I had a Qwest DS3 full bandwidth for $16K at my last company. Local loop was waived. Installation was waived. Same deal for T1's, but $1K - anywhere qwest serviced (can't do some states cause they are the LEC there... FCC shit.) Don't do a circuit with "burstable" or any limits / usage charges - that's crap.
You have to know how to negotiate. The major carriers are hungry. They will deal. Direct lines are ALWAYS cheaper / Mbit than colo hosting.
Besides the fact that this is a REALLY stupid "News" article...
Working for WCOM will be exactly the same as any other big company. Your experience will be dictated by your manager chain. You either have a good one and like your job or you have a bad one and life sucks. You are also just a number - nothing you do will mean squat for anyone 2 levels higher or any level latterally. You will also live in a cube farm - welcome to the Dilbert zone.
Um, most people probably bought the stock when VA was a HARDWARE company. It's only been recent that they changed their business model at which point all bets were off.
Hmm. CVS, bug tracking, and discussion are available now without sourceforge... CVS is just CVS, Bugzilla for bugs, and email list (with web archive) for discussion. All free, for all uses commercial and otherwise.
Let's not put criminals in jail because it just creates more criminals. Let's stop the cycle of crime and jail.
Makes good sense, right?
The Taliban are not going to let us come in and arrest Osama and his cohorts (which just happen to be the Taliban itself.) We have no other choice if we want to deal with him and we HAVE to deal with him unless we are willing to roll over and let EVERY terrorist group have their way with us.
I want my daughter to grow up in a world where she can feel reasonably safe from the likes of Osama. We MUST take him and all his associates out.
Well, the reality is that there is NO WAY to bomb all the terrorists and not kill innocents. (This is quite different from targeting innocnets and killing some govt. officials / military terrorists as collateral damage which is essentially what Osama did to us.)
What you hope to do is keep that number at a minimum, but the fact is that it will never be zero.
An analogy would be crime. Would you not put ANYONE in jail for the fear of putting one innocent person in jail? Of course not. That would be silly.
Kinda hard to do much more when the Taliban are SHOOTING at the airdrop planes, and confiscating (where they can) what little there is to feed soldiers...
There is very little we can do while we are at war and the Taliban (who does NOT care about the Afghani people) is still in control.
Oh yeah - The Taliban make shit up (counting military deaths as civilian, denying damage, etc.), but you would believe them over the US I suppose.
We do need to bomb the crap out of them, and send in ground troops to clean up what's left. If we don't, these terrorists will just keep at it forever, killing innocent people everywhere.
Oh yeah, they want to kill YOU too, not just our government, because of what you represent. They don't care what you actually believe.
The code may be different, but the architecture is the same. The API while being extended, moving from 16 to 32 bit, is the same. The way things work is the same.
The concepts and ideas on how things should work has not changed. Applications are still written from a single-user point of view. The concept of the end user controlling everything (from a security standpoint) is still there. While NT has added some levels of security, as long as you are permitted to install applications (which is the default behavior for workstations) there is basically no difference between NT/2000/XP and DOS / win31.
So what you have is:
Let's add windowing on top of DOS (Win 1 - 3.11)
Let's do a 32 bit version of 3.1 that really multi-tasks (NT) (BTW, best thing MS ever did...)
Let's take the 32bit API of NT and toss that into 3.1, and upgrade the graphical UI (Win95)
Let's take the new GUI and throw that on NT (NT4)
Time to integrate IE into the GUI to kill netscape (Win98)
And let's do the same for NT (Win2000)
Let's kill RealPlayer! (WinME)
Let's stop piracy and finally give the consumer
NT as DOS is still giving us fits and making us look bad! (XP)
Sure lots of things were redesigned and changed over the past 12 years, but the basics of 3.1 and DOS are still there. They have to be for compatability. Remember the win32 libraries that let you run some 95 code on 3.1??? Yup. Things haven't changed too much since then from a basic design / concept point of view. All that changed on the 9x(Me) side is moving code from DOS up into the protected environment. We still have a god aweful FAT file system, and NTFS still suffers from the lack of (usable) links and the concept of drive letters.
So I'll forgive your ignorance, but having worked with windows since 2.0 from a programming perspective, I do have a fscking clue.
