For the most part Oyster cards work extremely well. Two downtimes in several years isn't the worst thing ever considering the number of people with travelcards on their Oyster cards who are paying regardless of whether the system is up or down at a particular time.
Without Oyster the entire network would grind to a halt at peak hours due to added processing time (even to put a ticket through the tube gate machines, never mind queues and buying bus tickets instead of simply swiping).
There isn't any room to raise taxes right now, they've done it consistently over the past 11 years until people have very little spare cash. Anyway, Oyster works in London, which has the congestion charge for cars, so most people don't drive to work here if they don't have to. If they did they wouldn't ever get to work.
The only issue is the Oyster card hack, that took years to appear. But the track record is pretty impressive, so choosing them as the supplier seems quite a sensible solution to me. At least it wasn't one of the waste of time governmental contractors like EDS who just absorb public money in return for nothing or freedom-inhibiting systems.
Yeah, you're one of the lucky ones that has a company buy you a computer with non-crap components. The XP machine (Dell D820 laptop) I'm on (Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2.5GB RAM, XP SP3) takes around 10 minutes to get there, and longer to get Outlook and other software up and running. I swear my HP2133 is faster sometimes.
I wish I could say that it was okay once it was up and running, but XP is such a poor working environment that I can't... Still, when it works it's acceptable.
The issue here is booting to a working environment.
If you can boot Vista on a standard corporate PC to a working (i.e,. with Outlook open and connected, Excel open, Eclipse/Visual Studio open, browser open) within 5 minutes I am amazed. As an aside I would say they should use Suspend or Hibernate, but again the reality is that these systems mess up so often with XP/Vista and cheap business PCs that you might have to include a shutdown-restart onto that already long wait.
In my view, you are at work once you arrive at your desk. If you're not getting paid until you can "clock in" on a website, then you're not going to do anything related to work are you? You're going to get a coffee and chat with other coworkers in the same situation. In addition the law should state that computer operators should spend 5 minutes an hour away from the computer, and there are breaks and lunchtime allowances too that I bet the companies ride roughshod over.
Yeah, I think that's down to Apple only shipping Java 5, not Java 6 which has a lot of performance enhancements. Java 6 is available now, so they should have used that.
The SQLite benchmarks are an embarrassment for Ubuntu, or Linux in general. However I do know that Apple have done a lot of work on this, for the iPhone, etc, and I'm sure their enhancements are taking time to filter back into the mainstream repository.
All that really matters for desktop use is the user perceived performance however. My Ubuntu feels fast enough - Compiz helps a lot of course - espectially compared to XP on the same machine.
I've just switched my Ubuntu theme to Dust from ubuntu-art.org and it actually makes the desktop environment pleasant. Maybe the font is a little bit too large, but it's not jarring. I'm not normally a fan of dark themes but this theme is very promising.
One thing the Ubuntu Appearance manager should do is maintain a base theme selection and the changes separately, so if you switch the theme, the same changes apply (e.g., Cleartype, font choices, compiz effects, etc) instead of you having to go through and change them all again.
It wasn't a legal eviction, that's why that argument wasn't invoked. In effect, the computer was stolen. The defendant even reported it as stolen way before the child porn was reported.
It is a massive cock up by the police. If they had done things by the book it might have been alright, but to be honest I think the chain of custody of a stolen PC would pretty much erase any case they would have.
Indeed the defendant had reported the computer as stolen.
The police officer who said that the owner of the PC had given permission to search the PC had been informed that the PC had been reported as stolen earlier.
To be honest it really looks like the police messed up big here.
Except in this case they used MD5, not a fuzzy image matching algorithm.
I think it makes sense as a first run after you have your search warrant to find child porn. And I hope they were using a copy of the drive to keep the first intact. And that the datestamps were also recorded. And that no-one else had access to the computer in the time after it left the accused.
From those benchmarks the one thing that stuck out was that GCC is getting slower. This could be down to the Ubuntu default compilation parameters changing to use more optimisation, for example, which takes longer.
In addition the media portion of Ubuntu or Gnome has become incredibly slow compared to 7.04. Encoding is far far slower, and that's simply embarrassing.
Next up for review: How fast is Kubuntu (Linux + KDE), how fast is FreeBSD (+Gnome and +KDE), and how does it compare to Linux + Gnome.
And how heavy is that 15" laptop? There are very few lightweight 15" laptops, they're all heavy, bulky, awkward to carry.
