I was young enough to only really get into the Kenner stuff just after Empire. The first offer like this I remember was for the yet-to-be-seen Emperor action figure. Am I mistaken, or was that also an offer they made? I seem to remember getting mine, but then it could just be all the booze talkin'.
In Soviet Russia, they collected *your* UPC's...
Re:Isn't the issue in this area $/MIPS?
on
New SGI Altix 3000
·
· Score: 1
It is still the case in some circles that normal economics don't apply. The is virtually zero market for a car that performs a little bit better for ten times the cost. But in the realm of supercomputers, there are customers. (Granted, the pool of such super spenders has shrunk...)
There was a Scientific American article a few years back about this and it's relation to driving the pace of computer development at speeds normally only seen in breif spurts, as when essentially unlimited funds are available (think: Manhattan Project). The author posited that the computer industry had similar astronomical levels of funding available, and that might account for Moore's Law. Anyone remember that article? Have a link?
I forget the name, but there's at least one startup in the Bay Area proposing to do exactly this, but with cell phones. I think they are proposing to use the new GPS functionality required for emergency (911) calls.
Cost savings of open source software in the server room An informal case study in K-12 education
1. What is open source software?
2. Listing of open source software used
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
4. Implicit savings in hardware
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
2. Lower virus vulnerability
3. Upgrade costs
6. The roadblock to using open source software
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
1. What is open source software?
It is often difficult for people to understand that some of the most secure, reliable, and efficient software in the world is not owned by a company but rather is under an open license. Open source software is software that was developed with the source code freely available to the public. Anyone may download and use the software, and make changes to it as necessary, with the hope that any improvements made by individuals will be committed back to the main source tree so that everyone can benefit from the modifications.
While this may sound like a strange way to develop software, it is surprisingly common and effective. For instance, in October 2002, SourceForge.net (a site that offers free hosting for open software development projects) reached the milestone of hosting 50,000 open source projects with over 500,000 registered developers. Many people who, if asked, could only name two operating systems would be staggered to learn how many free and open source complete operating systems exist in the world (and that there are several free OS's that could run on the very hardware you're reading this web page with).
Although few people in my school division know what Linux is, every one of them uses it indirectly every day. Open source software has a particularly appropriate niche in budget-strapped public education institutions. This document aims to describe the benefits that Harrisonburg City Public Schools has reaped from the deployment of open source software in its server rooms.
2. Listing of open source software used
While certainly not comprehensive, the list below contains a large sample of the free software products that we employ in HCPS. I have attempted to estimate the cost of replacing these free software installations with commercial products. It should be noted that in some cases my estimations are really just wild guesses as to the cost of various commercial solutions. As a general rule I have tried to estimate on the conservative side. Another thing to note is that commercial solutions for a number of the products below often come bundled as one product, making it very difficult to assign individual replacement costs to the items. For instance, most commercial mail server solutions bundle an SMTP server and an IMAP server together while the open source community's philosophy is to create one product for each discrete function. Software Estimated cost of commercial solution Linux distributions
Red Hat Linux Linux distribution for i386 (PC) hardware $150 x 17 = $2550
YellowDog Linux Linux distribution for PowerPC (Macintosh) hardware $130 x 5 = $650 Web server software
Apache The most widely used web server on the internet $500 x 6 = $3000
PHP Server-side web scripting language $700 x 5 = $3500
MySQL Structured Query Language database server $500 x 3 = $1500
phpMyAdmin Powerful web-based database administration tool $100 x 3 = $300
DataMiner User-friendly web-based interface for managing database content $50 x 12 = $600
ht://Dig WWW Search Engine Software $200 x 1 = $200
Outreach Project Tool Web-based group project collaboration environment $500 x 1 = $500
Phorum Web-based forum/message board software $100 x 1 = $100 Mail server software
Sendmail Internet standard MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) $150 x 1 = $150
UW IMAP University of Washington IMAP/POP3 mail server $150 x 1 = $150
OpenLDAP LDAP server for intregrated authentication and directory services $200 x 2 = $400
MailMan Full-featured mailing list manager $150 x 1 = $150
Horde Groupware Web-based email, address book, and calendaring software $500 x 1 = $500 Firewalling/Routing software
netfilter/iptables Stateful IP filtering system $1000 x 2 = $2000 Cross-platform file server software
