It's not about Company A and Company B. It's about Programmer A and Programmer B.
Last year at OSCON there was an Open Source Business Summit. On one of the days they had a panel talking about business models. They had some CEO's and financial analysts talking shop (see the conference notes if you want more info). Basically, they all agreed that there was no viable Open Source Business Model.
They were wrong, because they asked the wrong question. The question they were implicitly asking was "Is there a SCALABLE Open Source Business Model?", where scalable ~= per-seat licensing. The answer to that question is no, with the exception of companies with established VAR networks and great marketing (ala Red Hat and IBM).
One of the audience members mentioned that his company's (~300 employees) core business was supporting open-source software, and they made profits and were a viable business. He was not given much attention by the people at the front of the room because that kind of business (which scales per person) is not a fundable, IPO-able, easy exit-strategy business which financial people are interested in.
Proprietary software benefits the company that produces it. Open Source software benefits the programmer. Example:
Name some famous programmers. How many of them code proprietary software?
Name some people you know from Microsoft. How many of them are programmers?
So what does that mean for the software industry?
Let me illustrate by analogy. Who creates Law and who profits from Law? Take a law firm as an example. A law firm is a partnership, where the members of the firm must be certified by a state board. The firm recruits new members based on the perceived expertise of the potential member. The business is built on trust, repeatable business, customer satisfaction, and expertise.
Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot access because of restrictive policy? Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot attempt to modify or argue in a court of law? Once a change has been commited, it becomes a part of the greater body of law until some better law has been determined.
No one company controls the law. No courtroom technique can be patented. No licensing fees are required for legal precedents.
Next question: do lawyers make money?
Back to the software industry. In the future, Software Engineers will be compensated in a manner which directly reflects their level of expertise. There will probably be certification required at the state level, like any other legitimate engineering discipline. Groups of skilled programmers and administrators will form partnerships, and distribution of earnings within the partnership will take place in a fair and transparent manner.
The successful partnerships will be successful (and make much money) because high levels of customer satisfaction will lead to repeat business. Customers will be satisfied because their IT will just work, and when it doesn't, or they need a new feature added, they will contact the IT firm and have the work done on a time and materials basis (with little transaction cost).
Now, that leaves one issue: What about the companies that invest huge amounts of time, money, and resources to develop a software product? Well, those companies will become very rare, as most software will be developed on the basis of incremental improvement (aka standing of the shoulders of giants). The Linux kernel is the best example of this, but we can see this form of development spreading to all ends of the software industry. As software becomes more modularized, interfaces open and standardized, and development tools improve, more and more software can be built by making modifications to existing software or using readily available libraries.
Want something far better? Try the GNOME mini-commander applet. You can specify shortcuts for things all over your system, not just your browser. It will save you the step of opening the browser everytime you want to use a shortcut.
Is it possible to file a bug against an RFC? If so, I'm going to post to bugtraq about RFC 2821.
Spam is a problem for users. But the problem that users have pales in comparison to the problem that ISPs and other providers have.
Most of the available solutions are catch-up solutions, which, like virus detection software, always arrives too late and is easily defeated (and in any case not the best way to solve the problem).
Anyhoo, why is spam the ultimate DoS? Very simple. Spammer sends 50,000+ emails to 50,000+ addresses using a forged "From: fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld" header. 49,987 of the spam emails bounce, and where to they go? You guessed it, right to fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld. fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld doesn't exist, of course, so the messages get double-bounced to postmaster@forgedfrom.tld.
What can postmaster@forgedfrom.tld do? Very little.
Can he block the incoming connections? No, they are coming from 49,987 different sources, most of which are valid functioning SMTP servers.
Can he contact the admin of the machine or relay where the spam is coming from? Sure, if he magically has 37 hours in his day. But, the relay server is most likely a rooted machine on the other side of the world. Good luck there. Or, the machine belongs to one of the 15 largest ISPs on the planet, in which case he will have to jump through 7 different hoops to talk to the person that can fix the problem. And even if he does get through to that person and the offending dialup account is shut down, the spammer usually has 15 more compromised accounts to choose from and is active on the same ISP within days. Would the large ISP share information so postmaster@forgedfrom.tld can track down the spammer? Doubt it.
Can't postmaster@forgedfrom.tld just send all incoming messages to fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld to the bitbucket? Sure. Will that save his bandwidth and prevent the DoS? Nope.
That's why Spam is the Ultimate DoS. A bug should be filed against RFC 2821. The implications of this type of DoS becoming widespread are serious.
In the corporate market, most Linux installations are going to come in as X servers and thin clients (see ltsp). This has huge advantages for maintenance and support, as well as hardware upgrade paths.
In this case, wine, or other emulators, are not necessarily the best solution for legacy windows apps. Look at using windows 2000 terminal server to host the windows apps and rdesktop to access them from the clients. Very simple to integrate and maintain. The drawback is the cost of the seats on windows 2000 terminal server - but that cost will certainly be offset by the cost orf managing and debugging an emulator.
