here's something I don't quite get about cable (and satellite).
At this point we have, lets say, a billion channels available.
Unlike broadcast TV, setting up a new channel doesn't require millions of dollars for local, bazillions for national viewing - it takes provisioning a new channel.
However, the cable folks seem mired in this 1948 model where you have to have a channel setup for years and years rather than realizing that if you want to tack a new channel on for a couple weeks/months you can.
I thought about this during the OJ trial and the Olympics. If people WANT to watch something that's a limited time thing, then hell, create
a channel for it for the duration.
OJ? Fine, the "OJ trial channel" is #58 until it's over. Then 58 is back in the pool of available channels. (disclaimer, I didn't own a TV during that whole thing, I just mocked my coworkers who were watching the blow by blow)
Olympics are 24x7 on channel whatever (or 4 channels if you want), with FULL RUNS of the events, not this highlights crap of things the networks deem popular. Want to watch the Finns battle the Algerians in the Biatholon/Luge/Nintendo event? You can.
Costs are minimum.
On topic: So set up an Anime channel.
It runs from 8PM EST until 4AM PST.
Want cartoon boobies? Well, at 11PM PST, the children should be asleep. we can get over our puritan heritage that says naked is bad (even cartoon naked) but watching a guys head get splattered against a wall in a faux gunshot is ok.
Sure, it can be.
Mismanagement can make lots of things really expensive.
I've used BIND for YEARS. Very little effort except to keep it up to date. Low costs.
I've seen people mangle Lotus Notes into being unbelievably expensive, shown when the lies, damn lies and statistics took into account the same costs they fixed to our Sendmail and QPopper infrastructure (every desktop admin who did pkg_add of my sendmail build once on the machine was had their salary attributed to the cost of standards based mail). We suggested that their notes costs that left out administrators was a bit slanted.
Careful management and selection of software is important.
The acquisition of software is usually the smallest cost.
But support for "unsupported software" and, more, the ability for a talented administrator to fit it to his company's needs is often well worth that lack of security PHB's have.
That and a list of unresolved bugs from our "supported" software:)
.
So yeah, I can take a bug tracking/CRM system, install it and make our bug tracking process fall in line with the vendor's notion of how we should do our business or
I can take open source components (bugzilla, GNATS, etc) and other tools and use them to fit how we do our business already.
The latter might take more effort, but at my previous company, we had an ENORMOUS CRM tool that only ran on windows (now add cost of desktop windows where before we had been a 70% unix shop) and we ended up with a tool that Sales marketing and tech support HATED. The data in it was often useless because it was such a burden to use, and we ended up hiring extra people to deal with data entry.
But I know that I could make a case that showed it was cheaper than using Open Source by perhaps showing that features we didn't really want before, but used later only because they were there (report generation that was handy, but far from critical) would have been an additional cost to add to O.S.S.
On the other hand, I've used tools where once we've been bound in, the ONLY way to generate reports was through expensive tools.
A little Perl and ASCII logs from Open Source often make Open Source a winner on this, but that often won't be taken into account.
Many of us here have slapped in a free tool to do things that the corps were taking forever on. Example:
A $3000/machine host monitoring solution was found and chosen.
Now there must be a committee to best decide how to deploy and configure it.
We get bored. net-SNMP on all our machines (runs scripts, reports info, etc) and NOCOL and 2 days later we have 40 machines monitored via the Web, pages getting sent on outages etc.
6 months later, we're told to take it down and pony up $3000/machine to use the "blessed" software.
okay, CD's came out for around $10/CD when record albums were around $6-$8 per.
Why?
Cause there was something like 1 CD burning plant in the hemisphere.
Costs were high. Understood.
Since then (1984?) costs have plunged. The entire cost of the CD, case, liner notes, etc. is around $0.80. Art work might be a little more,
but CD's are too small to really have good art.
So record companies rake it in. Artists don't get any more money with the overhead being down, they just bend over and hope the record companies have KY.
Now the companies want to remove the case, the artwork, and everything but the raw bits from the equation. Yeah, someone pays for bandwidth. 1 cost after the master is burned.
And the prices are higher per song that most CDs.
F*ck that. Give me a decent indie band and I'll Paypal them a quarter per song and the artists will make far more money per song than they would in the "big leagues".
I'd also do the micropayment model that's been around:
Everytime I listen to a song, the artist gets 1/4 cent from me.
When my account is dry, I can't listen to the song anymore.
You're in a studio. You've spent WEEKS laying out a 10 tracks. Everything is fine. Except the contract with the evil record company says "at least 11 tracks" and you're short some minutes.
Okay, that song you've been toying with a bit gets recorded. Its ok, not ideal. But if you spend another week in the studio, you're paying even MORE for the time and your contract says this will be ready to be mastered by next week.
You're not proud of it, but it's good enough to slide in between tracks 6 and 8.
It happens. Really.
Bad is when you have 4 - 6 songs like that.
The grateful dead cut side two of an album up into several tracks to
meet warner brothers contracts requiring "n tracks" per album.
Music and law meld as well as music and big business.
I was in a very small group that did core infrastructure at a large wall st bank. We introduced new things like "BIND" and "ntp" and the like.
