Here's another way to look at it --- I've been coding since about the age of 4. Yes, 4. And no, i'm not
kidding. (Hell, my parents still have one of my "Apple ][ Operators License" picture IDs in a photo album
from when I was in 2nd grade..) Now, do you think I would put "I'm 27 years old and have 23 years industry
experience" on my resume'?
Well, believe it or not - I've actually had encountered a number of individuals appling for jobs come close to this! One claimed to have had "15 years of computer experience" and it turned out he was only 20. Another claimed to have been a "professional programmer with over 10 years of experience" and wasn't much older! Sure, maybe they weren't 'technically' lying - and maybe in the Internet boom years someone would have bought such statements without questioning their ages - but today?!
You are right - it is not simply technical skills that are important but also the maturity of behavior that counts (e.g. knowing how to get along with people - even the boneheads above you...). Maturity generally comes with age (along certificates from the school of hard knocks).
You are quite right that Ken Auletta's style is to focus on the people involved in events - and frankly this is what many (mostly non-geek) readers are interested in. After all, if you can obtain some understanding of the mind-set of say a Bill Gates from his past behaviors you may well be in a better position to deal with such people in the future.
I attended one of Ken's book tour presentations when the book originally came out and it was fascinating to hear about the details of what went on in this court case - only some of which was reported in the press but they did not really report on the personal reactions and interactions involved in the case. Ken Auletta has been reporting on such business issues for many years and knew most of the principles involved. He is an excellent speaker and his presentation was concise review of the court case - so it probably would have appealed to someone not so inclined to read such a long and detailed book. His first-hand desciption of Bill Gates's behavior at various industry and social events (often volatile and insecure) and then in the context of the trial was revealing (clearly defining how he expected the Microsoft lawyers to behave) as was the courtroom background to Judge Jackson's opinions (not quite so outrageous if one where in his position). I did ask Ken Auletta whether he thought it was really appropiate for Judge Jackson to be revealing such opinions that would be published - after all, both of them should have known that Microsoft would use such comments to claim basis. Ken just shrugged as if it were solely Judge Jackson's decision. My impression was as Judge Jackson was infurious with Microsoft's court behavior - increasingly so as the case wore on (was Microsoft intentionally dragging them feet and mocking the court?) and needed an outlet to express his total exasperation!
If you lower your expectations far enough then you indeed could say that X11 runs fine on an Agenda VR (note: "fine", not "well") - I'm sure Windows 98 works just "fine" on a 16MB Pentium PC too! (And those old "3-M" machines way back when the X Window System was first released ran slow as molasses compared to what anyone today is used to). There are good reasons why X11 isn't widely adopted (yet) on PDAs and likely won't be without extensive modification - while it has advantages for porting applications, by the time you add a window manager, widget sets, etc. etc. you have a pretty heavyweight graphic system. Stripped down versions of "X" and Xlib-like libraries are available (Tiny-X, W Windows, FLTK) but so far they have their own trade-offs. I hadn't heard of the "Familiar" Linux distribution which sounds like a great step in the right direction...
I am not aware of ANY PDA that is capable of running some combination of Linux/X11 well. I'd certainly be interested in learning otherwise.
My impression is that memory and performance are still issues in implementing X11 on such devices, especially compared to other available graphical interfaces.
Then of course, there are the commercial issues against X11 - your average PDA consumer only cares about quick performance, a useable interface and lots of possible applications - something that X11 doesn't particularly offer. The target market is not for geeks and specialized applications (which is relatively small).
There has been some discussion on the Sharp Developer's comment posting web site about the possibility of implementing X11 on this device (the short answer is that Sharp has no plans to implement it).
The developer version costs $399 (plus shipping). According the the web site the final consumer version will cost in the $500 range - however, it is supposed to have more RAM (64MB) than the developer's version (32MB).
It is certainly a nice handheld with lots of features but this is essentially equivalent to the cost of a desktop machine... yeah, you can sort of surf the net on it's quarter-size VGA display but you can't run xeyes or can you can compile your Java...
