Why do you take for granted that f2f meetings are so easy to arrange? In a small organization, yes, it's easy to have f2f meetings when everybody's in the same room.
I work for a big corporation. I never have trouble arranging face-to-face meetings with people who work on my campus. Possibly upper management is harder to get time with (not an issue in my job), but I suspect I could if I had to. It's not like I don't know where they sit.
At one point in my telecommute experience, my home office was much more functional, much more conveniently located to all my colleagues, and just plain a better choice for meetings:)
In other words, you weren't really telecommuting, you were loaning your home to your company as a remote office and meeting center. Not a typical situation. Most home offices are not conveniently located. That's why most people want to telecommute in the first place: to avoid the hassle and expense of traveling from a relatively inconvenient location.
IMHO, this is the most thoroughly neglected aspect of telecommuting. Collaborating with people over the phone is hard. You can't look over each other's shoulders as you work, and you can't share a white board. Productivity suffers, big time.
Thing is, there are some technical solutions to these problems. Handy little online meeting tools like WebEx abound. But too many places (including all the places I've every worked) just can't be bothered with them. I'm guessing they don't want the expense of the tools and of training people to use them. Which is darned short-sighted.
All "high costs" are not created equal. You can get some fairly skilled labor in India or China for $30K. And that person has the same standard of living as a US resident who makes more than twice that, due to the difference in the cost of living.
Working from home may save your employer money. But half your salary? Unlikely.
That way you don't have to mess with xhost and environment variable settings.
The fact that this kind of hack is possible on Unix/Linux but not on Windows has nothing to do with support for multiple or non-admin users. It's purely historical. Unix started out as a time-sharing OS, Windows was always a single-user OS. Unix assumes that it has multiple users sitting in front of serial terminals, Windows assumes it has one user sitting in front of the actual computer.
When the time came to adapt Unix to the GUI era, people assumed that people would continue to use it as a time-sharing system, so they invented graphic monitor technology to support GUIs over the wire: X-Windows. That assumption was economically flawed: graphic terminals are not a big cost savings over PCs, and indeed X-Terminals never achieved the necessary economies of scale to be even comparably priced. So X-Windows mostly ended up being implemented in Unix workstations. If Unix GUIs had been designed with the right assumptions (and some proprietary GUIs actually were) the GUI system wouldn't have this handy remote-user feature.
According to their web site, they're in a lot of bluetooth devices. So yeah, I was overstating their defunctness. But they definitely are dead on the desktop.
Their article on Wikipedia links an interesting (if somewhat messy) article on the ICON computer, a QNX-based desktop that was commissioned by a Canadian public school system. Soon destroyed by IBM-compatibles, of course. A depressing glimpse of unrealized potential.
You can still buy the current incarnation of CP/M (now called Multiuser DOS) from Concurrent Controls. But I had to really hunt for that web site — there's obviously very little interest. And the web site hasn't been updated in a couple years.
Your memories differ from mine. Besides, what about QNX prevented it from being used as a desktop OS? Aside from that fact that they had no hope of competing with Microsoft.
Part of my perspective comes from working for Convergent Technologies, which sold x86-based systems running their own OS, called CTOS. Like QNX, CTOS was microkernel based, had a message-passing architecture, and a really good scheduler. Now, you could use these systems for "process control," but you could also use them for ordinary office work. That wasn't overkill: these OS features made it possible to implement some very fancy user interfaces. I worked for them as a technical writer, and did most of my writing on that system. The level of support for good interactive software wouldn't be matched in the PC world for many years. And the advanced features of the OS enabled this on very limited hardware.
Perhaps my ignorance is showing (or my memory is faulty), but it seemed to me that CTOS and QNX were very similar. The most important differences were that QNX was designed to run on generic hardware (no such thing when CTOS was invented in 1979) and to provide an API that would be intelligible to UNIX programmers. And if that's true, QNX would have been a good general-purpose OS from day one, even if it does do real-time stuff well.
Alive? Sure. As is CP/M. (I'm pretty sure CTOS is quite dead.) But hardly kicking.
QNX was originally designed as a general-purpose PC OS. When I first heard of it, around 1987, its feature list was pretty impressive compared to the leading OSs of the time. (Assuming you can call MS-DOS 2.0 an "operating system", which is debatable.) They actually claimed to do serious multitasking on 8088-based systems. No reason to be skeptical: I'd seen other OSs do it on similar hardware. But I was stuck using MS-DOS, which not only didn't support multitasking, it was actively hostile to it, due to some poor coding by Tim Patterson. There were various kludges to implement this and other "real" OS features, but they were pretty evil.
