Take a look at http://www.gov.im for more information. Commonly mistaken as part of the UK, but we aren't even in the European Union let alone the UK. Associated with the UK by the British Crown as a Crown Dependency (the Queen is Lord of Mann - but not Queen of Mann, so she appears on our banknotes without a crown). Tynwald - our parliament - is the longest running parliament in the world, it has been in continuous existence for around 1000 years.
Lots of tech people are long-term unemployed. But some are obviously succeeding.
When times are tough you have to (and I hate this phrase) "re-invent yourself". During the boom it was sufficient to be a surly technology prima-donna with the social skills of Spock in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Competition is much harder now. Where I live, 18 months ago, there was at least one tech job in the weekly paper each week of the C++/Java type. Currently, there's about one every three months. Our entire national population is only 78,000 so you can imagine that we don't have exactly masses of tech jobs to start with.
The last two jobs I got weren't advertised. In fact, the jobs didn't even exist - the positions were created.
What was the secret to my success in getting employers to create a new job for me? Networking. Not the type you do with a NIC and a reel of cat5e (although it ultimately involved quite a bit of that) but going out and socializing, and meeting people who ran businesses or were in charge of IT departments.
In the current climate you can't sit at home and surf the web/newspaper/have an agency pimp your {CV|resume} - the advertised positions just aren't there. (One agency told me they hadn't seen a tech position in 9 months). You have to go out of the house and get to know people. If you have an interest that many people who run businesses share, that's even better - I'm into flying and I've met many valuable business contacts through the flying club.
I've lived in both the UK and the US. Although when I was in the UK, I was in the phone directory, I only received one telemarketing call (someone wanting to sell me a conservatory, to which I said he'd have a bit of difficulty attaching it to my first floor flat).
In the US, I was also in the phone directory. I was receiving at least 5 phone spams a day after a while. I started using my answering machine as a screening device. Eventually they started giving up and I could go back to answering the phone.
I've since moved countries yet again, and now I only have a mobile phone, pay-as-you-go. Wonderfully un-spammy.
How about putting an air filter in the actual PSU?
A company called Misys (which makes a custom server for insurance brokers, running an obscure OS called Tripos) has air filters in all the ventilation systems of the machine they build (power supply etc.) I had a look inside one which had been powered on for a few years, and unlike the usual dusty catacombs that are the hallmark of a PC that's been on for a while, the inside of the machine still looked brand new. The machines are physically the size of a full tower unit or a 'double wide' full tower unit.
Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff..
on
First HDTV Camcorder
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Even with the resolution of digital exceeding 35mm, digital still has some artifacts that film doesn't.
Digital is now fine for happy snappy sort of photographs, but for anything I want to keep, it's still not good enough to replace 35mm. The other thing is I've still not seen a digital camera which will take my Nikon lenses for anything less than about 6 grand. Add that to the printer you need to get real photo quality (i.e. not inkjet) and it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.
Doubtless in the next few years we'll see digital cameras which will take interchangable lenses for sane prices - at that point, I'll probably use film for medium format only. But until then, I'll stick with my trusty SLR film camera.
Hmm.. i sense a trend in calling things open when they are actually closed. This is eroding the intended meaning of "Open" in front of fileformats or products.
That's nothing new - 10 years ago, the proprietary Motif toolkit was being put out by the Open Software Foundation. "Open" has been used as a euphamism for closed for quite a long time.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
on
AOL Sues Spammers
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· Score: 1
That's the problem. The hideous new incinerator is an enormous white elephant. The island doesn't generate enough trash to make an incinerator run efficiently, so it's going to be hideously expensive to run (or we'll have to import other people's junk to keep it running efficiently, and thus subsidise England's waste disposal). The hideous cost of running this...thing... has resulted in the wonderful idea of charging everyone GBP100/tonne for waste to pay for it all. So the unintended consequences of the incinerator is a worse environmental problem as people fly-tip to avoid the waste disposal charges, and the fly-tipping resulting in less waste feeding the incinerator, meaning the incinerator runs even more inefficiently.
The Island's problem with waste is a real one though - it's just the incinerator in its current form is not the answer - and now we're stuck with it.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
on
AOL Sues Spammers
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I live on a relatively small island (30 miles long and 15 miles wide). Trash is a problem, because we have nowhere to really put it, and it's expensive to export it.
We will shortly be paying the equivalent of US $160/tonne of trash we throw out. A couple of lbs of junk mail a week _is_ costing us directly as our local town council is thinking of weighing our bins when they collect the trash. Maybe all the physical junk mail I get costs only 16 cents per week to get rid of, but that's more than my current spam-load of 60-odd spams a day costs to get rid of.
