Is that you in disguise Mr Berners-Lee? 'Cause that's the only way you could have been surfing the web way back in 1988, and then only in your head, seeing as you didn't publish the protocol proposal until 1989:-)
John (who remembers the excitement at uni in early '93 when the sys-admins first installed Mosaic alpha for general use and everyone tried hitting it's homepage at once. God, it crawled, give me archie anyday...).
ALL the staff on the Telstra account are based in Australia.
Irony #1: At least 50% of GSA staff (and up to 80%) in the departments I've worked in are actually Indian/Asian Australians
Irony #2: IBM GSA is actually a joint venture between IBM, LendLease and... Telstra! It was originally founded to work on Telstras systems, before later expanding to take on other clients.
They will be using the OASIS file format, this doesn't mean they will be using the OOo MS import/export codebase. There MAY be a common library in the future, but that is not clear yet. Also, this is not for the coming release, but for the one after that (v2.0?) that is slated for say middle of next year.
Next time you catch a flight, take a look at that boarding pass in your hand, and consider the possibilites it presents for a voting system:
1) On a touchscreen, choose your candidates, then confirm your vote by pressing the "Vote & Print" button.
2) In the background, your vote is electronically counted.
3) The voting machine prints out your boarding pass / ballot, while also encoding the magnetic strip on the back with the details.
4) The voter can read the printed ballot to confirm it is correct, before dropping it into the ballot box.
5) When the polls close, the ballots are fed through a magnetic reader, and the tally compared to the electronic tally to confirm its validity.
6) If someone challenges the count, then the ballots are manually tallied using the print-out on the front.
The strong points for this system are transparency (you can still see the ballot), redundancy (for printer, magnetic encoder and electronic count to all fail is highly unlikely), clarity (no hanging or dimpled chads), security (you can hack the electronic count, but not the printed one) and cheap ubiquity (every airline clerk has a printer and a stack of cards).
I belive this combines the best features of electronic and paper voting, using each ones strenghts to overcome the others limitations.
If any boarding pass manufacturers choose to implement this, I expect royalties and a cushy seat on the board:-)
...constitutional rights could possibly be violated if "proceedings before state courts are obviously abused to discipline competitors through public media pressure and the risk of a conviction".
Now, if that isn't a neat description of the whole SCO strategy, I don't know what is. If ony SCO had filed in Germany, we'd have their assess:-)
That's what they're arguing now. All this changing of posture and revising of claims strikes me as Boies working his way back through all the contracts looking for ways to make money. This is the latest pearl he's found.
Interestingly, I've seen other claims that the original AT&T contracts don't include the normal "...and all their assignees and successors..." clause, leaving open the possibility that the derivatives don't belong to SCO, but still to AT&T!
What a mess, this will keep the courts embroiled for years, and will all come down to what constitutes derivitive works.
How are they claiming RCU? To quote that Byte interview from a day or 2 ago, where Sontag talked about the original AT&T license conditions:
"Everybody was happy to sign tough contracts... which deeded all derivative works back to AT&T, licenses that covered all "methods" and "concepts" of operating systems. But now those licenses are owned by SCO and its team of lawyers who are certain that AIX and all the other derivative IXs belong to SCO. (...) Specifically, Sontag believes the "SCO technologies" which were misappropriated... are: JFS, NUMA, RCU, SMP."
i.e. The code didn't have to come from SysV originally, they claim ANY code built on top of a SysV deriviative becomes SCO IP, no matter where the code came from originally! Be hard to prove in the case of JFS (adapted from OS/2), but I can see a judge going for all the stuff that Sequent built on top of their derivitive of SysV.
Perhaps IBM should just buy them out and release all the IP...
