Do nothing! Personally, I can't wait to see the parasitic GPL go to court and lose. If you write a book on fishing, and after reading it I invent a new maneuver that allows the catching of a larger type of bass, I shouldn't be forced to tell you how I did it. That isn't freedom, it's not even communism, it's just tyranny with a pretty face.
For what it's worth, if you don't want the hassle of going to court and being the martyr that pays through the nose to defeat this nonsense, just use BSD. Besides being more stable and closer to true unix, BSD licenses basically let you do whatever you like. This is why BSD has been a mainstay of appliances for years (and will remain so); that's what runs on this Snap! fileserver I've been playing with all day.
I've actually eaten purple potatoes...the wife brought them back for me from a farmer's market in Philly. These were regular potatoes grown in coloured water (coloured by the organic agent that prevented beetles i'm told) and they were very very cool to slice up, as you could see the packets of starch that would build up inside (and, I'm told again, cut them out if you're on a low starch diet).
They tasted just like regular red potatoes, and when I fried them up Saratoga style they made a very pleasant addition to a banquet-style spread we had for our halloween party.
I might add that they cost a bit less than the russets they had at the same market, and didn't taste anywhere near as the six dollar per pound organic russets I buy at the organic market when I make a batch of my super spicy Megabyte fries. Want the recipe? I'm afraid it's carefully guarded and heavily encrypted, but one of the secret ingredients is "sweetened cornmeal".
I work for a company with telecommuters scattered across the country and two offices seperated by several thousand miles. Our telecommuters are mostly user knowledge technical support, sales and training guys -- people who do a lot of constant interaction with customers, mostly over the phone, and to whom interaction with other employees is sort of a last result. The rest of us (product managers, data loaders, hardware tech support and, of course, developers) are constantly interacting.
I used to live close to an hour away from work, and would often telecommute if there was a problem in the morning before I left for that huge drive. On those days that I telecommuted, I noticed that I was less likely to get contacted by people in the office who had trouble, less likely to get contacted by customers, and that it took more time to get changes enacted by people in the office. They were more likely to forget about me. And once I moved to a new location (so close I can now cycle to work every morning, even if shit goes down), i noticed that more people started coming to ask questions or advice, more people remember my name and I'm overall a more respected worker.
I'd also like to point out that all of our telecommuting and half time developers were among those who felt the blade when we were on F---edcompany last year.
TC if you must...but realise you'll be much more expendable.
I recently upgraded my PowerBook G3-500 with a 30 gb hard disk and 640 meg of ram (that's 256 meg for OSX, 256 for Classic and 128 mb for virtual PC, for the "good lord thats a lot of ram" people amongst you). It cost me around $280, which is substantially less than the $2400 a nice new g4 powerbook with loads of ram would have run me. Furthurmore, I fetched $100 for my old 12 gigger.
Laptops get hard drives which are substantially slower than desktops and generally need more (i don't like to carry about my volumes of CDs when I'm on the road). A lot of memory allows you to avoid hyper slow virtual ram, which means less time spent opening programs (you just leave them open). OSX seems substantially more stable with > 256 meg of ram...never panics when i remove my wireless card.
How easy was it? took me an hour, all told, and I got very nice detailed directions in quicktime form from apple's knowledge base.
Yeah whatever. It takes upwards of four days for a domain name registration to trickle through to my shitty DNS...meaning this guy was squatting on the domain LONG before the bombing.
Even if this person is seeing the light, it's only as a result of the deaths...yesterday, they were the same as all the other squatting moneygrubbers.
What impetus do Mac users have to go Linux when Darwin BSD and MacOS X are so much better on a mac: better support, better optimized code, better applications and they fit the mac paradigms (single mouse, light administration and security, heavily wireless, heavily scsi and usb, form with function)? There are no applications for Linux that can't be compiled to a faster, better, prettier version on OSX or XFree86 on Darwin (if the "cost" of the $90 OSX upgrade is prohibitive; which, if you're a mac user, it isn't).
In the PC world, there's no OS like OSX -- a mainstream OS which runs a massive amount of tested Nth generation commercial software, a great load of new software, a host of free software and all based on a Unix kernel with a swift, powerful UI and no need to get under the hood. For the hackers in the world not satiated by OSX's many, many superior offerings, there's GNU Darwin. What good is Linux to these chaps? Mac users may have a small allegiance to the Penguin thanks to the great work done in mk linux back when the macos was still for the most part a slow buggy piece of shit (os 7.6), but we've surpassed you -- we already have unix on a desktop!
I've been running apache on my Cassiopeia for almost two years, i didn't know it was such a big deal! It was a nice way to step into connectivity on CE (apache having such decent docs and so many hackers at bay, it's a pleasure to port it) and also allows me to use my palm browser to browse pages dynamically. Useless? Naw. I can get an XML file from the Bentley manual to my Volkswagen and feed the information for a repair into pocket apache, then serve the info inside the file (including some SVG gfx) at a decent enough speed into my broswer. In a ten to fifteen page repair, i'd otherwise have to print everything out, thus wasting paper and creating a solution that won't last one oil change. Now, I just zip the palm pc in a freezer bag and BAM! Pocket Mechanic.
And for those of you naysayers out there, no, there isn't a paper manual for my engine, just the (poorly) encrypted XML version on CD.
Oh, excellent point. MySQL, a common database among non-DBAs, is creating a "new standard" rather than using the one that's available. It seems to me that that's widening the rift between those in charge of maintaining and optimizing database interaction and a non-optimizable database (okay, in all fairness you can optimize MySQL well enough, but not as easily or with as much benefit as other SQL servers). And in a world where marketshare is often determined by supportability, it seems that MySQL is telling decision makers "hey, you can use our database, which is inefficient and inelegant but maintainable by your cheapest UN*X admin." That's great and all for small databases...but for anything that's intended to scale (that means with an increased development personnel base as well as an increased server load) it seems to me that clinging to the defacto standard makes more sense than creating a newer, shittier one.
And it's not even like a TSQL stored procedure system is hard to implement! The MySQL programmers are just more Open Sourcers lost in an idiom of freedom that says that a feature is better released as a halfassed hack than an actual solution. But then again, with all the foolish squabbling between developmental agencies, it's a surprise they get anything done at all.
