Nothing sinsister about it, I'm afraid. The cloud is used because it does not matter how the internet works, only that you put packets in one place with the right address, and they come out at that address. How they got there, we neither know or care. Hence the cloud, not because there is mystery, but because maybe it's fiber, maybe copper, maybe SDSL, or Frame Relay, maybe it's satellite, maybe it goes via Hamburg, maybe via London, we don't care because it doeesn't matter.
It's a funny thing, I always used to assume that I'd be an Elvis man, not a Beatles man, you know, the same way that I'm a Kirk man, not a Picard man, and so on. There are some questions that you are on one side, not the other.
And then, thanks to my ipod, I tried listening to Elvis properly, and found to my surprise that I didn't like him that much.
So, logically, I must like the Beatles... and when I listened to them properly, it turns out I do!
One of the interesting things about listening to them properly, is that your first thought is "this sounds so modern" and then your second thought is "ah, because everyone in the world has ripped them off!"
My company is in the process of getting a proper helpdesk tracking system with all the bells and whistles in place, but while we are doing that we needed something quick-n-dirty to tide us over until the real system is in place.
Basically, a bit of thought showed that the absolute basics we needed were not that fancy. A way to add a ticket. A way to see that there were new tickets. A way to mark yourself as dealing with a ticket. A way for the manager to see all the tickets.
So I knocked something together in PHP. Very simple, I have a page where you fill in a form to add a new ticket to a MySQL database table, then a bunch of pages that query the database and print out various views ("my open tickets" "all closed tickets" "unassigned tickets"). I've not used PHP before but it's not too hard to pick up and because you can rapidly change stuff it's easy to start small and add features.
There's really no security in there because we don't need it, so you just say who you are the first time you visit the system and it drops a cookie with your name in it.
There are all sorts of tricks you can do to get something like this looking fancier than it is. For example, the users wanted a way to notify a user that you had taken over her ticket. Rather than add a "mail sending" routine, for example, I have one of the pages generate a link that says "click here to notify of an escalation" where the here is a long mailto: with the user's address and subject line defined.
Once this worked, I added a seperate perl script to the mix that looks in a helpdesk mailbox every 5 minutes, opens any mail it finds there, and copies it into the database. Lots of fun there writing routines to strip out all the insane HTML that Outlook puts in even the simplest of messages.
All in all, it's crude and buggy (the way I handle due dates is horrific!) but about 1000% better than not having anything.
Is this a valid solution for the submitter? Maybe, maybe not. I reckon though that you could get something working in a couple of days, and use that while you're finding something better.
Baron Fantastika won't be pleased... That bastard Tesla has already trademarked "Electronullifier" so he was hoping to call his ultimate weapon the "Atomonullifier"
This is your lucky day, my friend Bob has just released a new distro that has a UI exactly the same as OSX... oh excuse me, the phone's ringing.
Hey, Bob, just posting about you on Slashdot. Uh-huh. Sorry Bob, you'll have to speak up. What? Listen, what's all that noise? Lawyers? Why would lawyers sound like a thousand undead wolverines with machine guns? Oh, Apple Lawyers. But what's that crackling sound? Really? Yeah, put him on. Hi Steve, loved your last keynote. Bob tells me you can shoot lighting bolts from your eyes now that you've upgraded your brain to the latest Beta of Tiger. Heh, yeah, I'd like to see Steve Balmer copy that! Well, I'd better let you get back, Bob isn't going to disembowel himself, is he? What's that? Oh, he is going to disembowel himself...Reality Distortion Field, yes, that must come in handy.
Yup, it's practically an industry standard to act as though the exchange rate was 1:1 for UK and US.
Have a go yourself - although you can't buy something from a different iTunes Store to the one where your credit card lives, you can browse any of the stores just by picking it from a drop-down on the front page.
Yes, I was tempted too, but I fear that if I reference the Four Yorkshiremen sketch then some idiot will comes along and say "I love Monty Python".
And then I'd have to go and eat David Frost's liver because it's his fault that almost none of "At Last the 1948 Show" still exists, and you just know it's not going to taste very nice.
I just installed launchy from http://www.launchy.net/ today. It's open source, about 3Mb, you press ALT+Space (or whatever you choose) and up pops a dialog. Type the name of a shortcut on your start menu and it runs it. Got a calculator, a way to google something or look it up in wikipedia or whatever, a calculator, skin support, plugin support.
It seems to work well enough so far, I'm not so much recommending it (although I think you should check it out before you bother to RTFA above) as pointing out another alternative.
There's a sort of feature like this in Vista, by the way, in that there is a kind of hybrid search/run dialog on the start menu.
Not that I'm advising you upgrade to Vista, of course. Hell, I'm an Exchange admin who *has* to work in Windows 24/7 because I spend my entire life in Outlook and MMC - and I only managed 3 days with Vista before running sceaming back to XP. I know people say Vista is just "XP with eye candy" but they're wrong - it's "XP with eye candy and half a dozen things broken". One of which is MMC.