I used to work for a majoring outsourcer (think elephants). I was called in to review a project that was way over time and budget. An outside contractor had been brought in to develop a steady-state monitoring system for a large distributed system over many UNIX and NT boxes. He had tried to implement it in C++, because that's what he knew, and had been at it for over 6 months without anything usable coming out. My analysis was that the code was crap, and could be replaced by an experienced Perl programmer using standard UNIX tools in a matter of a few days. In fact, a quick web search located code that could easily have been adapted in a matter of hours. The guy was terminated, his file marked never to be hired again.
His user manual was beautiful, though. Best description of how to click a gui button I've ever read. Shame the 150 pages never actually got around to describing the what or how of the system, but then I guess he never really figured it out himself.
Every time ILve quit a job (never been fired, touch wood), ILve always given a "1 month guarantee" to the old boss that they can contact me and ask questions about stuff on the basis that maybe I forgot to tell them something during the handover. But I was always clear that after that I would be charging for my time, and even quoted the rate I would be expecting, 4 hour minimum charge.
While ILve been taken up on the guarantee a few times, ILve never had a boss come back to me after that. Programmers ILve been friends with have asked me stuff, and I have answered as best I could.
On a slightly related note, their was the company I quit shortly after desiging a solution to a major bug that was affected 10% of customers accounts, and so was supposedly the no. 1 priority. When I re-joined the company 2 years later, the work was still waiting to be done! Guess what my first task allocated was? The clean-up requied for the additional 2 years of compounding errors was a nightmare...
I still remember the first lecture I had with Biddle. It was 2nd Year Software Engineering, he wanders in 5 minutes late, typical Guru type charecter with hair and beard and sandels, carrying a tape player. He walks to the podium, sets the tape player down, plugs the power in, and presses the play button. After a couple of seconds of some awful noise he called music, he pressed the stop button. "The day computers are as easy and intuative for an average person to use as a tape player is the day we have finally mastered software engineering." He then spent most of the lecture explaining why. A guy who really does think differently.
I remember Nobles first lecture for 3rd year Comparitive Programming Languages for a different reason, the maths terrified me so much, I changed courses to Computer Graphics! I still failed due to bad maths, but it was much more fun:-)
If you're looking to go under the Work Permit system, you can almost forget about it. For a start, there's no Green Card or visa category allowing you to enter the country to look for work or move between jobs as you feel like it. The Work Permit is for a specific job offered at a specific employer at a specific location for a specific duration. Due to the downturn, the IT Contractors Association have recently convinced the government to tighten the fast-track regulations. Where as there used to be a generic list of job descriptions that qualified for automatic approval, it's now a
hard-and-fast list of specific, top-end skills that the job must require before it gets approved. Otherwise, you have to go the long way round of proving that there's no-one in the whole of the UK and Europe who can do the job. I've yet to find an employer willing to spend the time and money when they can have their pick from off the street. The one ray of hope is the latest list still has "Network Specialist, NT/2K/UNIX", but this is more at a design and consulting level, not so much the admin level. You need either an IT degree, any degree plus 1 years experience, or 3 years experience. Full details at the work permits website. Note: currently Work Permits are free if the employer applies directly, but there are unscrupulous agencies out there who try to charge the employer an extra GBP2000 to do it for them, which tends to scare them away.
You only need 1 job site in the UK, JobServe, as everyone advertises there. Be warned, though, the downturn has made for lean pickings.
You can find the regulations for joining significant others at the Home Office, friends have done it and it does take time. You have to apply from outside the country. You can only join your partner and work if you are legally married, if you are unmarried but there is a legal reason you can't marry (i.e. previous marriage and not yet divorced), or if you are engaged to be married within 6 months (but then you can't work until you are). After 2 years together, you can apply for permanent status.
Of course, if you happen to be qualified as a teacher or a nurse, they will pay for you to go there... The down side being the schools and health system are the scummy pits of hell, far, far worse than any call-centre or help desk you've ever been enslaved by.
In my previous job, I ran a development team that split it's time between small to medium size system changes and second-level production support. I actually went out of my way on a couple of occasions to hire help desk people for the support, analyst and testing type roles, as they knew the systems and the business reasons behind it better than any programmer I could hire off the street.
