I didn't see any mention of price on the page. It has to be comparable to the price of a regular glass, or bars and restaurants simply won't buy them. Broken dishes happen in these places. There is simply no denying it, and no way around it. Damn near everyone has been in an establishment and heard it happen. I can understand an owner shying away from these if they turn $100 in broken dishes into $1000 in broken dishes.
I'm not sure. They got so close to bankrupt that they had to cut their staff down to ~3 people. This is after they already had to make cuts from ~30 ppl down to ~8. I made the first cut, but started looking for alternate jobs right away. I was laid off when the second round of cuts came along.
My guess is, no, they haven't learned their lesson. I don't expect them to survive the rest of this year.
There were only 3 pages with that much code, and their functionality was extremely different, so code reuse wasn't possible. Believe me, I looked! And yes, I knew as well as you that this project would be impossible to do. I fought it tooth and nail, yet my boss only saw the dollar signs floating by.
My first reaction to the mockups we were given was, "we're doing this with java applets, right?". Once that was shot down, i knew the project was impossible. It ended up being at least three times over bugdet, and my the company had only charged the client a flat rate for the whole sha-bang. So, yes, we got screwed.
I finished doing a web-based application for a client about 4 months ago. That was a complete nightmare. They wanted native gui functionality, yet cross-platform, and it had to work on netscape (all vers) and IE (all vers). Oh, did I mention that we couldn't expect the users to download anything additional, EVER? So that ruled out java applets (since xp doesn't have a jvm by default). The whole thing was done with ASP, Javascript, and plain html forms.
Making a long story short, the Netscape 4.x functionality ended up being severely lacking (since 4.x JS engine wasn't capable of performing most of the functionality they wanted). Oh, we weren't allowed to refresh the pages very often, so almost everything had to be done with JS actively manipulating the current document. To make matters worse, my spineless boss allowed them to change the spec several times throughout the project. When you have 1000+ lines of JS per page, any little change is a pain in the ass.
And just exactly where are people going to attain work experience if everyone does as you, and sends them all to the help desk?
I've done my time on the help desk, and have since become a Sun certified system admin. I didn't go to any third rate night school either. I did it the real way. I bought a book for $35, a sparcstation for under $100 off eBay, and downloaded the Solaris 8 SPARCplatform cd's from Sun's website. I had my cert in less then 2 months, and I worked my ass off to get it.
So given that, when you see my resume, where do you think it really should have gone? Here's a better question, how can you tell just by looking at a piece of paper how much work went into getting that cert, and how much knowldege was attained?
I tried mentioning this in a thread, but it was too quickly drown out. There is a free product that does ld_preload style memory leak detection. It even does memory allocation profiling, so you can find that hidden 'for' loop that is responsible for that extra 15MB of allocated memory. The gui is done with gtk+, so it's easy to use, and will run on most any linux distro these days.
Am I the only one who didn't see a price tag on this little gem? I might spend as much as $1 more for this new fan design, but I wouldn't spend twice as much. From the lack of a price on their webpage, that's probably what it costs. Prices are usually not easily gotten when the manufacturer is worried that its outrageousness will steer you away from their product.
Somehow I don't see this as being safe. Not because of the materials used for construction, but simply because a few winters of negligence will make this sucker rust right through. If I was this guy's neightbor, I'd probably ride this thing a few times, but only during the first few weeks, and definitely not after a year.
The big difference between his ride and coaster parks that make the parks safer? They have mandatory ride inspections every morning before opening. Plus I believe they are also required to do a full inch-by-inch examination at least once a year. Probably before opening in the spring.
Both @Home and my employer were publically traded at the time. However, that statement was a figure of speech. (Was on a rant, and it sounded good. I definitely wouldn't have recommended that stock, though.) No one I knew had any @Home stock anyways. Even if I could be linked to this statement on Slashdot, what you have is an uncorroborated statement from over 2 years ago, and no specific stock transactions to back it up. I can't see that standing in any court.