This "feature" only means that they'll eventually have to add an adjunct system for writing stored procs in TSQL, adding to the bloat of the application and slowly destroying the only nice feature of this server: how quickly and efficiently it can return a simple rowset.
You know, the strength of query languages is that you don't have to use (and in face, are usually punished for using) loops and cursors to make massive changes. Perl is the most loop oriented language on earth. And even if, underneath it all, the optimizer is turning your code into a loop anyway, it's goddamn doing it more efficiently than Perl ever would. This addition is NOT going to increase the likelihood of people migrating from sybase or other TSQL based databases to MySql...it's going to increase the number of hardliners who feel that MySQL is a pathetic ghost of "real" servers, and as such decrease the cadence of better open source solutions like PostGreSQL. MySQL and Perl...it's fast becoming a database for control freaks who don't believe in doing anything automatically, or allowing the machine to do our optimizations for us -- and that's what computers are all about, goddamnit!
It is nice that there's finally a way to perform object operations on a server without performing the logic in scripted code, and it's nice that MySQL is trying to make a grab for usefulness beyond its INSERT, SELECT, DELETE simplicity. But Perl is not a standard language in the DB world...it's asking for DBAs and programmers used to TSQL and looking for a cheaper, freer alternative to gain new custom knowledge that is complex and no better then the knowledge they already have! All those linux sysadmins to have a little database are going to be overjoyed...but for the rest of us, this is totally useless, just like the rest of MySQL's features.
Right. Way to disspell one of my statements -- but there's still no stored procs, still no triggers, still nothing that would make this more than just another "make do" open source solution.
MySQL is usable, yes, and fast, but PostGreSQL is more useful with similar speed. So why use MySQL? My guess is that most MySQL developers are of the dominant school in OSS that fights against anything taught in MIS classes, meaning no objects, no complex relations, no self-cleanup or code reuse. Me, I'm all about the OOP principle of modular design and self maintenance...PostGreSQL, thorugh stored procs and triggers, allows me to code "almost" as if it were an OODBMS. This makes adding new functionality much faster and less painless...meaning that for a slightly larger initial investment I don't have to much about in pages and pages of code to alter an update statement whereever it's used. And no, just putting the statement in an include isn't enough...this reduces your ability to include multiple statements within a single transaction, furhur reducing your number of necesary connections and vastly reducing the crosstalk which is always the biggest barrier in client-server applications.
So while you might be getting a few hundred extra connections per second by using MySQL, i'm reducing my connection count by a third. Your machine gun is highly effective, but I'll take my BFG.
What? A web developer bashing the SQL server basically designed for web development? Yeah, and for very simple reasons: 1) No transaction protection means no reliability (and no, hacked add-ins do not transaction protection make) At all. If you use MySQL for anything more than a teenage girl's weblog, you're asking for trouble the first time your CPU spikes. 2) No triggers means relying on slow connections to do all your work across servers. Update a table and need to update its relations? Well, you'd better know their structures implicitly. 3) No stored procs: I couldn't fricking beleive this when I first used MySQL. What do you mean, no stored procs, no conditional logic in statements and no subqueries? MySQL basically requires you to code bad SQL...lots of crosstalk between servers and lots of iterative operations that should be done for you. 4) A very shoddy GUI. The shoddiest, in fact...it's the only GUI I've ever used for an RDB that was worse than raw SQL.
If you're doing any real development work, drop MySQL like a bad habit and pick up PostGreSQL. PGSQL does everything the big boys (db2, MS SQL, Sybase, Oracle) do and fairly well, meaning it can scale like a motherfucker. I ported our site from MS SQL to two PostGreSQL servers in a day and a half, after a week of trying to rewrite all our SPs in java and C and basically reducing the speed of our hefty article management work to a pittance.
MySQL has a slight advantage over using comma delimited text files or a good XML parser, but considering that there's a much better option in PostGreSQL, it will never touch my servers again. It's Free Software -- Free as in Free Dung.
Ew! You play your music off a 16 bit Sound Blaster? Those things have the WORST transient signals I have ever heard come out of a DAC! All the gold coated cables in the world won't eliminate the hiss from your fans and the snap every time the memory bus is called!
Switch to a nice digital output card (you can get coaxial digital from the old Aureal SQ1500 for $9, or optical digital out of the old SuperQuad 2500 for around $35) and deliver your sound cleanly to the card, and you'll have much, much better results. Since the DAC involved with digital out is the one on your receiver, you don't have ANY transient signals at all...no hiss means clean treble and no ambient rumbling from your bass!
I buy CAV laserdiscs. I write all images from my digital camera as TGA, even though i can then fit only 10 of them on a 64 meg card. I bought Dunlop DP-5000s and NJK plugs and nothing but Mobil-1 will ever touch my engine.
But I will *NOT* use ogg. Partly because of quality: it sounds similar, if not more washed out than, mp3 at the bitrates I encode my mp3s (archival VBR from Lame, iTunes and AudioCatalyst). Mostly, however, it's a conceptual thing. I consider it the difference between mini discs and CDs. Mini disc is slightly nicer sounding than CD in most cases, you can fit a little bit more data, it's smaller, it's more convenient, longer lasting (due to the covered case) and has less of a chance of skipping. And, let's face it, mini-discs are pretty cool. But when faced with the task of taking my 1000+ CDs and recording them to MD, buying a nice sounding home player to add wo my already cramped receiver, a new head for the car stereo, a new sound card, &tc...it turns MD into this huge investment of time and worry that isn't worth the meager gains.
With OGG, it's even worse. There are no home players to replace my Harmon-Kardon Progressive Scan DVD & MP3 player. There is no add-on for my Rio Volt or Cassiopeia to play OGG files. Furthurmore, I'd have to ditch ALL of my software for encoding, learn new software and keep on top of the weekly enhancements to OGG and so forth. And for what? Because a company that came up with a great sounding format would like other companies getting rich off that format to hook them up with a little dough? OGG is a format based in a something-for-nothing desire loosely wrapped with patriotic pleadings about open standards. It is a cumbersome format that has no hardware support, no commercial software support (yet, I know, Nullsoft is on it, but they also wrote a plugin for MOD files...ain't nobody uses tracked music anymore!) and a team of Fraunhoffer lawyers on their ass for concepts they might have stolen. Not exactly the sort of overhead baggage I'm looking for when I want to compress my copy of the Screaming Trees SST Anthology.
