What really hurts is that Congress and the RIAA have totally missed just how revolutionary the Internet is. You'd expect the RIAA to be blind to this because of their own vested interests but for Congress to so completely miss the point is unforgivable. Unforgivable, maybe, but not surprising. The last time a revolution this big happened in American society, we ended up beating the hell out of each other over it.
The party shift in Congress won't change anything regarding the DCMA or copyright. When I first read this, I thought it said, "The shifty part of Congress won't change anything regarding the DCMA or copyright."
"Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship" (or FAIR USE) I want to introduce my own bill...
"Initiative Halting Arbitrary Terms Excessively Bringing Additional Confusion and Kludginess to Resolutions, Ousting Newspeak, and Yielding a Manageable System." (or I. H.A.T.E. B.A.C.K.R.O.N.Y.M.S.)
When you apply some of it to a body part such as hands, there may be enough to kill the bacteria right there. But at the edge of the treated area there is a gradient of the antibiotic's concentration, which falls to zero over some distance. Within this gradient, there are bacteria with differing susceptibility to that particular antibiotic. Thus, withing the gradient zone, the more susceptible bacteria die, while the less susceptible bacteria live. This slightly increases the frequence of whatever genes provided the slightly better resistance of the survivors.
So the solution is pretty obvious: eliminate the gradient zones!
I'm off to buy a 50 gallon drum of Purel and an inflatable wading pool.
I would like to know where the "$2/episode" meme came from because I don't think any thought was put into it.
It happens to be how much the studios themselves are charging for the shows on DVD.
A 24-episode season of a show (typically 45 minutes an episode, fleshed out with commercials to fill an hour when aired) is packed up into a DVD box set and sold for $49.99. The shorter, half-hour slot shows (22 minutes an episode) are cheaper, as are seasons with fewer than 24 episodes in them.
You may think it's too much, but it is indeed the "going rate."
So is the iPod, the most popular music player around. What's your point?
When the iPod was first released, it was $499. The price of the iPhone will drop, and more models will be introduced, in the coming years. Just like the iPod.
What Google is doing is cool, but let's not kid ourselves. It's a LONG way away from being enterprise acceptable.
It's not designed to be enterprise acceptable (yet).
Why is it that you have the Microsoft-centric mindset that a single Office Suite is the best solution to every company's needs? In every market, there is a range of products to choose from, depending on the needs or wants of the consumer. Google's filling a niche near the bottom of the market, where Microsoft has traditionally ignored. Google's office suite is simpler, easier to use, and *cheaper*... thus it is perfect for small businesses who are probably wasting money on features of MS Office they never use.
Your company, on the other hand, has very strict regulations and laws, and currently Microsoft products meet that need. Therefore, they are still the best solution for your company, and you should stick with them.
Google is not marketing their products to you, nor are they claiming that their stuff is "enterprise ready". We should applaud what they're doing, which is to introduce a product in a neglected segment of the market. They are not out to compete with Microsoft's dominance, they just want to capture the market that Microsoft is ignoring (and therefore abusing due to the lack of other options for that market).
Maybe in a few years Google *will* develop "enterprise ready" software, and then go head-to-head with Microsoft. But not yet.
The majority of office software users are in large firms doing work in regulated industries.
That's probably true, although only by a very slight margin. This page from the Census Bureau shows that companies with more than 500 employees (which are more likely to have highly regulated IT departments) only account for about half of the employees in the work force, as of 2003. That percentage was slowly growing between 1988 and 2003, although I don't know what it's done since then.
I mentioned in another post that I work in banking. The stuff we use has to be deemed acceptable by external auditors and regulators. Do you think Google's servers live up to that level of scrutiny?
If your computers must, by law, meet a certain standard of regulation, then the people in charge of choosing an IT vendor will use those criteria. Once Google doesn't pass that test, they're crossed off the list, along with dozens, if not hundreds, of other companies who also don't meet the strict regulatory requirements.
