SMS is great, and you can do a lot, but it is limited to 160 characters, so typically you get 100 or so and some advertising or wrapping from the company providing you the service. SMS is also store and forward technology.
To say that WAP isn't needed because you can do it with SMS is almost like arguing we don't need the web because e-mail will do it all.
WAP isn't just for mobile phones, and it is another marker of the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones. As a previous poster noted, GPRS is a big advance tied in with WAP.
The killer app for WAP will come from someone who is sitting somewhere with their phone/PDA and who'll think "If only I had access to the net now I could do xxx"
You will start to see a swag of location based services that will based on your current position and the server will access a map database to be able to find you the closest resturant/bar/theatre/post office etc.The new nokia phones can display graphics so there is a good chance you'll get a map to where you are going.
Then there is purchasing from vending machines (big in certain parts of Europe I hear) where at the moment you ring a phone number in a soft drink machine, it debits your phone account and you get a drink. Wouldn't it be better if as you approached a drink machine it sensed your presence, displayed a drink menu on your phone, you select a drink and out it comes.
The point about voice calls etc being able to do much of this is true (heck I can check flight arrivals via the phone, or on the net too), there is always more than one way to do things, why not have the choice?
WAP browsers at the moment are akin to using lynx on a 4 line terminal, but as technology moves on things will move in leaps and bounds.
About 10 years ago Xerox PARC was playing around with PARCTabs, a device that had a touch sensitive LCD display, three buttons able to be operated by the hand you held the device in, and an infrared port. It had a baby 8 bit processor in it and got all of its applications from a server. The idea was that buildings would be wired with lots of IR basestations and you could do a bunch of stuff with your hand held Tab (play network games, read/write mail, schedule etc).
As PDAs have progressed I've seen them embody the ideas of the PARCTab, with the exception that they couldn't communicate. The IR ports on the palms were the first signs of the other half of the equation, bluetooth is a huge sign, and WAP sits in there too.
The company I'm currently doing work for is in the process of fitting out new offices, and as part of that they will be installing a wireless office on a scale as yet unseen worldwide - over 1000 employees and several floors. The floors will be wired with mobile basestations, and all staff will get a WAP enabled mobile phone.
For many businesses using an ASP is a form of outsourcing for them and removes a number of maintenance and administrative issues with their IT facilities. It is also a part of the process of IT becoming a commodity product. MIT might call it project oxygen, PARC have been working on it for 10 odd years under the banner of 'ubiquitous' computing.
Sure, as a hacker/nerd/geek you want control to play/fiddle/customise, but for people who the technology isn't an end in itself, all of that flexibility is a burden.
You get frustrated about the rapid advances and falling prices of technology - well in an ASP world you can forget about watching your $50K server turn into equivalent of next years $3K desktop.
ASPs also fit nicely into a netpliance world - they are the servers that give your netpliance life.
ASPs will be popular for similar reasons that web hosting is popular - its simpler and can be cheaper due to the economies of scale. Are you sitting there knowing that a proper tape backup system for your data will cost an arm and a leg? What if your data was stored remotely and backed up by a robotic backup system that looked after you and hundreds of others? For a small cost each day your data is securely backed up.
Using an ASP can potentially be more secure than any security you can put in place yourself. Do you have a firewall? I mean a real firewall, not a packet filter ala ipchains and ipfwadm. How many small businesses do you know with poor data security that would benefit from letting specialists look after things? Do you have DRP for your data? Do you have 99% uptime (application availability)?
Also, when looking at hype such as ASPs remember the real target market is the business world. There is far more money in making products for other businesses than for end users - where is there more money B2B or B2C? So while Sun will tell you that they are making an ASP version of StarOffice, they aren't really aiming at you sitting at home, they are thinking about that company around the corner with 100 people and overworked IT staff.
There will be a lot of lousy ASPs, companies looking to make a fast buck. These companies will die out, but the companies that addresses people's concerns - privacy, security and also have products people want will be the ones that stay around. Security will be a big selling point for any ASP that holds data.
You may already use some ASPs and not think of them as such. sourceforge, collab.net, eproject, hotmail, etc are all ASPs.
Doc++ was one of the tools I tried. It got confused with some of our source code. Root I haven't tried, but it looks good.
Now that you have a couple of candidates, do a local install of each of them and then run it across all of your existing source. Using all of your source is important - you don't want to find the tool you've selected doesn't understand namespaces or some other language feature you've used. Next take a small module and mark it up according to the guidelines for each tool and then run each of your candidates across the code again. By now you will have an obvious winner and at most it should have cost you a day of your time.
Looking at how each tool documents your code that isn't marked up is quite important when you have an existing code base. Commenting your code does take time and few managers will give you explicit permission to spend the next few weeks going back through the code base and marking it up.
