Another great trait is to be Lazy. This does not man to be slack, but to not want to have to do a job twice. Anything that can be done the same way twice can be done by a computer. Scripting is your friend, and invest the extra 10% effort required to make sure that when you are attending some disaster at 2:00am that you have everything you need done ahead of time. Also study and use more than one OS. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and any system can be set up poorly if you don't under stand why you are doing what you are doing. And learn from your mistakes, you WILL make them.
No university degree for me, but I did study Software Engineering at a tertiary level and got a Diploma with merit (meaning a 90% pass or better). From there I spent over a year unemployed looking for work before starting at a small company selling PCs and doing tech support. We had some Netware customers, so I studied for and passed my CNE, then after another year studied for and passed my MCSE for Windows NT4, then have kept this current, my CNE is only up to Netware 5.1 however 8) Now 15 years later I am a Consultant Engineer working for a NZ owned company, full time contracted to the Parliamentary Service, where I am part of a small team keeping the systems running for the organisation that provides all of the computing systems for the NZ Parliamentary Campus. We look after just under 200 servers, and 1500 clients (if you include all of the other agencies on the campus. I think I'm doing pretty well for "No Degree" 8)
Mya house last night at 7:00pm - wet and after dinner, My wife is on the desktop PC working on documents for a club she belongs to (or Facebook - one of the two), My 5yo son is playing "World of Goo" (brillant game) on my Mac Mini, my 3 yo daughter is sitting on my knee and stamping out penguins with tuxpaint on my tablet running Linux. I'm down to checking my mail and RSS feeds with my iPhone 8) All this equipment and I still only get to use the smallest and slowest one in the house 8).
Both my kids have been around tech and gadgets and have been allowed to use them alms as soon as they had the dexterity to do so. Generally they have been taught they are not toys, to treat them gently and with cellphones especially, to ask for permission which is usually granted unless they are too grubby/tired/just going out 8) For Kid friendly, my 5 yo son understood the iPhone interface right from the get go. There are plenty of kid friendly games available for it, and you can probably get a second hand ipod touch pretty cheap. Buy one of those 8). As mine get older, they will probably inherit my old Mac mini, as this is pretty indestructible, can be bolted to the underside of a desk or in the TV cabinet to keep the kids PC in a public place bluetooth for a wireless keyboard and mouse (again the industrial aluminum from Apple will do well here), and OS X has some pretty neat Parental controls like limited login times and length of sessions, and a simplified dock that can have a limited number of applications set up.
I agree, I found 30 minutes or so with them on any of my home computers helped them with mouse coordination and jsut pressing buttons. The best App was Tuxpaint on a tablet. The pen was the easiest thing for them to use and could launch full screen with no extra toolbars or exit buttons to click on. TuxPaint is available for Windows, Linux and OSX (I beleive) Many flash games are OK too. My son is now 5, and has moved onto a few console games, the lego Starwars series is great as it allows two player cooperative play, so I can play with him. and now "World of Goo" has got him hooked on my Mac. My daughter (2yrs) likes the Dora series, but I just get her to point at the screen and tell me what she wants to click on so again we play together. My son however is getting good at using any computer, OS X, Linux, or my old XBox with XBMC , or Windows it doesn't matter we have all of them at home. He can already set the TV, load his DVDs and browse my home server for his movies. Once reading took hold, there was no stopping him 8)
Well, the phone can nearly do this at this speed, it's that dang slow internet that is the problem 8) Oh, and they didn't show Safari crashing right after downloading 200KB or more data that you just paid for (mostly ads on the stinking pages - come-on, we need an ad blocker for this sucker!), and will have to pay for again when you try to go to the site again as it appears to cache nothing 8( Oh, and they didn't show stuttering flash on you tube, or slow reconnection between 3G and edge, or the 10 secinds it can take to open contacts. I find just after a firmweare update this is pretty fast, then starts to slow down again after a while. And they didn't show the pain of having to use iTunes to sync a calender...
