According to a friend of mine who dabbles in the stock market, Red Hat's stock is up nicely as a result of their decision to go back to doing more of what they do best: improving Linux and extending its marketability.
I wouldn't say that. RHAT settled in the $80-$85 range about a month ago, and hasn't moved either way with a comparatively low trading volume. That was until the Microsoft decision came down. On Monday after the decision, the stock jumped $16 to about $105. It's been a bit volatile this week, with heavier than normal trading volume.
It looks to me like the stock is going to settle again in the $95-$100 range. Those PR announcements regarding RSA and ReiserFS did not appear to be much of a factor. In fact, Yahoo reported that the RSA announcement was more of a factor on RSA's stock, then anything else.
This does appear to be an interesting pattern: announcements of some RHAT deal or partnership having very little effect on RHAT stock, but causing a rally in the other company's stock. --
Just to clarify some things that aren't obvious until you read the Salon story.
This "secret" meeting actually happened last year. It was only secret until it actually happened, and the news of it were made public a long time ago.
What the issue is here is that the DMA made a number of agreements and concessions at that meeting, and what the Salon story is talking about is that they are now backpedaling on their agreements. This made the news after several of the participants of that meeting made a number of high-profile announcement calling the DMA on the carpet to account for their lies.
Basically, the upshot of this is that now we have a proven track record of the DMA being nothing but a pack of liars and skunks. That's a pretty direct way of putting it, without mincing words.
So, we can now proceed without any doubt whatsoever on that account. We know what they are after, we know what they want, we know what they will going to do.
And, we'll stop them. Actually, to be technically correct: they'll be stopped. The DMA is making a big mistake thinking that they can bully us in our E-mailboxes the same way that they can bully us in our postal mailboxes and in our telephones. The DMA fails to understand a key difference between the Internet, and postal or telephone marketing. On the Internet, we do excersize some level of control on our mailboxes and on our portions of the network.
We are completely powerless to prevent anyone from stuffing our mailboxes with crap mail, and there's very little that can be done to block telemarketing calls.
However, a LOT can be done to block unwanted and unsolicited junk E-mail from filling our mailboxes. Depending on the tools that are available, you can do a pretty good job at filtering out unwanted crap from your E-mailbox. The DMA is going to wake up one day and act surprised when half the Internet suddenly blacklisted every DMA member that decided to start spamming everyone else's mailbox. The DMA is going to stomp their feet and make a huge temper tantrum, which, of course, will change absolutely nothing. And, that's all that they'll be able to do. The DMA simply hasn't been faced with the situation where the consumer can effectively fight back and defend his privacy. We tried to tell them that they will have to respect our privacy when it comes to our E-mailboxes. Well, folks, the DMA doesn't want to listen to us, so, we'll just have to show them and explain to the the facts of life, and go ahead and reconfigure our routers and mail servers to eliminate all presence of the DMA from the Internet, from our collective point of view.
I've been wondering why Corel's stock has been on a tear this week. It almost doubled since August, with most of the gains coming in the last month.
One thing I didn't like about WP 8, and I hope that they fixed this in WP 2000, is that the Linux version of WP 8 was pretty much a port of the DOS/Win product that did not take advantage of the Linux platform. I really thought it was quite silly to have application-specific printer drivers and fonts, in this day and age. That's so... 80s.
I gave up on WP 8 when I realized that I was spending more time fiddling with the printer driver, then playing with the program. I also so that it was rather strange that a word processor does not have a "Print Preview" function. I managed to hack one up by setting up a postscript printer driver that fed ghostview. That was fun, but I don't think that Joe Sixpack should be expected to live with something like that.
Although I don't have the time to beta WP2000, I'll definitely give WP 2000 a spin once its available. Although I didn't end up liking WP 8 very much, it was definitely a solid product which I'll keep my eye on.
Wish list for WP (is it too late, for one?)
Support for X or TT fonts.
Remove all that nonsense with the printer drivers. Spit out Postscript, and let the printer driver handle it.
How about a REAL print preview function?
Work on the import of MS Word files? Last time I tried it, WP completely butchered a rather simple Word document.
A cuddly penguin, scribbling on a tablet, for a logo.
An install script that automatically adds an icon or a menu entry for Gnome, KDE, or Afterstep. Come on, this is not rocket science. Took me a grand total of three minutes to figure out how to have my RPMs install the icons.
This turned out to be a big non event. It seems that the collective reaction has so far been: "So what?"
There was a lot of hype yesterday in the mainstream news. Both CNET and CNN were reporting breathlessly that some really really really big announcement from MS will be forthcoming tomorrow. Even Yahoo ran a little blurb.
It was going to be a major announcement about a mega-mega deal, I read yesterday, we promise.
And the announcement is... [drumroll]... Microsoft is going to sell stuff in Radio Shack.
Huh?
That's the big announcement?
By complete accident, I happen to find myself at www.radioshack.com earlier today (what a useless site, BTW). They had this splattered all over the home page. They had one of the fancy live webcast thingies going on.
