A generalization yes, but even the most die hard kernel hacker would likely have problems LEADING and organizing a large project for the first time no matter what age.
I have been writing code for 10 years, in a handful of languages. I thought I was sufficiently skilled, back in the day, and I did get the opportunity to lead a couple of big project during the first dot com bubble.
That being said, I look back on hat experience and see how utterly lacking I was. I learned so much it that time about organization, planning, implementation, documentation, user interface, etc.
I am a solo programmer now, and work like to work primarily on mid-sized web applications. Integrating and automating my customers online businesses with their existing brick and mortar / off line sales.
At this stage I have built a rather larger set of custom code, including a CMS, a PHP application framework, and a bunch of admin scripts, along with end user tools that allow me to hit most projects running. I fill a niche, I understand what I do and what my clients need very well, and also know my limitations and routinely turn down jobs that do not fill my skill set.
I'm still challenged enough to learn new things with each project, but don't have the stress of trying to fit the square-peg in the round hole. Some situations are simply not right. My guess is that most college graduates are not going to have the experience to recognize those situations, since the reasons for the bad fit are usually not technical in nature. Red tape, lack of management support, logistics, budget, etc are real-world variables that you don't usually see in college courses.
How often in a college course where have way through a project the professor changes the specs completely, and makes it do a week sooner? Or what about if the professor mandates that you have to work with another student that is at a satellite campus 3 hours away. Or what about if the professor assigns a project, but requires another professor to sign off on each stage of your development. There are some many ways that red tape and real world variables can make a 10 minute project into a 6 month effort. Is a college student going to see those coming?
ATA over Ethernet seems like an even better choice for small biz, than obsolete fibre channel. In some cases it may be a better choice over new fibre channel.
It mentions how you can use the ata over ethernet in combination with iSCSI. The ATAoE protocol has much less overhead than iSCSI, because ATAoE is not using TCPIP, rather it is its own non-routable protocol to be used for local storage using the ethernet hardware. It is explained a lot better in other places, but Iit sounds like something the original poster would be interested in.
My comments is with the new backend design in general. I am a subscriber, and a have the display set for "minimal'. With the old code base, I could have slashboxes and they showed up as nice lists at the bottom of the page, now withthe layout set at minimal, the slashboxes are gone.
I could probably just subscribe to the RSS feeds for the equivalent of slashboxes; however, I prefer to get my news for nerds in a browser, because I generally do not like RSS readers.
Oh well. As far as the little story stubs go, they are ok. What would be cool is if they were more closely related to the story they are "attached" to. To me (and apparently others) they are a bit confusing, because they look like some sort of footnote to specific the story, rather than simply other titles in the same section.
I think they would work better if the stories were organized by section on the main page (ala USAToday / CNN.com, etc) That way the lead stories are at the top and it is clear that the story stubs are part of the section. Of course that would destroy the blog look and the chronological ordering of the stories. Put I think the haphazard "blog" style is not a good fit for a site like slashdot, since it has many editiors and sections. For traditional blog style site where the chronolgy represents a train of thought, of an individual blogger (much like it did long ago when this was started by Taco) the chronology added something to the site. Here now the format is just plain confusing and annoying since the submmision queue is so backlogged we often see stories several days after they were submitted. Also changing the main page to group articles by section would likely cut down on dups, since a qucik scan would make it much clearer what has already been posted.
Yes I know these requests can basically be accomplished using slash boxes, but getting back to my original point, my slash boxes are gone!
As an owner/operator of a small hosting company (I am not going to pimp my own company here), I can say this kind of thread is a bit irritating, because it happens way too often. I am regularly dealing with web server security issues caused by users.
Security is always important, but so is the user experience. I would love to only allow users to select from known good preinstalled scripts. But is that realistic? No.... I would love to run PHP in safe mode by default, but then I get plenty of customers jumping ship because their scripts no longer work.
The point is ignorant users are going to cause problems. Hopefully only to their accounts, but often enough those problems extend to everyone on a shared (read cheap) server.
If you buy cheap hosting, you get cheap hosting. Do not expect a hosting company to bend over backwards for $5/month.
You install a poorly written script...Then your site gets hacked. Popular scripts make popular targets. How hard would it have been to do a google search BEFORE installing? another tip, get the script from the original author or official site. Web scripts are usually patched quickly, but often old versions hang around on mirrors and software search sites.
In this case, how much do you think your little screw up cost the hosting company? Did you ever stop to think that your mistake probably cost the company more $$$ than they will ever see from you?
Hosting company at a MINIMUM pays for: 1. The wasted bandwidth your error caused. 2. The administrators time to stop the problem. 3. The technical support persons time to deal with you. 4. The administrative time it takes to collect the files and cover their asses, in case law enforcement becomes involved. 5. The admin and support time it takes to deal with the numerous complaints that will flood them. Likely they heard from end users pissed off that they got spam/malware that originated from their IP range. They probably also had to answer to their upstream providers, and give them detailed evidence that the problem has been dealt with.
So your little error has cost the hosting company, in an best case scenario, hundreds of dollars by the time you add up the hourly costs for the administrator(s), technical support, the BW, storage and other overhead.
So how much did you pay them for hosting your site? $5 a month? $10 a month? You will probably move on to the next $2.50/month hosting offer you find, long before they recover the cost of your blunder.
Like, I said I deal with this situation regularly, it is not pleasant for anyone involved. It really is a lot easier (and cheaper) for you to install a copy of PHPMYADMIN and backup your database, and download your web site. Than it is for a hosting company to commit resources to holding your hand through every technical blunder you make.
