I had to send in my resume in word format after initially sending it in PDF format. Big deal. I saved as a.doc file and sent it in.
I agree.
PDF is a good format. However, I try to avoid formats that require additional software to view. I currently maintain my resume in HTML. It doesn't have PDF's guaranty of looking right. However, it can be read by anyone using default software.
I've never encountered anywhere that required Word. My current place of employment requests Word, RTF, HTML, or text. Acrobat Reader isn't installed on a lot of the workstations. It's only been the last couple of years that IT started installing it on workstations that deal with the public.
Throw in exchange 2003+, and let the students use outlook or webmail. Get the whole calendar thing together, and you can share them, etc.
I've only had to use Exchange in environments that required Outlook. I've used the web interface when I needed to access mail from the outside. A quick check of the inbox to see if anything new has come in is about all it's useful for. I understand that IMAP is available. It's been disabled in every installation I've had access to.
So my question is, how well does it interface with non-Microsoft products? Does the whole calendar thing work well with Thunderbird/Lightning? Or will students be forced to purchase Outlook to access their class schedule?
Thanks for the links. I'll have to look into them.
I've had some success in bundling drivers with the installation files. However, I've also hit a few snags. Wireless network and Video drivers are the biggest problem.
With network drivers, you'll often get different versions of the binary blob. The files will have the same name. You can't modify the INF because that voids the driver certificate. Windows OPK doesn't work with unsigned drivers.
Older Toshiba laptops give me the most problems when it comes to video. Some of them use modified ATI drivers for the video. However, they didn't modify the PCI ID. If the standard ATI driver is available, it gets loaded and video doesn't work correctly.
That would be Windows XP Pro. I generally have to hunt down network, video, sound, webcam, mouse, keyboard, and joystick drivers. Sometimes I need ACPI and chipset drivers as well. Some of my older installs also required hunting for a SATA hard drive controller driver.
I just noticed your message is modded funny. Please forgive me if you were joking.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
To each their own. However, I always preferred having the driver just be there when I need it. I always found it annoying, under Windows, to have to hunt down drivers. Especially when you have a hundred similar devices that have the same binary driver blob (same chipset) but require a hundred different INF files because every company that assembles a board insists on having a unique driver download. Then you can throw in driver signing that makes life even more difficult.
Do you know if there is any research on this? I've always wondered.
It's also worth pointing out that puberty was much later than now, often into the 20's due to unreliable nutrition.
That makes sense to me.
What has changed significantly is life expectancy as babies and 70+ due to medical advances. Survival rates when giving birth have also gone up sharply.
This only partly makes sense to me. I can see infant mortality rates having a negative effect on the average life span. A more meaningful number would be the average life span of people 10 years and older. However, woman dying from childbirth would certainly count.
Some of our biggest killers - cars and environmental cancers (i.e. smoking related lung cancer, liver issues from alcoholism, pollution) wouldn't have been an issue.
Much like being eaten by wild animals, lack of antibiotics, contaminated food and water, malnutrition, and being hit over the head by your neighbour are not as big an issue today, depending on where you live.
There are still large parts of Africa that suffer from the same problems as early hunter gathers. If they make it past 10, how long can they expect to live on average? What is the definition of "old age"?
I've had two netbooks so far, and on both, the Linux installations sucked.
I agree. I own an EeePC 2G Surf. It's the 512MB model, no web cam, and not upgradeable. Out of the box, it has a PDA-like interface. You can't add software to it. You can't upgrade the software. You can't add anything to the tabbed interface.
Hunting around the net, you find that you can add unofficial repositories. However, you have to be vary careful what you add. Asus modified parts of the system and several stock Xandros binaries are not compatible.
I installed Gentoo on a SD card as an alternative OS. It was quite a bit harder than the typical Gentoo install. The network devices are not supported in the standard kernel. The wired port has a driver in Portage. However, the wireless network does not. I found a modified ebuild for the WiFi in one of Gentoo's overlays. It wouldn't compile with the current (2.6.24) kernel. I had to hunt around the net for a patch to MadWiFi.
Kernel 2.6.26 is showing progress in EeePC support. It has an ACPI driver. A driver for the wireless recognizes the chip. However, it doesn't work. I'm currently running KDE 4.1 on it. It's a bit slow and has problems with video playback. I'm sure that's the limited processor capabilities and memory restraints. I use a stock EeePC at work with a barcode scanner and OpenOffice Calc for spot inventory checks. I wish they had included database support in the install.
As far as I'm concerned, open source means exactly that - the source is open.
