Only 16yr olds in russia with leet bot nets have those kinds of skills.
Besides, the chinese are too busy producing iPod clones to bother with such things. After all, what are they going to find out? "Oh, look, apparently we killed Kennedy - and we're martians who landed in the US desert. Interesting, we can now rule the world".
Maybe its a conspiracy theory in the making, maybe apple hacking into the US and made it look like china. Next, a rumor will start about oil fields in Tibet and suddenly the distinct lack of democracy will be apparent.. OMG... i've said too much!
1) go there 2) claim you own it 3) take some guns to defend your new property investment 3.1) (if you find oil, tell no one) 4) if someone comes and tries to take it, use guns 5) if they have bigger guns, they now own it 6) go to next nearest planet or moon and repeat.
i believe this is roughly how earth was conquered.
Everytime i see a post about slackware it brings back some old memories... slackware was the first distro i'd used (tho not the first time i'd used linux) and i think the only other options at the time were yggdrassil and sls.
Sooo many floppies. Its good to see it still survives and thrives.
Well, if the enterprise or an old klingon bird of prey doesn't make it, we still have McGeyver (assuming he's not in atlantis or some other strange place on the other side of the universe - it seems so rational when you say it that way!)
Well, as i said, i really dont care that much - If ooxml renders as well in openoffice as it does in MS office then fantastic. Although, i think you miss-read alot of what I said or at least miss-interpreted it. But, the OOXML translator tool for openoffice.org is provided by novell, which doesn't mean Open office 2.4 can read ooxml (in fact, ooxml native support in OO is not scheduled until 3.0).
As for unzipping and openning it up in a text editor "if all else fails", well most of the complaints about ooxml have been around it not being capable of doing that, but im no ooxml expert, all i was saying was that if ooxml is such a pourly written standard and ms office's ooxml support doesnt follow their own standard, then they'll effectively shoot themselves (or other people) in the feet.
How would i feel in 1 to 2 years? Well theres two answers to that isnt there? a) Slashdot started archiving old news items in ooxml and ms office cant read my article from 2 years ago because of a broken ooxml standard (thats humor by the way) b) who on earth looks back at something like i typed with anything other than "Whatever", its not like im painting a picture is it? im not saying that OOXML is broken - what i said was that if everyone who's screaming about ooxml's problems turns out to be correct then this would probably be a likely result. If OOXML really is a good standard, it doesnt make anything i said incorrect. Everything i had written was about possible scenario's based on other people's ooxml complains. If i had said something like "ooxml is a total waste of space and a porely developed spec and in 10 years everyone will flock away from MS office because of its problems", then sure there exists some potential for looking back going 'yeah, i got that totally wrong didnt i?'.
There really wasn't even any criticism (of either ooxml, odf or any of the companies involved) in the actual post - just a social commentary on the general hatred of the ooxml iso vote. Your comments would be better pasted at the end of a million other comments in reality.
Rambus came out with a technology and then attached tonnes of $ onto that technology - so the industry did what it does best, developed a competing technology with lower licesning fees (see firewire vs USB as a good example of a wonderful tech being maimed by its own creators). In reality, not only did rambus create a tech that turned out not-to-be-so-crash-hot-after-all, they priced themselves out of the market to a large degree (or at least made intel go "oh f**k, AMD's ram is sooo much cheaper to implement than ours, how do we get out of this bloody contract??" - or something like that).
Sure, rambus did some good things but its a pity they charged an arm and a leg for it... an even bigger pity that the resulting competing tech used tech patented by rambus.
I wonder if USB would ever suffer the same thing from firewire?? Now if you think RAM could be a problem from a patent troll, consider what that would mean if USB2 impacted a patent covered by firewire - that would cause serious damage to the industry..
Keep in mind, also, that RAMBUS didn't make ram, in their own words (paraphased) "we only make high-speed busses that access RAM, not ram itself". Thats right, all they were responsible for was an interface.
I know next to nothing about how iso standards go, and I suspect there are many people out there making comment (the vast majority) that know about as much as I do.
In all likely hood the guys at ISO central are sitting there laughing at each other going "hahahha, the IT crowd really got their knickers in a knot over this? they think this one was irregular, they should have seen ISO9004!". But they most likely have their hands fairly well tied too, the votes are in and they probably cant do much about the (supposedly) obvious corruption of the process.. or can they? What power do they have? I certainly don't know myself...
But look at it from another angle, what does it really mean? The whole purpose of standardizing the format (as i understand it) was so that documents could be accessed at any point in the future (and by other applications) without loosing their content and formatting. How does OOXML achieve this in reality? how do you test that theory? With ODF at least you can say, "ok, i just saved a document in ODF from MS word using sun's plugin and opened it up in Sun Star office - wow it prints and looks the same", but thats not case closed because you need to try that again in 10 years and confirm the theory. Try that again with OOXML - "ok, i just saved an OOXML from ms word, now lets open it up in..... err... what else reads ooxml? oh thats right nothing, we'll have to wait for office 2010"... Or even better (assuming what most people are saying is correct about ms word not even saving according to the standard). "wow, KOffice just realised their OOXML plugin, lets take a look - hmmm, this looks nothing like what i saved, and documents i saved in OOXML format in Koffice dont look right in MS Word either" (or even better, "but documents i saved in KOffice do look right in MS word"). The response "we coded our plugin according to the ISO standard", but of course, then everyone else codes according to the standard and the only one that looks wrong is MS Office - not a compelling argument for MS office is it?
