First of all, the rule is, if Microsoft doesn't support HTML 5 in Internet Explorer, then we won't see it being used. Also, we won't see companies like Adobe investing heavily in supporting HTML 5 in development tools since it competes with their Flash business and with their server business. Microsoft won't make much effort to support HTML 5 since they never considered it interesting to begin with. After all, they squashed EcmaScript 4 since as far as they were concerned, you don't need it when you have better systems like.NET and Flash.
On the other hand, like most other HTML elements out there, portions of HTML5 will be adopted as people see them being convenient to use as opposed to alternatives. But, what Ian Hickson (know him personally, nice guy, but has always lacked any realistic grip. Always assumes that people will gladly inconvenience themselves so long as there's an "open" standard as opposed to one like Flash), doesn't realize is, is that for a new tag to make it into HTML and propagate to all major browsers can take years. For a cool new feature to make it into Flash and propagate to nearly every computer that views a page that makes use of that feature is as fast as the download of the feature.
Plug-ins themselves aren't the problem. Flash is not the only solution out there thanks to Silverlight, so there are no alternatives. In fact, plug-ins are easy to write (I know since I implemented plug-in support in one of the major browsers) and because of what can be learned from Macromedia/Adobe, they are now quite easy to deploy. Using a tool like Trolltech Qt combined with OpenGL makes it even easier since you can write the plug-in once and deploy it to pretty much every browser with little more than makefile changes. As a matter of fact, I've been very tempted to make a sample which simply wraps the Qt SVG support to do the same in order to make SVG a plug-in with consistent behavior across all browsers instead of the fiasco it is now.
The fact is, plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight are possibly the best thing about the web since it is possible to extend the browser from a single central source as opposed to waiting 5-10 years for a W3C spec to be made and propagate. Also, they're even better than a W3C spec since they can provide consistent results across platforms.
The real important feature of HTML5 is the <video> tag which will only prove itself useful if browsers support it. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and of course Opera are obviously going to support it. But the question is, whether Internet Explorer will. And frankly, I'm sceptical about this.
W3C screwed up the video tag since they didn't make a true investment in multimedia as part of the standard. They didn't want to use H.264 for the obvious reasons, but more importantly, they should have made a formal container specification and streaming packetized protocol specification for use with it. Now, simply supporting the <video> tag isn't good enough. Now all the browsers have to standardize on what formats are baseline, and frankly, I'm waiting for sleeper patents to start popping up everywhere once all the major browsers support Ogg.
I am a software engineer working at a firm that has 50% engineering and 50% sales and administration. We use an outside firm for IT support since :
1) We can change our own printer toner
2) If something is broken on our PCs, we either don't trust anyone else to fix it for us or simply need a new PC at which point we reinstall it anyway.
3) There's no such thing as an IT guy that would even understand where to begin to install and configure our tools (which actually suck since we have to enter in hardware addresses just to get them to start)
4) We don't use much more than an e-mail server, a file server, and a Cisco. None of which requires a system administrator on site.
5) Subversion and Wiki servers are run on a separate machine that the developers take control of.
I would seriously pity any fool that would even consider being the first IT guy to start working at this company if it ever grew large enough that it should need one on site. Being the IT guy at a small engineering firm where the people on site have historically simply fixed their own stuff would be a disaster. I've seen it before as well. You just don't ever want to be that guy. The problem is, most software engineers learned a lot of what they know by grinding through these problems on test networks, home networks, school networks, etc... It is very rare they ever had to do a good job and make something that could stay live 24/7. So they don't know what it takes to make a system stable for 60 users that can be depended on, instead, they know that it's just a line in a script, what's so hard about that.
If you want a position where a system adminstrator receives more respect, then go to a non-tech company. For example, the happiest system admins I've heard of work at places like paper mills. Remember that you're working at a company where you're more of a convenience than a necessity. If you got hit by a bus, the software engineers would hate doing it, but they'd just start doing the work themselves instead. In a way, at the company you're working at, you're nothing more than a single person that asks the boss for money for new stuff instead of having 40 engineers dropping receipts on his desk. So, in a way, where you are working, you're simply a secretary.
If you want recognition for your talents, go to a company where instead of being "The guy who could have been a programmer/engineer but wasn't smart enough" and head to a company where you're "The guy who keeps the company running".
I find that if you just look at new games on the walls, the store looks bare and I don't spend a lot of time looking. Stores near here that are new games only almost never get my business. But, the kicker is, I almost never buy used games. Ok, occassionally I buy a DS game for my kid or I bought the early PS2 Guitar Hero games just to get the songs. But I almost always buy new games, but it's the used game selection that gets me to the store since I know there a 99% chance that I'll find at least something to play when I go in. Yesterday, I went to the store and ended up buying Rock Band Song Pack 2 even though I wasn't looking for it. But, I was looking for a Wii game, and the new game selection for Wii in Norway sucks, and a new release costs $90 US at most stores.
Probably the last 5-10 games I bought were new, but I bought them from GameStop because I knew walking in the door, if there wasn't anything new at an "affordable" price point, I could always buy something used.
Oh and I never sell my games back, I'll give them to friends if they want them instead. Taking a 50% loss or a 100% loss makes little difference to me so long as I got my money's worth from the game.
The fact the he insists that it's a Linux based solution goes to show that he's dieing to get some new toys and having a kids tracker seems like a lot of fun. When my local condo complex started having problems with break ins in our garage, I used the excuse to hook up some infrared cameras and use an HTC P3300 as a tracking device for stuff I was sure would be stolen. Built it into an old shuttle PC which I also loaded up with a 3lb lead acid cell that would last for weeks.