We created a "fire-wall" and brought in Internet connectivity for email and the like. We found this cool gopher replacement that ran on the NeXTs calls "www" - a CLI hyper browser thing.
Some of the business people did yell - "do you really see non-technical people using this 'Internet'?" and when we slid Mosaic to a few people "Do you really see business people using this 'World Web' thing?" . Yes, yes I do. "That just shows what you don't know about business." I'll get back to you on that one, ok?
Everyone had Unix desktops (well, most). Sendmail for 6,000 machines run mostly by, er, me, with end admins actually tossing in the binaries and one of 4 config files that ran the whole thing. SMTP got mail from London to Toyko, desktop to desktop, in under 2 seconds.
Did we live on Open Source? Well, the infrastructure did.
Trouble ticket systems took 2 years to be selected and rolled out.
Our group compiled "req" in a day and used that while we waited for Remedy.
Monitoring systems were selected for THOUSANDS per machine.
We put up CMU SNMP (would now use Net-SNMP) and got better results, despite management ("see, now, snmp is for Network devices"/me looks at ethernet on the NeXT and Sparc 2 "no, hubs and routers, that sort of thing - just pony up the money for each box and we'll monitor it").
Most importantly most trading system software is not store bought. Sure, on windows, they use some rapid development stuff. folks I know use a lot of Java, but it's a LOT of custom software.
The Unix problem was that X and Motif were so miserable to develop for. It was like punishment for choosing Unix. My hat is off to the KDE and GNOME folks for picking up the ball that the X Consortium dropped. Mandate application look and feel. You must quit apps through FILE -> Quit. That beats the random ways that you quite in Wordperfect or XV or Lotus or XTerm or whatever.
The financial world will go to where better app development and better support are. That's been MS for a while, I hate to say. GNOME & KDE may save Unix.
And why do I need a dial? I can turn the crank and
get Millie who will connect me to anyone I need. Even long distance, now!
New capabilities allow people to change how they use the tools available. It's a slow evolution. Sometimes, there are branches that die out or should die out (WinCE, for example).
DSL and wireless means I can browse decently from my coffee table. "Hey, what's that actor from" means that with tv.yahoo.com and imdb, I can find out, now. Not feasable with desktop in another room and 9600 with PEP connections.
But if I can get IP via otherwise "dead time" on the cells, and I can get things like, hmmm, directions, or "find me the nearest public restroom", then it changes how I interact with the world.
Now, if the stupid 1930's phone interface would die - the 4x4 dial grid (exposing just 3x4) is too stupid for words to spell on. The Kycotera palm/cell showed promise, but it not nearly rugged enough for real people use.
MacOS X's userland is a derivative of FreeBSD. The kernel is a Mac 3.x based kernel. Just like the previous versions of MacOS X, NeXTStep and OpenStep, were Mach 2.x and BSD 4.3 based.
That said, Suse runs just wonderfully on my Mac, as does NetBSD.
Suse Linux is a derivative of Linux... or something like that:)
I can even run NetBSD diskless on the powerbook by typing "boot net" at the
Ok prompt (oddly, wireless diskless booting doesn't work with the OpenBootProm). I'm still waiting for PeeCee's to have a real boot prom instead of that BIOS crap.
I say this as a native (who escaped):
Boston is not set up to run these large conventions.
The fact that the number of cabs have been fixed since, what, 1932?
and the second-rate town fueds between cabbies from Boston or Cambridge not being allowed to pick up fares in the other town just means that it's difficult to attend conferences there and get around.
Can I say how impressed I am about the T stopping at 12:30AM? (esp when bars are open until a raging 1AM - almost like a real city).
That might have changed, but I worked in clubs for years. Had to park at 2PM, go home or out and do my day. When I got out of work at 3AM, well, cabs are hard to find. The T is stopped (don't drink and drive, but we'll stop transit before the bars).
I hate the yankees as much as any good bostonian, but at least I can drink until 5AM if I want and hop on a subway to about anywhere any time of the night. Or get in one of billion taxis.
Javitts is inconvenient, and it sucks, but at least you don't need to have your show in TWO places with busses. At least its 4 hours drive from about 20% of the population. (DC, Philly, Boston &c).
Let's go to boston when the decide to become a real business town and perhaps when the roads and routes are consistent one week to the next.
These are not 10 front end desktop support people. To think that you singly handle 300 machines means that you have several people working for free or stuffed into other budget areas.
This is that 200 machines needed a total of 20 people in the organization to deal with their support.
You are "backed up by a... team of motivated people".
They are involved in the continued support of these machines. They count.
That person in purchasing whos only job is to handle getting parts and orders for the 400 machines. That's a 0.5FTE for the 200 machines.
That guy you have writing VB scripts to push out changes. He spends maybe 2hrs per day (10hrs/week) on that. Well, there's a 0.25FTE. It counts.
Those 4 people who run the file server, the database server and the other whatsit. They count.
That guy who ends up spending 1 FTE dealing with testing service packs and patches. He counts.
The guys who spend 10hrs/week run the virus scanning boxes at the gateways, make sure that desktops virus defs are up to date, they count.
