IRIX is bundled with SGI hardware, but it's not free (gratis). OS licenses, Plex licenses, compiler licenses, on and on...
Binary compatibility under NetBSD would allow SGI shops to replace IRIX (and it's costs) without giving up their software investment. Also good for hobbyists -- many used SGI boxes have an old IRIX license, or none at all.
I've been responsible for quite a few SpectraLogic 10000 units (2 or 4 drives, 24 or 40 slots). The hardware is high quality and the support is top-notch, put you pay for those things. 40GB/hr is about what you can expect from each drive, but that can varely widely based on the compression ratio. The AIT specs are dead-on in this regard.
Striping tapes is a bad idea, but if the data is readily divisible (not a single 200GB dbdump) you would be fine backing up one portion per drive in a quad AIT-2 or dual AIT-3 configuration, with room to grow.
If you can't divide the data, backing up to disk and streaming to tape later is the best option. Most client-server backup software will allow you to establish a disk-based target and subsequently copy the data to tape.
If you want an Uber headset, you have to be prepared to pay price. Hello Direct, a company that is never a price leader, sells the GN9020 for $350. "No wire" headsets thru them start at $300. With RF brain cancer shaping up to be the tobacco of the new millenium, I wouldn't want such a thing on my head, but if I did I would happily shell out $350.
I'll parrot the crowd saying "Cordless + Headset", and toss out "Cordless + Speakerphone." I use a Siemens 4200. It has no headset jack, but it has a speakerphone on the handset (not the base). People can't tell when I have them on speaker, and it doesn't freak out when there is heavy background noise. Panasonic sells a similar unit (with headset jack to boot), and I believe AT&T does as well. They can all be found at your local Best Buy or Office Depot.
I don't want to sound rigid, but these frequencies were given in exchange for the analog ones, so I don't see how they can do this without breaking thier agreement with the FCC.
Easy. The FCC gave them 6mhz worth of spectrum, good for ~19Mbps. The broadcasters have to use some portion of that for no-cost television, but they don't have to use all of it. WRAL in Raleigh uses a portion for an all-news sub-channel, and another chunk for PC data services.
Are you looking to change companies / industries? If you've been with your company for five years, you are probably a highly valued employee. You should speak to Management and HR about other opportunities that are available for someone with your skills and interests.
The hosting company that I work for is very large, so we have dedicated DBA, Development, R&D, and various applications groups as obvious routes for advancement. Some of our technical people have also moved on as account reps to our largest partners.
I happen to like Operations, just got tired of the constant "fire-fighting" and being attached to a pager. Unofficially I moved myself into more of a "Special Projects" role a while ago, lessening my day-to-day responsibilities. Now I'm getting ready to switch to genuine "Special Projects" group. On the Ops side, I'll be responsible for internal services. No pager, plenty of travel opportunities. When roll-outs aren't happening I'll be doing Dev and R&D type project work, without being shoe-horned into a specific role (I'm young, still not sure what I want my "career" to be).
A much better question would be: How many hours to you work in a year?
With a straight 40-hour per week job in America, with the normal two weeks of vacation per year, that's 2000 hours. In the rest of the civilized world, it's more like 1920 or even 1840. Less when you factor in the number of paid holidays.
With my latest performance review, I didn't ask for more money, stock, or fringe benefits like an Aeron chair. I asked for more vacation time. Once you're making "enough" money, it's nicer to be able to spend a few weeks touring Europe than to be able to buy an extra toy or two.
Quoting from Peopleware, second edition, chapter 28 "Competition", under the "Teamicide Re-visited" heading (pg. 183 in my copy):
"Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidale."
DeMarco & Lister quote W. Edwards Deming's "14 Points", where point 12B says that annual or merit ratings and management by objectives should be abolished. Alfie Kohn's work focuses on the harm caused by the "Do this and you'll get this" mentality. Joel Spolsky's essay, "Incentive Pay Considered Harmful" is a quick read on the subject.
Is this sort of thing feasible, or am I missing something critical which is a showstopper?
Pretty much every major Telco and Network player has a CTI product on the market, and there are PC-based PBX products out there (some even run on NT).