Samba File server for Windows clients $800 x 4 = $3200
Netatalk File server for Macintosh clients $500 x 7 = $3500 Other network server products
ISC BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) Internet standard DNS server $100 x 9 = $900
ISC DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server $100 x 8 = $800
WU-FTPD FTP server software $50 x 3 = $150
NTPd Network Time Protocol server for synchronization of computer clocks $50 x 4 = $200
Squid HTTP caching proxy server $200 x 2 = $400
rsync Incremental backup solution $50 x 12 = $600 Network management and monitoring
MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) Monitors traffic on switches and routers a lot x 3 = 3 lots
Nagios Monitors servers and routers and notifies me of outages via email $300 x 1 = $300
Ethereal Network analysis and packet sniffing tool $1000 x 1 = $1000
sntop Monitors network connectivity $30 x 1 = $30
LanLord Monitors leases on DHCP servers Bundled with commercial products
Webalizer Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with commercial products
Analog Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with commercial products
The list above comprises about $27,000 of (roughly) estimated cost savings in software purchases for HCPS.
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
The commercial replacement cost of the free software that we currently use is obviously very high. However, if I were forced to deploy commercial solutions for all of the above, you could probably guess that I would trim back what we needed to buy significantly. For instance, if it cost me $1000 per web server for the server OS and web server software, you can bet that I wouldn't be running six web servers in my server room like I am now. Rather, I would cut back and only run one or perhaps two web servers. This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.
4. Implicit savings in hardware
Linux can do a lot with only a little hardware. Here in HCPS we have a number of Linux servers running on hardware that would be inadequate for commercial server solutions such as Windows 2000 or Mac OS X. For instance, the web server that served this web page to you is running on an old, retired PC that has been recycled after its lifetime as a Windows desktop has passed. If I were to use Microsoft's IIS server software or Apple's Mac OS X, I would not have considered using this piece of hardware as a web server, and I would have needed to buy new hardware. By enabling me to reuse otherwise useless hardware, open source operating systems have saved our school division a considerable amount of money in hardware costs.
To provide a very rough figure on these cost savings, I estimate that I am currently running 11 Linux servers with hardware that would be inadequate for doing the same job with a commercial solution. To replace those servers with new hardware could easily cost well over $25,000.
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
Many companies put a lot of effort into monetary assessments of the liabilities of security risks on their networks. Such cost assessment is not as common in public education but nevertheless the possibilities for such costs exist and should not be ignored. If my installations of open source server software are more secure than a commercial alternative (and I believe they are, although a discussion of security issues is beyond the scope of this document), then we have a lower risk of losing data or productive staff time needed to clean up after a security breach.
2. Lower virus vulnerability
I am not qualified to provide a full analysis of virus vulnerabilities of various server operating systems, but I think everyone would agree that historically open source OS's have fared far better than... ahem... other operating systems. The HCPS technology staff spends a fair amount of valuable time combatting viruses on our client PC's but a virus infection on a network server can be devastating in terms of data loss, down time, and staff time required for reconstruction. Open source servers that are less vulnerable to virus infections provide cost savings in terms of decreased liability in these areas.
3. Upgrade or recurring licensing costs
The cost of a software solution is not merely the purchase price of the software. The usable lifetime of a commercial software product is rarely longer than 4 years, but where server software products are concerned I would contend that the lifetime is even less -- perhaps only 2 years on average. At this point one must purchase a newer product or an upgrade to the existing one. With open source software, updates are continually free, and I am able to keep my servers running the latest software versions without having to worry about whether I can afford the upgrade.
6. The roadblock to using open source software
So you're probably thinking, "If open source software saves people so much money, why isn't everyone using it?" Two words: learning curve. For people who are used to point-and-click administration of their servers, open source software is often bewilderingly complex to install and configure. I'll admit that you have to be somewhat of a geek to even try out an open source operating system such as Linux. The learning curve that must be followed by a first-time Linux user can be very time consuming and frustrating. For many, especially in public education, this difficulty constitutes a roadblock to the deployment of open source solutions in their district.
