And since the US does not have transit zones, this includes flying via a US airport. The 'normal' immigration and security checks already take so long that it's very easy to miss your connecting flight, when you are singled out for laptop inspection you will certainly miss it. So do not fly via or to the US for any reason.
When everybody stops flying to the US, they will know they went too far. For me the (security) delays on a transit flight already made me decide to stop flying there.
Good luck on your island of security and privacy invasion. Let's keep the rest of the world civilized.
After we were bitten by Netscape 4's layer handling when our company switched to IE6 as company browser, we made W3C HTML our standard. Since testing this in Firefox with the HTML validator add-on is so easy, all of our web programmers are now using Firefox.
Designing for the W3C standard is so much easier than designing for one browser and testing in many others, that we do not have the manpower or will to switch back to the era of browser-sniffing. I'm about to add a disclaimer to my site:
"For maximum viewing experience, please use a W3C compatible browser. Examples: Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc."
How on earth could the Internet have grown to its current size without these new fonts?
As long as web designers use the W3C advice to add the generic fonts as alternative, I don't see a problem of not downloading these fonts on my Linux PC.
And the FOBs that will set these new fonts as the only font obviously won't mind us taking our business elsewhere.
Maybe the people who live between.ca and.mx can start using.us instead of poluting.com with non-commercial or non-USA websites (if you care about using the most meaningful TLD)
Hey, if Costa Rica is stupid enough to vote "yes" for OOXML, I will take my holiday money elsewhere, to a tropical country that did vote "no": Brazil, Ecuador. Mmmmh, surprising low amount of countries had the brains to say no.
And some of the countries that approved don't even have the money to buy MS Office licenses to use that OOXML standard: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Congo, Cote d'Ivoir, Cuba, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.
Can anyone explain me why those countries voted "yes" ? Take Cuba... MS is not allowed to sell licenses there due to the USA governement childish rules. And all those developing nations, they don't have money...
I'm an IT architect with a 6000-person company, and yesterday added a clause to an XML repository vendor's contract with us:
"Nonconformance to W3C standards on HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc resulting in interfacing problems with other standard-compliant applications, or platform or browser dependencies will be treated as bugs."
This means we can connect any other standard-compliant application to it, and also that if this application breaks that we can replace it with another application of the same function, without changing neighboring applications or interfaces. It prevents that company from choosing Windows-only solutions because they know they will have to fix it for free.
My next step is to also add these clauses to the requirements and contracts of all other applications we buy or develop. For office functionality the obvious choice will be ODF, and this can be edited by several programs: OpenOffice.org, but also MS Office with the SUN ODF plugin. The SUN ODF plugin allows you to set the default office format to ODF. Download it from http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp
Of course, once this ODF office format is our standard, it does no longer matter which application is used to interface with this format. Maybe our Solaris users want to stop using Citrix and MS office (slow combination), and use OpenOffice instead saving us Citrix, MS-office and Acrobat license costs. And maybe our PC users who have very basic editing needs would like to try OpenOffice too, saving more MS-office and Acrobat licenses... I'm sure a few power users will want to keep using the 'real' MS-office, so a 100% migration is unlikely, but 80% of 6000 persons times the licenses is a lot of money, even with corporate discounts. And for those of you who say it will not save us money because you cannot resell licenses, we can at least disable the maintenance fee for the software.
I've been there twice, and the cuban people really suffer. The embargo halted a lot of technology entering the country, making it a live museum for tourists, but even without the embargo they would be too poor to afford any of it. There is a lot of prostitution from poor girls (their own will, not pushed by pimps). Since the russian stopped their money-feed, the economy is turning into a tourism-only income. The only people besides the government who have it good are the owners of the "casas particular" who earn tourist money by renting out 2 rooms in their house.
The cuban government watch their people closely, and you could reported by a neighborhood spy for having an unfavorable opinion on the government. It is forbidden for a cuban to approach a tourist or sit at the same table in a bar. Yet it happens, tourists driven towards the authentic bars and neighborhoods by romantic Buena Vista Social Club tunes are meeting cubans hungry for democracy and freedom. They are educating themselves indeed, but not via the government. It takes another president to understand that democracy and freedom is possible without capitalism. Maybe a few other presidents. Let's hope they get there peacefully.
