I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.
Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??
Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.
Sure, it sounds great. But the minute some company actually goes and does this, there will be a hue and cry from this and other quarters. "Information wants to be free" , will be the battle cry. A rash of projects to mirror, deliver fee-free, and thereby rip-off the content and intellectual property of these sites will be started, and any efforts to stifle them will be ridiculed and railed against. Companies will sue sites like Slashdot, which even now, in a fee-free world, routinely have users posting verbatim copies of the content which these companies hope to sell, and there will be outrage at this.
All micropayment and other schemes where people have to pay for something for content sound great until they really happen. Then we'll see how really honest people are. If music serves as any example, I for one am not optimistic.
In the Xena episode where Xena's psyche controlled your body, how much fun was it kissing Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor)? Was it weird kissing a woman knowing that you were really playing a woman in a man's body ? Did you channel any special feminity in that scene ?
Are you telling us that engineers are really much better qualified to run businesses than (say) the MBAs you ridicule ? MBAs are smart people who have gone through a certain amount of schooling learning how business works. Engineers are, for the most part, good at engineering but not necessarily good - or even schooled at - running a business.
Engineers are just as qualified at making stupid, stupid business decisions. How many stupid features in products/websites/programs have you seen because of something some engineer almost certainly put in or decided? Wasn't "Clippy" of Microsoft Word just "put in" by an engineer ? Isn't that one of the stupidest things ever ?
Just as you and I wouldn't place our faith in an MBA doing web development (I assume you mean coding) just because he used to manage a carpet business, I wouldn't put any faith in some engineer running my business just because he's a engineer and knows Linux, Java and HTML.
First the poster says that modern laptops have whiz-bang features you don't need (I am hard-pressed to think of which features these might be), then he goes on to demand a nice screen, ultra-light weight, insane (and unrealistic) battery life, good video performance for anti-aliased fonts, and built-in networking. He says he doesn't want a beefy processor but then says he's going to do coding and run Emacs...in my experience either or both require a beefy processor.
The inherent contradictions should be clear to all. The reality is, if you want all these features, you're going to be stuck with a whiz-bang computer. The latest screen, networking, and battery technologies always come with the most beefy processor available in the day, because those people who can afford those technologies are the ones who need and can afford the beefy processor. Sorry, but you're just NOT going to find ultralites with beautiful 15" TFT screens and 8-hour (?) battery life that runs a Celeron. And as others have suggested, you have NO chance of making a machine of your specifications - laptops represent the cutting edge of consumer PCs in almost every respect except where heat is a mitigating factor.
And forget about taking a computer to Tokyo and not charging it for a week, unless you plan to leave it in hibernate mode.
Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?
SCSI isn't more popular precisely because it is so damn expensive. To use your example, who exactly can afford the price of an Ultra160 controller and drive just for "application installs and OS install/cache" ?? Precious few people. Who *really* needs more than 4 drives - very few people, especially when bigger and bigger drives just get cheaper and cheaper.
And SCSI isn't cheaper because there is the less expensive IDE always available. Even if SCSI could be made as cheaply as IDE, good marketing people will always price SCSI devices more than comparably-sized IDE devices, because the people who need SCSI's features are willing to pay a premium over IDE. At least in this regard, it is all about market segmentation and differentiation.
A good friend of mine is of Slovenian and in an effort to bring me up to speed with the Slovenian govt's E-initiatives, she has been teaching me Slovenian. I thought I'd pass on what I've learned so far; spellings are phonetic (haven't learned how to read yet)
Ocusee moya clobasa (Taste my sausage)
Hochesh egrat tap-tap (Do you want to play tap-tap)
Yasmeeslin da bom coohil yitseh (I think I'm going to cook some eggs - note: 'cook some eggs' is a euphemism for farting)
That's all I've learned so far, but I'm eager to learn more about this beautiful language !
I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G.
This is very similar to the old maxim that the computer you really want is always $5000. Only now, for that money you get a 21" flat panel display, multiple GIGAhertz and more RAM than you can shake a stick at.