No worries.:)
(Hope I didn't sound like a dick or anything. I don't want to sound like I'm talking down to you. Just want to show my lack of worry and why. Cheers. )
Jesus christ. Every goddam analyst on the planet seems to think they know why @Home failed. It's not rocket science, it's basic accounting.
You dump a few billion dollars into a nationwide network, and then you convince every cable television provider you can shake a stick at that broadband internet is within their grasp, and that you'll help them deploy it by being their internet access point. You get a few hundred cable systems online, and all is good. You get 50% of their profits for providing the bandwidth, and they are happy because they've found a new source of revenue.
Your market share continues to rise as your cable systems count skyrockets past the thousands. Everything is great! But then it happens. Being that cable systems are greedy bastards, they start eyeing up your 50% of the profits. Then, the guy in their NOC that actually had the cluestick long enough to set up the whole damn headend for broadband internet has an idea. Why don't we just drop @Home and get our bandwidth from the local telcos? After all, DS3's from Chicago cost thousands more than DS3's from the Bell office down the street.
And one by one, every cable system that @Home helped set up, went independant. I worked in the cable industry at the time, and I saw it coming from a mile away. Hell, I watched the DS3 from @Home go dead. I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
But it gets better. @Home wasn't stupid. They knew that cable providers would eventually catch on. So they made lengthy contract with them. The problem is, the contracts ended up benig too market specific. For months, we supported both @Home, and our proprietary network. All new markets going live with broadband internet wouldn't even know what @Home was, as we only offered our proprietary network in new markets.
Eventually, we bought out the remainder of the @Home contract. @Home was stupid as all hell to let that happen too. That market's size has more than doubled in the past year. They would have been rolling in it. But then again, I supposed that when you're billions in debt, lump sums of cash can sure be appealing to your accountants as they try to fend off the lenders.
Making a long story short, @Home's demise had little to do with their network, and everything to do with unrenewed/prematurely-ended contracts. @Home's network was incredibly fast. Surprised the hell out of our network engineer at several times. But, you just can't run a business when you're not generating revenue.
I'm currently working on a solution to that problem.
There is really no reason why we can't have binary compatability between x86 distributions. What's really missing is a common packaging format. One that actually includes ALL nonstandard required libraries, and is self installing. (Meaning that it is a self installing executable that has no non-standard library requirements.)
The difficulty really comes in trying to determine what libraries are standard and which are not. I'm currently thinking of basing this on the Linux Standard Base. It seems to have a lot of weight with the large distro makers. (Hell, RedHat is a contributer!)
But you are absolutely right. Linux needs a "next, next, finish" installer. Trust me, it is on it's way. Just be patient.:)
If I were an OEM, I could install both Linux and Windows on the same machine, and be able to offer my customers a simple multi-boot solution without having to modify the boot sector at all. It's called a boot disk. Insert this disk when you want to boot to Linux. The disk contains nothing more than SysLinux, which is set up to boot the linux partition off of the harddrive. There, OEM License problem is solved.
Then just put a little icon on the Linux desktops. "Tire of using a floppy to boot linux?" Curious users will click it, and it will Druid them right through installing a multiOS bootloader on their harddrive. Probably LILO or GRUB. And voila, you're done.
Of course, most OEMs aren't too bright when it comes to getting around license restrictions. The legal departments tend to jump onto the MS bandwagon pretty quickly since it's been their bread and butter for so long.
So pay them for units their computer's complete. Problem solved. Now the OEM looks like a godsend to Joe Sixpack because they'll pay him just to leave it turned on. And since Joe Sixpack doesn't know jack about computers, he doesn't realize that he'll save money by not having it do anything.
A more effective solution would be to have operating systems ship with distributed computing clients pre-installed. That way, if it's ever on the net, it'll be able to do work.
