Even if it is a small one. She will understand if you have to get her a smaller one, but she will not understand if you take a stance against DeBeers and the whole diamond trade deal. Trust me, women have no interest (which is not the same as no clue) on the DeBeers cartel or in the life condition of the mining children.
I was forced to take Fortran 66, 77 and WATFIV (University of Waterloo Fortran) in engineering school in 1988. 14 years later and I still curse the goddamn day I walked into that classroom.
The only thing that course was good for was for some war stories:
1. Our professor, an electrical engineer, kept swearing there was no way a modem could go faster than 1200 bps. I know he meant baud, since normal copper has a hard time going over 2400 baud but to this day I still remember him. I bet he is still teaching that damn class.
2. I took this course at the University of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has sub tropical weather, for us 78 degrees means run and grab a frickin sweater. The very first time I saw a parka in person was in the admin console for the DEC/VAX 11/750 at the computing center. The VAX was kept in a glass-walled room at around 65 degrees Farenheith. The parka was kept by the door for when the sys admins had to walk into the room!
3. We were using DEC VT-100 terminals to access the VAX to do our homework. A couple lucky bastards got to use the VT-220 (which to us was the shiite).
4. The first time ever I connected to a computer system remotely was when we used our VAX accounts to connect to the library catalogs of the other UPR campuses in the island. We could use it to request inter-library book loans.
5. We learned to curse the students taking structured programming in Pascal. While our WATFIV programs were only a few hundred lines long, theirs were thousands! If you were unlucky enough to run a compile right after one of the WATFIV people started theirs, you could actually walk to the cafeteria a hundred yards away, get coffee, come back and still not finish the compile.
After I graduated in '92 I thought I would never see a damn VAX 11/7XX series again. 6 months later in the US Army Space Command, guess what I found: A freaking 11/780! Gimme a break!!!! We used them for simulating RF saturation of satellite communication networks. Terrible. Step too hard on the elevated floor tiles and the disk packs died on the spot. No wonder there were so many disk platters used as decorations (people would spend night shifts engraving them with all sorts of cool stuff, then hang them as cubicle art).
Fortran was a necessity back in the day, but honestly I don't see why would anyone need it now except people maintaining legacy apps. WATFIV output formats still give me the creeps after all this time.
Funny, I just had that argument with my wife. I was telling her that SuSe has its own little annoying traits, but a free operating system can get away with things a $200 OS update can't. Sure, the sound of DVDs is sometimes a split second off-sync, but I got the player for free. Sure, Quake 3 sometimes hoses the sound upon exiting the game, but it is fixed by killing the hosed process left behind. When Quake 3 gets hosed on XP or 2000 that is an automatic reboot to fix it.
I stil think the current installers for Mandrake and SuSE are no harder than installing WinME or XP. I don't even want to dream up of what is going to happen a year from now.
Windows machines: 1. nettime or 2. (if XP) let the OS sync it by itself.
Unix machines: xnetd. I forgot to turn it off when I setup my two machines over the last two weeks with Linux and this thread reminded me of it. Went to SuSE and 5 minutes later I had the daemon enabled and running. The SuSE tutorial is at http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/xntp.html .
I decided to bite the bullet two weeks ago and got rid of XP on my main home pc to install Suse 8.0. All my office needs so far can be fulfilled with Star Office 5.2, The Gimp and Ximian Evolution. Kopete takes care of my AOL/MSN instant messaging. Mozilla 1.0 for web surfing and newsgroups. Everything else is done with KDE and X apps I either got from the SuSE CDs or I downloaded, 99% of those I got as RPMs that installed without a problem. Even Ogle played encrypted DVDs without much heartburn. And my TV card (Hauppauge WinTV) works better in Linux than it ever did in WinXP.
And I am a card-carrying Windows whore.
About 3 days ago I converted my wife's Dell to Suse also. Her only complaint: I forgot to set it back to 800x600 (damn her!) after I was done setting it up. She does not really like Kopete but she tolerates it. She even likes Patience more than her solitary game in XP Pro.
Yesterday I managed to install the Linux binaries for Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena and Team Arena so I could re-use my Windows versions of these games. It took a few hours of research but by God it was awesome, the games run the same or maybe better than in XP Pro.
I have been trying Linux on and off since 1995 and I never lasted more than a day or two before going back to Windows. The install procedure for Suse 8.0 (and Mandrake 8.2, which I did at the office) are sooo dumbed down that they match the ease of the installer for WinME and almost XP. I paid $40 for the boxed media set, but I was already aware I could have gotten it for free if I downloaded the ISOs (just to make that point to a coworker I downloaded a freeBSD mini-iso and had a machine setup within half an hour). Mandrake came in a $12 Linux magazine imported from England.
I always used to say that old b/s mantra that yeah, Linux rocks on the server but it is 2 years behind on the desktop. Well, the two years are up. If they Linux folks can keep up the good work then it is only a matter of consumer education.
It comes down to good practices. When I started playing with Suse I remember how I would get kick/banned on the spot for trying to get into #linux on Undernet while logged as root. I asked them and they simply explained it was to teach me to use SU instead of a real root.
I think we all agree root itself is too dangerous to leave it on for more than a few minutes, even if you really know what you are doing. Even us windows weenies are trying to enforce this: my IT folks spent a week adding garbled (read: cannot memorize) local passwords for all our servers and for administration are using an obscure account with the proper permissions. It is impossible to guess by name that this account is a local administrator for all machines in our network.
For OS X and BSD I guess you should be able to do whatever you need without logging as root, that is what SU is used for.
Job #1: Satellite Communications Controller for the US Army Space Command. Lots of night shifts with nothing to do. Certain shift supervisors tolerated games as a way to keep people awake as long as the mission was not affected.