It has been my experience that "teamwork" exercises at the undergraduate or instruction level (versus say a funded research project or non-graded group endeavor) almost always are failures. Failures in the sense of not being realistic. Firstly consider whether the instructor actually has any experience him/herself working in a team. Academia is not a team - these guys and gals are often at each other proverbial throats - individual empire-building is the norm. Secondly, you can't create much of a "team" or real team effort in just a couple of months when you are only working together a few hours a day at most. Thirdly, teams are usually graded as a whole so the slackers on you team are going to often get the same grade as you but by doing half of the work (and you don't have a manager watching over things...).
In college it is far better to focus on academic learning and also how to get along with different types of people. Leave learning the real teamwork stuff to your apprenticeship as an intern and first few jobs. You'll quickly discover that "teamwork" in the workaday world has many different meanings - few of which you'd ever learn in a classroom.
Young people are a pain in the neck because they are not well-rounded. They come into companies thinking they have all the answers, but they don't understand what all the questions are. BTW, I'm describing myself here - I would not hire the person I was at 22.
I could not agree more - looking back I now realize how incredibly ignorant I was coming out of college - and I thought I was pretty bright. The reality is that you can't possibly learn everything you need to know for the work-a-day world in a few years of formal college training nor is it really possible to teach such skills effectively in a school setting. Students need to accept that the fact that they will be apprentices the first few years of their careers (any career) - effectively learning and observing on the job (absorbing the good and recognizing the bad). In the long term, knowing how to think and learn is far more important than learning specific technical skills (although they may certainly help to get a first job, they also give you the illusion you know more that you actually do). Any one starting out in software field ought to have a look at the recent book Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen which suggests that software development know-how takes time to learn from experience which in turn comes from being mentored by and working with more experienced programmers - NOT from studing for and passing certification exams.
Your reference to Richard Gabriel's article about Alexander's work and its relationship to software Design Patterns is quite appropriate as he points out that Alexander ultimately considered his concept of (architectural) Design Patterns to be mostly a failure for a number of reasons. Being overly simplistic and not taking into account other less tangible factors was certainly one of them. Alexander's concept of Design Patterns never did catch on in the field of architecture - and probably for good reason. (I seem to recall also seeing Gabriel's article published in at least one book on Design Patterns - it should appear in all of them!).
The real issue though is that of the gross abuse of over-extended analogies and metaphors from other fields to justify one's own strong-headed opinion. Comparing software design to home building or civil engineering as exemplified by Connell is typical of this type of wrong-headed fuzzy thinking.
Software design is software design. It is its own unique endeavor that may share all sorts of attributes with other activites but ultimatlely stands on its own. Software design has evolved into what it is now because that how it fits as a societal activity as determined by its practioners and product users. This means that software doesn't drive like a car, look like a house nor oink like a pig. And as Gabriel has pointed out, in the software field sometimes "worse is better"!
Re:Dark Days are approaching (aka Layoffs coming)
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
According to one press release:
The companies said they expect the deal to close in the first half of 2002 and to result in a cost savings of $2.5 billion by the middle of fiscal 2004.
There is no way the "new" HP is going to make those types of savings without more rounds of layoffs to eliminate redundant staff in the two companies. This indeed may be a bumpy ride for many long-time HP staffers (Deja vu for any former DEC employees still around). This is certainly what the stockholders are expecting and the stock value will dive if more cost-cutting measures aren't announced soon and implemented quickly. I'd certainly expect a lot of consolidation and elimination of current divisions in the 2 companies (bye bye HP PC group!).
They shouldn't do it this way anyway. What they should do is release under two licenses. One
for GPL use (non-profit oriented), and one for commercial use.
So I am curious - just how many companies/organizations are using such a dual license AND succeeding? What about the alternative of releasing GPL and also commercial versions of software? In particular, how are companies such as Sendmail Inc. doing? Any others? (Maybe Sendmail is the exception to the rule...)
