Species that spread well on their own can be a pain. Accidentally and intentionally introduced species are a bigger problem as transport gets faster and goes farther.
Choice climates are hardest hit.
Climates like Florida have been afflicted with a similar species of fish. The just wiggled out of their pond and down the road to the river, where they wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Likewise for water hyacinths, toads and giant snails. There's a long list: Rabbits and starlings in Australia, Cats and rats in New Zealand, Variola in the Americas.
As space travel becomes more of a reality, this becomes more of a serious issue. If we wipe out some species on another planet, that is not good and some here may actually care, but none are forced to care. If we bring something home, then we are forced to care.
You meant to say "the whole continent", right? Even without roaming, the whole country (of say, UK or Germany) is your zone.
I guess so. I've always taken it for granted that my phone worked in any European (and Eastern block) country, and that anywhere within my own country not just my home town was a local call, but never learned the English terms for it.
The point I am getting at is the contrast between level of service as well as price. In Europe, the phones are actually useful and, in some countries, worth the money. In contrast, in the U.S. I was really surprised to see ads in the U.S. bragging that brand X mobile phone with brand Y telco would work even *in the next city*, but with long distance rates. Aside from being an expensive status object, what's the point of having such a phone if it will cost you an arm and a leg every time you leave your front yard?
As mentioned, Kerberos, NFS and others need synchronized time. Even if you're not using these having servers show the same time helps with monitoring services and with intrusion detection.
Roaming may have been one of the keys to cell phone adoption in Europe -- the whole country is your zone. No point in buying a cell phone unless you can use it while travelling. Otherwise, you'll be near your regular phone, plus maybe a wireless handset.
In the U.S. Chicago, IL and Madison, WI are probably in different roaming areas. Shoot, maybe even San Diego, CA and San Francisco, CA are in different zones. Odds are it's cheaper there with a pager and a payphone. Also, the screwed up choice of frequencies in the U.S. means that European and Japanese manufacturers have to make a special model just for the U.S.
Perhaps Japanese cell phones work in all of Japan and perhaps even at the same price. Japanese companies are pretty good about responding to what sells, so this would make sense.
Too many of the new keyboards have the capslock key where the control key should be and used to be. Correcting this would make the keyboard more ergonomic. How often does anyone, aside from people writing Nigerian mail scams, use the caps lock? Odds are not as often as the control key, even for MS-Windows users.
Mandatory upgrade real possibility w/new MS EULA
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 2
The switch from 3.11 may be over and people don't seem to be flocking to fork over money for a lesser system like XP. However, the windows media player upgrade does take away that option to keep a system as it is by giving admin rights to your MS-Windows box. If you don't apply the patch now, you get "0wn3d" -- by anyone. If you do apply the patch, you lose your options and will have to accept whatever BillG decides is good for you.
Changes like this in the EULA have been used before to the disadvantage and inconvenience of the consumer. I see no reason to daoubt that they won't be used this time.
I'd have to call $3.3 bn a massive loss no matter how you slice n dice the bookkeeping. Aside from Xbox tanking in Europe and Japan, it's not doing so well in the U.S. And since that oft-cited $50 bn is not actually cash in the bank, but partially consists of inflated stock prices, the Xbox losses may actually hurt. Reporting a "net" profit is very different that actually having one. Just ask Enron, or perhaps Chairman Bill himself...
If a large amount of Microsoft's money comes from OEMs
and that depends on sales of new PCs and sales of new PCs have been pretty low, then Microsoft's revenues are probably low, too, and ups and downs will lag a quarter or two after the PC sales.
If, aside from not giving out dividends, Microsoft seems like it might be
cooking the books slightly since 1999 to hide losses, then it may acutally be running in the red.
1999 was economically a good year compared to more recent ones. If Microsoft has needed any such accounting "errors" prior to the economic resession, then the recession has been a real slam-dunk and a proper audit would show them uncomfortably far from being a profitable corporation.
Tape reading hardware may be around for a while as it takes active, often paid, effort to take them to the curb.
Magnetic media, left on their own, will lose data with no effort needed.
