The law is unjustly lenient in cases like this precisely because it is being abused by lawyers, and most laws are written by lawyers. I don't know anyone else who could write them, but it creates an inherent bias in favor of those acts that lawyers perform and others don't. And in favor of those acts that people who hire lawyers perform and others don't.
Lawyers will tend to work with other lawyers because they are both... lawyers. They are part of a guild, a professional brotherhood, united by common experience and training. Whether this is a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but it's a reality shared among lawyers, and any other professional group.
Think about it; when you start talking about firewalls, routing tables, and process management, are you going to consider the input of somebody who is clueless about such things over somebody who knows the difference between a default deny firewall and a NAT firewall?
And to every non-techie person who has to try to work with you, aren't you going to seem a bit, eh, elitist when you pay close attention to an arsehole who is speaking intelligently while ignoring the non-techies, who use words like "series of tubes" to describe technical details?
This isn't an issue with lawyers, it's an issue with all of mankind. Doctors listen to other doctors and ignore "lay folk". So do IT/techies, contractors, politicians, lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, architects, scientists, and pilots. A techie thinks the technically insecure doctor is an idiot for not installing an anti-virus or doing backups. The doctor thinks an unhealthy techie is an idiot for not losing weight and quitting smoking.
Welcome to life, folks. You cast the shadow you leave behind. It's OK - it's just humanity, each making judgments according to their own experience!
An interviewer has a pretty simple need: find somebody who can do the job. So focus on understanding the needs of your interviewer.
Other posts have commented on internships, that's a very good idea because it gives you an understanding (aka "experience") of what the interviewer's world is like. "Everybody" runs servers under their bed, far better to volunteer somewhere it matters
Go to your local elementary school district and volunteer. Don't be put off if the first guy you talk to blows you off, come back a week later and let him/her know that you are serious. And don't forget to go to all the schools in your area.
To say "I have a Linux box3n und3r my b3d!" just seems lame, even if doing so does improve your skillz as an admin. But to say "I consolidated user data management for 1,200 students at 3 schools for North County School District" is something that should make your interviewer pay close attention and will not only give you real-world experience, it will also give you something altruistic that feels real good to do, and it will give you rewards that you won't expect.
I did something similar - I was at a parent-teacher day at the local school with my wife and kids, you know, where teachers meet the parents over cookies and fruit punch, while the kids (being bored) gravitate to the new, l337 computer lab and/or the playground outside to play. My son (of course) went to the former, and promptly mis-typed the URL for the online games site he was trying to access, and managed to wind up in a porn popup storm.
So the computer lab supervisor proceeds to yell at my son, who turns purple since he just made an honest mistake, and I (in turn) yell at the supervisor. As a result, I tracked down some porn blocking software based on Squid, and donated my time, turned one of the school's EOL'd desktop computers into a porn-blocking proxy server. The school administrators loved the solution, which solved a real problem for them at effectively zero cost, I have a(nother) glowing reference, and an eternity of good will from the schooling community at large, (even a mention in the monthly school paper!) at a cost of a few hours of my time and a few MB of RPM downloads tweaking some config files in pico.
That was all years ago. Some years later, I was in a sales meeting, and the client's administrator at the meeting mentioned a staff member who was caught surfing for porn after hours at the office by a member of the opposite sex, and the inevitable sexual harassment law suit. One of those situations the lawyers circle like sharks smelling blood because there was big, big, money on the line.
Without thinking, I blurted out the EXACT SAME solution that I'd slapped together for that K-12 school some years before, and they bought without hesitation when I said I could have it done that same day. I SSH'd into my home network, downloaded the config files, and bought a P4 "server" (AKA cheap-ass desktop computer) at the local Office Depot for $400. I started at about 11:00, and was done about 3:30. They were ecstatic!
My experience volunteering for the local school eventually earned me thousands of dollars, when you include initial contract and annual support contract that continues to this day. Oh, and oodles more goodwill for instantly and permanently ending a nasty legal problem for my company's client.
Ok, you can tell SendMail to limit the number of recipients of a message. But.... why? What if you actually, legitimately, need to contact 2,000 people?
I remember reading an email sent by some clueless Gubbmint official, with THOUSANDS of people on the "To:" line. So just because I was feeling puckish, I hit "reply all" and lambasted the sender for not using BCC and exposing everybody on the list to any viruses and spam coming from any compromised system from ANY of its users.
Now, my mail server is a mere Pentium 3, running at 500 Mhz with no cache. Make no mistake, it's so slow (by today's standards) that it's just stupid silly. Yet, this craptastic mail server handled all these replies, and all their responses (at least 20 of the affected victims also chose to 'reply all") creating a nice, hilarious email stormm that lasted for the better part of 2 weeks.
When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty.
Except that, barring local instability, that's not what happens. What happens instead is that the infrastructure and capital from the [nameless] corporation is used to continue to develop the local economy, and the global pool of wealth continues to grow.
It's been happening (in fits and starts) for 500 years, and it's happening today. Do you think today's bad economy is bad?
