I've already got Picasa up and running on Wine, but I never use it because it references files on the c: drive (shudder) - will that be the case with this thing - or will there be proper paths?
Wow. Scary. Employers in the US have no such rights to your former salary. That's why we consider it much more private information.
That's exactly what I'm talking about - you may have more right to privacy, but you are totally enslaved by it.
You find such a thing scary; I don't find it even remotely scary - because the system doesn't define this piece of information important enough. Its significance is only in your mind.
I think you'll find that the more the individual holds privacy dear, the more the government (and others) will want to get to the secret.
Fair enough, if you think that someone knowing the colour of your eyes is going to have a major effect on your life, then by all means keep it to yourself.
But look at it this way, would you consider it a wise investment to spend 10 million dollars to keep that information secret. Probably not.
You just don't care that much - why, because it's not important information. It's only worth something to Google because you keep it a secret, and when they get that useless piece of information that value is transferred to them and then they have the power.
But, if it was never a secret then they can never have the power.
Recalling the salary secret; if someone knows how much you are earning (by sneaking a peek at the employee files or whatever), they have power over you. But if company salaries are displayed in the kitchen next to the biscuits - no one has any power.
Free yourself, have your salary tatooed to your forehead.
I'm not aware of your local customs, but where I live when you leave a job your last employer must provide documentation (for tax purposes) that details your salary earned so far, from this it isn't all that difficult to discern whether you were lying or not in your application - if you care that much. At which point your new employer would be perfectly within his rights to cut your salary. (As I say, you might have a different system).
In an open system or a closed system, you will most likely get paid the same - playing the game will really only get you so far.
As for credit information vs buying of bestsellers - a lot of credit information is based on the meagre (and often wrong) information that the banks can scrounge about you. Personal finance advice sites will tell their readers techniques to improve their reported credit rating - the real credit rating remains the same, but because they pay a visa bill on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, their rating is perceived to be better. A bit of openness there might change that playing field and you with your (perfect I'm sure) credit rating would float to the top.
As to FBI agents with breast possession warrants - your problems are bigger than the porn police knowing your secrets. (Hint: police state).
Just curious, but what exactly are these all so precious secrets that need protecting.
Obviously, if you're living in Area 51 this doesn't apply. But for the vast majority of people what do we really have that is so important.
The big one is of course salary, I know a lot of people who are really secretive about this one. Why? Who cares - it's really only interesting if your raking it in - in which case it's probably published in some kind of company return - or your making the same as any other joe schmo and it's published in some crappy salary review (or close enough).
Second one, deepest emotions/thoughts. Either you've put the on the web through a blog or you've not told anyone - in which case until Google Brain comes out, that's where they're staying.
Third, opinions. Everyone thinks that their opinions are unique. Bad news folks they're not, you share them with millions of others - no one cares.
Fourth, shopping habits. So what if the local supermarket knows I buy bread, cheese and eggs. And if they use that information to sell me stuff I want - well all the better.
I'm sure there a loads more types of secret but I'm just at a loss to know what the big secrets that Google can possibly know that we all need to get upset about the erosion of our civil liberties.
Of course, if you are living in a police state and you risk death if the government figures out your real intentions, then this is obviously important. But what do you care, your living in a police state!
Oracle and Siebel will have common administrative services - of which the new company does not need two. I'm sure they won't have two CEOs, so shouldn't that propagate the whole way down the company.
Laying those people off - while bad for the individuals - makes the company stronger and more secure. And what's the external measure of strength/security - stock price.
2000 jobs out of 55000 is, say, about 1 in 30. I work with a group of about 30 people - and on average 1 person leaves every month. I don't see why anyone would be shocked at the appalling tragedy of that.
There was a/. article about two weeks ago about Novell listing apps to be ported or something like that and at the top was Quicken/Quickbooks, which I use and am well pissed off that I can't get it to work on Linux.
One reply suggested that GnuCash was a viable alternative to quicken. My problem with GnuCash (or really with Quickbooks) was that I couldn't export the accounts from Quickbooks into GnuCash. Well anyway, at the time of the Novell article, we had just hit our year end, so we had P&L and Balance sheets for everything.
So, perfect time to try GnuCash, just resetting everything off the Balance Sheet. Anyway, through this process I discovered that Quickbooks had 'lost' some of my previous VAT payments. Added them all up - £400 for me (don't worry I triple checked - no messing with the tax man). So GnuCash wasn't free for me - they actually paid me to use it. Cheers, GnuCash!
