BT are *finally* going to grace us with 256K [or is it 512K?] DSL connections by March
It's 512K download, 256K upload. And it'll be March at the absolute earliest, with £50/month (about US$80) being the minimum, too. It wouldn't surprise me to see the final figure for end user consumers being around £75/month. Sigh. Fortunately, I should be in one of the early adopter areas, but as fair as I'm aware, they haven't even published finalised details of that yet.
solaris/sun hardware cannot even compare to intel/linux scalability and SMP efficiency.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Go away and don't come back until you've got a clue. When was the last time you saw Linux running on a 64 CPU SMP system? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Linux fan and have been running it for nearly 8 years now (I've even had it running on Sun Enterprise servers), but it doesn't yet scale as well as Solaris.
it's also why 80% of major corporations are abandoning solaris for linux.
Really? And just where did you pluck this figure from? In my experience, a few major corporations are replacing Solaris with Linux for DNS, email, and maybe web serving, and they're doing it for price/perfomance reasons, not for SMP scalability. None are doing it at the high end.
How many any rockers remeber his wife's censorship trip at the head of the PMRC?
Yep, I do, and the thought of her as first lady scares me senseless -- and I don't even live in the US! Sure, Al's done quite a good job of silencing her more militant views so his politcal coreer isn't derailed, but I'll guarantee they're still there. Interesting to note that she's now claiming it as a major politcal victory, saying she was instrumental in get parental advisory stickers put on offensive records. She was actually trying to ban them outright, and fortunately, she failed.
If Microsoft were to be punished with a fine, it would have to be spectacularly huge in order to make any significant difference. For example, it's been said that MS could easily pay off a $100 million fine without problems. The question is, would the American public (who are generally ingorant of just how much money MS has) stand for a bigger fine, or would they see it as an attack on a legitamate business?
I mean, if Cygnus turned bad, I always could have just grabbed the source and started my own forks, couldn't I?
Yes, you could... assuming you have the relevant knowledge of compilers and compilation techniques. Do you? Buying Cygnus gives Red Hat a supply of developers that know the tools inside and out. They already had a couple of staff that did (e.g., David Miller, Jakub Jelinek), but probably not enough to do a good job should Cygnus have decided to start concentrating more on the embedded market or whatever else. A decent development toolchain is probably the single most critical factor to Linux's survival. Red Hat know this, and have taken steps to protect it. Think of it as a support contract. Companies buy support not because they expect things to go wrong, but so they're covered on the offchance they they do go wrong. Wise move, IMHO.
It'll be interesting to see how Red Hat's commitment to open source stands up to this. Will they open source Source Navigator, for example?
Personally, I think it's a good move for Red Hat -- they're protecting their interests by ensuring they don't lose their development toolchain, which is pretty critical to their survival.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with the parts of Cygnus that aren't related to their core Linux business, though. I think there are huge opportunities for Red Hat in the embedded space now, but I wonder if they're too Linux server oriented to see them...
its going to be a cold day in hell when Microsoft ports IE to Linux.
It's already been done, but they're not going to release it. MS officially deny it, but from speaking to those who should know, it was apparently a fairly easy port from the Solaris IE codebase. Mind you, given how much IE for Solaris sucked, I think I'll stick with Netscape...
Of course, this is all unsubstantiated, and I have no actual proof, but I trust my informants, who have no need to lie about such things.
I've been seriously considering one of these, having found a source of them at a very good price. I have a few concerns though. Firstly, what's the print quality like? I'm not after anything spectacular, but I'm always a bit wary of "low-end" tech. Secondly, is the standard 2MB enough, or should I look at getting more? My current printer has 512K which is definitely not enough for some of the image-based stuff I print. Also, what does it do on a PostScript error? My current printer (a QMS 410-PS) just stops, and awaits a new job. The ones at work print out the PostScript error, so you can see what's gone wrong. Obviously, I'd prefer the latter...
... but they aren't always. If someone really places such little emphasis on the privacy of their medical records that they choose a non-secure password, then they deserve everything they get. IMHO, society is trying to hard to protect the stupid from themselves. It's always going to be a losing battle, and we should just let them get on with it.
