if you create a windows image or unattended install then YES there are no reboots, it is simply insert CD or send image and 1 reboot at the end. total time 15 minutes or less with no user interaction required.
But you're still comparing apples to oranges.
A "windows image" includes all the drivers preconfigured for a standardized hardware platform. An "unattended install" loads (crappy!) default drivers that generally don't work, and doesn't download updates as part of the install process. In either case, no applications are included. Slipstream doesn't include/*CURRENT*/ updates, just those as of download time.
What I'm referring to:
A) Loads in a clean set of drivers specific to the hardware, a la Anaconda, unlike your "windows image". Changing hardware on a Windows system is a dicey proposition at best. It's very typical to see Windows barf after spending 20 minutes at a "New Hardware Found" prompt and three reboots before bombing into uselessness. I've found that particularly for commodity systems in a server-based environment, Linux drivers seem to "just work" and do so very well.
B) Loads all updates via yum, not just what's on the CD. This means that I don't have to rip a new install CD everytime a new security update comes out, only when a completely new O/S version comes out. (EG: every 5 years or so!)
C) Includes ALL APPLICATIONS needed to run the system, NOT JUST THE O/S.
D) Sets up ALL RELATED SERVICES (EG: bind, squid, etc)
E) Completely FREE OF LICENSING WORRIES. No screwy "Certificate of Authenticity" or stickers on the bottom of the case. Just rip a CD, label with a perm marker, and begin burning systems.
I mean, a system loaded, setup, and READY FOR PRODUCTION in 15 minutes, not just a bare O/S. One reboot. Sorry, but Windows just can't cut this mustard. Windows, however, does fine for letting me play The Sims or perhaps GTA San Andreas.
You can slipstream the updates, and setup an install script for Windows too.. In which case it becomes:
1) Insert CD 2) Click Install
Have you EVER installed Windows without rebooting it some 10 or 20 times?
Neither have I. I'm talking about 2 reboots:
1) To load the installer on the O/S CD:
2) To reboot after the installer, the updates, and all the other patches have been applied.
Total time from opening the computer box to completed setup 15 minutes. I can do about 3 at a time, making the average time to setup a proxy as little as 5 minutes.
You need me to install all new Linux based stuff. See, linux doesn't have ports or windows, so the viruses can't sneak in!"
But, using a Linux/Unix custom distro cd (Think: RedHat Jump Start) can reduce the cost of administration by providing an easily setup, secure default. In other words, the install procedure gets reduced to
1) Install the O/S CD with minimal options 2) Install install script 3) Run a single command (eg: Setup) which sets everything for the O/S up.
I have something similar to this based on CentOS for setting up a porn-filtering Squid proxy server. Setup time for a server is reduced to 10 minutes per server, including applying all O/S updates, full configuration for DNS, squid, etc. and secure defaults. (firewall, etc)
I've been looking for something similar that's Linux based myself. The only thing I've found that might work is some hack of MythTV...
$20 contributed by a few hundred people can go a LONG, LONG WAY towards helping him out, even if only in terms of moral support. A little search at google reveals the attorney's address and phone number. I already called, to confirm that they are, in fact, representing Stephen Heller in this case.
I'll be throwing them $100. I encourage you to contribute, as well. Whether or not the "Whistle-Blower" law specifically supports Stephen's behavior, I commend his actions and feel that the Whistle-Blower law should be ammended to allow for what Stephen has done.
Don't laugh. I just took an original Pentium-100 out of service about a month ago. It was running RedHat 9 and had no complaints in many years of service. (taken down because security updates for RedHat 9 are no longer available) Especially if you run headless, Linux works GREAT on older hardware.
I have an ancient AMD K6-2 running with a few PCI IDE cards and 1.5 TB of disk space running as a disk-to-disk backup host. It's done fine in this much-needed capacity.
I tried to do this once with my Laptop and the Verizon "Air Card". As soon as I turned on NAT, the aircard went dead. I suspect that they're using some sort of NAT detection on their end to keep this "roaming hot spot" thing from happening on their "unlimited" plans.
Just to be sure, I tried the same thing with a different connection (eg: Ethernet) and my setup worked fine - it was definitely something to do with Verizon....
Is that like saying a "a program that's never run has fewer bugs"? I can imagine that Microsoft, Sun, and IBM would be VERY INTERESTED in this technology! THINK of the implications for software applications!
Most job sites are companies seeking people that don't have to have any particular skill, just be "good enough" for a specific job. You'll often find decent jobs, with benefits, but you'll NEVER get rich looking for a job at such places, regardless of your skill level. It's a meat market, with very little fat left over for pickings.