I miss the simple 'VAT Report' from QuickBooks - it's quite tricky in GnuCash. But if it was costing me £400 - I can handle the minor inconvenience.
I'm really looking forward to the 1.9.0 - hopefully, some more of the inconveniences will disappear and maybe the interface will be a little less GTK1.
...and IP lawyers argue that their clients are entitled to protection under the copyright laws - not whether that copyright law is right (meaning fair).
It is not valid for an opposing advocate to say 'you said this, this and this about copyright law - therefore you're client shouldn't be entitled to its protection'.
Or at least that's how the law works on my planet. (Morbo laughs at your puny laws!)
From personal experience I would suggest that Quickbooks being at the top is not actually a bias. I'm a big fan of Quickbooks as I have found it the most intuitive (no pun intended) solution for small business accounting - however:
I cannot get Quickbooks to install with Wine.
I cannot get Quickbooks to run with Crossover.
I cannot export from Quickbooks, so I can't switch to Gnucash (which is close enough for my taste).
I cannot use the online version of Quickbooks because it only supports IE on Windows.
My only Quickbooks options are dual-boot or of late Qemu (though I have yet to put it through its paces) - which is still Windows whether I like it or not.
I have been able to replace every single application on Windows with an equivalent or, more often, better on Linux, except for Quickbooks. It feels like Intuit's product strategy is 'If we ignore Linux, it will go away'.
I would suggest that Quickbooks is number one not because the application is more in demand, but because it is the most resistant to transfer, always sucking you back to Windows - when you don't want to go.
I installed Edubuntu 5.10 on a old laptop for my daughter - she's 6, so you don't get a more fresh view than that. After I set up some basic bits and pieces for her (make personalized google her home page etc), she was off and she's does most things herself - she even uses KTurtle.
Her brother (4) has also come onboard, and is often to be found playing with the Compris Educational Suite (granted she has to select it from the menu). They had a big fight one day over whose turn it was to play with 'the Penguin'.
The have also had some experience with Windows, but really the only interest there is Barbie.co.uk and Bob the Builder - and there is nothing OOTB to compare with Edubuntu's offering.
On a different note - I often find working with people who work with Windows that they have a kind of snowblindness towards problems with Windows, accepting them in the same way they accept that sometimes it rains. You will often hear that XYZ piece of hardware doesn't work with Windows - whereas the main reason not to switch to Linux, is that Linux doesn't work with XYZ.
People (technical and non-technical) working with Windows also are often blinkered into one way of thinking - a 'Where is the Start Button' mentality. Any superior desktop offering from Linux will not conquer this easily.
Doing bad things like not answering your phone, or setting fire to your servers is not a good idea.
Identifying and implementing best practise procedures and strategies, however, is. Establish (correct) procedures for doing things, take time to develop these procedures and ensure that they are followed every time.
e.g 'Procedure for adding new employee'... Take your time writing it and write it well. And always follow it.
1. If someone asks you to do something, you are legitimately busy creating best practise procedure. 2. Management cannot deny your need to operate under best practise conditions - especially if you are working for the govt. 3. You will need more people to manage this - and if your procedures are good they will be easy to take on.
You can do this to whatever extent you like i.e last 2 hours of the day is spent creating procedure documents, or you spend all day doing it.
OPEC does not have a monopoly of the supply of oil. OPEC is an economic grouping exploiting the free market to get the best price they can for their oil, there are plenty of other suppliers of oil. We may have to pay more for our oil - but the supply cannot be cut off by one country.
Military or national interests don't apply. Iraq, for example, is a member of OPEC, has been since the 1960s, but it was not in control of OPEC, and hence unable to exploit it to influence the global community's application of embargoes.
I can buy my oil from the Middle East, Venezuala, Russia, Britain, even the United States.
I can only get my TLD from ICANN.
The US's claims to be a supporter of free market economics seem to stop at the door of military and national interest.
Can't blame them for that - we're all the same; but what happens when someone else's military or national interest is threatened?
Does US control of ICANN actually constitute such a threat?
Yeah, I know ICANN is independent - and it's probably true that the US - like many other countries - is a society that guarantees that independence - but that always assumes that maintenance of the status quo.
Think 9/11, did you lose freedoms because of that event? Of course you did (understandably so). Would you be happy to take away the freedoms of others because of similar such events? I think you would.
I've looked at this for days now (since Saturday when it appeared in the Times), and the statics just don't add up. Maybe there are other factors that make tipping impossible, but taking this as an examination physics type question - the cow get's tipped.
