I've seen everything done from rack location to names of famous mass murderers. I've also come across trees, gems and minerals, elements, manufacturers, saints, serial numbers, dates, movie titles, etc.
Michael's 3 Rules of Device Taxonomy:
What information do you NOT wanting leaking out (write on the chalkboard 100 times "I will never name Payroll's server "Payroll" ever again!") In this case what information could make a Cracker's break-in easier?
What information in a name is going to be most important to the folks working with the servers? Owner, application, model, OS, location?
Finally, what information is likely to remain consistant for the life of the server?
I agree, but I own't [sic] buy one until the arm has a proven track record.
Its [sic] a great design, but it could easily be fowled [sic] up by poor manufacturing.
Certainly some mechanical engineer would have noticed any basic flaw and publicly pointed it out by now. So far none of the reviewers have noted any problems (they've had them longest) nor have the ones in stores begun to show any problems for all of their rough and heavy wear. If the arms were to begin to droop that would be an obvious design defect and Apple has an excellent record of remediation for those.
Personally I'm waiting for the first revision on general principal (as noted in another thread pivoting would be great) but so far there seems no cause for concern.
Infinitely flexible" is probably going a bit too far, don't you think?
OK, infinitely flexible within the bounds of reason for a consumer LCD.
It needs to PIVOT
AGREED. Its a pity that this wasn't included though I imagine with all of the other nifty engineering that went on this was just one step too far. The additionial range of motion would have likely complicated the cabling as well as required lots of fine-tuning (to prevent folks from regularly spinning their displays when they only wanted to shify them x/y.)
Vertical-orientation monitors are a boon for anyone who reads and writes long stretches of material. Between the ever-increasing number of toolbars and the dead-space most web-pages leave (reasonably and rightly) vertical orientation is much more efficient. Indeed at one time Apple shipped a line of vertical orientation b/w displays; I used to manage in a university computer lab.
Back around 1987-1989 Radius made a pivoting monochrome CRT for the Macintosh
Yep, got one in storage. Can't recall if it needs a custom card or if was custom drivers. In either case they were top-end products that while popular in their time ended up without a market; Portrait Displays got their heritage.
On the PC side I believe Cornerstone Monitors also once shipped pivoting displays though they're only doing oversize monitors now. Indeed I'm not sure if theirs ever shipped as a co-worker was testing a beta of theirs.
But yeah; it would have been great if Apple had reintroduced to the public this feature. Perhaps it will appear in the next rev of the hardware along with a higher resolution display. Nonetheless I'm deeply impressed with the current "floating" display and feel it has really shown what Apple does best: Good engineering melded to great design.
Imagine a MacOS X desktop as the display pivots, elements drifting to appropriate relative locations, no 45 degree sudden jump but an orderly progression. Very Jobs, possible under Aqua.
I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio. I need this (or some other language) to do my job (which isn't programming),
If a company isn't willing to supply the tools you need to do your job then whatever you're trying to do isn't your job.
Full stop.
Clearly your issue isn't what tool set you use but exactly what you are being paid to do. If your employer doesn't see value in making you more effective, productive, or whatever else your programming does for you then drop it. Either just do what they want, how they want, or move on.
Trying to find work-arounds is pointless if it means you epend more time and energy on this and produce something that whomever someday replaces you won't be able to maintain or have a clue how to use. In short: Get "buy-in" or get out of coding, at least in this job.
With that said it's quite remarkable what many office applications are capable of. I've seen quite sophisticated work done in word processors, spreadsheets and databases. You may already have all of the tools you need available for simply the time of reading the documentation. Scripting can work for good as well as ill in office applications.
But really; if you can't make a business case for a tool then drop it or get out.
The coolest thing about the new iMac isn't that it's an LCD, its how it's mounted. Not on a big box but a smallish base, at eye height, with an infinitely flexible yet stable arm, surrounded by a nice frame.
Let Jonathan Ive (its designer) go on about how "we wanted the user to violate the sacred plane of the monitor": Better put is it works. Around that high quality (though only 1024x768) perfectly poised LCD display is a frame that lets you casually reach out, grab it, adjust it, swing it about to share with someone else, nudge when you change position.
Just plain flat out unconsciously interact with the Display without needing to fight it or worry about smudging or getting any thing wrong.
That's AWESOME. You don't know how incredible until you've use it; afterwards everything else just sux. A display that fits folks, not the other way around, something Apple gets and the rest of the industry hasn't (nor likely will Gateway if their past is any guide.)
Sure it may look like a "Sunflower", or more like a desk lamp or a face mirror. On the other hand those two are great examples of good design - they're popular because they work and just like they the new iMac screen is adept at putting light right where you want it, in your eyes, from whatever angle you're comfortable with. And if that kinda brilliant design isn't nerdly or butch enough for ya then go back to chipping with rocks 'cause once again Apple has raised the bar for PC design and once folks get a taste they're not going to accept the 2nd rate layouts, hear that Gateway?
20th Anniversary Mac, 5 years later
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually this looks a lot more like Apple's 20th Anniversary Mac; essentially a laptop opened up with lots of built-in goodies.
Integrated custom Bose sound system with woofer/power suppply, integrated TV & FM radio system, S-Video input, and of course the little leather pads on the keyboard. Oh, and the high tech metal bracket holding it up that reportedly cost over a hundred bucks each to manufacture. Originially sold for around $10,000 then as low as $2,000. Of course for 10k it arrived a limo and was set up for you by a tech in a tux (kid you not!) A review from when it first came out is on MacWorld
Bet Gateway doesn't offer a tech in a cow suit to set theirs up...
Never argued that we don't get as many of the gizmos.. argued that what we get we seem to take up pretty quick.
Some of your countryfolks disagree about the former, and your government about the latter.
Of course the company's making the newest gizmos don't sell here first.. we're a smaller market. Big pickings are in the states, plus there's less to deal with there in terms of transport, duties, etc.
