I tell my friends that I get special disks from the manufacturer that don't require activation. That it's normally very expensive software but, as a promotional deal, they can install and use it on as many machines as they want and not get in trouble.
For some reason when people think they're getting some kind of special deal, FOSS gets a better reception.
The other promotion for FOSS that works is using Knoppix to rescue a Windows box with a virus. It's like magic to them.
I'm not worried about F/OSS becoming the defacto commodity desktop and specialty OS, that's already a given. I'm more worried about F/OSS after it becomes the defacto desktop standard. Success is two-edged sword.
Then lets apply it in a lot more places. Remote locks on refrigerators when you've eaten enough for the day. Or cut off your water when you've used your quota. Maybe a machine that dispenses your cigarettes for the day ala 5th Element. Maybe the government thinks you should exercise more so they regulate your TV time. Because, let's face it, a technical solution is just so much more effective than education.
Every really insane piece of regulation started with a reasonable idea.
I think a better solution would be some type of feedback that showed people the demand on the grid and let them throttle their own electricity usage. If that feedback mechanism showed them ways to shift their electricity usage to less expensive times of the day and shows them how much money they saved it would be almost as effective in a much less dickish, Dick Cheney kind of way.
Some of the younger programmers really don't want to work in an inflexible office environment. Absenteeism is pretty high where I am now, and that's a contract that pays pretty well. And they want their web mail, IM's and iPhones. Cut off internet services they want and you'll lose them.
They don't do office hours, don't like cubicles and want their toys. But if you can work with them on those issues, they are capable of producing some amazing work. The best project I ever worked we set up an office in the corner of a warehouse, walled it off with fence panels and white boards, collected old furniture and used shelf grates for desks. We had a basketball hoop, frig, microwave, satellite TV and our own DSL. Plus we'd stay late and play games after hours. No one quit on that project and we worked some long hours toward the end.
You don't really have a lot of options. You can deal with them or outsource to someplace that doesn't speak English as a native language and works in an office that's open in what's the middle of the night for you. They're not going to work in a cubicle so just deal with it and adapt. You're better off giving them an empty, unfinished room and give them money to punk it out to their own taste.
I can imagine that many here will have a hard time seeing the utility of a device like this because it doesn't have the horsepower for gaming or 3D rendering. But I think back to how many WebTV users were in my site logs and realize that most people can get by with relatively modest hardware requirements. A 75% solution would run basic productivity software, email, chat, view pictures, play movies and run Firefox.
I'd get one for the times I don't feel like hauling a full size laptop. Many times 75% is plenty.
I think the popularity of appliance type devices in Japan may signal the market is somewhat bigger than many at Microsoft are willing to accept.
I don't think MSFT is the driver, more of a means to an end for Intel. Their interests are aligned at some level but mainly Intel wants to sell chips. I'm guessing they don't care which OS runs as long as they can keep a finger in the emerging market pie.
MS and Intel have common goals, but that could change.
What's more interesting is the callous, self-serving manner Intel is undermining a project trying to help people. It's pathetic. Lacking in even basic decency. You can claim corporations exist only for profit but it hasn't always been that way. It's a fairly recent development that we have have, at least corporately, started to turn into the Ferengi. And there are limits. When you start undermining humanitarian projects in order to protect your market position, you're over that line.
Maybe Negroponte should just pull off the gloves and make a deal with Wal-Mart and Costco to carry OLPC's. Use the profits to donate machines to developing nations. Or use the profits to cut schools in this country a big discount. If Intel and MS want a war, give them a war.
...the answer to AT&T is of course a tiered internet where Google and Blizzard have to pay extra to guarantee that there packets get through
I was listening to a story on NPR this am about how AT&T was whining about their revenue dropping. Well, duh. Turn yourselves into the a**hats of the telecom world, then act surprised when people cut service or go elsewhere.
Doesn't it just move you to tears when mega-corporations making billions in profits every quarter start whining about the cost of an infrastructure upgrade? We have to upgrade the system...whaaaaaaa. We have make a few less billions in profit to support our market...boo-f'ing-hoo. If it's that tough then sell all your circuits and get into a new line of work.
meaning that customers acquire their software licenses from a Microsoft Reseller, who in turn, acquires the licensing from a Microsoft Volume Licensing Distributor.
