A little over 3 years using OS X as my Unix platform. The only problems I have encountered so far:
1. The MySQL library for CPAN does not install automagically, but the procedure was figured out long ago and is accessible to anyone that knows how to GIS.
2. Apache2 was much harder for me to setup, but I also had trouble in freeBSD so the fault is obviously mine.
Except for those two things, everything else is great.
While purchased items are capital expenditures. The trick is to do a $1 lease buyout, so you don't have to worry about repackaging the stuff once the lease is over.
Let O'Reilly access to a small fraction of this content so they can test for interest in their online book subscription service. If the geeks flock to it, O'Reilly will see it as a way to give their product more visibility and they can license the rest.
1. Maybe not for the general household, but $100 per computer will make it easier for every poor school to be able to afford at least one computer.
2. Maybe not for the general household, but $100 per computer would allow the governments of poor jurisdictions to modernize their operations a little bit. The enhanced flow of information has one hell of a lifestyle enhancement effect that cannot be ignored. Say a rural clinic is issued one of these $100 PCs they can use to google for medical information and send disease reports to WHO, the CDC, etc.
If the bug is not a show stopper, ask them to unlock the source in exchange for a final handoff. You get your final (which isn't) and they walk away with the money they took already.
If the bug is a show stopper, you have to see how much you spent so far and how much will cost you to fight it. The cost of fighting them over it may be higher than what you paid for the whole thing, so you may just have to take the hit.
I was in your spot at my previous job quite a few times. We tried it all but eventually in each incident we ended up pulling the plug, grabbed whatever we could recover from the project and walked away.
As for the outsourcers, don't worry about them. Eventually they will mess with someone big enough and they'll get bitchslapped for good. It is only a matter of time before they try to screw with a company big enough to have in-house counsel.
It does. I have a powerbook G4 1.25 and even with 1.25 GB ram on 10.3.7 it runs so slow as to make it unusable.
It is obvious there is a market for tools like Dreamweaver, but once you hit a certain skill level and/or project needs, you just can't stand anything beyond BBEdit or other text editors.
Which is why he has to go to the local tax authority.
In Virginia you don't get taxed twice. If you are a reseller, your sales tax permit allows you to buy things without paying the sales tax since it will be paid later when the merchandise is sold.
1. You don't have to worry about the cable company. The cable company will only get pissed if the local government tries to provide broadband, because it would be unfair competition.
2. Triple check that the AUP for your DSL allows you to share and resell the service. Then check again.
3. If you are reselling, you will probably have to charge for sales tax, check your local tax authority.
4. There are probably FCC rules about the equipment that you can use and the maximum power that it can irradiate. Of course, if you are using turnkey COTS equipment, the odds are that it is FCC legit.
5. Check your neighbors and see what is the interest in this kind of service. If there is too little interest then you are setting yourself for failure, since your location is fixed and there is only so far you can reach.
6. Write your own AUP and make sure the CYA provisions are in bold, plain english a second grader can understand. Then take the AUP to a lawyer to read and see if he can poke holes thru it.
7. Be prepared for the technical support burden, even if most of your customers are geeks.
Is that they are pulling 80-hr work weeks, not 80 hours of pure coding. Those guys are probably going thru useless meetings hell and reporting to six different bosses.
I did the 60+ hr week for about 10 months in 2000 and it totally burned me out. Did I pull 60 hrs of programming a week? Hell no! If I was lucky I may have coded for 20 to 30 hours, the rest was wasted dealing with customers and administrative b/s.
Is that they force us to look at Gmail in many different ways beyond the "Jesus Christ, look at all that space" factor.
When I started using Gmail I really liked the threaded messages feature and the search engine. Having to use labels instead of folders was (and still is) annoying, but I still place more value in the threading of the messages so all is well.
Some of my friends put more value in the fact that they can pretty much forget about their mailboxes getting too big and their PC choking on it. The mailbox here can be almost a gig and all your PC sees is just a web page.
Some friends also discovered that it is a great way to store memos, since is is very easy to pull them back between the labels and the search engine. I liked the idea so much that I sent myself every shareware license and CD key I have as separate emails so I can easily pull them.
The blog thing will probably break by the time it hits production, but it tells us (and Google too) that Gmail is so versatile that you can do all these crazy things with it.