In a way, MS could very well shoot themselves in the foot if they have 10 other office product vendors with the same ooxml implementation that looks wrong only in MS office...
Another thing to consider - Would OOXML being a standard kill ODF? No, ODF still exists and in reality alot of people round the world are already using it - ironically they're probably mostly using it from MS Office anyway because of Sun's ODF plugin. Which brings me to the next point, if OOXML wasn't a standard does it release the strangehold of MS office? no, Sun did all the dirty work providing ODF import/export for MS office already.
The only real problem that exists is when governments of the world (who fell into the trap of ooxml) realize that the MS Office written OOXML documents will only ever open again in MS office properly (hi, welcome to vendor lock-in, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride - oh and by the way, office 2010's OOXML implementation will be slighly different, so hang onto the old hardware cause your going to need it so you can keep office 2007 around). At the end of the day it just gives various bodies the world over a comfy feeling they can stick with MS office anyway and save in its native format (and perhaps point fingers at someone else when it goes wrong). When it comes to "oh, KOffice cant open OOXML the same way MS can", KOffice will get blamed but thats why MS have tonnes of money for pulling off stunts like this no?
Obviously im ignoring things like third party applications that dont open documents for word processing, but things like Google Search appliance wont record documents with a proper formatting and thus MS search will look "right" - and again, this will benefit MS (and there will be many applications in many field that will probably suffer something because of it).
Maybe the EU should have taken MS's 3.1bil and bought their own votes on the ISO committee's just for a bit of poetic justice (or
While i agree scsi is perhaps "Dieing" i would hardly say that sata is its replacement. Sure, on some SAN's, they use sata as either "near-line" or secondary disk, but has the guy ever heard of sas or fibre-channel? obviously not. As for infiniband - anyone who's used this technology knows what a load of over-exagurated tripe that is.
On the other hand, firewire is the port that should never have died. If it had been owned by someone who had a clue, it would have been the port that replaced (nearly) everything. We wouldnt have usb (1.1 or 2), sata, pata, serial, ps/2 (it would have almost definitely made scsi redundant though) etc.. Nothing makes me quite so angry as the firewire story. Charging as much for licensing each port as sun do for scsi disks (well thats an exaggerating) but needless to say, if they'd charged a reasonable cost they'd have been rich just because of firewire ports in everyones machines. That is probably one of the sadest stories in the computing era of our day. needless to say it was brought to us by the kings of IT stupidity, Apple.
I already hate apple, though most because of the mess they made when they introduced firewire... to me firewire will forever remain the iconic factor in Apples (lack of) achievement.
> These days I develop primarily in Java and Php, and I can say with assurance that if you think you can do anything in php that you can do in Java, you're out of your mind. > Php has its place, and it's easy to develop in, but if you can do everything you ever need to do in php, you have pretty simple needs.
I've deployed (as an integrator not a developer) some of the biggest j2ee apps in AU (not just web applications), and i think your waaay over simplifying the equation. PHP and java are both general purpose languages (for the most part), and yes you could do ANYTHING in php you can do in java.
However, just because you could code something in php doesnt mean its efficient use of your time or the resources of the box its running on. Which is an important difference. Now while java provides a tonne of things (both in the language and the API) that php doesn't, doesn't mean you cant code them into php or find alternative methods. This is true for any general-purpose language (again, generally speaking), but in the case of php v java i would almost bet money you cant name a single thing in java that couldn't be accoplished thru php (assuming time and computing resources were reasonably limitless).
Go to the nearest job-search web site and search for your platform. then search for the current modern platforms (dot net and j2ee or whatever) and see what the results are like, if your job advert was the only result for your platform, you should be probably looking to switch platforms.
Thats a very broad brush approach, but at least it gives some idea of the general popularity.
Jaycar in AU though use fedora 6 (or maybe 7),... has a barcode scanner, cash draw and everything, and they're got quite a number of stores was shocked when i saw the screen with fedora on it.
Having said that, i know nothing about it, but its obviously possible!
Haven't heard of the existence of it yet, but been looking for just the same thing... iirc though, google's fs sounds almost close on the money for what we'd want and its a shame we cant get it. There are alternatives like afs, coda, etc (although, i find some suggestions of dfs people have been making quite strange). But at the end of the day what you really need is something like:
1) the ability to spawn off say 10gb on users computers all over the place (maybe 100's to 1000's of machines) 2) machines can be on or off at any time 3) data must not be lost because a machine went off (or at least, data must be kept in tact if a machine is switched off)
This is not even close to what dfs is capable of, nor would managing 100's to 1000's of machines with it (even if it were capable on xp/vista) be even remotely manageable. Likewise AFS and Coda dont really lend themselves well to the job. I started working on something like this where a program running on a machine would grab 10% of the free space, create a "disk" file, then talk to some central computer telling it that it was available for use. I never really got far though because theres alot of exception handling to do (and meta data to track). At the end of the day you cant guarantee the availability of any one "block" because unless you mirror to every computer then you might be able to guarantee 1 machine is on at any one time. Unfortunately, that approach is almost pointless because the data might as well just sit on 2 physical volumes on a storage array rather then across all your machines.
