One thing that I like is the auto-power off stuff. I have a wireless laptop mouse from Logitech, and the power switch on it is probably the best feature on it; batteries seem to last forever when compared with a regular wireless mouse.
I hope the auto-poweroff stuff is just as good -- then I don't have to remind everyone to turn my mouse off if they stop my pc.
It sounds like an insurance plan; charge a small monthly fee and most of the people rarely if ever need lawyers.
That is definitely true... What I fear a bit about this system is that people are more likely to get lawyers involved in issues where they wouldn't consider it if they didn't have this kind of subscription.
Ultimately, when lawyers get involved in a conflict situation everybody loses (except for the lawyers).
Actually: I do run a small business and I have my own lawyer looking after things -- yet I don't need any kind of monthly fee for his services.
Contracts to be read/written
Whenever we need to deal with contracts, my lawyer will advise (and if required: create/update) as will my accountant and charge their respective hourly fees.
permit applications filed for building/renovating/improving
You need a licenced architect for dealing with permit applications, not a lawyer.
property management (a huge legal specialty)
Provided you're in that particular business. If it's just a regular lease, again my lawyer will advise on the validity/caveats for his hourly rates.
And believe me, the same system exists in europe and in many ways its much more rigid and arcane with the rules to be followed about labor and property management.
Everything that has to do with labor is contracted out to a social agency (translation?) that will manage the whole shebang (contracts, regulations, payroll, taxes) for a small fee per employee per month. If there's any kind of legal trouble with an (ex-)employee there's still my own lawyer (or one of his collegues specializing in social laws) to represent me and my firm.
A small company should be represented by a lawyer that knows the ins and outs of your business and has a working relationship with your business, not by somebody who happens to have a law degree and is the one that happens to pick up the phone whenever you dial in with an issue. I'll only get in touch with my lawyer when it is absolutely required (expensive bugger, that man;-) and most of that time it is just for legal advice -- by somebody who happens to know me and the company, the way we work and our full history.
Only once I had to actually let my lawyer pursuit, and only after I was convinced that:
there was no other way to get the issue resolved
the chance for a successful outcome was great enough to risk a lengthy litigation
(even then, my lawyer managed to resolve the case without official legal actions).
But no, please, continue ranting and further demonstrate your lack of knowledge about running a business.
If you would be running a small business, you would know that legal advice should come from someone who knows you and your company. You would also know that problematic situations should as much as possible be resolved directly with the other party, especially if they happen to be customers. Once both sides get lawyers involved, you can be pretty sure that a quick solution is off the table.
Especially in a small business, any money that is a stake in a litigation case that could take years to unwind is money that you're not getting. I've seen a small company go down the drain because the manager refused to resolve a problematic situation with some of his customers amicably. Instead, he opted to threaten them with a lawsuit; after which each of the aforementioned customers got a lawyer of their own and all goodwill disappeared. Last thing I know, the liquidator of that company is still pursuing this in court.
The point is that over here (Europe) you don't need that much legal counsel (yet). If you really require it, you go to a lawyer and pay whatever hourly fees there are to be paid.
This way, people only go to a lawyer as a last resort. With a monthly fee, I would imagine that people are more inclined to get a lawyer involved since they have already paid for them anyway.
I don't know how you see it, but imho when small businesses need to get lawyers involved in a dispute they're screwed anyhow.
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
Actually, some (or a lot according to your calculations) of that heat will get lost in transmission. And once this thing is up and running, I can imagine that a lot of the current pollutors (coal plants,...) will shut down.
More added bonuses: should create a whole lot of jobs and lessen budgets for "defense". My guess is that the overal picture will be pretty positive.
in stead of a blatant attempt at cencorship, much like seizing Indymedia's servers?
Seizing servers without a judicial verdict is kind of iffy
As far as I can see, this is what happened:
Some moron commits a crime that is serious enough to have the police actually investigate it.
Somebody (who may or may not be the aforementioned moron) boasts about it on the Indymedia forums
The police find out about this and ask Indymedia to get the relevant logs to investigate further
Indymedia does not keep logs (or does not want to hand them over), and tells the police that it won't hand anything over
The police get a search warrant from a judge and seize the equipment to investigate themselves.
Indymedia mutters something about "journalistic privileges" and starts a ruckus.
If it actually happened like this, I don't see any fault at the side of the police for this particular incident. They are investigating a crime, have contacted Indymedia directly about this and ultimately have got a judge's approval for searching the equipment themselves.