My impression is that the alternative income stream to licensing your code is to sell support. I just have never read much that suggests this is all that viable an option for a small company although maybe it might work for the IBMs of the world (to be seen) with their large coporate base of customers (and mix of proprietary software).
Firstly, it is "Mesa" NOT "MesaGL" so as
not to infringe on SGI's trademark. Mesa (www.mesa3d.org) utilizes the OpenGL APIs/command syntax but other than that
it has no direct connection with OpenGL. Mesa is not a licensed OpenGL implementation.
The reason your programs written in C using Mesa worked on different systems running Redhat Linux is because Mesa by default uses X11 (and the X device drivers) - so you are generally going to trade off performance for portability. (Note that software GLX support is now included in XFree86 version 4 - prior to this Mesa required its own device drivers to take advantage of certain graphics cards.)
I'd also point out that Knuth's books provides all of the equations and the mathematical basis needed to write the code - that's the point of the books. MIX is simply used to provide illustrative examples. Thinking that all you need to do is to recode MIX to another language misses the point - you need to really understand what it is that you are doing when writing such code. And you are right - it takes time to write good code. Which is why you and the vast majority of programmers use and rely upon pre-written ("canned") routines and components. There is certainly nothing wrong with this - just as long the implications are understood. This is why "low-level" references such as the Knuth books are becoming less and less relevant to most working programmers today (not irrelevant, just less needed).
I would suspect that "Windows" programmers outnumber "Unix" programmers by at least an order of magnitude.
The fact of the matter is that what constitutes programming today and who is considered a "programmer" has changed significantly since Don Knuth published his first encyclopedic volume in this ongoing series. At that time most programmers really were extremely knowledgeable about mathematics - programming degrees usually involved equal amounts of advanced math and programming. The Knuth volumes were practically bibles for programmers. I suspect that Knuth may have thought that you could actually distill all of the core knowledge required for programming into such a set of reference books. Just as technology has rapidly changed since that era so has programming. A single reference book on algorithms such as Introduction to Algorithms by T. H. Cormen et al. is more than sufficient for most programmers today - more likely even overkill. I can't help but think that few programmers today (say under the age of 30) would really understand much less truly appreciate Knuth's work - it simply isn't relevant for them. This isn't "good" or "bad" but reflects the changed nature of programming. Ask how many programmers today write low level subroutines to perform sorting etc. versus using an existing pre-written package or software component? Yeah, maybe it is good to know this stuff in Knuth's books but given the rush of other skills/techniques/methods to learn it simply isn't as crucial any more.
Note the the 30m resolution is for a "seamless" National DEM database. Interpolating (up) to a 30m resolution is intended to correspond to other satellite/digital data already interpolated to this semi-"standard" resolution. Some public data products will (eventually!) be available at a higher spatial resolution. (Frankly, 30m resolution may be overkill for Kansas but hardly sufficient for half of Colorado!)
More information about the potential resolution of this radar data can be found at:
Since Landsat (the image that is overlaid on the radar data) is typically 30m, these data sets won't be any better than that.
The fact that Landsat data resolution is 30 meters (actually, it varies with sensor and satellite) is *completely* irrelevant. The satellite imagery is simply overlaid over the radar-produced topographic data for visual effect when producing fancy pictures. The topographic data can be and will be of a higher spatial resolution.
Also consider the *enormous* volume of data required just by doubling the resolution - and of course you also need nearly twice as much data to obtain the overlapping imagery (at the correct angles). While it is true that both Mars and Venus had a more complete radar mapping of their surface before the Earth was so mapped - the quality of the Earth data is going to be so much better. Neither Mars or Venus have as much overlapping stereo radar imagery suitable for very high resolution topographic mapping of their surface. (I'd also point out that both Mars and Venus are smaller planets than the Earth...).