Now Google can look at it and go uhm, maybe this is faster than whatever it is we are doing to store Blogger entries, and it also takes care of the post comments! And since you are already giving people a Gig of space, you can in theory claim that your *hosted* Blogger option is now free and allows you to share your 1GB of Gmail space. Then later plug the whole thing into an Orkut that doesn't suck and also into Google Groups.
Touch typing itself is not bad, the problem is when people are taught old fashioned typing conventions that don't apply to computers. That is the part of typing that is a waste of time.
I can type maybe 30 WPM or so without touch typing. After 17+ years my fingers sort of memorized where the QUERTY keys are, so I can type without looking at the keyboard with very little errors (error rate usually goes up as soon as I realize that I am not looking at the keyboard, go figure). The problem is that my method HURTS!
Touch typists use their fingers more efficiently, so as long as they keep proper wrist alignment their hands won't hurt as bad as a guy like me that types very fast with 2-4 fingers.
Fast typing is great when you are IMing, it is the one thing that makes it feel like a conventional conversation.
I personally like stored procedures in SQL Server because the query is pre-planned, so when the procedure is called SQL Server does not have to waste precious time parsing and planning execution for the stored procedure. I have not touched a stored procedure in Oracle for over 3 years so I could not honestly tell if Oracle does it the same way.
It is also nice to get all these SQL queries out of the web code, and it gives its own little bit of (job) security by obscurity, but when it comes to it the main reason I do the stored procedure is because I want the damn thing to run faster.
What I don't like is when people write stored procedures and then they build a dynamic sql query inside, which is retarded since it will have to parse and pre-plan the damn query every time the stored procedure is running!
Had catch-all's on both my personal domains and the domains owned by my employer. On two separate freeBSD/sendmail boxes I saw the same situation: horrible amounts of spam.
Turning off the catch-all's in my personal box was simple, after all, it is my own server and I can do whatever I want. Spam dropped like crazy.
Turning it off at the work server was different because the marketroids are paranoid about people not being able to reach them for sales issues. What I did was switch one domain per week and wait to see if anyone noticed a difference.
I always imagined something like that, but with a twist: you carry something the size of an iPod or maybe even smaller wherever you go. The device holds pretty much a home folder, so you just walk up to a public terminal, it connects wirelessly and you can do whatever you need to. For travel purposes you could carry a touch screen the size of a paperback or whatever.
At my previous job we had a very solid telecommuting culture, the company had embraced the concept and most of the times it worked really well. Employees that telecommuted at least 50% of the time were reinbursed for cable modem or DSL, and if they needed a dial up it was provided by our own people, so no need to pay for an ISP.
Everybody was happy, work got done on time, we won awards. The works.
When things went south, the bean counters sort of took over and started cutting costs left and right. Broadband reinbursements were the first ones to go. The IT people were ordered to itemize their Nextel bills. That kind of thing.
Eventually the company got gutted, and pretty much everyone either bailed, got laid off or the bean counters found an excuse to fire them for cause instead of lay them off.
During the same time, colleagues elsewhere in the country told me they went thru very similar experiences, so the next time I see indiscrimminate cuts like these, I will know it is time to pack my bags and try my luck elsewhere.
In my first novel, "Shining Star," (released under a Creative Commons license, free download at http://pedrovera.com/media/shiningstar.pdf ) a soon-to-be defector carried a bunch of classified material out of a NOC by using his iPod as a firewire drive. He was one of the NOC techs, so he was expected to be in the equipment rooms messing with hardware.
He would go and swap some tapes, then run a psync from a server into the iPod. He did this a few times and did not get caught.
1. Giving my wife my 12" iBook 600 MHZ when I moved up to a Titanium Powerbook. About two days later she left the kid watching a DVD, he took a full can of coke and poured it into the keyboard. The motherboard was fried but everything else was pretty much pristine, so I chopped it off for parts and sold everything on eBay.
2. Did a fresh install of SQL Server while the server was online, so it got infected with Slammer. Two days later our colo host calls to tell us we are saturating the network. The short story: close to $9000 bandwidth penalty bill that month (as far as I can tell the lawyers are still arguing it).
3. Lightning fried my Viewsonic 17" monitor and my Abit BX-6 motherboard, but did not trip the piece of shit power strip.
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A little over 3 years using OS X as my Unix platform. The only problems I have encountered so far:
1. The MySQL library for CPAN does not install automagically, but the procedure was figured out long ago and is accessible to anyone that knows how to GIS.
2. Apache2 was much harder for me to setup, but I also had trouble in freeBSD so the fault is obviously mine.
Except for those two things, everything else is great.