But transferring Telco responsibilities to an IS department is a bad idea, replacing phones with PCs is even worse. How many IS departments are prepared to provide 99.999% (if not higher!) uptime at the network and desktop level? Computers crash. Or worse, they have "problems" -- drivers, viruses, just plain flakiness.
Imagine how costly it is for the average business to be without phone service for an hour. It's a completely devastating situation for even the smallest call center.
Reading the AnandTech review of the Aiwa that was linked to elsewhere, it sounds like the unit has the overall quality of the Nomad Jukebox. Which is to say, it'll play MP3s,
but overall the device is crap. I have a Nomad because it solved my immediate
desire to transport MP3s from home to the car and office, but as soon as something better
comes along it'll become a hand-me-down for my kid brother or go on eBay.
I rejected the Aiwa and Kenwood MP3 head units because I have better things
to do than burn my MP3 collection back to CD. I also worry about the longevity
of CDRs subjected to the abuse of being in the car (heat, scratching, etc).
Another MP3 option that hasn't been mentioned is the "PhatNoise",
a modular 2.5" hard-drive unit that emulates an OEM CD changer. The plus
side to it is that it provides "Stealth MP3", but their site has been
around for quite a while and they still aren't shipping.
I'd have bought an empeg for my car, but unfortunately it will not be coming back to America with me
(some stupid law about airbags) and I don't want to go through the hassle of re-installing the factory system when I sell it.
The drawbacks to the empeg are:
Price
AM/FM tuner isn't shipping yet
No CD option
#1: Nothing can be done about that. If you aren't geek enough to spend
whatever it takes to building the baddest MoFo vehicle that plays MP3s and runs
Linux, Slashdot can't help you. Sorry. Perhaps you need to find a better
job or re-locate somewhere with a lower cost-of-living.
The empeg also does not provide an amplified signal, which is an additional
cost if your car doesn't already have an amplifier. You can get around that by
slaving the empeg to a head-unit that does have an amplifier (see #2).
#2: I personally don't care about the tuner, but for true NPR die-hards the
empeg does have RCA line outputs AND inputs, which means that you can plug the
empeg into a standard head unit (or vice-versa). If your dash doesn't have a
double-DIN stereo slot, you'll need to do some hacking. GM and Chrysler
"DIN-and-a-half" designs usually have enough space around them to
build a double-DIN space. Don't risk screwing up your own dash with a dremel
tool, pay a professional installer to do it (if it's a friend's dash, and
they're offering beer, go for it;-)
On other single-DIN cars, like my present BMW E36 and my former Mustang,
there is often a storage area in the dash that happens to be single-DIN sized.
In the case of the Mustang, that space was actually designed to hold a factory
single CD player. Again, don't mess up your own dash, seek the help of a
professional installer. And the fools at Best Buy do not qualify as
professionals. Get a recommendation from that friend of yours who ripped out his
back seat to install three 18" subwoofers. If you don't have such a friend,
you need to get out more.
If your car doesn't have an available opening, it gets tricky. The glove box,
armrest, and under-dash mounting (CB-style) are the primary possibilities. There
is some possibility that you could hack a "detachable face" unit to
put the display and controls somewhere convenient, but I would strongly
recommend that you just replace the car (see #1).
#3: You have three choices for CD playback. You can go the route mentioned in
#2, using a full head-unit to provide CD playback. Or you can buy a stand-alone
in-dash CD unit, similar to what Ford offers for the Mustang. Sony's CDX-1000RF
is one example that provides RCA outputs. Or you can buy a CD changer that has
it's own controls, just make sure that it provides RCA outputs. Many use a
single RCA-style jack to run to an external FM modulator, this is not the same
thing. Be sure to check the manual before buying, never trust the sales guy
(especially if it's at Best Buy or any other chain).
For "once in a blue moon" CD use, you could also rig up a Discman
to the empeg's RCA inputs. It's a crappy way to do it, but if the desire to play
CDs will be very infrequent, it's good enough...
I doubt many small businesses are willing to "pay twice" to get Win9x/ME volume licenses (once when they buy the PC, again under the OLP).