The tapes themselves, not the readers and not the formats of the data on the tapes, last considerably less than a decade, depending on who you ask and how you store them and the quality of the tape. Analog tapes are far more vulnerable than digital ones, but estimates range from 1 year to 20 years, but between 5 and 10 (under optimal storage) being very common estimates.
Since most people choose their data tapes based on lowest price, quality is usually crap and you can only count on a year or two of reliability. Five years is probably top average life expectancy for less than top of the line tapes (non- metal or chrome tapes) with optimum storage. Optimum storage conditions are around 21 C and 41% humidity. Neither of the two common tape storage units like gym bags or car trunks meet those conditions.:P
Eventually you will have to migrate to another of the same type of physical medium or a different type of physical medium. Most people only think of this after they've lost a few years of archived data. Do this migration before you start losing data. A good tape costs a few bucks, the data probably cost hundreds of thousands or millions to acquire and may not be replacable.
If you are really paranoid, keep three backups: one for occasional restores, one for backup, and one in case something bad happened to the first two.
It flows both ways, I've seen a number of books in English with material ripped straight out of Chinese books. This will happen until there are enough people reading both Chinese and Englsh sources. BTW, reading Chinese isn't as hard as you think. After all, you've learned all the nasty little icons on your desktop and productivity applications. Besides, it may be useful or essential knowledge for computing depending on how OSS development goes in China & E. Asia.
Working with some european and east european mathematics journals brought up an anecdote about a mathematician who'd made a multi-decade academic career though translating material from an east european mathematician and publishing it in the west under his own name. His day was rained on when the Iron Curtain came down and the original material became available.
The decision in March to let cable companies exclude competitors does seem to violate common carriage and will probably disappear after either a short or long series of appeals.
Likewise with the cable companies deciding what content is allowed on their pipes. I can't see that holding up under scrutiny either.
Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.
Quite true. I helped get someone else started with Linux-based library and high school labs last year. KDE was more popular than MS-Windows in the labs that still had a MS-Windows machine or two.
Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.
Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net.
You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation.
Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).
Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site are relevant for a desktop as well.
One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.
Liquidwar has released a new version. I havent tried it so cannot say whether or not it is good. However, Im curious to try it myself. From the write up on the U-Foot site, it is definitely multiplayer, involves realtime strategy and, like Civ, isnt FPS.
Too many U.S. manuals sre written by the pound these days. They're verbose and of little use unless you're willing to read them like a novel using a highlighter and making your own margin notes.
Somewhere I have old Apple II and Apple II+ manuals for Apple DOS, Applesoft Basic, and the one with the schematic diagrams and the 6502 instruction set. These were truly great, very concise, clear and to the point. Usable by both a newbie and an expert and are a good example for tech writers to follow.
This would explain some of Microsoft's actions in regards to their new licensing and their BSA extortion-like activities. Perhaps it is not unmitigated greed, but greed plus the panic that they won't be able to find a new cash flow before the world finds out that their company is in the red.
According to an article in the Economist from August 5, 1999
entitled "
Share and share unalike."
"
For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable
company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost
of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of
outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18
billion, according to Smithers."
Microsoft Financial Pyramid covers some of the issues up to Nov 1999. I can only assume that these practices have continued and that MS probably would tank if subjected to a proper audit.
That's just the book keeping.
Also keep in mind that not only are OpenSource/Free Software breathing down their neck with increasingly viable desktop alternatives, but Oracle, Sun, IBM as well. Plus an increasing number of governments, lately Peru, China and Germany, are getting tired of their busness practices.
Now think about the software situation. Linux, QNX and others have them beat in the embedded OS market. Windows as a server OS is beat by Solaris, Linux, *BSD. Windows as middleware is becoming decreasingly competetive with Gnome and KDE. Aqua has it beat hands down, you can even run legacy apps like Ms-Word, which is about the only thing currently holding GNU/Linux back from the general desktop. However, OpenOffice and others are filling the gaps left by Lotus-123, Borland's Quattro, WordPerfect.