My point is that Google in this instance is just an IT vendor, providing solutions they believe the marketplace is interested in. If they meet your company's requirements, then their offering is worth considering. If not, then choose someone else. We shouldn't immediately decry what they're trying to do just because they're Google. We also shouldn't declare that just because Google's service does not have the certification needed to be used in military DoD applications that it is therefore unusable for people starting their own business selling hats or flowers. Different companies have different needs; there is a huge existing market for Google's products, even if your highly regulated company is not in that market.
This is just the beginning. Google is simply feeling out the market possibilities; if it's successful, I'm sure Google will add more features that will make migration very simple.
1) Legacy...everyone was using Exchange and we had tons of email in it that would be a pain to copy into folders.
Writing a script to convert Exhange mailboxes (and even local.pst files) to GMail format would be fairly trivial for Google to do. Expect this ability soon.
2) Regulation. How does google keep all company emails in one place that can be archived and backed up. I'm sure Google won't loose someone's email anytime soon ( less likely then us ), but how do you document their backup procedures.
Why would your company be responsible for Google's backup procedures? They are being hired as an outside supplier of IT service. If your company needs further assurances of backups, then write it into the contract with Google.
3) Current email addresses. No one wanted to give them up.
Gmail already has the ability to set a default reply-to address, and it's fairly trivial to forward emails from one address to a GMail account. I do it myself with several of my addresses. To people I communicate with, it looks like my address is my domain, yet I read and write all my email in the GMail interface. I expect Google might add to their service the ability to take over domains and integrate existing email accounts into the GMail structure. With functionality like this, GMail is not an account, it's an infrastructure.
4) Internet bandwidth and reliance. People tend to think of the internet like electricity, but we are not there yet. It is funny that I get a faster connection at my house with a cable modem then our dual t1s provide...and a lot cheaper. This is another post, but unless you are in a big data center getting a decent sized pipe at a reasonable price is still overpriced.
Bandwidth could be an issue. But again, Google is just testing the waters a little. I fully expect to see a Google Office device, a server that you simply plug in, and it houses all the apps and local storage, only utilizing Google's servers perhaps for offsite, daily, encrypted backups. This device would sit behind the company firewall, and the only connectivity needed by employees would be the local LAN (except for VPN situations).
5) Gateway level controls. We wanted to see every email that came in. We run a spam firewall, but if it blocks errantly we have a log. If Google blocks and email?
Again, this is part of the service Google provides. If you don't like it, negotiate a different service via the contract. (See point #1)
6) Customer support emails. We have tons of email addresses for our clients/etc that would probably be a pain to setup.
This is a lame assumption. Why would these emails be any harder to set up than any other email?
7) Fax support. We have to integrate with a fax server...yep it sucks.
This one I don't have an answer for, but there are many other fax-to-email/email-to-fax services available you could use until Google offered the feature.
8) Public folders ( ie email boxes accessible by more then one person )...ties in with 6.
GMail is in beta. This is a feature you should suggest to Google.
Your excuses are lame, and tell me you really don't know much about how IT works. If you're that convinced that Google can't help you, then by all means continue sinking much more money into maintaining your own infrastructure. But I know lots of small companies that would jump on this in a second.
Why would a company entrust an IT department with all of their corporate emails, and many of their files as well?
Google becomes an IT supplier with this scheme, and contracts will be written that stipulate confidentiality and security. This is no different than hiring an outside consultancy to run your own company owned servers. Cries of "OMG Gooogle will pwn us all!!!1!one!!" are simply not justified. It's a business relationship, same as any other.
Well, maybe not fuel, but you can make all the oxidizer you could ever need, and that's the more important half.
72% by weight of a typical Kerosene/LOX rocket engine is oxygen. And the soil/dust/regolith on the Moon is mostly oxygen. We just need to perfect automated methods of extracting the oxygen from the soil, but that's an engineering problem, and not a showstopper.
So you burn a bunch of fuel to get a bunch more fuel out of Earth's gravity well and deposit it on the moon. Then, you launch from the Moon, burning yet more fuel to climb out of the Moon's gravity well, and a bunch more to make the shot to Mars.