Transports, duties, I think those are pretty much a blip for large importers. Rather I think size of the market and wealth of the market as well as visibility of the market are more important The product hasn't shipped in NA until it has shipped in the US where 99% of the reviewers are as well as the vast majority of the customers. That US'ers have more disposable income is also likely an influence (not an opinion but a standard economic fact.)
Oh.. and you were looking for household services we had first beyond the debit card? I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think that the house-hold voice-mail/multi-line/caller-id packages were in wide usage here before down in the states.
Thank you. That was the example I used when I asked for you something other then debit cards. So you're stuck on a third eh?
As for products, oddly, the water-bed.
Oh, well there's a massive market, thriving, highly relevant. That was a fad of them in the 70's and early 80's and then...? Are they still a big product in Canada? I really do doubt it.
But you are right about the one thing, for the absolute newest in geek-toys, you're better off shopping in the states..
..but real geeks shop on-line anyway.:)
Actually when we shop online we have the products shipped to my parent's house in the US and pick them up there on trips (I'm down there at least every month on average.) By the time one jumps through the hoops of retailors who aren't set up to ship internatonially or charge absurd amounts for doing so it often isn't a winning proposition to get stuff sent here. For those that do have Canadian branches the prices aren't all that great generally.
For example we needed a new webcam recently. The few remaining companies on the market with active development, XP drivers, and high quality image are IBM through a remarketed product & Intel. By the time we figured shipping & tariffs from websites (other then www.ibm.ca's own ridiculous listing) the Maison du IBM in a mall downtown offered the same price. The Intel was the same case, it was available in the local screwdriver shoppes for about what it would have cost to buy & get it shipped from online.
Love Canada, love LOTS of things about it, live here by choice. But there are trade-offs and consumer technology is one of them.
I usually figure for products a 6 month lag, for services it can be several years or more. Sometimes it's language, labelling & support issues, other times there's constrained production so why bother selling in Canada before the easy-pickings in the US are supplied, and finally there's just the issue that lots of businesses are US-centric and the Canadian market isn't big enough, wealthy enough, or familier enough to make any effort on.
BTW I've worked for several software firms over the years where we explicitly DIDN'T sell to Canada. For many countries we had licensees through folks who do nothing but support US software in their domestic markets but Canada - we just blew off. It wasn't any slam on Canada (and certianly not my call) but the folks in charge didn't want to do translations or find bilingual support staff, didn't feel the market was worth the bother it entailed for them. In one case they'd regularly get calls from Canada and would service them but if it came in French "we don't sell in Canada." (True as far as it went, they didn't advertise in explicitly Canadian venues and supposedly refused direct sales to Canada.)
Be, the failed maker of a computer operating system once considered a rival to Microsoft's Windows
In what parrallel universe? Sure it went for the gold ring but c'mon, who ever really considered them a serious contender? Name me one large business that "went Be"?
Nice technology, clever stuff, but c'mon, that's like saying.. oh, wait, this is/., never mind.
On can wonder how long it will be until Steve will announce that the next Pixar movie won't be released by Disney.
Um - he as much as already has. Jobs has publically disputed the obligations Disney claims Pixar has to them, pretty much made it clear they're not interested in a further relationship.
Well, Jobs statements and the skewering Pixar gave Disney in Shrek. You don't think Lord Farquaad, er, Eisner was amused do you? Perfect little boring kindom, nasty leader, gates at the entrances, work it out!
There's a decent write-up about Moxie (far better then what's on Moxie's website) on TechTV.
Essentially it's a TiVo with expanded capabilities. The CEO is from WebTV and has a good track record, on the other hand they've a late start into the market and are up against some powerfull licensees of TiVo & RePlay's technologies.
Its expected on the market for next winter's buying season if it finds partners.
My wife and I, former New Jersey residents, moved to a Midwestern city in January.
Not to cut off your ode to the nature-life but it's irrelevant to the original posting.
Yes connection prices are coming down though not as fast as some folks are hoping, but this is about today, a telecommuter in a city or suburb doing standard remote-office work. Not running servers overlooking the glen or broadcasting telepresentations but apparently the stuff that 90% of folks (and geeks) do working at home.
Yes leaving The City freaks out its denizens. Heck I consult in one country and live in another six hours driving time away. I've had any number of folks who can't wrap their brains about it until I extol the quality of the patisserie down the block that calls me when my favorites come out of the oven and I describe going to the boucherie and charcuterie and fruiterie and the bistro we're going to dinner to tonight and the café I'm having my long lunch at... Then it all makes sense (somewhat) and I offer to tell them the best places to go when they visit.
But folks also understand that things do OCCASIONIALLY happen to others off site (and on) and so yeah, paying $2500/year for the kind of connectivity you're talking is overkill, IMHO. We just hope that our once or twice a year downtime doesn't occur when anyone notices and when things do die we rush to the backups. However in this person's case there wasn't ever a primary - he would have done just as well NOT waiting around for the phone company to fix things (3 days, over & over) but instead just decamped somewhere else until he got installed.
A failure didn't happen in the middle of something important and very rarely does for folks with functioning service. Indeed for myself and friends in the same position we seem to average out about one "Oh Shit!" time a year which is about the same or less for those back in the office pens. Indeed the vast majority of the time when a meeting goes south it's because someone's phone screws up or a PC hiccups, not because our urban & suburban high speed connections have any issues.
Besides most of us just need to get into the company servers, read our email, get and put files, hit the CVS or database or whatever, print out jobs remotely, send and receive faxes, etc. While highspeed is clearly far preferable dropping down to something else for an hour or even a day isn't a terrible thing, at worst call it a sick day, but just one day. And make sure it's NOT rolling over to the next day and yes, we do have Kinko's & such, especially those in Midwestern cities.
