You do realize that your minimums have little to no impact on your financial responsibility, right? If you're sued for damages as a result of your actions behind the wheel, you are liable for paying those damages. Keeping adequate insurance - not just the minimums - is one thing that you can do to make sure that you won't be bankrupted because of it.
One additional bonus to being insured is that your insurance company will provide legal representation as well, further reducing your financial burden in the case of an incident.
Having said that, BRK remains one of my all time favorite investments - at least partially because they own GEICO. Still, they make pretty much no money from it directly - claims effectively eat up the premiums, often running over 100% - but instead use the value of all that float to make other investments at a scale well beyond anything you or I could do with the miniscule amount of money we're talking about.
Insurance, priced correctly, should neither make nor cost the insured party any money. It should simply "smooth out" the irregular cash requirements of whatever you're insuring against.
And BTW, if they don't support 64-bit, they are finished anyway. No serious business needs 32-bit unix these days.
That's funny - I know a lot of Fortune 500s running their supply chains off of 32-bit software. Must just be some weird fluke. 64-bitness doesn't necessarily buy you anything in every field.
Most of us can't afford to tie up $40,000 cash just to avoid getting screwed by an insurance company.
Then how would you expect to be financially responsible if you were found liable for a wreck with serious medical and legal consequences - something that can end up charging you with well over a mere $40k of financial burden. If that relatively small amount of money is a big deal to you (and it is to most people, myself included), then you need insurance.
Its not just for the legality, its to allow you to do the right thing (by proxy) and cover things like property damage and medical liability if you do cause an accident. Which can happen.
First, the US needs far better driver education. My driver education consisted of watching silly movies from the 1950's, which recommended honking at every other car and pedestrian on the road, and basically being babysat (like most high school classes). My parent was the only real driving instructor I had. Most Americans are the same way. In Europe, you have to pay thousands for a professional driving instructor.
The European driving laws and police attitudes are (generally) set up the way they are because of this as well. In the 'States, you have to assume that most drivers are morons: laws are created and enforced accordingly. In the EU, you can assume that most people on the road actually do know how to drive. They may not show it, but at least they had to do more than a lap around the block (with a 30% tolerable error rate) before getting behind the wheel.
Heck, one of the things that you can be failed from in the UK was "lack of confidence." Ah, the days when a driver's license meant something...
I had a hard enough time when I used to type on an "ergonomic" keyboard - not in the typing, which was great, but when it came to moving across the office and keying stuff in on random people's keyboards. Although it did keep 'em off mine for the most part. Still, these days I just use conventional (even laptop most of the time) keyboards and keep my wrists angled - using a curve rather than a strict home-row approach. Works fine.
But that's the point. Just like Norton Desktop, weird keyboards may or may not be better. Heck, my ideal would be a "natural" keyboard folded in two so that I could keep my wrists upright instead of bent over at all. But I don't want to lose the ability to type well on arbitrary keyboards either - something that's often underrated by the users' (or at least sellers) of replacement keyboards/mice/desktops/etc.
Just like a car. Sure, with drive-by-wire you could remap all the controls, but there's a certain comfort, safety and familiarity in using the standard pattern, no matter how "good" or "bad" it is.
Well... 36 mpg, the ability to carry a relatively large amount of stuff, comfortable seating positions... why not an SUV?
Why not start smaller, and say, affordable for like a 2/4 door sedan or compact car for those "younger" types that are -hopefully- more interested in environmental concerns?
Have you noticed cars like the Insight and Prius before, perchance?
I say, "Good on yer Ford." Here is an application of technology that improves a product that people are actively interested in buying - despite its flaws. And by and large fixes them.
Of course, MY view of the "desktop" is the corporate desktop. But there are others. It's just that the corporate desktop is the largest segment.
Linux is ill-suited to the power-gamer desktop or the person who purchases new or weird devices. But these are much smaller segments (compared to the corporate desktop).