Personally I think that Source Forge being open source itself was cool but rather secondary to the fact that source forge provides a great place for people to collaborate on projects.
I think that it the acquiescence of one of Open Source's flagship companies to the realities of business that people are distressed about. After all the talk, it becomes harder and harder for people who want to argue that "Open Source software can work" to do so when their most prominent exemplars cannot seem to make it work. So we begin to see rationalizations like "I don't care if this Open Source site runs non-Open Source software" that try to jibe reality with an ill-fitting philosophy.
Make no mistake, if an Open Source site like Source Forge runs on proprietary software (which I don't think it does, anyways), or if an Open Source company resorts to Closed-Source business practices, that represents a HUGE P.R. blow to Open Source's credibility. If Open Source isn't good enough for its own advocates, just who would it be good for ? Just think about how foolish Microsoft looked running Hotmail on FreeBSD; think about how silly RedHat or Slashdot would look if they had to run on NT/IIS; think about how bad Stallman would look if he released a commercial and closed-source Emacs.
I have been suspecting that Microsoft's strategy may well be along the lines of what the original poster suggested. Didn't the Hallowe'en documents emerge at a key point in the antitrust proceedings ? Isn't this memo now also emerging at a key point ?
That Linux is making vast inroads at the server level is undeniable, but whether this by itself threatens Microsoft's OS hegemony is very, very arguable.
However, with Microsoft seeding the public with the tantalizing possibility that maybe - just maybe - Microsoft no longer possesses the bone-crushing arm-twisting power of its former monopoly, they decrease the vociferousness of MS backlash and, more specifically, of DOJ remedies. Wouldn't breaking up Microsoft be silly if Microsoft no longer dominated the marketplace ?
At this point, Microsoft can do no better than suggest that it has serious competitors. This may well be the rationale behind this (supposedly leaked) memo, just as it may well be the rationale for Microsoft supporting Apple with its cash infusions and now more recently with Office X.
Since the rejoinder to any WinCE machine is "Does it run Linux", I'm sure curious as to whether it runs Windows. Some geeks are interested in Windows machines, too, you know.
I'd have a hard time taking this book seriously
on
God's Debris
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· Score: 3, Funny
It would be hard to take any book by him that does not contain comic strips, seriously. I would also find it hard to take seriously a book on philosophy by Charles Schultz, Stan Lee, O.J. Simpson, or Tonya Harding. There's just too much extra baggage tied up with what I think I know of the author. Plus I still haven't forgiven him for that damn Dilbert T.V. show.
I fell into my job by accident. I don't love it, but it is a paycheck, and my experience might be useful.
I installed Linux in grad school (Psychology) while fooling with some web stuff. I learned just enough to write Perl scripts, move files around, configure interfaces, build Apache, set up virtual hosts, and configure my MUD client. Really minimal.
After grad school I took a job as a programmer for a few months where I did no administration. Then I started working for a pissy little young web development company. They needed someone to write Perl CGIs and they wanted someone with an academic pedigree, which I had. After meeting with the owner I bought a book on CGI programming, and learned how to write very minimal CGIs (with Perl). A couple of days later I was working for them, writing all their CGIs.
At this point they had their own 'administrator', which meant a tech guy they had off-site who could answer their questions. We had to telnet in to a box at the provider to do work. Our company had no "production" or "development" servers; all development work was just stashed under a hidden directory (of course this caused problems when an HTML monkey overwrote files in the wrong directory).
I quickly realized that I could run Apache in the office, and use my box as the development server. Our company also had this problem where we had only 10 I.P. addresses, and greater than 10 employees (part and full time). You can imagine the chaos this caused for a company working on Web work: people were literally stealing each other's IP addresses if they went to lunch or the bathroom, and other people were perplexed as to why all of a sudden their Net connections weren't working properly..