So the embargo will not throw over the government, tourism will.
I carefully avoided entering the USA in past years when visiting Cuba (salsa dancing and Havana Club drinking), Brazil, and Mexico (whitewater kayaking) by choosing european carriers like Air Portugal and Lufthansa. Great service, friendly staff and no hassle at airports.
For my kayaking trip to Costa Rica this December I thought I had a direct Martinair flight from Amsterdam to San Jose (the capital of Costa Rica, not the one in California), but due to the hub system, it turned out to be a Amsterdam-Miami flight, followed by 3 hours in Miami airport, and a Miami-San Jose flight. While european airports leave transit travelers in a 'twilight zone' the USA seems to think all inbound tourists want to enter the country, so must fill in a stupid form with your US address (none), walk barefeet or in your socks (no shoes), holding up your pants (no belt), through customs. There are a few non-USA-resident lines to handle a 747 full of europeans, and 20 lines for USA residents of which there where just a handfull on the flight. There you are fingerprinted, photographed, and asked stupid questions. You wonder "Did the cold war really end 30 years ago?" Two hours later the same routine. This is how it feels to be treated like a criminal. And then there is the thought that one small mistake in a database somewhere or slight resemblance to a known terrorist can turn this unpleasant treatment into a Guantanomo Bay-like nightmare. I'm just a tourist who wants to spend my euros and holidays in a nice country with friendly people!
Some places in the world require you to transit via USA, why can't they make twilight zones for transit passengers? I already stopped spending my tourist euros on USA destinations and USA airline companies, should I also exclude countries only reachable via USA transit hubs?
A dutch comedian (Lebbis & Jansen) this new year's eve said that pretty soon all flights to the USA will require you to be handcuffed and blindfolded for your own safety. People laughed, but I did not think it funny. The only way to stop that from happening is a worldwide boycott of USA airlines, airports and transit hubs. Even if it will not reverse the big brother practices of the USA government (51% of the USA residents did not vote for), at least it will counterbalance some of the air polution caused by USA's gas-guzzling SUV trucks and 1960-technology Boeing planes.
At my 5000+ people worldwide company we went from W2K to WinXP in 2005. We also went from owned hardware to leased hardware. Bad times made us stretch the upgrade cycle before that, so everything client-side and server-side really had to be replaced, except our Sun servers and clients.
The transition was from Win2K, Netscape 4.5, Office 97 to WinXP, IE6 and Office XP, plus the email system was migrated to Exchange on Win2k3 servers. Everybody got mandatory training. Many Intranet applications which were coded around Netscape 4's layers had to be migrated too, IE could not handle them (rightfully, as the W3C moved in a different direction).
For Vista we are extremely cautious. There is no business reason to switch. Nobody wants to be the early adopter, and enjoy bleeding edge computing.
At the same time we also monitor the alternatives, because this time we have a choice. Firefox and IE7 are functionally equal, so are Evolution and Outlook, Nvu and FrontPage, OpenOffice and MS-Office. Alongside our SUN servers we introduce Linux servers, containing popular Linux software like Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, ImageMagick, Nvu. With thin-client architecture we run those applications on the SUN and WinXP (fat) clients, stretching their lifespan. By switching to Open Standards, we free ourselves from the MS-directed upgrade cycle.
Vista itself we don't need, it's a solution looking for a problem. Why spend money on eye candy? My company needs the applications that now run on WinXP. As soon as these applications require Vista, we need to switch only those users that really require those applications. The rest stays on WinXP.
So Vista will not require that much money. Our leased PC clients will slowly be replaced with Vista-compatible hardware with the normal replacement cycle, so no extra money there. When we switch, it will be a partly switch as-dictated-by-applications, so max 20%. In that case we need to freeze the Office version on OfficeXP (even on Vista), or switch to OpenOffice.
