Imagine if you could use you digital recorder to rip a few movies into low-res, low bitrate copies and copy them to your iPaq to view on that next plane flight... Wouldn't that be cool?
Apple better come out with a set top QuickTime digital recorder fast. They're getting left behind again (no offense to you Apple folks out there, kudos on OS X).
If you read the court opinion you will find that CTS was only the first in a string of problems, including neck and back injury due to oiling the finish of cars on the assembly line.
Toyota and the plaintiff (let's not say victim, we don't know for sure what happened) disagreed over the work attendance of the plantiff. I find it difficult to believe that she had no record of her attendance; I get this on my paystub, and since she was probably hourly, she should have carbon copies of her time sheet.
The plaintiff was only seen by Toyota's doctors.
Toyota's physicians actually ordered her to stop working (or so it seems).
I think one piece of wisdom we can garner from this case is that it is important to keep good records of when you worked, what your medical conditions are, and your employer's evaluations. Perhaps it is good to be evaluated by impartial physicians as well.
Re:Samba validates Microsoft
on
Samba Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think Samba exists not for the validation of Microsoft but for the encouragement of interaction among heterogeneous systems.
Here are a couple of points to consider:
Microsoft's LAN Manager and their later implementations of SMB were not the only commercial implementations. Correct me if I'm wrong, but DEC PathWorks is an SMB implementation still under development and distribution by Compaq on OpenVMS.
Other proprietary file transfer protocols have been reverse-engineered and implemented in free software by other projects, including Novell and AppleTalk. Are the companies with the most popular implementations of the protocols also validated?
I think overriding effect of Samba and other free software projects that implement proprietary protocols is to make operating sytems that incorporate these implementations (originally GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but now also several other UNIX variants) more attractive as newcomers to many previously entirely DEC or Microsoft shops, since they can interoperate seamlessly with legacy equipment. I would rather implement GNU/Linux with Samba in my datacenter than some proprietary OS that doesn't use Samba because I know Samba will be perpetually maintained and will always interoperate with any particular legacy system I am forced to use.
Having worked for a major life sciences company in a biochemistry research facility, I know the need for interoperability with legacy systems. For example, we had a number of instruments called BetaRams which we the biochemistry IT team had to support because they would be expensive to replace, yet the company that manufactured these no longer existed. The only software available for these systems was only certified to work on particular versions of IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. We had to be able to allow the software to write data to network drives, and all we could run was LAN Manager or Novell. We needed to store the data on fault-tolerant, near-perfect-availability systems. So, we used VMS with PathWorks (SMB) - this decision was made long before Samba.
This sort of public network will help create an awareness among users about their own privacy and will encourage users to educate themselves about good computing practices, including using encrypted protocols for everything. The cryptosystems available for free to the public today (like RSA) are excellent, and people will learn to use them once they get burned. It will help to improve the security of network implementations on consumer operating systems and spurr competition among software companies; commercial network software will no longer be acceptable to the consumer if it does not exhibit the security excellence that open source network software does.
This being a government-owned network, however, could lead to antiprivacy regulation. The city or another government entity could set policies prohibiting encryption, much like the FCC prohibits encryption over certain radio bands. The proponents of such regulations will certainly point to terrorism as a factor mitigating this evil.
This will undoubtedly lead to the end of a way of thinking: that physical barriers are not adequate to ensure network privacy. Moreover, I think you will se companies and individuals use VPNs to replace the separation they once had with the outside world.
I mounted an old NEC 4x Narrow SCSI on the underside of the dash of a Mercury Sable a couple of years ago 'cause the price was about 360 for the GM changer. This reader has full FF/RW/Play/Eject control on the face plate. It skips way too much (gotta be on fresh asphalt without many cracks or stationary).
If one wanted to, one could hook it up to an SCSI-bus equipped computer under the front seat - this would be well within the 6 feet you get under the narrow SCSI spec.
It is kinda nice that this old player uses caddies instead of a tray. I have plenty of those tihngs and they keep cd's from getting scratched in the car when you fumble in the glove box.
Perhaps the IRS itself should provide a free (perhaps not open source) software solution in order to prevent any sort of liabilty issues affecting developers. It should be in Java for portability, or perhaps a PHP or Perl application running on a secure server. I think liability and complexity are the primary reasons for not having open source tax software.
It is very possible to develop your db application in Access and use mySQL as a backend. Use myODBC (free software, stable). Once you install this driver, you can create a machine data source to point to each of your mysql server's db's. Next, create your tables in mySQL. Then, create an mdb (Access application). Instead of creating new tables in Access, use the Link Table feature, select your myODBC data source, and then develop your application as you would have if you had created your tables in Access.
So, you want to web enable this with PHP4? Can do! Access is capable of exporting an ASP application which manipulates your db via ODBC (MS assumes you are running IIS, Win2K). You may take this exported ASP and use the asp2php application to crank out php code. A simple find-and-replace operation should be able to correctly point PHP at mySQL instead of Access.