Yes, there are problems related to the Code Red Worm - your friends in Minneapolis with Quest DSL are probably using a DSL modem that is affected - the main symptom is being disconnected. There is a fix listed for certain CISCO modems - have a look at:
Of course this doesn't have much to do with NASA's shuttle radar imagery! Except maybe that it can take a while to download one of those full resolution images for maximum viewing:-)
I'd point out that some of the imagery is too good - extremely sharp topographic relief simply cannot be captured in stereo from space (at least not in the shuttle passes) and thus no elevation data for those locations. I also recall that they were not able to image the entire surface of the Earth in stereo as they had hoped.
My only complaint about this creative little device is that you would have to reach behind the computer case to turn the switch - something that isn't always so easy to do. How about extending the wires out of the case with a switch that could be positioned elsewhere - right next to the keyboard? OK, maybe not so secure but far more convenient...
I tend to agree that is would be a good idea to have books/references that focus on different aspects of Unix/Linux system administration since the knowledge required is so broad (although that is apparently not the trend these days) - there is no way any single book is going to do a good job covering EVERYTHING even for a single OS (those 1,000 page "bibles" are a case in point). Some topics do have a more limited useful life-span and they might be more appropriate for e-books or on-line updates.
My favorite general Unix book is still the
Unix System Administration Handbook
currently in its third edition (2000) and now including Redhat 6.2 along with FreeBSD. What is particularly nice about this book is that it highlights the differences between these systems so you know what to look out for (the "gotchas") when you are administering multiple 'nixes.
One book that does try to cover system administration for Redhat (6 and 7) and other distributions (such as Debian) is
Linux System Administration
by Vicki Stanfield and Roderick W. Smith. In fact, this "Craig Hunt Linux Library" series of Linux books from Sybex is surprisingly good.
SuomiNet is a national network of GPS receivers, located primarily at universities, configured and managed to generate near real-time estimates of precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere, total electron content in the ionosphere, and other meteorological and geodetic information.
My office has these thermos-based coffee brewers - they work pretty well but you never know how much coffee is actually left in the pot! Now if only I could get them to use a better quality coffee:-( I am sure you can get purchase such coffee makers in North America although I have to admit that I haven't seen them in the retail stores. The standard glass carafe and heating element type brewer are undoubtedly cheaper - but they really do ruin the coffee if it sits around on the heating element for more than a few minutes. It would seem that many Americas are simply used to rotten tasting coffee.
Shouldn't they wait for the release, then if it still overrides their settings and they're absolutely sure its not a malfunction in their install process, then they should consider legal action.
You mean Kodak should wait and watch Microsoft screw them royally and then file a pointless lawsuit which they would undoubtedly lose? Oh, but let's assume for the sake of arguement that Kodak does win the lawsuit - which would be at least 2-4 years after initial litigation. By then they would have lost both marketshare and customers (to Fuji who is in bed with MS) - and with Microsoft then arguing that Windows XP is obsolete anyhow. Too bad.
While I have no sympathy for Kodak (and other such corporations trying to kiss up to Microsoft - like HP), I quite understand their actions. Wake up Kodak, Microsoft is a monopoly that doesn't play fair just like you were at one time.
Sybase is also available for Linux - it is a well-respected commercial database at a fraction of the cost of Oracle and less expensive than DB2.
Adaptive Server Enterprise version 12.5 for Linux can be downloaded and tried out for 60 days:
Slashdot Mirror
Well, believe it or not - I've actually had encountered a number of individuals appling for jobs come close to this! One claimed to have had "15 years of computer experience" and it turned out he was only 20. Another claimed to have been a "professional programmer with over 10 years of experience" and wasn't much older! Sure, maybe they weren't 'technically' lying - and maybe in the Internet boom years someone would have bought such statements without questioning their ages - but today?!
You are right - it is not simply technical skills that are important but also the maturity of behavior that counts (e.g. knowing how to get along with people - even the boneheads above you ...). Maturity generally comes with age (along certificates from the school of hard knocks).