Because actions speak louder than words... He's giving the corporate world what it wants while saying that he doesn't care what the corporate world wants. He's also doing this despite his own statements that only minor changes / fixes will go into the stable branch, yet the new VM, ext3 are here.
I believe Linus has learned to be a little more realistic with releases. While publicly he states that he doesn't care a hoot about what any polls, groups, or the press want or think, and is only interested in building the best dang kernel, my guess is that he desires to see Linux really catch on in the corporate world (and I'm talking linux vs other unix - not displacing MS.)
The corporate world really wants to see business features in the production kernel such as a rock solid good performing VM, a journaling file system, etc. The older kernels' VM and lack of journalling were really singled out as being critical hurdles for corporate acceptance.
It didn't matter that RedHat had ext3 or ReiserFS, it was needed in the base kernel without messing around with patches. It's more of a mindset / perception thing than reality.
The fact is, the corporate world wasn't going to wait another 2 years for 2.6. Those features really needed to be mainstream now. The only thing I'd really like to see added are extended ACLs, but that can wait. I don't know if a solution to device numbering can if Linus won't assign new numbers... (Alan will however, in his tree...)
Thanks Linus! And a big thanks to all the hundreds of other kernel hackers that made this all possible!
Windows still crashes. Anyone claiming otherwise is full of crap. It has to do with the basic design which hasn't changed since windows 3.1. While I haven't used XP (and don't intend to frankly,) NT4, 2000 and 98 crash frequently.
When applications install, they all come with their own versions of shared dll's (such as the infamous mfc42.dll of which there seem to be hundreds of versions...) which can cause instability (crashes) in other apps. A shared dll that almost every app uses (and is generated with MS tools) is effectivly part of the OS, since the OS itself uses these shared dll's which applications can replace! This is BAD BAD BAD folks! You will NEVER EVER see stability in apps and windows until MS changes the way apps are installed.
When one application crashes and won't run again without a reboot (or causes other apps to flake), I call that a windows crash. I have to reboot in order to work again.
The other big problem area is the extensability in windows - third party crap (of which there is tons - almost every app wants to put crap in the system tray, extend the desktop, etc.) creates instability in the desktop probably due to piss poor QA / coding.
Bigger than outright crashes for me has been degredation. Running windows for more than a day and it starts to get - "strange", where more programs start to crash or behave in unpredictable ways.
Enough. I don't need the headaches. If you want to use that crap and deal with all the problems, be my guest. I'll just use Linux for my primary work, and windows only when absolutely required (which is VERY rare.)
That's a red herring. One of the natures of open source is that people get to see what's going on under the hood. This allows more bugs to be found than if the hood is welded shut and you find them by stumbling over them.
Who knows how many MS security bugs were found that we DON'T know about, or how many INCREADIBLY stupid things are going on that could be HUGE problems inside that closed source...
MS refuses to address the massive security problems with word macros (who needs them REALLY...) email (Yet Another.vbs virus...), etc. MS claims that these massive security holes that are impossible for you to disable are there by customer demand! These are "Features", not "Flaws!"
And No, the options in IE, Outlook, word, etc that are supposed to secure things don't really. Check bugtraq archives for more info.
The limit depends on the account type. You can get accounts with a much higher limit. Same applies to the daily "purchase" limit wich is separate, and usually higher than the cash limit.
Yes, it must accept interference, but it doesn't have to WORK.... That's been a plague on all unlicensed band devices from garage door openers, old cordless phones, baby monitors, etc. all the way to 802.11b.
What's really needed is a chunk of frequency with a single spec. (protocol) that ALL devices operating on those channels are REQUIRED to adhere to.
Right now, all sorts of crap runs in the 900 and 2.4 ranges all using spectrum as it pleases - a literal garbage dump of protocols. It's a wonder ANYTHING works.
For what it's worth, I have the Lucent Wavepoint 802.11b system base, and the Siemens 2-line, 8handset 2.4G phone system base sitting 5 inches apart and they work fine, but the X-Cam 2.4G video is completely useless even across the house from those base stations with the X-10 xmitter & receiver 20' apart if either the phone or 802.11b is powered up.
Devices that don't play nice can ruin things for those that do, and some like the X-10 unit that don't play nice assume that it's the only 2.4G device within range.
BTW,don't you just hate pop-under ads like X10.com uses? That kinda thing drives people to ad-blocking software which is bad for everyone in the long-run...