Which is not to say its a bad idea, but it'd be good to find a "desktop storage agregator" or some such!.
As has been stated, tiered pricing has been in australia since pretty much the dawn of time. What i hate about it is two fold.
First, the internet (as far as i am concerned) is about putting in and taking out, you make it hard for users to put in, theres less to take out. (read that however you like, im not talking about piracy here).
Second, it leads the way to what our local IT idiots like to call "freezone". For example, bigpond have bigpondmovies and so forth and its in the "freezone" (unmetered) and itunes is not. So you either pay a rediculously high bandwidth fee for using itunes or a moderately high fee for using bigpond movies. Which are u going to do? Personally, i dont understand how they get away with such behaviour, but they do. On the plus side of that there is always the argument about "we need to provide as many services as possible in our freezone" so you get download servers, gaming servers and so forth (my isp has an up-to-date mirror of fedora, ubuntu and many others so ROCK ON - its dam fast!). The problem with that (imho) is that while local gaming servers and stuff are great, i'd so much rather have the ability to shoot at people in battlefield (or some such) in another country because hey, thats what the internet is all about.
Its a pity this is what the internet has come to though, big companies not being able to support bandwidth due to sheer incompetence (if you've ever worked in IT in AU at Telstra, you know what i mean). If Telstra were a plausible IT company they could provide 100 times the bandwidth at 1/100 the (current) price, anyone in the world could do it better than telstra do.
I love the way the MS supporters will set there and bang on about how the linux supporters are all biased, fanatics. So again we get to see MS doing what they do best, FUD and dis-information and Jeff Jones has to be one of MS's best trained maniacs in this area. And you CANT argue that vista has no users "so no bugs", cause vista probably has more then linux and MAC combined.
Vista may be more secure than XP, thats a certainty, but Jeff Jones has proven himself time and again to be completely willing to sacrifice his credability - so how can you believe a man like that?
Speaking of WAFS, brocade had a product suite based on an architecture called FAN's (file area networks). Originally it was several cobbled together disparate bits of software and an "appliance" running windows server 2003 - though i believe the components that make up tapestry now look more like they belong together rather then the way they used to look where it was very obvious the products were all from different vendors and had different design paradigms. Take a look though, http://www.brocade.com/products/tapestry.jsp (brocade arent the only ones that do this, so look around).
Assuming your running windows everywhere (which wouldn't be a leap) then its not a bad solution - the on-site box is literally a "branch office in a box" solution that incorporates wafs/distributed locked/etc and runs a version of windows server, which i believe can be a AD server as well. But the point of it all is that the remote side has no real date unto itself (Everything goes back to head office) but can manage everything at a remote site (including such things as printers) as well as being easy to replace (in fact, its supposed to be constructed in such a way that if the branch office box fails, people shouldn't notice, everything just starts going back to "head office" in a seamless way). Supposedly its operates over very small amounts of bandwidth, but i can imagine the first time someone opens a large file being a painful excersize.
Still, ive not seen the product except in demo's, but i have heard good things about it.
Personally i think thats somewhat implied (variation). It's not so much about producing 1 kind of meat, its about producing a specific type of meat in a repeatable process (not withstanding our lack of capabilities cloning that is). It also implies a market for clone varieties - hey you might not like the same meat i do and thus your definition of perfect is different to mine.
Either way, my point was simply that i think cloning is a less bothersome process then GM.
Did i think before i post, i sure did - and i managed to use alot less swearing than you... nice work there, might want to work on your language skills a bit. This is after all, a public forum.
Personally, i have no problem with cloning as such "hey, we managed to bread a perfect cow that produces perfect meat" - clone away. The downsides are somewhat limited really, sure it kills of the gene pool, but it'd probably not be that wide spread as such.
What i do find interesting is that people who object to cloning dont seem to have a problem with genetically modified. GM scares me half to death "oh, we created hardier wheat, but we found out (too late) that it makes humans impotent after 5 generations, if only we'd realized a little earlier" - bye bye human race.
When i think of the subnets i've used/worked in, i tend to believe that remembering ipv6 addresses isnt going to be that hard in reality.
Ok, they're long - but in my head right now i can remember 4 subnets, work, previous work, home and the university i went to. Now i tend to think in terms of subnets. For example lets say my home is 192.168.1.0/24, my router is 1, my dns is 2, my mailserver is 3, my printer is 4, etc etc. The bit at the front replacing the 192.168.1 may have got alot bigger, but i still only have to remember it once.