Again, your needs may vary but for most folks that f/T1 looks like big overkill. Glad you want to pay it and happy that it works for you but my $30/month cable, router with auto-kick-in dial-up and cellphone-with-a-cable-to-the-PC have stood me well the past five years. I've never had to apologize (ok, once, but I think tripping over the chair while pacing and knocking over the PC I was using is hardly a technical issue) and still gotten my quality-of-life, kept competitive.
They should have used microdots or long lived microfilm, or really anything other then electronic media.
Microfilm? Walk up to any reference librarian and say "Microfilm" and watch them shudder. Unstable stuff that get's chewed up by it's readers, akward as hell to manage (all the spools look alike and the lables are traditionially 'bout useless) and generally of terrible photographic quality. The only bennie is that it is smaller then the paper documents replaced but even for old high-acid cheap newspaper it's proving to have a shorter lifespan.
Any other media? Punch cards? What's the encoding? Paper tape same thing. Clay tablets? Storage and retrieval are hell. Printed? Storage and security are difficult and expensive, just ask the folks at the old library in Alaxandria.
There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived. Text on gold foil is pretty good, there are lots of other more exotic but similar-in-concept technologies. Of course one pertinant question is if anyone *cares*. If it was just realized that the modern Domesday Book was unreadable clearly it wasn't a standard reference. Yes it might be a loss to future historians but I doubt there's much in it that isn't replacable from any of the numerous more popular references.
Last time it was Unix-based, developed X Windows for an interface, and was offered out for license by other institutions.
This time it's some interpretation of the idea "Open" (MIT-style which is usually pretty good) and now with infrastructure widely available they're concentrating just on syllabi & courseware.
Nice how they've delineated what MIT-as-an-educational-experience-offers and how that's different from using their materials; that giving the latter away doesn't devalue the former.
Having an external firewire connection to me makes MUCH more sense in that they can use to for additional storage for drives.
Yes, but I think Tivo would rather limit what you can do, so you have to buy another Tivo when you want more space. Of course, they haven't managed to prevent swapping hard drives.
Yet.
It would be a trivial operation to have the OS report back storage space and check if that is in line with the model (derived from the serial number.) While TiVo has let lots of hacking go on they've never (to my knowledge) in any way communicated this was something they supported or wouldn't shut down the day they felt the cost/benefit ratio was in their favor.
I'm not saying they're likely to but don't fool yourself; tomorrow they could cut those folks off, release a patch that limits machines to their proper size, does checks on the OS to make sure it isn't hacked, etc. Sure it would piss off many of TiVo's most ardent supporters but remember TiVo is going for the consumer electronics model of business, not the computer end of it.
I'm likely to buy an "upgraded" TiVo myself at some point but I'll do so knowing full well that it's at my own risk and there are no guarantees (like the 3rd party folks won't fold up 30 minutes after the shit hits the fan?)
I do have redundant access (business class DSL and dialup), but both are dependant upon the telephone lines (residential class for now).
Use your cell phone. Or if it doesn't support a data connection get one that does and cough up the outrageous sum for the silly little custom cable to plug in your PC. While it's not the fastest connection in the world (next year, next year) it's enough to handle web surfing, remote log-in, email with attachments (particularly if you don't pull all your email down directly but selectively browse it.)
Also as I noted there's also simply decamping to someplace that does have service and setting up shop there. Kinko's already has keyboards, mice and monitors just lug your PC case in with you. Consider that $10/hour a solid investment in your career; you're undoubtedly still making a good wage on top of that temporary hourly expense. Or talk to a local hotel about a day rate, 9-5. Most are perfectly happy to let you use a room with a desk & a dataport over the afternoon for a much reduced rate. This is especially true if you make it clear the room won't be requiring bed service or anything to make it ready for a reserved customer at 5:05pm.
Sorry that you had to learn the hard way but like I said, you're now a branch office of your employer and need to start looking at everything with that attitude. Printer - no $59 rickety deal but a real one with a serious duty cycle, or at least two of the disposable ones for when the first blows smoke and you're on a deadline. Same for every other piece of hardware - they WILL melt down after every Radio Shack has closed for the night and you gotta get something out ASAP.
You're now Administrative Services, IS Field Support, Security Dept. and of course Facilities Management. All of those things you took for granted in the glass box are now your responsibility: Phones, phone-operator, fax, photocopier, filing, supplies, backups, library, librarian, mail, overnight mail, office accounting, and of course morale. You're working without a net, supply room, or those ubiquitous folks who kept everything running; that's now you.
Its a biiig transition and one lots of folks simply don't make properly. They look at what works for them on a few days home from the office and say "Hey, I could do this all of the time" and dive in. As you're learning (& folks who read this) its a whole lot more then that. I've seen any number of good folks go down in flames after they botched the transition to working at home.
Consider taking what you've learned doing it and what you've picked up here and bring it back to your employer; turn this negative experience it into a plus and use it to your advantage. See if corporate is willing to set up a "support group" for those who are working remotely. A message board where folks can share tips on what has worked for them, lessons learned, etc. is invaluable and is a great resource for management to get a feel for what needs to be improved, what positions and personalities succeed at this and which don't.
BTW best investments? Get a quality cell phone that supports a headset, also a home phone that does too (I'm fond of the Siemens 4200 series) and then pick out headsets that really work for you, sound good, invest in them. Also strangely enough a webcam - not necessarily for real-time interaction but to pop a face-shot into your emails occasionally, say with a picture what would take a 1MB words, remind folks what you look like and that you're a real person out there. If you're on Wintel learn how to use Application Sharing (built into Netmeeting & XP) or on any platform shared whiteboarding, it will be invaluable at some point.
Finally, make a few buddies who are also working from home and plug into that network around you. No office mates is isolating and the feedback and camaraderie of some lunch & coffee pals becomes invaluable. If nothing else it gives you a reason to dress up and leave the house in the daytime occasionally to do more then shop or run to the Post Office. Oh, and sit on a phone meeting in the nude once in awhile just to amuse yourself (but that's it!)