So, if the only requirement of open source is that I can read the source, and Microsoft allows me to read the Windows source if I sign a NDA, does that make Windows Open Source?
Or this might be a little more valid. Microsoft offers to show Windows Kernel code under various Shared Source programs. Their Enterprise Source Licensing Program allows you to see it. However, that is all you can do with it. Is Microsoft Windows an Open Source Operating System?
You are assuming that he moved out of his parents house.
"disappointment of her not being a C programmer"
Mine finds it boring. She thinks the end-product is cool. However, she doesn't want to take the time to create the end-product. I'm not too concerned though. She currently has an active interest in physics and chemistry. She's also involved in Karate. I don't take it myself. However, I take her to the lessons and have never missed a tournament. She's very competitive.
As for a kids section, I'm not really sure what they mean. Comment filtering? News of interest to technically inclined kids? Personally, if I find an article that I think my kids will find interesting, I'll show them the article and discuss it with them. There is nothing better than debating a topic of interest with your child. Just don't be surprised when they beat you.
Socializing health care makes no sense as a trade off - we allow the government make life and death choices over us for a marginal increase of benefit to our pocket books.
I realize this might be a stupid question. If the government program isn't offering the level of support you desire, what is stopping you from supplementing it with private insurance?
As for the trade off, how about getting healthcare to people when they are younger (18 to 25) and their heath problems are less complicated. Maybe I'm unique. I had some minor health problems when I was younger. However, I couldn't afford to get it taken care of. I certainly couldn't afford health insurance. Now I'm older and the health problems, having been ignored when I was younger, are more complicated. I have insurance now. However, I really can't take the time off work to have surgery done, not to mention the pain involved, and insurance only covers a portion of it. If I'd been able to get it taken care of when I was younger, surgery wouldn't have been required.
The default response to "does open source software do X?" is "you don't really need to do X."
Yes, unlike proprietary software. The default response to "does proprietary software do X?" is to be ignored, have a salesman lie to you, or be told that it doesn't and you should use feature Z instead. Feature Z being completely unrelated to what you need.
This isn't an open source problem. It's a general problem with trying to find a pre-made solution to your unique problem.
In fact, the GNU project was started because a developer was fed up with a flaky printer. The developer implemented a solution and wanted to port it to a newer printer. He was told no.
Having the source code, and being able to distribute it, is part of a solution to the problem you describe.
As for using proprietary solutions, if a pre-built proprietary solution fits your needs and you are happy with the service, use it.
I understand that many car owners exclusively use their dealership for basic maintenance (oil changes and such). This is despite the fact that local shops are cheaper and doing it yourself is even cheaper. Proprietary software is much like the car dealership, with the addition of locks to prevent you from doing it yourself.
Re:Gimp, the love that dare not speak its acronym
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Though I understand that many of these have been proven Urban Legends by snopes.com, here are a few other products that had marketing problems in foreign lands: Chevy Nova Awards
Without the framework of religion, why is it "wrong" to kill someone?
Off hand, I'd say a small scale version of MAD. If it is not wrong for me to kill someone, then it is not wrong for someone to kill me. I feel that it is wrong for people to kill me. Therefore, it is in my self-interest not to kill others.
The Supreme Leader of Iran is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, who are themselves elected by the people.... Members of the assembly are elected from a government-screened list of candidates by direct public vote to eight year terms.
The govt. screening makes the Iranian democracy about as democratic as the Soviet democracy was.
I don't know much about Iranian politics. However, based on your quotes, it doesn't sound half bad. I've lost count of the number of messages in this topic complaining about the candidates lack of qualifications. Imagine if we were to elect a panel of experts that in turn elected a qualified president. Should that president fail, then we would vote for a different expert.
I kind of imagine the electoral college should work this way. However, it doesn't. Rather, you cast your vote for who you think should be president and that vote goes to some, generally unknown, person who says they will vote the same way you do.
I've also never really agreed with the idea of the popular vote. It turns the election of the head of the executive branch (President) into a popularity contest. Popularity today is based on who looks good in a 30-second television commercial.
I've talked with a number of people concerning the election. It's amazing how many men are voting for McCain because Palin is "Hot". Of course, most of these people were also Bush supporters. They seem enamoured by the idea of an American empire enabled by a strong military. They are hoping McCain continues Bush's military ideals.
