I've got a friend in France who does exactly this. He started his own small business to setup and administer computers for home users and small businesses. He will do Windows, Linux and Mac depending on the needs of the users and I'm sure he's had more than one person switched to Linux that way. He's got quite a lot of business because he is local and can respond to queries very quickly. In fact, he just hired his first employee.
True indeed! From the UK, I get www.google.co.uk with the same search, along with news from the Guardian, a British newspaper. That's quite neat. Indeed, some competition to Google might do them some good. I'll add a Firefox quick search bookmark to MSN so that I can compare the two.
On solaris,/home is by default auto-mounted so that you can have home directories hosted on any machine: it mounts it via NFS when you log in and unmounts it when you log out. You can:
create your home directories under/export/home which is exported via NFS and is where the auto mounter points to
disable the auto mounter for/home: comment out the line that starts/home in/etc/auto_master
change/etc/auto_home to specify where it should look for home directories
And the main cause of instability and/or complexity in Linux or *BSD. Solaris only works on x86 because it supports a very limited set of x86 hardware.
They don't like closed products. They like products they can get from an identifiable supplier that can provide them with a support contract so that they have someone to turn to (and blame) when things go wrong.
It is the same logic that means it can be difficult for a small software company to start up in a field where you have large companies operating. Even if you sell software for a fraction of the price of equivalent software from a large multi-national company, and even if you have much more functionality and build everything on open standards when your large competitor does not, they are likely to go with the large company because they can have a 24x7 contract, someone to blame when things go wrong and the assurance that said large company will still be in business in 2, 5 or 10 years time.
This is exactly why it can be very difficult to promote open source and why a company like Red Hat is doing very well: they provide the support and credibility to Linux solutions that companies are looking for.
Now the fact that in most cases, they could do the same for cheaper if they went to open source solutions directly is irrelevant: people making the decision, who are usually technically clueless, don't want to take the risk of getting blamed for chosing a solution that had no support option if something goes wrong. The only companies that regularly go open source are technology companies because they have the staff in-house to solve things if something goes horribly wrong. But even then, it is usually a case of balancing the cost of diverting internal resources to solve a problem vs paying a supplier for support.
This is why the only way for open source software to be accepted by the main public is to be so much better than the closed source competition in terms of ease of use, learning curve, stability, community support, documentation that support is no longer an issue. Apache is a good example. Firefox is getting there.
You're right. The point is to standardise the binary representation, not to make it faster. But it doesn't mean this hasn't got very useful applications in the real world. Here is a situation where this technology will be useful:
You design a web application. It all looks good, you can access all functions through a web browser. One of those functions involves uploading binary files (let's say images) so that they can be retrieved online later on. Fine, HTTP allows you to upload binary data using MIME.
Now, your PHB comes in and tells you your biggest customer would like to be able to integrate directly with their own system over the internet and they can do it through web services. So you need to add web service support to you application. This means using XML as data exchange format. No problem for all textual data but what do you do for your upload function that happens to be an essential part of the application? If you use a proprietary mechanism to encode that binary data in the XML stream, chances are you and your customer won't be compatible and someone will have to do extra development. Using XOP, you know both sides are compatible out of the box and you can re-use the same routines available in your HTML channel to decode the MIME encoded data.
All in all, using XOP would probably save you weeks of development and enables you to re-use existing MIME code to have a leaner and simpler system. It's not rocket science but it's that sort of simple but sensible standards that make our day to day work easier.
Surely, as an IT professional, you should know it is *mandatory* to misread instructions and information and then blame it on the third party who provided said information?
I can't remember the number of times I've had suppliers and customers who were alledgedly professional IT people fail to properly read clear instructions, let alone log files. They then come back to you and tell you something is wrong, only for you to discover that they forgot a step that was explicitly marked as important or failed to read the word NOT, written in capital, bold, red letters.
So misreading a Lynx access in a log file for a hack attack seems highly plausible. Of course, at the moment, we don't know much about the matter so when the investigation comes to a conclusion it could be a "Clued On IT Staff Saves Tsunami Relief Web Site From Vile Attacker" or "Stupid Moron Gets Innocent Tsunami Disaster Benefactor Jailed" headline. Either way, tabloids will have a field day.
I can confirm that. I went to the London Apple store last week-end to see how a Mac would perform because I am seriously considering getting one. I had with me a USB memory key with a high resolution scan of a photograph I took: 5400dpi from a negative scanner. ie about 5000x7000 pixels, 17Mb JPEG, 113Mb in memory when uncompressed. So I wanted to see how a Mac would manage with a image like this. Here is what I did:
Open in Photoshop on a PowerBook (all the G5s were busy) that had 768Mb RAM and already quite a few apps open.