Unlike what some of the other commenters here said about him knowing his kid or the school better than we do, it's more that he knows himself better than we do and he knows he's the type that spends all his time goofing with computers and electronics and recognizes that he is highly likely to lose track of his kid regularly, this way he can have a task bar icon that pops up a "kid location service" map every 5 minutes with an alarm when the kid is "out of bounds". Then he doesn't have to have a clue about his surroundings.
Seriously, in today's economy where you have tens of thousands of unemployed job candidates with masters and 3-10 years work experience hunting for jobs and beginning to settle for lower level, lower paid positions just to feed themselves, a masters and a Ph.D. is a very good idea, if for no other reason but to delay your entry into the job market.
Besides, 2 years work experience on a bachelors and 2 years work experience on a high school diploma is the same. This is really your only chance you'll ever have in life to get the masters and it will make a huge difference later on when you want to move up the corporate ladder.
The masters might not help you today, but it will in 10-15 years.
If you have the option to get a masters degree now and you're not jumping at the opportunity, you should just drop out and flip burgers instead.
Google is a great company, but it's really beginning to worry me that a company as large as they are with the tremendous overhead they have is crushing companies left and right in their quest of world domination.
I do believe Google just wants to make great technology and make it available to everyone, but for the moment, they're riding a gray train where they have the luxury to be able to give away services for free to everyone, but it is crushing many companies quickly.
I can go on for a while, but Google is putting out applications ranging in quality from mediocre to great in all these different markets which are making it impossible for other vendors who offer exception products to compete since Google is supporting most of these businesses using an advertising model or otherwise which may or may not be sustainable over the long term.
In the end, if the advertising market bottoms out for some reason or another company begins to offer a better service (somehow) then not only has Google been crushed, but all the markets which have been monopolized by Google because of offering services online for free have disolved an we're left with nothing.
I want to see some regulation on Google which would make it so that as they monopolize markets, they are forced to make it possible for someone else to take over where they left off in case Google goes tits-up or just loses interest.
Seriously, this is the worst bill I have ever seen proposed. I mean, while we're at it, let's make a law that requires us to cane women to death in the streets because we suspect they might have had impure thoughts.
I seriously would say a lot of mean and hateful things about this useless abuser of our collective oxygen resources, but I'm sure that under this bill she would be able to have me put in prison for it.
There was a point in time when there was an SCO (probably prior to 7 buy outs and name transfers) that actually focused on technology. I remember when their product, in my opinion was the best UNIX desktop if for no other reason, but they had a control panel while everyone else still used configuration files. It was a dream being able to change screen resolution without having to restart X.
They also made some products in their Tarentella line which was a port of the Microsoft SMB stack and therefore was a MUCH MUCH better solution than the Samba of the time. In fact, management-wise, it might still be better. After all, when you can spend less time reverse engineering and hacking with compatibility problems you can spend more time on usability.
I guess that company is long gone and what's going bankrupt now is just some predators who attempted to capitalize off the accomplishments of the old SCO.
if you can find a way into the NYPD network, I'm sure you also have at least limited access to police radio, warrants as they're issued, patrol car locations, officer records (including where their families live) and even FBI databases. Thanks to Guilliani making the NYPD one of the biggest police departments in history, there are SO many computers that intrusion detection would be difficult on that scale. NYPD is probably the best target in the U.S. for access to records all over the place.
An organized crime group located in NY would be able to strengthen their defenses against the NYPD 100 fold easily if they had this kind of access.
So, if you were a hacker able to build a botnet by targeting PCs on an international scale, produce a series of backdoors in the NYPD network and obtain this information, then you could sell these services for millions and move to a sunny island somewhere.
China just happens to have probably the most unprotected consumer PCs on the planet and is an excellent target for botnet drones.
While it would be great to build a system that is dependable for 10-15 years, unless you have a huge budget for environmental testing of a large set of components and the knowledge necessary to interpret the figures that result from the research, there is no way to predict reliability of systems over that period of time. It's better to just try and buy what appears to be the best.
I recommend buying system components from a vendor like Tyan or Supermicro as opposed to Asus and Gigabyte for example. Those vendors survive on dependability. They sell the same components for years instead of months and from my experience are quite good at maintaining them.
If your dad has been using Windows all this time, then Windows is probably the best solution for the future. Any person that uses the same systems for that many years is not interested in a great deal of change. Windows Server 2008 is a great option for these types of environments. Use it with thin clients, check out http://www.chippc.com for example. They have a thin client that fits into a simple network jack.
Install the server as a virtual machine on the free VMWare ESXi, it should be a format supported for a while to come. The images are generally compatible with most other virtual machines, so 10 years from now, they should still work.
Install a tape backup and backup regularly the virtual machine. Get a SAS controller and install 5 drives. 3 for the stipe + parity, 2 for hot spares. This will allow for up to 3 full hard drive failures over the life of the machine. Since you're running a VM, I recommend using faster drives. Sounds like dad's been quite happy with 500meg drives for a while, doesn't sound like he needs too much storage. 73gig 10k or 15k drives should be sufficient.
Use overclocking RAM from Kingston or Micron(crucial). They have heatsinks and when you're not overclocking should prove highly reliable over extended periods.
If you'd prefer to avoid the hassle of building and possibly maintaining the machine, I would highly recommend purchasing an x86 server from Sun Microsystems with Windows and you can also use their thin clients with the system. Not as cheap as DIY in the short term, but is very likely the less expensive choice over a period of 10-15 years. Additionally, the components in Sun machines are the same ones they sell to the military, so the quality is quite high.
Scandinavia has an incredibly high English literacy rate at an early age. I am an American living in Norway and after 10 years of integrating myself with society have coined the term "Zero Tolerance Language". While Finnish is a highly phonetic language where if you can sound out a word, then you can pronounce it. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are anything but phonetic. The number of dialects are innumerable and in the case of Norway, there are even two official written languages reflecting nothing anyone speaks.
