Wikis are designed to lower the barrier to editing the content as low as possible. That is, the more hoops you make people jump through to tell you about a problem, the less people will bother. And not all wiki clones are identical, some include revisioning systems, different levels of access, peer review, etc.
Regardless, no matter what system you go with, you have to have a gatekeeper / editing team to periodically seperate the wheat from the chaff, to consolidate 3 pages of notes down into a easly digested single page.
The big advantage of a wiki is that if you find something wrong you can easily/quickly fix it (or submit a revision if it's a managed wiki). Which is a reasonable attempt at turning the entire documentation base into an open-source project. (Not all open-source projects accept changes willy-nilly from the end-users.)
I had a 1976 volvo that I drove until the early 1990s and it had around 275,000 miles on it. (Not quite 20 years old when I got rid of it.)
Rust killed it...
Domestic cars from the 70s were craptacular... lucky if you got 100,000 miles out of them. Volvos from the 70s weren't even considered to be broken in at 100,000 miles.
The problem is that we have created urban (and suburban, and exurban) town patterns that are useless for mass transit.
That's pretty much right on the money. Even in the dense Long Island NY area (around the Nassau/Suffolk county line), it's not possible to do simple day-to-day errands without a car (or walking 2-3 miles). Which bites, because I can take mass transit from where I live all the way out to the island to go visit the main office, but then I'm stuck bumming rides to/from the hotel every day. About 10 years ago, I spent a few weeks in the Netherlands where the majority of folks live in town, most people don't own cars (bicyles are common... lots of bike paths or bike lanes on the streets) and the mass-transit system makes it easy to get from point A to point B (and even take a day trip to Germany).
Living in a small town, with local shops is a very enjoyable existence because you don't *have* to use the car unless you want to. (I won't even get into the "keeping up with the joneses" mindset that is prevalent in suburbia.)
That pretty much nails it... if I have car that is paid off, low-maitenance, but only gets 12mpg (costing me maybe $100/mo in fuel), why buy a new fuel-efficient car at $300/mo to save $66/mo in fuel costs?
Gasoline prices have to hit either $3/gal or $4/gal before you'll see people start to make changes in their buying habits. As long as this process takes 5-10 years to reach the $4/gal mark, you won't see too much economic disruption because people will have time to move closer to work, change jobs, change cars, use mass transit.
Personally, I think higher gas prices might also provide a much needed kick to mass-transit. People don't use MT because the cost advantage isn't enough to make them give up the freedom of using their car.
It's a side-business, a way to stay current in multiple technologies while I focus on my primary business of writing code-for-hire (a.k.a. consulting).
I could work at MS/IBM/Apple/Adobe/Oracle/etc, but I would then have to deal with the corporate office politics that come with working at a large corporation.
There's a difference between following those principles and putting your head down in the sand. (This is also where a lot of religious folks get it wrong.)
Just because you're not willing to play the political game doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand the rules. Politics in business environments exist, you can't get away from it (entirely), so it's best to learn how to navigate those waters.
You can still do all three of those things while surviving in a political organization. By picking your battles, staying out of other people's battles and doing the right thing.
(shrugs)... yet another reason not to watch broadcast TV.
But then, I already stopped watching broadcast TV about 5 years ago.
The more difficult they make it to time-shift, share content with friends (and I don't mean your 100 million internet "friends"), the less likely that I'll ever start watching broadcast TV again.
The advantage that MSAccess has is low barrier of entry for a end-user to get a few forms and some tables up and running quickly. It's also easy to move a MDB from point A to point B and have it work as opposed to getting a database server to export data and then setting up and loading the data at the destination.
Not saying that it's always a good idea to use MSAccess, but it is a useful tool at the low-end of the spectrum. (We've prototyped systems in an MDB and used the form designer as a poor-man's mockup tool for the final app dialogs.)
The usual problem is that things start small and then suddenly the MSAccess database ends up getting used for something mission critical (or enterprise wide rollout).
And PGP is primarily concerned with security during transport and security during storage.
Once the end-user decrypts a PGP message, they can do whatever they want with the contents.
Digital restrictions for e-mail is a non-starter... I'm sure there were at least half a dozen startups that tried the concept during the boom. (Heck, document DRM on the whole is a non-starter. If the user can see the text, it can be copied.)
A better method is to use fingerprinting / watermarks to track the flow of restricted information and to prosecute the leaks.
The thing with telephone numbers is that they're divided into address spaces where all of the numbers that you'll usually dial from memory are within the same area code.
