Tell you the truth, managing photos can be a drag or at a minimum a time consumer. Sort by date, or tye or content. Oh you want to add EXIF data, that’s even more time spent. You get the picture. My recommendation — do what works for you, and cull the bad ones early in the process.
In the main though I don’t take a lot of digital pics. Maybe about 100 or some a month and probably pitch half of them away before storage. The blog Of Zen and Computing offers a method managing 10000 images. My collection is nowhere near that big.
We have noted before that the Open Source development is shifting from server to the desktop. Much of what needs to have happened to the Linux server platform has been done. Virtualization being one of the few exceptions. But the desktop? The number of developer eyeballs working on the desktop platform and its array of user tools continues to grow. A case in point –
It was good work that paid well. But over the last several years, changes crept in that began to bother Gunderloy. “I saw Office 2007 really, really early — alpha code. I gave feedback on parts of the code I was less than satisfied with. It was pretty clear my feedback and that of others was pretty much ignored. That was different from [my experiences with] Office 97, 2000, and 2003. It seems the Office team felt they didn’t need any outside” opinions, Gunderloy recalls.
But those annoyances were merely a precursor to what was to come. The beginning of the end for the developer was when Microsoft went patent berserk. “What finally pushed me over the edge to ‘I’m getting out’ was when Microsoft started to assert non-intellectual property rights over the its Ribbon interface, making that level of sweeping intellectual property claims. Microsoft went from not patenting much to patenting everything,” Gunderloy says.
Microsoft essentially tried to patent the new Ribbon interface that appeared on Office 2007 products. The Ribbon is a series of controls for various functions of Office programs. Redmond, Gunderloy says, “basically told any control vendor that wanted to make a control that the Ribbon was Microsoft property and they had to license it from Microsoft. They had to acknowledge that Microsoft owns that piece of the user interface. I said to myself, that’s nuts. You may have copyright rights in code, but the arrangement of controls in the user interface is not something that’s intellectual property.”
The point? If this developer has given M$ the boot, how many others are considering it? But there is a good point. Why work for a firm whose end game is to destroy the very environment that is your bread and butter. Clearly I would.
The car in question if ever produced will be about as Tightwad worthy as a Lear Jet, but it does present a concept that is adaptable to more down to earth Tightwad sensibilities.
The secret is the use of common sense. Low horsepower and light weight. Plenty of style and the hand built, low volume production run up the price.
But wait - actually they’re not. Also on show here today is the LifeCar, a concept from famously eccentric British luxury handbuild firm Morgan. The LifeCar, unusually for a fuel-cell design, has no battery pack at all. Its PEM fuel cell stack is rather small, too, rated for only 22 kilowatts of electric output: a measly 30 horsepower or so. And yet Morgan expects to get 0-60 mph in seven seconds and top speed of 90 mph. How?
“It’s all about using the right amount of power for the job,” Morgan marketing director Matthew Parkin told The Reg today. “With a car this light and this slippery, 30 horsepower is plenty.” (The Register)
Having past the half century mark, I have heard for more than 30 years about how a replacement for the gasoline car is just around the corner and watched eagerly as corporations and government have poured trillions into research the produces pretty concepts, but nothing to buy. It’s time to rethink what a car is if we expect a different outcome.
There are a few problems with the Morgan concept. First is that a light car will not pass safety standards in most western countries. We can argue all we want about them, but as long as the texting maniac is barreling down the highway in a Hummer, they may be necessary. The other is Hydrogen itself. While storage technology has advanced, the gas itself is pretty volatile. If you’ve seen photos of the Hindenburg (it was an airship filled with hydrogen) incident, you may want to question having tanks of the stuff on the highway for the crazed texter to inadvertently collide with.
The car you buy today is the result of too much government interference. The combination of emissions, safety, economy and other must includes or must exclude content has created a car that is neither efficient, attractive or affordable for the average Tightwad. The Morgan concept applied to the model of a typical light weight subcompact from the 70’s could be very workable and potentially affordable. Perhaps the government could get out of the way and let it happen.
So far Amazon has had all the fun with providing online services on a by the dip basis. But what if you are in a business that would preclude that? Like say you were the NYSE? What ya gonna do?
Eucalyptus my friend. No its not the latest stokin’ craze down at the Mall to get high. Its a EC2-like clone built on top of an HPC cluster. Eucalyptus provides an EC2 front end so if you wanted to you could host your own Amazon like service.
I have scanned thru the docs and it looks pretty complete. It does have a dependency on using ROCKs if you want to go the ease of install route. Otherwise its the source->.make->compile shuffle. ROCKs itself is pretty intriguing software. But it is tuned for high performance not necessarily high availability. Just be aware of this if you go that route.
According to the complaint, SFLC contacted Extreme Networks in February, but the company continues to distribute BusyBox in violation of the GPL. The complaint requests that an injunction be issued against the defendant and that damages and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs. A copy of the complaint, as filed July 17 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2008/jul/21/busybox/
“We attempted to negotiate with Extreme Networks, but they ultimately ignored us,” said Aaron Williamson, SFLC Counsel. “Like too many other companies we have contacted, they treated GPL compliance as an afterthought. That is not acceptable to us or our clients.”
The short answer is no.
The long answer is that SFLC who has taken up the mantle of defender of the GPL right now attempts to work out an agreement. Only when other arrangements have been exhausted or ignored does a court challenge ensue. To date other than court costs no serious money has changed hands. The settlements to date have been notice of appropriate attribution for the underlying work. Compare that to the RIAA who routinely issues John Doe suits and gathers fines in the thousands of dollars from end users.
