the "others" i refer to will claim that you can also swap legal stuff on kazaa. but we all know (so not just the all-knowing mydigitalself) what it was really built for and what it is really used for.
oh for fscks sake, you fool. alleys were not built for drug dealing. kazaa was built for media piracy, no matter what anyone else may claim. simple as that.
Re:This subject already covered millions of times!
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 1
Stores have been tracking the WHO for a long time, so that's not going to go away. You thought your store card was just some handy way to buy stuff on credit, its not.
If you bought with cash on every visit, they wouldn't know who buys what. But because you've filled in a form with some demographic details about yourself (probably sex, income, marital status...) - they know some information about you. Stores have been mining this data for years. What do they get from it? They send you stuff in the mail you might me interested in, they re-arrange the positioning of items that perhaps compliment each other. They determine that a certain product is not fulfilling its sales potential and can therefore question why and perhaps improve on it.
And so not only can the store benefit from this "tracking" in terms of its revenue potential, but equally the customer benefits by being provided with better service/products/convenience/offers and so on.
This whole "evil tracking" thing is just ridiculous - I mean you can be triangulated anyway from your mobile phone so, on two points, its not as if RFID is introducing something that isn't already in existince (and not being exploited towards the detriment of society).
right, so their system went online in November last year. so that's what - a 3 month old super computer being replaced by pretty much the same thing just to save on space and energyrequirements.
i mean surely they have enough space at the moment, otherwise their existing cluster wouldn't exist. so why not just scale it up using the Xserves rather than losing money on an investment that is so young???
Marimba is an platform indepedant software deployment and management tool.
Think of it this way: Novell have a product called ZenWorks, which sits on top of Novell Directory. Now say Mr I.T. Guy wants to deploy Napster to his 3,000 users. He could go to each of their machines and install it (sure!), he could edit the global shared login script to deploy it (messy, I'll explain in a bit) or he can use a software deployment tool.
Lets go back the the batch script thing. Great idea, but what if someone logs in again a few minutes later - they try to get the software pushed across to them again. Or what if he only wants to deploy it to people within a certain department - or people who have existing software dependancies, or etc...
Novell's ZenWorks allows you to create a "deployment package", which is essentially a wrapper around MSI to call all sorts of clever silent switches so the user gets a seamless experience. The package then has deployment rules, which can be based on LDAP (so organisational structure), dependancies, time of day, etc.. etc.. it also has licensing reporting capabilities built in so you can tell how many licenses of every single software package you can have installed. In truth, its got hundreds of features that you or I may go "who the fsck cares"...
Marimba is pretty much the same thing - although its "open", yeah whatever that means! It also allows application deployment and management across server architectures as well as desktop deployment.
So, no bullshit I'm affraid. These sorts of tools are very useful to either large and/or decentralised IT departments. Other players in this space include: * Tarantella * Microsoft SMS (now outdated) * Microsoft Active Directory Roll-out * WinInstall
I think Tivoli from IBM may also do some of this as well.
ah the other thing i just remembered. on a mac if you want to install something you just drag a single file into your application list, and bang - it installs.
on windows, you double click on the setup.exe or the MSI - or install via ActiveX from a web page.
so from a home users perpective, let me use my sister... i'd really like to see her install something on Redhat- even if its from RPM! i run RH 9 at home and sometimes i build from tarballs, other times i install RPMS - but most of the time the process is pathetic as there is no "call to action" at the end. what i normally end up doing with an RPM is: rpm --install whateveritis.rpm updatedb locate whateveritis | grep bin make a shortcut to the binary
that is just silly! XP has a great little feature - after you've installed something the start menu gives an indicitive tooltip "New Software Installed". when you expand the start menu, it highlights the new elements so you know exactly where they are for future reference. how about even just launching the application "Get Started" - but no.
so as a caviat to my previous statement: it will be the year of the Linux Desktop when someone sorts out installation of other software.
ok, so maybe linux itself is nearing readyness to take on windows. gnome/kde have come a long way as have the kernel and indeed linux PR in general.