Of course, terminal server / emulator is to be thought of as a temporary solution until the legacy app is ported to something which is client independent.
"Ask anyone who has visited the free trade zones in China, or the sweatshop labor factories in Indonesia."
Sorry, I can't help but set a bunch of terribly mislead people straight.
I'm American and have been living in Indonesia for the past 6 years. I have seen the factories and been to the villages. And I can tell you straight up that these anti-globalization demonstrators live in a dream world with no basis in reality.
People always like to cite "Sweatshops in Indonesia" owned by foreign multinationals as the root of all evil. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Simple fact is, the foreign factories pay an order of magnitude more than the local factories. They have more community involvement and better benefits as well. Any laborer in this country would most certainly choose to work for the multinational - better salary, better working hours, overall better treatment. It is a simple fact, visit the factories yourself if you don't believe me.
These factories allow the workers to break out of the cycle of subsistence farming, and create local, diversified economies for the first time in history. They have cash in their pockets when before they had none. Anti-capitalists would regard this as an evil thing, but the fact of the matter is that the local economy brings better education, better health care, and an overall better standard of living. All of these things cannot be had by planting rice ad infinitum.
It is very easy to be clouded by ideology and forget that the rules of the game are different in other countries. People like to look at labor costs in developing countries; I have seen it stated that factory workers in Indonesia only make $1/day. To the ideologist with no world knowledge, this seems like an incredibly small, unjust, almost slavery-like sum of money. The fact is, in Indonesia 50% of the population make far less than that. As a comparison, a licensed stock broker with a bachelors degree in economics will have a starting salary of $200/month. Imagine that. The stock broker's boss with 15 years of experience will probably only make $1000/mo. How can they live on that? Well, they probably have a huge house, a big car, a driver and two maids on that salary.
Is that exploitation? No, it is an entirely different economy than what exists in developed nations. How to equalize it, make the playing field level? Trade. Trade is the only way. The biological analogy for trade is osmosis. The flow of money across the borders of nations tends to equalize eventually.
Stopping trade to developing nations such as Indonesia is the only surefire way to plunge the country further into recession and cause more children to drop out of school and go hungry. Just come to visit and ask _anyone_ you meet.
First, read this slash about 4 Web Scripting Languages compared. It refers to a ZDNET article which benchmarked and came up with the following results:
The JSP was done with Tomcat, which is apparently not the fastest implementation.
The real interesting thing is, the test was done before the advent of caching technology for PHP. Since then, the Zend Cache and the APC Cache have been released. Now, sit back for a second.
I played around with these babies. Generally, the APC cache doubled my pps, and the Zend Cache QUADRUPLED my pps. Other benchmarks posted on mailing lists showed comparable results. (Note that the tests were done on the same server with the same apps using ab - and of course the results weren't so good for particlulary db intensive pages). I am not shitting you about those results. The stuff flies as the cache stores the compiled object code and doesn't need to recompile on every pageview.
So, lets look at those results again and hypothetically extend them (just for shits and grins):
Maybe well-placed gifts, free vacations, and computers are how things are done in the states, but out here in the real world they take CASH. Don't bother shopping at the airport and no, they don't take Visa.
dude, i have had far worse things happen when working with unstable. granted, unstable is a risk, but there are some nice versions in there. i usually install my base system from stable and my daemons from unstable.
anyway, if you are tempted to use unstable, do your upgrades on a test box before trying it on your production server. that's a fast and easy way to try it out with a box you are sitting next to - the alternative is to screw a box which may be thousands of miles away (depending on where you colo).
another benefit is that your test/development box always has the same state as your production server. as it should.
In Europe at least, Nokia is the premier mobile phone brand (though I use a Motorola v50), and the average consumer:
a) Has heard of Nokia,
b) Has trust in the company, and
c) expects a Nokia device to be easy to use
I'll second that and say that Nokia is the premier brand in Asia as well. They manage to make a good-looking and navigable display on a small screen. The nokia display is really easy to use - to the point where it is intuitive and easy to remember where everything is. They have great little apps as well, like the calculator and the alarm clock.
I recently switched to a Motorola timeport (tri-band gsm) because I need a phone which will work in Asia, Europe and the USA. If I didn't need tri-band, I would switch back in a second. The fonts on the phone are huge, making it impossible to see a phone number on a single screen. WTF? I think the motorola interface designers are either blind or don't use the phones. The menus are 5 levels deep, organized randomly, with the useless choices first. It doesn't have a calculator. Worst of all, the alarm clock rings once and then stops. How is that supposed to wake me up? With my Nokia I had a snooze button.
Anyway, once Nokia has a tri-band phone I'm buying it. I recommend the Motorola engineers do as well.
