Futhermore you should turn in your Nobel Prize for Economics, because you'd realize that a monopoly doesn't have to be 100% in order to be a monopoly.
My definition of monopoly is pretty much the same as the dictionary definition of monopoly. I'd post it here but it's darned long. You'll notice that it contains words like 'sole', 'exclusive' and 'absolute', not 'most', 'almost all', or 'dominant'.
Incidentally, you spelled 'furthermore' wrong:)
It need only have such a commanding presence that it is unassailable. Think of a guy with a stick trying to invade a castle. It's not going to happen.
That's because he's a dumbass for trying to invade a castle with a stick in the first place. Maybe he'd be better off using a little ingenuity and seducing one of the maids, or giving them a big horse on wheels for a gift. But I digress...
My point is that its *not* impossible for another company to produce a closed-source desktop operating system that cuts significantly into the Windows market. It hasn't yet been done, not because it is impossible, but because many would-be competitors have tried and fumbled due to their own mismanagement. Commodore failed to even attempt to market the Amiga (god I loved that computer). Apple has always had pretty good marketing, and was producing great stuff in the late 80s / early 90s, but consistently fucked up in their attempts to create a modern OS and ship affordable hardware. They're now recovering nicely under Jobs, which shows its possible to make headway. IBM could have scored big with OS/2, which was a great product, but fumbled big time on the marketing.
All of these would-be contenders had a chance, but none have managed to convince a large number of consumers that they offered more value than Windows.
If you ask the average Joe, he is quite happy with his Gatesway WinPC. He has no loyalty whatsoever to MS - he doesn't even really care about operating systems. If he heard of a better alternative he'd be willing to give it a shot, but for his purposes one does not exist.
Sooner or later, one of these competitors will manage to get it right and ship an affordable, widely-publicized, reliable, easy to use, closed-source operating system that offered more overall value than Windows. Apple's forthcoming Mac OS X is damned impressive next to Winblows - maybe that will be the one, who knows?
I think its all pretty irrelevant at this point anyway. Whether its Linux or something else, open source is obviously where things are happening. KDE2, Gnome2, Berlin, AtheOS, Mozilla, XFree4, KOffice, AbiWord, Konqueror, kernel 2.4, Gimp, Freenet, MPEG4, etc. Everything is developing so fast now its making my head spin, and its only accelerating as we add more users and as global Internet connectivity improves. Regardless of the court's ruling, Microsoft is in for the fight of its life against free software.
I respect your right to laugh at me, but of course I still disagree with you:)
Standard Oil never had a monopoly either. Before the breakup it had eight other large oil companies competing with it. It did indeed amass a dominant market share, but did so by undercutting competitors prices and dramatically expanding the market for oil. Like Microsoft, the government action against it came at the urging of its smaller, less successful competitors.
During the 1970's OPEC crisis, oil prices skyrocketed, there was gas rationing, the whole nine, but the market adapted. Auto manufacturers started making energy efficient cars (haha, Ford Pintos rock) instead of giant gas guzzlers, and for the first time people started seriously exploring other energy sources.
If the feds hadn't broken up Standard the same dynamics would apply. If Standard tried to raise prices too high, other energy sources would become popular, and as happened in the 70s, businesses that provided them would spring up faster than mom & pop ISPs in 1994. Standard's market share would drop, and they would be forced to cut prices to compete.
Maybe if Standard had been left alone things would have worked out differently and we'd now be using something less primitive and environmentally destructive than fossil fuels.
I know less about the AT&T breakup. IIRC, they actually had what I would consider more of a monopoly, because the government made it illegal for more than one phone company to compete in a given geographic area, with something like the government-granted cable tv franchise monopolies we have today. The old 'natural monopoly' argument - the idea that it was impossible for two communications providers to coexist in the same geographic area because of rights-of-way. I think the existence of the Internet pretty much blows that argument to hell, eh?
Not to dis your precious Caller ID, but maybe if the government hadn't created the monopoly for AT&T in the first place (if I am remembering correctly) we'd have something slightly cooler, like 3D wireless IP videoconferencing in 1986.