Someday my phone/camera/pda/mp3 player will be one tiny happy box.
Reallly? Why isn't it there today? I mean, both the iPaq and the Cassiopeia have performed all of those actions for about two years, and done so for a relatively decent price (figuring of course an extra $200 for the cell modem w/ voice hack, another $150 for the camera, still less than a grand).
It's the Microsoft thing, isn't it? Closed source OS get you down? Like it matters with CE. CE has free dev tools and compiler, free emulator, and downloadable source files. And I guarantee you it's more open than your current cell phone, mp3 player, pda and camera. Hell, I was ticked at the low quality of the cassiopeia mp3 recorder, so I wrote my own VB app. Took all of thirty minutes and runs slow as hell (almost as slow as Perl), but I can record mp3s at 44.1k. With a little elbow grease it'd be even better.
Furthurmore, though the Cassiopeia is a bit large, it's still small enough to fit in the back pocket of my loose fitting size 38 dockers...and there's less to keep track of when playing "mobile office." I intend on doing all my work remotely on my honeymoon via the Casiopeia...a copy of VNC, a cell modem and a solar recharger, and not even the Sangre de Cristos mountains will keep me from doing the programming thang.
God, that movie had the WORST cinematography of any movie ever made. They had one trick: take a picture of the start of an action, cut to another angle so the actor doesn't actually have to do any work when jumping or kicking or firing a shot, and then cut to a third angle to show the denoument of the action. To anybody who's ever seen a real hong kong action film (and i don't mean those stupid "wire films," either), this American trick spoils everything. The actors in these films are genuinely talented...they don't need three takes to make one action look good. Some of the best Jackie Chan movies are filmed from a very far exterior angle shot, so you can see the surreal, comic fluidity of their motions. A perfect example of this is Supercop (see the HK version if you can...the changes made for the US release are notoriously dumb, and the lip sync horrid). Michelle Yeoh's high kicks and splits as she defeats 10 surrounding opponents is filmed in such a way that you can see every limb as she does so. It's obvious that there's nobody holding her up when she jumps, she's doing her own stunts and it makes the film much higher quality.
These American Chan films have a similar failing...they never show his limbs! Watch "Shanghai Noon" and try to count the number of times you actually see him connect with his foot when he kicks something, as compared to the number of times he lashes out and then they show a guy stumbling back. Count also the number of times you can see a character's face or upper body during an attack. It may be more "graphic novel" to show action in close up, but it's also more artificial.
I want my Chan where he belongs...in the director's seat, in control of the camera for action shots, working with somebody ELSE's script (so the film doesn't have the stupid touchy-feely multiculutral nice guy feel that Chan's movies often do). Just giving him a part or letting him choreograph a fight isn't enough; for a truly great Chan film you need to picture the whole scene...after all, what would Picasso's Guernica be, looked at through a toilet paper roll?
1.1 gigs, eh Taco? Funny, I haven't received a single e-mail from Sircam yet, and I'm on a half dozen mailing lists and have no spam filter.
I guess I just have a contacts list full of people who aren't stupid enough to open random attachments to cryptic e-mails. Or, in my mom's case, are entirely too stupid to open attachments in the first place, and keep leaving messages on my answering machine to help them open attachments so they can "give all these people advice".
Anyway, I guess that's something to be said about being an editor for slashdot...you get e-mail from a lot of idiots. And you wanted to write off the effects of this virus as a strictly MS phenomenon!
Well, you're mistaking complexity with redundancy...they aren't the same. A redudant system with four nodes can easily have an interconnect one jump from each node, so that no one missing node would stop traffic. A complex system of, say, 400 nodes, would not have the same luxury...that would mean a whole shitload of interconnects. So you can feign redundancy, with big pipes connecting each smaller network with the smaller nets fairly redundant -- but they're not truly redundant. And that means if you're a node at the back of a big pipe, you may not have much recourse to stay connected -- either the traffic is too great to reach the next big pipe before your TTL expires, or you just don't have an auxilliary branch because your link to the other networks WAS the big pipe. So bang: there goes your redundancy, because your network lost its redundancy.
This is why 99.999% is a crock of shit -- no network is that close to perfect -- because even if the system stays up when its connections go down, it's still failed. If 911 crashes, it can come back up quickly...but if the phones to the whole town are gone, then the system is basically ineffective.
And let's not forget that these guys are working with cable AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN. Get you, your assistant and your good machine under 300 feet of brine and dark and see how quick you go:)
Well, isn't that nice...a geek with a fantasy complex.
I hate to break it to ya, bub, but all claims of "99.999%" reliability with physical devices are outlandish lies. I can't even claim 98% reliability with my own alarm clock; how am I supposed to do so with a bank of servers attached to the same line on the same power supply running the same OS with the same specialized code? 99.999% is a marketing lie -- the internet will never have complete reliability, because it is far too complex and has too many variables.
Your line that customers should sue for gaps in reliability is just selfish and silly. There was no way the company could have sped up the process, or they would have done so...I'm sure this was a terrible embarrasment. So if a group of customers were to file suit, this would be nothing more than a nuisance. Southern Cross didn't purposefully bring them down and they handled it as quickly as possible. A break in about 200 pieces of glass, each thiner than your hair and wrapper with insulant, jelly, 1/2 steel pipe and a copper conductor is not as easy as splicing two wires under a car hood -- a process which takes me about five minutes per wire.
The internet is a self switching entity tied to a scant few superfast backbones, and can never be 100% reliable. The trend towards claims that approach 100% is dangerous, because it causes investors and customers to see real claims (such as 98% reliability, or 100% during business hours, 96% after 7 pm) as underrated. And when you're looking for a host for your data, what's most important is the real uptime. Trying to find meaning in "99.999&" is like looking for the leprechaun in a box of Lucky Charms.