If this thing looked like the Captain's (picard, that is) chair on the Enterprise, I'd buy it. The e-Cliner one would just give me bad-airplane-travel-feedback.
This sounds like Jakob Nielsen's idea of micropayments. I'm not sure if Jakob ever considered aggregate charges, though.
Basically, ISP's already do what the author is suggesting as the charge users for the aggregate of the bandwidth they use. To pay for content, ISP's would most likely have to double the charge to the user. Obviously that is not going to happen any time soon.
It is a fundamentally good idea, but there are several logistical and economic issues which make it extremely difficult to implement.
Basically, to buy anything on the net, all you need is:
a) a name
b) a credit card number
c) a zip code
And that's all - your transaction will be authorized. Whoever thought up this system should be awarded with the "I killed e-commerce" trophy.
I run a free email service in Southeast Asia. Anyway, every once in a while we get complaints from some disgruntled person in the states about how one of our accounts is using their cc number. Generally, when this happens, we check the account, and usually we find a trail of purchases, along with the names and addresses to which the products were sent. We immediately lock the account.
Then we try to figure out what to do next. Our choices:
1. Alert the FBI? Un/fortunately the FBI has no jursidiction here. They can't do anything.
2. Alert the local auithorities? Well, there is _no_ law in this country. None whatsoever, sadly. And in a case like this, which would require some technical intelligence on their part, the local police would get so confused that they would probably throw us in jail. I'm not exaggerating.
3. Archive the files and wait. Yep.
An estimated 80% of the cc transactions originating in this country are with stolen cc numbers. So, if you have online cc processing on your site, MAKE SURE you block any requests originating with 202.* Of course, experienced kiddiez can use proxy servers, but you'll cut down the percentage.
A friend of mine has an online gift shop, and fake orders where sent through his system for weeks. Every request which is _verified_ by the cc authority and later cancelled cost him $5. He tried to notify the bank where the stolen numbers where coming from and got no response - they didn't care. Why should they, they were making $5 on every fraudulent transaction.
e-commerce sites are going to get killed by this when more unscrupulous people figure out how easy it is to order goods over the internet. as i said, all it takes is a name, a cc number, and a zip code.
> So maybe you can continue to provide your
> services at your price, and not worry about those
> of us who want (the equivelant of) an open source
> solution for training. Or even better, you could
> use your income to give back to the community and
> release some introductory materials for free!
<reason style="type:clear;mindset:level-headed;">
Actually, we do just that. We also support open source development projects - see http://phpreactor.org/ for one example.
Now, I have no problem with open source training materials. I learn everything myself from the online documentation, which I get for free. My point, should you choose to accept it, was that there is a place in the Linux world for things which cost money, which was in direct response to the original poster's indignance that people actually wanted money for training materials.
And though we are "making money of the people who created the software," I feel we are doing our part to promote open source in a corporate world. When I started this job it was a microsoft shop. Since then, I have shifted the entire focus of the courseware to open source technologies, which in turn leads to their acceptance by our corporate clients.
We have a great Linux/Apache course that we run in our training programs. It is geared to the new user, without an 'RTFM' attitude, and it has many useful exercises and links to related materials. We spent two months developing the course, and have had customers for it since the day it was completed.
Would we give it away for free? No chance. Like it or not, we are in the training _business_. Our course materials are our product, and giving them away would mean shutting down our operations.
The idea that everything should be free as in beer, AKAIK, is not the intention of open source (or free software, whatever). Course materials take time and resources to produce, and they bring value to the market. Those who bring value to the market should be rewarded with more than just an ego trip. Let's not get into the mindset that if it's not free as in beer, it's against the spirit of Linux. Open source software needs credible business models to survive. Training materials and books are a large part of that business model. Let's encourage them, and support open source.
Anyway, if you search anywhere for "foo tutorial" you'll find a wealth of information for free.
slairetam esruoc eht ni detseretni era uoy fi di.oc.etutitsni@sugna si liame my
>Humans would quickly become redundant in such a
>scenario, insofar as they would no longer have
>anything to contribute to the progress of our
>culture. The machines would inherit the Earth.
Actually, we wouldn't become redundant - all we would have to do is burn the sky and eliminate the sun as an energy source. Then the machines would have to use our bodies as a source of energy. Even better, they would build this ultimate video game that we could play twenty-four hours a day, so we wouldn't get bored. Friggin awesome or what? Imagine, you could do a high speed car chase the wrong way down I-5, crash in a blaze of glory, then press reset, load a previous saved game, and keep on going.
I'll have to second this one all the way. The key is to set a standard for how that data is stored and how it is transported between clients, which will allow several clients to interface.
I want something which works with a mail client and a web browser, irrespective of what client and browser i use. That way, I could use it at the office, at home, on my cell, at an internet cafe, and at one of those internet kiosks at the airport.
