I don't have a problem if this tag holds e.g. my name; I can see how that could be used to prevent my leg getting accidentally amputated.
I have a concern if it holds my medical history, regardless of any encryption that could be put on the data. Several years ago, many encryption algorithms were thought to be "good enough"; now they've been cracked. At the rate CPU speed is increasing, there's not likely to be any encryption that could be applied to an RFID tag that would be definitively uncrackable before I die; therefore, there's a chance that someone could access my implanted data in an unauthorised fashion while I'm still around to care about it. When I'm 80 years old, I don't want some gadget refusing me health insurance because it can extract info from a device that was implanted half a lifetime ago.
I agree that there are some good things that could be achieved by this technology; however, I want to see a significant chunk of history of use of RFID tags go by before they start getting implanted in me.
...So I go to hospital, and one of these RFID tags is implanted within me.
Next time I visit doctor/hospital, what restrictions are there on info from "my" tag being read? Two possible options I can see: - everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it. Get on a plane - *SCAN*; "Sorry sir, we believe your heart may give out on this flight and we don't want any lawsuits". Go to a job interview - *SCAN*; "Sorry but we won't employ someone with your health problems" - nobody can read my info except for readers authorised by the single company controlling the implants. Hmm, now I wonder how they could conceivably abuse that information...
Thanks, but no thanks - I'll take my chances with anonymity. The possibilities of abuse of this technology are just too high
> I got a patent on a device for providing light and > heat to a small space by means of the ignition of > methane gas directed from the posterior of a human > being
I have to ask - what form does this device take? Is it externally mounted, or... - on second thoughts, never mind.
Good luck - I'm looking forward to seeing it in the next Sears catalog.
Surely this is implementation of a business process (i.e. a means of verifying user identity before allowing access) rather than some great breakthrough in software . If so, doesn't that mean it isn't patentable by anyone?
One of the key inhibitors to fixing the spam problem has been the lack of ability for any solution to be widely enforced quickly. SPF et al are nice and dandy for what they are, but the time it takes to implement them globally is just too long. Each ISP is faced with two choices: - enforce new anti-spam technology, and accept that paying customers won't get their email for a while until the rest of the world falls in line - don't implement it, or wait till everyone else implements it, or partially implement it so that no customer misses their email
Neither of these options will work.
From a purely technical perspective, a lot could be done today to reduce spam dramatically. However almost all suggestions fail on the point that they require every ISP and/or user to adopt the new solution simultaneously, or risk losing email.
If the US FTC is hosting a forum on this, *and* they get support from equivalent bodies in other countries, then *just maybe* a technical solution can be put up and accepted on the understanding that (on some nominated date/time) every significant ISP worldwide will turn it on simultaneously.
> I had it figured out by the winter of 1999, you > can't tell me everyone else didn't know by then. > They really just wanted to cash in before it dried > up.
You sound like you've been around for a while, as have I. Unfortunately we're not true indicators of "everyone else".
I worked at the Australian Stock Exchange for a few years, and was on the trading floor during the 1987 crash. People who worked with me then, who had lost everything, who were otherwise quite intelligent, thought the Internet boom wasn't going to end.
I had people working for me in 1999-2000, techos fresh out of university who thought they knew it all, and were saving their money to go across to reap their just rewards in Silicon Valley. They bought into every e-float that came up, and most lost all of it. I'd be very surprised if their friends and relatives didn't buy into the same dream at least to some extent.
I have a mate who left a high-paying, global strategy-level job in IT to day trade fulltime from home. For a very brief time, he made a lot of money - more than he would have made in his old job. However, he had no idea of how to trade, and rode all his stocks down to virtually zero. Thankfully he didn't use any leverage - all he lost was everything he had invested, not house etc.
All of these people were skilled up in either IT or investment, and all lost big. Just because they're wanting to cash in while the going's good, didn't mean that they knew when to actually take their cash and run.
As others have pointed out, it seems that the patenting of software in general may not be legal in many/most/all cases. Obviously, arguing this case is going to cost a lot of money, as many global companies with deep pockets will support the opposite argument.
