When was the last time you saw a newbie sit down in front of a Windows XP system running Office XP or 2003? It's *not* easy to use; it's just that lots of people are used to using it.
Consider also the changes that went on between NT 4, Windows 2000 and XP, which were the last 3 versions of Microsoft's corporate desktop. Despite the fact that the 3 are *wildly* different in appearance and use, you didn't have zillions of end-users undergoing extensive training to move between the versions; they somehow managed to do it virtually unaided. If you compare the differences between NT 4 and XP on the UI front, the move from e.g. XP to e.g. KDE suddenly doesn't look that huge.
Linux on the desktop is now at the point where it's waiting on an evangelist - someone or some company that's prepared to say "I'm gonna make this ready for prime time". Apple managed to take BSD and produce a fantastic desktop user experience within a couple of years; sure, they had the background of many years R&D with earlier versions of Mac OS, but they're one company who just said "We're doing it now". There's absolutely no reason why it won't happen on Linux, other than nobody's sufficiently motivated to do it yet.
The other burning issue is applications. OpenOffice is here now, and is perfectly sufficient in terms of capability. Even MS is saying it's comparable to Office 97 from a capability viewpoint, and there's an awful lot of users who manage to survive on Office 97 to this day. Given that the vast majority of corporate Office users take pre-built MS Office templates and insert their own text - that's *all* they use Office for! - it seems that there's a compelling argument that a much simplified version of OpenOffice would gain corporate acceptance.
Imagine a version of OpenOffice that didn't include options for e.g. creating footnotes, changing page numbering, selecting 173 different fonts, changing paper formats, etc., but greatly simplified the following tasks: - selecting a document template - selecting styles within that template - saving, printing and emailing documents - simplifying the UI as much as possible - (a few others that I've forgotten due to a very late night...)
Such a version would remove the possibility of end-users doing things they weren't supposed to do within MS Office (a BIG problem for many corporates), and should remove concerns about migration and being "too difficult to use". Provided it preserved OOo's document compatibility with MS Office, I figure it would be a winner on corporate desktops.
The (very few) users who create document templates could do so under the "full version" of OOo, but (the many) users whose job it is to simply use those templates could use the "simple version" to do their job. I think that would be a compelling reason for corporates to switch to Linux desktops, and could be achievable this year if someone chose to implement it.
OK, I'll go first - I'm sure people will correct me if/when I'm wrong...
Zope is a Python-based, Web application development system. It runs on *nix and Windows, and I'm pretty sure Macs as well. One of its key strengths is that it allows Web page designers, content generators and Web logic coders to work together without stepping on each other's toes - that's a big challenge with most Web application tools. You do all your work within Zope using a Web-based GUI, which is another unusual feature. There's a lot more to Zope than this, but that's enough for starters.
CMF is a Content Management system that runs on top of Zope. Content Management is for those sites where you want relatively non-technical people to be able to contribute "content" without having to worry about HTML and other nasty techo stuff. Think of people providing articles for your local school's newsletter - they should just be able to supply ASCII text, and someone else deals with typesetting and page layout. In this case, the "someone else" is CMF. There's more to CMF than that, BTW...
Plone sits on top of CMF, and adds extra tools such as workflow to CMF. In the school newsletter, you would probably have an editor who checks all the incoming articles, fixes typos and ensures nobody's said anything nasty. The contributor of the article would send it to the editor, who would then either accept or reject it. The "workflow" in Plone lets you implement this editor-type role in software. Again, there's a lot more than Plone than that...
Hope this helps a bit. I really like Zope, but as many people have said, getting your head around it is a bit challenging at first. Unlike many tools, it's difficult to "start with the easy stuff and learn the tough stuff as you go along" - Zope doesn't really lend itself to that approach, which I think is where many people struggle with it.
that they've discovered their security problem is much bigger than they thought it was.
Sure they've progressed in terms of there's more known security holes fixed now than there was 1-2 years back, but there's also far more security holes that have been identified and at (seemingly) a much faster rate than 1-2 years ago.
In other words, 2 years ago, they rated a 4/10 in terms of security. Today, I'd say they probably rate 20/50. Overall, my impression is that they've essentially stayed in place in terms of removing security holes from their products.
If you think that I'm being unfair, consider how long it's taking new security holes to get fixed now versus 2 years ago - it seems to be generally longer.
Also, consider that MS has now taken the step of bundling security updates into big bunches, to ease the pain of applying them - that they've had to resort to this is a reasonable indication (IMHO) that the quantity of security holes being *fixed* has gone up significantly.
Finally, consider the rate at which security holes are being uncovered - it would have to start dropping off dramatically if MS was being successful in fixing their problems. That certainly doesn't seem to have happened.
The really old Dr Who shows are being repeated (possibly in order) on the ABC in Australia. I thought my kids (7 & 5) would only be interested once they got to (a) colour episodes and (b) Tom Baker.
Boy, was I wrong! These are kids who still don't understand that Dad once had a *black and white* TV, but they love the shows with the first doctor. Even when I was a keen Dr Who fan, I found the first Dr pretty tough to watch, but my kids never miss it.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me the TV's broken because there's no color...
