to be widely accessible on the range of access devices people use and will use. PDF is for people who grew up in the era of flattened dead trees and simply cannot adjust to a world in which text can be presented to meet the needs of the user.
If you develop web pages for fixed sizes you are by definition an amateur. The Web was designed ab initio to be resolution independent, and this neither the only nor the smallest handheld Web browser. Remember, the people browsing the Web on small devices are the wealthy, technically switched-on members of society - the people who commission and pay for Web sites are likely to be among them. Do you want them to see what your 640x480 fixed size site looks like on their handheld screen? Do you want them to see what your 640x480 fixed size site looks like on their 1200x1000 pixel screen (or, next year, on their 3000x2000 pixel screen) on their desktop?
The Web is an open system. You don't control the client. You don't control how much screen real estate you have. A professional, competent Web designer designs sites which flexibly and gracefully adapt to the amount of screen real estate the user chooses to give you.
Is antiailiased text really worth the extra processor/graphic cycles in most unix applications?
What UN*X applications are you talking about? UN*X does everything from digital imagery for Hollywood to laying out publications like newspapers and phone directories to controlling embedded devices, to handling tax collection for governments, to controlling factories, to serving Web sites. Some of these things will benefit from anti-aliasing, some won't. Those who won't benefit won't use it, so they won't waste processor cycles.
If you have an operating system that's really only good for one thing, you tend to think other operating systems are similar. They aren't. And, of course, X doesn't only run on UN*X.
It's worth pointing out that the London Times is part of the News International empire, which has been running a sustained campaign against agreement on climate change. This is by no means the first story they've published, claiming on very shaky grounds that there's no problem.
I think what this story is saying is that Rupert Murdoch thinks that sustained, co-ordinated action on global warming would hurt his profits. I don't think it says anything meaningful about the state of the planet, the ozone hole or anything else.
People think of the London Times as a respectable newspaper because it used to be a respectable newspaper. Frankly, that was a long time ago.
(Of course this doesn't mean the ozone hole isn't healing, just that I wouldn't trust the London Times to tell me the earth was round if RM thought there was profit to be made out of a belief in a flat one)
I am neverfailingly amazed about the amount of prejudice and misinformation on Slashdot when it comes to Java. If you have a web page ' that gets hit two million times a day [and] each hit requires a rather small program to be run' then Java Servlets are one of the more efficient solutions, certainly on a par with anything you can do in mod_perl and easily outstripping C CGI scripts.
One thing that never fails on slashdot is that everyone is preoccupied with
hardware efficiency rather than human efficiency.
It's worth pointing out at this point that Slashdot is written in Perl, and runs against MySql. Precisely what this has to do with efficiency, or why people who think this is a good thing should criticise Java on grounds of efficiency, is left as an exercise to the reader.
Linux is a fine OS, guys.. But isn't using Linux for a cellular phone a bit like using a cannon to kill a flea? I mean, it's not like I can port Quake III for Linux to my PalmPalm cellphone.
Read the sodding article! There's these raster bitmap thingies linked from it, that one of these clever modern browser thingies can render - in-line, even - into two dimensional matrices of coloured pixels. Neat, huh?
So no, I can tell you that isn't as big as a lunchbox, doesn't look like a 50's style toaster, and, in fact, looks more functional than the Nokia Communicator, which up to this moment was my personal choice for best mobile phone ever. Very neat.
In fact this is half-way to what I've been predicting for moby phones for quite a while now. If it was me I would move the buttons off the front face (or better, virtualise them) in order to make more room for the display, and orient the dislay landscape rather rather than portrait, but... looks very usable. Not certain I believe in a colour display on a portable device, though -- eats too much battery.
The Linux development methodology is broken. There's quite obviously an inner core of developers who do whatever they want, and then there's the public list, which is largely a decoy.
It's broken, is it?
How many other development methodologies have produced mature, stable, reliable, highly portable operating systems in under ten years? Do better, and then tell Linus his methodology is broken.
Let's face it, of course Linus listens mainly to people who've earned his trust and become his friends over a long period of years. That's human nature. He doesn't have time to listen to all the people who want to grind their own particular axe. He's a dictator. This is a good thing: there is one person who takes the final decisions, He doesn't have to get them past the technical architecture committee. He doesn't have to get them agreed by marketing. He doesn't have to get the board to buy in. He just decides. And because he decides, we get a decent platform in a reasonable time.
Like I say, if you can do better, go ahead and do it. There is nothing stopping you.
... at INET this summer, in Yokohama. Completely mad. Thinks numbers are more memorable than names, and his numbers are more memorable than IP numbers. So he wants to put a new addressing indirection layer on the Internet, to translate hopelessly unmemorable numbers into other hoelessly unmemorable numbers, so that people won't have to remember names. I expect his children are called 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Totally mad. Quite a pleasant guy to share a beer with, but...
