I'm using an Asus EP-121 full time at work now. Add OneNote 2010 and the pretty good handwriting recognition in Windows Tablet and I've got an excellent, two and a half pound tablet with a real processor (dual core i5 1.73 Ghz), 4 GB of RAM, and a 64 GB SSD and a Gorilla Glass screen. The only moving parts are the two fans. When I need to type a lot (and not just take notes) I use the included Bluetooth keyboard. This was at the $1100 price point, and while it has a few warts (mostly related to the stylus driver) it's been a great way to abandon paper and share notes from meetings, etc.
But just *try* to buy one: when I last checked everyone was sold out (even Microsoft), and when retailers get them in stock they're gone within hours. The market for tablets with handwriting recognition and full MS Office is out there even if it isn't as big as the market for iPad and Android toys. Compared to my last 7.5 pound Fujitsu tablet, the promise of the notebook replacement has finally been fulfilled.
My company is aggressively hiring Java developers. We're trying to recruit from all over the country, but we've also got a high bar and a lot of people won't consider moving to the intermountain West and that thins the pipeline quite a bit.
The jobs are there, although I had to move from Seattle to actually find companies that would follow-through with full-time offers for Java devs. It was a great market for.NET.
I recently converted a project from WebSphere 4.0 to Weblogic 6.1. A few things I ran into included: - WebSphere defines classloaders differently than Weblogic - Weblogic 6.1 (non-J2EE 1.3 version, or prior to SP2) does not interpret or load EAR files properly - WebSphere lets you get away with bad deployment descriptors if you change the classloader visibility to "Application"--the other developers has been using Together/J and it took me a few days to clean up the deployment descriptors - And the custom realm was definitely a PITA. I have to agree with Alayne on that.
I actually had about 13 issues on the list, but most dealt specifically with the way the project was architected. Deployment and installation of the app was easier under Weblogic, simply because ant included tasks to deploy to Weblogic, and I didn't have to write several Tcl scripts like I did for WebSphere. Scripting batch files on Win2K sucks. Installing the app into a clean Weblogic installation was also easier, as I could take the Weblogic config file, load it into a DOM tree, and rewrite the file with the application settings.
(Please note that Tcl is only available in WebSphere 4.0 Advanced Edition--not the one you download for free.)
In the 3.5 installations I've seen, there aren't that many issues unles you're using some of the vendor-specific features of WebSphere. Clean those out, make sure your JSPs are 1.0+ compatible, and that you have properly configured WAR files. If you've done that, your WAR should deploy without any real issues. WS 3.5 is a real pain to keep up, though some clients still insist on using it. I would expect that you'll enjoy being able to use JDBC 2 data sources in Weblogic 6.1+.
Remember, it could be worse: you could have all your developers writing and testing against JRun, while trying to deploy to ATG or Weblogic. And be forced to do development in Windows 95. On old hardware. That crashes all the time.
If you are a constiuent and a voter, call today to register your opposition to this proposed bill. Don't wait--the committee is scheduled to meet on this tomorrow.
You can find this list at http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/members.htm
202-224-5115 508 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg Washington, DC 20510-6125
Democrats Phone Number Fax Number Ernest F. Hollings, SC (202)224-6121 (202)224-4293 Daniel K. Inouye, Hawaii (202)224-3934 (202)224-3934 John D. Rockefeller IV, WV (202)224-6472 (202)224-7665 John F. Kerry, Massachusetts (202)224-2742 (202)224-8525 John B. Breaux, Louisiana (202)224-4623 (202)228-2577 Byron L. Dorgan, North Dakota (202)224-2551 (202)224-1193 Ron Wyden, Oregon (202)224-5244 (202)228-2717 Max Cleland, Georgia (202)224-3521 (202)224-0072 Barbara Boxer, California (202)224-3553 (202)228-1338 John Edwards, North Carolina (202)224-3154 (202)224-3154 Jean Carnahan, Missouri (202)224-6154 (202)224-6154 Bill Nelson, Florida (202)224-5274 (202)228-2183
Republicans Phone Number Fax Number John McCain, Arizona (202)224-2235 (202)228-2862 Ted Stevens, Alaska (202)224-3004 (202)224-2354 Conrad Burns, Montana (202)224-2644 (202)224-2644 Trent Lott, Mississippi (202)224-6253 (202)224-2262 Kay Bailey Hutchison,Texas (202)224-5922 (202)224-0776 Olympia J. Snowe, Maine (202)224-5344 (202)224-1946 Sam Brownback, Kansas (202)224-6521 (202)228 1265 Gordon Smith, Oregon (202)224-3753 (202)228-3997 Peter G. Fitzgerald, Illinois (202)224-2854 (202)228-1372 John Ensign, Nevada (202)224-6244 (202)228-2193 George Allen, Virginia (202)224-4024 (202)224-4024
We've successfully used Rogue Wave's Elements of Java Style conventions on most of our projects. Of course, people will still disagree on curly braces, indentation, tabs vs. spaces, but on the whole if you have the style guide as a hardcopy book, it'll be a lot easier to settle disputes and point out the standard. And it saves a helluva lot of time for the poor sucker on the team who has to write the coding standards if he can concentrate on project-specific usage patterns and framework notes instead of detailing where curly braces go and how to write variable names.
