Actually I think one problem is that the electoral "staff", people organizing the elections were improperly trained or probably not even trained at all.
WIll be hard to convince the French electronic vote is the way forward.
I think people who argue that these machines don't work, probably have never attended a "depouillement" to really see what a mess it is to open envelopes and count each paper.
-----------
Most screenshots really make it look like a girl with too much makeup.
But wow I like that System Monitor. Just seeing that CPU load drop with that cool transparent effect really turns me on! And Kate, oh she's a beaut'!
Last thing: people who are going to install KDE just to play KMahjong might be interested to know we've got lots of lonely-geek games like that on OS X.
Actually Mac computers are women and should be played by a sexy actress, here's why:
- they're sexy and have nice round Windows with lots of makeup.
- they bring all kinds of gadgets with them at all times.
- they actually use their 2 hemispheres.
- they can run hot
- they don't play FIFA soccer.
- they're expensive at the store
This post just doesn't look at reality. On the server market Windows is going to stay exactly where it's now and will probably win some new battles.
Why?
Because I don't see IT departments moving away from Windows server/Active Directory. Just too costly and completely unworkable. Companies rely more and more on distributed AD architectures, that have come a long way towards centralizing workstation configuration options. So now you can have really fine-grained AD-driven security policy that beats what linux ditros can offer.
I think Linux is good, but it didn't innovate enough to compete with the Microsoft steamroller.
----
Right! Maybe symantec just feels with Vista coming, it anticipates decrease of revenues. So the company has to diversify its portfolio of products.
Just think of all that untapped virgin market!
What a joke. I'm going to start an Anti-Anti-virus software campaign. Very cool virus name though, maybe that will give ideas for the new Apple commercial.
I can just see the problem coming with some users.
"Where are my files? I've lost everything"
"Click on start then my documents".
This is going to be a steep learning curve for the average Word/Excel/Outlook user--who anyway uses less than a third of what XP can do. In the end, I'm not so sure Aero will be used much in business environments, this is much more a consumer/marketing thing. I'd much prefer see IT departments spend bucks on data storage and system security than on expensive graphics cards.
Just imagine accounting users juggling spreadsheets or SAP screens like Tome Cruise in Minority Reports.
-------
I don't buy this. Microsoft actually helped the Anti-virus market a great deal by making super unsecured systems.
MS nearly created the market--ok maybe not quite true because I remember installing anti-virus software on my Amiga 500.
The system will always be as secure as its weakest link. If MS starts unlocking parts of the kernel then we can be sure to continue getting plenty of malware, viruses, rootkits that are going to exploit that. Gladly that will continue to feed the whole industry.
Still, it would really be great if for once the EU let the market decide. If consumers get tired of paying big bucks for anti-virus software then maybe they'll turn to something better, like OS X or Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, FreeBSD,Solaris, or any systems running on open-source Kernels.
The real problem is simply missing Xmas sales.
The only option MS has is to let OEMs sell PC with free upgrades to Vista, when it comes out next year.
That way you avoid too much contracting mess.
You're right on, I can just see the ad:
With Microsoft Vista(tm) 3D graphics, People-ready companies can turn user information into valuable enterprise knowledge.
If that's true, and as regular Google user I'm a little troubled by this technique.
We already give a lot of information to Google--search/browsing habits, keywords, IP address. Information that can be used to track us down. We all need to be sensitive to this. Personally I feel if they implement this I'd just find another search engine and sell Google stock.
For home users we can rule out all the expensive stuff like LTO3/LTO3, SDLT which backupexec, which has become pretty much standard in business.
I found by administering small networks, the most reliable backup tool in Windows is Robocopy. It's a neat program you can download from Microsoft as part of the XP support tool or the W2K3 resource kit. It's a command line utility so you can you use inside a small script, then add it to your scheduled tasks.
Here's what you could do: buy one or even better, two, cheap removable hard-drives. Then schedule robocopy to make incremental backup every day sometime at noon or during the nite to your removable drive. Then everyweek, change drive and put it in a safe place in your house.
That's only good for files, if you want to backup your system state then you'll have to use the backup tool in accessories. But keep in mind at home probably the most important stuff to backup is the email folder, address book, some documents, and very important all pictures (all that's in c:\documents and settings...)!
I guess that's what everybody "should" do.
I liked what I saw during the keynote presentation of OSX Leopard. I'm sure you all heard or read about the new app called "time machine" that was shown to do it all for u. Neither Vista nor Leopard will really solve the problem, but I think it will make it easier to implement cheap reliable solutions.