QNX survived, but only by tightly focusing its market. As you say, it's always been big as an embedded OS. (I seem to recall that it used to be the leading OS for some kinds of POS systems.) Nowadays it's marketed as a "realtime OS". That's honest enough, but it's really a good general-purpose OS that runs on very limited hardware. I've always been frustrated that it never captured significant mindshare.
...if Sun hadn't opened it, it's possible that they would have needed to abandon it completely as it would eventually become impossible to keep it competitive with the decreasing sales figures.
As have other hardware companies with their own flavor of UNIX. The difference is, those companies now get most of their business from systems that use commodity processors. Sun was very, very late to that game; its x64 line, though profitable, is still a small part of the business. So Sun can't abandon Solaris, because that would mean abandoning their main product line: SPARC-based servers and supercomputers.
HP didn't kill tru64, the marketplace did. This OS never ran on anything except Alpha and Itanium. Not a lot of demand for those.
The marketplace is littered with the corpses of superior OSs that failed: CP/M, QNX, CTOS (which all ran on x86, damn it!). Thinking too much about them is not healthy.
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benefit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's.
You're not making Sun management happy. Sun has taken a lot of heat from investors for "giving away" Solaris. Management's response: we're creating thousands of Solaris hackers. These hackers influence hardware buying decisions. Solaris runs on x64, but it also runs on SPARC, and that's still Sun's main business. Linux people probably won't buy SPARC systems and Windows people definitely won't. But Solaris people just might, especially if they need a system that scales.
Irix was never meant to be more than a workstation OS...
Say what? SGI sold servers too. In the late 90s it was their main business. The email server at AOL used to be an SGI Origin — running IRIX.
SGI's business was an is (they still exist, albeit as a very tiny supercomputer/server vendor) high performance computing. Doing HPC with workstations and doing it with servers and supercomputers is not all that different. And until they shifted from MIPS to x64 and Itanium, all their systems ran IRIX.
Obviously you shouldn't read Tolstoy while operating heavy machinery. Everybody knows that. But I think a comic book, or even a Steven King novel is perfectly OK.
That's all true, but only part of the story. I work in the U.S., but half the people I work with were born on the other side of the International Date Line. Which means that these countries not only have enough geeks to power their own exploding economies, that have a huge surplus that they export. The U.S. is falling behind in the Geek Race!
If you're not saying it's all a big joke, respond to my arguments with arguments of your own, not jokes. Quotes from "The Simpsons" are particularly lame.
Anyway, now you seem to be saying that all government officials are dishonest, therefore anything they say is true must be false, even if there's physical evidence. I have no idea how to respond to that.
Every hobby has its hazards. Building a fusor is probably safer than, say, mountain climbing. In both cases, you could die a nasty death if you're not careful. Serious practitioners are careful.
If this is the attitude of your IT staff they, and possibly you, should all be fired. Technology evolves all the time, keeping it up to date is part of the job.
Who said anything about an IT staff?
So? You can run both IPv4 and IPv6 without any problems. You can route IPv4 over and IPv6 WAN, no big deal.
Who said anything about routing?
Try going back and actually reading my post this time.
I'm talking the corporate level. They think ahead whole months at a time. Electronic Arts just gave up on acquiring Take Two Interactive because it wasn't going to happen in time to merge the product lines before Christmas. That shows thinking almost six months ahead!
Everything in modern publicly-held companies, anyway. They're all under enormous pressure to keep costs down. Sometimes I think we ought to bring back the robber barons. They had many faults, but at least they were capable of thinking beyond the end of the fiscal year.
I disagree with your logic. Yes, no IPv6 is one less thing to go wrong. But if it is going to go wrong, don't you want it to go wrong now, when you still have IPv4 to fall back on? A few years from now, you won't.
Because it's work. Work takes time. Time is money.
A certain product at a certain company (forgive my being vague, you know how these things are) has a network interface. This interface is currently IPv4 only, no IPv6 support. When anybody asks the design team why not, they say that no customers have asked for it. Somebody suggested that IPv6 was the sort of thing you want to support ahead of need, but these guys have a lot of deadlines to meet and not enough resources to meet them. They aren't about to spend time implementing features nobody's asked for.
Of course, the time will come when their customers realize they've put off changing over to IPv6 much too long, and will start crash programs to make it happen. They'll demand that this product start supporting IPv6 immediately, if not sooner. So the design team will begin their own crash program, and IPv6 support will be added to the product in a hurry. The implementation will probably cost more and be less robust (at least initially) than if they'd planned ahead.
But they have no incentive to plan ahead. It's a common pattern.
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Why do you take for granted that f2f meetings are so easy to arrange?
In a small organization, yes, it's easy to have f2f meetings when everybody's in the same room.
I work for a big corporation. I never have trouble arranging face-to-face meetings with people who work on my campus. Possibly upper management is harder to get time with (not an issue in my job), but I suspect I could if I had to. It's not like I don't know where they sit.