Actually, I'm hoping Novell might decide to open source OpeneXchange Server in the hope that this will establish a much larger user base. That could let Novell sell other products or services into a space that's a Microsoft stronghold at the moment. Alternately, they could provide free licences for e.g. 10 users and achieve mind share that way.
MS Exchange is one of the few pieces of back-office software that doesn't have a full-featured FOSS alternative; it'd be nice if that situation changed.
> Why would I want a global economy?? From what I > can see, it is beneficial to everyone EXCEPT the > US.
I'm guessing you haven't travelled much - don't worry, most people haven't. The fact is that the US leads the world in several areas of production, but not in others.
To give one example, how about the steel industry? The US steel industry used to be at the top of the pack, but now they're also rans. Many countries now produce better quality steel cheaper than the US can.
The US government has two choices: - allow US companies to import foreign steel without levying any tariffs. The steel importers would love to be getting cheaper, better steel, but the US steel industry would be destroyed - impose a tariff on steel imports, so that any US company importing foreign steel would have to pay extra. This is great for the US steel producers, as it means they have an advantage for local production since they don't have tariffs slugged on what they produce; basically without these tariffs they'd be dead. Conversely, the US-based consumers of steel have to pay more for quality steel
Wheat production is another area where the US is now lagging behind the rest of the world. In fact, many industries that consume lots of people effort are bad performers for US companies; largely because the cost of labor in the US is so high compared to 99% of the world.
Looking at it another way, the reason the US is falling behind in many of these areas is because you've been so successful in the past - that success has brought you a higher standard of living, with increased wages, and now the rest of the world can deliver those same services cheaper than you can. Personally, you seem to have two choices: - keep doing what you have been doing (e.g. producing steel, wheat, low-end IT services) and accept a lower income and lower standard of living - do something different that you feel the rest of the world can't do better and/or cheaper. IT used to be one of those areas; now the "commodity" IT jobs have been outsourced elsewhere.
If it cheers you up any, India's now starting to face the same problems with IT outsourcing that the US has faced over the past few years. It's now cheaper to source commodity IT people from countries like the Philippines and Malaysia, and Indian guys are starting to find jobs that would have gone to them are now going to these countries. A few months ago, I was working with a guy from Bangalore who'd had to fly to Australia to retain his "outsourced" job in the face of it potentially being shipped elsewhere in Asia; now he's working for a multinational here, but being paid at the same rate he was in India (i.e. maybe 10-20% of Australian rates) and trying to support his wife and kids in Bangalore as well. This is a guy with reasonably good IT qualifications, who left his family behind in Bangalore to find work and now sleeps on friends' couches and walks 5km to and from work each day because he can't afford bus fare. *He* doesn't know how he can keep supporting *his* family.
I'm in Australia too, and I'd be quite willing to pay US99c a track for iTMS access if the local record companies would only get their acts together and make such a thing available to us.
Hopefully, the (expected) forthcoming availability of free AAC files for the download will spur them on a bit. After all, I'm quite happy to pay for AAC DRM files *now*, but I expect that many people will be much less prepared to pay a few months down the track when AAC DRM files are as "free" as MP3 files are now.
The Oz (and other, non-US) record companies have a window of opportunity to provide a good service that would get people signed up and paying, and it's suddenly shrunk by a lot. If they can provide a good enough customer experience, they'll get people paying even after these files are available "for free" - iTMS seems to be that "good enough service", so they'd better get moving or kiss that potential revenue goodbye.
Re:People will keep using it, regardless...
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
> how about people, like myself, that have hardware > that will NOT run anything after Win98?...
> Looks like MS is forcing me to upgrade my hardware > too? Not cool.
No, MS is saying they won't support your box any more. Just like you (probably) won't get support from your hardware vendor after this many years, now you won't get software support either.
It's not like your laptop is about to stop working just because MS stops supporting the software you licenced from them. Well, probably not...
Well, that much at least is true. I kinda figure this guy is directly responsible for the employment of many, many mail admins the world over.
Then, as that spam that gets through filters consumes the time of many millions of people, then he's also responsible for the employment of the extra people needed to cover the non-productivity of those who are reading his spam.
Finally, he's also responsible for employing those people who create filters for individual email clients. If Al and co. stopped sending spam, these people would be out on the street as well.
It'd be interesting to try to quantify this. Who knows? - maybe Al Ralsky is actually responsible for employing more people than (say) IBM employs....And he does it all without a word of thanks from any of us
Are politicians required to send this email from specific email addresses e.g. your_faithful_candidate@congress.wankers.gov? It seems like they should be (i.e. in order to prove their spam is actually "from a political organization", it should at least come from a traceable *and documented* source), in which case a few simple email filters could make the problem essentially disappear.
Thankfully I'm not a US citizen, so my exposure to this sort of rubbish is, oh, probably 2-3 years away...
I assume that, unless/until software patents are recognised worldwide, that it is still legal to produce WordML import/export tools in many countries.
If so, then there's nothing stopping people in e.g. Uzbekistan writing such filters, then handing them over to the OOo maintainers. The OOo guys still have to decide whether or not to include them in the OOo "product", and since OOo is at least partly "run" by Sun, that may be a battle Sun chooses not to fight. However, there's nothing stopping Sun/OOo providing a pointer to non-US sites containing the legally-written and provided Uzbeki WordML filters, which could be downloaded and installed separately from OOo. Sun/OOo could also provide integration assistance to the Uzbeki guys quite legally.
