A friend I know runs a small business. They use MS Money to keep track of small finance items, sort of like a cash book.
They still use the 16-bit version of Money from the Windows 3.11 for Workgroup days. Why? Because it's simple, and all it does is the books. They won't upgrade because all the later versions of Money want to go on the internet and do other fancy things making it harder - not easier - to use. This is one of the points that the article mentions first.
As a software developer, I *highly* value my 1600x1200 21in display. A 17in display wouldn't be the same, especially at 1280x1024. I use lots of desktop real-estate.
It's old school though. It's a Sun 21in Trinitron display. I've not yet found an LCD that I can afford that beats (or comes close to) this excellent CRT. I bought it used, and I've had it for 3 years. I'll probably keep it till it dies. The drawback is its large depth to house all that glass.
The Isle of Man has complete ADSL coverage (the last exchanges were only done at the tail end of last year, Manx Telecom were very reluctant to do the small exchanges with perhaps only a few hundred subscribers, but I think the availability of micro DSLAMs may have made it feasable).
The problem is that Manx Telecom is a private monopoly that likes to charge a lot of money for business services (they can't get away with it for home services because too many people would whine to the government, and their comms license is up for renewal soon). I think companies like the MEA (fibre with their powerlines) and Domicilium (wireless 5.x GHz IIRC) are going to be pitching at the business market offering 2Mbps symmetric lines at about half the price of MT.
The MEA (Manx Electricity Authority) in the Isle of Man are thinking of doing broadband service.
However, they laid fibre everywhere they put in new power lines. I suspect the power line delivery will probably be the last 100 yards to the house, where the cable is already a few feet underground. It'll be interesting to see what their plans are.
The end of oil reserves are only within clear sight if you intend living over 100 years (at current usage). What is in sight is the end of CHEAP oil. There will always be quite a lot of oil for our lifetimes and at least the next generation, but I expect we'll see the cheap oil gone fairly soon.
The economics of that will mean it begins more economical to use alternative fuels (biodiesels etc.) than dino-oil, and necessity will force the change. The websites about how society is going to collapse is the real FUD.
How do you know this guy is hoarding the money? He may well be donating some of it to charity, starting new businesses with some of it (which creates wealth and employment) rather than just metaphorically stuffing it under the matress.
Hiring for software developers etc. as far as I can see has returned to the state it was when I graduated from university, before the dot-com thing. The dot-com hiring scene was a large deviation from the norm.
What helped me was being on a 'sandwich-degree' - which includes a year of employed work as part of the degree. Many companies took students on for a year of "industrial training" (internship, co-ops, the name varies by nation) - I worked for IBM. After that year, I went back to university and finished my degree. Since I had already proved myself with IBM, they had a job waiting for me when I came back as a graduate - at a significantly higher rate of pay than the graduates who had not had this experience because I was already proven - I had got essentially a year-long practical interview from them. I'm very grateful that IBM did this kind of thing (and still does) - the 7 years I spent with them after graduation were very good, and they treat their employees well. I only left because I moved back home where there's no IBM facilities, otherwise I'd have been happy to stay with them until the bitter end:-)
Um, if the thing is powered off, that counts as downtime.
You completely missed the point.
If the machine state survives a power cycle though, it's vastly different to if it starts from fresh every power cycle.
If a laptop is used 8 hours in a 24 hour period, and gets powered off 3 times a day, if the state isn't saved, it gets rebooted 3 times a day, starting from a clean state 3 times a day. If, however, state is saved and the machine is never actually rebooted, it can go years without a reboot - that was my point. An application might get a year of runtime without being restarted in a 4-year period without being restarted on a machine with non-volatile memory. It will need to be more stable - not less stable - to be useful on a machine that is designed this way.
No, it's not even that. If they carried the tagline that you suggest, they are still giving Linux the oxygen of publicity. If Microsoft never mentioned Linux, and instead only advertised their products and services on the merits, hardly anyone would know about Linux.