Make a copy of said image to crop scan border, meaning that I had 200Mb+ worth of image in memory.
Both names can be used but Western Farsi, as spoken in Iran differs slightly from Eastern Farsi, as spoken in Afghanistan. In general, I think if you want to differentiate, use the word "Persian" for Iranian Farsi and "Farsi" for Afghani Farsi. Both use the Arabic script, albeit with 4 extra letters, so you'd have to know the script as well as the language.
Exactly. Solaris is the best commercial UNIX out there but to fully appreciate it you need to see it run on one of Sun's Enterprise servers. What other operating system is able to scale from 1 processor to 96; reconfigure itself if it suddenly loses one processor, a network adapter, a memory chip or other vital component; have some of those components replaced live without shutting down the server? Mainframes can do it, I think AIX can as well and I'm convinced Linux will get there one day. But the best and quickest way for all *nix OSes to evolve and stay lightyears in front of Windows is for all of them to share ideas and improve each other.
Linux cannot assume it has nothing to learn from Solaris, this would be extremely arrogant and a big mistake. Sun might not always play fair but they are trying and have a huge amount of experience to bring to the open source table, especially with Solaris.
So seeing Gentoo and Solaris exchange technology is fantastic news. At the end of the day, the winners will be us, the users, the professional IT staff who have to deal with GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX et al. on a regular basis. Independently of how the different kernels work, sharing tools and technology between all those OSes will make our job easier and hence make it easier for us to argue the case for UNIX/Linux/BSD against Windows to a PHB.
What about AZERTY (aka French), QWERTZ (aka German) and other non-QWERTY keyboards? And what about the dual QWERTY-Arabic one I have on my desk or the dual QWERTY-Russian we have somewhere else in the office? I suspect this new design doesn't cater for any of them, in terms of available characters or ease of typing in another alphabet.
The reason why it is faster is because it uses Windows native widgets, not XUL like FF, hence why it's not portable. This is the typical quandary in software development: fast and not portable or slower and portable. I choose FireFox because it is fast enough on my laptop and I can also use it on the Sun box next to it. If I had an old and slow Windows box, I'd use K-Meleon.
Possibility #7: Some customers actually WANT to run IBM software on Solaris boxes because it is the simplest setup for their needs. We have quite a lot of Sun/Solaris hardware in house, basically most of our servers, because they are extremely reliable and our IT staff know Solaris inside out. However, we need to run WebSphere on those boxes because some of our customers want to deploy the J2EE applications we sell on WebSphere so we have to test on WebSphere.
I think you're missing the context here. First, this is a personal entry on a site that is read by very few users, it wasn't meant to be "news". Second, Brian, who had never done anything with ActiveX, decides to try the technology "on the side". He has heard all the horror stories about ActiveX but actually *using* the technology makes him realise that all the horror is real and, slightly amazed by his discovery, posts on that site. He is just expressing his dismay at the fact that all the horror stories about ActiveX are not myth but reality. Everyone of us does this: experiment to see for oneself and then share one's experiment with others. The findings might be old news for some but are not without interest.
In practice, I find this article very interesting for what it is: the findings of someone who is a recognised programmer into a field he has no knowledge about; and that prove that all the ghastly rumours about ActiveX are true, not hype. Now whether it should be on/. is another question.
Yes they will make it part and parcel of the image compression. If you read the white paper, they propose a new image format that integrates that algorithm.
Indeed. Which is exactly why people still use SLR cameras (digital or film) and medium format ones. Because the optics on those are just astounding compared to compact cameras. If you want a good picture, you need good optics first, whether you're using film or digital.
So the first advice I always give to friends buying a camera is to check what the specs of the optics are. More often than not, this is also the reason for a significant difference in price between cameras that are otherwise identical. But the point is investing in a good lens is actually worth it, if you want to take good sharp pictures. And sometimes "worth it" can means a lot of money. For instance, the telephoto zoom I have on my SLR costs about £160 in the UK. The professional equivalent I am currently considering upgrading to costs £1200. But it would be worth it in terms of quality.
Remember, it's for the American market where brown water qualifies as coffee. Disclaimer: I was once banned from making coffee in the office because I made it too strong for anybody else so I might be biased.
Considering the file format is XML, I suppose the filter that imports v1 files into v2 is an XSL style sheet that you could use with any command line XSL transformer. It's just a matter of finding said style sheet.