Norwegian is a "Zero Tolerance Language" as you are provided with two possible options. Either speak Norwegian well or speak English. Mispronouncing Norwegian will cause a native Norwegian speaker to immediately switch to English, almost forcefully as they lack the tolerance to attempt to struggle through the conversation where the non-native speaker can learn from their mistakes. English speakers tend to be purely monolingual, therefore when conversing with a foreigner who speaks poorly, they will slow down and try, sometimes even employing ad-hoc sign language to understand the other party. Norwegian speakers can always switch to English and therefore don't depend on trying to decipher their own language spoke poorly.
An excellent example of what would trigger a zero-tolerance language switch to trigger would be if someone were to say in Norwegian "Kan jeg få en løk" in the context of purchasing a coffee where they had intended to say "Kan jeg få en lokk". The pronunciation of "Løk" and "Lokk" are only slightly different to a non-native speaker and are very often confused either because the speaker can't hear the difference themselves are their tounge can not reproduce the vowel in the context, however one word means "Onion" and the other means "Lid (as in coffee cup lid)". The speaker was attempting to ask "Can I have a lid" might have even used sign language to motion something to cover the cup. Instead the speaker ask for an onion. The clerk will often not understand what was said and will immediately switch to English as they have no decided that Norwegian is not a functional language for the original speaker.
If you search for most spoken primary languages on the Internet, while most lists disagree as noone seems to have bothered to make phone calls to every language speaker on the planet to verify the data, generally speaking Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Spanish are all very good choices as a second language. Now that China has adopted English as a near universal second language, English is the closest thing we have to a universal international language.
As for regards to programming and engineering, while translating books to other languages is of value. The value is limited. Programming by its nature is communicating directions in a language other than your spoken assumes already that you're open to alternate languages of communication. I've rarely met a programmer that hasn't at least attempted to learn a second spoken language or at the very least respect the value of it highly. But, while Russian and Chinese combined may yield better search results for resolving problems online, it seems to me a poor solution to a problem. After all, Russian + English or Chinese + English or Russian + Chinese + English would be better than any of the other options.
What I would very much like to see is more translations of Chinese and Russian papers being published in English. While the other way around provides some benefit, nearly every educated person in Western Europe can read English. More people in China can read English than in America and possibly the U.K. combined. Even countries that have historically been linguistically purist such as Japan, France and Germany are learning English at break neck speeds today.
The only disadvantage to English is politically as it feels like a sell out to buy into a language that is native to two consecutive world dominating empires who generally show lack of respect or regard for people outside their cultures. However, for the sake of language consolidation in a time of world wide communication, less languages are generally better as miscommunication has much wider spread impact than it has in the past.
In a world where we can use robots remotely to perform surgery on patients around the world, I never understood why we couldn't perform less time critical operations such as building bases on the moon.
It seems to me that it should be possible to send several robots to the moon that could be remote controlled from earth and actually construct complex structures on the moon. The real problem of course would be the transportation of raw materials, but somehow I figure that since life support wouldn't be a huge issue, it should be possible to transport materials into space using the shuttle or a rocket and then send them to the moon using little more than guidance rockets. The rockets themselves can also be part of the raw materials once they're there.
I really hope China or India pull something like this off since they seem to be able to accomplish more with less politics than the western countries these past few decades.
I was under the impression that one of the top reasons men have been such excellent targets for sexual harassment cases (fairly or not) is that men have classically blurted out for everyone everywhere to listen about their sexuality. Like "Man you should have seen the legs on that babe. She was amazing!"
The thing is, even saying "Yeh, I'm a guy..." and later "Let me check with my boyfriend" is theoretically identifying as a homosexual or at least bi-sexual. Yet, if you say "Yeh, I'm a guy..." and later "Let me check with my girlfriend" then it's alright.
Frankly, I'm against the way the gay movement has been executed so far, but I respect what they are trying to accomplish... at least the serious ones.
Seeing that I doubt she'll get capitol punishment for this (damn shame, should have happened in Texas, the only state sane enough to understand it's better to fry them young before they have a chance to become voting liberals!) she should at least be publicly caned!
The problem with youth these days is that pansy ass liberals in Washington have made it so that we can't beat our kids to keep them in line anymore. What's worse is that those bra burning lesbians in Washington won't just stay where they belong, AT HOME, barefoot and pregnant. This world is going to hell in a hand basket fast and it's all because people listen to CNN and get their panties all in a twist because they can't see clearly Saint George W. Bush is going to save us from the evil A-Rabs.
It's about time we stop sending girls to schools where they can distract boys from their studies once they reach puberty. It's about time we start slapping our daughters around when they show signs of free thinking. It's about time we get this work back under control. These girls don't need school anyway, they should be making babies from the day they turn 18 in order to make sure that those hispanols don't take over this county!
Oh... wait I'm not a redneck.....
The principle of the school should be canned like tuna over this. When the principle of the school reacts this harshly to an incident of a teenager lying to avoid losing their phone in school, how will he/she respond to real problems. Teenagers ARE disorderly. Teenagers are unruly. Teenagers DO lie to avoid getting in trouble. Threatening a teenager you know is lying is a waste of time. The kid already knows he/she is in trouble. The kid knows that if they get caught the punishment can't really be any worse. The kid will just keep lying until the situation resolves itself.
A school principle who has a student arrested over a situation like this lacks leadership ability and lacks good decision making abilities. The girl did not endanger any other students. She did disrupt class, but she'd have been scared to do it again later. Can anyone seriously tell me, how, on any planet a school leader can ever be taken seriously or gain the trust or respect of their students when the principle thinks the proper method of dealing with a 14 year old that obviously is testing her boundaries, is to have her arrested and then tried?
If I lived in this middle of nowhere hick town, I'd lynch the principle unless he/she dropped the charges and made a public appology stating that he/she overreacted because of his/her incompitance as a school leader.