So I set up NAT on a Linux box, and the problem was solved. By this point I had *become* the de facto sysadmin, not by design or calculated career path or formal training, but by accident. I knew how to do some things, and I knew how to find out how to do the things I didn't, and I just went ahead and did them. Once you solve a problem or do something that needs to be done you start building credibility. Just make sure you do it right. Once you start doing some things you will be surprised at how many other things people ask you to do, and how many things you find yourself having to learn how to do.
So my advice to a would-be admin is - anyone can get into the field. Just start doing it. Set up a Linux box at home and host your own domain. Figure out how DNS works. Get a book on CGI and Perl and learn to write some CGIs. Host virtual domains. Set up email accounts and give them to your friends and family, and thereby learn how to administer users and mail and all the headaches that come with it. Design workable backup schemes even if you have nothing worth backing up. All this work *does* count for something, if not full-fledged work experience, it is better than nothing.
Then find a company that is willing to hire someone who is industrious but maybe not too experienced. Often times these are the tight-wads that don't want to pay for a 'real' administrator, but you're not a real administrator yet, anyways, so that's perfect. Look for companies that haven't yet figured out they need a UNIX-like solution, then go in and provide it for them.
Or do pro-bono or volunteer work. Just do something.
A while ago I tried to register a (.CA) domain with Register.com. They showed it as available, so I paid my money (March 6/2001) and waited for confirmation in the next few days as instructed. Each day I checked the domain's availability on Register.com (by using their search facility); each day it was listed as "Available". As early as March 6, I filed an inquiry with Support. More than a week later the domain was still showing as available. Perhaps a week and a half later I did a search on a Canadian registrar, which showed the domain as "UNAV". I thought perhaps that was my registration that had become pending. Register.com still showed the domain as available. I inquired with Register.com's customer service who set about investigating.
Then a few days later I found (at the Candian registrar) that it was now registered to another party in British Columbia. But the registration info looked phony...there was a bogus phone # and a bogus zip code. The descriptor fields looked bogus, as if they were trying to make a wan attempt at justifying their existence : they claimed it would be for "imaging purposes" (months later, there is no imaging purpose visible whatsoever).
At this point the WHOIS record had a Date-Approved field of March 20/2001 - 2 weeks after my initial registration . Though the latter refunded my money, I started feeling cheated.
I began wondering whether it was possible that some party in Canada had "hijacked" my registration attempt in transit, determined that a valuable domain was available, and set up a bogus registration complete with contact information and dummied-up purpose in order to claim it.
Is what I am imaging even at all possible ?
Are.CA domains registered completely electronically, or is there a human somewhere in the loop ? What are the procedures for registering a domain dispute ? (I found some body at one point that seemed as if it would govern.CA disputes, and sent them an email, but never received a reply and put the issue to bed until I saw this article).
I supect the Author's sole anecdotel example is also their neighbor. There isn't a story here.
So you view Net access as a necessity, and you would pay for it before anything else. Good for you. However, since this is a site with "News for Geeks", I presume you are a geek. Not everyone else views broadband - let alone Net access - as a necessity. Many people still see it as a luxury, and as such are less likely to pay a premium for it.
Don't be so sure that the author's example is the only one available. There are LOTS of people who have made similar choices, and there are WAY MORE people who chose never to pay the premium to go to broadband in the first place - else subscription rates in areas where available would be 100%, which they certainly are not.
Your analysis presupposes that all people care about Net access equally, such that they 1) will pay a premium for faster speed, or 2) will pay for a 2nd phone line if they opt for dialup. Both presuppose that the individual really cares about readily available, high-speed access, but many do not.
It might make economic sense to you, but there is a clear difference in cost ( using your numbers, a total of $40-$50/month if the person is willing to use his/her voiceline for dialup) for the luxury of faster downloads and no wait time. Even $10-$20 a month (if the dialup person springs for a 2nd line) is not a trivial amount. If you're just checking email, or reading CNN in the evenings, you really don't need broadband. Heck, just a few years ago, I used to download LOTS of binaries over a 28.8K connection - I just would start the download before I went to bed.