The really good jobs are handed out by executives talking to executives. People who say, over lunch/dinner/golf something like "I'm looking for a NNN, do you know anybody?". If you can be whomever is named 10 seconds after such a question, you are looking at the dream job. At this point, being convenient and "good enough" so that they don't have to worry about it, is very good reason to hire you. Once they have to go thru the hassle of reading 27,000 resumes and interviewing 47 people, whoever they hire is going to start off on the wrong foot, simply because of the hassles involved in hiring.
Make sure to be damned good at what you do, and be just as good about letting everybody around you know that, without coming off like a prick or a primadonna. Make sure that, when you're looking for work or contracts, that those who know how good you are know that. And, leave your name/business cards everywhere you can.
That referral is golden - when you get it, you'll end up with customers/employers who don't mind paying you well, and offer you smiles, thanks, and appreciation you while they hand you your check.
But, once you get to the job site, there's nothing special about you, and it's soooo much more difficult to find the cream!
Speaking of which, how many normal consumers actually DO upgrade their processors? Maybe we should move back to the soldered on processors of the past. No socket to be stuck to, no expensive ZIP socket to put on the board (you can't tell me that 940 pin ZIF sockets are cheap), not much downside (if your CPU dies, most people would just buy a new and faster computer today for the price to get the thing repaired).
What makes you think the ZIF socket is for the consumer? No, it's really about the small tech shops, which represent a significant portion of sales. Typically, you'll see a small shop stocking 2 or 3 different types of Motherboards (one for high performance, one for cheap-o upgrades, and one somewhere in the middle) and a half-dozen processor speeds.
With this scenario, the shop only has to stock 1 or 2 of each type of motherboard and maybe 5-6 processors. Stock is bad, because the deflationary index of computer gear is so high, so this lets just a dozen or so parts provide many different combinations for customer needs. This makes it more profitable for the business, and so more likely to stay in business.
This leads to more sales, and more happy customers. Probably worth the $0.45 it costs the manufacturers to have the ZIF socket.
Blasting off into space is cool, but will 2 hours + a lot of money + a good chance of blowing up outweigh a 12 hour, reasonbly priced and safe trip?
As somebody who's recently entered the scene of the "upper middle-class", certain aspects of economics start to make more sense.
For example, the company plane. Sounds like a waste, huh?
An executive earning $100,000/year has a market net worth of about $50/hour. To make baseline 6 figures, he/she represents a compensation (and thus, net worth to society) of about that rate. So, a 'Company plane' makes sense when it saves more time (at $50+ per hour) than it costs.
Now, a typical short-midrange flight entails 1-2 hours in the airport at both ends, and can be quite inconvenient, in that commercial flights worth mentioning only fly out of major airports. A 6-seat plane starts at around $75,000, so the monthly payment on that would be around $750, or about what your average middle-class family pays for 2 new-ish cars.
So, a company plane, in order to pay for itself, has to save $750/$50 hours of executive downtime, or 15 hours of $100,000 executive time per month. A SINGLE FLIGHT taken by three executives in the plane can often save 4-6 hours apiece in time for each of those exectives, easily meeting the minimum standard for compensation. Any flights taken after that are pure profit for the company! Thus, planes can make financial sense in this economic situation.
And, that's assuming your exeutives are only making $100,000 per year - if they're good, they're usually worth quite a bit more than that.
So, I have to ask you, how much do those 10 hours of time savings cost in your example? If your "lot of money" ticket adds in the neighborhood of $500 each way, it's already quite profitable for the buyer, as well as very convenient!
I'd like to see some rich dude state the following in his will:
There's a way you can GUARANTEE that this happens - become a "rich dude"!
No, I'm NOT kidding. The only difference between you and a "rich dude" is that he/she has figured out how to get their hands on a bunch of money. They aren't necessarily smarter, more capable, or more "high class" than you are. They just have money.
It's weird - in my businesses, I've been quickly clicking up through the classes, and I've discovered that being "high class" is alot different than I'd thought when I started. For one thing, I've discovered that having good money is easier than I thought. It really comprises of combining the idea of "think big" with "think realistic". Put the two together, and combine the element of "what can I do that has some worth", and you're probably staring in the right direction. On the other hand, it's harder than I thought, because once you're actually looking down the right road, you have to walk the road. And there are definitely some low points along the way.
It's easier than you think, and harder than you ever thought possible. But, if you'd REALLY like to see "some rich dude" do this, then be the rich dude, and make it how you like! Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air, and with global warming and all, there's more than enough of that to go around....
I can't believe his age is even being discussed. He could be 33 for all I care.
So, what? Is 33 now old? Do you have a problem with 33? I've nearly spent an entire year thinking that, as a 33 year-old executive/programmer, I was doing really well. I thought I was young. But, the way you refer to 33 as though it were some magic number describing incredibly old age, I have to wonder - am I really doing so well after all?