My core argument is that governments cannot promote or create competition. The only thing they can do is hamper it by taxation, regulation, and generally hindering and hampering the free market from doing what it does best, which is basically to route around inefficiency and price-gouging.
Obviously the feds think they did something illegal. Personally I think the feds are committing a far more heinous act than anything MS ever did. IMHO, antitrust laws are complete bullshit, and this trial is complete bullshit.
MS does not currently and has not ever had a monopoly on the OS or applications market. They managed to suck up 90% of the consumer desktop computing market because nobody else came even close to striking the right balance of technology, usability and marketing.
OS/2 is the only OS in the last 10 years that I can think of that even had a shot at mainstream adoption. It had great momentum for a while, but IBM chose to develop and market it only half-heartedly, and then eventually killed it. As far as MacOS, that didn't go downhill because of Microsoft so much as mismanagement by Sculley & Co. Very user-friendly OS, but with expensive proprietary hardware and a primitive technological undercarriage (cooperative multitasking, no protected memory) that made it extremely crash-prone.
So what if MS played a little hardball? If the OEM's didn't like the terms they were free to contract with a different supplier for an OS, or to develop their own OS (separately or cooperatively), or to ship no OS. Obviously the OEMs felt the contract terms were acceptable enough to stick with Windows and not explore these alternatives.
IMHO, the companies who urged the DOJ to bring this action are a bunch of has-been crybabies who couldn't compete in the marketplace by offering better value to the consumer, and decided to play dirty.
Despite all that, I can proudly say that I have never owned a Windows machine:) I never liked MS OS's or their manipulation of standards, and so have always exercised my option to use other operating systems. If MS had a monopoly I wouldn't be able to do that.
It seems that many people just want Microsoft to suffer, without considering the possibility that what the government is doing is anti-freedom, anti-competition and just plain immoral.
I believe it's called employment 'at will', which basically means that either party can terminate at any time for any reason, and there is no contract in place stipulating length of employment or conditions of termination. If there is no contract or other special arrangement in place, states generally consider the default employment status to be at-will.
In reality, employers have to be super-careful when firing people, because of the potential for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. Happens fairly often.
I really don't think it is good practice from a business, ethical or legal standpoint to do your firings in public or otherwise air your dirty laundry like Id is in this case, or like the Rasterman/Red Hat fiasco that went down a year or so ago. Just my opinion.
Haha. My apartment building (late 1800's / early 1900's) is absolutely gorgeous, but doesn't have grounded outlets, and I can't even get ISDN there, let alone broadband. That's OK cause I'm moving in 5 days, one of the reasons being so I can get ADSL.
If I were anywhere near St. Louis I'd be down with it, but I'm not.
Macs had Localtalk (PhoneNet) built-in from very early on (possibly the beginning - not sure), up until recently, when they dropped the serial ports and went to all USB & built-in Ethernet.
IIRC, Localtalk was a shared broadcast network running at 400Kbps. Slow as sin compared to Ethernet, but you have to remember that this was in the era when ArcNet and Token Ring were still around, although Ethernet was starting to take over.
Real networking was expensive and quite complicated then, and so it was really impressive to be able to plug 3 stock Macs together with a cheap cable, turn them on, and have them networked, sharing printers, hard drives, etc.
Knowledge is power. The more we know about the mistakes of the past, the less likely we are to repeat them.
When we try to sweep history under the rug and pretend it didn't happen, that plants the seeds for it to happen all over again.
The Nazis were human beings - imperfect, and not so different from you and I, eh? I suspect that many/most believed strongly that they were doing the right thing, probably out of stupid fucking blind nationalism like we have here in the U.S.
Humankind will be better off if we better understand the Nazis and what motivated them, so we can recognize, or better yet prevent, the circumstances leading to the Holocaust.
Can it happen again? Of course it can. We as imperfect human beings are no less fallible than the Nazis. There are plenty of potential Hitlers walking the streets around us, but right here and now the economic circumstances aren't right.
Knowledge is power. Understanding history is the key to not repeating it. We must never forget the Holocaust.
IMHO, despite good intentions the French court is doing a very bad thing.