The current implementation of Leech Computer requires the user to be surfing around with a web browser. My solution would be on every OEM pc sold. Seems like a more useful setup to me.
Yes, there are security implications, but only as much as having any self upgrading piece of software running in the background. (Besides, I never said Microsoft was the company I'd pick to make the software.;) Besides, even if it did get hacked, you could have it runnig in a sandbox so that the system's integrity would never be jeopardized.
The people buying computers these days are pretty clueless. I've seen people buy computers without having even used one before. Just because it's the 'in' thing. We might as well put all that wasted processing power to good use!
Re:Linux on the desktop is a matter of ambition
on
Alan Cox Interview
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· Score: 2
Maybe you should start up a project to make a standard GUI installer that everyone can use.
As I had stated at the end of my little rant, that is exactly what I am currently doing. Sorry if I wasn't more clear.:)
Re:Linux on the desktop is a matter of ambition
on
Alan Cox Interview
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, the biggest problem that I find with Linux on the desktop has little to do with the apps available for it, and more to do with the distribution channels. Think about it for a minute. Is there really any reason at all why we insist on distributing applications by source alone? Yes, I am aware that autoconf/automake makes installing as simple as './configure; make; make install', but is it REALLY that easy??? More often than not I find that Linux applications are a severe pain in the ass to install. Library requirements must be met, so you must hunt down the libraries, build and install those, but not before finding THEIR library requirements, and so on... There are many exceptions (Apache is probably a shining example of this), but for the most part it's true.
Over the years, I've found many applications that I wanted to use, only to simply give up because a binary package was not available. At 1am on a weekday, my dedication to installing an app is limited to either typing less than 5 commands, or walking through a gui installer. If anything hiccups along the way, my stance is (excuse the french) 'Fuck it, I guess I don't really need this'. Which basically limits my 1am install sessions to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and StarOffice. The 3 apps that I can './configure;make;make install' in my sleep, and the app with a gui installer.
So, why aren't we using more gui installers? I realize that there are quite a few zealots out there that are absolute control freaks. They feel the need to get the source and mess with it. That's really cool in my opinion. I've done it once or twice as well, and I can see the benefits of having the source available. But that doesn't mean that I think source code is a great way to distribute an application.
So use RPM's/DEB's/apt-get. Well that's all great, but I'd rather not use a platform specific packaging system to install applications that aren't all that platform specific. Plus RPMs have their own cute little version of the 'Windows DLL Hell'. It's call RPM Dependancy Hell. And at 1am, that shit flies about as well as autoconf bitching about a missing required library. I don't believe that I need to repeat my stance on that.
So why can't I just get a package that has everything required to run an application bundled with it??? Obviously I don't want an entire GNOME install when I try to install gedit, but if GNOME declared a standard 1.0 base, there really isn't any reason why I can't have binary compatability with any GNOME 1.0 libs. That includes updates to those libs.
Now obviously there will be compatability issues between architectures. So I'm not saying that autoconf doesn't have a place in all of this. It most certainly does. But why rely on it (or even RPMs) when joe sixpack already understands how to simply click 'next, next, finish'?
I hope I got my point across. This isn't a rant directed at the poster of the parent. Sorry if it seemed that way at all. This is really just a general rant of mine that seemed to fit this thread of discussion. By the way, I'm already working on the packaging system I speak of. So I'm not bitching without contributing.;)
Bitching about how letting MS put it's products into our children's classrooms will only increase their foothold isn't going to help when you only do it on slashdot! Here's the contact info for making your argument known! For those extra lazy people (myself included), they are also accepting emails!
US Postal Services:
Renata Hesse,Trial Attorney
Suite 1200, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Washington, DC 20530
Email:
microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Fax:
202-616-9937 or 202-307-1545
Try not to be too rude. Remember, someone has to actually read these, and you'll only make them ignore your arguments if you are snide. Also, try to get records of reciept where possible. (Send by certified mail, use email reciepts, get fax reciepts) Supposedly ALL recieved comments will be published in the Federal Register. So if you don't see your comment in it with all the others, then you will have your reciept to back up your claim that not all comments were considered and included!