It works just great over the cable modem at work (but, ah, this isn't the censored version so you probably don't want to watch it someplace where you might attract an audience--Terry Farrell makes lots of "noises" at the end).
Now, why didn't I hear about this one before?:-) I guess I was so tied up in the cdr-toaster/cdrecord usage pattern that I didn't bother to look for alternatives.
Thanks for the pointer.
Oh, and I do use OpenBSD as my firewall. Fast, small, quiet, and I really like ipf. Maybe I'll consider using FreeBSD for the server once I build my new workstation (and have someplace to hold the mail spool during the rebuild). Maybe I'll use Debian. Who does Netatalk better?
...because I'm cheap. I don't want to replace my IDE CD-RW with a SCSI model just because cdrecord can't handle IDE drives natively.
And because when I talk to the network managers at work, my fellow consultants/contractors, and my clients, they all talk about Linux, not FreeBSD. I've convinced a few of the wonders of OpenBSD and audited source, but many still compare Linux and FreeBSD in terms of market share: who is the bigger? Linux. Which is a customer more likely to ask for? Linux over BSD, but Solaris and AIX and HP-UX above Linux.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster, I'll be more inclined to switch. I like the ports project, but I like apt and Debian better these days (it's simply more convenient).
Me neither. I downloaded the Q3 demo for Linux, and went so far as to go buy a Voodoo 3 card so I could actually play it (since NVidia's support of my video card sucked at the time). I discovered that the game played well, was great eye candy, and it could be a lot of fun. Until about three minutes into it when I got motion sick.
So I went back to CivCTP (which I paid for) and pretty much had to say bye-bye to the whole FPS genre.
Port Diablo II. I'll buy it. Port Baldur's Gate II. I'll but it. When Neverwinter Nights hits Linux, I'll buy it. Heck, I'd buy another copy of Dungeon Keeper II if it was ported to Linux. I'm eager to spend money on games I want to (or can) play, but I'm not going to throw my money away to make id more profitable.
Interestingly enough, Atari used VMS for their internal systems:
[MOORE.PACKRAT]shi.mem
(It was something close to that. It was in the pink book in a mention of cartridge specifications.)
And having used VMS software that came out of that era, I have to say it was probably a good move. Honestly, I've seen more people with problems trying to use Win32 OSs and software than back in the days of DEC when we just told the lusers what their logins were and set up their accounts to pull up a simple menu.
But then, we also had to make sure that people went to class(es) to learn how to use the software effectively, gave them complete paper instruction manuals, keyboard templates with key combos, etc.
I did this last night, though not exactly the way you did. I was ostensibly shopping for parts for my i-opener and a PCMCIA Ethernet card. I walked out of the computer store spending $250+ because:
1) I bought a Linksys Etherfast PCMCIA 10/100 card (bought because of their excellent Linux support and encouragement of Open Source drivers) 2) I bought a Linksys USB 10/100 ethernet adapter (I can always run NetBSD on the i-opener) 3) Logitech mouse (I know, they don't open drivers on their bigger products, but I wanted a quality mouse that wasn't Microsoft) 4) Generic keyboard (three new keys? gonna check the scan codes) 5) PS/2 KB-Mouse splitter 6) Voodoo 3 3000 AGP.
The last item was almost an impulse (returned, open-box, and 20% off that for a total of $86...whee!). I felt good about the purchase, though, because I've had my STB Velocity 128 (nVidia RIVA 128, 4mb) for almost two years and am sick and tired of not being able to play any interesting new games. I can't play Quake III, Quake II is unplayable with the mouse, Parsec can't run without Voodoo, Heavy Gear II is coming, etc. It was a choice between the Matrox and the Voodoo 3, and the Voodoo won on price.
nVidia's support has been pathetic. I had copies of the old drivers, but I couldn't get the Quake III demo running. It seems obvious to me, just as it was a year and a half ago on my Windows game box, that if I want to play games, I need to get the best hardware. Direct X saved my RIVA 128 on the Windows box for a while, but nVidia isn't supporting DRI very quickly or well, so I've had enough.
I had bought the nVidia card because I wanted the best, most complete OpenGL support available in an economy card at the time. Today on my *NIX boxes, the Voodoo 3 will give me more complete support than the RIVA ever did.
I'm disappointed with nVidia and have voted with my dollars for companies that support Linux: Linksys and 3DFX.
The short answer is that this is a 60MHz bus box, probably 3.3v. If the chip was running at 200MHz, the bus would be 66MHz. The 3.3v will be fine for my Pentium 166-MMX, and the 60MHz bus should run okay with my chip (according to Intel's documentation. Whee! I'll have to check the documentation on my AMD K6 233MHz later.
# allow ICQ #pass in quick on ne3 proto udp from icq.mirabilis.com to any port 1024 > 5000
Not that different. I went out and retrieved the ICQ server IPs and inserted them manually (*slap* bad bad!) and limited incoming connections to 1024-5000 because of some document I had read on the ICQ site.
