A couple of years ago, I tried to get a job at one small company, where I was supposed to be the sysadmin, help desk, programmer, purchaser, webmaster, etc. Basically, I would be responsible for all of their computer needs. These are all things that I know how to do, more or less, and whatever I don't know at any given moment, I'm good at figuring out when I need it.
Anyway, when I showed up for my interview, the boss, who is a sort of layman nerd, the kind who reads Wired magazine and thinks he knows everything about computers, but who has about 150 adware and spyware programs on his Windows box that runs slow as molasses, that all he uses it for is checking his Hotmail account, asked me what certifications I had. Well, I had none, and that's what I told him. I think the interview ended abruptly at that point. I didn't get the job.
But the story gets better. As it turns out, I am a half-distant friend of this one guy who works there, and about six months later, after they hired someone with about 50 certifications, my friend told me that this guy doesn't know jack about schitt. They have so many problems there, it's not even funny. And it's stupid, obvious stuff. I mean, come on! I know I could have done a much better job there. Even another friend of mine, a machinist who doesn't give a rat's ass about computers, set up a complete network inside his company, where every job is referenced to a database that he set up. Hell, this guy knows so little about computers, he doesn't even know his administrator password to modify the database, so it's been the same way for years and years... but it gets the job done. No certification, no knowledge of anything... Sure, if it were hooked up to the Internet, he'd probably have the whole system h4x0r3d up faster than he could say Jack Robinson, but he knows that he doesn't know jack, so he has a single "Great Quality" PC hooked up to the dial-up for emailing customers. If he could do all that without knowing schitt about jack, imagine what I could do for the company that wouldn't hire me because I didn't have all kinds of glossy certifications from fancy companies.
Oh, the end of my story is that I finally got a job at another small business, actually an indirect competitor of the first company--same general business, but different market segment. When I got there they had 3 computers, and 1 printer. When someone needed to print, they'd wheel the printer over (it was on a cart), hook it up to the computer, and print. If all three needed to print at the same time, you had two people standing around waiting for a 50 page piece of crap the other person was printing to finish... What a waste of time! Now, they have 24 computers, including 4 servers, with a nice company network, a professional website, everything stored in databases, automated backup, and I'm continuously working on ways to make the most of our computational resources to better serve our customers, our sales team, and the employees inside the company. Still no certification though.
'A national do- not-e-mail registry, without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages, would fail to reduce the burden of spam and may even increase the amount of spam received by consumers,' said the commission.
Yeah, no duh!!! I know some folks who put their name and number on the national do-not-call registry before the law took effect, and guess what? The number of telemarketing calls nearly tripled!!! What kind of common sense is that?!
The way I see it, the email protocol needs to be updated so that the email header really shows where the email originates. Yes, it will break a lot of things, but do you mean to tell me that the ISPs and businesses - who are dealing with the flood of junk mail they receive and the bad image associated with Joe Lusers receiving spoofed mail with their names on it - will hesitate to modify their sendmail installation if it means that spam will be nearly eliminated? I don't think so.
Sure, your fridge will tell you you need milk, but convergence is not necessarily a good thing.
Next thing you know, some '1337 h4x0rz will compromise your oven while you're baking something at 350 degrees with the timer set on 20 minutes, and they'll make it 475 degrees for 40 minutes. And even then, your typical housewife won't understand why it's important to have an up-to-date OS and an up-to-date firewall protecting her network.
We were having a good time, joking, drooling over the girls, etc... then of course he asked were I was from, so I told him. He stands up says "Well I'm from Israel, so fuck you" and goes and leaves!
Well, all I can say is, he's an idiot! If he thought you were a decent fellow before he found out you're German, then WTF was his problem?
Anyway, I've seen pictures of Israel on TV, and they have BMWs and Mercedes over there. I also knew an Israeli photographer once, who swore by German lenses and optics. If they hate Germany so much, why do they buy all their stuff from over there?!?!?
I have a feeling you just had some bad experiences with a few people. Right now, Israel has much bigger problems with Muslims than it does with Germany.