Take as an example the 'niche market' of Linux. Look at the varying prices between distros. $30-$40 for a basic distro, $70 for some bells and whistles, $110 for a complete package... I can think of 4 different distros off the top of my head. *This* is a free and open market.
True, but no Linux company has NEAR the engineering staff of MS's OS division either. They are for the most part selling what others have created and given away. Also the fact that you can download the ISO's for all the distros, makes sure that they can't charge too much if they want to sell anything at all.
Look further, and companies like Sun give the base OS away for free too (just charge for media). MS being a software company can't do that.
In this case, I think Sun was beginning to see the light and realized that if they wanted to sell overpriced hardware, they couldn't add mega bucks on for the software too or the cost / benefit would favor Windows.
We know that MS products are more user-friendly but less functional than Linux to Person Off_the_street.
True when you qualify that with "Base OS Only", but with Office software, nobody else provides all the functionality or stability of MS products. Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, Staroffice, netscape, mozilla, etc. ALL crash easily, and more frequently than MS office products. Basically, Linux offerings are of beta quality. Slowly they are getting better, but don't match MS yet.
I don't need the DOJ / courts to break up MS, but I would like them to force MS to open up ALL protocols and file formats, and require free licensing of MS patents related to those proprietary file formats and protocols.
Hmm. IBM's storage site actually had a rather in-depth aritcle on heat related failures. Seems that for each degree increase in heat, the rate of failure doubled.
Most typical PC cases are prone to heat buildup. I bought a few of those drive-bay fans, beefed up the case fan, and haven't had a drive failure ever since (computer is quite loud however...) BTW, those 7200 or 10K RPM drives run very hot.
In order to have a credit / debit card, you MUST have a bank account. Having a bank account cannot be a requirement to exist or be a citizen.
Debit cards also have daily limits and credit cards have monthly limits. The debit card limits are generally small (although usually larger than the daily cash limit.) Checks don't have any such limits. I was really surprised once when I had over $40K in checking and had my card denied for a $100 grocery purchase due to a purchase earlier in the day.
In order to make a transaction via credit / debit. you need a form of communication between the merchant / bank. It's all to frequent where the machines don't work, or phone lines are out.
You can no longer give your son / daughter a twenty - you would have to do a transaction via public / private terminal. What a pain in the ass!
Garage sales would be unable to take payments.
The privacy issue alone is so massive that any attempt at going cashless would be shot down.
The list of problems goes on and on. While I do use debit / credit (mostly credit due to fraud / liability issues with debit) I still use cash when realistic. I don't need corporate america or the government knowing everything about me.
With X, you get multiple source code windows, the ability to recompile / test by hitting up-arrow, Enteri, etc. All navigation is done with the keyboard so no annoying mouse clicks...
IMHO, normal tools like Make, CVS, Vim / Emacs are VERY productive / easy to use if you take the time to learn them.
You won't have good code or be productive with any language / tool if you don't learn them inside and out.
Frankly, the advantage of being able to make wholesale changes in projects (sourcefiles, makefiles, etc.) with the standard tools available in most linux distributions so far outweighs the "any moron can use me" GUI tools favored by MS clones which require 3,561,992 mouse clicks to open a file....
I was the lead on a fairly large dual Sun / Windows application, and the amount of time dealing with the problems caused by "deeply hidden in a forest of menus" options / settings on VC++ casued the windows side to require twice as much time spent with build management than the UNIX side.
The "quality of life / job satisfaction" working on UNIX code is SOO much better than windows dreck (including better pay), that I find no reason to work on that cruft (windows) anymore.
What kind of logic is that? DVD's are not the same format as records - of COURSE it won't work. CD-Rom drives played audio CD's from DAY ONE. This record company is changing the rules saying that CD-ROM drives are no longer allowed to play audio CD's anymore. This is like changing gas so that it only works on passenger cars and minivans, and won't work in SUV's or pickups.
Buying CD's does put money into the artists pockets, but only a SMALL part of the total cost. The record companies are the ones getting rich off CD sales...
I would MUCH rather buy music online and have a LARGE chunk go to the artist. RIAA doesn't want this however.