Job #2: Civilian Satellite Communications Controller (the former American Mobile Satellite, now bankrupt as Motient). Again lots of shift work and hours upon hours of nothing to do. Lots of 3D shooters and Diablo. IT folks tolerated us as long as we did not screw up the PCs. Boss played stupid, he was only interested in people not getting in trouble.
Job #3: Web Applications Developer, the employer shall remain nameless. Boss-approved 3D-shooter games at lunch almost every day as long as it did not impact a project deliverable. Full cooperation from the IT folks. We would rotate between Quake III, Half-Life and Kingpin. Some high execs were popular for their Age of Empires games at lunch. The day the Sega Dreamcast was released we had ours FEDEXed to the office and paid for by the company (only console, controllers and memory cards, they told us we could buy our own $#^& games). Workplace started eroding and then one day some guys got yelled at for playing Dreamcast at lunch. Eventually everybody left the company.
Current job: Another web shop that shall remain nameless. No gaming whatsoever, the corporate mentality is BILL BILL BILL (if you have read Grisham's The Firm you know what I am talking about). People prefer to bail out of the office for Starbucks or good food instead of eating in front of the PC just to play Quake III or whatever.
I personally tolerate one of my employees. He is a total slacker but he is a total genius on what he does, so if he wants to play a bit of Shockwave Pool at lunch then I could care less as long as he delivers on time.
There is a project manager that likes to play Shockwave games whenever a customer puts her on hold, which is fine since the clock is ticking and the customer is paying to keep her on hold.
I personally believe that with such high stress levels in my workplace an everywhere else, it is necessary to give employees some breathing room. Let them play a little bit. Let them take a walk around town and maybe grab a cappuccino on the way back upstairs. And don't count their lunch minutes. If the guys want to hit a restaurant once a week and spend over an hour there instead of the institutional 30 minutes (which is a retarded concept) then by God let them relax and eat something a bit tasty than a freaking burger.
Also, if the employees are done working and they want to stay after hours for a Quake III shootout across the network, then I am not only going to look the other way but I am going to make sure the IT folks leave them alone too.
Of course, notice that I keep saying it is OK as long as the deadlines are met. If we don't meet the deadlines we lose business and we all lose our jobs. Also, if you know a certain Project Manager is a total asshole, don't let him catch you!
Discrimmination against Puerto Rico callers
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VoIP for the Masses!
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Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the USA and has been a possession since 1898 and it has been part of the US phone system since forever, but all the VoIP providers rate it as international as an excuse to rake up the rates. How come all national long distance carriers count Puerto Rico as a US zip code (which it is) but none of the VoIP carriers will do this but then rate Alaska and Hawaii as national?
Why should I pay these people 11 cents a minute for my wife's mom-a-thon phone calls when Sprint is charging us 7 cents with our current plan?
Worse still is packaging for WinModems (and it will hapen with WinWiFi) does not explain to the consumer the consequences of picking this product in particular. These usually say something along the lines of "designed for Windows" or "requires a Windows PC" but no warning on performance hits on your machine.
And yeah, if at least the drivers were optimized then maybe your ton of cheap ram will make a difference when using a winmodem. Of course, when you are selling $5-$30 modems that are little more than a phone plug wired into a PCI slot you don't want to spend money writing drivers.
You are completely correct. And I have worse news for you:
I got a dual-processor PC with 1.5 GB of RAM and 64MB graphics card and sometimes it chokes playing DVDs and things like Java applets. You can have the fastest PC in the world and it will be useless without proper software.
As for the Java/Flash issue, one of the reasons it is so damn frustrating to be on dialup is that web designers misuse Java and Flash. They use both for eye candy and to bloat the site without providing much value. When was the last time you found a useful Java applet on the web? The only Java applets I have used continuously over the last two years that I believe are absolutely priceless are (1) the bandwidth tester at dslreports.com and (2) the web-based timesheet system from Deltek that we use at my company. Two very nice applets that provide an actual service, not some mickey mouse eye candy.
And Flash rocks if you use it for content. For example, my company deals with e-learning. Flash rocks when you use animations to teach people how things work. Say, a machine or a processor.
Your problem with Java is not Java itself, it is more a poor implementation of a Virtual Machine.
Back when we had Pentium 100s with 16MB of ram and WIndows 95, the windows modem concept was a clear winner for the bean counters but dammit, it sucked the life away of the machine.
Now we are in the land of the 1+ GHZ Celeron with 128MB of ram. The overhead of the winmodem should be tiny, unless the drivers are horribly written.
Not that I give a crap, years ago I decided to bite the bullet and get a hardware modem that I eventually made work in Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4 Workstation, 2000 Pro, SuSe and RedHat.
The average WiFi card for a laptop right now is around $100. For $100 you can buy an Apple Airport or a Linksys WPC11. If companies start pumping out soft cards with less electronics that rely on a fat driver then the windows user can expect to pay a fraction of that cost. I doubt we are going to see $20 Lucent WinWiFi cards any time soon, but there is going to be a sweet spot in the price chart that is going to help with increasing the popularity of WiFi.
We have a bunch of early adopters at my office and so far people love being able to walk around the house with a laptop when they are telecommuting. I added a Netgear ME102 to my home network in December and use a WPC11 for my laptop and I like it so much sometimes I don't ever step into my home office when I telecommute. Had the WiFi card been $50-$60 instead of $100 I could have bought it a month or two earlier, plus it would make it easier to convince the IT folks at the office to shell out for a test base and a few cards to do a field test.