Larger business with real IT departments will already have a solid understanding of the benefits of standardizing on NT/W2K as the desktop OS, and aren't likely to be using Win9x/ME except in very limited circumstances... Laptops come to mind as having been typically bad candidates for NT once upon a time, but vendors eventually got their acts together and W2K resolves most of those issues.
I'd think that 1999 saw many companies replacing Win9x and NT3.5x desktops with NT4 in preparation for Y2K. Rollouts are painful, no matter what the OS, and I expect many companies aren't ready to take the plunge again.
I can't see anything that Microsoft does causing companies to move to Linux or BSD. Companies will move when it makes sense, and for most companies it just doesn't make any sense.
At my company, we could probably move Sales, Service, and Support to Linux/BSD easily. Support would need VMWare for a few things, but email and the browser are the primary applications for these people. But other groups, particularly Billing and Finance, are heavily dependant on Excel and Access... being less technical users, Linux/BSD + VMWare would be a poor solution for them.
For us, and probably most other companies, it boils down to the costs of supporting all of these users. It's much cheaper for us to staff our internal support department with three Wintel lackeys than two Wintel lackeys plus two *nix lackeys. And the Wintel lackeys probably are cheaper and easier to find/train.
Oops, Palm has updated their software to support IR Hotsync under W2K.
http://www.palm.com/support/downloads/palmdt_upd at e.html
Will have to try that out next week (what brain-dead Dell engineer decided that serial and IR ports belonged on my docking station and not the laptop itself?).
Both Palms have IR built-in, so just add an IR adapter to your PC. Under Win9x/NT, IR ports are mapped to COM ports, so the Palm Desktop software won't notice the difference. W2K has it's own "special" IR support that does not offer COM port mapping, so you'd need use an IR adapter that plugs into a serial port.
I'm looking into buying a new mobile phone (in North America) with a good WAP browser, internet access, and the general spiffy phone features.
WAP is terrible. It's slow, the gateways are unreliable, screens are too small... And if you're wanting to do real show-off things like check your Yahoo Mail account, realize that filling in a username/password on a WML form is a very trying exercise.
Check out Jakob Neilson's WAP Field Study. Look at the times to accomplish simple tasks with WAP.
I purchased a Nokia 7110 six months ago, and never bothered using the WAP features after the first couple of days. It collects dust on my shelf now, replaced by a (non-WAP) 8890 that is much more stylish, can stay comfortably in my front pocket while I'm sitting down, and works nearly anywhere on the planet that cellular service is available.
Get a phone that's just a phone. If you really want wireless 'net access, get a Palm Vx and a Minstrel.
Getting an American multi-national to send you overseas is the best way to go, especially if you can be considered "on-loan" to a foreign office. This has potential tax benefits, and as a "guest" in a foreign office your lack of language skills is more likely to be tolerated AND you'll find it easier to get help with mundane things like getting phone service. Not to mention that you'll probably find it easy to move to the "home office" (or another foreign office) if you find that the locale doesn't suit you.
The level of beauracracy that an American has to go through to work in an EU country is mind-boggling. Make sure that either the company you're working for is experienced in obtaining these permits or is willing to pay a professional to handle the matter. The fines for messing this up can be severe, as my employer is discovering, and may jeopardize your ability to continue working in that country. Liability applies to your employer AND YOU. These permits must generally be applied for before you enter the EU.
Be prepared for a great deal of culture shock. Rampant consumerism hasn't caught on over here. In Germany, stores close at 6-8pm on weekdays, 2-4pm on Saturdays, and don't open at all on Sundays and holidays. Italy is about the same. Haven't been to France. The UK (or at least central London) is much better with weekend hours, but has reduced weekday hours. London has the advantage of being thoroughly globalized, which is nice if you ever find yourself fancying a trip to Starbucks (I think that I visited 7 on my last trip) or something similarly American.
Anything that's electronic and imported costs a hell of a lot more than in America (my German PSX2 was US$375, but then again, I was able to buy it at a store the day after release;-) Fuel costs are obscene thanks to severe taxation (about US$3.50/gallon in my part of Germany). Where I live a car is semi-necessary, but in metropolitan areas driving can be counter-productive.
