I think the big thing not addressed in the linked article was the possibility of creating an "open" hardware standard, like the PC. Given that Atari and Amiga both followed with their own 68k systems, and Sun and others were making workstations out of them for quite some time, it's not entirely impossible that they could have produced a compatability standard.
They tried that later - there was a reference hardware design (CHRP) that would have unified hardware for Mac, Windows, AIX, Solaris and more on commodity parts. Only problem was that Intel wasn't part of it.
Good idea, but I'd like to take it a step further and make a "Browse to Profile" button so when I have a dual boot machine I can mount the Windows partition and use the same profile for both installs.
Things like bandwidth are enabling technologies. In themselves they do little, but just by existing, they allow a all of the inventive minds out there the freedom to create and to progress.
This might be true if those companies paid the high tax rates, but in practice most big companies pay little or no tax. More than ten percent of the top one hundred US companies actually receive rebates from the taxpayer (a total of 1.3 billion per annum).
In 1960, corporations paid 24% of all federal taxes. In the 1970's, that share fell to 15%. As recently as 1996, it was 12%. Now, corporate taxes make up only about 8% of U.S. revenues.
It's these companies which are bri-xxx sponsoring politicians who bring in these ridiculous bills. Your tax dollars working for you...
The Open Office presentetation tool (Impress) will save interactive presentations to the.swf format. It doesn't have anywhere near the features of Flash itself, but at a pinch, you can produce a fair presentation for the web. It's also extremely handy for converting existing Powerpoint presentations to a cross-browser format.
I'm actually a long-term Flash/Dreamweaver user, and until the latest Macromedia Studio release, would have been happy to continue using their tools. I have lobbied them on occasion to produce Linux versions, but I'm platform-agnostic enough that I wouldn't consider that a reason to stop using them.
The reason I won't be renewing my Devnet subscription or upgrading my Studio license is that they have introduced product activation with the MX 2004 version. When you combine this sort of abuse of customer rights with activities like the subversion of SVG, it's clear Macromedia is transitioning from being a toolmaker for developers into yet another marketing engine. Very sad.
"Siemens phones are actually quite reliable and durable, and especially their simpler models are almost indestructible."
That's not my experience. After owning one Siemens phone and having it fail, then having to deal with the appalling arrogance that is their attempt at a service department, it will be a cold day in hell before I use another Siemens product.
A few years ago, I was doing some contract work for a company that does the installs for some of the GSM base stations here in Australia.
During a conversation with one of the techs the subject of the ban on mobile phones came up. His comment was that the phone transmitters are too low powered to affect the plane's systems, but that if 300 passengers on a plane travelling at 400kmh+ all had phones on, the handover process from cell to cell would be swamped and there would be a trail of crashed cellular base stations behind each passenger plane.
Better than crashing the planes, but still enough of a problem to insist on a ban on phones, and if you want people to co-operate, linking their cooperation to their own safety is about as good an incentive as you're going to get.
A light plane travelling at 200kph won't cause the same problem, so nobody worries about enforcing the ban for them.
"The problem is that when microsoft's products matured, they also became commoditized"
But this is what we need as consumers. The ideal computing experience for us (at purchase time anyway) is commodity software which will run on whichever commodity OS we choose, which will run on whichever commodity hardware we choose.
That is what we have a right to expect from a free market. It's the payoff for consumers from capitalism.
That's why open source is so important. Not because Linux is a great step forward as an OS, but because it's a step towards an open, commodity computing future and a step away from a stagnant restrictive business model.
What I'd like is the ability to split a browser window and view differnt parts of long pages either alongside or above/below each other so I can compare page elements. It would be nice to be able to split two different pages the same way too - sort of like a personalised version of framesets.
In-page bookmarks, with the option of being temporary or persistent would also be handy for navigating through large documents.
Another nice-to-have would to be an option to open all (or settable a maximum number of) the links on a page as tabs so they could load in the background and be there when I'm ready.
I think it shows that Open Source is big enough not to worry about petty issues like demanding reliance on our own formats.