I love the iphone hardware, but I'm starting to find Apple can't write software to save themselves. OS X works well enough, but most of that is BSD. They only write the GUI - spinning wheel of death is all Apple! 8) and iTunes, my god, 500MB RAM used just to play music! And such a hassle to play DIVX content. I also note that you cant add lyrics to tunes in iTunes, but they have no problem displaying the tags automatically added by Amarok 8)
I agree on these points. My option of IE? It only runs in windows. I use Firefox primarily for most of my browsing with a few plugins - foxmarks, forcast-fox and these work in Linux/Mac/Windoows. I change the theme as I don't like the default FF theme very much. I also keep another browser around with no plugins or extensions enabled: on Windows/OSX I use Safari and on Linux I use Konqueror. I like the anonymous broswsing feature in Safari too. All nice features and all completely absent in the current version of IE 8) Hence I dont use it.
Hate to tell you, but the ipod/phone is already a computer. It just happens to be built to play media. All of the logic for a data transfer can be done over 2 or 4 wires, and can be done with imbedded chips, And a prom, use very low power cpu to handle the sync, or like the ipod, only synch when cabled and get power from the bus. With something with the power of the iphone or any arm CPU, doing this over a net connection would be trivial. Hell, why not even just use an ethernet connection at one end a a custom mini connector at the other, then your protocol could be wireless too.
For synching though, what ipod/iTunes does really well is report back the songs/podcasts/movies you played and if they are part way through etc, however it's playlist management sucks. This is the part that needs standardisation. Anyone can drop files into a device and have them play, the magic is managing them. The basic playback and simplicity of iphones iPod interface is great though and much better than any other PDA media player I have used, but I would like to mark podcasts as keepers on the phone, I don't want to have to remember to go into itunes and change the rules for a subscription before I synch.
On my Mac, Safari takes about 2-3 seonds to load the first time, but then when you "close" the ap, is is really still running, it has a little blue light in the finder showing you so. Fire fox is the same, then the startup between OpenOffice3 and Word 2003 for Mac, both take several seconds to start, but with OO.o, when you close Writer, it just leaves the document launcher running, next time you open a.odt, or ods OO.o opens up straight away. If you close Word2003, All of Word2003 seems to stay running based on the memory used, Open Excel, it takes a few seconds then starts, also consuming more RAM. The only way to get that memory back is to actually quit the MS Office App. I never feel I have to Quit OO.o, it takes so little RAM when not in active use. This is on a 2GHZ Mac Mini, 2GB RAM. Now under Linux on the same mini, OO.o also takes a few seconds to start, and if you exit, and re-open takes more time again to restart but still faster than under OS X, but I can't run MS Office there, so I guess it doesn't matter 8)
But hey, under Windows, have you noticed a fresh installation boot up is pretty quick until you add MS Office, then while Windows is busy loading the explorer desktop, starting services and bringing up it's AV and firewall, it is also trying to preload office components. Don't use Word every day? Doesn't matter, Windows will thoughtfully preload what it needs into memory anyway for you so that Word will appear to open really fast when you do click on a.doc. You can do the same thing with the OO.o launcher by putting it in your startup folder, but it is you choice, and if you dont want it to auto-load, you don't have to.
So waht is the choice, fast doing everything else, or fast loading Word, hmm.... I guess that is why my 2GHz Mac Mini is plenty for me while my work desktop has to be a 2.8GHZ box to feel as fast with Vista.
I've been reading books with my iPhone and its great at bed time. read with the lights off so I don't disturb my wife, and it powers off if I fall asleep and stop flipping pages. I also have it with me everywhere, so I 've got thought books faster as I can read it anytime. But content, I cant just loan a copy to my friend, and I cant just mail them a link to the book as hey need the software I use.
E-books need a common format with tags for meta data like MP3s and work on all platforms. I'd like an e-copy with every paper copy I buy, but copy protection will never allow this freedom. 8( Oh well.
I just wonder what feature won't be available in the other browsers. I'm still waiting for a good Linux or OS X implimentation of the MS Communicator client.