You are quite right that Ken Auletta's style is to focus on the people involved in events - and frankly this is what many (mostly non-geek) readers are interested in. After all, if you can obtain some understanding of the mind-set of say a Bill Gates from his past behaviors you may well be in a better position to deal with such people in the future. I attended one of Ken's book tour presentations when the book originally came out and it was fascinating to hear about the details of what went on in this court case - only some of which was reported in the press but they did not really report on the personal reactions and interactions involved in the case. Ken Auletta has been reporting on such business issues for many years and knew most of the principles involved. He is an excellent speaker and his presentation was concise review of the court case - so it probably would have appealed to someone not so inclined to read such a long and detailed book. His first-hand desciption of Bill Gates's behavior at various industry and social events (often volatile and insecure) and then in the context of the trial was revealing (clearly defining how he expected the Microsoft lawyers to behave) as was the courtroom background to Judge Jackson's opinions (not quite so outrageous if one where in his position). I did ask Ken Auletta whether he thought it was really appropiate for Judge Jackson to be revealing such opinions that would be published - after all, both of them should have known that Microsoft would use such comments to claim basis. Ken just shrugged as if it were solely Judge Jackson's decision. My impression was as Judge Jackson was infurious with Microsoft's court behavior - increasingly so as the case wore on (was Microsoft intentionally dragging them feet and mocking the court?) and needed an outlet to express his total exasperation!
If you lower your expectations far enough then you indeed could say that X11 runs fine on an Agenda VR (note: "fine", not "well") - I'm sure Windows 98 works just "fine" on a 16MB Pentium PC too! (And those old "3-M" machines way back when the X Window System was first released ran slow as molasses compared to what anyone today is used to). There are good reasons why X11 isn't widely adopted (yet) on PDAs and likely won't be without extensive modification - while it has advantages for porting applications, by the time you add a window manager, widget sets, etc. etc. you have a pretty heavyweight graphic system. Stripped down versions of "X" and Xlib-like libraries are available (Tiny-X, W Windows, FLTK) but so far they have their own trade-offs. I hadn't heard of the "Familiar" Linux distribution which sounds like a great step in the right direction ...
Then of course, there are the commercial issues against X11 - your average PDA consumer only cares about quick performance, a useable interface and lots of possible applications - something that X11 doesn't particularly offer. The target market is not for geeks and specialized applications (which is relatively small).
There has been some discussion on the Sharp Developer's comment posting web site about the possibility of implementing X11 on this device (the short answer is that Sharp has no plans to implement it).
It is certainly a nice handheld with lots of features but this is essentially equivalent to the cost of a desktop machine ... yeah, you can sort of surf the net on it's quarter-size VGA display but you can't run xeyes or can you can compile your Java ...
In college it is far better to focus on academic learning and also how to get along with different types of people. Leave learning the real teamwork stuff to your apprenticeship as an intern and first few jobs. You'll quickly discover that "teamwork" in the workaday world has many different meanings - few of which you'd ever learn in a classroom.
Young people are a pain in the neck because they are not well-rounded. They come into companies thinking they have all the answers, but they don't understand what all the questions are. BTW, I'm describing myself here - I would not hire the person I was at 22.
I could not agree more - looking back I now realize how incredibly ignorant I was coming out of college - and I thought I was pretty bright. The reality is that you can't possibly learn everything you need to know for the work-a-day world in a few years of formal college training nor is it really possible to teach such skills effectively in a school setting. Students need to accept that the fact that they will be apprentices the first few years of their careers (any career) - effectively learning and observing on the job (absorbing the good and recognizing the bad). In the long term, knowing how to think and learn is far more important than learning specific technical skills (although they may certainly help to get a first job, they also give you the illusion you know more that you actually do). Any one starting out in software field ought to have a look at the recent book Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen which suggests that software development know-how takes time to learn from experience which in turn comes from being mentored by and working with more experienced programmers - NOT from studing for and passing certification exams.
