How about Early Adopter Mac OS X Java? That covers Cocoa too, and is (to date) the only book that covers Java and Cocoa. The ISBN is 186100611X, and I am not at all biased because I was one of the editors on it:-)
Facts on Globalization
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Globalization
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I was always one to agree with globalization - in many ways it's like the ideal of Star Trek with a single world government and so no money - however, the idea doesn't work in practice.
The WTO (essentially THE prime mover of globalization) was never elected or ratified by any single government. You have to pay to enter it, and the more you pay, the more voting rights you have.
Fair enough, you may say. A bit cruel, but it's only like shareholders in a company. However, there are very strict rules and if you break these rules (on IP rights for instance) you are dismissed from the WTO. It explicitly states in its rules that to trade with the WTO, you need to be a member state. Considering the US, UK, and all of Europe is part of the WTO, with the US having the largest voting rights, how is that fair?
It has also created bad effects for member states as now, to be competitive, you have to have your industrial workers in third world countries being paid peanuts. You could argue that this has brought costs down for the consumer, and it has to some degree, but these products need to be shipped from A to B and stricter quality control needs to take place. Also, as fuel prices and other taxes increase, the costs of transporting these goods increase. Many of these third world countries have other industries but all industries rely on each other as the society members have relationships to each other. Only the trans-national corporations with their factories survive, killing off other local enterprise, and so increasing the costs of these other industries as the country gets more impoverished. So, eventually we have to buy from elsewhere, destroying that industry. And so it goes around...
I don't know what the answer is, but especially with the current terrorist crisis, we can cope for a while without the easy and free movement of trade. All countries will be hard hit, but seeing as we're all heading into recession, I can't see the problem with re-creating new industries.
He has an article here that gives some details. He did right a very good analysis in a book, I edited, Pro Linux Deployment, that for instance gave no software roadmap as one of the problems of open source but he gave the counter arguments. There might be an article that is almost the same on the Web somewhere. The Introductory chapter he did was also licensed under some open documentation license.
They unvelied these plans in the O'Really Open Source conference last year. I'm surprised it's taken so long to take off.
VNC is a really cool piece of technology AND they have vnc clients as Java applets so that you can connect using a web browser. For those who don't know, it is an X server that only sends information over to the client when the presentation changes, and then it only sends a rectangle that contains the changed data. With something like a phone, it will barely every change.
One reason it's good is that you can have a truly dumb terminal that does nothing but run the underlying OS and a VNC client. State remains on the server so that if the client dies for some reason, you restore exactly from where you left off. The Windoze vnc server is ridiculously slow as well
Remember that HP-UX's OS has been around on 64-bit platforms forever. It can cope with (I think) 64 TB of memory. Obscenely huge file sizes. HP-UX has numerous file system enhancemens (as well as mature journalling) that enable Oracle, for instance, to run like a bastard on one of these machines. They can have, last I heard, near unlimited amounts of prcessors, and their servers can come with 64 built in but you can add extra servers to a cluster and share processors like that. Some of their UNIX tools are annoyingly different from the norm, but otherwise their UNIX is really good.
To add all of this functionality to Linux would take a long time (years and years) and so HP would rather continue to use HP-UX on their high-end servers. When Linux approaches the HP-UX level, then they might decide to re-evaluate but they would be insane to use it now.
Mean but reasonable. When I can get a cable modem in my area in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, UK, the local cable firm say that they do not allow various popular Internet connections - essentially banning me from using servers. However, web addresses are easily solved, they will provide a home page for me, so Ican just stick a redirect to the address (perhaps via a DHS name) on a different port number.
Other services like DNS are best handled by external providers anyway, and I don't mind having to connect to different ports for LDAP, etc. They probably won't block ssh as they won't know what it is.
It's reasonable to stop people hosting servers as bandwidth is limited over such connections (hence why we get an asymmetric connection) and so they need to stop people hosting popular sites especially on there. I for one don't want to be charged by the bit rate, do you?
We have Big Brother over here in the UK. Annoyingly enough, it is all over the newspapers and millions watch the drivel. They do a free live webcam to the house at Channel 4 as well as various XXX versions of it done by the dodgier of our tabloids;-)
The thing is, the entire nation as gone voyeuristic: they all want to see one guy (Paul) I think, have sex with some other person.