Good luck wherever you decide to go. I've been in Germany for a year, and as trying as it's been at times, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
My recent experience is with Lufthansa, Condor and Lauda airlines on European and international flights. None of them restrict laptop use outside of takeoff and landing, just the use of optical drives, cell phones, radios... I'll keep BA in mind for my next trip home (Florida).
The last few flights that I've been on explicitly prohibited the use of DVD drives (along with CD drives/players and MDs) at all times. CmdrTaco's blatant disregard for the safety of his fellow passengers is astonishing.
I think the real problem is that Gas has been so cheap in the US for so long. We have had it WAY too good.
No kidding. Gas is nearly $4/gallon here in Germany. My friends and family back home in Florida get no sympathy from me when they complain about paying $1.80/gallon at the pump.
My company would have paid to ship my car (an '86 Trans Am) from the States to Germany, but I declined and picked up a '91 BMW 325 instead. The way that I figure it, the more fuel-efficient BMW will pay for itself in about 8 months. And a BMW 325 is hardly fuel-efficient by European standards...
Pager coverage is sporadic, and it's difficult to find carriers with multi-national networks. With the high cellular adoption rates in Europe, pagers for the most part simply are not necessary.
Giving up my pager was the best part of moving to Germany:-)
I wish that I still had a copy of my current employer's contract as it provides an excellent example of what not to do! When we were acquired, the acquiree foisted these contracts on us as a "condition of employment." In seven simple bullet items it said that we may not work for or found a company in a remotely related field, may not hire company employees even if they initiated contact, that the company would own any "ideas" that we had even if they were unrelated to any business that the company is currently or has future plans to be in, and assigned all copyright and patent interests to the company. With a final stipulation that it would be governed by the laws of a state that I've never set foot in (I work in a different country now, making that stipulation even more laughable).
My team refused to sign, and in the 18 months since I've declined on two additional occassions.
A proper contract should simply exercise common sense. If I worked in network engineering at UUNet, my ideas on how to make routers more efficient belong to them as a product of my employment. My ideas on 3D rendering belong to me. I shouldn't solicite fellow employees, but if they come to me they are fair game. If I want to work for, or found, a company focussed on something that isn't a core business of my employer (or directly related to my specific employment), that's my option, that's the American way.
I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads... sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars. In this day and age I don't see how a game like crossroads can be worth that much, it is mostly nostalgia for me (and there are all kinds of new-fangled graphical/textual interfaces that do so much more, but I never got into them as much..)
Crossroads by itself would do you no good without a system to run it on. It's not a traditional door, but a DLL add-in to the MajorBBS (nee WorldGroup) platform. Sadly, the platform was never very hobbiest-oriented, unless you were a wealthy hobbiest. In the early days, Crossroads cost several times the $200 or so that it sells for now. A medium-sized for-pay system could make back that money in a matter of days, but it was a sizable investment for anyone trying to run their system as a labor-of-love, especially after investing in the base platform, "Entertainment Pack" (with Action Chat and Fazuul!) and "User 6-Packs" necessary just to get up-and-running.
I'm amazed that the platform continues to exist. One of the founders comitted suicide, another was ousted in a change of ownership. There was a rescinded IPO, and another change of hands. As a former hobbiest MBBS Sysop, and then a former Galacticomm employee, I like to check back from time to time. Those were the good old days, back when community was more than just an IPO buzzword.
Old Galacticomm motto, once printed on the company's t-shirts before the corporate image thing kicked in: To do really cool things in the field of computerized communications, and make a buck or two.
>I said "price/performance", and, yes, that is precisely how "technical superiority" is defined.
I thought that "technical superiority" was based on the merits? By your logic, Windows must be "technically superior" because that's what the market chose.
VHS won over BetaMax in the consumer space due to price and availability. Performance and technical merit had nothing to do with it.
In the professional space, where price takes a back seat to quality, BetaMax-derived formats are king.
> >You'll never see a VHS deck in a professional edit suite.
>This, of course, is a bald-faced lie. I am a professional myself, and have seen nothing resembling what you describe.
A professional what, manager at Blockbuster?
