Ubuntu is fine for me. I'm happy with the improvements, but it's already a viable work and home platform for me now. But I've introduced it to a LOT of people with some successes and some failures.
The burden is on us geeks to see where it fails and try to determine the why so we can feed back to developers what isn't working for more average users. I suspect this will be the true power of brainstorm.
Law schools pump out people that see the law, at best, as ambiguous. As such, you find many aligning themselves where the money is.
For people such as us geeks, the world is often quite binary when it comes to these kinds of matters. In this case, it was pretty easy to see who were the sleazy money hungry extortionists and who were fighting for what was right.
But all too often, there are very gray areas where people fight it out. The lawyers always win. There is not always a winner on either side.
I wrote to the FTC to complain because since Yahoo now owns Zimbra, this means that Microsoft will have the ability to kill the only serious competitor to their Exchange platform.
I know about the other solutions, but none are as feature complete IMHO as Zimbra. Two words: Blackberry integration.
We use Plone for our intranet and it rocks. We have instituted a policy that knowledge such as processes go in there. It's FOSS and has lots of add-ons.
This takes a culture shift that must be implemented with a mandate from upper management. You can start by placing all of your processes/SOPs in the intranet to lead by example.
What if you could download the newest movies right when they come out and watch them at home instead of driving to the movies (waste of gas), standing in line to get tickets, buying overpriced refreshments and then sitting in a crowded theater just waiting for some dill hole's phone to ring. Extra suck points if they answer it.
I'd be willing to pay good money to watch it in my own home sitting in my own chair drinking and eating whatever I want (at a reasonable price) and have the added bonus of pausing for bathroom breaks.
I bet the average household would chew through 15 to 20 GB of movies a month or more. It would probably result in increased profit for the movie industry. Would suck for the theaters, but their model is busted anyway.
the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience
I think that if Bittorrent has taught us anything, it's that when content is available (either legal or otherwise) that people want, they WILL saturate their pipe to get it as soon as they can.
I sincerely think that this is a chicken and egg scenario where the demand _would_ be there if the content owners would get over themselves and work with tech companies to meld content and technology in an inexpensive and unrestricted manner.
The past decade has proven so many lessons that organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA are either unable or unwilling to learn. Sadly for them, in trying to be a damn in the path of the river, they are quickly becoming a bump in the road slowly being pound level to the pavement.
The saddest part of all is that we could all be enjoying inexpensive access to music and video content legally _right now_ with those organizations profiting instead of this stalemate we're in where we can last forever while those relying on profit cannot.
There's your corner and while I can't possibly predict how long it will take for us to get around that corner, rest assured that we will and then you will see demand skyrocket.
There is a fundamental technical problem with DRM which can't be solved that others have said before in various forms, so I can't claim this as my own:
Encryption is all about securing data so you can send it safely from A to C without B being able to read it. The problem with DRM is that B and C are the same person.
This reality will _never_ change despite what technology is being used. In order for our senses to comprehend the signal or heck even if it were sent as a direct data stream to our brain--the man in the middle is us and we can, if we so choose, mold that stream into whatever we want.
Re:Here is the PR
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hopefully they are starting to realize the real value in offering software virtually for free but charging for the support. You get a lot more regular paying customers if they can pay a very affordable annual cost for continued support vs paying some stupid high software cost up front. Many opportunities are missed because of the sticker shock for SMBs.
Amen. Up to and until I as an administrator can centrally configure settings--ideally via GPOs--Firefox will find corporate resistance.
Heck, I urge my users to use it and I have a coming headache where upper level management wants me to dictate our intranet site as the startup homepage. I can do it in five minutes on IE with a GPO. Firefox . . . well even if I go around and change it for everyone, how hard is it for them to change it to whatever they want?
I work for a manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry and I hear people say things like Linux and/or Open Source is a problem with the FDA, but I haven't seen anything yet to back that up. Period.
To "validate" software with the FDA, you really only need to do three things:
1) Make your software/system/device secure 2) Have control over the system 3) Document #1 and #2
There are people who come from an old guard that have all sorts of misconceptions about what can and can't pass FDA regulations. It seems to stem from a gross misunderstanding of what the regulations actually say.
