There are good reasons for people to get certified. There are not many good reasons but I can come up with one situation (my own of course) where it makes sense.
Let us say that you are in a general position that really is cool. You are learning SQL, Oracle scripting, NT (yuck but I do), shell scripting and Solaris. Ok, you know what you want to specialize in. You love Unix. However, your job is too general and you need to show potential employers that you have the stuff to run a Solaris sysadmin job despite the fact Unix is only one fourth of your job. You could stay a generalist but until you become a big-time system consultant or project manager it does not pay to be a generalist in the computer business.
So how do you show that you have enough knowledge despite the fact you job is not solely focused on the skill. You get the certification. I am going for the Solaris certification. It is not the basis of my resume but it highlights the fact that I take what I want to specialize in seriously.
If you want games then you have to have the desktop market for companies to start making games for Linux in any significant quantity. I am amazed at both the quality and the number of games from Loki actually.
The support and corporate desire to make more games for Linux will only come after we can demostrate a large enough installed desktop/home base. Until then, why the hell should a corporation throw money away by supporting such a small user base. Loki has the advantage since they are basically (with a few exceptions) the only game in town. It reminds me of MacSoft back in the day in the times of Macintosh ports.
The only thing I would say in warning is that if the linux community really wants the desktop market we better be ready for the ramifications in terms of clueless end lusers.
There will be plenty of wonderful literate people that will take right away to the OS and the unix-like principles behind it. However, there will always be the folks who don't read the readme files or the man pages and ask silly things at times they should not. We should be ready. If you flame those folks the way people rip into newbies in some corners of the linux/unix world then the desktop is a prize we will never attain.
That would be a shame in a way but sometimes it is nice to be different. Linux was designed originally for geeks by geeks. I am not sure it will be the same when it is designed for geeks for moms wanting to get online and check email.
Ok, I use to be the pointy hair manager behind a help desk of 18 people supporting 2500 sales reps in the field with Win 95 laptops doing remote connections in field conditions.
The real issue is how many calls the end lusers make to your help desk. If the average user makes 2 calls per month and you have 3000 end lusers then you expect around 6000 calls a month.
The you divide the calls into the days of the month lets say 30 days in the month so you get 200 calls a day. The average tech for the kinds of calls we got can take about 25 calls a day so that is eight techs. However, accounting for sick leaves, vacations, normal off days and on top of that lunch breaks etc. that would push up the number of reps needed for a good wait time for the end user to 10-12 reps on the desk.
These are kinds of figures that we used. I cannot remember the actual formula used to account for people out versus the need for additonal people. However, it is out there.
I see the concerns shaping up really quick. I also see the folks lining up with kudos. The kind of debate already voiced in some of the early comments are the sort of posts that will follow the discussion throughout.
The debate is whether or not corporation involvement in the direct exploration of space a good thing.
There are pluses:
1) Businesses are usually apt to get things quicker than the government. 2) Businesses tend to be more effective in the results gained. 3) Businesses do not suck as much taxpayer dollars to achieve their goals. Notice that comment: I have not forgotten the whole debate over corporate welfare programs. Programs that give money to corporations that already rich for going into this or that market etc..
There are downsides as well:
1) Can we trust the corporations who are not motivated by the popular vote factor to not exploit their position and pollute the heavens in the same way they have polluted the earth. 2) Safety concerns are also a factor. NASA despite the few notable exceptions we all remember has a pretty good safety record. Can we trust the corporations will have the same sort of record? 3) What about the science factor? Is there any incentive for a money making operation to support the scientific community the same way NASA has?
The real question is whether the practical use of space is worth the possible downsides of corporate involvement on a massive scale. With good regulatory limits and oversight I think that the corporate model can be the new wave and spark a new era in the exploration of space.
There are certain books that never need to be produced into movies or tv shows. The "mind numbing" detail as one slashdotter puts the film technically out of the money reach for most tv productions. The incredible length and breadth of the book puts it out of the reach of a simple 2 hour Hollywood production.
I am one of the people who like the book. The political play was fun. The plot was deep and intriguing IMHO. The attention to detail and the fact that many of the political implications are drawn from an interesting perspective of someone writing at the end of the era of colonialism and into the cold war period makes it actually more interesting.
Would I have read a series of books just like this? No. Did I think the original book still deserved to be called a classic? Yes. Should it ever be tried on the little screen as a mini-series? Only if you got the bucks and talent to do it right!
Listen, how many email virus outbreaks will it take before people get the clue. If you get five emails with the same subject from people who do NOT love you then don't open the crap it is a virus or useless spam!
It is amazing that someone sits around and takes the time to start this nonsense anyway. God, I hate Outlook and Neanderthal technology it runs on. Still, driving innocent sysadmins insane is not the answer people.
Re:Bullshit press != News For Nerds. Sorry, Mikey.
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It is funny to hear a this is not really news from a well-known member of the community. I thought that only hopeless trolls made those remarks. Thanks for correcting me.
Bullshit hippie news I guess is a matter of political preference. Most folks I know in the industry are either young turk libertarians or old school hippy style personal freedom types when it comes to politics. BTW, these are usually the same ex-hippies that vote Republican because of money and tax issues. Still, the whole Transvestite/hint of anti-gay slant is a bit disturbing to say the least.
Also, this sort of article is basically the Slashdot I have always seen.
In other words some person sees an article having to do with Linux, privacy rights on the web, the old-school news source articles on the computer industry or something having to do with a Science Fiction movie and they write up what it is about and provide a link. This is the old school newspaper guys writing about the computer industry. This is the kind of stuff that is referenced every other day in Slashdot. Then what happens is a bunch of people post comments on how lame that person, the article, the movie or someone else's mother is and we all go on to the next article.
It is just funny to see Bowie play into this bullshit.
With communities as large and diverse as the Open Source movment you are going to naturally have duplication of effort.
