This is a perfect fitting niche case - apparently the guy does a lot of recording and audio track editing. Linux/FOSS has many apps in that field that easyly rival and outperform close-source competitors. If you only do that kind of stuff Ubuntu actually *is* the cheaper alternative to anything else.
Here's a counter-example: I'm a very long term Linux user and plan on getting back to some video editing after an 8 year break. Video NLE still hasn't moved very much on Linux since then, so I guess I'll be working on my Mac with Premiere for doing that. Cinelerra and Blender Sequencer just aren't quite there yet.
There are special cases where you need Windows or OS X to get the job done (yes even Windows has those - some engineering stuff that only runs on MS for instance) but if your task is well specified it may be that you get the best option for free. On a FOSS operating system.
Bottom line: Allways check the alternatives. Or ask a non-zealot expert if FOSS has any boundaries for your field compared to the usual suspects.
I kinda hope she wins and sues the College into next wednesday. While she doesn't seem to be all that bright and the attempt at a lawsuit is a tad silly, it's time that academia notices they've gone to far in offering degrees in a bazillion different soft fields of expertise and hyping their importance.
We're seeing the same effect in Germany now that there is a universal Tuition proposedly to improve the academic field but basically used to generate interest for some pockets higher up the food chain and nothing else. Universities turning into degree-mills, grad schools and 'who can bare the most crap' torture chambers, with stuffed curiculae, understaffed teaching crew and semester plans completely void of any concept or sanity.
I resent academia more and more and say that most fields with 'social' and 'modern' in their names - and some others - should be dumped in favour of keeping the good old hard sciences healthy. There is to much rubbish out there in academia, to much stuff that doesn't belong there and to much power in degrees and papers with fancy titles on them - especially here in Germany. But I see the same problem in the US. If that stupid girl feel for the hype it is her fault - but not alone. Sue the colleges back into shape, that's what I say. Or at least get you tuition back.
Stupid girl or not, I completely see her point. Many young people fall for the legend, and don't be fooled: I did too and so did you. The only difference is that circumstances caused that she noticed it earlyer.
I started using Emacs about 3 years ago, away from my workstation, doing web developement on my trusty old G4 iBook. Eclipse was running for PHP stuff, Mamp was running in the background, jEdit (my favorite editor) was running to edit ActionScript and Flash MX 2k4 Pro was running to compile Flash/SWF and do some vector images I needed for the project. The system was totally bogged down and I pondered the thought of buying TextMate once again. Since I do Linux, OS X and Windows and also do a lot of CLI work, I eventually dismissed the TextMate option and went for the editor I've been wishing to learn since 1997.
Using Emacs is a huge pain. Basically everything you know about common user access standard is completly obsolete - Emacs is from before such things even existed. You have to actually proactively learn and practice(!!) the equivalents to select, copy and paste in order for them to be usable in everyday work. Getting emacs extensions to run and finding the correct place to put them is a science in itself, since the options for that are countless. Using anything but the most trivial things instantly requires a lookup in reference cards and often even the manual and switching from jEdit or something else to Emacs cold turkey will have your productivity plummet to unseen depths and your frustration skyrocket for months to come. Which is why I avoid that, and only expect to be fluent in Emacs and ELisp (the native Emacs PL) after another few years of usage.
Having said all that I have to say that attemting to move to Emacs as your primary tool for all IT related work has its very solid appeals. Which is why I've allways had Emacs on the radar. Only the work and effort it takes to switch kept me away from it for way more than a decade.
1) Nowadays Emacs runs *EVERYWHERE*, contrary to TextMate, which is closed source, only runs on OS X and requires scripting as much as Emacs does. No matter how obscure the OS, no matter how limited the enviroment, Emacs will run. If it runs with electricity, it will run Emacs.
2) It's basically an Operating System in itself. ELisp - an ancient scripting language - is the foundation to Emacs and you can script *EVERYTHING*.
3) Emacs is actually native to the CLI. There is nothing worth mentioning that an Emacs shoehorned into a GUI (aka XEmacs) has as benefit over the regular CLI Emacs, appart from maybe easyer installation on Windows or something like that.
4) Emacs is very powerfull. It supports seperated Windows on the CLI and there are a huge amount of scripts. There is a very neat PHP mode, still actively maintained and available on sourceforge and there's a lot of other neat stuff out there too.
5) Emacs was a massive performance hog... 25 years ago. Which means it's lightning fast by todays standards. It's very small and an entire custom Emacs work enviroment for every OS you can think of easyly fits on todays smallest USB-drive keychains.
6) Since it runs in the CLI, using it via a remote terminal makes no difference.
7) It is still actively maintained with regular releases (sic).
8) The input device it the Keyboard, and nothing else. Mouse support with xEmacs basically is a hack and feels very tacky and many occasions. For an editor you eventually expect to use everywhere, that is an advantage.
The 'Learn Linux' benefit of learing once, use until the day you die applies just as well to Emacs. That learning however is a walk through hell. I expect it to start paying off anytime soon.
Bottom line: Emacs is the oldest non-trivial end-user application in existance, and it shows in every respect. However, if you are an IT pro and expect to be working in the field for the rest of your worklife, in many heterogenous enviroments, learning Emacs (and Elisp) is a challange worth attempting. It is work, but with a very usefull result.
Well then maybe you shouldn't release your software with no marketing what-so-ever?
First of all: You wrote a HTTP library for Ruby. Big fat hairy deal. Frankly, I never knew and I couldn't care less. Second of all: The Rails crowd gained traction and scored bizar amounts of hype for one reason - and one reason *only*: They had, by standards of open source - a massive marketing campaign to push Rails into the FOSS webdev field. They have a website that, for *once* in the FOSS field, didn't look like shit (and changed the FOSS-Project-Website & Enduser Awareness Game for ever - God bless them!), they pratically invented the concept of screencasts to showcase their FOSS webkit in short understandable fashion and they abandoned all snotty-nosed elitist crap in favour of building a community for webdevs while at the same time doing huge inroads into the Java & academic community who needed Ruby to boost their ego and to seperate themselves from the PHP crowd. And who, until the rails hype, weren't aware of any FOSS webkits. Of which Rails, btw., isn't a particuarly new, good or innovative one anyway. Other kits from ages ago are still leading the field by far technology wise - with nobody careing. Due to, guess what?, no marketing.