By doing this, you could see legal WordML etc. filters in OOo quite quickly.
> As soon as they were confident that the technology > worked, the brothers approached the war offices of > several nations, hoping to sell their patent to > the highest bidder.
Any follow ups available? Did any country actually express an interest? Given the Boer War was current news, I imagine a whole new type of war machine might have been considered rather interesting...
God forbid SCO is involved. "Hello, Mr Boeing? My name's Darl McBride and I've got some bad news for you"
You make some interesting points, but I disagree with a few of them.
All IMHO...
I think software engineering can be planned like an assembly line. Most scientists build and enhance a set of tools over time; they re-use these tools knowing that they have a solid history of working.
Very few IT people have an equivalent set of tools. Sure, lots of people have e.g. a CD with the latest copies of vi/emacs, Perl, Python, gcc, latest Windows patches, etc, but how many have a set of tools they've developed or enhanced over time? How many write code to e.g. parse config files, having done it many times in the past but never having saved their previous work or generalised it? Lots of these simple tasks aren't covered in standard compiler libraries; you wind up writing a customised solution virtually from scratch, then knocking out the silly bugs that have crept in.
I'd venture that a sizeable percentage of code that gets written (as distinct from produced by a wizard) *could* be replaced by boilerplate code that gets reused from project to project. Stuff like repetitive Javascript data validation screens in Web pages; a lot of it is cut-paste work, yet very rarely do you find someone bringing in their own tried-and-tested code to do this in a project.
If this stuff was actually delivered in an assembly line fashion, which I think is entirely feasible, then I'd expect that projects would be able to be estimated much better.
The very best commercial coders out there work in this fashion; they bring their own, best-of-breed solutions to a job and they're capable of giving very precise time estimates for a piece of work. After all, once you've been coding for a certain period of time, the amount of seriously challenging (i.e. difficult to estimate) tasks should approach zero. They don't "think of a time, then multiply by 3" as seems to be common practice; they break down a piece of work into easily estimated chunks, then simply add up the times involved for each chunk.
These guys are "line items", as you put it - they come in, do a job and it gets done with minimal fuss. Their value is that they seek to eliminate risk. Their code doesn't fall apart under functional testing, because their standard tools already include checks for buffer overflows and similar mistakes.
Frankly, I'd pay them big bucks even if 100% of their code was delivered via boilerplate code and they actually spent hardly any time putting it together. I know their code would be solid, and the more of their boilerplate code there is, the less risk there is of it failing.
Note: I'm not saying that the guys who e.g. write kernel code fall into this category - a lot of that code is one-off by its very nature, and it's tough to genericise such code so that it will be highly reuseable and fault tolerant across applications and environments. However, that's the exception; the vast majority of commercial coding work is repetitive across projects and customers, and could be delivered via boilerplate reuse.
> So... tossing assembly line and guild models out > the window, is there a conceptual approach that > works?
I think there is - everyone involved in a software development project needs to accept responsibility for delivering their component, and manage expectations appropriately.
Every project I've seen over the last several years has had (a) a project manager who seemed to feel his/her job was to *dictate* when things would be completed based on negotiation rather than analysis, and whose performance was measured on meeting deadlines rather than delivering a workable solution, (b) techos who behave like artists, with an "it's finished when it's finished" mentality, and generally regard PMs and users as almost an enemy force, (c) business sponsors who abdicate any guidance responsibilities to the project manager, who is unqualified to provide that perspective, (d) testers who believe that removing test cases and "we'll fix it when it goes live" is a viable way of meeting deadlines, and (e) a user base that is prepared to continually change requirements and unwilling to accept resulting delays.
If these people all behaved like the project in question was "their" project, and adopted an attitude of maximising the chance of a successful outcome rather than ensuring they had plausible deniability, then I believe the success rate of IT projects would soar overnight.
Winner: Someone who accepts that the rules have now changed, and adjusts to play under the new rules
Loser: Someone who continues trying to compete under the old rules, who bitches and moans about "the good old days" and "the way things used to be"
Working for a large, notionally-faceless employer has only been common for about the last 100 years; prior to that, the vast majority of income-earners worked in their own small business producing products or services that they would sell directly. You were a baker, a bar owner or whatever, and you sold your goods and services to the other people in your town. Only in the 20th century did it become common for masses of people to work for a single employer and expect job security, so maybe what's happening now is an evolutionary step rather than the end of the world.
What's happening in IT now, with outsourcing of jobs to cheaper markets, is exactly what's happened to many other industries (primarily manufacturing) in Western countries over the last few decades. I'm sure there's ex-factory workers who've been out of work for years who are still convinced that "things will get better", but the majority of those people reskilled and moved on.
I suspect a sizeable chunk of these displaced workers thought their world was ending at the time as well, but it didn't.
There's now many indicators that the days of a majority of people in prosperous Western nations working for large employers may be coming to an end. It's not necessarily a doom-and-gloom period coming up, but sitting back waiting for things to change isn't likely to be the best preparation for what lies ahead.
> So I find it puzzling that traders wouldn't > realize something was amiss with a $20 spread on a > stock
I used to work for the Australian Stock Exchange, and for several brokers as well.
