Speakeasy Sucks. They have quite probably the worst customer service I have ever seen. I was stunned that a company so dysfunctional was able to remain in business. I mean, they hit every bad point from a customer's viewpoint: billing errors, lying customer service reps, service not in line with contract, etc. etc. etc. It sickens me now that they put forward this face of being geek friendly, "great service at a premium!" well, I was willing to pay the premium but instead of good customer service I got screwed. It really says something when the local Bell telephone offshoot has a better track record of service...
Putting it more bluntly, I ended up tossing about three hundred bucks down the drain on them. For that much, I could have spent some quality time with a hooker or two, and then at least getting screwed would have been a good thing.:-( As it is, I'll be going with Crime Warner. I know they're going to suck, but at least I'm prepared for it, rather than going into it with high expectations like I did with speakeasy.
I'd post the whole sordid saga here, but it's really fairly long and only marginally related to the topic at hand. Suffice to say that hosting your websites at home isn't neccessarily a bad idea, just don't expect to get anything but hassle from those seattle-ite latte-slurping asshounds at speakeasy. I post this here and not anonymously in the hopes that I can save other geeks like me the trouble of dealing with them.
DFW is also big into telecom for a lot of other reasons, e.g. Texas Instruments being HQ'd up there. Dallas as a city, though... And understand that I'm a native-born and raised Texan when I say this, so my dislike of that metroplex is informed:
The initial write up seemed to suggest that this will be a first for interfacing Java and the GNOME-related libs. This is notso. (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects... Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.) There may be other similar projects out there, that's just what I turned up with a few minutes' search on freshmeat and sourceforge.
Bravo to Sun, though, for making the decision to commit to GNOME. CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO. Even OpenWindows had some degree of retro charm about it, CDE just looked like what happens if you let Soviet housing block architects design a GUI. Feh!
So you think that Microsoft should include the source code to Windows if you pay them 100 bucks?
Then I might actually be inclined to pay for a copy, just for the hours of comedic value inherent in reading their source. (Hungarian notation, now that's just a barrel of monkeys wearing spandex [ the monkeys, not the barrel ].)
I'm guessing the storage space requirements for that in terms of the data files the programs would use to map vocalizations to meaning would be the biggest stumbling block... Most mainstream PDAs only have 8mb of ram/storage combined, and Palm is still shipping devices with as little as 2mb. Your best bet might be one of the StrongArm based handhelds combined with a reasonably large CompactFlash/SecureDigital card... (E.g. Sharp Zaurus, Hewlett-ComPackard's iPaq, etc.) Of course, that's probably 300-500, but that's still less than a new laptop...
So, do you want to port the app to a command-line form running on Linux on the current hardware? (0.02USD: ncurses, slackware) Or do you want to port the app to a GUI form running on Linux on newer hardware? (0.02USD: any number of toolkits, any number of distributions) Obviously as the second route is the greatest change, the variables are more numerous giving you a much wider of range of options to look at. I'm guessing your current programmers are C or Pascal folks? You might consider using GTK+ (GUI Lib written in C, also has bindings for FreePascal). As far as a linux distro for the more open-ended situation goes, I'd have to say debian. The install can be a bit of a pain for the uninitiated, but it more than pays back that annoyance after install becuase with the very intelligent package management system you can do stuff like point the terminals at a central server to pull updates from (e.g. roll your app in to a.deb, have terms auto-update once a week using a cron job, makes deploying patches and security updates easy as pie). Debian will also work in fairly constrained hardware environments like slackware, but it tends to be a beefier install usually.
You seem to be assuming that, a priori, the only movies made require Hollywood-level expense and infrastructure... Not so, with the advent of digital video and prosumer level video editing decks. (Is a $1000 video editing card cheap? A $3000 dv cam? $2000 a/v raid? hell no. but they're a damn sight cheaper than the big-studio level stuff.) I think the coming digital age will herald the end of the Hollywood blockbuster and the dawn of a new era of smaller independent filmmaking. Because now not only the tool but the distribution media are in place to make a good movie for less than 50 grand. If you can sell digital downloads of your film for $5 and get 10,000(*) people to look at it, you've broken even. Coupled with a strengthening of film festivals and online movie-consumer websites (think the Amazon book recommendation system applied to indie films), this could turn filmmaking from a hundreds-of-people-and-millions-of-dollars effort to a tens-of-people-and-thousands-of-dollars effort with a real chance of being a profitable enterprise... I think that this would allow a purer artistic vision to shine through in most of the resulting films because with lower financial risk and fewer participants there would be less of a "design by commitee" aspect.