Really, I must be missing something, but I don't see what the big deal is. The reason that only MSNBC is reporting on this, and only now, is because nobody else really cared about it, once they found out what was the big announcement. --
What's really funny is that currently Microsoft itself is VERY close to being RBLed for their massive spewage of Y2K related junk E-mail. They are spamming every last E-mail address they have their hands on, and, as a result of that, are really pushing the edge of the envelope.
So, if microsoft.com gets RBLed, we'll just pop some popcorn, and watch what happens when Microsoft ends up RBLing itself... --
I don't recall ever reading about Compaq investing equity in RHAT. However, Compaq does have an array of agreements, or "partnership"s with RHAT, running the gamut of jointly developing device drivers, certifying Compaq's hardware for RH Linux, and technical support. --
There's definitely a growing dissatisfaction in the enterprise with MS software and services. Just yesterday I was sitting in the meeting, and people were talking about how to move some files from PeeCees to our big dumb UNIX boxes, where all the company jewels are.
Someone said something to the effect "let's use our Samba boxes". I asked him to repeat what he just said, to make sure that I heard him right.
I do consulting, and my current contract is with the traditional suit-n-tie multinational financial corp. This is the last place you'd expect to find a bunch of Samba boxes running somewhere. I was in a state of shock for the rest of the day. It turned out that they have Samba running on Solaris, but that's a start, I suppose.
So it doesn't surprise me what the Japanese are doing. It's probably going to happen here too, within the next couple of years. Unless W2K is a smashing success, you'll start to see many places begin to decomission their NT servers when they reach the end of their lifecycle, and recycling the boxes to run something else. Maybe Linux, maybe Solaris, maybe Monterey. --
These people were the ones behind the "JTSR Restaurants" series of spam runs late last year and earlier this year. That was one of the more massive spam runs of the last couple of years, involving nearly hundreds of fraudulently opened throwaway dialup accounts, and hundreds of hijacked mail relays over the course of several months.
I think that it is very much possible that someone who had his mailbox pummeled day in and day out with that crap -- many people received half a dozen copies of the same fucking spam every day for weeks -- went bonkers and tracked these people down.
When you start annoying tens of millions of people at random, you are bound to come across more than just a couple of nuts, kooks, and freakazoids. That's a given, according to laws of probability and statistics. There's no way around it. When you have such a large sample of population chosen at random, there are bound to be quite a handful of nuts in there.
Well, if you want to go around and start annoying and harassing a bunch of mentally unstable people, well, you'll just have to do it at your own risk. I'm really surprised that this hasn't happened more often. --
Good grief... Flash forward to two years from now. You walk up to a condom vending machine. It uses an infrared sensor to, ahem, measure the blood flow in your lower extremeties (more blood, more heat given off), then charges you ten bucks for a pack of trojans...
Folks, I don't think we want to head in this direction (pun not intended). --
I've said something very similar a couple of times before. As long as I can help it, I am staying away as far from NT as possible. I can do VB, and I can do VC++, but I'd rather not to thankyouverymuch.
Every time I attempt to do any work in Win32, I feel like I have to undergo a lobotomy first. Win32 IDE may look like eye candy up front, but when you strip away all the makeup, underneath you'll find one ugly beast. The Win32 API is a complete and utter joke. In fact, it's so bad that you can't really work with it directly, and you have to use MFC to get a barely workable API to work with.
Ever tried to put together a simple process, under Win32, to listen on a socket for connections, for some simple processing? This is a ten minute job in *NIX. Win32 forces you to use a convoluted event-driven architecture that absolutely makes no sense, and is a royal pain in the ass. This is just an example, but is quite typical of Win32's idiocy.
I don't really know why people thing that graphical IDEs are so sexy. I have absolutely no problems with autoconf, automake, and make. A graphical IDE would probably be nice to have, but absence of it does not really make much of a difference to me. --
... Just add a better display, and, presto: portable p0rn. That's enough storage for at least a few thousand nekkid pics.
What a great idea! P0rn on demand. Find yourself at a boring sales meeting? Whip out your, err..., Palm, and pretend that you're busy working your, uhm...., Palm. Try not to smile to much (or drool, whatever the case may be).
Or, set up a timer and have your Palm automatically download the porn groups off Usenet during the wee hours of the morning. Then, on your way to work, as you sit on the train or bus, there'll be at least something entertaining to pass the time by. --
Off the top of my head, here are some of the things you see all the time that just make me squirm, and want to get up and leave.
Typing without a cursor. In almost every movie where the lead jock/babe tries to hack into the bad guy's system, they enter the password/access code/whatever one character at a time, AND WITHOUT A CURSOR. They show a blank screen with some lame password prompt, and each time you hear them peck at the keyboard, the next character comes up.
You can almost visualize the producer running over budget and hiring some high school kid to throw together a half-baked simulation of a logon screen, and that's what you get.
