I heard it 10 years ago, and it still hasn't happened.
It sounds like you didn't hear that it is happening.
We hit a point a few years ago where the average computer had more than enough horsepower for the average user's needs. As long as you're just using the computer for web surfing, email, and running productivity applications -- and I think it's fair to say that this is a valid description for perhaos 70% of most computer users today (making up a number, but it seems reasonable to me) -- then a computer running, say, a 500mhz x86 processor with 128mb of ram or so should be more than adequate.
All of the speed increases since then are just gravy for such users: their web pages aren't going to load significantly faster, there hasn't been any dramatic changes in productivity suites that would demand more horsepower than that, etc.
So, even though the needs haven't been expanding, the processor power has -- to the point that what cost a couple of thousand dollars in a desktop machine of several years ago can now be purchased for a couple of hundred in a laptop. And that low end modern laptop just might have nice features that weren't available not long ago, such as a DVD-R drive or removable USB memory modules.
I run a dual G4 tower at home, of 2000 vintage. My fiance has a 9 month old Toshiba laptop. My computer was high end at the time it was purchased; hers was an entry level model. I've got more disc space than she does (because I installed two additional hard drives), but the specs on her computer are in every other way faster. For 1/3 the price of what my G4 was when new, I could today buy a very nice iBook that would, again aside from the hard drive, have far better specs across the board.
At this point, I'm having a hard time of thinking of reasons to make my next computer be a desktop. (Well, aside from the G5, but I'm patient enough to consider waiting for G5 laptops:-).
The fact is, a very capable portable machine can be bought now for only a little bit more money than the average low end desktop model. If you're not looking to run a home server or run computationally intensive tasks (games, compiling lots of software, graphics & video editing, etc), there's very little reason not to seriously consider moving to laptops now. They're not much more expensive anymore, and they're more than capable.
But Entourage isn't an Outlook Express equivalent, it's an Outlook equivalent.
See, Outlook Express is & always was a mail client, able to speak the major mail protocols: POP3, IMAP4, & SMTP.
Outlook & Entourage, on the other hand, are Exchange server clients that happen to have rudimentary support for POP3 and SMTP, but not IMAP.
Comparing OE to Outlook is about as valid as comparing, say, Safari or IE to Sherlock or Watson: in each case, the former is a general purpose client that can speak the open protocol, while the latter is a special purpose client that uses part of that protocol in a restricted way. One isn't necessarily better or worse than the other, but the important bit is that they are not the same thing.
And that's the real news here: the attempted hijacking of an open protocol. To push the analogy a bit further, how would Mac users feel if Apple were to wait for Safari to get popular enough to crowd out most of the competition, then abandon it and go with Sherlock as their standard web application? While Sherlock provides the "same" access to web content, and in some ways does so in a much nicer interface, Sherlock is much less suitable as an all-purpose tool than the plain old web browser -- but at that point it would be too late.
This is the situation we're looking at now with Outlook/Entourage & Exchange. It is very bad news, because it indicates that Microsoft feels that their position is strong enough to make such a bold move. Let's hope they were wrong.
If things do go according to my interpretation, then the relevance of open protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP will be diminished, and the end result will be that all non-Microsoft mail software (both client & server) will be crowded out. This is a doomsday scenario, and I don't expect it to be quite that bad, but it seems obvious to me that this is what Microsoft is pushing for.
I think it would have been fair to press them on this angle in the article, as the significance of this is far greater than the mere discontinuation of a particular piece of software. But it sounds like you did put some thought into this, so I'll accept that it was your call to make...:-)
That hasn't been true for years. After W2k server came out, porting Hotmail to it was seen as a necessary marketing move. The transition didn't go completely smoothly at first, but eventually it was completed, and the entire web-facing tier of their network is now purely Windows based.
For the curious, there was a fascinating leaked whitepaper on the conversion, dated August 2000, by an [ex-?] Microsoft engineer named David Brooks. It's very good reading, if you have the time and want to understand a bit better how Microsoft is approaching their effort to evangelize their software over Unix.
As some commenters have noted, while OE certainly can be blamed for a lot of security gaffes, in usability terms it really has been excellent software.
I've never spent much time with the Windows version, but the old MacOS version was superb, and I know a bunch of very savvy tech folks -- people that were generally of the Linux & Free software persuasion -- that swore by OE/Mac as their favorite mail client.
However, it has been obvious for a while that that software probably didn't have a future. Outlook Express was never updated to be a native OSX application, so you had to run it in Classic mode. That was enough to start turning away users, but I understand that even still it's fairly popular.
But I digress.
If you read between the lines here, it's not just OE that's being dropped. Consider this quote from the article:
"IMAP is just not a very rich protocol," Steve Conn, Exchange Server product manager, told ZDNet Australia during the company's Tech Ed conference. "The great majority of people used Outlook Express because they weren't on a LAN environment, and Outlook was just too fat for them."