When I installed RedHat, I put a forwarding rule in:
$PORTFW -a -P tcp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000 $PORTFW -a -P udp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000
...so that all ICQ traffic goes to her box. She probably would have had a better experience if my firewall had a less restrictive rule and I just sent all ICQ to her machine.
I discovered BSD back in 1992 in college. A cluster of seven NeXT cubes (Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust) were being underutilized in one of the computer labs. They were a vast improvement from the AIX and Ultrix boxes that were the only UNIX on campus at the time. I got Linux a short while later for my 386 with 8mb of RAM. I nearly forgot about BSD until the BSD advocates started mouthing off in Slashdot and Linux Journal. I bought the Walnut Creek BSD 3.2 and 3.3, installed it, uninstalled it, reinstalled Linux, and was happy for a while. It came down to device support, and Linux supported more of my hardware at the time. In January I moved my firewall to OpenBSD and loved it. My wife, on the other hand, swears up and down that OpenBSD was killing her ICQ connections so I put RedHat 6.1 on the box and she didn't have the problems anymore. I don't know for sure if OpenBSD and ipf were breaking ICQ, but I really did love having that nice, clean BSD OS on my firewall. No guessing what a program did, and installing a second network card for the cable modem was almost painless (once I read the documentation). Now, superior OS? Hmmm...mebee, but you have to admit that more programs, more drivers, and more critical mass are being applied to Linux today. That makes it very attractive for me. Chris
My wife did that. Once in Nov-Dec 98 and again in Nov-Dec 99.
Her biggest complaint about Linux in '98 was that it didn't have a lot of the software she considers essential (Eudora, AIM, ICQ) and many features of the software she tried (Tk/TOC for AIM, early GICQ, KMail and Netscape Mail) were missing.
A year later (and an eMachine bought in March), GICQ is still missing a few features, but it looks and feels a little more like ICQ from Windows. GAIM is a decent replacement for AIM in her opinion, and she's using TkRat for e-mail.
Her biggest complaint today is that KDE doesn't feel consistent--really, she's complaining because Netscape uses its own Motif-like widgets, GAIM and GICQ use GTK widgets, and TkRat uses Tk widgets.
Arghhh! Now, she wants an iMac. The reason: everything will look and feel consistent, and she'll be able to use Eudora again, official versions of ICQ and AIM, and she can even get IRC and MUD clients for it. Oh, and she wants the eMachine to turn back into a Windows box so she can use Microsoft Publisher again. Ironically, she doesn't want to use OS 9--she wants Mac OS X with the BSD core.
In summary, her end-user testing said that for Internet power-users, Linux/Mandrake 6.1 isn't up to snuff...yet. But it's a hell of a lot more usable and closer than it was a year ago.
Me? I'm waiting until her Mac starts crashing and I get to put Yellow Dog on it.
How does a State Superior Court have any impact or bearing on a citizen of Denmark, Australia, or whatnot?
It's not a US federal court case. As far as I know, the state of California does NOT have any extradition treaty with Denmark or Australia, for example.
What do non-US nationals have to fear? Also, what about US residents who have given up their US citizenship and live only as citizens of another US state? (Yes, I've seen a few--it's a good way to get out of Social Security and the IRS.)
Even so, I sent my (politely worded) wishes to both Sorenson and Apple. We'll see what I get back from them.
Now, this isn't necessarily the best piece of video to watch, but my wife has dug up some QT4 videos that she would like to view. God help me, I almost bought an iMac today because I'm so sick of this.
Anyway, direct your politely worded e-mails to support@s-vision.com and wish@hype.quicktime.apple.com. My message:
Please consider allowing the xanim free video playing software by Mark Podlipec to support the Sorenson video codec. There are an increasing number of videos, trailers, and other media that I would like to be able to play, but there is no way to do that on Linux at present.
Please, if this is a licensing issue, contact Sorenson video and work something out.
At first, when reading this, I decided that I should start to abandon my Java work. Then I realized the awful truth of the world.
Every place I've worked has happily used proprietary tools.
I work for a consulting company. 1/3 of the people do mainframe work, about 1/2 work on VeeBee, and the remainder do training or work (like I do) in Java, C/C++, UNIX, etc. Our business is based on the fact that companies produce proprietary languages like VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi, Visual C++, etc. They may be based on standard languages, but they are NOT standards except to themselves.
As long as there is money to be made in Java, I'll end up continuing to work in it. I might really want to be doing projects in Python or C++, but I'll end up working in Java because that's where the money is. And it's the same way for business. My clients don't care if Java is proprietary or not as long as their web-apps get done on time, just like they've always approached client server development.
So, in the end, it doesn't matter to the people who really matter--the people who pay for my paycheck. If you want this to change, the staff people in these corporations need to convince their managers that only standards-based and open-source products should be used for development.
Check out _Peopleware_ by DeMarco and Lister. They describe different styles of management with some great insight.
It sounds like you were working for the "Spanish in the New World"-type of manager. For this manager, the world is a zero-sum game. "There's only so much gold and silver in the world, and if we mine it all, we can be the richest country in the world!" To that end, the managers will make you work harder and longer for less compensation. It makes the budget look a lot better, and the manager can "prove" that he not only motivated his people to work harder, but that he overcame significant odds to make the project succeed!
