There are three issuses here. The first is
that storage isn't as cheap as you think. The
second is that indexes are hard to maintain.
Finally, you forget that old text is a good
revenue stream.
Storage
You are correct that space is cheap for small amounts of storage. If you go to your local
computer store, you can buy a 60-gig drive for
less than I paid for my first five-meg drive. I
have no contention there.
However, people who archive data for a living
don't buy bare 60-gig IDE drives and string them
together. It ain't that simple.
I work for a newspaper. We have every text
we have published since 1985 and every picture
since 1996 (don't quote me on that last date).
They are both inside IBM RS/6000s. The text
archive is under 15 gig. The photo archive
clocks in at 230 gig (and growing by nearly
600 meg a day).
Initially, the data lived in a $100,000 HP
optical jukebox. When that got too small, we
scrapped it and bought IBM 7133 disk arrays.
Bare, before you put the first drive in the
box, they cost $36,000. Each nine gig drive
is $2,000. (Yes, I know you can get them
cheaper. But not hot-swap, not with an IBM
warrenty, etc.) When you hit 144 gig (9 gig
by 16 drives), you've got to buy another 7133.
In order to get good performance, you can't
just RAID-5 everything in one big SSA loop. You
have got to have multiple paths. Each enhanced
SSA card is a few thousand dollars.
Indexing
Keeping the raw images isn't that difficult
in the grand scheme of things. Indexing and
searching for content, however, is less than
trivial. Keeping the database well-groomed is
hard work. You do want all the stuff these web
sites keep online to be searchable, right?
Storing photographs is especially difficult.
For a quick discussion on archiving images, see
this post from a week or
so ago.
Revenue
Newspapers sell you a hundred stories with
pictures and comics a day for, generally, 50
cents. However, if you want a story that was
in last year's newspaper, they can charge you
five dollars for that story and you will pay it.
Why on earth would newspapers give you content
for free that they spent money to create and
archive? Yeah, yeah, information wants to be
free and all that but they are still have to
make a profit otherwise there will be no
information to be made free.
Solution?
The obvious solution is for these media
outlets to charge for old stories. That way
the links don't break and they have a way to
support the archive and indexing costs. Folks
here won't like that idea.
Summary
It's easy to say that the media should keep
everything online all the time. In the real
world, however, there's problems with doing just
that. The problems are both technical and
financial. Information may want to be free but
'wanting' doesn't pay the bills.
When people complain about the government, I
have to point out that we, not them, are the
government. If there's a government problem,
it's because I elected the wrong person.
To a great extent, we are the corporate power.
Never before in American history has so much
money been invested in the stock market by
so many people. We own our oppressor.
The same people who claim Microsoft is a
monopoly have stock in Microsoft. The same
people who think that Wal-Mart is homogenizing
America in an effort to mute culture and get
us to buy more Britney Sprears CDs are the
same people who rode the stock from $10 in
1991 to more than $55 this year.
Sure, AOL ruined the internet, but they did
it while making people such as you and me
rich in the process.
Corporations exist to make money. I'll be the
first to agree with that. But we forget that
they aren't making money for themselves. They
are making money for their shareholders. If
you don't like a company, don't buy its product
but do buy its shares. Become and owner and
change the way it operates.
There will be some who say that the average
stock owner has no effect on the company as
a whole. Before you tell me that, tell me
how much your vote will mean in the next
election. Tell me if your vote is wasted.
If those same photographs were in digital
format, no doubt they would have been erased the
first time the photographers disk needed a little
room.
You are right for now but will be wrong in
the near future.
My father has every negative he ever shot over
his more than 30-year career as a photojournalist.
This is common. Most major newspapers have their
negatives going back decades. Some have them
going back nearly a century.
Unused digital images, however, most often
aren't archived. At my newspaper, only digital
images that are used in the paper or are thought
to be of some lasting value are saved.
You're only half right as to the reason,
however. It's not just disk space. There are only
a few products on the market that are designed
for the archiving of digital images on such a
large scale and they aren't very good. The
Associated Press (someone you'd expect to have
their digital act together) was in the picture
archive business for about a decade. They are
now pulling out of the game for the most part.
We're looking at a few digital achive solutions
and will probably buy this year. I
doubt it's the best possible solution but it's
as good as it gets for now. I suspect it'll be
another five to ten years before someone develops
a really good photo archive system.
Storing terabytes of images is trivial from a
technical standpoint. Being able to search and
index those same images is very difficult. So
difficult, in fact, that one of the main reasons
folks didn't go digital in the mid- to late-1990s
was not because of the digital camera technology
(which hasn't really advanced much at the
high-end) but because of the lack of archive
options.
[way off-topic] However, newspaper negatives,
especially before the mid-1980s, weren't designed
(actually, processed) for longevity. Often times
negatives were used to make prints while they
were still dripping with fixer. Some negatives
were never washed. Prints needed on a tight
deadline often weren't fixed more than ten or 20
seconds. They started fading the second they left
the dark room. Newspaper negatives are not the best examples of proper photographic
processing. While movie negatives will last a
century because they were processed with
exacting standards, I suspect that most newspaper
negatives from the 1960s and 1970s will be in
seriously bad health real soon now.
they don't take "standard" 35mm accessories... I'd love to see a company come
out with a digital camera that could take some
of the fancier lenses
Assuming I haven't been trolled, check out
the Nikon D1. It does all of that you
requested and feels like an F5. That it's only
2.74 megapixel is not really relevant to its
target audience.
The newspaper I work for has all but stopped
shooting film. As of more than a year ago,
those folks in our remote offices stopped
shooting film. Deadline sports and out-of-state
assignments went digital shortly thereafter.
