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I stopped reading this headline when I saw the word "hypertori", because I knew whoever wrote it thinks i'll believe he's smart simply because he peppers his article with Al Gore-caliber buzzwords.
So..Who has a really interesting article to share?
In medieval times, hanging was a fairly swift method of getting what you wanted. Everyone from members of royalty and clergy, all the way down to prominent land owners and lords..they all engadged in offing their competitors in order to retain power and prominence within their communities. An accusation would be made, the unwitting victim would be captured, given a speedy trial, and swung from the gallows often in less time than it took for the victim to know that he was being railroaded.
In modern times, the members of royalty and clergy are now the CEOs and board members of corporations. Lords and landowners have become management, and perform the same role as their medieval counterparts -- maintenace of the kingdom and its assets. The game and its players have remained the same--Its only the strategy that has changed.
In a nutshell, VA has a problem. That problem, wether you like it or not, is you. You as a developer on SourceForge stand in VA's way of becoming profitable. You stand in the way of VA asserting ownership over your work, to repackage it and sell it. They cant sublicense it, since the nature of the GPL doesn't allow it. However, nothing prevents them from co-opting your work, as they have done to many people in the past, and leave you holding the bag.
The way in which VA needs to eliminate you is fundementally the same as how noblemen eliminated pesky serfs and minor land owners. They both found a way to put their enemy's head in a neuce, tighten it up, and knock the floor out from underneath their feet. Slowly but surely, VA is tightening the neuce around the neck of SourceForge's developers, so as to allow them to assert ownership and control over your work. Its a slow process that involves tweaking the terms and conditions of the usage agreement over time, allowing them to dictate what happens to the data you've "donated" to SourceForge. You can be assured that in another month or two, VA will make yet another revision to the usage agreement in a way that benefits them, at your expense. Its a well known tactic in the business world..write up the contract in such a way that you can go back and modify it without having to notify the other party--By the time they realize they're hanging by the neck in the town square, its already too late.
Soon you're going to see VA claim to "manage" less-active projects under the auspices of "community involvement"...You'll hear some bullshit about "We support the Linux community, and we want to see good projects go to waste..So, we've identified a hundred projects that have been languishing on SourceForge for some time, and we will be breathing new life into them!"...Translation: We now own these projects. We're going to bundle them and sell them to our customers without flipping you so much as a nickel, because the GPL and the Terms & Conditions you agreed to says we can."
So, if your tie begins to feel like a rope around your neck, stop and have a look at the situation. VA is not an altruistic company--The whole Linux scene is filled with stories of how VA and its employees systematically screwed hundreds of us. Their primary objective is not to make you happy. Its to make money, even if it's at your expense. Look into moving your project off SourceForge. If you're a project manager, issue a statement disallowing VA from ever asserting control over your project, in any form. If need be, switch your code's license from GPL to something hijack-proof. Look into Savannah, or iBiblio. Anything else is tantamount to neglect of your own project, as you're laying out the welcome mat for VA to come along and kick the floor out from beneath you.
If they think they can take the unpurified ore of your code, smelt the gold out and sell the ingots, you can bet they will. They're certainly not the first, and they certainly won't be the last company on Earth to do so. They did it to me, they did it to my friends, and they'll do it to you if you aren't careful. I made the mistake, like many of you, in believing that "VA would never do anything like that to us.." Ask yourself this: Isn't that what they WANT me to believe?
History is filled with martyrs that hung for their beliefs..But in the end, its them who lost the battle, while the fat got fatter off the work of the people.
Cheers,
PS..VA is Satan himself and I told you so first.;)
We elected the politicans who made the laws in the first place which allowed campaign contributions to be illegal. Infact, during the last election, we didn't want the guy who was willing to do away with them. We wanted to play Bush vs. Gore instead.
Before you run off pointing fingers at Microsoft for doing what they are within the scope of the law to do, ask yourself where the core of the corruption sits. Its not with them, or the politicians. Its us, and our lack of desire to make our elected officials accountable for their actions.
Lobbying wouldn't exist if we as a people decide not to allow it. Anything beyond it would be bribery.
Write a small script that finds out who your closest neighbors are pingwise. Establish multiple partnerships with multiple hosts so that in the event one host falls out of existance, you still have the ability to failover onto another host's provisions. Anyway, for the hosts it does find, crossmount the volumes across the network and keep the mirror structure hidden from the users by bundling a nice non-document-centric GUI, and bingo, all users now have access to all applications, and will use them in a manner best fitting their local network conditions. Speed of application delivery now depends on hardware infrastructure, not on what version of application X you happen to be running. If you typically get Application X from a T3 connection, you can still get Application X from another host outside of town, and you wouldn't know the difference anyway. Sure, it would take a network filesystem superior to NFS, and much, much wider pipes to deliver it, but its feasable today for the patient of mind.
Cheers,
Re:A little dose of reality never hurt anyone.
on
The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 2
IT "veteran" doesn't mean the same thing as it did 5 years ago. Thats whats happening right now, industry wide. A huge-ass shakeout, to keep the ones that are worth keeping, and send the Sally Struthers School of PC Repair graduates back home to mommy. The industry is infested with them.. Guys who think plugging in a PCI card, pushing a power button and clicking "OK" when Windows comes up qualifies as "industry experience".
And thank you, yes, my job is quite secure. Its secure because I can name a dozen things that set me apart from other spuds in terms of skills and experience. Can you?