Personally, I like the "Early industrialist"-type manager, who learned that if you apply mechanical power to your manufacturing problems, you can get more efficient work out of your people, make more profits, and still compensate everyone fairly. (I know, it's a rosy picture.)
Just keep in mind that in Spain, you had rampant inflation and couldn't get a hold of most goods because of the imbalance. And within 200 years, Spain was a second or third-rate world power. England, on the other hand, built itself into the dominant maritime and trading power by working smarter.
I just came off a project with a "Spanish Conquistador" manager. She wasn't a very fun person to work for and I can see how she is burning out her staff tech people.
Read _Peopleware_. It will help to open your eyes.
I don't recall exactly where I read this information, but IIRC:
- Professionals are defined as people like lawyers and doctors. They aren't supposed to be paid overtime.
- Everyone else *IS* supposed to be paid overtime...
-...unless you work in data processing/information systems.
Some lobbying group got the US Congress to set up the laws to allow salaried IS/DP people to work overtime but not require them to be compensated for that work.
In any case, most employers don't want to pay overtime anyway.
In my own life, I just came out of a firm where I was working 50-60 hour weeks for the first three months of the job. "Comp time" wasn't intended to be used more than a week or two past the original overtime, and there was no way that I was going to be getting paid extra. I managed to salvage the project but there was no recognition of that fact, nor was there any increase in pay or compensation. This convinced me that if you're salaried, you have less incentive to actually do the work after a point--I'd get paid the same amount when I came in at 10am and left at 3:30pm as when I was coming in at 7am and leaving at 6pm.
I'm glad that I chose consulting and contracting. The firm I work for pays my W2, they let me bill hourly, and I get vacation. I also am compensated well enough that I could get by with less hours worked, but I get incentives for billing over 40. And the benefits are better than most of the traditional salaried positions would offer.
All in all, I think it's more fair to the employees and clients to only bill for hours worked. A salaried position is like a fixed price contract where you know how much money is coming, and if you work more or less hours, it doesn't make any difference. That's not a good contract for myself or my clients. I would much rather be fair to them and myself by billing for work done and only billing for doing nothing when I'm on the client's premisis, waiting for things to blow up or looking for things to fix.
Personally, I loathe and despise plug-ins. But I've come across too many pages that need them in some form or another. Today, I'm doing about 70% of my home browsing on Netscape 4.61 (with plug-ins that crash), the remaining 30% with KFM/Konquerer from KDE 1.1.2.
But what I find I'm missing is the capability to add plug ins. I don't really want to have to use them--but sometimes, the site I'm going to absolutely requires the plug in (for instance, I wanted to find out what "verio.com" was after I got a port scan from one of their IPs--I couldn't view the homepage without Flash). It's a necessary evil today. What would be involved in porting the Netscape plug in specification to an open source browser?
I guess I'd also like a clean Java implementation that doesn't crash (like Netscape does far too often), but I'm betting Konquerer will make me very happy.
I hate to get too political about this stuff, but this is something that the Australian people are now virtually powerless to prevent. Anybody else notice that most guns in Australia were banned and destroyed recently? I'm beginning to wonder about the English-speaking world. We "won" the Cold War, only to fall into use of the same devices Marxism/Leninism used for decades against people. It's prohibitively expensive to bring new, unregulated lines into Australia, not to mention now illegal. I would wholeheartedly endorse the emigration of rational, liberty-loving Australians to other countries (but maybe not the US--we'll see how long we keep the tatters of the Bill of Rights intact). Failing that, I would hope that people who respect the freedom of information in Australia could put aside other political differences to lobby their government to reopen Internet access and stop further injustices like this proposal from happening. I'm all for protecting children from harm, but protecting children from information is a parent's job, not the state. Anybody know what the laws are like in Scandinavia? I'd like to be able to own a gun or two, have decent connectivity, be able to peacefully protest when the government does things that aren't in the citizens' best interest, have the freedom to privately practice whatever religion I choose, etc. America looks like it's modelling its new laws on Australia, and all the political action I can take (mostly, taking the form of voting) doesn't seem to do much good. Chris
(Apologies to all if this information is repeated. I can't get/. to display the seven posts before mine.)
I'm terrible at building the firewall rules myself. I understand perfectly what is going on--it's just that any script I make (from ipmasqadm to ipchains) won't work correctly. To compensate for this deficiency, I use the scripts at http://ipchains.nerdherd.org/. So far, I've recommended them to clients, implemented them at work and at home, and they've made me look really, really good.
The masquerading script is so simple, yet easily configurable. The latest versions are self-configuring and are perfect for the SOHO network.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using an Asus EP-121 full time at work now. Add OneNote 2010 and the pretty good handwriting recognition in Windows Tablet and I've got an excellent, two and a half pound tablet with a real processor (dual core i5 1.73 Ghz), 4 GB of RAM, and a 64 GB SSD and a Gorilla Glass screen. The only moving parts are the two fans. When I need to type a lot (and not just take notes) I use the included Bluetooth keyboard. This was at the $1100 price point, and while it has a few warts (mostly related to the stylus driver) it's been a great way to abandon paper and share notes from meetings, etc.