Granted, having a specialized app to interact with it will most likely be faster and benefit from additional features, but the goal here is to be independent of hardware and not have to carry a laptop, plam, or datebook. Even now, I don't carry a laptop because I can get internet access almost everywhere without it. If you give users this freedom - the ability to take notes and update their schedule from anywhere, your product will rule.
Don't think features - think protocol. make it ridiculously simple. Then build a server app which ports XML to an RDBMS and vice versa. User access priveledges will be a priority. Finally, build a client which has all the bells and whistles, build an API, and port existing/competing calendars to your XML format.
Get away from the cellular nightmare which is the USA. Go somewhere with GSM. Where I am I spend about $30/month and it covers all of my needs. I also have the ability to receive phone calls when I am travelling in Asia, Europe, almost every part of the world.
Except the USA:(
The possibility of free incoming calls? You mean people actually pay for incoming calls? Is anyone interested in this bridge I have for sale?!?
Could it be that Microsoft will use this as a precursor to opening their source - to say, "Now that it's out in the open, we might as well open it anyway. For security reasons, of course."
Far fetched, I know, but think about it.
1. Open Source is taking off, and it will continue to do so becuase it benefits the programmer, and is starting to benefit the user. People are realizing that the marginal cost of reproducing software is in no way related to its price.
B. MS has bet the farm on.NET. Maybe ballmer and gates ran out of lithium and are realizing how far behind they are in distributed computing. If they open their source, they could use all the GPL'd software in their product, and be caught up in a day.
7. Didn't they just buy Corel? Or did I dream that?
X. Maybe they saw how well WINE and StarOffice handle.doc and.xls and they realize their "competitive" advantage is slipping.
Think about it - if you can't beat them, join them. Think of all the benefits microsoft would reap from being able to incorporate GPL'd software into their system - while at the same time, they give up _very little_ by opening their source.
At the same time, a break up is pending. The only way the new divisions of MS could work together was if they opened their source.
Before: MS - huge, closed-source software powerhouse with dominant market share and surging profits.
After: OpenMS - huge, open-source software powerhouse with dominant market share and surging profits.
(The only task that remains is for the spin doctors to lessen the blow on Microsoft's ego)
i used to have to teach students about DBMS's with MS Access as the tool. Talk about an impossible job. That program just has no good qualitites. To wit:
* it has SQL, but the SQL is hidden. I felt retarded teaching students about databases and not teaching them SQL. Why? because every other friggin DBMS in the world uses SQL. Learning databases without it is like learning how to drive a swap-buggy and never driving it again.
* "Microsoft Jet Database Engine". Of all MS products, Access loves to hang. In a 2 hour long lab, at least 10-15 databases would hang to the point that the machine would have to be rebooted. At least once a week Access would have to be reinstalled. Similarly unacceptable, Access locks at the _database_ level. Talk about being useless. I wouldn't feel safe storing a list of phone numbers in it.
* Is SQL really that hard to learn? I think it would be easier to teach a newborn frog SQL than to teach a student all the menus and right-click properties stuff in Access.
* Disk footprint. One of the students projects was to build an application which had about 10 tables, 10 forms, and 1 report generator. The thing was bigger than 1.4 MB, although if you had dumped the entire database into flat files, it wouldn't have taken more than 10K. Serious. I don't know what the other 1.39 MB was for.
Anyway, I could go on. Access would be a good application if it kept things simple - simple data types, simple forms, and simple reports. But, click on any element in Access and then click on properties->All. They throw the whole kitchen sink into every field/control. It would be usefull if Access was in any way reliable for storing data, but since it isn't, it is just overkill to the nth degree.
My sneaking suspicion is that MS has built Access to distinctly confuse people about how a DBMS really works, and therefore make it harder for them to use an industrial dbms. I quit that job, but I still get angry whenever anyone talks about Access.
A method of using sophisticated voice recognition technology to advance presentation slides in a synchronous fashion by use of voice commands. The method has been demonstrated to advance slides forward, show them in reverse order, and skip ahead or behind in distinct pre-defined intervals. The technology allows a speaker to move about while speaking and not have to manually advance the keys on their traditional presentation controller (usually a laptop computer).
A successful test of the technology was made three months ago by yours truly. I showed up at a conference without a laptop and had to give a talk. Luckily, they had extra laptops wired into the system at the back of the room. I gave the operator my floppy and went to the podium, starting with "OK, today I am going to showcase my voice activated remote... Next Slide!"
The slide changed. Half the people laughed. The other half said "Wow..."
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about Company A and Company B. It's about Programmer A and Programmer B.
Last year at OSCON there was an Open Source Business Summit. On one of the days they had a panel talking about business models. They had some CEO's and financial analysts talking shop (see the conference notes if you want more info). Basically, they all agreed that there was no viable Open Source Business Model.
They were wrong, because they asked the wrong question. The question they were implicitly asking was "Is there a SCALABLE Open Source Business Model?", where scalable ~= per-seat licensing. The answer to that question is no, with the exception of companies with established VAR networks and great marketing (ala Red Hat and IBM).