North Kenwood suffered significant depopulation and attendant decline of the housing stock and retail base, bottoming out around 1990, although the area has been gradually redeveloping since then. South Kenwood fared this period rather better, escaping middle-class flight in the 1970s due to the efforts of the Kenwood Open House Committee to have the area zoned single-family homes only, halting a trend then underway to apartment and rooming-house conversion. In the real estate boom of the mid-2000s, houses sold for in excess of two million dollars, and long vacant lots were redeveloped with high-end luxury houses.
Big hint, you should not EVER be using PSTs for business email if you're in an exchange environment.
In some ways, I wish you were making policy where I work. Current policy is a 125MB quota. I regularly receive around 25MB a day, with a need to keep around 6 months of email immediately accessible. Exchange takes care of the 7-year backup requirement.
The policy was implemented as a cost-saving measure. No, I didn't design the policy, and I'm not sure of all the reasons. However, it saved on network storage and reduced bandwidth. At the end of the week, I dump everything to the local hard drive. The local computer has at least a 30GB hard drive. OS and applications only take up about 5GB. The rest is wasted. Keeping 6 months of email in a PST file, on the local hard-drive, saved money.
When hearing the radio play and reading the book you get a definite mental image of the kind of universe that Douglas Adams wanted you to see, and most of the movie contradicts that mental image.
Yes, but did you read the version printed on a towel?
For many, text adventure games are akin to a wheel made of stone, great in the day but with vulcanized rubber why would anyone use a stone wheel except in a museum...
Just a thought, update the interface a bit.
Combine the text adventure with voice recognition/synthesis. Put it on a cell phone. People love wandering around, talking into thin air. They might as well have a bit of fun doing it.
My oldest daughter recently discovered multiple-end fiction. She also enjoys reading the e-books I've been collecting from Tor. Combine the two. Make it look something like a book. You could even use "bookmarks" as save points.
These are just a couple of ideas. I'm sure there are others. The text adventure concept is sound. It's just that the technology was dropped as soon as graphics hit the scene. Television didn't replace books. Why should shiny graphics replace text adventures?
I've seen car commercials talk about how their car is environmentally safe because it uses diesel. I've always thought, WTF? It must be some scam. All too often, I've found myself behind a diesel that was belching out so much smoke that you couldn't see around it. I'd have to roll up all the windows and hold my breath until I was able to pass it.
Now I see that it's simply a poorly designed vehicle combined with a poorly refined fuel. That the newest diesels don't have this problem if you can find clean diesel. Now if only diesel wasn't the most expensive price at the pump. I suppose they have to pay for the new refining techniques.
I remember reading once that diesel engines were most efficient when run at their top RPM. Are there any vehicles that take advantage of this, by combining a diesel engine, generator, and electric motor? I believe that's how diesel locomotives work.
Please don't lump all of one party into one stereotype.
I thought that was the point of political parties. A party decides on a political platform and people who agree with it join the party.
To be fair, political platforms change over time. Members of the party might disagree with the new political platform. Those members can attempt to change the platform. However, if they don't succeed, they are left with the choice of supporting the platform or leaving the party.
In Gentoo, if I enable the official banding, I receive the following message:
You are enabling official branding. You may not redistribute this build to any users on your network or the internet. Doing so puts yourself into a legal problem with Mozilla Foundation. You can disable it by emerging mozilla-firefox-3.0.1 _with_ the bindist USE-flag
That tells me that it is illegal to distribute Firefox to anyone. The only method open to me for redistribution, even between computers I own, is to remove the branding and rename the product. It makes community builds of Firefox illegal.
I don't use Ubuntu, so I have not seen the EULA they have attached. If it's anything like Gentoo's installation message, I can understand people being upset.
Something to think about as well, it wasn't all that long ago that all of the major distributions dropped XFree86 in favour of XOrg for similar nonsense. It would be a shame to loose the Firefox brand. Firefox has been a very public part of OSS. However, if they won't allow redistribution...
If your inbox is somehow associated with direct customer support requests, you do have to respond when it arrives.
If your in-box is somehow associated with direct customer support requests, your job is reading e-mail. How is doing your job distracting you from doing your job?
Thus, you're "watching" the alert boxes and/or the client all the time, and then the usual "noise" e-mails from co-workers and of course, the boss, get more "attention" than they should.
Your customer support requests aren't separate from your regular e-mail?
Kind of the other way around, however, have you looked at: Insight Connector? It allows Outlook to connect to a IMAP/iCal/Groupware server while providing all of the services that Exchange offers.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to send in my resume in word format after initially sending it in PDF format. Big deal. I saved as a .doc file and sent it in.
I agree.