After dialing in over a phone line and breaking into the super sekret computer system, they pull up a screenfull of text and fancy high resolution graphics... in less than a second.
Who can forget Richard Pryor's elaborate computer program in one of the early Superman movies, where he supposedly had a bank's accounting program skim fractional interest into a slush fund account. He accomplished this amazing feat by simply sitting down, and typing the following command into a blank screen: "Transfer all half-cents into my account." Presto, he's a millionaire.
In "Tomorrow Never Dies", when whatshisface, the bad guy, was having his worldwide conference call via a big screen display, he was clearly punching keys on the control unit completely at random. C'mon, at least make it believable.
Version numbers in open source projects do not mean the same thing as they do in closed source projects. I found that very often the version number of a closed source product is akin to one's penis size: heh heh, my version number is bigger than yours'. Vendors bump up version X.0 to version X+1.0 solely because they want to leave an impression that the new release contains major changes and new features, instead of what it really is, most of the time: a couple of bug fixes.
Open source projects have no need for this, and thus the version numbers are often just a reflection of the developer's mood. One of my own projects is currently at version 0.73, even though I feel that it is as stable as anything you'd find on a production machine. Yup, I did find a bug earlier this week, so I bumped up version 0.72 to 0.73, end of story. That's all (shrug). --
This is pretty much my take on it. In addition to graduating with a comp-sci degree, I double-majored in mathematics. This is what I was referring to earlier -- you have to have a certain mind set, a way of thinking, in order to be a good programmer. I think it comes from being immersed heavily into logic and mathematics.
Towards the end of my freshman year I discovered, to my great surprise, that at the beginning of the year I got myself enrolled in an honors mathematics course due to a slight "mistake". That's a long story, but looking back on it, this was the best "mistake" I ever made. --
Those are not headhunters that materialize out of thin air, randomly. Most of them are headhunters I have had, in fact, had contact years before.
The fact that these blokes, who I faxed a resume two years ago, call me kinda tell me that they have to really dig deep and hard to find anyone who's available. --
Perhaps you should tell that to all the headhunters out there who keep filling up my answering machine, despite the fact that I have not sent out a single resume in almost three years.
The situation in IT is so out of whack, that everything you have learned about the job market, elsewhere, is thrown out the window. --
c) Large amounts of new labour become available - look at all the companies which have experimented with outsourcing their projects to 3rd world techies... these guys are just as bright, work just as hard (or harder) and cost fractions of a western worker.
I've heard the exact same words five years ago, when I started out in consulting -- man, we're getting killed by those consulting shops who bring over a dozen people from third-world nations on a work visa. They put them up in a rented house in the suburbs, pay them $10/hr to code, bill the client $40/hr, thus undercutting everyone else out there, but still make out a fortune.
Frankly, I always thought that this was merely a ploy by the headhunters to get me to knock down my consulting rate. I always thought that this was complete nonsense, and I still think that it's complete nonsense.
Since then, my consulting rate has tripled, despite all that doom and gloom. I don't know where you find those people, who will replace you for half your paycheck, and I don't really care. Frankly, I think they've been very helpful, if anything, because many times have I come in on a project, to find telltale fingerprints from shoddy programming work from people with unreadable names all over it.
The notion that any specific group of people has a disproportionate amount of geniuses seems to be quite absurd to me. The number of bright and intelligent people in third world nations is probably no more or no less than the number of bright and intelligent people in any other similar population sample. This stuff never concerned me, and gave me no reason to be concerned about. --
Don't worry about. Just go about your business, minding your own, and wait for those discount programmers finish their job, get their 20 bucks, deliver their brand new "trading system", and split.
Then, once the new "trading system" starts dumping core at 11:07 AM, while the Dow is up a 100 points, you will cheerfully agree to fix their mess. For $100/hr. Then, after poking around for the rest of the day, you will announce the next morning that the system is not salvageable, it's a big mess that can't simply be patched here or there, and that it must be rewritten from scratch.
I have heard (but not yet seen) the things that you have described. It doesn't worry me one bit. --
I do not believe that the shortage of highly-qualified, high-skilled, programmers will end anytime soon.
Sure, there'll be plenty of people whose eyes glaze over while reading the classifieds and seeing the salaries and rates of computer programmers. They'll turn around, and say to their drinking buddy: "Hey, Zeke! Look how much computer programmers are being paid these days (burp)! I think I'm going to go and become a computer programmer!!! (hic)".
So, they'll go to some diploma mill, go through the motions, and, presto! New! From Spishak! It's "The Programmer In A Box!!!!!!" Instant ASP! Instant Perl! Instant C++!!
So, the great unwashed will be hired en masse by clueless companies who will think that they'll save a bundle by hiring these new programmers at entry-level salaries or rates. They'll tinker around, for a little while, and things will seem to be fine for some time. Then, everything starts to crash and burn, the environment at work starts to get a bit tense because all the problems, so the new programmers will split, and the companies will be left holding the bag.
Who do you think the companies will turn to, now?