In the past couple months, we've bought two
dozen D1s and should be all digital by the
end of the year. If you live in a major market
(over 500,000 people), chances are that most
pictures in your newspaper were not shot on film.
I always hear that digital cameras don't have
the resolution of quality of film. That is true
and will be true for a long time (years if not
another decade or so). Quality isn't always the
deciding factor. For the news business, speed of
turnaround is most important.
Any business in which the quality of the image
is secondary to a need for quick turnaround and
minimal cost (realtors, newspapers, insurance
companies, etc.) will be digital this year if
they aren't already. Further, catalogs and ads where the image quality is greatly important
but the iamge size is small, will be digital.
I originally began researching the subject
because I live in a downtown appartment and the
building is so badly built that we smell the
cigarette smoke from adjacent rooms.
I realize this is a low-tech solution but have
you thought about moving? Your health has got to
be worth something, right?
If I were seated in a restaurant next to someone
who was smoking, I'd ask to be moved. A long meal
is just a couple hours. You're living with smoke.
For several hours a day. (Health issues aside,
I'm not an anti-smoking freak but I also don't
want to have to smell the stuff.)
If you really value your health, move. That will
do more good than any electronic gizmo.
If you want some really good tips on how to make
your house healthy as well as a good discussion
on why modern houses are worse for you than older
houses, check out the book Home Comforts : The Art and Science of Keeping House. (Summary: today's houses are air tight
and full of germs. Old houses had windows and
people actually opened them.) I highly recommend
it and it will help you pick up chicks if your
into that sort of thing.
When Novell drops support, you'll then have
about the same level of support that Linux has.
USENET, third-parties and else. If support is
the issue, you're going in the wrong direction
by going Linux. (Moderators: that's insightful
not flamebait.)
Novell 4.x has been on the market for many years. It is about as rock solid as an operating system can get. Do you need really need Novell's support?
Unless you need some new Novell features, I would not upgrade. I've got 3.x servers still running. I know of a Novell server that has been up for
nearly four years (no hardware problems, knock on
wood) and no one knows the admin password. We've
been through two Novell admins since it was
installed and since nothing had to be done to it,
it just sits there spinning. (This is not a
suggested practice.)
If I did anything at all, it would be to upgrade
the hardware only. I would not change operating
systems nor would I change versions. Get the box
on new hardware while it's still supported. If it
runs for three months, it'll run three years. If,
in a year or so, you decide Linux (or NT) would
be a better choice, you've got good hardware to
put it on.
For the last 24 years, we've had green-screen mainframe terminals and all was right with
the world. About a year ago, we phased out the
mainframe and installed PCs with lovely 21"
NEC monitors. Everyone in one area of the
building complained about horrible flicker
and the investigation started.
It turns out that the department was over the
electrical vault. Several times the acceptable
limit was coming up through the eight-inch
thick concrete floor. Needless to say, many
jokes were made about low sperm count. Then
people started to get worried. (First the people
in that area then our corporate lawyers.)
Many ideas were floated. The easiest way would
to have been to place a three-quarter-inch thick
piece of lead on all the vault walls. (I say all
because the folks on either side of the vault on
the first floor were now also seeing problems.)
This seemed like a good idea in theory.
While lead did fix the problems in the neighboring
offices, the EMF level in the room skyrocketed.
There was no place the the EMF to go so it just
bounced around in the room. We went from slightly
over the legal level to three-headed babies. We
had to take down the lead.
Since the department in question refused to wear
lead jock straps, we had to move the electrical vault to outside the building. (As is the
standard now, I'm told.)
In the end, it cost us several thousand dollars
to move the vault and, more costly, two power
outtages and a few weekends of load testing.
If I were you, I'd talk to the building's
property management. Ultimately, they will be
the ones to fix the problem. Further, if they
won't or can't fix it, I'd be looking for another
building before you get too settled in.
Even if the EMF is within legal limits, a flickering screen is a hazzard to worker productivity. If a worker comes down with a
bad headache, you're looking at a law suite.
If a woman has a child with any birth defects
even ones that could not possibly be caused be
EMF, the company will be sued out of existance.
I've got everything I've ever written on a
computer -- email and else -- since around 1981.
It ain't always pretty but I'll tell you the
secret to my success. Plain text. ASCII. If
you want to be able to read what you've written
now ten years from now, keep it ASCII.
Thanks to a basic format, I was able to convert
my TRS-80 Model I tapes to Model 4 disks and my
Model 4 disks to the 20-meg drive in my first
Tandy 1000. From there it has been easy. My new
harddrive is always huge compared to the last one
so my old data usually takes up a third of the
new disk. No big deak.
I read all my email with 'mail' thus protecting
myself from viruses and funky email formats
(Eudora, Outlook, CCMail, etc.). At the end of
the month, my mailbox it is dated, rotated and
gzipped. The header information (Date, From and
Subject) is added to a master index file along
with the filename where the message can be found.
I've got a few ugly scripts that will search by
keyword so I can find old stuff.
Yes, I'm living in the stone age. Those of you
able to read your email going back to the early
1980s feel free to throw stones.
I think putting the stuff in a database would be
a bad idea. When you change platforms, there will
be maintenance. When you change databases, there
will be maintenance. With plain ASCII text, you
know you'll always be able to read it and you
never have to upgrade. (Okay, by using gzip,
there may be some extra effort on my part. A few
years ago, I moved everything from compress to
gzip. That's not the same thing as going from
Oracle to Sybase, however.)
Final thought: don't keep everything. Mailing
lists are usually deleted on read. Any mailing
list worth reading (and worth reading two years
from now) is being archived on the web somewhere.
I see no need to create a local mirror. The
hardest part of being an archivist is knowing
what to throw away.