Oh, another thing, on this post I'm replying too, why do you think having a criminal's execution filmed will stop that criminal committing a crime? If anything, it will make it more likely. The death penalty never ever has worked. If someone is going to commit a murder, they will commit a murder - the only challenge for them is not to get caught. The only kinds of crime the death penalty will act as a deterrent on are things like speeding and illegally parking. Would anyone in the universe risk sudden death for just being five minutes nearer to their destination?
This article, although pointing out something I didn't know - that of there being 170,000 characters in existence on this planet, is wrong about Unicode. Firstly, there is now a UTF-32 standard which should be able to deal with just about everything, but that aside, there are more than 65,536 possible characters in UTF-16.
Out of those 65,536 possible characters, 20,000 characters or so are reserved so that we can use pairs of words to double the set. In fact, the specification allows us to add to it almost ad infinitum, continuously adding more characters. Just two words covers over 100,000 characters, three will do the lot.
Okay, the writers of unicode may have been slightly short-sighted, but also they probably considered the problems of using a 32-bit character set and decided against it (and 24-bit for that matter). They have added an extending property to the 16-bit unicode standard and that should cope with much. I don't know how the chinese/japanese/korean population deal with their HUGE character sets now (you couldn't have a keyboard big enough) but they must have a shorter, simpler method of coping with everyday data input. Surely, this double and triple pairing of UTF-16 will do?
I can think of lots of legitimate uses. At the minute, we use a client-server methodology for the Internet. There are some servers (that should never fail) and we all get our information from them. Computers fail (even Linux and FreeBSD ones), and some topics are too small-fry to bother investing the time and resources into them. Peer to peer makes a different Web possible.
Currently, P2P services usually advertise connected persons IP addresses on a public server. This could still happen, but subjects or uses could be advertised as well. The servers, can also use P2P to share their information.
Want a site to discuss and distribute folk music from a remote part of South Africa of which there is an audience of maybe 100 people? Currently, someone has to setup a free homepage for this information to be shared. With P2P, we can create a subject list and people interested share files, emails, whatever. Obviously, some more technology has to be built on top but this will always be the case. Raw P2P is only useful for copying and searching files of specific names (almost exclusively useful for music and video).
Perhaps a nice new XML format can be created to describe the nature of such information and do it.
Or, in other words, if any of you have used MS Windows, you may have noticed that you can cut and paste, not only text, but images, spreadsheets, or just about anything else between applications.
This isn't because every application can read and understand every other application, this is because each bit of the application is uses a COM component to view and manipulate the data, etc. These components are activated in other applications to view the data you've viewed in cut and paste, and to generally make application programming easier as you just make a call to an SMTP/CDO component to send mail, or a call to an Excel component to manipulate spreadsheet data.
Regarding Bonobo, Evolution uses it, so any application you use can make full use of the mailer facilities with simple Bonobo calls, and more importantly, Evolution can make use of other Bonobo applications in its interface. Gnumeric spreadsheet data and Abiword data, and OpenOffice applications, and Evolution mail and calendar objects can be easily shared by the user, by copying and pasting. Also, Nautilus uses it too, so file browsing can use Nautilus components if you want; and file viewing in Nautilus, can use the native viewers of the applications in question.
Bonobo is better than the original COM model, as everything is done using CORBA - which is network transparent, so you can copy and paste from applications not necesarily residing on the same machine. DCOM was supposed to do the same for Windows, only it never really did on all levels.
ReiserFS is the main thing you get. It's just too groovy when my laptop runs out of power when I squeeze every last drop of juice from the battery and unlike windows, it pops up at pretty much the same speed when I recharge it (no fsck!). ReiserFS is also a rather fast filesystem and there are no tools to resize such a filesystem, etc.
The simplicity is an advantage. Yes, on its own XML is a bit pants, but because of its simplicity, many add-in facilities are available. XSLT allows you to turn an XML document into anything (a Postscript Document if you want) and certainly back to SGML if necessary. It is an object-oriented language which some people will hiss at, but it does settle really nicely when coding in most programming languages. Okay, XML isn't ideal for databases (because it is object oriented and most databases aren't - hence why OOP languages work on recordsets and pass SQL as strings to a connection object), however, there are ways around this.