So even if its 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0001 you'll wrap your head around it. Am i going to remember the ipv6 addresses for slashdot, google and a dozen other public websites? No, but i dont know their ipv4 ones off the top of my head either, and its also why i have dns. The fact is the only place you're going to or should need to know ipv6 addresses is when your assigning them yourself and you'll probably memorize it out of use in any case.
And yet again, the Australian government proves how much they never understood the internet or technology in the first place.
Sadly, conroy is the next in a series of ministers in charge of "technology" who just dont get it - they are sadly idiots. Dont get me wrong, i dont have much respect for politicians in the first place. But theres a level of stupidity you always assume when it comes to sections of government and the people that oversee them. And when it comes to tech and comms, the ministers in charge have fallen so far below par (compared to the rest of the rabble) that its really quite sad.
Perhaps to be fair i should "lack of knowledge" rather than "level of stupidity", but conroy is just a moron im surprised he's not blue in most photo's because he's forgotten to breath again. The prior governments plan was more intelligent, and thats a sad state of affairs in itself.
I dont care about the "office" space - i.e. where the plebs sit is of no consequence except they'll need 4 rj45 ports and 4 power ports - who really cares about the rest?
The next thing i would ask for is 2 computer rooms (raised floor, AC, etc), whack a self-contained room next to it with enough space for the admin folks with windows into the server rooms.
Add onto that either a might big plasma or a projection screen that projects onto a wall (preferably not visible outside the room "for security reasons") and a decent sound system for audio alerts from your system monitoring application and your done!.
Then when its build and no ones the wiser you whack a digital tv tuner into your "server monitoring" box and your sweet!. Oh did i mention you should also have a very decent 3d video card for the games, err monitoring box? After all you'll need a very high resolution (HD at least) for all that server monitoring info, and only the top vid cards support that.
In all seriousness though, all i'd ever want is an independent display for monitoring purposes, well sound-shielded computer location with decent power/AC, a place for building test systems, VoIP comms and everything else will just fit together.
As with the original EU descision, i am somewhat disappointed.
The WSPP protocols dont covery enough. And to be honest, things like smb/ad should be FORCED into an open standard when they're a dominant player in the market (and used as leverage for even more monopolism).
On top of that, it should have covered many more protocols, the exchange protocols for starters.
Really very disappointed in this descision and AT for going out making it sound like a win.
Well, i say im working on it, but its a big project and im working alone.. I started a project called "Tag-Based colaboration machine". The idea being to remove folders as an organizational structure for mail.
But i wanted to do alot more with it like: 1) hierarchical storage (primary, secondary, archive, etc) 2) fully self-contained (i.e. can use auth off any system, but stores all mail in its own store, not in the user home directory) 3) imap backward compatible. etc
The idea would be you'd have 4 tag types, group, public, status and personal which you could create and you'd then have tag groups. Tag groups would be a set of tags that should show you either every mail with all of those tags, or every mail with one of those tags.
So in your email client your "inbox" might just be showing tags of "status: unread", then you might have a tag group like: "group: linux, faults, personal: linux, etc" and so this would allow anyone in your group to see it (a group being some logical collection of people in a company). And of course, finally "public" tags which would allow anyone who can conect to read it.
On top of that, connecting with an imap client would show you a folder structure based on your collection of tag groups and logical operations. like "inbox" wwould shot "status: unread, read + no other tags" or something like that, and when you moved a mail from one folder to another, it would be retagged according to that tag group.
But anyways, i've not gotten far past the storage mechanisms yet and it'll probably never be finished, but i'd love the idea of working/using a tag based mail system and I think this is one area where linux is falling behind a bit - not mail specifically, but innovation in general. Everything we're doing seem to be about what someone else is going and how to make our systems work exactly like those. its a bit tiresome.
If your seriously under the delusion that people will be traveling around in flying cars within the next 50 years, you should consider this:
1) take a look at the cars the are driving around you. How many of them look almost un-road-worthy? 2) how many times have you seen someone on the side of the road broken down? (sure it may just be a flat tyre, but thats still relavent). 3) how many times have you looked at a car driving along the road and thought "my god, that thing still goes?"
The point im trying to make is that until "flying cars" can stay floating in the air without any power being applied to them at all, we aren't going to be seeing "personal flying cars". The requirements for keeping a plane in the air (in terms of keeping it "air worthy") aren't for the poor, they are also very strict for a reason.
Now lets take your average break down. "oh no, my engine stalled". Suddenly what became an inconvenience that held up a few cars on a road is suddenly "oh my god, we're falling out of the sky in the middle of a residential area". Which would not end well. Now considering even minor neglect of a car can leave it stalled on the side of the road (and yeah, there are air-equivalents of flat tyres) and the same goes for a "flying car", do you really trust your neighbors to keep their "flying cars" air worthy? Do you really trust the easily-bought-off mechanic to properly inspect every "flying car" once a year?
If they ever do become a reality before said "power-less hovering" is a reality, i'm going to live in an underground bunker!
Slashdot Mirror
So is this "sunlight" thing a new calendar plugin for thunderbird?
Only 16yr olds in russia with leet bot nets have those kinds of skills.