Not exactly. You burn some fuel to bring a small amount fuel from Earth to the Moon, and don't bother to bring oxidizer. Then you combine the fuel you brought with LOX you harvested from the surface of the Moon, and launch to Mars with that. Since you're only leaving a 1/6g gravity well, you will need far less fuel to leave the moon and go to Mars than you would to leave Earth and go to Mars, assuming you left during the launch window when the Moon has a higher orbital velocity with respect to Mars than the Earth does (which happens about once a month). All this adds up to an energy savings.
Of course, this all requires some sort of infrastructure to work, like a moonbase, and that will be expensive to build. But once the infrastructure is in place, the long-term energy savings are substantial, especially if we start doing things like harvesting objects outside the Earth's gravity well for the other half of the fuel/oxidizer ratio. There's water in comets--that's a hydrogen source. Most asteroids have the same composition as Carbonaceous chontrite meteorites, which are chock full of organic compounds--these can be cracked open to collect both hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen can be burned by itself or combined with oxygen to make hydrogen peroxide (a low-energy monopropellant used in some thrusters). Nitrogen can be combined with oxygen to form dinitrogen tetroxide (a decent rocket fuel that requires an oxidizer) or with hydrogen to form hydrazine (a high-energy monopropellant). I'm sure people with more experience in chemistry and astronomy can suggest many other possibilities as well.
The bottom line is, there's lots of fuel available out in the solar system, outside the big gravity wells, and taking advantage of launching from a small gravity well using fuel harvested from other small gravity wells will result in a substantial energy savings.
If Dell is selling the machine without an OS, specifically so that people can put Linux on it, then yes, I think Dell should make at least a little effort to make sure it comes with Linux compatible hardware. Otherwise, what's the point?
I think the GP's point was that the demand is for the Linux option to be available on any machine Dell sells, which means that Dell would have to choose all their hardware to be Linux-compatible; kind of a lowest-common-denominator approach.
However, that being said, Dell is a big enough distributor of computers that they could lean on hardware manufacturers to write drivers for Linux, and thus make all their hardware compatible with Linux. After all, the only thing stopping these manufacturers from writing Linux drivers in the first place is market share: when 98% of the computers sold have Windows, they just develop for Windows. But if Dell started selling Linux machines, and/or offering the option of any OS on their machines, then the hardware vendors would have reason to develop drivers for those OSs; Dell wouldn't carry the hardware otherwise, and that's a mighty big account to lose.
When you're the 800lb gorilla in the room, you can dictate hardware specs to your vendors. I'm happy to see that Dell is willing to take on Microsoft and stop this Windows lock-in cycle. The end result of more competition can only be good for consumers.
If you want quantities of features, regardless of how easy it is to use them, then Apple products are probably not for you.
Agreed on that point.
What makes Apple products and UIs special is that they don't give the customer what they ask for... they give them what they want. Apple studies how people do things, and then develop interfaces that help the user accomplish tasks without getting in the way. Usually, this means coming up with a completely new paradigm (like the touch wheel on the iPod). Once you get over the initial shock of "hey, this isn't what I asked for" and accept the UI design on its own merits, you see that a lot of thought went into it, and it really is better. Other engineering companies have done similar things in the past (the Blender Foundation comes to mind), but they are rare in the industry.
People who dislike Apple interfaces are the same types of people who focus more on doing it their way than on doing it a better way. Apple may be called a lot of things, but "poor engineers" is most definitely not one of them.
Linux will never have a strong software ecosystem unless commercial/proprietary software is allow to compete on an even keep with open source software.
Portage can, and does, handle closed-source binary software, proprietary or otherwise. Nvidia drivers and Acrobat Reader come to mind as examples. Lots of proprietary software is distributed as RPMs, including enterprise-level software.