PDF is a good format. However, I try to avoid formats that require additional software to view. I currently maintain my resume in HTML. It doesn't have PDF's guaranty of looking right. However, it can be read by anyone using default software.
I've never encountered anywhere that required Word. My current place of employment requests Word, RTF, HTML, or text. Acrobat Reader isn't installed on a lot of the workstations. It's only been the last couple of years that IT started installing it on workstations that deal with the public.
Throw in exchange 2003+, and let the students use outlook or webmail. Get the whole calendar thing together, and you can share them, etc.
I've only had to use Exchange in environments that required Outlook. I've used the web interface when I needed to access mail from the outside. A quick check of the inbox to see if anything new has come in is about all it's useful for. I understand that IMAP is available. It's been disabled in every installation I've had access to.
So my question is, how well does it interface with non-Microsoft products? Does the whole calendar thing work well with Thunderbird/Lightning? Or will students be forced to purchase Outlook to access their class schedule?
Thanks for the links. I'll have to look into them.
I've had some success in bundling drivers with the installation files. However, I've also hit a few snags. Wireless network and Video drivers are the biggest problem.
With network drivers, you'll often get different versions of the binary blob. The files will have the same name. You can't modify the INF because that voids the driver certificate. Windows OPK doesn't work with unsigned drivers.
Older Toshiba laptops give me the most problems when it comes to video. Some of them use modified ATI drivers for the video. However, they didn't modify the PCI ID. If the standard ATI driver is available, it gets loaded and video doesn't work correctly.
Fun stuff. Thanks again for the links.
When's the last version of Windows you used?
That would be Windows XP Pro. I generally have to hunt down network, video, sound, webcam, mouse, keyboard, and joystick drivers. Sometimes I need ACPI and chipset drivers as well. Some of my older installs also required hunting for a SATA hard drive controller driver.
I just noticed your message is modded funny. Please forgive me if you were joking.
To each their own. However, I always preferred having the driver just be there when I need it. I always found it annoying, under Windows, to have to hunt down drivers. Especially when you have a hundred similar devices that have the same binary driver blob (same chipset) but require a hundred different INF files because every company that assembles a board insists on having a unique driver download. Then you can throw in driver signing that makes life even more difficult.
Linux drivers are much easier to deal with.
Do you know if there is any research on this? I've always wondered.
It's also worth pointing out that puberty was much later than now, often into the 20's due to unreliable nutrition.
That makes sense to me.
What has changed significantly is life expectancy as babies and 70+ due to medical advances. Survival rates when giving birth have also gone up sharply.
This only partly makes sense to me. I can see infant mortality rates having a negative effect on the average life span. A more meaningful number would be the average life span of people 10 years and older. However, woman dying from childbirth would certainly count.
Some of our biggest killers - cars and environmental cancers (i.e. smoking related lung cancer, liver issues from alcoholism, pollution) wouldn't have been an issue.
Much like being eaten by wild animals, lack of antibiotics, contaminated food and water, malnutrition, and being hit over the head by your neighbour are not as big an issue today, depending on where you live.
There are still large parts of Africa that suffer from the same problems as early hunter gathers. If they make it past 10, how long can they expect to live on average? What is the definition of "old age"?
I've had two netbooks so far, and on both, the Linux installations sucked.
I agree. I own an EeePC 2G Surf. It's the 512MB model, no web cam, and not upgradeable. Out of the box, it has a PDA-like interface. You can't add software to it. You can't upgrade the software. You can't add anything to the tabbed interface.
Hunting around the net, you find that you can add unofficial repositories. However, you have to be vary careful what you add. Asus modified parts of the system and several stock Xandros binaries are not compatible.
I installed Gentoo on a SD card as an alternative OS. It was quite a bit harder than the typical Gentoo install. The network devices are not supported in the standard kernel. The wired port has a driver in Portage. However, the wireless network does not. I found a modified ebuild for the WiFi in one of Gentoo's overlays. It wouldn't compile with the current (2.6.24) kernel. I had to hunt around the net for a patch to MadWiFi.
Kernel 2.6.26 is showing progress in EeePC support. It has an ACPI driver. A driver for the wireless recognizes the chip. However, it doesn't work. I'm currently running KDE 4.1 on it. It's a bit slow and has problems with video playback. I'm sure that's the limited processor capabilities and memory restraints. I use a stock EeePC at work with a barcode scanner and OpenOffice Calc for spot inventory checks. I wish they had included database support in the install.
As far as I'm concerned, open source means exactly that - the source is open.