Your conclusions are wrong, Mr. Shaw. People care squat about what you licence your software under. If you want money, you demand money. If you want attention, you demand attention. Rails did it, you didn't. Your Mongrel site isn't bad, by FOSS standards that is, but it doesn't look particuarly interesting either. Learn you lesson, licence with whatever you want - wether it's the GPL or not *nobody* of *any* importance fucking cares - and do a little marketing and reasearch before you push your next FOSS tool. That, and nothing else, will enable a business on top of it.
This sort of thing goes to show that regular off-the-shelf x86es basically are rubbish. I've got a Sharp PC-1403 Pocket Computer, pretty much from the same period. I use it to this very day - also because it comes with a full-blown scientific calculator - and it still runs software I built 20 years ago. It's got Sharps Basic and a feature rich ROM with all kinds of neat things hardwired into it, starts in nano-seconds and runs 300+ hours of the grid on two buttoncells.
I bet you could observe the very same thing with 'desktops' and portables from Commodore, Atary or Sinclair. PCs scale easy, but they still are quite junky till this very day. Just discovered that once again yesterday when charsets and keyboard signals wouldn't match in a virtual Linux desktop enviroment. Outside of a thriving eco-system of competition and many people basing their stuff of simular standards regular PCs fall short of delivering their promise. When things get tough, I'll take any old Tandy Portable over an PC Laptop any time. And not only because it runs on regular batteries if it needs to.
I'm weary allready. First Android, then a completely differently branded second Linux knockoff. I know Google isn't dependant on making money with their software and OSes projects, but the last thing we need is further market confusion due to Google joining the fray of alternative OSes and distros. I beg that they manage to string Android and this Chrome OS thing into one OS ecosystem and that it will be well standardised and documented.
Ever since they released the award winning Savage, a very good RTS / FPS combo, with an advertised (!) native Linux client right from the get go, S2 Games has a special place in my heart. They deserve support ever since they started publishing. Buy their Games, they are very cool and fun to play and also run great on older hardware.
This sort of 'shaking bed' is nothing new. Simular mechanisims are used as alarmclocks by deaf people. Maybe the force with which the bed is shaken is a new quality, but the basic concept has been around for a decade or two at least.
I have a server on the Inet with Debian and root access for websites and CMSes of critical long-term customers and my own project versioning and testing. I use a seperate usergroup for each project and also have a usergroup for my Project directory that basically has around 10 years worth of my projects in it. I sync using the CLI client for ssh+svn on OS X and Linux. If I had Windows in there somewhere - which I don't since about 7 years ago - I'd have TortoiseSVN to cover syncing there.
I find this a practical solution as I can access my current stuff from *anywhere* at any time and I can use the same skillkit I use for my daily developement work at the job. At work we also use SVN for project specific docs and media. The tools are there, svn is tried and true and you can also fix unreversably borked versioning with a little XML editing inside the.svn directory if things should go completely haywire.
For archiving I'd actually archive off the repository itself. Haven't seen the need to do that yet though. Backups I still to with alternating/overturning drag and drop copies of entire dirtrees via the Finder or Nautilus/Konqueror on to external HDDs - which is a leftover from the before-svn-sync times which I intend to change someday and integrate into the pipeline.
A lot has been said here allready, and a lot of it is important: Patience, Persistance, Success by volume of throughput, focussing on non-IT stuff, etc.
What can help is structured social interaction. That doesn't exist anymore and was lost throught the last 100 years - aside from very small and limited areas. One of them is dancing, more percisely: Tango dancing.
I got lured into it by a former colleague of mine, a teacher I once worked with. She asked me to join her in Tango lessons, since I have stage-dance and Aikido experience and she could use a little help. I agreed and didn't think much of it and expected to drop pair-dancing right after the course again. However, I'm *totally* hooked! Tango is a very hermetic scene - and for good reasons too - with own dance events called Milongas and an eventually very close and intimate style of interaction between the dancing partners.
As a super-geek and nerd I find that Tango covers a lot of aspects for me that would otherwise be beyond my controll:
1) People dancing tango are smart and more on the intellecutal side of things - no ultimate idiots or drunkards involved, as Tango requires a working brain (and a little more) to do. I've allways felt that clubs are stupid and pointless. Now I know it and have found a place where people go that think the same way.
2) Modern Tango and Tango Nuevo in particular still have the important remainders of formalized interaction between the sexes as seen around 1900 or so. You need to get confident in asking the next lady to a dance (or 10 dances as the case may be) but with pratice your confidence grows and even a turndown (which I've both gotten and also given) is allways polite and non-offensive. It's even possible to dance with ladies that don't even speak your language, or only a little.... Like that cute slender Korean beauty thats currently visiting her local relatives and visiting Europe and will be at my favorite Milonga on wednesday again...:-))) Asking to a dance can be done with simple gestures - no speaking involved.
3) All abount pair-dancing but also the special thing called Tango (Tango is not generic latin dancing - its an own thing) can be formally learned like learning programming techniques or a martial arts style. You can rehearse the steps and styles on your own or with another insecure member or your or the opposite sex. There are quite a few of those too, you'd be supprised. It also is a normal thing to switch leads and practice with members of the same gender, especially for men. That comes from the olden days when access to women was rare and wide and far between and you wanted to be good when the chance to prove yourself in leading a lady came up.
4) Lot's of people dancing tango are motion legastenics themselves, so if you put a little extra effort into it (I go to 3 milongas a week and take at least to classes with different Tangoschools) you'll be king of the dancefloor in no time. I had ladies lining up to dance with me last week at my favourite weekly milonga! Seriously. You can imagine how that feels - and it *does* feel great.
5) Tango is a cheap and fullfilling. Dancing shoes and some chump change for non-alcoholic drinks at Milongas and the admittance boil down to 50 Euros a month at max. And that's if I by drinks for two ladies per milonga. Which I rarely do.
6) Dancing Tango with a Lady is a *very* good method to find out if she's a good partner and mistress. It goes just as well the other way around. 3 dances and I'll tell you if the lady and I go well together. And we won't need to speak a word.
