It's more interesting in that we've seen a company specializing primarily in Linux consulting buy out a company which once specialized primarily in Windows software. In 1998 90% of Cygnus's revenue was based on versions of GNU pro and Code fusion which ran on Windows and competed directly with Microsoft Visual C++.
Remember wilberworks.com? The company which went into business in 1997 with the intention of sustaining itself solely by offering support for The Gimp. Well take a look at it and see how booming their business has been.
You're better off moving to LA, working for a few years, then trying to start something in NY. Visual effects artists don't have permanent jobs that you fill out an application to and everything is cut and dried. You have to pretty much go out and find a client who needs something done like a commercial and show them that you can get it done better than anyone else. There are a lot more clients in LA than NY. Another thing you should do is start working on stuff right now and put it on the internet. Don't put up a jpg but put up the entire movie. You'll also want to get a reset button that you can just click on instead of leaning over and feeling around the case. This kind of work requires a lot of rebooting if you get my drift.
In 1996 if you even brought up the subject of computers in medicine at an interview they would have drawn and quartered you and used your remains to teach gross anatomy (personal experience). Now that they've opened that up, their next brick wall is allowing anyone but the most highly qualified MIT grads touch the source code used in medical applications. There's a reason why most of these medical technology companies are in the northeast. If you want to work on medical software professionally you need serious formal EE or CS degrees to the cieling. Managers in that area are more anal retentive about the formalities than Bill Gates is about using Windows. So maybe in 5 to 10 years if the medical profession becomes really really strapped for cash you'll be able to get an open source project running a patient information system but today it's more likely used as a web server, a mail transport agent, and the same drill.
I'd love to get a copy of StarOffice that worked under libc-2.1. If anything that should be their primary emphasis, but I have a feeling it's more like Sun wanting to get their portal integrated in it. Sun's pledge was primarily aimed at integrating Sun's portal and advertising Sun products through the word processor and not at improving the word processor itself. But any delay is a good delay. It just allows us unemployed C++ coders to show off while the suits with their PhDCS credentials and certification watch their schedules melt away.
Linux has a very interesting memory management system that isn't intuitive at first. It enlists swap space even when you have plenty of physical RAM available. The degree to which you enlist swap space depends highly on how much disk activity you're performing and less on whether your program fits in memory. So every time you access the disk the kernel makes a decision: swap out physical RAM to speed up the disk or overwrite existing cache data to speed up the program. That decision has little to do with how far your resident set has exceeded physical RAM but mainly depends on how recently you accessed your resident set.
In fact as you approach 3/4 of your physical RAM the kernel becomes very reluctant to keep programs in memory. It's virtually impossible to use 100% of physical RAM because by that time the kernel is swapping out your resident sets with every disk access. Just try recording some uncompressed video. You'll see the video recording software fits perfectly well in RAM but after writing a few gigabytes of data the kernel has swapped out everything it can to increase disk caching. In fact your first fwrite will be very slow, as the kernel is writing physical RAM to disk to free up cache and only then writing your actual data.
Now this scheme can get very problematic if you really need the programs that the kernel swaps out. There are parameters in the kernel source which determine the swapping threshold but the problem is more what to set those parameters to than where they are.
The first blank on your questionaire is GPA and major and you dropped out of school yourself to start this business? You've got to be kidding. Seriously though, this is probably the most important thing the article misses. Salaries really depend a lot of your GPA and education.
If you want to see technology maybe you should go to LA or San Jose. It seems like all the few IT people who actually survive in Fl*rida want to do is wear business suits and write with gold plated pens but it is by no means a technology hub. With all the credit Orlando gets for having all kinds of multimedia attractions there are really no jobs in computer multimedia anything out here. I have a feeling everything you see in Orlando is developed in LA or San Jose and trucked to Fl*rida where MSEE's staff the ticket booths and CS PhD's serve the hot dogs.
When I hear the word XMMS I think of mp3 player but I've always used GQMpeg even back when XMMS was still called X11Amp. Sound playback is a pretty basic thing which can be accomplished by hundreds of programs without much issue. It's, well, an mp3 player that, well, plays mp3s. It seems like 4front Technologies is putting a lot of money into this program to turn it into the all-in-one solution for audio but I've yet to see any reason to use it for anything.