Could it be that I'm really just some crufty old fart, reeking in the smell of fatherhood, husbandry, and executiveness? And, I thought I'd achieved quite a bit in the (ahem) 33 years of my life so far.
I can't believe I've just been reduced to " He could be 33 for all I care....
Why 33, particularly? Is 33 so much older than, perhaps, 31?? Why not 43? or 39? What's wrong with 39? Or is 39 just too old for consideration?
Then I RTFCs and saw that this mistake was made in 1935. That puts it in the great run of eco-mistakes like mongooses to Hawaii, rose bushes to West Virginia, and Kudzu all over the south.
Funny, how what you call "the south" is in the NORTHERN hemisphere, huh? A small (but real) testament to the parochialistic viewpoint so common to USAians. It's like the end of the world happens at country's borders, and anything beyond is on another planet.
Also, did you notice how every single example you brought up happened in the World of the United States? It's not your fault, it just betrays the limitations of your culture.
PS: I'm a USAian, living in Northern California, and frustrated with stupidity and parochialism - don't take it personally.
If you can't program in c or c++ you really should not be called a PHP prgrammer.
Except that they are out there, and they call themselves PHP Programmers.
It's easy to pass judgements as above when you don't have to deal with the mechanics of enforcement. Would you rather pass some law or decree for what constitutes a "programmer", or make it clear, immediate, and obvious that a "programmer" needs to keep certain things in mind as they develop?
I lean heavily towards the latter - I've been a "PHP programmer" for some years, and pay very close attention to articles on security, as well as general *nix security. I look at some of my early works and shudder - but they were part of my clear and steady progress towards what I am today.
I invest a significant amount of time on trying new things, as well as finding creative and workable solutions to problems such as XSS (wrapper calls to handle input) and SQL injection. (prepared statements, anyone?)
PHP is a wonderful language, I use it to manage large datastructures Gigabytes in size. It's rock-solid stable, and lets me focus on the problem being solved rather than the minutiae of its solution. I love it!
As of kernel 2.2, this rolled over at 2.1 GB, making it useless for long periods of time or large quantities of data. (Don't know about 2.4/2.6, have they fixed it?)
However, couple ifconfig with a cron script that grabs this input, oh, say, every 5 minutes, and you have a neat history of usage on a 5-minute basis. Of course, there are many other ways to skin that cat.
Time travel does exist, in one direction and at one velocity.
Really? What about that whole Einsteinean time-dilation thingie that causes objects moving faster to slow down their time index relative to slower-moving objects?
With just that *alone*, you can travel through time.
Two people, age 20, are friends. Jack stays on Earth, gets married, has a baby, lives a long, full life. But Bob other goes into an ion-engine starcraft, and motors over to the nearest star at 99.999% the spead of light. Comes back 9 years later, to meet his friend Jack. (Nearest star is ~ 4.3 light years away)
Jack has aged 9 years. He's thinking about college, retirement funds, and buying his first home. But Bob has aged just a few months.
Hasn't Bob, in a sense, travelled forward in time almost 9 years? Or, from another perspective, hasn't Jack "travelled" back in time almost 9 years relative to Bob?
Certainly, their movement forward in time has happened at different velocities, no?
It's all fine and dandy to have standardization on coding language and conventions - these make it easier to read work done by somebody else, and lower the cost of maintenance. (which is, arguably, GREATER than the cost of development)
But, no matter what, I don't care what your philosophy, it's very, very important to standardize your DATA FORMATS. The state of Massachusetts is coming to this realization - that they need to be in some control of the format that their data gets stored in - and over the next 20 years, expect to see this become ever more of an issue.
You can write a perl script that interoperates with a java jar or a PHP weblication if you have a common, agreed-upon format for storing the data. If your data store is a particular database, such as PostgreSQL, this isn't much of an issue. But, if you feel OK giving developers their choice of languages, make sure that whatever format you save your apps in, you can READ IT using other technologies!
With the shitty connections we get here in the US they should be glad we're willing to pay at all. Some third world countries have better net access. Pitiful.
Dunno what connection you have that's so terrible, but I've paid between $40 and $50/month for my static IP DSL through PacBell/SBC/ATT. For that, I get a connection with 1.5 Mb download, ~350k upload. It's been rock-solid that whole time. I use it for my home office, and my average daily download is anywhere from 500 MB to 10 GB/day.
Is that "shitty"? Easily matched by the third world? Sure, better connections exist, but considering that this is to my small-town, USA home, I don't complain much.
I think it depends upon the scale. There are probably many small users out there looking at OSS databases to save money on licensing. And these types will be very happy to jump on board to a 'free' proprietary product.