The larger problem is lack of a decent micro-payment system. Paypal comes close.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a Qwest DS3 full bandwidth for $16K at my last company. Local loop was waived. Installation was waived. Same deal for T1's, but $1K - anywhere qwest serviced (can't do some states cause they are the LEC there... FCC shit.) Don't do a circuit with "burstable" or any limits / usage charges - that's crap.
You have to know how to negotiate. The major carriers are hungry. They will deal. Direct lines are ALWAYS cheaper / Mbit than colo hosting.
Besides the fact that this is a REALLY stupid "News" article...
Working for WCOM will be exactly the same as any other big company. Your experience will be dictated by your manager chain. You either have a good one and like your job or you have a bad one and life sucks. You are also just a number - nothing you do will mean squat for anyone 2 levels higher or any level latterally. You will also live in a cube farm - welcome to the Dilbert zone.
Um, most people probably bought the stock when VA was a HARDWARE company. It's only been recent that they changed their business model at which point all bets were off.
Hmm. CVS, bug tracking, and discussion are available now without sourceforge... CVS is just CVS, Bugzilla for bugs, and email list (with web archive) for discussion. All free, for all uses commercial and otherwise.
Let's use the same analogy with crime.
Let's not put criminals in jail because it just creates more criminals. Let's stop the cycle of crime and jail.
Makes good sense, right?
The Taliban are not going to let us come in and arrest Osama and his cohorts (which just happen to be the Taliban itself.) We have no other choice if we want to deal with him and we HAVE to deal with him unless we are willing to roll over and let EVERY terrorist group have their way with us.
I want my daughter to grow up in a world where she can feel reasonably safe from the likes of Osama. We MUST take him and all his associates out.
Well, the reality is that there is NO WAY to bomb all the terrorists and not kill innocents. (This is quite different from targeting innocnets and killing some govt. officials / military terrorists as collateral damage which is essentially what Osama did to us.)
What you hope to do is keep that number at a minimum, but the fact is that it will never be zero.
An analogy would be crime. Would you not put ANYONE in jail for the fear of putting one innocent person in jail? Of course not. That would be silly.
Good point. Let's feed the terrorists and send them weapons. That will make them like us. Oh wait, we already did that and...
Actually, most people I know are NOT scared. They are Mad as hell and would like to see Osama tortured to death.
Kinda hard to do much more when the Taliban are SHOOTING at the airdrop planes, and confiscating (where they can) what little there is to feed soldiers...
There is very little we can do while we are at war and the Taliban (who does NOT care about the Afghani people) is still in control.
Oh yeah - The Taliban make shit up (counting military deaths as civilian, denying damage, etc.), but you would believe them over the US I suppose.
We do need to bomb the crap out of them, and send in ground troops to clean up what's left. If we don't, these terrorists will just keep at it forever, killing innocent people everywhere.
Oh yeah, they want to kill YOU too, not just our government, because of what you represent. They don't care what you actually believe.
The code may be different, but the architecture is the same. The API while being extended, moving from 16 to 32 bit, is the same. The way things work is the same.
The concepts and ideas on how things should work has not changed. Applications are still written from a single-user point of view. The concept of the end user controlling everything (from a security standpoint) is still there. While NT has added some levels of security, as long as you are permitted to install applications (which is the default behavior for workstations) there is basically no difference between NT/2000/XP and DOS / win31.
So what you have is:
Let's add windowing on top of DOS (Win 1 - 3.11)
Let's do a 32 bit version of 3.1 that really multi-tasks (NT) (BTW, best thing MS ever did...)
Let's take the 32bit API of NT and toss that into 3.1, and upgrade the graphical UI (Win95)
Let's take the new GUI and throw that on NT (NT4)
Time to integrate IE into the GUI to kill netscape (Win98)
And let's do the same for NT (Win2000)
Let's kill RealPlayer! (WinME)
Let's stop piracy and finally give the consumer
NT as DOS is still giving us fits and making us look bad! (XP)
Sure lots of things were redesigned and changed over the past 12 years, but the basics of 3.1 and DOS are still there. They have to be for compatability. Remember the win32 libraries that let you run some 95 code on 3.1??? Yup. Things haven't changed too much since then from a basic design / concept point of view. All that changed on the 9x(Me) side is moving code from DOS up into the protected environment. We still have a god aweful FAT file system, and NTFS still suffers from the lack of (usable) links and the concept of drive letters.
