It's a little sad that you decided to go with Prentice/Pearson. As you point out, they are the largest, as such, it's kinda like you are supporting the Microsoft of the publishing world.
Did you approach anyone else with this idea? O'Reilly for instance? They have done OPL before.
It all depends upon how well the book sells of course.
That said, I can speak with great inside knowledge, and tell you that a poorly performing booking will get you about 3-6k before taxes in a year. An average performer will get you about 9k-14k. Anything above that is doing suprisingly well.
There are authors who make well over 20k per book on certain titles. If you want to make a living at it, you will need to have about 3 books in rotation during the year, with at least one of them being a great performer.
I think the solution to the anti-trust case should have been that Microsoft is only allowed to expand into new markets, or buy new companies, using profits from its non-monopoly businesses.
Since all divisions of Microsoft lose money except for the monopoly divisions of Office and Windows, Microsoft would have no money to invest in other companies or to extend into new markets.
The beauty of Linux is that it can be both like Windows and innovative.
Having multiple Window Managers allows a Windows user move over from Windows 2000 to KDE because it is so very Windowslike. Once they get used to being on a different platform and want to explore something a little different, they load WindowMaker or Fluxbox or some other WindowManager not yet invented that is a real shift in how we interface with a computer via keyboard and mouse.
Whew, I feel much safer now. It's always nice that someone feels ownership for the code, thus that someone takes quick action and fixes the problems. Thank you Michael Sweet for a great print system and quick action.
Microsoft does not allow concurrent licensing of its Office Product no matter how you are running.
Therefore, if you have 100 devices (not users) in your office, be they full blown PCs or thin clients, and at some point each one of them will have a user running Office on it, then you need a license for Office. It doesn't matter if only 2 devices are running Office at any given moment. It matters how many devices ultimately have used Office.
What Codeweavers allows is concurrent licensing. Which means that if you only have 2 devices using Office via Codeweavers at any given time, you only need 2 licenses of Codeweavers. If 25 devices are using it at the same time, you need 25. But you still need 100 licenses of MS Office itself.
Microsofts lack of concurrent licensing is a REAL drag.
The solution that Codweavers is trying to replace is Windows 2000 + Client Access Licenses + Terminal Server Client Access Licenses + Citrix Concurrent Licenses+Office Licenses per device. For 100 devices, but only 25 concurrent, the costs are roughly: 1000+3000+10000+3500+42500= 60000.
Codeweavers offers Codeweavers Server + 25 Concurrent Licenses + Offices Licenses per device. Or: 1195+1185+42500= 44880.
The savings are not insignificant, but not all that great. Especially when you consider that Codeweavers only runs a limited subset of Win32 applications, and not 100% on any. The Windows + Citrix solution runs all applications that could be run on a regular Windows 2000 desktop. Much more versatile.
That said, if you are seeking to move off of Microsoft products Codeweavers is providing a valuable intermediate step in that transition.
I actually think the software, OS X, is great for the desktop. Even if it is proprietary.
But, I think Apple looses the corporate desktop because of the hardware. There just isn't enough variety there yet. If you need a very small form factor PC to put on thousands of desks, a G4 tower won't cut it (neither will an iMac with a built in LCD). If you need a ruggedized laptop for field workers, there isn't an Apple machine that meets that need.
I liken Apple to BMW or Lexus. Awesome machines, very driveable (useable), but unrealistic to think there limited variety can take the place of GM, Ford and Chrysler.
And I'm typing this post on a PII366 Dell Latitude CPiA laptop. This machine, bought used off eBay, is 4 years old. So I guess I win.
Especially when you consider, as all Mac users seems to, that a 466mhz PowerPC processor is at least as good as an Intel processor at twice the megahertz. Therefore, you are posting using a 900mhz Pentium III laptop, which was hot stuff just last year.
Therefore, your laptop is only 1 year old in the Intel world and your boast is nothing special.
Of course, all of this over a post that could be made from a 8088 machine.
As for Macs being meant to be used for a longer period of time, that is a common myth. If users installed Windows 95 on their old Pentium II 233 and just kept putting security fixes and IE updates on it, they would have something equivalent to a beige G3 getting all the nice little fixes between OS 8 and 8.6. Both would have kept up just fine with the update process and would have been just as zippy four years later and just as useful. If you move up from Photoshop 4 to Photoshop 7 in that time period on either machine, then you would be reaching the limits of the machine (rather your patience with the machine).
My company currently uses Pentium III 450-550 machines with 192MB. I am fighting tooth and nail to prevent the CIO from buying new machines. The company is in a tough financial situation and these machines simply do NOT need to be upgraded. At the same time, our Mac Admin has encouraged the same CIO to upgrade our current stock of G4 towers at 500mhz.
This isn't necessary, he just wants to be able to go to OS X and have it be as fast as possible to make a good impression on everyone. I resisted the upgrade to XP myself in order to keep the OS in spec with the hardware. In fact, if any money is to be spent, I'd rather it be on a couple of servers I could use to run these machines (and older ones too) as thin clients for Linux.