People tend to use whatever is on their computer when they unpack it and stick it onto their card table.
This is the saddest thing I have ever heard -- I got a free DVD with my player and I never even considered watching it. What is it about computers that leads people to beleive that they come pre-ordained to do whatever you want them to?
I think it has to do with the amount of crap we hand people with a new computer. It's overwhelming. Instead of, "here's a box, a 35 page manual, and you're good," it's "here's a box, your monitor box, your cables and printer and mouse and keybouard an a set of For Dummies books on the OS, the browser, setting up internet, using software, scratching your ass and solving world hunger." We give them so much shit to learn...doesn't it make sense that they don't have time to absorb it all, and make all the pertinant decisions? When you buy a TV, you know how to use it...channel up, channel down, volume controls. Computers just don't have that level of ease of use...programs don't have any uniformity or really intuitive user interface that is common among them, and this is one area where Open Source just isn't helping (read the report Sun did of new users on Gnome...you'll realise why you need evils like project managers and marketeers to make a pervasive OS).
Maybe, rather than handing them all the software at once and burying them, we should go back to the old Commodore method of software sales. You get a PC with an OS, it does basically nothing. Learn that. Then we'll hand you your web browser, and when you need it your word processor. If this was how software was received, maybe there'd be time to choose which provider and package you wanted based on informed input. But software is rush, rush, rush...people want everything now, because that's what we've sold them. When you do that, you're openning the door for cruddy software and $35 kickbacks. It's a bit like beer vendors at a baseball game. I'd love to have open competition, with the choice to choose whatever beer I liked for a competitive price. But to prevent a lot of "confusion," the stadium offers a license to only one beer man, who offers a choice of piss yellow beer or piss yellow light beer, each for an abyssmal price. I drink it because it's there and don't really enjoy it. Software on a new PC is the same...you use it because that's what you got, and don't really get to know there's better stuff out there.
A painter doesn't complain that his canvas is too rough, or that paint isn't tactile enough, or that the colours that he mixes are too unreliable to match his vision. He just paints, and whether the painting is a masterpiece or a failure is built in how he paints it, not in the source.
The internet is a canvas, and it's a rough one -- there are holes broken by patches of smoothness, low pings breached by high ones. The brushes are IP Protocols, very simple things built on buffers and packets. They don't stream well, or lend themselves to flawless point to point conversation. There are security issues. And the paint is HTML...a dirty sort of paint made for painting houses. There are display issues. There are compatibility issues. It is difficult to rely on, because people can handle things pretty much however they like. A color that perfectly matches an offline swatch will look different on a monitor with a different contrast setting. People don't always get HTML...they don't understand links or buttons.
The internet is a set, understandable material: why are businesses blaiming their own failings on it? "We can't get it to do tricks for us," they say, but they're asking it to do the wrong tricks. Webcasting? This isn't TV, it's internet...it's made for text and graphics, it's TTY to the extreme. And companies that understand what the web is -- a vehicle for interactive information exchange -- are doing quite well on it. AOL, for example, and ebay. The problem is that a lot of businesses don't want to paint on the canvass they've got...they want to sculpt! They're building up layers of paint and pulling the threads out of their brushes in an attempt to make the internet do what it wasn't designed for and isn't ready to do.
Besides, ownership isn't the answer...we've had non-tcpip information services in the past, and they've had very limited appeal. If you remember the old modem nets, the biggest problem was the lack of uniformity. You couldn't send mail to Bob@AlbanySuperChat if you used HundsonValleyInfoCOnnect. You had so many problems due to the fact that not everybody want to use the same computer or the same network. But all owned infonets assume this, and in the end are doomed to failure because of their closed protocols. Do you think television would have survived if each network required you to buy an expensive proproetary TV from their network or "partners"?
The internet is an ever-changing entitiy...speed enhancements and new concepts liek IPv6 will eventually lead to a network that is both streamlined and open. Corporate entities building a new network from scratch will result in a needless expenditure of technology for uncertain (and probably low) returns. Only through open standards can an information solution be truly pervasive...otherwise, it's just more plastic & light.
AOL once got a large amount of press for refusing to force users on their IRC network on EfNet to use identd (kind of a useless practice, but also one that had very few ramifications for users' security). Their response right before the boys of Eris Free kicked their asses out of the tontine? "We're AOL, we ARE the internet."
This statement, bold as it is, was funny then, but mostly ironic now. AOL owned the number one dial up ISP in the world, bought (along with a shitload of cartoon characters and a vast media empire) the number one cable ISP in america, and now they're venturing their tendrils into the number two cable ISP...which also holds a dial up ISP in the top 5.
The internet, as we're proud to say, is a free entity -- it has no real rules, no real restrictions and no real governing bodies, and anybody who ventures into these usually gets laughed at. But everybody has to connect through the same draconian entity, that freedom lapses. AOL/TW doesn't like you doing anything but web browsing and reading e-mail (they tried a dozen times to shut down the web server I was running, but were tied because I signed a user agreement in 1995 that said they couldn't update their terms and didn't block serving); if it decides to block information across its network, it affectively closes off that information. You already can't swear in an AOL chat room...what if they begin to apply the same filter to web content? You wouldn't be reading this fucking page, that's for sure.
Normally I think ideas like this are just inane paranoia. But AOL has already integrated censorship into its network, and has not had any real opposition. Market factors don't affect it, becuase there's never a large enough share held by the opposition to hurt the giant. When 40 million people give you $21.95 a month, a thousand saying that they won't if you aren't nicer to them just don't matter to you. For this reason, AOL should be blocked in any way possible from absorbing relatively decent ISPs like AT&T's...even if it means a viscious anti-trust suit.
How are we supposed to attack the presiding notion of Free Software and Peer to Peer as being havens for social agitators and communists if we've got movie swiping criminals like Katz speaking for us?
Way to set back the movement, JK. Couldn't you just have accepted the lame dinosaurs and toughed it out???
