Of all the areas to attack them on, the Media Player is a strange one.
Firstly, it is probably the best out of Real Player and Quicktime so really I cannot see anyone wanting to swap Media Player for a crappy RP which pops up every two minutes and basically complains if you don't use it or upgrade it! Quicktime isn't really a big player in any event on the PC for any formats really. So, even if they do succeed in getting Media Player as something you have to 'opt in' to installing I'd guess that the experienced users won't use RP or QT.
Secondly, Media Player is integral to Windows - certainly XP. From the Windows Explorer you can preview media, view films, burn CD's etc etc with it. Ok, I suppose you could take out this functionality but as someone who uses it a lot I don't see why -I- should have my OS experience reduced just so I can get Real Player telling me I have messages every few hours.
Thirdly, as I think some of the other posters have said, there is a gradual blurring between PCs and TVs/hi fi nowadays and it is realistic to be able to have a media player as part of the OS.
I know I will be shot down for this, but the target market for Windows doesn't want to have to select which media player they want - most people won't have a clue anyway - they just want to go to 'My Music' and click on the MP3 and listen to some music whilst they browse the web or whatever.
They certainly have abused their monopoly, but this is just a typical EU style charge (I live in England). A lot of hot air, lots of reports, a good idea but poorly enacted.
Microsoft can afford to ignore this, and they'll just pay the fine and 'look at how we can open up' and do nothing.
The EU cannot stop them trading in the EU at all! Anyone who seriously thinks that is plain daft! I mean, I guess around 95%+ of PC's etc run MS software and if they have to stop trading it would have such a serious impact on business it simply won't happen!
I think the Sun vs Linux case is one in which the costs of going from Solaris to Linux in terms of hardware and training isn't that. Certainly I can see why spending a few thousand less by going for Linux over Sun.
However, as for Linux "destroying" Microsoft, the case isn't as clear as you simplistically state. There is a far greater difference between a Red Hat/SuSE and 2000 server than Solaris.
Knowing a few electricians (very handy!), I can tell you that I think it's a real misnomer that they earn a lot of money. Sure, they probably earn as much as a good IT guy but they HAVE to work nights and weekends to make up the cash. I mean, if I wanted to work through all my sparetime I would no doubt earn a fortune but I value by spare time and have the option of not having to continually work in sometimes dangerous conditions.
I personally can't wait until all the money grabbers who came into IT to get a load of cash p**s off to be electricians, brickies and plumbers. Things might not be great now, but they'll pick up, and when it does the UK WILL need IT experts, coders, support people etc.
I love IT and I will not leave it, even if the pay goes down a bit.
I work in northern England and we're still finding loads of work - sometimes too much.
To say that someone who is writing in Java is not writing a "serious program" is wrong. If I wrote a program for a mobile phone that interacted with an Exchange server, imported XML documents from your company intranet and performed some processing before presenting the result etc is not a trivial matter, but I do not need to necessarily to understand the low level details - which Java hides really well.
What it boils down to is...
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
... money. Plain and simple.
When a lot of big companies start seeing a potential to see their profits tumble they will react agressively to protect their interests. Is it any wonder that the media companies are worried that millions of people around the world are sharing millions of music tracks and films? Are the software companies worried about people downloading software? The answer is yes.
Do such companies want to control the internet? Undoutedly. Can you imagine the potential for a company like Disney to broadcast Disney.tv to every household on the planet with an internet enabled tv? Wow... you are talking serious money there, but people can already do it - for free at the moment.
I think a lot of these people identify the internet as this 'Holy Grail' to make billions, if only they had the final, killer ingredient. Whilst this potential exists, where there's money there's immense power and this power will try to bend, distort and manouever the internet as best it can towards its vested interests.
It's an interesting though, but the overwhelming thought I got through reading through their tricks is that no matter what a spam filter will be trained to catch, the spammers will adapt.
If an email is sent in plain text, then they would do tricks like write words like loan as financ etc, to just a basic example.
Sadly, whether we like it or not, HTML email -in some form- is here to stay.
Firstly, the techniques spammers will use to display the text in the email so that the end user will be able to view the text in the email.