however, i still do not feel that 2004 is "year of the linux desktop" because the market will not be ready for it. i will come back to my regular example - my mother. not only is she an occasional home user, but my mother runs a business of about 40 people strong who do medical aid claims processing. like many companies her size, she runs: * Windows on Desktop * Windows on Server * Office on Desktop * Exchange on Server * ACCESS APPLICATION THAT WAS WRITTEN FOR HER
ok. so the first 3 you can pretty much wipe out with linux. the exchange thing, i still believe is a problem. i have been babblin on about good groupware capabilities in Linux for years and quite frankly i'm still shocked at the lack of a good alternative to exchange. although i am impressed by ximian's exchange connector - how ironic is running MS Exchange for your server and Linux on the desktop...
anyway. lets get back to the BIG PROBLEM - her access database package. in fact, when i go to my dentist - they've got some custom built access application. as does my physio. as do many small sized businesses.
the thing that will make it the year for the linux desktop will be a big "SWITCH"-like campaign. although all the pieces of the puzzle (ximian, 2.6 kernel, KDE, GNOME, CrossOver etc...) are available - they still need to be assembled to create the correct picture - and this will continue to take time. but i feel that a big assistant to this could come from some clever people like VMWare or Citrix. "ok, so you have this, this and that running on Windows - and there is no Linux version. ok, lets just run them in a thin-client/emulator". that will need a lot more knowledge from the small outsourced IT company my mother currently uses, and a bit more technical innovation. the long and the short: still more time.
contrary to some of the other responses to your post - i agree with you wholeheartedly. success and penetration of the desktop will have very little to do with performance from 2.6 kernel - but rather with good usability practices within the community.
i photoshop user interfaces all day, so forgive me for not having the energy for visually articulating this idea...
the idea was inspired by Suggestion 3. if you go and read the discussion thread about this, the idea was actually to implement a FILTER rather than a SEARCH. i find this articulation a bit silly really because SEARCH implies a global search not a filter.. which made me think:
if you had a really simple dialog box that had a search capability you could just start typing in "hilton pari". in the background one just interrogates the slocate database and starts to put all items that start with "hilto..." in a list view below. the list view should display the parent folder of that element with a hyperlink/expander of sorts to illustrate the full path to that file.
furthermore if you abstracted this functionality, you could offer the same global search capabilities across filenames in the "recent documents" interface. so this would extend the search boundary to elements that are possibly not in your slocate database (SMB shared docs for example).
there would still be browing capabilities to allow users to do regular browsing of CD, Network etc... but i just thought this would be a highly Googleian way of opening files.
What article did you read? He explicitly states that design is most of the cost for software.
that's not the point. my point is that the design of the software and not neccessarily its implementation is (more often) where the innovation lies. i accept for the likes of oracle that this may not be the case and he does use them as an example.
"Sorry, but this is a recipe for disaster and it doesn't save you much, as the author points out. I don't know what world you live in, but the reality is that nobody writes up a perfect spec and then someone codes it. People change, requirements change and no spec is perfect."
the world i live in is actually a world that practices this quite well. we do all of our design here in the UK and develop a lot in South Africa. the world i live in, however, is an XP world. so what we do is design the system "metaphor" here - which is the general architecture and functionality behind the product. we then keep track on an interative (2 week iterations) basis by build-testing and adjusting the scope/functionality accordingly. we've done the maths and we get the same level of quality, the same level of innovation (because that all happens here) at just under half the cost.
"Farming out development to legions of programmers overseas will not create a differentiation advantage. When a technology company outsources software development, that company loses its capacity to innovate and its competitive advantage."
the author seems to be under the impression that the success and innovation of a product is purely in the hands of a bunch of software developers. this is rubbish. innovation in the software industry is also about building a product to solve a particular problem - and well. if the functionality is well designed (say with some good interaction design) by a US-based company, the specifications can be written up in the US and sent to the Indian shop for authoring. in a well designed component-based framework, the "glue" can be built in the US whereas the components or specific objects can be farmed out at a lower cost.
why not get a wireless router that will handle all of your DHCP, DNS, Firewall etc...
that way you don't have to have any operating system or anything that will just confuse "mom and pop". if they've got this box that just plugs into their ADSL line and if things go wrong they turn it off and on again?
as much as i agree with you as a geek, i'm afraid that MB is not a measurement that Joe User groks. for instance, when Joe downloads his Inbox and he has some large attachments he would have a high bill even if he spent a small amount of time online.