Yeah, in the short term, it's bad, when you look at the percentages, especially over the past decade or two.
But when you look at the absolute scale, real terms, the average sq footage of the average household, the services available to the poor, the actual net worth of infrastructure available, you'll find that you would only have to look back about 10-20 years before you find that our current economic situation is the best that mankind has ever experienced.
It will be a while before we have a true growth economy again. Businesses that consolidate, that save money, that integrate previously separate products will do well. Businesses based on luxury will suffer immeasurably over the next few years.
What's more, your fuel calculations are almost assuredly based on "cruise speed" which is near the power end of the power/efficiency curve. Slow the plane down by 25% or so and you'll see a marked efficiency increase!
Take a look at detailed stats, and pay close attention to "maximum range". They'll give two or more figures for most aircraft - the range at "normal cruise", and the range at "reduced power".
Airlines figure that the cost of the extra fuel is offset by customer satisfaction and the fact that by going faster, they can move more people in a given 24 hour period in the same plane resulting in higher profits. I have no doubt that they've done the math, and concluded that while it may be more fuel efficient to slow down, it's more dollars profit if they keep flying at normal cruise rather than the most power efficient setting.
Thanks to Moore's law, there is very little value in deleting records except in very extreme cases, or when the data itself acts as an un-necessary liability.
If you assume that you have enough storage for the current year on hand, are you going to more-than double the amount of storage you need over the next 18 months? Very few business will say "yes" to this, and thus the cost of storing everything is DROPPING with each passing year, despite the ever rising amount of it.
We recently upgraded one of our D2D backup arrays from 300 GB drives to 1.5 TB SATA drives. For less than the cost of the original array of 300 GB drives, we ended up with 5 times the storage space in just over 2 years, meaning that the cost of the old data is now 1/5 what it used to be. We were profitable keeping that data 2 years ago, so in a sense, we are 5x as profitable keeping that same information today!
I have a 6 MP digital camera, with a 4 GB card in it. I also have an old 1GB card, but I almost never use it - 4 GB is enough for me to take hundreds of pics and a few hours of VHS-quality video with no complaints. So I download my pics and stuff to my laptop every month or so, and it takes about 3 minutes - less than it takes to drive to my local Rite-Aid photo booth. (which is about 1.5 miles away!)
I think a 4 GB card costs about $10 nowadays, if even that much. And I say "buy big" but 4 GB is pretty ho-hum nowadays. 4x the space costs just $25.
Seriously, who cares? How many pictures do you TAKE?
No, it isn't. It's just that people value things other than just money.
For example, I am a skilled knowledge worker who's also well grounded in business operations, administration, and sales. I have had a number of opportunities over the past few years to make lots and lots of money - and yet I continue to stay where I'm at. Don't get me wrong - business is good where I'm at - but for me, the value of doing something altruistic as part of my job is something I get immense satisfaction from.
Let's be honest; I'm comfortable. Not "private Lear jet" comfortable, but "rent a private plane from time to time" comfortable. But not only do I get to be one of the best in my industry, but my works truly improve the quality of life for thousands of kids, each and every day.
And that's something I'll give lots for.
Glamor has value. If it didn't, the local uber-swanky restaurant would go out of business in a week. Also, see the iPod, which is, feature-for-feature, pulverized by the far-cheaper Creative Zen, but is more glamorous. Status has value. Why else do you think Sachs 5th Avenue is still in business?
Don't shrug your shoulders and conclude that people are just dumb; realize that intangibles that alter people's buying habits reflect people's values. Ex-hookers aren't worth much as wives. Somewhere, I read that a monogamous married man "pays" about $70,000 per year to have a non-ex-hooker wife in lost wages. This makes sense to me, because for me, and ex-hooker is a non-starter.
One thing that's often ignored is that some people have naturally "harder" teeth than others. I, unfortunately, am "blessed" with the softer variety. I put out the effort: brush vigorously, regularly, flossing daily, etc. and my teeth are just horrible, and probably a third are basically just plastic. I am one of my Dentist's best customers.
My wife, on the other hand, simply doesn't have to spend nearly as much effort on her teeth. She brushes and all, but she has gorgeous teeth and puts in only modest effort. I see the same in our children. Some have her teeth, put out little effort and consistently have nice, white teeth and no cavities, while others have mine, and brush regularly only to have cavities every single visit.
Finally, I can grow new teeth!?!? Oh wait, they'll be *MY* teeth? With *MY* crappy-ass tooth genes?
(to my wife) Eh, babe? (Ahem) Mind if I have one of your wisdom teeth?
Our stuff IS written to be cross-platform. We already support OSX. We can support Linux but why? The point is that there's no point in porting it, because the cost of supporting it would be too high, even if there was demand, which there isn't.
Instead I might write my own solution, release it as open source and become a competitor to you, with version that is portable and free.
And, that works for you in one of two scenarios:
A) The software has a broad need for applicability, EG: an O/S kernel or a word processor.
B) The software is very simple.