Just about every OSS word processor out there can read MS.DOC files, so it's not like they're causing us any hardship by using a format that's as common us muck, and not directly related to their field.
You've got to be kidding. The last thing the US aerospace industry wants is cheap and simple cruise missiles. They have government contracts. They want the biggest, most complicated and above all, the most expensive solutions out there.
The HDD would be better in some ways, and having a fast wireless connection would be cool too - so you could put an Ipod-like device next to a terminal you want to use, and have all your data and config "just work".
I think in the near future though, you'd have a better chance of getting acceptance with something which is so cheap its almost disposable, so that hotels etc could include the cost of giving the disk away with the price of the room or the web access. Of course that would mean you couldn't use a commercial OS...
Knoppix or a similar Linux live distro on a DVD RW would do this. I've even been considering what it would take to make a live distro on a DVD R and just keep writing new sessions. If the distro itself takes less than a gig, you'd have three and a half left for config and other data. More than enough for most office stuff.
What I'd target this at initially would be the hotel and net cafe types of place - the client could be given a DVD with the basic Linux distro which they'd boot on a hotel/cafe terminal. If they need any non-standard apps, they can apt-get whatever they need, make any config changes they want and save it all on the DVD.
Eject the disk once the job's done, take it away and have your data in a format any DVD-equipped machine can read. If you go to another hotel or cafe, boot with the disk again and you have your own environment with you.
No, the spammers won't (all) move to other countries, simply because they need to be active where the money is.
If you make it illegal for them to operate in most of the wealthy countries which buy their services, and prosecute organisations which commission spam in those conuntries, you will be reducing the money available to them and reduce the incentive to spam.
The Internet still runs on protocols designed 20-30 years ago that rested on the assumption that everyone using the network could be trusted. As long as we stick with that assumption, we're going to have blacklists, spoofing, what-have-you. The trick is to not rely on the Internet for anything important.
This comment needs to be modded up. Over the past six months random (non-existent) addresses on my domain (an Australian.au TLD) have been used by spammer(s) in the reply-to: field of their spams.
As a consequence, I'm having to deal with thousands of bounce messages. I'm getting abuse sent via the "Contact Us" section of my website, and email from my domain is being blocked by blacklists.
In meatspace, if someone had hijacked my business name and was using it for unsavory practices, I'd have legal recourse. As it is, I just have to grit my teeth and carry on losing business, paying the bills and cleaning up the detritus as it happens.
This is happening because the internet is immature and has no defence against the sort of misuse that spammers are perpetrating. As well, governments are still jerking to the wrong kneetaps and making laws against the senders of the spam instead of the companies which are paying them.
It's worth pointing out too, that although most of the spams are sent from third-world countries, the vast bulk of the businesses being promoted in the spams are US based.
In Australia during the Tampa "crisis" (when four hundred odd refugees were rescued by the contaainer ship Tampa Bay), the Defence Signals Directorate intercepted phone conversations between the Maritime Union of Australia and the Tampa, and passed on transcripts of the conversations to the government.
They were caught that time, but it's probable that they're routinely scanning both internal and overseas (the Tampa is Norwegian) conversations. The tapping was judged to be illegal, but no prosecutions occurred, and nothing has been changed to prevent a repetition.
I did try a few technical queries to compare the two. When the search term is a phrase containing several words which are not obscure themselves, but in combination are rare (i.e. Membrane Filter Method) MSN seems to choke completely and give zero results, while Google will return results with a high proportion of non-relevant links.
Room for improvement with both perhaps?
Scientific American is an excellent magazine, but it's a monthly, so I'd add New Scientist into the mix for a weekly mag. I'd generally buy a Time every few weeks to check what's happening in US politics. I'd be interested to see if there's an international equivalent of Time I could get instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely! That's why the Commodore CDTV and CD32 wiped the floor with all the other console systems of the early '90s.
Oh wait....
It has more to do with the fact that spammers are service providers, and most of the organisations which use those services are based in the US.
Trying to blame the rest of the world for this is just evading responsibility.
I can't work out whether to mod you up for being Australian or down for being obtuse...