In other words, Microsoft saw OE as their IMAP client, and so by dropping OE, they are also abandoning the IMAP mail protocol. In spite of what Mr Conn says, IMAP is a very rich protocol: it allows you to maintain multiple mail folders on the server, it allows you to keep your mail client configuration on the server, and in principle it allows you to store arbitrary files on the server.
All of this allows the user to have great mobility: leave the office and you can have all the same data available at home, or at school, or while travelling. All of this, in other words, is open competition for Exchange.
This isn't just abandoning OE, this is vendor lock-in. Microsoft is trying to steer us towards a world where you have two choices for mail access: get a Passport & sign up for MSN Hotmail, or buy a copy of Office and use Outlook to connect to your corporate or ISP provided Exchange server.
There is no room for open protocols in this worldview, and so no room for alternative servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, Exim) or clients (Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Pine, Mutt, Eudora, etc).
The death of an open protocol is the real headline here, but both the journalist & the story submitter seem to have missed it.
But then, Jaguar is the current version of OSX, and it does not AFAIK have NTFS support. Maybe Pathern (10.3) will?;-)
I think you've about nailed it though: while there are a lot of valid criteria for selecting a good filesystem (security, permissions, metadata, etc), one of them in this case has to be portability, and without the help of third party software, no version of Windows has support for anything other than FAT* or NTFS. And while NTFS isn't such a bad filesystem, incomplete support for NTFS's security mechanisms has meant that there are few if any non-Windows drivers that can both read and write the format. Maybe, as you say, Panter will have this, but that still leaves some maturing on the Linux side.
My best idea -- which maybe isn't viable to the original "anonymous reader" -- is to let the single partition requirement slip. If the drive has one or two FAT32 partitions, that can meet the portability requirement. Then a more advanced filesystem can be used for OSX/Linux interchange. I know you have more flexibility if you just need to support those two, but I'm not sure what your best options are. OSX will let you use either HFS+ (modernized version of the old MacOS filesystem) or UFS (Unix FileSystem, which AFAIK is also what the *BSDs use. UFS might be a pretty good choice then -- it should be mountable on not only OSX & Linux, but also Solaris, BSD, Irix, and other *nix variants. I don't know what support OSX has for ext2, ReiserFS etc, but if it isn't there already then the architecture of the system is such that adding third party support should in theory be easier than adding any other drivers to Windows.
Nice idea, not so nice question
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
[....] our next presidential candidate will have to answer "POP3 or IMAP?"
Any nitwit sluggish enough to prefer POP mail isn't fit to serve as president of a POS Ford Pinto, nevermind be POTUS & technocrat leader of the free world.
A better question in a similar vein could involve SMTP: does the candidate in question recognize that spam is a legitimate problem to 'net users, and what efforts would she sponsor to address the problem? The answer to such a question could be a fascinating insight into how she feels societal problems should be addressed: should we try to legislate the problem away, knowing that spam transmitted from other jurisdictions (Asia, Africa, etc) would continue regardless of US law, or should we find a way to let the markets correct the problem? If the markets won't fix themselves, as so far they have failed to do, then can we stimulate a technological solution? Would the candidate be willing to invest R&D into coming up to a successor to SMTP & related protocols? Or would the candidate take a more laissez faire approach, and not see spam as a problem in the first place? Any technically savvy candidate could have a wide variety of insightful commentaries in this vein.
POP or IMAP though, that's just dumb. What kind of moron doesn't prefer IMAP?:-)
Would you agree that this whole recall circus, with its washed up sitcom stars, meathead body building "actors", and gleeful pornographers, is just some kind of collective attempt to make Minnesota feel better about itself after the whole "wow we just elected a pro wrestler" thing? If so, don't you maybe think there's such a thing as trying too hard? Surely you realize that this is well worn ground by now:
Let Jesse be Jesse...
...Somewhere else. Minnesota wanted a Governor. Now we're stuck with him By Garrison Keillor
October 4, 1999
Web posted at: 12:29 p.m. EDT (1629 GMT)
Here in Minnesota, we are carrying on an experiment in democracy, having elected a Governor whom we can especially enjoy because only 37% voted for him and the rest of us are not responsible. This is something new in America, the ironic public servant.
[....]
Not to say that that Jesse Ventura did such a bad job or anything, but come on now -- two wrongs don't make a right.
In seriousness, this race is so fractured that anyone, even a computer geek, could end up winning. With that in mind, and with the nature of this circus in mind, wouldn't you be just a bit ashamed to win? The aftermath of this race is going to be nasty; the winner of the race is likely to be even more of an electoral loser than GWB was in 2000. The nation never got a proper reconciliation after that fiasco, but California will deserve one this time around. How do you intend to pull your fair state back together after this mess?