Heh, join the vast right-wing conspiracy, and find inner peace! Listen to conservative talk radio, usually found on the AM stations. It's sure to reward you with many hours of compelling arguments and controversial issues that will either have you switching conservative within a month or have you pissed off and yelling at the radio within a day.
Either way, you'll get your money's worth and more because you will be aware of many things that are going on in our government and our society, and more importantly, it will give you a completely different viewpoint to that of the popular media, which tends to emphasize the leftist viewpoint.
Personally, I have no party affiliation; I'm registered as an independant, but I lean strongly towards the pure libertarian point of view: Anyone can do pretty much what they want, as long as they don't harm those around them, and government keeps its long nose out of everyone's private affairs. I recommend talk radio because it allows you to hear "the other side's" story, and that's important in coming to your own conclusions as to what's right and how things should be done.
A word of warning, though: Know how far each host leans to the right, and remember to combine what you hear with the viewpoints of the left... The truth is somewhere in the middle.
This almost sounds more frightening than the cloak, since there's no reason why the sensors would have to be placed outside. Imagine a world where PHBs can turn their office wall into a window onto any cube. Zero privacy.
Holy Schitt, you might be right... I heard of this evil technology that's available right now, as we speak, to PHBs, the CIA, and other evil entities. It permits them to see things located in another place, live, or they can store the collected images as a motion picture of sorts and refer back to it later. This evil invention is called the video camera, and I have a feeling that these things will soon pop up all over the place. Zero privacy. Oh well.
That is a very interesting story... I suppose that there will be harsh feelings between the people of Israel and Germany because of certain historical facts. I'm Mexican, so I wouldn't know much about the contemporary effects of that history...
Oh yeah, and potential bidders, please note: He only accepts a "BONK TO BANK TRANSFER"... I don't know what a "BONK" is, must be some sort of Japanese institution. I'll ask my friend, he knows Japanese. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooh well.
You know, on a side note, after waiting about ten minutes for all the images to load, and only 85 out of the 300 or so have, I have come to the conclusion that if the seller were to list each item separately, he would probably double or triple his returns, regardless of the increased administration costs involved in doing so. This is because buyers are more likely to spend, say, $300 on some item, than $100,000 on a million billion things.
But that's just me. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh well.
d00d, this story just appeared, and I think eBay has been Slashdotted!!! This is really crazy, what a bunch of geeks we all are. The damn auction's starting bid is a hundred thousand bucks. You don't honestly believe that any idiot geek over here is gonna spend that kind of money, as if any of us actually have that much?!?!11???!?!?!?!!1!?!?!?1!?!?!111 I don't think so!!!
Slashdot. Because friends don't let friends plead guilty.
Power is the suxx0rz!!!!111 It is polluting the planet!!!!!!!!111 We did not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we are borrowing it from our children. Therefore, we must stop all power and fossil fuels, and we must stop chopping down trees! We should live like they did 3000 years ago, when they didn't pollute anything!!!!!!!11111 No global warming!!!!!!!!!!1111 We must live in caves and only eat grains and wheat..... So our children can enjoy a clean Earth....
Disclaimer: The above does not apply to the elitist environmentalists, who may continue driving their SUVs and throwing recyclables in the trash.
A group of german folks at the Wizards of OS conference have launched 24 hour sit-in 'to create a dotcom business from scratch in 24 hours.
You might consider capitalizing "German" next time. I'm not German, and I can't say that I like that country, because I met a German once, and he was a jerk, but please be a little more respectful next time, and put a capital letter where it belongs. They make good beer.
(Come on, jump on me for stereotyping an entire people based on one experience with one individual, but then, I'm not here to please anybody, and besides, look up the term sarcasm you insensitive clod.)
(Though i can't imagine why they didn't choose a BSD, which is far more mature, robust, and secure.)