Before posting "What does TiVo service offer?" just howzabout going to their website and looking it up for yourself? They do a lot better job then having a bunch of/.'ers put it in their own words. www.tivo.com
Next before saying "I can do that!" no, you really can't. Not in a nice box with a good remote and trick-play and quality recording with some exemplarily expert system software all hassle-free. Yes you can cobble together some Frankenstein of a solution that will get you 70%, mebbe 80% of the way there but it's those final few steps that make the whole thing a pleasure to use and not some annoyingly geeky custom half-solution.
Will we see these stand-alone devices superceded by PC-based ones? Mebbe, mebbe not. First off folks like to watch TV on their TVs, not on their computers (yes some of you don't, I'm talking the majority.) They want to sit on their couch with a remote in hand without cables strung across the house from the PC and be able to click the shows they want with minimum hassle. That doesn't describe most of the PC-based systems that we're hearing about.
Next there's the question is it preferable to make your great-as-a-PC PC do double-duty as a PVR? Sure the network connection is already there but in most cases the rest of the wiring (TV-in, TV-out, Audio out, IR-in, etc.) is a major PITA. Then there's just the hassle of having a heavy-load application running on your un-optimized hardware. Do-able? Mostly. Worth it? Likely not IMHO.
Lastly comes the question of the listings. This is where TiVo and the like really differ from a VCR - they're SMART. That smartness is based on having those current detailed listings customized to your local system & tier and no, that information isn't easy to come by. Yes it might be possible to try and snarf the listings out of TV Guide or someone but that's brittle and if enough folks did it they'd soon find ways to break it. Given that along with these listings come software updates and tech support and such it's likely that they're not all that bad a deal.
So - is TiVo gonna make it? Probably. They just got another round of financing, have lots of investment from the right folks, seem to be doing well in spite of the uphill battle of teaching folks just what their product is. The price hike isn't a great thing but with the lifetime-offer price still being offered for a short time that takes the sting out and once folks go TiVo they really don't want to go back, will pony up. Next fall we'll likely see more companies coming out with more licensed models and possibly another design but for now its TiVo & Replay.
The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to/. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?
For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.
Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.
It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that.99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for) but lets step back, take a deep breath, and ask if that is really a solution most folks are gonna gave a damn about? Would the average, or even many exceptional long-distance telecommuters require that speed and guarenteed uptime? Aren't there a lot of much more cost effective solution for most folks needs?
I dunno know about your needs but between dial-up, DSL or Broadband, and a backup cellphone connection I think most everyone could rough it out and keep productive while their primary service is out, all a lot cheaper then your solution.
OK - usually I just blow off AC's as duck-n-cover whiners but Sex & the City is over and I'm putting off folding laundy sooo...
Were you dropped as a child? Repeatedly? Oxygen deprivation? Poor nutrition? What? GIVE so we can prevent other dumbasses like you!
I've got a mac.com email address 'cause it's a decent, free, stable one that offers IMAP & SMTP. If you think folks that have them are Apple employees you REALLY neeed to get up to speed.
Second I'm WELL familier with IPP, also with PostScript, apparently you're not. PostScript is a pretty robust language (yes it's Turing Complete) and it's entirely possible to run applications written in it on a printer. Yes, you heard me; not just graphics but actual compute-and-do-something applications.
In this case I'm wondering if someone has done an IPP protocol stack in PS. Is it doable? Entirely. Most PS hosts (ie network printers) already have a TCP/IP stack, PS has no trouble tying into it and this it's clearly something that would be very popular.
Now, this may well ALL be news to you but folks raised properly generally have a bit more manners when publically flaunting their cluelessnes.
You may crawl back down that dank, apparently very deep and very dark AC hole you came from and not come back until you're willing to put a name to your own worthless words AND have picked up a bit of the information you so urgently push (and disparage) on others.
Buy appropriate grades of products and services. What part of "Residential Service" didn't you understand? How about how it differs from "Business Service"? If you want the better service you have to pay for it; going the cheapie route then complaining that you got what you paid for seems particularly inane. This is true for phone services, office products, whatever.
Always avoid a single point of failure. In this case apparently your phone line. Get cell phone service, get DSL or Broadband, invest in a VOIP service (heck the chat clients are building them in as fast as possible.) If you depend on a fax machine get two or set up your PC as a backup.
Have a backup plan. If you can't work from home then head off to a place that rents PCs by the hour (Kinko's are everywhere.) Or invest in a laptop and check into a local hotel with 'net connections for the day. Or get time at one of the shared business offices that have sprung up in many places (basically they supply the shared infrastructure and you pay rent.) Or head down to the local public library or friend's house. Don't wait for the problem to happen but be proactive and make contingency plans.
Look, if you're going to work from home, particularly primarily from home, then you've got to stop treating your home office as an extension of your home life and instead view it as a branch office of your employer. Telling your boss that you couldn't get work done because the printer broke down or the phone was out or you kid's latest computer game ate your PC just won't cut it.
You're competing against folks working in the big office and need to meet those same levels of performance and reliability. You're already two strikes behind by not being around in person, able to chat around the cooler, open to having an on-the-spot impromptu meeting convened in the hallway. Don't make it any worse by forcing folks to jump through yet more hoops to get in touch with you, calling in with (possibly perfectly true but still unacceptable) "The dog ate it" reasons why you were unable to perform your job.
Sit down and list out what you need in order to work effectively. Now go through each item and determine what you'll do if that items fails, what alternatives you can put in place now. Whatever you do the least disruptive to how everyone else works with you is the best.
This may mean investing in a laptop. It definitely means putting a good backup (and restore!) strategy in place. It also probably calls for having some second-string hardware in case the primary fails; things like printers, fax machines, network hubs & routers, etc. Obviously phone and network connections are important so you need to arrange for alternates and make sure your co-workers know them, the company address book lists primary and backup, etc.