Re:A little dose of reality never hurt anyone.
on
The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 1
There is no market for GIMPified crap, nor was there ever a market for GIMPified crap. Thats why its a hobby, and not my 7-to-5 job.
Oh wait, but if you didn't have so much bong resin clogging your brain, you would have known that already. Mmhmm.
I love you.
A little dose of reality never hurt anyone.
on
The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
If you're the greasy guy who works behind the counter in the "PC Repair" section of Best Buy, you should be laid off if you haven't been already. The industry is overrun with "technicians", a bumper crop of losers fresh off the boat with Sally Struthers School of PC Repair degrees, i.e. dime-a-dozen dorks with no formal training or experience in anything beyond building or tearing down PCs. You think you know alot, but, you dont.
Meanwhile, if you're one of the few who actually treat your career as a discipline, then you should have either held onto your job, or have found work by now. UNIX is a discipline -- If you have an O'Reilly book within 15 feet of your bed, count yourself among the lucky ones who decided not to ride the Win32 train. I know guys with Windows-only skills that haven't held a job in 8 months. If by chance you're still out of work, use your time wisely. Don't sit around and pick your ass. Get your certifications over with, register with ACM and USENIX, and start piling on the lines in your resume'.
Simple as that.
Cheers,
The First Real-Time Strategy Game? Uh, no...
on
HIstory of RTS Games
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· Score: 2
The first realtime strategy game I'm aware of is "Modem Wars" for the Commodore 64 circa 1985-1986. It encorporated all of the elements you'de see in any RTS game.. Movement of forces, variable terrain, variable damage, differing strengths/weaknesses of each piece, execution of feild strategy, even grouping of forces. Quite a breakthrough game considering it could be done within 64K of RAM, and played head to head over a modem.
Why bother. A vertical split-screen image for left and right eye is all you need. Theres nothing stopping conventional television from broadcasting stereoscopic images. Get two camcorders, tape em together at the sides and videotape stuff in your house. Edit the video so that the left camera's image displays on the right-hand side of the screen, and vice versa. Bingo, 3D video.
A large, ornately hand decorated, leather-bound hardcover UNIX manual, with "illuminated" pages, similar to medieval manuscripts. Beautiful margain decorations, stories, code examples, instructions on everything imaginable from LDAP to the art of regexp.. Just a large compendium of several commonly referenced books, manuals, HOWTOs, etc..... Plus a large section near the end where you can pencil in your own notes, and your own experiences in UNIX. I'd pay upwards of $500 for something like this, and would treaure it.
About 15 years ago, the city I grew up with threw its Mayor out of office.
The Mayor, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only commercial lumber & hardware supplier in town. He would modify the building codes for the city so that anyone who wanted to build a new home would have to go to this one specific lumber provider to get their raw materials.
Today, the community I grew up with is about to throw Miguel out of office.
Miguel, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only language-independent framework provider in town, Microsoft. He's trying to modify the way in which programmers build so that anyone who wants to build new apps has to go to this one specific provider to get their raw materials.
The Mayor of my home town hasn't held office, or worked anywhere, since.
Suppose we put our suspicions and personal views of Miguel aside for a moment, and look at the footprints Miguel's projects have left over the past year or two. After all, thats the best indication you're going to get as to where he (and the projects he's associated with) are headed.
In the beginning, GNOME meant "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Remember that? GNOME was being offered up as essentially Miguel's attempt build an API infrastructure, having complained in his original "Lets Maker Unix Not Suck" decree about the lack of code reuse and interapplication communication, among other complaints. CORBA was going to be thefoundation of the beast, and ORBit would be the broker making it all click. This approach failed because CORBA had to be badly kludged to get it to the point where it could even discover other components, let alone communicate with them. All dressed up and nowhere to go..which leads us to Bonobo.
Bonobo was Miguel's attempt to standardize the way in which components discovered eachother and talked with eachother, regardless of origin, and regardless of what language they're written in. It failed, because no coder in their right mind wants to deal with that level of overhead and abstraction, especially when the definition of HOW to go about doing it was never fully nailed down. Bonobo failed to pull the GNOME car out of the ditch. "All dressed up and nowhere to go" became "Die and leave a good looking corpse".
Meanwhile, the desktop wars were heating up. The GUI was getting all the attention, not the underlying mechanisms that were making it happen in the basement. For a guy who works hard and wants a little respect and attention, the basement is no place to be. You want the spotlight. You want a cameo in a movie, you want the speaking tour circuit, and you want progressively less and less to do with working and more to do with playing the figurehead game. Enter Ximian. Ximian GNOME was Miguel's attempt to distance himself from GNOME's basement. In short, Miguel decided to put himself on a level higher than his GNOME work, hoping his project management decisions would trickle down from the throne instead of trickle up from the basement. Miguel probably noticed at some point that issuing edicts from the basement would only get part of the project built. The other portion would have to be created by issuing edicts from the top. This brings us to today.
Ximian is pretty, but stability continues to be an issue. Its a 50 story building built from the ground up that halted construction around the 35th floor. Construction was resumed on the the top of the building, but it only extended down to the 45th floor leaving a messy framework of I-beams and scaffolding exposed for all the world to see.
Disappointed with how the Linux community has "failed" to deliver a completed structure to him, Miguel wants to call in Microsoft to fix that hole. They'll cover the holes on the outside of the building with plywood and paint them to look like the rest of the building. They'll worry about the insides later.
The whole issue comes down to this---If you insist on living in GNOME city, which would you rather look at? An ugly, unstable skyscraper with 10 unfinished floors at the top, or a pile of rubble and plywood? (No WTC jokes, please..)...Miguel has to finish his building somehow.