Major T. J. "King" Kong: Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one legal brief; two boxes of legal memoranda; four days' concentrated emergency affadavits; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination "Jargon File" phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in stock options; nine packs of Mountain Dew; one issue of prophylactics (expected to be returned unopened); three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a hacker' could have a pretty good weekend at Comdex with all that stuff.
*** *** ***
[After learning of the Doomsday Machine]
President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you *bring* such a suit?
Ambassador de Boies: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end SCO could not keep up with the expense involved in the "Free Beer" race, the "Free Speech" race, and the "Innovation" race. At the same time their employees grumbled for more nylons and stock options. Their doomsday scheme cost just a small fraction of what they had been spending on R&D in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your company was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Boies: Our source was the New York Times.
*** *** ***
[Strangelove admits that Microsoft investigated bringing such a suit.]
Dr. Strangelove: Based on the Findings Of Fact, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.
*** *** ***
General "Buck" Turgidson: Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday lawsuits.
*** *** ***
Major T. J. "King" Kong: Well boys, we got three engines out, we got more logical holes than a horse trader's mule, all revenues are gone and we're leaking cash and if we was flying any lower why we'd need sleigh bells on this thing... but we got one little budge on those Roosskies. At this height why thy might harpoon us but they dang sure ain't gonna spot us on no radar screen!
*** *** ***
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel... that Windows machine. I want you to shoot the password off it. There may be some change in there.
Colonel "Bat" Guano: That's private property.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame, outlook, way of life, and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of IBM? Can you imagine?! Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for, you twit!!
Colonel "Bat" Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of IBM on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake:
What?!
Colonel "Bat" Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Microsoft company.
*** *** ***
General "Buck" Turgidson: If the lawyer's good, I mean if he's reeeally sharp, he can barrel that thing in so low, oh it's a sight to see. You wouldn't expect it with a puny lil' company like SCO, but varrrooom! The jet exhaust... frying chickens in the courtroom!
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Erm, what about the suits, sir? Surely we must issue the recall code immediately.
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: Group Captain, the suits are not gonna be recalled. My attack orders have been issued, and the orders stand.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Well, if you'll excuse me saying so, sir, that would be, to my way of thinking, rather-- well, rather an odd way of looking at it. You see, if we actually had a leg to stand on, we would certainly not be such a laughingstock right now.
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: Are you certain of that, Mandrake?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Oh, I'm absolutely positive about it.
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: And what if it is true?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Well, I'm afraid I'm still not with you, sir, because, I mean, if our legal claims are in fact baseless, then your use of Plan R -- in fact, your order to the entire Company... Oh. I would say, sir, that there were something dreadfully wrong somewhere.
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: Now why don't you just take it easy, Group Captain, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like. [Mandrake snaps to attention and salutes]
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: General Ripper, Sir, as an officer in Her Majesty's Slashdot, it is my clear duty, under the present circumstances, to issue the recall code, upon my own authority, and bring back the Wing. If you'll excuse me, sir. [He finds the doors locked.] I'm afraid, sir, I must ask you for the key, and the recall code. Have you got them handy, sir?
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: Mandrake, do you recall what Kubrick once said about war?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.
General Darl "Jack D. Ripper" McBride: He said war was too important to be left to the politicians & generals. When he said that, 30 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians & generals. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious fluidy source code.
I was looking over more Dr Strangelove quotes, and I'm pretty sure that with only minor editing (five or ten percent of the dialogue), the story could cleanly be reworked to be about this lawsuit between SCO & the Linux world.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that one of Peter Sellars' characters is already named Mandrake:-)
Darl McBride's "surprise" at RedHat's suit is almost like a scene out of Dr Strangelove...
[The President calls the RedHat Premier.]
President Darl McBride: [to RedHat] Hello?... Ah... I can't hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?... Oh-ho, that's much better.... yeah... huh... yes... Fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri.... Clear and plain and coming through fine.... I'm coming through fine, too, eh?... Good, then... well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine.... Good.... Well, it's good that you're fine and... and I'm fine.... I agree with you, it's great to be fine.... a-ha-ha-ha-ha... Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Suit.... The Suit, Dmitri.... The legal suit!... Well now, what happened is... ah... one of our legal staff, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head... you know... just a little... funny. And, ah... he went and did a silly thing.... Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his staff... to attack your industry... Ah... Well, let me finish, Dmitri.... Let me finish, Dmitri.... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?!... Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri?... Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?... Of course I like to speak to you!... Of course I like to say hello!... Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened... It's a friendly call. Of course it's a friendly call.... Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even got it.... They will not reach their courts for at least another year.... I am... I am positive, Dmitri.... Listen, I've been all over this with your legal representative. It is not a trick.... Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your legal staff a complete run-down on the complaints, the allegations, and the insinuations in the lawsuits.... Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we're unable to recall the suits, then... I'd say that, ah... well, ah... we're just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri.... I know they're our boys.... All right, well listen now. Who should we call?... Who should we call, Dmitri? The... wha-whe, the People... you, sorry, you faded away there.... The People's Free Software Foundation.... Where is that, Dmitri?... In Boston.... Right.... Yes.... Oh, you'll call them first, will you?... Uh-huh... Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri?... Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Boston information.... Ah-ah-eh-uhm-hm... I'm surprised, too, Dmitri.... I'm very surprised.... All right, you're more surprised than I am, but I am as surprised as well.... I
As was pointed out in one of yesterday's SCO stories, less than 49% of SCO stock is publically available. You can pool with people to buy up every single share of available stock -- and at the rate things will hopefully go that will be very inexpensive to do -- but even then you will not have enough share to have a controlling interest in the company.