I've read the portions that deal with computers and electronic information. There is absolutely nothing in it to suggest open source even remotely is an issue. I suspect this is an urban legend started by companies selling proprietary software.
Regardless, the regulations (Part 11) are the FDA Bible and so long as you can satisfy the requirements in them which basically boil down to the three I listed above, then you are in compliance.
The end-user experience is absolutely the main point. There's no question about it. But don't forget that there's a lot more to experience than the shiny cover on the outside.
If the underlying OS is running sluggish because it is busy doing things that have _nothing_ to do with the task at hand (hello Vista!), then the user experience is going to be diminished.
Outlook 2003 doesn't work. It used to. Access has never worked AFAIK. There have been quite a few regressions in the version shipped with 7.10 that affect Office 2003, so I wouldn't tout it as a solution for that.
First, you can legally use all eleven channels of 802.11b in the US. It just so happens that if you want to have perfect channel separation, channels 1, 6 and 11 are the way to go. I've sat in on a discussion about using 1, 4, 8 and 11 or some such combination and achieving acceptable separation provide the APs aren't on top of each other.
Regardless, using the three channels and 120 degree directional antennas to cover the full 360 is the most effective way. That isn't cheap. Even if you roll your own using a WRAP board or some such thing, last I checked you can't get a weather proof AP with all three channels and antennas for less than $1,000. That doesn't count labor.
The point is that regardless of the efficiency of the usage of nuclear fuel, it's still very finite and relying on it or any other source of fuel as our source of power sets us on a crash course with inevitability. This doesn't mean we shouldn't look to nuclear to get past fossil fuels in the short term.
But we absolutely must look at it as a short term step and learn how to improve technology to make the most out of the closest thing to an infinite source of energy that we have (the sun) and make our energy usage as efficient as possible. This includes conservation and population control.
This should at least by us a couple of billion years or so to find a way to look for and migrate to other habitable planets to call home whose sun is younger than ours. The more planets we can find to populate the merrier.
I thought about this long ago and had a discussion about it with some other geek friends. The major problems, we concluded, were weight and safety.
I think the batteries in the Tesla are weighing in measuring in the hundreds of pounds. Swapping that in and out would be quite a task.
We decided the only way this would be viable would be to have an automatic and mechanical changer. This would also address the safety issue.
The only way this would happen is if standards on battery size and changing locations on vehicles were standardized. Having such a system would severely limit vehicle design.
Our final conclusion was that with battery technology at its current state, this solution wouldn't happen.
First - most cars get about 400 miles to the tank.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I drove without stopping until my tank went from full to empty. And I remember very clearly not being happy about it. Stopping would have done me good.
It seems to me that 300 miles or greater per charge would meet the needs of almost everyone.
Restaurants & hotels/motels/camp-grounds could install charge facilities
This is exactly the point. I believe there are such charging stations in many places in California right now.
If you can provide 5 to 6 hours of drive time (300 to 350 miles per charge at average 60 to 65 mph), I think that would suffice for most people.
If someone could squeeze 400 miles into a charge, then I have no doubts electrics would be completely viable. I still believe 300 would be ok for most.
An all electric car is quite a paradigm shift that is very difficult for existing auto makers to pursue.
While similar in form and function, electric cars are monumentally different from gasoline and/or diesel powered vehicles. It's much easier for a company such as Tesla to start their production model making cars numbering in the hundreds and ramp up their scale than it is for a huge manufacturer to go from the large scale and start small.
However, it's still a matter of who meets the magic numbers. I submit that the first company to develop an all electric car that will travel 300 miles on one charge, can recharge in less than 30 minutes plugged in, will recharge slowly in the sun on its own and costs less than $40,000 will sell like hot cakes.
Whether that's an old and established manufacturer or a new one like Tesla remains to be seen.
I'm using FOSS wherever I can. A preliminary use of Linux on the desktop is showing great promise. If the WINE folks can work out their regressions and make some further progress, I foresee Linux replacing many desktops.
The one thing I didn't see after (attempting) browsing through those modules is a desktop explorer integration piece.
Plone has this with some software from Enfold Systems. The general idea is to have an ultra quick and easy way for content managers to browse to files, open them, save their work back to the CMS and retain version history along the way.