That said, there are, of course, problem with the above reasoning. First and foremost is that the general public doesn't know what is and what is not a secure password. Most people will assume that if they don't tell anyone that their password is "elephant" then it's secure. Those of us that have ever done tech support are constantly amazed by the number of people that continue to use either their username, birthday of car registration for passwords. Furthermore, password authentication has some undesirable properties. Passwords can be cracked without the user knowing it, and once public, they can never be reused.
I'd say that for your application, single password authentication is about the best you can hope for in the near term. Certainly lobby management for better alternatives, but don't hold your breath. I've been there before, and a multibillion dollar global corporation I used to work can still be brought down by any unauthenticated user that knows how. I tried to explain just how vulnerable they were, but all they were interested in was getting the product in and running. Sigh.
Why the comment from Veritas? I assume they're implying that Veritas will be used as part of the deal, although it wasn't explicitly mentioned. Whatever the pros and cons of Veritas (I haven't used it enough to say one way or the other), it will certainly help corporate acceptance of Linux. Veritas has strong brand recognition in the corporate arena.
I find this thread intriguing. Given the typical British reticence to reveal salaries, there are an awful lot of people (including myself) who are quite prepared to tell the world how much they are earning. Is is because we feel safe (i.e., among friends), or is it just that geeks place less emphasis on the importance of salary then the general populace?
FWIW, I'm currently on £50/hour in London, and am looking for more Unix contract work. I'd consider a permanent position, but not for less than £50,000 a year, and even then, I'd have to think twice about it. I like the freedom of contracting.
a good IT worker here can expect to top out about 35-40k (according to the latest offerings in computer weekly - a trade mag)
Ignore the salaries listed there. They usually only list the lower end of the spectrum. You can certainly get 60k+ in the City, and 45k elsewhere in London. I'm not saying it's common, and you need a certain amount of experience to get that sort of money, but it doesn't top out at the 35/40k you're quoting.
I am a software developer-contractor with $100/hour rate. I am toying with the idea of spending summer in UK, is it possible to get 3-4mo contract there ? If yes, what kind of rate can I expect ? Well, the bottom has pretty much dropped out of the UK contract market at the moment. Mine expires in 3 weeks, and there's almost nothing available. Everyone's waiting until post-Y2K before even considering taking on new contractors. There's a few short term contracts available, and I'll probably have to take one until the market picks up again (which people seem to think will be around March). I even saw a one week contract as a Linux trainer:-) Rates are depressingly low at the moment -- around £40/hour, although I'm hoping they'll pick up again. If you go for financial institutions in the City of London, you're looking more at £55 to £75 per hour. 3-4 month contracts are very common, although you may need to check about work permits and the like.
I played Wolf3D to death in the early nineties, and loved every minute of it. It was a completely ground breaking game, and everyone was in awe of the graphics, and how they managed to display them so quickly, even on lowly 386s.
However, its time has long passed. I still go back and play Doom every now and again, but I can't remember the last time I played Wolf3D or Quake. Doom is so much better in terms of gameplay than either of them. Still, it's certainly nice to have Wolf3D on Linux, and I'll be downloading it, for novelty value if nothing else.
Now if only I could get UAE to play Battle Squadron at a sensible speed....
us plebians who just want symmetric 10 Mbit cable modem access.
That'd be nice, but right at this moment, I'd settle for BT sorting themselves out and giving me their pathetic 512Kb/s asymmetric line at their hugely inflated prices. They don't even seem to be able to get that right. Sigh. Until then, I'm stuck with ISDN, and even that is significantly better than the average UK household...
Sun HW offers 1000-way SMP capabale systems(in theory at least)
Nope. The most Sun offer is 64-way with the E10000 StarFire. We have four of them here. http://www.sun.com/servers/highe nd/10000/spec.html. Sure, you can go past 64 CPUs with clustering or server farms, etc., but not SMP.
Linux is slowly getting there but it;'s not there "just yet" Let's be sensible....
Agreed. I've even had Linux running on a Sun Ultra Enterprise server, but it certainly doesn't make as good use of it as Solaris does. It'll get there in time, but it's not there yet.
Such an obvious trap is laughabel, even thought it often snares the clueless.
You may think it's a trap, but through sheer coincindence, I genuinely did have the source, and genuinely did accidentally delete it this morning. Sigh.