The tipping force is assumed to be the same as the person's weight, which is given as 67kg - but kg are the SI Unit for mass not weight. So straight off we get 10 times the force from gravity @ 9.81m/s2 (ta very much Mr Newton).
The lines of action of the forces a screwy as well. The point of rotation is the cow's left feet. The weight of the cow acts downwards through the midpoint of the cow (the height of which is irrelevant) and the tipping force acts through the top of the cow.
So the question is, is:
1.45 * 67 * 9.81 > 0.31 * 2000
Working it all out and it appears that a 67kg person could easily tip a cow.
The final insult, comes from an agricultural colleague of mine, who points out that for a cow it has a mighty set of balls.
These results are purely theoretical and clear a massive experimental program must be undertaking to establish the veracity of this work.
A common module in enterprise applications is the 'produce word document' - for whatever use it is applied to.
Thing about this is, it's a bitch to produce a word document, what with OLE and the file formats and the pain and the death...
My guess is that a huge number of Word documents in the world today are not actually produced by Word at all, but by the API components of Word through automated batch processes.
With OpenDocument document format all these document will be produced by a much simpler process and won't require the Word API or consequent licensing. On top of that they can be processed after they are written.
I'm sure you're right about MS marginalization, but it might show up some flaws in their assumptions about market share.
The only reason I use IE is to do tax returns because my revenue service only supports IE. They say that FireFox support is coming soon - but that's been for 2 years now. I've often seen comments asking why we are so concerned about this, it's only a number - but it's not just a number, its the basis of many a (good/bad) design decision.
Everytime I open windows and type 'iexplore', a shiver runs down my spine. The sooner FireFox gets to 25% the better.
On another point, I think it is significant that the 11.5% that use FireFox, as opposed x% that use IE, actually choose to use FireFox, not just use it because it's there.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you're saying. But when you access the 'drives' in Picasa itself they will appear as c: not, say, '/var/myphotographs'.
It's just that touch beyond my annoyance tipping point.
I've already got Picasa up and running on Wine, but I never use it because it references files on the c: drive (shudder) - will that be the case with this thing - or will there be proper paths?
FYI Just to scare you away from ever working in the UK.
http://www.i-resign.com/uk/resignationkit/p45.asp
Check out box 7.
Aaaaaarrrggggghhhhhhh!!!!! Run for the hills boys, the british are coming, and they're armed with tea and P45s.
Wow. Scary. Employers in the US have no such rights to your former salary. That's why we consider it much more private information. That's exactly what I'm talking about - you may have more right to privacy, but you are totally enslaved by it. You find such a thing scary; I don't find it even remotely scary - because the system doesn't define this piece of information important enough. Its significance is only in your mind. I think you'll find that the more the individual holds privacy dear, the more the government (and others) will want to get to the secret.
Fair enough, if you think that someone knowing the colour of your eyes is going to have a major effect on your life, then by all means keep it to yourself.
But look at it this way, would you consider it a wise investment to spend 10 million dollars to keep that information secret. Probably not.
You just don't care that much - why, because it's not important information. It's only worth something to Google because you keep it a secret, and when they get that useless piece of information that value is transferred to them and then they have the power.
But, if it was never a secret then they can never have the power.
Recalling the salary secret; if someone knows how much you are earning (by sneaking a peek at the employee files or whatever), they have power over you. But if company salaries are displayed in the kitchen next to the biscuits - no one has any power.
Free yourself, have your salary tatooed to your forehead.
I'm not aware of your local customs, but where I live when you leave a job your last employer must provide documentation (for tax purposes) that details your salary earned so far, from this it isn't all that difficult to discern whether you were lying or not in your application - if you care that much. At which point your new employer would be perfectly within his rights to cut your salary. (As I say, you might have a different system).
In an open system or a closed system, you will most likely get paid the same - playing the game will really only get you so far.
As for credit information vs buying of bestsellers - a lot of credit information is based on the meagre (and often wrong) information that the banks can scrounge about you. Personal finance advice sites will tell their readers techniques to improve their reported credit rating - the real credit rating remains the same, but because they pay a visa bill on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, their rating is perceived to be better. A bit of openness there might change that playing field and you with your (perfect I'm sure) credit rating would float to the top.
As to FBI agents with breast possession warrants - your problems are bigger than the porn police knowing your secrets. (Hint: police state).
The real goal of these experiments: How women think.
With the dating and the lipstick and the slaps in the face, hoy-vn-fra-gn!
Just curious, but what exactly are these all so precious secrets that need protecting.
Obviously, if you're living in Area 51 this doesn't apply. But for the vast majority of people what do we really have that is so important.