You must be one of those MBA people who think unpaid mandatory overtime is a good thing since that's when you're at a tropical "retreat" doing "team building" while sipping drinks with umbrellas. Or at a trade show where you've hired a model to stand next to a product and pretend to be interested in your gizmo she doesn't understand.
We programmers do the mandatory overtime locked in dungeons where our only reward is free low budget coffee.
In the software world, there are some issues relating to privacy which concern me regarding DRM. I don't even have a problem with DRM that allows me to pay a lower price for something I want if I allow a hardware lock-in (iPod).
What does concern me however is DRM that discontinues working. When I purchase something, even if it's "The Rights to use it", I expect to continue to have those rights. An excellent example is a Microsoft High Definition DVD (the technology they released as a HD DVD before HD-DVD and BluRay came around.) which no longer works because Microsoft killed off the DRM server since they obsoleted the format. This left me with at least one $30 disc that will never work again since there's no key server anymore.
There should be regulation that requires that media purchased is guaranteed to continue working so long as the user has hardware to play it. It should not be possible to cut it off from a central source.
When I purchase audiobooks from Audible.com or Borders, the first thing I do is to remove the DRM since I don't expect to be able to a year later. I've invested thousands of dollars in audiobooks and I don't intend to risk my investment because they're worried someone else will pirate them.
I have stopped using services that implemented DRM which is too complex or time consuming to remove. I won't actually buy BluRay until I'm sure that the DRM issues are all sorted. Meaning that once BluRay becomes obsolete, I'll be able to reliably rip all my discs into another format. I currently own over 500 DVDs and have invested an average of $20 into each of them. I protect them by ripping them and keeping the originals stored in a carton in a dry dark place.
While I see DRM having very little use since the people who will pirate the game will use a crack anyway. DRM is little more than a deterrent that punishes the honest people.
My wife who loves me very much bought me the 28 port 512mb version of this hard drive controller for Christmas and I have loved it, but I feel like I'm wasting it by running it in a shitty Core 2 Quad motherboard instead of a Xeon motherboard.
I have actually run this exact controller in a Pentium M motherboard during my 3ware to Adaptec transition phase, and the results are entirely different. Especially since the Adaptec drivers are poorly suited for single core systems. After all, you just don't add a $300-$1700 controller to a computer that costs more to ship than to buy on eBay.
So far as I'm concerned, the test is entirely unrealistic and invalid. It's time these guys "rebooted" and got at least a quad core PC, at least using the x58 chipset, bus performance is less of an issue and peripherals should perform at their full potential.
I mean come on. With Florida counting votes using the Jeb Bush system of "Once I run out of fingers to count on, we'll just call it Republicans win by a close call" and with Texas not even counting votes since only thems mex-EEEE-caaans and colored folks would vote against the Christian party. It's just not right that first we denied the state of West Virginia dental care and now we're ignoring their votes.
Did this election really need any more opportunity for jokes. I mean, let McCain have the spare votes from West Virginia. The entire state doesn't have enough electoral votes to worry about and we should let him feel like someone loves him.
Would be great to have a town made up souly of individuals of high intelligence and capabilities. But did anyone ever think for a moment about two major draw backs ?
First : Nerds/Scientists are slobs No kidding, property values drop when a scientist moves onto the block. Their lawns grow to meters in length. Their house is generally a wreck. And eventually the houses look like they're about to burst at the seams from a kiloton of books piled up against the walls. So who will do the real work? This town of souly intelligent people would have to import all their labour from outside. This can be expensive or the alternative is, the workers will establish themselves near by and eventually the two groups will integrate.
Second : Food supply Food costs money. Money comes from work. Work comes from companies. Companies are run by MBAs. MBAs are frigging morons. So unless the whole town will telecommute for a living, there will be MBAs. And a single MBA can pull down the town IQ by several percent.
It's really quite funny, copy protected content continues to sell sell sell. In fact, even back in the days when Copy II PC was used to copy pretty much every copy protected disc on the market, people still copied copied copied.
But, guess what? This video game industry still exists and is still growing all these decades later. You know why?
The game companies are still selling shit loads of copies even though everyone is pirating.
I have a prediction. 50 years from now, there will still be game publishers making lots of money. Piracy or not.
I'm not sure if we're taking turns saying the same thing or arguing:)
Regarding the two vs. many party system, I'm simply sayng that the many party system would lead to disaster in a country like the states.
Americans are bread from birth to be "special". If Americans were to vote for the winner of the presidential election and there was a means for the runner up political parties to overturn the decision by joining their votes together, the result would be that somehow a president would have to be chosen from the coalition of parties that unified for the win.
At this time, the American people would become even more confused than usual and would act rashly as a leader is chosen for them instead of my them.
A few years ago, Ross Perot ran for president as well, proving that an independant (in this case, a candidate without backing by a major party), assuming they can aquire enough financial backing to do so could in fact make a real run for the presidency.
Perot performed fantastically and I'm disappointed he hasn't attempted to establish a new political party. I believe the result could have been that his party could attempt to choose candidates to support based on the merits of their abilities. I imagine they could spend some time building the party, first within the house and the senate and later within the whitehouse.
But, that's all pipe dreams. The fact is, America is a two party democracy. Employing systems from elsewhere would likely be devistation to their system. Americans hate the way it is, but regard the way the rest of the world does it as being worse. So much worse in fact, that even evaluating and learning about their systems is a waste of time.
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First of all, the rule is, if Microsoft doesn't support HTML 5 in Internet Explorer, then we won't see it being used. Also, we won't see companies like Adobe investing heavily in supporting HTML 5 in development tools since it competes with their Flash business and with their server business. Microsoft won't make much effort to support HTML 5 since they never considered it interesting to begin with. After all, they squashed EcmaScript 4 since as far as they were concerned, you don't need it when you have better systems like .NET and Flash.