OSS pretty much fails at niche software - software with a small user base and a high cost of entry. Niche software can be very extensive, as business rules and requirements get written into the code. And ultimately, the cost of maintaining all these requirements has to come from *somewhere*. So it's either done in-house (in which case open-sourcing the software effectively destroys your company's investment) or by a small software house (such as mine) which reduces the cost of managing the software by distributing the cost across multiple clients.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big OSS advocate, I use OSS wherever I can, and have standardized on RedHat Linux for all of our infrastructure! We've extensively reviewed the idea of open sourcing our product, as well. But our product is a niche product, and there's really no point in releasing our wares to the world like that.
... And along with your increased ability and incentive to move away from 'doze, comes increased incentive for developers to NOT move away from WinXX API.
If Wine works well, why should I, (a developer) want to port my appz to *nix? (not that I haven't, and we've offered OSX support for some time, but in all these years I've NEVER been asked about a Linux port) Of course, I won't officially support Wine on XYZ Linux, so the end result is a perpetual second-rate support for Linux.
On top of this, there's no particular incentive for us to support Linux anyway, since it's such an incohesive environment. Support RPM? Apt? Tar? Compiled sources? CUPs? PDF through Adobe? Ghost? Kghost? KDE? Gnome?
Each of these is important, because end users often have trouble finding the power switch. In this environment, having 24,000 flavors of the same O/S is *NOT* a good thing. And I say this despite using Linux for ALL of our core infrastructure and tech workstations!
Is this what you wanted? 'Cause it's what you are getting...
I remember MP3.com around the year 2000, when it was actually cool. Indie bands could post their music in any of zillions of genres, and you could listen with a click. I fell in love with one particular genre, the New Age genre, which consists of lots of trance tracks. But when MP3.com started down the "we host your CD library for you!" I knew that the game was about up and that they were about to be sued into oblivion (which happened), and wrote a bash/wget script to download everything I could of the MP3s. I still have this collection of MP3s today, almost 10 years later. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
Aren't backups great?
If you care, take a look at the SLA. And if it's free, don't cry about not getting what you didn't pay for in the first place.
255*255*255*255 = 4294967296 when you include the zero position! Represented in more normal base 10, you'd be multiplying 256*256*256*256 (-1 if you think zero doesn't mean anything), which completely fills a 32 bit integer...
Perhaps I represented this a bit awkwardly, but you get the idea now?
There is, of course, an entire discourse on the value of a zero. Why, for example, does 10 take two digits, when it's the conclusion of a logical sequence of single digits? 10 is not 0^10th, but 100 IS 10^10 and 1000 is 100^10 which is logically inconsistent, and what we now take as zero is really best approximated by NULL, which has no immediately recognizable digit. (Yes, there's an ANSI "nul" character but who actually knows it? Slashdot's garbage filter even rejects it, and you certainly aren't taught it in grade school)
(sigh) Even the relatively elegant digital Roman numeral system has its share of kluges....
Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
You misunderstand the meaning of the octet, which is little more than a way to make a large number more understandable. If you take 255*255*255*255 you end up with the largest number that can be stored in a 32 bit integer. And it's this integer that is actually your "ip address". It's just rendered in octet format because 63.95.215.231 is much more readable than some huge integer like 2393201938.
But when you are talking about very, very, very, very large numbers, such as 2^128, even breaking up the numbers into "bite sized chunks" falls apart. Even when you use alphanumeric values, it still is hard to remember.
So DNS is your friend. It works well, fast, and reliably.
Those "training costs" arguments are at least 99% bullshit though. You ever had an office job? How many of those people really know their way around MS Office? I've got news for you - when forced to actually perform anything more than basic tasks most of those trained employees would find themselves hard pressed to even recognize the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office much less find a bit of advanced functionality from the latter that they are familiar with that isn't in the former.
I frequently see this argument as an indicator that the costs of switching will be low, but my experience tends to lead me to conclude the other way; people who don't know how their Word Processor works will have only memorized the exact keystrokes to get their job done. It can take hours to days for each of these barely conscious cubicle monkeys to identify train, and support the switch to a new set of rote keystrokes and/or mouse clicks.
In review, while they can't necessarily identify or articulate the difference between Office, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Wordpad, they can sure tell that their Macro installed by $TECHGURU back in 1998 no longer works on the Excel sheet they've been copying and saving for the last 10 years.
Don't believe me? Take a look at some of the user comments from this very recent slashdot article. I once drove 9 hours round trip for a baffling support issue when it turned out that the site administrator needed to SCROLL DOWN to find the icon that we kept insisting HAD to be there!
You don't know until you've spent 2.5 hours discussing the difference between "Save" and "Save As" to a roomful of fearful, distraught staff members of all ages... people who've been using computers every day for 10 years and still don't know the difference...
The cost of switching is much higher than you think.
BTW, I'm strictly a developer; I really don't get into the IT world with boxen and routers and what not. You may have a terrible time of it but those dev tools MS puts out are the shiznit: polished, clean, and a pleasure to spend countless hours in front of. This puts starts in my eyes...so we are in two different worlds.
Oooohhhh! Shiny metals excite the crows!