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
As you have seen from the informal analysis on this page, I (and indeed my school division) owe a huge "thank you" to the thousands of developers and other people involved in open source software projects.
Copyright 2002 Rob Lineweaver Last Modified: Friday, October 25, 2002 Product names on this page may be copyrighted by their respective owners
In the U.S., there are at least three different network standards in common use (NOT even counting the old AMPS system that's still around and used as a fallback, esp. by Sprint). Different providers use different ones. Examples: CDMA -- Sprint PCS; GSM -- Cingular; and TDMA -- AT&T.
While there is much vapor-ware talk of it someday, I don't know of phones that do more than one of the above. Your Sprint phone CAN'T talk GSM and allow you to be on Cingular.
Now there are issues regarding systems on the same standard. Particularly, the various GSM systems. In principle, you can pop out your SIM card for one network, pop in another, and go. But the providers put lock on the phones to prevent this. This is a better example of what you are complaining about. In Europe, once you've spent enough money (maybe USD 150), you can usually get the provider to unlock it -- kinda like having to fulfill a contract.
Anyone know if you can get the unlock codes for your GSM phones here if you've spent enough money with one provider?
Outside of North America, it is common for the party calling the cell phone to incur the extra cost.
Here's how it works:
Cell phones get their own area code (thus you KNOW when you're calling a call phone).
Initiator of a call to/from a cell phone pays the extra cost above and beyond a normal phone call.
Thus, if you only receive calls (not make them), it can be quite economical (for you).
This is one reason mobiles are more common overseas. They didn't just start as executive toys. For example, workmen on call sites could be given a prepaid phone (with viturally no money on it), and then be reachable.
Particularly with the discontinuation of shortwave BBC World Service to North America (not that shortwave is common at all in one's car over here), the only way to get BBC News (except for the 20 mins a day we get in on local NPR at 3am) is over satellite radio. This is why I was thinking about it.
In a subject as complex and prone to misunderstanding as physics, there is simply no substitute for having an actual human being do the explaining. Find out who the best local instructors are and try to sit in their lectures. I've never seen a physics text that is so clear that one would actually understand the material without being able to ask questions and/or get more explaination.
Similarly, remember that all physics texts more or less require you to actually solve (or attempt to solve) the exercises. I do not mean you should do this in order to be the most earnest student. I mean that a great deal of material is often presented only in the exercises. (This is also true in Computer Science texts as well. It is probably a feature of any disciple where, at the end of the day, you actually have to solve problems.)
Granted, sitting in on a university could can be hard to do if you have to work 9 to 5, or your local university is very strict about such things, but you might be surprised to know that most profs would probably more than welcome a student who was just there to learn, not tick off another requirement from their list.
Texts: Get the Feynman Lectures. Then get a good intro text like a recent edition of University Physics by Sears, Zemanski and Young (I think it's now just "Young", who isn't) -- no reason to pay US$100 for the lastest one, go ahead and get the previous edition, I bet it's a lot cheaper. Then get a good Modern Physics text. For advanced stuff, I heard many good reviews of Understanding Quantum Physics by Michael A. Morrison (Univ. of Oklahoma) -- very readable compared to many such texts, possibly because the author has not only a Ph.D. in Physics, but also an advanced degree (Ph.D.? I don't recall) in English.
It's mostly a collection of links to various people's pages on their experience getting linux installed on various laptop makes and models. I found it very useful....
According to AT&T's website, they'll set up a domestic toll free number for 7.5 cents per minute. That's $100/day.
From the SPAM-L Faq:
Calling a spammer's 800 number, be careful!
All 800 numbers have something known as Automatic Number Identification, or ANI. This is so that the telephone companies will know where the 800 number calls are coming from so they can bill the owner for the correct amount. This is different from Caller ID in that you can not block your own number from being sent.
However, the owner of the 800 number can also get access to this list of numbers, which means that if you call a spammer to complain, it would be trivial for him to get your phone number!