Interesting to note that they're using Stronghold, which is basically Apache with 128-bit encryption added by UK company http://www.c2.net. If a US company had done this, they wouldn't be allowed to export it outside the US/Canada. As it stands, Stronghold has access to the global market.
It is probably the best example we have of why US export restrictions are bad for US businesses, and more importantly (at least for those of us in the UK), it's an example of why the UK shouldn't adopt similar export restrictions, something I'm increasingly worried that our government will try and do.
For some reason I've always hated hack (and later, nethack). I've loved pretty much every other game of the genre: rogue, larn, moria, angband, even omega (although it was a bit too slow and too buggy for my tastes). Somehow, though, {,net}hack just never felt right...
An ASCII character based version of rogue. I miss it.
I have the source somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it out. From what I remember, though, it's not freely distributable. Other than that, you may want to check out zangband. It's an enhancement of angband, which in itself is an enhanced version of moria, a rogue-like game. Yes, it has graphics if you want them, but I always compile it without them. Nothing like the good-old text based interface. More details at http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
By what moral principal should we (the people, therefore the government) be allowed to limit what they do to their own work, no matter how heinous?
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. However, MS abused a monopoly position to try and put their competitors (Digital Research, among others) out of business. It's the monopoly position that makes the difference. They're behaving in a means that is not in the public interest, and the only way to stop them is through the laws set up to prevent it. That's what this (and the DoJ case) is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
It's 512K download, 256K upload. And it'll be March at the absolute earliest, with £50/month (about US$80) being the minimum, too. It wouldn't surprise me to see the final figure for end user consumers being around £75/month. Sigh. Fortunately, I should be in one of the early adopter areas, but as fair as I'm aware, they haven't even published finalised details of that yet.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Go away and don't come back until you've got a clue. When was the last time you saw Linux running on a 64 CPU SMP system? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Linux fan and have been running it for nearly 8 years now (I've even had it running on Sun Enterprise servers), but it doesn't yet scale as well as Solaris.
it's also why 80% of major corporations are abandoning solaris for linux.
Really? And just where did you pluck this figure from? In my experience, a few major corporations are replacing Solaris with Linux for DNS, email, and maybe web serving, and they're doing it for price/perfomance reasons, not for SMP scalability. None are doing it at the high end.
Yep, I do, and the thought of her as first lady scares me senseless -- and I don't even live in the US! Sure, Al's done quite a good job of silencing her more militant views so his politcal coreer isn't derailed, but I'll guarantee they're still there. Interesting to note that she's now claiming it as a major politcal victory, saying she was instrumental in get parental advisory stickers put on offensive records. She was actually trying to ban them outright, and fortunately, she failed.
If Microsoft were to be punished with a fine, it would have to be spectacularly huge in order to make any significant difference. For example, it's been said that MS could easily pay off a $100 million fine without problems. The question is, would the American public (who are generally ingorant of just how much money MS has) stand for a bigger fine, or would they see it as an attack on a legitamate business?
Yes, you could... assuming you have the relevant knowledge of compilers and compilation techniques. Do you? Buying Cygnus gives Red Hat a supply of developers that know the tools inside and out. They already had a couple of staff that did (e.g., David Miller, Jakub Jelinek), but probably not enough to do a good job should Cygnus have decided to start concentrating more on the embedded market or whatever else. A decent development toolchain is probably the single most critical factor to Linux's survival. Red Hat know this, and have taken steps to protect it. Think of it as a support contract. Companies buy support not because they expect things to go wrong, but so they're covered on the offchance they they do go wrong. Wise move, IMHO.
Personally, I think it's a good move for Red Hat -- they're protecting their interests by ensuring they don't lose their development toolchain, which is pretty critical to their survival.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with the parts of Cygnus that aren't related to their core Linux business, though. I think there are huge opportunities for Red Hat in the embedded space now, but I wonder if they're too Linux server oriented to see them...
Read Robert Heinlein's "Waldo". Broadcast power is fine for certain specialised applications, but I'm very uneasy about it becoming commonplace.
It's already been done, but they're not going to release it. MS officially deny it, but from speaking to those who should know, it was apparently a fairly easy port from the Solaris IE codebase. Mind you, given how much IE for Solaris sucked, I think I'll stick with Netscape...