But just *try* to buy one: when I last checked everyone was sold out (even Microsoft), and when retailers get them in stock they're gone within hours. The market for tablets with handwriting recognition and full MS Office is out there even if it isn't as big as the market for iPad and Android toys. Compared to my last 7.5 pound Fujitsu tablet, the promise of the notebook replacement has finally been fulfilled.
My company is aggressively hiring Java developers. We're trying to recruit from all over the country, but we've also got a high bar and a lot of people won't consider moving to the intermountain West and that thins the pipeline quite a bit.
The jobs are there, although I had to move from Seattle to actually find companies that would follow-through with full-time offers for Java devs. It was a great market for .NET.
IA64 == Intel.
AMD has the Athlon 64. It has an NX (Non-Executable) bit that can be set on page tables so buffer overruns can't be exploited (as easily).
I recently converted a project from WebSphere 4.0 to Weblogic 6.1. A few things I ran into included:
- WebSphere defines classloaders differently than Weblogic
- Weblogic 6.1 (non-J2EE 1.3 version, or prior to SP2) does not interpret or load EAR files properly
- WebSphere lets you get away with bad deployment descriptors if you change the classloader visibility to "Application"--the other developers has been using Together/J and it took me a few days to clean up the deployment descriptors
- And the custom realm was definitely a PITA. I have to agree with Alayne on that.
I actually had about 13 issues on the list, but most dealt specifically with the way the project was architected. Deployment and installation of the app was easier under Weblogic, simply because ant included tasks to deploy to Weblogic, and I didn't have to write several Tcl scripts like I did for WebSphere. Scripting batch files on Win2K sucks. Installing the app into a clean Weblogic installation was also easier, as I could take the Weblogic config file, load it into a DOM tree, and rewrite the file with the application settings.
(Please note that Tcl is only available in WebSphere 4.0 Advanced Edition--not the one you download for free.)
In the 3.5 installations I've seen, there aren't that many issues unles you're using some of the vendor-specific features of WebSphere. Clean those out, make sure your JSPs are 1.0+ compatible, and that you have properly configured WAR files. If you've done that, your WAR should deploy without any real issues. WS 3.5 is a real pain to keep up, though some clients still insist on using it. I would expect that you'll enjoy being able to use JDBC 2 data sources in Weblogic 6.1+.
Remember, it could be worse: you could have all your developers writing and testing against JRun, while trying to deploy to ATG or Weblogic. And be forced to do development in Windows 95. On old hardware. That crashes all the time.
If you are a constiuent and a voter, call today to register your opposition to this proposed bill. Don't wait--the committee is scheduled to meet on this tomorrow.
You can find this list at http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/members.htm
202-224-5115
508 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg
Washington, DC 20510-6125
Democrats Phone Number Fax Number
Ernest F. Hollings, SC (202)224-6121 (202)224-4293
Daniel K. Inouye, Hawaii (202)224-3934 (202)224-3934
John D. Rockefeller IV, WV (202)224-6472 (202)224-7665
John F. Kerry, Massachusetts (202)224-2742 (202)224-8525
John B. Breaux, Louisiana (202)224-4623 (202)228-2577
Byron L. Dorgan, North Dakota (202)224-2551 (202)224-1193
Ron Wyden, Oregon (202)224-5244 (202)228-2717
Max Cleland, Georgia (202)224-3521 (202)224-0072
Barbara Boxer, California (202)224-3553 (202)228-1338
John Edwards, North Carolina (202)224-3154 (202)224-3154
Jean Carnahan, Missouri (202)224-6154 (202)224-6154
Bill Nelson, Florida (202)224-5274 (202)228-2183
Republicans Phone Number Fax Number
John McCain, Arizona (202)224-2235 (202)228-2862
Ted Stevens, Alaska (202)224-3004 (202)224-2354
Conrad Burns, Montana (202)224-2644 (202)224-2644
Trent Lott, Mississippi (202)224-6253 (202)224-2262
Kay Bailey Hutchison,Texas (202)224-5922 (202)224-0776
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine (202)224-5344 (202)224-1946
Sam Brownback, Kansas (202)224-6521 (202)228 1265
Gordon Smith, Oregon (202)224-3753 (202)228-3997
Peter G. Fitzgerald, Illinois (202)224-2854 (202)228-1372
John Ensign, Nevada (202)224-6244 (202)228-2193
George Allen, Virginia (202)224-4024 (202)224-4024
We've successfully used Rogue Wave's Elements of Java Style conventions on most of our projects. Of course, people will still disagree on curly braces, indentation, tabs vs. spaces, but on the whole if you have the style guide as a hardcopy book, it'll be a lot easier to settle disputes and point out the standard. And it saves a helluva lot of time for the poor sucker on the team who has to write the coding standards if he can concentrate on project-specific usage patterns and framework notes instead of detailing where curly braces go and how to write variable names.
Available at scifi.com at http://www.scifi.com/exposure/frameup/tripping.htm l in Real format.