Then again, I hear KDE City is building a nice skyscraper with gleaming spires and a solid foundation, and Microsoft is nowhere to be found.
Cheers,
What Difference Does It Make In The Long Run?
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
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· Score: 3
None, if you ask me.
Palm's CEO has been on record saying that his company has no interest in making "handheld computers", preferring to stick with the original plan of making better and better Palm organizers. Its like this guy's first reaction to finding a pot of gold would be to get rid of all the shiny yellow stuff inside it and use the pot to grow a house plant.
IMHO, Palm just doesn't get it. They're missing out on a market worth billions, potentially, all because they cant see past the idea of using their hardware for anything more than a $200 equivalent of a 39 cent paper note pad.
Palm just doesn't seem capable of looking down the road technologically speaking. I don't really think they understand the potential of their own niche. I mean, think about what people carry around on them today. A pager, a cellphone, a PDA. Nothing really stops Palm from designing and delivering a device that does all three of these things in one package. Fortunately, there WILL be a company that realizes where the handheld market is going. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt it will be Palm Inc, a company content on reinventing the Rolodex.
Eeek, I said theres "No such thing as a parity disk in RAID" up there? Egads..:)
For the record, yes, I meant HA. Not RAID in that context. I was attempting to point out that Google's choice of storage strategy would depend largely on the need to eliminate singular points of failure.
To continue the discussion, RAID 3 would be a rather poor choice of RAID type for an HA cluster. In RAID 3, parity needs to be handled sequentially whereas in RAID 5, read/write operations can happen simultaneously since parity isnt localized to any one particular drive. The margainal speed advantage RAID 3 offers over 5 is seldom enough for a typical admin to justify in the long run. Its only really seen in situations where overall latency takes a backseat to speedy access to huge files. Thats been my experience, at least.
And yes, i'm absolutely sure I do this for a living.:) I'm also absolutely sure I've had pneumonia & bronchitis for the past week, high fevers and all. Ended up in Urgent Care with a 104.6'F the night before. Hope that explains my storage faux-pas.:)
The example I gave was meant to demonstrate a point, not to be pedantic and overly technical. I'm well aware of the different pros and cons of RAID types.:) I do it for a living.
FYI, there is no such thing as a "parity disk" when it comes to RAID. I think you might be confusing parity with the notion of a quorum disk, which is something very different/ Parity is distributed thruought the array, and changes dynamically as data gets poured into the set. Having a "parity disk" would be contradictory to the whole point of RAID, as it represents a single point of failure for your storage. Not good.
Also, Google is a HA cluster. I can guarantee you they arent using JBODs to house their data, as you've inferred.
Its not a fair comparrison to put 1GB worth of DRAM on one side of the scale, and 1GB worth of physical storage on the other. The hard disk will obviously come out to be the cheaper of the two. However, to a company like Google who undoubtedly uses RAID technology for storage, you're effectively not getting the same "bang for your buck" as you would with a JBOD array. In order to have 1TB worth of DRAM on a scale next to 1TB of physical storage, you're going to have to amass like 2TB of storage on the plate in order to have just the 1TB worth of usable free space.
Mind you, thats not to say that RAID is a bad technology..heh, hardly. Its just that you cant make a 1 to 1 comparrison from DRAM to physical without taking into account the storage methods employed by each.
While the original article raises some good points, its awfully one-sided in its view of technology's impact on life. Here's my laundry list:
1) This article confuses the notion of personal safety with "comfort". Television is not a necessity, nor is radio, or the Internet, or your cell phone, or any telephone for that matter. These are luxuries, and having to go without them will not kill you. Yes, you'll be unhappy having to go without them, but unless you're deprived of the basics, you'll survive. If someone took it all away from you, you'de be confused for a while until you realized you dont need a radio, a television, a net connection or a telephone to obtain the information you need.
2) Step back and realize for a moment that 99.9999999% of mankind's life here on Earth has been spent without access to cell phones, televisions, net connections, and the Internet. Add to that, no lights, no heat, no AC, no electricity of any sort, no access to organized health care, no weather prediction, no food sanitation, etc. Having to go a week without your N'Sync ring-tones will not cause you to die, and if it does, we're all probably better off without you.
3) Nature takes care of the numbers game. In the event of any catastrophe, people will begin to immediately align themselves within groups. In any ecosystem, you have Rioters, Liabilities, Parasites, Cooperatives and Hibernators. All of the above will die off except the Cooperatives since their dependency upon their environment is one-sided.Cooperatives establish multiple dependencies in multiple directions so that in the event any one of those dependencies will fail, they can depend upon one of the others. Not only do they have a way to overcome the problem, but they have their choice of approaches.
4) Technology presents itself as an advantage to the Cooperative, as it allows the member of the Cooperative to establish greater levels of redundancy. The member of the Cooperative can tether himself to his ecosystem in never and more varied ways to ensure his own survival. To all the other types of organisms, technology is either useless or threatening.
Wherever you have a single point of failure, you're going to have nervous people. Technology, by its very nature, makes a scenario such as the one presented in the article an impossiblity. It amounts to more of a "discomfort" than a legitimate threat to health and well-being.