When you marked up the code, how closely did it match your existing commenting style? The closer the match the easier it is to convince the programming team to use it.
Who is the target audience of your documented code? This will also affect your choice of tool. Also, does the documentation make it easier to explain the code to someone else? The class diagrams are pretty handy when explaining to someone where the method fred comes from.
Check what control you have over which comments will form part of the documentation. You don't want 'stupid hack to get around xxx' included while the detailed explanation of a clever algorithm remains hidden in the source (or maybe you do).
At my last employer we were like everyplace - a bunch of talented developers who had better things to do than write documentation. The best way to get documentation was to have it in the source code (we had guys who would only read source code to find stuff out).
After searching around for a bit and trying a few things the winning tool was doxygen. We had a mix of C, C++, and Sybase ESQL code. Doxygen is smart enough to make sense of undocumented code, but really comes into its own when you write javadoc or qt style comments. For C++ it creates browseable class hierachies, can output in HTML or LATEX and includes a search feature. Nothing better than plugging in a method/function/constant name, clicking search and seeing where it is used.
We had source code in a large hierarchy of directories that ran into hundreds of thousands of lines and it took care of it all in a couple of minutes. One tool I tried choked on the size of our code, plus because it didn't come with a proper C++ pre-processor got really tangled up.
I made the generation of the documentation part of our build and package process so each release automatically had up to date source code documentation.
It made our Delphi programmers with their fancy IDE jealous of our documentation.
I am currently contracting, and can recommend it. The only way I'm going back to a permanent role is if a pre-sales/consulting position. Pre-sales is good because you have to be quite technical (talk to all of the technical people at the companies the sales person is trying to offload a solution to), and because it is related to sales the pay is quite good too (providing you are making sales, and exceeding budget).
It will be a shame to lose a couple of months holiday each year though.
It can also be hard to get into pre-sales if you are not a technical person with a vendor (apparently all of us schmucks who have to evaluate between different vendor offerings don't know what it takes to do pre-sales).
The previous comments about modelines/refresh rates/resolution are correct
Each projector has different capabilities, and later model projectors attempt to work out the correct resolution and refresh rate based on their input. Sometimes they get confused and display nothing. I've seen this happen on a regular basis with a projector attached to a windows laptop, and the projector can need power cycling to regain the plot. Moving between the laptop and external screen achieves a similar re-evaluation of the input when the projector hasn't totally confused itself.
The projector displaying nothing is in someways similar to when you try to overdrive your monitor and it goes into powersave mode. Likewise, changing settings (mode/resolution/refresh) too quickly powersaves some monitors and it can also confuse some projectors. This makes it hard to cycle through your 'available' modes.
Chances are the projector is a less capable screen than the laptop one - so while you might be able to run a 1024x768x16M laptop screen, the projector might max out at 800x600x256. This is all dependent on how much you've spent on the projector.
Set aside some time one afternoon with the projector and your laptop to work out what set of modes displays both on your laptop and projector. If you've got the specs handy for both your laptop and projector you can probably speed things up, but I'd suggest starting at 800x600x256 and work up from there.
Remember to always have a working backup copy of your XF86config file, and if you are using Xservers to specify a bpp (colour depth), keep a working copy of start line commented!
As part of Sun's Visual Workshop product line, recently renamed Forte [Insert Language Here], there is their C++ development environment consisting of compilers, debuggers, profilers, version control, and a GUI builder. Even better, the GUI builder will output Java or C++ code. The compilers are optimised for SPARC and the results are worthwhile (Sun have to do something to justify the expense).
Better yet, to help with your eval you can do a 'try and buy', but you better have a good net connection because the download is huge.
It is actively supported by Sun, although updates come in fits and starts - over 2 years between version 3 and version 5 (no version 4), and a year later version 6.
I'd be interested to know how you go. The Java GUI should run slightly slower.
I'm currently contracting in the mobile (cellular) billing section of an Australian Telco. Later this year an office move is planned, and as part of the new office fit out they are looking at going totally wireless - no fixed line phones for people, just mobiles, and wireless LAN connections.
I'm curious how this will work given the lack of consistency with in building coverage and other interference that mobiles can suffer.
In some areas when installing a 'fixed phone' we actually install a phone that uses the mobile network. IIRC there is at least one island whose entire phone network is provided using mobile technology.
Companies typically use a standard contract that they offer to employees, and in it many employers will try to get everything but your first born to belong to the company. In your case the VC lawyers are trying to maximise the potential return on their investment risk.
The important thing to realise is that employment contracts are negotiable. If there are clauses in a contract you don't like, ask to have them changed, if things appear confusing get them reworded.