Similarly, the OSS world shouldn't have even talked about the Ken Brown abombination (it was fortunate that this thing was so bad that it could be completely destroyed). It gave it the oxygen of publicity it would have never had if we'd just shut up about it.
However, their continuing mentions of Linux is giving the OS a great deal of publicity that it otherwise wouldn't have had.
Non-volatile main memory is unlikely to be a solution against crash-prone software. If the software crashed because there was a bug in how it handled the data in memory, if the data is still there and the application reads it again, it'll just crash in exactly the same place.
In any case, an application crashing very seldom causes the machine to actually power down, and an application crashing and being restarted never gets to use the same memory the same way anyway, so the point is entirely moot. If your main memory is nonvolatile RAM, the advantage is you can design a system that can be powered down and suspended without having all that lengthy write of the entire machine's state to disk (and read when it comes back up again), which would be extremely useful on a laptop. If you can do this, you can have essentially uptime of years, so the incentive would be to write MORE stable operating systems and applications if the expectation is that even a laptop may go years between reboots.
On hard-core geeky types: A friend of mine who's the manager of his engineering department has said, "I don't have a department, I have a freak show". One of his staff is so introverted he simply won't talk to strangers. My friend had to prevent the CEO firing thig guy after he point blank ignored the CEO. Introverted but extremely smart and productive. My friend would also fit in as a member of this freak show too, except he's got enough people skills to become a manager...
Up until a couple of years ago, I used to work for IBM on Space Park Drive in Houston (you can see the rocket as you drive out of the parking lot of Building 8). Any visitors I had would inevitably get a trip around JSC.
The rocket is not in good shape - there are holes in it, and the paintwork is cracking and peeling. It was quite sad really. Good they are doing some work on it.
I use Windows XP, Linux (RH 8.0) and OpenBSD on a daily basis. Linux and Windows have my highest 'interactive' usage.
RedHat 8.0 took about the same time to install and configure as Windows XP - neither supported my video card out of the box apart from in VESA mode, so both needed video drivers installing. Both supported everything else I use out of the box.
Can I get the uptime with Linux? One of the boxes I administer has 450 days uptime, so I'd say yes. With sound support? I've never had a problem with sound support on Linux since the original SoundBlaster drivers went in back in 1993 or so (admittedly, these days it autoconfigures, back then you had to configure it yourself). I even play *games* under Linux when I'm not writing software (UT, RTCW:ET, Quake etc.)
RH 8.0 had *no* extra aggravation. It works how I want it to work, it has a proper command line, and it came with basic tools like SSH et al. so I didn't have to download them. For my use at least, Linux makes much more sense than Windows.
APIs are supposed to be a black box. But in the real world, if you're involved in a large and complex project, it can really help if you actually know what's going on inside.
For example, I was heavily involved in writing a replacement GINA for a retail cash register project. We actually had a US$40K support contract with Microsoft in case we ran into problems when writing our GINA. (The GINA is the bit loaded by Winlogon.exe which asks for your user id/password and manages how authentication gets done to Windows NT and anything else you need to authenticate with). At the time, the GINA documentation was diabolical. We did run into problems - and called Microsoft. They couldn't answer us either, because it seems like the guy who wrote this stuff had left and MS didn't have any better information than us.
We ended up doing a significant reverse-engineering job on the MSGINA to find out what we were supposed to be setting and how to set it. If we had the source code, we could have done it in a fifth of the time and wouldn't have needed an expensive (and useless) support contract.
As for the rest of the Win32 API - it is quite well documented in the MSDN online (but for stdlib/stdio functions, I find the OpenBSD manpages more useful and informative, even if I'm using stdio/stdlib on Windows). The documentation may be perfectly adequate, but the API itself feels congealed rather than designed, and that's without even getting into the GUI side of things.
Although there is a huge focus on transport (because perhaps it's the most energy intensive thing we do on a personal basis), IIRC, transport only accounts for around 17% of our energy usage. If we entirely rid ourselves of transport, it wouldn't make that much of a difference to pollution (especially since most of our vehicles burn fuel pretty cleanly already).