Now, we are always wary of Big Bad Microsoft getting their hands on anything, but dammit, this standard is already open, and non Microsoft entities are huge players. Apple bases all their wireless networking on the same standard! Making a cheap, reliable windows-only wireless card does not affect Apple since they are a niche shop. It does not affect the open source folks since there will always be a full hardware solution, just like we have always had real modems sold alongside winmodems. And there is always an enterprising soul that wants to figure out how to make a winmodem work under Linux, so let's be honest, I know theres a few people out there eager as hell to give it a try:-)
Apple does not have the same goals as Dell or Compaq. For Apple to capture even.5% of the total PC market in the states is a huge jump, while Dell or Compaq would have to grab an extra 10% before even feeling it.
I had the same mentality as this guy, but a few things made me change, and I am in the process of saving my hard earned cash so I can afford to buy a titanium powerbook.
I am a card-carrying Microsoft-dor-whore. It is not rewarding spiritually like open source is, but it pays the bills and the projects are always a challenge. Because of the need to do things that only run on Windows I never thought about macs. Then I realized that over the last 2 years I have done 99% of my coding on a text editor (editplus, which really rocks, wwww.editplus.com) and the other 1% was done thru a terminal services client.
That meant I could use any kind of computer that could let me ftp a text file into my windows servers. Then I found out that there is a windows terminal services client written in Java that I can have for less than $50. On top of that I found out about Virtual PC. With Virtual PC I can have 3 or more computers in my back pack: A Mac, a Unix System and one or more Windows machines.
Now, I know the hardware is expensive, but he did not cover all the angles. There is no Windows laptop that can match the iBook's weight and feature set for the price. A 256MB, 600 MHZ iBook with the combo drive is 4.9 pounds and around $1500 if you add airport card.
Then, to be honest, there is no need to have my home computers running windows, even if I telecommute. I can do all my work with a Mac as long as I have the text editor and the terminal services client (I would not even need Virtual PC). And my wife could care less, she does not even use the second button in her mouse, and she was really thrilled when I took her to the Apple Store to see the new iMac.
As for components, I am sick and goddamn tired of how the homebuilt never measures up to your retal boxes. Of the 3 computers in my house the worst one is the dual processor machine I built for less than $1000. The retail Dell and the IBM Thinkpad run great.
I am a "Microsoft dot whore." I don't hate Macs but I have hated the MAC OS since forever. I hate Linux on the desktop but I am a hardcore fan of Linux used properly in a server environment. I have a lot of respect for freeBSD and it is my unix of choice when I need a dirt cheap web server. I am a Windows developer and I also work on web applications development, but non-Windows client platforms are never part of the specs.
My house right now has one Dell 600MHZ Celeron (wife), one homebuilt dual-processor PIII-1GHZ Windows 2000 server (for telecommuting), and two IBM Thinkpad laptops issued by my employers, one a Celeron 366 running XP Pro and one PIII-700 running Windows 2000 Professional. My home network shares a Comcast cable modem with a Linksys broadband router and a Netgear 802.11b wireless access point (using Linksys WPC11 wireless cards for the laptops).
And I am dying to get my hands on a Titanium Powerbook. Badly.
I go to CompUSA once a week just to look at their floor samples. I go to Microcenter hoping one is online so I can surf the web with it.
I buy every Mac magazine I can find, usually at a horrible markup. I have not bought a non-programming Windows magazine in more than 5 years.
I am telling my friends I am turning into a "Mac Hippie." (I spent years bothering our Mac users, calling them hippies and radicals. Somehow they liked that)
Why?
1. OS X. I have spent years telling people that the only reason Linux and BSD have not taken over Windows is the user interface. Using Unix for a Mac OS is brilliant!
2. Power users be damned, sometimes even us experts need to sit in front of a PC and have it work for us, not us fight it to get things done. A windows power user does not notice all the workarounds and hacks he learns over the year to adapt himself to Windows. This terrifies a newbie. I like how much simple everything is on the mac.
3. Open Source. I believe in making money from writing software, but there is just too much good free software out there that cannot be ignored. Embracing the open source movement was brilliant. Just looking at MAC OS X and knowing I got a fully functional Unix system underneath motivates me to drop my ASP.net and C# books and learn C++ and Java so I can write stuff that runs on Unix instead of Windows.
4. The colors! I embraced digital photography almost 2 years ago, and seeing my photos displayed on both a Cinema display and the new Mac was like seeing my work for the very first time. Everything looks much better on a mac.
5. Hardware + software integration. You cannot match any mac to a real world machine in the Windows world. For example, there is no way you can get a Windows laptop that can match a 600MHZ iBook, with its polycarbonate and magnesium 4.9 pound, body, built-in combo drive, pre-wired for WiFi and with firewire. not at that price. And let's not talk about the Titanium Powerbooks and the new dual processor Power Macs. I have a dual processor PIII-1GHZ and it is a pathetic piece of crap, I usually reinstall the OS every 60 days or so. It bothers me that this monster PC is less stable than my Celeron 366 IBM Thinkpad (which is rock-solid but slooooow).
6. Simplicity. My wife has been using computers since the day we met 10 years ago, but she has NEVER cared about computers. She sits down, does whatever she needs to and then walks away not thinking about it until the next time she needs to use it. In other words, she is not a computer geek. I took her to the Apple Store in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, to see the new iMac. 5 minutes after using it she turned around and told me "I want one." This is the first time in 7 years of marriage that she has ever asked me for a computer, usually she inherits my old PCs.
7. Available emulation software. I can carry a Titanium laptop on a business trip knowing I have Unix, Mac OS and Windows 2000 available in the same compact enclosure, thanks to Virtual PC.