Over time, I developed these peoples skills to the point where they were capable maintenance programmers. I don't think I'd trust them to design and build a system from scratch, but they filled a valuable niche that the hard-core tech-heads just weren't interested in doing at the time.
So it does happen, but now is probably not the best time to be looking to do this, as the once proud tech-heads are now taking whatever they can get.
It's unfortunate your current companys dev team is inter-state. All I can suggest is find another help-desk role in a company with a local dev team, if that's possible in this climate. Then work your arse off for 2 years to learn the company, it's business and it's systems inside out, better than the programmers do. Then get cosy with the team leaders and managers responsable for running the Analysis, Support and Test teams, bend over backwards to help them, and eventually the door should open. Avoid the HR types, they rarely understand IT or the business, all they know how to do is read a CV and yours will quickly be weeded out.
One final piece of advice: no matter how hard it may be to organise your life around it, any sort of qualification will help. It did for me, after 5 years part-time uni, the day I got my degree was the day my company moved me from a boring clerical job to an analyst job in the dev team I ended up running a few years later.
Hmmm, arn't some of the KDE bindings called platapus? Or is that the code that generates them? I think there's a Koala as well, that might be the Java bindings.
It's the PPC version of Mandrakes i586 release, which came out before KDE3 had it's final release. Mandrake may like the leading edge, but not the bleeding edge. It wasn't stable enough and they weren't prepared to wait. KDE3 is available for download, but still has a few packaging bugs to be shaken out.
Next version will be good: KDE3, Gnome 2, GCC 3.1, LSB compliant.
Re:What about inventing a new, non-gnu "language"?
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
If the language is obfuscated then you probably don't use it to maintain your code. If you don't use it to maintain the code yourself, then it obviously isn't the preferred form for modification, thus you would be in violation of the GPL.
The parent site for these images, NASA Earth Observatory is very cool, it's got some incredible pictures, and you can generate your own animations from their datasets! I've just watsted 2 hours and several 100Mb of my employers time/band-width on it:-) Damn, now that code is going to be late, time for another coke infusion...
God, I miss Wellington, the one perfect corner of the world where everything works as it should:-) Unlike Sydney or London or Cape Town or maybe soon Canada.
I've been meaning to come home "soon" for ages, now this gives me more incentive.
That would be "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire", done by BBC Animation for the Comic Relief charity in the UK. I think the animators were Aardman people donating their time, but using BBC facilities.
Official web-site at http://www.comicrelief.com/other/robbiereindeer.sh tml
The story seems to be saying that the animations will come on a free CD-ROM, which you stick in your PC. You then surf over to a specific web-site where you download a key to allow you to unlock this weeks episode.
Hmmm, let me guess, get the CD-ROM on the cover of "PC Format", unlock the vac-o-matic episode by visiting dyson.com, bowl-o-matic at nike.com, TV-Toaster at sony.com, well you get the idea. I know they need to pay the bills, but it's a bit much to call them "freely available over the internet".
Try looking at New Zealand, according to that map, Timaru, a town of population 10-20 thousand is brighter than our largest city of 1.5 million. It's almost as bright as Sydeny, population 3.5 million, the same as teh whole of NZ!
I know my parents often forget to turn the outside lights off, but they're not _that_ bright:-)
*Cough* And what's the default install for the Consumer edition of XP, the default that the average user will not even know to change? Why, no acounts, of course.
Raw sockets exist in Windows 2000, and I assume that it has a bit to do with the FreeBSD code in the TCP/IP stack... This code has helped to make Win 2k far more stable on a network than its predicessor, IMO. If they are such of a problem, why not acuse Linux or FreeBSD of the same problem...