(*)That seems like a lot of folks, but given the scale factor of the internet... (How many of us have laughed at one point or another at the "All Your Base" or "Gonads and Strife" clips?)
Slackware is where it's at for older machines. I put 7.1 on a 486dx2-50 laptop with 12megs of ram and a 200 mb harddisk. The only thing that was really limiting was such a small disk. Since many older machines may only have floppy drives, Slack really shines becuase of the fact that it supports floppy installs. (I think they may have just recently discontinued this, but I'm pretty sure the fairly modern 7.x Slacks still supported it.) Really the only thing I'd be even semi-worried about on your machine would be the speed of the cpu. You might look into getting a new 486 chip for it (say, off ebay or something; a working 486-dx at 66 to 100 mhz shouldn't cost you more than a buck or two) if your motherboard supports swapping in a higher spec part. (You'd probably be ok with 33, but if you can get 66 or higher for less time and money than a cheeseburger, why not?;))
I never played BZII, but I can second (third?) the recommendation for the "modern" BattleZone.
This is one of my favorite computer games of all time. Yes, it does have a few issues on 2k, but it plays fine on XP (go figure?), as I installed it a few weeks ago on my work machine (bleh, XP pro; I'd rather it be something Unixoid but if wishes were fishes, and all that).
Heh, kind of reminds me of organic chemistry lab. We had to copy down beforehand all the physical ("It set the bench on fire!!!") and health ("It set my arm on fire!!!") hazards of all the chemicals we were to use in the lab... Yes, *ALL* the chemicals, and water is a chemical. (Needless to say this is a fairly boring mickey-mouse procedure, but it is a good way to drill in to people's heads that you need to have complete knowledge of what you're doing with chemicals before you do anything.) So some anonymous wag stuck an Official Hazard Label (orange paper, skull and crossbones, bold 32pnt type face, etc) on the big jug of DI (DeIonized) water in the lab reading:
PHYSICAL HAZARD(S): flooding HEALTH HAZARD(S): drowning
Seems like you might get good info by directly talking to the FSF or linux kernel mailing list... I'm sure some people would piss and moan about binary this and proprietary that, but in the end I think you'd find more people eager to help expand linux's reach in an optimally efficient manner. IIRC the FSF's head legal eagle is a guy named Eben Moglen (there was something posted on/. just yesterday that involved his name, again IIRC.) Personally, although IANAL, making something available for public download from a website sounds pretty much like "distributing" something. True, the user has to decide to download it, but then again your users would have to decide to buy your particular widget (thus potentially getting the linux driver) also...
Wasn't it Isreal that made voting day a national get-off-from-work-type holiday? That would be a pretty cool thing. Either it make it really easy to go vote, or if you don't feel like voting, you can crank up the BBQ with beer and friends and celebrate how cool it is that other people are voting (democracy party?).;-)
Stack traces from within a servlet/J2EE container can be just as bad. "An exception was raised in Blah (called by Foo called by Bar called by Baz called by Quux called by yo mamma called by the illuminati called by the paper boy called by the log cabin republicans called by yo mamma again (boy, she done get around) called by larry wall called by 'jenny' the transvestite stripper homless man called by cowbody neal called by..." on and on for several hundred lines...
Dude, I've been reading organic chemistry wwwwaaaaaaay too much recently, becuase I first parsed that as some sort of odd four-way amino linkage in a molecule...;-)
Re:Teaching English as a Foreign Language
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Careers After Tech?
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· Score: 2
My ex is teaching english in Japan right now and having a blast. Apparently you do have to be really careful which company you go with, she and her best friend have had very good experiences working for AEON. Apparently NOVA sucks.
I'm trying to see something new or special about that u160 pci card but I'm failing. There's nothing new about u160 or it being less than $200. See Tekram's line for examples of that. (Tekram's scsi adaptor offerings in general look very cool, as they typically have more features and cost less than the equivalent Adaptec offering. Plus, they supply via their ftp site drivers for all kinds of wacky OSen that other people don't (Solaris on x86, beos, etc).)
Heck, the Tekram DC-390D3D card only costs about 30-50 dollars more and is a dual channel part...
(Not that you'd need dual channel except for the most demanding workstation usage, or low/mid server construction.)
There's a package you can download that is a compilation of XFree86 drivers "packaged" to work with xsun (for the !clued, that's sun's X11 implementation). This is, for example, the easiest way to get your Nvidia card to work if you decide to give solaris x86 a shot on said hardware... Also it apparently helps out a lot with laptop support. Here's the URL.