Marten: As CEO of a major FOSS company, are you aware of any industry-wide push to challenge the validity of software patents in general? I'm not talking about challenging the existence of individual patents; is there any investigation going on as to the possibility of throwing out *all* software patents as being e.g. insufficiently "novel"?
It's all about context - your son had just read the book, so the ideas in it were at the front of his mind.
I've traded futures and shares for many years, so I knew a bubble when I saw one - recognition that a bubble was happening was part of my training, if you want to look at it that way. However, one of my close friends, who is a *very* savvy businessman and has held very high level roles with multiple global corporations, used to argue with me that "everything has now changed with the Internet", "stock dividends are irrelevant now" and so on. Lots of investment advisors were saying the same thing; presumably some were trying to profit by boosting the stock they wanted to sell, and others were too dumb to know any better.
I pointed out to my friend that this had been said many times before, which he knew, but he thought the Internet bubble was The Big Leap Forward. His background covered 20+ years of business in manufacturing and IT, and he'd seen the Internet and related technologies could make changes to those areas that were an order of magnitude more significant than anything else he'd seen. All of this is still true, so he's not actually wrong.
As others have said, spikes in Yahoo, Cisco, MS, Sun etc. share price will happen, but the infrastructure that supports these companies is probably the safer investment bet in the long term. That said, a lot of people (myself included) felt that Cisco was one of those infrastructure companies, but it was part of the bubble - it can be hard to distinguish between the two.
> The United States is known as being the world's > most stable democracy.
Not to cast aspersions, but by which criteria do you make this statement?
If we allow that the US actually is a democracy: - many other democracies have been around longer - many other democracies have not been subjected to a civil war - many other democracies have not had in-office Presidents assassinated - many other democracies have not fought as many wars - many other democracies have lower crime rates
I'd go on, but hopefully the point is now made - the US is a lot of things (good and bad), but calling it the "most stable democracy" is really pushing it.
Although I regard Bill Gates as the leading robber baron of this generation, there is a long tradition of the most successful robber barons making major contributions to education and public works. Although I'm not a USian, I think this has been a significant factor in advancing the US in terms of innovation over a long period.
Sadly, this tradition seems to have faded somewhat over the last several years, so I applaud Gates for doing his bit and hope he spurs on some comparable acts by his "peers".
After writing this, I need to take a shower and lie down for a while...
I can see two potential solutions to this issue: - provide file import/export capabilities using plugins, and have the Office XML plugins maintained in a country that doesn't recognise US patent law - have the EFF and any other relevant OSS group come forward and state "we will provide financial support to any developer who gets sued for working on this, given they've exercised appropriate due diligence and basically acted in good faith"
The long term solution is obvious: the present US patent system is broken and needs a major overhaul, and the rest of the world needs to stop caving to the US in terms of intellectual property law under the guise of so-called "free trade agreements".
> Look at the restrictions. 1 CPU and 5GB of > storage, wtf? What kind of an "enterprise" does > anyone run with a twinky database server like > that?
Every enterprise I've ever worked in, and that's lots of them, has both gargantuan databases, mid-sized databases and MS-Access-sized databases. Not everything sits in the one big database.
I could potentially see a use for this: "Look, it's very similar to MS SQL, even comes from the same codebase several years ago. And it's free". I'll bet the porting effort to go from MS SQL to Sybase would be pretty small, unless you're one of those people who instantly uses the shiniest features of MS SQL when a new version gets released.
Unfortunately, most even moderate-sized corps have MS Select licences (or whatever they're called these days) whereby the marginal cost for an extra SQL Server is fairly tiny; that's the only reason I can't see this taking off.
I'm in Australia. Our infrastructure is probably pretty similar.
However, in many businesses intermittent connection problems to the Internet are not unusual.
Email problems occur every few days, but are generally transparent to the end user and frankly no-one really cares that much if their email message takes an extra hour or so to arrive at the destination.