If you have PC, a webcam and a burner, you're set.. It doesn't even need to be a fast PC or a fast burner. A typical sysadmin could sit down in one afternoon and get Linux up and running on the box, and toss a few entries into the crontab for that box to build an ISO of all the collected images to a harddisk, and subsequently burn a tarball of the day's events onto a CD-R. Cheap, costs pennies on the dollar compared to most commercial security systems, and is vastly more reliable/configurable/upgradable/stable. All you'de have to do is pop a new CD-R in the tray at the start of business every morning, or hell, make the CD-R a CDRW, and swap the disc out every couple weeks.
DIY or DIE, buddy.;)
Something tells me this guy has never set one up..
on
Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How is a Mac "easier to set up" in a Beowulf cluster than a group of identical PCs?
I can see where the author might make a point to say that the Mac is nice to use for a cluster because Mac hardware doesn't really change much from box to box, but the same could be said for a group of equal-built PCs. Infact, most real-world (re: not your bedroom.) Beowulf cluster nodes are NOT loosely conglomerated machines with wildly different capabilities from node to node. Most clusters are planned out well in advance, in where each node is precisely equal in terms of its hardware and horsepower.
"Its easy to set up because all of your nodes are the same with a Mac!!" ceases to be a valid "advantage", when the same can be said of a group of SGI O2 boxes, a group of Sun E10K boxes, or a group of lowly 386 PC boxes.
Besides, "its see-thru orange!!!" shouldn't top your list of reasons to purchase Macs for your cluster. You buy a pile of 1U rackmounts, because you normally don't have a whole room to dedicate to a cluster. (duh)..
IBM officially switched over to its new CEO the other day, allowing Lou Gerstner to retire. The guy taking over for him, Sam Palmisano, is a big Linux advocate, and is largely responsible for pushing IBM's Linux initiative internally in the past year or so. Looks like there will be good times ahead for us..
The dot-com bubble burst took alot of the steam out of the movement..Glad to see Big Blue pick up the flag and keep marching, hm?
The whole Austin Powers franchise is basically a spoof/remake of an old 60's movie called Casino Royale, which in and of itself was a spoof of the Bond films. It could be argued that Austin Powers is a spoof on Casino Royale, and NOT of the 007 movies. If anyone should be pissed, it would be Peter Sellers and the production company behind Casino Royale, not the company behind the 007 movies. They didn't seem to have a problem when Casino Royale came out, or when the first two Austin Powers movies were released.
"Open source and communication in computing brought C, Unix, the Internet, e-mail, etc.
"
Wrong. Those were brought to you by AT &T Bell Labs in the mid-late 60's, and were far from "open". The development efforts going on there were as closed as you can get. Here's an example: The concept of "email", while not developed by Bell Labs, was privately developed for nearly 7 years before it was shown to the public in December '68. Google for Doug Englebart sometime. He worked for decades to give kiddies like you the idea the impression you were doing something new.
You need to go back and learn a little history before you open your mouth and let your foot in.
Here's a clue, gang: Science costs money and takes time. As a result, Univerities, private companies, and even our government have a vested interest in the fruit that research tends to yeild. The whole point of science is to obtain your results and THEN share it with the scientific community, not the other way around. Its not like Oppenheimer was supposed to ring up Hitler from the basement of UC's football stadium and tell him "Hey, I gotsa l33t c0n+rOL3d fi$$1on c#@MBeR down here man!!! Ch3k it 0ut! B00y@h!!"
Get real. Open source is not applicable to science, never was, never will be.
Speaking as someone who actually DOES work in this capacity.....
I don't see what all the controversy is about. It was abundantly clear to me when I started down the path of being a Contractor, that the following rules and concepts applied:
o You're not an employee of the place where you work.
o This is not a permanent position, and you shouldn't expect it to become one.
o You should not expect to directly advance within the capacity you're assigned to.
Here's the situation: This article is about a guy who thinks he works for HP, and is entitled to HP's benefits. This simply isn't the case. He may work AT HP, but he is not an HP employee, and therefore is not privy to the benefits that HP provides. Here's another example. I work at IBM. I do not work for IBM. I am not an IBM employee. I do exactly the same work as IBM employees, go to the same meetings, work the same hours, make the same money, work on the same projects, work with the same people, enjoy the same perks, hell, I even have an IBM email address, an employee #, and 24/7 access to confidential materials.. But I am NOT an employee of IBM. "work AT IBM" != "work FOR IBM".
The only thing you should really be concerned with when you're a contractor, is entrenchment, flexibility, and experience. Be ready for anything. By the very nature of your employement, its temporary. You WILL get let go. Thats the whole point of why companies like HP and IBM hire contractors..You're there to fill in the spots where the market and the economy fluctuate. You often times sign a contract thats says you can be let go at any time, without warning, without reason. If you're lucky, your contractor firm will offer you a benefits package comparable to what regular employees are given. Knowing this, you should use your time working at Company X to your advantage. Learn as much stuff as rapidly as possible to make yourself more desirable to future employers down the road. For example -- Being a contractor at IBM gave me a first class education in storage subsystems, SAN implementation, performance tuning, a couple certifications, etc.. Not to mention half a dozen work references, reccomendations and accolades I can throw on my resume' when my contract runs out. Make yourself integral to as many processes as you can, it may save your neck. And above all, don't consider your job to be permanent. You're just setting yourself up for a disaster if you do, because when you get laid off (and you WILL get laid off) you'll have no one to blame but yourself in the end, because its your signature on the contract. You were supposed to read the contract BEFORE you signed, remember?
Most of all, be an honest person, and honest to yourself. This guy is lying to himself in that he thinks he's an HP employee. Thats his first mistake. The rest is common sense.