Dell and Nokia? Ah ah ah! This is a joke.
Since Nokia started producing cell-phones it also produced mountains of batteries.
Dell has only recently taken measures to recycle PCs and make them greener. As far as I know Dell doesn't take back its old junk. It doesn't even take back computers left on lease for 3 years!
I say something's fishy like maybe Greenpeace got cheaper price on Dell laptops and Nokia GSMs.
___________
Sorry no clever signature. If you find one I can use, the beer's on me.
Agree. SGI is worth a fortune in patents.
Apple could buy SGI, then scrap the hardware unit, save the good pieces. It would be a good fit for their high-end grid computing, or render-farm type hardware.
Let's talk about features. There is plenty of material on MSDN that show Vista may well be surpassing Linux or Mac in securing the user experience. OK it's not quite there yet and the debugging process will take months after consumer release.
Just take the neatest feature: virtual folders. I like the idea of having completely sealed user directories and program files. Think about it, it's a very clever trick, forcing programs--that today easily write all over system folders--into special virtual directories identified by uid. Now finally we can implement tighter security policy without impacting functionality.
Also a plus: IE 7. Now runs as limited user. Wow. Finally!
And then you have the new hardware features that appeal to me as sysadmin: mandatory driver signing (Microsoft started this with 64-bit drivers because of the small installed base) and SMART technology. SMART enables Windows to see when devices, hard-disks, etc, exceed fault tolerance factors. Not exactly new technology, I grant you that, but definitely a winner for business desktop users.
Vince
-----
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever" ---Gandhi.
You don't judge the language by the style it uses, but rather its effectiveness to translate data into meaningful information for the user. PHP is a very good and accessible tool that lots of functional people can use to create quick applications.
I've seen beautifully-written OO applications in java or.NET that don't give users anything they need.
I grant you the greatest flaw of PHP is its lack of clear separation of form and content. You can try to isolate your HTML data to hell but the effect will never be as good as ASP.NET code-behind. But this is a technical choice. Myself I've started by PHP and moved to greater and bigger things. That didn't prevent me from programming well and quickly in other languages.
In business you don't win in code-beauty contest. You get sacked really quickly because you don't deliver.
I've been trying to look for practical applications of Semantic Web. Can't find them anywhere. So far, what W3C proposes is a very high-level language. Of course, DAML,OWL... have nice features like cardinality constraints, axioms and so so forth. The idea is to build more logic into webpages.
This is all theory.
In practice, I don't really see how this will help making the web smarter. You can't expect people to write OWL by hand--like in the early days of HTML. We still lack an automated way of building taxonomies, and deriving the document's context and logical links with all other WWW documents.
That's anyway the purpose of search engines, and so far Google is doing a pretty nice job at it.
The next step is to build The Inference Engine, moving closer to A.I. Obviously we're not there yet. I think People who have the answer to this would reach the holy grail of computing. Not too mention being super rich!
Choked when I realized maybe Tarzan mated with Cheetah.
Obviously we're taking about a common ancestor way before Homo Erectus--the latter dating back 2 million years ago. Still that explains why Chimps and Humans have so much in common, sharing 96% of their DNA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_sapiens
Don't think it's a question of who goes to market first. I suspect you'll find engineers in Cupertino in fact had the technology way before Creative. I just wonder exactly who at Apple imagined the IPOD and when... Must have been a great moment of enlightment, or not!
That's really getting complicated!
Big deal, now we can do rollbacks. So I guess we'll have to "version" our girlfriends,kids,etc...
That could be a future extension of Ruby on Rails Migrations.
Here's my view:
People with blackberries get connected in such a way that they become part of the network, part of the enterprise hive mind.
I can't believe that for any company, information is so critical that it needs 24/7 user awareness.
I think this is becoming a management problem. Companies must be able to manage their human resources so they don't have to rely on just a few crackberry people to run the whole operation.
You'll also find Blackberries--and other mobile devices and applications--cause people to concentrate less on issues. By being always available, the risk is to lose the ability to find time to focus hard on problems. You are swamped with a never ending flow of emails, to which you respond by quick-fix, short answers, not always effective.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really laughable.
I think I'm going to patent this one: "method to evacuate digested matter".
I'm going to be rich!
Actually I think one problem is that the electoral "staff", people organizing the elections were improperly trained or probably not even trained at all.
WIll be hard to convince the French electronic vote is the way forward.
I think people who argue that these machines don't work, probably have never attended a "depouillement" to really see what a mess it is to open envelopes and count each paper.
