I seem to remember years ago that one way used to collect heavy metals from contaminated land was to plant potatoes. These drew them out of the land, and then the spuds were harvested and disposed of. If anybody can corroborate that I'd be grateful.
Years before the ubiquitous desktop machine, Xerox perceived a threat to their market space from the possibility of the paperless office. They were concerned that as new technology marched forwards, the market for traditional photocopiers would dwindle. They took the threat seriously, and started work to be in the vanguard of the new paperless office. Many of the features of the modern desktop still have their roots in Xerox PARC.
OK, so Xerox are a second tier player in most of the markets they trade in, and paper copying is still a major part of their business (perhaps *the* major part - I don't know), but they are a good example of a one horse company which did open its eyes to the changes, and *potential* changes around them.
The MS file format thing *is* an issue if a SO user is trying to thrive in a MS office based organisation. That's me. We have template documents for MS Word and Excel for basic business functions. They use macros. They won't work with SO.
But we don't send Word documents out of the organisation, we convert them to PDF so they can't (easily) be changed. If the organisation were to have SO as its primary platform, then all the interchange of internal documents would be in SO. Dealing with MS Office would *only* be an issue for documents coming from outside. In this case they would need to have access to a few machines with MS word for the peripheral stuff, with the capability to change it to a more portable format before they proceed into the organisation. Hey presto, you've removed your vulnerability to Word macro viruses.
Sending documents outside your organisation in a format where the reader is also an editing tool strikes me as foolish. Yes, digital signatures are the proper answer, but even a PHB ought to understand that anything which doesn't need to be in a modifiable format needs to not be in a modifiable format.
Yes, Sun did fix the ecache parity error in ultraSparc III, and have produced UltrasparcII CPU modules with mirrored ecache, drastically reducing the likelihood of them happening.
It certainly won't affect the E15K, and many E10K customers have had their CPU modules swapped for the mirrored cache ones (and it really *does* stop the panics). Similarly the 3000 - 6500.
1. An apparent attempt to broaden the minds of the young can be perceived, and can certainly be represented as Western Imperialism. What is suggested is taking our model of a consumer society and seducing the young of a different society with it
2. There are plenty of groups in the developed world who consider indiscriminate killing a legitimate weapon in their political struggles - ETA and the IRA for example. While their fanaticism doesn't extend to suicide missions, these are educated people in the first world who still dedicate their lives to terrorism
3. The approach of engendering economic interdependence *has* been successful in preventing war between states, but will have little effect on small groups who consider themselves disenfranchised from... well it doesn't matter what from.
So while what is suggested might help to make the ground a bit less fertile to the next generation of fanatics, we have to look deeper and prevent generation after generation carrying grievances as happens in Northern Ireland.
It's the second Feynman book, "What do you care what other people think" where Feynman is involved in the Challenger investigation, and gives his views (favourable) on the software development process followed.
Hear Hear, well said. All manner of silly little inconsistencies in UIs can make a product look less polished, and pop-up dialogues are a perfect example (Stop undeleting your deletions, confirm or cancel). Whatever the origins (and I'm sure a reader will know them), the UI of Windows95 was groundbreaking to those who were used to Win3.1/Motif/Openlook and an area which Microsoft haven't felt the need to change much (an aside, Microsoft Press publish a pretty good book on Ui design - can't remember the details though).
Corel have years of experience of real end users who have spent real money on their products, and the priorities and perceptions will be different to those of hackers. Rather than a source of conflict, this should add another viewpoint to the peer review process, though posting 142 bugs in 2 days is not a good way to introduce yourself. This will make the KDE cake bigger in the long run.
On the subject of filters for KOffice, Corel would make a lot of friends just by publishing a specification of the internal formats of the various products which import into Corel office. This would start us down the road towards making commodity file formats rather than proprietary and closed ones. The competition for Corel office isn't KOffice, and won't be for a year or two yet, it's MS Office. They can't win by playing closed and proprietary file formats, the way for them to win is by making WordPerfect the best engine for manipulating documents. If we had open formats from Corel, Sun (Staroffice) and IBM (Smartsuite) to go alongside those of KOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric etc. then we can begin to talk about commodity office software rather than extend and embrace.