Gladly. Let me sum up ten pages of buzzword bingo bullshit in a few simple sentences:
"We've got some robots and some ideas, neither one of which we've actually implemented yet. We only have one robot right now, but, here's a nice time-lapse photo of the same robot scooting around a corner to make you think we own dozens of them. Due to the incredible design of our software that doesn't exist yet, they communicate with you and eachother using radios that dont exist yet and draw stuff on the walls with an IRLEDs that don't exist yet either. We're burying the idea in a sea of buzzwords because we need to secure funding..That, and we're afraid youll find out these ideas have been around for years."
Slashdot Mirror
?
I stopped reading this headline when I saw the word "hypertori", because I knew whoever wrote it thinks i'll believe he's smart simply because he peppers his article with Al Gore-caliber buzzwords.
So..Who has a really interesting article to share?
In medieval times, hanging was a fairly swift method of getting what you wanted. Everyone from members of royalty and clergy, all the way down to prominent land owners and lords..they all engadged in offing their competitors in order to retain power and prominence within their communities. An accusation would be made, the unwitting victim would be captured, given a speedy trial, and swung from the gallows often in less time than it took for the victim to know that he was being railroaded.
In modern times, the members of royalty and clergy are now the CEOs and board members of corporations. Lords and landowners have become management, and perform the same role as their medieval counterparts -- maintenace of the kingdom and its assets. The game and its players have remained the same--Its only the strategy that has changed.
In a nutshell, VA has a problem. That problem, wether you like it or not, is you. You as a developer on SourceForge stand in VA's way of becoming profitable. You stand in the way of VA asserting ownership over your work, to repackage it and sell it. They cant sublicense it, since the nature of the GPL doesn't allow it. However, nothing prevents them from co-opting your work, as they have done to many people in the past, and leave you holding the bag.
The way in which VA needs to eliminate you is fundementally the same as how noblemen eliminated pesky serfs and minor land owners. They both found a way to put their enemy's head in a neuce, tighten it up, and knock the floor out from underneath their feet. Slowly but surely, VA is tightening the neuce around the neck of SourceForge's developers, so as to allow them to assert ownership and control over your work. Its a slow process that involves tweaking the terms and conditions of the usage agreement over time, allowing them to dictate what happens to the data you've "donated" to SourceForge. You can be assured that in another month or two, VA will make yet another revision to the usage agreement in a way that benefits them, at your expense. Its a well known tactic in the business world..write up the contract in such a way that you can go back and modify it without having to notify the other party--By the time they realize they're hanging by the neck in the town square, its already too late.
Soon you're going to see VA claim to "manage" less-active projects under the auspices of "community involvement"...You'll hear some bullshit about "We support the Linux community, and we want to see good projects go to waste..So, we've identified a hundred projects that have been languishing on SourceForge for some time, and we will be breathing new life into them!"
So, if your tie begins to feel like a rope around your neck, stop and have a look at the situation. VA is not an altruistic company--The whole Linux scene is filled with stories of how VA and its employees systematically screwed hundreds of us. Their primary objective is not to make you happy. Its to make money, even if it's at your expense. Look into moving your project off SourceForge. If you're a project manager, issue a statement disallowing VA from ever asserting control over your project, in any form. If need be, switch your code's license from GPL to something hijack-proof. Look into Savannah, or iBiblio. Anything else is tantamount to neglect of your own project, as you're laying out the welcome mat for VA to come along and kick the floor out from beneath you.
If they think they can take the unpurified ore of your code, smelt the gold out and sell the ingots, you can bet they will. They're certainly not the first, and they certainly won't be the last company on Earth to do so. They did it to me, they did it to my friends, and they'll do it to you if you aren't careful. I made the mistake, like many of you, in believing that "VA would never do anything like that to us.." Ask yourself this: Isn't that what they WANT me to believe?
History is filled with martyrs that hung for their beliefs..But in the end, its them who lost the battle, while the fat got fatter off the work of the people.
Cheers,
PS..VA is Satan himself and I told you so first.
We elected the politicans who made the laws in the first place which allowed campaign contributions to be illegal. Infact, during the last election, we didn't want the guy who was willing to do away with them. We wanted to play Bush vs. Gore instead.
Before you run off pointing fingers at Microsoft for doing what they are within the scope of the law to do, ask yourself where the core of the corruption sits. Its not with them, or the politicians. Its us, and our lack of desire to make our elected officials accountable for their actions.
Lobbying wouldn't exist if we as a people decide not to allow it. Anything beyond it would be bribery.
Cheers,
vi
/ *(rw,no_root_squash)
:wq!
exportfs -a
Write a small script that finds out who your closest neighbors are pingwise. Establish multiple partnerships with multiple hosts so that in the event one host falls out of existance, you still have the ability to failover onto another host's provisions. Anyway, for the hosts it does find, crossmount the volumes across the network and keep the mirror structure hidden from the users by bundling a nice non-document-centric GUI, and bingo, all users now have access to all applications, and will use them in a manner best fitting their local network conditions. Speed of application delivery now depends on hardware infrastructure, not on what version of application X you happen to be running. If you typically get Application X from a T3 connection, you can still get Application X from another host outside of town, and you wouldn't know the difference anyway. Sure, it would take a network filesystem superior to NFS, and much, much wider pipes to deliver it, but its feasable today for the patient of mind.