First we have seven layers of Vista licensing hell, now we have circle jerk licensing. You buy your license from some guy selling them out of the back of his car in an alley, then he gets them from another distributor who packages volume licenses...where's the value in that for the customer?
And if somewhere in that chain your licenses aren't legit, of course MS isn't going to hold you responsible. No BSA audits for you...oh, wait, you'd still be subject to those. But if you could prove you didn't know the licenses were bogus they might waive all the fines! Wo-ho! Lucky you!
Pretty soon they're going to need to offer a certification in MSBS just to manage enterprise licensing.
Utilizing "the cloud" requires businesses to give up a lot of control over their data.
You can't really compare electricity to privacy act data. No one ever got sued for losing electricity. You don't have to put 5 million people on credit monitoring if some hacker steals electricity. There are a lot of compelling reasons to keep control of your customer data but none of them are insurmountable objections, either.
You give a lot of control putting your phone calls on the phone system but that's working. I'm starting a business with nothing other than:
- A web browser
- An internet connection
- Ubuntu 7.10 on commodity hardware
I used to feel the same way about GIMP v Photoshop. Gimp seemed awkward and hard to work with...and that horrible name conjuring up visions of the gimp in Pulp Fiction...but I stuck with it. Now I get really nice results with GIMP, including some things I struggle with in Photoshop.
It all depends what you get used to. OSS is not bound by focus groups, industry standards or marketing research. They write it to work they way they want. A lot of times if you just stick with it one day you'll find you have difficulty working any other way.
Do their own graft, write their own damn software, and stop freeloading off the community.
What kind of leftie, tree-hugging nonsense is that? Expecting corporations to accept responsibility when there is shareholder value to consider, quarterly numbers to make and fat bonuses to earn.
Accountability...I can't believe such a radical concept will ever fly. The American corporate way is to have our cake, eat it too and expense the bill as entertainment.
Do all you can to confront and offend his "beliefs".
Not from around here, are ya? There's a way to do that and that's by earning their respect and leading by example. That will work though it takes longer. Your suggestion might be more immediately satisfying but ultimately counter-productive and would reinforce both the original behavior and "tree hugger" stereotype.
Haven't we had enough division over the last 8 years?
But no law guarantees using that right won't have consequences like losing your job or business.
I don't know art but I know what I like. Same thing with what employees post in their spare time. One of the guys on our volunteer fire department is seriously racist. His opinions are not shared by myself, the city or the department. If he keeps his mouth shut we can tolerate diversity of opinion, even some the rest of us might find highly objectionable. If he publishes a racially charged letter to the editor in the local paper, we'd likely have to suspend him. His employer might be looking at losing business if he keeps him on staff. He didn't do anything illegal, provided he wasn't advocating violence, but there are still consequences. Freedom of speech is not a license to kill.
Now let's suppose he merely posted pictures of some drunken but harmless escapades. We still might have to suspend him from the department, or limit what kind of calls he could answer. Imagine the department getting sued because of the way we handled a motor vehicle accident response and the opposing attorney parades those pictures in front of a jury. Could he have been impaired on the scene? Or hung over from the night before? Who else on the department might be involved? It would raise a doubt in my mind if I'm on the jury.
This isn't as clear cut as we might like it to be. Some employers will certainly go too far with monitoring employees online activities. What happens if the employee gets fired because of pictures of them at a Democratic fund raiser in a Republican leaning company? I think most reasonable people would agree that's not right. Where as if he was advocating segregation because one race or another was inferior, that's a different story.
You should be able to store and deploy your data, under your control, will any medical professional only being allowed to access and add to those records with your permissions.
Then how do you prove something like Medicaid fraud? Which is rampant. Or be alerted to people clinic shopping for pain meds? Also rampant. Many times hospitals have to comply with laws that make them or your doctor responsible for someone else getting silly.
