Does Morris still do summer courses for high school kids? I did that twice in 1986/87 which led to my U enrollment (and eventually a spot on the Gopher team).
The computer course was taught on their PDP-11. My first exposure to Unix and C. I made a little curses-based skiing game.
Also had a SciFi/Fantasy course. We spent most of it playing D&D.
Yes, the whole licensing thing was a total fiasco. The interesting thing is that some people actually did pay for it. For example Schlumberger licensed gopher which they installed on oil drills in the amazon connected with VSATs. And of course without licensing we would never had been able to coerce Adam Curry wearing a Gopher T on MTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxIwy1bW_M
Who here wants to be part of the race to the bottom? EVERY tech worker worldwide needs to confront this. Do we want software development to continue to be a worthy profession? Or will we allow the corps to try and pit us against each other as we fight for work?
Wake up! The service economy is just following the manufacturing playbook from the 80s. Capital will fly towards the least-regulated, cheapest places. Look at NAFTA and what happened to Mexico. Jobs went there for a while, but then all those jobs went over to China because the cost was lower. You folks in India should enjoy your investment -- just don't expect that your job is safe either...
The one thing you can do is GET INVOLVED and ORGANIZE. ACM and IEEE are doing squat about this. There are a number of other organizations working toward global tech worker rights. Start by checking out www.techsunite.org. There is a listing of organizations that represent tech workers there.
We need a slashdot political "Report Card"
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
1) Identify core values near and dear to the slashdot crowd (copyright, civil liberties, all that).
2) Rank each candidate based on their votes and political statements on these core values
3) Prof^H^H^H^H Publish!
Seriously, the NRA does it, NARAL does it, lots of groups do it. I await the day when a candidate goes up to the podium and says "Slashdot gives me an A+ rating, vote for me!"
Umm, do you know what the Cato Institute is? Call them libertarian, but never liberal! The article I referred to was published in the right-leaning The Economist weekly magazine. A quick search reveals the same information in the right-wing rag the National Review. In fact, the text there is even more damning:
According to de Rugy's research, three of the five biggest increases in government spending in history have all occurred during the first three years of the Bush administration; the other two occurred during the Second World War. That sounds pretty bad, but even these numbers undoubtedly understate the problem, since they do not account for the huge prescription-drug benefit President Bush is working hard to push through Congress.
See the recent article in the Economist entitled Red George. It mentions:
As Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute points out, federal spending has increased at a hellish 13.5% in the first three years of the Bush administration ("he is governing like a Frenchman"). Federal spending has risen from 18.4% of national income in 2000 to 19.9% today. Combine this profligacy with huge tax cuts, and you have a recipe for deficits as far ahead as the eye can see.
........
The Democrats can point out that Bill Clinton was not only better at balancing the budget than Mr Bush. He was better at keeping spending under control, increasing total government spending by a mere 3.5 % in his first three years in office and reducing discretionary spending by 8.8%.
Welcome to Slashdot Joe. Hope you find a few minutes to post on other topics of the day.
I have to commend you and this campaign for applying online tools in new and interesting ways. I check out the blogforamerica site now and then and find the discourse interesting and honest. It seems that people are empowered and that ideas are working their way back to the leaders there. Additionally I've seen the staff break in and educate people on campaign finance law. (They edited posts that advocated raising money by selling t-shirts and donating profits -- a definite no-no).
Now let's get Karl Rove in here.. Maybe he chose to moderate instead of posting. heh..
Then Ms. DiFranco could play a street corner, surely Clear Channel can't keep her off the streets of San Fransisco
But they sure can influence what the people buy, who gets exposure, and who can play when and where. Luckily there are still some people trying to change this. Local clubs are putting up a fight..
Virtuous is a great start to regaining control over the Ticketmaster and their ilk. They offer small clubs a way to sell tickets online -- like e-tickets.
The big difference here? People that care about the experience. Not about corralling a huge audience to sell advertising too. In my opinion that's the big difference, and something to cherish and encourage.
The problem is all these media companies going vertical. Right now Clear Channel has a lock on most outdoor advertising, and most of the large concert venues, plus significant control over the FM spectrum here in San Francisco. As a performer if you want to play a concert you have to play by their rules.
This leads to banning anti-war pamphlets at Ani Di Franco concerts, faux pro-war rallies, and more.
Salon has extensive coverage of the Clear Channel mess here
Complain now, don't wait for Clear Channel to buy/.
So, expect to see a big decline in local content, especially if you live in a smaller market. Check out what happened in Minot North Dakota in January 2002.