Secondly, it demonstrates how using the above approach they are trying to trick spam stopping techniques from working. For example, instead of having a email titled "Free viagra" you could write it as "F*r*e*e V*i*a*g*a*r*a" in an attempt to stop a spam stopper from spotting Viagara as easily in the title. In the body of the email you could write the html in such a way that decifering any words is quite tricky, eg writing Viagara as (font size="2")V(font size="2")iaga(font size="2")ra(/font) etc. Certainly to say spotting all variants of 'hiding' such words is not as simple as you might first think.
It certainly gave me an interesting insight into the problem that it is, and how the spammers are trying and continually evolving their techniques to ensure they can carry on.
Re:Java is bad for our industry
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, but I think you are wrong on this one.
There are a LOT of programmers out there with no experience of anything other than C, C++, Visual Basic, Perl etc etc. Just because students are taught Java and industry DEMANDED Java don't blame people for making a lot of money out of it!
Also, why should programming be hard? It shouldn't be. If I can find any tools, languages etc that make my job easier, quicker and less stressful I use them. And if I can be quicker it will be cheaper and if I am quicker and cheaper, I keep my job.
If my boss comes to me with a business problem and it can be solved in a day with Java, as opposed to a couple of days in Perl, VB or whatever then the business will make a decision to go with that.
I agree Sun won't get back it's R&D on Java, but I guess that MS with the.Net framework -will- make money from the Java R&D;)
Re:Don't know about Head First Java, but ...
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Cookbook is a great little book, but it only really provides snippets of code and little examples of how to achieve basic tasks. It does not teach you about Java, about OOP, how to build programs or anything about the differences in things like Applications, Applets or Server Applications etc.
I think you are pretty much right in what you are saying. If you are a F50 then you NEED a rock solid server and Sun is the best around. However, there are probably more people in the smaller companies who just cannot afford the hardware and if you are willing to accept, maybe, a marginally smaller downtime then a Linux box is cheaper handsdown and in the smaller company price is king. There's also the spectre of Windows improving as a server too so they are getting attacked from both ends if you like.
I'd also say that they're problems seem to stem from a lack of marketing too. I keep reading article in the trade press how Linux is making inroads into the market, how it's getting on PDA's, phones - pretty much everything and I also read how MS are improving with their Servers and how.Net is a Java rival. Again, this constant wearing down could give the impression they are losing ground.
But, the key is how many articles is there about Sun? The servers are pretty constant and it seems all the talk of Java is being done by IBM and other companies such as BEA and Oracle. When you have servers as reliable as they do and some great ideas such as Java they should be really pushing themselves as a real innovatively conservative(!) IT company.
There are lots of 'small' content management solutions like Zope, IBuySpy etc but whilst they will work for a 'small' website they just cannot cope when it comes to large (thousands of pages) sites which need full CMS features.
You need to be able to archive HTML, Word, Excel, PDFs, Images, Videos - the list grows and people want to be able to search through videos etc etc.
Zope's great but like many posters have said they just don't work for a large organisation which will rely on a good intranet/website.
From my limited experience, I've found that trusting users with HTML is just a total pain. Granted I was working with people who had no HTML experience but were entering content via a WYSIWYG type interface.
You will get everything from wrong fonts, colours, line breaks and your entire site/intranet will look a mess.
And when it starts to hit you is when your boss says that it doesn't work on a big clients browser (they still use Netscape 4) and that sales want to access the intranet on their PDA's. Using HTML here will just not work.
XML is no 'silver bullet' and I certainly agree that educating 'non web savvy' users to use XML is just doesn't work in real life. They break it, can't figure out why they break it and what happens is the site doesn't get updated but if you write your tools carefully and choose the appropriate software, XML will allow you to use XSL amongst other technologies to get your site working great on IE, Opera, Konqueror, PDA's - whatever.
Once a site gets to a certain stage, simple tools aren't that powerful and you will usually find that managers don't like simple looking UI's - they want Javascripts, Flash, you name it. If your site is being used to promote your company it -needs- to look good.
That's a very valid point, but I would say that if MS gave away the source code for NT4 tomorrow then it would take months before even the real coders would understand it fully, months before they could patch the problems and then test them.
NT4 is about 7(?) years old now and I'd be surprised if many people would be running on RH 5 and expecting support for it, and of those who would be able to code a patch for their own machine? Not many.