On the other hand, like most other HTML elements out there, portions of HTML5 will be adopted as people see them being convenient to use as opposed to alternatives. But, what Ian Hickson (know him personally, nice guy, but has always lacked any realistic grip. Always assumes that people will gladly inconvenience themselves so long as there's an "open" standard as opposed to one like Flash), doesn't realize is, is that for a new tag to make it into HTML and propagate to all major browsers can take years. For a cool new feature to make it into Flash and propagate to nearly every computer that views a page that makes use of that feature is as fast as the download of the feature.
Plug-ins themselves aren't the problem. Flash is not the only solution out there thanks to Silverlight, so there are no alternatives. In fact, plug-ins are easy to write (I know since I implemented plug-in support in one of the major browsers) and because of what can be learned from Macromedia/Adobe, they are now quite easy to deploy. Using a tool like Trolltech Qt combined with OpenGL makes it even easier since you can write the plug-in once and deploy it to pretty much every browser with little more than makefile changes. As a matter of fact, I've been very tempted to make a sample which simply wraps the Qt SVG support to do the same in order to make SVG a plug-in with consistent behavior across all browsers instead of the fiasco it is now.
The fact is, plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight are possibly the best thing about the web since it is possible to extend the browser from a single central source as opposed to waiting 5-10 years for a W3C spec to be made and propagate. Also, they're even better than a W3C spec since they can provide consistent results across platforms.
The real important feature of HTML5 is the <video> tag which will only prove itself useful if browsers support it. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and of course Opera are obviously going to support it. But the question is, whether Internet Explorer will. And frankly, I'm sceptical about this.
W3C screwed up the video tag since they didn't make a true investment in multimedia as part of the standard. They didn't want to use H.264 for the obvious reasons, but more importantly, they should have made a formal container specification and streaming packetized protocol specification for use with it. Now, simply supporting the <video> tag isn't good enough. Now all the browsers have to standardize on what formats are baseline, and frankly, I'm waiting for sleeper patents to start popping up everywhere once all the major browsers support Ogg.
I am a software engineer working at a firm that has 50% engineering and 50% sales and administration. We use an outside firm for IT support since :
1) We can change our own printer toner
2) If something is broken on our PCs, we either don't trust anyone else to fix it for us or simply need a new PC at which point we reinstall it anyway.
3) There's no such thing as an IT guy that would even understand where to begin to install and configure our tools (which actually suck since we have to enter in hardware addresses just to get them to start)
4) We don't use much more than an e-mail server, a file server, and a Cisco. None of which requires a system administrator on site.
5) Subversion and Wiki servers are run on a separate machine that the developers take control of.
I would seriously pity any fool that would even consider being the first IT guy to start working at this company if it ever grew large enough that it should need one on site. Being the IT guy at a small engineering firm where the people on site have historically simply fixed their own stuff would be a disaster. I've seen it before as well. You just don't ever want to be that guy. The problem is, most software engineers learned a lot of what they know by grinding through these problems on test networks, home networks, school networks, etc... It is very rare they ever had to do a good job and make something that could stay live 24/7. So they don't know what it takes to make a system stable for 60 users that can be depended on, instead, they know that it's just a line in a script, what's so hard about that.
If you want a position where a system adminstrator receives more respect, then go to a non-tech company. For example, the happiest system admins I've heard of work at places like paper mills. Remember that you're working at a company where you're more of a convenience than a necessity. If you got hit by a bus, the software engineers would hate doing it, but they'd just start doing the work themselves instead. In a way, at the company you're working at, you're nothing more than a single person that asks the boss for money for new stuff instead of having 40 engineers dropping receipts on his desk. So, in a way, where you are working, you're simply a secretary.
If you want recognition for your talents, go to a company where instead of being "The guy who could have been a programmer/engineer but wasn't smart enough" and head to a company where you're "The guy who keeps the company running".
I find that if you just look at new games on the walls, the store looks bare and I don't spend a lot of time looking. Stores near here that are new games only almost never get my business. But, the kicker is, I almost never buy used games. Ok, occassionally I buy a DS game for my kid or I bought the early PS2 Guitar Hero games just to get the songs. But I almost always buy new games, but it's the used game selection that gets me to the store since I know there a 99% chance that I'll find at least something to play when I go in. Yesterday, I went to the store and ended up buying Rock Band Song Pack 2 even though I wasn't looking for it. But, I was looking for a Wii game, and the new game selection for Wii in Norway sucks, and a new release costs $90 US at most stores.
Probably the last 5-10 games I bought were new, but I bought them from GameStop because I knew walking in the door, if there wasn't anything new at an "affordable" price point, I could always buy something used.
Oh and I never sell my games back, I'll give them to friends if they want them instead. Taking a 50% loss or a 100% loss makes little difference to me so long as I got my money's worth from the game.
The fact the he insists that it's a Linux based solution goes to show that he's dieing to get some new toys and having a kids tracker seems like a lot of fun. When my local condo complex started having problems with break ins in our garage, I used the excuse to hook up some infrared cameras and use an HTC P3300 as a tracking device for stuff I was sure would be stolen. Built it into an old shuttle PC which I also loaded up with a 3lb lead acid cell that would last for weeks.
Unlike what some of the other commenters here said about him knowing his kid or the school better than we do, it's more that he knows himself better than we do and he knows he's the type that spends all his time goofing with computers and electronics and recognizes that he is highly likely to lose track of his kid regularly, this way he can have a task bar icon that pops up a "kid location service" map every 5 minutes with an alarm when the kid is "out of bounds". Then he doesn't have to have a clue about his surroundings.
Seriously, in today's economy where you have tens of thousands of unemployed job candidates with masters and 3-10 years work experience hunting for jobs and beginning to settle for lower level, lower paid positions just to feed themselves, a masters and a Ph.D. is a very good idea, if for no other reason but to delay your entry into the job market.