In Minot, North Dakota, a train derailed in the wee hours of a cold January morning in 2002. After the accident, Minot was covered in a toxic cloud of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer that killed one person. But when local law enforcement officials tried to warn the community by calling radio station KCJB, they couldn't get through to anyone. Finally, local officials reached station staff by calling them at home, but the snafu lost valuable time.
Media giant Clear Channel owns all six of Minot's radio stations. Local news for the radio public in Minot is now served by one full-time news employee staffing all of the city's stations. So when an emergency struck, local radio in Minot struck out.
I love KEXP, the student run radio station associated with the Experience Music Project out of Seattle. Check them out at http://www.kexp.org/ It's listener supported (I'm a member) but free to all.
So, go out and get an Audiotron, and toss your AM/FM receiver in the trash.
As far as this latest ruling goes. It sucks. What needs to happen is radical change that vastly changes the value of the spectrum that people are using. Once these companies merge they'll be impossible to pull apart.
I think right now we need to free up more spectrum for public use, plus defend the WiFi space from being totally commercialized. Perhaps them we can have low cost bandwidth available everywhere and help keep us free from the monopolization of the airwaves.
The other avenue to fight back involves bringing back many of the FCC rules on community service, and the fairness doctrine. Fat chance, but worth writing and calling your congress-critter...
At CES TiVo announced their Media Center option. For the same price as the HP box you can get a TiVo that does pretty much the same stuff. You just have to wait until April. Here's the breakdown on costs:
$149 TiVo 40hr or 60hr refurb.
$ 25 USB Ethernet adapter
$ 99 TiVo home networking option
Some very nice features are in this new software, including integration with Apple's Rendezvous protocol (aka Zeroconf) to find all your iTunes mp3s.
One thing to note is that it is for the 1.3 version not the new 2.0 version. They say though there are not too many differences.
Funny thing. We were worried that mod_perl 2.0 would steal our thunder. It's now september 2002 and we still don't have the official release.
Apache 1.3 and mod_perl 1.x will be around for a long time though. Especially on all those production servers that don't get the latest greatest software, only the boring reliable stuff...
As one of the authors it's been difficult to wait for this book to get more widespread exposure. One reason might be because it is published by SAMS. I suspect if there was a cute O'Reilly animal on the cover we'd be much more widespread at this point. Who knows, maybe we should stuck with the (unfounded) SAMS stereotype and named the book mod_perl unleashed in 21 days for dummies. Nah..
In any case, it's nice to see a new review on one of my favorite web sites. More good reviews over there at amazon and at the book's official web site.
It doesn't actually add much to the info already available at CPAN. Still nice to have it on the shelve.
[disclaimer: author post follows]
The problem with CPAN is knowing what's useful and what's not. This book isn't just a collection of modules and documentation. Instead it's geared to people who are writing mod_perl code. The code examples are used to show you not just how to do some task, but also (in most cases) how the code does what it does.
In fact, distilling mod_perl code into short, sweet examples was where most of the effort went into writing this book. You don't want pages and pages of code to illustrate one or two simple ideas.
So, perhaps we didn't write a book that was useful to you. Given the feedback I've read, it is useful to many other people.
Go read the web site. It's premise is to compare the basic features/speed of the simplest application. One could add another caching layer on top of mod_perl to speed things up too....
Of course speed isn't everything, developer time, development tools, integration with content providers are all also factors.
While there are some numbers here available for your review, benchmarking does not provide a real world assessment for any application operating in a specific real world scenario, and this does not try to demonstrate any proof that any system is better than any other. More often than not, the benchmarks themselves are are too simple to fully utilize an application's strength or reveal its weaknesses. The benchmarks instead tend to be written for a lowest common denominator so more web applications can compete than not.
Check out the "hello world" benchmarks at www.chamas.com. mod_perl is right at the top of the heap when it comes to performance (after a C-based apache module) then java, THEN php.
From the site:
Welcome to the Hello World! benchmarks. This site seeks to give its visitors a sense of web application execution speed on various software platforms running under the Apache web server....... The benchmarks instead tend to be written for a lowest common denominator so more web applications can compete than not.
Re:Advertising would help
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Recently a whole bunch of Oracle advertisements for "Unbreakable Linux" have appeared. I've seen a full page ad on the back page of the "Economist" magazine and a huge billboard on highway 101 near Palo Alto.
So, have patience, more ads and more coverage will come organically.
If you do download it, make sure to use up2date, the RedHat Network's updating tool.
Note that the up2date server is about 10-20 times faster than ftp. ftp.redhat.com gets me 20k/sec whereas I've seen 300-400k/sec using up2date.