My experience is that people will try to make a buck on the markets wherever they think a buck can be made. People leaping in to trade a momentarily undervalued or overvalued stock is reasonably common; in fact, an entire trading approach called "arbitrage" is based on exactly this. Stocks that are traded on multiple exchanges typically have small price differences for exactly the same stock at the various exchanges; arbitrage involves buying for the lower price and selling instantly for the higher price. You might only make a tiny amount on each trade, but it's an exceptionally low risk trade and the opportunities for an arbitrage trade used to come up extremely often. Not sure if this is the case any longer...
Of all the people here saying "this is wrong; only a fool would trade on such a spread, and they've now got what they deserved", I wonder how many would hesitate to short SCOX if a similar situation appeared. Suppose SCOX suddenly blipped up by $5 a stock; would you be tempted to short it immediately, reasoning that the price was now totally ridiculous? Or, suppose SCOX suddenly dropped $5; would you be tempted to think "this is it!" and short it immediately?
The guy was supposedly Joe(?) Kennedy - patriarch of the Kennedy family in the US. Not sure if "Joe" is the right name or not; "history of Kennedy" is a subject I skipped at school...
> Of course, there is lot of evidence against SCO > and they will lose their case. But the fact is, > even they know it. This whole SCO suit is all > about keeping Linux from rapid adoption using FUD > and legal tactics.
No, the whole SCO suit is about keeping the stock price rising over 4 consecutive quarters.
If McBride et al can manage this, then they qualify for some huge payouts. They're currently midway through their 3rd quarter of rises, so there's somewhere between 4 and 6 months to go.
If/when they manage this, I expect a large amount of the FUD to disappear, and for SCO's stock price to plummet.
The key thing is that SCO has absolutely no interest in going to court over any of these accusations, as that would force the introduction and validation of fact into what is essentially a 100% FUD campaign. As long as they can keep fuelling the FUD fire, they expect SCO's stock price to keep rising; if it stops rising, expect to see more and more extreme FUD emerging.
Unless/until a "pump and dump" is proven, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do as SCO's execs - pushing the stock price higher is what they're ultimately employed to do, and failing to do so exposes them to potential shareholder litigation.
Consider this, then look back on the sequence of events SCO has gone through over the last 6-8 months and you'll see it all fits in place.
Has anyone tried both this and Knoppix? Are you able to comment on the pros and cons of each?
The only difference I noted is that MandrakeMove says it doesn't support use of a USB key from the download-only version. Whether it actually works or not, it doesn't say.
If society deems that time in jail isn't sufficient punishment for these people, and that seems to the be the message given by posting their personal details on Web sites without their consent, then maybe the legal system is failing us.
These people with their personal info displayed have pretty much been handed a life sentence. If society is accepting this is appropriate, maybe these people should be either locked up forever or given the death penalty. I personally think this is too harsh, even though I have two young kids and would cheerfully carve up anyone who interfered with them...
IMHO the biggest problem is that child molesters invoke an extremely strong hostile reaction in most people, and that level of emotion is probably similar to that evoked towards mass murderers. Note: I'm saying *mass* murderers since many/most child sex offenders attack repeatedly, and often many kids are victims of the one attacker. However, the punishment and judicial treatment of child sex offenders and mass murderers is very different; mass murderers are almost always locked up virtually indefinitely, or convicted to death in some countries, whereas child sex offenders are typically released back into society within a few years.
Maybe this imbalance is what really should be addressed. I don't know; I find the whole issue too emotional to discuss with any rationality...
It would make sense for Phoenix and/or other BIOS manufacturers to build in this Trusted BIOS rubbish in such a way it can be turned off if required.
From what I hear, next-gen Windows may require (enabled) Trusted BIOS, so it simply wouldn't work if the Trusted BIOS was disabled. However, Linux and other OS would probably not work with the Trusted BIOS, so it would want it either to not be implemented or to be able to be disabled.
Content vendors may require either Windows or the Trusted BIOS, so it may be that Linux simply can't play content provided by these vendors. So be it - if you want to use e.g. Linux, then you can't use this content. Either live with it, or wait till someone puts a workaround in place to "fool" the content vendor...
If you were Phoenix' CxO, and you'd heard all about this Linux thing, and how its market share had overtaken Apple's and was continuing to gain support, and that many companies were actively considering migrating off Windows for both their server and desktop machines and may conceivably start to do so in the next 2-3 years, do you think you'd implement the Trusted BIOS in such a way that it couldn't be disabled? It wouldn't make any sense - if Phoenix does this, they *may* miss out on the "next big thing" (even if you think desktop Linux isn't going to happen, you have to concede that Microsoft's hold on the market over the next few years could start to drop off).
There's no reason why Phoenix would implement the Trusted BIOS in such a way that it couldn't be turned off, unless Microsoft pays Phoenix a big slab of money and/or acquires a significant influence in Phoenix at the board level. They couldn't do this for every BIOS vendor in the world, particularly since Linux looks like gaining lots of seats in government departments around the world and those seats will be a very compelling market for a BIOS vendor that doesn't force Trusted BIOS down their users throats.
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When was the last time you saw a newbie sit down in front of a Windows XP system running Office XP or 2003? It's *not* easy to use; it's just that lots of people are used to using it.