When working for a cool little Australian start-up we had a pretty employer friendly contract that some staff had ammended to something less one sided. The MD was also happy to let specific instances of code be retained by the employee who wrote them. The intent here was to protect the core system and underlying patents.
Under Australian law one of the differences between employees and contractors is that unless a contractor signs away their copyright and IP then it resides with the contractor. Employees on the other hand don't keep copyright and IP unless they make specific arrangements to do so.
It can be hard to remember employees do have a good bargaining position. It takes a lot of work to find someone you want to hire and it is often less expensive to spend some time getting lawyers to revise contracts than to interview another 20 odd people.
When next at an interview ask how long positions take to be filled. In small companies in particular are looking for a cultural fit as well as a skill fit - a happy team works much better than the equally skilled team that hates each other's guts.
As a user of the nightly builds I have to agree that this isn't an issue. There are a bunch of good reasons this feature might not be there. The quality of nightly builds varies dramatically, and features that work one day go the next, only to return later.
The image blocking feature also blocks many non ad images - it doesn't discriminate. On my site for example I serve the 'Valid HTML4' images from a different domain hosted on the same box, but Mozilla can't tell that and blocks them.
If the feature disappears for good, then get involved with the code, dig back through CVS and work out how to put it back in...
If you are serious about blocking ads, run a proxy, a filter or one of the other ways to specifically target ads...
Maybe you should have a yarn to some of the folks at Telstra looking after their customer datawarehouse - they are using perl to access their Oracle database.
I've had a brief look at one of their scripts - it was the first time I've seen the parallel option used in a query and also the first time I'd seen a subquery as part of the from statement.
Sure, they probably could have used Pro*C, but I doubt the execution time would be much different - the slowness is in the retrieval from the database and transmission across the network. The power of string manipulation in perl makes the coding so much quicker and easier.
I've used perl accessing Sybase to populate tables from log files and my bottleneck was the fact I was doing row at a time inserts. It would have run just as slowly if I'd used E*SQL.
If I was choosing a database interface based on platform independence I'd look to java and then perl or PHP. Java has the added bonus of being able to run within the database for some databases (no more PL/SQL?).
For a web based app the startup time of your script is likely to be the slow point. Plus if you are using a web hosting service you might not be able to upload a compiled C program (you are probably also forced to use mySQL, and would therefore use PHP.
I helped implement an IVR credit card bill payment system and also did some work on a web based system in Australia.
I can't see why the credit status of your company was an issue for charge.com, unless they were concerned you wouldn't be able to pay them. If your bank is happy for you to accept credit card payments then thats all you need to become a merchant.
There are a number of different ways to start accepting online payments - good web hosting companies/ISPs offer e-commerce products, your bank might even have a product to do it. People like VeriSign etc have products to help.
Shop around for different products, estimate your volumes, look at fees (setup, monthly and per transaction) and find someone willing to work with you.
Web based credit card software is available for a range of platforms. The system I worked on had an OS/2 machine as the gateway to the credit card clearing house. There are *NIX and Windows software out there that do it, but it might be hard work finding open source ones - the financial world chokes about 'giving stuff away'!
Back to the point though, your available credit will guide your product selection, but shouldn't stop you from becoming a merchant.
The current leadership method has worked well up until this point, and shows no indications of future failure.
I find this statement very interesting and hard to justify. Leaders are responsible for seeing things get done, and ensuring people stay focussed and positive. Having 20 people, in unison, withdraw their support indicates a deep seated failure of the leadership.
Good leaders focus the talents of their charges. They keep them in high spirits when all seems lost and know how to manage each person to achieve their personal best. All of this while still getting the result the company wants.
Having 20 people go all at once is significant in any group.
It doesn't necessarily mean the end of stampede. Perhaps it will improve things in the long run because a large group of dissenters have left and the moral of the remaining people can be lifted and focused. Conversely, Maybe stampede will die because the heart has been removed.
Alert leaders would have either: a) been able to fix moral to keep things going, or b) given the boot to the main dissenters early on
A split is not necessarily a bad thing - look at Emacs and Xemacs, a common goal but a fundamental difference of opinion, neither one right nor wrong, just different.
The split shows the strength of open source rather than its weakness - the dissenters can now go and do things their way, and those who believe the dissenters are wrong can band with stampede, unhindered by the non-believers.
Telstra is behaving like a typical monopoly at the moment. In areas where they don't face competition they charge like a wounded bull so as to maximise profit while they can. As competition is introduced this changes, and they drop their prices, and introduce new services.
The cable situation in Australia is interesting. Initially cable was laid by Optus to give them access to the local loop so they could totally bypass Telstra. At the moment Telstra owns the local loop and other telcos don't have access to it, so Telstra gets a slice of every call made in Australia that involves a fixed line phone.