I wish all junk mailers would move to email. I can delete them much more cheaply and easily with automatic filters than physical junk mail. AOL CDs cause a much bigger environmental problem than spam.
It got 1500bps with a simple frequency modulated scheme on a normal cassette. Games makers would often use what they called 'flash loaders' - the first bit on the tape being a small loader program, which sped the tape read speed up to in some cases a whopping 2400bps!
The thing about 'no derogatory comments about our service' is nothing new - in the mid to late 1980s, Micronet (and Prestel), an online service in Britain, also had the same thing. And they did threaten to kick off a friend of mine for complaining about Micronet in one of the message boards.
Their AUP also didn't allow any kind of profanity in the message boards, either!
They did have some good things (such as Shades the MUD, which is *still going* - telnet games.world.co.uk, yes, it's on port 23).
That's not to say it's right. The "you must only say good things about us" clause was incredibly dumb, and people often pushed at them, just to see how far they could go.
My Dad used to be a salesman for Nacanco (a can making company). In about 1980, they equipped their sales force with car-phones. They had a whole fleet of Ford Cortinas with (presumably at the time) very expensive car phones!
The car phone looked a bit like a CB with a normal telephone handset attached instead of a CB mike. You didn't have a phone number as such, you had a call-sign. My Dad's was "Amber zero eighty six". You had to manually change the cell you were in with a switch on the front of the CB-like unit. The units came with a map to tell you where you should switch cells.
The bit you talked into was like a normal phone handset connected to the CB-like bit. Except it was half duplex and had a push-to-talk switch, so you were encouraged to say "Over" after you were done saying something to the person at the other end. The phones were incapable of dialing a number - you picked them up, and spoke to an operator who dialled the call for you, and then called you back when the other end answered. The operator couldn't tell who was calling - you had to give them your callsign so they could call you back.
The phones were made to ring (as far as I could tell - I wasn't very old at the time) by some kind of analogue tone signalling broadcast. When the phone recognised its tone sequence, it'd start to ring (well, beep loudly actually). The AirCall operator would then connect you to whoever called (or the party you were calling, if you were trying to make an outgoing call).
It was trivial to use the equipment to listen to everyone elses calls, too:-) I think these carphones were more "radio phones" than cell phones that we think of today.
When I lived in Texas (less than a year ago) you STILL had to pay extra for DTMF dialing! It was something trivial (less than a dollar) but it was itemised on my Verizon (nee GTE) phone bills.
The harsh reality is that if you think that, you're in denial, I'm afraid.
Start reskilling know if you want to remain in an IT job. Get some business skills. Get skills in jobs that require physical onsite presence (and therefore can't be exported). Stay in denial, and Darwinism will finish you off.
Internet Explorer already got in trouble by doing this. Leaving the TCP/IP connect unclosed violates standard practices and will only improve web speed if the server is running IIS since it expects IE to do this same trick.
Internet Explorer was not found to do this - rather, some ill-informed pillock who didn't know about HTTP keepalive (which is in the standard, and supported by Apache) went on an error-filled rant to which Slashdot posted a link.
For my uses, 3G is overpriced and overrated. OK - the transfer rates are pretty good (especially compared to GSM or 2.5G), but the latencies still suck making it unpleasant for remote administration.
From the point of view of people who want to have fun (play games), 3G sucks because of the latency.
There have been a few cool uses of 3G so it's not all lost - I live in the Isle of Man, and Manx Telecom's mobile arm (Pronto) are doing 3G trials. One use is a bus full of computers they drive around to various schools around the country. The bus is networked by a single 3G handset and according to the piece in the newspaper, has worked out pretty well as a mobile 'net cafe.
And even if 'global warming' is not being caused by pollution, we need to reduce it anyway.
Where I live, we've just had 2 weeks or so of high-pressure dominated weather. This time of year, this tends to mean a stable atmosphere, and a temperature inversion. Also, winds have been moving from the south east (i.e. coming in from Europe and the UK).
Visibility has been down to less than three miles in *smoke* because of pollution that's blown in from the UK and Europe. Normally our air is very clean and clear, coming in from the west with only Ireland in the way. But the inversion (trapping the pollution) and not much energy in the atmosphere to disperse it means we've been stuck in a pot with a lid on containing not only us but Europe and visibility has been getting worse as the days have gone on. Our normally clear air is currently getting close to as poor as Los Angeles air.
I don't care if he's sitting *behind* that door. It's when he's on the other side *in front* of that door where the problems begin! (Unless you know of an aircraft where the flight deck is in the back).