I don't know about this - as a small-company vendor myself, one of the main reasons I use OSS solutions anywhere possible is that "it can't get taken away" by changes in the licensing scheme. My license won't "expire" and the product won't be "EOL'd" as is so often the case with proprietary solutions. (Think: VB6)
There are many examples of this: PHP5 has been out for years, but PHP4 is still well supported, and is even the default (for example) on RHEL. Apache 1.x is still supported for security updates, and still represents a large percentage of the install base.
Postgres (the database on which I depend) is open enough and free enough, that even if the existing developers decided to hang up their hat, I'm quite confident that enough people in the community would step up to the plate to continue its support and development; in fact, I think this has already happened, in a sense, several times. Another example is the recent debacle with XFree86.org and X.org.
So, as you can see, it's not just cost. I'm very leery of Oracle's "little guy" offering, because it didn't exist before. I recognize that it's simply a way for Oracle to get their foot into my door, and I'm going to avoid it where a free-license, "they can't take it away" option exists.
Personally, I woudl try to judge the market and ask what will be hot in about a year, not what is hot NOW!. Then shoot for that market.
Hear HERE! This man speaks truth and wisdom!
In the Mid 1980s, I saw the MS DOS was going to be the thang for the forseeable future, and made a good living building, fixing, and networking MS DOS systems and networks? How many people here remember using himem.sys to squeeze out that last 4k of RAM to get NNN application up and running? Who here remembers Banyan VINES?
Then, in late 1998, sick of loading windows, and sick of the unstable driver hell that Windows had become, somebody told me about Linux. I tried it out, and instantly fell in love with it! It just worked, and ran everything I could imagine on my junker K5/133 stably for weeks before I'd even realized it was running!
A year later, I made a sudden career shift, doing Linux and programming (LAMP, with Postgres) heavy, full time. It was not an easy switch, and 2003 was a very hard year for me. But, now having emerged from the other side, I can say that *nix programming is coming up roses for me.
I have the platform, the technology, and the experience to pull it all off. Linux' share is growing by leaps and bounds, and it easily sold to customers. I've built quite a toolkit in PHP, and write powerful, extensible work-flow automation tools with PHP and PHP-GTK, as a partner in a small, profitable, and rapidly growing startup. Our clients save lots of money using our products, and we get paid very nicely for helping them.
It's like being a kid in a candy shop - I get to write cool stuff for a living! Wow!
Who really cares whether IE or Firefox has more market share?
Web developers. Like anybody else, they don't want to have to work any harder than they have to. When IE has > 95% marketshare, you end up with stupid things like checks for browser ID string, and then displaying a "You must upgrade [sic] to IE X.0 or better to use this site". They would have every motivation to use Microsoft specific HTML extensions, and your lovely Firefox browser slips into irrelevance and uselessness as a result.
By having an alternative browser commanding a significant percentage (Say, 10% or more) of the user marketplace, there's enough incentive to lay off the MS-specific stuff, and write stuff intended to work with documented standards - so your [Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, Spyglass, Opera] browser has a decent chance to remain relevant and useful.
But work is a university network which has been around for ~20 years with thousands of semi-autonomously administered hosts, so we have to assume it's nearly as hostile as the greater Internet. For now, anyway. But I'm working on fixing that.:-]
Go to Office Depot. Get a $19 ethernet router. (DHCP on the WAN side, provides NAT'd DHCP for clients) Set subnet for client side to something a bit "odd", such as 192.168.100.* or use a 10.1.2
To set up a workstation:
1) Plug router into Internet connection.
2) Plug computer into router.
3) Load Windows, and all patches using NAT'd internet connection.
4) Unplug $19 5-port "SOHO Router", go to next machine.
It really is that simple! I've seen as many as THREE STAGES OF NAT, inside each other, without any problem. EG: Public Internet -> 10.* -> 192.168.1.* -> 192.168.100.* and it all worked without a hitch.
If you think that the X86 platform has "caught up" with all the others, you are dead wrong. X86/32 or x86/64 does dead last in terms of total processing on any particular task. X86 is designed to do a large variety of tasks. Given a narrower scope, X86 gets blown apart by the likes of the Cell processor, used in the latest Playstation 3 in terms of total processing power - at the cost of genericity.
The Cell processor is highly optimized for graphical output, while the X86 is a "workhorse" number cruncher and all-around get-it-done engine.
The MIPS per transistor of the x86 is pretty low, as is the MIPS per clock cycle. So, if you want to run a mail server/Spam Asssassin/Greylisting on a system, use X86. But, if you want to produce realtimee graphiccs for video games, Cell is the way to go...
Slashdot Mirror
if you create a windows image or unattended install then YES there are no reboots, it is simply insert CD or send image and 1 reboot at the end. total time 15 minutes or less with no user interaction required.
/*CURRENT*/ updates, just those as of download time.