In this missive is a tale. If you are the CTO or CIO of a company YOU better know what your IT staff is doing in regards to GPL developed code. You can either go like Extreme Networks has done OR you can follow the IBM model — Adapt, Embrace and Return the Favor.
As a leader in the IT segment of your business it does not take a lot of money to be a FOSS guiding light. If your business uses a FOSS product that is critical to your business return the favor. Get a dialog going with that development team. Offer hardware, you might have it sitting in the IT junk pile. Instant write off. Offer a couple of free tickets to their next development meeting. They run it as a ‘vote for your best developer’ raffle. Trade that for sponsor advertising on their website. You should be able to write the tickets off as development costs for whatever system bundle back end you use the FOSS for. [Check with your accountant.]
The point is, don’t be a dork there Mr. CIO, if FOSS is good enough to use its good enough to support.
IE6, or for that matter, even IE7 the browser so many love to hate is being shown the door. IE6’s hey day was back in ‘02-03. Due to its quirky nature, W3C incompatibilities and general run against the grain many development
shops are giving the lonely browser the short stick. –
Since attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been rapidly losing market share. As the end of 2008 approaches, significant online services, vendors and web frameworks are dropping support for IE6. Will this year be the end of IE6 and what does this signify for Web 2.0 developers?
Recently 37signals, the company behind Ruby on Rails framework announced that they will be phasing out support for IE 6 across all their products on August 15, 2008
Read the whole thing here. What is interesting is that the development houses are recommending customers move to Firefox or Safari NOT IE7. The big reason being W3C compliance issues with the IE platform. It saves these development house by not having to worry about managing IE forks in their code. Yes Mildred not all HTML is considered equal.
Alright take a look at the thumbnail graphic. Its another desktop netbook. Now it costs $249 and its primary purpose is for web surfing and email. That’s not a bad purpose mind you. But folks ya gotta do better than this for the price. The reason I say that is you have ASUS, gOS, and KPC entry level dekstops with a full OS and local storage all selling for $199 as an entry level system. For the extra $50 difference I could cram a 1Gb memory into any of the competitors listed and come out even.
There is only one place this device makes sense. Locked down call centers that the entire CSR experience is web based order entry. The reduced power and quiet might be considered an acceptable price trade off.
But then I would probably with with Northec for the same specs.
The MCSE cert has been a claim to employment. I guess it still is though I have never bothered. I am too busy doing it to bother. But Intel goes and does this for the upcoming Intel Developers Forum –
It’s a sure thing that you can sit for a range of Microsoft certifications at almost any event where two or more ‘Softies are gathered together in Bill’s name. Now Intel is leveraging its own developer muscle by organising Linux certification exams for attendees of the Intel Developer Forum held late August in San Francisco.
Attendees at the annual techfest can land a substantial discount sitting for any of three open-source exams held by the Linux Professional Institute, the world’s premier Linux certification organisation. However, there’s been no word on any similar arrangement for Microsoft certification, despite Redmond once again paying top dollar to be listed among IDF’s Gold Sponsors.
Several tracks of the San Francisco IDF are predictably dedicated to mini-notes, which Intel calls ‘netbooks’, and their desktop equivalents, clumsily tagged as ‘net-tops’, along with mobile Internet devices and the Atom processor family which runs all three types of devices.
The significance? A recognition of where the development growth is. Intel for the last 3-4 years has been offering more and more Open Source tools. Most targeted to Linux as the base system. What better way to encourage further growth than offer discounts on LPI training while at the IDF? But this pretty much indicates that Intel considers Linux a valid partner and that the only place that garage level development that occurs today; does so on Linux.
First it was the game of Jackels, then chess, next first person shooter games. Now it is the real thing. That is, game playing as the real thing. As in right down to the controller systems being developed for the DoD. —
I’ll be the first to say — deploy anything that keeps our guys and gals in the military safe. But there are limits. I say limits only for this reason, its cheap. The cost of doing a UAV is now in the realm of the hobbyist. For less than a $1k you can build and deploy one. No you won’t be able to fly it half way around the world like a Global Hawk but for just general level terrorism a quarter scale model carrying 3-4 of C4 is more than enough to create havoc.
Don’t be surprised if Sony or Microsoft gaming wins a DoD contract in the future.
PostScript:
Sorry, but something very similiar of a civilian use came across my desktop moments ago. Go here for the jest of the idea. So lets make some mods
Ditch the drag fins for a popable parachute to decrease the drop rate.
Use 3G wireless to increase the bandwidth. Then tie this into both platoon level and battalion level defense nets.
Morph the shape into std NATO 40mm round to fit a M203 launcher for platoon level recon. Also adapt it for a 81mm mortar round for longer range.
Cheap enough you can throw it away but sturdy enough its is reusable and recoverable with a built in homer.
Has anyone in your house had the constant urge to turn your furniture into a clan of wandering nomads, with you doing most of the heavy lifting? While I can’t promise to end the furniture moving, I may be able to help you do less of it. Visually planning the move will often reduce the amount of physical movement. This particular solution is also free.
Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer “yes” to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don’t create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.
The program’s main window has four quadrants: a grid on which you place and rearrange walls and furniture, a real-time 3-D view of your design, a list of all of the furniture models that you can place into the scene, and a table of the objects currently in the scene.
The most recent version is 1.3, released in April. Sweet Home 3D is a Java app, requiring Java 5 or greater. You can use Java Web Start to launch the app directly from your browser on the project’s download page, but if you plan to continue using it you should grab the full installer. Packages are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (Linux.com)
The car in question if ever produced will be about as Tightwad worthy as a Lear Jet, but it does present a concept that is adaptable to more down to earth Tightwad sensibilities.