But this is how we got Lambourghini 8) Lambourghini goes back to Enzo Ferrari with a complaint about his crappy car, and Enzo tells him to "Go back to your Tractor Factory!" So now we have the Countach, Diablo, etc. 8) Excellent alternatives to the dominant fast Fiats Ferrari make 8)
I have missed more calls and SMS messages than I can count, but I have never missed a page.
The other thing I like is my pager is not on my belt when I am not on call, but I usually have my cellphone with me regardless. No annoying, server down , oh no, its back again messages when I'm not on call 8)
I agrree on the human operator part of paging services. Usually the breif description I get onteh page gives me a good guess at what the problem and solution is going to be. Very happy clients when I call them back and fix their problem right then and there for them (thanks also to a laptop and a 3G data card 8)
We use pagers for on call staff. The pagers are virtually indestructible, the batteries last for weeks, and With the paging call center being off site, if our mail servers or internet connections are down the page will still get through.
Now all our users can logoon to our citrix portal anf get all of their data using MS Office applications, or a web browser, or notepad. It doesn't matter. What Google docs does is offer thet level of shared document access, but without having to pay for the servers or software to do it.
You get what you pay for IMHO I do think you would be crazy to pay google for this though, but that what some companies are thinking of doing.
I like cloud computing, but only if it is on my cloud, not someone elses. My oldest server is a 1.8GHz box with 2GB RAM, running VMWare Server, a Novell iFolder VM appliance for file storage and sync, my mail server (Suse 10.2 appliance configured with cyrus(iMAP), and fetchmail(download mail from my pop mailbox at my ISP) allows CalDAV and iMAP for mail and calender sync. I have port open for web/java based VNC client to a locked down tiny linux desktop with mail and OpenOffice if I don't have my own netbook or iPhone with me. My domainname is provided by dynDNS, and I use a small script to keep my ever changing IP address up to date. All of this is "Free" software adhering to common standards (apart form iFolder, but it does run under Apache and Tomcat so that makes it OK... sort of) I do however use Google Calender sync to keep my work calender Outlook 2003 on exchange)synched to a read only calender in iCAL on my Mac at home as Apple don't seem to think you want to synch an iPhone with two machines at once, damn them. Oh, and I also use Jinzora, a PHP based web application to stream music from home to anywhere I am. I love living with the cloud, but it is my cloud.
Seriosly though, it takes almost the same amount of time to install OO.o as Acrobat these days. Once downloaded and insrtalled, you don't have to use it all the time. It's not like it install a gazillion libraries and other crap into your system like MS Office does to slow down your bootup time or eat memory when not even running. Whay not just install it with every new installation? It's free after all 8)
OS X Initial Speed: Many people buy the base spec machine, then say, Oh it was so slow! Just like any modern machine, for best performance you are really going to need 2GB RAM for anything other than basic office and browsing tasks on a desktop. Espcially if you use iTunes, as this little beast will eat 500MB of RAM or more if given the chance. I have entire VM images that use less memory than iTunes.
It's not just advandages in knowing the hardware, it can sometimes just be the pure work of optimising the code to speed up the slowest parts of the code.
But I have several email addresses, and I dont want to use my email address for mogin becuase thet is something a hacker may already know about me as I have my email address plastered all over the place.
Using a URL means the oly thing identified is the broker for my OpenID. Google are hoping using a mail address will mean you will choose @gmail.com.
Welcome the new monopolist, same as the old monopolist. 8)
I agree about cars. I want to replace my 1990 MR2 Turbo which I bought in 2000 for NZ1313K. Now if I try and find a new car for $13,000 there is no way I can find any mod engined 200HP rice rockets. They are all old slow junkers or much more expensive than my budget allows. They are also loaded with extra features like ABS brakes, adaptive dampers, airbags, pretensioning seatbelits, CD changers, run flat tyres, and all manner of other goodies that just add weight, not performance. Just like new OS's I guess
Actually beagle can search inside.pdf and.doc, and.odt etc. The last verion could even search inside.docx as it is plain text.xml inside the zip. Huge indexes though.
Slashdot Mirror
The other route these days, Buy a Mac, invest tin he iPhone dev kit, study hard, write a killer iPhone game, ....... profit. 8)
Another great trait is to be Lazy. This does not man to be slack, but to not want to have to do a job twice.