But you're still comparing apples to oranges.
A "windows image" includes all the drivers preconfigured for a standardized hardware platform. An "unattended install" loads (crappy!) default drivers that generally don't work, and doesn't download updates as part of the install process. In either case, no applications are included. Slipstream doesn't include
What I'm referring to:
A) Loads in a clean set of drivers specific to the hardware, a la Anaconda, unlike your "windows image". Changing hardware on a Windows system is a dicey proposition at best. It's very typical to see Windows barf after spending 20 minutes at a "New Hardware Found" prompt and three reboots before bombing into uselessness. I've found that particularly for commodity systems in a server-based environment, Linux drivers seem to "just work" and do so very well.
B) Loads all updates via yum, not just what's on the CD. This means that I don't have to rip a new install CD everytime a new security update comes out, only when a completely new O/S version comes out. (EG: every 5 years or so!)
C) Includes ALL APPLICATIONS needed to run the system, NOT JUST THE O/S.
D) Sets up ALL RELATED SERVICES (EG: bind, squid, etc)
E) Completely FREE OF LICENSING WORRIES. No screwy "Certificate of Authenticity" or stickers on the bottom of the case. Just rip a CD, label with a perm marker, and begin burning systems.
I mean, a system loaded, setup, and READY FOR PRODUCTION in 15 minutes, not just a bare O/S. One reboot. Sorry, but Windows just can't cut this mustard. Windows, however, does fine for letting me play The Sims or perhaps GTA San Andreas.
You can slipstream the updates, and setup an install script for Windows too.. In which case it becomes:
1) Insert CD
2) Click Install
Have you EVER installed Windows without rebooting it some 10 or 20 times?
Neither have I. I'm talking about 2 reboots:
1) To load the installer on the O/S CD:
2) To reboot after the installer, the updates, and all the other patches have been applied.
Total time from opening the computer box to completed setup 15 minutes. I can do about 3 at a time, making the average time to setup a proxy as little as 5 minutes.
You need me to install all new Linux based stuff. See, linux doesn't have ports or windows, so the viruses can't sneak in!"
But, using a Linux/Unix custom distro cd (Think: RedHat Jump Start) can reduce the cost of administration by providing an easily setup, secure default. In other words, the install procedure gets reduced to
1) Install the O/S CD with minimal options
2) Install install script
3) Run a single command (eg: Setup) which sets everything for the O/S up.
I have something similar to this based on CentOS for setting up a porn-filtering Squid proxy server. Setup time for a server is reduced to 10 minutes per server, including applying all O/S updates, full configuration for DNS, squid, etc. and secure defaults. (firewall, etc)
I've been looking for something similar that's Linux based myself. The only thing I've found that might work is some hack of MythTV...
Send money.
$20 contributed by a few hundred people can go a LONG, LONG WAY towards helping him out, even if only in terms of moral support. A little search at google reveals the attorney's address and phone number. I already called, to confirm that they are, in fact, representing Stephen Heller in this case.
I'll be throwing them $100. I encourage you to contribute, as well. Whether or not the "Whistle-Blower" law specifically supports Stephen's behavior, I commend his actions and feel that the Whistle-Blower law should be ammended to allow for what Stephen has done.
-Ben
> I had a PI with 32M RAM
Is that like an i3.14159...86?
Don't laugh. I just took an original Pentium-100 out of service about a month ago. It was running RedHat 9 and had no complaints in many years of service. (taken down because security updates for RedHat 9 are no longer available) Especially if you run headless, Linux works GREAT on older hardware.
I have an ancient AMD K6-2 running with a few PCI IDE cards and 1.5 TB of disk space running as a disk-to-disk backup host. It's done fine in this much-needed capacity.
I tried to do this once with my Laptop and the Verizon "Air Card". As soon as I turned on NAT, the aircard went dead. I suspect that they're using some sort of NAT detection on their end to keep this "roaming hot spot" thing from happening on their "unlimited" plans.
Just to be sure, I tried the same thing with a different connection (eg: Ethernet) and my setup worked fine - it was definitely something to do with Verizon....
I think this line takes the cake:
"A non-running computer produces fewer errors,"
Is that like saying a "a program that's never run has fewer bugs"? I can imagine that Microsoft, Sun, and IBM would be VERY INTERESTED in this technology! THINK of the implications for software applications!
Most job sites are companies seeking people that don't have to have any particular skill, just be "good enough" for a specific job. You'll often find decent jobs, with benefits, but you'll NEVER get rich looking for a job at such places, regardless of your skill level. It's a meat market, with very little fat left over for pickings.