That's right, Microsoft, you just made it as hard for me to switch to Vista as it is to switch to Ubuntu.
Or, in other words, you just made it as *easy* for me to switch to Ubuntu as it is to switch to Vista.
A copy of Britney's Greatest Hits (as a random example) on the US itunes store is $8.91. On the UK iTunes store it is $15.75 (i.e. £7.99) On the Canadian store, $8.47 New Zealand, $12.61 etc. etc. etc.
On the Japanese store, by the way, they don't sell it at all. Guess they saw the video for "Hit me Baby" and figured "Like the schoolgirl outfit, but needs more tentacles. Or cowbell."
One aspect no-one has commented on, I'd have assumed that the Security Service would be closely monitoring the Number 10 ISP etc. to look for hostile intrusions... Why didn't they catch this?
This is of course not a meaningful question. As I belive Cory Doctorow once pointed out, the only way you can build a DRM system that is able to accurately determine whether a copy is fair use or copyright violation is to embed in it an AI simulation of the Supreme Court of the USA.
And by the time that's possible, we'll have dismantled the MPAA, along with all the other non-geek population of the earth, in order to make more computonium. It'll be sad, but I can't imagine we'll pay much attention to our emotion subroutines.
Well, my BB is a constant surprise to me. The push e-mail just works (even better when I compare it to the Windows Mobile PDAs I see at work, where even POP is hard to configure), and the PIM stuff is the best I've ever used, not because the UI is the best (although it's OK) but necause it synce the PIM over the air as well; put an appointment into Outlook and a few seconds later it's on my BB without me having to plug it in. iPhone doesn't do that...
In the end it turns out to do everything I ever did with my various PDAs. I miss having the camera from my last PDA (which was very very crap, but nice to have), but on the other hand it works as a 3G USB modem for my laptop, which is more practically useful. Some of this functionality, particularly games and ebook reading I get thru third party apps and if Apple really are not going to release an SDK then they're crazy.
So, to summarise: iPhone has a superb, delicious UI, an ipod inside it, plays video, rich email, wifi, camera and a full browser BB has push PIM apps, 3G Modem support, decent 3rd party apps (not as much as a smartphone, but more than iPhone), and can open Office attachments
Would I flip... well, the iPhone is very, very beautiful, but I'd lose a lot of functionality if I went to my BB. It's kinda like "Do you want to go out with a supermodel, or an attractive woman who is also a gourmet cook". You'd be sorely tempted by the supermodel, but if you're honest, the attractive cook is the optimal choice.
Sometimes that 5 minutes you spend with a fan is worth a lifetime of them wanting your products Couldn't agree more; in fact, it goes further. When artists I trust - largely because they have used the power of the internet to reach out - recommend something else, even if it doesn't sound like my sort of thing, I'll try it out (and almost always discover something I love).
Cory Doctorow once wrote something along the lines of "If your friend had a new record out, you'd go and buy it, wouldn't you? So if artists establish a realtionship with fans that is like a friendship...."
On the other hand, I can't actually remember the last time I punched a number into my cell phone. Everyone I want to call is in my PIM and synced to my cell.
Oh wait, I remember now, I was calling a cab from a friends place and punched in the number from a card on their noticeboard. Yes. This was about a month and a half ago, though.
"Philadelphia police recently captured a serial killer with the help of a combination of rape and murder. Police raped 50 different sudpect and murdered the families of 12 of them, and eventually were able to identify the murderer. Once caught, he confessed to every other unsolved murder on their books. Without these methods this killer would probably be stalking the streets of Philadelphia today. With results like that, is there really a good basis for argument against these techniques?"
Have a read of ESR's paper on this, it's very clever bit of detective work.
For those who haven't: RAM prices follow Moores Law. The ammount of RAM in the average machine also follows this, because whenever you buy a new machine you tend to spend roughly the same money. You can plot a graph and watch the average RAM go up in line with Moores Law. Even if you don't want to do this you have to, because software vendors assume that you'll have an average spec machine. Extrapolate along this graph and you see that by 2008 the average machine is going to want more than 4Gb RAM. More than 4Gb RAM means you need a 64Bit machine running a 64 bit OS. Apple and GNU/Linux already have very solid 64bit versions of their current flagship OSes all ready to go. Microsoft don't.... Profit?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, I am so doing that on my next set of network diagrams.
Man, I've got mod points but if I mod you up my original goes and it all get confusing. Will you take a rain check?
Nothing sinsister about it, I'm afraid. The cloud is used because it does not matter how the internet works, only that you put packets in one place with the right address, and they come out at that address. How they got there, we neither know or care. Hence the cloud, not because there is mystery, but because maybe it's fiber, maybe copper, maybe SDSL, or Frame Relay, maybe it's satellite, maybe it goes via Hamburg, maybe via London, we don't care because it doeesn't matter.