However, I have to agree with this poster. There is far TOO much duplication of effort. I can see the need for four or even five email clients to account for individual taste but the twelve to twenty out there in the world is bordering on silly. Instead, we could all be better focused on moving aspects of applications and the interface forward. It seems that the desktop metaphor as well as many other aspects of "modern" OS interfaces could be updated. It seems that we are doing an excellent job of copying what has gone before us and in many ways improving and tweaking things without making the jump of making large improvements. It is just my opinion but I am not alone.
The points about fragmentation of distributions is silly. All major distributions contain essentially the same operating system with different tweaks and combinations of the same basic software. If you want this GUI configuration tool or installation then you choose this distribution or the other. GNU/LINUX is still there underneath the cool install and the neat config tool.
Finally the only "dangerous" or misguided suggestion is the unification of thought. It is good to be in an environment with debate and the idea of certain people being cut off from the community for towing the party line is not a pleasant one in my opinion. The idea of purging the concepts that lean toward socialism and collectivism makes me shiver. We need the long hair hippy coders with their years of experience and time in the community despite collective style ideals that may not fit my particular political mode.
Deal is, I am no Kevin Mitnik fan. I have always felt the guy was a weenie who would be better off creating and exposed to exploiting. That being said I have to ask the question. Doesn't this court order seem excessive?
I understand the court's power to limit a criminal's activity. However, are there any guidelines that say how far is too far? It seems a bit much when the guy can't even talk about computers in public. I can understand him being stopped cold from writing up procedures on how to crack systems. Yet, the gag order seems to be a bit over the top.
I guess being a sysadmin I never understood the cracker mentality. If you see a weakness in my site or network security schemes send me an email but don't go trudging all over my damn system as root screwing around with files and such. It just ain't right no matter what the beleagured excuse is.
The mere existence of an operating system that gives the end user access to a system as powerful as many of the top commercial Unix variants is amazing. The idea of two such operating systems is wild. The idea that they would be free and available to users no matter who they were or almost what hardware they are on is revolutionary. However, we are still recreating the wheel started nearly thirty years ago by Ritchie (an others BTW) at Bell Labs.
The same is true for the UI. In an amazingly short amount of time two projects doing the same things have come into being. They are doing a wonderful job of creating two desktop environments as robust as anything created in Cupertino or Redmond. Yet, we are still recreating the wheel.
We have had the technology to do voice recognition and activation for a couple of years (before that the hardware limited the technology to a large degree) yet what do we use it for in the real world, voice software is used for dictation.
We have had the technology to automate repetitive tasks performed by the end user on a daily basis (example: launch ppp, launch mail, start POP mail download, and then launch Netscape and go to Slahdot to see the news that matters:->). Yet, the technology is only used on an application basis with say for example macros in M$ products.
None of this stuff is revolutionary or out there. I want to be able to verbally tell my computer who I am have it recognize my voice and log me in. Why can't we perform the same repetitive task once and then run one program after that? I know that I automate tasks through shell scripts and the crontab but if we are worried over making pretty GUI for the regular end luser that ain't going to fly at all. The regular issue standard end luser would never write a shell script but the OS that can give them an easy way to automate their tasks would convert many more millions.
I am sure that I am thinking of only the minor stuff here. Still, I see posts here talking about the positioning of widgets, and themes versus consistency and a dozen other important look and feel issues that do not address the simple fact that nobody at all has had the guts to progress the user interface beyond the desktop.
The WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, pull-down menu) convention started by Xerox, stolen by Apple and barfed back at the world by M$ is nearly twenty years old. I am not saying ditch the damn thing I am talking about moving it FORWARD people!
Listen, in everything, business to hacking, duplication of effort is always a problem. I understand choice, I even understand two desktop environments but we need teams of people working on what seems to be a hundred different freaking email software projects. That's right man I just can't live with only 18 GNOME email clients. Can we get together and talk to the divergent groups and get some people working together on coming up with new ideas for email clients? What can we possibly do with an email client that has never been done before?
I am not sure. All I know is we don't need to be as good as winblows or the MacOS, we need to be better. We can't rely (and we never have before BTW) on the commercial interests to give the end luser a compelling reason to use Linux. We have to come up with the big reason and we have to understand that it will not be for the same reasons that computer geeks, programmers and sysadmins got into Linux.
They don't care and they will not brag to their friends about their computer that has not gone down for over a year. My mom will never, ever hack code or compile her own program. My wife's aunt will not care about the power and allure of the almighty command line and having the power of a Unix box at home.
Give them an OS that has a revolutionary UI that they can talk to, an office suite that is better than M$Office, and has one really cool killer app that can't live without and the MIGHT change operating systems. This kind of thing with the public and what they want is rarely logically.
First, I despise the bad grammar, mispelling, you made one mistake in your post so you must be full of crap replies. Sometimes the person is a complete moron and needs to be corrected. However, for the most part, those sort of posts appear for the sole purpose of turning attention away from the topic at hand.
Also, why in the world insult people from the south? The Research Triangle, the Atlanta Business districts(ie GA TECH), and Austin are all bastions of higher technology. There are ill-educated idiots in every part of the country. Southerners are famous for the accent and the bad grammar but I have heard people Jersey and Boston accents that are almost as thick.
There are a lot of beer drinking, pickup truck driving, country music loving, good ol' boys living in the South. However, it is not a requirement for being born and raised in the Deep South. It is hard to believe but true.
Finally, (just to keep this from being marked off-topic):-> all this distro infighting is silly. It is all about choice. Some people like the changes, "optimizations" and things Mandrake has done. Good. I like SuSe. Other people like Red Hat and swear by it. I can not tell you how many posts on the merits and problems with distros I have read in this group of posts echo one unifying characteristic. They reflect the user's own experiences. The most opinionated people had a bad experience with Mandrake and stuck with RedHat or they had a bad experience with RedHat and Mandrake had something they wanted. We all need further the Linux/GNU OS and stop bickering among ourselves over the little things.