The new chip is rumored to use the rarely seen iterative data fetch instruction (ANDTHN) to retrieve data from ram (really annoyed memory). In keeping with the RISC philosophy, this is the only instruction the cpu supports when interacting with other entities in the system.
(if you haven't seen "dude, where's my car" this will make no sense. so go watch the movie;))
One 26 inch home-brew subwoofer, coming right up!. They built it with the driver from an ancient hard drive. For those not up on Norse mythology, moljnir (several spellings seen) was the unstoppable hammer of the gods, carried by Thor himself. I'd say a building-shaking sub comes pretty close to that description.;-)
i wonder if anyone has ever thought about using starcraft to represent sysadmin things like people have done with doom. you could represent spam/worm email with zerglings. spam rush!
This is just an FYI, and I do recall you *really* have to dig on their site to find them, but you can get the basic version of the content creation program (real studio?) and an up-to-8-clients version of realserver for free. I looked into this at one point about nine months ago for my soon-to-be-ex employer (we wanted to test drive their stuff becuase we wanted to migrate away from windows media and win2k in general). I've heard several times that real server is an UNHOLY pain to deal with administratively on unix and/or behind a firewall... Good luck!
So, how about you look for a new battery rather than a super robot slave army? I mean, super robot slave armies are nice, but in the end rather hard to find at your local hardware store.
Also, let's say you do go for the robotic minion strategy of lawn management. If you're worried about your robotic minion being discontinued, and the price has been dropped 50%, why not just buy two and keep the second as a spare?
And, just for some extra sodium chloride for your wounds, have you considered the environmental consequences of chunking the whole damn mower or the battery (full of heavy metals) compared to the environmental impact of a quality gasoline-driven mower that'll last longer? Or even just nuking your lawn and putting in wild flowers or a rock garden? You'd be amazed how much pollution the average picket-fence-and-one-point-five-kids lawn contributes to your local watershed in the form of storm runoff becuase of all the crap you have to put on it to make it look "nice" ("nice" here evaluating to the traditional standard of perfection and control accepted by society, not natural chaotic beauty).
You need to evaluate your real goals; is your priority the environment, a nice lawn, or no time spent on lawn maintenance?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a computer programmer. I have no vested interest in this save getting good service.
Speakeasy Sucks. They have quite probably the worst customer service I have ever seen. I was stunned that a company so dysfunctional was able to remain in business. I mean, they hit every bad point from a customer's viewpoint: billing errors, lying customer service reps, service not in line with contract, etc. etc. etc. It sickens me now that they put forward this face of being geek friendly, "great service at a premium!" well, I was willing to pay the premium but instead of good customer service I got screwed. It really says something when the local Bell telephone offshoot has a better track record of service...
Putting it more bluntly, I ended up tossing about three hundred bucks down the drain on them. For that much, I could have spent some quality time with a hooker or two, and then at least getting screwed would have been a good thing. :-( As it is, I'll be going with Crime Warner. I know they're going to suck, but at least I'm prepared for it, rather than going into it with high expectations like I did with speakeasy.
I'd post the whole sordid saga here, but it's really fairly long and only marginally related to the topic at hand. Suffice to say that hosting your websites at home isn't neccessarily a bad idea, just don't expect to get anything but hassle from those seattle-ite latte-slurping asshounds at speakeasy. I post this here and not anonymously in the hopes that I can save other geeks like me the trouble of dealing with them.
DFW is also big into telecom for a lot of other reasons, e.g. Texas Instruments being HQ'd up there. Dallas as a city, though... And understand that I'm a native-born and raised Texan when I say this, so my dislike of that metroplex is informed:
Life is too short to live in Dallas.
The initial write up seemed to suggest that this will be a first for interfacing Java and the GNOME-related libs. This is not so. (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects... Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.) There may be other similar projects out there, that's just what I turned up with a few minutes' search on freshmeat and sourceforge.
Bravo to Sun, though, for making the decision to commit to GNOME. CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO. Even OpenWindows had some degree of retro charm about it, CDE just looked like what happens if you let Soviet housing block architects design a GUI. Feh!