Not everyone cares if they have dog-slow downloads, and not everyone cares about a 30-second wait to dial into their ISP. Most people still view Net access alone as a luxury; more still view fast and always-on Net access as even more of a luxury. And cost-conscious people are most likely to cut their expenditures on luxuries first. As, for instance, with the woman in the source article who seemed to have lost her job.
And if you challenge a cybersquatter by having a lawyer even so much as draft the necessary letters, you will incur a legal fees which almost certainly will cover registration fees for the next decade or two at minimum.
Linux is and has always been a server OS and I find it rather amusing that a simple pretty GUI email application is being crowned as "One of the most important projects in the open source world today"
It is amusing. Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency. As with most chauvinisms, particular points are relevant only to the extent that one's own biases are being advanced.
Of course, if Microsoft went about creating phony email addresses and 'real' mail addresses while writing into the public forum, they would be roundly abused here. Oh, I forgot, they did do that and we did do that.
It *is* fair to make these comparisons since the G4 and the P4 are the best Motorola and Intel have to offer us, right now. It's irrelevant what the G4 was "aimed at competing with"; what is relevant is what we have in our hands now.
I'm *certain* there are companies out there using Linux to host "mission-critical" (whatever that means) RDMSes. But this by itself would tell us nothing of Linux's suitability for this purpose. I happen to know lots of companies that use Linux for this purpose, but they also are companies that would not be able to afford the Sun boxes and Oracle licenses that they wish they could run. I also know several places running Linux for - what they would consider to be - "mission-critical" RDMS, but what they consider to be mission-critical is FAR different than what a big investment bank or hospital would consider to be mission critical.
Instead of just asking a question that is almost guaranteed to pat ourselves on the back, we need to also ask for descriptions of the conditions that people are using Linux for RDMSes. That is, before the answer "are you using Linux" can be properly interpreted, we also need to know answers to questions like: How many connections ? How many users ? What size of a database ? What kind of availability do you demand ? What kind of information is being stored ? How big is your staff ? How big is your budget ?
After all, knowing that a company uses Linux to host Postgres/MySql tells us nothing if the company can't afford to buy a Sun box/Oracle license in the first place.
I don't understand this classification at all. Why is this a story about 'my' rights ? I don't see how 'my' rights or 'your' rights were infringed upon when the site was shut down - while it is a nice resource, the "rights" moniker seems to imply some entitlement to this website. If someone shut down Britannica - say due to copyright issues - I certainly wouldn't be complaining about violation of 'my' rights. And I don't see any mention of access to and availability of arbitrary websites in the Constitution.
Surely we are not entitled to this website, after all, are we ??
The paper really spends most of its time talking about how they settled on the color scheme or arrangement of the circles on the graphs. This is perhaps more relevant in the context of the class the authors were taking. They spend only a few very short paragraphs on what they actually discovered or what could be discovered, and there were no real numbers presented.
A much more interesting article is here. It discusses a number of findings about Gnutella usage in the context of the famous "Tragedy of the Commons" dilemma commonly studied by economists, and the ramifications these findings have for the long term viability of Gnutella networks.
Do we really need these things anymore? I'm sure most television viewers out there can associate shows to networks, these days.
Come on. Firstly, viewers these days are FAR less likely to associate shows to network, and any ability to associate such is largely due to the effect of the superimposed logo. Do you know which network runs "The West Wing", the World Series or "Monday Night Football" ? I sure don't. This is NOT the days of old where there were precious few networks/channels, the networks had much larger mindshare, and there actually was such a thing as viewer loyalty.
Secondly, it is supremely hypocritical for an editor to argue that superimposed logos are not needed 'anymore' while his own website runs its own logo prominently. Don't you think most Slashdot readers know where they are ? Isn't this made more obvious by the fact that the location bar already *says* 'Slashdot' ?
At least one other poster has alluded to the powerful ability of VCRs and more recently PVRs to skip through commercials which are one of the major ways the networks both mark their brand and (of course) sell ad space. If this continues, it may be only a matter of time before networks are forced to start running advertisements underneath the programming itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.
Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??
Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.