To me, the main advantage is the fact that it is both machine and human readable. An XML config file is normally instantly understandable and programming languages can manipulate it quite easily without having to worry about CR/LFs and the completely different formats in flat file databases.
Also, the new XML Schemas allow a fully self-documenting, detailed explanation of what the content of an XML document should contain. You could use a stylesheet to turn the Schemas into DocBook documentation if you so desired. Certainly better than going over your application, taking notes, and writing up the documentation.
To be honest, although all of here at Slashdot can think that XML hasn't had an effect. MS's.NET is going to be entirely XML based, which is a good thing as it will allow communication with their platform easily. Sun's released ONE, which is just a rebranding name against.NET for Java, but it works now and is being used now. GNOME uses XML heavily and why not? Anyone writing applications can easily read the config files and output of another application and know what to do with it.
Okay, I've ranted a bit here, sorry, but it isn't just the future, it's the present. Of course, in the UNIX world we'll continue to use flat files and standard non-object oriented databases, but when we want to talk with the rest of the world, we will have a method of doing so now that doesn't involve reverse-engineering and so is a lot quicker to develop.
This was first devised a year ago, they have just managed to create a prototype. I think the Financial Times article is wrong when it talks about compression. The technology (as far as I can remember) involves layering memory technology on top of each other and then storing the data in a 3D format which allows much greater storage than, say, just adding the storage capabilites of each layer together. Much greater is a slight underestimate. Obscenely greater is a better description. I doubt their $50 pricetag though. Okay, the drive itself might be cheap but I suspect the interface to connect it will cost a fair bit more.
A hell of a lot goes into publishing a book other than writing it (and I'm not just talking about the mechanical process of printing). Editorial is essential in ALL pieces of work. If any of you are arts graduates, look over your old essays and you'll see what I mean.
Okay, I'm biased as I work for Wrox, and we spend far far more time and work on editorial than anyone else (and we still get typos), but I don't think you can print a book that cheap - unless you don't mind printing something that could tarnish your image as it hasn't been edited and proofread.
Good idea though, even if you just printed books of all the HOWTOs (edited of course) it would be worthwhile.
Yes you can regulate the Web that arrives at the computers in specific countries, but you can't censor the Web as a whole. I hate to tell you this, but the US isn't the only source of the Internet, many sites are located in other countries and most of the Internet users are located elsewhere too. The only way it can be censored is if the US stipulate what can be on a server in the US and have the main routers filtering content. Okay, all but two (I think) of the DNS servers are located in the states, which is almost like you own it, but it doesn't have to be so.
Even if dubya decided that the Internet was corrupting young american minds and banned it completely from your country, after a brief hiccup, the rest of the world would still have it - albeit a bit slower as most of the fast links connect to the US.
Being English, I'm obviously the life-long enemy of France, but, they seem to respect privacy far, far, more than we do here. The US don't. You may have something called the constitution but every government agency seems to see how much they can get away with - or - keep things secret and see how long we can get away with it. The French government are trying to sue the US and British government over nicking trade secrets picked up over the telephone so that an american company could get a contract.
What you generally find is that in a state of individualism, the state (which is always essential) tries to find people to spy on as the officials get paranoid. In a socially aware state - the state are still paranoid but at least the people they're spying on is everyone and everyone a larger target than whoever the agency feels like spying on at the moment.
Not having a constitution in the UK (except that of monarchy) means that any law can ultimately get passed in our country, including some very dodgy ones recently - however, thankfully Europe does have other laws to override the more stupid ones - like the human rights legislation. One of those human rights is one of privacy.
Oh, one more thing, whoever said that Canada invented Smarties is wrong. All of the US's decent chocolate comes through Canada but Smarties were invented by Rowntree Macintosh (a dodgy UK company) which got bought out by Nestle (a dodgy French company) and so that is presumably why you think they're Canadian.
Re:So you rate money higher than altruism?
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Geek Charities?
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Here Here!
Besides, much as many slashdot readers think that America is the world and everything that happens there affects the rest of the world (even if slowly), that isn't the case. The FSF and EFF don't really help anyone outside the US. Maybe the FSF were so against KDE for that reason, maybe the US idea of free differs from the European or other ideas of free. Open Source schemes elsewhere in India, for instance, are never mentioned.