Is there a case where THIS IS NOT SUFFICIENT? Is it really that much of a win to burden the entire architecture with a feature that in its common use can be implemented completely seperately and still solve 90% of the problem?
Several cases. Personally, I use the network transparency of X daily, to use GUI apps that are being run on more than one computer *without* disturbing the desktop on said computers (and in fact, one of them isn't even running its own X server). I find this feature very useful, and something VNC and its ilk does not replace.
Also, X over a network is quite a bit faster than VNC.
I'm not sure that's such an issue: X need not be bloated with the way it works. In 1993/1994, I was acceptably running X on a machine similar to the 386 you quote.
X has some superb architectural features (since 1986!) that Windows *still* doesn't have. There's no need to throw them away.
For IFR aviation use, it is sanity checked using RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring). A RAIM receiver checks GPS values against known values from other sources (such as altitude), and if the GPS coordinates disagree by more than a certain amount, it 'flags' the course deviation indicator to tell the pilot that the GPS signal is bad.
Handheld units of course have no such checks.
When navigating under visual flight rules, it's trivially easy to manually monitor your GPS - you continue to use the map, compass and stopwatch at the same time. With a little practise, visual navigation from the air in most parts of the world isn't that hard.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option
How many pageviews a day does Slashdot get? I wager many more than 100,000.
Remember this was 12 or 13 years ago. At that point, that 386 was the proverbial dog's bollocks - sort of the equivalent of my current 2GHz Pentium machine. And it was reasonable for its day when running DesqView as a multitasker.
I did ultimately end up running Linux on that machine (in summer 1992) and even then, it was fairly painful (partly due to the nature of Linux back then, but mostly due to the crappyness of the machine, it was an *early* 386 and the chip had bugs. I couldn't do kernel compiles on it (the compiler would segfault on any big files), but I could do enough compiling to learn C on that machine).
In 1993, I upgraded that machine to a 486 with 16MB of RAM...and...a SOUNDCARD! That was enough to run X with olvwm very well. I always used to show off about how it didn't need to swap during kernel compiles. Heaven:-]
I remember downloading the shareware version (a massive 600K!) of Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy via FidoNet freq (file request). You could file request files from other BBSes, and they'd be sent to your BBS (I ran 2:252/204 at the time). I had endless fun playing Commander Keen in a DesqView DOS session whilst the BBS ran in the other DOS session on my amazing 16MHz 80386 computer with 2.5MB of RAM!
The Dopefish for some reason reminded me of Sir Les Patterson, the Australian minister of Culture:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at http://www.gov.im for more information. Commonly mistaken as part of the UK, but we aren't even in the European Union let alone the UK. Associated with the UK by the British Crown as a Crown Dependency (the Queen is Lord of Mann - but not Queen of Mann, so she appears on our banknotes without a crown). Tynwald - our parliament - is the longest running parliament in the world, it has been in continuous existence for around 1000 years.
Lots of tech people are long-term unemployed. But some are obviously succeeding.
When times are tough you have to (and I hate this phrase) "re-invent yourself". During the boom it was sufficient to be a surly technology prima-donna with the social skills of Spock in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Competition is much harder now. Where I live, 18 months ago, there was at least one tech job in the weekly paper each week of the C++/Java type. Currently, there's about one every three months. Our entire national population is only 78,000 so you can imagine that we don't have exactly masses of tech jobs to start with.
The last two jobs I got weren't advertised. In fact, the jobs didn't even exist - the positions were created.
What was the secret to my success in getting employers to create a new job for me? Networking. Not the type you do with a NIC and a reel of cat5e (although it ultimately involved quite a bit of that) but going out and socializing, and meeting people who ran businesses or were in charge of IT departments.
In the current climate you can't sit at home and surf the web/newspaper/have an agency pimp your {CV|resume} - the advertised positions just aren't there. (One agency told me they hadn't seen a tech position in 9 months). You have to go out of the house and get to know people. If you have an interest that many people who run businesses share, that's even better - I'm into flying and I've met many valuable business contacts through the flying club.
I've lived in both the UK and the US. Although when I was in the UK, I was in the phone directory, I only received one telemarketing call (someone wanting to sell me a conservatory, to which I said he'd have a bit of difficulty attaching it to my first floor flat).
In the US, I was also in the phone directory. I was receiving at least 5 phone spams a day after a while. I started using my answering machine as a screening device. Eventually they started giving up and I could go back to answering the phone.
I've since moved countries yet again, and now I only have a mobile phone, pay-as-you-go. Wonderfully un-spammy.
How about putting an air filter in the actual PSU?