Heh, we don't know, maybe they chose FreeBSD. Unfortunately, though, FreeBSD doesn't have the widespread brand name recognition that Linux has, because it's not all over the news, and it's not the subject of all the bullshit SCO lawsuits. So, if the computer geek department is rolling out FreeBSD, they might tell the management that this is "Linux" (and with the Linux compatibility layer loaded, it can run Linux programs), so that the PHBs and shareholders will have an idea of what's going on. To them, it's probably all the same thing anyway.
what tools could be used to investigate ? like xrestop, strace, profilers (but i have no idea how to profile a whole desktop and not a single application)
Here's an interesting way you might be able to profile an entire desktop, rather than a single program: Run the entire OS and desktop in VMware or Bochs or something, and profile that. I think it would be necessary to implement a special profiler that could tell you the most executed addresses, which somehow knows how to map those to the individual programs. Come to think of it, that would be more difficult than it sounds, but imagine being able to profile not only desktop systems, but also entire server setups, to determine where the system is spending most of its time. If you could find a certain place in, say, Apache, or sendmail, or Qt that needs optimizing, and doing so would improve the speed of the entire system, then I think it would be very worthwhile to research a process like this.
Judge Kimball has stated that The SCO Group has failed to meet the requirements of the law in its complaint against Novell and has dismissed the case
Yes!!! Yes!!! SCO is going DOWN baby!!!
but gives TSG 30 days to try to meet the legal requirements.
Noooooooo!!!!!!! Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!!! Don't give 'em any more time--they're going to use it to stretch this bullshit even longer!!!!
***
Ok, seriously now, I think that each of SCO's cases is going to get thrown out one-by-one, and when SCO has to start paying others' legal fees (I can't wait until they have to pay IBM's), they are going to disappear, without accomplishing what Microsoft wants them to accomplish, which is to screw the Linux community over. I think they will accomplish the exact opposite, which is giving lots and lots and lots of free advertising worldwide to Linux, and then when SCO loses all these cases, it will prove to the world that Linux is legitimate, and Microsoft will have screwed themselves over. Nanny nanny boo boo!!!
Laugh all you want, but I have friends living in different parts of Europe, and they tell me that when they play a new song on the radio, the DJ will often start talking shit (or about some other, unrelated advertisement) in the middle of the song, to prevent folks from recording it off the radio, instead of buying the album. Now that is a shitty practice, if you ask me.
I hope this book really is as compelling as the reviewer makes it out to be. Actually, I'm going to make a trip down to the local bookstore (they have quite a selection of math books) to see if they have it.
Actually, if this book is compelling, I hope that some of the academic book authors take an example and figure out a way to make math interesting and compelling for children to learn in schools. It is a real shame that most of the public school system in the U.S. makes math seem so boring (the memorization of formulas and crap, rather than learning something that is truly useful and learning how to apply concepts to solve real life problems) that most kids do poorly in math. This, in my opinion, is part of the reason that a lot of the programmers being turned out by schools suck, but think they're hot stuff because they can turn out word processors with VB#.NET or whatever. They really don't have a good solid foundation in math, logic, and science to make really good software. The same problem applies to other areas as well, which is why a lot of U.S. jobs are being outsourced to other countries. I strongly believe that if the public education system here in the U.S. were improved drastically, a lot of employers would see a compelling reason to pay the higher price for domestic workers, because they would get increased value out of their investment.
Anyway, that was a rant, but I think a lot of technical subjects, like math, tie into the greater overall problem of teaching children how to think, how to apply concepts, how to learn something when they don't know the answer, rather than how to memorize the steps to accomplish a particular task, and fail when the task doesn't exactly match, they fail...
I hope this move means that McDonalds is testing Linux in Germany, and is planning to move its other 28800 restaurants worldwide to Linux as well, not to mention its corporate buildings.
Imagine the possibility of up-to-the-second financial information on McDonald's performance... Now I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I don't like McDonald's at all. (One time, I was flying across the country with my father, and while we waited in the airport, we both got really hungry. He broke down and got McDonald's. I told him I'd rather starve. After he ate that, he felt really sick for the remainder of our flight... In my opinion, they don't use healthy ingredients, or at least they don't use them in a healthy combination.) But, when a big market leader makes a move like this, it's sure to raise some eyebrows, and I think it will help when other corporate managers start considering alternatives to expensive proprietary software.
I'm happy this story appeared here, because it might help me with a project I've been working on for a while now...