You are a developer, and so am I. But I've also been a System Administrator, and I currently operate as a CIO. Because of my experience in all these areas, I can say that Microsoft does well in seducing developers. (Developers! Developers! Developers!) But it really falls short, and very, very badly in the System Administrator role, while Linux is a breeze to administer. So much so that we still don't yet have a full time administrator position for our company serving student data for over a hundred school districts, with 12 production servers.
Until you've spent a year or two administering for both do you really learn just how stark the difference is: night and DAY!
I have scripts to do backups, scripts to check for security updates and patches, scripts to monitor things like uptime, and all these scripts ensure that our servers are patched, backed up, and online at all times 24x7.
In my experience, the average uptime of a well-maintained, reasonable quality Linux server is about 99.95%, 24x7, even with otherwise commodity hardware, including patches, updates, and full-system backups. It usually takes significant effort to get Windows to do better than 99% when you include patches, updates, and full-system backups. (Most EULAs by providers covering Windows system specifically except these things, we don't)
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I honestly don't see it happening, though.:(
I don't agree with you. I think we are very, very close with the recent development of the "live" CD.
Start with a Live CD that's well supported. (EG: Canonical or maybe RedHat?)
Add drivers that are well supported for major hardware. (right now, most sound cards are supported, network cards, most video cards, though not in 3D, etc.)
Add WINE as a development platform for porting over Windows/Xbox games, in stable API releases that update only every 6 months or so, instead of every other day.
Finally, add some GUI glue to make device driver management easy(ier).
Suddenly, you have a stable API to port games to, and you don't have to worry about OS updates. Games could incorporate their own O/S in their Live CD, so you simply wouldn't have to worry about software updates, etc. unless you are upgrading to a supported new release for your game.
And, since each game comes with its own "O/S" on the game CD, if a newer release of the Live CD were out but your game wasn't supported on it, you'd just boot off the Live CD that's still compatible.
And, even security issues would be minor because all ports would be closed, etc.
When this happens, remember: you read it here on Slashdot, and you won't be a millionaire because you aren't the one who made it happen!
There's an "average" laptop size that's a pretty damned good mix between size, cost, usability, and portability. In my current laptop, I decided to go for the wider screen and bigger laptop, and I don't like it as much as my smaller, lighter, "standard" sized previous model. (a Dell 600m) While I've seen much smaller laptops, I figure they are probably in much the same camp as my larger, heavier, more annoying laptop - they deviate from a standard size that has proven to be an awfully good set of compromises over years of time.
Phones are as big as they are because people like them that size. I don't mind the brick that is my home cordless phone because I don't live with it in my pocket. My Razr cell phone, on the other hand, is delightful primarily because of its minute form factor and it's compatibility with and accessibility from my jeans pocket.
Deviating from the "standard" form factor is very risky - the value of finding a new "right size" is high, but the chances of getting it right is very low. Dell blew it on my current laptop, it's too big and heavy for me to love.
you saw what happened to katrina do you really think we're any more prepared for anything like this?
Despite the bunging of Katrina's aftermath, what I saw in *advance* of Katrina was quite useful. The Mayor BEGGED people to leave town on local television. Everybody had several days' warning, they just chose not to leave. And it's the idiots that didn't leave that were starving, peeing on and raping each other in the stadium a week later.
It would be terrible if it happened - I have a good friend in Montana, but if warnings were as good as Katrina's, I'd be just fine. As a Californian, if I see Arnie telling NorCal folks to bail, I'm gone in 60 seconds, with my kids in the back, laptop and backup drives in hand!
But in the Linux world, they will be (already are) largely open source. If a vendor puts out a crappy driver, people who know better can submit patches, and people who don't know will quickly learn who to avoid.
Red Hat is the wrong place to develop drivers...
on
Alan Cox Leaves Red Hat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
When you look at it, Red Hat is the wrong place to develop drivers. They should be developed by the vendors of the drivers, not the O/S packager.
It has been necessary so far to develop drivers at Red Hat simply to bootstrap the O/S. But now, Linux is becoming more popular every year, most enterprises have plans to deploy Linux in annually increasing scopes, and the "upward spiral" that Bill Gates (ghost-)wrote about 10 years ago in "The Road Ahead" is happening for the GNU/Linux system.
Red Hat doesn't develop devices. Device vendors develop devices, and it's their expertise in how their own devices function that makes them best qualified to write device drivers for the whatever O/S.
This move is really more a reflection of the continuing maturity of the Linux Operating System!
Slashdot Mirror
The law is unjustly lenient in cases like this precisely because it is being abused by lawyers, and most laws are written by lawyers. I don't know anyone else who could write them, but it creates an inherent bias in favor of those acts that lawyers perform and others don't. And in favor of those acts that people who hire lawyers perform and others don't.
Lawyers will tend to work with other lawyers because they are both... lawyers. They are part of a guild, a professional brotherhood, united by common experience and training. Whether this is a bad thing is a matter of opinion, but it's a reality shared among lawyers, and any other professional group.