Therefore, it is recommended that you call for free from a pay phone.:-) However, not all 800 numbers will accept calls from payphones.
I also wonder (if you used your home or busines sphone) if abuse of an 800# like would be grounds for a lawsuit against you...
This is slightly offtopic since the question pertained to a LARGE call center and this would work with the number of machines mentioned. But I thought I'd mention a rule used for the CS dept. of my old university.
In each lab they usually used a theme based system (surprise, surprise). But each name had to have the first three letters be unique. Then the first three letters were entered as DNS aliases. This was extremely convenient!
"telnet blahfoonarfzoinks" becomes "telnet bla".
No, of course it shouldn't. But the fair way to do it is by taxing income (corporate income tax) and (perhaps) through sales. Taxing the creation of a product is extremely counter productive -- do you then tax a local manufacturer for each widget made even if it's not sold? Or authors for the "value" of their work? Or course you shouldn't!
An income tax addresses these problems: The company (or author or whatever) pays based on what the earn, not produce and is therefore much more uniform and fair. And (should) apply to all regardless of the type of product or service.
No... This would just make software companies in that jurisdiction LEAVE. No other place structures taxes like that, nor should they. Companies are usually taxed on income and/or sales, not on production of a product.
If you don't like the DVD, you can recreate your own deadly 'Discs of Tron' game in real life!
Every seven year old boy in my neighborhood did just that the year the movie came out. The scary thing is that the frizbees lasted so long. I guess we didn't throw them hard enough...
In CDMA (and please note that if GSM providers move to 3G, they will also be going to a version of CDMA), the entire game is to always minimize power. A better antenna means you can broadcast with less power. As mentioned, battery life and size is also a constraint, but it's even more fundamental than that.
You share all the spectrum with all local users in CDMA (it's spread spectrum as opposed to working by putting users into channels like TDMA/GSM and AMPS). It only works by having everyone broadcast at minimal power. The analogy is to imagine everyone in your cell at a party talking. You can hear the people you are talking to if everyone agrees to talk only loud enough to be heard. If someone starts yelling, everyone has to speak up (more power) and yet more noise is generated, and so on. (Since everything is encoded, you don't hear signal from other conversations, you only get noise -- this is also fundamental to how CDMA works.)
Better antennas essentially enable more capacity in a cell -- they are one of the weaker links in the whole system, so an improvement there helps a lot.
Most university students in the U.S. sign away their rights to besically anything they create as part of coursework or research. Certainly the school I attended had you do so in your admissions proceedure. IIRC, you did not give up all your rights as a copyright holder (for example), but you did grant the university those right as well.
This has, of course, been a topic of debate here on Slashdot and in academia for a long time.
For some firms, the labor savings has drastically outweighed the additional licencing costs (for Citrix). The place I have in hada small IT staff generally responsible for database admin and maintaining clients to access same, plus sys and net admin work. They were able to replace the desktops for the entire rest of the company (200+ stations) with thin client (Citrix) which would also allow them to use X for their db clients.
The environment has been rock solid stable (by Windows standards, not Unix). They can get by with two (two!) NT servers, versus 200+ desktops. Most helpdesk calls are actually solved by cycling the client.
Here in San Diego, California, Cox Communications also has created a new network (so I'm lead to believe -- is it really them, or a branded version of someone else's?) following the @Home collapse. I'm curious if anyone has found similar behavior from them (or anyone else for that matter)...
1. Is their work in Linux part of a long-range strategy to phase out Solaris? After all, they make money selling hardware. If a free UNIX is available, why waste money developing Solaris.
Because (as has been brought up many times) the Linux and *BSD systems lack features and do not scale very well to enterprise level server hardware (e.g. a scalable TCP/IP stack, which I'm not aware of having been fixed). On a high-end server dealing with huge amounts of network traffic and/or transaction processing (for example) Linux doesn't yet cut it.
The day the commercial Unix systems can be phased out with confidence may come, but we ain't there yet! Many have speculated that contributions from IBM, Sun, and the like might help close this gap. I will be interesting to see what they do.