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Do nothing! Personally, I can't wait to see the parasitic GPL go to court and lose. If you write a book on fishing, and after reading it I invent a new maneuver that allows the catching of a larger type of bass, I shouldn't be forced to tell you how I did it. That isn't freedom, it's not even communism, it's just tyranny with a pretty face.
For what it's worth, if you don't want the hassle of going to court and being the martyr that pays through the nose to defeat this nonsense, just use BSD. Besides being more stable and closer to true unix, BSD licenses basically let you do whatever you like. This is why BSD has been a mainstay of appliances for years (and will remain so); that's what runs on this Snap! fileserver I've been playing with all day.
"It's a good thing they reevaluated all those wacky old designs." Hugh Parkfield, episode 2F15 "Lisa's Wedding"
I've actually eaten purple potatoes...the wife brought them back for me from a farmer's market in Philly. These were regular potatoes grown in coloured water (coloured by the organic agent that prevented beetles i'm told) and they were very very cool to slice up, as you could see the packets of starch that would build up inside (and, I'm told again, cut them out if you're on a low starch diet).
They tasted just like regular red potatoes, and when I fried them up Saratoga style they made a very pleasant addition to a banquet-style spread we had for our halloween party.
I might add that they cost a bit less than the russets they had at the same market, and didn't taste anywhere near as the six dollar per pound organic russets I buy at the organic market when I make a batch of my super spicy Megabyte fries. Want the recipe? I'm afraid it's carefully guarded and heavily encrypted, but one of the secret ingredients is "sweetened cornmeal".
I work for a company with telecommuters scattered across the country and two offices seperated by several thousand miles. Our telecommuters are mostly user knowledge technical support, sales and training guys -- people who do a lot of constant interaction with customers, mostly over the phone, and to whom interaction with other employees is sort of a last result. The rest of us (product managers, data loaders, hardware tech support and, of course, developers) are constantly interacting.
I used to live close to an hour away from work, and would often telecommute if there was a problem in the morning before I left for that huge drive. On those days that I telecommuted, I noticed that I was less likely to get contacted by people in the office who had trouble, less likely to get contacted by customers, and that it took more time to get changes enacted by people in the office. They were more likely to forget about me. And once I moved to a new location (so close I can now cycle to work every morning, even if shit goes down), i noticed that more people started coming to ask questions or advice, more people remember my name and I'm overall a more respected worker.
I'd also like to point out that all of our telecommuting and half time developers were among those who felt the blade when we were on F---edcompany last year.
TC if you must...but realise you'll be much more expendable.
I recently upgraded my PowerBook G3-500 with a 30 gb hard disk and 640 meg of ram (that's 256 meg for OSX, 256 for Classic and 128 mb for virtual PC, for the "good lord thats a lot of ram" people amongst you). It cost me around $280, which is substantially less than the $2400 a nice new g4 powerbook with loads of ram would have run me. Furthurmore, I fetched $100 for my old 12 gigger.
Laptops get hard drives which are substantially slower than desktops and generally need more (i don't like to carry about my volumes of CDs when I'm on the road). A lot of memory allows you to avoid hyper slow virtual ram, which means less time spent opening programs (you just leave them open). OSX seems substantially more stable with > 256 meg of ram...never panics when i remove my wireless card.
How easy was it? took me an hour, all told, and I got very nice detailed directions in quicktime form from apple's knowledge base.
Meant crash and not bombing. I'm a dumbass. But I'm a mod 40+ dumbass ;)
Yeah whatever. It takes upwards of four days for a domain name registration to trickle through to my shitty DNS...meaning this guy was squatting on the domain LONG before the bombing.
Even if this person is seeing the light, it's only as a result of the deaths...yesterday, they were the same as all the other squatting moneygrubbers.
What impetus do Mac users have to go Linux when Darwin BSD and MacOS X are so much better on a mac: better support, better optimized code, better applications and they fit the mac paradigms (single mouse, light administration and security, heavily wireless, heavily scsi and usb, form with function)? There are no applications for Linux that can't be compiled to a faster, better, prettier version on OSX or XFree86 on Darwin (if the "cost" of the $90 OSX upgrade is prohibitive; which, if you're a mac user, it isn't).
In the PC world, there's no OS like OSX -- a mainstream OS which runs a massive amount of tested Nth generation commercial software, a great load of new software, a host of free software and all based on a Unix kernel with a swift, powerful UI and no need to get under the hood. For the hackers in the world not satiated by OSX's many, many superior offerings, there's GNU Darwin. What good is Linux to these chaps? Mac users may have a small allegiance to the Penguin thanks to the great work done in mk linux back when the macos was still for the most part a slow buggy piece of shit (os 7.6), but we've surpassed you -- we already have unix on a desktop!
I've been running apache on my Cassiopeia for almost two years, i didn't know it was such a big deal! It was a nice way to step into connectivity on CE (apache having such decent docs and so many hackers at bay, it's a pleasure to port it) and also allows me to use my palm browser to browse pages dynamically. Useless? Naw. I can get an XML file from the Bentley manual to my Volkswagen and feed the information for a repair into pocket apache, then serve the info inside the file (including some SVG gfx) at a decent enough speed into my broswer. In a ten to fifteen page repair, i'd otherwise have to print everything out, thus wasting paper and creating a solution that won't last one oil change. Now, I just zip the palm pc in a freezer bag and BAM! Pocket Mechanic.
And for those of you naysayers out there, no, there isn't a paper manual for my engine, just the (poorly) encrypted XML version on CD.
Oh, excellent point. MySQL, a common database among non-DBAs, is creating a "new standard" rather than using the one that's available. It seems to me that that's widening the rift between those in charge of maintaining and optimizing database interaction and a non-optimizable database (okay, in all fairness you can optimize MySQL well enough, but not as easily or with as much benefit as other SQL servers). And in a world where marketshare is often determined by supportability, it seems that MySQL is telling decision makers "hey, you can use our database, which is inefficient and inelegant but maintainable by your cheapest UN*X admin." That's great and all for small databases...but for anything that's intended to scale (that means with an increased development personnel base as well as an increased server load) it seems to me that clinging to the defacto standard makes more sense than creating a newer, shittier one.