Every email virus and every effort to stop email born viruses should be charged to the use of Outbreak^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook and Windows.
The guy who Ghosts images onto drive to replace wonky laptop drives or bad desktop drives; the guy who deals with the backups for the servers; they count
And now you have 1 person per 20 or 25 that go and do desktop support, actually install patches on desktops and fix registry settings and deal with application issues that the users have. They count.
I sat next to a trading floor group with 35 folks in it. The head guy said, "Yeah, our guys are pretty smart. We don't need to have a dedicated System Admin."
Cool, who does the work?
"Our guys pretty much can run their own machines."
That's great. So they spent what? An hour a week on that?
"Nah, more like 2 or 3 hours. But it's much cheaper than a system admin."
So let me just figure this out: You have 35 guys spending 3 hrs/week dealing with system issues; not trading, but dealing with virus updates, anomolies, etc. You spend 105 hrs per week to keep from hiring someone for 40hrs/week right?
"Hmmm, you put it like that and it sounds different... I'll think on that."
>... is meant to
That's the killer phrase. I know SEVERAL H1Bs who are here (silicon valley) with decent programming skills. I also know that the woman at my Motorcycle shop has many better skills than they do. She's not at the shop for the glamour or the discount on bike parts; she's there because it's a job that can pay part of the rent.
Your must statements also fall into the "I wish I lived in your ideal fantasy land" category.
The H1-B program has been so heavily lobbied by those wanting cheap labor that those original intents are nearly meaningless.
And the congress critters went along because, during the boom, they got lots of money from the folks running those companies.
See also: Those companies shipping off the grunt work of coding to the suburbs and office parks of Bombay.
And yet, as a guy who came into a MainFrame house where we had desktop PCs and some Unix workstations,
our challenge was to get rid of hide-bound, over ritualized MainFrame guys who needed 6 weeks and several meetings to add a $10,000 printer to be
near us.
People just presumed that "quick" and "service oriented" were possible. We had brought in some PCs (XTs and ATs) and if someone needed a printer, we could get one for $400 and have it working that afternoon.
When the IBM's were depreciated and also needed connectivity (IRMA boards were $2000 to connect to the mainframe), we started bringing in Unix WorkStations from Sun or Apollo.
With PC-NFS, we met the "services" of the mainframe guys in 1/10th the cost and 1/100th of the time.
Are there places where using Unix is expensive? Sure. The mainframers went somewhere.
OTOH, the ability to take a PC headed for the trash and make it a group file server/web server/print server - leaving the fast machines for the desktops - should not be discounted.
Is MS WIndows cheaper than Unix? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Cheaper Admins, sure. But I've had 3 admins serving 200 Unix developers and they still had time to do scripting and whatnot. Compare and contrast with 1 Windows admin per 10 machines.
So where we had 3 admins, we'd now need 20. Plus managers. Plus meetings.
Most TALENTED admins can use the tools at their finger tips and be MUCH more efficient.
It's just that the tools possible for Windows pale in comparison with Unix tools.
In 3 days, I've rolled out production trading floors. A little "boot net", a little CVS and a little cfengine.
Machine dies, I can have it swapped out and the user working in under 3 minutes. With his own desktop and apps and preferences.
I'm still waiting for that "zero admin PC" that stopped the network computer.
OTOH, I had network computers in the form of XTerminal and Diskless computers in 1990. The ran WordPerfect or FrameMaker and spreadsheets and pretty little database front ends.
You need a 1 CPU desktop machine for a receptionist? Gnome or KDE on Linux, FreeBSD, other BSD's etc can meet your needs.
You need a machine to do database service to backend a bunch of sales guys? Fine. Oracle runs nicely on Linux. Sybase runs on MacOS X.
You running derivatives calculations and merging matrices and perhaps doing trade modelling? You can run it on your 12 way Sun or SGI. Maybe you need it faster so you get a 64 way Cray.
They all run Unix.
ls, cc, pwd, grep and sendmail are all there for you. From that little pocket sized firewall appliance to the dual CPU directory server for 20,000 people to the 128 Way SGI that's modeling every square foot inside of Hurricane Iris. It's Unix and generally the skills are all transferable.
Advanced Unix SAs are not just the ones who are good at working around the flaws in the OS; they're the ones with a deep understanding of how best to use the existing tools or how to best make ones that will both meet their needs and not be useless in three years. awk was written in 1973 or so. It's still the Right and Quick answer for many small problems today.
Now what does MS offer? Oh yeah, I virus run-time environment.
On the other hand, maybe the large scope is the problem.
On a large scope, if I take out an ad it goes
to folks in the UK, and JP and all over the US.
With THIS - a neighborhood scope - I could have an
ad for LOCAL services that would be seen by LOCAL people:
- The local computer shop
- a store with cool toys for geeks with extra $$$
- The coffee shop
- A locally owned ISP for DSL/Dialup
The banner problem on the global scale is that its too broad. I pay for 50,000 impressions and I have no CLUE if it's being seen by anyone useful or not.
I noticed that Sendmail used to advertise on/. once upon a time.
Did they get ANYONE who is actually in a position to purchase fairly large scale IMAP servers and commercial MTAs?