Darl McBride's "surprise" & "disappointment" at RedHat's suit (and now, IBM's) is almost like a scene out of Dr Strangelove...
[The President calls the RedHat Premier.]
President Darl McBride: [to RedHat] Hello?... Ah... I can't hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?... Oh-ho, that's much better.... yeah... huh... yes... Fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri.... Clear and plain and coming through fine.... I'm coming through fine, too, eh?... Good, then... well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine.... Good.... Well, it's good that you're fine and... and I'm fine.... I agree with you, it's great to be fine.... a-ha-ha-ha-ha... Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Suit.... The Suit, Dmitri.... The legal suit!... Well now, what happened is... ah... one of our legal staff, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head... you know... just a little... funny. And, ah... he went and did a silly thing.... Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his staff... to attack your industry... Ah... Well, let me finish, Dmitri.... Let me finish, Dmitri.... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?!... Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri?... Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?... Of course I like to speak to you!... Of course I like to say hello!... Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened... It's a friendly call. Of course it's a friendly call.... Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even got it.... They will not reach their courts for at least another year.... I am... I am positive, Dmitri.... Listen, I've been all over this with your legal representative. It is not a trick.... Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your legal staff a complete run-down on the complaints, the allegations, and the insinuations in the lawsuits.... Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we're unable to recall the suits, then... I'd say that, ah... well, ah... we're just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri.... I know they're our boys.... All right, well listen now. Who should we call?... Who should we call, Dmitri? The... wha-whe, the People... you, sorry, you faded away there.... The People's Free Software Foundation.... Where is that, Dmitri?... In Boston.... Right.... Yes.... Oh, you'll call them first, will you?... Uh-huh... Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri?... Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Boston information.... Ah-ah-eh-uhm-hm... I'm surprised, too, Dmitri.... I'm very surprised.... All right, you're more surprised than I am, but I am as sur
But, unless the voting system accounts for this somehow, there's no physical reason that someone couldn't manually monitor votes as they spool off the dot-matrix printer or thermal tape or whatever it ends up being. Sprinkle enough "intelligence" to the system and you start having the opportunity to do things that weren't possible before, and when this happens it will break or be abused.
I still think that electronic voting systems as currently being considered are attacking the wrong problem. We want fast, accurate counting. We need the system to be auditable, though this isn't always discussed. It seems to me that we could achieve this by having a traditional paper ballot of some kind, and have technological systems to automatically tally the votes.
This is how standardized tests like the SAT have been scored for decades now, and it has a lot of virtues going for it: the original documents are preservable & trustworthy, the counting technology is fast & presumably reliable, tampering should be pretty obvious, etc. I don't see why this reasonably well tested technique isn't at the forefront of most e-voting proposals floating around today. There may well be better approaches, but crap like the Diebold approach are not among them.
The nice thing about this idea is that it doesn't need to involve much of a process change from how things are already done. All you're doing is switching the paper ballot the user receives with some kind of "fill in the bubbles" form and then speeding up the offline processing of the forms after the ballots close for the day. There should be few if any chances for fraud or error that weren't there already, which seems to meet a kind of "first do no harm" principle that seems necessary to me.
On the other hand, building a system that [a] prints receipts while also [b] maintaining the secret ballot principle could be tricky.
Whenever I've voted (three different jurisdictions to date), there has always been a series of stations that voters have to pass through: [1] check in, [2] take a ballot (optional, depending on the voting technology), [3] enter a booth to vote, [4] deposit the ballot in some kind of tallying machine (again, optional depending on the technology), [5] check out.
If enough technical intelligence were added to this process, then figuring out who voted for what could be reduced to a fairly predictable traffic analysis problem. If you vote mid-day, when the lines tend to be short, it wouldn't be hard to pin down that voter John Doe checked in at 1:17pm, that a vote for candidates A, B, & C was recorded at booth 5 at 1:19pm, and that John Doe checked out at 1:20pm. Guess what, you've just figured out who John Doe voted for.