Besides, the chinese are too busy producing iPod clones to bother with such things. After all, what are they going to find out? "Oh, look, apparently we killed Kennedy - and we're martians who landed in the US desert. Interesting, we can now rule the world".
Maybe its a conspiracy theory in the making, maybe apple hacking into the US and made it look like china. Next, a rumor will start about oil fields in Tibet and suddenly the distinct lack of democracy will be apparent.. OMG... i've said too much!
No one...
Do you want to own the moon? simple:
1) go there
2) claim you own it
3) take some guns to defend your new property investment
3.1) (if you find oil, tell no one)
4) if someone comes and tries to take it, use guns
5) if they have bigger guns, they now own it
6) go to next nearest planet or moon and repeat.
i believe this is roughly how earth was conquered.
Everytime i see a post about slackware it brings back some old memories... slackware was the first distro i'd used (tho not the first time i'd used linux) and i think the only other options at the time were yggdrassil and sls.
Sooo many floppies. Its good to see it still survives and thrives.
Well, if the enterprise or an old klingon bird of prey doesn't make it, we still have McGeyver (assuming he's not in atlantis or some other strange place on the other side of the universe - it seems so rational when you say it that way!)
Well, as i said, i really dont care that much - If ooxml renders as well in openoffice as it does in MS office then fantastic. Although, i think you miss-read alot of what I said or at least miss-interpreted it. But, the OOXML translator tool for openoffice.org is provided by novell, which doesn't mean Open office 2.4 can read ooxml (in fact, ooxml native support in OO is not scheduled until 3.0).
As for unzipping and openning it up in a text editor "if all else fails", well most of the complaints about ooxml have been around it not being capable of doing that, but im no ooxml expert, all i was saying was that if ooxml is such a pourly written standard and ms office's ooxml support doesnt follow their own standard, then they'll effectively shoot themselves (or other people) in the feet.
How would i feel in 1 to 2 years? Well theres two answers to that isnt there?
a) Slashdot started archiving old news items in ooxml and ms office cant read my article from 2 years ago because of a broken ooxml standard (thats humor by the way)
b) who on earth looks back at something like i typed with anything other than "Whatever", its not like im painting a picture is it? im not saying that OOXML is broken - what i said was that if everyone who's screaming about ooxml's problems turns out to be correct then this would probably be a likely result. If OOXML really is a good standard, it doesnt make anything i said incorrect. Everything i had written was about possible scenario's based on other people's ooxml complains. If i had said something like "ooxml is a total waste of space and a porely developed spec and in 10 years everyone will flock away from MS office because of its problems", then sure there exists some potential for looking back going 'yeah, i got that totally wrong didnt i?'.
There really wasn't even any criticism (of either ooxml, odf or any of the companies involved) in the actual post - just a social commentary on the general hatred of the ooxml iso vote. Your comments would be better pasted at the end of a million other comments in reality.
Rambus came out with a technology and then attached tonnes of $ onto that technology - so the industry did what it does best, developed a competing technology with lower licesning fees (see firewire vs USB as a good example of a wonderful tech being maimed by its own creators). In reality, not only did rambus create a tech that turned out not-to-be-so-crash-hot-after-all, they priced themselves out of the market to a large degree (or at least made intel go "oh f**k, AMD's ram is sooo much cheaper to implement than ours, how do we get out of this bloody contract??" - or something like that).
Sure, rambus did some good things but its a pity they charged an arm and a leg for it... an even bigger pity that the resulting competing tech used tech patented by rambus.
I wonder if USB would ever suffer the same thing from firewire?? Now if you think RAM could be a problem from a patent troll, consider what that would mean if USB2 impacted a patent covered by firewire - that would cause serious damage to the industry..
Keep in mind, also, that RAMBUS didn't make ram, in their own words (paraphased) "we only make high-speed busses that access RAM, not ram itself". Thats right, all they were responsible for was an interface.
All I can I say "who cares?".
..... err... what else reads ooxml? oh thats right nothing, we'll have to wait for office 2010"... Or even better (assuming what most people are saying is correct about ms word not even saving according to the standard). "wow, KOffice just realised their OOXML plugin, lets take a look - hmmm, this looks nothing like what i saved, and documents i saved in OOXML format in Koffice dont look right in MS Word either" (or even better, "but documents i saved in KOffice do look right in MS word"). The response "we coded our plugin according to the ISO standard", but of course, then everyone else codes according to the standard and the only one that looks wrong is MS Office - not a compelling argument for MS office is it?
I know next to nothing about how iso standards go, and I suspect there are many people out there making comment (the vast majority) that know about as much as I do.
In all likely hood the guys at ISO central are sitting there laughing at each other going "hahahha, the IT crowd really got their knickers in a knot over this? they think this one was irregular, they should have seen ISO9004!". But they most likely have their hands fairly well tied too, the votes are in and they probably cant do much about the (supposedly) obvious corruption of the process.. or can they? What power do they have? I certainly don't know myself...