If you don't start treating your working at home as WORK and not just as a long day off from the office, doing what can be done from home trust me, you won't succeed. Today it was the phone, tomorrow your ISP, the next day something will fry on you. As far as you employer is concerned, as nice as they may be about it, each is an unexpected day when you disrupted plans by being unavailable and/or unproductive.
IPP is the way of the future. It provides a mechanism to connect any and every printer in the world together with any delivery mechanism.
Well, if Grandma gives you an account and password for her printer.
Like any other 'net resource the spammers & maladjusted will attempt to abuse IPP. Unsolicited Commercial Email, Mail Bombs, and Junk Faxes are problems today; Drive-By-Printings could be tomorrow.
Instead of coming home to 30 flyers advertising take-out places your printer would pump them out continuously along with guaranteed penis enhancements, herbal highs, the latest in puppy porn, and of course a thousand pages of solid black from the dork you belittled on/. last week. Or you'll end up having to write elaborate filters for your incoming queue (procqueue anyone?) previewing everything before allowing it to go through, blocking off known printer-jacking domains.
No, IPP is great inside a facility and between sites that cross-print a lot but I expect email will remain the standard way of distributing a document. Email is widely deployed, directories are already in place, it can be encrypted & authenticated, uses a store-and-forward architecture, doesn't require the output device be known or any drivers required. The recipient need only have an application capable of printing the document and there are any number of good formats running from the "business-standard" MS Word to Adobe Acrobat to HTML/XML pages on down to good old flat text - ASCII or Unicode.
Indeed while many print shops take jobs online none I'm aware of accept random ones without pre-arranged accounts. Then most of the time they specify the formats one can HTTP-upload to them or send via a custom print driver in their format (presumably some PostScript or HPGL variant with headers for job identification, output settings, and accounting.)
So while CUPS and IPP are great things and are definitely making the world more interoperable (Unix & varients, Win2k+, MacOS X, lots of newer printers & print servers) they're not going to revolutionize it any more then standard print queues, Windows Shares, MacOS Printer Sharing, Novell Distributed Print Services, iPrint, etc.
ps Anyone know of an IPP implementation in PostScript? Might be a great way to "upgrade" all of these older devices with a single loaded print job.
The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, the Greater Quebec School Board, the Lakeshore School Board and the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards
Appellants
v.
The Attorney General of Quebec
Respondent
and
The Attorney General for Ontario and the Attorney General of Newfoundland
Interveners
Goes into great detail over which religious officials get to choose what, all with public funds, also don't neglect the Ontario and Newfoundland bits...
Slashdot Mirror
Michael's 3 Rules of Device Taxonomy:
Personally I'm waiting for the first revision on general principal (as noted in another thread pivoting would be great) but so far there seems no cause for concern.
Vertical-orientation monitors are a boon for anyone who reads and writes long stretches of material. Between the ever-increasing number of toolbars and the dead-space most web-pages leave (reasonably and rightly) vertical orientation is much more efficient. Indeed at one time Apple shipped a line of vertical orientation b/w displays; I used to manage in a university computer lab.
Yep, got one in storage. Can't recall if it needs a custom card or if was custom drivers. In either case they were top-end products that while popular in their time ended up without a market; Portrait Displays got their heritage.On the PC side I believe Cornerstone Monitors also once shipped pivoting displays though they're only doing oversize monitors now. Indeed I'm not sure if theirs ever shipped as a co-worker was testing a beta of theirs.
But yeah; it would have been great if Apple had reintroduced to the public this feature. Perhaps it will appear in the next rev of the hardware along with a higher resolution display. Nonetheless I'm deeply impressed with the current "floating" display and feel it has really shown what Apple does best: Good engineering melded to great design.
Imagine a MacOS X desktop as the display pivots, elements drifting to appropriate relative locations, no 45 degree sudden jump but an orderly progression. Very Jobs, possible under Aqua.
Full stop.
Clearly your issue isn't what tool set you use but exactly what you are being paid to do. If your employer doesn't see value in making you more effective, productive, or whatever else your programming does for you then drop it. Either just do what they want, how they want, or move on.
Trying to find work-arounds is pointless if it means you epend more time and energy on this and produce something that whomever someday replaces you won't be able to maintain or have a clue how to use. In short: Get "buy-in" or get out of coding, at least in this job.
With that said it's quite remarkable what many office applications are capable of. I've seen quite sophisticated work done in word processors, spreadsheets and databases. You may already have all of the tools you need available for simply the time of reading the documentation. Scripting can work for good as well as ill in office applications.
But really; if you can't make a business case for a tool then drop it or get out.
Let Jonathan Ive (its designer) go on about how "we wanted the user to violate the sacred plane of the monitor": Better put is it works. Around that high quality (though only 1024x768) perfectly poised LCD display is a frame that lets you casually reach out, grab it, adjust it, swing it about to share with someone else, nudge when you change position.
Just plain flat out unconsciously interact with the Display without needing to fight it or worry about smudging or getting any thing wrong.
That's AWESOME. You don't know how incredible until you've use it; afterwards everything else just sux. A display that fits folks, not the other way around, something Apple gets and the rest of the industry hasn't (nor likely will Gateway if their past is any guide.)
Sure it may look like a "Sunflower", or more like a desk lamp or a face mirror. On the other hand those two are great examples of good design - they're popular because they work and just like they the new iMac screen is adept at putting light right where you want it, in your eyes, from whatever angle you're comfortable with. And if that kinda brilliant design isn't nerdly or butch enough for ya then go back to chipping with rocks 'cause once again Apple has raised the bar for PC design and once folks get a taste they're not going to accept the 2nd rate layouts, hear that Gateway?
Integrated custom Bose sound system with woofer/power suppply, integrated TV & FM radio system, S-Video input, and of course the little leather pads on the keyboard. Oh, and the high tech metal bracket holding it up that reportedly cost over a hundred bucks each to manufacture. Originially sold for around $10,000 then as low as $2,000. Of course for 10k it arrived a limo and was set up for you by a tech in a tux (kid you not!) A review from when it first came out is on MacWorld
Bet Gateway doesn't offer a tech in a cow suit to set theirs up...