You are your own country and your first priority is to take care of yourselves, but don't you think that the natural human skill/ability known as empathy gives us a responsiblity to help out those less fortunate than ourselves? Just as greed gives us a responsiblity to learn more and earn more?
(Okay that last sentence is very dodgy, but hey!)
What confuses me is this. Surely it makes sense to have a number of bodies (just as every country has its own body) to look after different TLDs? Domain name servers update their records (if they're top level domain servers) and then the rest of the world slowly gets hold of and caches this information. Surely the.com domain could be held by a business consortiums each with a domain name server, the.org the same, etc. just as the countries are. Then all we need is either an agreement to host top level domain servers among them or a rewriting so that basic information on the holders of all top level domain servers (including countries) can be distributed for everyone's DNS server to look at.
For instance, it's not really that decentralised at the mo. Yes, if the US president decided the Internet was bad and evil and decided to close it then the DNS servers around the world would pick up the business and we would be able to still talk to every other machine, but these DNS servers are just copies of the original ones at ICANN.
Unfortunately there is no widely accepted standard for things like calendars and tasks. Outlook can read IMAP mailboxes and get the addresses via LDAP, if you're brave. As an alternative, if schedule messaging is essential, you could install HP OpenMail. It works out about as expensive as Exchange only it runs on UNIX and supports more clients than Outlook. Outlook can get at the calendars and everything as if it were an Exchange Server. Groovy huh? However, I'd keep my ears close to the ground and see if an open messaging standard becomes widespread enough to adopt for calendars, etc.
Also, Exchange doesn't scale well at all. It does scale a bit (you can buy another hugely powerful machine and cluster it) but you have to pay extra licensing costs and get help to do it. The scalability of postfix/sendmail/imapd/popd/ldapd is much easier to implement (and free!)
One advantage behind Exchange (which you can do with UNIX, but you need some coding) is that you can buy a virus checking plug-in. We have it here and it removes dodgy attachments before the users read them. Assuming the virus isn't really new of course.
...If you ask me it's a bit silly. If it had to be done, I'd first segregate by country if you can and then separate again in a funky 3D way to provide related links between countries (remember we're a globe so all related links could transcend boundaries. Sorry, Tim, a bit more work needed.
Certain jobs, if they have flexi-time, need some kind of clocking in/out system to ensure that empoloyees aren't taking the piss. However, in most cases it is a vast improvement.
Your office needs a key holding system and needs to pay to have security available etc for longer hours (if the office is normally shut up and turned off after a certain time
However, to the crux of it, I couldn't work where I do without it. I commute 50 miles in and out each day. I could drive, only with the local road network, it would generally take just as long so I get the train. Trains are unreliable and even if I got up early and tried my hardest, I think the earliest I'd be in is generally 9:30. With Flexi time it allows your workplace to have a wider choice of employees from different areas, and, if they commute by train, then they can work on the train too.
Most importantly, programming-type work is very unreliable work in terms of time. Generally, something takes up your time towards the end that you didn't expect. By having a flexi-time system, the employee can work extra hours on getting it fixed (as you generally need to sort such problems ASAP before you forget your train of thought) and just take a few hours off later. For instance, finishing early on a Friday
However, certain roles don't lend themselves well to flexi-time. Telesales, Reception, and most Customer Service roles require a number of member of staff to be available between certain hours. Most other jobs will work to flexi-time, as long as it isn't abused (e.g. coming in at 1pm and finishing at 9-9:30pm).
What's the point really? All a DTD does (it is very limited in what it does define) is say what elements and attributes you are allowed, and to a certain extend, what order and contents. All you do by publishing your DTD is say what the contents of an XML file can be, so there should be no problems at all. Just leave it alone. There is no benefit in stealing someone else's DTD and then making it private. A private DTD is of no use to anyone and even if your DTD was licensed, it could easily be changed so it looks completely different but performs the same job.
Either way, if I were you, I'd learn Schemas. They have just become a Candidate Recommendation and are much more powerful in what they can define and do. And, more importantly, Schemas are XML files themselves so they can be transformed by XSLT if need be, or they can be parsed and processed, for instance, to provide the contents in a drop down list.