Not really a bug, but the Firefox 1.5 sp-AR I just downloaded to 2 Internet cafes in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico still mentions version 1.1.
Apart from that it works flawlessly and the sysadmin here likes it too after I explained it in my best spanish (I'm dutch, and speak very little spanish).
Tienez Firefox? Porque non? Es muy mas securidad de IE, y muy mas functionalidad: F11 con URL location, tabs, Ctrl-F y muchos extensions.
Perhaps time that someone makes a spanish version of the Firefox advantages just in time for the holiday season, because here in Mexico on 5 locations I have not been able to spot one place where Firefox was already installed, and just 1 place where the sysadmin already knew about it.
OOo is much faster than opening MSO through Citrix
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 1
I work in a mixed Sun Solaris/PC WinXP environment. To allow Sun users to view/edit Office (MSO) documents, we had to start up Citrix, login with username and our ultrasecure (=long and dificult) password, wait at least 30 seconds, and then see Citrix open the document. Major PITA.
With OpenOffice (OOo) being a Solaris-friendly application (both are made by Sun), we can soon open those Office documents a lot faster, and save a Citrix license, an Office license, and a bunch of heavy PC servers running Citrix. Native applications rule!
But the story does not end there. Once all Sun users use OOo, eventually someone will break a document because of incompatibilities between OOo and MSO in handling the Office format. Therefor we are now already looking into making (OASIS) OpenDocument (ODF) our default format for certain development documentation that is primarily authored by Sun users. IT must then roll out OOo on all PCs to be able to view/review/edit ODF (MS refuses to add support for ODF).
After that it's a small step to a full switch to ODF, especially since the XML is totally open and preferable over MSO-12 (our Sun users must also view the XML). By then the beancounter will come in for the kill: why spend MSO license money for 5000+ employees when you can do with a free and 99% compatible alternative, that even kills the necessity for Acrobat Elements (PDF generator for 100+ user companies) and a lot of Citrix licenses and hardware.
The trend in IT is 'cutting cost'. So we will probably end up with the cheapest hardware (PC) with the cheapest OS (Linux), with the cheapest office suite (OOo), browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), HTML editor (Nvu), graphics suite (GIMP), graphics conversion (ImageMagick), and so on.
Guess what: most of that software already runs in our company on Solaris and on WinXP today. Switching to Linux PCs is a breeze because users are already got used to the applications over the past years one by one. No costly retraining. Some users may not even notice the difference between SuSE Linux and WinXP, other than that the applications are now grouped together by type in the Start menu, rather than by manufacturer.
A large-screen laptop will be a status symbol like a SUV: the bigger the better. This is opposite to the miniturization in many other electronics, but with the emphasis on the UI and productivity they are the way to go (boss/partner: are you listening?):
designing XSLT with 3 windows of XML, XSLT, and XHTML next to eachother,
DTP work (A3 + some dialogue boxes)
webdesign
GIMP
email, if your friends like long subject lines
tabbed browsing
And the subject says it all: size matters (My desktop at home is 23.1", so my work laptop looks like a letterbox)
When I read a discussion site like slashdot, I read the whole page, middle-clicking all the interesting links which will then get loaded in the background. I end up with many tabs, sometimes too many to read in one session. What I've read I close, so I keep moving to the next tab.
I found that Firefox 1 (on Suse 9.3 Linux with KDE) will freeze on large amounts of open tabs. I contributed that to the memory-leaking bug, so if that's solved I am a happy surfer dude.
Another great reason to upgrade is being able to view SVG files in 1.5. SVG viewing is the business case for rolling out Firefox 1.5 on all the SUNs in the company I work for. PCs still only get IE6, but IT turns a blind eye when you install Firefox 1.5 in your data disk, many people do this.
Every journey starts with the first step, and switching the OS first means you have to switch every application on that OS too! That's not a step, that is a giant leap.
The step-by-step approach first replaces the no-impact applications like IE->Firefox, or mail->Thunderbird. These make users see that non-MS can actually be better, and soften the fear for change.