Internet access drops out from time to time, but then reappears - maybe IT is having to deal with e.g. loads of incoming spam messages and takes systems off the air briefly to clear the backlog. I don't know, and I work in IT - I just don't care enough to pursue it.
However, the real issue is that, for many small/medium enterprises, Internet access isn't as reliable as turning on a tap. The company I'm in now has 3500'ish employees spread across many sites, and has network connectivity problems on at least one site every day. Hardly any of these outages impact me, but you can bet that if a user at a site couldn't run his "software as a service" app during that downtime, it'd affect him *a lot*.
In fact, that issue alone *would* definitely kill the idea at this organization, which is legally obliged to deliver data every day and would suffer very big financial penalties if it couldn't do so.
Make Internet access as reliable as the water, gas, phone etc., and software as a service is well placed. That time, however, is many years away.
I think, in this case, "the standard" is equivalent to "the config that my software vendors will support".
As with many others here, I use Debian at home and love it. However, if you have to tie yourself up in knots to get Major App A to work on Debian, then jump through all sorts of hoops to get support for Major App A from the vendor because the vendor doesn't support Debian, then from a business perspective I'd have grave doubts about choosing Debian in the first place.
Yep it's great for all sorts of reasons, but businesses want risk-free, continual operation of their infrastructure. If they have to pay extra to get you trained on RedHat or SUSE, that's a tiny cost compared to an outage.
On the one hand, I don't want to not "own" something I buy. Yes, I know about software licences etc., but until they're tested in court, I don't believe that I can be bound by a contract that: - I don't sign - is only presented to me after I've paid my money at the shop, gone home, unpacked the box, inserted the CD and started "setup.exe" or whatever - seems to present me with no benefits for my requested compliance with a huge bunch of legalese that is beyond the scope for a non-legal person to understand. A contract is *not* a one-way street, and that *is* enshrined in law
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind the option of being able to pay a small amount of money for tools that I only use rarely e.g. MS Publisher. I'll never buy it and I couldn't be bothered even trying to pirate it, so I just track down someone who owns it and use it on their PC for a 1 hour session every year or so. Being able to licence it for that one session looks like a win-win to me.
However, the true showstopper issue is that systems that require me to validate my identity against a central system don't work when my Internet connection is unavailable for any reason. Unless/until Internet connectivity is truly universal and as reliable as my water supply, I can't see people bothering with it.
If I don't need to validate my identity against a central system, and the software only runs X times, then what's to stop me creating a VMware instance, installing the software, running it, then blowing away the VMware instance, creating a new one, installing the software again, etc.? Sure, not many people are going to do that, but being able to do it over and over again with little effort will let some kiddie crack the "encryption" scheme being used and publish a crack for it. Once the crack is published, the system is dead - everyone can pay once and use the software indefinitely.
> Are there classes in business school that teach > this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed > Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?
I've just come out of a meeting where the published agenda was "this is a critical initiative that requires contributions from all stakeholders to ensure that our department is able to work together effectively and efficiently, while delivering the quality that our customers expect".
That's the least useful description I've ever seen that didn't involve the phrase "paradigm shift".
Yes, it was a management meeting. No minutes taken, no decisions made, no action items taken by anyone, no ownership of any issues. On the other hand, given I had to be at work for that period of time anyway, it was a convenient opportunity for me to site quietly in the corner in a semi-comatose state for 90 minutes.
I'd like to think you're right, but I suspect you're not.
Parphrasing rather a lot, the DOD would tend to have lots of "desktop"-class systems whereas the Army would tend to have lots of "server"-class systems.
Stupid analogy, right? Let me explain.
Servers tend to do a few things, but do them exceptionally reliably. I figure most field combat systems would tend to do exactly one thing, and would need to do it exceptionally reliably. A missile control system is not also going to double as a supply coordination system.
Desktops tend to do all sorts of things, many of which will interact with each other in ways beyond their designer's original expectation. Almost by necessity, these systems are going to be less robust - all sorts of weird things have to work together and sometimes stuff will go wrong. I imagine the DOD is going to have a majority of these systems in the hands of army-office type of people, running Word, Excel, small databases, Powerpoint, etc.