The Enfold solution is almost there. It does everything except retain version history with the saving of files.
Plone with the Enfold Systems add-in is everything we want assuming versioning is added in soon--a CMS with straightforward intranet/extranet capabilities.
The benefit is a quick and easy way to publish documents internally and externally to customers.
If Drupal has that, I'd love to be able to evaluate it. If it doesn't have the desktop (yes, Windows) integration piece to easily open and save files, I'm not interested as this is an essential piece.
I work for a contract pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. I can tell you definitively that regulations have three major effects on pharmaceutical companies as opposed to those that don't have to follow them (i.e. herbal remedy companies):
1) Increased cost of development
2) Slower time to market
3) Increased cost of production
None of those prevent discoveries. They do raise the financial entry barriers for startups, however.
In all the years I've been helping people with their home computers, I've only encountered one person that actually "just checked email". The rest _say_ they only check email. Then watch their computer boot. Some random instant messaging client pops up and I get, "oh yeah, I use that to message my friends/book club/church group/whatever". They have a solitaire shortcut on their desktop that they use when they're bored. They have some program they use to edit photos of their grandchildren they receive in the email.
By the time all is said and done, they do a heck of a lot more than just email and more than what probably makes sense for some trimmed down applications.
If Google tracking every text message I send in order to text me occasional ads or whatever leads to a cheaper monthly plan, I'm all for it. Next to the big ticket items such as our mortgage, the monthly cell bill is the single biggest expenditure in our budget for two people.
If it can be steered, there is no mystery as to where it's going to land. That makes evacuations much easier. Especially if you are steering it to a sparsely populated area.
Besides, I'll be that the areas where they are running out of water would LOVE for a hurricane to be able to be guided to their neck of the woods right about now.
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu is fine for me. I'm happy with the improvements, but it's already a viable work and home platform for me now. But I've introduced it to a LOT of people with some successes and some failures.
The burden is on us geeks to see where it fails and try to determine the why so we can feed back to developers what isn't working for more average users. I suspect this will be the true power of brainstorm.
Law schools pump out people that see the law, at best, as ambiguous. As such, you find many aligning themselves where the money is.
For people such as us geeks, the world is often quite binary when it comes to these kinds of matters. In this case, it was pretty easy to see who were the sleazy money hungry extortionists and who were fighting for what was right.
But all too often, there are very gray areas where people fight it out. The lawyers always win. There is not always a winner on either side.
Obama narrowly defeated? Apparently you haven't examined the numbers.
1) He won the majority of states with 13 to 8 and New Mexico looks like he might win that too.
2) He won the majority of delegates if only by a slim margin.
3) He won 40% of the vote in Clinton's home state. He was polling as low as 15% there just a couple of months ago.
4) He won 8 states with over 60% of the vote (AK, CO, GA, ID, IL, KS, MN, ND). She did that with only one state--Arkansas (not even NY).
5) He won 3 states with over 70% of the vote (AK, ID, KS). She didn't manage that feat.
Given these facts, I just don't see how anyone calls this a win for her. I am not convinced you can call this a tie either.
I wrote to the FTC to complain because since Yahoo now owns Zimbra, this means that Microsoft will have the ability to kill the only serious competitor to their Exchange platform.
I know about the other solutions, but none are as feature complete IMHO as Zimbra. Two words: Blackberry integration.
We use Plone for our intranet and it rocks. We have instituted a policy that knowledge such as processes go in there. It's FOSS and has lots of add-ons.
This takes a culture shift that must be implemented with a mandate from upper management. You can start by placing all of your processes/SOPs in the intranet to lead by example.
What if you could download the newest movies right when they come out and watch them at home instead of driving to the movies (waste of gas), standing in line to get tickets, buying overpriced refreshments and then sitting in a crowded theater just waiting for some dill hole's phone to ring. Extra suck points if they answer it.
I'd be willing to pay good money to watch it in my own home sitting in my own chair drinking and eating whatever I want (at a reasonable price) and have the added bonus of pausing for bathroom breaks.
I bet the average household would chew through 15 to 20 GB of movies a month or more. It would probably result in increased profit for the movie industry. Would suck for the theaters, but their model is busted anyway.
the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience
I think that if Bittorrent has taught us anything, it's that when content is available (either legal or otherwise) that people want, they WILL saturate their pipe to get it as soon as they can.