This $600 (not $1000) 12" laptop is also too large, but at least it is light at under 3lbs. I don't think it is at the "throw it in the bag and forget about it" level though.
The 8.9" netbooks are where the portability is. 2lbs. Tiny. Sling it in the bag everyday and forget about it, instead of having to make a conscious decision about whether to take it or not.
Yeah, I saw that too, and wondered why they hadn't rated it. They also declined to give actual measurements for the device apart from thickness (24mm down to 21mm).
I strongly suspect my three year old 12" iBook is roughly the same size (maybe a little thicker). Sure, it's heavier, but it's vastly more powerful and expandable (and its battery life is 5 hours).
This 12" netbook uses Intel's new Atom chipset, Paulsbo. In order to conserve power, Intel used a leading-edge 130nm process. Yes, you read that right - not 45nm, not 65nm, not even 90nm. But 130nm.
This chipset is meant for MIDs - portable devices with small screens - not near-full-size laptops. The integrated graphics are top-end mobile-phone standard - great for MIDs, but they not even as fast as Intel's integrated graphics. It only supports a maximum of 1GB.
Considering Apple fitted in a CPU, discrete graphics, chipset, accessible RAM slots, optical drive, etc, into the iBook three years ago, I don't see how Dell had so much difficulty fitting a small CPU, chipset, some RAM mounted on the motherboard, etc, into a similarly sized case.
Don't promise clients the moon and make your people work 80 hour weeks.
Great answer, especially given the original question asker posted below stating that the employees have minimum 50 hour weeks and have to work 70+ hour weeks (and when this happens, it is because of under-staffing, poor management, and a big brother/punishment culture in the workplace).
You're overworking your employees and they will burn out eventually. Never mind installing the spy software on their systems to monitor what they do.
50 hour weeks are okay for short bursts, once or twice a year to meet a deadline, etc, with appropriate time off in lieu.
70 hour weeks will burn them out, probably very shortly. 70 hour weeks are for people who can gain massively from their work - startup creators and highly paid consultants who will take 3 months off over winter each year.
If you want these employees to feel happier then let them work the industry standard hours - 9 - 5.30 Monday to Friday, with some flexi-time.
In order to encourage people to take breaks from their workstation (for health and safety reasons) it is a more sensible idea to set up a communal gaming area (Wii + cheap LCD/Plasma TV) than to set up each employee with their own console at their desk.
The former will increase team interaction. You could have an inter-team tournament after work hours, etc, which would improve intra-team communications. Rayman Raving Rabbids 1 + 2, Brawl, Sports, Kart, etc. Hell, put a Wii Fit board in and get the (possibly hot) marketing chicks upstairs.
The latter will engender jealousy amongst other departments once they (inevitably) find out, and it would probably be a very quick way to get booted out of the company.
The other thing is that you have issued fairly decent laptops to the employees - so why not play games on these? As long as they don't have integrated graphics (the D820s have, my colleague's D830 has discrete) you should be able to set up some games for team play without any of the additional costs (hardware, subscriptions, setup, cables, you getting fired) that your solution would entail.
While I agree that the specs are underwhelming, that is how it is reaching its £99 price point - last generation display, last generation chipset, last generation memory capacity, etc.
This device's usefulness comes down to its keyboard and the applications installed.
I think it would be nice if they could have used a higher DPI screen to get 480x320, and in addition used a more up to date ARM SoC, the PXA270 is years old.
VIA may use ARMs as components within their other chips. It's not too hard to imagine an ARM inside their Firewire controllers, for example. ARMs are so small and efficient they get put everywhere you need some CPU functionality these days.
The problem is that both NVIDIA and AMD have products for this market that also double as system chipsets and thus are quite cheap to use instead of discrete graphics. For example, see the recently announced 9400M from NVIDIA (although their older AMD chipsets also had the video decode capability) and AMD's 780G.
(If you distill AMD's solution, you will end up with an ATI Xilleon chip (although I think they sold this off to Broadcom recently) that is a SoC with the video decode unit that is used in AMD GPUs, a MIPS CPU and all the other stuff.)
My six (?) year old Microsoft Optical Intellimouse is still working fine, even though I've covered it in paint splashes and it's gone a rather nasty yellow colour.
Seriously, this software is dire for use as an office replacement.