To protect its Telephony business Telstra rolled out cable to pretty much exactly the same places Optus did.
Both Telstra and Optus laid digital cable, with the aim of providing phone, internet and pay TV services on the cable. Optus made a lot of hoopla about 20c local phone calls across their cable network, but ran into technical problems and IIRC only in recent times has voice over cable worked for them. They had some similar problems with their cable internet service, which has been in beta for over a year. Telstra have never tried to carry voice traffic on their cable network -- they don't need to because they have the local loop.
Cable in Australia is about to change with Optus@home, a partnership between Optus and @home. They will be offering a cable internet service targeted at home and small businesses, with prices more competitive than those offered by Telstra.
AAPT are introducing satellite soon, which will also add pressure to the high bandwidth internet market.
The Australian DSTO has over the last 20 years been developing an over the horizon radar know as Jindalee.
IIRC it can see stealth planes because normal radar hits the underside of the plane, while this radar hits the top of the plane, and the stealth planes aren't stealthy on top.
Naturally, authoritive details that this is the case are hard to find. Aussies will tell you this is because the Yanks are still pissed they spent so much time developing something 'invisible' and the Aussies immediately said 'We can see it.'
I can't say whether newer stealth planes are stealthy on top and therefore get around the initial failing.
Frames certainly aren't dead, but you should ask 'does this really need a frame?'
In the majority of cases, if not all, the use of frames can be replaced by nested tables. And there is an increasing trend to do this.
Using tables instead of frames will increase the number of potential users who can make sense of your website. If you have a frames based website, you should also provide a non-frames version out of consideration for people using a browser that doesn't support frames.
Anyone authoring a website with Frontpage (ugggh) will invariably have a frame based website when they don't need to. This means that a lot of mom and pop websites, as well as small commercial websites have frames.
Larger commercial sites are tending to not use frames unless they have a really good reason. Look at the source code for sites such as Oracle TechNet, Wired, and About.com for examples of sites that use tables over frames. Interestingly, Oracle Technet has only recently made the change and Oracle still uses frames.
Many commercial software packages for website design favour tables over frames. Macromedia Dreamweaver will do this I think, although their site uses frames.
Webmonkey has a good guide to how to construct frames, but the article does say ask yourself: Do I really need frames at all? Most of the time, the answer is no. In my opinion, frames are only appropriate when you have a complex navigation structure going on - especially one that involves retaining a search query while reloading the search results (as in Cocktail or Net Surf Central).
At the end of the day the person you've hired has been asked to provide functionality into your existing web site, and while they shouldn't be stopped from making suggestions on how to improve your site, they do have a job to do. I'd be surprised if having frames actually prevents functionality being added.
Sure, the Internet started as a way for the DoD to have a comms network that would survive nuclear war, but researchers saw so many more advantages.
While it is true that in a number of underdeveloped areas things such as clean water are far more important than computers, there are millions of people around the world (including in developed countries) who can benefit from cheap computers.
If you believe that access to information is empowering, then the more people with unencumbered access to information the better. At the present point in time the most efficient way to provide information access is through computers.
The other area where computers help in developing areas is to support aid agencies. Computers are great at assisting in the streamlining and automation of processes, opening the opportunity for aid agencies to reduce their administrative overhead and channel scarce funds to helping those in need. As an expample, I would expect that community health centres can benefit from computerised patient records, or at least through having statistics on those that have been helped.
The use of MS in the office leads to the use of Front Page and Front Page Server Extensions for intranet sites. This then results in lots of small companies creating lousy Internet sites that can only be deployed onto NT servers. How much grief has the adding of Front Page Server Extensions caused the Apache group?
Front Page is a perfect example of using a position of power in one area to try and exert power in another area. The bundling of Front Page makes it easy for companies to build sites themselves rather than paying a good web designer to build one.
Most companies don't care that Front Page creates slow, shoddy HTML, with inappropriate use of frames. They've got one of those 'new fangled' websites they hear they need to survive. MS leverages this IT ignorance in decision makers. The saying used to be No one gets fired for buying IBM but in the minds of corporate purchasers and middle management decision makers it is now a case of No one gets fired for buying MS.
The greatest threats MS faces are:
Technical people getting decision making powers (requires techs to talk in terms of business cases), and
Decision makers becoming IT literate (requires techs to educate the great unwashed).
It will continue to be an uphill battle while MS can appear to make life easier for users with one hand and break standards (and reduce competition) with another.
MS may have lost some battles in trying to gain control of the server market and the web, but the 'war' is not over yet.
I am surprised so many people haven't realised there is no such thing as a non-biased benchmark, and that, shock, horror, Linux is perfect (yet).