It's a funny thing, I always used to assume that I'd be an Elvis man, not a Beatles man, you know, the same way that I'm a Kirk man, not a Picard man, and so on. There are some questions that you are on one side, not the other.
And then, thanks to my ipod, I tried listening to Elvis properly, and found to my surprise that I didn't like him that much.
So, logically, I must like the Beatles... and when I listened to them properly, it turns out I do!
One of the interesting things about listening to them properly, is that your first thought is "this sounds so modern" and then your second thought is "ah, because everyone in the world has ripped them off!"
My company is in the process of getting a proper helpdesk tracking system with all the bells and whistles in place, but while we are doing that we needed something quick-n-dirty to tide us over until the real system is in place.
Basically, a bit of thought showed that the absolute basics we needed were not that fancy. A way to add a ticket. A way to see that there were new tickets. A way to mark yourself as dealing with a ticket. A way for the manager to see all the tickets.
So I knocked something together in PHP. Very simple, I have a page where you fill in a form to add a new ticket to a MySQL database table, then a bunch of pages that query the database and print out various views ("my open tickets" "all closed tickets" "unassigned tickets"). I've not used PHP before but it's not too hard to pick up and because you can rapidly change stuff it's easy to start small and add features.
There's really no security in there because we don't need it, so you just say who you are the first time you visit the system and it drops a cookie with your name in it.
There are all sorts of tricks you can do to get something like this looking fancier than it is. For example, the users wanted a way to notify a user that you had taken over her ticket. Rather than add a "mail sending" routine, for example, I have one of the pages generate a link that says "click here to notify of an escalation" where the here is a long mailto: with the user's address and subject line defined.
Once this worked, I added a seperate perl script to the mix that looks in a helpdesk mailbox every 5 minutes, opens any mail it finds there, and copies it into the database. Lots of fun there writing routines to strip out all the insane HTML that Outlook puts in even the simplest of messages.
All in all, it's crude and buggy (the way I handle due dates is horrific!) but about 1000% better than not having anything.
Is this a valid solution for the submitter? Maybe, maybe not. I reckon though that you could get something working in a couple of days, and use that while you're finding something better.
Baron Fantastika won't be pleased... That bastard Tesla has already trademarked "Electronullifier" so he was hoping to call his ultimate weapon the "Atomonullifier"
Of course, but who cares? I want to say "Activate the Atomic Circuits" to my henchmen, so that means we need Atomic circuits.
This is your lucky day, my friend Bob has just released a new distro that has a UI exactly the same as OSX... oh excuse me, the phone's ringing.
Hey, Bob, just posting about you on Slashdot. Uh-huh. Sorry Bob, you'll have to speak up. What? Listen, what's all that noise? Lawyers? Why would lawyers sound like a thousand undead wolverines with machine guns? Oh, Apple Lawyers. But what's that crackling sound? Really? Yeah, put him on. Hi Steve, loved your last keynote. Bob tells me you can shoot lighting bolts from your eyes now that you've upgraded your brain to the latest Beta of Tiger. Heh, yeah, I'd like to see Steve Balmer copy that! Well, I'd better let you get back, Bob isn't going to disembowel himself, is he? What's that? Oh, he is going to disembowel himself...Reality Distortion Field, yes, that must come in handy.
Yup, it's practically an industry standard to act as though the exchange rate was 1:1 for UK and US.
Have a go yourself - although you can't buy something from a different iTunes Store to the one where your credit card lives, you can browse any of the stores just by picking it from a drop-down on the front page.
Yes, I was tempted too, but I fear that if I reference the Four Yorkshiremen sketch then some idiot will comes along and say "I love Monty Python".
And then I'd have to go and eat David Frost's liver because it's his fault that almost none of "At Last the 1948 Show" still exists, and you just know it's not going to taste very nice.
Long time ago I read on a music blog how the writer had found a record in a second hand store entitled "Beethoven's greatest hits".
It was a seven inch single.
You know, I looked that up once, and a nice Chianti is just the right wine to serve with liver....
I just installed launchy from http://www.launchy.net/ today. It's open source, about 3Mb, you press ALT+Space (or whatever you choose) and up pops a dialog. Type the name of a shortcut on your start menu and it runs it. Got a calculator, a way to google something or look it up in wikipedia or whatever, a calculator, skin support, plugin support.
It seems to work well enough so far, I'm not so much recommending it (although I think you should check it out before you bother to RTFA above) as pointing out another alternative.
There's a sort of feature like this in Vista, by the way, in that there is a kind of hybrid search/run dialog on the start menu.