I think it's inertia. Most of these writers are on Windows systems, they have copies of Office, and they don't know what else to use. Our editors, bless them, never suggest OpenOffice or StarOffice, even though we have templates for these programs that work just as well as Word templates.
It's our templates that do the heavy lifting. We don't try to make a Word document look exactly like our book layout. We just have them put in tags (think HTML) that our book converters interpret into FrameMaker, which is what really does the page layout.
I would like to see our editors strongly encourage everyone to use OpenOffice. If that were to happen, we could stop using Office licenses in our production department at the very least. These are the users I most want to move to Linux desktops.
* E-mail. Outlook and Outlook Express. No better mail client.
IMHO you're wrong here. the Bat! is the best email client. It has features useful for email that is head an shoulders above anything Outlook or Outlook Express offer. It handles multiple accounts better, mailing lists better, allows for templates for each folder you store your mail in, a signature for each folder you send mail out of, unique sounds for each folder, and boiler plate templates you can create and execute with just a typed word and a command sequence. Searches, man, they are the fastest ever. I had over 10k mail messages in the bat and it could search through them in about 4 seconds. Outlook is terrible at this. The other mail clients you mentioned simply do not have the features you really need to manage mail well.
However, those other mail clients have some features that do not exist in the Bat!. Outlook Express is also a newsgroup reader. And Outlook is a Personal Information Manager. It has tasks lists and Calendars, also, coupled with an Exchange Server, can be a powerful collaboration tool. But, those are features of PIM, not an email client.
See, I'm nitpicking your choice of words. Those programs you mentioned are not the best email clients. They are, however, very powerful capable programs that do things that have nothing to do with email.
One day while installing the Option Pack for Windows NT 4.0 I was confronted with the fact that the pack required me to install Internet Explorer 4.0 on my server. I think it had to do with changes in the MS Help System. I didn't want IE 4.0 on my server. It would replace my default explorer.exe and make system demands on my server that just wasn't necessary. I never browse the web from my server. That is when I realized, Microsoft wanted IE everywhere.
That is also when I realized, I didn't want to be a part of this anymore and I started to explore my options. Throughout the next four years I went through many aborted starts and stops to find an adequate alternative OS to Windows. Most of this was dealing with various Linux distributions, but a brief stint with Mac OS was also unsatisfying.
Now, I have been Microsoft free on my personal and work computer for one year. Not all of that year has been rosy, but none of it has been worse than a typical year with Windows. Mandrake wasn't very fast and Debian wasn't getting updates to Sid quickly enough for me. Gentoo came along and I've been incredibly happy ever since. My desktop has never been so snappy, stability so high, or the appearance of the gui so slick. I can do all my job tasks from this machine or by remotely connecting to a server.
In my work environment, their are two things which keep a large portion of my users from switching to Linux. One is a techinical problem dealing with SSH and Framemaker on Solaris, but I believe that will be worked out soon. The second is the fact that we receive book submissions from authors in Word format. Not all the "powers that be" at our company support the idea of switching to Linux and therefore it is a requirement of users to be able to handle these Word documents as Word documents and not have them converted to another format (such as OpenOffice.org or Framemaker). Trust me, this conversion is a time consuming process that takes one person several hours to two days to be done correctly. The conversion has to be done at some point, the "political football" is about when it will be done.
Thankfully, half our users are Microsoft Office free and they may be able to make a switch once the SSH problem is worked out. Of course, they should be easy anyway because they are xterm users connecting to a Sun box. The question about them is whether to keep them as is, or have the xterms boot from a Linux server, or give them a PC running Linux. I'm in favor of the middle option since i favor thin clients.
To sum up, nothing stopped me from making the switch to Linux. I choose not use anything that requires Windows. That includes games, personal finance software, and Lord of the Rings trailers that are only in Quicktime.
At work, lack of authority over the technical makeup of the company and inablity to change a work process prevents a switch to Linux.
My name is Erore and I'm a Windows System Administrator for the company that makes the animal books you all love so much.
Explain to me why easy-to-use, effective and free movie and image editing software is good for education so I won't be pathetic. I don't see where this free software is useful in a math class. Are students going to video tape their book reports? Is that the purpose of a book report, to put on a show? Or is it to learn how to critically read the material, formulate an argument, and present it in front of people? What about chemistry class? A student could video the experiments, add commentary, and show it around. But, the purpose of the experiments was to have hands on experience following procedures, recording observations, handling the equipment, measuring, etc. It was not to see the red liquid turn clear. If that was the purpose, teachers would only show video tapes of experiments done by professionals and the school could forgo the expense of a chemistry lab.
These tools could be useful in education. But to what end? At what expense? With what trade-offs.
I looked at Apple's website again, as you asked, but, without a thorough search, I found only one instance of a teacher using the iTools. She was a professor and she used the tools, not the student. I would also argue her use of the tools was excellent. But, I've also seen video tapes of professional documentaries that had the same type of information.Cost of the video tapes, $60. Cost of her Mac, $1100. Sure, she'll be able to make more videos for her class without paying again for the Mac, but that is about 18 videos. I wonder how many years it will be before she has the time and inclination to create 18 videos in support of her class teaching? Will it be before she feel's compelled to purchase a new machine?