However Google Apps (does anyone else get confused that Apps isn't Docs, but email and stuff) does provide a decent Exchange replacement, functionally (and with built-in IM). In fact GMail is far nicer to use than Outlook!
Anyone seen Outlook 2007's HTML viewer. 1996 called, they want their renderer back.
Definitely charge up front for the work you've already done that you haven't put back into the community yet (i.e., the work that they take ownership of they have to buy off you), then ask for a signing bonus on top (hey, it's you they want!), then get the non-compete clause struck off, maybe agree that during your employment period you will not contribute to the open source project but all bets are off once your tenure has ended for whatever reason, and maybe put in a clause relating to minimum employment duration otherwise you will deem the entire contract null and void (can you do that?).
Are people in the open source community for the project actively looking forward to your changes? If so, it could be a difficult move to make, so the money would have to be extremely good - not just ten thousand on top of your current wage for example.
Someone should port Adium to Linux - the interface component of course, as they both build upon libpurple.
In addition for common applications it is clear that a small leaflet with the system would fix half the questions, even if it resulted in people still being unable to use MSN video, audio, nudges, winks, etc.
And how did MSN win? AIM, ICQ, etc, they had the market! Yet again, bundling with the OS gave Microsoft an unfair advantage.
Does it handle Markdown formatting? Plain text that can be displayed in a reasonably neat way without messing up the plain text view for devices that don't support it.
I'll get one of these devices once the screen refresh is down to 0.5s and the price isn't the better part of 5 years worth of paperback novels.
However they're a great device for researchers and people who travel a lot or to places with intermittent or no power. And as you say, they don't have the direct light issue of LCDs, although maybe an LCD like the OLPC could be an option...
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Tried it. Didn't work reliably with Windows XP on the Dell D820.
Works with Ubuntu on my HP2133 however, it even restarts the wireless correctly.
And it just works, and has always just worked, on my now ancient iBook.
So I blame Windows.
Oh, bollocks, EDS is part of TranSys. D'oh!
That's probably what caused the problem in the first place.
For the most part Oyster cards work extremely well. Two downtimes in several years isn't the worst thing ever considering the number of people with travelcards on their Oyster cards who are paying regardless of whether the system is up or down at a particular time.
Without Oyster the entire network would grind to a halt at peak hours due to added processing time (even to put a ticket through the tube gate machines, never mind queues and buying bus tickets instead of simply swiping).
There isn't any room to raise taxes right now, they've done it consistently over the past 11 years until people have very little spare cash. Anyway, Oyster works in London, which has the congestion charge for cars, so most people don't drive to work here if they don't have to. If they did they wouldn't ever get to work.
The only issue is the Oyster card hack, that took years to appear. But the track record is pretty impressive, so choosing them as the supplier seems quite a sensible solution to me. At least it wasn't one of the waste of time governmental contractors like EDS who just absorb public money in return for nothing or freedom-inhibiting systems.
Yeah, you're one of the lucky ones that has a company buy you a computer with non-crap components. The XP machine (Dell D820 laptop) I'm on (Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2.5GB RAM, XP SP3) takes around 10 minutes to get there, and longer to get Outlook and other software up and running. I swear my HP2133 is faster sometimes.
I wish I could say that it was okay once it was up and running, but XP is such a poor working environment that I can't... Still, when it works it's acceptable.
The issue here is booting to a working environment.
If you can boot Vista on a standard corporate PC to a working (i.e,. with Outlook open and connected, Excel open, Eclipse/Visual Studio open, browser open) within 5 minutes I am amazed. As an aside I would say they should use Suspend or Hibernate, but again the reality is that these systems mess up so often with XP/Vista and cheap business PCs that you might have to include a shutdown-restart onto that already long wait.
In my view, you are at work once you arrive at your desk. If you're not getting paid until you can "clock in" on a website, then you're not going to do anything related to work are you? You're going to get a coffee and chat with other coworkers in the same situation. In addition the law should state that computer operators should spend 5 minutes an hour away from the computer, and there are breaks and lunchtime allowances too that I bet the companies ride roughshod over.
Yeah, I think that's down to Apple only shipping Java 5, not Java 6 which has a lot of performance enhancements. Java 6 is available now, so they should have used that.
The SQLite benchmarks are an embarrassment for Ubuntu, or Linux in general. However I do know that Apple have done a lot of work on this, for the iPhone, etc, and I'm sure their enhancements are taking time to filter back into the mainstream repository.