It works just great over the cable modem at work (but, ah, this isn't the censored version so you probably don't want to watch it someplace where you might attract an audience--Terry Farrell makes lots of "noises" at the end).
Now, why didn't I hear about this one before? :-) I guess I was so tied up in the cdr-toaster/cdrecord usage pattern that I didn't bother to look for alternatives.
Thanks for the pointer.
Oh, and I do use OpenBSD as my firewall. Fast, small, quiet, and I really like ipf. Maybe I'll consider using FreeBSD for the server once I build my new workstation (and have someplace to hold the mail spool during the rebuild). Maybe I'll use Debian. Who does Netatalk better?
And because when I talk to the network managers at work, my fellow consultants/contractors, and my clients, they all talk about Linux, not FreeBSD. I've convinced a few of the wonders of OpenBSD and audited source, but many still compare Linux and FreeBSD in terms of market share: who is the bigger? Linux. Which is a customer more likely to ask for? Linux over BSD, but Solaris and AIX and HP-UX above Linux.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster, I'll be more inclined to switch. I like the ports project, but I like apt and Debian better these days (it's simply more convenient).
Me neither. I downloaded the Q3 demo for Linux, and went so far as to go buy a Voodoo 3 card so I could actually play it (since NVidia's support of my video card sucked at the time). I discovered that the game played well, was great eye candy, and it could be a lot of fun. Until about three minutes into it when I got motion sick.
So I went back to CivCTP (which I paid for) and pretty much had to say bye-bye to the whole FPS genre.
Port Diablo II. I'll buy it. Port Baldur's Gate II. I'll but it. When Neverwinter Nights hits Linux, I'll buy it. Heck, I'd buy another copy of Dungeon Keeper II if it was ported to Linux. I'm eager to spend money on games I want to (or can) play, but I'm not going to throw my money away to make id more profitable.
Interestingly enough, Atari used VMS for their internal systems:
[MOORE.PACKRAT]shi.mem
(It was something close to that. It was in the pink book in a mention of cartridge specifications.)
And having used VMS software that came out of that era, I have to say it was probably a good move. Honestly, I've seen more people with problems trying to use Win32 OSs and software than back in the days of DEC when we just told the lusers what their logins were and set up their accounts to pull up a simple menu.
But then, we also had to make sure that people went to class(es) to learn how to use the software effectively, gave them complete paper instruction manuals, keyboard templates with key combos, etc.
DEC was a fun place to co-op. *sniffle*
Chris
I did this last night, though not exactly the way you did. I was ostensibly shopping for parts for my i-opener and a PCMCIA Ethernet card. I walked out of the computer store spending $250+ because:
1) I bought a Linksys Etherfast PCMCIA 10/100 card (bought because of their excellent Linux support and encouragement of Open Source drivers)
2) I bought a Linksys USB 10/100 ethernet adapter (I can always run NetBSD on the i-opener)
3) Logitech mouse (I know, they don't open drivers on their bigger products, but I wanted a quality mouse that wasn't Microsoft)
4) Generic keyboard (three new keys? gonna check the scan codes)
5) PS/2 KB-Mouse splitter
6) Voodoo 3 3000 AGP.
The last item was almost an impulse (returned, open-box, and 20% off that for a total of $86...whee!). I felt good about the purchase, though, because I've had my STB Velocity 128 (nVidia RIVA 128, 4mb) for almost two years and am sick and tired of not being able to play any interesting new games. I can't play Quake III, Quake II is unplayable with the mouse, Parsec can't run without Voodoo, Heavy Gear II is coming, etc. It was a choice between the Matrox and the Voodoo 3, and the Voodoo won on price.
nVidia's support has been pathetic. I had copies of the old drivers, but I couldn't get the Quake III demo running. It seems obvious to me, just as it was a year and a half ago on my Windows game box, that if I want to play games, I need to get the best hardware. Direct X saved my RIVA 128 on the Windows box for a while, but nVidia isn't supporting DRI very quickly or well, so I've had enough.
I had bought the nVidia card because I wanted the best, most complete OpenGL support available in an economy card at the time. Today on my *NIX boxes, the Voodoo 3 will give me more complete support than the RIVA ever did.
I'm disappointed with nVidia and have voted with my dollars for companies that support Linux: Linksys and 3DFX.
W inchip Specs
Another site, the Indiana University Knowledge Base had some decent, general information, but nothing on bus speeds and voltages.
The short answer is that this is a 60MHz bus box, probably 3.3v. If the chip was running at 200MHz, the bus would be 66MHz. The 3.3v will be fine for my Pentium 166-MMX, and the 60MHz bus should run okay with my chip (according to Intel's documentation. Whee! I'll have to check the documentation on my AMD K6 233MHz later.
Chris
This is what I ended up with for OpenBSD:
# allow ICQ
#pass in quick on ne3 proto udp from icq.mirabilis.com to any port 1024 >
5000
Not that different. I went out and retrieved the ICQ server IPs and inserted them manually (*slap* bad bad!) and limited incoming connections to 1024-5000 because of some document I had read on the ICQ site.