Then there are indications that there is no improvment on the horizon. For example the shift from software, to marketing to legislation. The way MS is working the punishment phase of the antitrust trial it looks that their products are unable to compete in a free market. Even die-hard MS fans cannot refute EWeek's report that "[Allchin] later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed." Maybe coincidentally, Bill
has been shifting investment money out of Microsoft. If the rest of the top execs are offloading also, (this is speculation and it would be nice to see some real figures, but where can that type of info be looked up)
then it would indicate no confidence.
So with out a cash flow or at least investor confidence, all Microsoft's troubles would bite them hard. Death by a thousand small bites, plus a few medium sized ones. Perhaps the SEC backed off to avoid popping Microsoft's baloon like just another overratted dot-com.
Or would it turn out to be a collapse more like Enron's.
Single instance storage is only good for intranets except that there there one should use file sharing to collaborate on documents rather than sending virii^H^H^H^H^Hattachments.
Alen, your experiences with MS-Exchanges are so many worlds of difference away from mine that I nearly suspect that you've written a troll. Rebooting a mission critical service like a mail server during working hours is unsatisfactory. If other mission critical services like file and print sharing are also disabled during that reboot, then it's time to look for a more robust product.
I have worked closely with three shops in the previous three years that used Microsoft Exchange. Each had at least 3 full time equivalents of MSCEs to babysit their Exchange servers, probably more if you count overtime. This is not counting the occasional high priced consultant. None of these shops could keep Exchange running for a full week. Nor could they keep it from losing mail (When I measured it was 10-15%, ). Nor could they get it to communicate well with other mail servers. Nor could they keep it from getting wiped out once every three months by MSTDs (especially worms and virii).
In contrast, Novell servers run years at a time unattended (nearly every consultant has at least two such anecdotes of their own) and many UNIX-based MTA's need only a few hours of non-hardware maintenance per year, when set up tight. I guess running MS-Exchange is a new status thing to flaunt resources, like having a tuburcular wife was during the Vicrotian era.
Needless to say the managment's support was/is a real PITA for anyone doing work via e-mail with people outside of the house's MS-Intranet. In one case it even delayed a publishing a book by several weeks. In house use of Exchange was fine -- when it was down for you, it was down for everyone else so it was a nice time out and a chance to go have coffee with the others. When put to the test, file sharing couldn't, wouldn't, didn't function often enough to be useful either. For file sharing, those without access to a Novell or Unix file server, used sneaker net or mailed attachments.
Yes, Exchange does look good in the 4-color glossy marketing brochure, but that's were it ends and reality sets in.
Puh.
Back to mail databases. RFC 2822, Internet Message Format specifies the general structure of a message. This can be over simplified as a header with its standard and non-standard fields and one or more message bodies. RFC2049 specifies multipart bodies. These structures do seem very well suited to a relational database.
More intriguing for me, are the non-generic uses (they also require wireless networking, but not necessarily internet access). A waitress taking orders on an iPaq instead of a pad of paper. No more wasting paper pulp, or having unreadable orders.
Yes, this is very intriguing, but it may not be as fast and efficient as regular paper, yet.
I visited a restaurant / cafe in Copenhagen a few times to see how they did this. Unfortunately, at that place the technology or the way it was used seemed to slow things down a lot. Prerequites for data mining can be done right now anyway by adding orders to the tab at the cash register as soon as they are requested. Most places have someone dedicated working the counter / register. Granted it would be fewer steps enter data just one at the point of order, but only if it's faster from the customer's perspective.
If disconnected networking activities are adequately supported, then these things will really replace the clipboard quickly.
The absence of source code precludes some analyses
to certify the code, and it may be illegal to do reverse
engineering of commercial products to deduce the
code.
So ideally, the government needs to be able to either read the
source (i.e. some form of Open Source) or be able to reverse
engineer the product (i.e. no DMCA). Obviously the former is more
efficient. Either way brings attention to the practical problems
caused by the DMCA.
Many scientists, librarians, and academics opposed the bill at the time, and the multiple provisions of the bill are now proving how real their concerns were. ... Forget about Napster -- this law has the potential
to halt your reserach work, or have you thrown into
jail.