At one point in my telecommute experience, my home office was much more functional, much more conveniently located to all my colleagues, and just plain a better choice for meetings :)
In other words, you weren't really telecommuting, you were loaning your home to your company as a remote office and meeting center. Not a typical situation. Most home offices are not conveniently located. That's why most people want to telecommute in the first place: to avoid the hassle and expense of traveling from a relatively inconvenient location.
4. How will telework affect collaboration?
IMHO, this is the most thoroughly neglected aspect of telecommuting. Collaborating with people over the phone is hard. You can't look over each other's shoulders as you work, and you can't share a white board. Productivity suffers, big time.
Thing is, there are some technical solutions to these problems. Handy little online meeting tools like WebEx abound. But too many places (including all the places I've every worked) just can't be bothered with them. I'm guessing they don't want the expense of the tools and of training people to use them. Which is darned short-sighted.
All "high costs" are not created equal. You can get some fairly skilled labor in India or China for $30K. And that person has the same standard of living as a US resident who makes more than twice that, due to the difference in the cost of living.
Working from home may save your employer money. But half your salary? Unlikely.
You mean I can sue for getting blown to pieces repeatedly? Sweet!
Oh no! /. has offended a whiny, oversensitive commissar of the politically correct!
You're confusing "offensive" with "lame".
It's more secure, and simpler, to do
ssh -v -l user2 localhost
That way you don't have to mess with xhost and environment variable settings.
The fact that this kind of hack is possible on Unix/Linux but not on Windows has nothing to do with support for multiple or non-admin users. It's purely historical. Unix started out as a time-sharing OS, Windows was always a single-user OS. Unix assumes that it has multiple users sitting in front of serial terminals, Windows assumes it has one user sitting in front of the actual computer.
When the time came to adapt Unix to the GUI era, people assumed that people would continue to use it as a time-sharing system, so they invented graphic monitor technology to support GUIs over the wire: X-Windows. That assumption was economically flawed: graphic terminals are not a big cost savings over PCs, and indeed X-Terminals never achieved the necessary economies of scale to be even comparably priced. So X-Windows mostly ended up being implemented in Unix workstations. If Unix GUIs had been designed with the right assumptions (and some proprietary GUIs actually were) the GUI system wouldn't have this handy remote-user feature.
I love learning new information. It's the convoluted arguments and personal insults that you use to defend your misinformation that's gets tiresome.
According to their web site, they're in a lot of bluetooth devices. So yeah, I was overstating their defunctness. But they definitely are dead on the desktop.
Their article on Wikipedia links an interesting (if somewhat messy) article on the ICON computer, a QNX-based desktop that was commissioned by a Canadian public school system. Soon destroyed by IBM-compatibles, of course. A depressing glimpse of unrealized potential.
You can still buy the current incarnation of CP/M (now called Multiuser DOS) from Concurrent Controls. But I had to really hunt for that web site — there's obviously very little interest. And the web site hasn't been updated in a couple years.
Your memories differ from mine. Besides, what about QNX prevented it from being used as a desktop OS? Aside from that fact that they had no hope of competing with Microsoft.
Part of my perspective comes from working for Convergent Technologies, which sold x86-based systems running their own OS, called CTOS. Like QNX, CTOS was microkernel based, had a message-passing architecture, and a really good scheduler. Now, you could use these systems for "process control," but you could also use them for ordinary office work. That wasn't overkill: these OS features made it possible to implement some very fancy user interfaces. I worked for them as a technical writer, and did most of my writing on that system. The level of support for good interactive software wouldn't be matched in the PC world for many years. And the advanced features of the OS enabled this on very limited hardware.
Perhaps my ignorance is showing (or my memory is faulty), but it seemed to me that CTOS and QNX were very similar. The most important differences were that QNX was designed to run on generic hardware (no such thing when CTOS was invented in 1979) and to provide an API that would be intelligible to UNIX programmers. And if that's true, QNX would have been a good general-purpose OS from day one, even if it does do real-time stuff well.
Simpson's quote: "Think of the children!"
Bored now.
Alive? Sure. As is CP/M. (I'm pretty sure CTOS is quite dead.) But hardly kicking.
QNX was originally designed as a general-purpose PC OS. When I first heard of it, around 1987, its feature list was pretty impressive compared to the leading OSs of the time. (Assuming you can call MS-DOS 2.0 an "operating system", which is debatable.) They actually claimed to do serious multitasking on 8088-based systems. No reason to be skeptical: I'd seen other OSs do it on similar hardware. But I was stuck using MS-DOS, which not only didn't support multitasking, it was actively hostile to it, due to some poor coding by Tim Patterson. There were various kludges to implement this and other "real" OS features, but they were pretty evil.