Whatever you do, you should let the boss know that it needs to be web-enabled. Browsers are free, Access is not. Unfortunately, Access-generated ASP files fail the XHTML 1.0 validator post-processing miserably, and I don't think they even use external CSS.
All this can be accomplished much more easily with a plain old mySQL client, emacs, Apache and PHP. Perhaps someone could start a benchmarking project to compare processing time for functionally equivalent scripts on the PHP4+Zend/mySQL/Apache/Linux and ASP/SQL-Server/IIS/Win2K platforms. That way you could have some tangible evidence to use to convince your boss to get off the MS soap box.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if you could use you digital recorder to rip a few movies into low-res, low bitrate copies and copy them to your iPaq to view on that next plane flight... Wouldn't that be cool?
Apple better come out with a set top QuickTime digital recorder fast. They're getting left behind again (no offense to you Apple folks out there, kudos on OS X).
I think one piece of wisdom we can garner from this case is that it is important to keep good records of when you worked, what your medical conditions are, and your employer's evaluations. Perhaps it is good to be evaluated by impartial physicians as well.
I think Samba exists not for the validation of Microsoft but for the encouragement of interaction among heterogeneous systems.
Here are a couple of points to consider:
I think overriding effect of Samba and other free software projects that implement proprietary protocols is to make operating sytems that incorporate these implementations (originally GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but now also several other UNIX variants) more attractive as newcomers to many previously entirely DEC or Microsoft shops, since they can interoperate seamlessly with legacy equipment. I would rather implement GNU/Linux with Samba in my datacenter than some proprietary OS that doesn't use Samba because I know Samba will be perpetually maintained and will always interoperate with any particular legacy system I am forced to use.
Having worked for a major life sciences company in a biochemistry research facility, I know the need for interoperability with legacy systems. For example, we had a number of instruments called BetaRams which we the biochemistry IT team had to support because they would be expensive to replace, yet the company that manufactured these no longer existed. The only software available for these systems was only certified to work on particular versions of IBM PC-DOS and MS-DOS. We had to be able to allow the software to write data to network drives, and all we could run was LAN Manager or Novell. We needed to store the data on fault-tolerant, near-perfect-availability systems. So, we used VMS with PathWorks (SMB) - this decision was made long before Samba.
This could be good or bad:
This sort of public network will help create an awareness among users about their own privacy and will encourage users to educate themselves about good computing practices, including using encrypted protocols for everything. The cryptosystems available for free to the public today (like RSA) are excellent, and people will learn to use them once they get burned. It will help to improve the security of network implementations on consumer operating systems and spurr competition among software companies; commercial network software will no longer be acceptable to the consumer if it does not exhibit the security excellence that open source network software does.
This will undoubtedly lead to the end of a way of thinking: that physical barriers are not adequate to ensure network privacy. Moreover, I think you will se companies and individuals use VPNs to replace the separation they once had with the outside world.
Thanks for reading.
I mounted an old NEC 4x Narrow SCSI on the underside of the dash of a Mercury Sable a couple of years ago 'cause the price was about 360 for the GM changer. This reader has full FF/RW/Play/Eject control on the face plate. It skips way too much (gotta be on fresh asphalt without many cracks or stationary).
If one wanted to, one could hook it up to an SCSI-bus equipped computer under the front seat - this would be well within the 6 feet you get under the narrow SCSI spec.
It is kinda nice that this old player uses caddies instead of a tray. I have plenty of those tihngs and they keep cd's from getting scratched in the car when you fumble in the glove box.
- Matt
Perhaps the IRS itself should provide a free (perhaps not open source) software solution in order to prevent any sort of liabilty issues affecting developers. It should be in Java for portability, or perhaps a PHP or Perl application running on a secure server. I think liability and complexity are the primary reasons for not having open source tax software.
It is very possible to develop your db application in Access and use mySQL as a backend. Use myODBC (free software, stable). Once you install this driver, you can create a machine data source to point to each of your mysql server's db's. Next, create your tables in mySQL. Then, create an mdb (Access application). Instead of creating new tables in Access, use the Link Table feature, select your myODBC data source, and then develop your application as you would have if you had created your tables in Access.
So, you want to web enable this with PHP4? Can do! Access is capable of exporting an ASP application which manipulates your db via ODBC (MS assumes you are running IIS, Win2K). You may take this exported ASP and use the asp2php application to crank out php code. A simple find-and-replace operation should be able to correctly point PHP at mySQL instead of Access.
Whatever you do, you should let the boss know that it needs to be web-enabled. Browsers are free, Access is not. Unfortunately, Access-generated ASP files fail the XHTML 1.0 validator post-processing miserably, and I don't think they even use external CSS.
All this can be accomplished much more easily with a plain old mySQL client, emacs, Apache and PHP. Perhaps someone could start a benchmarking project to compare processing time for functionally equivalent scripts on the PHP4+Zend/mySQL/Apache/Linux and ASP/SQL-Server/IIS/Win2K platforms. That way you could have some tangible evidence to use to convince your boss to get off the MS soap box.
Good luck.