I totally agree. A simple example: I wanted to test drive Mantis recently. What I did was download PHP Triad on my laptop, deploy Mantis and try. I know that if we end up using it, it will end up on a Solaris or Linux box but it would have been completely unrealistic for me to do the trial on one of those machines. I would have given it a miss if I had been limited to a *NIX platform. The same goes for FireFox and OpenOffice. If those applications where only available for *NIX, we would not use them because we just can't have everybody on Linux.
Also, the "slice and scan" method is much, much faster because you can feed the whole book in one go to a high volume scanner and hey presto! it comes out with all the scans in minutes rather than spending hours photographing and scanning each page individually. But of course, "slice and scan" is a destructive method (destructive for the book) so only makes sense if the printed book is not a rare item.
Thanks for the clarification. The moral of the story is: don't open popup windows, it is potentially insecure, it annoys users and it reduces the accessibility of your site.
'target' was part of the standard HTML 4.0. It has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1. The reason for it is not to force you to use Javascript, it is an accessibility issue. The idea is to discourage the creation of new windows unless the user explicitly requests so (by right-clicking on the link rather than left-clicking for instance). The reason for this is to make sites more accessible to people with disabilities. Forcing the browser to open a new window tends to confuse people because they might not always be aware that this has happened, especially if they have some sort of disability. For more information on the problem, see http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the web site: MC Solutions but it's in French.
I've got a friend in France who does exactly this. He started his own small business to setup and administer computers for home users and small businesses. He will do Windows, Linux and Mac depending on the needs of the users and I'm sure he's had more than one person switched to Linux that way. He's got quite a lot of business because he is local and can respond to queries very quickly. In fact, he just hired his first employee.
True indeed! From the UK, I get www.google.co.uk with the same search, along with news from the Guardian, a British newspaper. That's quite neat. Indeed, some competition to Google might do them some good. I'll add a Firefox quick search bookmark to MSN so that I can compare the two.
And the main cause of instability and/or complexity in Linux or *BSD. Solaris only works on x86 because it supports a very limited set of x86 hardware.
It is the same logic that means it can be difficult for a small software company to start up in a field where you have large companies operating. Even if you sell software for a fraction of the price of equivalent software from a large multi-national company, and even if you have much more functionality and build everything on open standards when your large competitor does not, they are likely to go with the large company because they can have a 24x7 contract, someone to blame when things go wrong and the assurance that said large company will still be in business in 2, 5 or 10 years time.
This is exactly why it can be very difficult to promote open source and why a company like Red Hat is doing very well: they provide the support and credibility to Linux solutions that companies are looking for.
Now the fact that in most cases, they could do the same for cheaper if they went to open source solutions directly is irrelevant: people making the decision, who are usually technically clueless, don't want to take the risk of getting blamed for chosing a solution that had no support option if something goes wrong. The only companies that regularly go open source are technology companies because they have the staff in-house to solve things if something goes horribly wrong. But even then, it is usually a case of balancing the cost of diverting internal resources to solve a problem vs paying a supplier for support.
This is why the only way for open source software to be accepted by the main public is to be so much better than the closed source competition in terms of ease of use, learning curve, stability, community support, documentation that support is no longer an issue. Apache is a good example. Firefox is getting there.
You design a web application. It all looks good, you can access all functions through a web browser. One of those functions involves uploading binary files (let's say images) so that they can be retrieved online later on. Fine, HTTP allows you to upload binary data using MIME.
Now, your PHB comes in and tells you your biggest customer would like to be able to integrate directly with their own system over the internet and they can do it through web services. So you need to add web service support to you application. This means using XML as data exchange format. No problem for all textual data but what do you do for your upload function that happens to be an essential part of the application? If you use a proprietary mechanism to encode that binary data in the XML stream, chances are you and your customer won't be compatible and someone will have to do extra development. Using XOP, you know both sides are compatible out of the box and you can re-use the same routines available in your HTML channel to decode the MIME encoded data.
All in all, using XOP would probably save you weeks of development and enables you to re-use existing MIME code to have a leaner and simpler system. It's not rocket science but it's that sort of simple but sensible standards that make our day to day work easier.
"Clam L has been occupied for 11 days" Surely, they should call the fire brigade to free the poor bugger?
I can't remember the number of times I've had suppliers and customers who were alledgedly professional IT people fail to properly read clear instructions, let alone log files. They then come back to you and tell you something is wrong, only for you to discover that they forgot a step that was explicitly marked as important or failed to read the word NOT, written in capital, bold, red letters.
So misreading a Lynx access in a log file for a hack attack seems highly plausible. Of course, at the moment, we don't know much about the matter so when the investigation comes to a conclusion it could be a "Clued On IT Staff Saves Tsunami Relief Web Site From Vile Attacker" or "Stupid Moron Gets Innocent Tsunami Disaster Benefactor Jailed" headline. Either way, tabloids will have a field day.