I'm very much pro-Linux - I've been MS-free for over 8 years, having stuck with various combinations of Unix/Mac/Linux - but this trial against MS really burns me up.
This trial is really setting a dangerous precedent for the U.S. Federal Government bureaucracy to get involved in regulating the software/Internet industry. Some Linux users may take glee in seeing MS in legal trouble, but don't realize that this could come right back around and bite their own company, or their favorite Linux distro.
If you dislike Microsoft for being an unreasonable bully, wait until you get to know the U.S. Government up close and personal:)
Not sure what caducity means. Is that something like audacity?
In order to set the default expiration poilcy for different MIME types, you need to compile mod_expires into Apache, then use the Expires directive in httpd.conf. It's quite powerful, definitely good stuff.
It really is annoying that every single app has its own config file format. It also has to be time-consuming for the programmers to reinvent a config parser along with every app, plus it makes it difficult to graft on GUI configuration tools.
Wouldn't it be cool if everyone used XML? I'm sure someone will point out what's wrong with my idea (this is Slashdot after all), but some of the benefits I see are:
1) Is both machine and human-readable.
2) Many XML parsers already exist, no need to write one for your app. Maybe someday a single XML lib will become defacto-standard on all distros.
3) Makes it easy to write a GUI configurator.
4) Makes it easy for apps to pull config data from other apps.
Anyway, I could be entirely wrong. I've been wrong before.
I don't necessarily think a registry is such a bad idea, but I agree that it should be text-based instead of binary.
Also, NT does ship with a journaling filesystem (NTFS). I don't know any details, but I have heard claims that it is lacking in several areas as compared to XFS or JFS.
The only *nix web product I know of that includes native drivers for MS Access.MDB files is Allaire Cold Fusion, which runs on NT, Solaris, Linux and HP/UX. I'm just going on my feeble memory so I could even be wrong about that.
I do recall a discussion somewhere (maybe on zend.com) about how you can use MS Access to create a database, and then do an 'Export SQL' to publish the contents to a MySQL server. I forget the details, but you might do a little searching.
There also are a few graphical client programs that are similar to Access (or MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager) that allow you to manage a MySQL server and add/edit data. I use KSQL under KDE, but I know that there are several others for Linux, and at least one for Windows. This might be a satisfactory alternative to Access for your designers.
Now, about FrontPage. I don't know how else to say this except... it's complete and total dog shit. I would elaborate but the product is so bad it doesn't deserve my time.
If the main reason you are stuck with Front Page is for its ability to publish easily to remote servers, consider these alternatives:
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) does the same basic thing, only it is standards-based. There's an Apache module for the server side, and a number of options on the client side, including 'Web Folders' (or something like that) under Windows 98. See http://www.webdav.org for lots of info on DAV.
RSync - I edit my sites on my personal workstation, and then publish the changes to my production server using RSync (http://rsync.samba.org/) over SSH. It basically is a quick, seamless way to mirror a site from one machine to another. It only transmits the changes each time you run it, not the whole site.
Wouldn't it be sweet if BeOS got GPLed, and people could merge parts of GNU/Linux and BeOS together as they saw fit?
Technical differences between the OS's aside, I realize that on the surface this doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for Be from a business perspective. But they are really in a tough battle on many fronts.
I like Be, and would like to see them succeed. I also like Linux, and would like to see it enhanced with better multimedia capabilities.
Is there a business model that Be could adopt that would allow them to join the open-source movement instead of trying to fight against it?
Actually, I used to have to enter a lot of movie data in a form to maintain content for a site, and this feature in IE was indispensable.
A lot of the time I would have to duplicate the information in a form, change a few things, and submit. With IE all I had to do was fill out the form once, hit Ctrl-N and it would pop up the form for me, already filled in with default information.
That's the only time its ever really come in handy. Perhaps it could be set as a user preference?
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When it comes to high school, I think our school system is a complete failure. It's geared to turning out lookalike, thinkalike production drones for some nonexistant industrial economy that depends on assembly line workers. I think that's what most people really want out of life, anyway.