Joe is used to two sorts of service-based payment options: flat rate (AOL subscription) and time-orientated (mobile phone). i don't know about the US, but here in the UK they do not bill water, electricity or gas by the unit. they take our average monthly/quaterly consumption and average out a fixed cost for a given period. if they discover you are using more or less units than averaged - they will adjust your monthly payment accordingly (yes, i have personally experienced them telling me i can pay less).
the way to bill wifi is by time used online. a service should offer some downlable status viewer that has prominant visibility to show the user how much time he/she has left or has used (like internet cafe's do).
it really depends on how heavily your developers have embraced 8i. as another poster mentioned - if they are really exploiting it then you will have a big migration task. if your applications only perform basic SQL statements - then you could probably get away with it. actually, if all you do is perform basic SQL, then you aren't utilising oracle to its full potential and you'd probably get a better ROI (return on investment) by moving to MySQL.
no offence to the potter fans - but i just could not grok this whole harry potter thing. i arrived in the UK from south africa about 3 years ago and EVERYONE was reading harry potter on the tube (that and "white teeth"). so i thought i'd give it a bash...
i've read the first 4 and will not buy the 5th. everytime i'm waiting for the books to mature slightly or something - i really just don't know and cannot understand why adults would read 700-odd pages of this. go and get "alastair reynolds - redemption ark" (ok thats the book i've just finished - and enjoyed) or something.
i also did have a point, and that was regarding the 12 year olds reading a 900 page novel. when i was 12 we read the hobbit in school and just about half the class ran out and bought the LOTR trilogy. now THERE'S an achievement! 12 year olds reading a 921384092 page adult book (the cooler kids had the one book edition!).
you have excellent taste! i missed a few of these (i haven't even heard of 21 grams!??!?!) so i'm looking forward to catching them up on DVD next year.
nope wrong. once OO.org is able to run VBA macros and is able to respond to solutions that have embedded Word (Outlook embeds Word as its email editor if you wish) and access to Word's API and DOM - THEN you will have conversion so OO.
i work on software in the legal sector and just about every instance of word in the legal sector has some sort of customisation done to it. wether it be document management integration with Hummingbird or iManage or maybe just a set of macros to centralise and populate templates etc...
people often don't realise the power of Office's VBA and the heavy investment that document-centric organisations have made in this technology.
this will be OO's biggest stumbling block regarding adoption.
i just went and read his personal web site and found two things quite funny
firsly, he's a vegetarian - never trust a vegetarian! secondly was this:
"I'm a liberal, bicycling vegetarian Jewish computer geek. I have a boyfriend, Jared, (yeah, mom, he's Jewish!) who makes me really happy (giant smile)."
now i'm not homophobic or anything - but surely that comment to his mother is just hilarious. surely when you bring home your partner and HES A GUY the fact that he's Jewish isn't exactly what's on your mothers mind!
"The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface."
1) No, a VB programmer will do this. 2) No, a good windows programmer will create an object (COM/C# Class) and then write a GUI that will call this object.
also interesting:
"They don't like GUIs much, except as lipstick painted cleanly on top of textual programs, and they don't like binary file formats. This is because a textual interface is easier to program against than, say, a GUI interface"
i would say that textual interfaces were more popular before bandwidth started becoming readily available. the rise of bandwidth has seen a rise of GUI applications because it is quite feasible to VNC from home->work and to run GUI. before ADSL it was a pain in the arse and using textual interfaces was fast and convenient.
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clearly you have great big balls mr AC.
the "others" i refer to will claim that you can also swap legal stuff on kazaa. but we all know (so not just the all-knowing mydigitalself) what it was really built for and what it is really used for.
oh for fscks sake, you fool.
alleys were not built for drug dealing. kazaa was built for media piracy, no matter what anyone else may claim. simple as that.