Then you look for the biggest bang for the euro: MSOffice. It is much more expensive than Windows, which comes prebought with most PCs anyway (regretfully). By building an OSS application suite on top of Windows, you can migrate everyone in their own pace. As soon as all your applications are OSS, you can switch to Linux. Remaining training time getting used to KDE is minimal.
In the release notes of Firefox 1.1 alpha, I saw that they finally are adding the native SVG support in Firefox by default. On other/earlier browsers you can download the Adobe SVGviewer plugin.
SVG is an XML dialect, standardized by the W3C. SVG is to Flash what PNG was to GIF. Flash is history!
No-one disputes any company to make an honest buck. The point here is that MS obscures and changes the data format that has become the de-facto standard, thereby monopolizing the office format, and shutting out competition.
The way out of this is to Open-source the data format, and let the software developers (MS, Corel, Sun, Abi, you and me) write software that produces and respects this data format. This may be closed (MSO) or open (OO.o) I don't care.
It works with the W3C HTML/XHTML/XML formats, and the multitude of editors/browsers. It can also work for office formats. All you need to do is download a OpenDocument-compliant editor, and work with it, complain about it, or even improve it. Make it industry-hardened like the Firefox bug hunt. Let the best, or most stable, or most feature-rich editor, or lowest price version become your personal editor.
MS may even (have to) join, to keep selling MSO to European/Brazilian governmental agencies and schools. If they then play their 'extend and deviate' strategy that worked so well for FrontPage/IE5 you can vote with your boot. That is, if you have not already voted with your wallet: OO.o is about E 500 cheaper than MSO, and if they share the same data format and feature-set, well, why bother with MSO?
Tonight I'll be installing OO.o 2.0 beta which is on the SuSE 9.3 DVD.
The Seychelles have three islands with mountains, for the rest the Maldives and Seychelles islands are 1-2m high, which could be totally overrun by waves higher than the island.
They are not mentioned anywhere, because communication equipment is swept into the sea, or because nothing happened? I'm interested because I went on holiday in the Seychelles a few years ago. It's a beautiful place with friendly people.
Does anybody have any news on these island nations?
Because he asked his secret friend Osama bin Laden to appear on TV for a little bit of extra fear in the hearts of the voters. Voters choose hardliners in case of danger, voila!
By not chasing Osama bin Laden (a family friend according to Fahrenheit 911), there is a perfect excuse to invade countries with oil at random in the name of fighting terror.
The real problem is that the US taxpayer will carry the bill for this. Couple that to less tourism to the US because of childish and time-consuming border security, tourists everywhere else switching to Euro currency, and open source software cutting off the lucrative income from software licenses, the US ends up with a large debt and a US$ devaluating faster than Banana Republic money.
Being big does not make friends, being friendly makes friends.
Slashdot Mirror
And since the US does not have transit zones, this includes flying via a US airport. The 'normal' immigration and security checks already take so long that it's very easy to miss your connecting flight, when you are singled out for laptop inspection you will certainly miss it. So do not fly via or to the US for any reason.
When everybody stops flying to the US, they will know they went too far. For me the (security) delays on a transit flight already made me decide to stop flying there.
Good luck on your island of security and privacy invasion. Let's keep the rest of the world civilized.
Designing for the W3C standard is so much easier than designing for one browser and testing in many others, that we do not have the manpower or will to switch back to the era of browser-sniffing. I'm about to add a disclaimer to my site:
"For maximum viewing experience, please use a W3C compatible browser. Examples: Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc."
As long as web designers use the W3C advice to add the generic fonts as alternative, I don't see a problem of not downloading these fonts on my Linux PC.
And the FOBs that will set these new fonts as the only font obviously won't mind us taking our business elsewhere.
Maybe the people who live between .ca and .mx can start using .us instead of poluting .com with non-commercial or non-USA websites (if you care about using the most meaningful TLD)
And some of the countries that approved don't even have the money to buy MS Office licenses to use that OOXML standard: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Congo, Cote d'Ivoir, Cuba, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.
Can anyone explain me why those countries voted "yes" ? Take Cuba... MS is not allowed to sell licenses there due to the USA governement childish rules. And all those developing nations, they don't have money...