But look at it from another angle, what does it really mean? The whole purpose of standardizing the format (as i understand it) was so that documents could be accessed at any point in the future (and by other applications) without loosing their content and formatting. How does OOXML achieve this in reality? how do you test that theory? With ODF at least you can say, "ok, i just saved a document in ODF from MS word using sun's plugin and opened it up in Sun Star office - wow it prints and looks the same", but thats not case closed because you need to try that again in 10 years and confirm the theory. Try that again with OOXML - "ok, i just saved an OOXML from ms word, now lets open it up in
In a way, MS could very well shoot themselves in the foot if they have 10 other office product vendors with the same ooxml implementation that looks wrong only in MS office...
Another thing to consider - Would OOXML being a standard kill ODF? No, ODF still exists and in reality alot of people round the world are already using it - ironically they're probably mostly using it from MS Office anyway because of Sun's ODF plugin. Which brings me to the next point, if OOXML wasn't a standard does it release the strangehold of MS office? no, Sun did all the dirty work providing ODF import/export for MS office already.
The only real problem that exists is when governments of the world (who fell into the trap of ooxml) realize that the MS Office written OOXML documents will only ever open again in MS office properly (hi, welcome to vendor lock-in, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride - oh and by the way, office 2010's OOXML implementation will be slighly different, so hang onto the old hardware cause your going to need it so you can keep office 2007 around). At the end of the day it just gives various bodies the world over a comfy feeling they can stick with MS office anyway and save in its native format (and perhaps point fingers at someone else when it goes wrong). When it comes to "oh, KOffice cant open OOXML the same way MS can", KOffice will get blamed but thats why MS have tonnes of money for pulling off stunts like this no?
Obviously im ignoring things like third party applications that dont open documents for word processing, but things like Google Search appliance wont record documents with a proper formatting and thus MS search will look "right" - and again, this will benefit MS (and there will be many applications in many field that will probably suffer something because of it).
Maybe the EU should have taken MS's 3.1bil and bought their own votes on the ISO committee's just for a bit of poetic justice (or
While i agree scsi is perhaps "Dieing" i would hardly say that sata is its replacement. Sure, on some SAN's, they use sata as either "near-line" or secondary disk, but has the guy ever heard of sas or fibre-channel? obviously not. As for infiniband - anyone who's used this technology knows what a load of over-exagurated tripe that is.
On the other hand, firewire is the port that should never have died. If it had been owned by someone who had a clue, it would have been the port that replaced (nearly) everything. We wouldnt have usb (1.1 or 2), sata, pata, serial, ps/2 (it would have almost definitely made scsi redundant though) etc.. Nothing makes me quite so angry as the firewire story. Charging as much for licensing each port as sun do for scsi disks (well thats an exaggerating) but needless to say, if they'd charged a reasonable cost they'd have been rich just because of firewire ports in everyones machines. That is probably one of the sadest stories in the computing era of our day. needless to say it was brought to us by the kings of IT stupidity, Apple.
I already hate apple, though most because of the mess they made when they introduced firewire... to me firewire will forever remain the iconic factor in Apples (lack of) achievement.
> These days I develop primarily in Java and Php, and I can say with assurance that if you think you can do anything in php that you can do in Java, you're out of your mind.
> Php has its place, and it's easy to develop in, but if you can do everything you ever need to do in php, you have pretty simple needs.
I've deployed (as an integrator not a developer) some of the biggest j2ee apps in AU (not just web applications), and i think your waaay over simplifying the equation. PHP and java are both general purpose languages (for the most part), and yes you could do ANYTHING in php you can do in java.
However, just because you could code something in php doesnt mean its efficient use of your time or the resources of the box its running on. Which is an important difference. Now while java provides a tonne of things (both in the language and the API) that php doesn't, doesn't mean you cant code them into php or find alternative methods. This is true for any general-purpose language (again, generally speaking), but in the case of php v java i would almost bet money you cant name a single thing in java that couldn't be accoplished thru php (assuming time and computing resources were reasonably limitless).
From my point of view it simple anyways.
Go to the nearest job-search web site and search for your platform. then search for the current modern platforms (dot net and j2ee or whatever) and see what the results are like, if your job advert was the only result for your platform, you should be probably looking to switch platforms.
Thats a very broad brush approach, but at least it gives some idea of the general popularity.
And i believe theres quite a few more.
Jaycar in AU though use fedora 6 (or maybe 7),... has a barcode scanner, cash draw and everything, and they're got quite a number of stores was shocked when i saw the screen with fedora on it.
Having said that, i know nothing about it, but its obviously possible!