Stores have been tracking the WHO for a long time, so that's not going to go away. You thought your store card was just some handy way to buy stuff on credit, its not.
If you bought with cash on every visit, they wouldn't know who buys what. But because you've filled in a form with some demographic details about yourself (probably sex, income, marital status...) - they know some information about you. Stores have been mining this data for years. What do they get from it? They send you stuff in the mail you might me interested in, they re-arrange the positioning of items that perhaps compliment each other. They determine that a certain product is not fulfilling its sales potential and can therefore question why and perhaps improve on it.
And so not only can the store benefit from this "tracking" in terms of its revenue potential, but equally the customer benefits by being provided with better service/products/convenience/offers and so on.
This whole "evil tracking" thing is just ridiculous - I mean you can be triangulated anyway from your mobile phone so, on two points, its not as if RFID is introducing something that isn't already in existince (and not being exploited towards the detriment of society).
right, so their system went online in November last year. so that's what - a 3 month old super computer being replaced by pretty much the same thing just to save on space and energyrequirements.
i mean surely they have enough space at the moment, otherwise their existing cluster wouldn't exist. so why not just scale it up using the Xserves rather than losing money on an investment that is so young???
oh right. i'd just seen illustrations on their web site and assumed they did something similar. thanks for the .nfo
Marimba is an platform indepedant software deployment and management tool.
Think of it this way: Novell have a product called ZenWorks, which sits on top of Novell Directory. Now say Mr I.T. Guy wants to deploy Napster to his 3,000 users. He could go to each of their machines and install it (sure!), he could edit the global shared login script to deploy it (messy, I'll explain in a bit) or he can use a software deployment tool.
Lets go back the the batch script thing. Great idea, but what if someone logs in again a few minutes later - they try to get the software pushed across to them again. Or what if he only wants to deploy it to people within a certain department - or people who have existing software dependancies, or etc...
Novell's ZenWorks allows you to create a "deployment package", which is essentially a wrapper around MSI to call all sorts of clever silent switches so the user gets a seamless experience. The package then has deployment rules, which can be based on LDAP (so organisational structure), dependancies, time of day, etc.. etc.. it also has licensing reporting capabilities built in so you can tell how many licenses of every single software package you can have installed. In truth, its got hundreds of features that you or I may go "who the fsck cares"...
Marimba is pretty much the same thing - although its "open", yeah whatever that means! It also allows application deployment and management across server architectures as well as desktop deployment.
So, no bullshit I'm affraid. These sorts of tools are very useful to either large and/or decentralised IT departments. Other players in this space include:
* Tarantella
* Microsoft SMS (now outdated)
* Microsoft Active Directory Roll-out
* WinInstall
I think Tivoli from IBM may also do some of this as well.
There you go. Whore the Karma!
not to be funny (i run my iPod on Linux) - but does the Karma play nicely on linux?
mate, that's what i thought until i bought a 15G iPod. now i'm regretting not getting the 40G one!
1) be unified
2) be honest
ah the other thing i just remembered. on a mac if you want to install something you just drag a single file into your application list, and bang - it installs.
on windows, you double click on the setup.exe or the MSI - or install via ActiveX from a web page.
so from a home users perpective, let me use my sister... i'd really like to see her install something on Redhat- even if its from RPM! i run RH 9 at home and sometimes i build from tarballs, other times i install RPMS - but most of the time the process is pathetic as there is no "call to action" at the end. what i normally end up doing with an RPM is:
rpm --install whateveritis.rpm
updatedb
locate whateveritis | grep bin
make a shortcut to the binary
that is just silly! XP has a great little feature - after you've installed something the start menu gives an indicitive tooltip "New Software Installed". when you expand the start menu, it highlights the new elements so you know exactly where they are for future reference. how about even just launching the application "Get Started" - but no.
so as a caviat to my previous statement: it will be the year of the Linux Desktop when someone sorts out installation of other software.
ok, so maybe linux itself is nearing readyness to take on windows. gnome/kde have come a long way as have the kernel and indeed linux PR in general.