7) Since scoring a pickup is a secondary and having fun dancing is a primary for all people involved theres a lot of humor and nonchalence involved in all social interactions. You sit together with the guys and judge the ladies and the ladies sit together and do the same. Experienced ladies and the Tango instructors in your local scene will acutally come up to you and tell you that you sho
23 years of hands-on software developement experience.
I (and many other old timers on this thread) are telling you in no uncertain terms how the cookie crumbles, [...]
Guess we need a drumroll tag in slashdot. Pardon me, pal, but I know very much myself 'how the cookie crumbles', thank you.
Let me give you an extreme example: I know mid-twenties CS grads who have done more in half an hour with a well coded SED script than an 20-head team of middleware consultants in two years. That is not an exaggeration. The entire middleware between Sonys mobile multimedia plattform and vodaphone europe mobile service (a Java behemoth beyond any imagination) was replaced with a single SED script a colleague of mine built in 30 minutes and placed on the right intersection. He scored 30 000 Euros for the job and a follow-up contract to maintaint the entire plattform that rakes in 15 000 per month to this day.
Another example: My very first real-life python programm was a 150 line script for a friends online media business that connected the 4 million entry database of Germanys largerst distributor of books, Libri (largerst automated/robotic distribution center in the world, 30 000 deliveries per hour, 24/7, less than 100 personell in fullfillment at any given time), with our online distribution channels, including the then brand new amazon market place. I wrote the script in 3 weeks while learning Python and spend most of my time dicking around the web looking at FOSS webkits and help setting up my friends online business. I actually wrote it in something like 15 hours and most of it was figuring out and testing the monster regexes required to filter the datastream we got from printer signals. 2 weeks into integrating the script into our regular pipeline Libri EDI Sales management and the data dept. called us and asked us how we generated the 3000% increase in throughput, where we got the 4 Million datasets from without using their bizar software behemoth priced at 5000 per year in licencing. My friend told them we were filtering their data of the free-client printer option after printing out a search for the space character, which naturally returned all datasets. We got a personal invitation to and tour of their facilities and got an exclusive distribution deal at zero cost. And were among the first to try out a XML option later on which we suggested (sometimes Captain Obvious doesn't stand a chance with the pointy-haired partner and need extra help) which made the script obsolete just as fast as I had written it.
Another example: Did you ever notice how on amazon marketplace the third-party prices often are only cents appart and the cheapest offer allways is on top? That's price-combat at its finest and I was the first to automate it. With another single python script under 1000 lines in length. *Before* the Amazon API for that part was available. I wrote it in less than 20 hours.
I could go on like this for hours, but the bottom line is: I have countless examples where entire ERP, SCM, Billing, Payment and Fullfilment setups have been replaced by a handfull of PHP, Python or Perl CLI scripts and have sped up the processes covered tenfold and more for *everyone* involved, including secretaries who sometimes even had to learn a handfull of Bash commands. Which they gladly did, as it spared them the alternative of an extra 10 hours per week in front of bloated unwieldy, slow, braindead and cookie-cutter SAP-style interfaces.
Give me a small (less than 10) team with one or two experienced leaders and the rest motivated programming enthusiasts + access to the people *directly* involved in the processes in question - and I will automate *anything* in 6 months, except maybe embedded military, avionics, critical medical software and mission critical space flight software stuff. Simply because that all is a totally different league due to testing and DBC requirements.
Trust me, with the things I mentioned in the parent post, building a payroll kit for a university - no matter how large it is - is absolutely doable and could actually turn out to be a walk in the park. And a fun one at that.
I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.
Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$.... And, sadly, I also bet that that won't happen, because then someone would have to admit that he burned 20+ Million on a project that was implemented start to finish with less than a tenth the money. Sometimes the sad and sorry state of our profession in some places makes me want to cry.
A few months ago somebody here on/. asked on how to go about becoming a sysadmin. I wrote a lengthy, high rated reply that basically covers everything you need to know. Admining isn't a bad thing to get skills in, it's sort of the career-path of helpdesk if you will. As a real Admin you're in expert territory. You have to serve, and serve fast, but you won't have PEBCAK stuff to deal with that often. Consider following that path. Here's a pimped version of the reply I mentioned that covers admin stuff.
This actually *is* a good thing - if the money inmediately is used for the intended purpose: Bringing nation-wide Broadband fast. Which would mean that the runtime of this tax is limited to a few years, when every corner of the countryside has broadband.
This is actually quite different from the German GEZ fee for Internet capable devices. Which is bizar beyond anything concievable.
I never understood the people relying solely on google ranking to do their business. The day their ranking tanked for whatever reason, they had/have to close down.
I certainly don't understand an entire generation of new web useres mistaking Google for the Internet.
I like Google for the uncluttered interface and I like clusty.com for the grouped results branches.
Beyond that, search is search to me and I will use whatever machine gives me results I'm satisfied with. Most of the time that is Google.
Google itself OTOH is way more than just search by now. It's a massive counterpart to MS - a value in itself - a huge supporter of FOSS, a mobile OS vendor about to crack open the 80s style proprietary lockdown of the mobile market ('Android' anyone?) and it has a wide range of free webapps and services that actually work on all plattforms and not just some Active X enabled proprietary MS browser.
Bottom line: As long as MS has the OS market in a firm monopolistic grip I'm shooing everyone I know away from b*ng and to other engines like Google or Clusty - better b*ng results be damned. They aren't that much better to just keep on lubeing up and bending over for MS.
I'm a programmer in a larger Software/IT company where the IT guys (admins included) are the cream and expect to be treated with respect. However, whenever I go down to our online customer managers or secretaries or to the janitor to ask for something, I am *very* polite. I'm smart enough to know a) polite is simply better in so many ways and b) these people can screw up my day big time if they are so inclined.
My suggestions:
You should do your job in such a way that you can keep the respect of others *and* your selfrespect. If somebody is being impolite, let them know politely. If they do not want to learn, let them run into a wall until they do. If I as a team organiser with quite some responseablities on my mind can take the time to be forthcoming to my admins, reception secretaries and community managers, so can everybody else. Even a departement lead has that much time (In fact, two of the most forthcoming people I know at our company are our CEO and CTO). And if your peer isn't inclined to put up with the minimum effort it takes to make the workplace worthwhile he simply is being a jerk and deserves whatever flak he gets from you. People generally treating IT (or anybody else for that matter) impolitely are just being imature and can use a fair share of forcefull lecture on manners.