Wouldn't that only be -1/2? :)
I'm guessing the storage space requirements for that in terms of the data files the programs would use to map vocalizations to meaning would be the biggest stumbling block... Most mainstream PDAs only have 8mb of ram/storage combined, and Palm is still shipping devices with as little as 2mb. Your best bet might be one of the StrongArm based handhelds combined with a reasonably large CompactFlash/SecureDigital card... (E.g. Sharp Zaurus, Hewlett-ComPackard's iPaq, etc.) Of course, that's probably 300-500, but that's still less than a new laptop...
So, do you want to port the app to a command-line form running on Linux on the current hardware? (0.02USD: ncurses, slackware) Or do you want to port the app to a GUI form running on Linux on newer hardware? (0.02USD: any number of toolkits, any number of distributions) Obviously as the second route is the greatest change, the variables are more numerous giving you a much wider of range of options to look at. I'm guessing your current programmers are C or Pascal folks? You might consider using GTK+ (GUI Lib written in C, also has bindings for FreePascal). As far as a linux distro for the more open-ended situation goes, I'd have to say debian. The install can be a bit of a pain for the uninitiated, but it more than pays back that annoyance after install becuase with the very intelligent package management system you can do stuff like point the terminals at a central server to pull updates from (e.g. roll your app in to a .deb, have terms auto-update once a week using a cron job, makes deploying patches and security updates easy as pie). Debian will also work in fairly constrained hardware environments like slackware, but it tends to be a beefier install usually.
You seem to be assuming that, a priori, the only movies made require Hollywood-level expense and infrastructure... Not so, with the advent of digital video and prosumer level video editing decks. (Is a $1000 video editing card cheap? A $3000 dv cam? $2000 a/v raid? hell no. but they're a damn sight cheaper than the big-studio level stuff.) I think the coming digital age will herald the end of the Hollywood blockbuster and the dawn of a new era of smaller independent filmmaking. Because now not only the tool but the distribution media are in place to make a good movie for less than 50 grand. If you can sell digital downloads of your film for $5 and get 10,000(*) people to look at it, you've broken even. Coupled with a strengthening of film festivals and online movie-consumer websites (think the Amazon book recommendation system applied to indie films), this could turn filmmaking from a hundreds-of-people-and-millions-of-dollars effort to a tens-of-people-and-thousands-of-dollars effort with a real chance of being a profitable enterprise... I think that this would allow a purer artistic vision to shine through in most of the resulting films because with lower financial risk and fewer participants there would be less of a "design by commitee" aspect.
(*)That seems like a lot of folks, but given the scale factor of the internet... (How many of us have laughed at one point or another at the "All Your Base" or "Gonads and Strife" clips?)
Slackware is where it's at for older machines. I put 7.1 on a 486dx2-50 laptop with 12megs of ram and a 200 mb harddisk. The only thing that was really limiting was such a small disk. Since many older machines may only have floppy drives, Slack really shines becuase of the fact that it supports floppy installs. (I think they may have just recently discontinued this, but I'm pretty sure the fairly modern 7.x Slacks still supported it.) Really the only thing I'd be even semi-worried about on your machine would be the speed of the cpu. You might look into getting a new 486 chip for it (say, off ebay or something; a working 486-dx at 66 to 100 mhz shouldn't cost you more than a buck or two) if your motherboard supports swapping in a higher spec part. (You'd probably be ok with 33, but if you can get 66 or higher for less time and money than a cheeseburger, why not? ;))
I never played BZII, but I can second (third?) the recommendation for the "modern" BattleZone. This is one of my favorite computer games of all time. Yes, it does have a few issues on 2k, but it plays fine on XP (go figure?), as I installed it a few weeks ago on my work machine (bleh, XP pro; I'd rather it be something Unixoid but if wishes were fishes, and all that).
Heh, kind of reminds me of organic chemistry lab. We had to copy down beforehand all the physical ("It set the bench on fire!!!") and health ("It set my arm on fire!!!") hazards of all the chemicals we were to use in the lab... Yes, *ALL* the chemicals, and water is a chemical. (Needless to say this is a fairly boring mickey-mouse procedure, but it is a good way to drill in to people's heads that you need to have complete knowledge of what you're doing with chemicals before you do anything.) So some anonymous wag stuck an Official Hazard Label (orange paper, skull and crossbones, bold 32pnt type face, etc) on the big jug of DI (DeIonized) water in the lab reading:
PHYSICAL HAZARD(S): flooding
HEALTH HAZARD(S): drowning
Seems like you might get good info by directly talking to the FSF or linux kernel mailing list... I'm sure some people would piss and moan about binary this and proprietary that, but in the end I think you'd find more people eager to help expand linux's reach in an optimally efficient manner. IIRC the FSF's head legal eagle is a guy named Eben Moglen (there was something posted on /. just yesterday that involved his name, again IIRC.) Personally, although IANAL, making something available for public download from a website sounds pretty much like "distributing" something. True, the user has to decide to download it, but then again your users would have to decide to buy your particular widget (thus potentially getting the linux driver) also...