Yup, meanwhile, the Programmer In A Box[tm] is busy running the scam at another clueless company.
I did not go to college and sign up for the comp-sci major because I wanted to make big bucks. In fact, when I was in school, programmers didn't really make that much money. They made a good buck, or two, but not that much. I became a programmer because that's what I really wanted to do.
Predictions that IT worker shortage will end soon are generally based upon the alleged scores of students signing up for computer science majors or computer schools, nationwide. My opinion is that the main attraction for most of these people is only the high salaries and rates that are being paid to highly qualified and skilled programmers.
Except that just the desire to earn big bucks will not make you a good programmer. There's a very good reason why good programmers make good money. Computer programming is a very mentally intensive job. To be a good computer programmer you not only have to know the computer language of choice. It also requires a certain mental discipline, I'd even say that it requires a certain way of thinking. Just knowing how to write printf("Hello world.\n"); is not going to help you much when you've been given a core dump, the source code, no way to reproduce the problem, and were told to figure out what happened, and to fix it.
I believe that very few of these people, who are looking in to cash in on the supposed IT worker shortage, are really prepared for the job. And I wish them luck. I really do. The more they screw up, the more money the rest of us will make, cleaning up their mess.
And even if I'm completely wrong, the bottom line is that we'll always have 10, 15, or more years of experience more than they will do. That cannot possibly ever change, so no matter how many bodies you'll throw into a computer science major, the number of people who already have decades of experience will never change.
... Man.../. needs a good spell checker and grammar checker. --
I hope that VA Linux will not neglect to include The Don in their directed share program. It's not widely known, but Donald Becker did get an invitation for RHAT's directed share program, but he ended up joining the ranks of the privileged few who E*TRADE screwed over completely. His story is included in the feedback portion of my web site. It would be a class gesture on VA Linux's part to make sure that something like this won't fall through the cracks again. --
The real question is, who made RHAT skyrocket: geeks, or businessmen?
... and there's plenty more where that came from.
Of course, I was one of the privileged few who E*TRADE shafted, but even if they did accept my money, I would still have no problems finding some loose change under the mattress, for this stock.
I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I've been mostly investing in Linux-related stocks. I have a long term buy-and-hold on Applix and Corel, and so far the stocks are doing very nicely, and I certainly intend to add LNUX to my portfolio at the first convenient opportunity. As far as RHAT goes, well, the little matter I have going with EGRP makes that a bit touchy to talk about, so I better not say anything without running it by my legal-eagle, first:-)
One thing I can say is that I'm absolutely delighted to see VA Linux's selection of underwriters. I'm sure the EGRP folks understand that this IPO could've been theirs too, so they must be wondering whether or not those shennanigans were worth it. --
If I recall the math correctly, DVDs take up about 1 gig per hour of video(+audio), so it should be possible to store 130-140 hours of movies on a "standard" 3.5" disk. --
This mirrors my experience almost down to the last T. I installed Linux on my laptop two years ago. Mind that: that was TWO years ago - Red Hat 4.2 distro.
I didn't notice anything peculiar, or out of the ordinary. RH 4.2 installer came up, detected my hardware, I chose the packages, the CD spun around for a while, and I was all set. Pretty much everything worked. I think I had to tweak X for a few minutes, but I don't recall any major problems with my Chips & Technologies chipset. Red Hat's installer also had no problem detecting the ESS audiodrive chipset, and everything pretty much worked out of the box. It took a while for the set up to complete -- the laptop's CD was pretty slow.
The laptop was partitioned to dual-boot Win95. By comparison, it took me at least a couple of month before I managed to combine the right concoction of assorted card and protocol stack drivers so that the PCMCIA network card could work properly with Win95 OSR2. Mind this: this was a 3COM PCMCIA card, supposed to have great support under Win95!
Bleah! The bloody thing refused to work for months. Finally I got it work simply by trying every device driver on the OEM Win95 CD in turn, until the bloody thing worked.
By comparison, pcmcia-cs worked nearly out of the box. All I had to do is tweak one setting in a config file. This was with Red Hat 4.2. Since then, the laptop was loaded with RH 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and 6.0 without a hiccup. Each upgrade went in on complete cruise control. I'm afraid to touch the Win95 partition. I'm afraid that if I as much as sneeze at it, it'll stop working.
This is not a joke. Win95 failed to correctly autodetect the network card, and choose the correct device driver. Meanwhile, even two years ago pcmcia-cs correctly picked out the correct device driver voo-doo logic after a one time either/or boolean option was set.
I've lost the number of times I installed and reinstalled all the OSes on countless machines. I've done them all - Win95, Win95OSR2, Win98, various Linux distros, etc... Always, without fail, I've had a much easier time bring up a Linux distro on the same machine, as opposed to a Win OS. --
I've been typing behind a keyboard for 19 years, since age 11. I've been a blind typist almost right from the start, and after a few cups of coffee I can do 60 WPM.