Back when most people didn't know anyone who wasn't from the same town or the next town over, their list of phone numbers often only differed in the last 4 digits. Then as the town got too big for 4 digits being enough people started to have to remember all 7 digits for each contact. Now, as our society becomes more and more mobile (area-code splits, overlaps, seperate area-codes for cell phones), it's less and less common that the phone numbers that you want to remember will have the same prefix digits.
You mean the just like the printed version of CW is a dying technology?
I used to receive half a dozen computer mags per month back in the early 90s... then came the web and e-mail newsletters. All the content that I used to pay oodles of cash per year for now delivered to my screen for free.
If all you're using the PDA for is a replacement for pen-n-paper Franklin/Daytimer, then I'm not surprised. I used Franklin/Daytimer planning systems for a number of years before finally switching over to a PalmOS PDA and then a PalmOS phone.
PDAs work best when they integrate into your life to track your finances (e.g. PocketQuicken), help organize your lifestyle (diet / exercise / auto logs), provide you with news on the go (AvantGo), serve as reference works (dictionarys, glossaries). There are thousands of programs written for the PalmOS out there, so it's pretty easy to find new ways to use the PDA.
My old Palm III lasted for about a month on a single set of batteries. (Most of the PalmOS devices are much easier on battery life.)
My Kyocera 6035 (cell phone with PalmOS) lasts around 3 days of moderate use. Using it as a cell phone is usually what kills the battery, not the PalmOS stuff. (Monochrome LCDs are pretty efficient.)
Simple is good when it comes to "smart" cell phones and PDAs, it's not a laptop replacement device.
Frankly, the cost difference doesn't bother me because it's one less device that I have to carry. If you use a PDA a lot for calendar / tasks / notes / expense tracking / receipt tracking / diet / exercise / lifestyle / news on the go... then a cell phone with PDA built-in is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I've owned a Kyocera 6035 for about 2.5 years now and have been very pleased with it. (Wish the physical design was a bit different... might switch to the Samsung PalmOS phone next time.)
For a lot of people, instead of having a desktop PC and a PDA for on-the-go they now use a laptop as their primary machine and take that with them. That reduces their portable data needs down to address book and calendar which a smartphone can easily handle. For those people, the PDA-only devices aren't as useful and are usually bypassed because it's one more device to carry.
My preference is a smartphone with full PDA functionality (PalmOS) like the Kyocera 6035 or the Samsung i500.
The other thing is that PDAs are just expensive toys unless you work them into your life (much like PCs are expensive toys to start). When I was on the road a lot, I used my PDA to track expense account items, keep track of my receipts (PocketQuicken), track my diet and exercise (DietLog), download news to read on the rail (AvantGo) in addition to keeping my contacts, calendar and notes. A dumbed-down "smartphone" wouldn't have given me those abilities.
Agreed, I have a Kyocera SmartPhone 6035 that runs the Palm OS and it's very handy not to carry around two devices. While the newer smart phones are getting better, nothing beats the simplicity of the Palm OS interface. Mine's about 2 1/2 years old now and has held up very well. A few design quirks that I'd like to see changed (switching to a clamshell design), but still a good solid design.
Plus, the smart phones based on the PalmOS are more compatible with multiple O/Ss (I'll take Palm's proprietary interface over a smart phone's proprietary software interface because there are lots of Palm devices out there). That means that I don't have to worry about switching O/S's or e-mail clients as much. If I had gone the proprietary route of a smartphone back when I bought the Kyocera, I might have been stuck running WinNT with MSOutlook97 unless the phone manufacturer updated their software.
When this one finally wears out, I might upgrade to the Samsung SPH-i500 which has the clamshell design to protect the screen. A lot like the form factor of the old Motorola StarTacs.
The other big thing is that the $599 for SBS 2003 is probably only for the (5) CAL version.
Is there still per-seat pricing for SBS 2003? What about RedHat?
You're still going to end up paying around $100-$150 per seat for the MS Solution if my numbers are correct (Enterprise Edition licenses are closer to $200-$250 per seat per year).
Agreed, 256Mb is the minimum WinXP install. But as soon as you load up MSOffice, and you have 3 or 4 other programs open in the background (MSOutlook usually), you're back in swap-land.
My work laptop has 512Mb and WinXP, and it's *just* enough... it was plenty when I got the machine 18 months ago, but now I'm dreaming about getting 1Gb with my new one in the spring. (Might even upgrade this laptop to 768Mb.)
The *minimum* amount of memory that we order for new machines is now 512Mb. With a good chance that by next spring we'll be moving that minimum up to 1Gb. (Getting a slower CPU if we want to cut costs at all.)