I don't buy this at all. People who are part of a culture and a society make the games. This cultural influence is reflected in every tv show and video game available today. Even when people protray different societies they do so from their own biased perception (ever read early settlers warped accounts of Indian traditions?).
Fiction is often exagerrated but almost always reflects events and people that live in the real world. The real world is not like Kingpin but if you live in the world of crime, guns and depravity it comes far too close. There are sick people out there sir and you are the one that is a victim.
If you believe that Quake makes and forges people into killers, then you are playing into the sort of hysteria gripping the same tv culture you seem to yell against.
It is instead a society competitive and obsessed with violence that creates the kind of atmosphere that these games come about in. The masses play the games because they like the games. They like the games because our culture has taken the sting out of the violence and it is ok to kill in the virtual world.
Before video games people said that Heavy Metal music made commit suicide and before that in the fifties it was comic books that forged teenage deliquents. We always come up with an excuse without facing the problem.
Listen, i don't mind the man's stories and I can even get into his non-fiction to a point. However, I guess I am just getting burned out on the whole techno-visionary political privacy commentator role.
I realize that the political privacy ramifications of living in a digital world is a very important topic but it seems that everyone from Slashdot to reporter types like Katz to fiction writers like Stephenson are getting obsessive about this. Listen, the Open Source community and the FSF folks and all the other people who have clued into this site for years need to focus on taking the OSes they code for -- Linux, BSD varient GNUhurd whatever to the next level and creating the next generation in OS/human interface design instead of focusing so intensely on politics.
It is not that I think we should not worry at all. However, it seems that a lot of folks are so focused on the politics it is hard to see the focus on the future, at least from here.:->
Yes, it is obvious but it is also a vast over simplification of a much more complex problem. Examining violent games alone without looking at the society that creates the games is a useless exercise to say the least. Violent games lead to violent behavior. I say yeah so? That is obivous to the point of being banal.
What nobody is really doing at this point is examining the kind of culture that produces these same games. Change society and the games and other forms of entertainment will become less violent. Less violent cultures simply do not get into the same violent passtimes that our culture goes for (the Japanese are odd in the sense that they love the epic fight/duel games and yet do not have the violence factor).
The society of the Japanese is not as violent(notice I am not saying that their culture is pacifist by any means and their history is very violent I know this) but the games are. The society and culture not the games the children play make the monsters taking out each other in our schools.
as how we define them. Patents have been defined far too broadly in the courts as of late. The whole idea of intellectual property and the fact that the courts have effectively ignored the fact that many patents are just blatant attempts to capitalize on the obvious.
For truly revolutionary and unique ideas, patents are an important protection for the people who create new technologies and industries. However, trying to patent ideas that are or would quickly become obvious to the whole of mankind is counterproductive and harmful to the population and industry as a whole.
Patents are a logical protection under the law for creators, inventors and people of imagination that want to profit from their creation. However, when the law is interpeted too broadly we are stuck in a situation where idiot companies like Amazon can patent technology that is obvious to anyone who is not completely ignorant of the same said technology. Either the patent department needs to catch a clue or the whole set of laws surrounded patents need to be revised on a Federal level. However, ditching the laws wholesale is counterproductive.
Maybe I am too conservative and not reactionary enough for some but the whole idea of throwing babies out with their bathwater is narrowsighted to me.
We can write all the laws we want and get our Senators and Representatives to pass all the legislation possible without restricting our personal liberty.
However, the real point is the fact that the federal authorities have limited numbers of people to enforce any set of laws. After all, how many companies pollute without fear because they know that the government does not have the people to enforce the current EPA laws already on the books. Hell, the NRA made a campaign out of the fact the Feds do not have the resources or for that matter the will to enforce current gun laws.
Can we really expect protection from the same government we consistently point to as being out of touch and clueless when it comes to technical matters. Just try to get your local law enforcement or even the Feds via the FBI to take on any sort of electronic crime. Unless a big e-commerce site is hacked or the cops find a group of kiddie pornsters to bust they are not going to be forward thinking in enforcing these sort of laws.
The government is too clueless to protect us and the law enforcement is too far behind the times to try. We will have to fight the battles ourselves.
First, as one poster has already pointed out, life has been getting "faster" since WWII or even earlier (say the beginning of the industrial age).
Secondly, I hardly think that shooting small furry animals amount to the important things in life. Sure, kill animals eat the meat and use the rest as you see fit. However, doing it for fun seems wasteful especially since I come from the backwoods where hunting was seen as a way to supplement the diet with meat not as merely as a way to have fun.
As for the decline in religion, that subject can fill and has filled volumes both from the right, left, religious and non-religious sources. I do not think that is what this book is about.
I am interested as many of us here are in the resulting effects of technology on culture. However, I think this book does little in terms of drawing well thought out conclusions and merely mouths many already accepted points of view while at the same time adding only a few essays on different scenes we all see every day. Once again, it is the intellectual conceit of telling the reader what they already know to make yourself look insightful.
The decline in religious activity by the masses is a symptom of the moral decline of society not the cause itself. People miss this point frequently. The idea of morality or good in people has been marginalized to the point that people simply do not see the need to seek guidance for their morality from any religious source. As society grows larger and larger and further away form the individual and more inclusive of more and more divergent groups, the idea of a diety becomes an idea so large and far removed from the lives of the individuals in the society that people cannot relate. This is a symptom once again of the moral decay of a society and not the cause in and of itself.
First, becaus the thing is not native it is going to be a bit buggy and I think Corel will learn quick that it is best to go native. Also, somebody give me a reason to EVER go and buy a product the minute it comes out. Even Corel that typically makes a much better product than M$ still has kinks to work out of the first product. I will wait till the next version or at least till some reasonable patch releases come out.
What is funny is the reaction from the community. I hear people blinding touting the idea of bringing Linux to the desktop and to the common user. Yet, they fuss when a major software player like Corel wants to make a product for Linux and expects people to -gasp!- pay for it. WTF?