I'd like to point out that while the data features of 3G and related technology is what gets the most press, it's not what most providers care about the most. The new networks that will be built in the next 5 years on 3G tech (starting for real in '03 or '04) will have much high voice call capacity. The limiting factor for providers is how much (i.e. how little) spectrum they really have. Spectrum utilization is much better in CDMA2000 and WCDMA (the 3G protocols) than in CDMA or GSM. While theres a lot of hype and hope about wireless data, the fact that, as it stands, you can about tripple the number of calls in a cell on a 3G system is what
really counts.
At to vaporware: We are going to see 3G systems... we just might not see the data features that have been hyped so much, because these are not critical to the providers business.
I have to wonder at what point could you legally treat agressive advertising as a hostile net attack? I would think that if it's interfering with the normal operations of your machine you'd might have some grounds for legal recourse.
Think adversiting DoS. Even if you actively agree to do something, if you are misled (they don't tell you what's going to happen, do they?) then that's fraud (in my book anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
I was young enough to only really get into the Kenner stuff just after Empire. The first offer like this I remember was for the yet-to-be-seen Emperor action figure. Am I mistaken, or was that also an offer they made? I seem to remember getting mine, but then it could just be all the booze talkin'.
In Soviet Russia, they collected *your* UPC's...
There was a Scientific American article a few years back about this and it's relation to driving the pace of computer development at speeds normally only seen in breif spurts, as when essentially unlimited funds are available (think: Manhattan Project). The author posited that the computer industry had similar astronomical levels of funding available, and that might account for Moore's Law. Anyone remember that article? Have a link?
I forget the name, but there's at least one startup in the Bay Area proposing to do exactly this, but with cell phones. I think they are proposing to use the new GPS functionality required for emergency (911) calls.
Cost savings of open source software
in the server room
An informal case study in K-12 education
1. What is open source software?
2. Listing of open source software used
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
4. Implicit savings in hardware
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
2. Lower virus vulnerability
3. Upgrade costs
6. The roadblock to using open source software
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
1. What is open source software?
It is often difficult for people to understand that some of the most secure, reliable, and efficient software in the world is not owned by a company but rather is under an open license. Open source software is software that was developed with the source code freely available to the public. Anyone may download and use the software, and make changes to it as necessary, with the hope that any improvements made by individuals will be committed back to the main source tree so that everyone can benefit from the modifications.
While this may sound like a strange way to develop software, it is surprisingly common and effective. For instance, in October 2002, SourceForge.net (a site that offers free hosting for open software development projects) reached the milestone of hosting 50,000 open source projects with over 500,000 registered developers. Many people who, if asked, could only name two operating systems would be staggered to learn how many free and open source complete operating systems exist in the world (and that there are several free OS's that could run on the very hardware you're reading this web page with).
Although few people in my school division know what Linux is, every one of them uses it indirectly every day. Open source software has a particularly appropriate niche in budget-strapped public education institutions. This document aims to describe the benefits that Harrisonburg City Public Schools has reaped from the deployment of open source software in its server rooms.
2. Listing of open source software used
While certainly not comprehensive, the list below contains a large sample of the free software products that we employ in HCPS. I have attempted to estimate the cost of replacing these free software installations with commercial products. It should be noted that in some cases my estimations are really just wild guesses as to the cost of various commercial solutions. As a general rule I have tried to estimate on the conservative side. Another thing to note is that commercial solutions for a number of the products below often come bundled as one product, making it very difficult to assign individual replacement costs to the items. For instance, most commercial mail server solutions bundle an SMTP server and an IMAP server together while the open source community's philosophy is to create one product for each discrete function.