If so, the DOD will face exactly the same problem that every company has as they try to migrate off an MS desktop environment. Word docs with embedded Excel graphs, Access databases with macros, Excel VBA macros - it's a REALLY tough job unless you go in with the approach "We *will* do this, and we'll just have to deal with these issues as they turn up". Then it's still a really tough job, but at least you've got the mandate to do something about it.
If you go in with the approach "OpenOffice is a replacement for MS Office, so no problem", then you'll hit circumstances where it won't work, and you may be forced to keep MS Office for those users that use those documents. Then you run the longer term risk of ensuring the future documents they produce are in a form that can be used by non-OS tools. That's gotta be tough...
Anyway, back to my point - while the Army may standardise on Linux, I think it'll be a long time before the DOD does the same.
- small size (Zaurus isn't pocket sized; if I have to use something that big, I'll just use a laptop) - takes CF cards up to (say) 512Mb - builtin 802.11x, maybe Bluetooth - runs Debian (I want to be easily able to download languages/tools to do my own stuff, not be stuck with a set of tools that one vendor decides is a good fit for my needs. It also has to have a decent OS under it, so I can e.g. create scripts to download data overnight and read it on the train a la SiteScooper) - Excel compatibility + PDF reader (I know that Word compatibility is a nice thing, but I just don't use it; who wants to write entire documents on a tiny screen with a tiny keypad?) - XML-based calendar/address book/etc. (Sharp really did this well with the Zaurus, but hardly anyone followed through on it with tools to extend the standard offerings) - sync with *anything* via a single button press over a wireless link (OK, let's reduce that down to Windows/Linux/Max and Outlook/Mozilla/KOffice/Evolution and maybe a few others. PDAs should strive for interoperability above all else; what good is a PDA if you can't back it up and have to manually keep a 2nd copy of your data in sync somewhere else) - sync with e.g. Yahoo Calendar - USB host port (so I can move data via generic external hard disc or USB drive if/when I want to) - optional foldup keyboard, for note taking in meetings
What I really want to live to see is how the world's religions suddenly reinvent their "sacred history" to deal with proof of the existence of intelligent alien life. My ideal scenario would be: - they're much more advanced that we are - they couldn't give a stuff about us, either way
That would give many established religions a big PR problem.
Amen - if you think late-teen / early-twenties women are hot, wait till you catch up to the 40yo single women. In a nutshell, - many remember their wilder younger days, and want to relive them after a marriage/relationship ends - many/most know what they actually enjoy, and will happily tell you if you ask (unlike many 20yo women) - give them what they want, and they'll give you what you want, almost without exception. Again, big difference from many 20yo women - financial independence is a wonderful thing!
Best of all, the tables are almost completely turned from when I was ~18. Then, my sex drive was sky high and I would do just about anything to get laid. Now, my sex drive is (relatively) under control while theirs is sky high; hello, home-cooked dinners and fully catered TV football games with your mates around!
Now I'd better make a call to ensure *someone special* doesn't read/. today...
Does anyone know of a reasonably objective review of MS Exchange/Outlook replacements, running on Linux/BSD? I'm looking for categories such as: - feature list compared with Exchange / Outlook (calendar, public folders) - plays well with Outlook (many sites just want to replace Exchange, but still use Outlook)
I've got several small business customers who are well informed and don't want to get caught up in MS dependency. They're either running demo Exchange (with the built in time bomb), or an email-only server and wishing they had calendaring. In general, they'd prefer to use Outlook as long as they have the ability to dump it and replace it with something else with little / no business impact.
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I don't have a problem if this tag holds e.g. my name; I can see how that could be used to prevent my leg getting accidentally amputated.