Catch a clue people. Most end lusers are not download slackware, configure Gnome without ever asking for help (go help the newbie that asks a Linux user for help), and then download a laundry list of GPL office programs and tries to compile each one themselves (only wimps use RPMs or deb packages after all). The laundry list of dependency errors alone would drive them insane. They would be old and gray before they downloaded the lib packages and kill themselves in the end before they realized it was not worth it.
Our community needs to stop waffling between the extremes and figure out once and for all do we want to be the geek man's favorite home system/server OS or do we want to be the everyman's productivity tool? If we want to be all things to all people we are going to have to make some concessions. People like buying pretty boxes with CDs that they can pay for, install and expect to get support for from a big name. The geek in us all may hate that but it is true.
Spam wastes time, bandwidth and the energy expended in filtering the junk out.
Spam on your cellphone considering the rates charged for time used is even worse.
Everyone agrees to this. Why can't there be some sort of law passed to prohibit this sort of nonsense? I thought that the fax spam law that says if it costs the person getting the fax money that it could be prohibited. Why is it taking lawmakers so looong to react?
A joke running around Ops after the tornadoes that ran through GA a couple of years ago went something like this:
"Yeah, the damn twister came right through and took out every Vax in the place. All the NT boxes just blew up before the twister even touched them. But the DEC/Alphas just sat there and kept running. Why? Because the Oracle told them they could."
One of the reasons so many of us chose Linux was the freedom to manipulate our UI environment the way we wanted to.
I do not really see the fuss about choice versus cutomization. Why? Well, the choices given do not confuse the newbie because they can stick with the default views if they care to. How many people do you know that still have the plain jane grey winamp skin? I know a lot of folks that are stuck in this view.
The idea that we have gone too far with allowing the customization of UI in the operating system or various applications is one to ponder but for only half a second. As long as the functionality remains the same then changing the look of different buttons and such is not a great big deal.
The real annoyance in my opinion is how radically different the actual functionality of buttons and options are under many GPLed apps and window managers. That is a major annoyance for the casual or home user. Unless, I want to go completely KDE or GNOME in my choice of applications then I have to go through the time of re-teaching the shortcuts and such to my wife so she gets the full functionality out of the applications.
She could just hunt and peck her way through the app but believe it or not there are home users out there that work on computers all day long that prefer keystroke shortcuts and want to be truly proficient in the use of their applications.
Skins are not an issue. The real issue is that under Linux at least there are so many divergent development tools that no one application looks, feels or acts the same. Many times the apps do not even bother to work together (can anyone say cut and paste into oblivion?)
The debate over development tools becomes even more complex. KDE in my opinion is too windoze like. Other people swear by it and say that development is easier than Gnome. Other people love the GTK tools and I personally like the look and feel of the GNOME apps a lot. Then there are developers using a hodge podge of various tools from all over the GPL landscape each with their own strengths. I love the OpenStep, GNUstep NeXt feel but the apps just are not as robust as some of the GNOME alternatives in terms of their feature set.
With no all powerful company calling the shots on look and feel the desktop with be a tough frontier for the Open Source community to take. However, none of us want one company calling the shots so the whole thing becomes the complex mess of GTK, KDE apps living in conflict with wx, xform and a half dozen other development widget set and tools to make apps.
Isn't SGI using Linux as a proxy to kill off Sun? Just joking,:->. IBM has no chance of catching enough of a clue to kill of Sun. The company that gave us Java does some boneheaded crap but I admit the hardware is solid and the OS (Solaris 8) is one of the very best Commercial distributions alive today.
To be frank, the only company with a product good enough to beat of the Sun boys is so absolutely clueless that they will never beat them. Yes, Compaq is sitting on the best hardware ever to run Oracle. There is nothing in the universe more solid than a damn DEC/Alpha running Oracle. Those boxes don't go down for anything.
Linux is great operating system for the small scale business that needs the stability of Unix or the Sysadmin sitting at home wanting the power of the command line. It is great for the network guy wanting to turn that 486 into a proxy server at home. It is wonderful for the programmer on the cheap who only has to download Code Crusader to get a great little IDE for nothing and his compiler for free. On a large scale, they make good little web servers, SMTP servers and can perform a half dozen or so roles in a large corporation data center.
However, I still want the big Sun boxes for my big sites. Dec/Alphas were spawned from the hell of Digital for the sole purpose of running Oracle. It is hard for some people to admit but the commercial *nixes still have some advantages in terms of stability and performance on their native hardware platforms. Will one day Linux finally take them over the same way that Linux is seeping into the hallowed halls of SGI? Sure!
Does this mean that Solaris sucks by default? No.
Another Open Source(kind of) game engine hmmm?
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How original! There seems to be no end to the different open source, kind of free, almost free trying to fool you to pay us money style game engines. The problem is that if I see one more engine without a game to show it off I will puke.
Let's follow the trend shall we. A URL is posted on linuxgames or happy penguin boasting of a 3d, flight sim, role playing engine. Hapless web surfer goes strolling over to said site.
First, there is no real game or even part of a game to download to get the feel of what the coders are trying to do. Even worse they taunt you saying they made the engine now you make the game. Fine, hapless web surfer knows a bit of c and even c++ so he downloads the code to try it out. Suddenly he realizes that the new engine does the exact same thing that every other OpenGL style 3d engine does only worse.
Hapless surfer breaks out CodeCrusader and corrects their mistakes sends it back to them taunting them to make a better engine first before asking people to use it to make games. Hapless surfer is now engaged in endless flame war with 15 old coders from Alaska.
Listen, as one post pointed out, people love to hear what they already know, but in a way they have not heard it before.
It is amazing to watch people call a book insightful when it is just parrotting back to them what they want to hear or already know.
I can see the use for this material to the stodgy old school business types. However, I do not think the writer really ever took his ideas far enough in some cases or even worse he got idealistic to the point of being silly in some other parts of the book.