Think about it; when you start talking about firewalls, routing tables, and process management, are you going to consider the input of somebody who is clueless about such things over somebody who knows the difference between a default deny firewall and a NAT firewall?
And to every non-techie person who has to try to work with you, aren't you going to seem a bit, eh, elitist when you pay close attention to an arsehole who is speaking intelligently while ignoring the non-techies, who use words like "series of tubes" to describe technical details?
This isn't an issue with lawyers, it's an issue with all of mankind. Doctors listen to other doctors and ignore "lay folk". So do IT/techies, contractors, politicians, lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, architects, scientists, and pilots. A techie thinks the technically insecure doctor is an idiot for not installing an anti-virus or doing backups. The doctor thinks an unhealthy techie is an idiot for not losing weight and quitting smoking.
Welcome to life, folks. You cast the shadow you leave behind. It's OK - it's just humanity, each making judgments according to their own experience!
An interviewer has a pretty simple need: find somebody who can do the job. So focus on understanding the needs of your interviewer.
Other posts have commented on internships, that's a very good idea because it gives you an understanding (aka "experience") of what the interviewer's world is like. "Everybody" runs servers under their bed, far better to volunteer somewhere it matters
Go to your local elementary school district and volunteer. Don't be put off if the first guy you talk to blows you off, come back a week later and let him/her know that you are serious. And don't forget to go to all the schools in your area.
To say "I have a Linux box3n und3r my b3d!" just seems lame, even if doing so does improve your skillz as an admin. But to say "I consolidated user data management for 1,200 students at 3 schools for North County School District" is something that should make your interviewer pay close attention and will not only give you real-world experience, it will also give you something altruistic that feels real good to do, and it will give you rewards that you won't expect.
I did something similar - I was at a parent-teacher day at the local school with my wife and kids, you know, where teachers meet the parents over cookies and fruit punch, while the kids (being bored) gravitate to the new, l337 computer lab and/or the playground outside to play. My son (of course) went to the former, and promptly mis-typed the URL for the online games site he was trying to access, and managed to wind up in a porn popup storm.
So the computer lab supervisor proceeds to yell at my son, who turns purple since he just made an honest mistake, and I (in turn) yell at the supervisor. As a result, I tracked down some porn blocking software based on Squid, and donated my time, turned one of the school's EOL'd desktop computers into a porn-blocking proxy server. The school administrators loved the solution, which solved a real problem for them at effectively zero cost, I have a(nother) glowing reference, and an eternity of good will from the schooling community at large, (even a mention in the monthly school paper!) at a cost of a few hours of my time and a few MB of RPM downloads tweaking some config files in pico.
That was all years ago. Some years later, I was in a sales meeting, and the client's administrator at the meeting mentioned a staff member who was caught surfing for porn after hours at the office by a member of the opposite sex, and the inevitable sexual harassment law suit. One of those situations the lawyers circle like sharks smelling blood because there was big, big, money on the line.
Without thinking, I blurted out the EXACT SAME solution that I'd slapped together for that K-12 school some years before, and they bought without hesitation when I said I could have it done that same day. I SSH'd into my home network, downloaded the config files, and bought a P4 "server" (AKA cheap-ass desktop computer) at the local Office Depot for $400. I started at about 11:00, and was done about 3:30. They were ecstatic!
My experience volunteering for the local school eventually earned me thousands of dollars, when you include initial contract and annual support contract that continues to this day. Oh, and oodles more goodwill for instantly and permanently ending a nasty legal problem for my company's client.
=D
Ok, you can tell SendMail to limit the number of recipients of a message. But.... why? What if you actually, legitimately, need to contact 2,000 people?
I remember reading an email sent by some clueless Gubbmint official, with THOUSANDS of people on the "To:" line. So just because I was feeling puckish, I hit "reply all" and lambasted the sender for not using BCC and exposing everybody on the list to any viruses and spam coming from any compromised system from ANY of its users.
Now, my mail server is a mere Pentium 3, running at 500 Mhz with no cache. Make no mistake, it's so slow (by today's standards) that it's just stupid silly. Yet, this craptastic mail server handled all these replies, and all their responses (at least 20 of the affected victims also chose to 'reply all") creating a nice, hilarious email stormm that lasted for the better part of 2 weeks.
Worth it? OMFG YES!
When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty.
Except that, barring local instability, that's not what happens. What happens instead is that the infrastructure and capital from the [nameless] corporation is used to continue to develop the local economy, and the global pool of wealth continues to grow.
It's been happening (in fits and starts) for 500 years, and it's happening today. Do you think today's bad economy is bad?
Yeah, in the short term, it's bad, when you look at the percentages, especially over the past decade or two.
But when you look at the absolute scale, real terms, the average sq footage of the average household, the services available to the poor, the actual net worth of infrastructure available, you'll find that you would only have to look back about 10-20 years before you find that our current economic situation is the best that mankind has ever experienced.
It will be a while before we have a true growth economy again. Businesses that consolidate, that save money, that integrate previously separate products will do well. Businesses based on luxury will suffer immeasurably over the next few years.