Before I get ripped into for this, I will point out I use Windows 2K at work, write programs for.Net framework but use Red Hat at home for my deskto and server.
The 'cost' of Windows is not as straight forward as 'buying' a Windows 2K server license or downloading Red Hat. I know in my area that someone who is a real expert in W2K will cost around £30k/year and I'd have a choice of them, yet the cost for a Red Hat specialist is -far- more expensive. It's more in the £40k region at least, and I'd not have many to choose from. Therefore, the cost of the software is beset by the personnel costs.
Support wise: I agree that there's enough information on the web for RH but also Windows. However, unless your a large organisation you shouldn't rely on a support contract. I'd not hire a £45k Red Hat expert to run the servers and expect him to rely on a support contract.
Documentation? You don't need it really do you? Do I need a manual for C#? SQL Server? Notepad? IE?
Source code: Ok, you get the source code. For me, that's not a selling point. For some it is though, I conceed.
Patches: 2K server is very stable. If you secure a 2K machine and make sure that it's properly patched you're not likely to get into trouble. Sorry, you might not like to hear it but it's true. Badly patched machines - whether Linux, Mac or Windows boxes are badly patched machines.
I don't think that the RH vs Windows is as simple as you make it. I am not a great fan of MS but some of the stuff they are doing is damned impressive - and I use RH.
Sorry uberslack, I wrote that last night after a few beers and I appreciate it is as clear as mud! Please forgive me:)
Ok, all I was trying(!) to say in essence was that you should not -look- small. Make yourself appear a small operation, but not a one person operation.
As someone who has worked at small companies and also at big companies employing one person and small companies, it is easy for the smaller companies to be seen as unreliable and unable to have the resources available to fully support a project.
My tips would be get good quality headed paper, a non-residential business address, maybe a virtual office with a secretary to make sure all your calls are answered and also make you look small but not too small.
Make sure you don't charge to little and take bad jobs just because you are on your own as bad jobs lead to bad reputations.
Finally, don't be too eager to undercharge. I've been in projects where the cheapest quote was the best but management have overruled going for a bigger company as there is simply someone to blame!
I agree it was interesting, and I must admit I thought it was a backward step to be honest!
As someone who's used IIS and Apache a fair bit, one thing I always preferred was the fact that IIS was easier as editing a text file is not as simple as editing a config panel. I am just not sure why they have taken this step when everything else they are doing is based on the MMC.
On the whole though it isn't too bad although I think it may scare a few people at first. Perhaps the most irritating thing is when you make a typo and it won't recognise it in Visual Studio but on the whole, it's fine.
Over reaction by the US and UK
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As a Brit, I am very saddened by what has happened in the last few months.
Nobody will ever try to deny the fact that Saddam is a scumbag and the world will be a better place without him. He is a truly evil, brutal tyrant who cares little for anyone or anything.
Since Sept 11, the US has been on the rampage looking for a head. Bin Laden's head was never found and the next easiest target was Saddam. Bush made it clear from Day 1 that he wanted a war and along with Blair he conjured up a variety of reasons to do so, all of them totally unconvincing.
There is no link with al-Qaeda, there are no chemical weapons, no nuclear weapons.
He has broke UN resolutions, but so have other countries including Israel who have broke more resolutions for longer than Iraq.
However, in order to remove one man and his regime the US/UK are planning one of the biggest military operations seen. This operation is not against a nation, a sizeable or strong army or even a militia. It is remove one man.
We will see a lot of totally innocent civilians die in the coming weeks. Can anyone tell me that blowing up and invading Iraq is going to solve international terrorism? Will the world be a safer place afterwards?
As someone who was caught in two IRA bombs that were planted in Manchester/UK I will tell you that the biggest recruiter for terrorism is violence. The only way you can stop it is by talking, listening and understanding.
Hmmm... putting my cynical hat on: RH are certainly looking like they are going to be the dominant Linux flavour in years to come and -maybe- stand the best chance of making the breakthrough onto the desktop. Certainly the company looks set up to be able to get software on servers, on desktops and provide the support that many IT managers would expect from a large software provider.