The 1700's saw a serious of protections from governmental abuses, it looks like the 2000's will see a series of protections against similar corporate abuses. It'll happen sooner than later if Europe decides to learn from the U.S.'s mistakes this time rather than emulated them.
That looks like it. The section Assuring the Safety and Security of COTS Software Products sums it up in the points quoted below. 2, 4, and 5 ping most closed source solutions and especially, given their business practices, Microsoft. Points 3, 5, and 6 imply Open Source / Free software based on practices. The last point names it explicitly.
It's mostly common sense, but common sense is forgotten too often.
Since that which goes without saying often goes unsaid, it's useful to see these published. That Mitre has published is extra useful because of their reputation and weight.
Assuring the safety and security of COTS products is difficult because:
The rush to market means end users become testers.
COTS products have an unknown pedigree (who developed it, what process was used).
The absence of source code precludes some analyses to certify the code, and it may be illegal to do reverse engineering of commercial products to deduce the code.
Systems may not use all the features of COTS software but the unused features may have an undesirable effect on the behavior and resource consumption of the product.
Suggestions for managing these risks include:
Determine if the vendor publishes all errors reported by users.
Tap into user communities that do disseminate information on errors, problems, and solutions.
Design the system to be defensive about COTS products performing critical functions by creating checks and bounds on the damage they can do if they perform incorrectly.
Use open source products in order to be able to obtain and analyze the source code.
Ok. The Washington Post says, "May 10 report [by Mitre Corp.] prepared for the Defense Department concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use
should be expanded."
A copy of the report seems like one of those things that's Good To Have (). What is the URL or Title+Author+Report No.?
I've looked at the Mitre site a bit, searched it, the press releases, but not turned up anything.
not to mention the ads that are great for wiping in a pinch.
Online newspapers, magazines and journals have a long way to develop before they are as useful and pleasant to use as their traditional counterparts. For all the nice features of the electronic media, it's just not the same as real paper.;)
How much does Windows XP cost? (Not the "home use only" version.) How much does Office cost? And how often do you have to keep paying Micros**t?
You pay extra with staff hours and mindshare. If you count the number of staff hours, then Linux is probably less than half the cost than WIndows. I spoke with a civil inductee who converted his city library's public workstations to Linux. He showed that they were now maintaining 75 linux stations with the same amount of man-hours as 5 MS-Windows workstations. Other things being equal that's 96% cheaper which is far better than 50% cheaper.
Apt-get and up2date by themselves ought to save any school district quite a bit. Given the excessing staffing I've seen at various MS shops, I'd expect similar savings across the board. Three places I've worked closely with during the last two years could not, even with IT staff of 5-8 FTE each, keep their MS-Exchange servers running a whole week. And that's even with nearly 100% neglect of the workstations.
All the problems generate mindshare. No one notices or cares about things that run like they were on rails. When was the last time you thought about the plumbing in your building, or the janitorial staff, or the switches in your POTS network? The MS-service packs, anxious waiting for service packs, emergency runs to rebuild the server in the middle of the day all generate mindshare.
Lastly, KDE and Gnome are as easy or easier to use than MS-Windows these days. Bonus points for ease of use if the tech installing it figures out what it's going to be used for and sets up the menus accordingly, adds short cuts and removes distractions.
When you donate your computer, put on a fresh linux distro and tape a copy of the GPL to the lid. Or do the corresponding thing for BSD. Either way, the school then has a computer and a license to go with it.
At this point ad filters become a practical necessity. Otherwise you end up donating a sorely missed portion of your own bandwidth to the ad companies. There's one of your business opportunities.
I tried ISDN for two years, but was kind of underwhelmed by the performance. Rarely above 6 kbps due to problems with the ISP, at least it was no charge (for me at the time). The second year, I decided to try filtering and found not only much faster page loading, but also found it much easier to focus on the content.
Just throwing a few lines in/etc/hosts gets many, but not enough since some hosts with content also serve ads. To get these too needs some DNS and URL regexp tricks.