Holy fsck. $500 for a 5 foot long ETHERNET CABLE!?!!? For the "serious audiophile"?!?!?
(Um, hello? It's DIGITAL?!?!)
Goes to show, there really IS a sucker born every minute, but at these prices, they'd make out like bandits if they only made 1 sale/week...
What's more, your fuel calculations are almost assuredly based on "cruise speed" which is near the power end of the power/efficiency curve. Slow the plane down by 25% or so and you'll see a marked efficiency increase!
Take a look at detailed stats, and pay close attention to "maximum range". They'll give two or more figures for most aircraft - the range at "normal cruise", and the range at "reduced power".
Airlines figure that the cost of the extra fuel is offset by customer satisfaction and the fact that by going faster, they can move more people in a given 24 hour period in the same plane resulting in higher profits. I have no doubt that they've done the math, and concluded that while it may be more fuel efficient to slow down, it's more dollars profit if they keep flying at normal cruise rather than the most power efficient setting.
Cash is king!
Thanks to Moore's law, there is very little value in deleting records except in very extreme cases, or when the data itself acts as an un-necessary liability.
If you assume that you have enough storage for the current year on hand, are you going to more-than double the amount of storage you need over the next 18 months? Very few business will say "yes" to this, and thus the cost of storing everything is DROPPING with each passing year, despite the ever rising amount of it.
We recently upgraded one of our D2D backup arrays from 300 GB drives to 1.5 TB SATA drives. For less than the cost of the original array of 300 GB drives, we ended up with 5 times the storage space in just over 2 years, meaning that the cost of the old data is now 1/5 what it used to be. We were profitable keeping that data 2 years ago, so in a sense, we are 5x as profitable keeping that same information today!
So why would we delete it?
I have a 6 MP digital camera, with a 4 GB card in it. I also have an old 1GB card, but I almost never use it - 4 GB is enough for me to take hundreds of pics and a few hours of VHS-quality video with no complaints. So I download my pics and stuff to my laptop every month or so, and it takes about 3 minutes - less than it takes to drive to my local Rite-Aid photo booth. (which is about 1.5 miles away!)
I think a 4 GB card costs about $10 nowadays, if even that much. And I say "buy big" but 4 GB is pretty ho-hum nowadays. 4x the space costs just $25.
Seriously, who cares? How many pictures do you TAKE?
You fail at phishing. That IP address doesn't even look at all like /.!
The economically rational human is a myth.
No, it isn't. It's just that people value things other than just money.
For example, I am a skilled knowledge worker who's also well grounded in business operations, administration, and sales. I have had a number of opportunities over the past few years to make lots and lots of money - and yet I continue to stay where I'm at. Don't get me wrong - business is good where I'm at - but for me, the value of doing something altruistic as part of my job is something I get immense satisfaction from.
Let's be honest; I'm comfortable. Not "private Lear jet" comfortable, but "rent a private plane from time to time" comfortable. But not only do I get to be one of the best in my industry, but my works truly improve the quality of life for thousands of kids, each and every day.
And that's something I'll give lots for.
Glamor has value. If it didn't, the local uber-swanky restaurant would go out of business in a week. Also, see the iPod, which is, feature-for-feature, pulverized by the far-cheaper Creative Zen, but is more glamorous. Status has value. Why else do you think Sachs 5th Avenue is still in business?
Don't shrug your shoulders and conclude that people are just dumb; realize that intangibles that alter people's buying habits reflect people's values. Ex-hookers aren't worth much as wives. Somewhere, I read that a monogamous married man "pays" about $70,000 per year to have a non-ex-hooker wife in lost wages. This makes sense to me, because for me, and ex-hooker is a non-starter.
One thing that's often ignored is that some people have naturally "harder" teeth than others. I, unfortunately, am "blessed" with the softer variety. I put out the effort: brush vigorously, regularly, flossing daily, etc. and my teeth are just horrible, and probably a third are basically just plastic. I am one of my Dentist's best customers.
My wife, on the other hand, simply doesn't have to spend nearly as much effort on her teeth. She brushes and all, but she has gorgeous teeth and puts in only modest effort. I see the same in our children. Some have her teeth, put out little effort and consistently have nice, white teeth and no cavities, while others have mine, and brush regularly only to have cavities every single visit.
Finally, I can grow new teeth!?!? Oh wait, they'll be *MY* teeth? With *MY* crappy-ass tooth genes?
(to my wife) Eh, babe? (Ahem) Mind if I have one of your wisdom teeth?
Our stuff IS written to be cross-platform. We already support OSX. We can support Linux but why? The point is that there's no point in porting it, because the cost of supporting it would be too high, even if there was demand, which there isn't.
Instead I might write my own solution, release it as open source and become a competitor to you, with version that is portable and free.
And, that works for you in one of two scenarios:
A) The software has a broad need for applicability, EG: an O/S kernel or a word processor.
B) The software is very simple.