I had a three-meter dish that I dumped for one of
the nifty 18-inch dishes. I sunk it in my back yard and filled it with potting soil. It's where I grow my strawberries. It keeps the weeds out and,
once I put some down some edging, it looked good enough that the wife didn't complain.
When PrimeStar went out of business, I grabbed
half a dozen dishes out of trash piles and
turned them into planters in the front yard. It
looks really nifty.
I tried to use some odd-ball dishes as cement
forms to create stepping stones (the pointy end
would go down, of course) but that didn't work
too well. They aren't deep enough and the cement
was too thin and kept cracking.
I'd like to find some more dishes. They really
are pretty handy. As someone else noted, if you
get the right shape, they make excellent sleds.
That question and those like it can never
really be answered honestly because no one
will ever define what gets counted.
Does that junker up on blocks behind your
neighbor's house count? Maybe. What about
that 1948 Ford that's rusting in the creak
down near the mill? Probably not.
When it comes to cars, I'd say the right count
would be the number of registered automobiles.
With applications, I think the count would be
the number of products on the shelf plus those
actively supported by in-house staffs.
I can't say that 70,000 sounds all
that unreasonable. There are hundreds of
thousands of companies in the United States
alone. If just a quarter of that number
wrote one application, you could easily hit
70,000. Add to that all your shrinkwrap
commercial products and shareware and you've
got far more than 70,000.
Heck, looking at all the legacy crap I've got
to support, built by employees who have long
since moved on to bigger and better things and
I can come up with almost that many applications
at my company alone.
At my last job, I had an office. It was nice. I had loud music after hours and a non-windowed door so I could freaky with the secretary.
At my current job, I'm in a cubicle. Of course,
I'd like an office but I'm really learning to like the cubicle. It allows me more interaction with my coworkers. I've found that I'm much more likely to ask for help or offer help living in such a communial environment than I every was in my office.
Overall, I'd say the best working environment is one you can customize. No matter if it's a desk, cubicle or office, the key is customization. One size doens't fit all and a comfortable employee is a productive employee.
The best office environment tip I can supply, however, is this one... Have a guest chair but always have something on it. That way, people can't just enter your work area and sit down. If you want someone to spend some time with you, take the laptop case (or whatever) off the chair. If you want piece and quiet, not offering the person a place to sit is pretty effective.
I'm just wondering about everyone wanting to write their own license.
{sigh}
When Larry Wall notes 'There's More Than One Way To Do It', we cheer and write folk songs.
When IBM says that the GPL isn't right for what they want to do, we get a bad feeling in
the pit of our collective our stomach. Why?
Not everything needs to be GPL. Not
everything should be GPL. Let's not make the
license the issue. Let's talk about what a
great product AFS is and how much a pain in
the buttocks it is to configure it correctly.
I don't know about their old stuff, but their new stuff sux!
Atex was the best publishing system in the world through the mid-80s. Unfortunately, they
lost sight of the ball. Instead of scrapping
the J11 base, they insisted on building on top
of it. All their old time programmers (who were
damn good) left the company to spinoffs.
(XyWrite was probably the best of them, by the
way. Still a top wordprocessor.)
Same goes for the other American publishing
system companies. Europe, who bit the bullet and
went fully-paginated in the late 80s and early
90s jumpped way ahead.
Fast to Atex means when we get to it, usually sometimes next week.
That's normal. Same for CCI. Same for SII.
Same for DTI.
We had to spend the money because our SII
system couldn't be made Y2K compliant.
We blew a load of cash to upgrade Atex knowing
that we would be throwing it away this August.
That extra eight months cost us big.
As for SII, we're using that, too. Editorial
uses CCI. Classified uses SII. I feel your pain.
On top of two new system installs, we're doing
web width reduction and a full redesign.
I never would have guessed Slashdot would have
had this many newspaper folks hanging around. Of
course, everyone else considers this thread off-topic. Which it probably is.
We've got over 30 IBM Netfinity servers
(3500, 3500M20, 5000, 5600, 8500, etc.) all
of them bought in the last couple years. I'm
a big fan of them.
Most of these servers replaced Compaq
products. We've ran into problems with
Compaq taking too long to deliver product
and poor quality control.
The IBMs are fast and well built. There
were some problems early on with Microsoft
NT clustering not supporting SSA drives but
that was resolved. (IBM and Microsoft worked
together to get it fixed within three months.
Not bad considering the players.)
I've got a mostly stock RedHat 6.2 install
running on a 3500 and a really warped version
of Debian running on a 5000. Our IBM hardware
tech is well versed in Linux and has giving
me a good feeling about IBM's support of Linux.
I may be biased, however. I've been working
with IBM's RS/6000 products for many years and
generally like IBM.
On August 25, 2000, the company I work for is going to be turning off its ten-node clustered PDP-11 (M-11 upgraded!). This computer system (Atex -- a newspaper publishing system also used by the Supreme Court) was installed in 1972 and still works like a charm.
At the height of production, we had over 240 users on the system. All with just 40 meg of memory (four meg in each of the ten nodes; I
can't boot a single-user instance of NT in just
40 meg). I've been working on this system for five years and it's older than I am. In the last eleven years, we've not had a single minute of unscheduled down time that has had a production impact.
In order to replace Atex, we bought three
12-processor RS/6000 S7As with 10 gig of RAM between them running AIX and 350 PCs
running NT for the client side.
Our Atex system produced a daily newspaper
(okay, maybe there were some reporters helping out, too) for 28 years. We expect we will have
to replace the new system in five years.
They sure don't make machines like they used to. If you every have an opportunity to work on
some of these systems, take it. You will learn
a great deal.