The machine didn't even swap. Impressive.
Both names can be used but Western Farsi, as spoken in Iran differs slightly from Eastern Farsi, as spoken in Afghanistan. In general, I think if you want to differentiate, use the word "Persian" for Iranian Farsi and "Farsi" for Afghani Farsi. Both use the Arabic script, albeit with 4 extra letters, so you'd have to know the script as well as the language.
Linux cannot assume it has nothing to learn from Solaris, this would be extremely arrogant and a big mistake. Sun might not always play fair but they are trying and have a huge amount of experience to bring to the open source table, especially with Solaris.
So seeing Gentoo and Solaris exchange technology is fantastic news. At the end of the day, the winners will be us, the users, the professional IT staff who have to deal with GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX et al. on a regular basis. Independently of how the different kernels work, sharing tools and technology between all those OSes will make our job easier and hence make it easier for us to argue the case for UNIX/Linux/BSD against Windows to a PHB.
What about AZERTY (aka French), QWERTZ (aka German) and other non-QWERTY keyboards? And what about the dual QWERTY-Arabic one I have on my desk or the dual QWERTY-Russian we have somewhere else in the office? I suspect this new design doesn't cater for any of them, in terms of available characters or ease of typing in another alphabet.
The reason why it is faster is because it uses Windows native widgets, not XUL like FF, hence why it's not portable. This is the typical quandary in software development: fast and not portable or slower and portable. I choose FireFox because it is fast enough on my laptop and I can also use it on the Sun box next to it. If I had an old and slow Windows box, I'd use K-Meleon.
Possibility #7: Some customers actually WANT to run IBM software on Solaris boxes because it is the simplest setup for their needs. We have quite a lot of Sun/Solaris hardware in house, basically most of our servers, because they are extremely reliable and our IT staff know Solaris inside out. However, we need to run WebSphere on those boxes because some of our customers want to deploy the J2EE applications we sell on WebSphere so we have to test on WebSphere.
In practice, I find this article very interesting for what it is: the findings of someone who is a recognised programmer into a field he has no knowledge about; and that prove that all the ghastly rumours about ActiveX are true, not hype. Now whether it should be on /. is another question.
Yes they will make it part and parcel of the image compression. If you read the white paper, they propose a new image format that integrates that algorithm.
So the first advice I always give to friends buying a camera is to check what the specs of the optics are. More often than not, this is also the reason for a significant difference in price between cameras that are otherwise identical. But the point is investing in a good lens is actually worth it, if you want to take good sharp pictures. And sometimes "worth it" can means a lot of money. For instance, the telephoto zoom I have on my SLR costs about £160 in the UK. The professional equivalent I am currently considering upgrading to costs £1200. But it would be worth it in terms of quality.
Does it mean we'll soon be able to export Caffe Nero to the US of A and give Starbucks a run for their money?
Remember, it's for the American market where brown water qualifies as coffee. Disclaimer: I was once banned from making coffee in the office because I made it too strong for anybody else so I might be biased.
Considering the file format is XML, I suppose the filter that imports v1 files into v2 is an XSL style sheet that you could use with any command line XSL transformer. It's just a matter of finding said style sheet.
I totally agree. A simple example: I wanted to test drive Mantis recently. What I did was download PHP Triad on my laptop, deploy Mantis and try. I know that if we end up using it, it will end up on a Solaris or Linux box but it would have been completely unrealistic for me to do the trial on one of those machines. I would have given it a miss if I had been limited to a *NIX platform. The same goes for FireFox and OpenOffice. If those applications where only available for *NIX, we would not use them because we just can't have everybody on Linux.
Also, the "slice and scan" method is much, much faster because you can feed the whole book in one go to a high volume scanner and hey presto! it comes out with all the scans in minutes rather than spending hours photographing and scanning each page individually. But of course, "slice and scan" is a destructive method (destructive for the book) so only makes sense if the printed book is not a rare item.
Thanks for the clarification. The moral of the story is: don't open popup windows, it is potentially insecure, it annoys users and it reduces the accessibility of your site.
'target' was part of the standard HTML 4.0. It has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1. The reason for it is not to force you to use Javascript, it is an accessibility issue. The idea is to discourage the creation of new windows unless the user explicitly requests so (by right-clicking on the link rather than left-clicking for instance). The reason for this is to make sites more accessible to people with disabilities. Forcing the browser to open a new window tends to confuse people because they might not always be aware that this has happened, especially if they have some sort of disability. For more information on the problem, see http://diveintoaccessibility.org/