Cheers,
IT "veteran" doesn't mean the same thing as it did 5 years ago. Thats whats happening right now, industry wide. A huge-ass shakeout, to keep the ones that are worth keeping, and send the Sally Struthers School of PC Repair graduates back home to mommy. The industry is infested with them.. Guys who think plugging in a PCI card, pushing a power button and clicking "OK" when Windows comes up qualifies as "industry experience".
And thank you, yes, my job is quite secure. Its secure because I can name a dozen things that set me apart from other spuds in terms of skills and experience. Can you?
There is no market for GIMPified crap, nor was there ever a market for GIMPified crap. Thats why its a hobby, and not my 7-to-5 job.
Oh wait, but if you didn't have so much bong resin clogging your brain, you would have known that already. Mmhmm.
I love you.
If you're the greasy guy who works behind the counter in the "PC Repair" section of Best Buy, you should be laid off if you haven't been already. The industry is overrun with "technicians", a bumper crop of losers fresh off the boat with Sally Struthers School of PC Repair degrees, i.e. dime-a-dozen dorks with no formal training or experience in anything beyond building or tearing down PCs. You think you know alot, but, you dont.
Meanwhile, if you're one of the few who actually treat your career as a discipline, then you should have either held onto your job, or have found work by now. UNIX is a discipline -- If you have an O'Reilly book within 15 feet of your bed, count yourself among the lucky ones who decided not to ride the Win32 train. I know guys with Windows-only skills that haven't held a job in 8 months. If by chance you're still out of work, use your time wisely. Don't sit around and pick your ass. Get your certifications over with, register with ACM and USENIX, and start piling on the lines in your resume'.
Simple as that.
Cheers,
The first realtime strategy game I'm aware of is "Modem Wars" for the Commodore 64 circa 1985-1986. It encorporated all of the elements you'de see in any RTS game.. Movement of forces, variable terrain, variable damage, differing strengths/weaknesses of each piece, execution of feild strategy, even grouping of forces. Quite a breakthrough game considering it could be done within 64K of RAM, and played head to head over a modem.
Why bother. A vertical split-screen image for left and right eye is all you need. Theres nothing stopping conventional television from broadcasting stereoscopic images. Get two camcorders, tape em together at the sides and videotape stuff in your house. Edit the video so that the left camera's image displays on the right-hand side of the screen, and vice versa. Bingo, 3D video.
See what I mean?
Cheers,
I've always wanted a book like this:
A large, ornately hand decorated, leather-bound hardcover UNIX manual, with "illuminated" pages, similar to medieval manuscripts. Beautiful margain decorations, stories, code examples, instructions on everything imaginable from LDAP to the art of regexp.. Just a large compendium of several commonly referenced books, manuals, HOWTOs, etc.
Cheers,
About 15 years ago, the city I grew up with threw its Mayor out of office.
The Mayor, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only commercial lumber & hardware supplier in town. He would modify the building codes for the city so that anyone who wanted to build a new home would have to go to this one specific lumber provider to get their raw materials.
Today, the community I grew up with is about to throw Miguel out of office.
Miguel, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only language-independent framework provider in town, Microsoft. He's trying to modify the way in which programmers build so that anyone who wants to build new apps has to go to this one specific provider to get their raw materials.
The Mayor of my home town hasn't held office, or worked anywhere, since.
Suppose we put our suspicions and personal views of Miguel aside for a moment, and look at the footprints Miguel's projects have left over the past year or two. After all, thats the best indication you're going to get as to where he (and the projects he's associated with) are headed.
In the beginning, GNOME meant "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Remember that? GNOME was being offered up as essentially Miguel's attempt build an API infrastructure, having complained in his original "Lets Maker Unix Not Suck" decree about the lack of code reuse and interapplication communication, among other complaints. CORBA was going to be thefoundation of the beast, and ORBit would be the broker making it all click. This approach failed because CORBA had to be badly kludged to get it to the point where it could even discover other components, let alone communicate with them. All dressed up and nowhere to go..which leads us to Bonobo.
Bonobo was Miguel's attempt to standardize the way in which components discovered eachother and talked with eachother, regardless of origin, and regardless of what language they're written in. It failed, because no coder in their right mind wants to deal with that level of overhead and abstraction, especially when the definition of HOW to go about doing it was never fully nailed down. Bonobo failed to pull the GNOME car out of the ditch. "All dressed up and nowhere to go" became "Die and leave a good looking corpse".
Meanwhile, the desktop wars were heating up. The GUI was getting all the attention, not the underlying mechanisms that were making it happen in the basement. For a guy who works hard and wants a little respect and attention, the basement is no place to be. You want the spotlight. You want a cameo in a movie, you want the speaking tour circuit, and you want progressively less and less to do with working and more to do with playing the figurehead game. Enter Ximian. Ximian GNOME was Miguel's attempt to distance himself from GNOME's basement. In short, Miguel decided to put himself on a level higher than his GNOME work, hoping his project management decisions would trickle down from the throne instead of trickle up from the basement. Miguel probably noticed at some point that issuing edicts from the basement would only get part of the project built. The other portion would have to be created by issuing edicts from the top. This brings us to today.
Ximian is pretty, but stability continues to be an issue. Its a 50 story building built from the ground up that halted construction around the 35th floor. Construction was resumed on the the top of the building, but it only extended down to the 45th floor leaving a messy framework of I-beams and scaffolding exposed for all the world to see.
Disappointed with how the Linux community has "failed" to deliver a completed structure to him, Miguel wants to call in Microsoft to fix that hole. They'll cover the holes on the outside of the building with plywood and paint them to look like the rest of the building. They'll worry about the insides later.