I have my little barn behind my house, where I build all sorts of cool projects, work on cars, and make some rather crappy software to control some of my ridiculous inventions. A good friend of mine lives about half a mile down the road, where he has his own (bigger) barn, and he works on even cooler projects, and runs a little electronic prototyping business. (When he puts those circuit boards together by hand, they come out looking like they were professionally assembled by machine.) The thing is, he doesn't have Internet access over there. I have DSL. (He's over the county line, where they don't have DSL.)
We came up with this idea of setting up some type of line-of-sight system to give him wireless access to my network and to the Internet, so we could collaborate easily and do our research and development together. Also, we want to have a connection from our respective barns to our respective houses, so the kids can have Internet as well. One of the requirements we had was to make it directional so that nobody could "wardrive" over here and tap into our system, unless they got in the way, which would be kind of hard, considering it's in the middle of this field of corn (or soy, depending on the crop rotations).
Our biggest problem so far has been to get a reliable signal, so up until now, we've been running these really long ethernet cables across the field. (These cables go a surprisingly long distance and still work.) Problem is, they get damaged every so often, and it costs a lot to fix them each time. I have cables running across my yard into my house, too, so my kids have the 'net. It's a funny thing, how we set up this network with all kinds of firewalls and stuff to separate the various areas from one another. But anyway, while we do have a connection now, we are still researching new ways to do it with wireless... He had this crazy idea of using lasers, but I don't know how we can make a laser light turn on and off rapidly enough to transmit a signal at a reasonable speed. (We want audio and video conferencing, plus the possibility of transferring big data files around while we're doing that. Obviously, we need a lot of bandwidth between our two houses.)
I'm happy this story appeared here because this could allow us to get the job done without interfering with anything else... Someday, maybe we'll have it perfected to the point that neighbors around the country will connect their homes together in a sort of grid that will increase the overall bandwidth, speed, and resiliance of the Internet.
This is what they should do... Get rid of all jobs in this country. Jobs are a pain in the ass anyway. Just send everything out of the country, and retain only the service businesses here. That way, all the money in this country will get exported to other countries, and when we have nothing left, we can pack up and go back home to Europe, or Africa, or Asia, or wherever the hell we're from, and then the Indians will have what they wanted about 150 years ago... the days of the buffalo will return, and the white man will be gone.
I won't be satisfied until the government starts installing surveillance cameras all over the interior of my house, especially in the bathroom, to make sure that I'm not carrying out any thoughtcrimes. Oh, and I think they should delete all words from the language that could be replaced by a smaller, simpler word, so that we won't be able to think about any of this, either.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
This is an intriguing idea. I think that with all the wireless technologies being integrated into computers nowadays, it shouldn't be any problem to put some memory into a pen, and then use that memory to pick things off one window/screen/computer and put them into another.
It would definitely be cool to transfer stuff between your PDA and phone, or phone and computer, or whatever, using this technique.
Hopefully the free software community will jump on this one and implement it, fast, before SCO patents it and starts suing Sony, Xerox PARC, all the Linux users, Microsoft, Apple, the RIAA, and Bill Cosby for using their valuable intellectual property that they invented 100 years ago (but somehow the patent is only filed right now, and in Darl's mind, that's perfectly ok)...
But seriously, this is an intriguing idea. It would be cool to see it work.
I think there are a lot of areas, besides software and bioinformatics, that benefit greatly from the concept of freedom and openness. Consider the area of technical literature, for example. What better way to sell a hardware product than to give people the information they need to fiddle with it and make it do cool new things?
Speaking of hardware, I once read about a project to design a RISC processor in an "open source" manner, where the only cost incurred would be in manufacturing the darn thing. I don't know where that ended up, but if it disappeared, that's a real shame. I think it would be awesome if a community of hardware hackers could put together an entire hardware specification that doesn't need to be burdened with all the backwards compatibility crap that commercial stuff must adhere to, and I could see that becoming an integral part of the projects to make free operating systems and other components. Who knows... But yes, open source will probably expand to other areas of business. It probably won't happen overnight, but it will happen...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, when I showed up for my interview, the boss, who is a sort of layman nerd, the kind who reads Wired magazine and thinks he knows everything about computers, but who has about 150 adware and spyware programs on his Windows box that runs slow as molasses, that all he uses it for is checking his Hotmail account, asked me what certifications I had. Well, I had none, and that's what I told him. I think the interview ended abruptly at that point. I didn't get the job.