Slashdot Mirror
There are good reasons for people to get certified. There are not many good reasons but I can come up with one situation (my own of course) where it makes sense.
Let us say that you are in a general position that really is cool. You are learning SQL, Oracle scripting, NT (yuck but I do), shell scripting and Solaris. Ok, you know what you want to specialize in. You love Unix. However, your job is too general and you need to show potential employers that you have the stuff to run a Solaris sysadmin job despite the fact Unix is only one fourth of your job. You could stay a generalist but until you become a big-time system consultant or project manager it does not pay to be a generalist in the computer business.
So how do you show that you have enough knowledge despite the fact you job is not solely focused on the skill. You get the certification. I am going for the Solaris certification. It is not the basis of my resume but it highlights the fact that I take what I want to specialize in seriously.
If you want games then you have to have the desktop market for companies to start making games for Linux in any significant quantity. I am amazed at both the quality and the number of games from Loki actually.
The support and corporate desire to make more games for Linux will only come after we can demostrate a large enough installed desktop/home base. Until then, why the hell should a corporation throw money away by supporting such a small user base. Loki has the advantage since they are basically (with a few exceptions) the only game in town. It reminds me of MacSoft back in the day in the times of Macintosh ports.
The only thing I would say in warning is that if the linux community really wants the desktop market we better be ready for the ramifications in terms of clueless end lusers.
There will be plenty of wonderful literate people that will take right away to the OS and the unix-like principles behind it. However, there will always be the folks who don't read the readme files or the man pages and ask silly things at times they should not. We should be ready. If you flame those folks the way people rip into newbies in some corners of the linux/unix world then the desktop is a prize we will never attain.
That would be a shame in a way but sometimes it is nice to be different. Linux was designed originally for geeks by geeks. I am not sure it will be the same when it is designed for geeks for moms wanting to get online and check email.
I hope I am wrong.
Ok, I use to be the pointy hair manager behind a help desk of 18 people supporting 2500 sales reps in the field with Win 95 laptops doing remote connections in field conditions.
The real issue is how many calls the end lusers make to your help desk. If the average user makes 2 calls per month and you have 3000 end lusers then you expect around 6000 calls a month.
The you divide the calls into the days of the month lets say 30 days in the month so you get 200 calls a day. The average tech for the kinds of calls we got can take about 25 calls a day so that is eight techs. However, accounting for sick leaves, vacations, normal off days and on top of that lunch breaks etc. that would push up the number of reps needed for a good wait time for the end user to 10-12 reps on the desk.
These are kinds of figures that we used. I cannot remember the actual formula used to account for people out versus the need for additonal people. However, it is out there.
I see the concerns shaping up really quick. I also see the folks lining up with kudos. The kind of debate already voiced in some of the early comments are the sort of posts that will follow the discussion throughout.
The debate is whether or not corporation involvement in the direct exploration of space a good thing.
There are pluses:
1) Businesses are usually apt to get things quicker than the government.
2) Businesses tend to be more effective in the results gained.
3) Businesses do not suck as much taxpayer dollars to achieve their goals. Notice that comment: I have not forgotten the whole debate over corporate welfare programs. Programs that give money to corporations that already rich for going into this or that market etc..
There are downsides as well:
1) Can we trust the corporations who are not motivated by the popular vote factor to not exploit their position and pollute the heavens in the same way they have polluted the earth.
2) Safety concerns are also a factor. NASA despite the few notable exceptions we all remember has a pretty good safety record. Can we trust the corporations will have the same sort of record?
3) What about the science factor? Is there any incentive for a money making operation to support the scientific community the same way NASA has?
The real question is whether the practical use of space is worth the possible downsides of corporate involvement on a massive scale. With good regulatory limits and oversight I think that the corporate model can be the new wave and spark a new era in the exploration of space.
There are certain books that never need to be produced into movies or tv shows. The "mind numbing" detail as one slashdotter puts the film technically out of the money reach for most tv productions. The incredible length and breadth of the book puts it out of the reach of a simple 2 hour Hollywood production.
I am one of the people who like the book. The political play was fun. The plot was deep and intriguing IMHO. The attention to detail and the fact that many of the political implications are drawn from an interesting perspective of someone writing at the end of the era of colonialism and into the cold war period makes it actually more interesting.
Would I have read a series of books just like this? No. Did I think the original book still deserved to be called a classic? Yes. Should it ever be tried on the little screen as a mini-series? Only if you got the bucks and talent to do it right!
Listen, how many email virus outbreaks will it take before people get the clue. If you get five emails with the same subject from people who do NOT love you then don't open the crap it is a virus or useless spam!
It is amazing that someone sits around and takes the time to start this nonsense anyway. God, I hate Outlook and Neanderthal technology it runs on. Still, driving innocent sysadmins insane is not the answer people.
It is funny to hear a this is not really news from a well-known member of the community. I thought that only hopeless trolls made those remarks. Thanks for correcting me.
Bullshit hippie news I guess is a matter of political preference. Most folks I know in the industry are either young turk libertarians or old school hippy style personal freedom types when it comes to politics. BTW, these are usually the same ex-hippies that vote Republican because of money and tax issues. Still, the whole Transvestite/hint of anti-gay slant is a bit disturbing to say the least.
Also, this sort of article is basically the Slashdot I have always seen.
In other words some person sees an article having to do with Linux, privacy rights on the web, the old-school news source articles on the computer industry or something having to do with a Science Fiction movie and they write up what it is about and provide a link. This is the old school newspaper guys writing about the computer industry. This is the kind of stuff that is referenced every other day in Slashdot. Then what happens is a bunch of people post comments on how lame that person, the article, the movie or someone else's mother is and we all go on to the next article.
It is just funny to see Bowie play into this bullshit.
With communities as large and diverse as the Open Source movment you are going to naturally have duplication of effort.