This is exactly what Sleepycat Software does with Berkely DB.
They will accept patches to their code, but not many of them ever make it in, and the ones that do make it in have the requirement of having the copyright signed over to Sleepycat. Effectively making them the sole owner of the codebase. Which, in turn, allows them to sell a relicensed version of their code to embedded manufacturers.
Using this model, they've kept a positive income since day 1.
If I were in the position of making the transfer, I'd explore the possibilities of a outage-less transfer as well. But looking back on previous experience of how my old employer handles issues like this (let's unplug it and plug it back in!), I fully expect 15 minutes of downtime sometime on friday morning or afternoon.
That's what I told my fiance as well. Her superiors told all CSRs to stop doing account conversions because of this issue. My response was to leave @Home in the dust and continue converting everyone. When @Home goes dark, pull @Home's UBR and simply issue a reset on all nodes. One-by-one every customer will come back online, this time guaranteed to be on the proper network. They'll get about 100 calls during the 15 minutes of downtime, but tech support could use the work. They've all been getting lazy ever since I stopped working there.
...or Extremely Low Frequency for those that have never heard the term before.
The nava used this to communicate with submarines on the other side of the earth by directing ELF signals directly through the earth's core. Saw it on Discovery once.:) I'm not sure if it's still in use today. Usually the government only shows you out-of-service tech on cable networks.
I'm hearing rumors that @Home is delibrately causing issues with customer account conversions at various cable offices. My fiance is a CSR, and she's been talking about how @Home's sytems are no longer removing modem records from the headends, and the regional General Manager is contantly on the phone bitching at them to fix it (and fast). Apparently every time they try to convert a customer, they issue the account close operation, and it returns successfully, but the customer's modem stays online. When they add the local record for the subscriber, their UBR is given the appropriate information and will accept the modems, but the customer has a 50/50 chance of the @Home UBR responding before theirs. Effectively keeping most customers on @Home's network.
You'd think that they were just having issues with their UBR, or maybe with their access to @Home's subscriber management system, but they are able to successfully add new customers to their own service just fine, and everything was going smoothly with conversions until just a week ago.
Could be @Home being a prick until the very last minute, could be a coincedence. I'm not apt to support one theory or the other, I'm just relaying what I hear.
"I think everyone should devote 5 minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to this article."
5 minutes my ass. Now that me and 250,000 other people are all trying to access their server within the same 15 minute timeframe, it's going to be a good 5 minute wait per page. Lol!
First my view:
I used to work in the cable modem industry, and my beliefs made it very hard to me to tell people that they needed to cough up an extra $4.95 per computer they wanted online.
I always looked at it like every other cable or electricity or phone service. You pay a certain amount of money for a line that goes up to your house, and the ability to use the service provided in general.
Think about it. I can have 1 phone, or 10,000 phones all connected to the same phone line. The phone company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the number of calls I make. I can have 1 outlet, or 10,000 outlets. (Or one desk lamp, or 10,000 desk lamps.) The elctric company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the amount of electricity used.
The cable company will let me connect 1 or 10,000 televisions up to their CATV service, so long as I pay my monthly bill for the channels I recieve.
Similarly, I should be able to have 1 computer, or 10,000 computers, so long as I pay for the bandwidth and IPs I use. In my case, I use 1 IP amongst 4 computers, and have opted to pay for the fastest cable modem service available, making it easy for all 4 computers to be using the service without noticable speed problems.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with my setup.
Now for the problem:
IPv4 has a limit number of valid IP's available. Many of the class A ranges are already taken by telco's and large network companies. If everyone obeyed the cable company's silly policies about 1 IP per computer, they WOULD run out of IP space. Yes, it would be a while, but if everyone that could have cable television had cable internet, and they all had an average of 1.5 PC's in their homes, you're looking at more than likely more IPs than are currently available.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see any mention of price on the page.