8. Awesome laptop design. The iBook is a beautiful piece of work (the 14" iBook is ugly, sorry). The Titanium Powerbook is so awesome that one of our artists bought one and had hers delivered to the office and the whole production department pretty much froze still while she unpacked it. Even the Ti Powerbook is at least a pound lighter than my ThinkPad PIII700. Probably 3 or so pounds lighter than my ThinkPad Celeron 366.
I am counting my days to get my Mac. I managed to steal a G4 450 from IT for "testing" but after a few weeks they came up with some lame excuse to bring it back to them. After a few days I was using it more than my own workstation, a PIII-1GHZ. Eventually I convinced my wife to let me buy a Ti Powerbook 667, but I have to save my pennies first:-)
If I get my act together I will have my Ti Powerbook 667 no later than the first of August. That is unless you guys revamp the line and I get stuck in a shipping wait like it happened with the iMac.
Thanks for this opportunity to sound off! And yes, it is OK to contact me.
[lame windows weenie troll starts] You mean that Linux crashes?
What is next? Blue screen's of death? [/lame windows weenie troll ends]
The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility. freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.
Your experience is similar to mine and my employees.
I am a microsoft dot whore, so all my web development is asp and SQL server. If I can get away with it I will run a development server from my home office and upload a daily update. If the project is too big or there are more than one programmer then I will host it at the office and use Terminal Services to manage the server.
And yes, people are working longer when we tell them to telecommute and use flex time. Some people work 10-12 hrs (with decent output) instead of the 5-6 hrs of productive work I dream of them getting while at the office.
I dunno about Oprah, but I got a Hauppauge card in my main home PC and I got used to watch Maury Povich while catching up the morning wave of emails. Then the rest of the day it was The Hitler Channel...oops, I mean The History Channel. If you have a quiet home office and a TV playing documentaries you can code for hours without even noticing.
Which is a bad thing.
Eventually I got sick of working at my home office for more than two days in a row. What I try to do now is go to the office 3 days a week. Depending on meetings I may not be at the office before 11:00 AM or after 3:00 PM. The way the projects are run it does not matter where we are as long as the work is done.
Now, one thing I learned in the last few months is that it is better to rotate around the house and not stay holed into the home office. I convinced the IT folks to assign me a laptop on top of the desktop I kept at the office (employees are usually allowed to sign for one computer).
I put a wireless card on the laptop and got a wireless access point. Now I can wake up at 7:00 AM, read the first wave of emails and then doze off until 10:00 AM, which is the time when most of the people will be up and ready to work. I can take the laptop to starbucks and connect to the wireless network in the nearby CompUSA (the idiots could not figure out WEP, so they left it off). That way I can keep an eye on email and instant messages.
If I want to take a nap in the afternoon I put the cordless phone and laptop by the bed, so I am always reachable.
Of course, people abuse the system. If project managers start to complain that they cannot reach you when they need you or that your work is lacking quality then you will lose these privileges pretty quickly.
I telecommute at least 50% of the time and more than 50% of my staff (web and multimedia programmers) are full time telecommuters. The rest of my staff works from home at least part time.
Dedicated phone lines and broadband are legitimate business expenses. If your employer does not refund you for these you can claim them as business expenses in your taxes.
By having a dedicated busines phone line the phone company will have to treat you as a business, so you will probably be credited for down time. Obviously you do not want to pay twice as much for the pro version of your cable modem (for example, if you are with comcast.net you would pay twice to get the commercial version) to get the pro version just so it counts as commercial, but if the cable modem goes down (or DSL) you can dial up with your commercial phone line so at the very worst you can have email running while the broadband outage is fixed.
Now, you still have the issue of lost work. My employees understand that if anything keeps them from working from home they have to pack their laptop and come to the office. Some of them live 100 miles or more away, so over time they have made their own contingency plans. For exaple, some have convinced close family to have broadband installed. Or they may know of a close-by cyber cafe of copy shop that will let them camp out for a day with a laptop.
I used these tapes as far back as 1996. We finally got rid of the last two units we had when our system (a custom-built satellite telemmetry station) was upgraded to DAT.
Funny thing is that the DAT decks were not more reliable than the old tape drives they replaced. Much faster and less annoying, sure, but no better in terms of reliability.
We still kept another tape drive, that one seemed to be at least 12" in diameter. It was hell to mount because both spools mounted on a bayonet mount coaxially!
Anyone running a telecommunications company has one or more NOCs running 24 x 7.
I spent 5 years of my life working night shifts in military NOCs and I pretty much worked every possible holiday (at least we got comp time). Then I spent the next 3 years doing the same for a civilian satellite communications company in the US. Worked night shifts all holidays and no comp time. Damn them.
I used to like the peace of working nights but it eventually drove me insane and to this date I refuse to take a NOC job even if they offer me twice as much as I make now. It has been 2 years since I left the last NOC and my sleeping patterns are still messed up.
I had a consultant that lived in an apartment complex that had a T1 for all the tenants. They just split the cost. I never got around to find the specifics, only that the tenants were much happier than the DSL lines they had before.
AT&T clearly warned all their customers that they would cap downloads to 1.5 MB as soon as they switched from @home into their own network. Any @home user that was hanging around the athome.* newsgroups during shutdown weekend knows this, since we were getting leaked info from some AT&T techs at least a week ahead. Comcast will probably follow suit.
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Even if it is a small one. She will understand if you have to get her a smaller one, but she will not understand if you take a stance against DeBeers and the whole diamond trade deal. Trust me, women have no interest (which is not the same as no clue) on the DeBeers cartel or in the life condition of the mining children.
The red stapler is gonna be freaking huge :-)
I was forced to take Fortran 66, 77 and WATFIV (University of Waterloo Fortran) in engineering school in 1988. 14 years later and I still curse the goddamn day I walked into that classroom.