I'm an IT architect with a 6000-person company, and yesterday added a clause to an XML repository vendor's contract with us:
This means we can connect any other standard-compliant application to it, and also that if this application breaks that we can replace it with another application of the same function, without changing neighboring applications or interfaces. It prevents that company from choosing Windows-only solutions because they know they will have to fix it for free.
My next step is to also add these clauses to the requirements and contracts of all other applications we buy or develop. For office functionality the obvious choice will be ODF, and this can be edited by several programs: OpenOffice.org, but also MS Office with the SUN ODF plugin. The SUN ODF plugin allows you to set the default office format to ODF. Download it from http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index. jsp
Of course, once this ODF office format is our standard, it does no longer matter which application is used to interface with this format. Maybe our Solaris users want to stop using Citrix and MS office (slow combination), and use OpenOffice instead saving us Citrix, MS-office and Acrobat license costs. And maybe our PC users who have very basic editing needs would like to try OpenOffice too, saving more MS-office and Acrobat licenses... I'm sure a few power users will want to keep using the 'real' MS-office, so a 100% migration is unlikely, but 80% of 6000 persons times the licenses is a lot of money, even with corporate discounts. And for those of you who say it will not save us money because you cannot resell licenses, we can at least disable the maintenance fee for the software.
I've been there twice, and the cuban people really suffer. The embargo halted a lot of technology entering the country, making it a live museum for tourists, but even without the embargo they would be too poor to afford any of it. There is a lot of prostitution from poor girls (their own will, not pushed by pimps). Since the russian stopped their money-feed, the economy is turning into a tourism-only income. The only people besides the government who have it good are the owners of the "casas particular" who earn tourist money by renting out 2 rooms in their house.
The cuban government watch their people closely, and you could reported by a neighborhood spy for having an unfavorable opinion on the government. It is forbidden for a cuban to approach a tourist or sit at the same table in a bar. Yet it happens, tourists driven towards the authentic bars and neighborhoods by romantic Buena Vista Social Club tunes are meeting cubans hungry for democracy and freedom. They are educating themselves indeed, but not via the government. It takes another president to understand that democracy and freedom is possible without capitalism. Maybe a few other presidents. Let's hope they get there peacefully.
So the embargo will not throw over the government, tourism will.
> Windows has found its way into Cuba Yeah, Windows latest version even has a 'cuban' name: Vista
... don't code in Flash. They write their own CMS or handcode XHTML + CSS.
For my kayaking trip to Costa Rica this December I thought I had a direct Martinair flight from Amsterdam to San Jose (the capital of Costa Rica, not the one in California), but due to the hub system, it turned out to be a Amsterdam-Miami flight, followed by 3 hours in Miami airport, and a Miami-San Jose flight. While european airports leave transit travelers in a 'twilight zone' the USA seems to think all inbound tourists want to enter the country, so must fill in a stupid form with your US address (none), walk barefeet or in your socks (no shoes), holding up your pants (no belt), through customs. There are a few non-USA-resident lines to handle a 747 full of europeans, and 20 lines for USA residents of which there where just a handfull on the flight. There you are fingerprinted, photographed, and asked stupid questions. You wonder "Did the cold war really end 30 years ago?" Two hours later the same routine. This is how it feels to be treated like a criminal. And then there is the thought that one small mistake in a database somewhere or slight resemblance to a known terrorist can turn this unpleasant treatment into a Guantanomo Bay-like nightmare. I'm just a tourist who wants to spend my euros and holidays in a nice country with friendly people!
Some places in the world require you to transit via USA, why can't they make twilight zones for transit passengers? I already stopped spending my tourist euros on USA destinations and USA airline companies, should I also exclude countries only reachable via USA transit hubs?
A dutch comedian (Lebbis & Jansen) this new year's eve said that pretty soon all flights to the USA will require you to be handcuffed and blindfolded for your own safety. People laughed, but I did not think it funny. The only way to stop that from happening is a worldwide boycott of USA airlines, airports and transit hubs. Even if it will not reverse the big brother practices of the USA government (51% of the USA residents did not vote for), at least it will counterbalance some of the air polution caused by USA's gas-guzzling SUV trucks and 1960-technology Boeing planes.