Video cameras in cell phones are a potential tool to buy elections. One of the basic tenets of a good election is that the ballot is secret. Someone can offer to buy a vote, but the buyer has no guarantee that the seller will deliver from the privacy of the voting booth. But video cameras in cell phones have the potential to change that; the buyer can demand proof of a vote bought before he pays.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3033551.s tm>
One of my big fears with all these electronic voting schemes is that they will also make it easier to get around "secret" ballots.
If electronic voting ever becomes the norm, I too want there to be an old-fashioned paper audit trail. On the other hand, that paper trail has to be done in a sufficiently anonymous way, and I don't have an answer for how to implement that. I do however appreciate that getting it right isn't likely to be easy, and that bugs in the system will cause serious problems in the first few elections in which such systems are employed (fraud, buying votes, unaudited software errors, crackers, etc).
Flava Flav was right: the hype for anything is almost always wrong, and the bigger it is, the bigger the letdown.
That doesn't mean that the Segway itself isn't a great idea, or that the idle predictions that the widespread adoption of such a machine could reshape the way cities are built.
Look at what another commenter noted about the bike city in Holland, for example. I've been to Amsterdam, and even there the city has evolved into a place where multiple forms of transportation co-exist. Many of the major streets are 100 feet across, with multiple channels for different modes of transportation. The widest streets were laid out something like this (arrows indicate direction that traffic is permitted to flow, which may or may not be bidirectional):
<--- wide brick sidewalk (perhaps 15 feet or 5 meters wide) --->
<--- tarmac bike lane (2m) --->
<--- narrower sidewalk for pedestrians (2 or 3m) --->
X--- barricades to protect slower moving traffic (1m) ---X
<--- space for parallel parked cars (3m) <---
<--- a lane or two for cars & trucks to travel (3-6m) <---
<--- a set of rails for streetcars / trolleys (3m) <---
<--- narrow sidewalk for crossing, train platforms etc (2m) --->
---> another set of train tracks (3m) --->
---> another lane or two for cars going the other direction (3-6m) --->
---> more space for parallel parking (3m) --->
X--- barricades (1m) ---X;
<--- narrow pedestrian sidewalk (2 or 3m) --->
<--- another bike lane (2m) --->
<--- another wide brick sidewalk (5m) --->
if you add it up, the whole thing ends up taking something like 40 meters, or ~120 feet. (It's been a couple of years since my visit, so the widths are rough estimates, but they seem roughly correct to me -- corrections welcome:-).
Additionally, some streets had wide canals for boats to go back & forth, but most of these streets dropped the rail & bike lanes, and the overall width was generally similar to the non-canal streets. For streets not wide enough for all the lanes above, different lanes would be dropped at random: there's always be sidwwalks, but there might or might not be car lanes, rail tracks, bike lanes, canals, etc.
Also, as an aside, everyone with a bike seemed to be a Pee-Wee Herman fan, which is just fantastic:-)
Anyway, just imagine how much American streets would have to be re-engineered to support such a rich breadth of traffic. If Segways were to catch on in Amsterdam, maybe they could share that bike lane on either side of the street, or that mini sidewalk next to the parked cars could be converted for Segway-only traffic. Either way though, they have the basic framework such that a vehicle like this could find a niche somewhere. That isn't the case in any American city I've been to. If we ever bother to build streets as wide as the ones I saw in Amsterdam, they almost always end up being used for three or four lanes of cars
It's news to me because I've read all about Sinclair based on tipoffs from mailing list discussions with people in the UK (Americans have generally never heard of Sinclair, the C5, or Sinclair's computers). The catch though is that all the stories I've read about Sinclair to date have been written in the past tense, with a note of sadness about how he was this mad, failed genius back in the 80s.
To be honest, until 10 minutes ago I thought the poor guy was dead.
<pseudo-ed-wood> Sinclair? Ain't he dead? </pseudo-ed-wood>
(cf. <real-ed-wood> Lugosi? Ain't he dead? </real-ed-wood>)
So for me the good news here is that Sinclair is alive & well clearly Not Dead:-)
In its judgment of 25 November 1968, the court declared that it was not competent in Roy of Sealand's case as it could not exert any jurisdiction outside of British national territory. This is the first de facto recognition of the Principality of Sealand.
Actually, by definition, this sounds like the first de jure recognition, which is an important distinction. "De facto" implies that something is generally accepted but indicates that the matter is not codified by law; "de jure" means that the legal system has recognized the matter as well. The latter is much stronger, and it looks to me as though the British courts have with this decision created a valid legal precedent for Sealand's independence. If they'd just thrown the case out of court then the matter would still be "de facto", but they went further, and the distinction is relevant.