I used to live in Houston. There was always talk about how car usage needed to be reduced and how mandatory smog checks on cars were required in Harris county, but someone rightly pointed out if you removed ALL the cars off the road in Houston, the pollution would still be above safe levels - because of the high density of oil refineries and other industrial plants. (The sky sometimes turns green around Baytown, and the air smells nauseatingly foul on a hot day. I'm told it used to be much worse - in nearby Beaumont, the rivers would sometimes catch fire)
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
Most modern cell phones will use ordinary MIDI files for ring tones. My Nokia certainly does. Just find somewhere like the MIDI Farm and download the file via GPRS and you're all set.
With my Nokia 6820 phone, I just put it on speaker phone and then enter the information into the contacts list. Most modern phones allow you to do other stuff (browse contacts, add an entry in the calendar etc.) whilst talking on them.
My Nokia 6820 opens out to have a full qwerty keyboard. Closed, it's the same size as most other small cell phones. It does everything I want out of a PDA and I can make phone calls on it and access the Internet with it via GPRS.
PDAs are also too big. My 6820 fits in my pocket, a PDA will fit but would be uncomfortable, say, in my jeans pocket (and probably the touch screen would be easily damaged there. The 6820 on the other hand takes a battering and keeps chugging away).
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A friend I know runs a small business. They use MS Money to keep track of small finance items, sort of like a cash book.
:-)
They still use the 16-bit version of Money from the Windows 3.11 for Workgroup days. Why? Because it's simple, and all it does is the books. They won't upgrade because all the later versions of Money want to go on the internet and do other fancy things making it harder - not easier - to use. This is one of the points that the article mentions first.
Personally, I use gnucash and it does for me
Blocking worms is easy. Just reject all Microsoft executables. Tt's not too difficult to configure a filter to do it in most MTAs.
As a software developer, I *highly* value my 1600x1200 21in display. A 17in display wouldn't be the same, especially at 1280x1024. I use lots of desktop real-estate.
It's old school though. It's a Sun 21in Trinitron display. I've not yet found an LCD that I can afford that beats (or comes close to) this excellent CRT. I bought it used, and I've had it for 3 years. I'll probably keep it till it dies. The drawback is its large depth to house all that glass.
I always liked the MS-DOS retail boxes. The documentation usually said:
"The Microsoft MS-DOS Operating System", which of course expands to the Microsoft Microsoft Disk operating System Operating System"
The Isle of Man has complete ADSL coverage (the last exchanges were only done at the tail end of last year, Manx Telecom were very reluctant to do the small exchanges with perhaps only a few hundred subscribers, but I think the availability of micro DSLAMs may have made it feasable).
The problem is that Manx Telecom is a private monopoly that likes to charge a lot of money for business services (they can't get away with it for home services because too many people would whine to the government, and their comms license is up for renewal soon). I think companies like the MEA (fibre with their powerlines) and Domicilium (wireless 5.x GHz IIRC) are going to be pitching at the business market offering 2Mbps symmetric lines at about half the price of MT.
The MEA (Manx Electricity Authority) in the Isle of Man are thinking of doing broadband service.
However, they laid fibre everywhere they put in new power lines. I suspect the power line delivery will probably be the last 100 yards to the house, where the cable is already a few feet underground. It'll be interesting to see what their plans are.
The end of oil reserves are only within clear sight if you intend living over 100 years (at current usage). What is in sight is the end of CHEAP oil. There will always be quite a lot of oil for our lifetimes and at least the next generation, but I expect we'll see the cheap oil gone fairly soon.
The economics of that will mean it begins more economical to use alternative fuels (biodiesels etc.) than dino-oil, and necessity will force the change. The websites about how society is going to collapse is the real FUD.
How do you know this guy is hoarding the money? He may well be donating some of it to charity, starting new businesses with some of it (which creates wealth and employment) rather than just metaphorically stuffing it under the matress.
Hiring for software developers etc. as far as I can see has returned to the state it was when I graduated from university, before the dot-com thing. The dot-com hiring scene was a large deviation from the norm.