If you're brave you can even update your 7.2 box to 7.3 using up2date. Just upgrade the redhat-release, and up2date RPMs and start downloading! (note you'll probably have to manually work around some rpm name changes, but it's not hard..)
The guild is way off base here. Authors actually can make more money by using Amazon's associates program.
I recently co-authored the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook and we link to Amazon for our sales. I've also sold some of my collection through the Amazon marketplace, so I've seen both sides.
Amazon's commission structure is simply the best. We average about 10% of the purchase price on referals, plus 5% of anything else the customer buys in that session. So far these commissions are almost outpacing actual royalties from total sales.
There have been some used books available for sale, but those have not bothered me one bit. Buying used might save some money, but it is a less convenient option and most people still opt to buy new. (For example you cannot get a better shipping cost for multiple items.)
The Author's Guild should focus it's efforts on getting authors a bigger royalty in the first place, and stamping out the nasty liability clauses in most contracts these days. See this article by Philip Greenspun for why these contracts suck.
I run mrtg on the various points of the network, so bandwidth use is tracked. If I notice anything amiss I can track it down at the central switch and identify the connection. Wireless is a little more difficult though.
After that it's a simple matter of bringing up the issue at the homeowners association meeting, where we can chastise said infringer, just like any other bad behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like they're trying to head off a negative news cycle from this tweet from the owner of No Starch Press
https://twitter.com/billpolloc...
"Images of counterfeit copies of Python for Kids being sold on Amazon. Legit copies are thicker, color, layflat binding, nicer paper. @amazon"
Also see discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Does Morris still do summer courses for high school kids? I did that twice in 1986/87 which led to my U enrollment (and eventually a spot on the Gopher team).
The computer course was taught on their PDP-11. My first exposure to Unix and C. I made a little curses-based skiing game.
Also had a SciFi/Fantasy course. We spent most of it playing D&D.
There is a gophervr build that runs on current hardware. let me know if you're interested...
Yes, the whole licensing thing was a total fiasco. The interesting thing is that some people actually did pay for it. For example Schlumberger licensed gopher which they installed on oil drills in the amazon connected with VSATs. And of course without licensing we would never had been able to coerce Adam Curry wearing a Gopher T on MTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyxIwy1bW_M
Maybe Amazon will start selling all the 'Yeah' speech remixes.
Then Amazon could link to other stuff too. Dean had a bit role in the K Street TV series. Sadly IMDB removed the link between Dean and a Ninja movie.
I posted this to the linked blog...
Hi Folks,
Who here wants to be part of the race to the bottom? EVERY tech worker worldwide needs to confront this. Do we want software development to continue to be a worthy profession? Or will we allow the corps to try and pit us against each other as we fight for work?
Wake up! The service economy is just following the manufacturing playbook from the 80s. Capital will fly towards the least-regulated, cheapest places. Look at NAFTA and what happened to Mexico. Jobs went there for a while, but then all those jobs went over to China because the cost was lower. You folks in India should enjoy your investment -- just don't expect that your job is safe either...
The one thing you can do is GET INVOLVED and ORGANIZE. ACM and IEEE are doing squat about this. There are a number of other organizations working toward global tech worker rights. Start by checking out www.techsunite.org. There is a listing of organizations that represent tech workers there.
1) Identify core values near and dear to the slashdot crowd (copyright, civil liberties, all that).
2) Rank each candidate based on their votes and political statements on these core values
3) Prof^H^H^H^H Publish!
Seriously, the NRA does it, NARAL does it, lots of groups do it. I await the day when a candidate goes up to the podium and says "Slashdot gives me an A+ rating, vote for me!"
Welcome to Slashdot Joe. Hope you find a few minutes to post on other topics of the day.
I have to commend you and this campaign for applying online tools in new and interesting ways. I check out the blogforamerica site now and then and find the discourse interesting and honest. It seems that people are empowered and that ideas are working their way back to the leaders there. Additionally I've seen the staff break in and educate people on campaign finance law. (They edited posts that advocated raising money by selling t-shirts and donating profits -- a definite no-no).
Now let's get Karl Rove in here.. Maybe he chose to moderate instead of posting. heh..
But they sure can influence what the people buy, who gets exposure, and who can play when and where. Luckily there are still some people trying to change this. Local clubs are putting up a fight..
Virtuous is a great start to regaining control over the Ticketmaster and their ilk. They offer small clubs a way to sell tickets online -- like e-tickets.
Liberation Radio and KUSF are popular (and high quality).
The big difference here? People that care about the experience. Not about corralling a huge audience to sell advertising too. In my opinion that's the big difference, and something to cherish and encourage.