I have a concern if it holds my medical history, regardless of any encryption that could be put on the data. Several years ago, many encryption algorithms were thought to be "good enough"; now they've been cracked. At the rate CPU speed is increasing, there's not likely to be any encryption that could be applied to an RFID tag that would be definitively uncrackable before I die; therefore, there's a chance that someone could access my implanted data in an unauthorised fashion while I'm still around to care about it. When I'm 80 years old, I don't want some gadget refusing me health insurance because it can extract info from a device that was implanted half a lifetime ago.
I agree that there are some good things that could be achieved by this technology; however, I want to see a significant chunk of history of use of RFID tags go by before they start getting implanted in me.
...So I go to hospital, and one of these RFID tags is implanted within me.
Next time I visit doctor/hospital, what restrictions are there on info from "my" tag being read? Two possible options I can see:
- everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it. Get on a plane - *SCAN*; "Sorry sir, we believe your heart may give out on this flight and we don't want any lawsuits". Go to a job interview - *SCAN*; "Sorry but we won't employ someone with your health problems"
- nobody can read my info except for readers authorised by the single company controlling the implants. Hmm, now I wonder how they could conceivably abuse that information...
Thanks, but no thanks - I'll take my chances with anonymity. The possibilities of abuse of this technology are just too high
djmitchell(at)optushome(dot)com(dot)au
TIA
> I got a patent on a device for providing light and
... - on second thoughts, never mind.
> heat to a small space by means of the ignition of
> methane gas directed from the posterior of a human
> being
I have to ask - what form does this device take? Is it externally mounted, or
Good luck - I'm looking forward to seeing it in the next Sears catalog.
Surely this is implementation of a business process (i.e. a means of verifying user identity before allowing access) rather than some great breakthrough in software . If so, doesn't that mean it isn't patentable by anyone?
One of the key inhibitors to fixing the spam problem has been the lack of ability for any solution to be widely enforced quickly. SPF et al are nice and dandy for what they are, but the time it takes to implement them globally is just too long. Each ISP is faced with two choices:
- enforce new anti-spam technology, and accept that paying customers won't get their email for a while until the rest of the world falls in line
- don't implement it, or wait till everyone else implements it, or partially implement it so that no customer misses their email
Neither of these options will work.
From a purely technical perspective, a lot could be done today to reduce spam dramatically. However almost all suggestions fail on the point that they require every ISP and/or user to adopt the new solution simultaneously, or risk losing email.
If the US FTC is hosting a forum on this, *and* they get support from equivalent bodies in other countries, then *just maybe* a technical solution can be put up and accepted on the understanding that (on some nominated date/time) every significant ISP worldwide will turn it on simultaneously.
> I had it figured out by the winter of 1999, you
> can't tell me everyone else didn't know by then.
> They really just wanted to cash in before it dried
> up.
You sound like you've been around for a while, as have I. Unfortunately we're not true indicators of "everyone else".
I worked at the Australian Stock Exchange for a few years, and was on the trading floor during the 1987 crash. People who worked with me then, who had lost everything, who were otherwise quite intelligent, thought the Internet boom wasn't going to end.
I had people working for me in 1999-2000, techos fresh out of university who thought they knew it all, and were saving their money to go across to reap their just rewards in Silicon Valley. They bought into every e-float that came up, and most lost all of it. I'd be very surprised if their friends and relatives didn't buy into the same dream at least to some extent.
I have a mate who left a high-paying, global strategy-level job in IT to day trade fulltime from home. For a very brief time, he made a lot of money - more than he would have made in his old job. However, he had no idea of how to trade, and rode all his stocks down to virtually zero. Thankfully he didn't use any leverage - all he lost was everything he had invested, not house etc.
All of these people were skilled up in either IT or investment, and all lost big. Just because they're wanting to cash in while the going's good, didn't mean that they knew when to actually take their cash and run.
As others have pointed out, it seems that the patenting of software in general may not be legal in many/most/all cases. Obviously, arguing this case is going to cost a lot of money, as many global companies with deep pockets will support the opposite argument.
Marten: As CEO of a major FOSS company, are you aware of any industry-wide push to challenge the validity of software patents in general? I'm not talking about challenging the existence of individual patents; is there any investigation going on as to the possibility of throwing out *all* software patents as being e.g. insufficiently "novel"?