So I'll forgive your ignorance, but having worked with windows since 2.0 from a programming perspective, I do have a fscking clue.
Because actions speak louder than words... He's giving the corporate world what it wants while saying that he doesn't care what the corporate world wants. He's also doing this despite his own statements that only minor changes / fixes will go into the stable branch, yet the new VM, ext3 are here.
I believe Linus has learned to be a little more realistic with releases. While publicly he states that he doesn't care a hoot about what any polls, groups, or the press want or think, and is only interested in building the best dang kernel, my guess is that he desires to see Linux really catch on in the corporate world (and I'm talking linux vs other unix - not displacing MS.)
The corporate world really wants to see business features in the production kernel such as a rock solid good performing VM, a journaling file system, etc. The older kernels' VM and lack of journalling were really singled out as being critical hurdles for corporate acceptance.
It didn't matter that RedHat had ext3 or ReiserFS, it was needed in the base kernel without messing around with patches. It's more of a mindset / perception thing than reality.
The fact is, the corporate world wasn't going to wait another 2 years for 2.6. Those features really needed to be mainstream now. The only thing I'd really like to see added are extended ACLs, but that can wait. I don't know if a solution to device numbering can if Linus won't assign new numbers... (Alan will however, in his tree...)
Thanks Linus! And a big thanks to all the hundreds of other kernel hackers that made this all possible!
Windows still crashes. Anyone claiming otherwise is full of crap. It has to do with the basic design which hasn't changed since windows 3.1. While I haven't used XP (and don't intend to frankly,) NT4, 2000 and 98 crash frequently.
When applications install, they all come with their own versions of shared dll's (such as the infamous mfc42.dll of which there seem to be hundreds of versions...) which can cause instability (crashes) in other apps. A shared dll that almost every app uses (and is generated with MS tools) is effectivly part of the OS, since the OS itself uses these shared dll's which applications can replace! This is BAD BAD BAD folks! You will NEVER EVER see stability in apps and windows until MS changes the way apps are installed.
When one application crashes and won't run again without a reboot (or causes other apps to flake), I call that a windows crash. I have to reboot in order to work again.
The other big problem area is the extensability in windows - third party crap (of which there is tons - almost every app wants to put crap in the system tray, extend the desktop, etc.) creates instability in the desktop probably due to piss poor QA / coding.
Bigger than outright crashes for me has been degredation. Running windows for more than a day and it starts to get - "strange", where more programs start to crash or behave in unpredictable ways.
Enough. I don't need the headaches. If you want to use that crap and deal with all the problems, be my guest. I'll just use Linux for my primary work, and windows only when absolutely required (which is VERY rare.)
That's a red herring. One of the natures of open source is that people get to see what's going on under the hood. This allows more bugs to be found than if the hood is welded shut and you find them by stumbling over them.
.vbs virus...), etc. MS claims that these massive security holes that are impossible for you to disable are there by customer demand! These are "Features", not "Flaws!"
Who knows how many MS security bugs were found that we DON'T know about, or how many INCREADIBLY stupid things are going on that could be HUGE problems inside that closed source...
MS refuses to address the massive security problems with word macros (who needs them REALLY...) email (Yet Another
And No, the options in IE, Outlook, word, etc that are supposed to secure things don't really. Check bugtraq archives for more info.
The limit depends on the account type. You can get accounts with a much higher limit. Same applies to the daily "purchase" limit wich is separate, and usually higher than the cash limit.
USB 2.0. Solves bandwidth. There are quite a few 2.0 devices out now - about the same price as firewire.
Yes, it must accept interference, but it doesn't have to WORK.... That's been a plague on all unlicensed band devices from garage door openers, old cordless phones, baby monitors, etc. all the way to 802.11b.
What's really needed is a chunk of frequency with a single spec. (protocol) that ALL devices operating on those channels are REQUIRED to adhere to.
Right now, all sorts of crap runs in the 900 and 2.4 ranges all using spectrum as it pleases - a literal garbage dump of protocols. It's a wonder ANYTHING works.
For what it's worth, I have the Lucent Wavepoint 802.11b system base, and the Siemens 2-line, 8handset 2.4G phone system base sitting 5 inches apart and they work fine, but the X-Cam 2.4G video is completely useless even across the house from those base stations with the X-10 xmitter & receiver 20' apart if either the phone or 802.11b is powered up.