Aha. Well, fine. By your definitions, you're completely correct. Of course, by those definitions, the SunBlade and the Wyse60 are also "ready for the desktop." I was using that phrase as it was reflected both in the article and in the vast majority of other posts in this discussion. Silly me...
Honestly, how many users do you think are going to replace the damn motherboard to get Linux installed?
Heh - I'd missed that. You make a damned good point there. And its testament to the overall tone of the article (and the lack of understanding about new users) that such a thing was just tossed off so quietly.
Er, you didn't actually address any of my points. Sure, anyone can rent a DeLorean and move it around. That's different than owning and maintaining it. Which I already said - anyone can use a Linux box if someone else sets it up and maintains it. That's hardly "ready for the desktop."
Administrating that DHCP server seems to be more difficult though, I've never stumbled upon it, and can't be assed to look for it, either. Setting up a HTTPD is easy enough if you use one of the many Apache/Win32 setup apps which basically do most of the work - again, administrating it is, well, as hard as administrating Apache is. The initial setup certainly was easier for me on Windows than on Linux, but that's partly because the Linux system didn't have APT or anything installed. I never used IIS, so I can't comment on how easy it is to set up.
Well, under Windows 2003 (the only one I have easy access to), they're both trivial. First, you have the "Manage This Server" wizard which can get you to whatever you need in about 30 seconds. Second... er, no, that covers it.
IIS is easy - you can set up things like a new virtual host just as quickly as you can in Apache. This from someone who's set up hundreds of sites in Apache and had never used IIS before in his life. What's more, the advanced options (after using the Wizard to set things up) are very accessible - I found out that I can do things like set bandwidth throttles per site. Can probably do that in Apache too, but I wouldn't know how.
It may (note: may) be harder to administer a large pool of Windows servers. But for a lot of folk just running a workgroup-level box, it can be surprisingly easy. And this is coming from a confirmed UNIX fan. If its as easy for me to do most of the common admin stuff on a new platform (Windows) as it is on the old standbys (UNIX), I'm assuming that its even easier for people who are more familiar with those servers. I'm not so sure that it would be as easy for a Windows guru to take charge of the average UNIX box.
Back to the other point. I - again, this is my first Windows server - could add an auto-dialed PPTP connection, enable sharing and NAT on it, and share it with the rest of the office lan. This was for remote connectivity to a client site. I'll be honest - I don't know how to do that on a Linux box. Could I find out? Probably. My point is though that I got it running in about 10 minutes on our Windows box, from a few hundred miles away, with no need to reference any documentation or external websites. Not too shabby.
Is it perfect? No. But what's the alternative for Windows that does as much as the GIMP, at anywhere near the cost?
Paint Shop Pro? Photoshop Elements?
Seriously, I've tried the GIMP too. I'm pretty tech savvy - can admin and code for a variety of platforms, been using UNIX for well over a decade, etc, etc. I'm no stranger to poor UNIX user interfaces for that matter. At one point, I wanted to do some basic photo work for our website. I gave GIMP a try. The simplest of goals - while very possible - were far from intuitive. Bear in mind that I'm by no means an experienced photoshopper either, hadn't used it before. Tried it under Windows, and Linux, and got frustrated.
I downloaded PSP instead - and was able to get my artwork cleaned up and nicely changed in a couple of hours. Recently tried Photoshop Elements - same kind of results. Much more easy to use. And they're both under $100. Heck, Elements can be found free in $39 cheapo scanners and other such products.
Do they do as much as the GIMP? Well, I don't know if I can sit down and write my own extensions to them in a weird scripting language. Then again, I don't want to have to do that either. Both of them cover the basics, and have been able to do everything I've wanted to do with them. Does that count?
Only if you define "average" to be "not someone who wants to spend the time with a DeLorean".
If anyone has an interest to, they can. They do not need to learn new skills
Well, I did say "maintained." Would you be comfortable taking a DeLorean down to JiffyLube for an oil change? What if you get a problem with, say, the wiring - think that your local service station will be able to fix it? How about the dealership (whoops...). Want to replace the stereo? Sure... but watch out for that integration work, and I sure hope that you use a good shop.