It doesn't take a trained eye to see that VHS (and it's derivatives) produce lower quality video than virtually every other format.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the NEC MobilePro and all of the recent Toshiba Pocket PCs have USB Master support.
IRIX is bundled with SGI hardware, but it's not free (gratis). OS licenses, Plex licenses, compiler licenses, on and on...
Binary compatibility under NetBSD would allow SGI shops to replace IRIX (and it's costs) without giving up their software investment. Also good for hobbyists -- many used SGI boxes have an old IRIX license, or none at all.
I've been responsible for quite a few SpectraLogic 10000 units (2 or 4 drives, 24 or 40 slots). The hardware is high quality and the support is top-notch, put you pay for those things. 40GB/hr is about what you can expect from each drive, but that can varely widely based on the compression ratio. The AIT specs are dead-on in this regard.
Striping tapes is a bad idea, but if the data is readily divisible (not a single 200GB dbdump) you would be fine backing up one portion per drive in a quad AIT-2 or dual AIT-3 configuration, with room to grow.
If you can't divide the data, backing up to disk and streaming to tape later is the best option. Most client-server backup software will allow you to establish a disk-based target and subsequently copy the data to tape.
-Bryce
I'll parrot the crowd saying "Cordless + Headset", and toss out "Cordless + Speakerphone." I use a Siemens 4200. It has no headset jack, but it has a speakerphone on the handset (not the base). People can't tell when I have them on speaker, and it doesn't freak out when there is heavy background noise. Panasonic sells a similar unit (with headset jack to boot), and I believe AT&T does as well. They can all be found at your local Best Buy or Office Depot.
Easy. The FCC gave them 6mhz worth of spectrum, good for ~19Mbps. The broadcasters have to use some portion of that for no-cost television, but they don't have to use all of it. WRAL in Raleigh uses a portion for an all-news sub-channel, and another chunk for PC data services.
Are you looking to change companies / industries? If you've been with your company for five years, you are probably a highly valued employee. You should speak to Management and HR about other opportunities that are available for someone with your skills and interests.
The hosting company that I work for is very large, so we have dedicated DBA, Development, R&D, and various applications groups as obvious routes for advancement. Some of our technical people have also moved on as account reps to our largest partners.
I happen to like Operations, just got tired of the constant "fire-fighting" and being attached to a pager. Unofficially I moved myself into more of a "Special Projects" role a while ago, lessening my day-to-day responsibilities. Now I'm getting ready to switch to genuine "Special Projects" group. On the Ops side, I'll be responsible for internal services. No pager, plenty of travel opportunities. When roll-outs aren't happening I'll be doing Dev and R&D type project work, without being shoe-horned into a specific role (I'm young, still not sure what I want my "career" to be).
A much better question would be: How many hours to you work in a year?
With a straight 40-hour per week job in America, with the normal two weeks of vacation per year, that's 2000 hours. In the rest of the civilized world, it's more like 1920 or even 1840. Less when you factor in the number of paid holidays.
With my latest performance review, I didn't ask for more money, stock, or fringe benefits like an Aeron chair. I asked for more vacation time. Once you're making "enough" money, it's nicer to be able to spend a few weeks touring Europe than to be able to buy an extra toy or two.
Quoting from Peopleware, second edition, chapter 28 "Competition", under the "Teamicide Re-visited" heading (pg. 183 in my copy):
"Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidale."
DeMarco & Lister quote W. Edwards Deming's "14 Points", where point 12B says that annual or merit ratings and management by objectives should be abolished. Alfie Kohn's work focuses on the harm caused by the "Do this and you'll get this" mentality. Joel Spolsky's essay, "Incentive Pay Considered Harmful" is a quick read on the subject.
Pretty much every major Telco and Network player has a CTI product on the market, and there are PC-based PBX products out there (some even run on NT).
But transferring Telco responsibilities to an IS department is a bad idea, replacing phones with PCs is even worse. How many IS departments are prepared to provide 99.999% (if not higher!) uptime at the network and desktop level? Computers crash. Or worse, they have "problems" -- drivers, viruses, just plain flakiness.
Imagine how costly it is for the average business to be without phone service for an hour. It's a completely devastating situation for even the smallest call center.