When I installed RedHat, I put a forwarding rule in:
$PORTFW -a -P tcp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000
$PORTFW -a -P udp -L $LOCALIP 4000 -R 192.168.1.29 4000
...so that all ICQ traffic goes to her box. She probably would have had a better experience if my firewall had a less restrictive rule and I just sent all ICQ to her machine.
Chris
I discovered BSD back in 1992 in college. A cluster of seven NeXT cubes (Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust) were being underutilized in one of the computer labs. They were a vast improvement from the AIX and Ultrix boxes that were the only UNIX on campus at the time. I got Linux a short while later for my 386 with 8mb of RAM. I nearly forgot about BSD until the BSD advocates started mouthing off in Slashdot and Linux Journal. I bought the Walnut Creek BSD 3.2 and 3.3, installed it, uninstalled it, reinstalled Linux, and was happy for a while. It came down to device support, and Linux supported more of my hardware at the time. In January I moved my firewall to OpenBSD and loved it. My wife, on the other hand, swears up and down that OpenBSD was killing her ICQ connections so I put RedHat 6.1 on the box and she didn't have the problems anymore. I don't know for sure if OpenBSD and ipf were breaking ICQ, but I really did love having that nice, clean BSD OS on my firewall. No guessing what a program did, and installing a second network card for the cable modem was almost painless (once I read the documentation). Now, superior OS? Hmmm...mebee, but you have to admit that more programs, more drivers, and more critical mass are being applied to Linux today. That makes it very attractive for me. Chris
IIRC, Yourdon and his daughter sold everything in New Yuck City and moved out to New Mexico on a self-sustaining ranch.
Now, that's just generally a good idea, but he did it for Y2K reasons--so sure (in 1997?) was he that the world would come to a screeching halt.
Chris
My wife did that. Once in Nov-Dec 98 and again in Nov-Dec 99.
Her biggest complaint about Linux in '98 was that it didn't have a lot of the software she considers essential (Eudora, AIM, ICQ) and many features of the software she tried (Tk/TOC for AIM, early GICQ, KMail and Netscape Mail) were missing.
A year later (and an eMachine bought in March), GICQ is still missing a few features, but it looks and feels a little more like ICQ from Windows. GAIM is a decent replacement for AIM in her opinion, and she's using TkRat for e-mail.
Her biggest complaint today is that KDE doesn't feel consistent--really, she's complaining because Netscape uses its own Motif-like widgets, GAIM and GICQ use GTK widgets, and TkRat uses Tk widgets.
Arghhh! Now, she wants an iMac. The reason: everything will look and feel consistent, and she'll be able to use Eudora again, official versions of ICQ and AIM, and she can even get IRC and MUD clients for it. Oh, and she wants the eMachine to turn back into a Windows box so she can use Microsoft Publisher again. Ironically, she doesn't want to use OS 9--she wants Mac OS X with the BSD core.
In summary, her end-user testing said that for Internet power-users, Linux/Mandrake 6.1 isn't up to snuff...yet. But it's a hell of a lot more usable and closer than it was a year ago.
Me? I'm waiting until her Mac starts crashing and I get to put Yellow Dog on it.
Chris
How does a State Superior Court have any impact or bearing on a citizen of Denmark, Australia, or whatnot?
It's not a US federal court case. As far as I know, the state of California does NOT have any extradition treaty with Denmark or Australia, for example.
What do non-US nationals have to fear? Also, what about US residents who have given up their US citizenship and live only as citizens of another US state? (Yes, I've seen a few--it's a good way to get out of Social Security and the IRS.)
Chris
Even so, I sent my (politely worded) wishes to both Sorenson and Apple. We'll see what I get back from them.
Now, this isn't necessarily the best piece of video to watch, but my wife has dug up some QT4 videos that she would like to view. God help me, I almost bought an iMac today because I'm so sick of this.
Anyway, direct your politely worded e-mails to support@s-vision.com and wish@hype.quicktime.apple.com. My message:
Please consider allowing the xanim free video playing software by Mark
Podlipec to support the Sorenson video codec. There are an increasing
number of videos, trailers, and other media that I would like to be able
to play, but there is no way to do that on Linux at present.
Please, if this is a licensing issue, contact Sorenson video and work something
out.
Thank you very much,
Chris Jones
cjones@one.net
At first, when reading this, I decided that I should start to abandon my Java work. Then I realized the awful truth of the world.
Every place I've worked has happily used proprietary tools.
I work for a consulting company. 1/3 of the people do mainframe work, about 1/2 work on VeeBee, and the remainder do training or work (like I do) in Java, C/C++, UNIX, etc. Our business is based on the fact that companies produce proprietary languages like VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi, Visual C++, etc. They may be based on standard languages, but they are NOT standards except to themselves.
As long as there is money to be made in Java, I'll end up continuing to work in it. I might really want to be doing projects in Python or C++, but I'll end up working in Java because that's where the money is. And it's the same way for business. My clients don't care if Java is proprietary or not as long as their web-apps get done on time, just like they've always approached client server development.
So, in the end, it doesn't matter to the people who really matter--the people who pay for my paycheck. If you want this to change, the staff people in these corporations need to convince their managers that only standards-based and open-source products should be used for development.