The real issue though is that of the gross abuse of over-extended analogies and metaphors from other fields to justify one's own strong-headed opinion. Comparing software design to home building or civil engineering as exemplified by Connell is typical of this type of wrong-headed fuzzy thinking.
Software design is software design. It is its own unique endeavor that may share all sorts of attributes with other activites but ultimatlely stands on its own. Software design has evolved into what it is now because that how it fits as a societal activity as determined by its practioners and product users. This means that software doesn't drive like a car, look like a house nor oink like a pig. And as Gabriel has pointed out, in the software field sometimes "worse is better"!
The companies said they expect the deal to close in the first half of 2002 and to result in a cost savings of $2.5 billion by the middle of fiscal 2004.
There is no way the "new" HP is going to make those types of savings without more rounds of layoffs to eliminate redundant staff in the two companies. This indeed may be a bumpy ride for many long-time HP staffers (Deja vu for any former DEC employees still around). This is certainly what the stockholders are expecting and the stock value will dive if more cost-cutting measures aren't announced soon and implemented quickly. I'd certainly expect a lot of consolidation and elimination of current divisions in the 2 companies (bye bye HP PC group!).
So I am curious - just how many companies/organizations are using such a dual license AND succeeding? What about the alternative of releasing GPL and also commercial versions of software? In particular, how are companies such as Sendmail Inc. doing? Any others? (Maybe Sendmail is the exception to the rule ...)
My impression is that the alternative income stream to licensing your code is to sell support. I just have never read much that suggests this is all that viable an option for a small company although maybe it might work for the IBMs of the world (to be seen) with their large coporate base of customers (and mix of proprietary software).
The reason your programs written in C using Mesa worked on different systems running Redhat Linux is because Mesa by default uses X11 (and the X device drivers) - so you are generally going to trade off performance for portability. (Note that software GLX support is now included in XFree86 version 4 - prior to this Mesa required its own device drivers to take advantage of certain graphics cards.)
I'd also point out that Knuth's books provides all of the equations and the mathematical basis needed to write the code - that's the point of the books. MIX is simply used to provide illustrative examples. Thinking that all you need to do is to recode MIX to another language misses the point - you need to really understand what it is that you are doing when writing such code. And you are right - it takes time to write good code. Which is why you and the vast majority of programmers use and rely upon pre-written ("canned") routines and components. There is certainly nothing wrong with this - just as long the implications are understood. This is why "low-level" references such as the Knuth books are becoming less and less relevant to most working programmers today (not irrelevant, just less needed).
The fact of the matter is that what constitutes programming today and who is considered a "programmer" has changed significantly since Don Knuth published his first encyclopedic volume in this ongoing series. At that time most programmers really were extremely knowledgeable about mathematics - programming degrees usually involved equal amounts of advanced math and programming. The Knuth volumes were practically bibles for programmers. I suspect that Knuth may have thought that you could actually distill all of the core knowledge required for programming into such a set of reference books. Just as technology has rapidly changed since that era so has programming. A single reference book on algorithms such as Introduction to Algorithms by T. H. Cormen et al. is more than sufficient for most programmers today - more likely even overkill. I can't help but think that few programmers today (say under the age of 30) would really understand much less truly appreciate Knuth's work - it simply isn't relevant for them. This isn't "good" or "bad" but reflects the changed nature of programming. Ask how many programmers today write low level subroutines to perform sorting etc. versus using an existing pre-written package or software component? Yeah, maybe it is good to know this stuff in Knuth's books but given the rush of other skills/techniques/methods to learn it simply isn't as crucial any more.
http://www.qwest.com/dsl/customerservice/win675ups .html
I think that 2.4.1 was one of the patches that resolved this security issue:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/CBOS-multiple .shtml
http://support.visi.com/dsl/242/
I'd suspect that you could also find it this update using google (look for "c675.2.4.2.bin" or something equivalent ...)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/datafinaldescriptions .html
Note the the 30m resolution is for a "seamless" National DEM database. Interpolating (up) to a 30m resolution is intended to correspond to other satellite/digital data already interpolated to this semi-"standard" resolution. Some public data products will (eventually!) be available at a higher spatial resolution. (Frankly, 30m resolution may be overkill for Kansas but hardly sufficient for half of Colorado!)