QNX survived, but only by tightly focusing its market. As you say, it's always been big as an embedded OS. (I seem to recall that it used to be the leading OS for some kinds of POS systems.) Nowadays it's marketed as a "realtime OS". That's honest enough, but it's really a good general-purpose OS that runs on very limited hardware. I've always been frustrated that it never captured significant mindshare.
...if Sun hadn't opened it, it's possible that they would have needed to abandon it completely as it would eventually become impossible to keep it competitive with the decreasing sales figures.
As have other hardware companies with their own flavor of UNIX. The difference is, those companies now get most of their business from systems that use commodity processors. Sun was very, very late to that game; its x64 line, though profitable, is still a small part of the business. So Sun can't abandon Solaris, because that would mean abandoning their main product line: SPARC-based servers and supercomputers.
HP didn't kill tru64, the marketplace did. This OS never ran on anything except Alpha and Itanium. Not a lot of demand for those.
The marketplace is littered with the corpses of superior OSs that failed: CP/M, QNX, CTOS (which all ran on x86, damn it!). Thinking too much about them is not healthy.
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benefit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's.
You're not making Sun management happy. Sun has taken a lot of heat from investors for "giving away" Solaris. Management's response: we're creating thousands of Solaris hackers. These hackers influence hardware buying decisions. Solaris runs on x64, but it also runs on SPARC, and that's still Sun's main business. Linux people probably won't buy SPARC systems and Windows people definitely won't. But Solaris people just might, especially if they need a system that scales.
Irix was never meant to be more than a workstation OS...
Say what? SGI sold servers too. In the late 90s it was their main business. The email server at AOL used to be an SGI Origin — running IRIX.
SGI's business was an is (they still exist, albeit as a very tiny supercomputer/server vendor) high performance computing. Doing HPC with workstations and doing it with servers and supercomputers is not all that different. And until they shifted from MIPS to x64 and Itanium, all their systems ran IRIX.
Obviously you shouldn't read Tolstoy while operating heavy machinery. Everybody knows that. But I think a comic book, or even a Steven King novel is perfectly OK.
That's all true, but only part of the story. I work in the U.S., but half the people I work with were born on the other side of the International Date Line. Which means that these countries not only have enough geeks to power their own exploding economies, that have a huge surplus that they export. The U.S. is falling behind in the Geek Race!
If you're not saying it's all a big joke, respond to my arguments with arguments of your own, not jokes. Quotes from "The Simpsons" are particularly lame.
Anyway, now you seem to be saying that all government officials are dishonest, therefore anything they say is true must be false, even if there's physical evidence. I have no idea how to respond to that.
Every hobby has its hazards. Building a fusor is probably safer than, say, mountain climbing. In both cases, you could die a nasty death if you're not careful. Serious practitioners are careful.
If this is the attitude of your IT staff they, and possibly you, should all be fired. Technology evolves all the time, keeping it up to date is part of the job.
Who said anything about an IT staff?
So? You can run both IPv4 and IPv6 without any problems. You can route IPv4 over and IPv6 WAN, no big deal.
Who said anything about routing?
Try going back and actually reading my post this time.
...but honestly, while the tech geek in me wants it, the pragmatist knows that it's not really that useful... At least, not yet.
How about 3 years from now? That's when the IPv4 address space is supposed to run out of new address blocks.
I'm talking the corporate level. They think ahead whole months at a time. Electronic Arts just gave up on acquiring Take Two Interactive because it wasn't going to happen in time to merge the product lines before Christmas. That shows thinking almost six months ahead!
Everything in modern publicly-held companies, anyway. They're all under enormous pressure to keep costs down. Sometimes I think we ought to bring back the robber barons. They had many faults, but at least they were capable of thinking beyond the end of the fiscal year.
I disagree with your logic. Yes, no IPv6 is one less thing to go wrong. But if it is going to go wrong, don't you want it to go wrong now, when you still have IPv4 to fall back on? A few years from now, you won't.
What's the downside to being ready?
Because it's work. Work takes time. Time is money.
A certain product at a certain company (forgive my being vague, you know how these things are) has a network interface. This interface is currently IPv4 only, no IPv6 support. When anybody asks the design team why not, they say that no customers have asked for it. Somebody suggested that IPv6 was the sort of thing you want to support ahead of need, but these guys have a lot of deadlines to meet and not enough resources to meet them. They aren't about to spend time implementing features nobody's asked for.
Of course, the time will come when their customers realize they've put off changing over to IPv6 much too long, and will start crash programs to make it happen. They'll demand that this product start supporting IPv6 immediately, if not sooner. So the design team will begin their own crash program, and IPv6 support will be added to the product in a hurry. The implementation will probably cost more and be less robust (at least initially) than if they'd planned ahead.
But they have no incentive to plan ahead. It's a common pattern.