One of the audience members mentioned that his company's (~300 employees) core business was supporting open-source software, and they made profits and were a viable business. He was not given much attention by the people at the front of the room because that kind of business (which scales per person) is not a fundable, IPO-able, easy exit-strategy business which financial people are interested in.
Proprietary software benefits the company that produces it. Open Source software benefits the programmer. Example:
Name some famous programmers. How many of them code proprietary software?
Name some people you know from Microsoft. How many of them are programmers?
So what does that mean for the software industry?
Let me illustrate by analogy. Who creates Law and who profits from Law? Take a law firm as an example. A law firm is a partnership, where the members of the firm must be certified by a state board. The firm recruits new members based on the perceived expertise of the potential member. The business is built on trust, repeatable business, customer satisfaction, and expertise.
Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot access because of restrictive policy? Is there any part of the Law which lawyers cannot attempt to modify or argue in a court of law? Once a change has been commited, it becomes a part of the greater body of law until some better law has been determined.
No one company controls the law. No courtroom technique can be patented. No licensing fees are required for legal precedents.
Next question: do lawyers make money?
Back to the software industry. In the future, Software Engineers will be compensated in a manner which directly reflects their level of expertise. There will probably be certification required at the state level, like any other legitimate engineering discipline. Groups of skilled programmers and administrators will form partnerships, and distribution of earnings within the partnership will take place in a fair and transparent manner.
The successful partnerships will be successful (and make much money) because high levels of customer satisfaction will lead to repeat business. Customers will be satisfied because their IT will just work, and when it doesn't, or they need a new feature added, they will contact the IT firm and have the work done on a time and materials basis (with little transaction cost).
Now, that leaves one issue: What about the companies that invest huge amounts of time, money, and resources to develop a software product? Well, those companies will become very rare, as most software will be developed on the basis of incremental improvement (aka standing of the shoulders of giants). The Linux kernel is the best example of this, but we can see this form of development spreading to all ends of the software industry. As software becomes more modularized, interfaces open and standardized, and development tools improve, more and more software can be built by making modifications to existing software or using readily available libraries.
That's my $0.03
Want something far better? Try the GNOME mini-commander applet. You can specify shortcuts for things all over your system, not just your browser. It will save you the step of opening the browser everytime you want to use a shortcut.
Is it possible to file a bug against an RFC? If so, I'm going to post to bugtraq about RFC 2821.
Spam is a problem for users. But the problem that users have pales in comparison to the problem that ISPs and other providers have.
Most of the available solutions are catch-up solutions, which, like virus detection software, always arrives too late and is easily defeated (and in any case not the best way to solve the problem).
Anyhoo, why is spam the ultimate DoS? Very simple. Spammer sends 50,000+ emails to 50,000+ addresses using a forged "From: fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld" header. 49,987 of the spam emails bounce, and where to they go? You guessed it, right to fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld. fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld doesn't exist, of course, so the messages get double-bounced to postmaster@forgedfrom.tld.
What can postmaster@forgedfrom.tld do? Very little.
Can he block the incoming connections? No, they are coming from 49,987 different sources, most of which are valid functioning SMTP servers.
Can he contact the admin of the machine or relay where the spam is coming from? Sure, if he magically has 37 hours in his day. But, the relay server is most likely a rooted machine on the other side of the world. Good luck there. Or, the machine belongs to one of the 15 largest ISPs on the planet, in which case he will have to jump through 7 different hoops to talk to the person that can fix the problem. And even if he does get through to that person and the offending dialup account is shut down, the spammer usually has 15 more compromised accounts to choose from and is active on the same ISP within days. Would the large ISP share information so postmaster@forgedfrom.tld can track down the spammer? Doubt it.
Can't postmaster@forgedfrom.tld just send all incoming messages to fooXK343@forgedfrom.tld to the bitbucket? Sure. Will that save his bandwidth and prevent the DoS? Nope.
That's why Spam is the Ultimate DoS. A bug should be filed against RFC 2821. The implications of this type of DoS becoming widespread are serious.
In the corporate market, most Linux installations are going to come in as X servers and thin clients (see ltsp). This has huge advantages for maintenance and support, as well as hardware upgrade paths.
In this case, wine, or other emulators, are not necessarily the best solution for legacy windows apps. Look at using windows 2000 terminal server to host the windows apps and rdesktop to access them from the clients. Very simple to integrate and maintain. The drawback is the cost of the seats on windows 2000 terminal server - but that cost will certainly be offset by the cost orf managing and debugging an emulator.
Of course, terminal server / emulator is to be thought of as a temporary solution until the legacy app is ported to something which is client independent.
"Ask anyone who has visited the free trade zones in China, or the sweatshop labor factories in Indonesia."