Generally I tend to side with your viewpoint but I've also come into contact with those in rehab when dealing with a close relative with addiction issues. Some of them are relentlessly imaginative when it comes to gaming the system to get drugs. Collectively we lose hundreds of millions to Medicaid fraud. A lot of times hospitals and doctors are caught between their patient and law enforcement. And that doesn't even touch the insurance companies. If there's data abuse going on anywhere in the medical system, it's on the insurance side.
Personally, I think we could get by with a lot less law enforcement involvement in medical care. But to get there we need a mechanism for the primary care provider to alert authorities to the more egregious abuses and that's at odds with the privacy of your medical records. Solve those problems and I believe the interchange data format becomes much less of a mountain to climb.
It's a waste of time pitching the Navy anything. NMCI outsourced their entire network infrastructure to EDS. A monumental cesspool of pork barrel contracting that puts Haliburton's Iraq contracts to shame. There are hurdles and endless reviews for getting any piece of software approved for use on Navy or Marine networks. And between SPAWAR and EDS they're busy trying to squeeze out what little internal development is left in the Navy and move everything to the giant hosted service architecture. The very people most likely to use and promote any type of open source software or a project built on open standards are the ones jumping ship and going elsewhere.
You can waste your time trying to educate DoD if you want but it's maddeningly frustrating. They'll listen and understand, then go off and do something entirely different. Which is a shame because the military is an organization that would benefit the most from an open, flexible infrastructure. One that could scale on demand, integrate disparate information sources and is reliable on legacy hardware. You would think with the massive paperwork hassles of buying anything through the government, the military would pounce on technology that let them side-step the entire procurement process and load it when you need it.
It would all be funny if it wasn't billions of your tax dollars going down the crapper.
Ubuntu is nice, but it still isn't as noob-friendly as I'd like to see.
Agreed, though the advances from version to version are both impressive and appreciated. I run Gutsy on my home network and still notice some minor niggles. Support for wireless networking is improved but still needs work. I'm seeing memory leak issues and other minor annoyances with more than one user on a machine. Closing Firefox between sessions helps, but it still needs a restart once a week or so.
Like I said, minor niggles. Certainly not enough to get me to quit using it.
What I'd like to see:
- Portable user profiles. Login on a base install, network machine have have your working folders, desktop and apps follow you where ever you login, including remotely.
- Wireless networking wizard.
- Easier integration with Windows networks (probably coming after the Samba deal with MS).
- Simplify backup and recovery options.
Not a big list. Testimony to how good of job they're doing at Canonical.
Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture,
I'll be happy to liquidate it for them. Imagine being able to sell SCO office furniture on eBay? Along with a certificate of authenticity. Heck, I'd bid on a piece myself. It's like owning a piece of the Titanic of tech history.
Makes you wonder why freighters aren't robotic. You'd have to load human pilots for the relatively short hop from international waters into port but there wouldn't seem to be any reason to have a full time crew. GPS, satellite communications, video cameras, radar, infrared...it would be near real time, at least at the speeds a freighter moves. If something goes wrong helo a repair crew out and fix it.
Without the need to accommodate a full time human crew you could weld a cover over the top and seal it. Modern freighters are pretty automated these days, just take the next step. If they can automate a frickin oil rig, they should be able to automate a freight container.
No one ever imagines the other side coming up with something like autonomous aerial swarm bots that have the sole purpose in life of putting themselves on a collision course with any other aircraft in the area. If they were optically guided they could potentially be pretty rough on stealth bombers.
You could buy a lot of inexpensive swarm bots for the cost of one stealth bomber. Not to mention the headline news effect of the wreckage.
The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
You can get arrested for anything these days and now the FBI is going to become your employers watchdog? I've seen some dickish, big brother behavior since 9-11 but this tops the suck pyramid.
We have DirecTV on some sets but as they keep escalating prices, I keep cutting service. Was contemplating dropping them all together. All my TV's are analog but getting digital converters wouldn't be that expensive. I can use the same big air antenna that's already up. So some converter boxes and that should be all there is to the transition.
The other option would be switching to Free To Air satellite, but that's still pretty complicated.
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I tell my friends that I get special disks from the manufacturer that don't require activation. That it's normally very expensive software but, as a promotional deal, they can install and use it on as many machines as they want and not get in trouble.