It's all about context - your son had just read the book, so the ideas in it were at the front of his mind.
I've traded futures and shares for many years, so I knew a bubble when I saw one - recognition that a bubble was happening was part of my training, if you want to look at it that way. However, one of my close friends, who is a *very* savvy businessman and has held very high level roles with multiple global corporations, used to argue with me that "everything has now changed with the Internet", "stock dividends are irrelevant now" and so on. Lots of investment advisors were saying the same thing; presumably some were trying to profit by boosting the stock they wanted to sell, and others were too dumb to know any better.
I pointed out to my friend that this had been said many times before, which he knew, but he thought the Internet bubble was The Big Leap Forward. His background covered 20+ years of business in manufacturing and IT, and he'd seen the Internet and related technologies could make changes to those areas that were an order of magnitude more significant than anything else he'd seen. All of this is still true, so he's not actually wrong.
As others have said, spikes in Yahoo, Cisco, MS, Sun etc. share price will happen, but the infrastructure that supports these companies is probably the safer investment bet in the long term. That said, a lot of people (myself included) felt that Cisco was one of those infrastructure companies, but it was part of the bubble - it can be hard to distinguish between the two.
> The United States is known as being the world's
> most stable democracy.
Not to cast aspersions, but by which criteria do you make this statement?
If we allow that the US actually is a democracy:
- many other democracies have been around longer
- many other democracies have not been subjected to a civil war
- many other democracies have not had in-office Presidents assassinated
- many other democracies have not fought as many wars
- many other democracies have lower crime rates
I'd go on, but hopefully the point is now made - the US is a lot of things (good and bad), but calling it the "most stable democracy" is really pushing it.
Although I regard Bill Gates as the leading robber baron of this generation, there is a long tradition of the most successful robber barons making major contributions to education and public works. Although I'm not a USian, I think this has been a significant factor in advancing the US in terms of innovation over a long period.
Sadly, this tradition seems to have faded somewhat over the last several years, so I applaud Gates for doing his bit and hope he spurs on some comparable acts by his "peers".
After writing this, I need to take a shower and lie down for a while...
I can see two potential solutions to this issue:
- provide file import/export capabilities using plugins, and have the Office XML plugins maintained in a country that doesn't recognise US patent law
- have the EFF and any other relevant OSS group come forward and state "we will provide financial support to any developer who gets sued for working on this, given they've exercised appropriate due diligence and basically acted in good faith"
The long term solution is obvious: the present US patent system is broken and needs a major overhaul, and the rest of the world needs to stop caving to the US in terms of intellectual property law under the guise of so-called "free trade agreements".
No offence bud, but don't be surprised if your 73yo Mum has been asking your 77yo Dad about "hardening" for some years now.
Just don't assume it's only an IT issue, despite the appearance of most of us...
> Look at the restrictions. 1 CPU and 5GB of
> storage, wtf? What kind of an "enterprise" does
> anyone run with a twinky database server like
> that?
Every enterprise I've ever worked in, and that's lots of them, has both gargantuan databases, mid-sized databases and MS-Access-sized databases. Not everything sits in the one big database.
I could potentially see a use for this: "Look, it's very similar to MS SQL, even comes from the same codebase several years ago. And it's free". I'll bet the porting effort to go from MS SQL to Sybase would be pretty small, unless you're one of those people who instantly uses the shiniest features of MS SQL when a new version gets released.
Unfortunately, most even moderate-sized corps have MS Select licences (or whatever they're called these days) whereby the marginal cost for an extra SQL Server is fairly tiny; that's the only reason I can't see this taking off.
I'm in Australia. Our infrastructure is probably pretty similar.
However, in many businesses intermittent connection problems to the Internet are not unusual.
Email problems occur every few days, but are generally transparent to the end user and frankly no-one really cares that much if their email message takes an extra hour or so to arrive at the destination.