Benchmarks must reduce the scope of tests and make assumptions, which are not always true, so as to be possible. They also need to be done at a point in time, and not wait 'for the next version, which is so much better'. Doug Ledford of RedHat was there for the tests and has his spin on the tests, where he talks about the difficulty of getting a meaningful benchmark. The Tranaction Processing Council are continually revising their benchmarks to remain meaningful. The big guns, IBM, Sun, HP, Oracle, Sybase, Compaq and Microsoft all use different TPC benchmarks to try and gain ammunition for sales staff. At some point Linux people will need to do the same.
The Mindcraft benchmarks look to be as fair as any I've seen. The reaction to the benchmarks is far more informative than the results themselves.
Linux can still be improved, it isn't as strong as other operating systems in some areas. The fact there is development occuring proves this point.
If you don't like the results, find a benchmark and configuration that gets the results you do like! Where there is a real deficiency lend a hand and be part of the solution.
There are a number of options depending on the effort you want to expend.
On the free side, definately look at Bugzilla, from Mozilla.org. In many respects defect tracking and help desk is very similiar, so a customised Bugzilla could do the trick.
You could code your own Helpdesk software, which is what Australian ISP connect.com.au have done, using perl.
If you are a glutton for punishment and seeking mega kudos, then perhaps try getting the NCR (AT&T) MP-RAS version of Remedy to work. I assume you would need to do something similar to what happened with the SCO version of Oracle on Linux before Oracle did a Linux port
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To say that WAP isn't needed because you can do it with SMS is almost like arguing we don't need the web because e-mail will do it all.
WAP isn't just for mobile phones, and it is another marker of the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones. As a previous poster noted, GPRS is a big advance tied in with WAP.
The killer app for WAP will come from someone who is sitting somewhere with their phone/PDA and who'll think "If only I had access to the net now I could do xxx"
You will start to see a swag of location based services that will based on your current position and the server will access a map database to be able to find you the closest resturant/bar/theatre/post office etc.The new nokia phones can display graphics so there is a good chance you'll get a map to where you are going.
Then there is purchasing from vending machines (big in certain parts of Europe I hear) where at the moment you ring a phone number in a soft drink machine, it debits your phone account and you get a drink. Wouldn't it be better if as you approached a drink machine it sensed your presence, displayed a drink menu on your phone, you select a drink and out it comes.
The point about voice calls etc being able to do much of this is true (heck I can check flight arrivals via the phone, or on the net too), there is always more than one way to do things, why not have the choice?
WAP browsers at the moment are akin to using lynx on a 4 line terminal, but as technology moves on things will move in leaps and bounds.
About 10 years ago Xerox PARC was playing around with PARCTabs, a device that had a touch sensitive LCD display, three buttons able to be operated by the hand you held the device in, and an infrared port. It had a baby 8 bit processor in it and got all of its applications from a server. The idea was that buildings would be wired with lots of IR basestations and you could do a bunch of stuff with your hand held Tab (play network games, read/write mail, schedule etc).
As PDAs have progressed I've seen them embody the ideas of the PARCTab, with the exception that they couldn't communicate. The IR ports on the palms were the first signs of the other half of the equation, bluetooth is a huge sign, and WAP sits in there too.
The company I'm currently doing work for is in the process of fitting out new offices, and as part of that they will be installing a wireless office on a scale as yet unseen worldwide - over 1000 employees and several floors. The floors will be wired with mobile basestations, and all staff will get a WAP enabled mobile phone.
Sure, as a hacker/nerd/geek you want control to play/fiddle/customise, but for people who the technology isn't an end in itself, all of that flexibility is a burden.
You get frustrated about the rapid advances and falling prices of technology - well in an ASP world you can forget about watching your $50K server turn into equivalent of next years $3K desktop.
ASPs also fit nicely into a netpliance world - they are the servers that give your netpliance life.
ASPs will be popular for similar reasons that web hosting is popular - its simpler and can be cheaper due to the economies of scale. Are you sitting there knowing that a proper tape backup system for your data will cost an arm and a leg? What if your data was stored remotely and backed up by a robotic backup system that looked after you and hundreds of others? For a small cost each day your data is securely backed up.
Using an ASP can potentially be more secure than any security you can put in place yourself. Do you have a firewall? I mean a real firewall, not a packet filter ala ipchains and ipfwadm. How many small businesses do you know with poor data security that would benefit from letting specialists look after things? Do you have DRP for your data? Do you have 99% uptime (application availability)?
Also, when looking at hype such as ASPs remember the real target market is the business world. There is far more money in making products for other businesses than for end users - where is there more money B2B or B2C? So while Sun will tell you that they are making an ASP version of StarOffice, they aren't really aiming at you sitting at home, they are thinking about that company around the corner with 100 people and overworked IT staff.