It has to be comparable to the price of a regular glass, or bars and restaurants simply won't buy them. Broken dishes happen in these places. There is simply no denying it, and no way around it. Damn near everyone has been in an establishment and heard it happen. I can understand an owner shying away from these if they turn $100 in broken dishes into $1000 in broken dishes.
I'm not sure. They got so close to bankrupt that they had to cut their staff down to ~3 people. This is after they already had to make cuts from ~30 ppl down to ~8. I made the first cut, but started looking for alternate jobs right away. I was laid off when the second round of cuts came along.
My guess is, no, they haven't learned their lesson. I don't expect them to survive the rest of this year.
There were only 3 pages with that much code, and their functionality was extremely different, so code reuse wasn't possible. Believe me, I looked! And yes, I knew as well as you that this project would be impossible to do. I fought it tooth and nail, yet my boss only saw the dollar signs floating by.
My first reaction to the mockups we were given was, "we're doing this with java applets, right?". Once that was shot down, i knew the project was impossible. It ended up being at least three times over bugdet, and my the company had only charged the client a flat rate for the whole sha-bang. So, yes, we got screwed.
I finished doing a web-based application for a client about 4 months ago. That was a complete nightmare. They wanted native gui functionality, yet cross-platform, and it had to work on netscape (all vers) and IE (all vers). Oh, did I mention that we couldn't expect the users to download anything additional, EVER? So that ruled out java applets (since xp doesn't have a jvm by default). The whole thing was done with ASP, Javascript, and plain html forms.
Making a long story short, the Netscape 4.x functionality ended up being severely lacking (since 4.x JS engine wasn't capable of performing most of the functionality they wanted). Oh, we weren't allowed to refresh the pages very often, so almost everything had to be done with JS actively manipulating the current document. To make matters worse, my spineless boss allowed them to change the spec several times throughout the project. When you have 1000+ lines of JS per page, any little change is a pain in the ass.
And just exactly where are people going to attain work experience if everyone does as you, and sends them all to the help desk?
I've done my time on the help desk, and have since become a Sun certified system admin. I didn't go to any third rate night school either. I did it the real way. I bought a book for $35, a sparcstation for under $100 off eBay, and downloaded the Solaris 8 SPARCplatform cd's from Sun's website. I had my cert in less then 2 months, and I worked my ass off to get it.
So given that, when you see my resume, where do you think it really should have gone? Here's a better question, how can you tell just by looking at a piece of paper how much work went into getting that cert, and how much knowldege was attained?
I tried mentioning this in a thread, but it was too quickly drown out. There is a free product that does ld_preload style memory leak detection. It even does memory allocation profiling, so you can find that hidden 'for' loop that is responsible for that extra 15MB of allocated memory. The gui is done with gtk+, so it's easy to use, and will run on most any linux distro these days.
It's available at http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/memprof/
Freshmeat has an entry for it as well.
yea, it's called memprof. works great. And if you compiled your binary with debugging symbols on, it'll even give you line numbers and stack dumps.
"Your's for a mere $100 each!"
Am I the only one who didn't see a price tag on this little gem? I might spend as much as $1 more for this new fan design, but I wouldn't spend twice as much. From the lack of a price on their webpage, that's probably what it costs. Prices are usually not easily gotten when the manufacturer is worried that its outrageousness will steer you away from their product.
Somehow I don't see this as being safe. Not because of the materials used for construction, but simply because a few winters of negligence will make this sucker rust right through. If I was this guy's neightbor, I'd probably ride this thing a few times, but only during the first few weeks, and definitely not after a year.
The big difference between his ride and coaster parks that make the parks safer? They have mandatory ride inspections every morning before opening. Plus I believe they are also required to do a full inch-by-inch examination at least once a year. Probably before opening in the spring.