Sorry, I can't help but set a bunch of terribly mislead people straight.
I'm American and have been living in Indonesia for the past 6 years. I have seen the factories and been to the villages. And I can tell you straight up that these anti-globalization demonstrators live in a dream world with no basis in reality.
People always like to cite "Sweatshops in Indonesia" owned by foreign multinationals as the root of all evil. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Simple fact is, the foreign factories pay an order of magnitude more than the local factories. They have more community involvement and better benefits as well. Any laborer in this country would most certainly choose to work for the multinational - better salary, better working hours, overall better treatment. It is a simple fact, visit the factories yourself if you don't believe me.
These factories allow the workers to break out of the cycle of subsistence farming, and create local, diversified economies for the first time in history. They have cash in their pockets when before they had none. Anti-capitalists would regard this as an evil thing, but the fact of the matter is that the local economy brings better education, better health care, and an overall better standard of living. All of these things cannot be had by planting rice ad infinitum.
It is very easy to be clouded by ideology and forget that the rules of the game are different in other countries. People like to look at labor costs in developing countries; I have seen it stated that factory workers in Indonesia only make $1/day. To the ideologist with no world knowledge, this seems like an incredibly small, unjust, almost slavery-like sum of money. The fact is, in Indonesia 50% of the population make far less than that. As a comparison, a licensed stock broker with a bachelors degree in economics will have a starting salary of $200/month. Imagine that. The stock broker's boss with 15 years of experience will probably only make $1000/mo. How can they live on that? Well, they probably have a huge house, a big car, a driver and two maids on that salary.
Is that exploitation? No, it is an entirely different economy than what exists in developed nations. How to equalize it, make the playing field level? Trade. Trade is the only way. The biological analogy for trade is osmosis. The flow of money across the borders of nations tends to equalize eventually.
Stopping trade to developing nations such as Indonesia is the only surefire way to plunge the country further into recession and cause more children to drop out of school and go hungry. Just come to visit and ask _anyone_ you meet.
g
we use AT&T Global. they have a pretty big footprint. use them with VPN and you'll be all set.
Am I missing something, or is IBM hoping people won't notice?
If it ran Debian I'd buy it tomorrow. I wonder what their motivation was behind choosing Caldera OpenLinux.
g
First, read this slash about 4 Web Scripting Languages compared. It refers to a ZDNET article which benchmarked and came up with the following results:
PHP: 47pps
ASP: 43pps
CF: 29pps
JSP: 13pps
(pps = pages per second).
The JSP was done with Tomcat, which is apparently not the fastest implementation.
The real interesting thing is, the test was done before the advent of caching technology for PHP. Since then, the Zend Cache and the APC Cache have been released. Now, sit back for a second.
I played around with these babies. Generally, the APC cache doubled my pps, and the Zend Cache QUADRUPLED my pps. Other benchmarks posted on mailing lists showed comparable results. (Note that the tests were done on the same server with the same apps using ab - and of course the results weren't so good for particlulary db intensive pages). I am not shitting you about those results. The stuff flies as the cache stores the compiled object code and doesn't need to recompile on every pageview.
So, lets look at those results again and hypothetically extend them (just for shits and grins):
PHP+ZendCache: 198 pps
PHP+APC: 94 pps
PHP: 47pps
ASP: 43pps
CF: 29pps
JSP: 13pps
Not sure where mod_perl, C, or native servlets fit in there, but that's a pretty impressive showing by PHP.
g
Maybe well-placed gifts, free vacations, and computers are how things are done in the states, but out here in the real world they take CASH. Don't bother shopping at the airport and no, they don't take Visa.
dude, i have had far worse things happen when working with unstable. granted, unstable is a risk, but there are some nice versions in there. i usually install my base system from stable and my daemons from unstable.
anyway, if you are tempted to use unstable, do your upgrades on a test box before trying it on your production server. that's a fast and easy way to try it out with a box you are sitting next to - the alternative is to screw a box which may be thousands of miles away (depending on where you colo).
another benefit is that your test/development box always has the same state as your production server. as it should.
everything you need. php(Reactor).
try http://phpreactor.org/
a) Has heard of Nokia,
b) Has trust in the company, and
c) expects a Nokia device to be easy to use
I'll second that and say that Nokia is the premier brand in Asia as well. They manage to make a good-looking and navigable display on a small screen. The nokia display is really easy to use - to the point where it is intuitive and easy to remember where everything is. They have great little apps as well, like the calculator and the alarm clock.
I recently switched to a Motorola timeport (tri-band gsm) because I need a phone which will work in Asia, Europe and the USA. If I didn't need tri-band, I would switch back in a second. The fonts on the phone are huge, making it impossible to see a phone number on a single screen. WTF? I think the motorola interface designers are either blind or don't use the phones. The menus are 5 levels deep, organized randomly, with the useless choices first. It doesn't have a calculator. Worst of all, the alarm clock rings once and then stops. How is that supposed to wake me up? With my Nokia I had a snooze button.