Reading my original post I realize that I didn't make my points clear. I was ranting. Basically, what I want to say is that a computer + free software (whether Linux, OS X, GNU, or Microsoft) does not make an educational tool instantly. Just because it has software that "could" be put to education use doesn't mean that using it is a good use of time for the educator or the student. Teachers have a limited amount of time with the children and I question whether that time should be spent with either of them in front of a computer when it isn't the best tool for the job.
I can purchase 30 computers, stick them in a lab and have my 4th graders come in and use a math program that drills them on multiplication. That's 15k in computers at a minimum, plus the cost of a lab person to administer the machines. They will be put to use by multiple classes througout the week. Or, I could buy 15 sets of flash cards and pair the students up and have them drill away with each other. The flash cards will last longer than the computers. The students learn the same skills, and they arguably learn them in a better way because they are interacting with a real person who will be more sensitive to mistakes and probably help guide them to better answers.
* Apple's innovative iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes applications that bring the Digital Hub to the classroom for easy integration of digital media into lessons and presentations;
* Sherlock® 3, Apple's all-new Internet services tool that makes it easy to find and display some of the most practical and useful information available on the Internet with a variety of "channels" like dictionary, thesaurus and language translation;
* Address Book, a central database for student, parent and colleague contacts that allows users to enter information just once and access it from other applications;
* a new Mail application that features junk mail filtering to identify and flag junk email messages, especially those that contain material inappropriate for schools;
* Universal Access features that exceed Section 508 requirements with the ability to magnify the screen, have highlighted text read aloud and use special keyboard commands such as mouse keys, sticky keys and slow keys; and
* unprecedented stability and performance from advanced features such as true protected memory, preemptive multitasking and advanced memory management.
Who gives a rat's rear end about iPhoto, iMovie, or iTunes for the education market? What are you wanting these people to do with their machine? Hey Johnny, take some pictures and I'll scan them in and take the red eye out and then we'll have a digital photo album we can put up on the classroom website. Who cares? I mean, sure, you can DO that with a computer, but is that education? Is that what Johnny, who has trouble with basic reading comprehension really needs to be doing? The iTools are neat, they are great programs, they are especially useful for those who have a need for them. Teachers are not those people.
Okay, Sherlock has great search capabilities. Whoop dee doo. So does Google. Dictionary apps are readily available already (I use kdict myself). Students don't need this search tool to help them find information on their own machines, they need to learn how to organize information better. It's an important skill that is a first step to becoming a critical thinking adult.
The idea of the unified addressbook is nothing new. It exists in many forms. LDAP is one of them. A school system can easily supply an LDAP server to all networked machines. If this was a Microsoft shop, Exchange does a great job too. Does addressbook auto discover the email addresses of everyone on the network? Didn't think so.
Spam filtering on the client side is useful if you don't control the mail server (such as being dependent upon an ISP). But, in the school, filtering software should be on the server side and email with "offensive" content should be held there. A porn message stopped on the server is never seen, a porn message filtered by the Mail app on OS X is still viewable by young eyes. This tool has no practical value to the students.
I'm not going to argue about Universal Access. I know nothing about it.
Stability and performance are great things. What is odd about including this choice is that it was a feature also touted in Mac OS 9 and earlier as well as Windows 9.x. Yet, in neither sets of operating systems did stability exist. Though they lied to me before, I know their claims this time around are true. Oddly enough, OS 9 was good enough without stability.
In general I find the selling points marketing types focus upon as being a study in the latest buzz word or gee whiz technobabble. Very rarely is real innovation mentioned in them. The best example of this is that Apple touts the iTools incessently. Well, I don't have a digital camera, an iPod, or a video camera. Tell me once again why these applications matter to me and the millions more like me?
2) Most of this is going to be for the teachers that have an original iMac sitting in their classroom (or their house) that is still running MacOS 9.1 (or even 8.6) on it. No, this will not bring in new users directly, but an argument could be made "Well, if we buy new Macs, Apple might keep us with up-to-date operating system upgrades for free in the future."
Or maybe Apple is trying to both show how nice their new operating system is as well as show how slow the teacher's current hardware is. With one stone they convince people to transition to OS X and they convince people to buy new hardware (or push for it in their budget if it isn't a personal purchase)
Personally, I find this kind of thing (seeding the education market, or discounting products for it) distateful. Apple and Microsoft are for profit companies. Anything they do in the education market is with tainted motives. What school administrators need to ask themselves are what are those motives and what do they cost me(the school) and the students both now and in the future.
If everyone believes that education for our students is of vital importance, why do we do it so poorly and allow commercial entities to have such power? Read the post someone else made about Channel One. That is after my time at school, but it is a perfect example of the drug dealer giving away something for free (the TV, the OS) in order to hook you on a product for life (Pepsi, Apple Hardware). Why do we allow this? The school is the one place were children should be safe from overt advertising.
Ever since Jackson was rebuked and his decision to breakup Microsoft overturned, I've always had a sneaking suspician that Microsoft might be behind it.
Picture this: Microsoft is losing the case. They know they are in deep trouble. Their worst fear is that they get broken up. Their greatest hope is for a mistrial. But, if there is a mistrial, another judge might still rule for a breakup.