Mozilla tabs eat RAM like you wouldn't believe, and I for one am not going back to the old ways of only keeping a few windows/tabs open at a time. Sorry, but this feature changes the entire web experience for me and it uses RAM.
Yep... switch to Firebird and you'll get about 1/2 of that memory back. I usually had 12-24 tabs open at a time across 4-5 Mozilla windows and Mozilla.exe would eat up around 180Mb of RAM.
Switched to Firebird this past week and it runs around 60-80Mb for the same number of tabs/windows.
Digital media archives require care and feeding. They're not store and forget like paper archives are. You have to refresh the archive every few years or run a high risk of losing data. (Everyone argues about what the actual numbers are, but I'd say you'll want to verify content at least yearly.)
However, you have to have some method of verifying that the backup/archive data is still correct and readable. One option is a program that stores CRC/MD5 signatures of every file on the disk. Then you can check your data later against the signature files and verify that the disk is still readable.
A newer option is to use something like QuickPar. QuickPar analyzes a group of files, then creates recovery files which would allow the original data to be repaired if it gets damaged. It's an open source specification with ports to most platforms, so it will probably be around in 5 years. You can choose varying levels of paranoia such as being able to still recover your data even if 20% of the data files are trashed. The downside is that the recovery files require extra storage space (10% redundancy will result in recovery files that are around 12% of the original data's size).
Re:Still haven't fixed the old file system
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
How much memory do you have installed? WinNT needed around 64Mb to run happy, Win2000 128-256Mb, WinXP wants 256Mb-512Mb.
VMS has auto-revisioning where it would store (complete) copies of older revisions of the file every time you saved. So you'd end up with a directory filled with:
PROGRAM.C:1
PROGRAM.C:2
PROGRAM.C:3
I don't know of any desktop file systems today that do that (maybe NTFS?). (That was back around 1990, when a 20Mb HD was huge.) It's definitely something that I wish would be built into a file system today (especially now that we have oodles of HD space).
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Wikis are designed to lower the barrier to editing the content as low as possible. That is, the more hoops you make people jump through to tell you about a problem, the less people will bother. And not all wiki clones are identical, some include revisioning systems, different levels of access, peer review, etc.
Regardless, no matter what system you go with, you have to have a gatekeeper / editing team to periodically seperate the wheat from the chaff, to consolidate 3 pages of notes down into a easly digested single page.
The big advantage of a wiki is that if you find something wrong you can easily/quickly fix it (or submit a revision if it's a managed wiki). Which is a reasonable attempt at turning the entire documentation base into an open-source project. (Not all open-source projects accept changes willy-nilly from the end-users.)
I had a 1976 volvo that I drove until the early 1990s and it had around 275,000 miles on it. (Not quite 20 years old when I got rid of it.)
Rust killed it...
Domestic cars from the 70s were craptacular... lucky if you got 100,000 miles out of them. Volvos from the 70s weren't even considered to be broken in at 100,000 miles.
The problem is that we have created urban (and suburban, and exurban) town patterns that are useless for mass transit.
That's pretty much right on the money. Even in the dense Long Island NY area (around the Nassau/Suffolk county line), it's not possible to do simple day-to-day errands without a car (or walking 2-3 miles). Which bites, because I can take mass transit from where I live all the way out to the island to go visit the main office, but then I'm stuck bumming rides to/from the hotel every day. About 10 years ago, I spent a few weeks in the Netherlands where the majority of folks live in town, most people don't own cars (bicyles are common... lots of bike paths or bike lanes on the streets) and the mass-transit system makes it easy to get from point A to point B (and even take a day trip to Germany).
Living in a small town, with local shops is a very enjoyable existence because you don't *have* to use the car unless you want to. (I won't even get into the "keeping up with the joneses" mindset that is prevalent in suburbia.)
That pretty much nails it... if I have car that is paid off, low-maitenance, but only gets 12mpg (costing me maybe $100/mo in fuel), why buy a new fuel-efficient car at $300/mo to save $66/mo in fuel costs?
Gasoline prices have to hit either $3/gal or $4/gal before you'll see people start to make changes in their buying habits. As long as this process takes 5-10 years to reach the $4/gal mark, you won't see too much economic disruption because people will have time to move closer to work, change jobs, change cars, use mass transit.
Personally, I think higher gas prices might also provide a much needed kick to mass-transit. People don't use MT because the cost advantage isn't enough to make them give up the freedom of using their car.