More information about the potential resolution of this radar data can be found at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/datafinaldescriptions .html
The fact that Landsat data resolution is 30 meters (actually, it varies with sensor and satellite) is *completely* irrelevant. The satellite imagery is simply overlaid over the radar-produced topographic data for visual effect when producing fancy pictures. The topographic data can be and will be of a higher spatial resolution.
Also consider the *enormous* volume of data required just by doubling the resolution - and of course you also need nearly twice as much data to obtain the overlapping imagery (at the correct angles). While it is true that both Mars and Venus had a more complete radar mapping of their surface before the Earth was so mapped - the quality of the Earth data is going to be so much better. Neither Mars or Venus have as much overlapping stereo radar imagery suitable for very high resolution topographic mapping of their surface. (I'd also point out that both Mars and Venus are smaller planets than the Earth ...).
http://support.visi.com/dsl/codered.html
Of course this doesn't have much to do with NASA's shuttle radar imagery! Except maybe that it can take a while to download one of those full resolution images for maximum viewing :-)
I'd point out that some of the imagery is too good - extremely sharp topographic relief simply cannot be captured in stereo from space (at least not in the shuttle passes) and thus no elevation data for those locations. I also recall that they were not able to image the entire surface of the Earth in stereo as they had hoped.
My only complaint about this creative little device is that you would have to reach behind the computer case to turn the switch - something that isn't always so easy to do. How about extending the wires out of the case with a switch that could be positioned elsewhere - right next to the keyboard? OK, maybe not so secure but far more convenient ...
My favorite general Unix book is still the Unix System Administration Handbook currently in its third edition (2000) and now including Redhat 6.2 along with FreeBSD. What is particularly nice about this book is that it highlights the differences between these systems so you know what to look out for (the "gotchas") when you are administering multiple 'nixes.
One book that does try to cover system administration for Redhat (6 and 7) and other distributions (such as Debian) is Linux System Administration by Vicki Stanfield and Roderick W. Smith. In fact, this "Craig Hunt Linux Library" series of Linux books from Sybex is surprisingly good.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/suominet/
http://www.unavco.ucar.edu/equipment/suominet/
SuomiNet is a national network of GPS receivers, located primarily at universities, configured and managed to generate near real-time estimates of precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere, total electron content in the ionosphere, and other meteorological and geodetic information.
Example use of this data can be found at:
http://www.gst.ucar.edu/gpsrg/realtime.html
Neat stuff! Now if only the data from these fixed GPS sites were easily available via the web ...
My office has these thermos-based coffee brewers - they work pretty well but you never know how much coffee is actually left in the pot! Now if only I could get them to use a better quality coffee :-( I am sure you can get purchase such coffee makers in North America although I have to admit that I haven't seen them in the retail stores. The standard glass carafe and heating element type brewer are undoubtedly cheaper - but they really do ruin the coffee if it sits around on the heating element for more than a few minutes. It would seem that many Americas are simply used to rotten tasting coffee.
You mean Kodak should wait and watch Microsoft screw them royally and then file a pointless lawsuit which they would undoubtedly lose? Oh, but let's assume for the sake of arguement that Kodak does win the lawsuit - which would be at least 2-4 years after initial litigation. By then they would have lost both marketshare and customers (to Fuji who is in bed with MS) - and with Microsoft then arguing that Windows XP is obsolete anyhow. Too bad.
While I have no sympathy for Kodak (and other such corporations trying to kiss up to Microsoft - like HP), I quite understand their actions. Wake up Kodak, Microsoft is a monopoly that doesn't play fair just like you were at one time.
http://www.sybase.com/ase_125eval
Alas, you don't say exactly what it is you intend to do with this database nor what issues/capabilities are most important to you.