But the story gets better. As it turns out, I am a half-distant friend of this one guy who works there, and about six months later, after they hired someone with about 50 certifications, my friend told me that this guy doesn't know jack about schitt. They have so many problems there, it's not even funny. And it's stupid, obvious stuff. I mean, come on! I know I could have done a much better job there. Even another friend of mine, a machinist who doesn't give a rat's ass about computers, set up a complete network inside his company, where every job is referenced to a database that he set up. Hell, this guy knows so little about computers, he doesn't even know his administrator password to modify the database, so it's been the same way for years and years... but it gets the job done. No certification, no knowledge of anything... Sure, if it were hooked up to the Internet, he'd probably have the whole system h4x0r3d up faster than he could say Jack Robinson, but he knows that he doesn't know jack, so he has a single "Great Quality" PC hooked up to the dial-up for emailing customers. If he could do all that without knowing schitt about jack, imagine what I could do for the company that wouldn't hire me because I didn't have all kinds of glossy certifications from fancy companies.
Oh, the end of my story is that I finally got a job at another small business, actually an indirect competitor of the first company--same general business, but different market segment. When I got there they had 3 computers, and 1 printer. When someone needed to print, they'd wheel the printer over (it was on a cart), hook it up to the computer, and print. If all three needed to print at the same time, you had two people standing around waiting for a 50 page piece of crap the other person was printing to finish... What a waste of time! Now, they have 24 computers, including 4 servers, with a nice company network, a professional website, everything stored in databases, automated backup, and I'm continuously working on ways to make the most of our computational resources to better serve our customers, our sales team, and the employees inside the company. Still no certification though.
Yeah, no duh!!! I know some folks who put their name and number on the national do-not-call registry before the law took effect, and guess what? The number of telemarketing calls nearly tripled!!! What kind of common sense is that?!
The way I see it, the email protocol needs to be updated so that the email header really shows where the email originates. Yes, it will break a lot of things, but do you mean to tell me that the ISPs and businesses - who are dealing with the flood of junk mail they receive and the bad image associated with Joe Lusers receiving spoofed mail with their names on it - will hesitate to modify their sendmail installation if it means that spam will be nearly eliminated? I don't think so.
Next thing you know, some '1337 h4x0rz will compromise your oven while you're baking something at 350 degrees with the timer set on 20 minutes, and they'll make it 475 degrees for 40 minutes. And even then, your typical housewife won't understand why it's important to have an up-to-date OS and an up-to-date firewall protecting her network.
Next thing you know, you'll need a virus blocker for your genitals to avoid downloading a virus while having sexual intercourse.
Oh, wait...
There are three of us: Mr. Rice, Dr. Burners, and Mr. Sucks, Esquire.
Well, all I can say is, he's an idiot! If he thought you were a decent fellow before he found out you're German, then WTF was his problem?
Anyway, I've seen pictures of Israel on TV, and they have BMWs and Mercedes over there. I also knew an Israeli photographer once, who swore by German lenses and optics. If they hate Germany so much, why do they buy all their stuff from over there?!?!?
I have a feeling you just had some bad experiences with a few people. Right now, Israel has much bigger problems with Muslims than it does with Germany.
Either way, you'll get your money's worth and more because you will be aware of many things that are going on in our government and our society, and more importantly, it will give you a completely different viewpoint to that of the popular media, which tends to emphasize the leftist viewpoint.
Personally, I have no party affiliation; I'm registered as an independant, but I lean strongly towards the pure libertarian point of view: Anyone can do pretty much what they want, as long as they don't harm those around them, and government keeps its long nose out of everyone's private affairs. I recommend talk radio because it allows you to hear "the other side's" story, and that's important in coming to your own conclusions as to what's right and how things should be done.