Haven't heard of the existence of it yet, but been looking for just the same thing... iirc though, google's fs sounds almost close on the money for what we'd want and its a shame we cant get it. There are alternatives like afs, coda, etc (although, i find some suggestions of dfs people have been making quite strange). But at the end of the day what you really need is something like:
1) the ability to spawn off say 10gb on users computers all over the place (maybe 100's to 1000's of machines)
2) machines can be on or off at any time
3) data must not be lost because a machine went off (or at least, data must be kept in tact if a machine is switched off)
This is not even close to what dfs is capable of, nor would managing 100's to 1000's of machines with it (even if it were capable on xp/vista) be even remotely manageable. Likewise AFS and Coda dont really lend themselves well to the job. I started working on something like this where a program running on a machine would grab 10% of the free space, create a "disk" file, then talk to some central computer telling it that it was available for use. I never really got far though because theres alot of exception handling to do (and meta data to track). At the end of the day you cant guarantee the availability of any one "block" because unless you mirror to every computer then you might be able to guarantee 1 machine is on at any one time. Unfortunately, that approach is almost pointless because the data might as well just sit on 2 physical volumes on a storage array rather then across all your machines.
Which is not to say its a bad idea, but it'd be good to find a "desktop storage agregator" or some such!.
As has been stated, tiered pricing has been in australia since pretty much the dawn of time. What i hate about it is two fold.
First, the internet (as far as i am concerned) is about putting in and taking out, you make it hard for users to put in, theres less to take out. (read that however you like, im not talking about piracy here).
Second, it leads the way to what our local IT idiots like to call "freezone". For example, bigpond have bigpondmovies and so forth and its in the "freezone" (unmetered) and itunes is not. So you either pay a rediculously high bandwidth fee for using itunes or a moderately high fee for using bigpond movies. Which are u going to do? Personally, i dont understand how they get away with such behaviour, but they do. On the plus side of that there is always the argument about "we need to provide as many services as possible in our freezone" so you get download servers, gaming servers and so forth (my isp has an up-to-date mirror of fedora, ubuntu and many others so ROCK ON - its dam fast!). The problem with that (imho) is that while local gaming servers and stuff are great, i'd so much rather have the ability to shoot at people in battlefield (or some such) in another country because hey, thats what the internet is all about.
Its a pity this is what the internet has come to though, big companies not being able to support bandwidth due to sheer incompetence (if you've ever worked in IT in AU at Telstra, you know what i mean). If Telstra were a plausible IT company they could provide 100 times the bandwidth at 1/100 the (current) price, anyone in the world could do it better than telstra do.
I love the way the MS supporters will set there and bang on about how the linux supporters are all biased, fanatics. So again we get to see MS doing what they do best, FUD and dis-information and Jeff Jones has to be one of MS's best trained maniacs in this area. And you CANT argue that vista has no users "so no bugs", cause vista probably has more then linux and MAC combined.
Vista may be more secure than XP, thats a certainty, but Jeff Jones has proven himself time and again to be completely willing to sacrifice his credability - so how can you believe a man like that?
Speaking of WAFS, brocade had a product suite based on an architecture called FAN's (file area networks). Originally it was several cobbled together disparate bits of software and an "appliance" running windows server 2003 - though i believe the components that make up tapestry now look more like they belong together rather then the way they used to look where it was very obvious the products were all from different vendors and had different design paradigms. Take a look though, http://www.brocade.com/products/tapestry.jsp (brocade arent the only ones that do this, so look around).
And if you look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Area_Network - this is the generic term for most of the technology involved, file area networks.
Assuming your running windows everywhere (which wouldn't be a leap) then its not a bad solution - the on-site box is literally a "branch office in a box" solution that incorporates wafs/distributed locked/etc and runs a version of windows server, which i believe can be a AD server as well. But the point of it all is that the remote side has no real date unto itself (Everything goes back to head office) but can manage everything at a remote site (including such things as printers) as well as being easy to replace (in fact, its supposed to be constructed in such a way that if the branch office box fails, people shouldn't notice, everything just starts going back to "head office" in a seamless way). Supposedly its operates over very small amounts of bandwidth, but i can imagine the first time someone opens a large file being a painful excersize.
Still, ive not seen the product except in demo's, but i have heard good things about it.
Personally i think thats somewhat implied (variation). It's not so much about producing 1 kind of meat, its about producing a specific type of meat in a repeatable process (not withstanding our lack of capabilities cloning that is). It also implies a market for clone varieties - hey you might not like the same meat i do and thus your definition of perfect is different to mine.
Either way, my point was simply that i think cloning is a less bothersome process then GM.
Did i think before i post, i sure did - and i managed to use alot less swearing than you... nice work there, might want to work on your language skills a bit. This is after all, a public forum.
Personally, i have no problem with cloning as such "hey, we managed to bread a perfect cow that produces perfect meat" - clone away. The downsides are somewhat limited really, sure it kills of the gene pool, but it'd probably not be that wide spread as such.
What i do find interesting is that people who object to cloning dont seem to have a problem with genetically modified. GM scares me half to death "oh, we created hardier wheat, but we found out (too late) that it makes humans impotent after 5 generations, if only we'd realized a little earlier" - bye bye human race.
When i think of the subnets i've used/worked in, i tend to believe that remembering ipv6 addresses isnt going to be that hard in reality.
Ok, they're long - but in my head right now i can remember 4 subnets, work, previous work, home and the university i went to. Now i tend to think in terms of subnets. For example lets say my home is 192.168.1.0/24, my router is 1, my dns is 2, my mailserver is 3, my printer is 4, etc etc. The bit at the front replacing the 192.168.1 may have got alot bigger, but i still only have to remember it once.