Sigh. As a million people have pointed out in a million other forums, it's not the raw sockets that are the problem, it's the lack of security that's the problem. In Win2K the raw sockets are there, protected by security safeguards, as they are in BSD and Linux, and work well as a result. The problem with XP Consumer is that MS have deliberately (by their own admission) removed those security safeguards, supposedly to meet user requirements. Cringley is suggesting that they have actually an ulterior motive in doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
>my 15 years of web browsing...
:-)
Is that you in disguise Mr Berners-Lee? 'Cause that's the only way you could have been surfing the web way back in 1988, and then only in your head, seeing as you didn't publish the protocol proposal until 1989
John (who remembers the excitement at uni in early '93 when the sys-admins first installed Mosaic alpha for general use and everyone tried hitting it's homepage at once. God, it crawled, give me archie anyday...).
GSA = Global Services Australia
ALL the staff on the Telstra account are based in Australia.
Irony #1: At least 50% of GSA staff (and up to 80%) in the departments I've worked in are actually Indian/Asian Australians
Irony #2: IBM GSA is actually a joint venture between IBM, LendLease and... Telstra! It was originally founded to work on Telstras systems, before later expanding to take on other clients.
They will be using the OASIS file format, this doesn't mean they will be using the OOo MS import/export codebase. There MAY be a common library in the future, but that is not clear yet. Also, this is not for the coming release, but for the one after that (v2.0?) that is slated for say middle of next year.
Next time you catch a flight, take a look at that boarding pass in your hand, and consider the possibilites it presents for a voting system:
:-)
1) On a touchscreen, choose your candidates, then confirm your vote by pressing the "Vote & Print" button.
2) In the background, your vote is electronically counted.
3) The voting machine prints out your boarding pass / ballot, while also encoding the magnetic strip on the back with the details.
4) The voter can read the printed ballot to confirm it is correct, before dropping it into the ballot box.
5) When the polls close, the ballots are fed through a magnetic reader, and the tally compared to the electronic tally to confirm its validity.
6) If someone challenges the count, then the ballots are manually tallied using the print-out on the front.
The strong points for this system are transparency (you can still see the ballot), redundancy (for printer, magnetic encoder and electronic count to all fail is highly unlikely), clarity (no hanging or dimpled chads), security (you can hack the electronic count, but not the printed one) and cheap ubiquity (every airline clerk has a printer and a stack of cards).
I belive this combines the best features of electronic and paper voting, using each ones strenghts to overcome the others limitations.
If any boarding pass manufacturers choose to implement this, I expect royalties and a cushy seat on the board
...constitutional rights could possibly be violated if "proceedings before state courts are obviously abused to discipline competitors through public media pressure and the risk of a conviction".
:-)
Now, if that isn't a neat description of the whole SCO strategy, I don't know what is. If ony SCO had filed in Germany, we'd have their assess
That's what they're arguing now. All this changing of posture and revising of claims strikes me as Boies working his way back through all the contracts looking for ways to make money. This is the latest pearl he's found.
Interestingly, I've seen other claims that the original AT&T contracts don't include the normal "...and all their assignees and successors..." clause, leaving open the possibility that the derivatives don't belong to SCO, but still to AT&T!
What a mess, this will keep the courts embroiled for years, and will all come down to what constitutes derivitive works.
How are they claiming RCU? To quote that Byte interview from a day or 2 ago, where Sontag talked about the original AT&T license conditions:
... which deeded all derivative works back to AT&T, licenses that covered all "methods" and "concepts" of operating systems. But now those licenses are owned by SCO and its team of lawyers who are certain that AIX and all the other derivative IXs belong to SCO. (...) Specifically, Sontag believes the "SCO technologies" which were misappropriated ... are: JFS, NUMA, RCU, SMP."
"Everybody was happy to sign tough contracts
i.e. The code didn't have to come from SysV originally, they claim ANY code built on top of a SysV deriviative becomes SCO IP, no matter where the code came from originally! Be hard to prove in the case of JFS (adapted from OS/2), but I can see a judge going for all the stuff that Sequent built on top of their derivitive of SysV.