For example we needed a new webcam recently. The few remaining companies on the market with active development, XP drivers, and high quality image are IBM through a remarketed product & Intel. By the time we figured shipping & tariffs from websites (other then www.ibm.ca's own ridiculous listing) the Maison du IBM in a mall downtown offered the same price. The Intel was the same case, it was available in the local screwdriver shoppes for about what it would have cost to buy & get it shipped from online.
Love Canada, love LOTS of things about it, live here by choice. But there are trade-offs and consumer technology is one of them.
I usually figure for products a 6 month lag, for services it can be several years or more. Sometimes it's language, labelling & support issues, other times there's constrained production so why bother selling in Canada before the easy-pickings in the US are supplied, and finally there's just the issue that lots of businesses are US-centric and the Canadian market isn't big enough, wealthy enough, or familier enough to make any effort on.
BTW I've worked for several software firms over the years where we explicitly DIDN'T sell to Canada. For many countries we had licensees through folks who do nothing but support US software in their domestic markets but Canada - we just blew off. It wasn't any slam on Canada (and certianly not my call) but the folks in charge didn't want to do translations or find bilingual support staff, didn't feel the market was worth the bother it entailed for them. In one case they'd regularly get calls from Canada and would service them but if it came in French "we don't sell in Canada." (True as far as it went, they didn't advertise in explicitly Canadian venues and supposedly refused direct sales to Canada.)
Nice technology, clever stuff, but c'mon, that's like saying.. oh, wait, this is /., never mind.
Clever writers.
Well, Jobs statements and the skewering Pixar gave Disney in Shrek. You don't think Lord Farquaad, er, Eisner was amused do you? Perfect little boring kindom, nasty leader, gates at the entrances, work it out!
$129 USD
Free evaluation version available
From the folks that make PaintShop Pro
The mailing list is active, there are any number of distributions though few on the latest kernels, all appears kosher if not frantically active.
Was there any reason for this possibly very damaging statement?
Essentially it's a TiVo with expanded capabilities. The CEO is from WebTV and has a good track record, on the other hand they've a late start into the market and are up against some powerfull licensees of TiVo & RePlay's technologies.
Its expected on the market for next winter's buying season if it finds partners.
Yes connection prices are coming down though not as fast as some folks are hoping, but this is about today, a telecommuter in a city or suburb doing standard remote-office work. Not running servers overlooking the glen or broadcasting telepresentations but apparently the stuff that 90% of folks (and geeks) do working at home.
Yes leaving The City freaks out its denizens. Heck I consult in one country and live in another six hours driving time away. I've had any number of folks who can't wrap their brains about it until I extol the quality of the patisserie down the block that calls me when my favorites come out of the oven and I describe going to the boucherie and charcuterie and fruiterie and the bistro we're going to dinner to tonight and the café I'm having my long lunch at... Then it all makes sense (somewhat) and I offer to tell them the best places to go when they visit.
But folks also understand that things do OCCASIONIALLY happen to others off site (and on) and so yeah, paying $2500/year for the kind of connectivity you're talking is overkill, IMHO. We just hope that our once or twice a year downtime doesn't occur when anyone notices and when things do die we rush to the backups. However in this person's case there wasn't ever a primary - he would have done just as well NOT waiting around for the phone company to fix things (3 days, over & over) but instead just decamped somewhere else until he got installed.
A failure didn't happen in the middle of something important and very rarely does for folks with functioning service. Indeed for myself and friends in the same position we seem to average out about one "Oh Shit!" time a year which is about the same or less for those back in the office pens. Indeed the vast majority of the time when a meeting goes south it's because someone's phone screws up or a PC hiccups, not because our urban & suburban high speed connections have any issues.
Besides most of us just need to get into the company servers, read our email, get and put files, hit the CVS or database or whatever, print out jobs remotely, send and receive faxes, etc. While highspeed is clearly far preferable dropping down to something else for an hour or even a day isn't a terrible thing, at worst call it a sick day, but just one day. And make sure it's NOT rolling over to the next day and yes, we do have Kinko's & such, especially those in Midwestern cities.
Again, your needs may vary but for most folks that f/T1 looks like big overkill. Glad you want to pay it and happy that it works for you but my $30/month cable, router with auto-kick-in dial-up and cellphone-with-a-cable-to-the-PC have stood me well the past five years. I've never had to apologize (ok, once, but I think tripping over the chair while pacing and knocking over the PC I was using is hardly a technical issue) and still gotten my quality-of-life, kept competitive.
YMMV.
Any other media? Punch cards? What's the encoding? Paper tape same thing. Clay tablets? Storage and retrieval are hell. Printed? Storage and security are difficult and expensive, just ask the folks at the old library in Alaxandria.
There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived. Text on gold foil is pretty good, there are lots of other more exotic but similar-in-concept technologies. Of course one pertinant question is if anyone *cares*. If it was just realized that the modern Domesday Book was unreadable clearly it wasn't a standard reference. Yes it might be a loss to future historians but I doubt there's much in it that isn't replacable from any of the numerous more popular references.
Last time it was Unix-based, developed X Windows for an interface, and was offered out for license by other institutions.
This time it's some interpretation of the idea "Open" (MIT-style which is usually pretty good) and now with infrastructure widely available they're concentrating just on syllabi & courseware.
Nice how they've delineated what MIT-as-an-educational-experience-offers and how that's different from using their materials; that giving the latter away doesn't devalue the former.
It would be a trivial operation to have the OS report back storage space and check if that is in line with the model (derived from the serial number.) While TiVo has let lots of hacking go on they've never (to my knowledge) in any way communicated this was something they supported or wouldn't shut down the day they felt the cost/benefit ratio was in their favor.