Software Estimated cost of
commercial solution
Linux distributions
Red Hat Linux
Linux distribution for i386 (PC) hardware $150 x 17 = $2550
YellowDog Linux
Linux distribution for PowerPC (Macintosh) hardware $130 x 5 = $650
Web server software
Apache
The most widely used web server on the internet $500 x 6 = $3000
PHP
Server-side web scripting language $700 x 5 = $3500
MySQL
Structured Query Language database server $500 x 3 = $1500
phpMyAdmin
Powerful web-based database administration tool $100 x 3 = $300
DataMiner
User-friendly web-based interface for managing database content $50 x 12 = $600
ht://Dig
WWW Search Engine Software $200 x 1 = $200
Outreach Project Tool
Web-based group project collaboration environment $500 x 1 = $500
Phorum
Web-based forum/message board software $100 x 1 = $100
Mail server software
Sendmail
Internet standard MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) $150 x 1 = $150
UW IMAP
University of Washington IMAP/POP3 mail server $150 x 1 = $150
OpenLDAP
LDAP server for intregrated authentication and directory services $200 x 2 = $400
MailMan
Full-featured mailing list manager $150 x 1 = $150
Horde Groupware
Web-based email, address book, and calendaring software $500 x 1 = $500
Firewalling/Routing software
netfilter/iptables
Stateful IP filtering system $1000 x 2 = $2000
Cross-platform file server software
Samba
File server for Windows clients $800 x 4 = $3200
Netatalk
File server for Macintosh clients $500 x 7 = $3500
Other network server products
ISC BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon)
Internet standard DNS server $100 x 9 = $900
ISC DHCP
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server $100 x 8 = $800
WU-FTPD
FTP server software $50 x 3 = $150
NTPd
Network Time Protocol server for synchronization of computer clocks $50 x 4 = $200
Squid
HTTP caching proxy server $200 x 2 = $400
rsync
Incremental backup solution $50 x 12 = $600
Network management and monitoring
MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher)
Monitors traffic on switches and routers a lot x 3 = 3 lots
Nagios
Monitors servers and routers and notifies me of outages via email $300 x 1 = $300
Ethereal
Network analysis and packet sniffing tool $1000 x 1 = $1000
sntop
Monitors network connectivity $30 x 1 = $30
LanLord
Monitors leases on DHCP servers Bundled with
commercial products
Webalizer
Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with
commercial products
Analog
Web server statistics reporting tool Bundled with
commercial products
The list above comprises about $27,000 of (roughly) estimated cost savings in software purchases for HCPS.
3. Cost savings versus capabilities gained
The commercial replacement cost of the free software that we currently use is obviously very high. However, if I were forced to deploy commercial solutions for all of the above, you could probably guess that I would trim back what we needed to buy significantly. For instance, if it cost me $1000 per web server for the server OS and web server software, you can bet that I wouldn't be running six web servers in my server room like I am now. Rather, I would cut back and only run one or perhaps two web servers. This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.
4. Implicit savings in hardware
Linux can do a lot with only a little hardware. Here in HCPS we have a number of Linux servers running on hardware that would be inadequate for commercial server solutions such as Windows 2000 or Mac OS X. For instance, the web server that served this web page to you is running on an old, retired PC that has been recycled after its lifetime as a Windows desktop has passed. If I were to use Microsoft's IIS server software or Apple's Mac OS X, I would not have considered using this piece of hardware as a web server, and I would have needed to buy new hardware. By enabling me to reuse otherwise useless hardware, open source operating systems have saved our school division a considerable amount of money in hardware costs.
To provide a very rough figure on these cost savings, I estimate that I am currently running 11 Linux servers with hardware that would be inadequate for doing the same job with a commercial solution. To replace those servers with new hardware could easily cost well over $25,000.
5. Other implicit cost savings
1. Security
Many companies put a lot of effort into monetary assessments of the liabilities of security risks on their networks. Such cost assessment is not as common in public education but nevertheless the possibilities for such costs exist and should not be ignored. If my installations of open source server software are more secure than a commercial alternative (and I believe they are, although a discussion of security issues is beyond the scope of this document), then we have a lower risk of losing data or productive staff time needed to clean up after a security breach.
2. Lower virus vulnerability
I am not qualified to provide a full analysis of virus vulnerabilities of various server operating systems, but I think everyone would agree that historically open source OS's have fared far better than... ahem... other operating systems. The HCPS technology staff spends a fair amount of valuable time combatting viruses on our client PC's but a virus infection on a network server can be devastating in terms of data loss, down time, and staff time required for reconstruction. Open source servers that are less vulnerable to virus infections provide cost savings in terms of decreased liability in these areas.