And it's not even like a TSQL stored procedure system is hard to implement! The MySQL programmers are just more Open Sourcers lost in an idiom of freedom that says that a feature is better released as a halfassed hack than an actual solution. But then again, with all the foolish squabbling between developmental agencies, it's a surprise they get anything done at all.
This "feature" only means that they'll eventually have to add an adjunct system for writing stored procs in TSQL, adding to the bloat of the application and slowly destroying the only nice feature of this server: how quickly and efficiently it can return a simple rowset.
PERL????
Jesus, PERL????
You know, the strength of query languages is that you don't have to use (and in face, are usually punished for using) loops and cursors to make massive changes. Perl is the most loop oriented language on earth. And even if, underneath it all, the optimizer is turning your code into a loop anyway, it's goddamn doing it more efficiently than Perl ever would. This addition is NOT going to increase the likelihood of people migrating from sybase or other TSQL based databases to MySql...it's going to increase the number of hardliners who feel that MySQL is a pathetic ghost of "real" servers, and as such decrease the cadence of better open source solutions like PostGreSQL. MySQL and Perl...it's fast becoming a database for control freaks who don't believe in doing anything automatically, or allowing the machine to do our optimizations for us -- and that's what computers are all about, goddamnit!
It is nice that there's finally a way to perform object operations on a server without performing the logic in scripted code, and it's nice that MySQL is trying to make a grab for usefulness beyond its INSERT, SELECT, DELETE simplicity. But Perl is not a standard language in the DB world...it's asking for DBAs and programmers used to TSQL and looking for a cheaper, freer alternative to gain new custom knowledge that is complex and no better then the knowledge they already have! All those linux sysadmins to have a little database are going to be overjoyed...but for the rest of us, this is totally useless, just like the rest of MySQL's features.
Right. Way to disspell one of my statements -- but there's still no stored procs, still no triggers, still nothing that would make this more than just another "make do" open source solution.
MySQL is usable, yes, and fast, but PostGreSQL is more useful with similar speed. So why use MySQL? My guess is that most MySQL developers are of the dominant school in OSS that fights against anything taught in MIS classes, meaning no objects, no complex relations, no self-cleanup or code reuse. Me, I'm all about the OOP principle of modular design and self maintenance...PostGreSQL, thorugh stored procs and triggers, allows me to code "almost" as if it were an OODBMS. This makes adding new functionality much faster and less painless...meaning that for a slightly larger initial investment I don't have to much about in pages and pages of code to alter an update statement whereever it's used. And no, just putting the statement in an include isn't enough...this reduces your ability to include multiple statements within a single transaction, furhur reducing your number of necesary connections and vastly reducing the crosstalk which is always the biggest barrier in client-server applications.
So while you might be getting a few hundred extra connections per second by using MySQL, i'm reducing my connection count by a third. Your machine gun is highly effective, but I'll take my BFG.
MySQL is a joke.
What? A web developer bashing the SQL server basically designed for web development? Yeah, and for very simple reasons:
1) No transaction protection means no reliability (and no, hacked add-ins do not transaction protection make) At all. If you use MySQL for anything more than a teenage girl's weblog, you're asking for trouble the first time your CPU spikes.
2) No triggers means relying on slow connections to do all your work across servers. Update a table and need to update its relations? Well, you'd better know their structures implicitly.
3) No stored procs: I couldn't fricking beleive this when I first used MySQL. What do you mean, no stored procs, no conditional logic in statements and no subqueries? MySQL basically requires you to code bad SQL...lots of crosstalk between servers and lots of iterative operations that should be done for you.
4) A very shoddy GUI. The shoddiest, in fact...it's the only GUI I've ever used for an RDB that was worse than raw SQL.
If you're doing any real development work, drop MySQL like a bad habit and pick up PostGreSQL. PGSQL does everything the big boys (db2, MS SQL, Sybase, Oracle) do and fairly well, meaning it can scale like a motherfucker. I ported our site from MS SQL to two PostGreSQL servers in a day and a half, after a week of trying to rewrite all our SPs in java and C and basically reducing the speed of our hefty article management work to a pittance.
MySQL has a slight advantage over using comma delimited text files or a good XML parser, but considering that there's a much better option in PostGreSQL, it will never touch my servers again. It's Free Software -- Free as in Free Dung.
Ew! You play your music off a 16 bit Sound Blaster? Those things have the WORST transient signals I have ever heard come out of a DAC! All the gold coated cables in the world won't eliminate the hiss from your fans and the snap every time the memory bus is called!
Switch to a nice digital output card (you can get coaxial digital from the old Aureal SQ1500 for $9, or optical digital out of the old SuperQuad 2500 for around $35) and deliver your sound cleanly to the card, and you'll have much, much better results. Since the DAC involved with digital out is the one on your receiver, you don't have ANY transient signals at all...no hiss means clean treble and no ambient rumbling from your bass!
I buy CAV laserdiscs. I write all images from my digital camera as TGA, even though i can then fit only 10 of them on a 64 meg card. I bought Dunlop DP-5000s and NJK plugs and nothing but Mobil-1 will ever touch my engine.
But I will *NOT* use ogg. Partly because of quality: it sounds similar, if not more washed out than, mp3 at the bitrates I encode my mp3s (archival VBR from Lame, iTunes and AudioCatalyst). Mostly, however, it's a conceptual thing. I consider it the difference between mini discs and CDs. Mini disc is slightly nicer sounding than CD in most cases, you can fit a little bit more data, it's smaller, it's more convenient, longer lasting (due to the covered case) and has less of a chance of skipping. And, let's face it, mini-discs are pretty cool. But when faced with the task of taking my 1000+ CDs and recording them to MD, buying a nice sounding home player to add wo my already cramped receiver, a new head for the car stereo, a new sound card, &tc...it turns MD into this huge investment of time and worry that isn't worth the meager gains.