I live in Los Angeles. One day I went up to Yosemite to hike Half-Dome. It's a long hike, so we started at 3 in the morning. When we broke out of the trees, I looked up and shit my pants.
Sorry, but me missing you shitting your pants is absolutely fine with me. Thanks for the concern though.
This is yet another slew of ultra-pointless pre-election gibberish. Extremely violent videogames such as Manhunt are allready factually banned for public sale and sale to minors in Germany, based on laws existing since the dawn of the republic.
The rubbish on Computers, Videogames and the Internet that the ruling class in Germany has been putting out in recent years has reached staggering heights that are compareable to the situation in the US.
I for one am going to send in my support signature for the Piratenpartei (German branch of the Pirate Party) and do an all out vote for them whenever the occasion arises. If all German INet savy people do that, we could have the 5% hurdle for the Bundestag in no time. That'll teach them.
And if you are german, how about pitching in? Your signature paves the way to the Bundestag. For once get off your fat lazy unpolitical geek ass and help roll Schäuble and Zensursula straight out of office. And screw the Greens (Grüne) on this one! Don't forget that Tritin and Fischer had a big hand in passing that Internet law a few years back ('Gesetz zum verbesserten Schutz des Urheberrechtes im Internet' aka 'German DMCA')!
Beweg' Deinen Arsch und tu' was! (visit links above)
As far as modern day handheld computers go, I have to say that the Asus EEE induced second coming of the Netbook and its liklings has had extremley positive side effects on the market in the last two years.
Portability? Check. Openess and flexibility of plattform? Check. Price? Check. Versatility? Check.
However, there is just one more thing I want before I can say they are on par with the mid-nineties PC handhelds that where available back then and could easyly keep up with their big desktop brothers in terms of getting the job done: Battery Uptime and/or easy replacement of battery.
Let me explain: The HP 200LX, Sharp PC 3000, 3100 and its non-name rebrands ran on AA cells. And while the off-grid uptime was a meager 3,5 hours at max, you could easyly replace them with rechargeables or - in an emergency - with fresh AA cells from the next gas station or convenience store. I want that kind of battery time or convenience from todays handhelds aswell. If convenience is not an option, I want the same uptime I could get from my old Palm m105 with folding keyboard attached or from the original Psion Netbook: 40 hours.... On the Palm that uptime came from 3 or 4 AAA cells btw - but that's another story.
Substancially increased battery uptime without outlandish pricing - then handhelds are back in the game for me. It would be about time.
The campaing is a fake. Somebody took Asus EEE commercial videos and slapped a crappy looking badly aligned 'It's better with Windows' Slogan over it. Fonts aren't MS branding and the layout of the website is notably amatureish. You all have been trolled, so chill. It's a compareatively elaborate troll though, I give him that.
People seem to forget that Shockley went to death valley because there was absolutely nothing there and you could get all the basics dirt cheap. The nutcases that started the silicon revolution did that in barns and garages and of those in the cheapest they could find. The shockley five went to start Intel in the neighbourhood and thus Silicon Valley was born.
If I where building a startup in the US today, I'd seriously consider Detroit. You can buy houses for 500$ right now in Detroit and infrastructure is just good enough to live. You could spent years there on the most minimal VC and since Detroit is so super-boring now the team actually would have a personal interest in concentrating on the thing their building.
Revolutions very often start in extremely unspectacular places, where the artists and crazies move in because they have other things to worry about than finding the best way to rake in cash. It's only a few decades later that these places become the hippest areas on the planet. Notting Hill in London, Schanzenviertel and Hafenstraße in Hamburg, etc. etc. - all the same story.
Anjuta and KDevelop only run under OSS Unix (Linux) but you can run them in an emulated enviroment - there is a no-hassle installation for such an enviroment from Ubuntu.
JEdit and Emacs are both editors that can be extended to IDEs and beyond. You may want to look into that approach.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
While the handling of Vi or Emacs actually *is* breathtakingly bizar and unwieldy, what you're saying is not correct. If someone actually takes the time to learn to use Emacs and the extensions it offers for developement - which can take a few years - it can be the most powerfull and fast IDE out there. And it opens files upwards of 40 MB (that's Megabyte) in half a minute and then you can navigate around them with no delay at all. That league of performance is the reason I started using it. In terms of performance Emacs is the most powerfull IDE on the planet.
Then again, I started using Emacs 3 years ago - after briefly considering the purchase of Macsperts new darling child TextMate, basically a modern Emacs rip - and I still can't bear it for longer than 10 minutes - mostly because it so totally doesn't comply with CUAS (Common User Access Standard). Yet then again, Emacs was created when CUAS didn't even exist, so that's no fault on behalf of Emacs.
Bottom line: If you are willing to invest months (!) of time actively learning an IDE, the cli version of Emacs will be with you until the day you die, as it runs well on everything that uses electricity. Up from the most powerfull supercomputer using the most bizar unix variant right down to a 10-year old handheld PC.
Mainly? Meaning they actually *will* want to do preview at occasions? That's a no brainer: Mac OS X. If they only want to communitacte and use the web, that's a no-brainer aswell: Get some cheap-ass netbooks that are cheap, small, light and don't break that easy. If you're going into warzones, deserts or rainforests that's also - guess what? - a no-brainer: Get Panasonic Toughbooks. And some solar panels.
Another thing: If you're going on a 18 month tour as the prime IT guy and you have to ask this question I'd actually presume you're maybe the wrong guy for this sort of thing, no?
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This is a perfect fitting niche case - apparently the guy does a lot of recording and audio track editing. Linux/FOSS has many apps in that field that easyly rival and outperform close-source competitors. If you only do that kind of stuff Ubuntu actually *is* the cheaper alternative to anything else.
Here's a counter-example: I'm a very long term Linux user and plan on getting back to some video editing after an 8 year break. Video NLE still hasn't moved very much on Linux since then, so I guess I'll be working on my Mac with Premiere for doing that. Cinelerra and Blender Sequencer just aren't quite there yet.