Besides, 2 years work experience on a bachelors and 2 years work experience on a high school diploma is the same. This is really your only chance you'll ever have in life to get the masters and it will make a huge difference later on when you want to move up the corporate ladder.
The masters might not help you today, but it will in 10-15 years.
If you have the option to get a masters degree now and you're not jumping at the opportunity, you should just drop out and flip burgers instead.
Google is a great company, but it's really beginning to worry me that a company as large as they are with the tremendous overhead they have is crushing companies left and right in their quest of world domination.
I do believe Google just wants to make great technology and make it available to everyone, but for the moment, they're riding a gray train where they have the luxury to be able to give away services for free to everyone, but it is crushing many companies quickly.
- Browser market
- Map market
- Navigation market
- GIS market
- online e-mail market
- online storage market
- telephone platform market
- speech recognition market
- VoiP market
- Video conferencing market
- Translation market
I can go on for a while, but Google is putting out applications ranging in quality from mediocre to great in all these different markets which are making it impossible for other vendors who offer exception products to compete since Google is supporting most of these businesses using an advertising model or otherwise which may or may not be sustainable over the long term.
In the end, if the advertising market bottoms out for some reason or another company begins to offer a better service (somehow) then not only has Google been crushed, but all the markets which have been monopolized by Google because of offering services online for free have disolved an we're left with nothing.
I want to see some regulation on Google which would make it so that as they monopolize markets, they are forced to make it possible for someone else to take over where they left off in case Google goes tits-up or just loses interest.
Apple has destroyed more good products simply by buying them than any other company.
While Twitter isn't really a good product, it can still be destroyed.
Can anyone here actually name a product that got better after Apple bought it?
Seriously, this is the worst bill I have ever seen proposed. I mean, while we're at it, let's make a law that requires us to cane women to death in the streets because we suspect they might have had impure thoughts.
I seriously would say a lot of mean and hateful things about this useless abuser of our collective oxygen resources, but I'm sure that under this bill she would be able to have me put in prison for it.
There was a point in time when there was an SCO (probably prior to 7 buy outs and name transfers) that actually focused on technology. I remember when their product, in my opinion was the best UNIX desktop if for no other reason, but they had a control panel while everyone else still used configuration files. It was a dream being able to change screen resolution without having to restart X.
They also made some products in their Tarentella line which was a port of the Microsoft SMB stack and therefore was a MUCH MUCH better solution than the Samba of the time. In fact, management-wise, it might still be better. After all, when you can spend less time reverse engineering and hacking with compatibility problems you can spend more time on usability.
I guess that company is long gone and what's going bankrupt now is just some predators who attempted to capitalize off the accomplishments of the old SCO.
But Goodbye SCO. I miss you
if you can find a way into the NYPD network, I'm sure you also have at least limited access to police radio, warrants as they're issued, patrol car locations, officer records (including where their families live) and even FBI databases. Thanks to Guilliani making the NYPD one of the biggest police departments in history, there are SO many computers that intrusion detection would be difficult on that scale. NYPD is probably the best target in the U.S. for access to records all over the place.
An organized crime group located in NY would be able to strengthen their defenses against the NYPD 100 fold easily if they had this kind of access.
So, if you were a hacker able to build a botnet by targeting PCs on an international scale, produce a series of backdoors in the NYPD network and obtain this information, then you could sell these services for millions and move to a sunny island somewhere.
China just happens to have probably the most unprotected consumer PCs on the planet and is an excellent target for botnet drones.
http://gizmodo.com/5091473/sgi-molecule-packs-10000-atom-cores-one-ton-of-awesomeness
While it would be great to build a system that is dependable for 10-15 years, unless you have a huge budget for environmental testing of a large set of components and the knowledge necessary to interpret the figures that result from the research, there is no way to predict reliability of systems over that period of time. It's better to just try and buy what appears to be the best.
I recommend buying system components from a vendor like Tyan or Supermicro as opposed to Asus and Gigabyte for example. Those vendors survive on dependability. They sell the same components for years instead of months and from my experience are quite good at maintaining them.
If your dad has been using Windows all this time, then Windows is probably the best solution for the future. Any person that uses the same systems for that many years is not interested in a great deal of change. Windows Server 2008 is a great option for these types of environments. Use it with thin clients, check out http://www.chippc.com for example. They have a thin client that fits into a simple network jack.
Install the server as a virtual machine on the free VMWare ESXi, it should be a format supported for a while to come. The images are generally compatible with most other virtual machines, so 10 years from now, they should still work.
Install a tape backup and backup regularly the virtual machine. Get a SAS controller and install 5 drives. 3 for the stipe + parity, 2 for hot spares. This will allow for up to 3 full hard drive failures over the life of the machine. Since you're running a VM, I recommend using faster drives. Sounds like dad's been quite happy with 500meg drives for a while, doesn't sound like he needs too much storage. 73gig 10k or 15k drives should be sufficient.
Use overclocking RAM from Kingston or Micron(crucial). They have heatsinks and when you're not overclocking should prove highly reliable over extended periods.
If you'd prefer to avoid the hassle of building and possibly maintaining the machine, I would highly recommend purchasing an x86 server from Sun Microsystems with Windows and you can also use their thin clients with the system. Not as cheap as DIY in the short term, but is very likely the less expensive choice over a period of 10-15 years. Additionally, the components in Sun machines are the same ones they sell to the military, so the quality is quite high.
Scandinavia has an incredibly high English literacy rate at an early age. I am an American living in Norway and after 10 years of integrating myself with society have coined the term "Zero Tolerance Language". While Finnish is a highly phonetic language where if you can sound out a word, then you can pronounce it. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are anything but phonetic. The number of dialects are innumerable and in the case of Norway, there are even two official written languages reflecting nothing anyone speaks.