Not that I'm advising you upgrade to Vista, of course. Hell, I'm an Exchange admin who *has* to work in Windows 24/7 because I spend my entire life in Outlook and MMC - and I only managed 3 days with Vista before running sceaming back to XP. I know people say Vista is just "XP with eye candy" but they're wrong - it's "XP with eye candy and half a dozen things broken". One of which is MMC.
That's right, Microsoft, you just made it as hard for me to switch to Vista as it is to switch to Ubuntu.
Or, in other words, you just made it as *easy* for me to switch to Ubuntu as it is to switch to Vista.
And the XP end-of-life is Feb 2008...
A copy of Britney's Greatest Hits (as a random example) on the US itunes store is $8.91.
On the UK iTunes store it is $15.75 (i.e. £7.99)
On the Canadian store, $8.47
New Zealand, $12.61
etc. etc. etc.
On the Japanese store, by the way, they don't sell it at all. Guess they saw the video for "Hit me Baby" and figured "Like the schoolgirl outfit, but needs more tentacles. Or cowbell."
Weaklings! I give my users a bucket of sand, and if they haven't build a 486 laptop from it by the end of the day, we kill them and eat their livers.
One aspect no-one has commented on, I'd have assumed that the Security Service would be closely monitoring the Number 10 ISP etc. to look for hostile intrusions... Why didn't they catch this?
This is of course not a meaningful question. As I belive Cory Doctorow once pointed out, the only way you can build a DRM system that is able to accurately determine whether a copy is fair use or copyright violation is to embed in it an AI simulation of the Supreme Court of the USA.
And by the time that's possible, we'll have dismantled the MPAA, along with all the other non-geek population of the earth, in order to make more computonium. It'll be sad, but I can't imagine we'll pay much attention to our emotion subroutines.
Well, my BB is a constant surprise to me. The push e-mail just works (even better when I compare it to the Windows Mobile PDAs I see at work, where even POP is hard to configure), and the PIM stuff is the best I've ever used, not because the UI is the best (although it's OK) but necause it synce the PIM over the air as well; put an appointment into Outlook and a few seconds later it's on my BB without me having to plug it in. iPhone doesn't do that...
In the end it turns out to do everything I ever did with my various PDAs. I miss having the camera from my last PDA (which was very very crap, but nice to have), but on the other hand it works as a 3G USB modem for my laptop, which is more practically useful. Some of this functionality, particularly games and ebook reading I get thru third party apps and if Apple really are not going to release an SDK then they're crazy.
So, to summarise:
iPhone has a superb, delicious UI, an ipod inside it, plays video, rich email, wifi, camera and a full browser
BB has push PIM apps, 3G Modem support, decent 3rd party apps (not as much as a smartphone, but more than iPhone), and can open Office attachments
Would I flip... well, the iPhone is very, very beautiful, but I'd lose a lot of functionality if I went to my BB. It's kinda like "Do you want to go out with a supermodel, or an attractive woman who is also a gourmet cook". You'd be sorely tempted by the supermodel, but if you're honest, the attractive cook is the optimal choice.
Cory Doctorow once wrote something along the lines of "If your friend had a new record out, you'd go and buy it, wouldn't you? So if artists establish a realtionship with fans that is like a friendship...."
On the other hand, I can't actually remember the last time I punched a number into my cell phone. Everyone I want to call is in my PIM and synced to my cell.
Oh wait, I remember now, I was calling a cab from a friends place and punched in the number from a card on their noticeboard. Yes. This was about a month and a half ago, though.
"Philadelphia police recently captured a serial killer with the help of a combination of rape and murder. Police raped 50 different sudpect and murdered the families of 12 of them, and eventually were able to identify the murderer. Once caught, he confessed to every other unsolved murder on their books. Without these methods this killer would probably be stalking the streets of Philadelphia today. With results like that, is there really a good basis for argument against these techniques?"
I forgot to mention that the paper was co-written by Rob Landley. See http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/24/ 1356204
Have a read of ESR's paper on this, it's very clever bit of detective work.
...
For those who haven't:
RAM prices follow Moores Law.
The ammount of RAM in the average machine also follows this, because whenever you buy a new machine you tend to spend roughly the same money. You can plot a graph and watch the average RAM go up in line with Moores Law.
Even if you don't want to do this you have to, because software vendors assume that you'll have an average spec machine.
Extrapolate along this graph and you see that by 2008 the average machine is going to want more than 4Gb RAM.
More than 4Gb RAM means you need a 64Bit machine running a 64 bit OS.
Apple and GNU/Linux already have very solid 64bit versions of their current flagship OSes all ready to go.
Microsoft don't.
Profit?
Surely... OSX won't work on your laptop either?
Yeah, what could be more obvious than right-clicking on the clock to tile windows...er...
It doesn't suck as much as the movie of The Shadow.
That doesn't really tell you much, though, does it.