Internet access drops out from time to time, but then reappears - maybe IT is having to deal with e.g. loads of incoming spam messages and takes systems off the air briefly to clear the backlog. I don't know, and I work in IT - I just don't care enough to pursue it.
However, the real issue is that, for many small/medium enterprises, Internet access isn't as reliable as turning on a tap. The company I'm in now has 3500'ish employees spread across many sites, and has network connectivity problems on at least one site every day. Hardly any of these outages impact me, but you can bet that if a user at a site couldn't run his "software as a service" app during that downtime, it'd affect him *a lot*.
In fact, that issue alone *would* definitely kill the idea at this organization, which is legally obliged to deliver data every day and would suffer very big financial penalties if it couldn't do so.
Make Internet access as reliable as the water, gas, phone etc., and software as a service is well placed. That time, however, is many years away.
I think, in this case, "the standard" is equivalent to "the config that my software vendors will support".
As with many others here, I use Debian at home and love it. However, if you have to tie yourself up in knots to get Major App A to work on Debian, then jump through all sorts of hoops to get support for Major App A from the vendor because the vendor doesn't support Debian, then from a business perspective I'd have grave doubts about choosing Debian in the first place.
Yep it's great for all sorts of reasons, but businesses want risk-free, continual operation of their infrastructure. If they have to pay extra to get you trained on RedHat or SUSE, that's a tiny cost compared to an outage.
I can see pros and cons to this.
On the one hand, I don't want to not "own" something I buy. Yes, I know about software licences etc., but until they're tested in court, I don't believe that I can be bound by a contract that:
- I don't sign
- is only presented to me after I've paid my money at the shop, gone home, unpacked the box, inserted the CD and started "setup.exe" or whatever
- seems to present me with no benefits for my requested compliance with a huge bunch of legalese that is beyond the scope for a non-legal person to understand. A contract is *not* a one-way street, and that *is* enshrined in law
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind the option of being able to pay a small amount of money for tools that I only use rarely e.g. MS Publisher. I'll never buy it and I couldn't be bothered even trying to pirate it, so I just track down someone who owns it and use it on their PC for a 1 hour session every year or so. Being able to licence it for that one session looks like a win-win to me.
However, the true showstopper issue is that systems that require me to validate my identity against a central system don't work when my Internet connection is unavailable for any reason. Unless/until Internet connectivity is truly universal and as reliable as my water supply, I can't see people bothering with it.
If I don't need to validate my identity against a central system, and the software only runs X times, then what's to stop me creating a VMware instance, installing the software, running it, then blowing away the VMware instance, creating a new one, installing the software again, etc.? Sure, not many people are going to do that, but being able to do it over and over again with little effort will let some kiddie crack the "encryption" scheme being used and publish a crack for it. Once the crack is published, the system is dead - everyone can pay once and use the software indefinitely.
> Are there classes in business school that teach
> this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed
> Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?
I've just come out of a meeting where the published agenda was "this is a critical initiative that requires contributions from all stakeholders to ensure that our department is able to work together effectively and efficiently, while delivering the quality that our customers expect".
That's the least useful description I've ever seen that didn't involve the phrase "paradigm shift".
Yes, it was a management meeting. No minutes taken, no decisions made, no action items taken by anyone, no ownership of any issues. On the other hand, given I had to be at work for that period of time anyway, it was a convenient opportunity for me to site quietly in the corner in a semi-comatose state for 90 minutes.
I'd like to think you're right, but I suspect you're not.
Parphrasing rather a lot, the DOD would tend to have lots of "desktop"-class systems whereas the Army would tend to have lots of "server"-class systems.
Stupid analogy, right? Let me explain.
Servers tend to do a few things, but do them exceptionally reliably. I figure most field combat systems would tend to do exactly one thing, and would need to do it exceptionally reliably. A missile control system is not also going to double as a supply coordination system.