Both @Home and my employer were publically traded at the time. However, that statement was a figure of speech. (Was on a rant, and it sounded good. I definitely wouldn't have recommended that stock, though.) No one I knew had any @Home stock anyways. Even if I could be linked to this statement on Slashdot, what you have is an uncorroborated statement from over 2 years ago, and no specific stock transactions to back it up. I can't see that standing in any court.
:)
No worries.
(Hope I didn't sound like a dick or anything. I don't want to sound like I'm talking down to you. Just want to show my lack of worry and why. Cheers. )
Jesus christ. Every goddam analyst on the planet seems to think they know why @Home failed. It's not rocket science, it's basic accounting.
You dump a few billion dollars into a nationwide network, and then you convince every cable television provider you can shake a stick at that broadband internet is within their grasp, and that you'll help them deploy it by being their internet access point. You get a few hundred cable systems online, and all is good. You get 50% of their profits for providing the bandwidth, and they are happy because they've found a new source of revenue.
Your market share continues to rise as your cable systems count skyrockets past the thousands. Everything is great! But then it happens. Being that cable systems are greedy bastards, they start eyeing up your 50% of the profits. Then, the guy in their NOC that actually had the cluestick long enough to set up the whole damn headend for broadband internet has an idea. Why don't we just drop @Home and get our bandwidth from the local telcos? After all, DS3's from Chicago cost thousands more than DS3's from the Bell office down the street.
And one by one, every cable system that @Home helped set up, went independant. I worked in the cable industry at the time, and I saw it coming from a mile away. Hell, I watched the DS3 from @Home go dead. I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
But it gets better. @Home wasn't stupid. They knew that cable providers would eventually catch on. So they made lengthy contract with them. The problem is, the contracts ended up benig too market specific. For months, we supported both @Home, and our proprietary network. All new markets going live with broadband internet wouldn't even know what @Home was, as we only offered our proprietary network in new markets.
Eventually, we bought out the remainder of the @Home contract. @Home was stupid as all hell to let that happen too. That market's size has more than doubled in the past year. They would have been rolling in it. But then again, I supposed that when you're billions in debt, lump sums of cash can sure be appealing to your accountants as they try to fend off the lenders.
Making a long story short, @Home's demise had little to do with their network, and everything to do with unrenewed/prematurely-ended contracts. @Home's network was incredibly fast. Surprised the hell out of our network engineer at several times. But, you just can't run a business when you're not generating revenue.
I'm currently working on a solution to that problem.
:)
There is really no reason why we can't have binary compatability between x86 distributions. What's really missing is a common packaging format. One that actually includes ALL nonstandard required libraries, and is self installing. (Meaning that it is a self installing executable that has no non-standard library requirements.)
The difficulty really comes in trying to determine what libraries are standard and which are not. I'm currently thinking of basing this on the Linux Standard Base. It seems to have a lot of weight with the large distro makers. (Hell, RedHat is a contributer!)
But you are absolutely right. Linux needs a "next, next, finish" installer. Trust me, it is on it's way. Just be patient.
If I were an OEM, I could install both Linux and Windows on the same machine, and be able to offer my customers a simple multi-boot solution without having to modify the boot sector at all. It's called a boot disk. Insert this disk when you want to boot to Linux. The disk contains nothing more than SysLinux, which is set up to boot the linux partition off of the harddrive. There, OEM License problem is solved.
Then just put a little icon on the Linux desktops. "Tire of using a floppy to boot linux?" Curious users will click it, and it will Druid them right through installing a multiOS bootloader on their harddrive. Probably LILO or GRUB. And voila, you're done.
Of course, most OEMs aren't too bright when it comes to getting around license restrictions. The legal departments tend to jump onto the MS bandwagon pretty quickly since it's been their bread and butter for so long.