FTP and other TCP hogs like audio, video and games we do to ourselves voluntarily. Ads are an unneccessary added cost. When there are bandwidth caps, then ads become far too intrusive, not worth their weight (wait / size).
Unlike a space station it could be self sufficient
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This would be great if it became a second phase of the space race. It's also a better long term move than a space station. While a space station has a lot of advantages, a moon base has more long term growth potential. Among other things, the moon itself is in a pretty stable orbit and anything under the surface is sheltered from micrometors. Then with mining and manufacturing, you have a steady supply of building materials. An excellent place for observatories, low gravity manufacturing or as a step point to the rest of the solar system.
Lets also hope it's governed by similar laws as Antarctica.
Slashdot Mirror
Climates like Florida have been afflicted with a similar species of fish. The just wiggled out of their pond and down the road to the river, where they wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Likewise for water hyacinths, toads and giant snails. There's a long list: Rabbits and starlings in Australia, Cats and rats in New Zealand, Variola in the Americas.
As space travel becomes more of a reality, this becomes more of a serious issue. If we wipe out some species on another planet, that is not good and some here may actually care, but none are forced to care. If we bring something home, then we are forced to care.
The point I am getting at is the contrast between level of service as well as price. In Europe, the phones are actually useful and, in some countries, worth the money. In contrast, in the U.S. I was really surprised to see ads in the U.S. bragging that brand X mobile phone with brand Y telco would work even *in the next city*, but with long distance rates. Aside from being an expensive status object, what's the point of having such a phone if it will cost you an arm and a leg every time you leave your front yard?
As mentioned, Kerberos, NFS and others need synchronized time. Even if you're not using these having servers show the same time helps with monitoring services and with intrusion detection.
Perhaps Japanese cell phones work in all of Japan and perhaps even at the same price. Japanese companies are pretty good about responding to what sells, so this would make sense.
Too many of the new keyboards have the capslock key where the control key should be and used to be. Correcting this would make the keyboard more ergonomic. How often does anyone, aside from people writing Nigerian mail scams, use the caps lock? Odds are not as often as the control key, even for MS-Windows users.
Changes like this in the EULA have been used before to the disadvantage and inconvenience of the consumer. I see no reason to daoubt that they won't be used this time.
If a large amount of Microsoft's money comes from OEMs and that depends on sales of new PCs and sales of new PCs have been pretty low, then Microsoft's revenues are probably low, too, and ups and downs will lag a quarter or two after the PC sales.
If, aside from not giving out dividends, Microsoft seems like it might be cooking the books slightly since 1999 to hide losses, then it may acutally be running in the red.
1999 was economically a good year compared to more recent ones. If Microsoft has needed any such accounting "errors" prior to the economic resession, then the recession has been a real slam-dunk and a proper audit would show them uncomfortably far from being a profitable corporation.
The tapes themselves, not the readers and not the formats of the data on the tapes, last considerably less than a decade, depending on who you ask and how you store them and the quality of the tape. Analog tapes are far more vulnerable than digital ones, but estimates range from 1 year to 20 years, but between 5 and 10 (under optimal storage) being very common estimates.
Since most people choose their data tapes based on lowest price, quality is usually crap and you can only count on a year or two of reliability. Five years is probably top average life expectancy for less than top of the line tapes (non- metal or chrome tapes) with optimum storage. Optimum storage conditions are around 21 C and 41% humidity. Neither of the two common tape storage units like gym bags or car trunks meet those conditions. :P
Eventually you will have to migrate to another of the same type of physical medium or a different type of physical medium. Most people only think of this after they've lost a few years of archived data. Do this migration before you start losing data. A good tape costs a few bucks, the data probably cost hundreds of thousands or millions to acquire and may not be replacable.
If you are really paranoid, keep three backups: one for occasional restores, one for backup, and one in case something bad happened to the first two.
Working with some european and east european mathematics journals brought up an anecdote about a mathematician who'd made a multi-decade academic career though translating material from an east european mathematician and publishing it in the west under his own name. His day was rained on when the Iron Curtain came down and the original material became available.