InitZero
(If anyone knows of a good home for these ten
nodes and related equipment, drop me email. Paying customers would be our first choice. Musuems are number two. Private citizens with more money than brains always welcome. {grin})
Yes, ISDN is old technology and not all that
fast (only 128kbps raw and I generally get 170
kbps compressed) but it's better than 28.8kbps.
I get ISDN for $59 a month. Add to that a 3Com
OfficeConnect ISDN router with built in four-port
hub, NAT and a bunch of other nifty features for
$300 (or close) and you've got a nice setup.
In my area I get a 200 channel hours of use
a month for the base rate and a penny a minute
per channel above that. In the two years I've
had ISDN, I've never used more than 200 channel
hours. (If I ever spend more than 200 hours
online a month from home, I've got bigger
problems than a per-minute charge; I've got a
lack of life problem.)
I've looked into DSL but since I'm 20,540
feet from the CO, I'm limited to 144 kbps. For
comparable cost at the number of hours I use,
it just ain't worth the hassel of changing
the server over.
At the very least they mean that you are getting
training. How many people get offsite training as
part of their employment? You are lucky.
I have no problem with you being on the hook if
you take the training and run. If they gave you
a signing bonus of $11,000 (which is what my
company has spent on my training in the past
year), I'd expect to have to pay it back if I
left the company before a year. Be reasonable.
When your employer sends you to training that's
as good as cash in your pocket. Only, unlike a
monetary bonus, the government doesn't take
taxes out of the sum. Plus, spending $10,000 on
Oracle DBA classes will likely bring you more
than $25,000 more on the open market. That's a
great return by any standard.
We are woking in a tight labor market and, as
others have noted, it would be easy to find an
employer who doesn't have this sort of contract.
But, unless you are planning to jump ship in the
next year, why bother? Even if you do plan on
jumpping ship, wouldn't your new job pay enough
to cover paying back the classes?
As for the legal status of training contracts,
you better believe they are solid. For decades
if not centuries, small towns have put doctors
through school (eg. training) in order to ensure
they can make the doctor work in a given town
for a designated period of time.
This is a case of folks wanting to get something
for nothing and people who don't want to be held
accountable for their actions. Music should be
free. Video should be free. Training should be
free. Etc.
Grow up. There is no free lunch. Heck, it's even
getting hard to find free T-Shirts.
InitZero
More Insidious Than Spam is Harassment
on
Gnutella Vs. SPAM
·
· Score: 5
For a week in July, a pissed-off spammer returned
my email address as every gnutella response...
gnut> find anything
CURRENT RESPONSES
-----------------
1) email matt@steinhoff.net for kiddie porn and anything
216.10.33.21:6345 size:80.854M ref:84279680 speed:10000
I got thousands of email messages looking for
child porn and else
before I nailed the guy.
When the search is distributed, the abuse is
distributed as well.
Pardon my ignorance but what is a remote
login cluster?
Are you just looking to balance shell accounts
across multiple nodes? If that's the case, set
one node up as the NFS server serving the home
directories. Set up DNS such that shell.wherever.edu points to the three nodes.
Depending on what your users do, that's probably
all you will need.
A group of us are hoping to convince a
big UK based defence organisation to break
away from Microsoft's stranglehold on the
workplace and to try out Linux.
Summary: I think you'll be shooting yourself
in the foot if you continue as you are. If you
really want to get linux online, write a
business proposal and make sure you show a clear
return on investment. If you can't do that, you
won't get linux.
You sound as though you are writing from the
heart and head instead of the pocketbook.
Phrases such as 'break away from Microsoft's
stranglehold' are not conducive to a business
plan or course of action. Using emotional
language and supplying links to news sites
praising linux aren't going do get you very far.
What you need to do is write a proposal using
hard numbers and balancing the risks and benefits
of using linux. You're thinking like a tech head.
FAQs? That's just silly.
Accountants aren't interested in what linux
is or what it does. They want to know that it
costs $72,000 less than a comparable setup using
Microsoft.
Non-technical managers don't want to see
boring benchmarks. (Who cares if linux runs 60%
of web servers if you are using it as a
firewall?) They want to see a desktop the
majority of users can understand without
additional training.
No one gives a damn about the penguin.
Does anyone care why IBM's color is blue? If
IBM was trying to sell me AIX and their proposal
included an FAQ about the color blue, I'd find
it hard to take them seriously.
I'm not even going to touch the 'games'
question. You did say these were workplace PCs.
The problem with folks who want to convert from
Microsoft (or whatever) to Linux is that they
want to do it as its own project. I can't see
a reasonable company trying something like that. In terms of just man power to make the conversion,
I can't see any way to recapture the investment.
When you factor in retraining the users, I'll
tell you right now that you won't be able to
cost justify the action.
Do you have a reason to switch operating systems?
If not, you will not win this fight. Find a new
project and bring linux in the door through that
project. It may take five to ten years to get
linux at the majority of seats. Windows wasn't
built in a day.
I'm taking these nodes to be workstations
for individual users. These are, for the most
part, not shared machines. Thus, while I agree
with you in theory, in this practical case, you
security concerns are moot.
a big screwup causes corruption of a
particular partition
Good point though I can't think of a
non-physical problem that would screw up a single
partition given the single harddrive.
I'm not trying to be negative. I've split data
across many partitions on single drives myself.
I just want to know if I've been wasting my time.
There is a bit of difference between the MP3 copyright issues and those faced by those of Sega.
ROMs are licensed to Sega and have copyrights retained by dozens and dozens of various companies.
Oh. I understand now. Stealing from many sources
as is the case with ROMs is bad. However,
stealing from just one person, a musical artist,
well, that's just fine.