OSS pretty much fails at niche software - software with a small user base and a high cost of entry. Niche software can be very extensive, as business rules and requirements get written into the code. And ultimately, the cost of maintaining all these requirements has to come from *somewhere*. So it's either done in-house (in which case open-sourcing the software effectively destroys your company's investment) or by a small software house (such as mine) which reduces the cost of managing the software by distributing the cost across multiple clients.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big OSS advocate, I use OSS wherever I can, and have standardized on RedHat Linux for all of our infrastructure! We've extensively reviewed the idea of open sourcing our product, as well. But our product is a niche product, and there's really no point in releasing our wares to the world like that.
... And along with your increased ability and incentive to move away from 'doze, comes increased incentive for developers to NOT move away from WinXX API.
If Wine works well, why should I, (a developer) want to port my appz to *nix? (not that I haven't, and we've offered OSX support for some time, but in all these years I've NEVER been asked about a Linux port) Of course, I won't officially support Wine on XYZ Linux, so the end result is a perpetual second-rate support for Linux.
On top of this, there's no particular incentive for us to support Linux anyway, since it's such an incohesive environment. Support RPM? Apt? Tar? Compiled sources? CUPs? PDF through Adobe? Ghost? Kghost? KDE? Gnome?
Each of these is important, because end users often have trouble finding the power switch. In this environment, having 24,000 flavors of the same O/S is *NOT* a good thing. And I say this despite using Linux for ALL of our core infrastructure and tech workstations!
Is this what you wanted? 'Cause it's what you are getting...
I remember MP3.com around the year 2000, when it was actually cool. Indie bands could post their music in any of zillions of genres, and you could listen with a click. I fell in love with one particular genre, the New Age genre, which consists of lots of trance tracks. But when MP3.com started down the "we host your CD library for you!" I knew that the game was about up and that they were about to be sued into oblivion (which happened), and wrote a bash/wget script to download everything I could of the MP3s. I still have this collection of MP3s today, almost 10 years later. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
Aren't backups great?
If you care, take a look at the SLA. And if it's free, don't cry about not getting what you didn't pay for in the first place.
255*255*255*255 = 4294967296 when you include the zero position! Represented in more normal base 10, you'd be multiplying 256*256*256*256 (-1 if you think zero doesn't mean anything), which completely fills a 32 bit integer...
Perhaps I represented this a bit awkwardly, but you get the idea now?
There is, of course, an entire discourse on the value of a zero. Why, for example, does 10 take two digits, when it's the conclusion of a logical sequence of single digits? 10 is not 0^10th, but 100 IS 10^10 and 1000 is 100^10 which is logically inconsistent, and what we now take as zero is really best approximated by NULL, which has no immediately recognizable digit. (Yes, there's an ANSI "nul" character but who actually knows it? Slashdot's garbage filter even rejects it, and you certainly aren't taught it in grade school)
(sigh) Even the relatively elegant digital Roman numeral system has its share of kluges....
Why not extend IPv4 by adding more bits to the representation of each octet? For example, instead of using 8 bits, use x bits where x is specified at the beginning of the address. For example, you can use x=10 and create an address up to 1024.1024.1024.1024.
You misunderstand the meaning of the octet, which is little more than a way to make a large number more understandable. If you take 255*255*255*255 you end up with the largest number that can be stored in a 32 bit integer. And it's this integer that is actually your "ip address". It's just rendered in octet format because 63.95.215.231 is much more readable than some huge integer like 2393201938.
But when you are talking about very, very, very, very large numbers, such as 2^128, even breaking up the numbers into "bite sized chunks" falls apart. Even when you use alphanumeric values, it still is hard to remember.
So DNS is your friend. It works well, fast, and reliably.
Those "training costs" arguments are at least 99% bullshit though. You ever had an office job? How many of those people really know their way around MS Office? I've got news for you - when forced to actually perform anything more than basic tasks most of those trained employees would find themselves hard pressed to even recognize the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office much less find a bit of advanced functionality from the latter that they are familiar with that isn't in the former.
I frequently see this argument as an indicator that the costs of switching will be low, but my experience tends to lead me to conclude the other way; people who don't know how their Word Processor works will have only memorized the exact keystrokes to get their job done. It can take hours to days for each of these barely conscious cubicle monkeys to identify train, and support the switch to a new set of rote keystrokes and/or mouse clicks.
In review, while they can't necessarily identify or articulate the difference between Office, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Wordpad, they can sure tell that their Macro installed by $TECHGURU back in 1998 no longer works on the Excel sheet they've been copying and saving for the last 10 years.
Don't believe me? Take a look at some of the user comments from this very recent slashdot article. I once drove 9 hours round trip for a baffling support issue when it turned out that the site administrator needed to SCROLL DOWN to find the icon that we kept insisting HAD to be there!
You don't know until you've spent 2.5 hours discussing the difference between "Save" and "Save As" to a roomful of fearful, distraught staff members of all ages... people who've been using computers every day for 10 years and still don't know the difference...
The cost of switching is much higher than you think.
Preacher, meet choir.
Choir, meet preacher. (Queue preaching)
BTW, I'm strictly a developer; I really don't get into the IT world with boxen and routers and what not. You may have a terrible time of it but those dev tools MS puts out are the shiznit: polished, clean, and a pleasure to spend countless hours in front of. This puts starts in my eyes...so we are in two different worlds.