I'm not saying they're likely to but don't fool yourself; tomorrow they could cut those folks off, release a patch that limits machines to their proper size, does checks on the OS to make sure it isn't hacked, etc. Sure it would piss off many of TiVo's most ardent supporters but remember TiVo is going for the consumer electronics model of business, not the computer end of it.
I'm likely to buy an "upgraded" TiVo myself at some point but I'll do so knowing full well that it's at my own risk and there are no guarantees (like the 3rd party folks won't fold up 30 minutes after the shit hits the fan?)
Also as I noted there's also simply decamping to someplace that does have service and setting up shop there. Kinko's already has keyboards, mice and monitors just lug your PC case in with you. Consider that $10/hour a solid investment in your career; you're undoubtedly still making a good wage on top of that temporary hourly expense. Or talk to a local hotel about a day rate, 9-5. Most are perfectly happy to let you use a room with a desk & a dataport over the afternoon for a much reduced rate. This is especially true if you make it clear the room won't be requiring bed service or anything to make it ready for a reserved customer at 5:05pm.
Sorry that you had to learn the hard way but like I said, you're now a branch office of your employer and need to start looking at everything with that attitude. Printer - no $59 rickety deal but a real one with a serious duty cycle, or at least two of the disposable ones for when the first blows smoke and you're on a deadline. Same for every other piece of hardware - they WILL melt down after every Radio Shack has closed for the night and you gotta get something out ASAP.
You're now Administrative Services, IS Field Support, Security Dept. and of course Facilities Management. All of those things you took for granted in the glass box are now your responsibility: Phones, phone-operator, fax, photocopier, filing, supplies, backups, library, librarian, mail, overnight mail, office accounting, and of course morale. You're working without a net, supply room, or those ubiquitous folks who kept everything running; that's now you.
Its a biiig transition and one lots of folks simply don't make properly. They look at what works for them on a few days home from the office and say "Hey, I could do this all of the time" and dive in. As you're learning (& folks who read this) its a whole lot more then that. I've seen any number of good folks go down in flames after they botched the transition to working at home.
Consider taking what you've learned doing it and what you've picked up here and bring it back to your employer; turn this negative experience it into a plus and use it to your advantage. See if corporate is willing to set up a "support group" for those who are working remotely. A message board where folks can share tips on what has worked for them, lessons learned, etc. is invaluable and is a great resource for management to get a feel for what needs to be improved, what positions and personalities succeed at this and which don't.
BTW best investments? Get a quality cell phone that supports a headset, also a home phone that does too (I'm fond of the Siemens 4200 series) and then pick out headsets that really work for you, sound good, invest in them. Also strangely enough a webcam - not necessarily for real-time interaction but to pop a face-shot into your emails occasionally, say with a picture what would take a 1MB words, remind folks what you look like and that you're a real person out there. If you're on Wintel learn how to use Application Sharing (built into Netmeeting & XP) or on any platform shared whiteboarding, it will be invaluable at some point.
Finally, make a few buddies who are also working from home and plug into that network around you. No office mates is isolating and the feedback and camaraderie of some lunch & coffee pals becomes invaluable. If nothing else it gives you a reason to dress up and leave the house in the daytime occasionally to do more then shop or run to the Post Office. Oh, and sit on a phone meeting in the nude once in awhile just to amuse yourself (but that's it!)
Before posting "What does TiVo service offer?" just howzabout going to their website and looking it up for yourself? They do a lot better job then having a bunch of /.'ers put it in their own words. www.tivo.com
Next before saying "I can do that!" no, you really can't. Not in a nice box with a good remote and trick-play and quality recording with some exemplarily expert system software all hassle-free. Yes you can cobble together some Frankenstein of a solution that will get you 70%, mebbe 80% of the way there but it's those final few steps that make the whole thing a pleasure to use and not some annoyingly geeky custom half-solution.
Will we see these stand-alone devices superceded by PC-based ones? Mebbe, mebbe not. First off folks like to watch TV on their TVs, not on their computers (yes some of you don't, I'm talking the majority.) They want to sit on their couch with a remote in hand without cables strung across the house from the PC and be able to click the shows they want with minimum hassle. That doesn't describe most of the PC-based systems that we're hearing about.
Next there's the question is it preferable to make your great-as-a-PC PC do double-duty as a PVR? Sure the network connection is already there but in most cases the rest of the wiring (TV-in, TV-out, Audio out, IR-in, etc.) is a major PITA. Then there's just the hassle of having a heavy-load application running on your un-optimized hardware. Do-able? Mostly. Worth it? Likely not IMHO.
Lastly comes the question of the listings. This is where TiVo and the like really differ from a VCR - they're SMART. That smartness is based on having those current detailed listings customized to your local system & tier and no, that information isn't easy to come by. Yes it might be possible to try and snarf the listings out of TV Guide or someone but that's brittle and if enough folks did it they'd soon find ways to break it. Given that along with these listings come software updates and tech support and such it's likely that they're not all that bad a deal.
So - is TiVo gonna make it? Probably. They just got another round of financing, have lots of investment from the right folks, seem to be doing well in spite of the uphill battle of teaching folks just what their product is. The price hike isn't a great thing but with the lifetime-offer price still being offered for a short time that takes the sting out and once folks go TiVo they really don't want to go back, will pony up. Next fall we'll likely see more companies coming out with more licensed models and possibly another design but for now its TiVo & Replay.
The original poster was complaining about POTS. Y'know, voice, over copper, the old stuff. Now work-from-home folks who post to /. can also be reasonably assumed to require network access but five 9's @ $180/month?
For that $2160 (plus hardware) a year they can get a darn good laptop and a cellphone with plan to plug into it. Or camp out at Kinko's while drinking champagne. Or check into a nice hotel room with that laptop while their home connectivity is down and get to use the pool and room-service.
Unless someone actually needs always-on super-fast connectivity you're talking about MASSIVE overkill and one that would put the kibosh on lots of employer-sponsored telecommuting, or waste a lot of someone's hard earned money.