So for basic, easy, if-nothing-goes-wrong use, its fine. For anything more real-world, it doesn't work. Just like Linux for a lot of people. Could they use a kiosk at the library? Sure. Could they upgrade their web browser, make sure that the latest patches are installed, and use their new hardware? Not so easily.
Which was the point that I was (apparently badly) trying to make.
There aren't many DeLoreans out there. And you have to pay particular attention when purchasing parts for them (and sometimes special order).
But that does not mean they aren't ready to be driven.
Good point. It does mean that they aren't ready to be driven and maintained by your Aunt Minnie. Or by most people for that matter. How about DeLorian enthusiasts? Absolutely, and they'll work fine (and when they don't, fixing them is half the fun). The average guy-on-the-street? Not a chance.
It has with early adopters. If there was an option to buy HD versions of movies at a reasonable (DVDesque) cost, I know that I would. The difference is pretty damn noticable - about the same as going from a crappy interlaced compressed sattelite feed to a progressive-scan DVD.
At the very least, he could probably be charged with maintaining an attractive nuisance. IANAL but I can't help but wonder if you're allowed to stipulate to something claimed by the other party even when they don't have the law on their side - is that a ruling that needs a contest, in other words? Probably so, and he could always retract in any case, but it'd be interesting whatever happened. Who wants a headline?
What he did not acknowledge was that a 15 year old game does not have the complexity or richness of game play that new titles possess. Sim City 2000 is no comparison to Meet The Sims, just like an AMD 486-DX4/100 processor is no match for an AMD 64.
And yet I find myself feeling nostalgic for a lot of the old games which I spent orders of magnitude more time with than the current set - they were just a lot more playable. For me, at least. So while the graphics may not have been as realistic (just as those of a word processor weren't back then), their percieved value was at least as high.
Ah, Carrier Command. Or way back, Munch Man. Adventure. Hack. Heck, I spent way too many hours on Hunt the Wumpus.
The fact that I know where the keys are under my fingers and can type around 90 wpm or so and the fact that I understand where to put periods, commas, and apostrophes and how to spell correctly are, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated.
Hey, I'm just greatful that you didn't say "apostrophe's". [Shudder] You'd think after 12 years of classes the average American would have figured out how to use punctuation, whether typed or written. Or put up on large marquees for that matter.
thn agn ppl jst lzy i gess
What's really sad is that I've had some communications - fairly serious in their content - from business professionals that look like l33t speak. Malformed l33t at that. Not that they're trying, just that they don't seem to understand that good writing is both an aid to their appearance and a useful device for being understood.
Well, it's disabled in fedora, but in a default Gnome install, like on slackware, you simply open Nautilus, go to Applications://, and edit it's subfolders. Really, it couldn't be simpler
Emphasis added.
Seriously - not meaning to troll - this is the kind of low-level knowledge (easy once you know how but about as unintuitive as you can get), the avoidance of which has made OSX what it is today.
Even the Windows way - want to edit the menu? Use the "action" button (ie: right-click) on... wait for it... the menu! Interacting with the object (or its representation) directly is, after all, one of the reasons that GUIs are traditionally easier to learn and use than non-GUIs.
Heck, I've been using graphical UNIX systems for well over a decade (although not Gnome) and I doubt that I'd have stumbled across that particular sequence of events without some kind of documentation. Right-clicking on the thing I want to change though has become easy - sure, its a learned behavior, but its a consistent one (right-click on anything to interact with it in interesting, non-default ways) rather than a specific one, such as that method for using the browser to edit your menus.
Issue 1 is best handled with a pseudonym ('I am Dash Riprock').
Heh. Funny coincidence - I worked with the "real" Dash Riprock for many years. Not in a musical capacity though.
Issue 2 is the current holy grail for the online business and consumer. MS has Passport, and the others have the Liberty Alliance.