I know you were just venting and ranting, but it seemed to me that you're being forced to support something that you don't really know well enough. Training budgets are always the first to get cut... Anyhow, while this'll probably won't change your mind, it may very well help you to scratch some personal itches...
The first thing you see is a huge Lotus Notes splash screen.
Lotus notes is started by a little executable stub that does three things: 1) show the splash screen, 2) check for other running notes processes and/or stuff that was left behind by a previous crash to make sure you don't have two concurrent clients running 3) launch the actual notes program.
Update the program shortcut to use nlnotes.exe instead of notes.exe and you'll immediately skep to number 3, no splash screens required... While this is not a company-wide solution, it may scratch your personal itch.
One of the things I would like this form to do is to generate a richtext read-only version of the report in the document, a kind of "preview" feature.
This is definitely not a problem: Lotus Notes Designer is a powerful RAD tool; and as with so many tools it is relatively easy tot get going with it once you get the way Notes works (documents/views/forms/...). Almost everybody can do some basic stuff when they get into it, but there is a whole lot more than just basics that you can do with it that you can't just learn in a couple of weeks/months. Creating a "preview" version of a document you created can be easily accomplished using either LotusScript or Java using the API.
I have no idea what Ctrl-E does, so I chose Cancel to continue editing my document
Ctrl-E switches the current document from "read mode" to "edit mode" and vice versa (also see my tough on training budgets). Unless there is specific code for dealing with this within a database/application you'll be always prompted to save your data if you changed anything.
The problem you had seems to be with the code which is specific for the mail application, where there deal with this in custom code instead of handling the notes client deal with this. If this is the case, you should file a bug report with IBM/Lotus since it is not the way it should work.
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones). Yes, I've heard about Note's replication and security features, which are at best comparable to a properly configured MS Exchange environment.
First off, Lotus Notes is not an RDBMS and does not claim to be one: it is a document store that happens to have a very good security and replication layer. You should not use it to perform tasks that should be performed by an RDBMS system. Don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
About the replication and security features: this is were Lotus Notes really shines. Saying it is 'comparable' to a properly configured MS Exchange environment does not do it justice, by far. It is one of the very few enterprise "products" for wich security was not just an afterthought but is one of the core parts on which the entire platform is built. Exchange/Outlook doesn't come even close. You should really read up on Notes security if you're in a position to support it.
I can imagine that you have major gripes with the Lotus Notes UI (it very much sucks in a lot of ways), and the look and feel of the mail application. Consider going to openntf.org (the open source notes site), where they have a different mail template with a UI that should be a lot better if you like MS and/or Outlook.
The sooner the IT world can kill off Lotus Notes and expunge it from the realm of corporate applications, the better.
There simply is no competitor for Notes at this point in time. Nothing that comes even close that can do what Notes can do, even with IBM pulling OS/2-style marketing for Lotus.
What I find most amusing is how my original post about how Cuba's human rights issues should not be underestimated results in so many responses about the US. Why is that? I'm not an American, and I didn't say anything about America except to say that I thought the American media was too soft on Cuba.
Maybe we're thinking you are too soft on the US (or American media, for that matter)?
Nobody is denying that Cuba has some serious human rights issues. Most of us are trying to make a point that the US, the glorious land of the free, is pulling some of the same shit that you'd only expect to happen in a banana republic.
It's not a black/white subject: Cuba's not all bad; in the given circumstances they manage to pull off some pretty impressive stuff (healthcare, education). The US embargo on Cuba is serving nothing and nobody, other than perhaps keeping the current regime in position longer than they should have been without the embargo...
They're not imprisoning ordinary American citizens who haven't committed a crime. What's your point?
Well.. They're imprisoning citizens of 40+ different countries without pressing charges and denying them a free and fair trial. What's the difference with Cuba?
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime. Police are using this power to imprison people who are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination - it's a purely repressive tactic, used to intimidate and control.
So... what exactly are the Americans doing in Guantanamo Bay?
You seem to be confusing the recently announced Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (which is already shipping) with the long beforehand hyped Seagate Momentus stuff.
However, I'm more annoyed by your fundmentalistic Anti-Americanism. Have you spent any time in this country?
Ironically, we non-Americans generally don't care about local American politics or the way of life in the USA. We're not really interested in your local politics. We are very much interested in (and worried about) your foreign policy and the impact of the Bush administration on the rest of the globe and our lives in particular.
