Never having used Notes myself, I wonder if it had a problem with a certain version that people have fixated on or if poor administration commonly caused some problems that have given people a phobia towards it?.
It does get sold to large scale sites where management will supply the minimum resources to get the system working. So it gets a reputation for being slow, while sneaking into the SLA requirement by 1%. Thats a good way to earn long term hatred from the users.
Maybe it is better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Applications with a lot of history accumulate a lot of hatred. In the installation I saw 10 years ago the fact it ran on windows 98 and OS/2 may have contributed to the bad reputation. Additionally our site was trying to run the server side on AIX which was apparently a brave thing to do at the time.
I didn't have to use it much but the people who did referred to it as "scrotus notes".
Some time ago I read that spamming software had broken the captcha in gmail. Today I had to log into my gmail account and discovered that I am unable to parse the captcha.
The NTP daemon is normally used to interface with GPS clocks and to distribute time around a LAN. It never allows time to just jump. It always slews the clock. My ubuntu desktop system at work took two weeks to slew the time by a couple of hours.
As another poster pointed out, POSIX doesn't understand leap seconds the way it understands leap days. The leap second has to be faked by changing the speed of a clock for a while and living with the inconsistency in the mean time.
The main problem is with real time systems which continually broadcast their physical state and the time at which that state was correct. When the time starts to slew the system which listens to those messages may think the sender has a fault because the interval between messages seems to have changed (as reported by the sender). You might be trying to get millisecond timing accuracy over a packet switched LAN. To do that you have to rely on time stamps.
You just can't use NTP everywhere. Different components will run different OS's, some of which can't run the same NTP software. Some won't have TCP/IP networks to them, like aircraft. GPS is supposed to give the universal time reference. Its just that every now and then, it doesn't do exactly that.
You mean that in a critical field-of-work a system that fails more often than "doesn't work on leap days" gets past the acceptance tests?
Yes, I suppose so
I now understand where the pressure to remove leap seconds comes from. From the idiots that can't specify systems that handle them correctly.
A leap second applied across a distributed system where clocks will slew at different rates is effectively a source of noise. When your noise level increases some degradation of service is inevitable.
Yes, but we are talking about interfaces between a lot of different networks, each of which have their own GPS based time reference. An NTP daemon in each network talks to the GPS device, but there is no way to be sure that all the daemons will slew the time at the same rate.
Uhh, wouldn't it be nice if we were given a little bit more of a warning? Say, something like, oh a week?
You may laugh, but I work in Air Traffic Control. We rely on absolutely precise timing in a system distributed over 1000s of kilometres. Many components can be marked as non-functional by the system if they appear to have an incorrect clock.
Every time we add a leap second we get issues raised. I have to say it is a real PITA.
I once saw a hydrogen transport truck in my city. The hydrogen was stored in narrow thick walled tanks on the back of a trailer. It looked very inefficient.
On the other hand you can combine the hydrogen with carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into Methane with almost as much energy density. Then you can transport it with existing infrastructure.
Now there's a thought. Build a big hydrogen balloon. Tether it to the ground and attach a generator to the tether. To store energy crank in the tether. To recover energy let it out. You could even put wind generators on the balloon.
In a stationary mount, you don't have to worry about gyroscopic affect
Not completely accurate. The rotation of the Earth will cause a stationary gyro to put some torque on its bearings, depending on your latitude, just as a Foucault pendulum veers over time. It's not a big effect, but there are no "small effects" when we're talking about gigawatts of kinetic energy:)
You just need to align the axis of rotation of the flywheel with the axis of rotation of the Earth. As a bonus you get a way to avoid adding leap seconds to UTC.
Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.
Sun wants give the impression of making the software open but at the same time they need tight control over the copyright so that they can continue to sell Star Office.
The code is notoriously difficult to work with and the the owners of the copyright use this to limit the number of players.
For example, when the new administration is looking to negotiate a deal with North Korea, they need to know exactly what the old administration was doing and why. They need to know what overtures the US has made and why.
But shouldn't all that data then (at the least) be archived in whatever database they already use for that stuff (probably kept at some intelligence agency) and/or in the Secretary of State's computer system or whatever databases he or she, and whoever else needs the info, already uses. Also at the archives for posterity, sure, but why keep the working copy there if it adds to the cost unnecessarily?
I doubt there is any pressing need for the Barney cam (and probably some of the other date in the 100TB total) to be protected or accessible at anywhere near the levels of some of the other stuff, and most of the data will mostly be accessed by different people.
The impression I have of the way Governments operate is that only specific bits of information are preserved in the long run, and these specific bits were defined by legislation and convention hundreds of years ago. I think the secretary of state's computer system will get taken from the building and erased the minute she leaves office.
I don't think there exists specific Secretary Of State groupware, just waiting to bring Hillary up to speed and pass on her next hundred tasks.
I think google have a free service where they lend you a Network Attached Storage box. You load it up with whatever then send it back to them. You still have online access to the data and google indexes it for you.
I thought netbooks were most popular because they are cheap and good for basic utilities. Won't adding a touchscreen just raise the price?
In theory a touchscreen could be cheaper because it is built into the screen, and both can be manufactured together in large quantities. Splitting UI into two devices (screen+keyboard) bites into economies of scale.
Additionally solid state devices are generally cheaper to make than devices with moving parts.
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Fuck IBM and their hidden agendas. Fuck WebSphere, DB/2, ZSeries and all the rest of their crap.
Can we fuck ClearCase while we are at it please?