Sure, it sounds great. But the minute some company actually goes and does this, there will be a hue and cry from this and other quarters. "Information wants to be free" , will be the battle cry. A rash of projects to mirror, deliver fee-free, and thereby rip-off the content and intellectual property of these sites will be started, and any efforts to stifle them will be ridiculed and railed against. Companies will sue sites like Slashdot, which even now, in a fee-free world, routinely have users posting verbatim copies of the content which these companies hope to sell, and there will be outrage at this.
All micropayment and other schemes where people have to pay for something for content sound great until they really happen. Then we'll see how really honest people are. If music serves as any example, I for one am not optimistic.
In the Xena episode where Xena's psyche controlled your body, how much fun was it kissing Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor)? Was it weird kissing a woman knowing that you were really playing a woman in a man's body ? Did you channel any special feminity in that scene ?
Are you telling us that engineers are really much better qualified to run businesses than (say) the MBAs you ridicule ? MBAs are smart people who have gone through a certain amount of schooling learning how business works. Engineers are, for the most part, good at engineering but not necessarily good - or even schooled at - running a business.
Engineers are just as qualified at making stupid, stupid business decisions. How many stupid features in products/websites/programs have you seen because of something some engineer almost certainly put in or decided? Wasn't "Clippy" of Microsoft Word just "put in" by an engineer ? Isn't that one of the stupidest things ever ?
Just as you and I wouldn't place our faith in an MBA doing web development (I assume you mean coding) just because he used to manage a carpet business, I wouldn't put any faith in some engineer running my business just because he's a engineer and knows Linux, Java and HTML.
First the poster says that modern laptops have whiz-bang features you don't need (I am hard-pressed to think of which features these might be), then he goes on to demand a nice screen, ultra-light weight, insane (and unrealistic) battery life, good video performance for anti-aliased fonts, and built-in networking. He says he doesn't want a beefy processor but then says he's going to do coding and run Emacs...in my experience either or both require a beefy processor.
The inherent contradictions should be clear to all. The reality is, if you want all these features, you're going to be stuck with a whiz-bang computer. The latest screen, networking, and battery technologies always come with the most beefy processor available in the day, because those people who can afford those technologies are the ones who need and can afford the beefy processor. Sorry, but you're just NOT going to find ultralites with beautiful 15" TFT screens and 8-hour (?) battery life that runs a Celeron. And as others have suggested, you have NO chance of making a machine of your specifications - laptops represent the cutting edge of consumer PCs in almost every respect except where heat is a mitigating factor.
And forget about taking a computer to Tokyo and not charging it for a week, unless you plan to leave it in hibernate mode.
Basically, with all this going for it, why isn't SCSI more popular (and less expensive)?
SCSI isn't more popular precisely because it is so damn expensive. To use your example, who exactly can afford the price of an Ultra160 controller and drive just for "application installs and OS install/cache" ?? Precious few people. Who *really* needs more than 4 drives - very few people, especially when bigger and bigger drives just get cheaper and cheaper.
And SCSI isn't cheaper because there is the less expensive IDE always available. Even if SCSI could be made as cheaply as IDE, good marketing people will always price SCSI devices more than comparably-sized IDE devices, because the people who need SCSI's features are willing to pay a premium over IDE. At least in this regard, it is all about market segmentation and differentiation.
A good friend of mine is of Slovenian and in an effort to bring me up to speed with the Slovenian govt's E-initiatives, she has been teaching me Slovenian. I thought I'd pass on what I've learned so far; spellings are phonetic (haven't learned how to read yet)
Ocusee moya clobasa (Taste my sausage)
Hochesh egrat tap-tap (Do you want to play tap-tap)
Yasmeeslin da bom coohil yitseh (I think I'm going to cook some eggs - note: 'cook some eggs' is a euphemism for farting)
That's all I've learned so far, but I'm eager to learn more about this beautiful language !
I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G.
This is very similar to the old maxim that the computer you really want is always $5000. Only now, for that money you get a 21" flat panel display, multiple GIGAhertz and more RAM than you can shake a stick at.