So, what they do, besides help get Bush elected into office, is buy Jackson. The cleverness of it is that they want him to rule against them, throw the book at them, and call them lots of nasty names while doing it and show himself in all ways to be biased against Microsoft.
The outcome, is just what we saw. Yes, Microsoft lost the case, but the Federal Judges are "afraid" of delivering the same verdict as Jackson, so they will come up with lesser remedies. Thus, Microsoft as a single company will survive.
Jackson's repeal above is just him trying to save face in his professional career.
Just a thought.
What I never understood about Napster
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Reflecting Fires
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· Score: 2
Is why they didn't offer a service matching Indie bands to your favorite "known" musician.
For a small fee, an Indie band should have been able to post their music to Napster (for the initial downloads, P2P afterwards) and list their music in a search database as being, "Genre: Soft Pop; Similar Artists: Sarah McLaughlin, Jewel"
Then people would do searches for Indie bands that are like Jewel, and they would get a list of bands that were like that.
You could even have a rating system were listeners then say, no, they aren't really Jewel-like, they're more Sting like.
That way people will be exposed to Indie music that is "like" their current muscial preferences.
Doing this would be huge. Good thing I have the whole idea patented.
I see some changing connotations/definitions going on here.
Microsoft is essentially equating Free Software to free beer.
By doing so they take the ethical right to free software out of the equation.
Then, they point at Open Source as say the only special about it is that the source code is viewable and that they have a community.
So, they come up with a way that they can share the Windows source with the community and then they say, "See, we are just the same as Open Source."
And, for the most part they will be.
However, what they will not be at that point is free software. And that is the true spirit behind the whole thing.
They are telling people people who want apples that apples are really oranges and that they can't give you oranges but they can give you tangerines, which are essentially the same but easier to peel. But, in the end, when you get that tangerine, you really don't have an apple afterall do you?
If you want to combine this discussion of free will and the writings of JRR Tolkien, read chapter 2 of the Silmarillion.
You'll see that it is a story about free will. Free will for the dwarves, free will for Aule. Parallels to the Bible as explanations of why God created us and gave us free will, as well as the free will choice of Abraham to "begat" Ishmael, to "begat" Islam, to "begat" future conflict between the Jewish and Islamic people. (I'm not trying to start any flame wars here about the Jewish and Islamic faiths, I'm trying to show how the choice of one man led to some pretty big things years later.)
Free will "begat" an awful lot of future strife in both the Silmarillion and the Bible-real life. But, that free will never altered God's perfect plans for his creation. Which is exactly what the opening sequence, called Ainulindale, of the Silmarillion is all about.
"...and often strife will arise between thine and mine; the children of my adoption and the children of my choice."
Not related to a travelling LCD screen, but directly related to the idea of how a teenager might consider spending their time (instead of coding all the time or playing games all the time) I offer a link to some advice from the late Frank Willison, editor-in-chief at O'Reilly & Associates.
If you read about TMDA you will see that it has a verification system. By responding to the verification request, customers will get through.
Word your verification request in such a way that it appears to the customer that you are doing them a favor. For instance: Thank you for contacting us for technical support. We receive a large volume of mail, and unfortunately, much of it is spam. In order to give more time for our support people to work on real problems we are asking you to respond to this message so that your request will be put in the support queue and not left in a holding bin with illegitimate mail.
Customers like this. What is more efficient for you in this case, and costs them 3 or 4 seconds (for the first contact, 0 for later contacts) will get their technical request, order, complaint, whaterver answered more quickly.
I'm continually amazed at the people who are beating their heads up against a very simple problem. The answer is not statistics, it is not heuristics, it is not AI, it is not procmail.
The answer is verification...aka whitelists. Check out TMDA, tmda.sourceforge.net. This program assumes you don't want mail from anybody whom you haven't explicitly allowed, or who has verified that they are a real person and not a spammer.
Verification is simple, and some people will point out that it could be defeated by a spammer. But, the economics of spam do not make it feasible for a spammer to attempt to defeat TMDA.
TMDA is similar to making your phone number private. You only get phone calls from people you have given your number to, and you never get telemarketers.
TMDA user since December 2001. Spam messages that tried to get in, 12,133, spam messages that got in 3, false positives, 0. Time I've spent tweaking and modifying the program since installation, 0 minutes.
Not only do they sell it, they sell it cheap. And they made improvements to it, like the LCD console version.
Anyway, I'm just funning yah. I see your point. But, I think the C128 failed because it didn't offer enough of a reason to move from the C64. This might have been because the feature set change wasn't great enough, or it might have been because the market wasn't ready for that feature set change.
Afterall, this was just before the time that Bill Gates though that a PC would never need more then 640k.
Hmmm... Ignorant of the C128's existance, but qualified to speak about it? The problem was it was 100% compatable with a C64. Venders openly stated they had no plans to develop C128 software because the C64 software covered the market. The C128 had a larger market share than Linux Desktops have now but the market was ignored because the less capable C64 software covered it.
I heard that Playstation 2 is completely compatible with Playstation 1. It will run all the Playstation 1 games.