I know there is an air of open-source evangelism surrounding most Linux distros, but commercial/proprietary software is alive and well in the marketplace, and used extensively on Linux installations. What's missing is commercial/proprietary software in the home market, and I agree with you there. The capability exists, but there are too many devs who preach "down with binary blobs!" for it to gain any traction. The greater Linux community needs to accept that while Open Source is awesome, and good for the user in the long run, until we dominate the desktop we have to play by the commercial software industry's rules, and that means including proprietary stuff in our repositories, using local caches to prevent having to use DRM.*
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*Example: Portage allows ebuilds to exist in a local overlay directory, usually/usr/local/portage. Paid-for, commercial software could come with a CD that automatically copies the ebuild and associated tarballs to/usr/local/portage and/usr/local/portage/distfiles, and then runs an emerge command to install the software. This would be no different, from the user's perspective, than a Windows Installer, but the installer would be able to use the power of the Portage system to maintain the software and its dependencies. CD-key nonsense is, of course, optional. (See MacOSX for reference.)
Ok, so the binary package capability of Gentoo may not be completely unused, but it is used sparsely, if that. A very few select programs have binary equivalents (OpenOffice, Firefox, and Azureus come to mind), but what I think the GP is looking for is a way to specify "all binary, all the time" as a build option. I'm certainly looking for that. Combine that option with the newly-introduced graphical installer, and voila! Gentoo can be used as a Grandma System, too.
What the Gentoo devs need to do is to add arches like x86-bin, amd64-bin, etc. to the Portage tree, and these arches would not compile anything--just install binary packages. Every time this is brought up, many Gentoo devs jump to the defense of building from scratch, saying "if you don't want to build from scratch, what the hell are you doing using Gentoo?" And I usually respond with something along the lines of "but isn't Gentoo all about choice? And shouldn't I have the choice to install binary packages?"
The binary packages would be standardized on a certain set of USE variables, and only compiled for each arch/CHOST combination (to reduce storage costs at the repositories). If someone needs a specific set of USE variables for a particular package, they can build from source by specifying a non-binary arch in their/etc/portage/package.keywords.
The beauty of Gentoo is scalability; the system can be tailored to be anything you want it to be. This will add one more option: Gentoo can also be a binary distro, suitable for non-hardcore users. If Debian can do it, why can't Gentoo?
Everyone who is harassed by the RIAA should counter-sue them for $100M for being an illegal price-fixing monopoly. They have already been convicted of this.
It seems to me they settled with Elliott Spitzer. Do you have a link to back up that conviction claim?
Slashdot Mirror
...an MS that could fit in a van... Vista?Too bad most of Congress is shifty.
"Initiative Halting Arbitrary Terms Excessively Bringing Additional Confusion and Kludginess to Resolutions, Ousting Newspeak, and Yielding a Manageable System." (or I. H.A.T.E. B.A.C.K.R.O.N.Y.M.S.)
* CowboyNeal says maybe.
<-- WHOOOSH --
. O
. |
"Sarcasm"
Text on Internet Post
AeroIllini, 2007
So the solution is pretty obvious: eliminate the gradient zones!
I'm off to buy a 50 gallon drum of Purel and an inflatable wading pool.
Right on.
It happens to be how much the studios themselves are charging for the shows on DVD.
A 24-episode season of a show (typically 45 minutes an episode, fleshed out with commercials to fill an hour when aired) is packed up into a DVD box set and sold for $49.99. The shorter, half-hour slot shows (22 minutes an episode) are cheaper, as are seasons with fewer than 24 episodes in them.
You may think it's too much, but it is indeed the "going rate."
Hey! Those companies go to the gym 3 times a week, you insensitive clod!
So is the iPod, the most popular music player around. What's your point?
When the iPod was first released, it was $499. The price of the iPhone will drop, and more models will be introduced, in the coming years. Just like the iPod.
The true test of a stable society is when a tragedy occurs and no laws are changed.
Why is it that you have the Microsoft-centric mindset that a single Office Suite is the best solution to every company's needs? In every market, there is a range of products to choose from, depending on the needs or wants of the consumer. Google's filling a niche near the bottom of the market, where Microsoft has traditionally ignored. Google's office suite is simpler, easier to use, and *cheaper*... thus it is perfect for small businesses who are probably wasting money on features of MS Office they never use.
Your company, on the other hand, has very strict regulations and laws, and currently Microsoft products meet that need. Therefore, they are still the best solution for your company, and you should stick with them.