Reading the AnandTech review of the Aiwa that was linked to elsewhere, it sounds like the unit has the overall quality of the Nomad Jukebox. Which is to say, it'll play MP3s, but overall the device is crap. I have a Nomad because it solved my immediate desire to transport MP3s from home to the car and office, but as soon as something better comes along it'll become a hand-me-down for my kid brother or go on eBay.
I rejected the Aiwa and Kenwood MP3 head units because I have better things to do than burn my MP3 collection back to CD. I also worry about the longevity of CDRs subjected to the abuse of being in the car (heat, scratching, etc). Another MP3 option that hasn't been mentioned is the "PhatNoise", a modular 2.5" hard-drive unit that emulates an OEM CD changer. The plus side to it is that it provides "Stealth MP3", but their site has been around for quite a while and they still aren't shipping.
I'd have bought an empeg for my car, but unfortunately it will not be coming back to America with me (some stupid law about airbags) and I don't want to go through the hassle of re-installing the factory system when I sell it. The drawbacks to the empeg are:
#1: Nothing can be done about that. If you aren't geek enough to spend whatever it takes to building the baddest MoFo vehicle that plays MP3s and runs Linux, Slashdot can't help you. Sorry. Perhaps you need to find a better job or re-locate somewhere with a lower cost-of-living.
The empeg also does not provide an amplified signal, which is an additional cost if your car doesn't already have an amplifier. You can get around that by slaving the empeg to a head-unit that does have an amplifier (see #2).
#2: I personally don't care about the tuner, but for true NPR die-hards the empeg does have RCA line outputs AND inputs, which means that you can plug the empeg into a standard head unit (or vice-versa). If your dash doesn't have a double-DIN stereo slot, you'll need to do some hacking. GM and Chrysler "DIN-and-a-half" designs usually have enough space around them to build a double-DIN space. Don't risk screwing up your own dash with a dremel tool, pay a professional installer to do it (if it's a friend's dash, and they're offering beer, go for it ;-)
On other single-DIN cars, like my present BMW E36 and my former Mustang, there is often a storage area in the dash that happens to be single-DIN sized. In the case of the Mustang, that space was actually designed to hold a factory single CD player. Again, don't mess up your own dash, seek the help of a professional installer. And the fools at Best Buy do not qualify as professionals. Get a recommendation from that friend of yours who ripped out his back seat to install three 18" subwoofers. If you don't have such a friend, you need to get out more.
If your car doesn't have an available opening, it gets tricky. The glove box, armrest, and under-dash mounting (CB-style) are the primary possibilities. There is some possibility that you could hack a "detachable face" unit to put the display and controls somewhere convenient, but I would strongly recommend that you just replace the car (see #1).
#3: You have three choices for CD playback. You can go the route mentioned in #2, using a full head-unit to provide CD playback. Or you can buy a stand-alone in-dash CD unit, similar to what Ford offers for the Mustang. Sony's CDX-1000RF is one example that provides RCA outputs. Or you can buy a CD changer that has it's own controls, just make sure that it provides RCA outputs. Many use a single RCA-style jack to run to an external FM modulator, this is not the same thing. Be sure to check the manual before buying, never trust the sales guy (especially if it's at Best Buy or any other chain).
For "once in a blue moon" CD use, you could also rig up a Discman to the empeg's RCA inputs. It's a crappy way to do it, but if the desire to play CDs will be very infrequent, it's good enough...
-Bryce
What company buys Win9x/ME on the volume plan?
I doubt many small businesses are willing to "pay twice" to get Win9x/ME volume licenses (once when they buy the PC, again under the OLP).
Larger business with real IT departments will already have a solid understanding of the benefits of standardizing on NT/W2K as the desktop OS, and aren't likely to be using Win9x/ME except in very limited circumstances... Laptops come to mind as having been typically bad candidates for NT once upon a time, but vendors eventually got their acts together and W2K resolves most of those issues.
I'd think that 1999 saw many companies replacing Win9x and NT3.5x desktops with NT4 in preparation for Y2K. Rollouts are painful, no matter what the OS, and I expect many companies aren't ready to take the plunge again.