3. Upgrade or recurring licensing costs
The cost of a software solution is not merely the purchase price of the software. The usable lifetime of a commercial software product is rarely longer than 4 years, but where server software products are concerned I would contend that the lifetime is even less -- perhaps only 2 years on average. At this point one must purchase a newer product or an upgrade to the existing one. With open source software, updates are continually free, and I am able to keep my servers running the latest software versions without having to worry about whether I can afford the upgrade.
6. The roadblock to using open source software
So you're probably thinking, "If open source software saves people so much money, why isn't everyone using it?" Two words: learning curve. For people who are used to point-and-click administration of their servers, open source software is often bewilderingly complex to install and configure. I'll admit that you have to be somewhat of a geek to even try out an open source operating system such as Linux. The learning curve that must be followed by a first-time Linux user can be very time consuming and frustrating. For many, especially in public education, this difficulty constitutes a roadblock to the deployment of open source solutions in their district.
7. A big thanks to OSS developers
As you have seen from the informal analysis on this page, I (and indeed my school division) owe a huge "thank you" to the thousands of developers and other people involved in open source software projects.
Copyright 2002
Rob Lineweaver
Last Modified: Friday, October 25, 2002 Product names on this page
may be copyrighted by their respective owners
While there is much vapor-ware talk of it someday, I don't know of phones that do more than one of the above. Your Sprint phone CAN'T talk GSM and allow you to be on Cingular.
Now there are issues regarding systems on the same standard. Particularly, the various GSM systems. In principle, you can pop out your SIM card for one network, pop in another, and go. But the providers put lock on the phones to prevent this. This is a better example of what you are complaining about. In Europe, once you've spent enough money (maybe USD 150), you can usually get the provider to unlock it -- kinda like having to fulfill a contract.
Anyone know if you can get the unlock codes for your GSM phones here if you've spent enough money with one provider?
Here's how it works:
This is one reason mobiles are more common overseas. They didn't just start as executive toys. For example, workmen on call sites could be given a prepaid phone (with viturally no money on it), and then be reachable.
Particularly with the discontinuation of shortwave BBC World Service to North America (not that shortwave is common at all in one's car over here), the only way to get BBC News (except for the 20 mins a day we get in on local NPR at 3am) is over satellite radio. This is why I was thinking about it.
Similarly, remember that all physics texts more or less require you to actually solve (or attempt to solve) the exercises. I do not mean you should do this in order to be the most earnest student. I mean that a great deal of material is often presented only in the exercises. (This is also true in Computer Science texts as well. It is probably a feature of any disciple where, at the end of the day, you actually have to solve problems.)
Granted, sitting in on a university could can be hard to do if you have to work 9 to 5, or your local university is very strict about such things, but you might be surprised to know that most profs would probably more than welcome a student who was just there to learn, not tick off another requirement from their list.
Texts: Get the Feynman Lectures. Then get a good intro text like a recent edition of University Physics by Sears, Zemanski and Young (I think it's now just "Young", who isn't) -- no reason to pay US$100 for the lastest one, go ahead and get the previous edition, I bet it's a lot cheaper. Then get a good Modern Physics text. For advanced stuff, I heard many good reviews of Understanding Quantum Physics by Michael A. Morrison (Univ. of Oklahoma) -- very readable compared to many such texts, possibly because the author has not only a Ph.D. in Physics, but also an advanced degree (Ph.D.? I don't recall) in English.
Linux on Laptops
It's mostly a collection of links to various people's pages on their experience getting linux installed on various laptop makes and models. I found it very useful....
According to AT&T's website, they'll set up a domestic toll free number for 7.5 cents per minute. That's $100/day. From the SPAM-L Faq: Calling a spammer's 800 number, be careful! All 800 numbers have something known as Automatic Number Identification, or ANI. This is so that the telephone companies will know where the 800 number calls are coming from so they can bill the owner for the correct amount. This is different from Caller ID in that you can not block your own number from being sent. However, the owner of the 800 number can also get access to this list of numbers, which means that if you call a spammer to complain, it would be trivial for him to get your phone number! Therefore, it is recommended that you call for free from a pay phone. :-) However, not all 800 numbers will accept calls from payphones.