Anyway, once Nokia has a tri-band phone I'm buying it. I recommend the Motorola engineers do as well.
If this thing looked like the Captain's (picard, that is) chair on the Enterprise, I'd buy it. The e-Cliner one would just give me bad-airplane-travel-feedback.
This sounds like Jakob Nielsen's idea of micropayments. I'm not sure if Jakob ever considered aggregate charges, though.
Basically, ISP's already do what the author is suggesting as the charge users for the aggregate of the bandwidth they use. To pay for content, ISP's would most likely have to double the charge to the user. Obviously that is not going to happen any time soon.
It is a fundamentally good idea, but there are several logistical and economic issues which make it extremely difficult to implement.
Basically, to buy anything on the net, all you need is:
a) a name
b) a credit card number
c) a zip code
And that's all - your transaction will be authorized. Whoever thought up this system should be awarded with the "I killed e-commerce" trophy.
I run a free email service in Southeast Asia. Anyway, every once in a while we get complaints from some disgruntled person in the states about how one of our accounts is using their cc number. Generally, when this happens, we check the account, and usually we find a trail of purchases, along with the names and addresses to which the products were sent. We immediately lock the account.
Then we try to figure out what to do next. Our choices:
1. Alert the FBI? Un/fortunately the FBI has no jursidiction here. They can't do anything.
2. Alert the local auithorities? Well, there is _no_ law in this country. None whatsoever, sadly. And in a case like this, which would require some technical intelligence on their part, the local police would get so confused that they would probably throw us in jail. I'm not exaggerating.
3. Archive the files and wait. Yep.
An estimated 80% of the cc transactions originating in this country are with stolen cc numbers. So, if you have online cc processing on your site, MAKE SURE you block any requests originating with 202.* Of course, experienced kiddiez can use proxy servers, but you'll cut down the percentage.
A friend of mine has an online gift shop, and fake orders where sent through his system for weeks. Every request which is _verified_ by the cc authority and later cancelled cost him $5. He tried to notify the bank where the stolen numbers where coming from and got no response - they didn't care. Why should they, they were making $5 on every fraudulent transaction.
e-commerce sites are going to get killed by this when more unscrupulous people figure out how easy it is to order goods over the internet. as i said, all it takes is a name, a cc number, and a zip code.
> So maybe you can continue to provide your
> services at your price, and not worry about those
> of us who want (the equivelant of) an open source
> solution for training. Or even better, you could
> use your income to give back to the community and
> release some introductory materials for free!
<reason style="type:clear;mindset:level-headed;">
Actually, we do just that. We also support open source development projects - see http://phpreactor.org/ for one example.
Now, I have no problem with open source training materials. I learn everything myself from the online documentation, which I get for free. My point, should you choose to accept it, was that there is a place in the Linux world for things which cost money, which was in direct response to the original poster's indignance that people actually wanted money for training materials.
And though we are "making money of the people who created the software," I feel we are doing our part to promote open source in a corporate world. When I started this job it was a microsoft shop. Since then, I have shifted the entire focus of the courseware to open source technologies, which in turn leads to their acceptance by our corporate clients.
</reason>
We have a great Linux/Apache course that we run in our training programs. It is geared to the new user, without an 'RTFM' attitude, and it has many useful exercises and links to related materials. We spent two months developing the course, and have had customers for it since the day it was completed.
Would we give it away for free? No chance. Like it or not, we are in the training _business_. Our course materials are our product, and giving them away would mean shutting down our operations.
The idea that everything should be free as in beer, AKAIK, is not the intention of open source (or free software, whatever). Course materials take time and resources to produce, and they bring value to the market. Those who bring value to the market should be rewarded with more than just an ego trip. Let's not get into the mindset that if it's not free as in beer, it's against the spirit of Linux. Open source software needs credible business models to survive. Training materials and books are a large part of that business model. Let's encourage them, and support open source.
Anyway, if you search anywhere for "foo tutorial" you'll find a wealth of information for free.
slairetam esruoc eht ni detseretni era uoy fi di.oc.etutitsni@sugna si liame my
>Humans would quickly become redundant in such a
>scenario, insofar as they would no longer have
>anything to contribute to the progress of our
>culture. The machines would inherit the Earth.
Actually, we wouldn't become redundant - all we would have to do is burn the sky and eliminate the sun as an energy source. Then the machines would have to use our bodies as a source of energy. Even better, they would build this ultimate video game that we could play twenty-four hours a day, so we wouldn't get bored. Friggin awesome or what? Imagine, you could do a high speed car chase the wrong way down I-5, crash in a blaze of glory, then press reset, load a previous saved game, and keep on going.
I know it's true because I saw it on TV.
I'll have to second this one all the way. The key is to set a standard for how that data is stored and how it is transported between clients, which will allow several clients to interface.