I wonder why games are being developed for Playstation 2 at all.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little sad that you decided to go with Prentice/Pearson. As you point out, they are the largest, as such, it's kinda like you are supporting the Microsoft of the publishing world.
Did you approach anyone else with this idea? O'Reilly for instance? They have done OPL before.
It all depends upon how well the book sells of course.
That said, I can speak with great inside knowledge, and tell you that a poorly performing booking will get you about 3-6k before taxes in a year. An average performer will get you about 9k-14k. Anything above that is doing suprisingly well.
There are authors who make well over 20k per book on certain titles. If you want to make a living at it, you will need to have about 3 books in rotation during the year, with at least one of them being a great performer.
I think the solution to the anti-trust case should have been that Microsoft is only allowed to expand into new markets, or buy new companies, using profits from its non-monopoly businesses.
Since all divisions of Microsoft lose money except for the monopoly divisions of Office and Windows, Microsoft would have no money to invest in other companies or to extend into new markets.
Just a thought.
The beauty of Linux is that it can be both like Windows and innovative.
Having multiple Window Managers allows a Windows user move over from Windows 2000 to KDE because it is so very Windowslike. Once they get used to being on a different platform and want to explore something a little different, they load WindowMaker or Fluxbox or some other WindowManager not yet invented that is a real shift in how we interface with a computer via keyboard and mouse.
http://www.cups.org/news.php?V87
Whew, I feel much safer now. It's always nice that someone feels ownership for the code, thus that someone takes quick action and fixes the problems. Thank you Michael Sweet for a great print system and quick action.
Microsoft does not allow concurrent licensing of its Office Product no matter how you are running.
Therefore, if you have 100 devices (not users) in your office, be they full blown PCs or thin clients, and at some point each one of them will have a user running Office on it, then you need a license for Office. It doesn't matter if only 2 devices are running Office at any given moment. It matters how many devices ultimately have used Office.
What Codeweavers allows is concurrent licensing. Which means that if you only have 2 devices using Office via Codeweavers at any given time, you only need 2 licenses of Codeweavers. If 25 devices are using it at the same time, you need 25. But you still need 100 licenses of MS Office itself.
Microsofts lack of concurrent licensing is a REAL drag.
The solution that Codweavers is trying to replace is Windows 2000 + Client Access Licenses + Terminal Server Client Access Licenses + Citrix Concurrent Licenses+Office Licenses per device. For 100 devices, but only 25 concurrent, the costs are roughly: 1000+3000+10000+3500+42500= 60000.
Codeweavers offers Codeweavers Server + 25 Concurrent Licenses + Offices Licenses per device. Or: 1195+1185+42500= 44880.
The savings are not insignificant, but not all that great. Especially when you consider that Codeweavers only runs a limited subset of Win32 applications, and not 100% on any. The Windows + Citrix solution runs all applications that could be run on a regular Windows 2000 desktop. Much more versatile.
That said, if you are seeking to move off of Microsoft products Codeweavers is providing a valuable intermediate step in that transition.
Durnit!
Marked you as a friend and you get all my mod points until I find something better to do with them.
I actually think the software, OS X, is great for the desktop. Even if it is proprietary.
But, I think Apple looses the corporate desktop because of the hardware. There just isn't enough variety there yet. If you need a very small form factor PC to put on thousands of desks, a G4 tower won't cut it (neither will an iMac with a built in LCD). If you need a ruggedized laptop for field workers, there isn't an Apple machine that meets that need.
I liken Apple to BMW or Lexus. Awesome machines, very driveable (useable), but unrealistic to think there limited variety can take the place of GM, Ford and Chrysler.
And I'm typing this post on a PII366 Dell Latitude CPiA laptop. This machine, bought used off eBay, is 4 years old. So I guess I win.
Especially when you consider, as all Mac users seems to, that a 466mhz PowerPC processor is at least as good as an Intel processor at twice the megahertz. Therefore, you are posting using a 900mhz Pentium III laptop, which was hot stuff just last year.
Therefore, your laptop is only 1 year old in the Intel world and your boast is nothing special.
Of course, all of this over a post that could be made from a 8088 machine.
As for Macs being meant to be used for a longer period of time, that is a common myth. If users installed Windows 95 on their old Pentium II 233 and just kept putting security fixes and IE updates on it, they would have something equivalent to a beige G3 getting all the nice little fixes between OS 8 and 8.6. Both would have kept up just fine with the update process and would have been just as zippy four years later and just as useful. If you move up from Photoshop 4 to Photoshop 7 in that time period on either machine, then you would be reaching the limits of the machine (rather your patience with the machine).
My company currently uses Pentium III 450-550 machines with 192MB. I am fighting tooth and nail to prevent the CIO from buying new machines. The company is in a tough financial situation and these machines simply do NOT need to be upgraded. At the same time, our Mac Admin has encouraged the same CIO to upgrade our current stock of G4 towers at 500mhz.
This isn't necessary, he just wants to be able to go to OS X and have it be as fast as possible to make a good impression on everyone. I resisted the upgrade to XP myself in order to keep the OS in spec with the hardware. In fact, if any money is to be spent, I'd rather it be on a couple of servers I could use to run these machines (and older ones too) as thin clients for Linux.