And OS X can run a lot of BSD stuff without too much work.
While purchased items are capital expenditures. The trick is to do a $1 lease buyout, so you don't have to worry about repackaging the stuff once the lease is over.
Let O'Reilly access to a small fraction of this content so they can test for interest in their online book subscription service. If the geeks flock to it, O'Reilly will see it as a way to give their product more visibility and they can license the rest.
Thank you sir, in those two very short sentences you described it exactly as it is.
I have a current clickwheel iPod, and it shipped with both USB2 and Firewire cables.
Firewire is integral to the whole Mac experience, it is not just a socket you use to hook iPods.
The cost of shipping all this old, heavy gear might make the whole idea unrealistic.
1. Maybe not for the general household, but $100 per computer will make it easier for every poor school to be able to afford at least one computer.
2. Maybe not for the general household, but $100 per computer would allow the governments of poor jurisdictions to modernize their operations a little bit. The enhanced flow of information has one hell of a lifestyle enhancement effect that cannot be ignored. Say a rural clinic is issued one of these $100 PCs they can use to google for medical information and send disease reports to WHO, the CDC, etc.
If the bug is not a show stopper, ask them to unlock the source in exchange for a final handoff. You get your final (which isn't) and they walk away with the money they took already.
If the bug is a show stopper, you have to see how much you spent so far and how much will cost you to fight it. The cost of fighting them over it may be higher than what you paid for the whole thing, so you may just have to take the hit.
I was in your spot at my previous job quite a few times. We tried it all but eventually in each incident we ended up pulling the plug, grabbed whatever we could recover from the project and walked away.
As for the outsourcers, don't worry about them. Eventually they will mess with someone big enough and they'll get bitchslapped for good. It is only a matter of time before they try to screw with a company big enough to have in-house counsel.
It does. I have a powerbook G4 1.25 and even with 1.25 GB ram on 10.3.7 it runs so slow as to make it unusable.
It is obvious there is a market for tools like Dreamweaver, but once you hit a certain skill level and/or project needs, you just can't stand anything beyond BBEdit or other text editors.
Which is why he has to go to the local tax authority.
In Virginia you don't get taxed twice. If you are a reseller, your sales tax permit allows you to buy things without paying the sales tax since it will be paid later when the merchandise is sold.
1. You don't have to worry about the cable company. The cable company will only get pissed if the local government tries to provide broadband, because it would be unfair competition.
2. Triple check that the AUP for your DSL allows you to share and resell the service. Then check again.
3. If you are reselling, you will probably have to charge for sales tax, check your local tax authority.
4. There are probably FCC rules about the equipment that you can use and the maximum power that it can irradiate. Of course, if you are using turnkey COTS equipment, the odds are that it is FCC legit.
5. Check your neighbors and see what is the interest in this kind of service. If there is too little interest then you are setting yourself for failure, since your location is fixed and there is only so far you can reach.
6. Write your own AUP and make sure the CYA provisions are in bold, plain english a second grader can understand. Then take the AUP to a lawyer to read and see if he can poke holes thru it.
7. Be prepared for the technical support burden, even if most of your customers are geeks.
Is that they are pulling 80-hr work weeks, not 80 hours of pure coding. Those guys are probably going thru useless meetings hell and reporting to six different bosses.
I did the 60+ hr week for about 10 months in 2000 and it totally burned me out. Did I pull 60 hrs of programming a week? Hell no! If I was lucky I may have coded for 20 to 30 hours, the rest was wasted dealing with customers and administrative b/s.
I need every one of those 250lbs of flab you insensitive clod.
Is that they force us to look at Gmail in many different ways beyond the "Jesus Christ, look at all that space" factor.
When I started using Gmail I really liked the threaded messages feature and the search engine. Having to use labels instead of folders was (and still is) annoying, but I still place more value in the threading of the messages so all is well.
Some of my friends put more value in the fact that they can pretty much forget about their mailboxes getting too big and their PC choking on it. The mailbox here can be almost a gig and all your PC sees is just a web page.
Some friends also discovered that it is a great way to store memos, since is is very easy to pull them back between the labels and the search engine. I liked the idea so much that I sent myself every shareware license and CD key I have as separate emails so I can easily pull them.
The blog thing will probably break by the time it hits production, but it tells us (and Google too) that Gmail is so versatile that you can do all these crazy things with it.