The really good jobs are handed out by executives talking to executives. People who say, over lunch/dinner/golf something like "I'm looking for a NNN, do you know anybody?". If you can be whomever is named 10 seconds after such a question, you are looking at the dream job. At this point, being convenient and "good enough" so that they don't have to worry about it, is very good reason to hire you. Once they have to go thru the hassle of reading 27,000 resumes and interviewing 47 people, whoever they hire is going to start off on the wrong foot, simply because of the hassles involved in hiring.
Make sure to be damned good at what you do, and be just as good about letting everybody around you know that, without coming off like a prick or a primadonna. Make sure that, when you're looking for work or contracts, that those who know how good you are know that. And, leave your name/business cards everywhere you can.
That referral is golden - when you get it, you'll end up with customers/employers who don't mind paying you well, and offer you smiles, thanks, and appreciation you while they hand you your check.
But, once you get to the job site, there's nothing special about you, and it's soooo much more difficult to find the cream!
Speaking of which, how many normal consumers actually DO upgrade their processors? Maybe we should move back to the soldered on processors of the past. No socket to be stuck to, no expensive ZIP socket to put on the board (you can't tell me that 940 pin ZIF sockets are cheap), not much downside (if your CPU dies, most people would just buy a new and faster computer today for the price to get the thing repaired).
What makes you think the ZIF socket is for the consumer? No, it's really about the small tech shops, which represent a significant portion of sales. Typically, you'll see a small shop stocking 2 or 3 different types of Motherboards (one for high performance, one for cheap-o upgrades, and one somewhere in the middle) and a half-dozen processor speeds.
With this scenario, the shop only has to stock 1 or 2 of each type of motherboard and maybe 5-6 processors. Stock is bad, because the deflationary index of computer gear is so high, so this lets just a dozen or so parts provide many different combinations for customer needs. This makes it more profitable for the business, and so more likely to stay in business.
This leads to more sales, and more happy customers. Probably worth the $0.45 it costs the manufacturers to have the ZIF socket.
Blasting off into space is cool, but will 2 hours + a lot of money + a good chance of blowing up outweigh a 12 hour, reasonbly priced and safe trip?
As somebody who's recently entered the scene of the "upper middle-class", certain aspects of economics start to make more sense.
For example, the company plane. Sounds like a waste, huh?
An executive earning $100,000/year has a market net worth of about $50/hour. To make baseline 6 figures, he/she represents a compensation (and thus, net worth to society) of about that rate. So, a 'Company plane' makes sense when it saves more time (at $50+ per hour) than it costs.
Now, a typical short-midrange flight entails 1-2 hours in the airport at both ends, and can be quite inconvenient, in that commercial flights worth mentioning only fly out of major airports. A 6-seat plane starts at around $75,000, so the monthly payment on that would be around $750, or about what your average middle-class family pays for 2 new-ish cars.
So, a company plane, in order to pay for itself, has to save $750/$50 hours of executive downtime, or 15 hours of $100,000 executive time per month. A SINGLE FLIGHT taken by three executives in the plane can often save 4-6 hours apiece in time for each of those exectives, easily meeting the minimum standard for compensation. Any flights taken after that are pure profit for the company! Thus, planes can make financial sense in this economic situation.
And, that's assuming your exeutives are only making $100,000 per year - if they're good, they're usually worth quite a bit more than that.
So, I have to ask you, how much do those 10 hours of time savings cost in your example? If your "lot of money" ticket adds in the neighborhood of $500 each way, it's already quite profitable for the buyer, as well as very convenient!
Yup. Humor. I'm a very happy 33 YO! http://www.myspace.com/benfun
Best of luck,
I'd like to see some rich dude state the following in his will:
There's a way you can GUARANTEE that this happens - become a "rich dude"!
No, I'm NOT kidding. The only difference between you and a "rich dude" is that he/she has figured out how to get their hands on a bunch of money. They aren't necessarily smarter, more capable, or more "high class" than you are. They just have money.
It's weird - in my businesses, I've been quickly clicking up through the classes, and I've discovered that being "high class" is alot different than I'd thought when I started. For one thing, I've discovered that having good money is easier than I thought. It really comprises of combining the idea of "think big" with "think realistic". Put the two together, and combine the element of "what can I do that has some worth", and you're probably staring in the right direction. On the other hand, it's harder than I thought, because once you're actually looking down the right road, you have to walk the road. And there are definitely some low points along the way.
It's easier than you think, and harder than you ever thought possible. But, if you'd REALLY like to see "some rich dude" do this, then be the rich dude, and make it how you like! Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air, and with global warming and all, there's more than enough of that to go around....
I can't believe his age is even being discussed. He could be 33 for all I care.
So, what? Is 33 now old? Do you have a problem with 33? I've nearly spent an entire year thinking that, as a 33 year-old executive/programmer, I was doing really well. I thought I was young. But, the way you refer to 33 as though it were some magic number describing incredibly old age, I have to wonder - am I really doing so well after all?