If your data is important it is ultimately your responsibility that the data is taken care of, not your hosting company, not your ISP, not the maker of your PC or of your hard drive. If your data gets lost it is YOUR problem.
Yes, there are slime ball hosting companies (I personally hate them because they tend to make customers pretty paranoid, but at least their shittyness provides me with additional business). But customers need to understand that they have responsibilities and obligations too. Otherwise the hosting experience isn't likely to be a good one for anyone involved.
Thunderbird has actually done client side filtering quite well for the last several versions. Way back evolution used to to an acceptable job. KMAIL has finally ccaught up as you pointed out, which is why I am finally using it as my main mail app. The point though is filtering has been available for a while with IMAP.
It is strange why it has taken so long for the clients to mature with respect to IMAP. I find that strange, as IMAP has been around a long time. I remember using PINE in college back in 1995, with the new IMAP support. I have been hooked on IMAP for a long time. I guess I am one of those grumpy old time users...
I use both thunderbird and KMAIL form multiple computers. KMAIL is now my primary client. The key for me is all my mailboxes are IMAP, and I make sure to specify sent, and trash folders that are on the IMAP server rather than the default local versions.
I don't know how (or why) people choose to live with POP mail boxes. I cannot believe POP3 has not gone the way of telnet. IMAP is so superior, that it really makes little sense to use anything else...
IMAP makes a much bigger difference if you have multiple computers, than the mail client. IMAP makes life easy in a multiple computer world. Most ISPs and hosting companies offer it, but not all of them advertise that fact.
The other cool thing is with IMAP it can be used as a universal remote file server (much like an ftp server) using KDE IOSLAVES enter the url: imap://USERNAME@IMAP.SERVER.HOST.NAME/
You might not have a lot of use for it, but it makes it easy to backup large messages, or an alternate private place to dump some files (especially if you have a large mailbox quota.) On many hosts the IMAP folders are in the user home directory, so browsing via IMAP is an alternate way to manage files on the server.
I was (and still am to a lesser extent) a Thunderbird users, but with my new Kubuntu box I finally switched to a primarily KMAIL setup. The main reasons are the very nice integration with the KDE environment.
It is so nice to be able to easily drag and drop between konqueror for attachments (especially for my non-techy wife). The tight integration really is the main thing for me.
I am a bit tired of customizing things, I have been doing it for close to 10 years now with Linux, that I am at the stage where it is nice to just have things work without having to spend the time and effort to make them work.
Thunderbird is nice, and works fine, and I like the filtering and the plug-in support better but to get the same level of integration with KDE takes much more effort.
I have found that Thunderbird still seems more stable, KMAIL on KDE 3.5 still crashes once every couple of days on me and has some weird "lock-ups" when it has trouble with a network connection. (I have a flaky switch that itself needs to be reset every few days, and that seems to cause KMAIL grief).
I have not used Evolution since I gave up on gnome about 3 years ago. It was probably the one thing I missed the most about gnome when I first switched to KDE. I know I could run it on KDE, but it always seemed to be a major pain after the early days of red carpet setup.
I personally like the sites I design to have a balance of white space between the layout (the actual site design) and the content. Hence I tend to fix my design so that it is relatively small about 780 pixels wide. That way when a client has a short page, with only a paragraph or two and someone on 1600x1200 maximizes the screen, the page is rendered so that it still looks like a couple of paragraphs, as opposed to a couple of sentences.
If you don't have the content to fill the screen I believe it is better to fix the viewing size of the layout, and force the white space to the edges, while at the same time minimizing the white space within the content. That way the site renders relatively consistently page to page, and does not force eye strain. Moving your eyes side to side for long distances is *almost* as bad as horizontal scrolling. That is why newspapers and magazines and other relatively large format publications use columns. Of course websites can use columns too, but the text in those columns is usually fixed, and cannot easily adjust to resolution, and hence the visual design tends to look really ugly at high resolution if the width of the columns is not somehow fixed in advance.
WTF? What does open source have to do with file sharers. Opensource the author has EXPLICITLY given permission, under the conditions of the license to redistribute the software or more generally the work they produced.
The copyright owner in the case of OSS may have many reasons for their actions, and are motivated by more than $$$. There are some occasions where squeezing every last dollar does not make sense. For example many in-house applications, that perform limited, but useful tasks. It would cost more to distribute and support those applications than it would to just give it away.
Why give it away? Say your little application saves your company $50 a day, in the time it takes hourly employees to sort and classify incoming email orders. Well if you give that away to another company, and they save the same $50 a day, that is about $15,000 a year. Maybe they can now hire another part-time employee, or slightly lower their prices, or pay a bigger xmas bonus to their employees.
There are also many other ways to be compensated other than money. If you hate OSS what the hell are you doing hanging out on slashdot? Slashdot and its parent companies are open source hippies after all and give away source code all the time.
Also you may want to refrain from using the Internet since most sites are served up by Apache, most email passes through servers based on Sendmail or one of its open source competitors, ftp / ssh and numerous other protocols are also dominated by open source tools.
The fact is you'd still be enjoying Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve at $50 a month, on a $2000+ Windows box or a $3000+ Mac box if not for open source.
My kids watch a children's show called the "Magic School Bus". The school kids taken on magical field trips in the bus. Often the trip revolves around a child making a silly wish. For example one kid wished "recycling" didn't exist. So the bus magically transformed the world into "a world without recycling", which of course was not a pretty site.