Perhaps IBM should just buy them out and release all the IP...
I used to work for a majoring outsourcer (think elephants). I was called in to review a project that was way over time and budget. An outside contractor had been brought in to develop a steady-state monitoring system for a large distributed system over many UNIX and NT boxes. He had tried to implement it in C++, because that's what he knew, and had been at it for over 6 months without anything usable coming out. My analysis was that the code was crap, and could be replaced by an experienced Perl programmer using standard UNIX tools in a matter of a few days. In fact, a quick web search located code that could easily have been adapted in a matter of hours. The guy was terminated, his file marked never to be hired again.
His user manual was beautiful, though. Best description of how to click a gui button I've ever read. Shame the 150 pages never actually got around to describing the what or how of the system, but then I guess he never really figured it out himself.
Every time ILve quit a job (never been fired, touch wood), ILve always given a "1 month guarantee" to the old boss that they can contact me and ask questions about stuff on the basis that maybe I forgot to tell them something during the handover. But I was always clear that after that I would be charging for my time, and even quoted the rate I would be expecting, 4 hour minimum charge.
While ILve been taken up on the guarantee a few times, ILve never had a boss come back to me after that. Programmers ILve been friends with have asked me stuff, and I have answered as best I could.
On a slightly related note, their was the company I quit shortly after desiging a solution to a major bug that was affected 10% of customers accounts, and so was supposedly the no. 1 priority. When I re-joined the company 2 years later, the work was still waiting to be done! Guess what my first task allocated was? The clean-up requied for the additional 2 years of compounding errors was a nightmare...
I still remember the first lecture I had with Biddle. It was 2nd Year Software Engineering, he wanders in 5 minutes late, typical Guru type charecter with hair and beard and sandels, carrying a tape player. He walks to the podium, sets the tape player down, plugs the power in, and presses the play button. After a couple of seconds of some awful noise he called music, he pressed the stop button. "The day computers are as easy and intuative for an average person to use as a tape player is the day we have finally mastered software engineering." He then spent most of the lecture explaining why. A guy who really does think differently.
:-)
I remember Nobles first lecture for 3rd year Comparitive Programming Languages for a different reason, the maths terrified me so much, I changed courses to Computer Graphics! I still failed due to bad maths, but it was much more fun
You only need 1 job site in the UK, JobServe, as everyone advertises there. Be warned, though, the downturn has made for lean pickings.
You can find the regulations for joining significant others at the Home Office, friends have done it and it does take time. You have to apply from outside the country. You can only join your partner and work if you are legally married, if you are unmarried but there is a legal reason you can't marry (i.e. previous marriage and not yet divorced), or if you are engaged to be married within 6 months (but then you can't work until you are). After 2 years together, you can apply for permanent status.
Of course, if you happen to be qualified as a teacher or a nurse, they will pay for you to go there... The down side being the schools and health system are the scummy pits of hell, far, far worse than any call-centre or help desk you've ever been enslaved by.
In my previous job, I ran a development team that split it's time between small to medium size system changes and second-level production support. I actually went out of my way on a couple of occasions to hire help desk people for the support, analyst and testing type roles, as they knew the systems and the business reasons behind it better than any programmer I could hire off the street.
Over time, I developed these peoples skills to the point where they were capable maintenance programmers. I don't think I'd trust them to design and build a system from scratch, but they filled a valuable niche that the hard-core tech-heads just weren't interested in doing at the time.
So it does happen, but now is probably not the best time to be looking to do this, as the once proud tech-heads are now taking whatever they can get.
It's unfortunate your current companys dev team is inter-state. All I can suggest is find another help-desk role in a company with a local dev team, if that's possible in this climate. Then work your arse off for 2 years to learn the company, it's business and it's systems inside out, better than the programmers do. Then get cosy with the team leaders and managers responsable for running the Analysis, Support and Test teams, bend over backwards to help them, and eventually the door should open. Avoid the HR types, they rarely understand IT or the business, all they know how to do is read a CV and yours will quickly be weeded out.