I think the big thing not addressed in the linked article was the possibility of creating an "open" hardware standard, like the PC. Given that Atari and Amiga both followed with their own 68k systems, and Sun and others were making workstations out of them for quite some time, it's not entirely impossible that they could have produced a compatability standard.
They tried that later - there was a reference hardware design (CHRP) that would have unified hardware for Mac, Windows, AIX, Solaris and more on commodity parts. Only problem was that Intel wasn't part of it.
http://www.firmworks.com/www/chrp.htm
Good idea, but I'd like to take it a step further and make a "Browse to Profile" button so when I have a dual boot machine I can mount the Windows partition and use the same profile for both installs.
Things like bandwidth are enabling technologies. In themselves they do little, but just by existing, they allow a all of the inventive minds out there the freedom to create and to progress.
This might be true if those companies paid the high tax rates, but in practice most big companies pay little or no tax. More than ten percent of the top one hundred US companies actually receive rebates from the taxpayer (a total of 1.3 billion per annum).
In 1960, corporations paid 24% of all federal taxes. In the 1970's, that share fell to 15%. As recently as 1996, it was 12%. Now, corporate taxes make up only about 8% of U.S. revenues.
It's these companies which are bri-xxx sponsoring politicians who bring in these ridiculous bills. Your tax dollars working for you...
The Open Office presentetation tool (Impress) will save interactive presentations to the .swf format. It doesn't have anywhere near the features of Flash itself, but at a pinch, you can produce a fair presentation for the web. It's also extremely handy for converting existing Powerpoint presentations to a cross-browser format.
I'm actually a long-term Flash/Dreamweaver user, and until the latest Macromedia Studio release, would have been happy to continue using their tools. I have lobbied them on occasion to produce Linux versions, but I'm platform-agnostic enough that I wouldn't consider that a reason to stop using them.
The reason I won't be renewing my Devnet subscription or upgrading my Studio license is that they have introduced product activation with the MX 2004 version. When you combine this sort of abuse of customer rights with activities like the subversion of SVG, it's clear Macromedia is transitioning from being a toolmaker for developers into yet another marketing engine. Very sad.
"Siemens phones are actually quite reliable and durable, and especially their simpler models are almost indestructible."
That's not my experience. After owning one Siemens phone and having it fail, then having to deal with the appalling arrogance that is their attempt at a service department, it will be a cold day in hell before I use another Siemens product.
Keep talking like that and we'll have to elect you president!
A few years ago, I was doing some contract work for a company that does the installs for some of the GSM base stations here in Australia.
During a conversation with one of the techs the subject of the ban on mobile phones came up. His comment was that the phone transmitters are too low powered to affect the plane's systems, but that if 300 passengers on a plane travelling at 400kmh+ all had phones on, the handover process from cell to cell would be swamped and there would be a trail of crashed cellular base stations behind each passenger plane.
Better than crashing the planes, but still enough of a problem to insist on a ban on phones, and if you want people to co-operate, linking their cooperation to their own safety is about as good an incentive as you're going to get.
A light plane travelling at 200kph won't cause the same problem, so nobody worries about enforcing the ban for them.
i wonder if those clouds could have carried over any kind of effects to this day...
It would explain a lot about SCO....
"The problem is that when microsoft's products matured, they also became commoditized"
But this is what we need as consumers. The ideal computing experience for us (at purchase time anyway) is commodity software which will run on whichever commodity OS we choose, which will run on whichever commodity hardware we choose.
That is what we have a right to expect from a free market. It's the payoff for consumers from capitalism.
That's why open source is so important. Not because Linux is a great step forward as an OS, but because it's a step towards an open, commodity computing future and a step away from a stagnant restrictive business model.
What I'd like is the ability to split a browser window and view differnt parts of long pages either alongside or above/below each other so I can compare page elements. It would be nice to be able to split two different pages the same way too - sort of like a personalised version of framesets.
In-page bookmarks, with the option of being temporary or persistent would also be handy for navigating through large documents.
Another nice-to-have would to be an option to open all (or settable a maximum number of) the links on a page as tabs so they could load in the background and be there when I'm ready.