The only thing that course was good for was for some war stories:
1. Our professor, an electrical engineer, kept swearing there was no way a modem could go faster than 1200 bps. I know he meant baud, since normal copper has a hard time going over 2400 baud but to this day I still remember him. I bet he is still teaching that damn class.
2. I took this course at the University of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has sub tropical weather, for us 78 degrees means run and grab a frickin sweater. The very first time I saw a parka in person was in the admin console for the DEC/VAX 11/750 at the computing center. The VAX was kept in a glass-walled room at around 65 degrees Farenheith. The parka was kept by the door for when the sys admins had to walk into the room!
3. We were using DEC VT-100 terminals to access the VAX to do our homework. A couple lucky bastards got to use the VT-220 (which to us was the shiite).
4. The first time ever I connected to a computer system remotely was when we used our VAX accounts to connect to the library catalogs of the other UPR campuses in the island. We could use it to request inter-library book loans.
5. We learned to curse the students taking structured programming in Pascal. While our WATFIV programs were only a few hundred lines long, theirs were thousands! If you were unlucky enough to run a compile right after one of the WATFIV people started theirs, you could actually walk to the cafeteria a hundred yards away, get coffee, come back and still not finish the compile.
After I graduated in '92 I thought I would never see a damn VAX 11/7XX series again. 6 months later in the US Army Space Command, guess what I found: A freaking 11/780! Gimme a break!!!! We used them for simulating RF saturation of satellite communication networks. Terrible. Step too hard on the elevated floor tiles and the disk packs died on the spot. No wonder there were so many disk platters used as decorations (people would spend night shifts engraving them with all sorts of cool stuff, then hang them as cubicle art).
Fortran was a necessity back in the day, but honestly I don't see why would anyone need it now except people maintaining legacy apps. WATFIV output formats still give me the creeps after all this time.
I really hope they do justice to the book. That has to be one of the most original books I have read since 100 Years of Solitude.
:-)
Especially the hellhound
Funny, I just had that argument with my wife. I was telling her that SuSe has its own little annoying traits, but a free operating system can get away with things a $200 OS update can't. Sure, the sound of DVDs is sometimes a split second off-sync, but I got the player for free. Sure, Quake 3 sometimes hoses the sound upon exiting the game, but it is fixed by killing the hosed process left behind. When Quake 3 gets hosed on XP or 2000 that is an automatic reboot to fix it.
I stil think the current installers for Mandrake and SuSE are no harder than installing WinME or XP. I don't even want to dream up of what is going to happen a year from now.
Windows machines:
1. nettime or
2. (if XP) let the OS sync it by itself.
Unix machines:
xnetd. I forgot to turn it off when I setup my two machines over the last two weeks with Linux and this thread reminded me of it. Went to SuSE and 5 minutes later I had the daemon enabled and running. The SuSE tutorial is at http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/xntp.html .
I decided to bite the bullet two weeks ago and got rid of XP on my main home pc to install Suse 8.0. All my office needs so far can be fulfilled with Star Office 5.2, The Gimp and Ximian Evolution. Kopete takes care of my AOL/MSN instant messaging. Mozilla 1.0 for web surfing and newsgroups. Everything else is done with KDE and X apps I either got from the SuSE CDs or I downloaded, 99% of those I got as RPMs that installed without a problem. Even Ogle played encrypted DVDs without much heartburn. And my TV card (Hauppauge WinTV) works better in Linux than it ever did in WinXP.
And I am a card-carrying Windows whore.
About 3 days ago I converted my wife's Dell to Suse also. Her only complaint: I forgot to set it back to 800x600 (damn her!) after I was done setting it up. She does not really like Kopete but she tolerates it. She even likes Patience more than her solitary game in XP Pro.
Yesterday I managed to install the Linux binaries for Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena and Team Arena so I could re-use my Windows versions of these games. It took a few hours of research but by God it was awesome, the games run the same or maybe better than in XP Pro.
I have been trying Linux on and off since 1995 and I never lasted more than a day or two before going back to Windows. The install procedure for Suse 8.0 (and Mandrake 8.2, which I did at the office) are sooo dumbed down that they match the ease of the installer for WinME and almost XP. I paid $40 for the boxed media set, but I was already aware I could have gotten it for free if I downloaded the ISOs (just to make that point to a coworker I downloaded a freeBSD mini-iso and had a machine setup within half an hour). Mandrake came in a $12 Linux magazine imported from England.
I always used to say that old b/s mantra that yeah, Linux rocks on the server but it is 2 years behind on the desktop. Well, the two years are up. If they Linux folks can keep up the good work then it is only a matter of consumer education.
Hell, it happened to me too. MAybe next time we want to say "OpenSSH gets yet more paranoid, not that there is anything wrong with that."
It comes down to good practices. When I started playing with Suse I remember how I would get kick/banned on the spot for trying to get into #linux on Undernet while logged as root. I asked them and they simply explained it was to teach me to use SU instead of a real root.
I think we all agree root itself is too dangerous to leave it on for more than a few minutes, even if you really know what you are doing. Even us windows weenies are trying to enforce this: my IT folks spent a week adding garbled (read: cannot memorize) local passwords for all our servers and for administration are using an obscure account with the proper permissions. It is impossible to guess by name that this account is a local administrator for all machines in our network.
For OS X and BSD I guess you should be able to do whatever you need without logging as root, that is what SU is used for.
Quick look back:
Job #1: Satellite Communications Controller for the US Army Space Command. Lots of night shifts with nothing to do. Certain shift supervisors tolerated games as a way to keep people awake as long as the mission was not affected.