Anyway, my point is you are like that simple minded child, who could not comprehend the world beyond their own small world view. Hopefully you like that fictional child will see the bigger picture eventually and be so selfish and self centered.
I guess until then you can move to France, since they do want to outlaw open source, though you'd have to deal with the darn file sharers... Oh well I guess you'll just have to pick your poison (which is fine by me.)
The one point that is not often said, but I think is important is the fact that nearly everyone *HATES* the record labels. Most people love music, and artists, but the business that is around it is obviously flawed.
The lack of sales probably has a lot to do with the fact that the labels are still trying to sell the stuff THEY want us to buy, rather than embracing the internet and allowing consumers the real opportunity to buy the music they want to hear for fair prices.
On a more consious level I think consumers are like me and don't want to support the selfish, greedy labels who we all know only care about $$$. They shit on arists, they shit on fans, they'll shit on everyone they possibly can to get every last possible penny. The industry truely distgusts me.
One other factor I postulate has something to do with the decline in sales is the old payola scheme. I am sure payola is alive and well, the evidence is the shitty state of over-the-air radio. It sucks so bad. The labels are trying so bad to *CREATE* the next big hit that they are cutting off their own noses just to spite their face. In an effort to force shitty music on us, they influence radio stations to play their shit. It is much easier now to influence playlists since the radio network has been revived, the large multi-market broadcast companies, like clear channel, make it much easier for payolaish side deals to happen. Instead of making deals with a hundred small stations the labels can work out arrangements at the top.
So the record industy is plummeting more because of their selfish, greedy actions, and their ineptitude to recognize a paradime shift in the way people listen to and respons to music. The inertia will only carry them so far.
What they need to do is:
> Give people a good product, and let them decide what that product is -- in a word give them a CHOICE.
> Stop wasting time and $$ on tracking down file swappers and sueing them. Create competative legal services, and track the illegal services to know the direction the market is going. In the mordern world patterns change quickly, and now that they cannot control the pattern, they have to learn to recognize and adapt quickly. They must shift from being proactive to reactive.
> Look at other business models to sell cds. Subscriptions, downloads, memory cards, differnet formats, different quality. Sell some low quality CDs at a cheaper price. Make music more readily available. If people like the lowend stuff they will "upgrade"
> Partner with a cellphones. Offer some type of low bandwidth *FREE* streaming radio to all cellphones.
> Do something to make people like them again. I'm not creative enough to think of anything along this lines, since I think most of the people running these companies are canidates for the next anti-christ.
I have done this on white box machines. Albeit not in a "production" environment.
Using a second machine as a serial console server, then enable the serial console on the "target" server.
Obviously, this is not slick, and if the BIOS on the MB does not support a serial console you don't have "full" access, but for 99% of the issues you'll run into a serial terminal on a white box system, combined with a reboot switch will work.
The other 100% you'll have to make a trip, but you'd probably have to make a trip anyway, if the problem is serious enough...
I was just about to post the same comment. Olympus has been doing this for years... I still use my E10 regularly, and I can definately say it is *NOT* a compact camera. Anyway, dpreview has a very detailed (as usual) review of the camera at: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscr1/
Only if it is an on-site warranty, and the turn around is guaranteed in a short period of time. I have used White boxes, because I can usuall afford to buy 3 lowend boxes for about the price of a single Dell.
I run webserver and have about 25 boxes. I buy motherboards from only a couple of manufacturers that I trust. I run commodity Harddrives, and use rsync rather than fancy scsi. I look at the individual warranty on the parts.
I generally save enough $$ that I can buy the server and a "hot-spare" for well less than the price of a name brand box. I have had relatively few hardware issues, and even the ones I did have could be fixed quickly and cheaply. It is nice when no single component costs more than about $150.
I guess in essense I am warrantying it myself, warranties do no good if the server is going to be down for any length of time and you are dependent on a big companies whims.
I thought the laptop would be available to all students EVERYWHERE. In the orginal article I thought I read that at least one state (Mass?) was alreaady considering aquiring these for their students...
What is the problem with having a design goal, that would allow it to be deployed in thiord world countries? They will still work in the USA....
I like Kmail also, but one thing that Thunderbird has that Kmail does not is the ability to filter IMAP messages on the server (especially the SPAM). I have not used POP in years, and had grown quite accustom to the filters applied to my IMAP mail boxes in Thunderbird. I also *REALLY* like kmail integration with the KDE desktop. (KDE's IOSLAVES simply rock). So I was very torn, I finally settled on a very kludgy work-around. I run a copy of thunderbird solely to filter my incoming mail. The normal interaction with my inbox is through Kmail (composing, manually deleting / organizing etc) Far from ideal, but it works for me (for the most part)...
What I really really want though is to be able to have my blackberry sync the calendar and email with out having the enterprise server. Or having an open source equivalent black berry server.
Basically, you add your own disks, and have up to several terabytes of RAID storage. The best part is that teh RAID and all the complicated stuff is ghandled by the drive unit, to the OS it just looks like one huge drive.
You can add a NAS (SAMBA/NFS) server (or roll your own), to make accessing the drive from Windows / Mac even easier.
I don't have one of these myself, but have been drooling for a while...