I think it's inertia. Most of these writers are on Windows systems, they have copies of Office, and they don't know what else to use. Our editors, bless them, never suggest OpenOffice or StarOffice, even though we have templates for these programs that work just as well as Word templates.
It's our templates that do the heavy lifting. We don't try to make a Word document look exactly like our book layout. We just have them put in tags (think HTML) that our book converters interpret into FrameMaker, which is what really does the page layout.
I would like to see our editors strongly encourage everyone to use OpenOffice. If that were to happen, we could stop using Office licenses in our production department at the very least. These are the users I most want to move to Linux desktops.
* E-mail. Outlook and Outlook Express. No better mail client.
IMHO you're wrong here. the Bat! is the best email client. It has features useful for email that is head an shoulders above anything Outlook or Outlook Express offer. It handles multiple accounts better, mailing lists better, allows for templates for each folder you store your mail in, a signature for each folder you send mail out of, unique sounds for each folder, and boiler plate templates you can create and execute with just a typed word and a command sequence. Searches, man, they are the fastest ever. I had over 10k mail messages in the bat and it could search through them in about 4 seconds. Outlook is terrible at this. The other mail clients you mentioned simply do not have the features you really need to manage mail well.
However, those other mail clients have some features that do not exist in the Bat!. Outlook Express is also a newsgroup reader. And Outlook is a Personal Information Manager. It has tasks lists and Calendars, also, coupled with an Exchange Server, can be a powerful collaboration tool. But, those are features of PIM, not an email client.
See, I'm nitpicking your choice of words. Those programs you mentioned are not the best email clients. They are, however, very powerful capable programs that do things that have nothing to do with email.
One day while installing the Option Pack for Windows NT 4.0 I was confronted with the fact that the pack required me to install Internet Explorer 4.0 on my server. I think it had to do with changes in the MS Help System. I didn't want IE 4.0 on my server. It would replace my default explorer.exe and make system demands on my server that just wasn't necessary. I never browse the web from my server. That is when I realized, Microsoft wanted IE everywhere.
That is also when I realized, I didn't want to be a part of this anymore and I started to explore my options. Throughout the next four years I went through many aborted starts and stops to find an adequate alternative OS to Windows. Most of this was dealing with various Linux distributions, but a brief stint with Mac OS was also unsatisfying.
Now, I have been Microsoft free on my personal and work computer for one year. Not all of that year has been rosy, but none of it has been worse than a typical year with Windows. Mandrake wasn't very fast and Debian wasn't getting updates to Sid quickly enough for me. Gentoo came along and I've been incredibly happy ever since. My desktop has never been so snappy, stability so high, or the appearance of the gui so slick. I can do all my job tasks from this machine or by remotely connecting to a server.
In my work environment, their are two things which keep a large portion of my users from switching to Linux. One is a techinical problem dealing with SSH and Framemaker on Solaris, but I believe that will be worked out soon. The second is the fact that we receive book submissions from authors in Word format. Not all the "powers that be" at our company support the idea of switching to Linux and therefore it is a requirement of users to be able to handle these Word documents as Word documents and not have them converted to another format (such as OpenOffice.org or Framemaker). Trust me, this conversion is a time consuming process that takes one person several hours to two days to be done correctly. The conversion has to be done at some point, the "political football" is about when it will be done.
Thankfully, half our users are Microsoft Office free and they may be able to make a switch once the SSH problem is worked out. Of course, they should be easy anyway because they are xterm users connecting to a Sun box. The question about them is whether to keep them as is, or have the xterms boot from a Linux server, or give them a PC running Linux. I'm in favor of the middle option since i favor thin clients.
To sum up, nothing stopped me from making the switch to Linux. I choose not use anything that requires Windows. That includes games, personal finance software, and Lord of the Rings trailers that are only in Quicktime.
At work, lack of authority over the technical makeup of the company and inablity to change a work process prevents a switch to Linux.
My name is Erore and I'm a Windows System Administrator for the company that makes the animal books you all love so much.
Okay, I found apple.com/education. I'll read that.
Explain to me why easy-to-use, effective and free movie and image editing software is good for education so I won't be pathetic. I don't see where this free software is useful in a math class. Are students going to video tape their book reports? Is that the purpose of a book report, to put on a show? Or is it to learn how to critically read the material, formulate an argument, and present it in front of people? What about chemistry class? A student could video the experiments, add commentary, and show it around. But, the purpose of the experiments was to have hands on experience following procedures, recording observations, handling the equipment, measuring, etc. It was not to see the red liquid turn clear. If that was the purpose, teachers would only show video tapes of experiments done by professionals and the school could forgo the expense of a chemistry lab.
These tools could be useful in education. But to what end? At what expense? With what trade-offs.
I looked at Apple's website again, as you asked, but, without a thorough search, I found only one instance of a teacher using the iTools. She was a professor and she used the tools, not the student. I would also argue her use of the tools was excellent. But, I've also seen video tapes of professional documentaries that had the same type of information.Cost of the video tapes, $60. Cost of her Mac, $1100. Sure, she'll be able to make more videos for her class without paying again for the Mac, but that is about 18 videos. I wonder how many years it will be before she has the time and inclination to create 18 videos in support of her class teaching? Will it be before she feel's compelled to purchase a new machine?