Personally I think that Source Forge being open source itself was cool but rather secondary to the fact that source forge provides a great place for people to collaborate on projects.
I think that it the acquiescence of one of Open Source's flagship companies to the realities of business that people are distressed about. After all the talk, it becomes harder and harder for people who want to argue that "Open Source software can work" to do so when their most prominent exemplars cannot seem to make it work. So we begin to see rationalizations like "I don't care if this Open Source site runs non-Open Source software" that try to jibe reality with an ill-fitting philosophy.
Make no mistake, if an Open Source site like Source Forge runs on proprietary software (which I don't think it does, anyways), or if an Open Source company resorts to Closed-Source business practices, that represents a HUGE P.R. blow to Open Source's credibility. If Open Source isn't good enough for its own advocates, just who would it be good for ? Just think about how foolish Microsoft looked running Hotmail on FreeBSD; think about how silly RedHat or Slashdot would look if they had to run on NT/IIS; think about how bad Stallman would look if he released a commercial and closed-source Emacs.
I have been suspecting that Microsoft's strategy may well be along the lines of what the original poster suggested. Didn't the Hallowe'en documents emerge at a key point in the antitrust proceedings ? Isn't this memo now also emerging at a key point ?
That Linux is making vast inroads at the server level is undeniable, but whether this by itself threatens Microsoft's OS hegemony is very, very arguable.
However, with Microsoft seeding the public with the tantalizing possibility that maybe - just maybe - Microsoft no longer possesses the bone-crushing arm-twisting power of its former monopoly, they decrease the vociferousness of MS backlash and, more specifically, of DOJ remedies. Wouldn't breaking up Microsoft be silly if Microsoft no longer dominated the marketplace ?
At this point, Microsoft can do no better than suggest that it has serious competitors. This may well be the rationale behind this (supposedly leaked) memo, just as it may well be the rationale for Microsoft supporting Apple with its cash infusions and now more recently with Office X.
Don't believe everything you read.
Since the rejoinder to any WinCE machine is "Does it run Linux", I'm sure curious as to whether it runs Windows. Some geeks are interested in Windows machines, too, you know.
It would be hard to take any book by him that does not contain comic strips, seriously. I would also find it hard to take seriously a book on philosophy by Charles Schultz, Stan Lee, O.J. Simpson, or Tonya Harding. There's just too much extra baggage tied up with what I think I know of the author. Plus I still haven't forgiven him for that damn Dilbert T.V. show.
I fell into my job by accident. I don't love it, but it is a paycheck, and my experience might be useful.
I installed Linux in grad school (Psychology) while fooling with some web stuff. I learned just enough to write Perl scripts, move files around, configure interfaces, build Apache, set up virtual hosts, and configure my MUD client. Really minimal.
After grad school I took a job as a programmer for a few months where I did no administration. Then I started working for a pissy little young web development company. They needed someone to write Perl CGIs and they wanted someone with an academic pedigree, which I had. After meeting with the owner I bought a book on CGI programming, and learned how to write very minimal CGIs (with Perl). A couple of days later I was working for them, writing all their CGIs.
At this point they had their own 'administrator', which meant a tech guy they had off-site who could answer their questions. We had to telnet in to a box at the provider to do work. Our company had no "production" or "development" servers; all development work was just stashed under a hidden directory (of course this caused problems when an HTML monkey overwrote files in the wrong directory).
I quickly realized that I could run Apache in the office, and use my box as the development server. Our company also had this problem where we had only 10 I.P. addresses, and greater than 10 employees (part and full time). You can imagine the chaos this caused for a company working on Web work: people were literally stealing each other's IP addresses if they went to lunch or the bathroom, and other people were perplexed as to why all of a sudden their Net connections weren't working properly..
So I set up NAT on a Linux box, and the problem was solved. By this point I had *become* the de facto sysadmin, not by design or calculated career path or formal training, but by accident. I knew how to do some things, and I knew how to find out how to do the things I didn't, and I just went ahead and did them. Once you solve a problem or do something that needs to be done you start building credibility. Just make sure you do it right. Once you start doing some things you will be surprised at how many other things people ask you to do, and how many things you find yourself having to learn how to do.