I got my start in the tech business doing support for an EDI software company- For those not aware EDI - Electronic Data Interchange - was setup to allow business to business transactions before the internet was widely popular. When I was working with EDI , there were several main communication networks, which were really nothing more than an overly complex electronic mailbox. These networks were a royal pain in the ass because they all had different communicatioon protocols, usually worked with only specific brands of modems, and could be accessed with only very specific software.
Amazing what huge companies can force their little vendors to do. Anyway, the EDI documents where essentially text documents that where defined according to a standard. The definitions where often "modified" by the companies and its partners (causing moe headaches for software vendors). But the bottom line is EDI at the end of the last century filled a niche that XML has made **MUCH** simplier. In fact XML was one of the reason why I changed my focus and got out of EDI, I saw that the Internet and XML specifically were going to make EDI nothing more than a legacy dinosaur.
I pointed out these mistakes in a comment to the editor on Forbes already.
I hope they get inudated. To me to misrepresent the GPL so grossly is either extreme negligence, i.e. the author (Daniel Fisher) is such a lazy writer that he cannot be bothered to put the term GPL into Google and read the first age that comes back -OR- Mr. Fisher is just another MS cronie, trying to spread FUD to decision makers in businesses (Forbes target market) to further hinder OSS adoption. Either way it does a great disservice to the OSS community.
A much more minor nitpick, but in this situation, I think they also should have used the term GNU GPL, since their audience is not likely to be familiar with the GNU project, and thus may have more difficulty finding the gnu.org website to learn about the license and the background. Mr. Fisher makes it sound like the GPL is some sort of anti-american anti-capitialist pinko tool that "prohits" making money.
I cannot believe Forbes would make this the feature article on thier main page, that certainly lost them a lot of credibilty in my mind. -MS2k
I have done work for people and hired people for work through rent-a-coder. Both types of experiences when pretty smoothly. Like anything you have to be able to effectively communicate.
As a programmer you need to be able to communicate to the potential client what you can do. This is the hardest part in my opinion.
Overall communication is the biggest key. Do you understand what the bidder wants? Does the bid have enough information for you as the coder to accurately estimate the amount of time.
Bottom line is can you work with the person at the other end? The few times I have participated it went pretty well because as a coder I knew what they wanted, and if there was a question I come usuallly elicit a clearer response. As a buyer, it was easy for me to define metrics / milestones for the project. I also knew approximately how long and hard the task was because I have done a lot of coding (I just didn't have time to do it myself).
Anyway, I think rent-a-coder is a pretty good service, -MS2k
Then you have to define "belt" - if you look atthe relative distances of things the object in the kuiper "belt" are more spread out that say the objects (read planets) in the inner solar system of roughly similar size.
Personally I think it is silly to disqualify something because it has "neighbors" or orbits in a "belt".
My $.02: Any object that revolves around a star, and is not a star, has enough mass to be roughly spherical (say +/- 1% of a perfect sphere) due to its gravity is a PLANET.
Objects that are roughly spherical that revolve around planets are MOONS (regardless of size.) If two objects revolve around each other and their center of gravity lies outside the radius of either partner then it is a binary planet.
Objects that revolve around a star that are not roughly spherical are MINOR OBJECTS. This leads us to a bit of a problem because under my definition there would be no distinction between our friends the comets and asteroids.
I imagine there could be a further classification, based on the shape of the orbit - so we can continue to have "comets" and "asteroids". However I do not like using the orbit shape in any definition.
Objects that revolve around a planet taht are not roughly spherical are SATELLITES.
By the way the reason WHY i do not like using the shape of the orbit or something like the vicinity of other objects in the definition is simple. Those characteristics can be changed. Orbits gradually change over time, especially early in the life cycle of the solar system.
Granted objects are "captured" by planets and stars, and "ejected" in the same way. However, given enough time (and any external influences) don't orbits tend to become circular? So just because comets have highly elliptical orbits now does not mean they will be elliptical forever. The orbital shape is a TRANSITION characteristic. It is not inherent to the object.
Oh well I have rambled on way to long about this....I am ponderig the much larger question - "Why do I care?"
I have to agree with the bottom browser placement of the find box, and the elimination of the "go" menu. I have NEVER scene anyone use that.
Though I disagree with his take on tabs. I love having a blank tab, because I often prefer typing a URL (or at leat the first few characters) to using the mouse for drop down in my bookmarks. Bookmarks work great if you only have a few, but I tend to bookmark interesting sites that I won't visit frequently, but I nevertheless find interesting.
I never book my frequent sites, my browsing goes like this: slas, cnn, coa, espn, nfl, never takes more than 4 characters to get to where I go most often. If I were to scroll through my bookmark list it takes considerably longer. So for my usage firefox work the best.
Though I would like a little button nextto the URL bar to instantly clear it like in Konq. That makes it much easier in Linux to copy and paste URLS. A pet peeve i have is selecting a URL with the mouse,and going to the browser to "midde click" paste and having the URL automatically become selected, thus wiping out the X windows clipboard. Yes I know I can usually use the seperate cntl-c / cntl-v but that requires switching from mouse to keyboard and back....
Slashdot Mirror
A generalization yes, but even the most die hard kernel hacker would likely have problems LEADING and organizing a large project for the first time no matter what age.
I have been writing code for 10 years, in a handful of languages. I thought I was sufficiently skilled, back in the day, and I did get the opportunity to lead a couple of big project during the first dot com bubble.
That being said, I look back on hat experience and see how utterly lacking I was. I learned so much it that time about organization, planning, implementation, documentation, user interface, etc.