Norwegian is a "Zero Tolerance Language" as you are provided with two possible options. Either speak Norwegian well or speak English. Mispronouncing Norwegian will cause a native Norwegian speaker to immediately switch to English, almost forcefully as they lack the tolerance to attempt to struggle through the conversation where the non-native speaker can learn from their mistakes. English speakers tend to be purely monolingual, therefore when conversing with a foreigner who speaks poorly, they will slow down and try, sometimes even employing ad-hoc sign language to understand the other party. Norwegian speakers can always switch to English and therefore don't depend on trying to decipher their own language spoke poorly.
An excellent example of what would trigger a zero-tolerance language switch to trigger would be if someone were to say in Norwegian "Kan jeg få en løk" in the context of purchasing a coffee where they had intended to say "Kan jeg få en lokk". The pronunciation of "Løk" and "Lokk" are only slightly different to a non-native speaker and are very often confused either because the speaker can't hear the difference themselves are their tounge can not reproduce the vowel in the context, however one word means "Onion" and the other means "Lid (as in coffee cup lid)". The speaker was attempting to ask "Can I have a lid" might have even used sign language to motion something to cover the cup. Instead the speaker ask for an onion. The clerk will often not understand what was said and will immediately switch to English as they have no decided that Norwegian is not a functional language for the original speaker.
If you search for most spoken primary languages on the Internet, while most lists disagree as noone seems to have bothered to make phone calls to every language speaker on the planet to verify the data, generally speaking Mandarin, Arabic, Russian and Spanish are all very good choices as a second language. Now that China has adopted English as a near universal second language, English is the closest thing we have to a universal international language.
As for regards to programming and engineering, while translating books to other languages is of value. The value is limited. Programming by its nature is communicating directions in a language other than your spoken assumes already that you're open to alternate languages of communication. I've rarely met a programmer that hasn't at least attempted to learn a second spoken language or at the very least respect the value of it highly. But, while Russian and Chinese combined may yield better search results for resolving problems online, it seems to me a poor solution to a problem. After all, Russian + English or Chinese + English or Russian + Chinese + English would be better than any of the other options.
What I would very much like to see is more translations of Chinese and Russian papers being published in English. While the other way around provides some benefit, nearly every educated person in Western Europe can read English. More people in China can read English than in America and possibly the U.K. combined. Even countries that have historically been linguistically purist such as Japan, France and Germany are learning English at break neck speeds today.
The only disadvantage to English is politically as it feels like a sell out to buy into a language that is native to two consecutive world dominating empires who generally show lack of respect or regard for people outside their cultures. However, for the sake of language consolidation in a time of world wide communication, less languages are generally better as miscommunication has much wider spread impact than it has in the past.
In a world where we can use robots remotely to perform surgery on patients around the world, I never understood why we couldn't perform less time critical operations such as building bases on the moon.
It seems to me that it should be possible to send several robots to the moon that could be remote controlled from earth and actually construct complex structures on the moon. The real problem of course would be the transportation of raw materials, but somehow I figure that since life support wouldn't be a huge issue, it should be possible to transport materials into space using the shuttle or a rocket and then send them to the moon using little more than guidance rockets. The rockets themselves can also be part of the raw materials once they're there.
I really hope China or India pull something like this off since they seem to be able to accomplish more with less politics than the western countries these past few decades.
I was under the impression that one of the top reasons men have been such excellent targets for sexual harassment cases (fairly or not) is that men have classically blurted out for everyone everywhere to listen about their sexuality. Like "Man you should have seen the legs on that babe. She was amazing!"
The thing is, even saying "Yeh, I'm a guy..." and later "Let me check with my boyfriend" is theoretically identifying as a homosexual or at least bi-sexual. Yet, if you say "Yeh, I'm a guy..." and later "Let me check with my girlfriend" then it's alright.
Frankly, I'm against the way the gay movement has been executed so far, but I respect what they are trying to accomplish... at least the serious ones.
Seeing that I doubt she'll get capitol punishment for this (damn shame, should have happened in Texas, the only state sane enough to understand it's better to fry them young before they have a chance to become voting liberals!) she should at least be publicly caned!
... wait I'm not a redneck.....
The problem with youth these days is that pansy ass liberals in Washington have made it so that we can't beat our kids to keep them in line anymore. What's worse is that those bra burning lesbians in Washington won't just stay where they belong, AT HOME, barefoot and pregnant. This world is going to hell in a hand basket fast and it's all because people listen to CNN and get their panties all in a twist because they can't see clearly Saint George W. Bush is going to save us from the evil A-Rabs.
It's about time we stop sending girls to schools where they can distract boys from their studies once they reach puberty. It's about time we start slapping our daughters around when they show signs of free thinking. It's about time we get this work back under control. These girls don't need school anyway, they should be making babies from the day they turn 18 in order to make sure that those hispanols don't take over this county!
Oh
The principle of the school should be canned like tuna over this. When the principle of the school reacts this harshly to an incident of a teenager lying to avoid losing their phone in school, how will he/she respond to real problems. Teenagers ARE disorderly. Teenagers are unruly. Teenagers DO lie to avoid getting in trouble. Threatening a teenager you know is lying is a waste of time. The kid already knows he/she is in trouble. The kid knows that if they get caught the punishment can't really be any worse. The kid will just keep lying until the situation resolves itself.
A school principle who has a student arrested over a situation like this lacks leadership ability and lacks good decision making abilities. The girl did not endanger any other students. She did disrupt class, but she'd have been scared to do it again later. Can anyone seriously tell me, how, on any planet a school leader can ever be taken seriously or gain the trust or respect of their students when the principle thinks the proper method of dealing with a 14 year old that obviously is testing her boundaries, is to have her arrested and then tried?