If they knew that people who liked Open Source and were BUYING (slashdot for technical managers) that model would have worked better.
At least with a local impression, I can KNOW who the users are within a few blocks.
It's an old model applied in a new way (patent it;) Seems like a good idea.
Most of the (software) engineers, I deal with spend much of their time in editors.
A Pentium/100 will be fine for that.
Our focus has been on good graphics cards and good monitors. Looking more for resolution than FPS.
That said, builds need to be done and engineers need to not wait. A 4Way "compile" server with very fast local disks serves MANY people.
In reality, development is usually for 4-5 platforms or more. So the Eng sits in front of a 21" screen running BSD or Linux with $VISUAL of choice. Another window is logged into the over priced 2 or 4 Way sun. He saves changes in emacs, hits the other window; catches the compiler crapping all over itself and goes back to emacs.
BACK ON TOPIC:
Laptops are, for the most part, faster than you will ever need them. Same for all but gaming machines for home. My Zaurus is faster than the Sparc 5 I have; faster than the older Mac.
So I buy on the cutting edge of 6-9 months ago.
Apple will screw you - they *won't* tell you that next week they're dumping that machine you just bought. It doesn't matter. It's just as good as when you bought it. I still have a working Powerbook 180 that gets used periodically. Fine client for the kitchen.
But that 2 CPU monster that's $2500 today, or that 17" G4 Laptop heatmonster for $3800 will cost half that in a year. And be no less useful.
In general, the best ugprade you can do it more RAM or faster disks. The CPU is spending a lot of time waiting for I/O anyhow. 2GHz just means more waits.
Buy the trailing edge and put the extra money into RAM, a good monitor and a comfy chair. You're l33t geek friends won't swoon, but really: They're poor and is it really important to impress those guys?
iPlanet just whaled on their staffing by big layoffs.
And they dropped Linux support (for LDAP at least) and are expected to drop other non-Sun platforms.
Sendmail has a high performance IMAP server, webmail, directory server, but I don't know about replacing the Contact management that Outbreak has.
OpenSource? Well you can kludge together stuff,
(cyrus, calendars, webmail, sendmail) but there's a lot of unpleasant work (MAPI support) that tends not to be trendy enough for people to tackle Open Source.
And that's the key: If you can replace exchange without replacing what the users see and believe they need, then you win. And you can start to replace the desktop end later; without panicking the users.
Firewire 1 (IEEE1394) runs at 400Mb/s. In fantasy land, 8 bits gets a serial BYTE. In reality, there is usually some overhead. let's call it 10%. 40MB/s (sorta slow SCSI, these days)
cause an ideal 40MB/s max isn't really a lot to write home about.
OTOH, with just two disks/channel, it's more than most single drives can emit.
What if EVERY TV had a PCCard (aka PCMCIA) slot?
on
Outside the Cable Box
·
· Score: 1
Back in 1978 or so, you needed a cable box. Many TV's had no remote, so it was kinda handy.
It's now 2002. Most of us don't tune with the TV anymore. Many of us have VCRs or some other tuner in between. Most of us are really tired of figuring out that the VCR (or PVR) must be 'listening' to the cable box to record the premium channels while the TV is watching something else. It's a big PITA. I spend too much time walking mom and her friends through how to set it up because of this stupid box.
Most of us have laptops or are familiar in some way with PCCards.
What if EVERY TV tuner had a PCCard (aka PCMCIA)
like slot in it? What if there were no cable box? Let the card handle the decoding and all the roles of the big hot cable box. Let me slide the card into my VCR that is really the tuner, let me carry it into that spare TV I keep in the garage when I'm working there - it's not worth a box, but I've moved the box into there.
Most televisions with tuners (non-"monitors") are capable of tuning in 200+ channels. Yet they are usually locked onto channel 3. The box demodulates the signal then remodulates it - usually with poor quality - to pass it to the TV. The Audio-Out of those boxes generally is limited to a 30dB range - too poor to run into the home ent. system, so I run it out of the demodulator (my VCR).
Results of a no-box system?
Lower costs for cable weasels
Better quality for end users
Slight increase in costs for various tuners to support (run signal to card and take it back) (start now and it will be commoditized and can be advertised as an advantage)
Flexibility for the customer
Portability for the customer
Easier to program/upgrade for cable provider (need digital, fine - re-flash them or swap them out and do it remotely)
Make it a standard and it will be cheap and work for your cable, or satellite, etc. No sony-only or comcast-only system. Pins 2&4 take balanced digital in, pins 8 & 12 put it out. A DSP and flash are "magic goes here", and you're done.
"News for Nerds, stuff that matters" not "information for the sheep of Microsoft"
OpenBSD and NetBSD use ALTQ from KAME. Basic traffic shaping tool that can be used by the largest installs or the smallest.
FreeBSD uses its "dummynet" interface that can also replace those $50,000 (US) "WAN IN A CAN" devices.
If you configure it, it can add a 1000 mile lag and drop 5% of the packets to simulate a T1 between Ontario and Kansas City.
Linux has stuff as well. I don't know it.