President Darl McBride: [to RedHat] Hello?... Ah... I can't hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?... Oh-ho, that's much better.... yeah... huh... yes... Fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri.... Clear and plain and coming through fine.... I'm coming through fine, too, eh?... Good, then... well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine.... Good.... Well, it's good that you're fine and... and I'm fine.... I agree with you, it's great to be fine.... a-ha-ha-ha-ha... Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Suit.... The Suit, Dmitri.... The legal suit!... Well now, what happened is... ah... one of our legal staff, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head... you know... just a little... funny. And, ah... he went and did a silly thing.... Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his staff... to attack your industry... Ah... Well, let me finish, Dmitri.... Let me finish, Dmitri.... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?!... Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri?... Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?... *Of course* I like to speak to you!... *Of course* I like to say hello!... Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened... It's a friendly call. Of course it's a friendly call.... Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even got it.... They will not reach their courts for at least another year.... I am... I am positive, Dmitri.... Listen, I've been all over this with your legal representative. It is not a trick.... Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your legal staff a complete run-down on the complaints, the allegations, and the insinuations systems of the lawsuits.... Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we're unable to recall the suits, then... I'd say that, ah... well, ah... we're just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri.... I know they're our boys.... All right, well listen now. Who should we call?... Who should we call, Dmitri? The... wha-whe, the People... you, surprised, you faded away there.... The People's Free Software Foundation.... Where is that, Dmitri?... In Boston.... Right.... Yes.... Oh, you'll call them first, will you?... Uh-huh... Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri?... Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Boston information.... Ah-ah-eh-uhm-hm... I'm surprised, too, Dmitri.... I'm very surprised.... *All right*, you're more surprised than I am, but I am as surprised as well.... I am as surprised as you are, Dmitri! Don't say that you're more surprised than I am, because I'm capable of being just as surprised as you are.... So we're both surprised, all right?!... All right.
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It sounds like you didn't hear that it is happening.
We hit a point a few years ago where the average computer had more than enough horsepower for the average user's needs. As long as you're just using the computer for web surfing, email, and running productivity applications -- and I think it's fair to say that this is a valid description for perhaos 70% of most computer users today (making up a number, but it seems reasonable to me) -- then a computer running, say, a 500mhz x86 processor with 128mb of ram or so should be more than adequate.
All of the speed increases since then are just gravy for such users: their web pages aren't going to load significantly faster, there hasn't been any dramatic changes in productivity suites that would demand more horsepower than that, etc.
So, even though the needs haven't been expanding, the processor power has -- to the point that what cost a couple of thousand dollars in a desktop machine of several years ago can now be purchased for a couple of hundred in a laptop. And that low end modern laptop just might have nice features that weren't available not long ago, such as a DVD-R drive or removable USB memory modules.
I run a dual G4 tower at home, of 2000 vintage. My fiance has a 9 month old Toshiba laptop. My computer was high end at the time it was purchased; hers was an entry level model. I've got more disc space than she does (because I installed two additional hard drives), but the specs on her computer are in every other way faster. For 1/3 the price of what my G4 was when new, I could today buy a very nice iBook that would, again aside from the hard drive, have far better specs across the board.
At this point, I'm having a hard time of thinking of reasons to make my next computer be a desktop. (Well, aside from the G5, but I'm patient enough to consider waiting for G5 laptops :-).
The fact is, a very capable portable machine can be bought now for only a little bit more money than the average low end desktop model. If you're not looking to run a home server or run computationally intensive tasks (games, compiling lots of software, graphics & video editing, etc), there's very little reason not to seriously consider moving to laptops now. They're not much more expensive anymore, and they're more than capable.
Welcome to the 21st century, Yomiko :-)
But Entourage isn't an Outlook Express equivalent, it's an Outlook equivalent.
See, Outlook Express is & always was a mail client, able to speak the major mail protocols: POP3, IMAP4, & SMTP.
Outlook & Entourage, on the other hand, are Exchange server clients that happen to have rudimentary support for POP3 and SMTP, but not IMAP.
Comparing OE to Outlook is about as valid as comparing, say, Safari or IE to Sherlock or Watson: in each case, the former is a general purpose client that can speak the open protocol, while the latter is a special purpose client that uses part of that protocol in a restricted way. One isn't necessarily better or worse than the other, but the important bit is that they are not the same thing.
And that's the real news here: the attempted hijacking of an open protocol. To push the analogy a bit further, how would Mac users feel if Apple were to wait for Safari to get popular enough to crowd out most of the competition, then abandon it and go with Sherlock as their standard web application? While Sherlock provides the "same" access to web content, and in some ways does so in a much nicer interface, Sherlock is much less suitable as an all-purpose tool than the plain old web browser -- but at that point it would be too late.
This is the situation we're looking at now with Outlook/Entourage & Exchange. It is very bad news, because it indicates that Microsoft feels that their position is strong enough to make such a bold move. Let's hope they were wrong.
But dropping the protocol is the story!
If things do go according to my interpretation, then the relevance of open protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP will be diminished, and the end result will be that all non-Microsoft mail software (both client & server) will be crowded out. This is a doomsday scenario, and I don't expect it to be quite that bad, but it seems obvious to me that this is what Microsoft is pushing for.