The lengths people go to justify their activities
never ceases to amaze me. Then again, my mom
taught me that any stealing was wrong. It didn't
matter the cost or quality of the item being
stolen. Stealing is stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Storage keeps getting cheaper,
There are three issuses here. The first is that storage isn't as cheap as you think. The second is that indexes are hard to maintain. Finally, you forget that old text is a good revenue stream.
Storage
You are correct that space is cheap for small amounts of storage. If you go to your local computer store, you can buy a 60-gig drive for less than I paid for my first five-meg drive. I have no contention there.
However, people who archive data for a living don't buy bare 60-gig IDE drives and string them together. It ain't that simple.
I work for a newspaper. We have every text we have published since 1985 and every picture since 1996 (don't quote me on that last date). They are both inside IBM RS/6000s. The text archive is under 15 gig. The photo archive clocks in at 230 gig (and growing by nearly 600 meg a day).
Initially, the data lived in a $100,000 HP optical jukebox. When that got too small, we scrapped it and bought IBM 7133 disk arrays. Bare, before you put the first drive in the box, they cost $36,000. Each nine gig drive is $2,000. (Yes, I know you can get them cheaper. But not hot-swap, not with an IBM warrenty, etc.) When you hit 144 gig (9 gig by 16 drives), you've got to buy another 7133. In order to get good performance, you can't just RAID-5 everything in one big SSA loop. You have got to have multiple paths. Each enhanced SSA card is a few thousand dollars.
Indexing
Keeping the raw images isn't that difficult in the grand scheme of things. Indexing and searching for content, however, is less than trivial. Keeping the database well-groomed is hard work. You do want all the stuff these web sites keep online to be searchable, right?
Storing photographs is especially difficult. For a quick discussion on archiving images, see this post from a week or so ago.
Revenue
Newspapers sell you a hundred stories with pictures and comics a day for, generally, 50 cents. However, if you want a story that was in last year's newspaper, they can charge you five dollars for that story and you will pay it.
Why on earth would newspapers give you content for free that they spent money to create and archive? Yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and all that but they are still have to make a profit otherwise there will be no information to be made free.
Solution?
The obvious solution is for these media outlets to charge for old stories. That way the links don't break and they have a way to support the archive and indexing costs. Folks here won't like that idea.
Summary
It's easy to say that the media should keep everything online all the time. In the real world, however, there's problems with doing just that. The problems are both technical and financial. Information may want to be free but 'wanting' doesn't pay the bills.
InitZero
When people complain about the government, I have to point out that we, not them, are the government. If there's a government problem, it's because I elected the wrong person.
To a great extent, we are the corporate power. Never before in American history has so much money been invested in the stock market by so many people. We own our oppressor.
The same people who claim Microsoft is a monopoly have stock in Microsoft. The same people who think that Wal-Mart is homogenizing America in an effort to mute culture and get us to buy more Britney Sprears CDs are the same people who rode the stock from $10 in 1991 to more than $55 this year.
Sure, AOL ruined the internet, but they did it while making people such as you and me rich in the process.
Corporations exist to make money. I'll be the first to agree with that. But we forget that they aren't making money for themselves. They are making money for their shareholders. If you don't like a company, don't buy its product but do buy its shares. Become and owner and change the way it operates.
There will be some who say that the average stock owner has no effect on the company as a whole. Before you tell me that, tell me how much your vote will mean in the next election. Tell me if your vote is wasted.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
InitZero
If those same photographs were in digital format, no doubt they would have been erased the first time the photographers disk needed a little room.
You are right for now but will be wrong in the near future.
My father has every negative he ever shot over his more than 30-year career as a photojournalist. This is common. Most major newspapers have their negatives going back decades. Some have them going back nearly a century.
Unused digital images, however, most often aren't archived. At my newspaper, only digital images that are used in the paper or are thought to be of some lasting value are saved.
You're only half right as to the reason, however. It's not just disk space. There are only a few products on the market that are designed for the archiving of digital images on such a large scale and they aren't very good. The Associated Press (someone you'd expect to have their digital act together) was in the picture archive business for about a decade. They are now pulling out of the game for the most part.
We're looking at a few digital achive solutions and will probably buy this year. I doubt it's the best possible solution but it's as good as it gets for now. I suspect it'll be another five to ten years before someone develops a really good photo archive system.
Storing terabytes of images is trivial from a technical standpoint. Being able to search and index those same images is very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that one of the main reasons folks didn't go digital in the mid- to late-1990s was not because of the digital camera technology (which hasn't really advanced much at the high-end) but because of the lack of archive options.
[way off-topic] However, newspaper negatives, especially before the mid-1980s, weren't designed (actually, processed) for longevity. Often times negatives were used to make prints while they were still dripping with fixer. Some negatives were never washed. Prints needed on a tight deadline often weren't fixed more than ten or 20 seconds. They started fading the second they left the dark room. Newspaper negatives are not the best examples of proper photographic processing. While movie negatives will last a century because they were processed with exacting standards, I suspect that most newspaper negatives from the 1960s and 1970s will be in seriously bad health real soon now.
InitZero
they don't take "standard" 35mm accessories... I'd love to see a company come out with a digital camera that could take some of the fancier lenses
Assuming I haven't been trolled, check out the Nikon D1. It does all of that you requested and feels like an F5. That it's only 2.74 megapixel is not really relevant to its target audience.
The newspaper I work for has all but stopped shooting film. As of more than a year ago, those folks in our remote offices stopped shooting film. Deadline sports and out-of-state assignments went digital shortly thereafter.
In the past couple months, we've bought two dozen D1s and should be all digital by the end of the year. If you live in a major market (over 500,000 people), chances are that most pictures in your newspaper were not shot on film.