I also wonder (if you used your home or busines sphone) if abuse of an 800# like would be grounds for a lawsuit against you...
In each lab they usually used a theme based system (surprise, surprise). But each name had to have the first three letters be unique. Then the first three letters were entered as DNS aliases. This was extremely convenient! "telnet blahfoonarfzoinks" becomes "telnet bla".
An income tax addresses these problems: The company (or author or whatever) pays based on what the earn, not produce and is therefore much more uniform and fair. And (should) apply to all regardless of the type of product or service.
No... This would just make software companies in that jurisdiction LEAVE. No other place structures taxes like that, nor should they. Companies are usually taxed on income and/or sales, not on production of a product.
Pinging 1.1.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out. Ouch!
Request timed out. Ouch!
Request timed out. Ouch!
Request timed out. Ouch!
^C I give up!
Oh wait. You said "pong", not "ping"...
Every seven year old boy in my neighborhood did just that the year the movie came out. The scary thing is that the frizbees lasted so long. I guess we didn't throw them hard enough...
You share all the spectrum with all local users in CDMA (it's spread spectrum as opposed to working by putting users into channels like TDMA/GSM and AMPS). It only works by having everyone broadcast at minimal power. The analogy is to imagine everyone in your cell at a party talking. You can hear the people you are talking to if everyone agrees to talk only loud enough to be heard. If someone starts yelling, everyone has to speak up (more power) and yet more noise is generated, and so on. (Since everything is encoded, you don't hear signal from other conversations, you only get noise -- this is also fundamental to how CDMA works.)
Better antennas essentially enable more capacity in a cell -- they are one of the weaker links in the whole system, so an improvement there helps a lot.
Hmm... I've been to at least two here in San Diego (one in Scripps Ranch, one in RB). Granted, that does not ubiquitous make...
This has, of course, been a topic of debate here on Slashdot and in academia for a long time.
The environment has been rock solid stable (by Windows standards, not Unix). They can get by with two (two!) NT servers, versus 200+ desktops. Most helpdesk calls are actually solved by cycling the client.
End result: a big savings in labor costs.
By coincidence, that's the first I'd heard of this project in years -- and I just download that program a few days ago. Go figger.
Here in San Diego, California, Cox Communications also has created a new network (so I'm lead to believe -- is it really them, or a branded version of someone else's?) following the @Home collapse. I'm curious if anyone has found similar behavior from them (or anyone else for that matter)...
Because (as has been brought up many times) the Linux and *BSD systems lack features and do not scale very well to enterprise level server hardware (e.g. a scalable TCP/IP stack, which I'm not aware of having been fixed). On a high-end server dealing with huge amounts of network traffic and/or transaction processing (for example) Linux doesn't yet cut it.
The day the commercial Unix systems can be phased out with confidence may come, but we ain't there yet! Many have speculated that contributions from IBM, Sun, and the like might help close this gap. I will be interesting to see what they do.
I'd like to point out that while the data features of 3G and related technology is what gets the most press, it's not what most providers care about the most. The new networks that will be built in the next 5 years on 3G tech (starting for real in '03 or '04) will have much high voice call capacity. The limiting factor for providers is how much (i.e. how little) spectrum they really have. Spectrum utilization is much better in CDMA2000 and WCDMA (the 3G protocols) than in CDMA or GSM. While theres a lot of hype and hope about wireless data, the fact that, as it stands, you can about tripple the number of calls in a cell on a 3G system is what really counts.
At to vaporware: We are going to see 3G systems... we just might not see the data features that have been hyped so much, because these are not critical to the providers business.
I was quite disappointed when I browsed through later books they published. They certainly didn't live up to the one I bought.
Think adversiting DoS. Even if you actively agree to do something, if you are misled (they don't tell you what's going to happen, do they?) then that's fraud (in my book anyway).