When I went to high school (grad '88 in Maryland) you got severely disciplined if you had hair or clothes that were too wild looking. I was repeatedly suspended for my flourescent green jeans. Also, if you weren't with the school spirit / football agenda, the administration hated you, and just wanted you out.
If I were a school administrator who really wanted to do something to stop the violence I would:
1) Adopt a ZERO tolerance policy toward harassment or physical force of any kind, regardless of how the person is dressed, the color of their skin, or what kind of hair they have. No more jocks knocking people down. No more punkers getting shoved in lockers. We wouldn't tolerate that sort of environment in the workplace, why should our schools be any different? Don't we all deserve to walk down the hall without getting shoved?
2) Not only tolerate diversity, but encourage it. Wear your clothes and hair however the hell you want. Be yourself - express yourself - respect others and learn from them. Similarly to #1, enforce a zero tolerance policy regarding malicious harassment of others because of differences in looks.
3) Teach non-violent methods of resolving conflict - assertiveness, or whatever. Place as great an emphasis on ethics and getting along with others as on the 3 R's.
I guess all that could only go so far. If I really was in control, I'd ditch the whole idea of government-run schools, and go to a voucher or free-market system. But I'm not in control, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for the rest of America to lose its addiction to big government:(
Don't forget mailing list archives, which suck becuase you have to click and load each message, then hit Back, then scroll back down to where you were.
I think the answer is that we as a country need to fully embrace the concept of free speech instead of just giving it lip service in our homogenized textbooks in our government-run schools.
I think we did that once a few hundred years ago and it worked out really well.
Now there are a lot of people who are scared of free speech, or use the government to squelch viewpoints they don't agree with. I'm starting to get really worried lately, what with all the closed-minded newbies getting on the internet and trying to regulate it to death.
Also, I think there's much more at stake than just pr0n on library computers. First they block pr0n, then they block 'dangerous' ideas, then the next thing you know you're living in a country like China or Singapore. Poor oppressed fucks. I don't want to live under a government like theirs. I want the opposite: lots of freedom, and tolerance for differing morals and viewpoints.
Maybe instead of sitting around watching my freedoms stripped away from me I should get off my ass and do something about it.
Thanks for listening to my stream-of-consciousness rambling. I should get back to work now. Flame away...
This is EXACTLY the problem I had. I guess I'm not the only one then, huh?
Their customer service reps kept referring me to some screen with options that just aren't there.
I sent them screenshots and everything to prove it wasn't there, but they kept referring me to the same screen. Maddening.
Then I got a 'how are we doing?' customer service questionaire from the president, so I told him. Still nothing. That was months ago.
The problem is that I HAVE to host my own DNS, because I have hosts other than www, like mail, secure, stage, etc. AFAIK, their DNS will only point to 'domain.com' and 'www.domain.com'.
FYI, I did find some 'Host registration form' on Network Solutions page which seems to be related to the problem we're having. Go to networksolutions.com -> forms -> expert to see it.
I really would like to find a solution to this so I can give the old IPs back to my provider.
I've registered a handful of domains through register.com so far, and while the forms and pricing are very friendly, I did have a rather unpleasant experience when I had to contact their customer service about renumbering my nameservers. I never did get a satisfactory resolution on the issue. I would have been completely and extremely SOL if my ISP hadn't let me keep my old IPs along with my new ones, because register.com NEVER DID GET BACK TO ME.
On a related note, what is the deal with this new thing where you have to register your nameservers? I don't recall ever having had to do that before.
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True, true.
Futhermore you should turn in your Nobel Prize for Economics, because you'd realize that a monopoly doesn't have to be 100% in order to be a monopoly.
My definition of monopoly is pretty much the same as the dictionary definition of monopoly. I'd post it here but it's darned long. You'll notice that it contains words like 'sole', 'exclusive' and 'absolute', not 'most', 'almost all', or 'dominant'.
Incidentally, you spelled 'furthermore' wrong :)
It need only have such a commanding presence that it is unassailable. Think of a guy with a stick trying to invade a castle. It's not going to happen.
That's because he's a dumbass for trying to invade a castle with a stick in the first place. Maybe he'd be better off using a little ingenuity and seducing one of the maids, or giving them a big horse on wheels for a gift. But I digress...