There will be a lot of lousy ASPs, companies looking to make a fast buck. These companies will die out, but the companies that addresses people's concerns - privacy, security and also have products people want will be the ones that stay around. Security will be a big selling point for any ASP that holds data.
You may already use some ASPs and not think of them as such. sourceforge, collab.net, eproject, hotmail, etc are all ASPs.
Now that you have a couple of candidates, do a local install of each of them and then run it across all of your existing source. Using all of your source is important - you don't want to find the tool you've selected doesn't understand namespaces or some other language feature you've used. Next take a small module and mark it up according to the guidelines for each tool and then run each of your candidates across the code again. By now you will have an obvious winner and at most it should have cost you a day of your time.
Looking at how each tool documents your code that isn't marked up is quite important when you have an existing code base. Commenting your code does take time and few managers will give you explicit permission to spend the next few weeks going back through the code base and marking it up.
When you marked up the code, how closely did it match your existing commenting style? The closer the match the easier it is to convince the programming team to use it.
Who is the target audience of your documented code? This will also affect your choice of tool. Also, does the documentation make it easier to explain the code to someone else? The class diagrams are pretty handy when explaining to someone where the method fred comes from.
Check what control you have over which comments will form part of the documentation. You don't want 'stupid hack to get around xxx' included while the detailed explanation of a clever algorithm remains hidden in the source (or maybe you do).
After searching around for a bit and trying a few things the winning tool was doxygen. We had a mix of C, C++, and Sybase ESQL code. Doxygen is smart enough to make sense of undocumented code, but really comes into its own when you write javadoc or qt style comments. For C++ it creates browseable class hierachies, can output in HTML or LATEX and includes a search feature. Nothing better than plugging in a method/function/constant name, clicking search and seeing where it is used.
We had source code in a large hierarchy of directories that ran into hundreds of thousands of lines and it took care of it all in a couple of minutes. One tool I tried choked on the size of our code, plus because it didn't come with a proper C++ pre-processor got really tangled up.
I made the generation of the documentation part of our build and package process so each release automatically had up to date source code documentation.
It made our Delphi programmers with their fancy IDE jealous of our documentation.
It will be a shame to lose a couple of months holiday each year though.
It can also be hard to get into pre-sales if you are not a technical person with a vendor (apparently all of us schmucks who have to evaluate between different vendor offerings don't know what it takes to do pre-sales).
Each projector has different capabilities, and later model projectors attempt to work out the correct resolution and refresh rate based on their input. Sometimes they get confused and display nothing. I've seen this happen on a regular basis with a projector attached to a windows laptop, and the projector can need power cycling to regain the plot. Moving between the laptop and external screen achieves a similar re-evaluation of the input when the projector hasn't totally confused itself.
The projector displaying nothing is in someways similar to when you try to overdrive your monitor and it goes into powersave mode. Likewise, changing settings (mode/resolution/refresh) too quickly powersaves some monitors and it can also confuse some projectors. This makes it hard to cycle through your 'available' modes.
Chances are the projector is a less capable screen than the laptop one - so while you might be able to run a 1024x768x16M laptop screen, the projector might max out at 800x600x256. This is all dependent on how much you've spent on the projector.
Set aside some time one afternoon with the projector and your laptop to work out what set of modes displays both on your laptop and projector. If you've got the specs handy for both your laptop and projector you can probably speed things up, but I'd suggest starting at 800x600x256 and work up from there.
Remember to always have a working backup copy of your XF86config file, and if you are using Xservers to specify a bpp (colour depth), keep a working copy of start line commented!
Better yet, to help with your eval you can do a 'try and buy', but you better have a good net connection because the download is huge.
It is actively supported by Sun, although updates come in fits and starts - over 2 years between version 3 and version 5 (no version 4), and a year later version 6.
I'd be interested to know how you go. The Java GUI should run slightly slower.
I'm curious how this will work given the lack of consistency with in building coverage and other interference that mobiles can suffer.
In some areas when installing a 'fixed phone' we actually install a phone that uses the mobile network. IIRC there is at least one island whose entire phone network is provided using mobile technology.
The important thing to realise is that employment contracts are negotiable. If there are clauses in a contract you don't like, ask to have them changed, if things appear confusing get them reworded.
Don't be afraid to get unrelated work that you do in your own time specifically mentioned, as per some of the examples in the topic What happens When Open Source And Work Collide
When working for a cool little Australian start-up we had a pretty employer friendly contract that some staff had ammended to something less one sided. The MD was also happy to let specific instances of code be retained by the employee who wrote them. The intent here was to protect the core system and underlying patents.