I always hear that digital cameras don't have the resolution of quality of film. That is true and will be true for a long time (years if not another decade or so). Quality isn't always the deciding factor. For the news business, speed of turnaround is most important.
Any business in which the quality of the image is secondary to a need for quick turnaround and minimal cost (realtors, newspapers, insurance companies, etc.) will be digital this year if they aren't already. Further, catalogs and ads where the image quality is greatly important but the iamge size is small, will be digital.
InitZero
I originally began researching the subject because I live in a downtown appartment and the building is so badly built that we smell the cigarette smoke from adjacent rooms.
I realize this is a low-tech solution but have you thought about moving? Your health has got to be worth something, right?
If I were seated in a restaurant next to someone who was smoking, I'd ask to be moved. A long meal is just a couple hours. You're living with smoke. For several hours a day. (Health issues aside, I'm not an anti-smoking freak but I also don't want to have to smell the stuff.)
If you really value your health, move. That will do more good than any electronic gizmo.
If you want some really good tips on how to make your house healthy as well as a good discussion on why modern houses are worse for you than older houses, check out the book Home Comforts : The Art and Science of Keeping House. (Summary: today's houses are air tight and full of germs. Old houses had windows and people actually opened them.) I highly recommend it and it will help you pick up chicks if your into that sort of thing.
InitZero
Novell is dropping support. So what?
When Novell drops support, you'll then have about the same level of support that Linux has. USENET, third-parties and else. If support is the issue, you're going in the wrong direction by going Linux. (Moderators: that's insightful not flamebait.)
Novell 4.x has been on the market for many years. It is about as rock solid as an operating system can get. Do you need really need Novell's support?
Unless you need some new Novell features, I would not upgrade. I've got 3.x servers still running. I know of a Novell server that has been up for nearly four years (no hardware problems, knock on wood) and no one knows the admin password. We've been through two Novell admins since it was installed and since nothing had to be done to it, it just sits there spinning. (This is not a suggested practice.)
If I did anything at all, it would be to upgrade the hardware only. I would not change operating systems nor would I change versions. Get the box on new hardware while it's still supported. If it runs for three months, it'll run three years. If, in a year or so, you decide Linux (or NT) would be a better choice, you've got good hardware to put it on.
InitZero
For the last 24 years, we've had green-screen mainframe terminals and all was right with the world. About a year ago, we phased out the mainframe and installed PCs with lovely 21" NEC monitors. Everyone in one area of the building complained about horrible flicker and the investigation started.
It turns out that the department was over the electrical vault. Several times the acceptable limit was coming up through the eight-inch thick concrete floor. Needless to say, many jokes were made about low sperm count. Then people started to get worried. (First the people in that area then our corporate lawyers.)
Many ideas were floated. The easiest way would to have been to place a three-quarter-inch thick piece of lead on all the vault walls. (I say all because the folks on either side of the vault on the first floor were now also seeing problems.) This seemed like a good idea in theory.
While lead did fix the problems in the neighboring offices, the EMF level in the room skyrocketed. There was no place the the EMF to go so it just bounced around in the room. We went from slightly over the legal level to three-headed babies. We had to take down the lead.
Since the department in question refused to wear lead jock straps, we had to move the electrical vault to outside the building. (As is the standard now, I'm told.)
In the end, it cost us several thousand dollars to move the vault and, more costly, two power outtages and a few weekends of load testing.
If I were you, I'd talk to the building's property management. Ultimately, they will be the ones to fix the problem. Further, if they won't or can't fix it, I'd be looking for another building before you get too settled in.
Even if the EMF is within legal limits, a flickering screen is a hazzard to worker productivity. If a worker comes down with a bad headache, you're looking at a law suite. If a woman has a child with any birth defects even ones that could not possibly be caused be EMF, the company will be sued out of existance.
InitZero
I've got everything I've ever written on a computer -- email and else -- since around 1981.
It ain't always pretty but I'll tell you the secret to my success. Plain text. ASCII. If you want to be able to read what you've written now ten years from now, keep it ASCII.
Thanks to a basic format, I was able to convert my TRS-80 Model I tapes to Model 4 disks and my Model 4 disks to the 20-meg drive in my first Tandy 1000. From there it has been easy. My new harddrive is always huge compared to the last one so my old data usually takes up a third of the new disk. No big deak.
I read all my email with 'mail' thus protecting myself from viruses and funky email formats (Eudora, Outlook, CCMail, etc.). At the end of the month, my mailbox it is dated, rotated and gzipped. The header information (Date, From and Subject) is added to a master index file along with the filename where the message can be found.
I've got a few ugly scripts that will search by keyword so I can find old stuff.
Yes, I'm living in the stone age. Those of you able to read your email going back to the early 1980s feel free to throw stones.
I think putting the stuff in a database would be a bad idea. When you change platforms, there will be maintenance. When you change databases, there will be maintenance. With plain ASCII text, you know you'll always be able to read it and you never have to upgrade. (Okay, by using gzip, there may be some extra effort on my part. A few years ago, I moved everything from compress to gzip. That's not the same thing as going from Oracle to Sybase, however.)
Final thought: don't keep everything. Mailing lists are usually deleted on read. Any mailing list worth reading (and worth reading two years from now) is being archived on the web somewhere. I see no need to create a local mirror. The hardest part of being an archivist is knowing what to throw away.
InitZero
I had a three-meter dish that I dumped for one of the nifty 18-inch dishes. I sunk it in my back yard and filled it with potting soil. It's where I grow my strawberries. It keeps the weeds out and, once I put some down some edging, it looked good enough that the wife didn't complain.
When PrimeStar went out of business, I grabbed half a dozen dishes out of trash piles and turned them into planters in the front yard. It looks really nifty.