So, if the only requirement of open source is that I can read the source, and Microsoft allows me to read the Windows source if I sign a NDA, does that make Windows Open Source?
Or this might be a little more valid. Microsoft offers to show Windows Kernel code under various Shared Source programs. Their Enterprise Source Licensing Program allows you to see it. However, that is all you can do with it. Is Microsoft Windows an Open Source Operating System?
I think you are confusing open with viewable.
"and move back to your parents house"
You are assuming that he moved out of his parents house.
"disappointment of her not being a C programmer"
Mine finds it boring. She thinks the end-product is cool. However, she doesn't want to take the time to create the end-product. I'm not too concerned though. She currently has an active interest in physics and chemistry. She's also involved in Karate. I don't take it myself. However, I take her to the lessons and have never missed a tournament. She's very competitive.
As for a kids section, I'm not really sure what they mean. Comment filtering? News of interest to technically inclined kids? Personally, if I find an article that I think my kids will find interesting, I'll show them the article and discuss it with them. There is nothing better than debating a topic of interest with your child. Just don't be surprised when they beat you.
Socializing health care makes no sense as a trade off - we allow the government make life and death choices over us for a marginal increase of benefit to our pocket books.
I realize this might be a stupid question. If the government program isn't offering the level of support you desire, what is stopping you from supplementing it with private insurance?
As for the trade off, how about getting healthcare to people when they are younger (18 to 25) and their heath problems are less complicated. Maybe I'm unique. I had some minor health problems when I was younger. However, I couldn't afford to get it taken care of. I certainly couldn't afford health insurance. Now I'm older and the health problems, having been ignored when I was younger, are more complicated. I have insurance now. However, I really can't take the time off work to have surgery done, not to mention the pain involved, and insurance only covers a portion of it. If I'd been able to get it taken care of when I was younger, surgery wouldn't have been required.
The default response to "does open source software do X?" is "you don't really need to do X."
Yes, unlike proprietary software. The default response to "does proprietary software do X?" is to be ignored, have a salesman lie to you, or be told that it doesn't and you should use feature Z instead. Feature Z being completely unrelated to what you need.
This isn't an open source problem. It's a general problem with trying to find a pre-made solution to your unique problem.
In fact, the GNU project was started because a developer was fed up with a flaky printer. The developer implemented a solution and wanted to port it to a newer printer. He was told no.
Having the source code, and being able to distribute it, is part of a solution to the problem you describe.
As for using proprietary solutions, if a pre-built proprietary solution fits your needs and you are happy with the service, use it.
I understand that many car owners exclusively use their dealership for basic maintenance (oil changes and such). This is despite the fact that local shops are cheaper and doing it yourself is even cheaper. Proprietary software is much like the car dealership, with the addition of locks to prevent you from doing it yourself.
Though I understand that many of these have been proven Urban Legends by snopes.com, here are a few other products that had marketing problems in foreign lands: Chevy Nova Awards
Without the framework of religion, why is it "wrong" to kill someone?
Off hand, I'd say a small scale version of MAD. If it is not wrong for me to kill someone, then it is not wrong for someone to kill me. I feel that it is wrong for people to kill me. Therefore, it is in my self-interest not to kill others.
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
LISP is poetry. But then, I suppose that art is in the eye of the beholder.
The Supreme Leader of Iran is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, who are themselves elected by the people. ... Members of the assembly are elected from a government-screened list of candidates by direct public vote to eight year terms.
The govt. screening makes the Iranian democracy about as democratic as the Soviet democracy was.
I don't know much about Iranian politics. However, based on your quotes, it doesn't sound half bad. I've lost count of the number of messages in this topic complaining about the candidates lack of qualifications. Imagine if we were to elect a panel of experts that in turn elected a qualified president. Should that president fail, then we would vote for a different expert.
I kind of imagine the electoral college should work this way. However, it doesn't. Rather, you cast your vote for who you think should be president and that vote goes to some, generally unknown, person who says they will vote the same way you do.
I've also never really agreed with the idea of the popular vote. It turns the election of the head of the executive branch (President) into a popularity contest. Popularity today is based on who looks good in a 30-second television commercial.
I've talked with a number of people concerning the election. It's amazing how many men are voting for McCain because Palin is "Hot". Of course, most of these people were also Bush supporters. They seem enamoured by the idea of an American empire enabled by a strong military. They are hoping McCain continues Bush's military ideals.
It's tiring to argue with these people.