A word of warning, though: Know how far each host leans to the right, and remember to combine what you hear with the viewpoints of the left... The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Holy Schitt, you might be right... I heard of this evil technology that's available right now, as we speak, to PHBs, the CIA, and other evil entities. It permits them to see things located in another place, live, or they can store the collected images as a motion picture of sorts and refer back to it later. This evil invention is called the video camera, and I have a feeling that these things will soon pop up all over the place. Zero privacy. Oh well.
That is a very interesting story... I suppose that there will be harsh feelings between the people of Israel and Germany because of certain historical facts. I'm Mexican, so I wouldn't know much about the contemporary effects of that history...
Oh yeah, and potential bidders, please note: He only accepts a "BONK TO BANK TRANSFER"... I don't know what a "BONK" is, must be some sort of Japanese institution. I'll ask my friend, he knows Japanese. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooh well.
But that's just me. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh well.
Slashdot. Because friends don't let friends plead guilty.
Disclaimer: The above does not apply to the elitist environmentalists, who may continue driving their SUVs and throwing recyclables in the trash.
You might consider capitalizing "German" next time. I'm not German, and I can't say that I like that country, because I met a German once, and he was a jerk, but please be a little more respectful next time, and put a capital letter where it belongs. They make good beer.
(Come on, jump on me for stereotyping an entire people based on one experience with one individual, but then, I'm not here to please anybody, and besides, look up the term sarcasm you insensitive clod.)
Heh, we don't know, maybe they chose FreeBSD. Unfortunately, though, FreeBSD doesn't have the widespread brand name recognition that Linux has, because it's not all over the news, and it's not the subject of all the bullshit SCO lawsuits. So, if the computer geek department is rolling out FreeBSD, they might tell the management that this is "Linux" (and with the Linux compatibility layer loaded, it can run Linux programs), so that the PHBs and shareholders will have an idea of what's going on. To them, it's probably all the same thing anyway.
Here's an interesting way you might be able to profile an entire desktop, rather than a single program: Run the entire OS and desktop in VMware or Bochs or something, and profile that. I think it would be necessary to implement a special profiler that could tell you the most executed addresses, which somehow knows how to map those to the individual programs. Come to think of it, that would be more difficult than it sounds, but imagine being able to profile not only desktop systems, but also entire server setups, to determine where the system is spending most of its time. If you could find a certain place in, say, Apache, or sendmail, or Qt that needs optimizing, and doing so would improve the speed of the entire system, then I think it would be very worthwhile to research a process like this.
Yes!!! Yes!!! SCO is going DOWN baby!!!
but gives TSG 30 days to try to meet the legal requirements.
Noooooooo!!!!!!! Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!!! Don't give 'em any more time--they're going to use it to stretch this bullshit even longer!!!!
***
Ok, seriously now, I think that each of SCO's cases is going to get thrown out one-by-one, and when SCO has to start paying others' legal fees (I can't wait until they have to pay IBM's), they are going to disappear, without accomplishing what Microsoft wants them to accomplish, which is to screw the Linux community over. I think they will accomplish the exact opposite, which is giving lots and lots and lots of free advertising worldwide to Linux, and then when SCO loses all these cases, it will prove to the world that Linux is legitimate, and Microsoft will have screwed themselves over. Nanny nanny boo boo!!!
Laugh all you want, but I have friends living in different parts of Europe, and they tell me that when they play a new song on the radio, the DJ will often start talking shit (or about some other, unrelated advertisement) in the middle of the song, to prevent folks from recording it off the radio, instead of buying the album. Now that is a shitty practice, if you ask me.
Actually, if this book is compelling, I hope that some of the academic book authors take an example and figure out a way to make math interesting and compelling for children to learn in schools. It is a real shame that most of the public school system in the U.S. makes math seem so boring (the memorization of formulas and crap, rather than learning something that is truly useful and learning how to apply concepts to solve real life problems) that most kids do poorly in math. This, in my opinion, is part of the reason that a lot of the programmers being turned out by schools suck, but think they're hot stuff because they can turn out word processors with VB#.NET or whatever. They really don't have a good solid foundation in math, logic, and science to make really good software. The same problem applies to other areas as well, which is why a lot of U.S. jobs are being outsourced to other countries. I strongly believe that if the public education system here in the U.S. were improved drastically, a lot of employers would see a compelling reason to pay the higher price for domestic workers, because they would get increased value out of their investment.