If I lived in this middle of nowhere hick town, I'd lynch the principle unless he/she dropped the charges and made a public appology stating that he/she overreacted because of his/her incompitance as a school leader.
Whoever said slavery is dead?
You must be one of those MBA people who think unpaid mandatory overtime is a good thing since that's when you're at a tropical "retreat" doing "team building" while sipping drinks with umbrellas. Or at a trade show where you've hired a model to stand next to a product and pretend to be interested in your gizmo she doesn't understand.
We programmers do the mandatory overtime locked in dungeons where our only reward is free low budget coffee.
In the software world, there are some issues relating to privacy which concern me regarding DRM. I don't even have a problem with DRM that allows me to pay a lower price for something I want if I allow a hardware lock-in (iPod).
What does concern me however is DRM that discontinues working. When I purchase something, even if it's "The Rights to use it", I expect to continue to have those rights. An excellent example is a Microsoft High Definition DVD (the technology they released as a HD DVD before HD-DVD and BluRay came around.) which no longer works because Microsoft killed off the DRM server since they obsoleted the format. This left me with at least one $30 disc that will never work again since there's no key server anymore.
There should be regulation that requires that media purchased is guaranteed to continue working so long as the user has hardware to play it. It should not be possible to cut it off from a central source.
When I purchase audiobooks from Audible.com or Borders, the first thing I do is to remove the DRM since I don't expect to be able to a year later. I've invested thousands of dollars in audiobooks and I don't intend to risk my investment because they're worried someone else will pirate them.
I have stopped using services that implemented DRM which is too complex or time consuming to remove. I won't actually buy BluRay until I'm sure that the DRM issues are all sorted. Meaning that once BluRay becomes obsolete, I'll be able to reliably rip all my discs into another format. I currently own over 500 DVDs and have invested an average of $20 into each of them. I protect them by ripping them and keeping the originals stored in a carton in a dry dark place.
While I see DRM having very little use since the people who will pirate the game will use a crack anyway. DRM is little more than a deterrent that punishes the honest people.
My wife who loves me very much bought me the 28 port 512mb version of this hard drive controller for Christmas and I have loved it, but I feel like I'm wasting it by running it in a shitty Core 2 Quad motherboard instead of a Xeon motherboard.
I have actually run this exact controller in a Pentium M motherboard during my 3ware to Adaptec transition phase, and the results are entirely different. Especially since the Adaptec drivers are poorly suited for single core systems. After all, you just don't add a $300-$1700 controller to a computer that costs more to ship than to buy on eBay.
So far as I'm concerned, the test is entirely unrealistic and invalid. It's time these guys "rebooted" and got at least a quad core PC, at least using the x58 chipset, bus performance is less of an issue and peripherals should perform at their full potential.
I mean come on. With Florida counting votes using the Jeb Bush system of "Once I run out of fingers to count on, we'll just call it Republicans win by a close call" and with Texas not even counting votes since only thems mex-EEEE-caaans and colored folks would vote against the Christian party. It's just not right that first we denied the state of West Virginia dental care and now we're ignoring their votes.
Did this election really need any more opportunity for jokes. I mean, let McCain have the spare votes from West Virginia. The entire state doesn't have enough electoral votes to worry about and we should let him feel like someone loves him.
Would be great to have a town made up souly of individuals of high intelligence and capabilities. But did anyone ever think for a moment about two major draw backs ?
First : Nerds/Scientists are slobs
No kidding, property values drop when a scientist moves onto the block. Their lawns grow to meters in length. Their house is generally a wreck. And eventually the houses look like they're about to burst at the seams from a kiloton of books piled up against the walls. So who will do the real work? This town of souly intelligent people would have to import all their labour from outside. This can be expensive or the alternative is, the workers will establish themselves near by and eventually the two groups will integrate.
Second : Food supply
Food costs money. Money comes from work. Work comes from companies. Companies are run by MBAs. MBAs are frigging morons. So unless the whole town will telecommute for a living, there will be MBAs. And a single MBA can pull down the town IQ by several percent.
Is this the first time a Dutch court has punished teenagers fo violently attacking someone to steal something of value to them?
What did they do before, give them lollipops and medals of achievment?
It's really quite funny, copy protected content continues to sell sell sell. In fact, even back in the days when Copy II PC was used to copy pretty much every copy protected disc on the market, people still copied copied copied.
But, guess what? This video game industry still exists and is still growing all these decades later. You know why?
The game companies are still selling shit loads of copies even though everyone is pirating.
I have a prediction. 50 years from now, there will still be game publishers making lots of money. Piracy or not.
Are you sure that's not where old men pretending to be teenaged girls go to talk to old men pretending to be teenaged boys?
I'm not sure if we're taking turns saying the same thing or arguing :)
Regarding the two vs. many party system, I'm simply sayng that the many party system would lead to disaster in a country like the states.
Americans are bread from birth to be "special". If Americans were to vote for the winner of the presidential election and there was a means for the runner up political parties to overturn the decision by joining their votes together, the result would be that somehow a president would have to be chosen from the coalition of parties that unified for the win.
At this time, the American people would become even more confused than usual and would act rashly as a leader is chosen for them instead of my them.
A few years ago, Ross Perot ran for president as well, proving that an independant (in this case, a candidate without backing by a major party), assuming they can aquire enough financial backing to do so could in fact make a real run for the presidency.
Perot performed fantastically and I'm disappointed he hasn't attempted to establish a new political party. I believe the result could have been that his party could attempt to choose candidates to support based on the merits of their abilities. I imagine they could spend some time building the party, first within the house and the senate and later within the whitehouse.
But, that's all pipe dreams. The fact is, America is a two party democracy. Employing systems from elsewhere would likely be devistation to their system. Americans hate the way it is, but regard the way the rest of the world does it as being worse. So much worse in fact, that even evaluating and learning about their systems is a waste of time.