-----------
Vincent
KDE ressembles more and more quartz-wm/OS X.
Most screenshots really make it look like a girl with too much makeup.
But wow I like that System Monitor. Just seeing that CPU load drop with that cool transparent effect really turns me on!
And Kate, oh she's a beaut'!
Last thing: people who are going to install KDE just to play KMahjong might be interested to know we've got lots of lonely-geek games like that on OS X.
Try the Apple+TAB shortcut. Same as Alt+Tab in Win.
I think this is just EU racket from high-flying technocrats.
I like what babelfish translates:
"I do not have eternal living ', thus Kroes concerning intensified very".
Strange Dutch people.
Actually Mac computers are women and should be played by a sexy actress, here's why:
- they're sexy and have nice round Windows with lots of makeup.
- they bring all kinds of gadgets with them at all times.
- they actually use their 2 hemispheres.
- they can run hot
- they don't play FIFA soccer.
- they're expensive at the store
------
This post just doesn't look at reality. On the server market Windows is going to stay exactly where it's now and will probably win some new battles.
Why?
Because I don't see IT departments moving away from Windows server/Active Directory. Just too costly and completely unworkable. Companies rely more and more on distributed AD architectures, that have come a long way towards centralizing workstation configuration options. So now you can have really fine-grained AD-driven security policy that beats what linux ditros can offer.
I think Linux is good, but it didn't innovate enough to compete with the Microsoft steamroller.
----
Right! Maybe symantec just feels with Vista coming, it anticipates decrease of revenues. So the company has to diversify its portfolio of products.
Just think of all that untapped virgin market!
What a joke. I'm going to start an Anti-Anti-virus software campaign. Very cool virus name though, maybe that will give ideas for the new Apple commercial.
I can just see the problem coming with some users.
"Where are my files? I've lost everything"
"Click on start then my documents".
This is going to be a steep learning curve for the average Word/Excel/Outlook user--who anyway uses less than a third of what XP can do. In the end, I'm not so sure Aero will be used much in business environments, this is much more a consumer/marketing thing. I'd much prefer see IT departments spend bucks on data storage and system security than on expensive graphics cards.
Just imagine accounting users juggling spreadsheets or SAP screens like Tome Cruise in Minority Reports.
-------
Vincent.
I don't buy this. Microsoft actually helped the Anti-virus market a great deal by making super unsecured systems.
MS nearly created the market--ok maybe not quite true because I remember installing anti-virus software on my Amiga 500.
The system will always be as secure as its weakest link. If MS starts unlocking parts of the kernel then we can be sure to continue getting plenty of malware, viruses, rootkits that are going to exploit that. Gladly that will continue to feed the whole industry.
Still, it would really be great if for once the EU let the market decide. If consumers get tired of paying big bucks for anti-virus software then maybe they'll turn to something better, like OS X or Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, FreeBSD,Solaris, or any systems running on open-source Kernels.
The real problem is simply missing Xmas sales. The only option MS has is to let OEMs sell PC with free upgrades to Vista, when it comes out next year. That way you avoid too much contracting mess.
You're right on, I can just see the ad: With Microsoft Vista(tm) 3D graphics, People-ready companies can turn user information into valuable enterprise knowledge.
If that's true, and as regular Google user I'm a little troubled by this technique.
We already give a lot of information to Google--search/browsing habits, keywords, IP address. Information that can be used to track us down. We all need to be sensitive to this. Personally I feel if they implement this I'd just find another search engine and sell Google stock.
Now that's a very important feature, that adds so much to Vista.
I can't believe we're going to pay to get that feature.
I hope we get a serious rebate. That may damage my ears or my THX speakers.
Vincent.
For home users we can rule out all the expensive stuff like LTO3/LTO3, SDLT which backupexec, which has become pretty much standard in business.
I found by administering small networks, the most reliable backup tool in Windows is Robocopy. It's a neat program you can download from Microsoft as part of the XP support tool or the W2K3 resource kit. It's a command line utility so you can you use inside a small script, then add it to your scheduled tasks.
Here's what you could do: buy one or even better, two, cheap removable hard-drives. Then schedule robocopy to make incremental backup every day sometime at noon or during the nite to your removable drive. Then everyweek, change drive and put it in a safe place in your house.
That's only good for files, if you want to backup your system state then you'll have to use the backup tool in accessories. But keep in mind at home probably the most important stuff to backup is the email folder, address book, some documents, and very important all pictures (all that's in c:\documents and settings...)!