I think it would have been fair to press them on this angle in the article, as the significance of this is far greater than the mere discontinuation of a particular piece of software. But it sounds like you did put some thought into this, so I'll accept that it was your call to make... :-)
For the curious, there was a fascinating leaked whitepaper on the conversion, dated August 2000, by an [ex-?] Microsoft engineer named David Brooks. It's very good reading, if you have the time and want to understand a bit better how Microsoft is approaching their effort to evangelize their software over Unix.
I've never spent much time with the Windows version, but the old MacOS version was superb, and I know a bunch of very savvy tech folks -- people that were generally of the Linux & Free software persuasion -- that swore by OE/Mac as their favorite mail client.
However, it has been obvious for a while that that software probably didn't have a future. Outlook Express was never updated to be a native OSX application, so you had to run it in Classic mode. That was enough to start turning away users, but I understand that even still it's fairly popular.
But I digress.
If you read between the lines here, it's not just OE that's being dropped. Consider this quote from the article:
In other words, Microsoft saw OE as their IMAP client, and so by dropping OE, they are also abandoning the IMAP mail protocol. In spite of what Mr Conn says, IMAP is a very rich protocol: it allows you to maintain multiple mail folders on the server, it allows you to keep your mail client configuration on the server, and in principle it allows you to store arbitrary files on the server.
All of this allows the user to have great mobility: leave the office and you can have all the same data available at home, or at school, or while travelling. All of this, in other words, is open competition for Exchange.
This isn't just abandoning OE, this is vendor lock-in. Microsoft is trying to steer us towards a world where you have two choices for mail access: get a Passport & sign up for MSN Hotmail, or buy a copy of Office and use Outlook to connect to your corporate or ISP provided Exchange server.
There is no room for open protocols in this worldview, and so no room for alternative servers (Sendmail, Postfix, Qmail, Exim) or clients (Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Pine, Mutt, Eudora, etc).
The death of an open protocol is the real headline here, but both the journalist & the story submitter seem to have missed it.
I think you've about nailed it though: while there are a lot of valid criteria for selecting a good filesystem (security, permissions, metadata, etc), one of them in this case has to be portability, and without the help of third party software, no version of Windows has support for anything other than FAT* or NTFS. And while NTFS isn't such a bad filesystem, incomplete support for NTFS's security mechanisms has meant that there are few if any non-Windows drivers that can both read and write the format. Maybe, as you say, Panter will have this, but that still leaves some maturing on the Linux side.
My best idea -- which maybe isn't viable to the original "anonymous reader" -- is to let the single partition requirement slip. If the drive has one or two FAT32 partitions, that can meet the portability requirement. Then a more advanced filesystem can be used for OSX/Linux interchange. I know you have more flexibility if you just need to support those two, but I'm not sure what your best options are. OSX will let you use either HFS+ (modernized version of the old MacOS filesystem) or UFS (Unix FileSystem, which AFAIK is also what the *BSDs use. UFS might be a pretty good choice then -- it should be mountable on not only OSX & Linux, but also Solaris, BSD, Irix, and other *nix variants. I don't know what support OSX has for ext2, ReiserFS etc, but if it isn't there already then the architecture of the system is such that adding third party support should in theory be easier than adding any other drivers to Windows.
Or for that matter, compare them to IBM...
Any nitwit sluggish enough to prefer POP mail isn't fit to serve as president of a POS Ford Pinto, nevermind be POTUS & technocrat leader of the free world.
A better question in a similar vein could involve SMTP: does the candidate in question recognize that spam is a legitimate problem to 'net users, and what efforts would she sponsor to address the problem? The answer to such a question could be a fascinating insight into how she feels societal problems should be addressed: should we try to legislate the problem away, knowing that spam transmitted from other jurisdictions (Asia, Africa, etc) would continue regardless of US law, or should we find a way to let the markets correct the problem? If the markets won't fix themselves, as so far they have failed to do, then can we stimulate a technological solution? Would the candidate be willing to invest R&D into coming up to a successor to SMTP & related protocols? Or would the candidate take a more laissez faire approach, and not see spam as a problem in the first place? Any technically savvy candidate could have a wide variety of insightful commentaries in this vein.
POP or IMAP though, that's just dumb. What kind of moron doesn't prefer IMAP? :-)
Not to say that that Jesse Ventura did such a bad job or anything, but come on now -- two wrongs don't make a right.
In seriousness, this race is so fractured that anyone, even a computer geek, could end up winning. With that in mind, and with the nature of this circus in mind, wouldn't you be just a bit ashamed to win? The aftermath of this race is going to be nasty; the winner of the race is likely to be even more of an electoral loser than GWB was in 2000. The nation never got a proper reconciliation after that fiasco, but California will deserve one this time around. How do you intend to pull your fair state back together after this mess?
:-)
Q: How is American beer like sex in a canoe?