Devices that don't play nice can ruin things for those that do, and some like the X-10 unit that don't play nice assume that it's the only 2.4G device within range.
BTW,don't you just hate pop-under ads like X10.com uses? That kinda thing drives people to ad-blocking software which is bad for everyone in the long-run...
True, but no Linux company has NEAR the engineering staff of MS's OS division either. They are for the most part selling what others have created and given away. Also the fact that you can download the ISO's for all the distros, makes sure that they can't charge too much if they want to sell anything at all.
Look further, and companies like Sun give the base OS away for free too (just charge for media). MS being a software company can't do that.
In this case, I think Sun was beginning to see the light and realized that if they wanted to sell overpriced hardware, they couldn't add mega bucks on for the software too or the cost / benefit would favor Windows.
True when you qualify that with "Base OS Only", but with Office software, nobody else provides all the functionality or stability of MS products. Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, Staroffice, netscape, mozilla, etc. ALL crash easily, and more frequently than MS office products. Basically, Linux offerings are of beta quality. Slowly they are getting better, but don't match MS yet.
I don't need the DOJ / courts to break up MS, but I would like them to force MS to open up ALL protocols and file formats, and require free licensing of MS patents related to those proprietary file formats and protocols.
Hmm. IBM's storage site actually had a rather in-depth aritcle on heat related failures. Seems that for each degree increase in heat, the rate of failure doubled.
Most typical PC cases are prone to heat buildup. I bought a few of those drive-bay fans, beefed up the case fan, and haven't had a drive failure ever since (computer is quite loud however...) BTW, those 7200 or 10K RPM drives run very hot.
Several issues.
In order to have a credit / debit card, you MUST have a bank account. Having a bank account cannot be a requirement to exist or be a citizen.
Debit cards also have daily limits and credit cards have monthly limits. The debit card limits are generally small (although usually larger than the daily cash limit.) Checks don't have any such limits. I was really surprised once when I had over $40K in checking and had my card denied for a $100 grocery purchase due to a purchase earlier in the day.
In order to make a transaction via credit / debit. you need a form of communication between the merchant / bank. It's all to frequent where the machines don't work, or phone lines are out.
You can no longer give your son / daughter a twenty - you would have to do a transaction via public / private terminal. What a pain in the ass!
Garage sales would be unable to take payments.
The privacy issue alone is so massive that any attempt at going cashless would be shot down.
The list of problems goes on and on. While I do use debit / credit (mostly credit due to fraud / liability issues with debit) I still use cash when realistic. I don't need corporate america or the government knowing everything about me.
With X, you get multiple source code windows, the ability to recompile / test by hitting up-arrow, Enteri, etc. All navigation is done with the keyboard so no annoying mouse clicks...
IMHO, normal tools like Make, CVS, Vim / Emacs are VERY productive / easy to use if you take the time to learn them.
You won't have good code or be productive with any language / tool if you don't learn them inside and out.
Frankly, the advantage of being able to make wholesale changes in projects (sourcefiles, makefiles, etc.) with the standard tools available in most linux distributions so far outweighs the "any moron can use me" GUI tools favored by MS clones which require 3,561,992 mouse clicks to open a file....
I was the lead on a fairly large dual Sun / Windows application, and the amount of time dealing with the problems caused by "deeply hidden in a forest of menus" options / settings on VC++ casued the windows side to require twice as much time spent with build management than the UNIX side.
The "quality of life / job satisfaction" working on UNIX code is SOO much better than windows dreck (including better pay), that I find no reason to work on that cruft (windows) anymore.
What kind of logic is that? DVD's are not the same format as records - of COURSE it won't work. CD-Rom drives played audio CD's from DAY ONE. This record company is changing the rules saying that CD-ROM drives are no longer allowed to play audio CD's anymore. This is like changing gas so that it only works on passenger cars and minivans, and won't work in SUV's or pickups.
Buying CD's does put money into the artists pockets, but only a SMALL part of the total cost. The record companies are the ones getting rich off CD sales...
I would MUCH rather buy music online and have a LARGE chunk go to the artist. RIAA doesn't want this however.
The larger problem is lack of a decent micro-payment system. Paypal comes close.