Anyway, that was a rant, but I think a lot of technical subjects, like math, tie into the greater overall problem of teaching children how to think, how to apply concepts, how to learn something when they don't know the answer, rather than how to memorize the steps to accomplish a particular task, and fail when the task doesn't exactly match, they fail...
Imagine the possibility of up-to-the-second financial information on McDonald's performance... Now I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I don't like McDonald's at all. (One time, I was flying across the country with my father, and while we waited in the airport, we both got really hungry. He broke down and got McDonald's. I told him I'd rather starve. After he ate that, he felt really sick for the remainder of our flight... In my opinion, they don't use healthy ingredients, or at least they don't use them in a healthy combination.) But, when a big market leader makes a move like this, it's sure to raise some eyebrows, and I think it will help when other corporate managers start considering alternatives to expensive proprietary software.
I have my little barn behind my house, where I build all sorts of cool projects, work on cars, and make some rather crappy software to control some of my ridiculous inventions. A good friend of mine lives about half a mile down the road, where he has his own (bigger) barn, and he works on even cooler projects, and runs a little electronic prototyping business. (When he puts those circuit boards together by hand, they come out looking like they were professionally assembled by machine.) The thing is, he doesn't have Internet access over there. I have DSL. (He's over the county line, where they don't have DSL.)
We came up with this idea of setting up some type of line-of-sight system to give him wireless access to my network and to the Internet, so we could collaborate easily and do our research and development together. Also, we want to have a connection from our respective barns to our respective houses, so the kids can have Internet as well. One of the requirements we had was to make it directional so that nobody could "wardrive" over here and tap into our system, unless they got in the way, which would be kind of hard, considering it's in the middle of this field of corn (or soy, depending on the crop rotations).
Our biggest problem so far has been to get a reliable signal, so up until now, we've been running these really long ethernet cables across the field. (These cables go a surprisingly long distance and still work.) Problem is, they get damaged every so often, and it costs a lot to fix them each time. I have cables running across my yard into my house, too, so my kids have the 'net. It's a funny thing, how we set up this network with all kinds of firewalls and stuff to separate the various areas from one another. But anyway, while we do have a connection now, we are still researching new ways to do it with wireless... He had this crazy idea of using lasers, but I don't know how we can make a laser light turn on and off rapidly enough to transmit a signal at a reasonable speed. (We want audio and video conferencing, plus the possibility of transferring big data files around while we're doing that. Obviously, we need a lot of bandwidth between our two houses.)
I'm happy this story appeared here because this could allow us to get the job done without interfering with anything else... Someday, maybe we'll have it perfected to the point that neighbors around the country will connect their homes together in a sort of grid that will increase the overall bandwidth, speed, and resiliance of the Internet.
Hmmmmmmm... Good deal.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
It would definitely be cool to transfer stuff between your PDA and phone, or phone and computer, or whatever, using this technique.
Hopefully the free software community will jump on this one and implement it, fast, before SCO patents it and starts suing Sony, Xerox PARC, all the Linux users, Microsoft, Apple, the RIAA, and Bill Cosby for using their valuable intellectual property that they invented 100 years ago (but somehow the patent is only filed right now, and in Darl's mind, that's perfectly ok)...
But seriously, this is an intriguing idea. It would be cool to see it work.
Speaking of hardware, I once read about a project to design a RISC processor in an "open source" manner, where the only cost incurred would be in manufacturing the darn thing. I don't know where that ended up, but if it disappeared, that's a real shame. I think it would be awesome if a community of hardware hackers could put together an entire hardware specification that doesn't need to be burdened with all the backwards compatibility crap that commercial stuff must adhere to, and I could see that becoming an integral part of the projects to make free operating systems and other components. Who knows... But yes, open source will probably expand to other areas of business. It probably won't happen overnight, but it will happen...