The decision in March to let cable companies exclude competitors does seem to violate common carriage and will probably disappear after either a short or long series of appeals.
Likewise with the cable companies deciding what content is allowed on their pipes. I can't see that holding up under scrutiny either.
Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.
Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net. You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation. Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).
Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site are relevant for a desktop as well.
One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.
Liquidwar has released a new version. I havent tried it so cannot say whether or not it is good. However, Im curious to try it myself. From the write up on the U-Foot site, it is definitely multiplayer, involves realtime strategy and, like Civ, isnt FPS.
Youll notice in the article that you dont actually have to have a gopher server running. MSIE just has to connect to the trap via a gopher-like URL.
Somewhere I have old Apple II and Apple II+ manuals for Apple DOS, Applesoft Basic, and the one with the schematic diagrams and the 6502 instruction set. These were truly great, very concise, clear and to the point. Usable by both a newbie and an expert and are a good example for tech writers to follow.
According to an article in the Economist from August 5, 1999 entitled " Share and share unalike."
Microsoft Financial Pyramid covers some of the issues up to Nov 1999. I can only assume that these practices have continued and that MS probably would tank if subjected to a proper audit. That's just the book keeping.Also keep in mind that not only are OpenSource/Free Software breathing down their neck with increasingly viable desktop alternatives, but Oracle, Sun, IBM as well. Plus an increasing number of governments, lately Peru, China and Germany, are getting tired of their busness practices.
Now think about the software situation. Linux, QNX and others have them beat in the embedded OS market. Windows as a server OS is beat by Solaris, Linux, *BSD. Windows as middleware is becoming decreasingly competetive with Gnome and KDE. Aqua has it beat hands down, you can even run legacy apps like Ms-Word, which is about the only thing currently holding GNU/Linux back from the general desktop. However, OpenOffice and others are filling the gaps left by Lotus-123, Borland's Quattro, WordPerfect.
Then there are indications that there is no improvment on the horizon. For example the shift from software, to marketing to legislation. The way MS is working the punishment phase of the antitrust trial it looks that their products are unable to compete in a free market. Even die-hard MS fans cannot refute EWeek's report that "[Allchin] later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed." Maybe coincidentally, Bill has been shifting investment money out of Microsoft. If the rest of the top execs are offloading also, (this is speculation and it would be nice to see some real figures, but where can that type of info be looked up) then it would indicate no confidence.
So with out a cash flow or at least investor confidence, all Microsoft's troubles would bite them hard. Death by a thousand small bites, plus a few medium sized ones. Perhaps the SEC backed off to avoid popping Microsoft's baloon like just another overratted dot-com.
Or would it turn out to be a collapse more like Enron's.
Alen, your experiences with MS-Exchanges are so many worlds of difference away from mine that I nearly suspect that you've written a troll. Rebooting a mission critical service like a mail server during working hours is unsatisfactory. If other mission critical services like file and print sharing are also disabled during that reboot, then it's time to look for a more robust product.
I have worked closely with three shops in the previous three years that used Microsoft Exchange. Each had at least 3 full time equivalents of MSCEs to babysit their Exchange servers, probably more if you count overtime. This is not counting the occasional high priced consultant. None of these shops could keep Exchange running for a full week. Nor could they keep it from losing mail (When I measured it was 10-15%, ). Nor could they get it to communicate well with other mail servers. Nor could they keep it from getting wiped out once every three months by MSTDs (especially worms and virii).
In contrast, Novell servers run years at a time unattended (nearly every consultant has at least two such anecdotes of their own) and many UNIX-based MTA's need only a few hours of non-hardware maintenance per year, when set up tight. I guess running MS-Exchange is a new status thing to flaunt resources, like having a tuburcular wife was during the Vicrotian era.