I sincerely think that this is a chicken and egg scenario where the demand _would_ be there if the content owners would get over themselves and work with tech companies to meld content and technology in an inexpensive and unrestricted manner.
The past decade has proven so many lessons that organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA are either unable or unwilling to learn. Sadly for them, in trying to be a damn in the path of the river, they are quickly becoming a bump in the road slowly being pound level to the pavement.
The saddest part of all is that we could all be enjoying inexpensive access to music and video content legally _right now_ with those organizations profiting instead of this stalemate we're in where we can last forever while those relying on profit cannot.
There's your corner and while I can't possibly predict how long it will take for us to get around that corner, rest assured that we will and then you will see demand skyrocket.
There is a fundamental technical problem with DRM which can't be solved that others have said before in various forms, so I can't claim this as my own:
Encryption is all about securing data so you can send it safely from A to C without B being able to read it. The problem with DRM is that B and C are the same person.
This reality will _never_ change despite what technology is being used. In order for our senses to comprehend the signal or heck even if it were sent as a direct data stream to our brain--the man in the middle is us and we can, if we so choose, mold that stream into whatever we want.
Hopefully they are starting to realize the real value in offering software virtually for free but charging for the support. You get a lot more regular paying customers if they can pay a very affordable annual cost for continued support vs paying some stupid high software cost up front. Many opportunities are missed because of the sticker shock for SMBs.
Amen. Up to and until I as an administrator can centrally configure settings--ideally via GPOs--Firefox will find corporate resistance.
Heck, I urge my users to use it and I have a coming headache where upper level management wants me to dictate our intranet site as the startup homepage. I can do it in five minutes on IE with a GPO. Firefox . . . well even if I go around and change it for everyone, how hard is it for them to change it to whatever they want?
And while I'm at it, hopefully improved compatibility due to the Samba team finally getting the proper documentation from Microsoft.
I work for a manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry and I hear people say things like Linux and/or Open Source is a problem with the FDA, but I haven't seen anything yet to back that up. Period.
To "validate" software with the FDA, you really only need to do three things:
1) Make your software/system/device secure
2) Have control over the system
3) Document #1 and #2
There are people who come from an old guard that have all sorts of misconceptions about what can and can't pass FDA regulations. It seems to stem from a gross misunderstanding of what the regulations actually say.
I've read the portions that deal with computers and electronic information. There is absolutely nothing in it to suggest open source even remotely is an issue. I suspect this is an urban legend started by companies selling proprietary software.
Regardless, the regulations (Part 11) are the FDA Bible and so long as you can satisfy the requirements in them which basically boil down to the three I listed above, then you are in compliance.
To convince yourself this is true, read this.
The end-user experience is absolutely the main point. There's no question about it. But don't forget that there's a lot more to experience than the shiny cover on the outside.
If the underlying OS is running sluggish because it is busy doing things that have _nothing_ to do with the task at hand (hello Vista!), then the user experience is going to be diminished.
Outlook 2003 doesn't work. It used to. Access has never worked AFAIK. There have been quite a few regressions in the version shipped with 7.10 that affect Office 2003, so I wouldn't tout it as a solution for that.
First, you can legally use all eleven channels of 802.11b in the US. It just so happens that if you want to have perfect channel separation, channels 1, 6 and 11 are the way to go. I've sat in on a discussion about using 1, 4, 8 and 11 or some such combination and achieving acceptable separation provide the APs aren't on top of each other.
Regardless, using the three channels and 120 degree directional antennas to cover the full 360 is the most effective way. That isn't cheap. Even if you roll your own using a WRAP board or some such thing, last I checked you can't get a weather proof AP with all three channels and antennas for less than $1,000. That doesn't count labor.
The point is that regardless of the efficiency of the usage of nuclear fuel, it's still very finite and relying on it or any other source of fuel as our source of power sets us on a crash course with inevitability. This doesn't mean we shouldn't look to nuclear to get past fossil fuels in the short term.
But we absolutely must look at it as a short term step and learn how to improve technology to make the most out of the closest thing to an infinite source of energy that we have (the sun) and make our energy usage as efficient as possible. This includes conservation and population control.