Out of curiosity, have you (or anyone else) ever seen this Liberty Alliance stuff working anywhere? I see various non-MS sites using Passport occasionally, but I've never seen a LA login (even on things like Sun's partner program, unless they hide the fact).
Sun is the company I hate to hate. They have some of the brightest people in-house and create some amazing tech and ALWAYS seem to crap the bed on the business side. What good is a beautiful baby boy when it ends up being still-born? Man, I wish IBM just officially turn them into an R&D department
Hey, they're still miles ahead of TI... There's a company that screwed up the business side of pretty much every consumer or small-biz accessible product they've ever made. I mean, semis are one thing, but some of their products (heck, just look at the old 99/4A) were way ahead of their time. Pity that they couldn't market their way out of a paper bag...
In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.
I've never used Cloudscape, but coming from its Informix roots I trust this - to a certain extent, of course. If you never used Informix, it absolutely rocked in terms of stability and ease of maintenance. We had one Informix DBA for every 100 or so installed machines (with many installed instances per machine) for product support at my last company. It never got the press that Oracle did: they made the classic (beta, Xerox, TI,...) mistake of assuming that just because they were technically superior that people would just flock to them. That, and you don't get the Informix consultants recommending the product like you do with Oracle - mainly because you don't need 'em around. 95% of the standard "Oracle add-on" products and services were either built in or not needed.
So since this was their most "simple" database, I have some pretty good feelings about it. One thing that would be interesting is that this will open up the code to their SQL optimizer. That's one area where Informix always truly rocked compared to pretty much everyone else outside of a lab situation. I don't know how much of it got into Cloudscape, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's an odd choice of moderation for the parent post.
Yeah, yeah, I know, -1 Offtopic...
You do realize that your minimums have little to no impact on your financial responsibility, right? If you're sued for damages as a result of your actions behind the wheel, you are liable for paying those damages. Keeping adequate insurance - not just the minimums - is one thing that you can do to make sure that you won't be bankrupted because of it.
One additional bonus to being insured is that your insurance company will provide legal representation as well, further reducing your financial burden in the case of an incident.
Having said that, BRK remains one of my all time favorite investments - at least partially because they own GEICO. Still, they make pretty much no money from it directly - claims effectively eat up the premiums, often running over 100% - but instead use the value of all that float to make other investments at a scale well beyond anything you or I could do with the miniscule amount of money we're talking about.
Insurance, priced correctly, should neither make nor cost the insured party any money. It should simply "smooth out" the irregular cash requirements of whatever you're insuring against.
And BTW, if they don't support 64-bit, they are finished anyway. No serious business needs 32-bit unix these days.
That's funny - I know a lot of Fortune 500s running their supply chains off of 32-bit software. Must just be some weird fluke. 64-bitness doesn't necessarily buy you anything in every field.
Most of us can't afford to tie up $40,000 cash just to avoid getting screwed by an insurance company.
Then how would you expect to be financially responsible if you were found liable for a wreck with serious medical and legal consequences - something that can end up charging you with well over a mere $40k of financial burden. If that relatively small amount of money is a big deal to you (and it is to most people, myself included), then you need insurance.
Its not just for the legality, its to allow you to do the right thing (by proxy) and cover things like property damage and medical liability if you do cause an accident. Which can happen.
First, the US needs far better driver education. My driver education consisted of watching silly movies from the 1950's, which recommended honking at every other car and pedestrian on the road, and basically being babysat (like most high school classes). My parent was the only real driving instructor I had. Most Americans are the same way. In Europe, you have to pay thousands for a professional driving instructor.
The European driving laws and police attitudes are (generally) set up the way they are because of this as well. In the 'States, you have to assume that most drivers are morons: laws are created and enforced accordingly. In the EU, you can assume that most people on the road actually do know how to drive. They may not show it, but at least they had to do more than a lap around the block (with a 30% tolerable error rate) before getting behind the wheel.
Heck, one of the things that you can be failed from in the UK was "lack of confidence." Ah, the days when a driver's license meant something...