My point is that its *not* impossible for another company to produce a closed-source desktop operating system that cuts significantly into the Windows market. It hasn't yet been done, not because it is impossible, but because many would-be competitors have tried and fumbled due to their own mismanagement. Commodore failed to even attempt to market the Amiga (god I loved that computer). Apple has always had pretty good marketing, and was producing great stuff in the late 80s / early 90s, but consistently fucked up in their attempts to create a modern OS and ship affordable hardware. They're now recovering nicely under Jobs, which shows its possible to make headway. IBM could have scored big with OS/2, which was a great product, but fumbled big time on the marketing.
All of these would-be contenders had a chance, but none have managed to convince a large number of consumers that they offered more value than Windows.
If you ask the average Joe, he is quite happy with his Gatesway WinPC. He has no loyalty whatsoever to MS - he doesn't even really care about operating systems. If he heard of a better alternative he'd be willing to give it a shot, but for his purposes one does not exist.
Sooner or later, one of these competitors will manage to get it right and ship an affordable, widely-publicized, reliable, easy to use, closed-source operating system that offered more overall value than Windows. Apple's forthcoming Mac OS X is damned impressive next to Winblows - maybe that will be the one, who knows?
I think its all pretty irrelevant at this point anyway. Whether its Linux or something else, open source is obviously where things are happening. KDE2, Gnome2, Berlin, AtheOS, Mozilla, XFree4, KOffice, AbiWord, Konqueror, kernel 2.4, Gimp, Freenet, MPEG4, etc. Everything is developing so fast now its making my head spin, and its only accelerating as we add more users and as global Internet connectivity improves. Regardless of the court's ruling, Microsoft is in for the fight of its life against free software.
I respect your right to laugh at me, but of course I still disagree with you :)
Standard Oil never had a monopoly either. Before the breakup it had eight other large oil companies competing with it. It did indeed amass a dominant market share, but did so by undercutting competitors prices and dramatically expanding the market for oil. Like Microsoft, the government action against it came at the urging of its smaller, less successful competitors.
During the 1970's OPEC crisis, oil prices skyrocketed, there was gas rationing, the whole nine, but the market adapted. Auto manufacturers started making energy efficient cars (haha, Ford Pintos rock) instead of giant gas guzzlers, and for the first time people started seriously exploring other energy sources.
If the feds hadn't broken up Standard the same dynamics would apply. If Standard tried to raise prices too high, other energy sources would become popular, and as happened in the 70s, businesses that provided them would spring up faster than mom & pop ISPs in 1994. Standard's market share would drop, and they would be forced to cut prices to compete.
Maybe if Standard had been left alone things would have worked out differently and we'd now be using something less primitive and environmentally destructive than fossil fuels.
I know less about the AT&T breakup. IIRC, they actually had what I would consider more of a monopoly, because the government made it illegal for more than one phone company to compete in a given geographic area, with something like the government-granted cable tv franchise monopolies we have today. The old 'natural monopoly' argument - the idea that it was impossible for two communications providers to coexist in the same geographic area because of rights-of-way. I think the existence of the Internet pretty much blows that argument to hell, eh?
Not to dis your precious Caller ID, but maybe if the government hadn't created the monopoly for AT&T in the first place (if I am remembering correctly) we'd have something slightly cooler, like 3D wireless IP videoconferencing in 1986.
My core argument is that governments cannot promote or create competition. The only thing they can do is hamper it by taxation, regulation, and generally hindering and hampering the free market from doing what it does best, which is basically to route around inefficiency and price-gouging.
Obviously the feds think they did something illegal. Personally I think the feds are committing a far more heinous act than anything MS ever did. IMHO, antitrust laws are complete bullshit, and this trial is complete bullshit.
:) I never liked MS OS's or their manipulation of standards, and so have always exercised my option to use other operating systems. If MS had a monopoly I wouldn't be able to do that.
MS does not currently and has not ever had a monopoly on the OS or applications market. They managed to suck up 90% of the consumer desktop computing market because nobody else came even close to striking the right balance of technology, usability and marketing.