So pay them for units their computer's complete. Problem solved. Now the OEM looks like a godsend to Joe Sixpack because they'll pay him just to leave it turned on. And since Joe Sixpack doesn't know jack about computers, he doesn't realize that he'll save money by not having it do anything.
A more effective solution would be to have operating systems ship with distributed computing clients pre-installed. That way, if it's ever on the net, it'll be able to do work.
;) Besides, even if it did get hacked, you could have it runnig in a sandbox so that the system's integrity would never be jeopardized.
The current implementation of Leech Computer requires the user to be surfing around with a web browser. My solution would be on every OEM pc sold. Seems like a more useful setup to me.
Yes, there are security implications, but only as much as having any self upgrading piece of software running in the background. (Besides, I never said Microsoft was the company I'd pick to make the software.
The people buying computers these days are pretty clueless. I've seen people buy computers without having even used one before. Just because it's the 'in' thing. We might as well put all that wasted processing power to good use!
Actually, the biggest problem that I find with Linux on the desktop has little to do with the apps available for it, and more to do with the distribution channels. Think about it for a minute. Is there really any reason at all why we insist on distributing applications by source alone? Yes, I am aware that autoconf/automake makes installing as simple as './configure; make; make install', but is it REALLY that easy??? More often than not I find that Linux applications are a severe pain in the ass to install. Library requirements must be met, so you must hunt down the libraries, build and install those, but not before finding THEIR library requirements, and so on... There are many exceptions (Apache is probably a shining example of this), but for the most part it's true.
;)
Over the years, I've found many applications that I wanted to use, only to simply give up because a binary package was not available. At 1am on a weekday, my dedication to installing an app is limited to either typing less than 5 commands, or walking through a gui installer. If anything hiccups along the way, my stance is (excuse the french) 'Fuck it, I guess I don't really need this'. Which basically limits my 1am install sessions to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and StarOffice. The 3 apps that I can './configure;make;make install' in my sleep, and the app with a gui installer.
So, why aren't we using more gui installers? I realize that there are quite a few zealots out there that are absolute control freaks. They feel the need to get the source and mess with it. That's really cool in my opinion. I've done it once or twice as well, and I can see the benefits of having the source available. But that doesn't mean that I think source code is a great way to distribute an application.
So use RPM's/DEB's/apt-get. Well that's all great, but I'd rather not use a platform specific packaging system to install applications that aren't all that platform specific. Plus RPMs have their own cute little version of the 'Windows DLL Hell'. It's call RPM Dependancy Hell. And at 1am, that shit flies about as well as autoconf bitching about a missing required library. I don't believe that I need to repeat my stance on that.
So why can't I just get a package that has everything required to run an application bundled with it??? Obviously I don't want an entire GNOME install when I try to install gedit, but if GNOME declared a standard 1.0 base, there really isn't any reason why I can't have binary compatability with any GNOME 1.0 libs. That includes updates to those libs.
Now obviously there will be compatability issues between architectures. So I'm not saying that autoconf doesn't have a place in all of this. It most certainly does. But why rely on it (or even RPMs) when joe sixpack already understands how to simply click 'next, next, finish'?
I hope I got my point across. This isn't a rant directed at the poster of the parent. Sorry if it seemed that way at all. This is really just a general rant of mine that seemed to fit this thread of discussion. By the way, I'm already working on the packaging system I speak of. So I'm not bitching without contributing.
Bitching about how letting MS put it's products into our children's classrooms will only increase their foothold isn't going to help when you only do it on slashdot! Here's the contact info for making your argument known! For those extra lazy people (myself included), they are also accepting emails!
US Postal Services:
Renata Hesse,Trial Attorney
Suite 1200, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice
601 D Street NW
Washington, DC 20530
Email:
microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Fax:
202-616-9937 or 202-307-1545
Try not to be too rude. Remember, someone has to actually read these, and you'll only make them ignore your arguments if you are snide. Also, try to get records of reciept where possible. (Send by certified mail, use email reciepts, get fax reciepts) Supposedly ALL recieved comments will be published in the Federal Register. So if you don't see your comment in it with all the others, then you will have your reciept to back up your claim that not all comments were considered and included!