The big one is of course salary, I know a lot of people who are really secretive about this one. Why? Who cares - it's really only interesting if your raking it in - in which case it's probably published in some kind of company return - or your making the same as any other joe schmo and it's published in some crappy salary review (or close enough).
Second one, deepest emotions/thoughts. Either you've put the on the web through a blog or you've not told anyone - in which case until Google Brain comes out, that's where they're staying.
Third, opinions. Everyone thinks that their opinions are unique. Bad news folks they're not, you share them with millions of others - no one cares.
Fourth, shopping habits. So what if the local supermarket knows I buy bread, cheese and eggs. And if they use that information to sell me stuff I want - well all the better.
I'm sure there a loads more types of secret but I'm just at a loss to know what the big secrets that Google can possibly know that we all need to get upset about the erosion of our civil liberties.
Of course, if you are living in a police state and you risk death if the government figures out your real intentions, then this is obviously important. But what do you care, your living in a police state!
There's absolutely nothing screwed up about that.
Oracle and Siebel will have common administrative services - of which the new company does not need two. I'm sure they won't have two CEOs, so shouldn't that propagate the whole way down the company.
Laying those people off - while bad for the individuals - makes the company stronger and more secure. And what's the external measure of strength/security - stock price.
2000 jobs out of 55000 is, say, about 1 in 30. I work with a group of about 30 people - and on average 1 person leaves every month. I don't see why anyone would be shocked at the appalling tragedy of that.
You need to take a perspective view on this.
There was a /. article about two weeks ago about Novell listing apps to be ported or something like that and at the top was Quicken/Quickbooks, which I use and am well pissed off that I can't get it to work on Linux.
One reply suggested that GnuCash was a viable alternative to quicken. My problem with GnuCash (or really with Quickbooks) was that I couldn't export the accounts from Quickbooks into GnuCash. Well anyway, at the time of the Novell article, we had just hit our year end, so we had P&L and Balance sheets for everything.
So, perfect time to try GnuCash, just resetting everything off the Balance Sheet. Anyway, through this process I discovered that Quickbooks had 'lost' some of my previous VAT payments. Added them all up - £400 for me (don't worry I triple checked - no messing with the tax man). So GnuCash wasn't free for me - they actually paid me to use it. Cheers, GnuCash!
I miss the simple 'VAT Report' from QuickBooks - it's quite tricky in GnuCash. But if it was costing me £400 - I can handle the minor inconvenience.
I'm really looking forward to the 1.9.0 - hopefully, some more of the inconveniences will disappear and maybe the interface will be a little less GTK1.
Godwin's Law.
In the original offending article none of the firms clients are mentioned.
However, she is cleary guilty of a fashion crime - and possibly for responsible for the extinction of the rare purple rinse arctic snow cheetah.
...and IP lawyers argue that their clients are entitled to protection under the copyright laws - not whether that copyright law is right (meaning fair).
It is not valid for an opposing advocate to say 'you said this, this and this about copyright law - therefore you're client shouldn't be entitled to its protection'.
Or at least that's how the law works on my planet. (Morbo laughs at your puny laws!)
If she worked for a Criminal Law firm should she believe that murder is acceptable?
It is actually a pure example of Ad Hominum to suggest that the argument is invalid if it comes from someone who doesn't believe it.
From personal experience I would suggest that Quickbooks being at the top is not actually a bias. I'm a big fan of Quickbooks as I have found it the most intuitive (no pun intended) solution for small business accounting - however:
My only Quickbooks options are dual-boot or of late Qemu (though I have yet to put it through its paces) - which is still Windows whether I like it or not.
I have been able to replace every single application on Windows with an equivalent or, more often, better on Linux, except for Quickbooks. It feels like Intuit's product strategy is 'If we ignore Linux, it will go away'.
I would suggest that Quickbooks is number one not because the application is more in demand, but because it is the most resistant to transfer, always sucking you back to Windows - when you don't want to go.
I can give you a 6-years olds perspective.
I installed Edubuntu 5.10 on a old laptop for my daughter - she's 6, so you don't get a more fresh view than that. After I set up some basic bits and pieces for her (make personalized google her home page etc), she was off and she's does most things herself - she even uses KTurtle.
Her brother (4) has also come onboard, and is often to be found playing with the Compris Educational Suite (granted she has to select it from the menu). They had a big fight one day over whose turn it was to play with 'the Penguin'.
The have also had some experience with Windows, but really the only interest there is Barbie.co.uk and Bob the Builder - and there is nothing OOTB to compare with Edubuntu's offering.