A: They're both fucking close to water.
*ahem*
heh heh heh, thats awesome :)
:-)
Of course, it doesn't hurt that one of Peter Sellars' characters is already named Mandrake :-)
Cute idea though :)
I still think that electronic voting systems as currently being considered are attacking the wrong problem. We want fast, accurate counting. We need the system to be auditable, though this isn't always discussed. It seems to me that we could achieve this by having a traditional paper ballot of some kind, and have technological systems to automatically tally the votes.
This is how standardized tests like the SAT have been scored for decades now, and it has a lot of virtues going for it: the original documents are preservable & trustworthy, the counting technology is fast & presumably reliable, tampering should be pretty obvious, etc. I don't see why this reasonably well tested technique isn't at the forefront of most e-voting proposals floating around today. There may well be better approaches, but crap like the Diebold approach are not among them.
The nice thing about this idea is that it doesn't need to involve much of a process change from how things are already done. All you're doing is switching the paper ballot the user receives with some kind of "fill in the bubbles" form and then speeding up the offline processing of the forms after the ballots close for the day. There should be few if any chances for fraud or error that weren't there already, which seems to meet a kind of "first do no harm" principle that seems necessary to me.
Whenever I've voted (three different jurisdictions to date), there has always been a series of stations that voters have to pass through: [1] check in, [2] take a ballot (optional, depending on the voting technology), [3] enter a booth to vote, [4] deposit the ballot in some kind of tallying machine (again, optional depending on the technology), [5] check out.
If enough technical intelligence were added to this process, then figuring out who voted for what could be reduced to a fairly predictable traffic analysis problem. If you vote mid-day, when the lines tend to be short, it wouldn't be hard to pin down that voter John Doe checked in at 1:17pm, that a vote for candidates A, B, & C was recorded at booth 5 at 1:19pm, and that John Doe checked out at 1:20pm. Guess what, you've just figured out who John Doe voted for.
In the June 2003 issue of Cryptogram, Bruce Schneier pointed out that:
One of my big fears with all these electronic voting schemes is that they will also make it easier to get around "secret" ballots.
If electronic voting ever becomes the norm, I too want there to be an old-fashioned paper audit trail. On the other hand, that paper trail has to be done in a sufficiently anonymous way, and I don't have an answer for how to implement that. I do however appreciate that getting it right isn't likely to be easy, and that bugs in the system will cause serious problems in the first few elections in which such systems are employed (fraud, buying votes, unaudited software errors, crackers, etc).
Flava Flav was right: the hype for anything is almost always wrong, and the bigger it is, the bigger the letdown.
That doesn't mean that the Segway itself isn't a great idea, or that the idle predictions that the widespread adoption of such a machine could reshape the way cities are built.
Look at what another commenter noted about the bike city in Holland, for example. I've been to Amsterdam, and even there the city has evolved into a place where multiple forms of transportation co-exist. Many of the major streets are 100 feet across, with multiple channels for different modes of transportation. The widest streets were laid out something like this (arrows indicate direction that traffic is permitted to flow, which may or may not be bidirectional):
if you add it up, the whole thing ends up taking something like 40 meters, or ~120 feet. (It's been a couple of years since my visit, so the widths are rough estimates, but they seem roughly correct to me -- corrections welcome :-).
Additionally, some streets had wide canals for boats to go back & forth, but most of these streets dropped the rail & bike lanes, and the overall width was generally similar to the non-canal streets. For streets not wide enough for all the lanes above, different lanes would be dropped at random: there's always be sidwwalks, but there might or might not be car lanes, rail tracks, bike lanes, canals, etc.
Also, as an aside, everyone with a bike seemed to be a Pee-Wee Herman fan, which is just fantastic :-)
Anyway, just imagine how much American streets would have to be re-engineered to support such a rich breadth of traffic. If Segways were to catch on in Amsterdam, maybe they could share that bike lane on either side of the street, or that mini sidewalk next to the parked cars could be converted for Segway-only traffic. Either way though, they have the basic framework such that a vehicle like this could find a niche somewhere. That isn't the case in any American city I've been to. If we ever bother to build streets as wide as the ones I saw in Amsterdam, they almost always end up being used for three or four lanes of cars
What's that line about predicting the futur
To be honest, until 10 minutes ago I thought the poor guy was dead.
So for me the good news here is that Sinclair is alive & well clearly Not Dead :-)
Actually, by definition, this sounds like the first de jure recognition, which is an important distinction. "De facto" implies that something is generally accepted but indicates that the matter is not codified by law; "de jure" means that the legal system has recognized the matter as well. The latter is much stronger, and it looks to me as though the British courts have with this decision created a valid legal precedent for Sealand's independence. If they'd just thrown the case out of court then the matter would still be "de facto", but they went further, and the distinction is relevant.
(IANAL yadda yadda yadda)