Windows: Well, given that the source code is open to everyone and that the code base has always been based on a meritocracy: the only code that goes in are features that people care about, I'd expect it really soon. Hold your breath for it, ok?P?
Slashdot Mirror
At this point we have, lets say, a billion channels available.
Unlike broadcast TV, setting up a new channel doesn't require millions of dollars for local, bazillions for national viewing - it takes provisioning a new channel.
However, the cable folks seem mired in this 1948 model where you have to have a channel setup for years and years rather than realizing that if you want to tack a new channel on for a couple weeks/months you can.
I thought about this during the OJ trial and the Olympics. If people WANT to watch something that's a limited time thing, then hell, create a channel for it for the duration.
OJ? Fine, the "OJ trial channel" is #58 until it's over. Then 58 is back in the pool of available channels. (disclaimer, I didn't own a TV during that whole thing, I just mocked my coworkers who were watching the blow by blow)
Olympics are 24x7 on channel whatever (or 4 channels if you want), with FULL RUNS of the events, not this highlights crap of things the networks deem popular. Want to watch the Finns battle the Algerians in the Biatholon/Luge/Nintendo event? You can.
Costs are minimum.
On topic: So set up an Anime channel.
It runs from 8PM EST until 4AM PST.
Want cartoon boobies? Well, at 11PM PST, the children should be asleep. we can get over our puritan heritage that says naked is bad (even cartoon naked) but watching a guys head get splattered against a wall in a faux gunshot is ok.
I don't see Sears blaming "pirates" on lower washing machine and refrigerator sales.
Nor are airlines complaining about stowaways causing ridership to be down.
RIAA: Charge me a decent price for a CD (lets say, 1hr at minimum wage) and I'll buy them. Oh, and perhaps promote more than your top 15 bands to me.
Mismanagement can make lots of things really expensive.
I've used BIND for YEARS. Very little effort except to keep it up to date. Low costs.
I've seen people mangle Lotus Notes into being unbelievably expensive, shown when the lies, damn lies and statistics took into account the same costs they fixed to our Sendmail and QPopper infrastructure (every desktop admin who did pkg_add of my sendmail build once on the machine was had their salary attributed to the cost of standards based mail). We suggested that their notes costs that left out administrators was a bit slanted.
Careful management and selection of software is important.
The acquisition of software is usually the smallest cost.
But support for "unsupported software" and, more, the ability for a talented administrator to fit it to his company's needs is often well worth that lack of security PHB's have.
That and a list of unresolved bugs from our "supported" software :)
. So yeah, I can take a bug tracking/CRM system, install it and make our bug tracking process fall in line with the vendor's notion of how we should do our business or
I can take open source components (bugzilla, GNATS, etc) and other tools and use them to fit how we do our business already.
The latter might take more effort, but at my previous company, we had an ENORMOUS CRM tool that only ran on windows (now add cost of desktop windows where before we had been a 70% unix shop) and we ended up with a tool that Sales marketing and tech support HATED. The data in it was often useless because it was such a burden to use, and we ended up hiring extra people to deal with data entry.
But I know that I could make a case that showed it was cheaper than using Open Source by perhaps showing that features we didn't really want before, but used later only because they were there (report generation that was handy, but far from critical) would have been an additional cost to add to O.S.S.
On the other hand, I've used tools where once we've been bound in, the ONLY way to generate reports was through expensive tools.
A little Perl and ASCII logs from Open Source often make Open Source a winner on this, but that often won't be taken into account.
Many of us here have slapped in a free tool to do things that the corps were taking forever on. Example:
A $3000/machine host monitoring solution was found and chosen.
Now there must be a committee to best decide how to deploy and configure it.
We get bored. net-SNMP on all our machines (runs scripts, reports info, etc) and NOCOL and 2 days later we have 40 machines monitored via the Web, pages getting sent on outages etc.
6 months later, we're told to take it down and pony up $3000/machine to use the "blessed" software.
Why?
Cause there was something like 1 CD burning plant in the hemisphere. Costs were high. Understood.
Since then (1984?) costs have plunged. The entire cost of the CD, case, liner notes, etc. is around $0.80. Art work might be a little more, but CD's are too small to really have good art.
So record companies rake it in. Artists don't get any more money with the overhead being down, they just bend over and hope the record companies have KY.
Now the companies want to remove the case, the artwork, and everything but the raw bits from the equation. Yeah, someone pays for bandwidth. 1 cost after the master is burned.
And the prices are higher per song that most CDs.
F*ck that. Give me a decent indie band and I'll Paypal them a quarter per song and the artists will make far more money per song than they would in the "big leagues".
I'd also do the micropayment model that's been around:
Everytime I listen to a song, the artist gets 1/4 cent from me.
When my account is dry, I can't listen to the song anymore.
Hows that?
Okay, that song you've been toying with a bit gets recorded. Its ok, not ideal. But if you spend another week in the studio, you're paying even MORE for the time and your contract says this will be ready to be mastered by next week.
You're not proud of it, but it's good enough to slide in between tracks 6 and 8.
It happens. Really.
Bad is when you have 4 - 6 songs like that.
The grateful dead cut side two of an album up into several tracks to meet warner brothers contracts requiring "n tracks" per album.