Anything that can be done the same way twice can be done by a computer. Scripting is your friend, and invest the extra 10% effort required to make sure that when you are attending some disaster at 2:00am that you have everything you need done ahead of time.
Also study and use more than one OS. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and any system can be set up poorly if you don't under stand why you are doing what you are doing.
And learn from your mistakes, you WILL make them.
No university degree for me, but I did study Software Engineering at a tertiary level and got a Diploma with merit (meaning a 90% pass or better). From there I spent over a year unemployed looking for work before starting at a small company selling PCs and doing tech support. We had some Netware customers, so I studied for and passed my CNE, then after another year studied for and passed my MCSE for Windows NT4, then have kept this current, my CNE is only up to Netware 5.1 however 8)
Now 15 years later I am a Consultant Engineer working for a NZ owned company, full time contracted to the Parliamentary Service, where I am part of a small team keeping the systems running for the organisation that provides all of the computing systems for the NZ Parliamentary Campus. We look after just under 200 servers, and 1500 clients (if you include all of the other agencies on the campus. I think I'm doing pretty well for "No Degree" 8)
Mya house last night at 7:00pm - wet and after dinner, My wife is on the desktop PC working on documents for a club she belongs to (or Facebook - one of the two), My 5yo son is playing "World of Goo" (brillant game) on my Mac Mini, my 3 yo daughter is sitting on my knee and stamping out penguins with tuxpaint on my tablet running Linux. I'm down to checking my mail and RSS feeds with my iPhone 8) All this equipment and I still only get to use the smallest and slowest one in the house 8).
Both my kids have been around tech and gadgets and have been allowed to use them alms as soon as they had the dexterity to do so. Generally they have been taught they are not toys, to treat them gently and with cellphones especially, to ask for permission which is usually granted unless they are too grubby/tired/just going out 8)
For Kid friendly, my 5 yo son understood the iPhone interface right from the get go. There are plenty of kid friendly games available for it, and you can probably get a second hand ipod touch pretty cheap. Buy one of those 8).
As mine get older, they will probably inherit my old Mac mini, as this is pretty indestructible, can be bolted to the underside of a desk or in the TV cabinet to keep the kids PC in a public place bluetooth for a wireless keyboard and mouse (again the industrial aluminum from Apple will do well here), and OS X has some pretty neat Parental controls like limited login times and length of sessions, and a simplified dock that can have a limited number of applications set up.
I agree, I found 30 minutes or so with them on any of my home computers helped them with mouse coordination and jsut pressing buttons. The best App was Tuxpaint on a tablet. The pen was the easiest thing for them to use and could launch full screen with no extra toolbars or exit buttons to click on. TuxPaint is available for Windows, Linux and OSX (I beleive)
Many flash games are OK too. My son is now 5, and has moved onto a few console games, the lego Starwars series is great as it allows two player cooperative play, so I can play with him. and now "World of Goo" has got him hooked on my Mac. My daughter (2yrs) likes the Dora series, but I just get her to point at the screen and tell me what she wants to click on so again we play together.
My son however is getting good at using any computer, OS X, Linux, or my old XBox with XBMC , or Windows it doesn't matter we have all of them at home. He can already set the TV, load his DVDs and browse my home server for his movies. Once reading took hold, there was no stopping him 8)
Well, the phone can nearly do this at this speed, it's that dang slow internet that is the problem 8)
Oh, and they didn't show Safari crashing right after downloading 200KB or more data that you just paid for (mostly ads on the stinking pages - come-on, we need an ad blocker for this sucker!), and will have to pay for again when you try to go to the site again as it appears to cache nothing 8(
Oh, and they didn't show stuttering flash on you tube, or slow reconnection between 3G and edge, or the 10 secinds it can take to open contacts.
I find just after a firmweare update this is pretty fast, then starts to slow down again after a while.
And they didn't show the pain of having to use iTunes to sync a calender...
I love the iphone hardware, but I'm starting to find Apple can't write software to save themselves.