Job #2: Civilian Satellite Communications Controller (the former American Mobile Satellite, now bankrupt as Motient).
Again lots of shift work and hours upon hours of nothing to do. Lots of 3D shooters and Diablo. IT folks tolerated us as long as we did not screw up the PCs. Boss played stupid, he was only interested in people not getting in trouble.
Job #3: Web Applications Developer, the employer shall remain nameless. Boss-approved 3D-shooter games at lunch almost every day as long as it did not impact a project deliverable. Full cooperation from the IT folks. We would rotate between Quake III, Half-Life and Kingpin. Some high execs were popular for their Age of Empires games at lunch. The day the Sega Dreamcast was released we had ours FEDEXed to the office and paid for by the company (only console, controllers and memory cards, they told us we could buy our own $#^& games).
Workplace started eroding and then one day some guys got yelled at for playing Dreamcast at lunch. Eventually everybody left the company.
Current job: Another web shop that shall remain nameless. No gaming whatsoever, the corporate mentality is BILL BILL BILL (if you have read Grisham's The Firm you know what I am talking about). People prefer to bail out of the office for Starbucks or good food instead of eating in front of the PC just to play Quake III or whatever.
I personally tolerate one of my employees. He is a total slacker but he is a total genius on what he does, so if he wants to play a bit of Shockwave Pool at lunch then I could care less as long as he delivers on time.
There is a project manager that likes to play Shockwave games whenever a customer puts her on hold, which is fine since the clock is ticking and the customer is paying to keep her on hold.
I personally believe that with such high stress levels in my workplace an everywhere else, it is necessary to give employees some breathing room. Let them play a little bit. Let them take a walk around town and maybe grab a cappuccino on the way back upstairs. And don't count their lunch minutes. If the guys want to hit a restaurant once a week and spend over an hour there instead of the institutional 30 minutes (which is a retarded concept) then by God let them relax and eat something a bit tasty than a freaking burger.
Also, if the employees are done working and they want to stay after hours for a Quake III shootout across the network, then I am not only going to look the other way but I am going to make sure the IT folks leave them alone too.
Of course, notice that I keep saying it is OK as long as the deadlines are met. If we don't meet the deadlines we lose business and we all lose our jobs. Also, if you know a certain Project Manager is a total asshole, don't let him catch you!
Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the USA and has been a possession since 1898 and it has been part of the US phone system since forever, but all the VoIP providers rate it as international as an excuse to rake up the rates. How come all national long distance carriers count Puerto Rico as a US zip code (which it is) but none of the VoIP carriers will do this but then rate Alaska and Hawaii as national?
Why should I pay these people 11 cents a minute for my wife's mom-a-thon phone calls when Sprint is charging us 7 cents with our current plan?
Worse still is packaging for WinModems (and it will hapen with WinWiFi) does not explain to the consumer the consequences of picking this product in particular. These usually say something along the lines of "designed for Windows" or "requires a Windows PC" but no warning on performance hits on your machine.
And yeah, if at least the drivers were optimized then maybe your ton of cheap ram will make a difference when using a winmodem. Of course, when you are selling $5-$30 modems that are little more than a phone plug wired into a PCI slot you don't want to spend money writing drivers.
You are completely correct. And I have worse news for you:
I got a dual-processor PC with 1.5 GB of RAM and 64MB graphics card and sometimes it chokes playing DVDs and things like Java applets. You can have the fastest PC in the world and it will be useless without proper software.
As for the Java/Flash issue, one of the reasons it is so damn frustrating to be on dialup is that web designers misuse Java and Flash. They use both for eye candy and to bloat the site without providing much value. When was the last time you found a useful Java applet on the web? The only Java applets I have used continuously over the last two years that I believe are absolutely priceless are (1) the bandwidth tester at dslreports.com and (2) the web-based timesheet system from Deltek that we use at my company. Two very nice applets that provide an actual service, not some mickey mouse eye candy.
And Flash rocks if you use it for content. For example, my company deals with e-learning. Flash rocks when you use animations to teach people how things work. Say, a machine or a processor.
Your problem with Java is not Java itself, it is more a poor implementation of a Virtual Machine.
Back when we had Pentium 100s with 16MB of ram and WIndows 95, the windows modem concept was a clear winner for the bean counters but dammit, it sucked the life away of the machine.
:-)
Now we are in the land of the 1+ GHZ Celeron with 128MB of ram. The overhead of the winmodem should be tiny, unless the drivers are horribly written.
Not that I give a crap, years ago I decided to bite the bullet and get a hardware modem that I eventually made work in Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4 Workstation, 2000 Pro, SuSe and RedHat.
The average WiFi card for a laptop right now is around $100. For $100 you can buy an Apple Airport or a Linksys WPC11. If companies start pumping out soft cards with less electronics that rely on a fat driver then the windows user can expect to pay a fraction of that cost. I doubt we are going to see $20 Lucent WinWiFi cards any time soon, but there is going to be a sweet spot in the price chart that is going to help with increasing the popularity of WiFi.
We have a bunch of early adopters at my office and so far people love being able to walk around the house with a laptop when they are telecommuting. I added a Netgear ME102 to my home network in December and use a WPC11 for my laptop and I like it so much sometimes I don't ever step into my home office when I telecommute. Had the WiFi card been $50-$60 instead of $100 I could have bought it a month or two earlier, plus it would make it easier to convince the IT folks at the office to shell out for a test base and a few cards to do a field test.