You mean like Audi's "Warm Weather Package"?
Granted.
Given the subtractive properties of such a dye, won't that cause the glass to let in less light, just like the tinting they're trying to replace?
One advantage that I can see would be that in low-light situations there would be no visible tint...?
I had a hard enough time when I used to type on an "ergonomic" keyboard - not in the typing, which was great, but when it came to moving across the office and keying stuff in on random people's keyboards. Although it did keep 'em off mine for the most part. Still, these days I just use conventional (even laptop most of the time) keyboards and keep my wrists angled - using a curve rather than a strict home-row approach. Works fine.
But that's the point. Just like Norton Desktop, weird keyboards may or may not be better. Heck, my ideal would be a "natural" keyboard folded in two so that I could keep my wrists upright instead of bent over at all. But I don't want to lose the ability to type well on arbitrary keyboards either - something that's often underrated by the users' (or at least sellers) of replacement keyboards/mice/desktops/etc.
Just like a car. Sure, with drive-by-wire you could remap all the controls, but there's a certain comfort, safety and familiarity in using the standard pattern, no matter how "good" or "bad" it is.
You're off on your weight estimate, but only by about 3,000 lbs. And adding, what was it, about 200lbs for batteries is far from unreasonable.
WHY AN SUV?
It's a big fuel consuming road hog.
Well... 36 mpg, the ability to carry a relatively large amount of stuff, comfortable seating positions... why not an SUV?
Why not start smaller, and say, affordable for like a 2/4 door sedan or compact car for those "younger" types that are -hopefully- more interested in environmental concerns?
Have you noticed cars like the Insight and Prius before, perchance?
I say, "Good on yer Ford." Here is an application of technology that improves a product that people are actively interested in buying - despite its flaws. And by and large fixes them.
Not too shabby, IMO.
Of course, MY view of the "desktop" is the corporate desktop. But there are others. It's just that the corporate desktop is the largest segment.
Linux is ill-suited to the power-gamer desktop or the person who purchases new or weird devices. But these are much smaller segments (compared to the corporate desktop).
Aha. Well, fine. By your definitions, you're completely correct. Of course, by those definitions, the SunBlade and the Wyse60 are also "ready for the desktop." I was using that phrase as it was reflected both in the article and in the vast majority of other posts in this discussion. Silly me...
Honestly, how many users do you think are going to replace the damn motherboard to get Linux installed?
Heh - I'd missed that. You make a damned good point there. And its testament to the overall tone of the article (and the lack of understanding about new users) that such a thing was just tossed off so quietly.
Er, you didn't actually address any of my points. Sure, anyone can rent a DeLorean and move it around. That's different than owning and maintaining it. Which I already said - anyone can use a Linux box if someone else sets it up and maintains it. That's hardly "ready for the desktop."
Administrating that DHCP server seems to be more difficult though, I've never stumbled upon it, and can't be assed to look for it, either. Setting up a HTTPD is easy enough if you use one of the many Apache/Win32 setup apps which basically do most of the work - again, administrating it is, well, as hard as administrating Apache is. The initial setup certainly was easier for me on Windows than on Linux, but that's partly because the Linux system didn't have APT or anything installed. I never used IIS, so I can't comment on how easy it is to set up.
Well, under Windows 2003 (the only one I have easy access to), they're both trivial. First, you have the "Manage This Server" wizard which can get you to whatever you need in about 30 seconds. Second... er, no, that covers it.
IIS is easy - you can set up things like a new virtual host just as quickly as you can in Apache. This from someone who's set up hundreds of sites in Apache and had never used IIS before in his life. What's more, the advanced options (after using the Wizard to set things up) are very accessible - I found out that I can do things like set bandwidth throttles per site. Can probably do that in Apache too, but I wouldn't know how.