OS X works well enough, but most of that is BSD. They only write the GUI - spinning wheel of death is all Apple! 8) and iTunes, my god, 500MB RAM used just to play music! And such a hassle to play DIVX content.
I also note that you cant add lyrics to tunes in iTunes, but they have no problem displaying the tags automatically added by Amarok 8)
I agree on these points. My option of IE?
It only runs in windows. I use Firefox primarily for most of my browsing with a few plugins - foxmarks, forcast-fox and these work in Linux/Mac/Windoows. I change the theme as I don't like the default FF theme very much. I also keep another browser around with no plugins or extensions enabled: on Windows/OSX I use Safari and on Linux I use Konqueror. I like the anonymous broswsing feature in Safari too.
All nice features and all completely absent in the current version of IE 8) Hence I dont use it.
Hate to tell you, but the ipod/phone is already a computer. It just happens to be built to play media.
All of the logic for a data transfer can be done over 2 or 4 wires, and can be done with imbedded chips, And a prom, use very low power cpu to handle the sync, or like the ipod, only synch when cabled and get power from the bus.
With something with the power of the iphone or any arm CPU, doing this over a net connection would be trivial. Hell, why not even just use an ethernet connection at one end a a custom mini connector at the other, then your protocol could be wireless too.
For synching though, what ipod/iTunes does really well is report back the songs/podcasts/movies you played and if they are part way through etc, however it's playlist management sucks.
This is the part that needs standardisation. Anyone can drop files into a device and have them play, the magic is managing them.
The basic playback and simplicity of iphones iPod interface is great though and much better than any other PDA media player I have used, but I would like to mark podcasts as keepers on the phone, I don't want to have to remember to go into itunes and change the rules for a subscription before I synch.
howabout "Matrix" ? 8)
On my Mac, Safari takes about 2-3 seonds to load the first time, but then when you "close" the ap, is is really still running, it has a little blue light in the finder showing you so. Fire fox is the same, then the startup between OpenOffice3 and Word 2003 for Mac, both take several seconds to start, but with OO.o, when you close Writer, it just leaves the document launcher running, next time you open a .odt, or ods OO.o opens up straight away. If you close Word2003, All of Word2003 seems to stay running based on the memory used, Open Excel, it takes a few seconds then starts, also consuming more RAM. The only way to get that memory back is to actually quit the MS Office App. I never feel I have to Quit OO.o, it takes so little RAM when not in active use.
This is on a 2GHZ Mac Mini, 2GB RAM.
Now under Linux on the same mini, OO.o also takes a few seconds to start, and if you exit, and re-open takes more time again to restart but still faster than under OS X, but I can't run MS Office there, so I guess it doesn't matter 8)
But hey, under Windows, have you noticed a fresh installation boot up is pretty quick until you add MS Office, then while Windows is busy loading the explorer desktop, starting services and bringing up it's AV and firewall, it is also trying to preload office components. Don't use Word every day? Doesn't matter, Windows will thoughtfully preload what it needs into memory anyway for you so that Word will appear to open really fast when you do click on a .doc.
You can do the same thing with the OO.o launcher by putting it in your startup folder, but it is you choice, and if you dont want it to auto-load, you don't have to.
So waht is the choice, fast doing everything else, or fast loading Word, hmm.... I guess that is why my 2GHz Mac Mini is plenty for me while my work desktop has to be a 2.8GHZ box to feel as fast with Vista.
I've been reading books with my iPhone and its great at bed time. read with the lights off so I don't disturb my wife, and it powers off if I fall asleep and stop flipping pages. I also have it with me everywhere, so I 've got thought books faster as I can read it anytime.
But content, I cant just loan a copy to my friend, and I cant just mail them a link to the book as hey need the software I use.
E-books need a common format with tags for meta data like MP3s and work on all platforms.
I'd like an e-copy with every paper copy I buy, but copy protection will never allow this freedom.
8(
Oh well.
I just wonder what feature won't be available in the other browsers.
I'm still waiting for a good Linux or OS X implimentation of the MS Communicator client.