All that really matters for desktop use is the user perceived performance however. My Ubuntu feels fast enough - Compiz helps a lot of course - espectially compared to XP on the same machine.
I've just switched my Ubuntu theme to Dust from ubuntu-art.org and it actually makes the desktop environment pleasant. Maybe the font is a little bit too large, but it's not jarring. I'm not normally a fan of dark themes but this theme is very promising.
One thing the Ubuntu Appearance manager should do is maintain a base theme selection and the changes separately, so if you switch the theme, the same changes apply (e.g., Cleartype, font choices, compiz effects, etc) instead of you having to go through and change them all again.
It wasn't a legal eviction, that's why that argument wasn't invoked. In effect, the computer was stolen. The defendant even reported it as stolen way before the child porn was reported.
It is a massive cock up by the police. If they had done things by the book it might have been alright, but to be honest I think the chain of custody of a stolen PC would pretty much erase any case they would have.
Indeed the defendant had reported the computer as stolen.
The police officer who said that the owner of the PC had given permission to search the PC had been informed that the PC had been reported as stolen earlier.
To be honest it really looks like the police messed up big here.
Except in this case they used MD5, not a fuzzy image matching algorithm.
I think it makes sense as a first run after you have your search warrant to find child porn. And I hope they were using a copy of the drive to keep the first intact. And that the datestamps were also recorded. And that no-one else had access to the computer in the time after it left the accused.
From those benchmarks the one thing that stuck out was that GCC is getting slower. This could be down to the Ubuntu default compilation parameters changing to use more optimisation, for example, which takes longer.
In addition the media portion of Ubuntu or Gnome has become incredibly slow compared to 7.04. Encoding is far far slower, and that's simply embarrassing.
Next up for review: How fast is Kubuntu (Linux + KDE), how fast is FreeBSD (+Gnome and +KDE), and how does it compare to Linux + Gnome.
And how heavy is that 15" laptop? There are very few lightweight 15" laptops, they're all heavy, bulky, awkward to carry.
This $600 (not $1000) 12" laptop is also too large, but at least it is light at under 3lbs. I don't think it is at the "throw it in the bag and forget about it" level though.
The 8.9" netbooks are where the portability is. 2lbs. Tiny. Sling it in the bag everyday and forget about it, instead of having to make a conscious decision about whether to take it or not.
Yeah, I saw that too, and wondered why they hadn't rated it. They also declined to give actual measurements for the device apart from thickness (24mm down to 21mm).
I strongly suspect my three year old 12" iBook is roughly the same size (maybe a little thicker). Sure, it's heavier, but it's vastly more powerful and expandable (and its battery life is 5 hours).
This 12" netbook uses Intel's new Atom chipset, Paulsbo. In order to conserve power, Intel used a leading-edge 130nm process. Yes, you read that right - not 45nm, not 65nm, not even 90nm. But 130nm.
This chipset is meant for MIDs - portable devices with small screens - not near-full-size laptops. The integrated graphics are top-end mobile-phone standard - great for MIDs, but they not even as fast as Intel's integrated graphics. It only supports a maximum of 1GB.
Considering Apple fitted in a CPU, discrete graphics, chipset, accessible RAM slots, optical drive, etc, into the iBook three years ago, I don't see how Dell had so much difficulty fitting a small CPU, chipset, some RAM mounted on the motherboard, etc, into a similarly sized case.
Don't promise clients the moon and make your people work 80 hour weeks.
Great answer, especially given the original question asker posted below stating that the employees have minimum 50 hour weeks and have to work 70+ hour weeks (and when this happens, it is because of under-staffing, poor management, and a big brother/punishment culture in the workplace).
You're overworking your employees and they will burn out eventually. Never mind installing the spy software on their systems to monitor what they do.
50 hour weeks are okay for short bursts, once or twice a year to meet a deadline, etc, with appropriate time off in lieu.
70 hour weeks will burn them out, probably very shortly. 70 hour weeks are for people who can gain massively from their work - startup creators and highly paid consultants who will take 3 months off over winter each year.
If you want these employees to feel happier then let them work the industry standard hours - 9 - 5.30 Monday to Friday, with some flexi-time.
In order to encourage people to take breaks from their workstation (for health and safety reasons) it is a more sensible idea to set up a communal gaming area (Wii + cheap LCD/Plasma TV) than to set up each employee with their own console at their desk.