Copyright was invented to protect authors and the owners of expensive printing presses back in the 17th or 16th century (my history is dodgy). I agree that it should exist for printed material (not least because I am an editor;-)
However, we need something different for music and software. Shame the rest of the world hasn't realised this. The code in our books is completely free (not even GPLed in most cases). However, the text is ours and should be completely ours.
Unless you live in Turkey or various other countries, where you can buy materials under someone else's name for dirt cheap, legally. E.g. Armani, Levi, etc. made by some seamstresses out in the mountains somewhere, but with an authentic label stuck on it because they can.
The issue is that global megacorps dictate the law and so if they don't like something they will either prosecute to the full extent under the law of the relevant country, or pull all trading from that country. And people think that Libertarianism is a good thing? Pah!
Slashdot Mirror
Read about it here
The WTO (essentially THE prime mover of globalization) was never elected or ratified by any single government. You have to pay to enter it, and the more you pay, the more voting rights you have.
Fair enough, you may say. A bit cruel, but it's only like shareholders in a company. However, there are very strict rules and if you break these rules (on IP rights for instance) you are dismissed from the WTO. It explicitly states in its rules that to trade with the WTO, you need to be a member state. Considering the US, UK, and all of Europe is part of the WTO, with the US having the largest voting rights, how is that fair?
It has also created bad effects for member states as now, to be competitive, you have to have your industrial workers in third world countries being paid peanuts. You could argue that this has brought costs down for the consumer, and it has to some degree, but these products need to be shipped from A to B and stricter quality control needs to take place. Also, as fuel prices and other taxes increase, the costs of transporting these goods increase. Many of these third world countries have other industries but all industries rely on each other as the society members have relationships to each other. Only the trans-national corporations with their factories survive, killing off other local enterprise, and so increasing the costs of these other industries as the country gets more impoverished. So, eventually we have to buy from elsewhere, destroying that industry. And so it goes around...
I don't know what the answer is, but especially with the current terrorist crisis, we can cope for a while without the easy and free movement of trade. All countries will be hard hit, but seeing as we're all heading into recession, I can't see the problem with re-creating new industries.
He has an article here that gives some details. He did right a very good analysis in a book, I edited, Pro Linux Deployment, that for instance gave no software roadmap as one of the problems of open source but he gave the counter arguments. There might be an article that is almost the same on the Web somewhere. The Introductory chapter he did was also licensed under some open documentation license.
VNC is a really cool piece of technology AND they have vnc clients as Java applets so that you can connect using a web browser. For those who don't know, it is an X server that only sends information over to the client when the presentation changes, and then it only sends a rectangle that contains the changed data. With something like a phone, it will barely every change.
One reason it's good is that you can have a truly dumb terminal that does nothing but run the underlying OS and a VNC client. State remains on the server so that if the client dies for some reason, you restore exactly from where you left off. The Windoze vnc server is ridiculously slow as well
To add all of this functionality to Linux would take a long time (years and years) and so HP would rather continue to use HP-UX on their high-end servers. When Linux approaches the HP-UX level, then they might decide to re-evaluate but they would be insane to use it now.
Other services like DNS are best handled by external providers anyway, and I don't mind having to connect to different ports for LDAP, etc. They probably won't block ssh as they won't know what it is.
It's reasonable to stop people hosting servers as bandwidth is limited over such connections (hence why we get an asymmetric connection) and so they need to stop people hosting popular sites especially on there. I for one don't want to be charged by the bit rate, do you?
The thing is, the entire nation as gone voyeuristic: they all want to see one guy (Paul) I think, have sex with some other person.
Oh, another thing, on this post I'm replying too, why do you think having a criminal's execution filmed will stop that criminal committing a crime? If anything, it will make it more likely. The death penalty never ever has worked. If someone is going to commit a murder, they will commit a murder - the only challenge for them is not to get caught. The only kinds of crime the death penalty will act as a deterrent on are things like speeding and illegally parking. Would anyone in the universe risk sudden death for just being five minutes nearer to their destination?
Out of those 65,536 possible characters, 20,000 characters or so are reserved so that we can use pairs of words to double the set. In fact, the specification allows us to add to it almost ad infinitum, continuously adding more characters. Just two words covers over 100,000 characters, three will do the lot.