However, I have to agree with this poster. There is far TOO much duplication of effort. I can see the need for four or even five email clients to account for individual taste but the twelve to twenty out there in the world is bordering on silly. Instead, we could all be better focused on moving aspects of applications and the interface forward. It seems that the desktop metaphor as well as many other aspects of "modern" OS interfaces could be updated. It seems that we are doing an excellent job of copying what has gone before us and in many ways improving and tweaking things without making the jump of making large improvements. It is just my opinion but I am not alone.
The points about fragmentation of distributions is silly. All major distributions contain essentially the same operating system with different tweaks and combinations of the same basic software. If you want this GUI configuration tool or installation then you choose this distribution or the other. GNU/LINUX is still there underneath the cool install and the neat config tool.
Finally the only "dangerous" or misguided suggestion is the unification of thought. It is good to be in an environment with debate and the idea of certain people being cut off from the community for towing the party line is not a pleasant one in my opinion. The idea of purging the concepts that lean toward socialism and collectivism makes me shiver. We need the long hair hippy coders with their years of experience and time in the community despite collective style ideals that may not fit my particular political mode.
Deal is, I am no Kevin Mitnik fan. I have always felt the guy was a weenie who would be better off creating and exposed to exploiting. That being said I have to ask the question. Doesn't this court order seem excessive?
I understand the court's power to limit a criminal's activity. However, are there any guidelines that say how far is too far? It seems a bit much when the guy can't even talk about computers in public. I can understand him being stopped cold from writing up procedures on how to crack systems. Yet, the gag order seems to be a bit over the top.
I guess being a sysadmin I never understood the cracker mentality. If you see a weakness in my site or network security schemes send me an email but don't go trudging all over my damn system as root screwing around with files and such. It just ain't right no matter what the beleagured excuse is.
When I say two OSes in the first paragraph or so I am refering to Linux and BSD by the way.
The mere existence of an operating system that gives the end user access to a system as powerful as many of the top commercial Unix variants is amazing. The idea of two such operating systems is wild. The idea that they would be free and available to users no matter who they were or almost what hardware they are on is revolutionary. However, we are still recreating the wheel started nearly thirty years ago by Ritchie (an others BTW) at Bell Labs.
:->). Yet, the technology is only used on an application basis with say for example macros in M$ products.
The same is true for the UI. In an amazingly short amount of time two projects doing the same things have come into being. They are doing a wonderful job of creating two desktop environments as robust as anything created in Cupertino or Redmond. Yet, we are still recreating the wheel.
We have had the technology to do voice recognition and activation for a couple of years (before that the hardware limited the technology to a large degree) yet what do we use it for in the real world, voice software is used for dictation.
We have had the technology to automate repetitive tasks performed by the end user on a daily basis (example: launch ppp, launch mail, start POP mail download, and then launch Netscape and go to Slahdot to see the news that matters
None of this stuff is revolutionary or out there. I want to be able to verbally tell my computer who I am have it recognize my voice and log me in. Why can't we perform the same repetitive task once and then run one program after that? I know that I automate tasks through shell scripts and the crontab but if we are worried over making pretty GUI for the regular end luser that ain't going to fly at all. The regular issue standard end luser would never write a shell script but the OS that can give them an easy way to automate their tasks would convert many more millions.
I am sure that I am thinking of only the minor stuff here. Still, I see posts here talking about the positioning of widgets, and themes versus consistency and a dozen other important look and feel issues that do not address the simple fact that nobody at all has had the guts to progress the user interface beyond the desktop.
The WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, pull-down menu) convention started by Xerox, stolen by Apple and barfed back at the world by M$ is nearly twenty years old. I am not saying ditch the damn thing I am talking about moving it FORWARD people!
Listen, in everything, business to hacking, duplication of effort is always a problem. I understand choice, I even understand two desktop environments but we need teams of people working on what seems to be a hundred different freaking email software projects. That's right man I just can't live with only 18 GNOME email clients. Can we get together and talk to the divergent groups and get some people working together on coming up with new ideas for email clients? What can we possibly do with an email client that has never been done before?
I am not sure. All I know is we don't need to be as good as winblows or the MacOS, we need to be better. We can't rely (and we never have before BTW) on the commercial interests to give the end luser a compelling reason to use Linux. We have to come up with the big reason and we have to understand that it will not be for the same reasons that computer geeks, programmers and sysadmins got into Linux.
They don't care and they will not brag to their friends about their computer that has not gone down for over a year. My mom will never, ever hack code or compile her own program. My wife's aunt will not care about the power and allure of the almighty command line and having the power of a Unix box at home.
Give them an OS that has a revolutionary UI that they can talk to, an office suite that is better than M$Office, and has one really cool killer app that can't live without and the MIGHT change operating systems. This kind of thing with the public and what they want is rarely logically.
First, I despise the bad grammar, mispelling, you made one mistake in your post so you must be full of crap replies. Sometimes the person is a complete moron and needs to be corrected. However, for the most part, those sort of posts appear for the sole purpose of turning attention away from the topic at hand.
:-> all this distro infighting is silly. It is all about choice. Some people like the changes, "optimizations" and things Mandrake has done. Good. I like SuSe. Other people like Red Hat and swear by it. I can not tell you how many posts on the merits and problems with distros I have read in this group of posts echo one unifying characteristic. They reflect the user's own experiences. The most opinionated people had a bad experience with Mandrake and stuck with RedHat or they had a bad experience with RedHat and Mandrake had something they wanted. We all need further the Linux/GNU OS and stop bickering among ourselves over the little things.
Also, why in the world insult people from the south? The Research Triangle, the Atlanta Business districts(ie GA TECH), and Austin are all bastions of higher technology. There are ill-educated idiots in every part of the country. Southerners are famous for the accent and the bad grammar but I have heard people Jersey and Boston accents that are almost as thick.
There are a lot of beer drinking, pickup truck driving, country music loving, good ol' boys living in the South. However, it is not a requirement for being born and raised in the Deep South. It is hard to believe but true.