:-)
What helped me was being on a 'sandwich-degree' - which includes a year of employed work as part of the degree. Many companies took students on for a year of "industrial training" (internship, co-ops, the name varies by nation) - I worked for IBM. After that year, I went back to university and finished my degree. Since I had already proved myself with IBM, they had a job waiting for me when I came back as a graduate - at a significantly higher rate of pay than the graduates who had not had this experience because I was already proven - I had got essentially a year-long practical interview from them. I'm very grateful that IBM did this kind of thing (and still does) - the 7 years I spent with them after graduation were very good, and they treat their employees well. I only left because I moved back home where there's no IBM facilities, otherwise I'd have been happy to stay with them until the bitter end
You completely missed the point.
If the machine state survives a power cycle though, it's vastly different to if it starts from fresh every power cycle.
If a laptop is used 8 hours in a 24 hour period, and gets powered off 3 times a day, if the state isn't saved, it gets rebooted 3 times a day, starting from a clean state 3 times a day. If, however, state is saved and the machine is never actually rebooted, it can go years without a reboot - that was my point. An application might get a year of runtime without being restarted in a 4-year period without being restarted on a machine with non-volatile memory. It will need to be more stable - not less stable - to be useful on a machine that is designed this way.
No, it's not even that. If they carried the tagline that you suggest, they are still giving Linux the oxygen of publicity. If Microsoft never mentioned Linux, and instead only advertised their products and services on the merits, hardly anyone would know about Linux.
Similarly, the OSS world shouldn't have even talked about the Ken Brown abombination (it was fortunate that this thing was so bad that it could be completely destroyed). It gave it the oxygen of publicity it would have never had if we'd just shut up about it.
However, their continuing mentions of Linux is giving the OS a great deal of publicity that it otherwise wouldn't have had.
Non-volatile main memory is unlikely to be a solution against crash-prone software. If the software crashed because there was a bug in how it handled the data in memory, if the data is still there and the application reads it again, it'll just crash in exactly the same place.
In any case, an application crashing very seldom causes the machine to actually power down, and an application crashing and being restarted never gets to use the same memory the same way anyway, so the point is entirely moot. If your main memory is nonvolatile RAM, the advantage is you can design a system that can be powered down and suspended without having all that lengthy write of the entire machine's state to disk (and read when it comes back up again), which would be extremely useful on a laptop. If you can do this, you can have essentially uptime of years, so the incentive would be to write MORE stable operating systems and applications if the expectation is that even a laptop may go years between reboots.
On hard-core geeky types: A friend of mine who's the manager of his engineering department has said, "I don't have a department, I have a freak show". One of his staff is so introverted he simply won't talk to strangers. My friend had to prevent the CEO firing thig guy after he point blank ignored the CEO. Introverted but extremely smart and productive. My friend would also fit in as a member of this freak show too, except he's got enough people skills to become a manager...
Up until a couple of years ago, I used to work for IBM on Space Park Drive in Houston (you can see the rocket as you drive out of the parking lot of Building 8). Any visitors I had would inevitably get a trip around JSC.
The rocket is not in good shape - there are holes in it, and the paintwork is cracking and peeling. It was quite sad really. Good they are doing some work on it.
I use Windows XP, Linux (RH 8.0) and OpenBSD on a daily basis. Linux and Windows have my highest 'interactive' usage.
RedHat 8.0 took about the same time to install and configure as Windows XP - neither supported my video card out of the box apart from in VESA mode, so both needed video drivers installing. Both supported everything else I use out of the box.
Can I get the uptime with Linux? One of the boxes I administer has 450 days uptime, so I'd say yes. With sound support? I've never had a problem with sound support on Linux since the original SoundBlaster drivers went in back in 1993 or so (admittedly, these days it autoconfigures, back then you had to configure it yourself). I even play *games* under Linux when I'm not writing software (UT, RTCW:ET, Quake etc.)