Could it be that I'm really just some crufty old fart, reeking in the smell of fatherhood, husbandry, and executiveness? And, I thought I'd achieved quite a bit in the (ahem) 33 years of my life so far.
I can't believe I've just been reduced to " He could be 33 for all I care....
Why 33, particularly? Is 33 so much older than, perhaps, 31?? Why not 43? or 39? What's wrong with 39? Or is 39 just too old for consideration?
Augh! The questions!
Then I RTFCs and saw that this mistake was made in 1935. That puts it in the great run of eco-mistakes like mongooses to Hawaii, rose bushes to West Virginia, and Kudzu all over the south.
Funny, how what you call "the south" is in the NORTHERN hemisphere, huh? A small (but real) testament to the parochialistic viewpoint so common to USAians. It's like the end of the world happens at country's borders, and anything beyond is on another planet.
Also, did you notice how every single example you brought up happened in the World of the United States? It's not your fault, it just betrays the limitations of your culture.
PS: I'm a USAian, living in Northern California, and frustrated with stupidity and parochialism - don't take it personally.
If you can't program in c or c++ you really should not be called a PHP prgrammer.
Except that they are out there, and they call themselves PHP Programmers.
It's easy to pass judgements as above when you don't have to deal with the mechanics of enforcement. Would you rather pass some law or decree for what constitutes a "programmer", or make it clear, immediate, and obvious that a "programmer" needs to keep certain things in mind as they develop?
I lean heavily towards the latter - I've been a "PHP programmer" for some years, and pay very close attention to articles on security, as well as general *nix security. I look at some of my early works and shudder - but they were part of my clear and steady progress towards what I am today.
I invest a significant amount of time on trying new things, as well as finding creative and workable solutions to problems such as XSS (wrapper calls to handle input) and SQL injection. (prepared statements, anyone?)
PHP is a wonderful language, I use it to manage large datastructures Gigabytes in size. It's rock-solid stable, and lets me focus on the problem being solved rather than the minutiae of its solution. I love it!
What's really sad is that this cliche, with no particular wit, intelligence, or humor, gets modded UP.
My only consolence is that the upmod doesn't actually improve the poster's karma any...
As of kernel 2.2, this rolled over at 2.1 GB, making it useless for long periods of time or large quantities of data. (Don't know about 2.4/2.6, have they fixed it?)
However, couple ifconfig with a cron script that grabs this input, oh, say, every 5 minutes, and you have a neat history of usage on a 5-minute basis. Of course, there are many other ways to skin that cat.
Time travel does exist, in one direction and at one velocity.
Really? What about that whole Einsteinean time-dilation thingie that causes objects moving faster to slow down their time index relative to slower-moving objects?
With just that *alone*, you can travel through time.
Two people, age 20, are friends. Jack stays on Earth, gets married, has a baby, lives a long, full life. But Bob other goes into an ion-engine starcraft, and motors over to the nearest star at 99.999% the spead of light. Comes back 9 years later, to meet his friend Jack. (Nearest star is ~ 4.3 light years away)
Jack has aged 9 years. He's thinking about college, retirement funds, and buying his first home. But Bob has aged just a few months.
Hasn't Bob, in a sense, travelled forward in time almost 9 years? Or, from another perspective, hasn't Jack "travelled" back in time almost 9 years relative to Bob?
Certainly, their movement forward in time has happened at different velocities, no?
It's all fine and dandy to have standardization on coding language and conventions - these make it easier to read work done by somebody else, and lower the cost of maintenance. (which is, arguably, GREATER than the cost of development)
But, no matter what, I don't care what your philosophy, it's very, very important to standardize your DATA FORMATS. The state of Massachusetts is coming to this realization - that they need to be in some control of the format that their data gets stored in - and over the next 20 years, expect to see this become ever more of an issue.
You can write a perl script that interoperates with a java jar or a PHP weblication if you have a common, agreed-upon format for storing the data. If your data store is a particular database, such as PostgreSQL, this isn't much of an issue. But, if you feel OK giving developers their choice of languages, make sure that whatever format you save your apps in, you can READ IT using other technologies!
With the shitty connections we get here in the US they should be glad we're willing to pay at all. Some third world countries have better net access. Pitiful.
Dunno what connection you have that's so terrible, but I've paid between $40 and $50/month for my static IP DSL through PacBell/SBC/ATT. For that, I get a connection with 1.5 Mb download, ~350k upload. It's been rock-solid that whole time. I use it for my home office, and my average daily download is anywhere from 500 MB to 10 GB/day.
Is that "shitty"? Easily matched by the third world? Sure, better connections exist, but considering that this is to my small-town, USA home, I don't complain much.