I can't see anything that Microsoft does causing companies to move to Linux or BSD. Companies will move when it makes sense, and for most companies it just doesn't make any sense.
At my company, we could probably move Sales, Service, and Support to Linux/BSD easily. Support would need VMWare for a few things, but email and the browser are the primary applications for these people. But other groups, particularly Billing and Finance, are heavily dependant on Excel and Access... being less technical users, Linux/BSD + VMWare would be a poor solution for them.
For us, and probably most other companies, it boils down to the costs of supporting all of these users. It's much cheaper for us to staff our internal support department with three Wintel lackeys than two Wintel lackeys plus two *nix lackeys. And the Wintel lackeys probably are cheaper and easier to find/train.
-Bryce
Oops, Palm has updated their software to support IR Hotsync under W2K.
d at e.html
http://www.palm.com/support/downloads/palmdt_up
Will have to try that out next week (what brain-dead Dell engineer decided that serial and IR ports belonged on my docking station and not the laptop itself?).
Both Palms have IR built-in, so just add an IR adapter to your PC. Under Win9x/NT, IR ports are mapped to COM ports, so the Palm Desktop software won't notice the difference. W2K has it's own "special" IR support that does not offer COM port mapping, so you'd need use an IR adapter that plugs into a serial port.
I'm looking into buying a new mobile phone (in North America) with a good WAP browser, internet access, and the general spiffy phone features.
WAP is terrible. It's slow, the gateways are unreliable, screens are too small... And if you're wanting to do real show-off things like check your Yahoo Mail account, realize that filling in a username/password on a WML form is a very trying exercise.
Check out Jakob Neilson's WAP Field Study. Look at the times to accomplish simple tasks with WAP.
I purchased a Nokia 7110 six months ago, and never bothered using the WAP features after the first couple of days. It collects dust on my shelf now, replaced by a (non-WAP) 8890 that is much more stylish, can stay comfortably in my front pocket while I'm sitting down, and works nearly anywhere on the planet that cellular service is available.
Get a phone that's just a phone. If you really want wireless 'net access, get a Palm Vx and a Minstrel.
Getting an American multi-national to send you overseas is the best way to go, especially if you can be considered "on-loan" to a foreign office. This has potential tax benefits, and as a "guest" in a foreign office your lack of language skills is more likely to be tolerated AND you'll find it easier to get help with mundane things like getting phone service. Not to mention that you'll probably find it easy to move to the "home office" (or another foreign office) if you find that the locale doesn't suit you.
The level of beauracracy that an American has to go through to work in an EU country is mind-boggling. Make sure that either the company you're working for is experienced in obtaining these permits or is willing to pay a professional to handle the matter. The fines for messing this up can be severe, as my employer is discovering, and may jeopardize your ability to continue working in that country. Liability applies to your employer AND YOU. These permits must generally be applied for before you enter the EU.
Be prepared for a great deal of culture shock. Rampant consumerism hasn't caught on over here. In Germany, stores close at 6-8pm on weekdays, 2-4pm on Saturdays, and don't open at all on Sundays and holidays. Italy is about the same. Haven't been to France. The UK (or at least central London) is much better with weekend hours, but has reduced weekday hours. London has the advantage of being thoroughly globalized, which is nice if you ever find yourself fancying a trip to Starbucks (I think that I visited 7 on my last trip) or something similarly American.
Anything that's electronic and imported costs a hell of a lot more than in America (my German PSX2 was US$375, but then again, I was able to buy it at a store the day after release ;-) Fuel costs are obscene thanks to severe taxation (about US$3.50/gallon in my part of Germany). Where I live a car is semi-necessary, but in metropolitan areas driving can be counter-productive.
Good luck wherever you decide to go. I've been in Germany for a year, and as trying as it's been at times, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
-Bryce
My recent experience is with Lufthansa, Condor and Lauda airlines on European and international flights. None of them restrict laptop use outside of takeoff and landing, just the use of optical drives, cell phones, radios... I'll keep BA in mind for my next trip home (Florida).