Chris
Check out _Peopleware_ by DeMarco and Lister. They describe different styles of management with some great insight.
It sounds like you were working for the "Spanish in the New World"-type of manager. For this manager, the world is a zero-sum game. "There's only so much gold and silver in the world, and if we mine it all, we can be the richest country in the world!" To that end, the managers will make you work harder and longer for less compensation. It makes the budget look a lot better, and the manager can "prove" that he not only motivated his people to work harder, but that he overcame significant odds to make the project succeed!
Personally, I like the "Early industrialist"-type manager, who learned that if you apply mechanical power to your manufacturing problems, you can get more efficient work out of your people, make more profits, and still compensate everyone fairly. (I know, it's a rosy picture.)
Just keep in mind that in Spain, you had rampant inflation and couldn't get a hold of most goods because of the imbalance. And within 200 years, Spain was a second or third-rate world power. England, on the other hand, built itself into the dominant maritime and trading power by working smarter.
I just came off a project with a "Spanish Conquistador" manager. She wasn't a very fun person to work for and I can see how she is burning out her staff tech people.
Read _Peopleware_. It will help to open your eyes.
Chris
I don't recall exactly where I read this information, but IIRC:
...unless you work in data processing/information systems.
- Professionals are defined as people like lawyers and doctors. They aren't supposed to be paid overtime.
- Everyone else *IS* supposed to be paid overtime...
-
Some lobbying group got the US Congress to set up the laws to allow salaried IS/DP people to work overtime but not require them to be compensated for that work.
In any case, most employers don't want to pay overtime anyway.
In my own life, I just came out of a firm where I was working 50-60 hour weeks for the first three months of the job. "Comp time" wasn't intended to be used more than a week or two past the original overtime, and there was no way that I was going to be getting paid extra. I managed to salvage the project but there was no recognition of that fact, nor was there any increase in pay or compensation. This convinced me that if you're salaried, you have less incentive to actually do the work after a point--I'd get paid the same amount when I came in at 10am and left at 3:30pm as when I was coming in at 7am and leaving at 6pm.
I'm glad that I chose consulting and contracting. The firm I work for pays my W2, they let me bill hourly, and I get vacation. I also am compensated well enough that I could get by with less hours worked, but I get incentives for billing over 40. And the benefits are better than most of the traditional salaried positions would offer.
All in all, I think it's more fair to the employees and clients to only bill for hours worked. A salaried position is like a fixed price contract where you know how much money is coming, and if you work more or less hours, it doesn't make any difference. That's not a good contract for myself or my clients. I would much rather be fair to them and myself by billing for work done and only billing for doing nothing when I'm on the client's premisis, waiting for things to blow up or looking for things to fix.
Chris
Personally, I loathe and despise plug-ins. But I've come across too many pages that need them in some form or another. Today, I'm doing about 70% of my home browsing on Netscape 4.61 (with plug-ins that crash), the remaining 30% with KFM/Konquerer from KDE 1.1.2.
But what I find I'm missing is the capability to add plug ins. I don't really want to have to use them--but sometimes, the site I'm going to absolutely requires the plug in (for instance, I wanted to find out what "verio.com" was after I got a port scan from one of their IPs--I couldn't view the homepage without Flash). It's a necessary evil today. What would be involved in porting the Netscape plug in specification to an open source browser?
I guess I'd also like a clean Java implementation that doesn't crash (like Netscape does far too often), but I'm betting Konquerer will make me very happy.
Chris
I hate to get too political about this stuff, but this is something that the Australian people are now virtually powerless to prevent. Anybody else notice that most guns in Australia were banned and destroyed recently? I'm beginning to wonder about the English-speaking world. We "won" the Cold War, only to fall into use of the same devices Marxism/Leninism used for decades against people. It's prohibitively expensive to bring new, unregulated lines into Australia, not to mention now illegal. I would wholeheartedly endorse the emigration of rational, liberty-loving Australians to other countries (but maybe not the US--we'll see how long we keep the tatters of the Bill of Rights intact). Failing that, I would hope that people who respect the freedom of information in Australia could put aside other political differences to lobby their government to reopen Internet access and stop further injustices like this proposal from happening. I'm all for protecting children from harm, but protecting children from information is a parent's job, not the state. Anybody know what the laws are like in Scandinavia? I'd like to be able to own a gun or two, have decent connectivity, be able to peacefully protest when the government does things that aren't in the citizens' best interest, have the freedom to privately practice whatever religion I choose, etc. America looks like it's modelling its new laws on Australia, and all the political action I can take (mostly, taking the form of voting) doesn't seem to do much good. Chris
(Apologies to all if this information is repeated. I can't get /. to display the seven posts before mine.)
I'm terrible at building the firewall rules myself. I understand perfectly what is going on--it's just that any script I make (from ipmasqadm to ipchains) won't work correctly. To compensate for this deficiency, I use the scripts at http://ipchains.nerdherd.org/. So far, I've recommended them to clients, implemented them at work and at home, and they've made me look really, really good.
The masquerading script is so simple, yet easily configurable. The latest versions are self-configuring and are perfect for the SOHO network.
Chris