I've used (and paid for) all the pay-for office suites under Linux, and the only one that's still on my hard disk is Applix. I would be very sorry to have to do without it. It is lightweight, small footprint, fast, solid, reliable, intuitive. By comparison, StarOffice is bloated, clumsy, slow, fragile and balky; the only advantage that SO has is that it is better at reading MicroSoft files. I can't really think of an advantage that WordPerfect has, but there must be one.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology companies, in the wider economy, are relatively rare. They are the companies whose primary business is innovation, which add value through creating new kinds of things. Even the big, obvious 'technology companies' aren't really technology companies considered as a whole (although divisions within them may be): Sun, IBM, HP, for example, though they do develop new technology, fundamentally add value through their knowledge of their customer base and its needs; innovation supports this, it doesn't lead it. So here again I would expect the information function to be senior to the technology function.
It's in less established companies, or smaller specialist companies which concentrate on innovation, that I would expect the technology function to be genuinely senior to the information function.
Guy, I'm sorry, but it is funny. That's the nature of humour: you laugh at the appalling things which you know perfectly well really could happen to you, because if you didn't laugh at them you'd have to weep.
On the evidence here I think it will take you a very long time - nearly as long as it's taken the English, in fact.
Seriously, if you want quality of life, freedom, and safety, try Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark or Switzerland. Iceland is also great but it's a little too cold. Any of them easily beat the US on all the measures you've given.
I really don't agree. I was able to install gabber (the gnome client) by just adding one line to my sources.list and typing apt-get install gabber. I find it works just fine. I've tried to install the Konverse client but haven't yet had success with that. The Java Applet client also works fine on Linux; the pure Java Swagger client works, but isn't (as yet) nearly as polished as gabber or the Windows clients.
But Gabber just works[tm] and is easily up to the standards of the Windows clients. Recommended. The server is also extremely easy to get set up and running. This is often extemely important: if you're setting up a system for communication inside any commercial organisation, you really don't want your messages routed through someone else's server.
Oh, and, re your .sig, if you want to do XML and stylesheets and stuff with Apache or Jigsaw or WebLogic or more or less anything, really, you probably want Jacquard ;-)
So get off your lazy fat arse and learn. Nobody was born a programmer, and while some programmers are much better than others, 90% of that is hard work and dedication.
Bollocks[TM]
Strong encryption does nothing to protect you against traffic analysis, and in a totalitarian state traffic analysis alone is going to be enough to convict you. You send email to someone who sends email to some known dissident? Case closed.
Freenet does defend against traffic analysis at least to a degree (how effective this is I'm not really certain). So for people in totalitarian states, Freenet together with things like the steganographic file system offers plausibly deniable access to data and plausibly deniable storage of data. How successful this would be as an information-sharing system for dissidents is hard to say, but provided people are allowed real control over real computers (and the ability to load and configure their own software without supervision), and so long as those computers are connected to packet-switched networks over which it's possible to route encrypted (or steganographic) packets, it looks as if it would be unstoppable.
Of course, as soon as people start being arrested merely for owning a computer with software the authorities haven't authorised, or merely for sending a packet the authorities don't understand over a network, this all falls to pieces.
OK, here's a specific example from an on-line auction system I wrote in 1996. This is, to my knowledge, the thirteenth US software patent where I personally have written prior art. Having said that, of course, it was scarcely a novel idea when I used it.
OK, so what do we need from them? Open Source software is built on open standards, depends on open standards. We've seen software vendors 'embrace and extend' standards to the point that they've ceased to be open (can anyone say 'Kerberos'?)
The biggest christmas present any of the big comupting companies could give the Open Source community is a cast-iron, board-level committment to support and comply with open standards wherever appropriate, and most significantly of all, never to 'extend' an open standard without making those extensions freely available under the same terms as thr original standard.
I think you're missing the point. If you're too dumn to install Linux, that isn't a problem for Linux. It isn't a problem for you either, if Windows does what you want. If Windows doesn't do what you want, then you're going to be motivated to go out and make something that does, work for you. Too lazy? Too dumb? No problem. Use Windows.
Why would you 'love to use Linux'?
Face it, guy, if you can't make your mouse work, that's your problem, not Linux's.
The benefit of volunteer effort in maintenances is not so much that you get a lot of work done, but that you get a lot of committed work done. Things people do in their own time they do well, they do with pride; it's that which (IMHO) gives Open Source software its quality edge, far more than the peer review effect. If the volunteers all drifted away to another OS project, it's probable that the commercial Linux companies could still continue to develop the OS. But it would be developed by wage-slaves driven by marketing agendas, and pretty soon it would have no quality advantage over Uncle Bill's finest.
Linux is good at what it does because the people who know enough to make it what it is care enough about what it does to make it do what it does. If Windows did what we need, Linux wouldn't exist. If Linux did what the Windows audience needs, we would need something different.
It's silly to think of Linux as competing with Windows. The two operating systems address radically different audiences. This is inevitable and a good thing . Let's not dumb down Linux!