OS/2 is the only OS in the last 10 years that I can think of that even had a shot at mainstream adoption. It had great momentum for a while, but IBM chose to develop and market it only half-heartedly, and then eventually killed it. As far as MacOS, that didn't go downhill because of Microsoft so much as mismanagement by Sculley & Co. Very user-friendly OS, but with expensive proprietary hardware and a primitive technological undercarriage (cooperative multitasking, no protected memory) that made it extremely crash-prone.
So what if MS played a little hardball? If the OEM's didn't like the terms they were free to contract with a different supplier for an OS, or to develop their own OS (separately or cooperatively), or to ship no OS. Obviously the OEMs felt the contract terms were acceptable enough to stick with Windows and not explore these alternatives.
IMHO, the companies who urged the DOJ to bring this action are a bunch of has-been crybabies who couldn't compete in the marketplace by offering better value to the consumer, and decided to play dirty.
Despite all that, I can proudly say that I have never owned a Windows machine
It seems that many people just want Microsoft to suffer, without considering the possibility that what the government is doing is anti-freedom, anti-competition and just plain immoral.
If I'm not mistaken, the US federal income tax came in 1933 also, or maybe 1934.
What a bad year.
I believe it's called employment 'at will', which basically means that either party can terminate at any time for any reason, and there is no contract in place stipulating length of employment or conditions of termination. If there is no contract or other special arrangement in place, states generally consider the default employment status to be at-will.
In reality, employers have to be super-careful when firing people, because of the potential for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. Happens fairly often.
I really don't think it is good practice from a business, ethical or legal standpoint to do your firings in public or otherwise air your dirty laundry like Id is in this case, or like the Rasterman/Red Hat fiasco that went down a year or so ago. Just my opinion.
BTW, I'm not a lawyer; I just play one on TV.
Haha. My apartment building (late 1800's / early 1900's) is absolutely gorgeous, but doesn't have grounded outlets, and I can't even get ISDN there, let alone broadband. That's OK cause I'm moving in 5 days, one of the reasons being so I can get ADSL.
If I were anywhere near St. Louis I'd be down with it, but I'm not.
Macs had Localtalk (PhoneNet) built-in from very early on (possibly the beginning - not sure), up until recently, when they dropped the serial ports and went to all USB & built-in Ethernet.
IIRC, Localtalk was a shared broadcast network running at 400Kbps. Slow as sin compared to Ethernet, but you have to remember that this was in the era when ArcNet and Token Ring were still around, although Ethernet was starting to take over.
Real networking was expensive and quite complicated then, and so it was really impressive to be able to plug 3 stock Macs together with a cheap cable, turn them on, and have them networked, sharing printers, hard drives, etc.
Very well said.
Knowledge is power. The more we know about the mistakes of the past, the less likely we are to repeat them.
When we try to sweep history under the rug and pretend it didn't happen, that plants the seeds for it to happen all over again.
The Nazis were human beings - imperfect, and not so different from you and I, eh? I suspect that many/most believed strongly that they were doing the right thing, probably out of stupid fucking blind nationalism like we have here in the U.S.
Humankind will be better off if we better understand the Nazis and what motivated them, so we can recognize, or better yet prevent, the circumstances leading to the Holocaust.
Can it happen again? Of course it can. We as imperfect human beings are no less fallible than the Nazis. There are plenty of potential Hitlers walking the streets around us, but right here and now the economic circumstances aren't right.
Knowledge is power. Understanding history is the key to not repeating it. We must never forget the Holocaust.
IMHO, despite good intentions the French court is doing a very bad thing.
Interesting you should mention that...
I'm very much pro-Linux - I've been MS-free for over 8 years, having stuck with various combinations of Unix/Mac/Linux - but this trial against MS really burns me up.
This trial is really setting a dangerous precedent for the U.S. Federal Government bureaucracy to get involved in regulating the software/Internet industry. Some Linux users may take glee in seeing MS in legal trouble, but don't realize that this could come right back around and bite their own company, or their favorite Linux distro.