It's all very nice that you got a bunch of poles and a line strung through the park, and I'm sure that .99999% uptime lets you sleep better at night (though if you need to keep a spare card you're clearly not getting what you're paying for) but lets step back, take a deep breath, and ask if that is really a solution most folks are gonna gave a damn about? Would the average, or even many exceptional long-distance telecommuters require that speed and guarenteed uptime? Aren't there a lot of much more cost effective solution for most folks needs?
I dunno know about your needs but between dial-up, DSL or Broadband, and a backup cellphone connection I think most everyone could rough it out and keep productive while their primary service is out, all a lot cheaper then your solution.
IMHO
Were you dropped as a child? Repeatedly? Oxygen deprivation? Poor nutrition? What? GIVE so we can prevent other dumbasses like you!
I've got a mac.com email address 'cause it's a decent, free, stable one that offers IMAP & SMTP. If you think folks that have them are Apple employees you REALLY neeed to get up to speed.
Second I'm WELL familier with IPP, also with PostScript, apparently you're not. PostScript is a pretty robust language (yes it's Turing Complete) and it's entirely possible to run applications written in it on a printer. Yes, you heard me; not just graphics but actual compute-and-do-something applications.
In this case I'm wondering if someone has done an IPP protocol stack in PS. Is it doable? Entirely. Most PS hosts (ie network printers) already have a TCP/IP stack, PS has no trouble tying into it and this it's clearly something that would be very popular.
Now, this may well ALL be news to you but folks raised properly generally have a bit more manners when publically flaunting their cluelessnes.
You may crawl back down that dank, apparently very deep and very dark AC hole you came from and not come back until you're willing to put a name to your own worthless words AND have picked up a bit of the information you so urgently push (and disparage) on others.
Over-&-Out
- Buy appropriate grades of products and services.
- Always avoid a single point of failure.
- Have a backup plan.
Look, if you're going to work from home, particularly primarily from home, then you've got to stop treating your home office as an extension of your home life and instead view it as a branch office of your employer. Telling your boss that you couldn't get work done because the printer broke down or the phone was out or you kid's latest computer game ate your PC just won't cut it.What part of "Residential Service" didn't you understand? How about how it differs from "Business Service"? If you want the better service you have to pay for it; going the cheapie route then complaining that you got what you paid for seems particularly inane. This is true for phone services, office products, whatever.
In this case apparently your phone line. Get cell phone service, get DSL or Broadband, invest in a VOIP service (heck the chat clients are building them in as fast as possible.) If you depend on a fax machine get two or set up your PC as a backup.
If you can't work from home then head off to a place that rents PCs by the hour (Kinko's are everywhere.) Or invest in a laptop and check into a local hotel with 'net connections for the day. Or get time at one of the shared business offices that have sprung up in many places (basically they supply the shared infrastructure and you pay rent.) Or head down to the local public library or friend's house. Don't wait for the problem to happen but be proactive and make contingency plans.
You're competing against folks working in the big office and need to meet those same levels of performance and reliability. You're already two strikes behind by not being around in person, able to chat around the cooler, open to having an on-the-spot impromptu meeting convened in the hallway. Don't make it any worse by forcing folks to jump through yet more hoops to get in touch with you, calling in with (possibly perfectly true but still unacceptable) "The dog ate it" reasons why you were unable to perform your job.
Sit down and list out what you need in order to work effectively. Now go through each item and determine what you'll do if that items fails, what alternatives you can put in place now. Whatever you do the least disruptive to how everyone else works with you is the best.
This may mean investing in a laptop. It definitely means putting a good backup (and restore!) strategy in place. It also probably calls for having some second-string hardware in case the primary fails; things like printers, fax machines, network hubs & routers, etc. Obviously phone and network connections are important so you need to arrange for alternates and make sure your co-workers know them, the company address book lists primary and backup, etc.
If you don't start treating your working at home as WORK and not just as a long day off from the office, doing what can be done from home trust me, you won't succeed. Today it was the phone, tomorrow your ISP, the next day something will fry on you. As far as you employer is concerned, as nice as they may be about it, each is an unexpected day when you disrupted plans by being unavailable and/or unproductive.
Like any other 'net resource the spammers & maladjusted will attempt to abuse IPP. Unsolicited Commercial Email, Mail Bombs, and Junk Faxes are problems today; Drive-By-Printings could be tomorrow.
Instead of coming home to 30 flyers advertising take-out places your printer would pump them out continuously along with guaranteed penis enhancements, herbal highs, the latest in puppy porn, and of course a thousand pages of solid black from the dork you belittled on /. last week. Or you'll end up having to write elaborate filters for your incoming queue (procqueue anyone?) previewing everything before allowing it to go through, blocking off known printer-jacking domains.
No, IPP is great inside a facility and between sites that cross-print a lot but I expect email will remain the standard way of distributing a document. Email is widely deployed, directories are already in place, it can be encrypted & authenticated, uses a store-and-forward architecture, doesn't require the output device be known or any drivers required. The recipient need only have an application capable of printing the document and there are any number of good formats running from the "business-standard" MS Word to Adobe Acrobat to HTML/XML pages on down to good old flat text - ASCII or Unicode.
Indeed while many print shops take jobs online none I'm aware of accept random ones without pre-arranged accounts. Then most of the time they specify the formats one can HTTP-upload to them or send via a custom print driver in their format (presumably some PostScript or HPGL variant with headers for job identification, output settings, and accounting.)
So while CUPS and IPP are great things and are definitely making the world more interoperable (Unix & varients, Win2k+, MacOS X, lots of newer printers & print servers) they're not going to revolutionize it any more then standard print queues, Windows Shares, MacOS Printer Sharing, Novell Distributed Print Services, iPrint, etc.
ps Anyone know of an IPP implementation in PostScript? Might be a great way to "upgrade" all of these older devices with a single loaded print job.