I am a solo programmer now, and work like to work primarily on mid-sized web applications. Integrating and automating my customers online businesses with their existing brick and mortar / off line sales.
At this stage I have built a rather larger set of custom code, including a CMS, a PHP application framework, and a bunch of admin scripts, along with end user tools that allow me to hit most projects running. I fill a niche, I understand what I do and what my clients need very well, and also know my limitations and routinely turn down jobs that do not fill my skill set.
I'm still challenged enough to learn new things with each project, but don't have the stress of trying to fit the square-peg in the round hole. Some situations are simply not right. My guess is that most college graduates are not going to have the experience to recognize those situations, since the reasons for the bad fit are usually not technical in nature. Red tape, lack of management support, logistics, budget, etc are real-world variables that you don't usually see in college courses.
How often in a college course where have way through a project the professor changes the specs completely, and makes it do a week sooner? Or what about if the professor mandates that you have to work with another student that is at a satellite campus 3 hours away. Or what about if the professor assigns a project, but requires another professor to sign off on each stage of your development. There are some many ways that red tape and real world variables can make a 10 minute project into a 6 month effort. Is a college student going to see those coming?
That's my $0.02
-Ms2k
ATA over Ethernet seems like an even better choice for small biz, than obsolete fibre channel. In some cases it may be a better choice over new fibre channel.
Heres a little write up on it: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS3189760067.html
It mentions how you can use the ata over ethernet in combination with iSCSI. The ATAoE protocol has much less overhead than iSCSI, because ATAoE is not using TCPIP, rather it is its own non-routable protocol to be used for local storage using the ethernet hardware. It is explained a lot better in other places, but Iit sounds like something the original poster would be interested in.
-MS2k
Comcast just renumbered me a short while ago. Now my IP is Top 10 material. That made my day!
-MS2K
My comments is with the new backend design in general. I am a subscriber, and a have the display set for "minimal'. With the old code base, I could have slashboxes and they showed up as nice lists at the bottom of the page, now withthe layout set at minimal, the slashboxes are gone.
I could probably just subscribe to the RSS feeds for the equivalent of slashboxes; however, I prefer to get my news for nerds in a browser, because I generally do not like RSS readers.
Oh well. As far as the little story stubs go, they are ok. What would be cool is if they were more closely related to the story they are "attached" to. To me (and apparently others) they are a bit confusing, because they look like some sort of footnote to specific the story, rather than simply other titles in the same section.
I think they would work better if the stories were organized by section on the main page (ala USAToday / CNN.com, etc) That way the lead stories are at the top and it is clear that the story stubs are part of the section. Of course that would destroy the blog look and the chronological ordering of the stories. Put I think the haphazard "blog" style is not a good fit for a site like slashdot, since it has many editiors and sections. For traditional blog style site where the chronolgy represents a train of thought, of an individual blogger (much like it did long ago when this was started by Taco) the chronology added something to the site. Here now the format is just plain confusing and annoying since the submmision queue is so backlogged we often see stories several days after they were submitted. Also changing the main page to group articles by section would likely cut down on dups, since a qucik scan would make it much clearer what has already been posted.
Yes I know these requests can basically be accomplished using slash boxes, but getting back to my original point, my slash boxes are gone!
-MS2k
I was just about to plunk down some cash for the 7D, after himming and hawing for weeks...
Now I have to start my search over, but atleat I won't be stuck on a dead end platform....
-MS2k
As an owner/operator of a small hosting company (I am not going to pimp my own company here), I can say this kind of thread is a bit irritating, because it happens way too often. I am regularly dealing with web server security issues caused by users.
/month.
Security is always important, but so is the user experience. I would love to only allow users to select from known good preinstalled scripts. But is that realistic? No.... I would love to run PHP in safe mode by default, but then I get plenty of customers jumping ship because their scripts no longer work.
The point is ignorant users are going to cause problems. Hopefully only to their accounts, but often enough those problems extend to everyone on a shared (read cheap) server.
If you buy cheap hosting, you get cheap hosting. Do not expect a hosting company to bend over backwards for $5
You install a poorly written script...Then your site gets hacked. Popular scripts make popular targets. How hard would it have been to do a google search BEFORE installing? another tip, get the script from the original author or official site. Web scripts are usually patched quickly, but often old versions hang around on mirrors and software search sites.
In this case, how much do you think your little screw up cost the hosting company? Did you ever stop to think that your mistake probably cost the company more $$$ than they will ever see from you?
Hosting company at a MINIMUM pays for:
1. The wasted bandwidth your error caused.
2. The administrators time to stop the problem.
3. The technical support persons time to deal with you.
4. The administrative time it takes to collect the files and cover their asses, in case law enforcement becomes involved.
5. The admin and support time it takes to deal with the numerous complaints that will flood them. Likely they heard from end users pissed off that they got spam/malware that originated from their IP range. They probably also had to answer to their upstream providers, and give them detailed evidence that the problem has been dealt with.
So your little error has cost the hosting company, in an best case scenario, hundreds of dollars by the time you add up the hourly costs for the administrator(s), technical support, the BW, storage and other overhead.
So how much did you pay them for hosting your site? $5 a month? $10 a month? You will probably move on to the next $2.50/month hosting offer you find, long before they recover the cost of your blunder.
Like, I said I deal with this situation regularly, it is not pleasant for anyone involved. It really is a lot easier (and cheaper) for you to install a copy of PHPMYADMIN and backup your database, and download your web site. Than it is for a hosting company to commit resources to holding your hand through every technical blunder you make.