Music and law meld as well as music and big business.
Um, IE wasn't from Mosaic, it was from SpyGlass, a respectable browser for its time. It, of course was based on the open source Mosaic.
Some of the business people did yell - "do you really see non-technical people using this 'Internet'?" and when we slid Mosaic to a few people "Do you really see business people using this 'World Web' thing?" . Yes, yes I do. "That just shows what you don't know about business." I'll get back to you on that one, ok?
Everyone had Unix desktops (well, most). Sendmail for 6,000 machines run mostly by, er, me, with end admins actually tossing in the binaries and one of 4 config files that ran the whole thing. SMTP got mail from London to Toyko, desktop to desktop, in under 2 seconds.
Did we live on Open Source? Well, the infrastructure did.
Trouble ticket systems took 2 years to be selected and rolled out.
Our group compiled "req" in a day and used that while we waited for Remedy.
Monitoring systems were selected for THOUSANDS per machine. /me looks at ethernet on the NeXT and Sparc 2 "no, hubs and routers, that sort of thing - just pony up the money for each box and we'll monitor it").
We put up CMU SNMP (would now use Net-SNMP) and got better results, despite management ("see, now, snmp is for Network devices"
Most importantly most trading system software is not store bought. Sure, on windows, they use some rapid development stuff. folks I know use a lot of Java, but it's a LOT of custom software.
The Unix problem was that X and Motif were so miserable to develop for. It was like punishment for choosing Unix. My hat is off to the KDE and GNOME folks for picking up the ball that the X Consortium dropped. Mandate application look and feel. You must quit apps through FILE -> Quit. That beats the random ways that you quite in Wordperfect or XV or Lotus or XTerm or whatever.
The financial world will go to where better app development and better support are. That's been MS for a while, I hate to say. GNOME & KDE may save Unix.
And why do I need a dial? I can turn the crank and get Millie who will connect me to anyone I need. Even long distance, now!
New capabilities allow people to change how they use the tools available. It's a slow evolution. Sometimes, there are branches that die out or should die out (WinCE, for example).
DSL and wireless means I can browse decently from my coffee table. "Hey, what's that actor from" means that with tv.yahoo.com and imdb, I can find out, now. Not feasable with desktop in another room and 9600 with PEP connections.
But if I can get IP via otherwise "dead time" on the cells, and I can get things like, hmmm, directions, or "find me the nearest public restroom", then it changes how I interact with the world.
Now, if the stupid 1930's phone interface would die - the 4x4 dial grid (exposing just 3x4) is too stupid for words to spell on. The Kycotera palm/cell showed promise, but it not nearly rugged enough for real people use.
I <heart> my Zaurus.
That said, Suse runs just wonderfully on my Mac, as does NetBSD.
Suse Linux is a derivative of Linux... or something like that :)
I can even run NetBSD diskless on the powerbook by typing "boot net" at the Ok prompt (oddly, wireless diskless booting doesn't work with the OpenBootProm). I'm still waiting for PeeCee's to have a real boot prom instead of that BIOS crap.
Boston is not set up to run these large conventions.
The fact that the number of cabs have been fixed since, what, 1932? and the second-rate town fueds between cabbies from Boston or Cambridge not being allowed to pick up fares in the other town just means that it's difficult to attend conferences there and get around.
Can I say how impressed I am about the T stopping at 12:30AM? (esp when bars are open until a raging 1AM - almost like a real city).
That might have changed, but I worked in clubs for years. Had to park at 2PM, go home or out and do my day. When I got out of work at 3AM, well, cabs are hard to find. The T is stopped (don't drink and drive, but we'll stop transit before the bars).
I hate the yankees as much as any good bostonian, but at least I can drink until 5AM if I want and hop on a subway to about anywhere any time of the night. Or get in one of billion taxis.
Javitts is inconvenient, and it sucks, but at least you don't need to have your show in TWO places with busses. At least its 4 hours drive from about 20% of the population. (DC, Philly, Boston &c).
Let's go to boston when the decide to become a real business town and perhaps when the roads and routes are consistent one week to the next.
This is that 200 machines needed a total of 20 people in the organization to deal with their support.
You are "backed up by a ... team of motivated people".
They are involved in the continued support of these machines. They count.
That person in purchasing whos only job is to handle getting parts and orders for the 400 machines. That's a 0.5FTE for the 200 machines.
That guy you have writing VB scripts to push out changes. He spends maybe 2hrs per day (10hrs/week) on that. Well, there's a 0.25FTE. It counts.
Those 4 people who run the file server, the database server and the other whatsit. They count.
That guy who ends up spending 1 FTE dealing with testing service packs and patches. He counts.
The guys who spend 10hrs/week run the virus scanning boxes at the gateways, make sure that desktops virus defs are up to date, they count.
Every email virus and every effort to stop email born viruses should be charged to the use of Outbreak^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook and Windows.
The guy who Ghosts images onto drive to replace wonky laptop drives or bad desktop drives; the guy who deals with the backups for the servers; they count
And now you have 1 person per 20 or 25 that go and do desktop support, actually install patches on desktops and fix registry settings and deal with application issues that the users have. They count.