So my advice to a would-be admin is - anyone can get into the field. Just start doing it. Set up a Linux box at home and host your own domain. Figure out how DNS works. Get a book on CGI and Perl and learn to write some CGIs. Host virtual domains. Set up email accounts and give them to your friends and family, and thereby learn how to administer users and mail and all the headaches that come with it. Design workable backup schemes even if you have nothing worth backing up. All this work *does* count for something, if not full-fledged work experience, it is better than nothing.
Then find a company that is willing to hire someone who is industrious but maybe not too experienced. Often times these are the tight-wads that don't want to pay for a 'real' administrator, but you're not a real administrator yet, anyways, so that's perfect. Look for companies that haven't yet figured out they need a UNIX-like solution, then go in and provide it for them.
Or do pro-bono or volunteer work. Just do something.
A while ago I tried to register a (.CA) domain with Register.com. They showed it as available, so I paid my money (March 6/2001) and waited for confirmation in the next few days as instructed. Each day I checked the domain's availability on Register.com (by using their search facility); each day it was listed as "Available". As early as March 6, I filed an inquiry with Support. More than a week later the domain was still showing as available. Perhaps a week and a half later I did a search on a Canadian registrar, which showed the domain as "UNAV". I thought perhaps that was my registration that had become pending. Register.com still showed the domain as available. I inquired with Register.com's customer service who set about investigating.
.CA domains registered completely electronically, or is there a human somewhere in the loop ? What are the procedures for registering a domain dispute ? (I found some body at one point that seemed as if it would govern .CA disputes, and sent them an email, but never received a reply and put the issue to bed until I saw this article).
Then a few days later I found (at the Candian registrar) that it was now registered to another party in British Columbia. But the registration info looked phony...there was a bogus phone # and a bogus zip code. The descriptor fields looked bogus, as if they were trying to make a wan attempt at justifying their existence : they claimed it would be for "imaging purposes" (months later, there is no imaging purpose visible whatsoever).
At this point the WHOIS record had a Date-Approved field of March 20/2001 - 2 weeks after my initial registration . Though the latter refunded my money, I started feeling cheated.
I began wondering whether it was possible that some party in Canada had "hijacked" my registration attempt in transit, determined that a valuable domain was available, and set up a bogus registration complete with contact information and dummied-up purpose in order to claim it.
Is what I am imaging even at all possible ?
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I supect the Author's sole anecdotel example is also their neighbor. There isn't a story here.
So you view Net access as a necessity, and you would pay for it before anything else. Good for you. However, since this is a site with "News for Geeks", I presume you are a geek. Not everyone else views broadband - let alone Net access - as a necessity. Many people still see it as a luxury, and as such are less likely to pay a premium for it.
Don't be so sure that the author's example is the only one available. There are LOTS of people who have made similar choices, and there are WAY MORE people who chose never to pay the premium to go to broadband in the first place - else subscription rates in areas where available would be 100%, which they certainly are not.
Your analysis presupposes that all people care about Net access equally, such that they 1) will pay a premium for faster speed, or 2) will pay for a 2nd phone line if they opt for dialup. Both presuppose that the individual really cares about readily available, high-speed access, but many do not.
It might make economic sense to you, but there is a clear difference in cost ( using your numbers, a total of $40-$50/month if the person is willing to use his/her voiceline for dialup) for the luxury of faster downloads and no wait time. Even $10-$20 a month (if the dialup person springs for a 2nd line) is not a trivial amount. If you're just checking email, or reading CNN in the evenings, you really don't need broadband. Heck, just a few years ago, I used to download LOTS of binaries over a 28.8K connection - I just would start the download before I went to bed.
Not everyone cares if they have dog-slow downloads, and not everyone cares about a 30-second wait to dial into their ISP. Most people still view Net access alone as a luxury; more still view fast and always-on Net access as even more of a luxury. And cost-conscious people are most likely to cut their expenditures on luxuries first. As, for instance, with the woman in the source article who seemed to have lost her job.