A company called Misys (which makes a custom server for insurance brokers, running an obscure OS called Tripos) has air filters in all the ventilation systems of the machine they build (power supply etc.) I had a look inside one which had been powered on for a few years, and unlike the usual dusty catacombs that are the hallmark of a PC that's been on for a while, the inside of the machine still looked brand new.
The machines are physically the size of a full tower unit or a 'double wide' full tower unit.
Even with the resolution of digital exceeding 35mm, digital still has some artifacts that film doesn't.
Digital is now fine for happy snappy sort of photographs, but for anything I want to keep, it's still not good enough to replace 35mm. The other thing is I've still not seen a digital camera which will take my Nikon lenses for anything less than about 6 grand. Add that to the printer you need to get real photo quality (i.e. not inkjet) and it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.
Doubtless in the next few years we'll see digital cameras which will take interchangable lenses for sane prices - at that point, I'll probably use film for medium format only. But until then, I'll stick with my trusty SLR film camera.
That's nothing new - 10 years ago, the proprietary Motif toolkit was being put out by the Open Software Foundation. "Open" has been used as a euphamism for closed for quite a long time.
That's the problem. The hideous new incinerator is an enormous white elephant. The island doesn't generate enough trash to make an incinerator run efficiently, so it's going to be hideously expensive to run (or we'll have to import other people's junk to keep it running efficiently, and thus subsidise England's waste disposal). The hideous cost of running this ...thing... has resulted in the wonderful idea of charging everyone GBP100/tonne for waste to pay for it all.
So the unintended consequences of the incinerator is a worse environmental problem as people fly-tip to avoid the waste disposal charges, and the fly-tipping resulting in less waste feeding the incinerator, meaning the incinerator runs even more inefficiently.
The Island's problem with waste is a real one though - it's just the incinerator in its current form is not the answer - and now we're stuck with it.
I live on a relatively small island (30 miles long and 15 miles wide). Trash is a problem, because we have nowhere to really put it, and it's expensive to export it.
We will shortly be paying the equivalent of US $160/tonne of trash we throw out. A couple of lbs of junk mail a week _is_ costing us directly as our local town council is thinking of weighing our bins when they collect the trash. Maybe all the physical junk mail I get costs only 16 cents per week to get rid of, but that's more than my current spam-load of 60-odd spams a day costs to get rid of.
I wish all junk mailers would move to email. I can delete them much more cheaply and easily with automatic filters than physical junk mail. AOL CDs cause a much bigger environmental problem than spam.
At least the Speccy beat the Apple II :-)
It got 1500bps with a simple frequency modulated scheme on a normal cassette. Games makers would often use what they called 'flash loaders' - the first bit on the tape being a small loader program, which sped the tape read speed up to in some cases a whopping 2400bps!
The thing about 'no derogatory comments about our service' is nothing new - in the mid to late 1980s, Micronet (and Prestel), an online service in Britain, also had the same thing. And they did threaten to kick off a friend of mine for complaining about Micronet in one of the message boards.
Their AUP also didn't allow any kind of profanity in the message boards, either!
They did have some good things (such as Shades the MUD, which is *still going* - telnet games.world.co.uk, yes, it's on port 23).
That's not to say it's right. The "you must only say good things about us" clause was incredibly dumb, and people often pushed at them, just to see how far they could go.
My Dad used to be a salesman for Nacanco (a can making company). In about 1980, they equipped their sales force with car-phones. They had a whole fleet of Ford Cortinas with (presumably at the time) very expensive car phones!
:-) I think these carphones were more "radio phones" than cell phones that we think of today.
The car phone looked a bit like a CB with a normal telephone handset attached instead of a CB mike. You didn't have a phone number as such, you had a call-sign. My Dad's was "Amber zero eighty six". You had to manually change the cell you were in with a switch on the front of the CB-like unit. The units came with a map to tell you where you should switch cells.
The bit you talked into was like a normal phone handset connected to the CB-like bit. Except it was half duplex and had a push-to-talk switch, so you were encouraged to say "Over" after you were done saying something to the person at the other end. The phones were incapable of dialing a number - you picked them up, and spoke to an operator who dialled the call for you, and then called you back when the other end answered. The operator couldn't tell who was calling - you had to give them your callsign so they could call you back.
The phones were made to ring (as far as I could tell - I wasn't very old at the time) by some kind of analogue tone signalling broadcast. When the phone recognised its tone sequence, it'd start to ring (well, beep loudly actually). The AirCall operator would then connect you to whoever called (or the party you were calling, if you were trying to make an outgoing call).
It was trivial to use the equipment to listen to everyone elses calls, too
Oh wonderful. Not only do they steal my Slashdot nick, now I'm going to have one of those UDRP lawsuits against me for one of my domains!!