I think it shows that Open Source is big enough not to worry about petty issues like demanding reliance on our own formats.
.DOC files, so it's not like they're causing us any hardship by using a format that's as common us muck, and not directly related to their field.
Just about every OSS word processor out there can read MS
You've got to be kidding. The last thing the US aerospace industry wants is cheap and simple cruise missiles. They have government contracts. They want the biggest, most complicated and above all, the most expensive solutions out there.
The HDD would be better in some ways, and having a fast wireless connection would be cool too - so you could put an Ipod-like device next to a terminal you want to use, and have all your data and config "just work".
I think in the near future though, you'd have a better chance of getting acceptance with something which is so cheap its almost disposable, so that hotels etc could include the cost of giving the disk away with the price of the room or the web access. Of course that would mean you couldn't use a commercial OS...
Knoppix or a similar Linux live distro on a DVD RW would do this. I've even been considering what it would take to make a live distro on a DVD R and just keep writing new sessions. If the distro itself takes less than a gig, you'd have three and a half left for config and other data. More than enough for most office stuff.
What I'd target this at initially would be the hotel and net cafe types of place - the client could be given a DVD with the basic Linux distro which they'd boot on a hotel/cafe terminal. If they need any non-standard apps, they can apt-get whatever they need, make any config changes they want and save it all on the DVD.
Eject the disk once the job's done, take it away and have your data in a format any DVD-equipped machine can read. If you go to another hotel or cafe, boot with the disk again and you have your own environment with you.
No, the spammers won't (all) move to other countries, simply because they need to be active where the money is.
If you make it illegal for them to operate in most of the wealthy countries which buy their services, and prosecute organisations which commission spam in those conuntries, you will be reducing the money available to them and reduce the incentive to spam.
The Internet still runs on protocols designed 20-30 years ago that rested on the assumption that everyone using the network could be trusted. As long as we stick with that assumption, we're going to have blacklists, spoofing, what-have-you. The trick is to not rely on the Internet for anything important.
.au TLD) have been used by spammer(s) in the reply-to: field of their spams.
This comment needs to be modded up. Over the past six months random (non-existent) addresses on my domain (an Australian
As a consequence, I'm having to deal with thousands of bounce messages. I'm getting abuse sent via the "Contact Us" section of my website, and email from my domain is being blocked by blacklists.
In meatspace, if someone had hijacked my business name and was using it for unsavory practices, I'd have legal recourse. As it is, I just have to grit my teeth and carry on losing business, paying the bills and cleaning up the detritus as it happens.
This is happening because the internet is immature and has no defence against the sort of misuse that spammers are perpetrating. As well, governments are still jerking to the wrong kneetaps and making laws against the senders of the spam instead of the companies which are paying them.
It's worth pointing out too, that although most of the spams are sent from third-world countries, the vast bulk of the businesses being promoted in the spams are US based.
In Australia during the Tampa "crisis" (when four hundred odd refugees were rescued by the contaainer ship Tampa Bay), the Defence Signals Directorate intercepted phone conversations between the Maritime Union of Australia and the Tampa, and passed on transcripts of the conversations to the government.
They were caught that time, but it's probable that they're routinely scanning both internal and overseas (the Tampa is Norwegian) conversations. The tapping was judged to be illegal, but no prosecutions occurred, and nothing has been changed to prevent a repetition.
I did try a few technical queries to compare the two. When the search term is a phrase containing several words which are not obscure themselves, but in combination are rare (i.e. Membrane Filter Method) MSN seems to choke completely and give zero results, while Google will return results with a high proportion of non-relevant links. Room for improvement with both perhaps?
Scientific American is an excellent magazine, but it's a monthly, so I'd add New Scientist into the mix for a weekly mag. I'd generally buy a Time every few weeks to check what's happening in US politics. I'd be interested to see if there's an international equivalent of Time I could get instead.
Um, wouldn't that be herbs?
No its not. It's called stagnation, and its the best evidence yet that Microsoft's monopoly is stifling innovation.
Anyone who thinks current computer hardware/OS combinations are anywhere close to maturity has no imagination and reads too little science fiction...