Desktops tend to do all sorts of things, many of which will interact with each other in ways beyond their designer's original expectation. Almost by necessity, these systems are going to be less robust - all sorts of weird things have to work together and sometimes stuff will go wrong. I imagine the DOD is going to have a majority of these systems in the hands of army-office type of people, running Word, Excel, small databases, Powerpoint, etc.
If so, the DOD will face exactly the same problem that every company has as they try to migrate off an MS desktop environment. Word docs with embedded Excel graphs, Access databases with macros, Excel VBA macros - it's a REALLY tough job unless you go in with the approach "We *will* do this, and we'll just have to deal with these issues as they turn up". Then it's still a really tough job, but at least you've got the mandate to do something about it.
If you go in with the approach "OpenOffice is a replacement for MS Office, so no problem", then you'll hit circumstances where it won't work, and you may be forced to keep MS Office for those users that use those documents. Then you run the longer term risk of ensuring the future documents they produce are in a form that can be used by non-OS tools. That's gotta be tough...
Anyway, back to my point - while the Army may standardise on Linux, I think it'll be a long time before the DOD does the same.
- small size (Zaurus isn't pocket sized; if I have to use something that big, I'll just use a laptop)
- takes CF cards up to (say) 512Mb
- builtin 802.11x, maybe Bluetooth
- runs Debian (I want to be easily able to download languages/tools to do my own stuff, not be stuck with a set of tools that one vendor decides is a good fit for my needs. It also has to have a decent OS under it, so I can e.g. create scripts to download data overnight and read it on the train a la SiteScooper)
- Excel compatibility + PDF reader (I know that Word compatibility is a nice thing, but I just don't use it; who wants to write entire documents on a tiny screen with a tiny keypad?)
- XML-based calendar/address book/etc. (Sharp really did this well with the Zaurus, but hardly anyone followed through on it with tools to extend the standard offerings)
- sync with *anything* via a single button press over a wireless link (OK, let's reduce that down to Windows/Linux/Max and Outlook/Mozilla/KOffice/Evolution and maybe a few others. PDAs should strive for interoperability above all else; what good is a PDA if you can't back it up and have to manually keep a 2nd copy of your data in sync somewhere else)
- sync with e.g. Yahoo Calendar
- USB host port (so I can move data via generic external hard disc or USB drive if/when I want to)
- optional foldup keyboard, for note taking in meetings
Bah.
What I really want to live to see is how the world's religions suddenly reinvent their "sacred history" to deal with proof of the existence of intelligent alien life. My ideal scenario would be:
- they're much more advanced that we are
- they couldn't give a stuff about us, either way
That would give many established religions a big PR problem.
Let's see if Heinlein was right after all...
Amen - if you think late-teen / early-twenties women are hot, wait till you catch up to the 40yo single women. In a nutshell,
/. today...
- many remember their wilder younger days, and want to relive them after a marriage/relationship ends
- many/most know what they actually enjoy, and will happily tell you if you ask (unlike many 20yo women)
- give them what they want, and they'll give you what you want, almost without exception. Again, big difference from many 20yo women
- financial independence is a wonderful thing!
Best of all, the tables are almost completely turned from when I was ~18. Then, my sex drive was sky high and I would do just about anything to get laid. Now, my sex drive is (relatively) under control while theirs is sky high; hello, home-cooked dinners and fully catered TV football games with your mates around!
Now I'd better make a call to ensure *someone special* doesn't read
Does anyone know of a reasonably objective review of MS Exchange/Outlook replacements, running on Linux/BSD? I'm looking for categories such as:
- feature list compared with Exchange / Outlook (calendar, public folders)
- plays well with Outlook (many sites just want to replace Exchange, but still use Outlook)
I've got several small business customers who are well informed and don't want to get caught up in MS dependency. They're either running demo Exchange (with the built in time bomb), or an email-only server and wishing they had calendaring. In general, they'd prefer to use Outlook as long as they have the ability to dump it and replace it with something else with little / no business impact.
Any pointers / URLs?
Buckaroo Bonzai
is a nice juicy Free Trade Agreement between France and the US. That way, French law would simply be overruled by US law, and everyone could be happy