Earlier this year I've started to get CPS. My advice is to avoid any kind of surgery at all costs, and it should be done only as a last resort.
Use your head. Pay attention to your wrists. At the first signs of any discomfort, stop. Take a break. Get a cup of coffee. Take it easy for a few minutes, then start again. Even if the pain starts coming back a few minutes later, stop. Take another break.
You may want to try taking some generic over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen (that's Advil, but don't waste your money on the brand label, buy the drug store generic brand which is the same thing). If your usual aches and pains respond better to acetaminophen (Tylenol), try that. Don't over do it, you can only take a few pills a day, at the most.
Eventually, your wrists will adjust. It took about a month before the pain went away for me completely. I threw away my old keyboard, bought a new one - "Fellowes" keyboard which comes with a gel-filled wrist pad that is VERY comfortable. I feel absolutely no pain any more. --
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say that. RHAT settled in the $80-$85 range about a month ago, and hasn't moved either way with a comparatively low trading volume. That was until the Microsoft decision came down. On Monday after the decision, the stock jumped $16 to about $105. It's been a bit volatile this week, with heavier than normal trading volume.
It looks to me like the stock is going to settle again in the $95-$100 range. Those PR announcements regarding RSA and ReiserFS did not appear to be much of a factor. In fact, Yahoo reported that the RSA announcement was more of a factor on RSA's stock, then anything else.
This does appear to be an interesting pattern: announcements of some RHAT deal or partnership having very little effect on RHAT stock, but causing a rally in the other company's stock.
--
Just to clarify some things that aren't obvious until you read the Salon story.
This "secret" meeting actually happened last year. It was only secret until it actually happened, and the news of it were made public a long time ago.
What the issue is here is that the DMA made a number of agreements and concessions at that meeting, and what the Salon story is talking about is that they are now backpedaling on their agreements. This made the news after several of the participants of that meeting made a number of high-profile announcement calling the DMA on the carpet to account for their lies.
Basically, the upshot of this is that now we have a proven track record of the DMA being nothing but a pack of liars and skunks. That's a pretty direct way of putting it, without mincing words.
So, we can now proceed without any doubt whatsoever on that account. We know what they are after, we know what they want, we know what they will going to do.
And, we'll stop them. Actually, to be technically correct: they'll be stopped. The DMA is making a big mistake thinking that they can bully us in our E-mailboxes the same way that they can bully us in our postal mailboxes and in our telephones. The DMA fails to understand a key difference between the Internet, and postal or telephone marketing. On the Internet, we do excersize some level of control on our mailboxes and on our portions of the network.
We are completely powerless to prevent anyone from stuffing our mailboxes with crap mail, and there's very little that can be done to block telemarketing calls.
However, a LOT can be done to block unwanted and unsolicited junk E-mail from filling our mailboxes. Depending on the tools that are available, you can do a pretty good job at filtering out unwanted crap from your E-mailbox. The DMA is going to wake up one day and act surprised when half the Internet suddenly blacklisted every DMA member that decided to start spamming everyone else's mailbox. The DMA is going to stomp their feet and make a huge temper tantrum, which, of course, will change absolutely nothing. And, that's all that they'll be able to do. The DMA simply hasn't been faced with the situation where the consumer can effectively fight back and defend his privacy. We tried to tell them that they will have to respect our privacy when it comes to our E-mailboxes. Well, folks, the DMA doesn't want to listen to us, so, we'll just have to show them and explain to the the facts of life, and go ahead and reconfigure our routers and mail servers to eliminate all presence of the DMA from the Internet, from our collective point of view.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
--
I've been wondering why Corel's stock has been on a tear this week. It almost doubled since August, with most of the gains coming in the last month.
One thing I didn't like about WP 8, and I hope that they fixed this in WP 2000, is that the Linux version of WP 8 was pretty much a port of the DOS/Win product that did not take advantage of the Linux platform. I really thought it was quite silly to have application-specific printer drivers and fonts, in this day and age. That's so... 80s.
I gave up on WP 8 when I realized that I was spending more time fiddling with the printer driver, then playing with the program. I also so that it was rather strange that a word processor does not have a "Print Preview" function. I managed to hack one up by setting up a postscript printer driver that fed ghostview. That was fun, but I don't think that Joe Sixpack should be expected to live with something like that.
Although I don't have the time to beta WP2000, I'll definitely give WP 2000 a spin once its available. Although I didn't end up liking WP 8 very much, it was definitely a solid product which I'll keep my eye on.
Wish list for WP (is it too late, for one?)
--
This turned out to be a big non event. It seems that the collective reaction has so far been: "So what?"
There was a lot of hype yesterday in the mainstream news. Both CNET and CNN were reporting breathlessly that some really really really big announcement from MS will be forthcoming tomorrow. Even Yahoo ran a little blurb.
It was going to be a major announcement about a mega-mega deal, I read yesterday, we promise.
And the announcement is ... [drumroll] ... Microsoft is going to sell stuff in Radio Shack.