It may (note: may) be harder to administer a large pool of Windows servers. But for a lot of folk just running a workgroup-level box, it can be surprisingly easy. And this is coming from a confirmed UNIX fan. If its as easy for me to do most of the common admin stuff on a new platform (Windows) as it is on the old standbys (UNIX), I'm assuming that its even easier for people who are more familiar with those servers. I'm not so sure that it would be as easy for a Windows guru to take charge of the average UNIX box.
Back to the other point. I - again, this is my first Windows server - could add an auto-dialed PPTP connection, enable sharing and NAT on it, and share it with the rest of the office lan. This was for remote connectivity to a client site. I'll be honest - I don't know how to do that on a Linux box. Could I find out? Probably. My point is though that I got it running in about 10 minutes on our Windows box, from a few hundred miles away, with no need to reference any documentation or external websites. Not too shabby.
But we're getting pretty off topic here.
Is it perfect? No. But what's the alternative for Windows that does as much as the GIMP, at anywhere near the cost?
Paint Shop Pro? Photoshop Elements?
Seriously, I've tried the GIMP too. I'm pretty tech savvy - can admin and code for a variety of platforms, been using UNIX for well over a decade, etc, etc. I'm no stranger to poor UNIX user interfaces for that matter. At one point, I wanted to do some basic photo work for our website. I gave GIMP a try. The simplest of goals - while very possible - were far from intuitive. Bear in mind that I'm by no means an experienced photoshopper either, hadn't used it before. Tried it under Windows, and Linux, and got frustrated.
I downloaded PSP instead - and was able to get my artwork cleaned up and nicely changed in a couple of hours. Recently tried Photoshop Elements - same kind of results. Much more easy to use. And they're both under $100. Heck, Elements can be found free in $39 cheapo scanners and other such products.
Do they do as much as the GIMP? Well, I don't know if I can sit down and write my own extensions to them in a weird scripting language. Then again, I don't want to have to do that either. Both of them cover the basics, and have been able to do everything I've wanted to do with them. Does that count?
Only if you define "average" to be "not someone who wants to spend the time with a DeLorean".
If anyone has an interest to, they can. They do not need to learn new skills
Well, I did say "maintained." Would you be comfortable taking a DeLorean down to JiffyLube for an oil change? What if you get a problem with, say, the wiring - think that your local service station will be able to fix it? How about the dealership (whoops...). Want to replace the stereo? Sure... but watch out for that integration work, and I sure hope that you use a good shop.
So for basic, easy, if-nothing-goes-wrong use, its fine. For anything more real-world, it doesn't work. Just like Linux for a lot of people. Could they use a kiosk at the library? Sure. Could they upgrade their web browser, make sure that the latest patches are installed, and use their new hardware? Not so easily.
Which was the point that I was (apparently badly) trying to make.
There aren't many DeLoreans out there. And you have to pay particular attention when purchasing parts for them (and sometimes special order).
But that does not mean they aren't ready to be driven.
Good point. It does mean that they aren't ready to be driven and maintained by your Aunt Minnie. Or by most people for that matter. How about DeLorian enthusiasts? Absolutely, and they'll work fine (and when they don't, fixing them is half the fun). The average guy-on-the-street? Not a chance.
A good, if unintentionally ironic, example.
Has HD really caught on?
It has with early adopters. If there was an option to buy HD versions of movies at a reasonable (DVDesque) cost, I know that I would. The difference is pretty damn noticable - about the same as going from a crappy interlaced compressed sattelite feed to a progressive-scan DVD.
At the very least, he could probably be charged with maintaining an attractive nuisance. IANAL but I can't help but wonder if you're allowed to stipulate to something claimed by the other party even when they don't have the law on their side - is that a ruling that needs a contest, in other words? Probably so, and he could always retract in any case, but it'd be interesting whatever happened. Who wants a headline?
What he did not acknowledge was that a 15 year old game does not have the complexity or richness of game play that new titles possess. Sim City 2000 is no comparison to Meet The Sims, just like an AMD 486-DX4/100 processor is no match for an AMD 64.