Finally, (just to keep this from being marked off-topic)
I don't buy this at all. People who are part of a culture and a society make the games. This cultural influence is reflected in every tv show and video game available today. Even when people protray different societies they do so from their own biased perception (ever read early settlers warped accounts of Indian traditions?).
Fiction is often exagerrated but almost always reflects events and people that live in the real world. The real world is not like Kingpin but if you live in the world of crime, guns and depravity it comes far too close. There are sick people out there sir and you are the one that is a victim.
If you believe that Quake makes and forges people into killers, then you are playing into the sort of hysteria gripping the same tv culture you seem to yell against.
It is instead a society competitive and obsessed with violence that creates the kind of atmosphere that these games come about in. The masses play the games because they like the games. They like the games because our culture has taken the sting out of the violence and it is ok to kill in the virtual world.
Before video games people said that Heavy Metal music made commit suicide and before that in the fifties it was comic books that forged teenage deliquents. We always come up with an excuse without facing the problem.
Listen, i don't mind the man's stories and I can even get into his non-fiction to a point. However, I guess I am just getting burned out on the whole techno-visionary political privacy commentator role.
:->
I realize that the political privacy ramifications of living in a digital world is a very important topic but it seems that everyone from Slashdot to reporter types like Katz to fiction writers like Stephenson are getting obsessive about this. Listen, the Open Source community and the FSF folks and all the other people who have clued into this site for years need to focus on taking the OSes they code for -- Linux, BSD varient GNUhurd whatever to the next level and creating the next generation in OS/human interface design instead of focusing so intensely on politics.
It is not that I think we should not worry at all. However, it seems that a lot of folks are so focused on the politics it is hard to see the focus on the future, at least from here.
Yes, it is obvious but it is also a vast over simplification of a much more complex problem. Examining violent games alone without looking at the society that creates the games is a useless exercise to say the least. Violent games lead to violent behavior. I say yeah so? That is obivous to the point of being banal.
What nobody is really doing at this point is examining the kind of culture that produces these same games. Change society and the games and other forms of entertainment will become less violent. Less violent cultures simply do not get into the same violent passtimes that our culture goes for (the Japanese are odd in the sense that they love the epic fight/duel games and yet do not have the violence factor).
The society of the Japanese is not as violent(notice I am not saying that their culture is pacifist by any means and their history is very violent I know this) but the games are. The society and culture not the games the children play make the monsters taking out each other in our schools.
as how we define them. Patents have been defined far too broadly in the courts as of late. The whole idea of intellectual property and the fact that the courts have effectively ignored the fact that many patents are just blatant attempts to capitalize on the obvious.
For truly revolutionary and unique ideas, patents are an important protection for the people who create new technologies and industries. However, trying to patent ideas that are or would quickly become obvious to the whole of mankind is counterproductive and harmful to the population and industry as a whole.
Patents are a logical protection under the law for creators, inventors and people of imagination that want to profit from their creation. However, when the law is interpeted too broadly we are stuck in a situation where idiot companies like Amazon can patent technology that is obvious to anyone who is not completely ignorant of the same said technology. Either the patent department needs to catch a clue or the whole set of laws surrounded patents need to be revised on a Federal level. However, ditching the laws wholesale is counterproductive.
Maybe I am too conservative and not reactionary enough for some but the whole idea of throwing babies out with their bathwater is narrowsighted to me.
We can write all the laws we want and get our Senators and Representatives to pass all the legislation possible without restricting our personal liberty.
However, the real point is the fact that the federal authorities have limited numbers of people to enforce any set of laws. After all, how many companies pollute without fear because they know that the government does not have the people to enforce the current EPA laws already on the books. Hell, the NRA made a campaign out of the fact the Feds do not have the resources or for that matter the will to enforce current gun laws.
Can we really expect protection from the same government we consistently point to as being out of touch and clueless when it comes to technical matters. Just try to get your local law enforcement or even the Feds via the FBI to take on any sort of electronic crime. Unless a big e-commerce site is hacked or the cops find a group of kiddie pornsters to bust they are not going to be forward thinking in enforcing these sort of laws.
The government is too clueless to protect us and the law enforcement is too far behind the times to try. We will have to fight the battles ourselves.
First, as one poster has already pointed out, life has been getting "faster" since WWII or even earlier (say the beginning of the industrial age).
Secondly, I hardly think that shooting small furry animals amount to the important things in life. Sure, kill animals eat the meat and use the rest as you see fit. However, doing it for fun seems wasteful especially since I come from the backwoods where hunting was seen as a way to supplement the diet with meat not as merely as a way to have fun.
As for the decline in religion, that subject can fill and has filled volumes both from the right, left, religious and non-religious sources. I do not think that is what this book is about.
I am interested as many of us here are in the resulting effects of technology on culture. However, I think this book does little in terms of drawing well thought out conclusions and merely mouths many already accepted points of view while at the same time adding only a few essays on different scenes we all see every day. Once again, it is the intellectual conceit of telling the reader what they already know to make yourself look insightful.
The decline in religious activity by the masses is a symptom of the moral decline of society not the cause itself. People miss this point frequently. The idea of morality or good in people has been marginalized to the point that people simply do not see the need to seek guidance for their morality from any religious source. As society grows larger and larger and further away form the individual and more inclusive of more and more divergent groups, the idea of a diety becomes an idea so large and far removed from the lives of the individuals in the society that people cannot relate. This is a symptom once again of the moral decay of a society and not the cause in and of itself.
First, becaus the thing is not native it is going to be a bit buggy and I think Corel will learn quick that it is best to go native. Also, somebody give me a reason to EVER go and buy a product the minute it comes out. Even Corel that typically makes a much better product than M$ still has kinks to work out of the first product. I will wait till the next version or at least till some reasonable patch releases come out.
What is funny is the reaction from the community. I hear people blinding touting the idea of bringing Linux to the desktop and to the common user. Yet, they fuss when a major software player like Corel wants to make a product for Linux and expects people to -gasp!- pay for it. WTF?