Never having used Notes myself, I wonder if it had a problem with a certain version that people have fixated on or if poor administration commonly caused some problems that have given people a phobia towards it?.
It does get sold to large scale sites where management will supply the minimum resources to get the system working. So it gets a reputation for being slow, while sneaking into the SLA requirement by 1%. Thats a good way to earn long term hatred from the users.
So, seriously, why such hatred?
Maybe it is better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Applications with a lot of history accumulate a lot of hatred. In the installation I saw 10 years ago the fact it ran on windows 98 and OS/2 may have contributed to the bad reputation. Additionally our site was trying to run the server side on AIX which was apparently a brave thing to do at the time.
I didn't have to use it much but the people who did referred to it as "scrotus notes".
Some time ago I read that spamming software had broken the captcha in gmail. Today I had to log into my gmail account and discovered that I am unable to parse the captcha.
Maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was.
I love the bit about baselining time at mean sea level. I am always amazed by how much complexity there is in the universe.
You mean that in a critical field-of-work a system that fails more often than "doesn't work on leap days" gets past the acceptance tests?
Yes, I suppose so
I now understand where the pressure to remove leap seconds comes from. From the idiots that can't specify systems that handle them correctly.
A leap second applied across a distributed system where clocks will slew at different rates is effectively a source of noise. When your noise level increases some degradation of service is inevitable.
Yes, but we are talking about interfaces between a lot of different networks, each of which have their own GPS based time reference. An NTP daemon in each network talks to the GPS device, but there is no way to be sure that all the daemons will slew the time at the same rate.
Uhh, wouldn't it be nice if we were given a little bit more of a warning? Say, something like, oh a week?
You may laugh, but I work in Air Traffic Control. We rely on absolutely precise timing in a system distributed over 1000s of kilometres. Many components can be marked as non-functional by the system if they appear to have an incorrect clock.
Every time we add a leap second we get issues raised. I have to say it is a real PITA.
Hydrogen is a PAIN.
I once saw a hydrogen transport truck in my city. The hydrogen was stored in narrow thick walled tanks on the back of a trailer. It looked very inefficient.
On the other hand you can combine the hydrogen with carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into Methane with almost as much energy density. Then you can transport it with existing infrastructure.
Wouldn't wind storage be best done with balloons?
Now there's a thought. Build a big hydrogen balloon. Tether it to the ground and attach a generator to the tether. To store energy crank in the tether. To recover energy let it out. You could even put wind generators on the balloon.
I am installing a server in my home at the moment. Just outside the server room is a rain water tank. I wonder if I could build a micro hydro UPS?
In a stationary mount, you don't have to worry about gyroscopic affect
Not completely accurate. The rotation of the Earth will cause a stationary gyro to put some torque on its bearings, depending on your latitude, just as a Foucault pendulum veers over time. It's not a big effect, but there are no "small effects" when we're talking about gigawatts of kinetic energy :)
You just need to align the axis of rotation of the flywheel with the axis of rotation of the Earth. As a bonus you get a way to avoid adding leap seconds to UTC.
In soviet slashdot batteries charge you!
Or they should just give you a password for iPlayer when you pay your TV license.
I dread the next version when this probably closes the document without saving or something
If our documents were properly version controlled we wouldn't have to worry about the saved/unsaved state at all.
I believe Ctrl-P still works as well and is even faster.
I have lost track of which thread you are replying to. Are you talking about Print or Paste?
I mean does *anybody* actually own Star Office?
According to the article:
Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.
...Sun owns open office.
There's such a thing as finished software.
Yes.
Sun wants give the impression of making the software open but at the same time they need tight control over the copyright so that they can continue to sell Star Office.
The code is notoriously difficult to work with and the the owners of the copyright use this to limit the number of players.
For example, when the new administration is looking to negotiate a deal with North Korea, they need to know exactly what the old administration was doing and why. They need to know what overtures the US has made and why.
But shouldn't all that data then (at the least) be archived in whatever database they already use for that stuff (probably kept at some intelligence agency) and/or in the Secretary of State's computer system or whatever databases he or she, and whoever else needs the info, already uses. Also at the archives for posterity, sure, but why keep the working copy there if it adds to the cost unnecessarily?
I doubt there is any pressing need for the Barney cam (and probably some of the other date in the 100TB total) to be protected or accessible at anywhere near the levels of some of the other stuff, and most of the data will mostly be accessed by different people.
The impression I have of the way Governments operate is that only specific bits of information are preserved in the long run, and these specific bits were defined by legislation and convention hundreds of years ago. I think the secretary of state's computer system will get taken from the building and erased the minute she leaves office.
I don't think there exists specific Secretary Of State groupware, just waiting to bring Hillary up to speed and pass on her next hundred tasks.
You'd think the NSA would have it all archived anyway.
I think google have a free service where they lend you a Network Attached Storage box. You load it up with whatever then send it back to them. You still have online access to the data and google indexes it for you.
I had to open four tabs to find out what the article was about. But then it wasn't so interesting. To me, anyway.
Maybe I should submit an article about running open office on ubuntu: "Pull down Applications menu..."
I thought netbooks were most popular because they are cheap and good for basic utilities. Won't adding a touchscreen just raise the price?
In theory a touchscreen could be cheaper because it is built into the screen, and both can be manufactured together in large quantities. Splitting UI into two devices (screen+keyboard) bites into economies of scale.
Additionally solid state devices are generally cheaper to make than devices with moving parts.