The whole issue comes down to this---If you insist on living in GNOME city, which would you rather look at? An ugly, unstable skyscraper with 10 unfinished floors at the top, or a pile of rubble and plywood? (No WTC jokes, please..)
Then again, I hear KDE City is building a nice skyscraper with gleaming spires and a solid foundation, and Microsoft is nowhere to be found.
Cheers,
None, if you ask me.
Palm's CEO has been on record saying that his company has no interest in making "handheld computers", preferring to stick with the original plan of making better and better Palm organizers. Its like this guy's first reaction to finding a pot of gold would be to get rid of all the shiny yellow stuff inside it and use the pot to grow a house plant.
IMHO, Palm just doesn't get it. They're missing out on a market worth billions, potentially, all because they cant see past the idea of using their hardware for anything more than a $200 equivalent of a 39 cent paper note pad.
Palm just doesn't seem capable of looking down the road technologically speaking. I don't really think they understand the potential of their own niche. I mean, think about what people carry around on them today. A pager, a cellphone, a PDA. Nothing really stops Palm from designing and delivering a device that does all three of these things in one package. Fortunately, there WILL be a company that realizes where the handheld market is going. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt it will be Palm Inc, a company content on reinventing the Rolodex.
Eeek, I said theres "No such thing as a parity disk in RAID" up there? Egads..
For the record, yes, I meant HA. Not RAID in that context. I was attempting to point out that Google's choice of storage strategy would depend largely on the need to eliminate singular points of failure.
To continue the discussion, RAID 3 would be a rather poor choice of RAID type for an HA cluster. In RAID 3, parity needs to be handled sequentially whereas in RAID 5, read/write operations can happen simultaneously since parity isnt localized to any one particular drive. The margainal speed advantage RAID 3 offers over 5 is seldom enough for a typical admin to justify in the long run. Its only really seen in situations where overall latency takes a backseat to speedy access to huge files. Thats been my experience, at least.
And yes, i'm absolutely sure I do this for a living.
The example I gave was meant to demonstrate a point, not to be pedantic and overly technical. I'm well aware of the different pros and cons of RAID types.
FYI, there is no such thing as a "parity disk" when it comes to RAID. I think you might be confusing parity with the notion of a quorum disk, which is something very different/ Parity is distributed thruought the array, and changes dynamically as data gets poured into the set. Having a "parity disk" would be contradictory to the whole point of RAID, as it represents a single point of failure for your storage. Not good.
Also, Google is a HA cluster. I can guarantee you they arent using JBODs to house their data, as you've inferred.
Cheers,
Its not a fair comparrison to put 1GB worth of DRAM on one side of the scale, and 1GB worth of physical storage on the other. The hard disk will obviously come out to be the cheaper of the two. However, to a company like Google who undoubtedly uses RAID technology for storage, you're effectively not getting the same "bang for your buck" as you would with a JBOD array. In order to have 1TB worth of DRAM on a scale next to 1TB of physical storage, you're going to have to amass like 2TB of storage on the plate in order to have just the 1TB worth of usable free space.
Mind you, thats not to say that RAID is a bad technology..heh, hardly. Its just that you cant make a 1 to 1 comparrison from DRAM to physical without taking into account the storage methods employed by each.
Cheers
While the original article raises some good points, its awfully one-sided in its view of technology's impact on life. Here's my laundry list:
1) This article confuses the notion of personal safety with "comfort". Television is not a necessity, nor is radio, or the Internet, or your cell phone, or any telephone for that matter. These are luxuries, and having to go without them will not kill you. Yes, you'll be unhappy having to go without them, but unless you're deprived of the basics, you'll survive. If someone took it all away from you, you'de be confused for a while until you realized you dont need a radio, a television, a net connection or a telephone to obtain the information you need.
2) Step back and realize for a moment that 99.9999999% of mankind's life here on Earth has been spent without access to cell phones, televisions, net connections, and the Internet. Add to that, no lights, no heat, no AC, no electricity of any sort, no access to organized health care, no weather prediction, no food sanitation, etc. Having to go a week without your N'Sync ring-tones will not cause you to die, and if it does, we're all probably better off without you.
3) Nature takes care of the numbers game. In the event of any catastrophe, people will begin to immediately align themselves within groups. In any ecosystem, you have Rioters, Liabilities, Parasites, Cooperatives and Hibernators. All of the above will die off except the Cooperatives since their dependency upon their environment is one-sided.Cooperatives establish multiple dependencies in multiple directions so that in the event any one of those dependencies will fail, they can depend upon one of the others. Not only do they have a way to overcome the problem, but they have their choice of approaches.
4) Technology presents itself as an advantage to the Cooperative, as it allows the member of the Cooperative to establish greater levels of redundancy. The member of the Cooperative can tether himself to his ecosystem in never and more varied ways to ensure his own survival. To all the other types of organisms, technology is either useless or threatening.
Wherever you have a single point of failure, you're going to have nervous people. Technology, by its very nature, makes a scenario such as the one presented in the article an impossiblity. It amounts to more of a "discomfort" than a legitimate threat to health and well-being.
If you have PC, a webcam and a burner, you're set.. It doesn't even need to be a fast PC or a fast burner. A typical sysadmin could sit down in one afternoon and get Linux up and running on the box, and toss a few entries into the crontab for that box to build an ISO of all the collected images to a harddisk, and subsequently burn a tarball of the day's events onto a CD-R. Cheap, costs pennies on the dollar compared to most commercial security systems, and is vastly more reliable/configurable/upgradable/stable. All you'de have to do is pop a new CD-R in the tray at the start of business every morning, or hell, make the CD-R a CDRW, and swap the disc out every couple weeks.