Yes, when you're in college you have no legal rights. Even with the free legal counsel most colleges give, it would be no contest to the kind of money the film industry can through at the best lawyers. Why is it that people with big bucks and mega lawyers aren't the ones cracking computer codes?
It's hard to believe threaded programming is used as little as this guy says it is. Every hiring manager who hears the word "thread" turns green and starts vomiting cover letters from people who write threaded programs it's just so trivial. Parallel programming is so simple your development times drop and your productivity shoots up.
The problem isn't as much the old school getting ignored as it is the opportunity cost of not using modern machines to their full potential. Although it may not be the most vogue thing to do, modern computers are quite capable of video production. This is an application which just doesn't seem to work in text consoles. You could just enjoy the thrill of doing it in text but that's a lot of development money for tinkering when you could put that money into an X program someone can actually use.
Well if the suits end up tethering all of us to centralized servers using software we can't own, I'll be happy to put them out of business by offering consumers a package they can take home and actually own outright, even if my degree isn't CS, like they seem to banish you if you don't have.
We are witnessing what are known as suits. Behind all the formalwear, gold plated pens, and Florsheim shoes there is only a picture of slashdotters as unemployed biologists who are fascinated by tinkering with basic sciences but offer little justification for stating as sources. To the suit we're all supposed to be flipping hamburgers and cleaning toilets so there's little lost, much gained in not referencing us.
Well knowing that the most you can expect out of a hard drive is 18 months of continuous operation and that hard drives go obsolete after 6 months, you're better off getting a 27 gig Maxtor for $200, wearing it into the ground, and next year getting a 50 gig Maxtor at twice the speed for $100, wearing it in the ground, and then if getting a 100 gig for $50. Today's hard drives all get the same performance: 15megs/sec no matter what the bus interface is. Next year's hard drives will get 30megs/sec.
If my degree just said math or engineering instead of biology I'd have a job right now. The only reason you should pursue science is if you can't do anything else. If you can do anything even remotely you'd better make sure you do that before biology.
Well I'm ready to either change filesystems or increase the block size on my ext2 partition but there's one problem: I've got 15 gigs of data to migrate, a CD recorder, and no money to invest in 15 gigs of tape storage. What strategies are most often used to migrate filesystems?
If you want to get hits to your website you'd best get the word "Portal" tagged to it. This world works on key words. "E-commerce" and "Portal" are the two new words we learned in 1999. Everytime I mention any new technology to people, especially suits, their eyes glaze over but say one of the established key words and they instantly snap to attention.
is a genbank type interface which allows you to submit requests and have the agents email you sequences as they're entered in the databases. It should also let you select only complete sequences, specify a maximum number of sequences to retrieve from one species, and automatically search not just genbank but all the databases. This of course requires realtime access to all the databases.
I'd expect online romance to be as successful as online job searches. About 4% of people got jobs through the internet last year. I used to participate in online dating services as an undergrad. Nothing ever came of it and since then I figured there are better things to do than lead around a Mary Cleaver wannabe.
often to promote Linux at trade shows. For the last 3 years Netscape was the only program you'd see at trade shows. It's in every screenshot. It's the only program dual headed X is demonstrated on. We haven't had anything as flashy to demonstrate Linux on since Netscape. Losing Netscape would definitely put us back a few years.
When the first article on this came out I posted a comment on how they were probably violating some law. Obviously it was moderated down as a troll but it was true anyways. If there's any law against cracking DVD encryption you can bet the RIAA and MPAA goons are going to hit them with it and with the amount of money these guys can throw at lawyers they'll either put these kids in jail or settle on a $multi-million lawsuit if they ever distribute Livid.
Slashdot Mirror
Or else you'd never get more than a 50% improvement on the same hardware. Never heard of an NT box that served pages fast in the real world.