Huh?
That's the big announcement?
By complete accident, I happen to find myself at www.radioshack.com earlier today (what a useless site, BTW). They had this splattered all over the home page. They had one of the fancy live webcast thingies going on.
Really, I must be missing something, but I don't see what the big deal is. The reason that only MSNBC is reporting on this, and only now, is because nobody else really cared about it, once they found out what was the big announcement.
--
What's really funny is that currently Microsoft itself is VERY close to being RBLed for their massive spewage of Y2K related junk E-mail. They are spamming every last E-mail address they have their hands on, and, as a result of that, are really pushing the edge of the envelope.
So, if microsoft.com gets RBLed, we'll just pop some popcorn, and watch what happens when Microsoft ends up RBLing itself...
--
I don't recall ever reading about Compaq investing equity in RHAT. However, Compaq does have an array of agreements, or "partnership"s with RHAT, running the gamut of jointly developing device drivers, certifying Compaq's hardware for RH Linux, and technical support.
--
There's definitely a growing dissatisfaction in the enterprise with MS software and services. Just yesterday I was sitting in the meeting, and people were talking about how to move some files from PeeCees to our big dumb UNIX boxes, where all the company jewels are.
Someone said something to the effect "let's use our Samba boxes". I asked him to repeat what he just said, to make sure that I heard him right.
I do consulting, and my current contract is with the traditional suit-n-tie multinational financial corp. This is the last place you'd expect to find a bunch of Samba boxes running somewhere. I was in a state of shock for the rest of the day. It turned out that they have Samba running on Solaris, but that's a start, I suppose.
So it doesn't surprise me what the Japanese are doing. It's probably going to happen here too, within the next couple of years. Unless W2K is a smashing success, you'll start to see many places begin to decomission their NT servers when they reach the end of their lifecycle, and recycling the boxes to run something else. Maybe Linux, maybe Solaris, maybe Monterey.
--
Is it released already? I thought that they said that CVS and Bugzilla is not going to ready for at least a week, or so.
--
These people were the ones behind the "JTSR Restaurants" series of spam runs late last year and earlier this year. That was one of the more massive spam runs of the last couple of years, involving nearly hundreds of fraudulently opened throwaway dialup accounts, and hundreds of hijacked mail relays over the course of several months.
I think that it is very much possible that someone who had his mailbox pummeled day in and day out with that crap -- many people received half a dozen copies of the same fucking spam every day for weeks -- went bonkers and tracked these people down.
When you start annoying tens of millions of people at random, you are bound to come across more than just a couple of nuts, kooks, and freakazoids. That's a given, according to laws of probability and statistics. There's no way around it. When you have such a large sample of population chosen at random, there are bound to be quite a handful of nuts in there.
Well, if you want to go around and start annoying and harassing a bunch of mentally unstable people, well, you'll just have to do it at your own risk. I'm really surprised that this hasn't happened more often.
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Good grief... Flash forward to two years from now. You walk up to a condom vending machine. It uses an infrared sensor to, ahem, measure the blood flow in your lower extremeties (more blood, more heat given off), then charges you ten bucks for a pack of trojans...
Folks, I don't think we want to head in this direction (pun not intended).
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I've said something very similar a couple of times before. As long as I can help it, I am staying away as far from NT as possible. I can do VB, and I can do VC++, but I'd rather not to thankyouverymuch.
Every time I attempt to do any work in Win32, I feel like I have to undergo a lobotomy first. Win32 IDE may look like eye candy up front, but when you strip away all the makeup, underneath you'll find one ugly beast. The Win32 API is a complete and utter joke. In fact, it's so bad that you can't really work with it directly, and you have to use MFC to get a barely workable API to work with.
Ever tried to put together a simple process, under Win32, to listen on a socket for connections, for some simple processing? This is a ten minute job in *NIX. Win32 forces you to use a convoluted event-driven architecture that absolutely makes no sense, and is a royal pain in the ass. This is just an example, but is quite typical of Win32's idiocy.
I don't really know why people thing that graphical IDEs are so sexy. I have absolutely no problems with autoconf, automake, and make. A graphical IDE would probably be nice to have, but absence of it does not really make much of a difference to me.
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... Just add a better display, and, presto: portable p0rn. That's enough storage for at least a few thousand nekkid pics.
What a great idea! P0rn on demand. Find yourself at a boring sales meeting? Whip out your, err..., Palm, and pretend that you're busy working your, uhm...., Palm. Try not to smile to much (or drool, whatever the case may be).
Or, set up a timer and have your Palm automatically download the porn groups off Usenet during the wee hours of the morning. Then, on your way to work, as you sit on the train or bus, there'll be at least something entertaining to pass the time by.
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Off the top of my head, here are some of the things you see all the time that just make me squirm, and want to get up and leave.
You can almost visualize the producer running over budget and hiring some high school kid to throw together a half-baked simulation of a logon screen, and that's what you get.