If your data is important it is ultimately your responsibility that the data is taken care of, not your hosting company, not your ISP, not the maker of your PC or of your hard drive. If your data gets lost it is YOUR problem.
Yes, there are slime ball hosting companies (I personally hate them because they tend to make customers pretty paranoid, but at least their shittyness provides me with additional business). But customers need to understand that they have responsibilities and obligations too. Otherwise the hosting experience isn't likely to be a good one for anyone involved.
-Ms2k
Thunderbird has actually done client side filtering quite well for the last several versions. Way back evolution used to to an acceptable job. KMAIL has finally ccaught up as you pointed out, which is why I am finally using it as my main mail app. The point though is filtering has been available for a while with IMAP.
It is strange why it has taken so long for the clients to mature with respect to IMAP. I find that strange, as IMAP has been around a long time. I remember using PINE in college back in 1995, with the new IMAP support. I have been hooked on IMAP for a long time. I guess I am one of those grumpy old time users...
-MS2k
I use both thunderbird and KMAIL form multiple computers. KMAIL is now my primary client. The key for me is all my mailboxes are IMAP, and I make sure to specify sent, and trash folders that are on the IMAP server rather than the default local versions.
I don't know how (or why) people choose to live with POP mail boxes. I cannot believe POP3 has not gone the way of telnet. IMAP is so superior, that it really makes little sense to use anything else...
IMAP makes a much bigger difference if you have multiple computers, than the mail client. IMAP makes life easy in a multiple computer world. Most ISPs and hosting companies offer it, but not all of them advertise that fact.
The other cool thing is with IMAP it can be used as a universal remote file server (much like an ftp server) using KDE IOSLAVES enter the url: imap://USERNAME@IMAP.SERVER.HOST.NAME/
You might not have a lot of use for it, but it makes it easy to backup large messages, or an alternate private place to dump some files (especially if you have a large mailbox quota.) On many hosts the IMAP folders are in the user home directory, so browsing via IMAP is an alternate way to manage files on the server.
-MS2k
I was (and still am to a lesser extent) a Thunderbird users, but with my new Kubuntu box I finally switched to a primarily KMAIL setup. The main reasons are the very nice integration with the KDE environment.
It is so nice to be able to easily drag and drop between konqueror for attachments (especially for my non-techy wife). The tight integration really is the main thing for me.
I am a bit tired of customizing things, I have been doing it for close to 10 years now with Linux, that I am at the stage where it is nice to just have things work without having to spend the time and effort to make them work.
Thunderbird is nice, and works fine, and I like the filtering and the plug-in support better but to get the same level of integration with KDE takes much more effort.
I have found that Thunderbird still seems more stable, KMAIL on KDE 3.5 still crashes once every couple of days on me and has some weird "lock-ups" when it has trouble with a network connection. (I have a flaky switch that itself needs to be reset every few days, and that seems to cause KMAIL grief).
I have not used Evolution since I gave up on gnome about 3 years ago.
It was probably the one thing I missed the most about gnome when I first switched to KDE. I know I could run it on KDE, but it always seemed to be a major pain after the early days of red carpet setup.
-MS2k
I personally like the sites I design to have a balance of white space between the layout (the actual site design) and the content. Hence I tend to fix my design so that it is relatively small about 780 pixels wide. That way when a client has a short page, with only a paragraph or two and someone on 1600x1200 maximizes the screen, the page is rendered so that it still looks like a couple of paragraphs, as opposed to a couple of sentences.
If you don't have the content to fill the screen I believe it is better to fix the viewing size of the layout, and force the white space to the edges, while at the same time minimizing the white space within the content. That way the site renders relatively consistently page to page, and does not force eye strain. Moving your eyes side to side for long distances is *almost* as bad as horizontal scrolling. That is why newspapers and magazines and other relatively large format publications use columns. Of course websites can use columns too, but the text in those columns is usually fixed, and cannot easily adjust to resolution, and hence the visual design tends to look really ugly at high resolution if the width of the columns is not somehow fixed in advance.
-MS2k
WTF? What does open source have to do with file sharers. Opensource the author has EXPLICITLY given permission, under the conditions of the license to redistribute the software or more generally the work they produced.
The copyright owner in the case of OSS may have many reasons for their actions, and are motivated by more than $$$. There are some occasions where squeezing every last dollar does not make sense. For example many in-house applications, that perform limited, but useful tasks. It would cost more to distribute and support those applications than it would to just give it away.
Why give it away? Say your little application saves your company $50 a day, in the time it takes hourly employees to sort and classify incoming email orders. Well if you give that away to another company, and they save the same $50 a day, that is about $15,000 a year. Maybe they can now hire another part-time employee, or slightly lower their prices, or pay a bigger xmas bonus to their employees.
There are also many other ways to be compensated other than money. If you hate OSS what the hell are you doing hanging out on slashdot? Slashdot and its parent companies are open source hippies after all and give away source code all the time.
Also you may want to refrain from using the Internet since most sites are served up by Apache, most email passes through servers based on Sendmail or one of its open source competitors, ftp / ssh and numerous other protocols are also dominated by open source tools.
The fact is you'd still be enjoying Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve at $50 a month, on a $2000+ Windows box or a $3000+ Mac box if not for open source.