There are special cases where you need Windows or OS X to get the job done (yes even Windows has those - some engineering stuff that only runs on MS for instance) but if your task is well specified it may be that you get the best option for free. On a FOSS operating system.
Bottom line: Allways check the alternatives. Or ask a non-zealot expert if FOSS has any boundaries for your field compared to the usual suspects.
I kinda hope she wins and sues the College into next wednesday. While she doesn't seem to be all that bright and the attempt at a lawsuit is a tad silly, it's time that academia notices they've gone to far in offering degrees in a bazillion different soft fields of expertise and hyping their importance.
We're seeing the same effect in Germany now that there is a universal Tuition proposedly to improve the academic field but basically used to generate interest for some pockets higher up the food chain and nothing else. Universities turning into degree-mills, grad schools and 'who can bare the most crap' torture chambers, with stuffed curiculae, understaffed teaching crew and semester plans completely void of any concept or sanity.
I resent academia more and more and say that most fields with 'social' and 'modern' in their names - and some others - should be dumped in favour of keeping the good old hard sciences healthy. There is to much rubbish out there in academia, to much stuff that doesn't belong there and to much power in degrees and papers with fancy titles on them - especially here in Germany. But I see the same problem in the US. If that stupid girl feel for the hype it is her fault - but not alone. Sue the colleges back into shape, that's what I say. Or at least get you tuition back.
Stupid girl or not, I completely see her point. Many young people fall for the legend, and don't be fooled: I did too and so did you. The only difference is that circumstances caused that she noticed it earlyer.
My 2 cents.
I started using Emacs about 3 years ago, away from my workstation, doing web developement on my trusty old G4 iBook. Eclipse was running for PHP stuff, Mamp was running in the background, jEdit (my favorite editor) was running to edit ActionScript and Flash MX 2k4 Pro was running to compile Flash/SWF and do some vector images I needed for the project. The system was totally bogged down and I pondered the thought of buying TextMate once again. Since I do Linux, OS X and Windows and also do a lot of CLI work, I eventually dismissed the TextMate option and went for the editor I've been wishing to learn since 1997.
Using Emacs is a huge pain. Basically everything you know about common user access standard is completly obsolete - Emacs is from before such things even existed. You have to actually proactively learn and practice(!!) the equivalents to select, copy and paste in order for them to be usable in everyday work. Getting emacs extensions to run and finding the correct place to put them is a science in itself, since the options for that are countless. Using anything but the most trivial things instantly requires a lookup in reference cards and often even the manual and switching from jEdit or something else to Emacs cold turkey will have your productivity plummet to unseen depths and your frustration skyrocket for months to come. Which is why I avoid that, and only expect to be fluent in Emacs and ELisp (the native Emacs PL) after another few years of usage.
Having said all that I have to say that attemting to move to Emacs as your primary tool for all IT related work has its very solid appeals. Which is why I've allways had Emacs on the radar. Only the work and effort it takes to switch kept me away from it for way more than a decade.
1) Nowadays Emacs runs *EVERYWHERE*, contrary to TextMate, which is closed source, only runs on OS X and requires scripting as much as Emacs does. No matter how obscure the OS, no matter how limited the enviroment, Emacs will run. If it runs with electricity, it will run Emacs.
2) It's basically an Operating System in itself. ELisp - an ancient scripting language - is the foundation to Emacs and you can script *EVERYTHING*.
3) Emacs is actually native to the CLI. There is nothing worth mentioning that an Emacs shoehorned into a GUI (aka XEmacs) has as benefit over the regular CLI Emacs, appart from maybe easyer installation on Windows or something like that.
4) Emacs is very powerfull. It supports seperated Windows on the CLI and there are a huge amount of scripts. There is a very neat PHP mode, still actively maintained and available on sourceforge and there's a lot of other neat stuff out there too.
5) Emacs was a massive performance hog ... 25 years ago. Which means it's lightning fast by todays standards. It's very small and an entire custom Emacs work enviroment for every OS you can think of easyly fits on todays smallest USB-drive keychains.
6) Since it runs in the CLI, using it via a remote terminal makes no difference.
7) It is still actively maintained with regular releases (sic).
8) The input device it the Keyboard, and nothing else. Mouse support with xEmacs basically is a hack and feels very tacky and many occasions. For an editor you eventually expect to use everywhere, that is an advantage.
The 'Learn Linux' benefit of learing once, use until the day you die applies just as well to Emacs. That learning however is a walk through hell. I expect it to start paying off anytime soon.
Bottom line: Emacs is the oldest non-trivial end-user application in existance, and it shows in every respect. However, if you are an IT pro and expect to be working in the field for the rest of your worklife, in many heterogenous enviroments, learning Emacs (and Elisp) is a challange worth attempting. It is work, but with a very usefull result.
My 2 cents.
He says: 'I Dont Want To Be Ignored Again'.
Well then maybe you shouldn't release your software with no marketing what-so-ever?
First of all: You wrote a HTTP library for Ruby. Big fat hairy deal. Frankly, I never knew and I couldn't care less. Second of all: The Rails crowd gained traction and scored bizar amounts of hype for one reason - and one reason *only*: They had, by standards of open source - a massive marketing campaign to push Rails into the FOSS webdev field. They have a website that, for *once* in the FOSS field, didn't look like shit (and changed the FOSS-Project-Website & Enduser Awareness Game for ever - God bless them!), they pratically invented the concept of screencasts to showcase their FOSS webkit in short understandable fashion and they abandoned all snotty-nosed elitist crap in favour of building a community for webdevs while at the same time doing huge inroads into the Java & academic community who needed Ruby to boost their ego and to seperate themselves from the PHP crowd. And who, until the rails hype, weren't aware of any FOSS webkits. Of which Rails, btw., isn't a particuarly new, good or innovative one anyway. Other kits from ages ago are still leading the field by far technology wise - with nobody careing. Due to, guess what?, no marketing.
Your conclusions are wrong, Mr. Shaw. People care squat about what you licence your software under. If you want money, you demand money. If you want attention, you demand attention. Rails did it, you didn't. Your Mongrel site isn't bad, by FOSS standards that is, but it doesn't look particuarly interesting either. Learn you lesson, licence with whatever you want - wether it's the GPL or not *nobody* of *any* importance fucking cares - and do a little marketing and reasearch before you push your next FOSS tool. That, and nothing else, will enable a business on top of it.