Google is not marketing their products to you, nor are they claiming that their stuff is "enterprise ready". We should applaud what they're doing, which is to introduce a product in a neglected segment of the market. They are not out to compete with Microsoft's dominance, they just want to capture the market that Microsoft is ignoring (and therefore abusing due to the lack of other options for that market).
Maybe in a few years Google *will* develop "enterprise ready" software, and then go head-to-head with Microsoft. But not yet.
My point is that Google in this instance is just an IT vendor, providing solutions they believe the marketplace is interested in. If they meet your company's requirements, then their offering is worth considering. If not, then choose someone else. We shouldn't immediately decry what they're trying to do just because they're Google. We also shouldn't declare that just because Google's service does not have the certification needed to be used in military DoD applications that it is therefore unusable for people starting their own business selling hats or flowers. Different companies have different needs; there is a huge existing market for Google's products, even if your highly regulated company is not in that market.
Your excuses are lame, and tell me you really don't know much about how IT works. If you're that convinced that Google can't help you, then by all means continue sinking much more money into maintaining your own infrastructure. But I know lots of small companies that would jump on this in a second.
Why would a company entrust an IT department with all of their corporate emails, and many of their files as well?
Google becomes an IT supplier with this scheme, and contracts will be written that stipulate confidentiality and security. This is no different than hiring an outside consultancy to run your own company owned servers. Cries of "OMG Gooogle will pwn us all!!!1!one!!" are simply not justified. It's a business relationship, same as any other.
Well, maybe not fuel, but you can make all the oxidizer you could ever need, and that's the more important half.
72% by weight of a typical Kerosene/LOX rocket engine is oxygen. And the soil/dust/regolith on the Moon is mostly oxygen. We just need to perfect automated methods of extracting the oxygen from the soil, but that's an engineering problem, and not a showstopper.
Not exactly. You burn some fuel to bring a small amount fuel from Earth to the Moon, and don't bother to bring oxidizer. Then you combine the fuel you brought with LOX you harvested from the surface of the Moon, and launch to Mars with that. Since you're only leaving a 1/6g gravity well, you will need far less fuel to leave the moon and go to Mars than you would to leave Earth and go to Mars, assuming you left during the launch window when the Moon has a higher orbital velocity with respect to Mars than the Earth does (which happens about once a month). All this adds up to an energy savings.
Of course, this all requires some sort of infrastructure to work, like a moonbase, and that will be expensive to build. But once the infrastructure is in place, the long-term energy savings are substantial, especially if we start doing things like harvesting objects outside the Earth's gravity well for the other half of the fuel/oxidizer ratio. There's water in comets--that's a hydrogen source. Most asteroids have the same composition as Carbonaceous chontrite meteorites, which are chock full of organic compounds--these can be cracked open to collect both hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen can be burned by itself or combined with oxygen to make hydrogen peroxide (a low-energy monopropellant used in some thrusters). Nitrogen can be combined with oxygen to form dinitrogen tetroxide (a decent rocket fuel that requires an oxidizer) or with hydrogen to form hydrazine (a high-energy monopropellant). I'm sure people with more experience in chemistry and astronomy can suggest many other possibilities as well.
The bottom line is, there's lots of fuel available out in the solar system, outside the big gravity wells, and taking advantage of launching from a small gravity well using fuel harvested from other small gravity wells will result in a substantial energy savings.
What do you mean? It's easy to emerge other satellite companies:
# emerge -av opensatelliteradio
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild N ] media-audio/satradio-player-2.3.1-r1 USE="X ogg flac mp3 aac wma wav -ldap" 3,870 kB
[ebuild N ] media-audio/opensatelliteradio-2.1.0.1-r4 USE="blues classical comedy news pop jazz groove hairrock nfl -howardstern -opieanthony -oprah (-regularguys) -elevatormusic" 8,465 kB
Total: 2 packages (2 new), Size of downloads: 12,335 kB
Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]
A geek not building his own computer is like a Jedi not building his own lightsaber.