I was curious if IE7 was that bad, so I tried to see for myself. Unfortunately IE7 does not install on my Linux system. So, who cares?
The transition was from Win2K, Netscape 4.5, Office 97 to WinXP, IE6 and Office XP, plus the email system was migrated to Exchange on Win2k3 servers. Everybody got mandatory training. Many Intranet applications which were coded around Netscape 4's layers had to be migrated too, IE could not handle them (rightfully, as the W3C moved in a different direction).
For Vista we are extremely cautious. There is no business reason to switch. Nobody wants to be the early adopter, and enjoy bleeding edge computing.
At the same time we also monitor the alternatives, because this time we have a choice. Firefox and IE7 are functionally equal, so are Evolution and Outlook, Nvu and FrontPage, OpenOffice and MS-Office. Alongside our SUN servers we introduce Linux servers, containing popular Linux software like Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, ImageMagick, Nvu. With thin-client architecture we run those applications on the SUN and WinXP (fat) clients, stretching their lifespan. By switching to Open Standards, we free ourselves from the MS-directed upgrade cycle.
Vista itself we don't need, it's a solution looking for a problem. Why spend money on eye candy? My company needs the applications that now run on WinXP. As soon as these applications require Vista, we need to switch only those users that really require those applications. The rest stays on WinXP.
So Vista will not require that much money. Our leased PC clients will slowly be replaced with Vista-compatible hardware with the normal replacement cycle, so no extra money there. When we switch, it will be a partly switch as-dictated-by-applications, so max 20%. In that case we need to freeze the Office version on OfficeXP (even on Vista), or switch to OpenOffice.
Speeding ticket income is like an inverse lottery: it is highest if you can make drivers believe they will not win the prize (get caught).
They will not be that stupid... I hope.
Apart from that it works flawlessly and the sysadmin here likes it too after I explained it in my best spanish (I'm dutch, and speak very little spanish).
Tienez Firefox? Porque non? Es muy mas securidad de IE, y muy mas functionalidad: F11 con URL location, tabs, Ctrl-F y muchos extensions.
Perhaps time that someone makes a spanish version of the Firefox advantages just in time for the holiday season, because here in Mexico on 5 locations I have not been able to spot one place where Firefox was already installed, and just 1 place where the sysadmin already knew about it.
With OpenOffice (OOo) being a Solaris-friendly application (both are made by Sun), we can soon open those Office documents a lot faster, and save a Citrix license, an Office license, and a bunch of heavy PC servers running Citrix. Native applications rule!
But the story does not end there. Once all Sun users use OOo, eventually someone will break a document because of incompatibilities between OOo and MSO in handling the Office format. Therefor we are now already looking into making (OASIS) OpenDocument (ODF) our default format for certain development documentation that is primarily authored by Sun users. IT must then roll out OOo on all PCs to be able to view/review/edit ODF (MS refuses to add support for ODF).
After that it's a small step to a full switch to ODF, especially since the XML is totally open and preferable over MSO-12 (our Sun users must also view the XML). By then the beancounter will come in for the kill: why spend MSO license money for 5000+ employees when you can do with a free and 99% compatible alternative, that even kills the necessity for Acrobat Elements (PDF generator for 100+ user companies) and a lot of Citrix licenses and hardware.
The trend in IT is 'cutting cost'. So we will probably end up with the cheapest hardware (PC) with the cheapest OS (Linux), with the cheapest office suite (OOo), browser (Firefox), email client (Thunderbird), HTML editor (Nvu), graphics suite (GIMP), graphics conversion (ImageMagick), and so on.
Guess what: most of that software already runs in our company on Solaris and on WinXP today. Switching to Linux PCs is a breeze because users are already got used to the applications over the past years one by one. No costly retraining. Some users may not even notice the difference between SuSE Linux and WinXP, other than that the applications are now grouped together by type in the Start menu, rather than by manufacturer.