My 2 Euros.
This sort of thing goes to show that regular off-the-shelf x86es basically are rubbish. I've got a Sharp PC-1403 Pocket Computer, pretty much from the same period. I use it to this very day - also because it comes with a full-blown scientific calculator - and it still runs software I built 20 years ago. It's got Sharps Basic and a feature rich ROM with all kinds of neat things hardwired into it, starts in nano-seconds and runs 300+ hours of the grid on two buttoncells.
I bet you could observe the very same thing with 'desktops' and portables from Commodore, Atary or Sinclair. PCs scale easy, but they still are quite junky till this very day. Just discovered that once again yesterday when charsets and keyboard signals wouldn't match in a virtual Linux desktop enviroment.
Outside of a thriving eco-system of competition and many people basing their stuff of simular standards regular PCs fall short of delivering their promise. When things get tough, I'll take any old Tandy Portable over an PC Laptop any time. And not only because it runs on regular batteries if it needs to.
Weary means tired. Wary means suspicious. Maybe you meant weary, but I think you probably meant wary.
Thanks. Gotta work on my english wording, it is a tad rusty at times. :-)
I'm weary allready. First Android, then a completely differently branded second Linux knockoff. I know Google isn't dependant on making money with their software and OSes projects, but the last thing we need is further market confusion due to Google joining the fray of alternative OSes and distros. I beg that they manage to string Android and this Chrome OS thing into one OS ecosystem and that it will be well standardised and documented.
Ever since they released the award winning Savage, a very good RTS / FPS combo, with an advertised (!) native Linux client right from the get go, S2 Games has a special place in my heart. They deserve support ever since they started publishing. Buy their Games, they are very cool and fun to play and also run great on older hardware.
This sort of 'shaking bed' is nothing new. Simular mechanisims are used as alarmclocks by deaf people. Maybe the force with which the bed is shaken is a new quality, but the basic concept has been around for a decade or two at least.
I have a server on the Inet with Debian and root access for websites and CMSes of critical long-term customers and my own project versioning and testing. I use a seperate usergroup for each project and also have a usergroup for my Project directory that basically has around 10 years worth of my projects in it. I sync using the CLI client for ssh+svn on OS X and Linux. If I had Windows in there somewhere - which I don't since about 7 years ago - I'd have TortoiseSVN to cover syncing there.
I find this a practical solution as I can access my current stuff from *anywhere* at any time and I can use the same skillkit I use for my daily developement work at the job. At work we also use SVN for project specific docs and media. The tools are there, svn is tried and true and you can also fix unreversably borked versioning with a little XML editing inside the .svn directory if things should go completely haywire.
For archiving I'd actually archive off the repository itself. Haven't seen the need to do that yet though. Backups I still to with alternating/overturning drag and drop copies of entire dirtrees via the Finder or Nautilus/Konqueror on to external HDDs - which is a leftover from the before-svn-sync times which I intend to change someday and integrate into the pipeline.
A lot has been said here allready, and a lot of it is important: Patience, Persistance, Success by volume of throughput, focussing on non-IT stuff, etc.
What can help is structured social interaction. That doesn't exist anymore and was lost throught the last 100 years - aside from very small and limited areas. One of them is dancing, more percisely: Tango dancing.
I got lured into it by a former colleague of mine, a teacher I once worked with. She asked me to join her in Tango lessons, since I have stage-dance and Aikido experience and she could use a little help. I agreed and didn't think much of it and expected to drop pair-dancing right after the course again. However, I'm *totally* hooked! Tango is a very hermetic scene - and for good reasons too - with own dance events called Milongas and an eventually very close and intimate style of interaction between the dancing partners.
As a super-geek and nerd I find that Tango covers a lot of aspects for me that would otherwise be beyond my controll:
1) People dancing tango are smart and more on the intellecutal side of things - no ultimate idiots or drunkards involved, as Tango requires a working brain (and a little more) to do. I've allways felt that clubs are stupid and pointless. Now I know it and have found a place where people go that think the same way.
2) Modern Tango and Tango Nuevo in particular still have the important remainders of formalized interaction between the sexes as seen around 1900 or so. You need to get confident in asking the next lady to a dance (or 10 dances as the case may be) but with pratice your confidence grows and even a turndown (which I've both gotten and also given) is allways polite and non-offensive. It's even possible to dance with ladies that don't even speak your language, or only a little. ... Like that cute slender Korean beauty thats currently visiting her local relatives and visiting Europe and will be at my favorite Milonga on wednesday again ... :-))) Asking to a dance can be done with simple gestures - no speaking involved.
3) All abount pair-dancing but also the special thing called Tango (Tango is not generic latin dancing - its an own thing) can be formally learned like learning programming techniques or a martial arts style. You can rehearse the steps and styles on your own or with another insecure member or your or the opposite sex. There are quite a few of those too, you'd be supprised. It also is a normal thing to switch leads and practice with members of the same gender, especially for men. That comes from the olden days when access to women was rare and wide and far between and you wanted to be good when the chance to prove yourself in leading a lady came up.
4) Lot's of people dancing tango are motion legastenics themselves, so if you put a little extra effort into it (I go to 3 milongas a week and take at least to classes with different Tangoschools) you'll be king of the dancefloor in no time. I had ladies lining up to dance with me last week at my favourite weekly milonga! Seriously. You can imagine how that feels - and it *does* feel great.
5) Tango is a cheap and fullfilling. Dancing shoes and some chump change for non-alcoholic drinks at Milongas and the admittance boil down to 50 Euros a month at max. And that's if I by drinks for two ladies per milonga. Which I rarely do.
6) Dancing Tango with a Lady is a *very* good method to find out if she's a good partner and mistress. It goes just as well the other way around. 3 dances and I'll tell you if the lady and I go well together. And we won't need to speak a word.
7) Since scoring a pickup is a secondary and having fun dancing is a primary for all people involved theres a lot of humor and nonchalence involved in all social interactions. You sit together with the guys and judge the ladies and the ladies sit together and do the same. Experienced ladies and the Tango instructors in your local scene will acutally come up to you and tell you that you sho
What are you basing your optimism in?