Consider also the changes that went on between NT 4, Windows 2000 and XP, which were the last 3 versions of Microsoft's corporate desktop. Despite the fact that the 3 are *wildly* different in appearance and use, you didn't have zillions of end-users undergoing extensive training to move between the versions; they somehow managed to do it virtually unaided. If you compare the differences between NT 4 and XP on the UI front, the move from e.g. XP to e.g. KDE suddenly doesn't look that huge.
Linux on the desktop is now at the point where it's waiting on an evangelist - someone or some company that's prepared to say "I'm gonna make this ready for prime time". Apple managed to take BSD and produce a fantastic desktop user experience within a couple of years; sure, they had the background of many years R&D with earlier versions of Mac OS, but they're one company who just said "We're doing it now". There's absolutely no reason why it won't happen on Linux, other than nobody's sufficiently motivated to do it yet.
The other burning issue is applications. OpenOffice is here now, and is perfectly sufficient in terms of capability. Even MS is saying it's comparable to Office 97 from a capability viewpoint, and there's an awful lot of users who manage to survive on Office 97 to this day. Given that the vast majority of corporate Office users take pre-built MS Office templates and insert their own text - that's *all* they use Office for! - it seems that there's a compelling argument that a much simplified version of OpenOffice would gain corporate acceptance.
Imagine a version of OpenOffice that didn't include options for e.g. creating footnotes, changing page numbering, selecting 173 different fonts, changing paper formats, etc., but greatly simplified the following tasks:
- selecting a document template
- selecting styles within that template
- saving, printing and emailing documents
- simplifying the UI as much as possible
- (a few others that I've forgotten due to a very late night...)
Such a version would remove the possibility of end-users doing things they weren't supposed to do within MS Office (a BIG problem for many corporates), and should remove concerns about migration and being "too difficult to use". Provided it preserved OOo's document compatibility with MS Office, I figure it would be a winner on corporate desktops.
The (very few) users who create document templates could do so under the "full version" of OOo, but (the many) users whose job it is to simply use those templates could use the "simple version" to do their job. I think that would be a compelling reason for corporates to switch to Linux desktops, and could be achievable this year if someone chose to implement it.
OK, I'll go first - I'm sure people will correct me if/when I'm wrong...
Zope is a Python-based, Web application development system. It runs on *nix and Windows, and I'm pretty sure Macs as well. One of its key strengths is that it allows Web page designers, content generators and Web logic coders to work together without stepping on each other's toes - that's a big challenge with most Web application tools. You do all your work within Zope using a Web-based GUI, which is another unusual feature. There's a lot more to Zope than this, but that's enough for starters.
CMF is a Content Management system that runs on top of Zope. Content Management is for those sites where you want relatively non-technical people to be able to contribute "content" without having to worry about HTML and other nasty techo stuff. Think of people providing articles for your local school's newsletter - they should just be able to supply ASCII text, and someone else deals with typesetting and page layout. In this case, the "someone else" is CMF. There's more to CMF than that, BTW...
Plone sits on top of CMF, and adds extra tools such as workflow to CMF. In the school newsletter, you would probably have an editor who checks all the incoming articles, fixes typos and ensures nobody's said anything nasty. The contributor of the article would send it to the editor, who would then either accept or reject it. The "workflow" in Plone lets you implement this editor-type role in software. Again, there's a lot more than Plone than that...
Hope this helps a bit. I really like Zope, but as many people have said, getting your head around it is a bit challenging at first. Unlike many tools, it's difficult to "start with the easy stuff and learn the tough stuff as you go along" - Zope doesn't really lend itself to that approach, which I think is where many people struggle with it.
that they've discovered their security problem is much bigger than they thought it was.
Sure they've progressed in terms of there's more known security holes fixed now than there was 1-2 years back, but there's also far more security holes that have been identified and at (seemingly) a much faster rate than 1-2 years ago.
In other words, 2 years ago, they rated a 4/10 in terms of security. Today, I'd say they probably rate 20/50. Overall, my impression is that they've essentially stayed in place in terms of removing security holes from their products.
If you think that I'm being unfair, consider how long it's taking new security holes to get fixed now versus 2 years ago - it seems to be generally longer.
Also, consider that MS has now taken the step of bundling security updates into big bunches, to ease the pain of applying them - that they've had to resort to this is a reasonable indication (IMHO) that the quantity of security holes being *fixed* has gone up significantly.
Finally, consider the rate at which security holes are being uncovered - it would have to start dropping off dramatically if MS was being successful in fixing their problems. That certainly doesn't seem to have happened.
The really old Dr Who shows are being repeated (possibly in order) on the ABC in Australia. I thought my kids (7 & 5) would only be interested once they got to (a) colour episodes and (b) Tom Baker.
Boy, was I wrong! These are kids who still don't understand that Dad once had a *black and white* TV, but they love the shows with the first doctor. Even when I was a keen Dr Who fan, I found the first Dr pretty tough to watch, but my kids never miss it.
I'm still waiting for them to tell me the TV's broken because there's no color...
I'm using Firebird/Thunderbird, but I'd switch back to Mozilla in a heartbeat if they ever got SVG integrated back into the main build.
Actually, I'm hoping Novell might decide to open source OpeneXchange Server in the hope that this will establish a much larger user base. That could let Novell sell other products or services into a space that's a Microsoft stronghold at the moment. Alternately, they could provide free licences for e.g. 10 users and achieve mind share that way.