Now Google can look at it and go uhm, maybe this is faster than whatever it is we are doing to store Blogger entries, and it also takes care of the post comments! And since you are already giving people a Gig of space, you can in theory claim that your *hosted* Blogger option is now free and allows you to share your 1GB of Gmail space. Then later plug the whole thing into an Orkut that doesn't suck and also into Google Groups.
Thanks for saving me the $70, I was *this* close to replace my regular cable lock for one of them motion sensor thingies.
Touch typing itself is not bad, the problem is when people are taught old fashioned typing conventions that don't apply to computers. That is the part of typing that is a waste of time.
I can type maybe 30 WPM or so without touch typing. After 17+ years my fingers sort of memorized where the QUERTY keys are, so I can type without looking at the keyboard with very little errors (error rate usually goes up as soon as I realize that I am not looking at the keyboard, go figure). The problem is that my method HURTS!
Touch typists use their fingers more efficiently, so as long as they keep proper wrist alignment their hands won't hurt as bad as a guy like me that types very fast with 2-4 fingers.
Fast typing is great when you are IMing, it is the one thing that makes it feel like a conventional conversation.
I personally like stored procedures in SQL Server because the query is pre-planned, so when the procedure is called SQL Server does not have to waste precious time parsing and planning execution for the stored procedure. I have not touched a stored procedure in Oracle for over 3 years so I could not honestly tell if Oracle does it the same way.
It is also nice to get all these SQL queries out of the web code, and it gives its own little bit of (job) security by obscurity, but when it comes to it the main reason I do the stored procedure is because I want the damn thing to run faster.
What I don't like is when people write stored procedures and then they build a dynamic sql query inside, which is retarded since it will have to parse and pre-plan the damn query every time the stored procedure is running!
Back in my dot-com days. It was not the end of the world, but sure as hell you could see it from there!
Had catch-all's on both my personal domains and the domains owned by my employer. On two separate freeBSD/sendmail boxes I saw the same situation: horrible amounts of spam.
Turning off the catch-all's in my personal box was simple, after all, it is my own server and I can do whatever I want. Spam dropped like crazy.
Turning it off at the work server was different because the marketroids are paranoid about people not being able to reach them for sales issues. What I did was switch one domain per week and wait to see if anyone noticed a difference.
Nobody did.
I always imagined something like that, but with a twist: you carry something the size of an iPod or maybe even smaller wherever you go. The device holds pretty much a home folder, so you just walk up to a public terminal, it connects wirelessly and you can do whatever you need to. For travel purposes you could carry a touch screen the size of a paperback or whatever.
At my previous job we had a very solid telecommuting culture, the company had embraced the concept and most of the times it worked really well. Employees that telecommuted at least 50% of the time were reinbursed for cable modem or DSL, and if they needed a dial up it was provided by our own people, so no need to pay for an ISP.
Everybody was happy, work got done on time, we won awards. The works.
When things went south, the bean counters sort of took over and started cutting costs left and right. Broadband reinbursements were the first ones to go. The IT people were ordered to itemize their Nextel bills. That kind of thing.
Eventually the company got gutted, and pretty much everyone either bailed, got laid off or the bean counters found an excuse to fire them for cause instead of lay them off.
During the same time, colleagues elsewhere in the country told me they went thru very similar experiences, so the next time I see indiscrimminate cuts like these, I will know it is time to pack my bags and try my luck elsewhere.
Of course. Worst case scenario I also get a free server stress test out of it.
In my first novel, "Shining Star," (released under a Creative Commons license, free download at http://pedrovera.com/media/shiningstar.pdf ) a soon-to-be defector carried a bunch of classified material out of a NOC by using his iPod as a firewire drive. He was one of the NOC techs, so he was expected to be in the equipment rooms messing with hardware.
He would go and swap some tapes, then run a psync from a server into the iPod. He did this a few times and did not get caught.
1. Giving my wife my 12" iBook 600 MHZ when I moved up to a Titanium Powerbook. About two days later she left the kid watching a DVD, he took a full can of coke and poured it into the keyboard. The motherboard was fried but everything else was pretty much pristine, so I chopped it off for parts and sold everything on eBay.
2. Did a fresh install of SQL Server while the server was online, so it got infected with Slammer. Two days later our colo host calls to tell us we are saturating the network. The short story: close to $9000 bandwidth penalty bill that month (as far as I can tell the lawyers are still arguing it).
3. Lightning fried my Viewsonic 17" monitor and my Abit BX-6 motherboard, but did not trip the piece of shit power strip.