The former will increase team interaction. You could have an inter-team tournament after work hours, etc, which would improve intra-team communications. Rayman Raving Rabbids 1 + 2, Brawl, Sports, Kart, etc. Hell, put a Wii Fit board in and get the (possibly hot) marketing chicks upstairs.
The latter will engender jealousy amongst other departments once they (inevitably) find out, and it would probably be a very quick way to get booted out of the company.
The other thing is that you have issued fairly decent laptops to the employees - so why not play games on these? As long as they don't have integrated graphics (the D820s have, my colleague's D830 has discrete) you should be able to set up some games for team play without any of the additional costs (hardware, subscriptions, setup, cables, you getting fired) that your solution would entail.
While I agree that the specs are underwhelming, that is how it is reaching its £99 price point - last generation display, last generation chipset, last generation memory capacity, etc.
This device's usefulness comes down to its keyboard and the applications installed.
I think it would be nice if they could have used a higher DPI screen to get 480x320, and in addition used a more up to date ARM SoC, the PXA270 is years old.
VIA may use ARMs as components within their other chips. It's not too hard to imagine an ARM inside their Firewire controllers, for example. ARMs are so small and efficient they get put everywhere you need some CPU functionality these days.
The problem is that both NVIDIA and AMD have products for this market that also double as system chipsets and thus are quite cheap to use instead of discrete graphics. For example, see the recently announced 9400M from NVIDIA (although their older AMD chipsets also had the video decode capability) and AMD's 780G.
(If you distill AMD's solution, you will end up with an ATI Xilleon chip (although I think they sold this off to Broadcom recently) that is a SoC with the video decode unit that is used in AMD GPUs, a MIPS CPU and all the other stuff.)
My six (?) year old Microsoft Optical Intellimouse is still working fine, even though I've covered it in paint splashes and it's gone a rather nasty yellow colour.
$100 for a mouse? Screw that.
Seriously, this software is dire for use as an office replacement.
However Google Apps (does anyone else get confused that Apps isn't Docs, but email and stuff) does provide a decent Exchange replacement, functionally (and with built-in IM). In fact GMail is far nicer to use than Outlook!
Anyone seen Outlook 2007's HTML viewer. 1996 called, they want their renderer back.
Ugh, horrible story. Bad luck dude.
Are you for or against in-car GPS location recording systems?
For you, this would have proven your case - you did stop.
Yet a lot of people on Slashdot argue that it is state snooping or worse, and of course that is a valid point as well.
++
Definitely charge up front for the work you've already done that you haven't put back into the community yet (i.e., the work that they take ownership of they have to buy off you), then ask for a signing bonus on top (hey, it's you they want!), then get the non-compete clause struck off, maybe agree that during your employment period you will not contribute to the open source project but all bets are off once your tenure has ended for whatever reason, and maybe put in a clause relating to minimum employment duration otherwise you will deem the entire contract null and void (can you do that?).
Are people in the open source community for the project actively looking forward to your changes? If so, it could be a difficult move to make, so the money would have to be extremely good - not just ten thousand on top of your current wage for example.
Someone should port Adium to Linux - the interface component of course, as they both build upon libpurple.
In addition for common applications it is clear that a small leaflet with the system would fix half the questions, even if it resulted in people still being unable to use MSN video, audio, nudges, winks, etc.
And how did MSN win? AIM, ICQ, etc, they had the market! Yet again, bundling with the OS gave Microsoft an unfair advantage.
Like the Securicor vans which say "Warning! Securicor Van Reversing"?
"Attention! Vehicle Approaching! VROOM VROOM!"
"Warning! Vehicle Driven By Woman applying make-up Approaching!"
"WATCH OUT! Vehicle Driven By Self-Obsessed Wanker On Mobile Phone Approaching!"
It could get louder and faster the faster the vehicle travels, like an ice cream van.
In addition you could get famous actors and comedians to voice the alerts.
Does it handle Markdown formatting? Plain text that can be displayed in a reasonably neat way without messing up the plain text view for devices that don't support it.
I'll get one of these devices once the screen refresh is down to 0.5s and the price isn't the better part of 5 years worth of paperback novels.
However they're a great device for researchers and people who travel a lot or to places with intermittent or no power. And as you say, they don't have the direct light issue of LCDs, although maybe an LCD like the OLPC could be an option...