It's more interesting in that we've seen a company specializing primarily in Linux consulting buy out a company which once specialized primarily in Windows software. In 1998 90% of Cygnus's revenue was based on versions of GNU pro and Code fusion which ran on Windows and competed directly with Microsoft Visual C++.
Remember wilberworks.com? The company which went into business in 1997 with the intention of sustaining itself solely by offering support for The Gimp. Well take a look at it and see how booming their business has been.
I've got these in 320x480 24fps. 20 megs a pop.
You're better off moving to LA, working for a few years, then trying to start something in NY. Visual effects artists don't have permanent jobs that you fill out an application to and everything is cut and dried. You have to pretty much go out and find a client who needs something done like a commercial and show them that you can get it done better than anyone else. There are a lot more clients in LA than NY. Another thing you should do is start working on stuff right now and put it on the internet. Don't put up a jpg but put up the entire movie. You'll also want to get a reset button that you can just click on instead of leaning over and feeling around the case. This kind of work requires a lot of rebooting if you get my drift.
In 1996 if you even brought up the subject of computers in medicine at an interview they would have drawn and quartered you and used your remains to teach gross anatomy (personal experience). Now that they've opened that up, their next brick wall is allowing anyone but the most highly qualified MIT grads touch the source code used in medical applications. There's a reason why most of these medical technology companies are in the northeast. If you want to work on medical software professionally you need serious formal EE or CS degrees to the cieling. Managers in that area are more anal retentive about the formalities than Bill Gates is about using Windows. So maybe in 5 to 10 years if the medical profession becomes really really strapped for cash you'll be able to get an open source project running a patient information system but today it's more likely used as a web server, a mail transport agent, and the same drill.
I'd love to get a copy of StarOffice that worked under libc-2.1. If anything that should be their primary emphasis, but I have a feeling it's more like Sun wanting to get their portal integrated in it. Sun's pledge was primarily aimed at integrating Sun's portal and advertising Sun products through the word processor and not at improving the word processor itself. But any delay is a good delay. It just allows us unemployed C++ coders to show off while the suits with their PhDCS credentials and certification watch their schedules melt away.
Linux has a very interesting memory management system that isn't intuitive at first. It enlists swap space even when you have plenty of physical RAM available. The degree to which you enlist swap space depends highly on how much disk activity you're performing and less on whether your program fits in memory. So every time you access the disk the kernel makes a decision: swap out physical RAM to speed up the disk or overwrite existing cache data to speed up the program. That decision has little to do with how far your resident set has exceeded physical RAM but mainly depends on how recently you accessed your resident set.
In fact as you approach 3/4 of your physical RAM the kernel becomes very reluctant to keep programs in memory. It's virtually impossible to use 100% of physical RAM because by that time the kernel is swapping out your resident sets with every disk access. Just try recording some uncompressed video. You'll see the video recording software fits perfectly well in RAM but after writing a few gigabytes of data the kernel has swapped out everything it can to increase disk caching. In fact your first fwrite will be very slow, as the kernel is writing physical RAM to disk to free up cache and only then writing your actual data.
Now this scheme can get very problematic if you really need the programs that the kernel swaps out. There are parameters in the kernel source which determine the swapping threshold but the problem is more what to set those parameters to than where they are.
The first blank on your questionaire is GPA and major and you dropped out of school yourself to start this business? You've got to be kidding. Seriously though, this is probably the most important thing the article misses. Salaries really depend a lot of your GPA and education.
If you want to see technology maybe you should go to LA or San Jose. It seems like all the few IT people who actually survive in Fl*rida want to do is wear business suits and write with gold plated pens but it is by no means a technology hub. With all the credit Orlando gets for having all kinds of multimedia attractions there are really no jobs in computer multimedia anything out here. I have a feeling everything you see in Orlando is developed in LA or San Jose and trucked to Fl*rida where MSEE's staff the ticket booths and CS PhD's serve the hot dogs.
When I hear the word XMMS I think of mp3 player but I've always used GQMpeg even back when XMMS was still called X11Amp. Sound playback is a pretty basic thing which can be accomplished by hundreds of programs without much issue. It's, well, an mp3 player that, well, plays mp3s. It seems like 4front Technologies is putting a lot of money into this program to turn it into the all-in-one solution for audio but I've yet to see any reason to use it for anything.