However, if I look at RH from a financial standpoint, it would be in their economic interest to make sure that when someone starts to deploy Linux around the workplace that it is not so easy to (say) switch to another flavour as you will lose revenue.
I am a big fan of RH but suspect in the years to come, could (ab)use their position in the Linux world in a similar way to another large OS company!
On the web, a big problem is that the content of the page is mixed in with the formatting. So, this content cannot be displayed easily on a PDA, phone or even across different browsers to an extent.
By separting the content from how it is displayed makes it easier to display it in pretty much any format. By taking a single XML document you could create a page that looks great on Mozilla, great on IE, a WAP enabled phone, Opera, Microwave, Fridge - whatever!
XML is NOT a programming language. It is more like a way of describing data and one MAJOR benefit in my opinion is that it is human as well as machine readable. I can ask my 'pointy haired boss' to make an ammendment to an XML document and he will pretty much be able to read it quite easily.
It has plenty of uses such as a way of sharing data. There is no reason, for example, why a XML source could not be used in other webpages, as an input source for a database, or even as a way of getting output from your C++ program into my Java app, my ASP.NET page or even another C++ program!
The author didn't say that a KDE or Gnome wasn't as good as XP and Slashdot gets the usual 'XP is totally unusable' posts.
KDE IS good, but how many of you actually use XP? It is solid, consistent, can be themed/skinned and to be dead honest, if it was so bad why do Linux lovers spend half their time trying to emulate the look and feel of it? Answer: Becuase it IS good.
Well, what happens when viruses break out on phones? If people are downloading/installing software on their phone what's to stop malicious code spreading across the network to other phones?
I must admit, I like my 'closed' phone. I know it won't crash. It doesn't have any security issues. It won't take a photo in the wrong place. It just works!
I have still yet to see anyone actually playing a game on their phone yet as well...
... why do Linux lovers constantly keep trying to emulate Microsoft's software? Whether it's the OS, the office suite etc etc it appears that by making it look/feel as good as a MS product is the aim and achieving it is a good thing!
Slashdot Mirror
Of all the areas to attack them on, the Media Player is a strange one.
Firstly, it is probably the best out of Real Player and Quicktime so really I cannot see anyone wanting to swap Media Player for a crappy RP which pops up every two minutes and basically complains if you don't use it or upgrade it! Quicktime isn't really a big player in any event on the PC for any formats really. So, even if they do succeed in getting Media Player as something you have to 'opt in' to installing I'd guess that the experienced users won't use RP or QT.
Secondly, Media Player is integral to Windows - certainly XP. From the Windows Explorer you can preview media, view films, burn CD's etc etc with it. Ok, I suppose you could take out this functionality but as someone who uses it a lot I don't see why -I- should have my OS experience reduced just so I can get Real Player telling me I have messages every few hours.
Thirdly, as I think some of the other posters have said, there is a gradual blurring between PCs and TVs/hi fi nowadays and it is realistic to be able to have a media player as part of the OS.
I know I will be shot down for this, but the target market for Windows doesn't want to have to select which media player they want - most people won't have a clue anyway - they just want to go to 'My Music' and click on the MP3 and listen to some music whilst they browse the web or whatever.
They certainly have abused their monopoly, but this is just a typical EU style charge (I live in England). A lot of hot air, lots of reports, a good idea but poorly enacted.
Microsoft can afford to ignore this, and they'll just pay the fine and 'look at how we can open up' and do nothing.
The EU cannot stop them trading in the EU at all! Anyone who seriously thinks that is plain daft! I mean, I guess around 95%+ of PC's etc run MS software and if they have to stop trading it would have such a serious impact on business it simply won't happen!
My guess is that it's Java...
I think the Sun vs Linux case is one in which the costs of going from Solaris to Linux in terms of hardware and training isn't that. Certainly I can see why spending a few thousand less by going for Linux over Sun.
However, as for Linux "destroying" Microsoft, the case isn't as clear as you simplistically state. There is a far greater difference between a Red Hat/SuSE and 2000 server than Solaris.
Knowing a few electricians (very handy!), I can tell you that I think it's a real misnomer that they earn a lot of money. Sure, they probably earn as much as a good IT guy but they HAVE to work nights and weekends to make up the cash. I mean, if I wanted to work through all my sparetime I would no doubt earn a fortune but I value by spare time and have the option of not having to continually work in sometimes dangerous conditions.