But this is how we got Lambourghini 8)
Lambourghini goes back to Enzo Ferrari with a complaint about his crappy car, and Enzo tells him to "Go back to your Tractor Factory!"
So now we have the Countach, Diablo, etc. 8) Excellent alternatives to the dominant fast Fiats Ferrari make 8)
I have missed more calls and SMS messages than I can count, but I have never missed a page.
The other thing I like is my pager is not on my belt when I am not on call, but I usually have my cellphone with me regardless. No annoying, server down , oh no, its back again messages when I'm not on call 8)
I agrree on the human operator part of paging services. Usually the breif description I get onteh page gives me a good guess at what the problem and solution is going to be. Very happy clients when I call them back and fix their problem right then and there for them (thanks also to a laptop and a 3G data card 8)
We use pagers for on call staff. The pagers are virtually indestructible, the batteries last for weeks, and With the paging call center being off site, if our mail servers or internet connections are down the page will still get through.
Now all our users can logoon to our citrix portal anf get all of their data using MS Office applications, or a web browser, or notepad. It doesn't matter.
What Google docs does is offer thet level of shared document access, but without having to pay for the servers or software to do it.
You get what you pay for IMHO
I do think you would be crazy to pay google for this though, but that what some companies are thinking of doing.
I like cloud computing, but only if it is on my cloud, not someone elses. ... sort of)
My oldest server is a 1.8GHz box with 2GB RAM, running VMWare Server, a Novell iFolder VM appliance for file storage and sync, my mail server (Suse 10.2 appliance configured with cyrus(iMAP), and fetchmail(download mail from my pop mailbox at my ISP) allows CalDAV and iMAP for mail and calender sync. I have port open for web/java based VNC client to a locked down tiny linux desktop with mail and OpenOffice if I don't have my own netbook or iPhone with me.
My domainname is provided by dynDNS, and I use a small script to keep my ever changing IP address up to date.
All of this is "Free" software adhering to common standards (apart form iFolder, but it does run under Apache and Tomcat so that makes it OK
I do however use Google Calender sync to keep my work calender Outlook 2003 on exchange)synched to a read only calender in iCAL on my Mac at home as Apple don't seem to think you want to synch an iPhone with two machines at once, damn them.
Oh, and I also use Jinzora, a PHP based web application to stream music from home to anywhere I am.
I love living with the cloud, but it is my cloud.
Seriosly though, it takes almost the same amount of time to install OO.o as Acrobat these days. Once downloaded and insrtalled, you don't have to use it all the time. It's not like it install a gazillion libraries and other crap into your system like MS Office does to slow down your bootup time or eat memory when not even running.
Whay not just install it with every new installation? It's free after all 8)
OS X Initial Speed: Many people buy the base spec machine, then say, Oh it was so slow!
Just like any modern machine, for best performance you are really going to need 2GB RAM for anything other than basic office and browsing tasks on a desktop. Espcially if you use iTunes, as this little beast will eat 500MB of RAM or more if given the chance. I have entire VM images that use less memory than iTunes.
It's not just advandages in knowing the hardware, it can sometimes just be the pure work of optimising the code to speed up the slowest parts of the code.
But I have several email addresses, and I dont want to use my email address for mogin becuase thet is something a hacker may already know about me as I have my email address plastered all over the place.
Using a URL means the oly thing identified is the broker for my OpenID.
Google are hoping using a mail address will mean you will choose @gmail.com.
Welcome the new monopolist, same as the old monopolist. 8)
I agree about cars. I want to replace my 1990 MR2 Turbo which I bought in 2000 for NZ1313K. Now if I try and find a new car for $13,000 there is no way I can find any mod engined 200HP rice rockets. They are all old slow junkers or much more expensive than my budget allows.
They are also loaded with extra features like ABS brakes, adaptive dampers, airbags, pretensioning seatbelits, CD changers, run flat tyres, and all manner of other goodies that just add weight, not performance.
Just like new OS's I guess
Actually beagle can search inside .pdf and .doc, and .odt etc. The last verion could even search inside .docx as it is plain text .xml inside the zip. Huge indexes though.