Oh, and Sun should make StarOffice libre as well as gratis.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember years ago that one way used to collect heavy metals from contaminated land was to plant potatoes. These drew them out of the land, and then the spuds were harvested and disposed of. If anybody can corroborate that I'd be grateful.
Dunstan
and any network administrator should know Unix first.
And any security specialist should know unix and TCP/IP first
Dunstan
Years before the ubiquitous desktop machine, Xerox perceived a threat to their market space from the possibility of the paperless office. They were concerned that as new technology marched forwards, the market for traditional photocopiers would dwindle. They took the threat seriously, and started work to be in the vanguard of the new paperless office. Many of the features of the modern desktop still have their roots in Xerox PARC.
OK, so Xerox are a second tier player in most of the markets they trade in, and paper copying is still a major part of their business (perhaps *the* major part - I don't know), but they are a good example of a one horse company which did open its eyes to the changes, and *potential* changes around them.
Dunstan
The MS file format thing *is* an issue if a SO user is trying to thrive in a MS office based organisation. That's me. We have template documents for MS Word and Excel for basic business functions. They use macros. They won't work with SO.
But we don't send Word documents out of the organisation, we convert them to PDF so they can't (easily) be changed. If the organisation were to have SO as its primary platform, then all the interchange of internal documents would be in SO. Dealing with MS Office would *only* be an issue for documents coming from outside. In this case they would need to have access to a few machines with MS word for the peripheral stuff, with the capability to change it to a more portable format before they proceed into the organisation. Hey presto, you've removed your vulnerability to Word macro viruses.
Sending documents outside your organisation in a format where the reader is also an editing tool strikes me as foolish. Yes, digital signatures are the proper answer, but even a PHB ought to understand that anything which doesn't need to be in a modifiable format needs to not be in a modifiable format.
Dunstan
Yes, Sun did fix the ecache parity error in ultraSparc III, and have produced UltrasparcII CPU modules with mirrored ecache, drastically reducing the likelihood of them happening.
It certainly won't affect the E15K, and many E10K customers have had their CPU modules swapped for the mirrored cache ones (and it really *does* stop the panics). Similarly the 3000 - 6500.
Hmm. A couple of points on this:
... well it doesn't matter what from.
1. An apparent attempt to broaden the minds of the young can be perceived, and can certainly be represented as Western Imperialism. What is suggested is taking our model of a consumer society and seducing the young of a different society with it
2. There are plenty of groups in the developed world who consider indiscriminate killing a legitimate weapon in their political struggles - ETA and the IRA for example. While their fanaticism doesn't extend to suicide missions, these are educated people in the first world who still dedicate their lives to terrorism
3. The approach of engendering economic interdependence *has* been successful in preventing war between states, but will have little effect on small groups who consider themselves disenfranchised from
So while what is suggested might help to make the ground a bit less fertile to the next generation of fanatics, we have to look deeper and prevent generation after generation carrying grievances as happens in Northern Ireland.
It's the second Feynman book, "What do you care what other people think" where Feynman is involved in the Challenger investigation, and gives his views (favourable) on the software development process followed.
Corel have years of experience of real end users who have spent real money on their products, and the priorities and perceptions will be different to those of hackers. Rather than a source of conflict, this should add another viewpoint to the peer review process, though posting 142 bugs in 2 days is not a good way to introduce yourself. This will make the KDE cake bigger in the long run.
On the subject of filters for KOffice, Corel would make a lot of friends just by publishing a specification of the internal formats of the various products which import into Corel office. This would start us down the road towards making commodity file formats rather than proprietary and closed ones. The competition for Corel office isn't KOffice, and won't be for a year or two yet, it's MS Office. They can't win by playing closed and proprietary file formats, the way for them to win is by making WordPerfect the best engine for manipulating documents. If we had open formats from Corel, Sun (Staroffice) and IBM (Smartsuite) to go alongside those of KOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric etc. then we can begin to talk about commodity office software rather than extend and embrace.
Oh, and Sun should make StarOffice libre as well as gratis.
Dunstan