MS Exchange is one of the few pieces of back-office software that doesn't have a full-featured FOSS alternative; it'd be nice if that situation changed.
> Why would I want a global economy?? From what I
> can see, it is beneficial to everyone EXCEPT the
> US.
I'm guessing you haven't travelled much - don't worry, most people haven't. The fact is that the US leads the world in several areas of production, but not in others.
To give one example, how about the steel industry? The US steel industry used to be at the top of the pack, but now they're also rans. Many countries now produce better quality steel cheaper than the US can.
The US government has two choices:
- allow US companies to import foreign steel without levying any tariffs. The steel importers would love to be getting cheaper, better steel, but the US steel industry would be destroyed
- impose a tariff on steel imports, so that any US company importing foreign steel would have to pay extra. This is great for the US steel producers, as it means they have an advantage for local production since they don't have tariffs slugged on what they produce; basically without these tariffs they'd be dead. Conversely, the US-based consumers of steel have to pay more for quality steel
Wheat production is another area where the US is now lagging behind the rest of the world. In fact, many industries that consume lots of people effort are bad performers for US companies; largely because the cost of labor in the US is so high compared to 99% of the world.
Looking at it another way, the reason the US is falling behind in many of these areas is because you've been so successful in the past - that success has brought you a higher standard of living, with increased wages, and now the rest of the world can deliver those same services cheaper than you can. Personally, you seem to have two choices:
- keep doing what you have been doing (e.g. producing steel, wheat, low-end IT services) and accept a lower income and lower standard of living
- do something different that you feel the rest of the world can't do better and/or cheaper. IT used to be one of those areas; now the "commodity" IT jobs have been outsourced elsewhere.
If it cheers you up any, India's now starting to face the same problems with IT outsourcing that the US has faced over the past few years. It's now cheaper to source commodity IT people from countries like the Philippines and Malaysia, and Indian guys are starting to find jobs that would have gone to them are now going to these countries. A few months ago, I was working with a guy from Bangalore who'd had to fly to Australia to retain his "outsourced" job in the face of it potentially being shipped elsewhere in Asia; now he's working for a multinational here, but being paid at the same rate he was in India (i.e. maybe 10-20% of Australian rates) and trying to support his wife and kids in Bangalore as well. This is a guy with reasonably good IT qualifications, who left his family behind in Bangalore to find work and now sleeps on friends' couches and walks 5km to and from work each day because he can't afford bus fare. *He* doesn't know how he can keep supporting *his* family.
I'm in Australia too, and I'd be quite willing to pay US99c a track for iTMS access if the local record companies would only get their acts together and make such a thing available to us.
Hopefully, the (expected) forthcoming availability of free AAC files for the download will spur them on a bit. After all, I'm quite happy to pay for AAC DRM files *now*, but I expect that many people will be much less prepared to pay a few months down the track when AAC DRM files are as "free" as MP3 files are now.
The Oz (and other, non-US) record companies have a window of opportunity to provide a good service that would get people signed up and paying, and it's suddenly shrunk by a lot. If they can provide a good enough customer experience, they'll get people paying even after these files are available "for free" - iTMS seems to be that "good enough service", so they'd better get moving or kiss that potential revenue goodbye.
> how about people, like myself, that have hardware ...
> that will NOT run anything after Win98?
> Looks like MS is forcing me to upgrade my hardware
> too? Not cool.
No, MS is saying they won't support your box any more. Just like you (probably) won't get support from your hardware vendor after this many years, now you won't get software support either.
It's not like your laptop is about to stop working just because MS stops supporting the software you licenced from them. Well, probably not...
Damn, next time I've got to remember to put ... around posts like that, just so people get the idea
>> "I create jobs.
...And he does it all without a word of thanks from any of us
Well, that much at least is true. I kinda figure this guy is directly responsible for the employment of many, many mail admins the world over.
Then, as that spam that gets through filters consumes the time of many millions of people, then he's also responsible for the employment of the extra people needed to cover the non-productivity of those who are reading his spam.
Finally, he's also responsible for employing those people who create filters for individual email clients. If Al and co. stopped sending spam, these people would be out on the street as well.
It'd be interesting to try to quantify this. Who knows? - maybe Al Ralsky is actually responsible for employing more people than (say) IBM employs.
Are politicians required to send this email from specific email addresses e.g. your_faithful_candidate@congress.wankers.gov? It seems like they should be (i.e. in order to prove their spam is actually "from a political organization", it should at least come from a traceable *and documented* source), in which case a few simple email filters could make the problem essentially disappear.
Thankfully I'm not a US citizen, so my exposure to this sort of rubbish is, oh, probably 2-3 years away...
I assume that, unless/until software patents are recognised worldwide, that it is still legal to produce WordML import/export tools in many countries.
If so, then there's nothing stopping people in e.g. Uzbekistan writing such filters, then handing them over to the OOo maintainers. The OOo guys still have to decide whether or not to include them in the OOo "product", and since OOo is at least partly "run" by Sun, that may be a battle Sun chooses not to fight. However, there's nothing stopping Sun/OOo providing a pointer to non-US sites containing the legally-written and provided Uzbeki WordML filters, which could be downloaded and installed separately from OOo. Sun/OOo could also provide integration assistance to the Uzbeki guys quite legally.