And yet I find myself feeling nostalgic for a lot of the old games which I spent orders of magnitude more time with than the current set - they were just a lot more playable. For me, at least. So while the graphics may not have been as realistic (just as those of a word processor weren't back then), their percieved value was at least as high.
Ah, Carrier Command. Or way back, Munch Man. Adventure. Hack. Heck, I spent way too many hours on Hunt the Wumpus.
The fact that I know where the keys are under my fingers and can type around 90 wpm or so and the fact that I understand where to put periods, commas, and apostrophes and how to spell correctly are, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated.
Hey, I'm just greatful that you didn't say "apostrophe's". [Shudder] You'd think after 12 years of classes the average American would have figured out how to use punctuation, whether typed or written. Or put up on large marquees for that matter.
thn agn ppl jst lzy i gess
What's really sad is that I've had some communications - fairly serious in their content - from business professionals that look like l33t speak. Malformed l33t at that. Not that they're trying, just that they don't seem to understand that good writing is both an aid to their appearance and a useful device for being understood.
You know, sometimes I just feel old.
Well, it's disabled in fedora, but in a default Gnome install, like on slackware, you simply open Nautilus, go to Applications://, and edit it's subfolders. Really, it couldn't be simpler
... wait for it ... the menu! Interacting with the object (or its representation) directly is, after all, one of the reasons that GUIs are traditionally easier to learn and use than non-GUIs.
Emphasis added.
Seriously - not meaning to troll - this is the kind of low-level knowledge (easy once you know how but about as unintuitive as you can get), the avoidance of which has made OSX what it is today.
Even the Windows way - want to edit the menu? Use the "action" button (ie: right-click) on
Heck, I've been using graphical UNIX systems for well over a decade (although not Gnome) and I doubt that I'd have stumbled across that particular sequence of events without some kind of documentation. Right-clicking on the thing I want to change though has become easy - sure, its a learned behavior, but its a consistent one (right-click on anything to interact with it in interesting, non-default ways) rather than a specific one, such as that method for using the browser to edit your menus.
Now, can this really not be made any simpler?
Issue 1 is best handled with a pseudonym ('I am Dash Riprock').
Heh. Funny coincidence - I worked with the "real" Dash Riprock for many years. Not in a musical capacity though.
Issue 2 is the current holy grail for the online business and consumer. MS has Passport, and the others have the Liberty Alliance.
Out of curiosity, have you (or anyone else) ever seen this Liberty Alliance stuff working anywhere? I see various non-MS sites using Passport occasionally, but I've never seen a LA login (even on things like Sun's partner program, unless they hide the fact).
Sun is the company I hate to hate. They have some of the brightest people in-house and create some amazing tech and ALWAYS seem to crap the bed on the business side. What good is a beautiful baby boy when it ends up being still-born? Man, I wish IBM just officially turn them into an R&D department
Hey, they're still miles ahead of TI... There's a company that screwed up the business side of pretty much every consumer or small-biz accessible product they've ever made. I mean, semis are one thing, but some of their products (heck, just look at the old 99/4A) were way ahead of their time. Pity that they couldn't market their way out of a paper bag...
In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.
...) mistake of assuming that just because they were technically superior that people would just flock to them. That, and you don't get the Informix consultants recommending the product like you do with Oracle - mainly because you don't need 'em around. 95% of the standard "Oracle add-on" products and services were either built in or not needed.
I've never used Cloudscape, but coming from its Informix roots I trust this - to a certain extent, of course. If you never used Informix, it absolutely rocked in terms of stability and ease of maintenance. We had one Informix DBA for every 100 or so installed machines (with many installed instances per machine) for product support at my last company. It never got the press that Oracle did: they made the classic (beta, Xerox, TI,
So since this was their most "simple" database, I have some pretty good feelings about it. One thing that would be interesting is that this will open up the code to their SQL optimizer. That's one area where Informix always truly rocked compared to pretty much everyone else outside of a lab situation. I don't know how much of it got into Cloudscape, of course.