The last few flights that I've been on explicitly prohibited the use of DVD drives (along with CD drives/players and MDs) at all times. CmdrTaco's blatant disregard for the safety of his fellow passengers is astonishing.
I suppose that he's been forced to relocate to Davie Jones' locker...
Have you tried Windows 2000?
:-)
My first troll
I think the real problem is that Gas has been so cheap in the US for so long. We have had it WAY too good.
No kidding. Gas is nearly $4/gallon here in Germany. My friends and family back home in Florida get no sympathy from me when they complain about paying $1.80/gallon at the pump.
My company would have paid to ship my car (an '86 Trans Am) from the States to Germany, but I declined and picked up a '91 BMW 325 instead. The way that I figure it, the more fuel-efficient BMW will pay for itself in about 8 months. And a BMW 325 is hardly fuel-efficient by European standards...
Pager coverage is sporadic, and it's difficult to find carriers with multi-national networks. With the high cellular adoption rates in Europe, pagers for the most part simply are not necessary.
:-)
Giving up my pager was the best part of moving to Germany
-Bryce
I wish that I still had a copy of my current employer's contract as it provides an excellent example of what not to do! When we were acquired, the acquiree foisted these contracts on us as a "condition of employment." In seven simple bullet items it said that we may not work for or found a company in a remotely related field, may not hire company employees even if they initiated contact, that the company would own any "ideas" that we had even if they were unrelated to any business that the company is currently or has future plans to be in, and assigned all copyright and patent interests to the company. With a final stipulation that it would be governed by the laws of a state that I've never set foot in (I work in a different country now, making that stipulation even more laughable).
My team refused to sign, and in the 18 months since I've declined on two additional occassions.
A proper contract should simply exercise common sense. If I worked in network engineering at UUNet, my ideas on how to make routers more efficient belong to them as a product of my employment. My ideas on 3D rendering belong to me. I shouldn't solicite fellow employees, but if they come to me they are fair game. If I want to work for, or found, a company focussed on something that isn't a core business of my employer (or directly related to my specific employment), that's my option, that's the American way.
-Bryce
Check out the Biomorph line of desks. These desks have all of the ergo adjustments you could ever want, and they are quite large.
I've been wanting their "Personal" model for some time now, it's $1295.
I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads... sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars. In this day and age I don't see how a game like crossroads can be worth that much, it is mostly nostalgia for me (and there are all kinds of new-fangled graphical/textual interfaces that do so much more, but I never got into them as much..)
Crossroads by itself would do you no good without a system to run it on. It's not a traditional door, but a DLL add-in to the MajorBBS (nee WorldGroup) platform. Sadly, the platform was never very hobbiest-oriented, unless you were a wealthy hobbiest. In the early days, Crossroads cost several times the $200 or so that it sells for now. A medium-sized for-pay system could make back that money in a matter of days, but it was a sizable investment for anyone trying to run their system as a labor-of-love, especially after investing in the base platform, "Entertainment Pack" (with Action Chat and Fazuul!) and "User 6-Packs" necessary just to get up-and-running.
I'm amazed that the platform continues to exist. One of the founders comitted suicide, another was ousted in a change of ownership. There was a rescinded IPO, and another change of hands. As a former hobbiest MBBS Sysop, and then a former Galacticomm employee, I like to check back from time to time. Those were the good old days, back when community was more than just an IPO buzzword.
Old Galacticomm motto, once printed on the company's t-shirts before the corporate image thing kicked in: To do really cool things in the field of computerized communications, and make a buck or two.
>I said "price/performance", and, yes, that is precisely how "technical superiority" is defined.
I thought that "technical superiority" was based on the merits? By your logic, Windows must be "technically superior" because that's what the market chose.
VHS won over BetaMax in the consumer space due to price and availability. Performance and technical merit had nothing to do with it.
In the professional space, where price takes a back seat to quality, BetaMax-derived formats are king.
> >You'll never see a VHS deck in a professional edit suite.
>This, of course, is a bald-faced lie. I am a professional myself, and have seen nothing resembling what you describe.
A professional what, manager at Blockbuster?
It doesn't take a trained eye to see that VHS (and it's derivatives) produce lower quality video than virtually every other format.