/stolen shamelessly from someone's sig
I think the GP's point was that the demand is for the Linux option to be available on any machine Dell sells, which means that Dell would have to choose all their hardware to be Linux-compatible; kind of a lowest-common-denominator approach.
However, that being said, Dell is a big enough distributor of computers that they could lean on hardware manufacturers to write drivers for Linux, and thus make all their hardware compatible with Linux. After all, the only thing stopping these manufacturers from writing Linux drivers in the first place is market share: when 98% of the computers sold have Windows, they just develop for Windows. But if Dell started selling Linux machines, and/or offering the option of any OS on their machines, then the hardware vendors would have reason to develop drivers for those OSs; Dell wouldn't carry the hardware otherwise, and that's a mighty big account to lose.
When you're the 800lb gorilla in the room, you can dictate hardware specs to your vendors. I'm happy to see that Dell is willing to take on Microsoft and stop this Windows lock-in cycle. The end result of more competition can only be good for consumers.
Agreed on that point.
What makes Apple products and UIs special is that they don't give the customer what they ask for... they give them what they want. Apple studies how people do things, and then develop interfaces that help the user accomplish tasks without getting in the way. Usually, this means coming up with a completely new paradigm (like the touch wheel on the iPod). Once you get over the initial shock of "hey, this isn't what I asked for" and accept the UI design on its own merits, you see that a lot of thought went into it, and it really is better. Other engineering companies have done similar things in the past (the Blender Foundation comes to mind), but they are rare in the industry.
People who dislike Apple interfaces are the same types of people who focus more on doing it their way than on doing it a better way. Apple may be called a lot of things, but "poor engineers" is most definitely not one of them.
Thanks, but I didn't create any recursive MD5 algorithm or anything, although that would be cool.
That's the MD5 hash of a null string, ''. It's actually a self-deprecating commentary on the content of my posts (and sig). Glad you liked it, though.
Portage can, and does, handle closed-source binary software, proprietary or otherwise. Nvidia drivers and Acrobat Reader come to mind as examples. Lots of proprietary software is distributed as RPMs, including enterprise-level software.
I know there is an air of open-source evangelism surrounding most Linux distros, but commercial/proprietary software is alive and well in the marketplace, and used extensively on Linux installations. What's missing is commercial/proprietary software in the home market, and I agree with you there. The capability exists, but there are too many devs who preach "down with binary blobs!" for it to gain any traction. The greater Linux community needs to accept that while Open Source is awesome, and good for the user in the long run, until we dominate the desktop we have to play by the commercial software industry's rules, and that means including proprietary stuff in our repositories, using local caches to prevent having to use DRM.*
-----
*Example: Portage allows ebuilds to exist in a local overlay directory, usually
Ok, so the binary package capability of Gentoo may not be completely unused, but it is used sparsely, if that. A very few select programs have binary equivalents (OpenOffice, Firefox, and Azureus come to mind), but what I think the GP is looking for is a way to specify "all binary, all the time" as a build option. I'm certainly looking for that. Combine that option with the newly-introduced graphical installer, and voila! Gentoo can be used as a Grandma System, too.
/etc/portage/package.keywords.
What the Gentoo devs need to do is to add arches like x86-bin, amd64-bin, etc. to the Portage tree, and these arches would not compile anything--just install binary packages. Every time this is brought up, many Gentoo devs jump to the defense of building from scratch, saying "if you don't want to build from scratch, what the hell are you doing using Gentoo?" And I usually respond with something along the lines of "but isn't Gentoo all about choice? And shouldn't I have the choice to install binary packages?"
The binary packages would be standardized on a certain set of USE variables, and only compiled for each arch/CHOST combination (to reduce storage costs at the repositories). If someone needs a specific set of USE variables for a particular package, they can build from source by specifying a non-binary arch in their
The beauty of Gentoo is scalability; the system can be tailored to be anything you want it to be. This will add one more option: Gentoo can also be a binary distro, suitable for non-hardcore users. If Debian can do it, why can't Gentoo?
It seems to me they settled with Elliott Spitzer. Do you have a link to back up that conviction claim?