My kids watch a children's show called the "Magic School Bus". The school kids taken on magical field trips in the bus. Often the trip revolves around a child making a silly wish. For example one kid wished "recycling" didn't exist. So the bus magically transformed the world into "a world without recycling", which of course was not a pretty site.
Anyway, my point is you are like that simple minded child, who could not comprehend the world beyond their own small world view. Hopefully you like that fictional child will see the bigger picture eventually and be so selfish and self centered.
I guess until then you can move to France, since they do want to outlaw open source, though you'd have to deal with the darn file sharers... Oh well I guess you'll just have to pick your poison (which is fine by me.)
-MS2k
The one point that is not often said, but I think is important is the fact that nearly everyone *HATES* the record labels. Most people love music, and artists, but the business that is around it is obviously flawed.
The lack of sales probably has a lot to do with the fact that the labels are still trying to sell the stuff THEY want us to buy, rather than embracing the internet and allowing consumers the real opportunity to buy the music they want to hear for fair prices.
On a more consious level I think consumers are like me and don't want to support the selfish, greedy labels who we all know only care about $$$. They shit on arists, they shit on fans, they'll shit on everyone they possibly can to get every last possible penny. The industry truely distgusts me.
One other factor I postulate has something to do with the decline in sales is the old payola scheme. I am sure payola is alive and well, the evidence is the shitty state of over-the-air radio. It sucks so bad. The labels are trying so bad to *CREATE* the next big hit that they are cutting off their own noses just to spite their face. In an effort to force shitty music on us, they influence radio stations to play their shit. It is much easier now to influence playlists since the radio network has been revived, the large multi-market broadcast companies, like clear channel, make it much easier for payolaish side deals to happen. Instead of making deals with a hundred small stations the labels can work out arrangements at the top.
So the record industy is plummeting more because of their selfish, greedy actions, and their ineptitude to recognize a paradime shift in the way people listen to and respons to music. The inertia will only carry them so far.
What they need to do is:
> Give people a good product, and let them decide what that product is -- in a word give them a CHOICE.
> Stop wasting time and $$ on tracking down file swappers and sueing them. Create competative legal services, and track the illegal services to know the direction the market is going. In the mordern world patterns change quickly, and now that they cannot control the pattern, they have to learn to recognize and adapt quickly. They must shift from being proactive to reactive.
> Look at other business models to sell cds. Subscriptions, downloads, memory cards, differnet formats, different quality. Sell some low quality CDs at a cheaper price. Make music more readily available. If people like the lowend stuff they will "upgrade"
> Partner with a cellphones. Offer some type of low bandwidth *FREE* streaming radio to all cellphones.
> Do something to make people like them again. I'm not creative enough to think of anything along this lines, since I think most of the people running these companies are canidates for the next anti-christ.
I have done this on white box machines. Albeit not in a "production" environment.
Using a second machine as a serial console server, then enable the serial console on the "target" server.
Obviously, this is not slick, and if the BIOS on the MB does not support a serial console you don't have "full" access, but for 99% of the issues you'll run into a serial terminal on a white box system, combined with a reboot switch will work.
The other 100% you'll have to make a trip, but you'd probably have to make a trip anyway, if the problem is serious enough...
-MS2k
I was just about to post the same comment. Olympus has been doing this for years... I still use my E10 regularly, and I can definately say it is *NOT* a compact camera. Anyway, dpreview has a very detailed (as usual) review of the camera at: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscr1/
-MS2K
Only if it is an on-site warranty, and the turn around is guaranteed in a short period of time. I have used White boxes, because I can usuall afford to buy 3 lowend boxes for about the price of a single Dell.
I run webserver and have about 25 boxes. I buy motherboards from only a couple of manufacturers that I trust. I run commodity Harddrives, and use rsync rather than fancy scsi. I look at the individual warranty on the parts.
I generally save enough $$ that I can buy the server and a "hot-spare" for well less than the price of a name brand box. I have had relatively few hardware issues, and even the ones I did have could be fixed quickly and cheaply. It is nice when no single component costs more than about $150.
I guess in essense I am warrantying it myself, warranties do no good if the server is going to be down for any length of time and you are dependent on a big companies whims.
-MS2k
I thought the laptop would be available to all students EVERYWHERE. In the orginal article I thought I read that at least one state (Mass?) was alreaady considering aquiring these for their students...
What is the problem with having a design goal, that would allow it to be deployed in thiord world countries? They will still work in the USA....
-MS2k
The IMAP server supports sieve, which unfortuantely mine does not.
I like Kmail also, but one thing that Thunderbird has that Kmail does not is the ability to filter IMAP messages on the server (especially the SPAM). I have not used POP in years, and had grown quite accustom to the filters applied to my IMAP mail boxes in Thunderbird. I also *REALLY* like kmail integration with the KDE desktop. (KDE's IOSLAVES simply rock). So I was very torn, I finally settled on a very kludgy work-around. I run a copy of thunderbird solely to filter my incoming mail. The normal interaction with my inbox is through Kmail (composing, manually deleting / organizing etc) Far from ideal, but it works for me (for the most part)...
What I really really want though is to be able to have my blackberry sync the calendar and email with out having the enterprise server. Or having an open source equivalent black berry server.
MS2k
If I were tasked with this same job this is the solution I would use:
http://coraid.com/
Basically, you add your own disks, and have up to several terabytes of RAID storage. The best part is that teh RAID and all the complicated stuff is ghandled by the drive unit, to the OS it just looks like one huge drive.
You can add a NAS (SAMBA/NFS) server (or roll your own), to make accessing the drive from Windows / Mac even easier.