Under Australian law one of the differences between employees and contractors is that unless a contractor signs away their copyright and IP then it resides with the contractor. Employees on the other hand don't keep copyright and IP unless they make specific arrangements to do so.
It can be hard to remember employees do have a good bargaining position. It takes a lot of work to find someone you want to hire and it is often less expensive to spend some time getting lawyers to revise contracts than to interview another 20 odd people.
When next at an interview ask how long positions take to be filled. In small companies in particular are looking for a cultural fit as well as a skill fit - a happy team works much better than the equally skilled team that hates each other's guts.
The image blocking feature also blocks many non ad images - it doesn't discriminate. On my site for example I serve the 'Valid HTML4' images from a different domain hosted on the same box, but Mozilla can't tell that and blocks them.
If the feature disappears for good, then get involved with the code, dig back through CVS and work out how to put it back in...
If you are serious about blocking ads, run a proxy, a filter or one of the other ways to specifically target ads...
I've had a brief look at one of their scripts - it was the first time I've seen the parallel option used in a query and also the first time I'd seen a subquery as part of the from statement.
Sure, they probably could have used Pro*C, but I doubt the execution time would be much different - the slowness is in the retrieval from the database and transmission across the network. The power of string manipulation in perl makes the coding so much quicker and easier.
I've used perl accessing Sybase to populate tables from log files and my bottleneck was the fact I was doing row at a time inserts. It would have run just as slowly if I'd used E*SQL.
If I was choosing a database interface based on platform independence I'd look to java and then perl or PHP. Java has the added bonus of being able to run within the database for some databases (no more PL/SQL?).
For a web based app the startup time of your script is likely to be the slow point. Plus if you are using a web hosting service you might not be able to upload a compiled C program (you are probably also forced to use mySQL, and would therefore use PHP.
At the end of the day its all horses for courses.
I can't see why the credit status of your company was an issue for charge.com, unless they were concerned you wouldn't be able to pay them. If your bank is happy for you to accept credit card payments then thats all you need to become a merchant.
There are a number of different ways to start accepting online payments - good web hosting companies/ISPs offer e-commerce products, your bank might even have a product to do it. People like VeriSign etc have products to help.
Shop around for different products, estimate your volumes, look at fees (setup, monthly and per transaction) and find someone willing to work with you.
Web based credit card software is available for a range of platforms. The system I worked on had an OS/2 machine as the gateway to the credit card clearing house. There are *NIX and Windows software out there that do it, but it might be hard work finding open source ones - the financial world chokes about 'giving stuff away'!
Back to the point though, your available credit will guide your product selection, but shouldn't stop you from becoming a merchant.
I find this statement very interesting and hard to justify. Leaders are responsible for seeing things get done, and ensuring people stay focussed and positive. Having 20 people, in unison, withdraw their support indicates a deep seated failure of the leadership.
Good leaders focus the talents of their charges. They keep them in high spirits when all seems lost and know how to manage each person to achieve their personal best. All of this while still getting the result the company wants.
Having 20 people go all at once is significant in any group.
It doesn't necessarily mean the end of stampede. Perhaps it will improve things in the long run because a large group of dissenters have left and the moral of the remaining people can be lifted and focused. Conversely, Maybe stampede will die because the heart has been removed.
Alert leaders would have either:
a) been able to fix moral to keep things going, or
b) given the boot to the main dissenters early on
A split is not necessarily a bad thing - look at Emacs and Xemacs, a common goal but a fundamental difference of opinion, neither one right nor wrong, just different.
The split shows the strength of open source rather than its weakness - the dissenters can now go and do things their way, and those who believe the dissenters are wrong can band with stampede, unhindered by the non-believers.
The cable situation in Australia is interesting. Initially cable was laid by Optus to give them access to the local loop so they could totally bypass Telstra. At the moment Telstra owns the local loop and other telcos don't have access to it, so Telstra gets a slice of every call made in Australia that involves a fixed line phone.
To protect its Telephony business Telstra rolled out cable to pretty much exactly the same places Optus did.
Both Telstra and Optus laid digital cable, with the aim of providing phone, internet and pay TV services on the cable. Optus made a lot of hoopla about 20c local phone calls across their cable network, but ran into technical problems and IIRC only in recent times has voice over cable worked for them. They had some similar problems with their cable internet service, which has been in beta for over a year. Telstra have never tried to carry voice traffic on their cable network -- they don't need to because they have the local loop.
Cable in Australia is about to change with Optus@home, a partnership between Optus and @home. They will be offering a cable internet service targeted at home and small businesses, with prices more competitive than those offered by Telstra.
AAPT are introducing satellite soon, which will also add pressure to the high bandwidth internet market.