One final piece of advice: no matter how hard it may be to organise your life around it, any sort of qualification will help. It did for me, after 5 years part-time uni, the day I got my degree was the day my company moved me from a boring clerical job to an analyst job in the dev team I ended up running a few years later.
John.
Hmmm, arn't some of the KDE bindings called platapus? Or is that the code that generates them? I think there's a Koala as well, that might be the Java bindings.
It's the PPC version of Mandrakes i586 release, which came out before KDE3 had it's final release. Mandrake may like the leading edge, but not the bleeding edge. It wasn't stable enough and they weren't prepared to wait. KDE3 is available for download, but still has a few packaging bugs to be shaken out.
Next version will be good: KDE3, Gnome 2, GCC 3.1, LSB compliant.
If the language is obfuscated then you probably don't use it to maintain your code. If you don't use it to maintain the code yourself, then it obviously isn't the preferred form for modification, thus you would be in violation of the GPL.
That's it in a nutshell...
The parent site for these images, NASA Earth Observatory is very cool, it's got some incredible pictures, and you can generate your own animations from their datasets! I've just watsted 2 hours and several 100Mb of my employers time/band-width on it :-) Damn, now that code is going to be late, time for another coke infusion...
... you're making me home-sick!!!
:-) Unlike Sydney or London or Cape Town or maybe soon Canada.
God, I miss Wellington, the one perfect corner of the world where everything works as it should
I've been meaning to come home "soon" for ages, now this gives me more incentive.
Next year. Maybe.
>>Maybe some claymation Dancing Santas in a cameo?
Try "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire" for the clamation Santa...
A little more searching elicits:
"It was directed by Richard Goleszowski, known for his Aardman work on the 1987 Barefootin' promo and the Rex the Runt TV series."
That would be "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire", done by BBC Animation for the Comic Relief charity in the UK. I think the animators were Aardman people donating their time, but using BBC facilities.
h tml
Official web-site at http://www.comicrelief.com/other/robbiereindeer.s
The story seems to be saying that the animations will come on a free CD-ROM, which you stick in your PC. You then surf over to a specific web-site where you download a key to allow you to unlock this weeks episode.
Hmmm, let me guess, get the CD-ROM on the cover of "PC Format", unlock the vac-o-matic episode by visiting dyson.com, bowl-o-matic at nike.com, TV-Toaster at sony.com, well you get the idea. I know they need to pay the bills, but it's a bit much to call them "freely available over the internet".
And how much you want a bet it's Windows only???
So the USA, emitting 25% of global pollution, is actually completely innocent, huh???
Try looking at New Zealand, according to that map, Timaru, a town of population 10-20 thousand is brighter than our largest city of 1.5 million. It's almost as bright as Sydeny, population 3.5 million, the same as teh whole of NZ!
:-)
I know my parents often forget to turn the outside lights off, but they're not _that_ bright
*Cough* And what's the default install for the Consumer edition of XP, the default that the average user will not even know to change? Why, no acounts, of course.
Raw sockets exist in Windows 2000, and I assume that it has a bit to do with the FreeBSD code in the TCP/IP stack... This code has helped to make Win 2k far more stable on a network than its predicessor, IMO. If they are such of a problem, why not acuse Linux or FreeBSD of the same problem...
Sigh. As a million people have pointed out in a million other forums, it's not the raw sockets that are the problem, it's the lack of security that's the problem. In Win2K the raw sockets are there, protected by security safeguards, as they are in BSD and Linux, and work well as a result. The problem with XP Consumer is that MS have deliberately (by their own admission) removed those security safeguards, supposedly to meet user requirements. Cringley is suggesting that they have actually an ulterior motive in doing so.