This is exactly what Sleepycat Software does with Berkely DB.
They will accept patches to their code, but not many of them ever make it in, and the ones that do make it in have the requirement of having the copyright signed over to Sleepycat. Effectively making them the sole owner of the codebase. Which, in turn, allows them to sell a relicensed version of their code to embedded manufacturers. Using this model, they've kept a positive income since day 1.
If I were in the position of making the transfer, I'd explore the possibilities of a outage-less transfer as well. But looking back on previous experience of how my old employer handles issues like this (let's unplug it and plug it back in!), I fully expect 15 minutes of downtime sometime on friday morning or afternoon.
That's what I told my fiance as well. Her superiors told all CSRs to stop doing account conversions because of this issue. My response was to leave @Home in the dust and continue converting everyone. When @Home goes dark, pull @Home's UBR and simply issue a reset on all nodes. One-by-one every customer will come back online, this time guaranteed to be on the proper network. They'll get about 100 calls during the 15 minutes of downtime, but tech support could use the work. They've all been getting lazy ever since I stopped working there.
...or Extremely Low Frequency for those that have never heard the term before.
:) I'm not sure if it's still in use today. Usually the government only shows you out-of-service tech on cable networks.
The nava used this to communicate with submarines on the other side of the earth by directing ELF signals directly through the earth's core. Saw it on Discovery once.
I'm hearing rumors that @Home is delibrately causing issues with customer account conversions at various cable offices. My fiance is a CSR, and she's been talking about how @Home's sytems are no longer removing modem records from the headends, and the regional General Manager is contantly on the phone bitching at them to fix it (and fast). Apparently every time they try to convert a customer, they issue the account close operation, and it returns successfully, but the customer's modem stays online. When they add the local record for the subscriber, their UBR is given the appropriate information and will accept the modems, but the customer has a 50/50 chance of the @Home UBR responding before theirs. Effectively keeping most customers on @Home's network.
You'd think that they were just having issues with their UBR, or maybe with their access to @Home's subscriber management system, but they are able to successfully add new customers to their own service just fine, and everything was going smoothly with conversions until just a week ago.
Could be @Home being a prick until the very last minute, could be a coincedence. I'm not apt to support one theory or the other, I'm just relaying what I hear.
Moderation: -1 Heresay! (lmao)
First my view:
I used to work in the cable modem industry, and my beliefs made it very hard to me to tell people that they needed to cough up an extra $4.95 per computer they wanted online.
I always looked at it like every other cable or electricity or phone service. You pay a certain amount of money for a line that goes up to your house, and the ability to use the service provided in general.
Think about it. I can have 1 phone, or 10,000 phones all connected to the same phone line. The phone company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the number of calls I make. I can have 1 outlet, or 10,000 outlets. (Or one desk lamp, or 10,000 desk lamps.) The elctric company doesn't care, so long as I pay for the amount of electricity used.
The cable company will let me connect 1 or 10,000 televisions up to their CATV service, so long as I pay my monthly bill for the channels I recieve.
Similarly, I should be able to have 1 computer, or 10,000 computers, so long as I pay for the bandwidth and IPs I use. In my case, I use 1 IP amongst 4 computers, and have opted to pay for the fastest cable modem service available, making it easy for all 4 computers to be using the service without noticable speed problems.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with my setup.
Now for the problem:
IPv4 has a limit number of valid IP's available. Many of the class A ranges are already taken by telco's and large network companies. If everyone obeyed the cable company's silly policies about 1 IP per computer, they WOULD run out of IP space. Yes, it would be a while, but if everyone that could have cable television had cable internet, and they all had an average of 1.5 PC's in their homes, you're looking at more than likely more IPs than are currently available.