IIRC it can see stealth planes because normal radar hits the underside of the plane, while this radar hits the top of the plane, and the stealth planes aren't stealthy on top.
Naturally, authoritive details that this is the case are hard to find. Aussies will tell you this is because the Yanks are still pissed they spent so much time developing something 'invisible' and the Aussies immediately said 'We can see it.'
I can't say whether newer stealth planes are stealthy on top and therefore get around the initial failing.
In the majority of cases, if not all, the use of frames can be replaced by nested tables. And there is an increasing trend to do this.
Using tables instead of frames will increase the number of potential users who can make sense of your website. If you have a frames based website, you should also provide a non-frames version out of consideration for people using a browser that doesn't support frames.
Anyone authoring a website with Frontpage (ugggh) will invariably have a frame based website when they don't need to. This means that a lot of mom and pop websites, as well as small commercial websites have frames.
Larger commercial sites are tending to not use frames unless they have a really good reason. Look at the source code for sites such as Oracle TechNet, Wired, and About.com for examples of sites that use tables over frames. Interestingly, Oracle Technet has only recently made the change and Oracle still uses frames.
Many commercial software packages for website design favour tables over frames. Macromedia Dreamweaver will do this I think, although their site uses frames.
Webmonkey has a good guide to how to construct frames, but the article does say
ask yourself: Do I really need frames at all? Most of the time, the answer is no. In my opinion, frames are only appropriate when you have a complex navigation structure going on - especially one that involves retaining a search query while reloading the search results (as in Cocktail or Net Surf Central).
At the end of the day the person you've hired has been asked to provide functionality into your existing web site, and while they shouldn't be stopped from making suggestions on how to improve your site, they do have a job to do. I'd be surprised if having frames actually prevents functionality being added.
While it is true that in a number of underdeveloped areas things such as clean water are far more important than computers, there are millions of people around the world (including in developed countries) who can benefit from cheap computers.
If you believe that access to information is empowering, then the more people with unencumbered access to information the better. At the present point in time the most efficient way to provide information access is through computers.
The other area where computers help in developing areas is to support aid agencies. Computers are great at assisting in the streamlining and automation of processes, opening the opportunity for aid agencies to reduce their administrative overhead and channel scarce funds to helping those in need. As an expample, I would expect that community health centres can benefit from computerised patient records, or at least through having statistics on those that have been helped.
Front Page is a perfect example of using a position of power in one area to try and exert power in another area. The bundling of Front Page makes it easy for companies to build sites themselves rather than paying a good web designer to build one.
Most companies don't care that Front Page creates slow, shoddy HTML, with inappropriate use of frames. They've got one of those 'new fangled' websites they hear they need to survive. MS leverages this IT ignorance in decision makers. The saying used to be No one gets fired for buying IBM but in the minds of corporate purchasers and middle management decision makers it is now a case of No one gets fired for buying MS.
The greatest threats MS faces are:
- Technical people getting decision making powers (requires techs to talk in terms of business cases), and
- Decision makers becoming IT literate (requires techs to educate the great unwashed).
It will continue to be an uphill battle while MS can appear to make life easier for users with one hand and break standards (and reduce competition) with another.MS may have lost some battles in trying to gain control of the server market and the web, but the 'war' is not over yet.
I am surprised so many people haven't realised there is no such thing as a non-biased benchmark, and that, shock, horror, Linux is perfect (yet).
Benchmarks must reduce the scope of tests and make assumptions, which are not always true, so as to be possible. They also need to be done at a point in time, and not wait 'for the next version, which is so much better'. Doug Ledford of RedHat was there for the tests and has his spin on the tests, where he talks about the difficulty of getting a meaningful benchmark. The Tranaction Processing Council are continually revising their benchmarks to remain meaningful. The big guns, IBM, Sun, HP, Oracle, Sybase, Compaq and Microsoft all use different TPC benchmarks to try and gain ammunition for sales staff. At some point Linux people will need to do the same.
The Mindcraft benchmarks look to be as fair as any I've seen. The reaction to the benchmarks is far more informative than the results themselves.
Linux can still be improved, it isn't as strong as other operating systems in some areas. The fact there is development occuring proves this point.
If you don't like the results, find a benchmark and configuration that gets the results you do like! Where there is a real deficiency lend a hand and be part of the solution.
On the free side, definately look at Bugzilla, from Mozilla.org. In many respects defect tracking and help desk is very similiar, so a customised Bugzilla could do the trick.
You could code your own Helpdesk software, which is what Australian ISP connect.com.au have done, using perl.
If you are a glutton for punishment and seeking mega kudos, then perhaps try getting the NCR (AT&T) MP-RAS version of Remedy to work. I assume you would need to do something similar to what happened with the SCO version of Oracle on Linux before Oracle did a Linux port