Okay, the writers of unicode may have been slightly short-sighted, but also they probably considered the problems of using a 32-bit character set and decided against it (and 24-bit for that matter). They have added an extending property to the 16-bit unicode standard and that should cope with much. I don't know how the chinese/japanese/korean population deal with their HUGE character sets now (you couldn't have a keyboard big enough) but they must have a shorter, simpler method of coping with everyday data input. Surely, this double and triple pairing of UTF-16 will do?
I've had Telnet in 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2. Not sure about before then though. Pretty sure.
Currently, P2P services usually advertise connected persons IP addresses on a public server. This could still happen, but subjects or uses could be advertised as well. The servers, can also use P2P to share their information.
Want a site to discuss and distribute folk music from a remote part of South Africa of which there is an audience of maybe 100 people? Currently, someone has to setup a free homepage for this information to be shared. With P2P, we can create a subject list and people interested share files, emails, whatever. Obviously, some more technology has to be built on top but this will always be the case. Raw P2P is only useful for copying and searching files of specific names (almost exclusively useful for music and video).
Perhaps a nice new XML format can be created to describe the nature of such information and do it.
Or, in other words, if any of you have used MS Windows, you may have noticed that you can cut and paste, not only text, but images, spreadsheets, or just about anything else between applications.
This isn't because every application can read and understand every other application, this is because each bit of the application is uses a COM component to view and manipulate the data, etc. These components are activated in other applications to view the data you've viewed in cut and paste, and to generally make application programming easier as you just make a call to an SMTP/CDO component to send mail, or a call to an Excel component to manipulate spreadsheet data.
Regarding Bonobo, Evolution uses it, so any application you use can make full use of the mailer facilities with simple Bonobo calls, and more importantly, Evolution can make use of other Bonobo applications in its interface. Gnumeric spreadsheet data and Abiword data, and OpenOffice applications, and Evolution mail and calendar objects can be easily shared by the user, by copying and pasting. Also, Nautilus uses it too, so file browsing can use Nautilus components if you want; and file viewing in Nautilus, can use the native viewers of the applications in question.
Bonobo is better than the original COM model, as everything is done using CORBA - which is network transparent, so you can copy and paste from applications not necesarily residing on the same machine. DCOM was supposed to do the same for Windows, only it never really did on all levels.
ReiserFS is the main thing you get. It's just too groovy when my laptop runs out of power when I squeeze every last drop of juice from the battery and unlike windows, it pops up at pretty much the same speed when I recharge it (no fsck!). ReiserFS is also a rather fast filesystem and there are no tools to resize such a filesystem, etc.
To me, the main advantage is the fact that it is both machine and human readable. An XML config file is normally instantly understandable and programming languages can manipulate it quite easily without having to worry about CR/LFs and the completely different formats in flat file databases.
Also, the new XML Schemas allow a fully self-documenting, detailed explanation of what the content of an XML document should contain. You could use a stylesheet to turn the Schemas into DocBook documentation if you so desired. Certainly better than going over your application, taking notes, and writing up the documentation.
To be honest, although all of here at Slashdot can think that XML hasn't had an effect. MS's .NET is going to be entirely XML based, which is a good thing as it will allow communication with their platform easily. Sun's released ONE, which is just a rebranding name against .NET for Java, but it works now and is being used now. GNOME uses XML heavily and why not? Anyone writing applications can easily read the config files and output of another application and know what to do with it.
Okay, I've ranted a bit here, sorry, but it isn't just the future, it's the present. Of course, in the UNIX world we'll continue to use flat files and standard non-object oriented databases, but when we want to talk with the rest of the world, we will have a method of doing so now that doesn't involve reverse-engineering and so is a lot quicker to develop.
This was first devised a year ago, they have just managed to create a prototype. I think the Financial Times article is wrong when it talks about compression. The technology (as far as I can remember) involves layering memory technology on top of each other and then storing the data in a 3D format which allows much greater storage than, say, just adding the storage capabilites of each layer together. Much greater is a slight underestimate. Obscenely greater is a better description. I doubt their $50 pricetag though. Okay, the drive itself might be cheap but I suspect the interface to connect it will cost a fair bit more.