And if you challenge a cybersquatter by having a lawyer even so much as draft the necessary letters, you will incur a legal fees which almost certainly will cover registration fees for the next decade or two at minimum.
Linux is and has always been a server OS and I find it rather amusing that a simple pretty GUI email application is being crowned as "One of the most important projects in the open source world today"
It is amusing. Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency. As with most chauvinisms, particular points are relevant only to the extent that one's own biases are being advanced.
Of course, if Microsoft went about creating phony email addresses and 'real' mail addresses while writing into the public forum, they would be roundly abused here. Oh, I forgot, they did do that and we did do that.
It *is* fair to make these comparisons since the G4 and the P4 are the best Motorola and Intel have to offer us, right now. It's irrelevant what the G4 was "aimed at competing with"; what is relevant is what we have in our hands now.
I'm *certain* there are companies out there using Linux to host "mission-critical" (whatever that means) RDMSes. But this by itself would tell us nothing of Linux's suitability for this purpose. I happen to know lots of companies that use Linux for this purpose, but they also are companies that would not be able to afford the Sun boxes and Oracle licenses that they wish they could run. I also know several places running Linux for - what they would consider to be - "mission-critical" RDMS, but what they consider to be mission-critical is FAR different than what a big investment bank or hospital would consider to be mission critical.
Instead of just asking a question that is almost guaranteed to pat ourselves on the back, we need to also ask for descriptions of the conditions that people are using Linux for RDMSes. That is, before the answer "are you using Linux" can be properly interpreted, we also need to know answers to questions like: How many connections ? How many users ? What size of a database ? What kind of availability do you demand ? What kind of information is being stored ? How big is your staff ? How big is your budget ?
After all, knowing that a company uses Linux to host Postgres/MySql tells us nothing if the company can't afford to buy a Sun box/Oracle license in the first place.
I don't understand this classification at all. Why is this a story about 'my' rights ? I don't see how 'my' rights or 'your' rights were infringed upon when the site was shut down - while it is a nice resource, the "rights" moniker seems to imply some entitlement to this website. If someone shut down Britannica - say due to copyright issues - I certainly wouldn't be complaining about violation of 'my' rights. And I don't see any mention of access to and availability of arbitrary websites in the Constitution.
Surely we are not entitled to this website, after all, are we ??
You missed a few. I count (at least) 5 apparent porn searches: fat, Traci, sex, jenna, and Pavarotti. Where's that damn Pavarotti nude AVI ?
The paper really spends most of its time talking about how they settled on the color scheme or arrangement of the circles on the graphs. This is perhaps more relevant in the context of the class the authors were taking. They spend only a few very short paragraphs on what they actually discovered or what could be discovered, and there were no real numbers presented.
A much more interesting article is here. It discusses a number of findings about Gnutella usage in the context of the famous "Tragedy of the Commons" dilemma commonly studied by economists, and the ramifications these findings have for the long term viability of Gnutella networks.
Do we really need these things anymore? I'm sure most television viewers out there can associate shows to networks, these days.
Come on. Firstly, viewers these days are FAR less likely to associate shows to network, and any ability to associate such is largely due to the effect of the superimposed logo. Do you know which network runs "The West Wing", the World Series or "Monday Night Football" ? I sure don't. This is NOT the days of old where there were precious few networks/channels, the networks had much larger mindshare, and there actually was such a thing as viewer loyalty.
Secondly, it is supremely hypocritical for an editor to argue that superimposed logos are not needed 'anymore' while his own website runs its own logo prominently. Don't you think most Slashdot readers know where they are ? Isn't this made more obvious by the fact that the location bar already *says* 'Slashdot' ?
At least one other poster has alluded to the powerful ability of VCRs and more recently PVRs to skip through commercials which are one of the major ways the networks both mark their brand and (of course) sell ad space. If this continues, it may be only a matter of time before networks are forced to start running advertisements underneath the programming itself.