Yes, when you're in college you have no legal rights. Even with the free legal counsel most colleges give, it would be no contest to the kind of money the film industry can through at the best lawyers. Why is it that people with big bucks and mega lawyers aren't the ones cracking computer codes?
It's hard to believe threaded programming is used as little as this guy says it is. Every hiring manager who hears the word "thread" turns green and starts vomiting cover letters from people who write threaded programs it's just so trivial. Parallel programming is so simple your development times drop and your productivity shoots up.
The problem isn't as much the old school getting ignored as it is the opportunity cost of not using modern machines to their full potential. Although it may not be the most vogue thing to do, modern computers are quite capable of video production. This is an application which just doesn't seem to work in text consoles. You could just enjoy the thrill of doing it in text but that's a lot of development money for tinkering when you could put that money into an X program someone can actually use.
Well if the suits end up tethering all of us to centralized servers using software we can't own, I'll be happy to put them out of business by offering consumers a package they can take home and actually own outright, even if my degree isn't CS, like they seem to banish you if you don't have.
We are witnessing what are known as suits. Behind all the formalwear, gold plated pens, and Florsheim shoes there is only a picture of slashdotters as unemployed biologists who are fascinated by tinkering with basic sciences but offer little justification for stating as sources. To the suit we're all supposed to be flipping hamburgers and cleaning toilets so there's little lost, much gained in not referencing us.
Well knowing that the most you can expect out of a hard drive is 18 months of continuous operation and that hard drives go obsolete after 6 months, you're better off getting a 27 gig Maxtor for $200, wearing it into the ground, and next year getting a 50 gig Maxtor at twice the speed for $100, wearing it in the ground, and then if getting a 100 gig for $50. Today's hard drives all get the same performance: 15megs/sec no matter what the bus interface is. Next year's hard drives will get 30megs/sec.
If my degree just said math or engineering instead of biology I'd have a job right now. The only reason you should pursue science is if you can't do anything else. If you can do anything even remotely you'd better make sure you do that before biology.
Well I'm ready to either change filesystems or increase the block size on my ext2 partition but there's one problem: I've got 15 gigs of data to migrate, a CD recorder, and no money to invest in 15 gigs of tape storage. What strategies are most often used to migrate filesystems?
If you want to get hits to your website you'd best get the word "Portal" tagged to it. This world works on key words. "E-commerce" and "Portal" are the two new words we learned in 1999. Everytime I mention any new technology to people, especially suits, their eyes glaze over but say one of the established key words and they instantly snap to attention.
is a genbank type interface which allows you to submit requests and have the agents email you sequences as they're entered in the databases. It should also let you select only complete sequences, specify a maximum number of sequences to retrieve from one species, and automatically search not just genbank but all the databases. This of course requires realtime access to all the databases.
I'd expect online romance to be as successful as online job searches. About 4% of people got jobs through the internet last year. I used to participate in online dating services as an undergrad. Nothing ever came of it and since then I figured there are better things to do than lead around a Mary Cleaver wannabe.
How does this new filesystem compare to ext2fs on deletion times. For starters here is what a typical deletion ext2fs takes:
heroine:/home/mov% l *.mov
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1958135327 Nov 6 17:49 xena1.mov
heroine:/home/mov% time rm xena1.mov
real 0m56.536s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.920s
Even a 30 second deletion time would be great.
often to promote Linux at trade shows. For the last 3 years Netscape was the only program you'd see at trade shows. It's in every screenshot. It's the only program dual headed X is demonstrated on. We haven't had anything as flashy to demonstrate Linux on since Netscape. Losing Netscape would definitely put us back a few years.
When the first article on this came out I posted a comment on how they were probably violating some law. Obviously it was moderated down as a troll but it was true anyways. If there's any law against cracking DVD encryption you can bet the RIAA and MPAA goons are going to hit them with it and with the amount of money these guys can throw at lawyers they'll either put these kids in jail or settle on a $multi-million lawsuit if they ever distribute Livid.