For some reason when people think they're getting some kind of special deal, FOSS gets a better reception.
The other promotion for FOSS that works is using Knoppix to rescue a Windows box with a virus. It's like magic to them.
I'm not worried about F/OSS becoming the defacto commodity desktop and specialty OS, that's already a given. I'm more worried about F/OSS after it becomes the defacto desktop standard. Success is two-edged sword.
This seems like a reasonable idea...
Then lets apply it in a lot more places. Remote locks on refrigerators when you've eaten enough for the day. Or cut off your water when you've used your quota. Maybe a machine that dispenses your cigarettes for the day ala 5th Element. Maybe the government thinks you should exercise more so they regulate your TV time. Because, let's face it, a technical solution is just so much more effective than education.
Every really insane piece of regulation started with a reasonable idea.
I think a better solution would be some type of feedback that showed people the demand on the grid and let them throttle their own electricity usage. If that feedback mechanism showed them ways to shift their electricity usage to less expensive times of the day and shows them how much money they saved it would be almost as effective in a much less dickish, Dick Cheney kind of way.
Some of the younger programmers really don't want to work in an inflexible office environment. Absenteeism is pretty high where I am now, and that's a contract that pays pretty well. And they want their web mail, IM's and iPhones. Cut off internet services they want and you'll lose them.
They don't do office hours, don't like cubicles and want their toys. But if you can work with them on those issues, they are capable of producing some amazing work. The best project I ever worked we set up an office in the corner of a warehouse, walled it off with fence panels and white boards, collected old furniture and used shelf grates for desks. We had a basketball hoop, frig, microwave, satellite TV and our own DSL. Plus we'd stay late and play games after hours. No one quit on that project and we worked some long hours toward the end.
You don't really have a lot of options. You can deal with them or outsource to someplace that doesn't speak English as a native language and works in an office that's open in what's the middle of the night for you. They're not going to work in a cubicle so just deal with it and adapt. You're better off giving them an empty, unfinished room and give them money to punk it out to their own taste.
Without one of the new IDs you will be unable to board a plane after 2014 if you are under 50.
Gimme my boarding pass and stay off my lawn! Punks.
I can imagine that many here will have a hard time seeing the utility of a device like this because it doesn't have the horsepower for gaming or 3D rendering. But I think back to how many WebTV users were in my site logs and realize that most people can get by with relatively modest hardware requirements. A 75% solution would run basic productivity software, email, chat, view pictures, play movies and run Firefox.
I'd get one for the times I don't feel like hauling a full size laptop. Many times 75% is plenty.
I think the popularity of appliance type devices in Japan may signal the market is somewhat bigger than many at Microsoft are willing to accept.
I don't think MSFT is the driver, more of a means to an end for Intel. Their interests are aligned at some level but mainly Intel wants to sell chips. I'm guessing they don't care which OS runs as long as they can keep a finger in the emerging market pie.
MS and Intel have common goals, but that could change.
What's more interesting is the callous, self-serving manner Intel is undermining a project trying to help people. It's pathetic. Lacking in even basic decency. You can claim corporations exist only for profit but it hasn't always been that way. It's a fairly recent development that we have have, at least corporately, started to turn into the Ferengi. And there are limits. When you start undermining humanitarian projects in order to protect your market position, you're over that line.
Maybe Negroponte should just pull off the gloves and make a deal with Wal-Mart and Costco to carry OLPC's. Use the profits to donate machines to developing nations. Or use the profits to cut schools in this country a big discount. If Intel and MS want a war, give them a war.
I was listening to a story on NPR this am about how AT&T was whining about their revenue dropping. Well, duh. Turn yourselves into the a**hats of the telecom world, then act surprised when people cut service or go elsewhere.
Doesn't it just move you to tears when mega-corporations making billions in profits every quarter start whining about the cost of an infrastructure upgrade? We have to upgrade the system...whaaaaaaa. We have make a few less billions in profit to support our market...boo-f'ing-hoo. If it's that tough then sell all your circuits and get into a new line of work.
I despise corporate whiners.
meaning that customers acquire their software licenses from a Microsoft Reseller, who in turn, acquires the licensing from a Microsoft Volume Licensing Distributor.