I want something which works with a mail client and a web browser, irrespective of what client and browser i use. That way, I could use it at the office, at home, on my cell, at an internet cafe, and at one of those internet kiosks at the airport.
Granted, having a specialized app to interact with it will most likely be faster and benefit from additional features, but the goal here is to be independent of hardware and not have to carry a laptop, plam, or datebook. Even now, I don't carry a laptop because I can get internet access almost everywhere without it. If you give users this freedom - the ability to take notes and update their schedule from anywhere, your product will rule.
Don't think features - think protocol. make it ridiculously simple. Then build a server app which ports XML to an RDBMS and vice versa. User access priveledges will be a priority. Finally, build a client which has all the bells and whistles, build an API, and port existing/competing calendars to your XML format.
Get away from the cellular nightmare which is the USA. Go somewhere with GSM. Where I am I spend about $30/month and it covers all of my needs. I also have the ability to receive phone calls when I am travelling in Asia, Europe, almost every part of the world.
:(
Except the USA
The possibility of free incoming calls? You mean people actually pay for incoming calls? Is anyone interested in this bridge I have for sale?!?
Could it be that Microsoft will use this as a precursor to opening their source - to say, "Now that it's out in the open, we might as well open it anyway. For security reasons, of course."
.NET. Maybe ballmer and gates ran out of lithium and are realizing how far behind they are in distributed computing. If they open their source, they could use all the GPL'd software in their product, and be caught up in a day.
.doc and .xls and they realize their "competitive" advantage is slipping.
Far fetched, I know, but think about it.
1. Open Source is taking off, and it will continue to do so becuase it benefits the programmer, and is starting to benefit the user. People are realizing that the marginal cost of reproducing software is in no way related to its price.
B. MS has bet the farm on
7. Didn't they just buy Corel? Or did I dream that?
X. Maybe they saw how well WINE and StarOffice handle
Think about it - if you can't beat them, join them. Think of all the benefits microsoft would reap from being able to incorporate GPL'd software into their system - while at the same time, they give up _very little_ by opening their source.
At the same time, a break up is pending. The only way the new divisions of MS could work together was if they opened their source.
Before: MS - huge, closed-source software powerhouse with dominant market share and surging profits.
After: OpenMS - huge, open-source software powerhouse with dominant market share and surging profits.
(The only task that remains is for the spin doctors to lessen the blow on Microsoft's ego)
i used to have to teach students about DBMS's with MS Access as the tool. Talk about an impossible job. That program just has no good qualitites. To wit:
* it has SQL, but the SQL is hidden. I felt retarded teaching students about databases and not teaching them SQL. Why? because every other friggin DBMS in the world uses SQL. Learning databases without it is like learning how to drive a swap-buggy and never driving it again.
* "Microsoft Jet Database Engine". Of all MS products, Access loves to hang. In a 2 hour long lab, at least 10-15 databases would hang to the point that the machine would have to be rebooted. At least once a week Access would have to be reinstalled. Similarly unacceptable, Access locks at the _database_ level. Talk about being useless. I wouldn't feel safe storing a list of phone numbers in it.
* Is SQL really that hard to learn? I think it would be easier to teach a newborn frog SQL than to teach a student all the menus and right-click properties stuff in Access.
* Disk footprint. One of the students projects was to build an application which had about 10 tables, 10 forms, and 1 report generator. The thing was bigger than 1.4 MB, although if you had dumped the entire database into flat files, it wouldn't have taken more than 10K. Serious. I don't know what the other 1.39 MB was for.
Anyway, I could go on. Access would be a good application if it kept things simple - simple data types, simple forms, and simple reports. But, click on any element in Access and then click on properties->All. They throw the whole kitchen sink into every field/control. It would be usefull if Access was in any way reliable for storing data, but since it isn't, it is just overkill to the nth degree.
My sneaking suspicion is that MS has built Access to distinctly confuse people about how a DBMS really works, and therefore make it harder for them to use an industrial dbms. I quit that job, but I still get angry whenever anyone talks about Access.
farmer ted you scrubber! where the heck are you. and why are you wasting your time reading slashdot?
me forgetty my arabic cuz brain filled with other language.
A method of using sophisticated voice recognition technology to advance presentation slides in a synchronous fashion by use of voice commands. The method has been demonstrated to advance slides forward, show them in reverse order, and skip ahead or behind in distinct pre-defined intervals. The technology allows a speaker to move about while speaking and not have to manually advance the keys on their traditional presentation controller (usually a laptop computer).
... Next Slide!"
..."
A successful test of the technology was made three months ago by yours truly. I showed up at a conference without a laptop and had to give a talk. Luckily, they had extra laptops wired into the system at the back of the room. I gave the operator my floppy and went to the podium, starting with "OK, today I am going to showcase my voice activated remote
The slide changed. Half the people laughed. The other half said "Wow