It's a side-business, a way to stay current in multiple technologies while I focus on my primary business of writing code-for-hire (a.k.a. consulting).
I could work at MS/IBM/Apple/Adobe/Oracle/etc, but I would then have to deal with the corporate office politics that come with working at a large corporation.
Moz 1.4 runs around 180Mb of RAM on my WinXP system with maybe 2 dozen tabs open.
Firebird runs around 60-80Mb with the same number of tabs open...
Good enough advantage?
There's a difference between following those principles and putting your head down in the sand. (This is also where a lot of religious folks get it wrong.)
Just because you're not willing to play the political game doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand the rules. Politics in business environments exist, you can't get away from it (entirely), so it's best to learn how to navigate those waters.
You can still do all three of those things while surviving in a political organization. By picking your battles, staying out of other people's battles and doing the right thing.
(shrugs)... yet another reason not to watch broadcast TV.
But then, I already stopped watching broadcast TV about 5 years ago.
The more difficult they make it to time-shift, share content with friends (and I don't mean your 100 million internet "friends"), the less likely that I'll ever start watching broadcast TV again.
The advantage that MSAccess has is low barrier of entry for a end-user to get a few forms and some tables up and running quickly. It's also easy to move a MDB from point A to point B and have it work as opposed to getting a database server to export data and then setting up and loading the data at the destination.
Not saying that it's always a good idea to use MSAccess, but it is a useful tool at the low-end of the spectrum. (We've prototyped systems in an MDB and used the form designer as a poor-man's mockup tool for the final app dialogs.)
The usual problem is that things start small and then suddenly the MSAccess database ends up getting used for something mission critical (or enterprise wide rollout).
And PGP is primarily concerned with security during transport and security during storage.
Once the end-user decrypts a PGP message, they can do whatever they want with the contents.
Digital restrictions for e-mail is a non-starter... I'm sure there were at least half a dozen startups that tried the concept during the boom. (Heck, document DRM on the whole is a non-starter. If the user can see the text, it can be copied.)
A better method is to use fingerprinting / watermarks to track the flow of restricted information and to prosecute the leaks.
The thing with telephone numbers is that they're divided into address spaces where all of the numbers that you'll usually dial from memory are within the same area code.
Back when most people didn't know anyone who wasn't from the same town or the next town over, their list of phone numbers often only differed in the last 4 digits. Then as the town got too big for 4 digits being enough people started to have to remember all 7 digits for each contact. Now, as our society becomes more and more mobile (area-code splits, overlaps, seperate area-codes for cell phones), it's less and less common that the phone numbers that you want to remember will have the same prefix digits.
You mean the just like the printed version of CW is a dying technology?
I used to receive half a dozen computer mags per month back in the early 90s... then came the web and e-mail newsletters. All the content that I used to pay oodles of cash per year for now delivered to my screen for free.
If all you're using the PDA for is a replacement for pen-n-paper Franklin/Daytimer, then I'm not surprised. I used Franklin/Daytimer planning systems for a number of years before finally switching over to a PalmOS PDA and then a PalmOS phone.
PDAs work best when they integrate into your life to track your finances (e.g. PocketQuicken), help organize your lifestyle (diet / exercise / auto logs), provide you with news on the go (AvantGo), serve as reference works (dictionarys, glossaries). There are thousands of programs written for the PalmOS out there, so it's pretty easy to find new ways to use the PDA.
My old Palm III lasted for about a month on a single set of batteries. (Most of the PalmOS devices are much easier on battery life.)
My Kyocera 6035 (cell phone with PalmOS) lasts around 3 days of moderate use. Using it as a cell phone is usually what kills the battery, not the PalmOS stuff. (Monochrome LCDs are pretty efficient.)
Simple is good when it comes to "smart" cell phones and PDAs, it's not a laptop replacement device.
Kyocera 6035 had a speakerphone mode to handle that problem. Or, if you don't like that option, plug a headset in.
Samsung i500 is around $499 as well (AFAIK).
Frankly, the cost difference doesn't bother me because it's one less device that I have to carry. If you use a PDA a lot for calendar / tasks / notes / expense tracking / receipt tracking / diet / exercise / lifestyle / news on the go... then a cell phone with PDA built-in is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I've owned a Kyocera 6035 for about 2.5 years now and have been very pleased with it. (Wish the physical design was a bit different... might switch to the Samsung PalmOS phone next time.)
Look at the PalmOS phones such as the Kyocera 6035 or the Samsung i500.
Easy to develop applications for the PalmOS that will run on your phone then.