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Version numbers in open source projects do not mean the same thing as they do in closed source projects. I found that very often the version number of a closed source product is akin to one's penis size: heh heh, my version number is bigger than yours'. Vendors bump up version X.0 to version X+1.0 solely because they want to leave an impression that the new release contains major changes and new features, instead of what it really is, most of the time: a couple of bug fixes.
Open source projects have no need for this, and thus the version numbers are often just a reflection of the developer's mood. One of my own projects is currently at version 0.73, even though I feel that it is as stable as anything you'd find on a production machine. Yup, I did find a bug earlier this week, so I bumped up version 0.72 to 0.73, end of story. That's all (shrug).
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This is pretty much my take on it. In addition to graduating with a comp-sci degree, I double-majored in mathematics. This is what I was referring to earlier -- you have to have a certain mind set, a way of thinking, in order to be a good programmer. I think it comes from being immersed heavily into logic and mathematics.
Towards the end of my freshman year I discovered, to my great surprise, that at the beginning of the year I got myself enrolled in an honors mathematics course due to a slight "mistake". That's a long story, but looking back on it, this was the best "mistake" I ever made.
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Those are not headhunters that materialize out of thin air, randomly. Most of them are headhunters I have had, in fact, had contact years before.
The fact that these blokes, who I faxed a resume two years ago, call me kinda tell me that they have to really dig deep and hard to find anyone who's available.
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Really?
Perhaps you should tell that to all the headhunters out there who keep filling up my answering machine, despite the fact that I have not sent out a single resume in almost three years.
The situation in IT is so out of whack, that everything you have learned about the job market, elsewhere, is thrown out the window.
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I've heard the exact same words five years ago, when I started out in consulting -- man, we're getting killed by those consulting shops who bring over a dozen people from third-world nations on a work visa. They put them up in a rented house in the suburbs, pay them $10/hr to code, bill the client $40/hr, thus undercutting everyone else out there, but still make out a fortune.
Frankly, I always thought that this was merely a ploy by the headhunters to get me to knock down my consulting rate. I always thought that this was complete nonsense, and I still think that it's complete nonsense.
Since then, my consulting rate has tripled, despite all that doom and gloom. I don't know where you find those people, who will replace you for half your paycheck, and I don't really care. Frankly, I think they've been very helpful, if anything, because many times have I come in on a project, to find telltale fingerprints from shoddy programming work from people with unreadable names all over it.
The notion that any specific group of people has a disproportionate amount of geniuses seems to be quite absurd to me. The number of bright and intelligent people in third world nations is probably no more or no less than the number of bright and intelligent people in any other similar population sample. This stuff never concerned me, and gave me no reason to be concerned about.
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Don't worry about. Just go about your business, minding your own, and wait for those discount programmers finish their job, get their 20 bucks, deliver their brand new "trading system", and split.
Then, once the new "trading system" starts dumping core at 11:07 AM, while the Dow is up a 100 points, you will cheerfully agree to fix their mess. For $100/hr. Then, after poking around for the rest of the day, you will announce the next morning that the system is not salvageable, it's a big mess that can't simply be patched here or there, and that it must be rewritten from scratch.
I have heard (but not yet seen) the things that you have described. It doesn't worry me one bit.
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I do not believe that the shortage of highly-qualified, high-skilled, programmers will end anytime soon.
Sure, there'll be plenty of people whose eyes glaze over while reading the classifieds and seeing the salaries and rates of computer programmers. They'll turn around, and say to their drinking buddy: "Hey, Zeke! Look how much computer programmers are being paid these days (burp)! I think I'm going to go and become a computer programmer!!! (hic)".
So, they'll go to some diploma mill, go through the motions, and, presto! New! From Spishak! It's "The Programmer In A Box!!!!!!" Instant ASP! Instant Perl! Instant C++!!
So, the great unwashed will be hired en masse by clueless companies who will think that they'll save a bundle by hiring these new programmers at entry-level salaries or rates. They'll tinker around, for a little while, and things will seem to be fine for some time. Then, everything starts to crash and burn, the environment at work starts to get a bit tense because all the problems, so the new programmers will split, and the companies will be left holding the bag.
Who do you think the companies will turn to, now?
Yup, meanwhile, the Programmer In A Box[tm] is busy running the scam at another clueless company.
I did not go to college and sign up for the comp-sci major because I wanted to make big bucks. In fact, when I was in school, programmers didn't really make that much money. They made a good buck, or two, but not that much. I became a programmer because that's what I really wanted to do.
Predictions that IT worker shortage will end soon are generally based upon the alleged scores of students signing up for computer science majors or computer schools, nationwide. My opinion is that the main attraction for most of these people is only the high salaries and rates that are being paid to highly qualified and skilled programmers.
Except that just the desire to earn big bucks will not make you a good programmer. There's a very good reason why good programmers make good money. Computer programming is a very mentally intensive job. To be a good computer programmer you not only have to know the computer language of choice. It also requires a certain mental discipline, I'd even say that it requires a certain way of thinking. Just knowing how to write printf("Hello world.\n"); is not going to help you much when you've been given a core dump, the source code, no way to reproduce the problem, and were told to figure out what happened, and to fix it.