however, i still do not feel that 2004 is "year of the linux desktop" because the market will not be ready for it. i will come back to my regular example - my mother. not only is she an occasional home user, but my mother runs a business of about 40 people strong who do medical aid claims processing. like many companies her size, she runs:
* Windows on Desktop
* Windows on Server
* Office on Desktop
* Exchange on Server
* ACCESS APPLICATION THAT WAS WRITTEN FOR HER
ok. so the first 3 you can pretty much wipe out with linux. the exchange thing, i still believe is a problem. i have been babblin on about good groupware capabilities in Linux for years and quite frankly i'm still shocked at the lack of a good alternative to exchange. although i am impressed by ximian's exchange connector - how ironic is running MS Exchange for your server and Linux on the desktop...
anyway. lets get back to the BIG PROBLEM - her access database package. in fact, when i go to my dentist - they've got some custom built access application. as does my physio. as do many small sized businesses.
the thing that will make it the year for the linux desktop will be a big "SWITCH"-like campaign. although all the pieces of the puzzle (ximian, 2.6 kernel, KDE, GNOME, CrossOver etc...) are available - they still need to be assembled to create the correct picture - and this will continue to take time. but i feel that a big assistant to this could come from some clever people like VMWare or Citrix. "ok, so you have this, this and that running on Windows - and there is no Linux version. ok, lets just run them in a thin-client/emulator". that will need a lot more knowledge from the small outsourced IT company my mother currently uses, and a bit more technical innovation. the long and the short: still more time.
contrary to some of the other responses to your post - i agree with you wholeheartedly. success and penetration of the desktop will have very little to do with performance from 2.6 kernel - but rather with good usability practices within the community.
i photoshop user interfaces all day, so forgive me for not having the energy for visually articulating this idea...
the idea was inspired by Suggestion 3. if you go and read the discussion thread about this, the idea was actually to implement a FILTER rather than a SEARCH. i find this articulation a bit silly really because SEARCH implies a global search not a filter.. which made me think:
if you had a really simple dialog box that had a search capability you could just start typing in "hilton pari". in the background one just interrogates the slocate database and starts to put all items that start with "hilto..." in a list view below. the list view should display the parent folder of that element with a hyperlink/expander of sorts to illustrate the full path to that file.
furthermore if you abstracted this functionality, you could offer the same global search capabilities across filenames in the "recent documents" interface. so this would extend the search boundary to elements that are possibly not in your slocate database (SMB shared docs for example).
there would still be browing capabilities to allow users to do regular browsing of CD, Network etc... but i just thought this would be a highly Googleian way of opening files.
What article did you read? He explicitly states that design is most of the cost for software.
that's not the point. my point is that the design of the software and not neccessarily its implementation is (more often) where the innovation lies. i accept for the likes of oracle that this may not be the case and he does use them as an example.
"Sorry, but this is a recipe for disaster and it doesn't save you much, as the author points out. I don't know what world you live in, but the reality is that nobody writes up a perfect spec and then someone codes it. People change, requirements change and no spec is perfect."
the world i live in is actually a world that practices this quite well. we do all of our design here in the UK and develop a lot in South Africa. the world i live in, however, is an XP world. so what we do is design the system "metaphor" here - which is the general architecture and functionality behind the product. we then keep track on an interative (2 week iterations) basis by build-testing and adjusting the scope/functionality accordingly. we've done the maths and we get the same level of quality, the same level of innovation (because that all happens here) at just under half the cost.
"Farming out development to legions of programmers overseas will not create a differentiation advantage. When a technology company outsources software development, that company loses its capacity to innovate and its competitive advantage."
the author seems to be under the impression that the success and innovation of a product is purely in the hands of a bunch of software developers. this is rubbish. innovation in the software industry is also about building a product to solve a particular problem - and well. if the functionality is well designed (say with some good interaction design) by a US-based company, the specifications can be written up in the US and sent to the Indian shop for authoring. in a well designed component-based framework, the "glue" can be built in the US whereas the components or specific objects can be farmed out at a lower cost.
why not get a wireless router that will handle all of your DHCP, DNS, Firewall etc...
that way you don't have to have any operating system or anything that will just confuse "mom and pop". if they've got this box that just plugs into their ADSL line and if things go wrong they turn it off and on again?
something like this should do the trick nicely.
as much as i agree with you as a geek, i'm afraid that MB is not a measurement that Joe User groks. for instance, when Joe downloads his Inbox and he has some large attachments he would have a high bill even if he spent a small amount of time online.