I tried to use some odd-ball dishes as cement forms to create stepping stones (the pointy end would go down, of course) but that didn't work too well. They aren't deep enough and the cement was too thin and kept cracking.
I'd like to find some more dishes. They really are pretty handy. As someone else noted, if you get the right shape, they make excellent sleds.
InitZero
That question and those like it can never really be answered honestly because no one will ever define what gets counted.
Does that junker up on blocks behind your neighbor's house count? Maybe. What about that 1948 Ford that's rusting in the creak down near the mill? Probably not.
When it comes to cars, I'd say the right count would be the number of registered automobiles.
With applications, I think the count would be the number of products on the shelf plus those actively supported by in-house staffs.
I can't say that 70,000 sounds all that unreasonable. There are hundreds of thousands of companies in the United States alone. If just a quarter of that number wrote one application, you could easily hit 70,000. Add to that all your shrinkwrap commercial products and shareware and you've got far more than 70,000.
Heck, looking at all the legacy crap I've got to support, built by employees who have long since moved on to bigger and better things and I can come up with almost that many applications at my company alone.
InitZero
At my last job, I had an office. It was nice. I had loud music after hours and a non-windowed door so I could freaky with the secretary.
At my current job, I'm in a cubicle. Of course, I'd like an office but I'm really learning to like the cubicle. It allows me more interaction with my coworkers. I've found that I'm much more likely to ask for help or offer help living in such a communial environment than I every was in my office.
Overall, I'd say the best working environment is one you can customize. No matter if it's a desk, cubicle or office, the key is customization. One size doens't fit all and a comfortable employee is a productive employee.
The best office environment tip I can supply, however, is this one... Have a guest chair but always have something on it. That way, people can't just enter your work area and sit down. If you want someone to spend some time with you, take the laptop case (or whatever) off the chair. If you want piece and quiet, not offering the person a place to sit is pretty effective.
InitZero
I'm just wondering about everyone wanting to write their own license.
{sigh}
When Larry Wall notes 'There's More Than One Way To Do It', we cheer and write folk songs. When IBM says that the GPL isn't right for what they want to do, we get a bad feeling in the pit of our collective our stomach. Why?
Not everything needs to be GPL. Not everything should be GPL. Let's not make the license the issue. Let's talk about what a great product AFS is and how much a pain in the buttocks it is to configure it correctly.
InitZero
isn't Atex the firm which was sued for their non ergonomic keyboard?
Yes. In fact, Atex was hit so hard, they decided to stop producing keyboards. I believe it was the first ergo case of this kind.
When Atex stopped making keyboards, a company calling itself Xeta started. Xeta is Atex backwards.
InitZero
I don't know about their old stuff, but their new stuff sux!
Atex was the best publishing system in the world through the mid-80s. Unfortunately, they lost sight of the ball. Instead of scrapping the J11 base, they insisted on building on top of it. All their old time programmers (who were damn good) left the company to spinoffs. (XyWrite was probably the best of them, by the way. Still a top wordprocessor.)
Same goes for the other American publishing system companies. Europe, who bit the bullet and went fully-paginated in the late 80s and early 90s jumpped way ahead.
Fast to Atex means when we get to it, usually sometimes next week.
That's normal. Same for CCI. Same for SII. Same for DTI.
We had to spend the money because our SII system couldn't be made Y2K compliant.
We blew a load of cash to upgrade Atex knowing that we would be throwing it away this August. That extra eight months cost us big.
As for SII, we're using that, too. Editorial uses CCI. Classified uses SII. I feel your pain.
On top of two new system installs, we're doing web width reduction and a full redesign.
I never would have guessed Slashdot would have had this many newspaper folks hanging around. Of course, everyone else considers this thread off-topic. Which it probably is.
InitZero
do you think this ten node cluster would fit into my Residence room?
I doubt it.
Per a handful of email requests, I've put some snapshots online. Enjoy.
InitZero
We've got over 30 IBM Netfinity servers (3500, 3500M20, 5000, 5600, 8500, etc.) all of them bought in the last couple years. I'm a big fan of them.
Most of these servers replaced Compaq products. We've ran into problems with Compaq taking too long to deliver product and poor quality control.
The IBMs are fast and well built. There were some problems early on with Microsoft NT clustering not supporting SSA drives but that was resolved. (IBM and Microsoft worked together to get it fixed within three months. Not bad considering the players.)
I've got a mostly stock RedHat 6.2 install running on a 3500 and a really warped version of Debian running on a 5000. Our IBM hardware tech is well versed in Linux and has giving me a good feeling about IBM's support of Linux.
I may be biased, however. I've been working with IBM's RS/6000 products for many years and generally like IBM.
InitZero
On August 25, 2000, the company I work for is going to be turning off its ten-node clustered PDP-11 (M-11 upgraded!). This computer system (Atex -- a newspaper publishing system also used by the Supreme Court) was installed in 1972 and still works like a charm.
At the height of production, we had over 240 users on the system. All with just 40 meg of memory (four meg in each of the ten nodes; I can't boot a single-user instance of NT in just 40 meg). I've been working on this system for five years and it's older than I am. In the last eleven years, we've not had a single minute of unscheduled down time that has had a production impact.
In order to replace Atex, we bought three 12-processor RS/6000 S7As with 10 gig of RAM between them running AIX and 350 PCs running NT for the client side.
Our Atex system produced a daily newspaper (okay, maybe there were some reporters helping out, too) for 28 years. We expect we will have to replace the new system in five years.
They sure don't make machines like they used to. If you every have an opportunity to work on some of these systems, take it. You will learn a great deal.