By doing this, you could see legal WordML etc. filters in OOo quite quickly.
> As soon as they were confident that the technology
> worked, the brothers approached the war offices of
> several nations, hoping to sell their patent to
> the highest bidder.
Any follow ups available? Did any country actually express an interest? Given the Boer War was current news, I imagine a whole new type of war machine might have been considered rather interesting...
God forbid SCO is involved. "Hello, Mr Boeing? My name's Darl McBride and I've got some bad news for you"
You make some interesting points, but I disagree with a few of them.
All IMHO...
I think software engineering can be planned like an assembly line. Most scientists build and enhance a set of tools over time; they re-use these tools knowing that they have a solid history of working.
Very few IT people have an equivalent set of tools. Sure, lots of people have e.g. a CD with the latest copies of vi/emacs, Perl, Python, gcc, latest Windows patches, etc, but how many have a set of tools they've developed or enhanced over time? How many write code to e.g. parse config files, having done it many times in the past but never having saved their previous work or generalised it? Lots of these simple tasks aren't covered in standard compiler libraries; you wind up writing a customised solution virtually from scratch, then knocking out the silly bugs that have crept in.
I'd venture that a sizeable percentage of code that gets written (as distinct from produced by a wizard) *could* be replaced by boilerplate code that gets reused from project to project. Stuff like repetitive Javascript data validation screens in Web pages; a lot of it is cut-paste work, yet very rarely do you find someone bringing in their own tried-and-tested code to do this in a project.
If this stuff was actually delivered in an assembly line fashion, which I think is entirely feasible, then I'd expect that projects would be able to be estimated much better.
The very best commercial coders out there work in this fashion; they bring their own, best-of-breed solutions to a job and they're capable of giving very precise time estimates for a piece of work. After all, once you've been coding for a certain period of time, the amount of seriously challenging (i.e. difficult to estimate) tasks should approach zero. They don't "think of a time, then multiply by 3" as seems to be common practice; they break down a piece of work into easily estimated chunks, then simply add up the times involved for each chunk.
These guys are "line items", as you put it - they come in, do a job and it gets done with minimal fuss. Their value is that they seek to eliminate risk. Their code doesn't fall apart under functional testing, because their standard tools already include checks for buffer overflows and similar mistakes.
Frankly, I'd pay them big bucks even if 100% of their code was delivered via boilerplate code and they actually spent hardly any time putting it together. I know their code would be solid, and the more of their boilerplate code there is, the less risk there is of it failing.
Note: I'm not saying that the guys who e.g. write kernel code fall into this category - a lot of that code is one-off by its very nature, and it's tough to genericise such code so that it will be highly reuseable and fault tolerant across applications and environments. However, that's the exception; the vast majority of commercial coding work is repetitive across projects and customers, and could be delivered via boilerplate reuse.
> So... tossing assembly line and guild models out
> the window, is there a conceptual approach that
> works?
I think there is - everyone involved in a software development project needs to accept responsibility for delivering their component, and manage expectations appropriately.
Every project I've seen over the last several years has had (a) a project manager who seemed to feel his/her job was to *dictate* when things would be completed based on negotiation rather than analysis, and whose performance was measured on meeting deadlines rather than delivering a workable solution, (b) techos who behave like artists, with an "it's finished when it's finished" mentality, and generally regard PMs and users as almost an enemy force, (c) business sponsors who abdicate any guidance responsibilities to the project manager, who is unqualified to provide that perspective, (d) testers who believe that removing test cases and "we'll fix it when it goes live" is a viable way of meeting deadlines, and (e) a user base that is prepared to continually change requirements and unwilling to accept resulting delays.
If these people all behaved like the project in question was "their" project, and adopted an attitude of maximising the chance of a successful outcome rather than ensuring they had plausible deniability, then I believe the success rate of IT projects would soar overnight.
Winner: Someone who accepts that the rules have now changed, and adjusts to play under the new rules
Loser: Someone who continues trying to compete under the old rules, who bitches and moans about "the good old days" and "the way things used to be"
Working for a large, notionally-faceless employer has only been common for about the last 100 years; prior to that, the vast majority of income-earners worked in their own small business producing products or services that they would sell directly. You were a baker, a bar owner or whatever, and you sold your goods and services to the other people in your town. Only in the 20th century did it become common for masses of people to work for a single employer and expect job security, so maybe what's happening now is an evolutionary step rather than the end of the world.
What's happening in IT now, with outsourcing of jobs to cheaper markets, is exactly what's happened to many other industries (primarily manufacturing) in Western countries over the last few decades. I'm sure there's ex-factory workers who've been out of work for years who are still convinced that "things will get better", but the majority of those people reskilled and moved on.
I suspect a sizeable chunk of these displaced workers thought their world was ending at the time as well, but it didn't.
There's now many indicators that the days of a majority of people in prosperous Western nations working for large employers may be coming to an end. It's not necessarily a doom-and-gloom period coming up, but sitting back waiting for things to change isn't likely to be the best preparation for what lies ahead.
> So I find it puzzling that traders wouldn't
> realize something was amiss with a $20 spread on a
> stock
I used to work for the Australian Stock Exchange, and for several brokers as well.