Joe is used to two sorts of service-based payment options: flat rate (AOL subscription) and time-orientated (mobile phone). i don't know about the US, but here in the UK they do not bill water, electricity or gas by the unit. they take our average monthly/quaterly consumption and average out a fixed cost for a given period. if they discover you are using more or less units than averaged - they will adjust your monthly payment accordingly (yes, i have personally experienced them telling me i can pay less).
the way to bill wifi is by time used online. a service should offer some downlable status viewer that has prominant visibility to show the user how much time he/she has left or has used (like internet cafe's do).
it really depends on how heavily your developers have embraced 8i. as another poster mentioned - if they are really exploiting it then you will have a big migration task. if your applications only perform basic SQL statements - then you could probably get away with it. actually, if all you do is perform basic SQL, then you aren't utilising oracle to its full potential and you'd probably get a better ROI (return on investment) by moving to MySQL.
no offence to the potter fans - but i just could not grok this whole harry potter thing. i arrived in the UK from south africa about 3 years ago and EVERYONE was reading harry potter on the tube (that and "white teeth"). so i thought i'd give it a bash...
i've read the first 4 and will not buy the 5th. everytime i'm waiting for the books to mature slightly or something - i really just don't know and cannot understand why adults would read 700-odd pages of this. go and get "alastair reynolds - redemption ark" (ok thats the book i've just finished - and enjoyed) or something.
i also did have a point, and that was regarding the 12 year olds reading a 900 page novel. when i was 12 we read the hobbit in school and just about half the class ran out and bought the LOTR trilogy. now THERE'S an achievement! 12 year olds reading a 921384092 page adult book (the cooler kids had the one book edition!).
you have excellent taste! i missed a few of these (i haven't even heard of 21 grams!??!?!) so i'm looking forward to catching them up on DVD next year.
nope wrong. once OO.org is able to run VBA macros and is able to respond to solutions that have embedded Word (Outlook embeds Word as its email editor if you wish) and access to Word's API and DOM - THEN you will have conversion so OO.
i work on software in the legal sector and just about every instance of word in the legal sector has some sort of customisation done to it. wether it be document management integration with Hummingbird or iManage or maybe just a set of macros to centralise and populate templates etc...
people often don't realise the power of Office's VBA and the heavy investment that document-centric organisations have made in this technology.
this will be OO's biggest stumbling block regarding adoption.
i just went and read his personal web site and found two things quite funny
firsly, he's a vegetarian - never trust a vegetarian! secondly was this:
"I'm a liberal, bicycling vegetarian Jewish computer geek. I have a boyfriend, Jared, (yeah, mom, he's Jewish!) who makes me really happy (giant smile)."
now i'm not homophobic or anything - but surely that comment to his mother is just hilarious. surely when you bring home your partner and HES A GUY the fact that he's Jewish isn't exactly what's on your mothers mind!
"The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface."
1) No, a VB programmer will do this.
2) No, a good windows programmer will create an object (COM/C# Class) and then write a GUI that will call this object.
also interesting:
"They don't like GUIs much, except as lipstick painted cleanly on top of textual programs, and they don't like binary file formats. This is because a textual interface is easier to program against than, say, a GUI interface"
i would say that textual interfaces were more popular before bandwidth started becoming readily available. the rise of bandwidth has seen a rise of GUI applications because it is quite feasible to VNC from home->work and to run GUI. before ADSL it was a pain in the arse and using textual interfaces was fast and convenient.
isn't the whole point of him continuing to wear glasses so that he doesn't give his identity away?
um. we are talking geeks here - what the hell are they going to do with golf clubs?!