Now I need to add file upload capability; there is a file upload component out there, but the license is weird and definitely not compatible with what I'm doing. So I'm going to have to reinvent that wheel, and I'm going to have to do it 'clean room' even though I know that there are a lot of tricky little tweaks which someone else has already sorted out...
There's no doubt that open source licensing is a bit of a mess. I've a great deal of respect for RMS; we wouldn't be anywhere like where we are now without him. But at the same time after a lot of thought I've decided that the BSD-style licence is best for what I'm doing, because I want my work to be useful to the widest possible number of people and that explicitly includes people working in shops where they aren't realistically going to be allowed to publish their mods.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that life would be a lot simpler, and we would get a lot more innovation done, if the Intellectual Property laws (including copyright) were just scrapped. And yes, I do earn my living doing this.
BT don't have a patent on hyperlinks under British law, because, under British law, you can't patent software...
Sensible, that.
In particular, the KISS principle applies to Web design: the simpler a site design is, the more likely it is to work well on a wide range of devices. This doesn't mean it needs to be ugly -- careful use of stylesheets can produce an elegant, colourful, well laid out design from very simple markup.
Most important is to follow the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines.
However, on one point I'd like to disagree strongly with what's been posted above: I really don't like the use of PDF. It's an exceedingly inflexible format -- after all, inflexibility is precisely what it's designed for. It is most unlikely to be widely accessible on the range of access devices people use and will use. PDF is for people who grew up in the era of flattened dead trees and simply cannot adjust to a world in which text can be presented to meet the needs of the user.
Stick to HTML: the simpler, the better.
Why do I need Flash to even visit your Website?
The Web is an open system. You don't control the client. You don't control how much screen real estate you have. A professional, competent Web designer designs sites which flexibly and gracefully adapt to the amount of screen real estate the user chooses to give you.
It's worth pointing out that the London Times is part of the News International empire, which has been running a sustained campaign against agreement on climate change. This is by no means the first story they've published, claiming on very shaky grounds that there's no problem.
I think what this story is saying is that Rupert Murdoch thinks that sustained, co-ordinated action on global warming would hurt his profits. I don't think it says anything meaningful about the state of the planet, the ozone hole or anything else.
People think of the London Times as a respectable newspaper because it used to be a respectable newspaper. Frankly, that was a long time ago.
(Of course this doesn't mean the ozone hole isn't healing, just that I wouldn't trust the London Times to tell me the earth was round if RM thought there was profit to be made out of a belief in a flat one)
I am neverfailingly amazed about the amount of prejudice and misinformation on Slashdot when it comes to Java. If you have a web page ' that gets hit two million times a day [and] each hit requires a rather small program to be run' then Java Servlets are one of the more efficient solutions, certainly on a par with anything you can do in mod_perl and easily outstripping C CGI scripts.
It's worth pointing out at this point that Slashdot is written in Perl, and runs against MySql. Precisely what this has to do with efficiency, or why people who think this is a good thing should criticise Java on grounds of efficiency, is left as an exercise to the reader.
No need, man, it's been done.
So no, I can tell you that isn't as big as a lunchbox, doesn't look like a 50's style toaster, and, in fact, looks more functional than the Nokia Communicator, which up to this moment was my personal choice for best mobile phone ever. Very neat.
In fact this is half-way to what I've been predicting for moby phones for quite a while now. If it was me I would move the buttons off the front face (or better, virtualise them) in order to make more room for the display, and orient the dislay landscape rather rather than portrait, but... looks very usable. Not certain I believe in a colour display on a portable device, though -- eats too much battery.
It's broken, is it?
How many other development methodologies have produced mature, stable, reliable, highly portable operating systems in under ten years? Do better, and then tell Linus his methodology is broken.
Let's face it, of course Linus listens mainly to people who've earned his trust and become his friends over a long period of years. That's human nature. He doesn't have time to listen to all the people who want to grind their own particular axe. He's a dictator. This is a good thing: there is one person who takes the final decisions, He doesn't have to get them past the technical architecture committee. He doesn't have to get them agreed by marketing. He doesn't have to get the board to buy in. He just decides. And because he decides, we get a decent platform in a reasonable time.
Like I say, if you can do better, go ahead and do it. There is nothing stopping you.
... at INET this summer, in Yokohama. Completely mad. Thinks numbers are more memorable than names, and his numbers are more memorable than IP numbers. So he wants to put a new addressing indirection layer on the Internet, to translate hopelessly unmemorable numbers into other hoelessly unmemorable numbers, so that people won't have to remember names. I expect his children are called 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Totally mad. Quite a pleasant guy to share a beer with, but...
ApplixWare is much more efficient, and does support similar features.
I've used (and paid for) all the pay-for office suites under Linux, and the only one that's still on my hard disk is Applix. I would be very sorry to have to do without it. It is lightweight, small footprint, fast, solid, reliable, intuitive. By comparison, StarOffice is bloated, clumsy, slow, fragile and balky; the only advantage that SO has is that it is better at reading MicroSoft files. I can't really think of an advantage that WordPerfect has, but there must be one.