I personally can't wait until all the money grabbers who came into IT to get a load of cash p**s off to be electricians, brickies and plumbers. Things might not be great now, but they'll pick up, and when it does the UK WILL need IT experts, coders, support people etc.
I love IT and I will not leave it, even if the pay goes down a bit.
I work in northern England and we're still finding loads of work - sometimes too much.
Totally disagree with you I'm afraid.
To say that someone who is writing in Java is not writing a "serious program" is wrong. If I wrote a program for a mobile phone that interacted with an Exchange server, imported XML documents from your company intranet and performed some processing before presenting the result etc is not a trivial matter, but I do not need to necessarily to understand the low level details - which Java hides really well.
... money. Plain and simple.
When a lot of big companies start seeing a potential to see their profits tumble they will react agressively to protect their interests. Is it any wonder that the media companies are worried that millions of people around the world are sharing millions of music tracks and films? Are the software companies worried about people downloading software? The answer is yes.
Do such companies want to control the internet? Undoutedly. Can you imagine the potential for a company like Disney to broadcast Disney.tv to every household on the planet with an internet enabled tv? Wow... you are talking serious money there, but people can already do it - for free at the moment.
I think a lot of these people identify the internet as this 'Holy Grail' to make billions, if only they had the final, killer ingredient. Whilst this potential exists, where there's money there's immense power and this power will try to bend, distort and manouever the internet as best it can towards its vested interests.
It's an interesting though, but the overwhelming thought I got through reading through their tricks is that no matter what a spam filter will be trained to catch, the spammers will adapt.
If an email is sent in plain text, then they would do tricks like write words like loan as financ etc, to just a basic example.
Sadly, whether we like it or not, HTML email -in some form- is here to stay.
From what I gathered, it demonstrates two things:
Firstly, the techniques spammers will use to display the text in the email so that the end user will be able to view the text in the email.
Secondly, it demonstrates how using the above approach they are trying to trick spam stopping techniques from working. For example, instead of having a email titled "Free viagra" you could write it as "F*r*e*e V*i*a*g*a*r*a" in an attempt to stop a spam stopper from spotting Viagara as easily in the title. In the body of the email you could write the html in such a way that decifering any words is quite tricky, eg writing Viagara as (font size="2")V(font size="2")iaga(font size="2")ra(/font) etc. Certainly to say spotting all variants of 'hiding' such words is not as simple as you might first think.
It certainly gave me an interesting insight into the problem that it is, and how the spammers are trying and continually evolving their techniques to ensure they can carry on.
Sorry, but I think you are wrong on this one.
.Net framework -will- make money from the Java R&D ;)
There are a LOT of programmers out there with no experience of anything other than C, C++, Visual Basic, Perl etc etc. Just because students are taught Java and industry DEMANDED Java don't blame people for making a lot of money out of it!
Also, why should programming be hard? It shouldn't be. If I can find any tools, languages etc that make my job easier, quicker and less stressful I use them. And if I can be quicker it will be cheaper and if I am quicker and cheaper, I keep my job.
If my boss comes to me with a business problem and it can be solved in a day with Java, as opposed to a couple of days in Perl, VB or whatever then the business will make a decision to go with that.
I agree Sun won't get back it's R&D on Java, but I guess that MS with the
The Cookbook is a great little book, but it only really provides snippets of code and little examples of how to achieve basic tasks. It does not teach you about Java, about OOP, how to build programs or anything about the differences in things like Applications, Applets or Server Applications etc.
I think you are pretty much right in what you are saying. If you are a F50 then you NEED a rock solid server and Sun is the best around. However, there are probably more people in the smaller companies who just cannot afford the hardware and if you are willing to accept, maybe, a marginally smaller downtime then a Linux box is cheaper handsdown and in the smaller company price is king. There's also the spectre of Windows improving as a server too so they are getting attacked from both ends if you like.
.Net is a Java rival. Again, this constant wearing down could give the impression they are losing ground.