Now, we are always wary of Big Bad Microsoft getting their hands on anything, but dammit, this standard is already open, and non Microsoft entities are huge players. Apple bases all their wireless networking on the same standard! Making a cheap, reliable windows-only wireless card does not affect Apple since they are a niche shop. It does not affect the open source folks since there will always be a full hardware solution, just like we have always had real modems sold alongside winmodems. And there is always an enterprising soul that wants to figure out how to make a winmodem work under Linux, so let's be honest, I know theres a few people out there eager as hell to give it a try
Apple does not have the same goals as Dell or Compaq. For Apple to capture even .5% of the total PC market in the states is a huge jump, while Dell or Compaq would have to grab an extra 10% before even feeling it.
I had the same mentality as this guy, but a few things made me change, and I am in the process of saving my hard earned cash so I can afford to buy a titanium powerbook.
I am a card-carrying Microsoft-dor-whore. It is not rewarding spiritually like open source is, but it pays the bills and the projects are always a challenge. Because of the need to do things that only run on Windows I never thought about macs. Then I realized that over the last 2 years I have done 99% of my coding on a text editor (editplus, which really rocks, wwww.editplus.com) and the other 1% was done thru a terminal services client.
That meant I could use any kind of computer that could let me ftp a text file into my windows servers. Then I found out that there is a windows terminal services client written in Java that I can have for less than $50. On top of that I found out about Virtual PC. With Virtual PC I can have 3 or more computers in my back pack: A Mac, a Unix System and one or more Windows machines.
Now, I know the hardware is expensive, but he did not cover all the angles. There is no Windows laptop that can match the iBook's weight and feature set for the price. A 256MB, 600 MHZ iBook with the combo drive is 4.9 pounds and around $1500 if you add airport card.
Then, to be honest, there is no need to have my home computers running windows, even if I telecommute. I can do all my work with a Mac as long as I have the text editor and the terminal services client (I would not even need Virtual PC). And my wife could care less, she does not even use the second button in her mouse, and she was really thrilled when I took her to the Apple Store to see the new iMac.
As for components, I am sick and goddamn tired of how the homebuilt never measures up to your retal boxes. Of the 3 computers in my house the worst one is the dual processor machine I built for less than $1000. The retail Dell and the IBM Thinkpad run great.
A little about myself first:
:-)
I am a "Microsoft dot whore." I don't hate Macs but I have hated the MAC OS
since forever. I hate Linux on the desktop but I am a hardcore fan of Linux
used properly in a server environment. I have a lot of respect for freeBSD
and it is my unix of choice when I need a dirt cheap web server. I am a
Windows developer and I also work on web applications development, but
non-Windows client platforms are never part of the specs.
My house right now has one Dell 600MHZ Celeron (wife), one homebuilt
dual-processor PIII-1GHZ Windows 2000 server (for telecommuting), and two
IBM Thinkpad laptops issued by my employers, one a Celeron 366 running XP
Pro and one PIII-700 running Windows 2000 Professional. My home network
shares a Comcast cable modem with a Linksys broadband router and a Netgear
802.11b wireless access point (using Linksys WPC11 wireless cards for the
laptops).
And I am dying to get my hands on a Titanium Powerbook. Badly.
I go to CompUSA once a week just to look at their floor samples. I go to
Microcenter hoping one is online so I can surf the web with it.
I buy every Mac magazine I can find, usually at a horrible markup. I have
not bought a non-programming Windows magazine in more than 5 years.
I am telling my friends I am turning into a "Mac Hippie." (I spent years
bothering our Mac users, calling them hippies and radicals. Somehow they
liked that)
Why?
1. OS X. I have spent years telling people that the only reason Linux and
BSD have not taken over Windows is the user interface. Using Unix for a Mac
OS is brilliant!
2. Power users be damned, sometimes even us experts need to sit in front of
a PC and have it work for us, not us fight it to get things done. A windows
power user does not notice all the workarounds and hacks he learns over the
year to adapt himself to Windows. This terrifies a newbie. I like how much
simple everything is on the mac.
3. Open Source. I believe in making money from writing software, but there
is just too much good free software out there that cannot be ignored.
Embracing the open source movement was brilliant. Just looking at MAC OS X
and knowing I got a fully functional Unix system underneath motivates me to
drop my ASP.net and C# books and learn C++ and Java so I can write stuff
that runs on Unix instead of Windows.
4. The colors! I embraced digital photography almost 2 years ago, and seeing
my photos displayed on both a Cinema display and the new Mac was like seeing
my work for the very first time. Everything looks much better on a mac.
5. Hardware + software integration. You cannot match any mac to a real world
machine in the Windows world. For example, there is no way you can get a
Windows laptop that can match a 600MHZ iBook, with its polycarbonate and
magnesium 4.9 pound, body, built-in combo drive, pre-wired for WiFi and with
firewire. not at that price. And let's not talk about the Titanium
Powerbooks and the new dual processor Power Macs. I have a dual processor
PIII-1GHZ and it is a pathetic piece of crap, I usually reinstall the OS
every 60 days or so. It bothers me that this monster PC is less stable than
my Celeron 366 IBM Thinkpad (which is rock-solid but slooooow).
6. Simplicity. My wife has been using computers since the day we met 10
years ago, but she has NEVER cared about computers. She sits down, does
whatever she needs to and then walks away not thinking about it until the
next time she needs to use it. In other words, she is not a computer geek. I
took her to the Apple Store in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, to see the new
iMac. 5 minutes after using it she turned around and told me "I want one."
This is the first time in 7 years of marriage that she has ever asked me for
a computer, usually she inherits my old PCs.
7. Available emulation software. I can carry a Titanium laptop on a business
trip knowing I have Unix, Mac OS and Windows 2000 available in the same
compact enclosure, thanks to Virtual PC.