23 years of hands-on software developement experience.
I (and many other old timers on this thread) are telling you in no uncertain terms how the cookie crumbles, [...]
Guess we need a drumroll tag in slashdot.
Pardon me, pal, but I know very much myself 'how the cookie crumbles', thank you.
Let me give you an extreme example:
I know mid-twenties CS grads who have done more in half an hour with a well coded SED script than an 20-head team of middleware consultants in two years. That is not an exaggeration. The entire middleware between Sonys mobile multimedia plattform and vodaphone europe mobile service (a Java behemoth beyond any imagination) was replaced with a single SED script a colleague of mine built in 30 minutes and placed on the right intersection. He scored 30 000 Euros for the job and a follow-up contract to maintaint the entire plattform that rakes in 15 000 per month to this day.
Another example:
My very first real-life python programm was a 150 line script for a friends online media business that connected the 4 million entry database of Germanys largerst distributor of books, Libri (largerst automated/robotic distribution center in the world, 30 000 deliveries per hour, 24/7, less than 100 personell in fullfillment at any given time), with our online distribution channels, including the then brand new amazon market place. I wrote the script in 3 weeks while learning Python and spend most of my time dicking around the web looking at FOSS webkits and help setting up my friends online business. I actually wrote it in something like 15 hours and most of it was figuring out and testing the monster regexes required to filter the datastream we got from printer signals. 2 weeks into integrating the script into our regular pipeline Libri EDI Sales management and the data dept. called us and asked us how we generated the 3000% increase in throughput, where we got the 4 Million datasets from without using their bizar software behemoth priced at 5000 per year in licencing. My friend told them we were filtering their data of the free-client printer option after printing out a search for the space character, which naturally returned all datasets. We got a personal invitation to and tour of their facilities and got an exclusive distribution deal at zero cost. And were among the first to try out a XML option later on which we suggested (sometimes Captain Obvious doesn't stand a chance with the pointy-haired partner and need extra help) which made the script obsolete just as fast as I had written it.
Another example:
Did you ever notice how on amazon marketplace the third-party prices often are only cents appart and the cheapest offer allways is on top? That's price-combat at its finest and I was the first to automate it. With another single python script under 1000 lines in length. *Before* the Amazon API for that part was available. I wrote it in less than 20 hours.
I could go on like this for hours, but the bottom line is:
I have countless examples where entire ERP, SCM, Billing, Payment and Fullfilment setups have been replaced by a handfull of PHP, Python or Perl CLI scripts and have sped up the processes covered tenfold and more for *everyone* involved, including secretaries who sometimes even had to learn a handfull of Bash commands. Which they gladly did, as it spared them the alternative of an extra 10 hours per week in front of bloated unwieldy, slow, braindead and cookie-cutter SAP-style interfaces.
Give me a small (less than 10) team with one or two experienced leaders and the rest motivated programming enthusiasts + access to the people *directly* involved in the processes in question - and I will automate *anything* in 6 months, except maybe embedded military, avionics, critical medical software and mission critical space flight software stuff. Simply because that all is a totally different league due to testing and DBC requirements.
Trust me, with the things I mentioned in the parent post, building a payroll kit for a university - no matter how large it is - is absolutely doable and could actually turn out to be a walk in the park. And a fun one at that.
I bet a group of enthusiatic CS/IT students with programming skills and maybe one teacher with real life experience can build and/or fix this in 4 months. Give them the tools, have them prepare by giving them access to all personell doing payroll stuff and familiar with the process of payroll and pay them a good salary plus a bonus if they finish it before next winter-semester is over. Give them option to do their thesis or degree paper on the project. Add in a few law students if complicated German-style tax stuff is involved for some extra interdisciplinary flavour and results.
Voila! Top-of-the-line payroll system for something like 100 000$. ... And, sadly, I also bet that that won't happen, because then someone would have to admit that he burned 20+ Million on a project that was implemented start to finish with less than a tenth the money. Sometimes the sad and sorry state of our profession in some places makes me want to cry.
A few months ago somebody here on /. asked on how to go about becoming a sysadmin. I wrote a lengthy, high rated reply that basically covers everything you need to know. Admining isn't a bad thing to get skills in, it's sort of the career-path of helpdesk if you will. As a real Admin you're in expert territory. You have to serve, and serve fast, but you won't have PEBCAK stuff to deal with that often. Consider following that path. Here's a pimped version of the reply I mentioned that covers admin stuff.
This actually *is* a good thing - if the money inmediately is used for the intended purpose: Bringing nation-wide Broadband fast. Which would mean that the runtime of this tax is limited to a few years, when every corner of the countryside has broadband.
This is actually quite different from the German GEZ fee for Internet capable devices. Which is bizar beyond anything concievable.
I never understood the people relying solely on google ranking to do their business. The day their ranking tanked for whatever reason, they had/have to close down.
I certainly don't understand an entire generation of new web useres mistaking Google for the Internet.
I like Google for the uncluttered interface and I like clusty.com for the grouped results branches.
Beyond that, search is search to me and I will use whatever machine gives me results I'm satisfied with. Most of the time that is Google.
Google itself OTOH is way more than just search by now. It's a massive counterpart to MS - a value in itself - a huge supporter of FOSS, a mobile OS vendor about to crack open the 80s style proprietary lockdown of the mobile market ('Android' anyone?) and it has a wide range of free webapps and services that actually work on all plattforms and not just some Active X enabled proprietary MS browser.
Bottom line:
As long as MS has the OS market in a firm monopolistic grip I'm shooing everyone I know away from b*ng and to other engines like Google or Clusty - better b*ng results be damned. They aren't that much better to just keep on lubeing up and bending over for MS.
My 2 Eurocents.
I'm a programmer in a larger Software/IT company where the IT guys (admins included) are the cream and expect to be treated with respect. However, whenever I go down to our online customer managers or secretaries or to the janitor to ask for something, I am *very* polite. I'm smart enough to know a) polite is simply better in so many ways and b) these people can screw up my day big time if they are so inclined.