Needless to say the managment's support was/is a real PITA for anyone doing work via e-mail with people outside of the house's MS-Intranet. In one case it even delayed a publishing a book by several weeks. In house use of Exchange was fine -- when it was down for you, it was down for everyone else so it was a nice time out and a chance to go have coffee with the others. When put to the test, file sharing couldn't, wouldn't, didn't function often enough to be useful either. For file sharing, those without access to a Novell or Unix file server, used sneaker net or mailed attachments. Yes, Exchange does look good in the 4-color glossy marketing brochure, but that's were it ends and reality sets in.
Puh.
Back to mail databases. RFC 2822, Internet Message Format specifies the general structure of a message. This can be over simplified as a header with its standard and non-standard fields and one or more message bodies. RFC2049 specifies multipart bodies. These structures do seem very well suited to a relational database.
Yes, this is very intriguing, but it may not be as fast and efficient as regular paper, yet. I visited a restaurant / cafe in Copenhagen a few times to see how they did this. Unfortunately, at that place the technology or the way it was used seemed to slow things down a lot. Prerequites for data mining can be done right now anyway by adding orders to the tab at the cash register as soon as they are requested. Most places have someone dedicated working the counter / register. Granted it would be fewer steps enter data just one at the point of order, but only if it's faster from the customer's perspective.
If disconnected networking activities are adequately supported, then these things will really replace the clipboard quickly.
While everyone was discussing the tautology of newspapers, including the Wash. Post being full of shit...
The report from Mitre Corp. discussed in Thursday's thread on the Washington Post's article contained one very interesting point regarding Assuring the Safety and Security of COTS Software Products very relevant to the DMCA:
So ideally, the government needs to be able to either read the source (i.e. some form of Open Source) or be able to reverse engineer the product (i.e. no DMCA). Obviously the former is more efficient. Either way brings attention to the practical problems caused by the DMCA.Awareness of the DMCA is creeping in to more trade journals. The February 2002 issue of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation features a special report on the DMCA (page 54 of the dead tree version):
The 1700's saw a serious of protections from governmental abuses, it looks like the 2000's will see a series of protections against similar corporate abuses. It'll happen sooner than later if Europe decides to learn from the U.S.'s mistakes this time rather than emulated them.
It's mostly common sense, but common sense is forgotten too often. Since that which goes without saying often goes unsaid, it's useful to see these published. That Mitre has published is extra useful because of their reputation and weight.
A copy of the report seems like one of those things that's Good To Have (). What is the URL or Title+Author+Report No.? I've looked at the Mitre site a bit, searched it, the press releases, but not turned up anything.
Apt-get and up2date by themselves ought to save any school district quite a bit. Given the excessing staffing I've seen at various MS shops, I'd expect similar savings across the board. Three places I've worked closely with during the last two years could not, even with IT staff of 5-8 FTE each, keep their MS-Exchange servers running a whole week. And that's even with nearly 100% neglect of the workstations.
All the problems generate mindshare. No one notices or cares about things that run like they were on rails. When was the last time you thought about the plumbing in your building, or the janitorial staff, or the switches in your POTS network? The MS-service packs, anxious waiting for service packs, emergency runs to rebuild the server in the middle of the day all generate mindshare.
Lastly, KDE and Gnome are as easy or easier to use than MS-Windows these days. Bonus points for ease of use if the tech installing it figures out what it's going to be used for and sets up the menus accordingly, adds short cuts and removes distractions.
When you donate your computer, put on a fresh linux distro and tape a copy of the GPL to the lid. Or do the corresponding thing for BSD. Either way, the school then has a computer and a license to go with it.
I tried ISDN for two years, but was kind of underwhelmed by the performance. Rarely above 6 kbps due to problems with the ISP, at least it was no charge (for me at the time). The second year, I decided to try filtering and found not only much faster page loading, but also found it much easier to focus on the content.
Just throwing a few lines in /etc/hosts gets many, but not enough since some hosts with content also serve ads. To get these too needs some DNS and URL regexp tricks.
FTP and other TCP hogs like audio, video and games we do to ourselves voluntarily. Ads are an unneccessary added cost. When there are bandwidth caps, then ads become far too intrusive, not worth their weight (wait / size).
Lets also hope it's governed by similar laws as Antarctica.