8. Awesome laptop design. The iBook is a beautiful piece of work (the 14"
iBook is ugly, sorry). The Titanium Powerbook is so awesome that one of our
artists bought one and had hers delivered to the office and the whole
production department pretty much froze still while she unpacked it. Even
the Ti Powerbook is at least a pound lighter than my ThinkPad PIII700.
Probably 3 or so pounds lighter than my ThinkPad Celeron 366.
I am counting my days to get my Mac. I managed to steal a G4 450 from IT for
"testing" but after a few weeks they came up with some lame excuse to bring
it back to them. After a few days I was using it more than my own
workstation, a PIII-1GHZ. Eventually I convinced my wife to let me buy a Ti
Powerbook 667, but I have to save my pennies first
If I get my act together I will have my Ti Powerbook 667 no later than the
first of August. That is unless you guys revamp the line and I get stuck in
a shipping wait like it happened with the iMac.
Thanks for this opportunity to sound off! And yes, it is OK to contact me.
Hell, the first thing I said is I am a windows weenie :-P
(actually I am losing my faith on Windows, and BSD is welcoming me with open arms)
Yeah, its one of those things that would be nice if they make them more visible.
[lame windows weenie troll starts]
You mean that Linux crashes?
What is next? Blue screen's of death?
[/lame windows weenie troll ends]
The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility. freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.
Your experience is similar to mine and my employees.
I am a microsoft dot whore, so all my web development is asp and SQL server. If I can get away with it I will run a development server from my home office and upload a daily update. If the project is too big or there are more than one programmer then I will host it at the office and use Terminal Services to manage the server.
And yes, people are working longer when we tell them to telecommute and use flex time. Some people work 10-12 hrs (with decent output) instead of the 5-6 hrs of productive work I dream of them getting while at the office.
I dunno about Oprah, but I got a Hauppauge card in my main home PC and I got used to watch Maury Povich while catching up the morning wave of emails. Then the rest of the day it was The Hitler Channel...oops, I mean The History Channel. If you have a quiet home office and a TV playing documentaries you can code for hours without even noticing.
Which is a bad thing.
Eventually I got sick of working at my home office for more than two days in a row. What I try to do now is go to the office 3 days a week. Depending on meetings I may not be at the office before 11:00 AM or after 3:00 PM. The way the projects are run it does not matter where we are as long as the work is done.
Now, one thing I learned in the last few months is that it is better to rotate around the house and not stay holed into the home office. I convinced the IT folks to assign me a laptop on top of the desktop I kept at the office (employees are usually allowed to sign for one computer).
I put a wireless card on the laptop and got a wireless access point. Now I can wake up at 7:00 AM, read the first wave of emails and then doze off until 10:00 AM, which is the time when most of the people will be up and ready to work. I can take the laptop to starbucks and connect to the wireless network in the nearby CompUSA (the idiots could not figure out WEP, so they left it off). That way I can keep an eye on email and instant messages.
If I want to take a nap in the afternoon I put the cordless phone and laptop by the bed, so I am always reachable.
Of course, people abuse the system. If project managers start to complain that they cannot reach you when they need you or that your work is lacking quality then you will lose these privileges pretty quickly.
I telecommute at least 50% of the time and more than 50% of my staff (web and multimedia programmers) are full time telecommuters. The rest of my staff works from home at least part time.
Dedicated phone lines and broadband are legitimate business expenses. If your employer does not refund you for these you can claim them as business expenses in your taxes.
By having a dedicated busines phone line the phone company will have to treat you as a business, so you will probably be credited for down time. Obviously you do not want to pay twice as much for the pro version of your cable modem (for example, if you are with comcast.net you would pay twice to get the commercial version) to get the pro version just so it counts as commercial, but if the cable modem goes down (or DSL) you can dial up with your commercial phone line so at the very worst you can have email running while the broadband outage is fixed.
Now, you still have the issue of lost work. My employees understand that if anything keeps them from working from home they have to pack their laptop and come to the office. Some of them live 100 miles or more away, so over time they have made their own contingency plans. For exaple, some have convinced close family to have broadband installed. Or they may know of a close-by cyber cafe of copy shop that will let them camp out for a day with a laptop.
Apple could easily make a drawer like the Sun Cobalt Raq. Nobody ever compares a Cobalt Raq to the looks of a Compaq Proliant drawer.
I used these tapes as far back as 1996. We finally got rid of the last two units we had when our system (a custom-built satellite telemmetry station) was upgraded to DAT.
Funny thing is that the DAT decks were not more reliable than the old tape drives they replaced. Much faster and less annoying, sure, but no better in terms of reliability.
We still kept another tape drive, that one seemed to be at least 12" in diameter. It was hell to mount because both spools mounted on a bayonet mount coaxially!
Anyone running a telecommunications company has one or more NOCs running 24 x 7.
I spent 5 years of my life working night shifts in military NOCs and I pretty much worked every possible holiday (at least we got comp time). Then I spent the next 3 years doing the same for a civilian satellite communications company in the US. Worked night shifts all holidays and no comp time. Damn them.
I used to like the peace of working nights but it eventually drove me insane and to this date I refuse to take a NOC job even if they offer me twice as much as I make now. It has been 2 years since I left the last NOC and my sleeping patterns are still messed up.
I had a consultant that lived in an apartment complex that had a T1 for all the tenants. They just split the cost. I never got around to find the specifics, only that the tenants were much happier than the DSL lines they had before.
AT&T clearly warned all their customers that they would cap downloads to 1.5 MB as soon as they switched from @home into their own network. Any @home user that was hanging around the athome.* newsgroups during shutdown weekend knows this, since we were getting leaked info from some AT&T techs at least a week ahead. Comcast will probably follow suit.