DIY or DIE, buddy.
How is a Mac "easier to set up" in a Beowulf cluster than a group of identical PCs?
I can see where the author might make a point to say that the Mac is nice to use for a cluster because Mac hardware doesn't really change much from box to box, but the same could be said for a group of equal-built PCs. Infact, most real-world (re: not your bedroom.) Beowulf cluster nodes are NOT loosely conglomerated machines with wildly different capabilities from node to node. Most clusters are planned out well in advance, in where each node is precisely equal in terms of its hardware and horsepower.
"Its easy to set up because all of your nodes are the same with a Mac!!" ceases to be a valid "advantage", when the same can be said of a group of SGI O2 boxes, a group of Sun E10K boxes, or a group of lowly 386 PC boxes.
Besides, "its see-thru orange!!!" shouldn't top your list of reasons to purchase Macs for your cluster. You buy a pile of 1U rackmounts, because you normally don't have a whole room to dedicate to a cluster. (duh)..
Cheers,
IBM officially switched over to its new CEO the other day, allowing Lou Gerstner to retire. The guy taking over for him, Sam Palmisano, is a big Linux advocate, and is largely responsible for pushing IBM's Linux initiative internally in the past year or so. Looks like there will be good times ahead for us..
The dot-com bubble burst took alot of the steam out of the movement..Glad to see Big Blue pick up the flag and keep marching, hm?
The whole Austin Powers franchise is basically a spoof
Go figure.
"Open source and communication in computing brought C, Unix, the Internet, e-mail, etc.
"
Wrong. Those were brought to you by AT &T Bell Labs in the mid-late 60's, and were far from "open". The development efforts going on there were as closed as you can get. Here's an example: The concept of "email", while not developed by Bell Labs, was privately developed for nearly 7 years before it was shown to the public in December '68. Google for Doug Englebart sometime. He worked for decades to give kiddies like you the idea the impression you were doing something new.
You need to go back and learn a little history before you open your mouth and let your foot in.
Cheers,
Here's a clue, gang: Science costs money and takes time. As a result, Univerities, private companies, and even our government have a vested interest in the fruit that research tends to yeild. The whole point of science is to obtain your results and THEN share it with the scientific community, not the other way around. Its not like Oppenheimer was supposed to ring up Hitler from the basement of UC's football stadium and tell him "Hey, I gotsa l33t c0n+rOL3d fi$$1on c#@MBeR down here man!!! Ch3k it 0ut! B00y@h!!"
Get real. Open source is not applicable to science, never was, never will be.
Speaking as someone who actually DOES work in this capacity.....
I don't see what all the controversy is about. It was abundantly clear to me when I started down the path of being a Contractor, that the following rules and concepts applied:
o You're not an employee of the place where you work.
o This is not a permanent position, and you shouldn't expect it to become one.
o You should not expect to directly advance within the capacity you're assigned to.
Here's the situation: This article is about a guy who thinks he works for HP, and is entitled to HP's benefits. This simply isn't the case. He may work AT HP, but he is not an HP employee, and therefore is not privy to the benefits that HP provides. Here's another example. I work at IBM. I do not work for IBM. I am not an IBM employee. I do exactly the same work as IBM employees, go to the same meetings, work the same hours, make the same money, work on the same projects, work with the same people, enjoy the same perks, hell, I even have an IBM email address, an employee #, and 24/7 access to confidential materials.. But I am NOT an employee of IBM. "work AT IBM" != "work FOR IBM".
The only thing you should really be concerned with when you're a contractor, is entrenchment, flexibility, and experience. Be ready for anything. By the very nature of your employement, its temporary. You WILL get let go. Thats the whole point of why companies like HP and IBM hire contractors..You're there to fill in the spots where the market and the economy fluctuate. You often times sign a contract thats says you can be let go at any time, without warning, without reason. If you're lucky, your contractor firm will offer you a benefits package comparable to what regular employees are given. Knowing this, you should use your time working at Company X to your advantage. Learn as much stuff as rapidly as possible to make yourself more desirable to future employers down the road. For example -- Being a contractor at IBM gave me a first class education in storage subsystems, SAN implementation, performance tuning, a couple certifications, etc.. Not to mention half a dozen work references, reccomendations and accolades I can throw on my resume' when my contract runs out. Make yourself integral to as many processes as you can, it may save your neck. And above all, don't consider your job to be permanent. You're just setting yourself up for a disaster if you do, because when you get laid off (and you WILL get laid off) you'll have no one to blame but yourself in the end, because its your signature on the contract. You were supposed to read the contract BEFORE you signed, remember?
Most of all, be an honest person, and honest to yourself. This guy is lying to himself in that he thinks he's an HP employee. Thats his first mistake. The rest is common sense.
Gladly. Let me sum up ten pages of buzzword bingo bullshit in a few simple sentences:
"We've got some robots and some ideas, neither one of which we've actually implemented yet. We only have one robot right now, but, here's a nice time-lapse photo of the same robot scooting around a corner to make you think we own dozens of them. Due to the incredible design of our software that doesn't exist yet, they communicate with you and eachother using radios that dont exist yet and draw stuff on the walls with an IRLEDs that don't exist yet either. We're burying the idea in a sea of buzzwords because we need to secure funding..That, and we're afraid youll find out these ideas have been around for years."
Next.