I sat next to a trading floor group with 35 folks in it. The head guy said,
"Yeah, our guys are pretty smart. We don't need to have a dedicated System Admin."
Cool, who does the work?
"Our guys pretty much can run their own machines."
That's great. So they spent what? An hour a week on that?
"Nah, more like 2 or 3 hours. But it's much cheaper than a system admin."
So let me just figure this out: You have 35 guys spending 3 hrs/week dealing with system issues; not trading, but dealing with virus updates, anomolies, etc. You spend 105 hrs per week to keep from hiring someone for 40hrs/week right?
"Hmmm, you put it like that and it sounds different... I'll think on that."
Your must statements also fall into the "I wish I lived in your ideal fantasy land" category.
The H1-B program has been so heavily lobbied by those wanting cheap labor that those original intents are nearly meaningless.
And the congress critters went along because, during the boom, they got lots of money from the folks running those companies.
See also: Those companies shipping off the grunt work of coding to the suburbs and office parks of Bombay.
People just presumed that "quick" and "service oriented" were possible. We had brought in some PCs (XTs and ATs) and if someone needed a printer, we could get one for $400 and have it working that afternoon.
When the IBM's were depreciated and also needed connectivity (IRMA boards were $2000 to connect to the mainframe), we started bringing in Unix WorkStations from Sun or Apollo.
With PC-NFS, we met the "services" of the mainframe guys in 1/10th the cost and 1/100th of the time.
Are there places where using Unix is expensive? Sure. The mainframers went somewhere.
OTOH, the ability to take a PC headed for the trash and make it a group file server/web server/print server - leaving the fast machines for the desktops - should not be discounted.
Is MS WIndows cheaper than Unix? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Cheaper Admins, sure. But I've had 3 admins serving 200 Unix developers and they still had time to do scripting and whatnot. Compare and contrast with 1 Windows admin per 10 machines.
So where we had 3 admins, we'd now need 20. Plus managers. Plus meetings.
Most TALENTED admins can use the tools at their finger tips and be MUCH more efficient. It's just that the tools possible for Windows pale in comparison with Unix tools.
In 3 days, I've rolled out production trading floors. A little "boot net", a little CVS and a little cfengine.
Machine dies, I can have it swapped out and the user working in under 3 minutes. With his own desktop and apps and preferences.
I'm still waiting for that "zero admin PC" that stopped the network computer.
OTOH, I had network computers in the form of XTerminal and Diskless computers in 1990. The ran WordPerfect or FrameMaker and spreadsheets and pretty little database front ends.
You need a 1 CPU desktop machine for a receptionist? Gnome or KDE on Linux, FreeBSD, other BSD's etc can meet your needs.
You need a machine to do database service to backend a bunch of sales guys? Fine. Oracle runs nicely on Linux. Sybase runs on MacOS X.
You running derivatives calculations and merging matrices and perhaps doing trade modelling? You can run it on your 12 way Sun or SGI. Maybe you need it faster so you get a 64 way Cray.
They all run Unix.
ls, cc, pwd, grep and sendmail are all there for you. From that little pocket sized firewall appliance to the dual CPU directory server for 20,000 people to the 128 Way SGI that's modeling every square foot inside of Hurricane Iris. It's Unix and generally the skills are all transferable.
Advanced Unix SAs are not just the ones who are good at working around the flaws in the OS; they're the ones with a deep understanding of how best to use the existing tools or how to best make ones that will both meet their needs and not be useless in three years. awk was written in 1973 or so. It's still the Right and Quick answer for many small problems today.
Now what does MS offer? Oh yeah, I virus run-time environment.
With only 2-3hrs/week of TV, yeah, you'd be fine.
1200HRs of TV means you are look at the TV too much. Even over a year.
On a large scope, if I take out an ad it goes to folks in the UK, and JP and all over the US.
With THIS - a neighborhood scope - I could have an ad for LOCAL services that would be seen by LOCAL people:
- The local computer shop
- a store with cool toys for geeks with extra $$$
- The coffee shop
- A locally owned ISP for DSL/Dialup
The banner problem on the global scale is that its too broad. I pay for 50,000 impressions and I have no CLUE if it's being seen by anyone useful or not.
I noticed that Sendmail used to advertise on /. once upon a time.
Did they get ANYONE who is actually in a position to purchase fairly large scale IMAP servers and commercial MTAs?
If they knew that people who liked Open Source and were BUYING (slashdot for technical managers) that model would have worked better.
At least with a local impression, I can KNOW who the users are within a few blocks.
It's an old model applied in a new way (patent it ;) Seems like a good idea.
Good luck.
A Pentium/100 will be fine for that.
Our focus has been on good graphics cards and good monitors. Looking more for resolution than FPS.
That said, builds need to be done and engineers need to not wait. A 4Way "compile" server with very fast local disks serves MANY people.
In reality, development is usually for 4-5 platforms or more. So the Eng sits in front of a 21" screen running BSD or Linux with $VISUAL of choice. Another window is logged into the over priced 2 or 4 Way sun. He saves changes in emacs, hits the other window; catches the compiler crapping all over itself and goes back to emacs.