I guess that's what everybody "should" do.
I liked what I saw during the keynote presentation of OSX Leopard. I'm sure you all heard or read about the new app called "time machine" that was shown to do it all for u. Neither Vista nor Leopard will really solve the problem, but I think it will make it easier to implement cheap reliable solutions.
Dell and Nokia? Ah ah ah! This is a joke. Since Nokia started producing cell-phones it also produced mountains of batteries. Dell has only recently taken measures to recycle PCs and make them greener. As far as I know Dell doesn't take back its old junk. It doesn't even take back computers left on lease for 3 years! I say something's fishy like maybe Greenpeace got cheaper price on Dell laptops and Nokia GSMs.
___________
Sorry no clever signature. If you find one I can use, the beer's on me.
Agree. SGI is worth a fortune in patents. Apple could buy SGI, then scrap the hardware unit, save the good pieces. It would be a good fit for their high-end grid computing, or render-farm type hardware.
Let's talk about features. There is plenty of material on MSDN that show Vista may well be surpassing Linux or Mac in securing the user experience. OK it's not quite there yet and the debugging process will take months after consumer release.
Just take the neatest feature: virtual folders. I like the idea of having completely sealed user directories and program files. Think about it, it's a very clever trick, forcing programs--that today easily write all over system folders--into special virtual directories identified by uid. Now finally we can implement tighter security policy without impacting functionality.
Also a plus: IE 7. Now runs as limited user. Wow. Finally!
And then you have the new hardware features that appeal to me as sysadmin: mandatory driver signing (Microsoft started this with 64-bit drivers because of the small installed base) and SMART technology. SMART enables Windows to see when devices, hard-disks, etc, exceed fault tolerance factors. Not exactly new technology, I grant you that, but definitely a winner for business desktop users.
Vince
-----
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever" ---Gandhi.
You don't judge the language by the style it uses, but rather its effectiveness to translate data into meaningful information for the user. PHP is a very good and accessible tool that lots of functional people can use to create quick applications. I've seen beautifully-written OO applications in java or .NET that don't give users anything they need.
I grant you the greatest flaw of PHP is its lack of clear separation of form and content. You can try to isolate your HTML data to hell but the effect will never be as good as ASP.NET code-behind. But this is a technical choice. Myself I've started by PHP and moved to greater and bigger things. That didn't prevent me from programming well and quickly in other languages.
In business you don't win in code-beauty contest. You get sacked really quickly because you don't deliver.
I've been trying to look for practical applications of Semantic Web. Can't find them anywhere. So far, what W3C proposes is a very high-level language. Of course, DAML,OWL... have nice features like cardinality constraints, axioms and so so forth. The idea is to build more logic into webpages. This is all theory. In practice, I don't really see how this will help making the web smarter. You can't expect people to write OWL by hand--like in the early days of HTML. We still lack an automated way of building taxonomies, and deriving the document's context and logical links with all other WWW documents. That's anyway the purpose of search engines, and so far Google is doing a pretty nice job at it. The next step is to build The Inference Engine, moving closer to A.I. Obviously we're not there yet. I think People who have the answer to this would reach the holy grail of computing. Not too mention being super rich!
Choked when I realized maybe Tarzan mated with Cheetah. Obviously we're taking about a common ancestor way before Homo Erectus--the latter dating back 2 million years ago. Still that explains why Chimps and Humans have so much in common, sharing 96% of their DNA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_sapiens
Don't think it's a question of who goes to market first. I suspect you'll find engineers in Cupertino in fact had the technology way before Creative. I just wonder exactly who at Apple imagined the IPOD and when... Must have been a great moment of enlightment, or not!
That's really getting complicated! Big deal, now we can do rollbacks. So I guess we'll have to "version" our girlfriends,kids,etc... That could be a future extension of Ruby on Rails Migrations.
OS X inherited so many linux genes, I don't think the idea is very far-fetched. Eventually someone will be able to do it.
Here's my view: People with blackberries get connected in such a way that they become part of the network, part of the enterprise hive mind. I can't believe that for any company, information is so critical that it needs 24/7 user awareness. I think this is becoming a management problem. Companies must be able to manage their human resources so they don't have to rely on just a few crackberry people to run the whole operation. You'll also find Blackberries--and other mobile devices and applications--cause people to concentrate less on issues. By being always available, the risk is to lose the ability to find time to focus hard on problems. You are swamped with a never ending flow of emails, to which you respond by quick-fix, short answers, not always effective.