Oooohhhh! Shiny metals excite the crows!
You are a developer, and so am I. But I've also been a System Administrator, and I currently operate as a CIO. Because of my experience in all these areas, I can say that Microsoft does well in seducing developers. (Developers! Developers! Developers!) But it really falls short, and very, very badly in the System Administrator role, while Linux is a breeze to administer. So much so that we still don't yet have a full time administrator position for our company serving student data for over a hundred school districts, with 12 production servers.
Until you've spent a year or two administering for both do you really learn just how stark the difference is: night and DAY!
I have scripts to do backups, scripts to check for security updates and patches, scripts to monitor things like uptime, and all these scripts ensure that our servers are patched, backed up, and online at all times 24x7.
In my experience, the average uptime of a well-maintained, reasonable quality Linux server is about 99.95%, 24x7, even with otherwise commodity hardware, including patches, updates, and full-system backups. It usually takes significant effort to get Windows to do better than 99% when you include patches, updates, and full-system backups. (Most EULAs by providers covering Windows system specifically except these things, we don't)
But in both cases, I think Linux is going to have to be a clear "best choice" before game developers will flock to it. Make it outperform other OSes in game execution as well as graphics and multimedia, and make compelling tools or toolkits for developing games and the graphics and multimedia they need, and they will come.
I honestly don't see it happening, though. :(
I don't agree with you. I think we are very, very close with the recent development of the "live" CD.
Start with a Live CD that's well supported. (EG: Canonical or maybe RedHat?)
Add drivers that are well supported for major hardware. (right now, most sound cards are supported, network cards, most video cards, though not in 3D, etc.)
Add WINE as a development platform for porting over Windows/Xbox games, in stable API releases that update only every 6 months or so, instead of every other day.
Finally, add some GUI glue to make device driver management easy(ier).
Suddenly, you have a stable API to port games to, and you don't have to worry about OS updates. Games could incorporate their own O/S in their Live CD, so you simply wouldn't have to worry about software updates, etc. unless you are upgrading to a supported new release for your game.
And, since each game comes with its own "O/S" on the game CD, if a newer release of the Live CD were out but your game wasn't supported on it, you'd just boot off the Live CD that's still compatible.
And, even security issues would be minor because all ports would be closed, etc.
When this happens, remember: you read it here on Slashdot, and you won't be a millionaire because you aren't the one who made it happen!
There's an "average" laptop size that's a pretty damned good mix between size, cost, usability, and portability. In my current laptop, I decided to go for the wider screen and bigger laptop, and I don't like it as much as my smaller, lighter, "standard" sized previous model. (a Dell 600m) While I've seen much smaller laptops, I figure they are probably in much the same camp as my larger, heavier, more annoying laptop - they deviate from a standard size that has proven to be an awfully good set of compromises over years of time.
Phones are as big as they are because people like them that size. I don't mind the brick that is my home cordless phone because I don't live with it in my pocket. My Razr cell phone, on the other hand, is delightful primarily because of its minute form factor and it's compatibility with and accessibility from my jeans pocket.
Deviating from the "standard" form factor is very risky - the value of finding a new "right size" is high, but the chances of getting it right is very low. Dell blew it on my current laptop, it's too big and heavy for me to love.
you saw what happened to katrina do you really think we're any more prepared for anything like this?
Despite the bunging of Katrina's aftermath, what I saw in *advance* of Katrina was quite useful. The Mayor BEGGED people to leave town on local television. Everybody had several days' warning, they just chose not to leave. And it's the idiots that didn't leave that were starving, peeing on and raping each other in the stadium a week later.
It would be terrible if it happened - I have a good friend in Montana, but if warnings were as good as Katrina's, I'd be just fine. As a Californian, if I see Arnie telling NorCal folks to bail, I'm gone in 60 seconds, with my kids in the back, laptop and backup drives in hand!
In Windows' case, the drivers are binary.
But in the Linux world, they will be (already are) largely open source. If a vendor puts out a crappy driver, people who know better can submit patches, and people who don't know will quickly learn who to avoid.
When you look at it, Red Hat is the wrong place to develop drivers. They should be developed by the vendors of the drivers, not the O/S packager.
It has been necessary so far to develop drivers at Red Hat simply to bootstrap the O/S. But now, Linux is becoming more popular every year, most enterprises have plans to deploy Linux in annually increasing scopes, and the "upward spiral" that Bill Gates (ghost-)wrote about 10 years ago in "The Road Ahead" is happening for the GNU/Linux system.
Red Hat doesn't develop devices. Device vendors develop devices, and it's their expertise in how their own devices function that makes them best qualified to write device drivers for the whatever O/S.
This move is really more a reflection of the continuing maturity of the Linux Operating System!
Ovaltine is a chocolate milk drink that's vitamin fortified. It's marketed as being rich, chocolaty, and healthy to boot.
Google "I'm feeling lucky" for "Ovaltine" results in this link at Wikipedia...