On a different note - I often find working with people who work with Windows that they have a kind of snowblindness towards problems with Windows, accepting them in the same way they accept that sometimes it rains. You will often hear that XYZ piece of hardware doesn't work with Windows - whereas the main reason not to switch to Linux, is that Linux doesn't work with XYZ.
People (technical and non-technical) working with Windows also are often blinkered into one way of thinking - a 'Where is the Start Button' mentality. Any superior desktop offering from Linux will not conquer this easily.
Doing bad things like not answering your phone, or setting fire to your servers is not a good idea.
Identifying and implementing best practise procedures and strategies, however, is. Establish (correct) procedures for doing things, take time to develop these procedures and ensure that they are followed every time.
e.g 'Procedure for adding new employee'...
Take your time writing it and write it well. And always follow it.
1. If someone asks you to do something, you are legitimately busy creating best practise procedure.
2. Management cannot deny your need to operate under best practise conditions - especially if you are working for the govt.
3. You will need more people to manage this - and if your procedures are good they will be easy to take on.
You can do this to whatever extent you like i.e last 2 hours of the day is spent creating procedure documents, or you spend all day doing it.
Is it not a concern of your users that you store their passwords in plaintext in your database?
I would have thought that was a fairly serious security risk.
OMG you've probably already compromised my bigjugs.com account! Shame on you.
Given a choice, .us or .com?
Oil is oil - but some TLDs are more equal than others.
OPEC does not have a monopoly of the supply of oil. OPEC is an economic grouping exploiting the free market to get the best price they can for their oil, there are plenty of other suppliers of oil. We may have to pay more for our oil - but the supply cannot be cut off by one country.
Military or national interests don't apply. Iraq, for example, is a member of OPEC, has been since the 1960s, but it was not in control of OPEC, and hence unable to exploit it to influence the global community's application of embargoes.
I can buy my oil from the Middle East, Venezuala, Russia, Britain, even the United States.
I can only get my TLD from ICANN.
The US's claims to be a supporter of free market economics seem to stop at the door of military and national interest.
Can't blame them for that - we're all the same; but what happens when someone else's military or national interest is threatened?
Does US control of ICANN actually constitute such a threat?
Yeah, I know ICANN is independent - and it's probably true that the US - like many other countries - is a society that guarantees that independence - but that always assumes that maintenance of the status quo.
Think 9/11, did you lose freedoms because of that event? Of course you did (understandably so). Would you be happy to take away the freedoms of others because of similar such events? I think you would.
Obviously it's not meant to be taken literally.
It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
I've looked at this for days now (since Saturday when it appeared in the Times), and the statics just don't add up. Maybe there are other factors that make tipping impossible, but taking this as an examination physics type question - the cow get's tipped.
The tipping force is assumed to be the same as the person's weight, which is given as 67kg - but kg are the SI Unit for mass not weight. So straight off we get 10 times the force from gravity @ 9.81m/s2 (ta very much Mr Newton).
The lines of action of the forces a screwy as well. The point of rotation is the cow's left feet. The weight of the cow acts downwards through the midpoint of the cow (the height of which is irrelevant) and the tipping force acts through the top of the cow.
So the question is, is:
1.45 * 67 * 9.81 > 0.31 * 2000
Working it all out and it appears that a 67kg person could easily tip a cow.
The final insult, comes from an agricultural colleague of mine, who points out that for a cow it has a mighty set of balls.
These results are purely theoretical and clear a massive experimental program must be undertaking to establish the veracity of this work.
A common module in enterprise applications is the 'produce word document' - for whatever use it is applied to. Thing about this is, it's a bitch to produce a word document, what with OLE and the file formats and the pain and the death... My guess is that a huge number of Word documents in the world today are not actually produced by Word at all, but by the API components of Word through automated batch processes. With OpenDocument document format all these document will be produced by a much simpler process and won't require the Word API or consequent licensing. On top of that they can be processed after they are written. I'm sure you're right about MS marginalization, but it might show up some flaws in their assumptions about market share.
The only reason I use IE is to do tax returns because my revenue service only supports IE. They say that FireFox support is coming soon - but that's been for 2 years now. I've often seen comments asking why we are so concerned about this, it's only a number - but it's not just a number, its the basis of many a (good/bad) design decision.
Everytime I open windows and type 'iexplore', a shiver runs down my spine. The sooner FireFox gets to 25% the better.
On another point, I think it is significant that the 11.5% that use FireFox, as opposed x% that use IE, actually choose to use FireFox, not just use it because it's there.