In a couple of years, the USA evolved (that's evolution theory right there for ya;-) from a friendly allied superpower, into a not-so friendly superpower that acts unilaterally and touts the "either you're with us, or you're against us" mantra. The "anti-americanism" you're experiencing is partly caused by the stance of your government towards us.
When I am in the USA, the perception I get are from the people I meet and work with, the places I see and the things I do.
When I am outside of the USA, that same perception is 95% based on whatever your president and his cronies are up to that particular day. A lot of us don't like that, and it shows in the media.
Just so you know: we don't dislike every individual American (why should we), but the words and actions off your (re-elected!) president surely rub off.
Dubya is just the chauffeur of the American limo. You all are sitting in the back, and have the right to replace him when he's driving you guys somewhere where you don't like to go.
They just are sharing diffs or telling you what the changes are. So what. Do they really have to?
Since khtml is LGPL, they are obliged to release the source; even though technically they only have to release it on request to anybody who also has the binary.
The cooperation is one way, Apple takes khtml and modifies it and makes it better
Actually: Apple started out with getting a lot of code from the KDE team, so I wouldn't call it "one way". I can imagine that they are still integrating bugfixes/features that the KDE team is doing on khtml.
its up to the khtml team to figure out what they did. That's what diff was for I though.
Technically, that's possible. But due to the sheer size of the code and the fact that Apple isn't providing any supplementary information it is very difficult to integrate any changes without a lot o manual work. Apple's changes also include (understandeably) a lot of non-portable code, which just makes it harder.
The gripe of the khtml guys is pretty simple: Apple is providing the required minimum, which makes it hard for the khtml team to integrate any changes. If Apple would cooperate just a little bit more, both parties would gain in the end.
On top of this, a lot of end users seem to think that Apple is to be credited for a lot of development in khtml while in reality there's a lot of work done by the khtml team. A lot of OSS developers are doing what they do (partly) because of the recognition. Currently they're not getting that much...
because the text was "too small" on the high res display
A lot of people don't know that you can easily adapt the font settings for the density. The text size of slashdot is the same on this LCD and another lower resolution LCD. Only are the characters a lot clearer on this screen:-).**
Do you know a 22" LCD that can do 3840x2400? (200dpi)
IIyama sells an LCD monitor which is primarily focused on the CAD target market (hence the $9K MSRP tag). See here.
Not exactly a budget solution, but it's possible.
** Websites that use a fixed-pixel font size of course not included...
I'm typing this on a 1600x1200 15" LCD, so they definitely do exist. (If you're wondering: it's attached to my nearly 3yo Dell Laptop).
Without DVI on a CRT, bumping to higher resolutions also increases fuzziness due to the analog connection. For my digital photos I have a 22" iiyama doing 1600x1200 using a quality BNC cable on a Matrox card (which incidently still has one of the best DACs, despite being 8 years old!). While my LCD can't touch the color reproduction of my CRT, the sharpness of the image is equal or better than the CRT.
And if you want to go really hardcore on resolution, a (really bloody expensive;-) LCD is the way to go... Do you know a 22" CRT that can do 3840 x 2400?
Actually, this was quoted in the linked article: "The explosive potential in a fully charged 80cf aluminum SCUBA cylinder is approximately 1,300,000 foot pounds -- enough to lift a typical fire department hook-and-ladder truck over 60 feet in the air!"
If the tap of a scuba bottle shoots off, it will just fly like a rocket... and it better not be aimed at your head;-).
Energy density on these things may not be that high, but they can release all of it in a fraction of second. On top of that, if it goes, it will send fragments of the tank like shrapnell all over the place. I wouldn't want to be sitting in the car where such a tank explodes.
Or more detailed: I wouldn't want to be sitting in any car where anything explodes (outside the confines of the explosion engine, of course;-)
Does the store owner really care that it's crowded? No! That's great business!
Not if the "consumers" are only paying for one drink and then staying for hours on end, leeching from your internet connection and (even worse) hogging table space.
While I agree that you shouldn't be rushing anybody out, I can understand that after a reasonable amount of time after your last consumption your welcome officially "runs out".
Most everyday people do this by themselves (either they consume something or they leave), but there are categories of people (e.g.: cash-strapped students) that want to have their cake and eat it too.
Mind you that the owner of the bar is not chasing anybody away: students are still free to stay while reading a book; he just wants to put a reasonable limit on the free internet access. Students that don't have too much cash and need free internet can always go to the library without having to consume anything at all.