Wasn't it Isreal that made voting day a national get-off-from-work-type holiday? That would be a pretty cool thing. Either it make it really easy to go vote, or if you don't feel like voting, you can crank up the BBQ with beer and friends and celebrate how cool it is that other people are voting (democracy party?). ;-)
Stack traces from within a servlet/J2EE container can be just as bad. "An exception was raised in Blah (called by Foo called by Bar called by Baz called by Quux called by yo mamma called by the illuminati called by the paper boy called by the log cabin republicans called by yo mamma again (boy, she done get around) called by larry wall called by 'jenny' the transvestite stripper homless man called by cowbody neal called by ..." on and on for several hundred lines...
Dude, I've been reading organic chemistry wwwwaaaaaaay too much recently, becuase I first parsed that as some sort of odd four-way amino linkage in a molecule... ;-)
My ex is teaching english in Japan right now and having a blast. Apparently you do have to be really careful which company you go with, she and her best friend have had very good experiences working for AEON. Apparently NOVA sucks.
I'm trying to see something new or special about that u160 pci card but I'm failing. There's nothing new about u160 or it being less than $200. See Tekram's line for examples of that. (Tekram's scsi adaptor offerings in general look very cool, as they typically have more features and cost less than the equivalent Adaptec offering. Plus, they supply via their ftp site drivers for all kinds of wacky OSen that other people don't (Solaris on x86, beos, etc).) Heck, the Tekram DC-390D3D card only costs about 30-50 dollars more and is a dual channel part... (Not that you'd need dual channel except for the most demanding workstation usage, or low/mid server construction.)
There's a package you can download that is a compilation of XFree86 drivers "packaged" to work with xsun (for the !clued, that's sun's X11 implementation). This is, for example, the easiest way to get your Nvidia card to work if you decide to give solaris x86 a shot on said hardware... Also it apparently helps out a lot with laptop support. Here's the URL.
The new chip is rumored to use the rarely seen iterative data fetch instruction (ANDTHN) to retrieve data from ram (really annoyed memory). In keeping with the RISC philosophy, this is the only instruction the cpu supports when interacting with other entities in the system.
;))
(if you haven't seen "dude, where's my car" this will make no sense. so go watch the movie
One 26 inch home-brew subwoofer, coming right up!. They built it with the driver from an ancient hard drive. For those not up on Norse mythology, moljnir (several spellings seen) was the unstoppable hammer of the gods, carried by Thor himself. I'd say a building-shaking sub comes pretty close to that description. ;-)
i wonder if anyone has ever thought about using starcraft to represent sysadmin things like people have done with doom. you could represent spam/worm email with zerglings. spam rush!
so in this case if the site gets terminally slashdotted, is it a zerg rush?
This is just an FYI, and I do recall you *really* have to dig on their site to find them, but you can get the basic version of the content creation program (real studio?) and an up-to-8-clients version of realserver for free. I looked into this at one point about nine months ago for my soon-to-be-ex employer (we wanted to test drive their stuff becuase we wanted to migrate away from windows media and win2k in general). I've heard several times that real server is an UNHOLY pain to deal with administratively on unix and/or behind a firewall... Good luck!
So, how about you look for a new battery rather than a super robot slave army? I mean, super robot slave armies are nice, but in the end rather hard to find at your local hardware store. Also, let's say you do go for the robotic minion strategy of lawn management. If you're worried about your robotic minion being discontinued, and the price has been dropped 50%, why not just buy two and keep the second as a spare?
And, just for some extra sodium chloride for your wounds, have you considered the environmental consequences of chunking the whole damn mower or the battery (full of heavy metals) compared to the environmental impact of a quality gasoline-driven mower that'll last longer? Or even just nuking your lawn and putting in wild flowers or a rock garden? You'd be amazed how much pollution the average picket-fence-and-one-point-five-kids lawn contributes to your local watershed in the form of storm runoff becuase of all the crap you have to put on it to make it look "nice" ("nice" here evaluating to the traditional standard of perfection and control accepted by society, not natural chaotic beauty). You need to evaluate your real goals; is your priority the environment, a nice lawn, or no time spent on lawn maintenance?