More people watch "The Daily Show" than Fox.
More people watch "Spongebob Squarepants" than Fox.
Fox isn't the problem. The problem other media outlets following their example.
The problem is all these media companies going vertical. Right now Clear Channel has a lock on most outdoor advertising, and most of the large concert venues, plus significant control over the FM spectrum here in San Francisco. As a performer if you want to play a concert you have to play by their rules.
/.
This leads to banning anti-war pamphlets at Ani Di Franco concerts, faux pro-war rallies, and more.
Salon has extensive coverage of the Clear Channel mess here
Complain now, don't wait for Clear Channel to buy
I love KEXP, the student run radio station associated with the Experience Music Project out of Seattle. Check them out at http://www.kexp.org/ It's listener supported (I'm a member) but free to all.
So, go out and get an Audiotron, and toss your AM/FM receiver in the trash.
As far as this latest ruling goes. It sucks. What needs to happen is radical change that vastly changes the value of the spectrum that people are using. Once these companies merge they'll be impossible to pull apart.
I think right now we need to free up more spectrum for public use, plus defend the WiFi space from being totally commercialized. Perhaps them we can have low cost bandwidth available everywhere and help keep us free from the monopolization of the airwaves.
The other avenue to fight back involves bringing back many of the FCC rules on community service, and the fairness doctrine. Fat chance, but worth writing and calling your congress-critter...
At CES TiVo announced their Media Center option. For the same price as the HP box you can get a TiVo that does pretty much the same stuff. You just have to wait until April. Here's the breakdown on costs:
$149 TiVo 40hr or 60hr refurb.
$ 25 USB Ethernet adapter
$ 99 TiVo home networking option
Some very nice features are in this new software, including integration with Apple's Rendezvous protocol (aka Zeroconf) to find all your iTunes mp3s.
Funny thing. We were worried that mod_perl 2.0 would steal our thunder. It's now september 2002 and we still don't have the official release.
Apache 1.3 and mod_perl 1.x will be around for a long time though. Especially on all those production servers that don't get the latest greatest software, only the boring reliable stuff...
In any case, it's nice to see a new review on one of my favorite web sites. More good reviews over there at amazon and at the book's official web site.
[disclaimer: author post follows]
The problem with CPAN is knowing what's useful and what's not. This book isn't just a collection of modules and documentation. Instead it's geared to people who are writing mod_perl code. The code examples are used to show you not just how to do some task, but also (in most cases) how the code does what it does.
In fact, distilling mod_perl code into short, sweet examples was where most of the effort went into writing this book. You don't want pages and pages of code to illustrate one or two simple ideas.
So, perhaps we didn't write a book that was useful to you. Given the feedback I've read, it is useful to many other people.
Of course speed isn't everything, developer time, development tools, integration with content providers are all also factors.
Another quote from the benchmark web site:
From the site:
Recently a whole bunch of Oracle advertisements for "Unbreakable Linux" have appeared. I've seen a full page ad on the back page of the "Economist" magazine and a huge billboard on highway 101 near Palo Alto.
So, have patience, more ads and more coverage will come organically.
Note that the up2date server is about 10-20 times faster than ftp. ftp.redhat.com gets me 20k/sec whereas I've seen 300-400k/sec using up2date.
If you're brave you can even update your 7.2 box to 7.3 using up2date. Just upgrade the redhat-release, and up2date RPMs and start downloading! (note you'll probably have to manually work around some rpm name changes, but it's not hard..)
The guild is way off base here. Authors actually can make more money by using Amazon's associates program.
I recently co-authored the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook and we link to Amazon for our sales. I've also sold some of my collection through the Amazon marketplace, so I've seen both sides.
Amazon's commission structure is simply the best. We average about 10% of the purchase price on referals, plus 5% of anything else the customer buys in that session. So far these commissions are almost outpacing actual royalties from total sales.
There have been some used books available for sale, but those have not bothered me one bit. Buying used might save some money, but it is a less convenient option and most people still opt to buy new. (For example you cannot get a better shipping cost for multiple items.)
The Author's Guild should focus it's efforts on getting authors a bigger royalty in the first place, and stamping out the nasty liability clauses in most contracts these days. See this article by Philip Greenspun for why these contracts suck.
I run mrtg on the various points of the network, so bandwidth use is tracked. If I notice anything amiss I can track it down at the central switch and identify the connection. Wireless is a little more difficult though.
After that it's a simple matter of bringing up the issue at the homeowners association meeting, where we can chastise said infringer, just like any other bad behavior.