I'd also say that they're problems seem to stem from a lack of marketing too. I keep reading article in the trade press how Linux is making inroads into the market, how it's getting on PDA's, phones - pretty much everything and I also read how MS are improving with their Servers and how
But, the key is how many articles is there about Sun? The servers are pretty constant and it seems all the talk of Java is being done by IBM and other companies such as BEA and Oracle. When you have servers as reliable as they do and some great ideas such as Java they should be really pushing themselves as a real innovatively conservative(!) IT company.
There are lots of 'small' content management solutions like Zope, IBuySpy etc but whilst they will work for a 'small' website they just cannot cope when it comes to large (thousands of pages) sites which need full CMS features.
You need to be able to archive HTML, Word, Excel, PDFs, Images, Videos - the list grows and people want to be able to search through videos etc etc.
Zope's great but like many posters have said they just don't work for a large organisation which will rely on a good intranet/website.
From my limited experience, I've found that trusting users with HTML is just a total pain. Granted I was working with people who had no HTML experience but were entering content via a WYSIWYG type interface.
You will get everything from wrong fonts, colours, line breaks and your entire site/intranet will look a mess.
And when it starts to hit you is when your boss says that it doesn't work on a big clients browser (they still use Netscape 4) and that sales want to access the intranet on their PDA's. Using HTML here will just not work.
XML is no 'silver bullet' and I certainly agree that educating 'non web savvy' users to use XML is just doesn't work in real life. They break it, can't figure out why they break it and what happens is the site doesn't get updated but if you write your tools carefully and choose the appropriate software, XML will allow you to use XSL amongst other technologies to get your site working great on IE, Opera, Konqueror, PDA's - whatever.
Once a site gets to a certain stage, simple tools aren't that powerful and you will usually find that managers don't like simple looking UI's - they want Javascripts, Flash, you name it. If your site is being used to promote your company it -needs- to look good.
That's a very valid point, but I would say that if MS gave away the source code for NT4 tomorrow then it would take months before even the real coders would understand it fully, months before they could patch the problems and then test them.
NT4 is about 7(?) years old now and I'd be surprised if many people would be running on RH 5 and expecting support for it, and of those who would be able to code a patch for their own machine? Not many.
Before I get ripped into for this, I will point out I use Windows 2K at work, write programs for .Net framework but use Red Hat at home for my deskto and server.
The 'cost' of Windows is not as straight forward as 'buying' a Windows 2K server license or downloading Red Hat. I know in my area that someone who is a real expert in W2K will cost around £30k/year and I'd have a choice of them, yet the cost for a Red Hat specialist is -far- more expensive. It's more in the £40k region at least, and I'd not have many to choose from. Therefore, the cost of the software is beset by the personnel costs.
Support wise: I agree that there's enough information on the web for RH but also Windows. However, unless your a large organisation you shouldn't rely on a support contract. I'd not hire a £45k Red Hat expert to run the servers and expect him to rely on a support contract.
Documentation? You don't need it really do you? Do I need a manual for C#? SQL Server? Notepad? IE?
Source code: Ok, you get the source code. For me, that's not a selling point. For some it is though, I conceed.
Patches: 2K server is very stable. If you secure a 2K machine and make sure that it's properly patched you're not likely to get into trouble. Sorry, you might not like to hear it but it's true. Badly patched machines - whether Linux, Mac or Windows boxes are badly patched machines.
I don't think that the RH vs Windows is as simple as you make it. I am not a great fan of MS but some of the stuff they are doing is damned impressive - and I use RH.
Sorry uberslack, I wrote that last night after a few beers and I appreciate it is as clear as mud! Please forgive me :)
Ok, all I was trying(!) to say in essence was that you should not -look- small. Make yourself appear a small operation, but not a one person operation.
As someone who has worked at small companies and also at big companies employing one person and small companies, it is easy for the smaller companies to be seen as unreliable and unable to have the resources available to fully support a project.
My tips would be get good quality headed paper, a non-residential business address, maybe a virtual office with a secretary to make sure all your calls are answered and also make you look small but not too small.
Make sure you don't charge to little and take bad jobs just because you are on your own as bad jobs lead to bad reputations.
Finally, don't be too eager to undercharge. I've been in projects where the cheapest quote was the best but management have overruled going for a bigger company as there is simply someone to blame!
Hope this helps and good luck.
That most companies in my experience will treat you as bedroom without decent headed paper, a domestic address and cheap prices.