IMHO 1 hour of free internet access after every consumption would be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that I like is the auto-power off stuff. I have a wireless laptop mouse from Logitech, and the power switch on it is probably the best feature on it; batteries seem to last forever when compared with a regular wireless mouse.
I hope the auto-poweroff stuff is just as good -- then I don't have to remind everyone to turn my mouse off if they stop my pc.
Ultimately, when lawyers get involved in a conflict situation everybody loses (except for the lawyers).
A small company should be represented by a lawyer that knows the ins and outs of your business and has a working relationship with your business, not by somebody who happens to have a law degree and is the one that happens to pick up the phone whenever you dial in with an issue. I'll only get in touch with my lawyer when it is absolutely required (expensive bugger, that man ;-) and most of that time it is just for legal advice -- by somebody who happens to know me and the company, the way we work and our full history.
Only once I had to actually let my lawyer pursuit, and only after I was convinced that:
- there was no other way to get the issue resolved
- the chance for a successful outcome was great enough to risk a lengthy litigation
(even then, my lawyer managed to resolve the case without official legal actions). If you would be running a small business, you would know that legal advice should come from someone who knows you and your company. You would also know that problematic situations should as much as possible be resolved directly with the other party, especially if they happen to be customers. Once both sides get lawyers involved, you can be pretty sure that a quick solution is off the table.Especially in a small business, any money that is a stake in a litigation case that could take years to unwind is money that you're not getting. I've seen a small company go down the drain because the manager refused to resolve a problematic situation with some of his customers amicably. Instead, he opted to threaten them with a lawsuit; after which each of the aforementioned customers got a lawyer of their own and all goodwill disappeared. Last thing I know, the liquidator of that company is still pursuing this in court.
This way, people only go to a lawyer as a last resort. With a monthly fee, I would imagine that people are more inclined to get a lawyer involved since they have already paid for them anyway.
I don't know how you see it, but imho when small businesses need to get lawyers involved in a dispute they're screwed anyhow.
How litigious can a society get, when lawyers are just one more utility service. Boggles the mind, really.
More added bonuses: should create a whole lot of jobs and lessen budgets for "defense". My guess is that the overal picture will be pretty positive.
- Some moron commits a crime that is serious enough to have the police actually investigate it.
- Somebody (who may or may not be the aforementioned moron) boasts about it on the Indymedia forums
- The police find out about this and ask Indymedia to get the relevant logs to investigate further
- Indymedia does not keep logs (or does not want to hand them over), and tells the police that it won't hand anything over
- The police get a search warrant from a judge and seize the equipment to investigate themselves.
- Indymedia mutters something about "journalistic privileges" and starts a ruckus.
If it actually happened like this, I don't see any fault at the side of the police for this particular incident. They are investigating a crime, have contacted Indymedia directly about this and ultimately have got a judge's approval for searching the equipment themselves.Update the program shortcut to use nlnotes.exe instead of notes.exe and you'll immediately skep to number 3, no splash screens required... While this is not a company-wide solution, it may scratch your personal itch. This is definitely not a problem: Lotus Notes Designer is a powerful RAD tool; and as with so many tools it is relatively easy tot get going with it once you get the way Notes works (documents/views/forms/...). Almost everybody can do some basic stuff when they get into it, but there is a whole lot more than just basics that you can do with it that you can't just learn in a couple of weeks/months. Creating a "preview" version of a document you created can be easily accomplished using either LotusScript or Java using the API. Ctrl-E switches the current document from "read mode" to "edit mode" and vice versa (also see my tough on training budgets). Unless there is specific code for dealing with this within a database/application you'll be always prompted to save your data if you changed anything.
The problem you had seems to be with the code which is specific for the mail application, where there deal with this in custom code instead of handling the notes client deal with this. If this is the case, you should file a bug report with IBM/Lotus since it is not the way it should work. First off, Lotus Notes is not an RDBMS and does not claim to be one: it is a document store that happens to have a very good security and replication layer. You should not use it to perform tasks that should be performed by an RDBMS system. Don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
About the replication and security features: this is were Lotus Notes really shines. Saying it is 'comparable' to a properly configured MS Exchange environment does not do it justice, by far. It is one of the very few enterprise "products" for wich security was not just an afterthought but is one of the core parts on which the entire platform is built. Exchange/Outlook doesn't come even close. You should really read up on Notes security if you're in a position to support it.