When I lived in Texas (less than a year ago) you STILL had to pay extra for DTMF dialing! It was something trivial (less than a dollar) but it was itemised on my Verizon (nee GTE) phone bills.
The harsh reality is that if you think that, you're in denial, I'm afraid.
Start reskilling know if you want to remain in an IT job. Get some business skills. Get skills in jobs that require physical onsite presence (and therefore can't be exported). Stay in denial, and Darwinism will finish you off.
But of course, the female player is the most powerful of the lot.
:-]
Anyone who's ever spent any time with a woman knows this to be true
Internet Explorer was not found to do this - rather, some ill-informed pillock who didn't know about HTTP keepalive (which is in the standard, and supported by Apache) went on an error-filled rant to which Slashdot posted a link.
For my uses, 3G is overpriced and overrated. OK - the transfer rates are pretty good (especially compared to GSM or 2.5G), but the latencies still suck making it unpleasant for remote administration.
From the point of view of people who want to have fun (play games), 3G sucks because of the latency.
There have been a few cool uses of 3G so it's not all lost - I live in the Isle of Man, and Manx Telecom's mobile arm (Pronto) are doing 3G trials. One use is a bus full of computers they drive around to various schools around the country. The bus is networked by a single 3G handset and according to the piece in the newspaper, has worked out pretty well as a mobile 'net cafe.
And even if 'global warming' is not being caused by pollution, we need to reduce it anyway.
Where I live, we've just had 2 weeks or so of high-pressure dominated weather. This time of year, this tends to mean a stable atmosphere, and a temperature inversion. Also, winds have been moving from the south east (i.e. coming in from Europe and the UK).
Visibility has been down to less than three miles in *smoke* because of pollution that's blown in from the UK and Europe. Normally our air is very clean and clear, coming in from the west with only Ireland in the way. But the inversion (trapping the pollution) and not much energy in the atmosphere to disperse it means we've been stuck in a pot with a lid on containing not only us but Europe and visibility has been getting worse as the days have gone on. Our normally clear air is currently getting close to as poor as Los Angeles air.
I don't care if he's sitting *behind* that door. It's when he's on the other side *in front* of that door where the problems begin! (Unless you know of an aircraft where the flight deck is in the back).
Several cases. Personally, I use the network transparency of X daily, to use GUI apps that are being run on more than one computer *without* disturbing the desktop on said computers (and in fact, one of them isn't even running its own X server). I find this feature very useful, and something VNC and its ilk does not replace.
Also, X over a network is quite a bit faster than VNC.
I'm not sure that's such an issue: X need not be bloated with the way it works. In 1993/1994, I was acceptably running X on a machine similar to the 386 you quote.
X has some superb architectural features (since 1986!) that Windows *still* doesn't have. There's no need to throw them away.
For IFR aviation use, it is sanity checked using RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring). A RAIM receiver checks GPS values against known values from other sources (such as altitude), and if the GPS coordinates disagree by more than a certain amount, it 'flags' the course deviation indicator to tell the pilot that the GPS signal is bad.
Handheld units of course have no such checks.
When navigating under visual flight rules, it's trivially easy to manually monitor your GPS - you continue to use the map, compass and stopwatch at the same time. With a little practise, visual navigation from the air in most parts of the world isn't that hard.
How many pageviews a day does Slashdot get? I wager many more than 100,000.
Slashdot uses MySQL.
Remember this was 12 or 13 years ago. At that point, that 386 was the proverbial dog's bollocks - sort of the equivalent of my current 2GHz Pentium machine. And it was reasonable for its day when running DesqView as a multitasker.
:-]
I did ultimately end up running Linux on that machine (in summer 1992) and even then, it was fairly painful (partly due to the nature of Linux back then, but mostly due to the crappyness of the machine, it was an *early* 386 and the chip had bugs. I couldn't do kernel compiles on it (the compiler would segfault on any big files), but I could do enough compiling to learn C on that machine).
In 1993, I upgraded that machine to a 486 with 16MB of RAM...and...a SOUNDCARD! That was enough to run X with olvwm very well. I always used to show off about how it didn't need to swap during kernel compiles. Heaven
I remember downloading the shareware version (a massive 600K!) of Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy via FidoNet freq (file request). You could file request files from other BBSes, and they'd be sent to your BBS (I ran 2:252/204 at the time). I had endless fun playing Commander Keen in a DesqView DOS session whilst the BBS ran in the other DOS session on my amazing 16MHz 80386 computer with 2.5MB of RAM!
:-)
The Dopefish for some reason reminded me of Sir Les Patterson, the Australian minister of Culture