North Kenwood suffered significant depopulation and attendant decline of the housing stock and retail base, bottoming out around 1990, although the area has been gradually redeveloping since then. South Kenwood fared this period rather better, escaping middle-class flight in the 1970s due to the efforts of the Kenwood Open House Committee to have the area zoned single-family homes only, halting a trend then underway to apartment and rooming-house conversion. In the real estate boom of the mid-2000s, houses sold for in excess of two million dollars, and long vacant lots were redeveloped with high-end luxury houses.
So is he from South or North Kenwood?
Big hint, you should not EVER be using PSTs for business email if you're in an exchange environment.
In some ways, I wish you were making policy where I work. Current policy is a 125MB quota. I regularly receive around 25MB a day, with a need to keep around 6 months of email immediately accessible. Exchange takes care of the 7-year backup requirement.
The policy was implemented as a cost-saving measure. No, I didn't design the policy, and I'm not sure of all the reasons. However, it saved on network storage and reduced bandwidth. At the end of the week, I dump everything to the local hard drive. The local computer has at least a 30GB hard drive. OS and applications only take up about 5GB. The rest is wasted. Keeping 6 months of email in a PST file, on the local hard-drive, saved money.
When hearing the radio play and reading the book you get a definite mental image of the kind of universe that Douglas Adams wanted you to see, and most of the movie contradicts that mental image.
Yes, but did you read the version printed on a towel?
For many, text adventure games are akin to a wheel made of stone, great in the day but with vulcanized rubber why would anyone use a stone wheel except in a museum...
Just a thought, update the interface a bit.
Combine the text adventure with voice recognition/synthesis. Put it on a cell phone. People love wandering around, talking into thin air. They might as well have a bit of fun doing it.
My oldest daughter recently discovered multiple-end fiction. She also enjoys reading the e-books I've been collecting from Tor. Combine the two. Make it look something like a book. You could even use "bookmarks" as save points.
These are just a couple of ideas. I'm sure there are others. The text adventure concept is sound. It's just that the technology was dropped as soon as graphics hit the scene. Television didn't replace books. Why should shiny graphics replace text adventures?
I've seen car commercials talk about how their car is environmentally safe because it uses diesel. I've always thought, WTF? It must be some scam. All too often, I've found myself behind a diesel that was belching out so much smoke that you couldn't see around it. I'd have to roll up all the windows and hold my breath until I was able to pass it.
Now I see that it's simply a poorly designed vehicle combined with a poorly refined fuel. That the newest diesels don't have this problem if you can find clean diesel. Now if only diesel wasn't the most expensive price at the pump. I suppose they have to pay for the new refining techniques.
I remember reading once that diesel engines were most efficient when run at their top RPM. Are there any vehicles that take advantage of this, by combining a diesel engine, generator, and electric motor? I believe that's how diesel locomotives work.
Please don't lump all of one party into one stereotype.
I thought that was the point of political parties. A party decides on a political platform and people who agree with it join the party.
To be fair, political platforms change over time. Members of the party might disagree with the new political platform. Those members can attempt to change the platform. However, if they don't succeed, they are left with the choice of supporting the platform or leaving the party.
In Gentoo, if I enable the official banding, I receive the following message:
You are enabling official branding. You may not redistribute this build to any users on your network or the internet. Doing so puts yourself into a legal problem with Mozilla Foundation. You can disable it by emerging mozilla-firefox-3.0.1 _with_ the bindist USE-flag
That tells me that it is illegal to distribute Firefox to anyone. The only method open to me for redistribution, even between computers I own, is to remove the branding and rename the product. It makes community builds of Firefox illegal.
I don't use Ubuntu, so I have not seen the EULA they have attached. If it's anything like Gentoo's installation message, I can understand people being upset.
Something to think about as well, it wasn't all that long ago that all of the major distributions dropped XFree86 in favour of XOrg for similar nonsense. It would be a shame to loose the Firefox brand. Firefox has been a very public part of OSS. However, if they won't allow redistribution...
If your inbox is somehow associated with direct customer support requests, you do have to respond when it arrives.
If your in-box is somehow associated with direct customer support requests, your job is reading e-mail. How is doing your job distracting you from doing your job?
Thus, you're "watching" the alert boxes and/or the client all the time, and then the usual "noise" e-mails from co-workers and of course, the boss, get more "attention" than they should.
Your customer support requests aren't separate from your regular e-mail?
Kind of the other way around, however, have you looked at: Insight Connector? It allows Outlook to connect to a IMAP/iCal/Groupware server while providing all of the services that Exchange offers.