- designing XSLT with 3 windows of XML, XSLT, and XHTML next to eachother,
- DTP work (A3 + some dialogue boxes)
- webdesign
- GIMP
- email, if your friends like long subject lines
- tabbed browsing
And the subject says it all: size matters (My desktop at home is 23.1", so my work laptop looks like a letterbox)Didn't we see this behaviour earlier when 'independent' analists declared Linux inferior to Windows?
Funny how GWB's election compaign and the following years are such a natural match to MS beta versions and the real thing.
At home I have 23.1" widescreen LCD
Laptops screens are way too small for today's apps.
When I read a discussion site like slashdot, I read the whole page, middle-clicking all the interesting links which will then get loaded in the background. I end up with many tabs, sometimes too many to read in one session. What I've read I close, so I keep moving to the next tab.
I found that Firefox 1 (on Suse 9.3 Linux with KDE) will freeze on large amounts of open tabs. I contributed that to the memory-leaking bug, so if that's solved I am a happy surfer dude.
Another great reason to upgrade is being able to view SVG files in 1.5. SVG viewing is the business case for rolling out Firefox 1.5 on all the SUNs in the company I work for. PCs still only get IE6, but IT turns a blind eye when you install Firefox 1.5 in your data disk, many people do this.
Every journey starts with the first step, and switching the OS first means you have to switch every application on that OS too! That's not a step, that is a giant leap.
The step-by-step approach first replaces the no-impact applications like IE->Firefox, or mail->Thunderbird. These make users see that non-MS can actually be better, and soften the fear for change.
Then you look for the biggest bang for the euro: MSOffice. It is much more expensive than Windows, which comes prebought with most PCs anyway (regretfully). By building an OSS application suite on top of Windows, you can migrate everyone in their own pace. As soon as all your applications are OSS, you can switch to Linux. Remaining training time getting used to KDE is minimal.
SVG is an XML dialect, standardized by the W3C. SVG is to Flash what PNG was to GIF. Flash is history!
The way out of this is to Open-source the data format, and let the software developers (MS, Corel, Sun, Abi, you and me) write software that produces and respects this data format. This may be closed (MSO) or open (OO.o) I don't care.
It works with the W3C HTML/XHTML/XML formats, and the multitude of editors/browsers. It can also work for office formats. All you need to do is download a OpenDocument-compliant editor, and work with it, complain about it, or even improve it. Make it industry-hardened like the Firefox bug hunt. Let the best, or most stable, or most feature-rich editor, or lowest price version become your personal editor.
MS may even (have to) join, to keep selling MSO to European/Brazilian governmental agencies and schools. If they then play their 'extend and deviate' strategy that worked so well for FrontPage/IE5 you can vote with your boot. That is, if you have not already voted with your wallet: OO.o is about E 500 cheaper than MSO, and if they share the same data format and feature-set, well, why bother with MSO?
Tonight I'll be installing OO.o 2.0 beta which is on the SuSE 9.3 DVD.
They are not mentioned anywhere, because communication equipment is swept into the sea, or because nothing happened? I'm interested because I went on holiday in the Seychelles a few years ago. It's a beautiful place with friendly people.
Does anybody have any news on these island nations?
The deeper the water (the further away from the shore), the more likely he survived.
Because Phuket is an island, he could be lucky to dive on the safe side of the island.
Because he asked his secret friend Osama bin Laden to appear on TV for a little bit of extra fear in the hearts of the voters. Voters choose hardliners in case of danger, voila!
By not chasing Osama bin Laden (a family friend according to Fahrenheit 911), there is a perfect excuse to invade countries with oil at random in the name of fighting terror.
The real problem is that the US taxpayer will carry the bill for this. Couple that to less tourism to the US because of childish and time-consuming border security, tourists everywhere else switching to Euro currency, and open source software cutting off the lucrative income from software licenses, the US ends up with a large debt and a US$ devaluating faster than Banana Republic money.
Being big does not make friends, being friendly makes friends.