I don't have one of these myself, but have been drooling for a while...
-Ms2k
I got my start in the tech business doing support for an EDI software company- For those not aware EDI - Electronic Data Interchange - was setup to allow business to business transactions before the internet was widely popular. When I was working with EDI , there were several main communication networks, which were really nothing more than an overly complex electronic mailbox. These networks were a royal pain in the ass because they all had different communicatioon protocols, usually worked with only specific brands of modems, and could be accessed with only very specific software.
Amazing what huge companies can force their little vendors to do. Anyway, the EDI documents where essentially text documents that where defined according to a standard. The definitions where often "modified" by the companies and its partners (causing moe headaches for software vendors). But the bottom line is EDI at the end of the last century filled a niche that XML has made **MUCH** simplier. In fact XML was one of the reason why I changed my focus and got out of EDI, I saw that the Internet and XML specifically were going to make EDI nothing more than a legacy dinosaur.
-MS2k
I would mod you up if I could. . . .
I pointed out these mistakes in a comment to the editor on Forbes already.
I hope they get inudated. To me to misrepresent the GPL so grossly is either extreme negligence, i.e. the author (Daniel Fisher) is such a lazy writer that he cannot be bothered to put the term GPL into Google and read the first age that comes back -OR- Mr. Fisher is just another MS cronie, trying to spread FUD to decision makers in businesses (Forbes target market) to further hinder OSS adoption. Either way it does a great disservice to the OSS community.
A much more minor nitpick, but in this situation, I think they also should have used the term GNU GPL, since their audience is not likely to be familiar with the GNU project, and thus may have more difficulty finding the gnu.org website to learn about the license and the background. Mr. Fisher makes it sound like the GPL is some sort of anti-american anti-capitialist pinko tool that "prohits" making money.
I cannot believe Forbes would make this the feature article on thier main page, that certainly lost them a lot of credibilty in my mind.
-MS2k
I have done work for people and hired people for work through rent-a-coder. Both types of experiences when pretty smoothly. Like anything you have to be able to effectively communicate.
As a programmer you need to be able to communicate to the potential client what you can do. This is the hardest part in my opinion.
Overall communication is the biggest key. Do you understand what the bidder wants? Does the bid have enough information for you as the coder to accurately estimate the amount of time.
Bottom line is can you work with the person at the other end? The few times I have participated it went pretty well because as a coder I knew what they wanted, and if there was a question I come usuallly elicit a clearer response. As a buyer, it was easy for me to define metrics / milestones for the project. I also knew approximately how long and hard the task was because I have done a lot of coding (I just didn't have time to do it myself).
Anyway, I think rent-a-coder is a pretty good service,
-MS2k
Then you have to define "belt" - if you look atthe relative distances of things the object in the kuiper "belt" are more spread out that say the objects (read planets) in the inner solar system of roughly similar size.
Personally I think it is silly to disqualify something because it has "neighbors" or orbits in a "belt".
My $.02:
Any object that revolves around a star, and is not a star, has enough mass to be roughly spherical (say +/- 1% of a perfect sphere) due to its gravity is a PLANET.
Objects that are roughly spherical that revolve around planets are MOONS (regardless of size.) If two objects revolve around each other and their center of gravity lies outside the radius of either partner then it is a binary planet.
Objects that revolve around a star that are not roughly spherical are MINOR OBJECTS. This leads us to a bit of a problem because under my definition there would be no distinction between our friends the comets and asteroids.
I imagine there could be a further classification, based on the shape of the orbit - so we can continue to have "comets" and "asteroids". However I do not like using the orbit shape in any definition.
Objects that revolve around a planet taht are not roughly spherical are SATELLITES.
By the way the reason WHY i do not like using the shape of the orbit or something like the vicinity of other objects in the definition is simple. Those characteristics can be changed. Orbits gradually change over time, especially early in the life cycle of the solar system.
Granted objects are "captured" by planets and stars, and "ejected" in the same way. However, given enough time (and any external influences) don't orbits tend to become circular? So just because comets have highly elliptical orbits now does not mean they will be elliptical forever. The orbital shape is a TRANSITION characteristic. It is not inherent to the object.
Oh well I have rambled on way to long about this....I am ponderig the much larger question - "Why do I care?"
Cool, that works quite well. Learn something new everyday. I guess these discussions are good fro something after all.
-Ms2k
I have to agree with the bottom browser placement of the find box, and the elimination of the "go" menu. I have NEVER scene anyone use that.
Though I disagree with his take on tabs. I love having a blank tab, because I often prefer typing a URL (or at leat the first few characters) to using the mouse for drop down in my bookmarks. Bookmarks work great if you only have a few, but I tend to bookmark interesting sites that I won't visit frequently, but I nevertheless find interesting.
I never book my frequent sites, my browsing goes like this: slas, cnn, coa, espn, nfl, never takes more than 4 characters to get to where I go most often. If I were to scroll through my bookmark list it takes considerably longer. So for my usage firefox work the best.
Though I would like a little button nextto the URL bar to instantly clear it like in Konq. That makes it much easier in Linux to copy and paste URLS. A pet peeve i have is selecting a URL with the mouse,and going to the browser to "midde click" paste and having the URL automatically become selected, thus wiping out the X windows clipboard. Yes I know I can usually use the seperate cntl-c / cntl-v but that requires switching from mouse to keyboard and back....
Oh well that is just my $0.02
-MS2k