I believe that very few of these people, who are looking in to cash in on the supposed IT worker shortage, are really prepared for the job. And I wish them luck. I really do. The more they screw up, the more money the rest of us will make, cleaning up their mess.
And even if I'm completely wrong, the bottom line is that we'll always have 10, 15, or more years of experience more than they will do. That cannot possibly ever change, so no matter how many bodies you'll throw into a computer science major, the number of people who already have decades of experience will never change.
... Man... /. needs a good spell checker and grammar checker.
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I hope that VA Linux will not neglect to include The Don in their directed share program. It's not widely known, but Donald Becker did get an invitation for RHAT's directed share program, but he ended up joining the ranks of the privileged few who E*TRADE screwed over completely. His story is included in the feedback portion of my web site. It would be a class gesture on VA Linux's part to make sure that something like this won't fall through the cracks again.
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... and there's plenty more where that came from.
Of course, I was one of the privileged few who E*TRADE shafted, but even if they did accept my money, I would still have no problems finding some loose change under the mattress, for this stock.
I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I've been mostly investing in Linux-related stocks. I have a long term buy-and-hold on Applix and Corel, and so far the stocks are doing very nicely, and I certainly intend to add LNUX to my portfolio at the first convenient opportunity. As far as RHAT goes, well, the little matter I have going with EGRP makes that a bit touchy to talk about, so I better not say anything without running it by my legal-eagle, first :-)
One thing I can say is that I'm absolutely delighted to see VA Linux's selection of underwriters. I'm sure the EGRP folks understand that this IPO could've been theirs too, so they must be wondering whether or not those shennanigans were worth it.
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Hmmm... 120mm is slightly less than 3.5"
If I recall the math correctly, DVDs take up about 1 gig per hour of video(+audio), so it should be possible to store 130-140 hours of movies on a "standard" 3.5" disk.
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This mirrors my experience almost down to the last T. I installed Linux on my laptop two years ago. Mind that: that was TWO years ago - Red Hat 4.2 distro.
I didn't notice anything peculiar, or out of the ordinary. RH 4.2 installer came up, detected my hardware, I chose the packages, the CD spun around for a while, and I was all set. Pretty much everything worked. I think I had to tweak X for a few minutes, but I don't recall any major problems with my Chips & Technologies chipset. Red Hat's installer also had no problem detecting the ESS audiodrive chipset, and everything pretty much worked out of the box. It took a while for the set up to complete -- the laptop's CD was pretty slow.
The laptop was partitioned to dual-boot Win95. By comparison, it took me at least a couple of month before I managed to combine the right concoction of assorted card and protocol stack drivers so that the PCMCIA network card could work properly with Win95 OSR2. Mind this: this was a 3COM PCMCIA card, supposed to have great support under Win95!
Bleah! The bloody thing refused to work for months. Finally I got it work simply by trying every device driver on the OEM Win95 CD in turn, until the bloody thing worked.
By comparison, pcmcia-cs worked nearly out of the box. All I had to do is tweak one setting in a config file. This was with Red Hat 4.2. Since then, the laptop was loaded with RH 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, and 6.0 without a hiccup. Each upgrade went in on complete cruise control. I'm afraid to touch the Win95 partition. I'm afraid that if I as much as sneeze at it, it'll stop working.
This is not a joke. Win95 failed to correctly autodetect the network card, and choose the correct device driver. Meanwhile, even two years ago pcmcia-cs correctly picked out the correct device driver voo-doo logic after a one time either/or boolean option was set.
I've lost the number of times I installed and reinstalled all the OSes on countless machines. I've done them all - Win95, Win95OSR2, Win98, various Linux distros, etc... Always, without fail, I've had a much easier time bring up a Linux distro on the same machine, as opposed to a Win OS.
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I've been typing behind a keyboard for 19 years, since age 11. I've been a blind typist almost right from the start, and after a few cups of coffee I can do 60 WPM.
Earlier this year I've started to get CPS. My advice is to avoid any kind of surgery at all costs, and it should be done only as a last resort.
Use your head. Pay attention to your wrists. At the first signs of any discomfort, stop. Take a break. Get a cup of coffee. Take it easy for a few minutes, then start again. Even if the pain starts coming back a few minutes later, stop. Take another break.
You may want to try taking some generic over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen (that's Advil, but don't waste your money on the brand label, buy the drug store generic brand which is the same thing). If your usual aches and pains respond better to acetaminophen (Tylenol), try that. Don't over do it, you can only take a few pills a day, at the most.
Eventually, your wrists will adjust. It took about a month before the pain went away for me completely. I threw away my old keyboard, bought a new one - "Fellowes" keyboard which comes with a gel-filled wrist pad that is VERY comfortable. I feel absolutely no pain any more.
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