Okay, I'm biased as I work for Wrox, and we spend far far more time and work on editorial than anyone else (and we still get typos), but I don't think you can print a book that cheap - unless you don't mind printing something that could tarnish your image as it hasn't been edited and proofread.
Good idea though, even if you just printed books of all the HOWTOs (edited of course) it would be worthwhile.
Even if dubya decided that the Internet was corrupting young american minds and banned it completely from your country, after a brief hiccup, the rest of the world would still have it - albeit a bit slower as most of the fast links connect to the US.
What you generally find is that in a state of individualism, the state (which is always essential) tries to find people to spy on as the officials get paranoid. In a socially aware state - the state are still paranoid but at least the people they're spying on is everyone and everyone a larger target than whoever the agency feels like spying on at the moment.
Not having a constitution in the UK (except that of monarchy) means that any law can ultimately get passed in our country, including some very dodgy ones recently - however, thankfully Europe does have other laws to override the more stupid ones - like the human rights legislation. One of those human rights is one of privacy.
Oh, one more thing, whoever said that Canada invented Smarties is wrong. All of the US's decent chocolate comes through Canada but Smarties were invented by Rowntree Macintosh (a dodgy UK company) which got bought out by Nestle (a dodgy French company) and so that is presumably why you think they're Canadian.
You are your own country and your first priority is to take care of yourselves, but don't you think that the natural human skill/ability known as empathy gives us a responsiblity to help out those less fortunate than ourselves? Just as greed gives us a responsiblity to learn more and earn more?
(Okay that last sentence is very dodgy, but hey!)
For instance, it's not really that decentralised at the mo. Yes, if the US president decided the Internet was bad and evil and decided to close it then the DNS servers around the world would pick up the business and we would be able to still talk to every other machine, but these DNS servers are just copies of the original ones at ICANN.
Also, Exchange doesn't scale well at all. It does scale a bit (you can buy another hugely powerful machine and cluster it) but you have to pay extra licensing costs and get help to do it. The scalability of postfix/sendmail/imapd/popd/ldapd is much easier to implement (and free!)
One advantage behind Exchange (which you can do with UNIX, but you need some coding) is that you can buy a virus checking plug-in. We have it here and it removes dodgy attachments before the users read them. Assuming the virus isn't really new of course.
...If you ask me it's a bit silly. If it had to be done, I'd first segregate by country if you can and then separate again in a funky 3D way to provide related links between countries (remember we're a globe so all related links could transcend boundaries. Sorry, Tim, a bit more work needed.
Your office needs a key holding system and needs to pay to have security available etc for longer hours (if the office is normally shut up and turned off after a certain time
However, to the crux of it, I couldn't work where I do without it. I commute 50 miles in and out each day. I could drive, only with the local road network, it would generally take just as long so I get the train. Trains are unreliable and even if I got up early and tried my hardest, I think the earliest I'd be in is generally 9:30. With Flexi time it allows your workplace to have a wider choice of employees from different areas, and, if they commute by train, then they can work on the train too.
Most importantly, programming-type work is very unreliable work in terms of time. Generally, something takes up your time towards the end that you didn't expect. By having a flexi-time system, the employee can work extra hours on getting it fixed (as you generally need to sort such problems ASAP before you forget your train of thought) and just take a few hours off later. For instance, finishing early on a Friday
However, certain roles don't lend themselves well to flexi-time. Telesales, Reception, and most Customer Service roles require a number of member of staff to be available between certain hours. Most other jobs will work to flexi-time, as long as it isn't abused (e.g. coming in at 1pm and finishing at 9-9:30pm).
Either way, if I were you, I'd learn Schemas. They have just become a Candidate Recommendation and are much more powerful in what they can define and do. And, more importantly, Schemas are XML files themselves so they can be transformed by XSLT if need be, or they can be parsed and processed, for instance, to provide the contents in a drop down list.
However, we need something different for music and software. Shame the rest of the world hasn't realised this. The code in our books is completely free (not even GPLed in most cases). However, the text is ours and should be completely ours.
The issue is that global megacorps dictate the law and so if they don't like something they will either prosecute to the full extent under the law of the relevant country, or pull all trading from that country. And people think that Libertarianism is a good thing? Pah!