If you dislike Microsoft for being an unreasonable bully, wait until you get to know the U.S. Government up close and personal :)
Reason Magazine has an excellent section with some free-market viewpoints on the MS breakup. It's located at http://reason.com/bi/microsoft.html. IMHO, one of the very best articles in the collection is The New Trustbusters.
That's 'pr0n' actually, and it was a bad-ass movie back in the day. My favorite part was the lightcycle race.
Not sure what caducity means. Is that something like audacity?
In order to set the default expiration poilcy for different MIME types, you need to compile mod_expires into Apache, then use the Expires directive in httpd.conf. It's quite powerful, definitely good stuff.
It really is annoying that every single app has its own config file format. It also has to be time-consuming for the programmers to reinvent a config parser along with every app, plus it makes it difficult to graft on GUI configuration tools.
Wouldn't it be cool if everyone used XML? I'm sure someone will point out what's wrong with my idea (this is Slashdot after all), but some of the benefits I see are:
1) Is both machine and human-readable.
2) Many XML parsers already exist, no need to write one for your app. Maybe someday a single XML lib will become defacto-standard on all distros.
3) Makes it easy to write a GUI configurator.
4) Makes it easy for apps to pull config data from other apps.
Anyway, I could be entirely wrong. I've been wrong before.
I don't necessarily think a registry is such a bad idea, but I agree that it should be text-based instead of binary.
Also, NT does ship with a journaling filesystem (NTFS). I don't know any details, but I have heard claims that it is lacking in several areas as compared to XFS or JFS.
randombit speaks the truth. Baltimore rats are *huge*, not to mention numerous, downright bold, and completely out of hand.
:P
I'd link you to a bunch of SunSpot stories on the subject but SunSpot charges for access to the stories in their archive
The only *nix web product I know of that includes native drivers for MS Access .MDB files is Allaire Cold Fusion, which runs on NT, Solaris, Linux and HP/UX. I'm just going on my feeble memory so I could even be wrong about that.
:(
I do recall a discussion somewhere (maybe on zend.com) about how you can use MS Access to create a database, and then do an 'Export SQL' to publish the contents to a MySQL server. I forget the details, but you might do a little searching.
There also are a few graphical client programs that are similar to Access (or MS SQL Server Enterprise Manager) that allow you to manage a MySQL server and add/edit data. I use KSQL under KDE, but I know that there are several others for Linux, and at least one for Windows. This might be a satisfactory alternative to Access for your designers.
Now, about FrontPage. I don't know how else to say this except... it's complete and total dog shit. I would elaborate but the product is so bad it doesn't deserve my time.
If the main reason you are stuck with Front Page is for its ability to publish easily to remote servers, consider these alternatives:
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) does the same basic thing, only it is standards-based. There's an Apache module for the server side, and a number of options on the client side, including 'Web Folders' (or something like that) under Windows 98. See http://www.webdav.org for lots of info on DAV.
RSync - I edit my sites on my personal workstation, and then publish the changes to my production server using RSync (http://rsync.samba.org/) over SSH. It basically is a quick, seamless way to mirror a site from one machine to another. It only transmits the changes each time you run it, not the whole site.
Anyway, hope that helps a little bit. Good luck.
- pb with no j
Wouldn't it be sweet if BeOS got GPLed, and people could merge parts of GNU/Linux and BeOS together as they saw fit?
Technical differences between the OS's aside, I realize that on the surface this doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for Be from a business perspective. But they are really in a tough battle on many fronts.
I like Be, and would like to see them succeed. I also like Linux, and would like to see it enhanced with better multimedia capabilities.
Is there a business model that Be could adopt that would allow them to join the open-source movement instead of trying to fight against it?
Actually, I used to have to enter a lot of movie data in a form to maintain content for a site, and this feature in IE was indispensable.
A lot of the time I would have to duplicate the information in a form, change a few things, and submit. With IE all I had to do was fill out the form once, hit Ctrl-N and it would pop up the form for me, already filled in with default information.
That's the only time its ever really come in handy. Perhaps it could be set as a user preference?
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I heartily agree with you, sig11.