I can imagine that you have major gripes with the Lotus Notes UI (it very much sucks in a lot of ways), and the look and feel of the mail application. Consider going to openntf.org (the open source notes site), where they have a different mail template with a UI that should be a lot better if you like MS and/or Outlook.
There simply is no competitor for Notes at this point in time. Nothing that comes even close that can do what Notes can do, even with IBM pulling OS/2-style marketing for Lotus.(Good thing the missus isn't reading slashdot ;-)
Nobody is denying that Cuba has some serious human rights issues. Most of us are trying to make a point that the US, the glorious land of the free, is pulling some of the same shit that you'd only expect to happen in a banana republic.
It's not a black/white subject: Cuba's not all bad; in the given circumstances they manage to pull off some pretty impressive stuff (healthcare, education). The US embargo on Cuba is serving nothing and nobody, other than perhaps keeping the current regime in position longer than they should have been without the embargo...
You seem to be confusing the recently announced Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (which is already shipping) with the long beforehand hyped Seagate Momentus stuff.
In a couple of years, the USA evolved (that's evolution theory right there for ya ;-) from a friendly allied superpower, into a not-so friendly superpower that acts unilaterally and touts the "either you're with us, or you're against us" mantra. The "anti-americanism" you're experiencing is partly caused by the stance of your government towards us.
When I am in the USA, the perception I get are from the people I meet and work with, the places I see and the things I do.
When I am outside of the USA, that same perception is 95% based on whatever your president and his cronies are up to that particular day. A lot of us don't like that, and it shows in the media.
Just so you know: we don't dislike every individual American (why should we), but the words and actions off your (re-elected!) president surely rub off.
Dubya is just the chauffeur of the American limo. You all are sitting in the back, and have the right to replace him when he's driving you guys somewhere where you don't like to go.
The gripe of the khtml guys is pretty simple: Apple is providing the required minimum, which makes it hard for the khtml team to integrate any changes. If Apple would cooperate just a little bit more, both parties would gain in the end.
On top of this, a lot of end users seem to think that Apple is to be credited for a lot of development in khtml while in reality there's a lot of work done by the khtml team. A lot of OSS developers are doing what they do (partly) because of the recognition. Currently they're not getting that much...
- Lemmings -- I love these little critters. What was great about the gameplay is that there is no exact correct way to solve it.
- The Seventh Guest -- one of the first games that really used the "new" CD-ROM media. (Who remembers the MPC recommendations
:-)
- Myst -- you're directly immersed in the game with nearly zero hints/tips/documentation. You're forced to discover the game.
- Doom -- First pseudo-3D immersive FPS. Made me get my first Pentium-66.
- Descent -- First real-3D game engine which.
- Quake -- Real 3D FPS action, written by Carmack et al. 'nuff said.
I haven't kept up with games after that. (I guess that's what getting older does to youYou may want to get the European train services, you definitely don't want to get the UK train services (which is where this service is implemented).
Not exactly a budget solution, but it's possible.
** Websites that use a fixed-pixel font size of course not included...
Without DVI on a CRT, bumping to higher resolutions also increases fuzziness due to the analog connection. For my digital photos I have a 22" iiyama doing 1600x1200 using a quality BNC cable on a Matrox card (which incidently still has one of the best DACs, despite being 8 years old!). While my LCD can't touch the color reproduction of my CRT, the sharpness of the image is equal or better than the CRT. ;-) LCD is the way to go... Do you know a 22" CRT that can do 3840 x 2400?
And if you want to go really hardcore on resolution, a (really bloody expensive
If the tap of a scuba bottle shoots off, it will just fly like a rocket... and it better not be aimed at your head ;-).
Energy density on these things may not be that high, but they can release all of it in a fraction of second. On top of that, if it goes, it will send fragments of the tank like shrapnell all over the place. I wouldn't want to be sitting in the car where such a tank explodes. ;-)
Or more detailed: I wouldn't want to be sitting in any car where anything explodes (outside the confines of the explosion engine, of course
While I agree that you shouldn't be rushing anybody out, I can understand that after a reasonable amount of time after your last consumption your welcome officially "runs out".
Most everyday people do this by themselves (either they consume something or they leave), but there are categories of people (e.g.: cash-strapped students) that want to have their cake and eat it too.
Mind you that the owner of the bar is not chasing anybody away: students are still free to stay while reading a book; he just wants to put a reasonable limit on the free internet access. Students that don't have too much cash and need free internet can always go to the library without having to consume anything at all.
IMHO 1 hour of free internet access after every consumption would be a perfectly reasonable solution.