Reading my original post I realize that I didn't make my points clear. I was ranting. Basically, what I want to say is that a computer + free software (whether Linux, OS X, GNU, or Microsoft) does not make an educational tool instantly. Just because it has software that "could" be put to education use doesn't mean that using it is a good use of time for the educator or the student. Teachers have a limited amount of time with the children and I question whether that time should be spent with either of them in front of a computer when it isn't the best tool for the job.
I can purchase 30 computers, stick them in a lab and have my 4th graders come in and use a math program that drills them on multiplication. That's 15k in computers at a minimum, plus the cost of a lab person to administer the machines. They will be put to use by multiple classes througout the week. Or, I could buy 15 sets of flash cards and pair the students up and have them drill away with each other. The flash cards will last longer than the computers. The students learn the same skills, and they arguably learn them in a better way because they are interacting with a real person who will be more sensitive to mistakes and probably help guide them to better answers.
* Sherlock® 3, Apple's all-new Internet services tool that makes it easy to find and display some of the most practical and useful information available on the Internet with a variety of "channels" like dictionary, thesaurus and language translation;
* Address Book, a central database for student, parent and colleague contacts that allows users to enter information just once and access it from other applications;
* a new Mail application that features junk mail filtering to identify and flag junk email messages, especially those that contain material inappropriate for schools;
* Universal Access features that exceed Section 508 requirements with the ability to magnify the screen, have highlighted text read aloud and use special keyboard commands such as mouse keys, sticky keys and slow keys; and
* unprecedented stability and performance from advanced features such as true protected memory, preemptive multitasking and advanced memory management.
Who gives a rat's rear end about iPhoto, iMovie, or iTunes for the education market? What are you wanting these people to do with their machine? Hey Johnny, take some pictures and I'll scan them in and take the red eye out and then we'll have a digital photo album we can put up on the classroom website. Who cares? I mean, sure, you can DO that with a computer, but is that education? Is that what Johnny, who has trouble with basic reading comprehension really needs to be doing? The iTools are neat, they are great programs, they are especially useful for those who have a need for them. Teachers are not those people.
Okay, Sherlock has great search capabilities. Whoop dee doo. So does Google. Dictionary apps are readily available already (I use kdict myself). Students don't need this search tool to help them find information on their own machines, they need to learn how to organize information better. It's an important skill that is a first step to becoming a critical thinking adult.
The idea of the unified addressbook is nothing new. It exists in many forms. LDAP is one of them. A school system can easily supply an LDAP server to all networked machines. If this was a Microsoft shop, Exchange does a great job too. Does addressbook auto discover the email addresses of everyone on the network? Didn't think so.
Spam filtering on the client side is useful if you don't control the mail server (such as being dependent upon an ISP). But, in the school, filtering software should be on the server side and email with "offensive" content should be held there. A porn message stopped on the server is never seen, a porn message filtered by the Mail app on OS X is still viewable by young eyes. This tool has no practical value to the students.
I'm not going to argue about Universal Access. I know nothing about it.
Stability and performance are great things. What is odd about including this choice is that it was a feature also touted in Mac OS 9 and earlier as well as Windows 9.x. Yet, in neither sets of operating systems did stability exist. Though they lied to me before, I know their claims this time around are true. Oddly enough, OS 9 was good enough without stability.
In general I find the selling points marketing types focus upon as being a study in the latest buzz word or gee whiz technobabble. Very rarely is real innovation mentioned in them. The best example of this is that Apple touts the iTools incessently. Well, I don't have a digital camera, an iPod, or a video camera. Tell me once again why these applications matter to me and the millions more like me?
2) Most of this is going to be for the teachers that have an original iMac sitting in their classroom (or their house) that is still running MacOS 9.1 (or even 8.6) on it. No, this will not bring in new users directly, but an argument could be made "Well, if we buy new Macs, Apple might keep us with up-to-date operating system upgrades for free in the future."
Or maybe Apple is trying to both show how nice their new operating system is as well as show how slow the teacher's current hardware is. With one stone they convince people to transition to OS X and they convince people to buy new hardware (or push for it in their budget if it isn't a personal purchase)
Personally, I find this kind of thing (seeding the education market, or discounting products for it) distateful. Apple and Microsoft are for profit companies. Anything they do in the education market is with tainted motives. What school administrators need to ask themselves are what are those motives and what do they cost me(the school) and the students both now and in the future.
If everyone believes that education for our students is of vital importance, why do we do it so poorly and allow commercial entities to have such power? Read the post someone else made about Channel One. That is after my time at school, but it is a perfect example of the drug dealer giving away something for free (the TV, the OS) in order to hook you on a product for life (Pepsi, Apple Hardware). Why do we allow this? The school is the one place were children should be safe from overt advertising.
Ever since Jackson was rebuked and his decision to breakup Microsoft overturned, I've always had a sneaking suspician that Microsoft might be behind it.