:(
When it comes to high school, I think our school system is a complete failure. It's geared to turning out lookalike, thinkalike production drones for some nonexistant industrial economy that depends on assembly line workers. I think that's what most people really want out of life, anyway.
When I went to high school (grad '88 in Maryland) you got severely disciplined if you had hair or clothes that were too wild looking. I was repeatedly suspended for my flourescent green jeans. Also, if you weren't with the school spirit / football agenda, the administration hated you, and just wanted you out.
If I were a school administrator who really wanted to do something to stop the violence I would:
1) Adopt a ZERO tolerance policy toward harassment or physical force of any kind, regardless of how the person is dressed, the color of their skin, or what kind of hair they have. No more jocks knocking people down. No more punkers getting shoved in lockers. We wouldn't tolerate that sort of environment in the workplace, why should our schools be any different? Don't we all deserve to walk down the hall without getting shoved?
2) Not only tolerate diversity, but encourage it. Wear your clothes and hair however the hell you want. Be yourself - express yourself - respect others and learn from them. Similarly to #1, enforce a zero tolerance policy regarding malicious harassment of others because of differences in looks.
3) Teach non-violent methods of resolving conflict - assertiveness, or whatever. Place as great an emphasis on ethics and getting along with others as on the 3 R's.
I guess all that could only go so far. If I really was in control, I'd ditch the whole idea of government-run schools, and go to a voucher or free-market system. But I'm not in control, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for the rest of America to lose its addiction to big government
I've rambled enough now.
The Delphi online service ran on VAX/VMS. Guess that doesn't count as public access though.
Don't forget mailing list archives, which suck becuase you have to click and load each message, then hit Back, then scroll back down to where you were.
I think the answer is that we as a country need to fully embrace the concept of free speech instead of just giving it lip service in our homogenized textbooks in our government-run schools.
I think we did that once a few hundred years ago and it worked out really well.
Now there are a lot of people who are scared of free speech, or use the government to squelch viewpoints they don't agree with. I'm starting to get really worried lately, what with all the closed-minded newbies getting on the internet and trying to regulate it to death.
Also, I think there's much more at stake than just pr0n on library computers. First they block pr0n, then they block 'dangerous' ideas, then the next thing you know you're living in a country like China or Singapore. Poor oppressed fucks. I don't want to live under a government like theirs. I want the opposite: lots of freedom, and tolerance for differing morals and viewpoints.
Maybe instead of sitting around watching my freedoms stripped away from me I should get off my ass and do something about it.
Thanks for listening to my stream-of-consciousness rambling. I should get back to work now. Flame away...
This is EXACTLY the problem I had. I guess I'm not the only one then, huh?
Their customer service reps kept referring me to some screen with options that just aren't there.
I sent them screenshots and everything to prove it wasn't there, but they kept referring me to the same screen. Maddening.
Then I got a 'how are we doing?' customer service questionaire from the president, so I told him. Still nothing. That was months ago.
The problem is that I HAVE to host my own DNS, because I have hosts other than www, like mail, secure, stage, etc. AFAIK, their DNS will only point to 'domain.com' and 'www.domain.com'.
FYI, I did find some 'Host registration form' on Network Solutions page which seems to be related to the problem we're having. Go to networksolutions.com -> forms -> expert to see it.
I really would like to find a solution to this so I can give the old IPs back to my provider.
I've registered a handful of domains through register.com so far, and while the forms and pricing are very friendly, I did have a rather unpleasant experience when I had to contact their customer service about renumbering my nameservers. I never did get a satisfactory resolution on the issue. I would have been completely and extremely SOL if my ISP hadn't let me keep my old IPs along with my new ones, because register.com NEVER DID GET BACK TO ME.
On a related note, what is the deal with this new thing where you have to register your nameservers?
I don't recall ever having had to do that before.
I do not understand what is so horrible about the naked (natural) human body, portrayed erotically or otherwise.
I am much more terrified of well-meaning, yet misguided bible-thumpers telling me what I can read, view, hear or think.
Can anyone from other countries provide some insight? Is the US the only country that is this uptight about things of a sexual nature?
Get up, get down...
You sound like James Brown.