With OGG, it's even worse. There are no home players to replace my Harmon-Kardon Progressive Scan DVD & MP3 player. There is no add-on for my Rio Volt or Cassiopeia to play OGG files. Furthurmore, I'd have to ditch ALL of my software for encoding, learn new software and keep on top of the weekly enhancements to OGG and so forth. And for what? Because a company that came up with a great sounding format would like other companies getting rich off that format to hook them up with a little dough? OGG is a format based in a something-for-nothing desire loosely wrapped with patriotic pleadings about open standards. It is a cumbersome format that has no hardware support, no commercial software support (yet, I know, Nullsoft is on it, but they also wrote a plugin for MOD files...ain't nobody uses tracked music anymore!) and a team of Fraunhoffer lawyers on their ass for concepts they might have stolen. Not exactly the sort of overhead baggage I'm looking for when I want to compress my copy of the Screaming Trees SST Anthology.
Someday my phone/camera/pda/mp3 player will be one tiny happy box.
Reallly? Why isn't it there today? I mean, both the iPaq and the Cassiopeia have performed all of those actions for about two years, and done so for a relatively decent price (figuring of course an extra $200 for the cell modem w/ voice hack, another $150 for the camera, still less than a grand).
It's the Microsoft thing, isn't it? Closed source OS get you down? Like it matters with CE. CE has free dev tools and compiler, free emulator, and downloadable source files. And I guarantee you it's more open than your current cell phone, mp3 player, pda and camera. Hell, I was ticked at the low quality of the cassiopeia mp3 recorder, so I wrote my own VB app. Took all of thirty minutes and runs slow as hell (almost as slow as Perl), but I can record mp3s at 44.1k. With a little elbow grease it'd be even better.
Furthurmore, though the Cassiopeia is a bit large, it's still small enough to fit in the back pocket of my loose fitting size 38 dockers...and there's less to keep track of when playing "mobile office." I intend on doing all my work remotely on my honeymoon via the Casiopeia...a copy of VNC, a cell modem and a solar recharger, and not even the Sangre de Cristos mountains will keep me from doing the programming thang.
God, that movie had the WORST cinematography of any movie ever made. They had one trick: take a picture of the start of an action, cut to another angle so the actor doesn't actually have to do any work when jumping or kicking or firing a shot, and then cut to a third angle to show the denoument of the action. To anybody who's ever seen a real hong kong action film (and i don't mean those stupid "wire films," either), this American trick spoils everything. The actors in these films are genuinely talented...they don't need three takes to make one action look good. Some of the best Jackie Chan movies are filmed from a very far exterior angle shot, so you can see the surreal, comic fluidity of their motions. A perfect example of this is Supercop (see the HK version if you can...the changes made for the US release are notoriously dumb, and the lip sync horrid). Michelle Yeoh's high kicks and splits as she defeats 10 surrounding opponents is filmed in such a way that you can see every limb as she does so. It's obvious that there's nobody holding her up when she jumps, she's doing her own stunts and it makes the film much higher quality.
These American Chan films have a similar failing...they never show his limbs! Watch "Shanghai Noon" and try to count the number of times you actually see him connect with his foot when he kicks something, as compared to the number of times he lashes out and then they show a guy stumbling back. Count also the number of times you can see a character's face or upper body during an attack. It may be more "graphic novel" to show action in close up, but it's also more artificial.
I want my Chan where he belongs...in the director's seat, in control of the camera for action shots, working with somebody ELSE's script (so the film doesn't have the stupid touchy-feely multiculutral nice guy feel that Chan's movies often do). Just giving him a part or letting him choreograph a fight isn't enough; for a truly great Chan film you need to picture the whole scene...after all, what would Picasso's Guernica be, looked at through a toilet paper roll?
1.1 gigs, eh Taco? Funny, I haven't received a single e-mail from Sircam yet, and I'm on a half dozen mailing lists and have no spam filter.
I guess I just have a contacts list full of people who aren't stupid enough to open random attachments to cryptic e-mails. Or, in my mom's case, are entirely too stupid to open attachments in the first place, and keep leaving messages on my answering machine to help them open attachments so they can "give all these people advice".
Anyway, I guess that's something to be said about being an editor for slashdot...you get e-mail from a lot of idiots. And you wanted to write off the effects of this virus as a strictly MS phenomenon!
Well, you're mistaking complexity with redundancy...they aren't the same. A redudant system with four nodes can easily have an interconnect one jump from each node, so that no one missing node would stop traffic. A complex system of, say, 400 nodes, would not have the same luxury...that would mean a whole shitload of interconnects. So you can feign redundancy, with big pipes connecting each smaller network with the smaller nets fairly redundant -- but they're not truly redundant. And that means if you're a node at the back of a big pipe, you may not have much recourse to stay connected -- either the traffic is too great to reach the next big pipe before your TTL expires, or you just don't have an auxilliary branch because your link to the other networks WAS the big pipe. So bang: there goes your redundancy, because your network lost its redundancy.
This is why 99.999% is a crock of shit -- no network is that close to perfect -- because even if the system stays up when its connections go down, it's still failed. If 911 crashes, it can come back up quickly...but if the phones to the whole town are gone, then the system is basically ineffective.
And let's not forget that these guys are working with cable AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN. Get you, your assistant and your good machine under 300 feet of brine and dark and see how quick you go :)
Well, isn't that nice...a geek with a fantasy complex.
I hate to break it to ya, bub, but all claims of "99.999%" reliability with physical devices are outlandish lies. I can't even claim 98% reliability with my own alarm clock; how am I supposed to do so with a bank of servers attached to the same line on the same power supply running the same OS with the same specialized code? 99.999% is a marketing lie -- the internet will never have complete reliability, because it is far too complex and has too many variables.
Your line that customers should sue for gaps in reliability is just selfish and silly. There was no way the company could have sped up the process, or they would have done so...I'm sure this was a terrible embarrasment. So if a group of customers were to file suit, this would be nothing more than a nuisance. Southern Cross didn't purposefully bring them down and they handled it as quickly as possible. A break in about 200 pieces of glass, each thiner than your hair and wrapper with insulant, jelly, 1/2 steel pipe and a copper conductor is not as easy as splicing two wires under a car hood -- a process which takes me about five minutes per wire.