My experience is that people will try to make a buck on the markets wherever they think a buck can be made. People leaping in to trade a momentarily undervalued or overvalued stock is reasonably common; in fact, an entire trading approach called "arbitrage" is based on exactly this. Stocks that are traded on multiple exchanges typically have small price differences for exactly the same stock at the various exchanges; arbitrage involves buying for the lower price and selling instantly for the higher price. You might only make a tiny amount on each trade, but it's an exceptionally low risk trade and the opportunities for an arbitrage trade used to come up extremely often. Not sure if this is the case any longer...
Of all the people here saying "this is wrong; only a fool would trade on such a spread, and they've now got what they deserved", I wonder how many would hesitate to short SCOX if a similar situation appeared. Suppose SCOX suddenly blipped up by $5 a stock; would you be tempted to short it immediately, reasoning that the price was now totally ridiculous? Or, suppose SCOX suddenly dropped $5; would you be tempted to think "this is it!" and short it immediately?
The guy was supposedly Joe(?) Kennedy - patriarch of the Kennedy family in the US. Not sure if "Joe" is the right name or not; "history of Kennedy" is a subject I skipped at school...
> Of course, there is lot of evidence against SCO
> and they will lose their case. But the fact is,
> even they know it. This whole SCO suit is all
> about keeping Linux from rapid adoption using FUD
> and legal tactics.
No, the whole SCO suit is about keeping the stock price rising over 4 consecutive quarters.
If McBride et al can manage this, then they qualify for some huge payouts. They're currently midway through their 3rd quarter of rises, so there's somewhere between 4 and 6 months to go.
If/when they manage this, I expect a large amount of the FUD to disappear, and for SCO's stock price to plummet.
The key thing is that SCO has absolutely no interest in going to court over any of these accusations, as that would force the introduction and validation of fact into what is essentially a 100% FUD campaign. As long as they can keep fuelling the FUD fire, they expect SCO's stock price to keep rising; if it stops rising, expect to see more and more extreme FUD emerging.
Unless/until a "pump and dump" is proven, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do as SCO's execs - pushing the stock price higher is what they're ultimately employed to do, and failing to do so exposes them to potential shareholder litigation.
Consider this, then look back on the sequence of events SCO has gone through over the last 6-8 months and you'll see it all fits in place.
Has anyone tried both this and Knoppix? Are you able to comment on the pros and cons of each?
The only difference I noted is that MandrakeMove says it doesn't support use of a USB key from the download-only version. Whether it actually works or not, it doesn't say.
You make some good points.
If society deems that time in jail isn't sufficient punishment for these people, and that seems to the be the message given by posting their personal details on Web sites without their consent, then maybe the legal system is failing us.
These people with their personal info displayed have pretty much been handed a life sentence. If society is accepting this is appropriate, maybe these people should be either locked up forever or given the death penalty. I personally think this is too harsh, even though I have two young kids and would cheerfully carve up anyone who interfered with them...
IMHO the biggest problem is that child molesters invoke an extremely strong hostile reaction in most people, and that level of emotion is probably similar to that evoked towards mass murderers. Note: I'm saying *mass* murderers since many/most child sex offenders attack repeatedly, and often many kids are victims of the one attacker. However, the punishment and judicial treatment of child sex offenders and mass murderers is very different; mass murderers are almost always locked up virtually indefinitely, or convicted to death in some countries, whereas child sex offenders are typically released back into society within a few years.
Maybe this imbalance is what really should be addressed. I don't know; I find the whole issue too emotional to discuss with any rationality...
It would make sense for Phoenix and/or other BIOS manufacturers to build in this Trusted BIOS rubbish in such a way it can be turned off if required.
From what I hear, next-gen Windows may require (enabled) Trusted BIOS, so it simply wouldn't work if the Trusted BIOS was disabled. However, Linux and other OS would probably not work with the Trusted BIOS, so it would want it either to not be implemented or to be able to be disabled.
Content vendors may require either Windows or the Trusted BIOS, so it may be that Linux simply can't play content provided by these vendors. So be it - if you want to use e.g. Linux, then you can't use this content. Either live with it, or wait till someone puts a workaround in place to "fool" the content vendor...
If you were Phoenix' CxO, and you'd heard all about this Linux thing, and how its market share had overtaken Apple's and was continuing to gain support, and that many companies were actively considering migrating off Windows for both their server and desktop machines and may conceivably start to do so in the next 2-3 years, do you think you'd implement the Trusted BIOS in such a way that it couldn't be disabled? It wouldn't make any sense - if Phoenix does this, they *may* miss out on the "next big thing" (even if you think desktop Linux isn't going to happen, you have to concede that Microsoft's hold on the market over the next few years could start to drop off).
There's no reason why Phoenix would implement the Trusted BIOS in such a way that it couldn't be turned off, unless Microsoft pays Phoenix a big slab of money and/or acquires a significant influence in Phoenix at the board level. They couldn't do this for every BIOS vendor in the world, particularly since Linux looks like gaining lots of seats in government departments around the world and those seats will be a very compelling market for a BIOS vendor that doesn't force Trusted BIOS down their users throats.
don't put a mod chip in it.
You'll void the warranty.
Anyone know if "Darl" is a Nigerian name?
The resemblance is uncanny...