This should at least by us a couple of billion years or so to find a way to look for and migrate to other habitable planets to call home whose sun is younger than ours. The more planets we can find to populate the merrier.
I thought about this long ago and had a discussion about it with some other geek friends. The major problems, we concluded, were weight and safety.
I think the batteries in the Tesla are weighing in measuring in the hundreds of pounds. Swapping that in and out would be quite a task.
We decided the only way this would be viable would be to have an automatic and mechanical changer. This would also address the safety issue.
The only way this would happen is if standards on battery size and changing locations on vehicles were standardized. Having such a system would severely limit vehicle design.
Our final conclusion was that with battery technology at its current state, this solution wouldn't happen.
First - most cars get about 400 miles to the tank.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I drove without stopping until my tank went from full to empty. And I remember very clearly not being happy about it. Stopping would have done me good.
It seems to me that 300 miles or greater per charge would meet the needs of almost everyone.
Restaurants & hotels/motels/camp-grounds could install charge facilities
This is exactly the point. I believe there are such charging stations in many places in California right now.
If you can provide 5 to 6 hours of drive time (300 to 350 miles per charge at average 60 to 65 mph), I think that would suffice for most people.
If someone could squeeze 400 miles into a charge, then I have no doubts electrics would be completely viable. I still believe 300 would be ok for most.
An all electric car is quite a paradigm shift that is very difficult for existing auto makers to pursue.
While similar in form and function, electric cars are monumentally different from gasoline and/or diesel powered vehicles. It's much easier for a company such as Tesla to start their production model making cars numbering in the hundreds and ramp up their scale than it is for a huge manufacturer to go from the large scale and start small.
However, it's still a matter of who meets the magic numbers. I submit that the first company to develop an all electric car that will travel 300 miles on one charge, can recharge in less than 30 minutes plugged in, will recharge slowly in the sun on its own and costs less than $40,000 will sell like hot cakes.
Whether that's an old and established manufacturer or a new one like Tesla remains to be seen.
I'm using FOSS wherever I can. A preliminary use of Linux on the desktop is showing great promise. If the WINE folks can work out their regressions and make some further progress, I foresee Linux replacing many desktops.
The one thing I didn't see after (attempting) browsing through those modules is a desktop explorer integration piece.
Plone has this with some software from Enfold Systems. The general idea is to have an ultra quick and easy way for content managers to browse to files, open them, save their work back to the CMS and retain version history along the way.
The Enfold solution is almost there. It does everything except retain version history with the saving of files.
Plone with the Enfold Systems add-in is everything we want assuming versioning is added in soon--a CMS with straightforward intranet/extranet capabilities.
The benefit is a quick and easy way to publish documents internally and externally to customers.
If Drupal has that, I'd love to be able to evaluate it. If it doesn't have the desktop (yes, Windows) integration piece to easily open and save files, I'm not interested as this is an essential piece.
I work for a contract pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. I can tell you definitively that regulations have three major effects on pharmaceutical companies as opposed to those that don't have to follow them (i.e. herbal remedy companies):
1) Increased cost of development
2) Slower time to market
3) Increased cost of production
None of those prevent discoveries. They do raise the financial entry barriers for startups, however.
In all the years I've been helping people with their home computers, I've only encountered one person that actually "just checked email". The rest _say_ they only check email. Then watch their computer boot. Some random instant messaging client pops up and I get, "oh yeah, I use that to message my friends/book club/church group/whatever". They have a solitaire shortcut on their desktop that they use when they're bored. They have some program they use to edit photos of their grandchildren they receive in the email.
By the time all is said and done, they do a heck of a lot more than just email and more than what probably makes sense for some trimmed down applications.
If Google tracking every text message I send in order to text me occasional ads or whatever leads to a cheaper monthly plan, I'm all for it. Next to the big ticket items such as our mortgage, the monthly cell bill is the single biggest expenditure in our budget for two people.
If it can be steered, there is no mystery as to where it's going to land. That makes evacuations much easier. Especially if you are steering it to a sparsely populated area.
Besides, I'll be that the areas where they are running out of water would LOVE for a hurricane to be able to be guided to their neck of the woods right about now.