First we have seven layers of Vista licensing hell, now we have circle jerk licensing. You buy your license from some guy selling them out of the back of his car in an alley, then he gets them from another distributor who packages volume licenses...where's the value in that for the customer?
And if somewhere in that chain your licenses aren't legit, of course MS isn't going to hold you responsible. No BSA audits for you...oh, wait, you'd still be subject to those. But if you could prove you didn't know the licenses were bogus they might waive all the fines! Wo-ho! Lucky you!
Pretty soon they're going to need to offer a certification in MSBS just to manage enterprise licensing.
Utilizing "the cloud" requires businesses to give up a lot of control over their data.
You can't really compare electricity to privacy act data. No one ever got sued for losing electricity. You don't have to put 5 million people on credit monitoring if some hacker steals electricity. There are a lot of compelling reasons to keep control of your customer data but none of them are insurmountable objections, either.
You give a lot of control putting your phone calls on the phone system but that's working. I'm starting a business with nothing other than:
- A web browser
- An internet connection
- Ubuntu 7.10 on commodity hardware
I used to feel the same way about GIMP v Photoshop. Gimp seemed awkward and hard to work with...and that horrible name conjuring up visions of the gimp in Pulp Fiction...but I stuck with it. Now I get really nice results with GIMP, including some things I struggle with in Photoshop.
It all depends what you get used to. OSS is not bound by focus groups, industry standards or marketing research. They write it to work they way they want. A lot of times if you just stick with it one day you'll find you have difficulty working any other way.
Do their own graft, write their own damn software, and stop freeloading off the community.
What kind of leftie, tree-hugging nonsense is that? Expecting corporations to accept responsibility when there is shareholder value to consider, quarterly numbers to make and fat bonuses to earn.
Accountability...I can't believe such a radical concept will ever fly. The American corporate way is to have our cake, eat it too and expense the bill as entertainment.
Do all you can to confront and offend his "beliefs".
Not from around here, are ya? There's a way to do that and that's by earning their respect and leading by example. That will work though it takes longer. Your suggestion might be more immediately satisfying but ultimately counter-productive and would reinforce both the original behavior and "tree hugger" stereotype.
Haven't we had enough division over the last 8 years?
But no law guarantees using that right won't have consequences like losing your job or business.
I don't know art but I know what I like. Same thing with what employees post in their spare time. One of the guys on our volunteer fire department is seriously racist. His opinions are not shared by myself, the city or the department. If he keeps his mouth shut we can tolerate diversity of opinion, even some the rest of us might find highly objectionable. If he publishes a racially charged letter to the editor in the local paper, we'd likely have to suspend him. His employer might be looking at losing business if he keeps him on staff. He didn't do anything illegal, provided he wasn't advocating violence, but there are still consequences. Freedom of speech is not a license to kill.
Now let's suppose he merely posted pictures of some drunken but harmless escapades. We still might have to suspend him from the department, or limit what kind of calls he could answer. Imagine the department getting sued because of the way we handled a motor vehicle accident response and the opposing attorney parades those pictures in front of a jury. Could he have been impaired on the scene? Or hung over from the night before? Who else on the department might be involved? It would raise a doubt in my mind if I'm on the jury.
This isn't as clear cut as we might like it to be. Some employers will certainly go too far with monitoring employees online activities. What happens if the employee gets fired because of pictures of them at a Democratic fund raiser in a Republican leaning company? I think most reasonable people would agree that's not right. Where as if he was advocating segregation because one race or another was inferior, that's a different story.
You should be able to store and deploy your data, under your control, will any medical professional only being allowed to access and add to those records with your permissions.
Then how do you prove something like Medicaid fraud? Which is rampant. Or be alerted to people clinic shopping for pain meds? Also rampant. Many times hospitals have to comply with laws that make them or your doctor responsible for someone else getting silly.
Generally I tend to side with your viewpoint but I've also come into contact with those in rehab when dealing with a close relative with addiction issues. Some of them are relentlessly imaginative when it comes to gaming the system to get drugs. Collectively we lose hundreds of millions to Medicaid fraud. A lot of times hospitals and doctors are caught between their patient and law enforcement. And that doesn't even touch the insurance companies. If there's data abuse going on anywhere in the medical system, it's on the insurance side.