So even if its 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0001 you'll wrap your head around it. Am i going to remember the ipv6 addresses for slashdot, google and a dozen other public websites? No, but i dont know their ipv4 ones off the top of my head either, and its also why i have dns. The fact is the only place you're going to or should need to know ipv6 addresses is when your assigning them yourself and you'll probably memorize it out of use in any case.
And yet again, the Australian government proves how much they never understood the internet or technology in the first place.
Sadly, conroy is the next in a series of ministers in charge of "technology" who just dont get it - they are sadly idiots. Dont get me wrong, i dont have much respect for politicians in the first place. But theres a level of stupidity you always assume when it comes to sections of government and the people that oversee them. And when it comes to tech and comms, the ministers in charge have fallen so far below par (compared to the rest of the rabble) that its really quite sad.
Perhaps to be fair i should "lack of knowledge" rather than "level of stupidity", but conroy is just a moron im surprised he's not blue in most photo's because he's forgotten to breath again. The prior governments plan was more intelligent, and thats a sad state of affairs in itself.
I dont care about the "office" space - i.e. where the plebs sit is of no consequence except they'll need 4 rj45 ports and 4 power ports - who really cares about the rest?
The next thing i would ask for is 2 computer rooms (raised floor, AC, etc), whack a self-contained room next to it with enough space for the admin folks with windows into the server rooms.
Add onto that either a might big plasma or a projection screen that projects onto a wall (preferably not visible outside the room "for security reasons") and a decent sound system for audio alerts from your system monitoring application and your done!.
Then when its build and no ones the wiser you whack a digital tv tuner into your "server monitoring" box and your sweet!. Oh did i mention you should also have a very decent 3d video card for the games, err monitoring box? After all you'll need a very high resolution (HD at least) for all that server monitoring info, and only the top vid cards support that.
In all seriousness though, all i'd ever want is an independent display for monitoring purposes, well sound-shielded computer location with decent power/AC, a place for building test systems, VoIP comms and everything else will just fit together.
As with the original EU descision, i am somewhat disappointed.
The WSPP protocols dont covery enough. And to be honest, things like smb/ad should be FORCED into an open standard when they're a dominant player in the market (and used as leverage for even more monopolism).
On top of that, it should have covered many more protocols, the exchange protocols for starters.
Really very disappointed in this descision and AT for going out making it sound like a win.
Well, i say im working on it, but its a big project and im working alone.. I started a project called "Tag-Based colaboration machine". The idea being to remove folders as an organizational structure for mail.
But i wanted to do alot more with it like:
1) hierarchical storage (primary, secondary, archive, etc)
2) fully self-contained (i.e. can use auth off any system, but stores all mail in its own store, not in the user home directory)
3) imap backward compatible.
etc
The idea would be you'd have 4 tag types, group, public, status and personal which you could create and you'd then have tag groups. Tag groups would be a set of tags that should show you either every mail with all of those tags, or every mail with one of those tags.
So in your email client your "inbox" might just be showing tags of "status: unread", then you might have a tag group like: "group: linux, faults, personal: linux, etc" and so this would allow anyone in your group to see it (a group being some logical collection of people in a company). And of course, finally "public" tags which would allow anyone who can conect to read it.
On top of that, connecting with an imap client would show you a folder structure based on your collection of tag groups and logical operations. like "inbox" wwould shot "status: unread, read + no other tags" or something like that, and when you moved a mail from one folder to another, it would be retagged according to that tag group.
But anyways, i've not gotten far past the storage mechanisms yet and it'll probably never be finished, but i'd love the idea of working/using a tag based mail system and I think this is one area where linux is falling behind a bit - not mail specifically, but innovation in general. Everything we're doing seem to be about what someone else is going and how to make our systems work exactly like those. its a bit tiresome.
If your seriously under the delusion that people will be traveling around in flying cars within the next 50 years, you should consider this:
1) take a look at the cars the are driving around you. How many of them look almost un-road-worthy?
2) how many times have you seen someone on the side of the road broken down? (sure it may just be a flat tyre, but thats still relavent).
3) how many times have you looked at a car driving along the road and thought "my god, that thing still goes?"
The point im trying to make is that until "flying cars" can stay floating in the air without any power being applied to them at all, we aren't going to be seeing "personal flying cars". The requirements for keeping a plane in the air (in terms of keeping it "air worthy") aren't for the poor, they are also very strict for a reason.
Now lets take your average break down. "oh no, my engine stalled". Suddenly what became an inconvenience that held up a few cars on a road is suddenly "oh my god, we're falling out of the sky in the middle of a residential area". Which would not end well. Now considering even minor neglect of a car can leave it stalled on the side of the road (and yeah, there are air-equivalents of flat tyres) and the same goes for a "flying car", do you really trust your neighbors to keep their "flying cars" air worthy? Do you really trust the easily-bought-off mechanic to properly inspect every "flying car" once a year?
If they ever do become a reality before said "power-less hovering" is a reality, i'm going to live in an underground bunker!