My suggestions:
You should do your job in such a way that you can keep the respect of others *and* your selfrespect. If somebody is being impolite, let them know politely. If they do not want to learn, let them run into a wall until they do. If I as a team organiser with quite some responseablities on my mind can take the time to be forthcoming to my admins, reception secretaries and community managers, so can everybody else. Even a departement lead has that much time (In fact, two of the most forthcoming people I know at our company are our CEO and CTO). And if your peer isn't inclined to put up with the minimum effort it takes to make the workplace worthwhile he simply is being a jerk and deserves whatever flak he gets from you. People generally treating IT (or anybody else for that matter) impolitely are just being imature and can use a fair share of forcefull lecture on manners.
My 2 Euros.
I live in Los Angeles. One day I went up to Yosemite to hike Half-Dome. It's a long hike, so we started at 3 in the morning. When we broke out of the trees, I looked up and shit my pants.
Sorry, but me missing you shitting your pants is absolutely fine with me. Thanks for the concern though.
This is yet another slew of ultra-pointless pre-election gibberish. Extremely violent videogames such as Manhunt are allready factually banned for public sale and sale to minors in Germany, based on laws existing since the dawn of the republic.
The rubbish on Computers, Videogames and the Internet that the ruling class in Germany has been putting out in recent years has reached staggering heights that are compareable to the situation in the US.
I for one am going to send in my support signature for the Piratenpartei (German branch of the Pirate Party) and do an all out vote for them whenever the occasion arises. If all German INet savy people do that, we could have the 5% hurdle for the Bundestag in no time. That'll teach them.
And if you are german, how about pitching in? Your signature paves the way to the Bundestag. For once get off your fat lazy unpolitical geek ass and help roll Schäuble and Zensursula straight out of office. And screw the Greens (Grüne) on this one! Don't forget that Tritin and Fischer had a big hand in passing that Internet law a few years back ('Gesetz zum verbesserten Schutz des Urheberrechtes im Internet' aka 'German DMCA')!
Beweg' Deinen Arsch und tu' was! (visit links above)
My 2 Euros.
As far as modern day handheld computers go, I have to say that the Asus EEE induced second coming of the Netbook and its liklings has had extremley positive side effects on the market in the last two years.
Portability? Check.
Openess and flexibility of plattform? Check.
Price? Check.
Versatility? Check.
However, there is just one more thing I want before I can say they are on par with the mid-nineties PC handhelds that where available back then and could easyly keep up with their big desktop brothers in terms of getting the job done: Battery Uptime and/or easy replacement of battery.
Let me explain: The HP 200LX, Sharp PC 3000, 3100 and its non-name rebrands ran on AA cells. And while the off-grid uptime was a meager 3,5 hours at max, you could easyly replace them with rechargeables or - in an emergency - with fresh AA cells from the next gas station or convenience store. ... On the Palm that uptime came from 3 or 4 AAA cells btw - but that's another story.
I want that kind of battery time or convenience from todays handhelds aswell. If convenience is not an option, I want the same uptime I could get from my old Palm m105 with folding keyboard attached or from the original Psion Netbook: 40 hours.
Substancially increased battery uptime without outlandish pricing - then handhelds are back in the game for me. It would be about time.
My 2 cents.
The campaing is a fake. Somebody took Asus EEE commercial videos and slapped a crappy looking badly aligned 'It's better with Windows' Slogan over it. Fonts aren't MS branding and the layout of the website is notably amatureish. You all have been trolled, so chill. It's a compareatively elaborate troll though, I give him that.
People seem to forget that Shockley went to death valley because there was absolutely nothing there and you could get all the basics dirt cheap. The nutcases that started the silicon revolution did that in barns and garages and of those in the cheapest they could find. The shockley five went to start Intel in the neighbourhood and thus Silicon Valley was born.
If I where building a startup in the US today, I'd seriously consider Detroit. You can buy houses for 500$ right now in Detroit and infrastructure is just good enough to live. You could spent years there on the most minimal VC and since Detroit is so super-boring now the team actually would have a personal interest in concentrating on the thing their building.
Revolutions very often start in extremely unspectacular places, where the artists and crazies move in because they have other things to worry about than finding the best way to rake in cash. It's only a few decades later that these places become the hippest areas on the planet. Notting Hill in London, Schanzenviertel and Hafenstraße in Hamburg, etc. etc. - all the same story.
In order of interest according to your requirements:
Code::Blocks
Anjuta
KDevelop
JEdit
Emacs
NetBeans
Eclipse
Anjuta and KDevelop only run under OSS Unix (Linux) but you can run them in an emulated enviroment - there is a no-hassle installation for such an enviroment from Ubuntu.
JEdit and Emacs are both editors that can be extended to IDEs and beyond. You may want to look into that approach.
If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
While the handling of Vi or Emacs actually *is* breathtakingly bizar and unwieldy, what you're saying is not correct. If someone actually takes the time to learn to use Emacs and the extensions it offers for developement - which can take a few years - it can be the most powerfull and fast IDE out there. And it opens files upwards of 40 MB (that's Megabyte) in half a minute and then you can navigate around them with no delay at all. That league of performance is the reason I started using it. In terms of performance Emacs is the most powerfull IDE on the planet.
Then again, I started using Emacs 3 years ago - after briefly considering the purchase of Macsperts new darling child TextMate, basically a modern Emacs rip - and I still can't bear it for longer than 10 minutes - mostly because it so totally doesn't comply with CUAS (Common User Access Standard). Yet then again, Emacs was created when CUAS didn't even exist, so that's no fault on behalf of Emacs.
Bottom line:
If you are willing to invest months (!) of time actively learning an IDE, the cli version of Emacs will be with you until the day you die, as it runs well on everything that uses electricity. Up from the most powerfull supercomputer using the most bizar unix variant right down to a 10-year old handheld PC.
Mainly? Meaning they actually *will* want to do preview at occasions?
That's a no brainer: Mac OS X.
If they only want to communitacte and use the web, that's a no-brainer aswell: Get some cheap-ass netbooks that are cheap, small, light and don't break that easy.
If you're going into warzones, deserts or rainforests that's also - guess what? - a no-brainer: Get Panasonic Toughbooks. And some solar panels.
Another thing: If you're going on a 18 month tour as the prime IT guy and you have to ask this question I'd actually presume you're maybe the wrong guy for this sort of thing, no?