Personally, I think we could get by with a lot less law enforcement involvement in medical care. But to get there we need a mechanism for the primary care provider to alert authorities to the more egregious abuses and that's at odds with the privacy of your medical records. Solve those problems and I believe the interchange data format becomes much less of a mountain to climb.
It's a waste of time pitching the Navy anything. NMCI outsourced their entire network infrastructure to EDS. A monumental cesspool of pork barrel contracting that puts Haliburton's Iraq contracts to shame. There are hurdles and endless reviews for getting any piece of software approved for use on Navy or Marine networks. And between SPAWAR and EDS they're busy trying to squeeze out what little internal development is left in the Navy and move everything to the giant hosted service architecture. The very people most likely to use and promote any type of open source software or a project built on open standards are the ones jumping ship and going elsewhere.
You can waste your time trying to educate DoD if you want but it's maddeningly frustrating. They'll listen and understand, then go off and do something entirely different. Which is a shame because the military is an organization that would benefit the most from an open, flexible infrastructure. One that could scale on demand, integrate disparate information sources and is reliable on legacy hardware. You would think with the massive paperwork hassles of buying anything through the government, the military would pounce on technology that let them side-step the entire procurement process and load it when you need it.
It would all be funny if it wasn't billions of your tax dollars going down the crapper.
Ubuntu is nice, but it still isn't as noob-friendly as I'd like to see.
Agreed, though the advances from version to version are both impressive and appreciated. I run Gutsy on my home network and still notice some minor niggles. Support for wireless networking is improved but still needs work. I'm seeing memory leak issues and other minor annoyances with more than one user on a machine. Closing Firefox between sessions helps, but it still needs a restart once a week or so.
Like I said, minor niggles. Certainly not enough to get me to quit using it.
What I'd like to see:
- Portable user profiles. Login on a base install, network machine have have your working folders, desktop and apps follow you where ever you login, including remotely.
- Wireless networking wizard.
- Easier integration with Windows networks (probably coming after the Samba deal with MS).
- Simplify backup and recovery options.
Not a big list. Testimony to how good of job they're doing at Canonical.
Now, under the Bush administration, they're keen on getting the band that still kept playing while the ship was sinking.
Hehe. Good one.
Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture,
I'll be happy to liquidate it for them. Imagine being able to sell SCO office furniture on eBay? Along with a certificate of authenticity. Heck, I'd bid on a piece myself. It's like owning a piece of the Titanic of tech history.
Or goatse rush hour traffic. ROFL! Here's an eye full for all of you stuck out in traffic this am.
Makes you wonder why freighters aren't robotic. You'd have to load human pilots for the relatively short hop from international waters into port but there wouldn't seem to be any reason to have a full time crew. GPS, satellite communications, video cameras, radar, infrared...it would be near real time, at least at the speeds a freighter moves. If something goes wrong helo a repair crew out and fix it.
Without the need to accommodate a full time human crew you could weld a cover over the top and seal it. Modern freighters are pretty automated these days, just take the next step. If they can automate a frickin oil rig, they should be able to automate a freight container.
Does anyone else think it looks more like a vacuum cleaner?
No one ever imagines the other side coming up with something like autonomous aerial swarm bots that have the sole purpose in life of putting themselves on a collision course with any other aircraft in the area. If they were optically guided they could potentially be pretty rough on stealth bombers.
You could buy a lot of inexpensive swarm bots for the cost of one stealth bomber. Not to mention the headline news effect of the wreckage.
Sounds more like a case of the problem dictating the solution to me.
The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
You can get arrested for anything these days and now the FBI is going to become your employers watchdog? I've seen some dickish, big brother behavior since 9-11 but this tops the suck pyramid.
We have DirecTV on some sets but as they keep escalating prices, I keep cutting service. Was contemplating dropping them all together. All my TV's are analog but getting digital converters wouldn't be that expensive. I can use the same big air antenna that's already up. So some converter boxes and that should be all there is to the transition.
The other option would be switching to Free To Air satellite, but that's still pretty complicated.