BACK ON TOPIC:
Laptops are, for the most part, faster than you will ever need them. Same for all but gaming machines for home. My Zaurus is faster than the Sparc 5 I have; faster than the older Mac.
So I buy on the cutting edge of 6-9 months ago.
Apple will screw you - they *won't* tell you that next week they're dumping that machine you just bought. It doesn't matter. It's just as good as when you bought it. I still have a working Powerbook 180 that gets used periodically. Fine client for the kitchen.
But that 2 CPU monster that's $2500 today, or that 17" G4 Laptop heatmonster for $3800 will cost half that in a year. And be no less useful.
In general, the best ugprade you can do it more RAM or faster disks. The CPU is spending a lot of time waiting for I/O anyhow. 2GHz just means more waits.
Buy the trailing edge and put the extra money into RAM, a good monitor and a comfy chair. You're l33t geek friends won't swoon, but really: They're poor and is it really important to impress those guys?
Tested.
If you need help getting more than 100k entries, I'm sure something could be arranged for a consulting fee.
And they dropped Linux support (for LDAP at least) and are expected to drop other non-Sun platforms.
Sendmail has a high performance IMAP server, webmail, directory server, but I don't know about replacing the Contact management that Outbreak has.
OpenSource? Well you can kludge together stuff, (cyrus, calendars, webmail, sendmail) but there's a lot of unpleasant work (MAPI support) that tends not to be trendy enough for people to tackle Open Source.
And that's the key: If you can replace exchange without replacing what the users see and believe they need, then you win. And you can start to replace the desktop end later; without panicking the users.
the G3 desktop machine (the one running NetBSD, right now).
That's 3.
But I still can't upgrade the 4 NeXT's to this NeXTStep 5.6 release they call Jaguar.
Bastards.
~$2k for machine, $500 for monitor
$200 for networking stuff.
1/10th of a desktop support person's salary ($6k?).
4 servers (PDC + BDC + file server + print server) shared by, hmmm, 30-50 people.
4*15k/40 (software licenses, hardware, rackspace) = $1.5k
Network connection (ok, for them free, but for calling internally when it goes down, 0.2FTE).
Software and support for software ($5k EASILY)
Downtime for desktops? Salary and time lost? $100-$200/hour. This includes patches and the like.
I can see $22k/year per machine in an enterprise.
Firewire 1 (IEEE1394) runs at 400Mb/s.
In fantasy land, 8 bits gets a serial BYTE.
In reality, there is usually some overhead. let's call it 10%.
40MB/s (sorta slow SCSI, these days)
3 connectors per voltage offered:
Positive, negative and ground
Computer scientology in use there. My electronics taught me:
Voltage, and a (shared) ground. so 4 voltages needs 5 wires.
But that's Toms Hardware for you.
cause an ideal 40MB/s max isn't really a lot to write home about.
OTOH, with just two disks/channel, it's more than most single drives can emit.
It's now 2002. Most of us don't tune with the TV anymore. Many of us have VCRs or some other tuner in between. Most of us are really tired of figuring out that the VCR (or PVR) must be 'listening' to the cable box to record the premium channels while the TV is watching something else. It's a big PITA. I spend too much time walking mom and her friends through how to set it up because of this stupid box.
Most of us have laptops or are familiar in some way with PCCards.
What if EVERY TV tuner had a PCCard (aka PCMCIA) like slot in it? What if there were no cable box? Let the card handle the decoding and all the roles of the big hot cable box. Let me slide the card into my VCR that is really the tuner, let me carry it into that spare TV I keep in the garage when I'm working there - it's not worth a box, but I've moved the box into there.
Most televisions with tuners (non-"monitors") are capable of tuning in 200+ channels. Yet they are usually locked onto channel 3. The box demodulates the signal then remodulates it - usually with poor quality - to pass it to the TV. The Audio-Out of those boxes generally is limited to a 30dB range - too poor to run into the home ent. system, so I run it out of the demodulator (my VCR).
Results of a no-box system?
- Lower costs for cable weasels
- Better quality for end users
- Slight increase in costs for various tuners to support (run signal to card and take it back) (start now and it will be commoditized and can be advertised as an advantage)
- Flexibility for the customer
- Portability for the customer
- Easier to program/upgrade for cable provider (need digital, fine - re-flash them or swap them out and do it remotely)
Make it a standard and it will be cheap and work for your cable, or satellite, etc. No sony-only or comcast-only system. Pins 2&4 take balanced digital in, pins 8 & 12 put it out. A DSP and flash are "magic goes here", and you're done.TV industry, are you listening?
not "information for the sheep of Microsoft"
OpenBSD and NetBSD use ALTQ from KAME. Basic traffic shaping tool that can be used by the largest installs or the smallest.
FreeBSD uses its "dummynet" interface that can also replace those $50,000 (US) "WAN IN A CAN" devices.
If you configure it, it can add a 1000 mile lag and drop 5% of the packets to simulate a T1 between Ontario and Kansas City.
Linux has stuff as well. I don't know it.
Windows: Well, given that the source code is open to everyone and that the code base has always been based on a meritocracy: the only code that goes in are features that people care about, I'd expect it really soon. Hold your breath for it, ok?P?