For a lot of people, instead of having a desktop PC and a PDA for on-the-go they now use a laptop as their primary machine and take that with them. That reduces their portable data needs down to address book and calendar which a smartphone can easily handle. For those people, the PDA-only devices aren't as useful and are usually bypassed because it's one more device to carry.
My preference is a smartphone with full PDA functionality (PalmOS) like the Kyocera 6035 or the Samsung i500.
The other thing is that PDAs are just expensive toys unless you work them into your life (much like PCs are expensive toys to start). When I was on the road a lot, I used my PDA to track expense account items, keep track of my receipts (PocketQuicken), track my diet and exercise (DietLog), download news to read on the rail (AvantGo) in addition to keeping my contacts, calendar and notes. A dumbed-down "smartphone" wouldn't have given me those abilities.
Agreed, I have a Kyocera SmartPhone 6035 that runs the Palm OS and it's very handy not to carry around two devices. While the newer smart phones are getting better, nothing beats the simplicity of the Palm OS interface. Mine's about 2 1/2 years old now and has held up very well. A few design quirks that I'd like to see changed (switching to a clamshell design), but still a good solid design.
Plus, the smart phones based on the PalmOS are more compatible with multiple O/Ss (I'll take Palm's proprietary interface over a smart phone's proprietary software interface because there are lots of Palm devices out there). That means that I don't have to worry about switching O/S's or e-mail clients as much. If I had gone the proprietary route of a smartphone back when I bought the Kyocera, I might have been stuck running WinNT with MSOutlook97 unless the phone manufacturer updated their software.
When this one finally wears out, I might upgrade to the Samsung SPH-i500 which has the clamshell design to protect the screen. A lot like the form factor of the old Motorola StarTacs.
The other big thing is that the $599 for SBS 2003 is probably only for the (5) CAL version.
Is there still per-seat pricing for SBS 2003? What about RedHat?
You're still going to end up paying around $100-$150 per seat for the MS Solution if my numbers are correct (Enterprise Edition licenses are closer to $200-$250 per seat per year).
Agreed, 256Mb is the minimum WinXP install. But as soon as you load up MSOffice, and you have 3 or 4 other programs open in the background (MSOutlook usually), you're back in swap-land.
My work laptop has 512Mb and WinXP, and it's *just* enough... it was plenty when I got the machine 18 months ago, but now I'm dreaming about getting 1Gb with my new one in the spring. (Might even upgrade this laptop to 768Mb.)
The *minimum* amount of memory that we order for new machines is now 512Mb. With a good chance that by next spring we'll be moving that minimum up to 1Gb. (Getting a slower CPU if we want to cut costs at all.)
Mozilla tabs eat RAM like you wouldn't believe, and I for one am not going back to the old ways of only keeping a few windows/tabs open at a time. Sorry, but this feature changes the entire web experience for me and it uses RAM.
Yep... switch to Firebird and you'll get about 1/2 of that memory back. I usually had 12-24 tabs open at a time across 4-5 Mozilla windows and Mozilla.exe would eat up around 180Mb of RAM.
Switched to Firebird this past week and it runs around 60-80Mb for the same number of tabs/windows.
Digital media archives require care and feeding. They're not store and forget like paper archives are. You have to refresh the archive every few years or run a high risk of losing data. (Everyone argues about what the actual numbers are, but I'd say you'll want to verify content at least yearly.)
However, you have to have some method of verifying that the backup/archive data is still correct and readable. One option is a program that stores CRC/MD5 signatures of every file on the disk. Then you can check your data later against the signature files and verify that the disk is still readable.
A newer option is to use something like QuickPar. QuickPar analyzes a group of files, then creates recovery files which would allow the original data to be repaired if it gets damaged. It's an open source specification with ports to most platforms, so it will probably be around in 5 years. You can choose varying levels of paranoia such as being able to still recover your data even if 20% of the data files are trashed. The downside is that the recovery files require extra storage space (10% redundancy will result in recovery files that are around 12% of the original data's size).
How much memory do you have installed? WinNT needed around 64Mb to run happy, Win2000 128-256Mb, WinXP wants 256Mb-512Mb.
VMS has auto-revisioning where it would store (complete) copies of older revisions of the file every time you saved. So you'd end up with a directory filled with:
PROGRAM.C:1
PROGRAM.C:2
PROGRAM.C:3
I don't know of any desktop file systems today that do that (maybe NTFS?). (That was back around 1990, when a 20Mb HD was huge.) It's definitely something that I wish would be built into a file system today (especially now that we have oodles of HD space).