RH 8.0 had *no* extra aggravation. It works how I want it to work, it has a proper command line, and it came with basic tools like SSH et al. so I didn't have to download them. For my use at least, Linux makes much more sense than Windows.
I had dealings with Siemens about a year ago, we had some Siemens folks from .de and .at come over to talk about one of their products.
It seems like the Siemens company culture, at least the bits we had contact with, are open standards friendly.
APIs are supposed to be a black box. But in the real world, if you're involved in a large and complex project, it can really help if you actually know what's going on inside.
For example, I was heavily involved in writing a replacement GINA for a retail cash register project. We actually had a US$40K support contract with Microsoft in case we ran into problems when writing our GINA. (The GINA is the bit loaded by Winlogon.exe which asks for your user id/password and manages how authentication gets done to Windows NT and anything else you need to authenticate with). At the time, the GINA documentation was diabolical. We did run into problems - and called Microsoft. They couldn't answer us either, because it seems like the guy who wrote this stuff had left and MS didn't have any better information than us.
We ended up doing a significant reverse-engineering job on the MSGINA to find out what we were supposed to be setting and how to set it. If we had the source code, we could have done it in a fifth of the time and wouldn't have needed an expensive (and useless) support contract.
As for the rest of the Win32 API - it is quite well documented in the MSDN online (but for stdlib/stdio functions, I find the OpenBSD manpages more useful and informative, even if I'm using stdio/stdlib on Windows). The documentation may be perfectly adequate, but the API itself feels congealed rather than designed, and that's without even getting into the GUI side of things.
With the shell, it depends which kernel you're running for Linux - 2.6.x is rather better than 2.4.x. Well, the difference is like night and day.
Although there is a huge focus on transport (because perhaps it's the most energy intensive thing we do on a personal basis), IIRC, transport only accounts for around 17% of our energy usage. If we entirely rid ourselves of transport, it wouldn't make that much of a difference to pollution (especially since most of our vehicles burn fuel pretty cleanly already).
I used to live in Houston. There was always talk about how car usage needed to be reduced and how mandatory smog checks on cars were required in Harris county, but someone rightly pointed out if you removed ALL the cars off the road in Houston, the pollution would still be above safe levels - because of the high density of oil refineries and other industrial plants. (The sky sometimes turns green around Baytown, and the air smells nauseatingly foul on a hot day. I'm told it used to be much worse - in nearby Beaumont, the rivers would sometimes catch fire)
I host a site for a pilot's union. Around bid time they all hammer a heavily DB oriented application with many, many reloads.
The load average on the system regularly gets over 50 during the last hour or so of the bid period.
It runs RedHat Enterprise Server. It's not fallen over once.
OpenBSD's focus is vastly different from Linux's (I use both, and I use them where appropriate). OpenBSD's primary focus has been on security and correctness of the implementation. Compare OpenBSD's pf with Linux's iptables - pf is so much more powerful and useful than iptables the difference is like night and day. The OpenBSD pf has security features that cost large sums of money in the closed source world.
SMP simply is not a priority for OpenBSD. The kind of uses OpenBSD is put to hardly ever requires it, so it's not in the least surprising that they are only just implementing it now.
Most modern cell phones will use ordinary MIDI files for ring tones. My Nokia certainly does. Just find somewhere like the MIDI Farm and download the file via GPRS and you're all set.
With my Nokia 6820 phone, I just put it on speaker phone and then enter the information into the contacts list. Most modern phones allow you to do other stuff (browse contacts, add an entry in the calendar etc.) whilst talking on them.
Some cell phones do.
My Nokia 6820 opens out to have a full qwerty keyboard. Closed, it's the same size as most other small cell phones. It does everything I want out of a PDA and I can make phone calls on it and access the Internet with it via GPRS.
PDAs are also too big. My 6820 fits in my pocket, a PDA will fit but would be uncomfortable, say, in my jeans pocket (and probably the touch screen would be easily damaged there. The 6820 on the other hand takes a battering and keeps chugging away).
Ph.D means Piled Higher and Deeper, according to one Ph.D I know.