Picture this: Microsoft is losing the case. They know they are in deep trouble. Their worst fear is that they get broken up. Their greatest hope is for a mistrial. But, if there is a mistrial, another judge might still rule for a breakup.
So, what they do, besides help get Bush elected into office, is buy Jackson. The cleverness of it is that they want him to rule against them, throw the book at them, and call them lots of nasty names while doing it and show himself in all ways to be biased against Microsoft.
The outcome, is just what we saw. Yes, Microsoft lost the case, but the Federal Judges are "afraid" of delivering the same verdict as Jackson, so they will come up with lesser remedies. Thus, Microsoft as a single company will survive.
Jackson's repeal above is just him trying to save face in his professional career.
Just a thought.
Is why they didn't offer a service matching Indie bands to your favorite "known" musician.
For a small fee, an Indie band should have been able to post their music to Napster (for the initial downloads, P2P afterwards) and list their music in a search database as being, "Genre: Soft Pop; Similar Artists: Sarah McLaughlin, Jewel"
Then people would do searches for Indie bands that are like Jewel, and they would get a list of bands that were like that.
You could even have a rating system were listeners then say, no, they aren't really Jewel-like, they're more Sting like.
That way people will be exposed to Indie music that is "like" their current muscial preferences.
Doing this would be huge. Good thing I have the whole idea patented.
I see some changing connotations/definitions going on here.
Microsoft is essentially equating Free Software to free beer.
By doing so they take the ethical right to free software out of the equation.
Then, they point at Open Source as say the only special about it is that the source code is viewable and that they have a community.
So, they come up with a way that they can share the Windows source with the community and then they say, "See, we are just the same as Open Source."
And, for the most part they will be.
However, what they will not be at that point is free software. And that is the true spirit behind the whole thing.
They are telling people people who want apples that apples are really oranges and that they can't give you oranges but they can give you tangerines, which are essentially the same but easier to peel. But, in the end, when you get that tangerine, you really don't have an apple afterall do you?
If you want to combine this discussion of free will and the writings of JRR Tolkien, read chapter 2 of the Silmarillion.
You'll see that it is a story about free will. Free will for the dwarves, free will for Aule. Parallels to the Bible as explanations of why God created us and gave us free will, as well as the free will choice of Abraham to "begat" Ishmael, to "begat" Islam, to "begat" future conflict between the Jewish and Islamic people. (I'm not trying to start any flame wars here about the Jewish and Islamic faiths, I'm trying to show how the choice of one man led to some pretty big things years later.)
Free will "begat" an awful lot of future strife in both the Silmarillion and the Bible-real life. But, that free will never altered God's perfect plans for his creation. Which is exactly what the opening sequence, called Ainulindale, of the Silmarillion is all about.
"...and often strife will arise between thine and mine; the children of my adoption and the children of my choice."
http://www.oreilly.com/frank/webdesign_0401.htm
If you read about TMDA you will see that it has a verification system. By responding to the verification request, customers will get through.
Word your verification request in such a way that it appears to the customer that you are doing them a favor. For instance: Thank you for contacting us for technical support. We receive a large volume of mail, and unfortunately, much of it is spam. In order to give more time for our support people to work on real problems we are asking you to respond to this message so that your request will be put in the support queue and not left in a holding bin with illegitimate mail.
Customers like this. What is more efficient for you in this case, and costs them 3 or 4 seconds (for the first contact, 0 for later contacts) will get their technical request, order, complaint, whaterver answered more quickly.
I'm continually amazed at the people who are beating their heads up against a very simple problem. The answer is not statistics, it is not heuristics, it is not AI, it is not procmail.
The answer is verification...aka whitelists. Check out TMDA, tmda.sourceforge.net. This program assumes you don't want mail from anybody whom you haven't explicitly allowed, or who has verified that they are a real person and not a spammer.
Verification is simple, and some people will point out that it could be defeated by a spammer. But, the economics of spam do not make it feasible for a spammer to attempt to defeat TMDA.
TMDA is similar to making your phone number private. You only get phone calls from people you have given your number to, and you never get telemarketers.
TMDA user since December 2001. Spam messages that tried to get in, 12,133, spam messages that got in 3, false positives, 0. Time I've spent tweaking and modifying the program since installation, 0 minutes.
Not only do they sell it, they sell it cheap. And they made improvements to it, like the LCD console version.
Anyway, I'm just funning yah. I see your point. But, I think the C128 failed because it didn't offer enough of a reason to move from the C64. This might have been because the feature set change wasn't great enough, or it might have been because the market wasn't ready for that feature set change.
Afterall, this was just before the time that Bill Gates though that a PC would never need more then 640k.
Hmmm... Ignorant of the C128's existance, but qualified to speak about it? The problem was it was 100% compatable with a C64. Venders openly stated they had no plans to develop C128 software because the C64 software covered the market. The C128 had a larger market share than Linux Desktops have now but the market was ignored because the less capable C64 software covered it.
I heard that Playstation 2 is completely compatible with Playstation 1. It will run all the Playstation 1 games.
I wonder why games are being developed for Playstation 2 at all. ;-)