InitZero
(If anyone knows of a good home for these ten nodes and related equipment, drop me email. Paying customers would be our first choice. Musuems are number two. Private citizens with more money than brains always welcome. {grin})
Yes, ISDN is old technology and not all that fast (only 128kbps raw and I generally get 170 kbps compressed) but it's better than 28.8kbps. I get ISDN for $59 a month. Add to that a 3Com OfficeConnect ISDN router with built in four-port hub, NAT and a bunch of other nifty features for $300 (or close) and you've got a nice setup.
In my area I get a 200 channel hours of use a month for the base rate and a penny a minute per channel above that. In the two years I've had ISDN, I've never used more than 200 channel hours. (If I ever spend more than 200 hours online a month from home, I've got bigger problems than a per-minute charge; I've got a lack of life problem.)
I've looked into DSL but since I'm 20,540 feet from the CO, I'm limited to 144 kbps. For comparable cost at the number of hours I use, it just ain't worth the hassel of changing the server over.
Have you looked into ISDN?
InitZero
Here in Texas, it's a state law that if you LOOK into someone's car, you can be arrested for attempted burglary.
Dude, in Texes, Bush can *fry* you for looking in someone's car.
InitZero
At the very least they mean that you are getting training. How many people get offsite training as part of their employment? You are lucky.
I have no problem with you being on the hook if you take the training and run. If they gave you a signing bonus of $11,000 (which is what my company has spent on my training in the past year), I'd expect to have to pay it back if I left the company before a year. Be reasonable.
When your employer sends you to training that's as good as cash in your pocket. Only, unlike a monetary bonus, the government doesn't take taxes out of the sum. Plus, spending $10,000 on Oracle DBA classes will likely bring you more than $25,000 more on the open market. That's a great return by any standard.
We are woking in a tight labor market and, as others have noted, it would be easy to find an employer who doesn't have this sort of contract. But, unless you are planning to jump ship in the next year, why bother? Even if you do plan on jumpping ship, wouldn't your new job pay enough to cover paying back the classes?
As for the legal status of training contracts, you better believe they are solid. For decades if not centuries, small towns have put doctors through school (eg. training) in order to ensure they can make the doctor work in a given town for a designated period of time.
This is a case of folks wanting to get something for nothing and people who don't want to be held accountable for their actions. Music should be free. Video should be free. Training should be free. Etc.
Grow up. There is no free lunch. Heck, it's even getting hard to find free T-Shirts.
InitZero
For a week in July, a pissed-off spammer returned
my email address as every gnutella response...
gnut> find anything
CURRENT RESPONSES
-----------------
1) email matt@steinhoff.net for kiddie porn and anything
216.10.33.21:6345 size:80.854M ref:84279680 speed:10000
I got thousands of email messages looking for
child porn and else
before I nailed the guy.
When the search is distributed, the abuse is
distributed as well.
InitZero
Pardon my ignorance but what is a remote login cluster?
Are you just looking to balance shell accounts across multiple nodes? If that's the case, set one node up as the NFS server serving the home directories. Set up DNS such that shell.wherever.edu points to the three nodes.
Depending on what your users do, that's probably all you will need.
InitZero
A group of us are hoping to convince a big UK based defence organisation to break away from Microsoft's stranglehold on the workplace and to try out Linux.
Summary: I think you'll be shooting yourself in the foot if you continue as you are. If you really want to get linux online, write a business proposal and make sure you show a clear return on investment. If you can't do that, you won't get linux.
You sound as though you are writing from the heart and head instead of the pocketbook.
Phrases such as 'break away from Microsoft's stranglehold' are not conducive to a business plan or course of action. Using emotional language and supplying links to news sites praising linux aren't going do get you very far.
What you need to do is write a proposal using hard numbers and balancing the risks and benefits of using linux. You're thinking like a tech head. FAQs? That's just silly.
Accountants aren't interested in what linux is or what it does. They want to know that it costs $72,000 less than a comparable setup using Microsoft.
Non-technical managers don't want to see boring benchmarks. (Who cares if linux runs 60% of web servers if you are using it as a firewall?) They want to see a desktop the majority of users can understand without additional training.
No one gives a damn about the penguin.
Does anyone care why IBM's color is blue? If IBM was trying to sell me AIX and their proposal included an FAQ about the color blue, I'd find it hard to take them seriously.
I'm not even going to touch the 'games' question. You did say these were workplace PCs.
The problem with folks who want to convert from Microsoft (or whatever) to Linux is that they want to do it as its own project. I can't see a reasonable company trying something like that. In terms of just man power to make the conversion, I can't see any way to recapture the investment. When you factor in retraining the users, I'll tell you right now that you won't be able to cost justify the action.
Do you have a reason to switch operating systems? If not, you will not win this fight. Find a new project and bring linux in the door through that project. It may take five to ten years to get linux at the majority of seats. Windows wasn't built in a day.
InitZero
first off, for security purposes.
I'm taking these nodes to be workstations for individual users. These are, for the most part, not shared machines. Thus, while I agree with you in theory, in this practical case, you security concerns are moot.
a big screwup causes corruption of a particular partition
Good point though I can't think of a non-physical problem that would screw up a single partition given the single harddrive.
I'm not trying to be negative. I've split data across many partitions on single drives myself. I just want to know if I've been wasting my time.
InitZero
There is a bit of difference between the MP3 copyright issues and those faced by those of Sega. ROMs are licensed to Sega and have copyrights retained by dozens and dozens of various companies.
Oh. I understand now. Stealing from many sources as is the case with ROMs is bad. However, stealing from just one person, a musical artist, well, that's just fine.
The lengths people go to justify their activities never ceases to amaze me. Then again, my mom taught me that any stealing was wrong. It didn't matter the cost or quality of the item being stolen. Stealing is stealing.
InitZero