Catch a clue people. Most end lusers are not download slackware, configure Gnome without ever asking for help (go help the newbie that asks a Linux user for help), and then download a laundry list of GPL office programs and tries to compile each one themselves (only wimps use RPMs or deb packages after all). The laundry list of dependency errors alone would drive them insane. They would be old and gray before they downloaded the lib packages and kill themselves in the end before they realized it was not worth it.
Our community needs to stop waffling between the extremes and figure out once and for all do we want to be the geek man's favorite home system/server OS or do we want to be the everyman's productivity tool? If we want to be all things to all people we are going to have to make some concessions. People like buying pretty boxes with CDs that they can pay for, install and expect to get support for from a big name. The geek in us all may hate that but it is true.
Spam wastes time, bandwidth and the energy expended in filtering the junk out.
Spam on your cellphone considering the rates charged for time used is even worse.
Everyone agrees to this. Why can't there be some sort of law passed to prohibit this sort of nonsense? I thought that the fax spam law that says if it costs the person getting the fax money that it could be prohibited. Why is it taking lawmakers so looong to react?
A joke running around Ops after the tornadoes that ran through GA a couple of years ago went something like this:
"Yeah, the damn twister came right through and took out every Vax in the place. All the NT boxes just blew up before the twister even touched them. But the DEC/Alphas just sat there and kept running. Why? Because the Oracle told them they could."
Ok, I could never tell a joke even in a email.
One of the reasons so many of us chose Linux was the freedom to manipulate our UI environment the way we wanted to.
I do not really see the fuss about choice versus cutomization. Why? Well, the choices given do not confuse the newbie because they can stick with the default views if they care to. How many people do you know that still have the plain jane grey winamp skin? I know a lot of folks that are stuck in this view.
The idea that we have gone too far with allowing the customization of UI in the operating system or various applications is one to ponder but for only half a second. As long as the functionality remains the same then changing the look of different buttons and such is not a great big deal.
The real annoyance in my opinion is how radically different the actual functionality of buttons and options are under many GPLed apps and window managers. That is a major annoyance for the casual or home user. Unless, I want to go completely KDE or GNOME in my choice of applications then I have to go through the time of re-teaching the shortcuts and such to my wife so she gets the full functionality out of the applications.
She could just hunt and peck her way through the app but believe it or not there are home users out there that work on computers all day long that prefer keystroke shortcuts and want to be truly proficient in the use of their applications.
Skins are not an issue. The real issue is that under Linux at least there are so many divergent development tools that no one application looks, feels or acts the same. Many times the apps do not even bother to work together (can anyone say cut and paste into oblivion?)
The debate over development tools becomes even more complex. KDE in my opinion is too windoze like. Other people swear by it and say that development is easier than Gnome. Other people love the GTK tools and I personally like the look and feel of the GNOME apps a lot. Then there are developers using a hodge podge of various tools from all over the GPL landscape each with their own strengths. I love the OpenStep, GNUstep NeXt feel but the apps just are not as robust as some of the GNOME alternatives in terms of their feature set.
With no all powerful company calling the shots on look and feel the desktop with be a tough frontier for the Open Source community to take. However, none of us want one company calling the shots so the whole thing becomes the complex mess of GTK, KDE apps living in conflict with wx, xform and a half dozen other development widget set and tools to make apps.
Isn't SGI using Linux as a proxy to kill off Sun? Just joking, :->. IBM has no chance of catching enough of a clue to kill of Sun. The company that gave us Java does some boneheaded crap but I admit the hardware is solid and the OS (Solaris 8) is one of the very best Commercial distributions alive today.
To be frank, the only company with a product good enough to beat of the Sun boys is so absolutely clueless that they will never beat them. Yes, Compaq is sitting on the best hardware ever to run Oracle. There is nothing in the universe more solid than a damn DEC/Alpha running Oracle. Those boxes don't go down for anything.
Linux is great operating system for the small scale business that needs the stability of Unix or the Sysadmin sitting at home wanting the power of the command line. It is great for the network guy wanting to turn that 486 into a proxy server at home. It is wonderful for the programmer on the cheap who only has to download Code Crusader to get a great little IDE for nothing and his compiler for free. On a large scale, they make good little web servers, SMTP servers and can perform a half dozen or so roles in a large corporation data center.
However, I still want the big Sun boxes for my big sites. Dec/Alphas were spawned from the hell of Digital for the sole purpose of running Oracle. It is hard for some people to admit but the commercial *nixes still have some advantages in terms of stability and performance on their native hardware platforms. Will one day Linux finally take them over the same way that Linux is seeping into the hallowed halls of SGI? Sure!
Does this mean that Solaris sucks by default? No.
How original! There seems to be no end to the different open source, kind of free, almost free trying to fool you to pay us money style game engines. The problem is that if I see one more engine without a game to show it off I will puke.
:->
Let's follow the trend shall we. A URL is posted on linuxgames or happy penguin boasting of a 3d, flight sim, role playing engine. Hapless web surfer goes strolling over to said site.
First, there is no real game or even part of a game to download to get the feel of what the coders are trying to do. Even worse they taunt you saying they made the engine now you make the game. Fine, hapless web surfer knows a bit of c and even c++ so he downloads the code to try it out. Suddenly he realizes that the new engine does the exact same thing that every other OpenGL style 3d engine does only worse.
Hapless surfer breaks out CodeCrusader and corrects their mistakes sends it back to them taunting them to make a better engine first before asking people to use it to make games. Hapless surfer is now engaged in endless flame war with 15 old coders from Alaska.
Not that this has happened to me mind you.
Listen, as one post pointed out, people love to hear what they already know, but in a way they have not heard it before.
It is amazing to watch people call a book insightful when it is just parrotting back to them what they want to hear or already know.
I can see the use for this material to the stodgy old school business types. However, I do not think the writer really ever took his ideas far enough in some cases or even worse he got idealistic to the point of being silly in some other parts of the book.