Make sure you don't take on poorly paid jobs in the short term at the expense of long term security.
I agree it was interesting, and I must admit I thought it was a backward step to be honest!
As someone who's used IIS and Apache a fair bit, one thing I always preferred was the fact that IIS was easier as editing a text file is not as simple as editing a config panel. I am just not sure why they have taken this step when everything else they are doing is based on the MMC.
On the whole though it isn't too bad although I think it may scare a few people at first. Perhaps the most irritating thing is when you make a typo and it won't recognise it in Visual Studio but on the whole, it's fine.
As a Brit, I am very saddened by what has happened in the last few months.
Nobody will ever try to deny the fact that Saddam is a scumbag and the world will be a better place without him. He is a truly evil, brutal tyrant who cares little for anyone or anything.
Since Sept 11, the US has been on the rampage looking for a head. Bin Laden's head was never found and the next easiest target was Saddam. Bush made it clear from Day 1 that he wanted a war and along with Blair he conjured up a variety of reasons to do so, all of them totally unconvincing.
There is no link with al-Qaeda, there are no chemical weapons, no nuclear weapons.
He has broke UN resolutions, but so have other countries including Israel who have broke more resolutions for longer than Iraq.
However, in order to remove one man and his regime the US/UK are planning one of the biggest military operations seen. This operation is not against a nation, a sizeable or strong army or even a militia. It is remove one man.
We will see a lot of totally innocent civilians die in the coming weeks. Can anyone tell me that blowing up and invading Iraq is going to solve international terrorism? Will the world be a safer place afterwards?
As someone who was caught in two IRA bombs that were planted in Manchester/UK I will tell you that the biggest recruiter for terrorism is violence. The only way you can stop it is by talking, listening and understanding.
Unfortunately Bush and Blair will do neither.
Hmmm... putting my cynical hat on: RH are certainly looking like they are going to be the dominant Linux flavour in years to come and -maybe- stand the best chance of making the breakthrough onto the desktop. Certainly the company looks set up to be able to get software on servers, on desktops and provide the support that many IT managers would expect from a large software provider.
However, if I look at RH from a financial standpoint, it would be in their economic interest to make sure that when someone starts to deploy Linux around the workplace that it is not so easy to (say) switch to another flavour as you will lose revenue.
I am a big fan of RH but suspect in the years to come, could (ab)use their position in the Linux world in a similar way to another large OS company!
On the web, a big problem is that the content of the page is mixed in with the formatting. So, this content cannot be displayed easily on a PDA, phone or even across different browsers to an extent.
By separting the content from how it is displayed makes it easier to display it in pretty much any format. By taking a single XML document you could create a page that looks great on Mozilla, great on IE, a WAP enabled phone, Opera, Microwave, Fridge - whatever!
XML is NOT a programming language. It is more like a way of describing data and one MAJOR benefit in my opinion is that it is human as well as machine readable. I can ask my 'pointy haired boss' to make an ammendment to an XML document and he will pretty much be able to read it quite easily.
It has plenty of uses such as a way of sharing data. There is no reason, for example, why a XML source could not be used in other webpages, as an input source for a database, or even as a way of getting output from your C++ program into my Java app, my ASP.NET page or even another C++ program!
The author didn't say that a KDE or Gnome wasn't as good as XP and Slashdot gets the usual 'XP is totally unusable' posts.
KDE IS good, but how many of you actually use XP? It is solid, consistent, can be themed/skinned and to be dead honest, if it was so bad why do Linux lovers spend half their time trying to emulate the look and feel of it? Answer: Becuase it IS good.
Get a Nokia or Siemens...Sagem are not the best phone makers at all!!
Well, what happens when viruses break out on phones? If people are downloading/installing software on their phone what's to stop malicious code spreading across the network to other phones?
I must admit, I like my 'closed' phone. I know it won't crash. It doesn't have any security issues. It won't take a photo in the wrong place. It just works!
I have still yet to see anyone actually playing a game on their phone yet as well...
... why do Linux lovers constantly keep trying to emulate Microsoft's software? Whether it's the OS, the office suite etc etc it appears that by making it look/feel as good as a MS product is the aim and achieving it is a good thing!