I think it depends upon the scale. There are probably many small users out there looking at OSS databases to save money on licensing. And these types will be very happy to jump on board to a 'free' proprietary product.
I don't know about this - as a small-company vendor myself, one of the main reasons I use OSS solutions anywhere possible is that "it can't get taken away" by changes in the licensing scheme. My license won't "expire" and the product won't be "EOL'd" as is so often the case with proprietary solutions. (Think: VB6)
There are many examples of this: PHP5 has been out for years, but PHP4 is still well supported, and is even the default (for example) on RHEL. Apache 1.x is still supported for security updates, and still represents a large percentage of the install base.
Postgres (the database on which I depend) is open enough and free enough, that even if the existing developers decided to hang up their hat, I'm quite confident that enough people in the community would step up to the plate to continue its support and development; in fact, I think this has already happened, in a sense, several times. Another example is the recent debacle with XFree86.org and X.org.
So, as you can see, it's not just cost. I'm very leery of Oracle's "little guy" offering, because it didn't exist before. I recognize that it's simply a way for Oracle to get their foot into my door, and I'm going to avoid it where a free-license, "they can't take it away" option exists.
Personally, I woudl try to judge the market and ask what will be hot in about a year, not what is hot NOW!. Then shoot for that market.
Hear HERE! This man speaks truth and wisdom!
In the Mid 1980s, I saw the MS DOS was going to be the thang for the forseeable future, and made a good living building, fixing, and networking MS DOS systems and networks? How many people here remember using himem.sys to squeeze out that last 4k of RAM to get NNN application up and running? Who here remembers Banyan VINES?
Then, in late 1998, sick of loading windows, and sick of the unstable driver hell that Windows had become, somebody told me about Linux. I tried it out, and instantly fell
in love with it! It just worked, and ran everything I could imagine on my junker K5/133 stably for weeks before I'd even realized it was running!
A year later, I made a sudden career shift, doing Linux and programming (LAMP, with Postgres) heavy, full time. It was not an easy switch, and 2003 was a very hard year for me. But, now having emerged from the other side, I can say that *nix programming is coming up roses for me.
I have the platform, the technology, and the experience to pull it all off. Linux' share is growing by leaps and bounds, and it easily sold to customers. I've built quite a toolkit in PHP, and write powerful, extensible work-flow automation tools with PHP and PHP-GTK, as a partner in a small, profitable, and rapidly growing startup. Our clients save lots of money using our products, and we get paid very nicely for helping them.
It's like being a kid in a candy shop - I get to write cool stuff for a living! Wow!
Who really cares whether IE or Firefox has more market share?
Web developers. Like anybody else, they don't want to have to work any harder than they have to. When IE has > 95% marketshare, you end up with stupid things like checks for browser ID string, and then displaying a "You must upgrade [sic] to IE X.0 or better to use this site". They would have every motivation to use Microsoft specific HTML extensions, and your lovely Firefox browser slips into irrelevance and uselessness as a result.
By having an alternative browser commanding a significant percentage (Say, 10% or more) of the user marketplace, there's enough incentive to lay off the MS-specific stuff, and write stuff intended to work with documented standards - so your [Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, Spyglass, Opera] browser has a decent chance to remain relevant and useful.
So, in short, you should care.
But work is a university network which has been around for ~20 years with thousands of semi-autonomously administered hosts, so we have to assume it's nearly as hostile as the greater Internet. For now, anyway. But I'm working on fixing that. :-]
Go to Office Depot. Get a $19 ethernet router. (DHCP on the WAN side, provides NAT'd DHCP for clients) Set subnet for client side to something a bit "odd", such as 192.168.100.* or use a 10.1.2
To set up a workstation:
1) Plug router into Internet connection.
2) Plug computer into router.
3) Load Windows, and all patches using NAT'd internet connection.
4) Unplug $19 5-port "SOHO Router", go to next machine.
It really is that simple! I've seen as many as THREE STAGES OF NAT, inside each other, without any problem. EG: Public Internet -> 10.* -> 192.168.1.* -> 192.168.100.* and it all worked without a hitch.
If you think that the X86 platform has "caught up" with all the others, you are dead wrong. X86/32 or x86/64 does dead last in terms of total processing on any particular task. X86 is designed to do a large variety of tasks. Given a narrower scope, X86 gets blown apart by the likes of the Cell processor, used in the latest Playstation 3 in terms of total processing power - at the cost of genericity.
The Cell processor is highly optimized for graphical output, while the X86 is a "workhorse" number cruncher and all-around get-it-done engine.
The MIPS per transistor of the x86 is pretty low, as is the MIPS per clock cycle. So, if you want to run a mail server/Spam Asssassin/Greylisting on a system, use X86. But, if you want to produce realtimee graphiccs for video games, Cell is the way to go...