The internet is a self switching entity tied to a scant few superfast backbones, and can never be 100% reliable. The trend towards claims that approach 100% is dangerous, because it causes investors and customers to see real claims (such as 98% reliability, or 100% during business hours, 96% after 7 pm) as underrated. And when you're looking for a host for your data, what's most important is the real uptime. Trying to find meaning in "99.999&" is like looking for the leprechaun in a box of Lucky Charms.
People tend to use whatever is on their computer when they unpack it and stick it onto their card table.
This is the saddest thing I have ever heard -- I got a free DVD with my player and I never even considered watching it. What is it about computers that leads people to beleive that they come pre-ordained to do whatever you want them to?
I think it has to do with the amount of crap we hand people with a new computer. It's overwhelming. Instead of, "here's a box, a 35 page manual, and you're good," it's "here's a box, your monitor box, your cables and printer and mouse and keybouard an a set of For Dummies books on the OS, the browser, setting up internet, using software, scratching your ass and solving world hunger." We give them so much shit to learn...doesn't it make sense that they don't have time to absorb it all, and make all the pertinant decisions? When you buy a TV, you know how to use it...channel up, channel down, volume controls. Computers just don't have that level of ease of use...programs don't have any uniformity or really intuitive user interface that is common among them, and this is one area where Open Source just isn't helping (read the report Sun did of new users on Gnome...you'll realise why you need evils like project managers and marketeers to make a pervasive OS).
Maybe, rather than handing them all the software at once and burying them, we should go back to the old Commodore method of software sales. You get a PC with an OS, it does basically nothing. Learn that. Then we'll hand you your web browser, and when you need it your word processor. If this was how software was received, maybe there'd be time to choose which provider and package you wanted based on informed input. But software is rush, rush, rush...people want everything now, because that's what we've sold them. When you do that, you're openning the door for cruddy software and $35 kickbacks. It's a bit like beer vendors at a baseball game. I'd love to have open competition, with the choice to choose whatever beer I liked for a competitive price. But to prevent a lot of "confusion," the stadium offers a license to only one beer man, who offers a choice of piss yellow beer or piss yellow light beer, each for an abyssmal price. I drink it because it's there and don't really enjoy it. Software on a new PC is the same...you use it because that's what you got, and don't really get to know there's better stuff out there.
A painter doesn't complain that his canvas is too rough, or that paint isn't tactile enough, or that the colours that he mixes are too unreliable to match his vision. He just paints, and whether the painting is a masterpiece or a failure is built in how he paints it, not in the source.
The internet is a canvas, and it's a rough one -- there are holes broken by patches of smoothness, low pings breached by high ones. The brushes are IP Protocols, very simple things built on buffers and packets. They don't stream well, or lend themselves to flawless point to point conversation. There are security issues. And the paint is HTML...a dirty sort of paint made for painting houses. There are display issues. There are compatibility issues. It is difficult to rely on, because people can handle things pretty much however they like. A color that perfectly matches an offline swatch will look different on a monitor with a different contrast setting. People don't always get HTML...they don't understand links or buttons.
The internet is a set, understandable material: why are businesses blaiming their own failings on it? "We can't get it to do tricks for us," they say, but they're asking it to do the wrong tricks. Webcasting? This isn't TV, it's internet...it's made for text and graphics, it's TTY to the extreme. And companies that understand what the web is -- a vehicle for interactive information exchange -- are doing quite well on it. AOL, for example, and ebay. The problem is that a lot of businesses don't want to paint on the canvass they've got...they want to sculpt! They're building up layers of paint and pulling the threads out of their brushes in an attempt to make the internet do what it wasn't designed for and isn't ready to do.
Besides, ownership isn't the answer...we've had non-tcpip information services in the past, and they've had very limited appeal. If you remember the old modem nets, the biggest problem was the lack of uniformity. You couldn't send mail to Bob@AlbanySuperChat if you used HundsonValleyInfoCOnnect. You had so many problems due to the fact that not everybody want to use the same computer or the same network. But all owned infonets assume this, and in the end are doomed to failure because of their closed protocols. Do you think television would have survived if each network required you to buy an expensive proproetary TV from their network or "partners"?
The internet is an ever-changing entitiy...speed enhancements and new concepts liek IPv6 will eventually lead to a network that is both streamlined and open. Corporate entities building a new network from scratch will result in a needless expenditure of technology for uncertain (and probably low) returns. Only through open standards can an information solution be truly pervasive...otherwise, it's just more plastic & light.
AOL once got a large amount of press for refusing to force users on their IRC network on EfNet to use identd (kind of a useless practice, but also one that had very few ramifications for users' security). Their response right before the boys of Eris Free kicked their asses out of the tontine? "We're AOL, we ARE the internet."
This statement, bold as it is, was funny then, but mostly ironic now. AOL owned the number one dial up ISP in the world, bought (along with a shitload of cartoon characters and a vast media empire) the number one cable ISP in america, and now they're venturing their tendrils into the number two cable ISP...which also holds a dial up ISP in the top 5.
The internet, as we're proud to say, is a free entity -- it has no real rules, no real restrictions and no real governing bodies, and anybody who ventures into these usually gets laughed at. But everybody has to connect through the same draconian entity, that freedom lapses. AOL/TW doesn't like you doing anything but web browsing and reading e-mail (they tried a dozen times to shut down the web server I was running, but were tied because I signed a user agreement in 1995 that said they couldn't update their terms and didn't block serving); if it decides to block information across its network, it affectively closes off that information. You already can't swear in an AOL chat room...what if they begin to apply the same filter to web content? You wouldn't be reading this fucking page, that's for sure.
Normally I think ideas like this are just inane paranoia. But AOL has already integrated censorship into its network, and has not had any real opposition. Market factors don't affect it, becuase there's never a large enough share held by the opposition to hurt the giant. When 40 million people give you $21.95 a month, a thousand saying that they won't if you aren't nicer to them just don't matter to you. For this reason, AOL should be blocked in any way possible from absorbing relatively decent ISPs like AT&T's...even if it means a viscious anti-trust suit.
How are we supposed to attack the presiding notion of Free Software and Peer to Peer as being havens for social agitators and communists if we've got movie swiping criminals like Katz speaking for us?
Way to set back the movement, JK. Couldn't you just have accepted the lame dinosaurs and toughed it out???