Of course, this is all unsubstantiated, and I have no actual proof, but I trust my informants, who have no need to lie about such things.
I've been seriously considering one of these, having found a source of them at a very good price. I have a few concerns though. Firstly, what's the print quality like? I'm not after anything spectacular, but I'm always a bit wary of "low-end" tech. Secondly, is the standard 2MB enough, or should I look at getting more? My current printer has 512K which is definitely not enough for some of the image-based stuff I print. Also, what does it do on a PostScript error? My current printer (a QMS 410-PS) just stops, and awaits a new job. The ones at work print out the PostScript error, so you can see what's gone wrong. Obviously, I'd prefer the latter...
That said, there are, of course, problem with the above reasoning. First and foremost is that the general public doesn't know what is and what is not a secure password. Most people will assume that if they don't tell anyone that their password is "elephant" then it's secure. Those of us that have ever done tech support are constantly amazed by the number of people that continue to use either their username, birthday of car registration for passwords. Furthermore, password authentication has some undesirable properties. Passwords can be cracked without the user knowing it, and once public, they can never be reused.
I'd say that for your application, single password authentication is about the best you can hope for in the near term. Certainly lobby management for better alternatives, but don't hold your breath. I've been there before, and a multibillion dollar global corporation I used to work can still be brought down by any unauthenticated user that knows how. I tried to explain just how vulnerable they were, but all they were interested in was getting the product in and running. Sigh.
Why the comment from Veritas? I assume they're implying that Veritas will be used as part of the deal, although it wasn't explicitly mentioned. Whatever the pros and cons of Veritas (I haven't used it enough to say one way or the other), it will certainly help corporate acceptance of Linux. Veritas has strong brand recognition in the corporate arena.
FWIW, I'm currently on £50/hour in London, and am looking for more Unix contract work. I'd consider a permanent position, but not for less than £50,000 a year, and even then, I'd have to think twice about it. I like the freedom of contracting.
Ignore the salaries listed there. They usually only list the lower end of the spectrum. You can certainly get 60k+ in the City, and 45k elsewhere in London. I'm not saying it's common, and you need a certain amount of experience to get that sort of money, but it doesn't top out at the 35/40k you're quoting.
I am a software developer-contractor with $100/hour rate. I am toying with the idea of spending summer in UK, is it possible to get 3-4mo contract there ? If yes, what kind of rate can I expect ? Well, the bottom has pretty much dropped out of the UK contract market at the moment. Mine expires in 3 weeks, and there's almost nothing available. Everyone's waiting until post-Y2K before even considering taking on new contractors. There's a few short term contracts available, and I'll probably have to take one until the market picks up again (which people seem to think will be around March). I even saw a one week contract as a Linux trainer :-) Rates are depressingly low at the moment -- around £40/hour, although I'm hoping they'll pick up again. If you go for financial institutions in the City of London, you're looking more at £55 to £75 per hour. 3-4 month contracts are very common, although you may need to check about work permits and the like.
However, its time has long passed. I still go back and play Doom every now and again, but I can't remember the last time I played Wolf3D or Quake. Doom is so much better in terms of gameplay than either of them. Still, it's certainly nice to have Wolf3D on Linux, and I'll be downloading it, for novelty value if nothing else.
Now if only I could get UAE to play Battle Squadron at a sensible speed....
That'd be nice, but right at this moment, I'd settle for BT sorting themselves out and giving me their pathetic 512Kb/s asymmetric line at their hugely inflated prices. They don't even seem to be able to get that right. Sigh. Until then, I'm stuck with ISDN, and even that is significantly better than the average UK household...
Bollocks. Data General have been offering 64 CPU Intel based servers for some time now. See http://www.dg.com/avi ion/html/av_25000_enterprise_server.html. 128 CPU and higher versions are due to follow early next year.
Sun HW offers 1000-way SMP capabale systems(in theory at least)
Nope. The most Sun offer is 64-way with the E10000 StarFire. We have four of them here. http://www.sun.com/servers/highe nd/10000/spec.html. Sure, you can go past 64 CPUs with clustering or server farms, etc., but not SMP.
Linux is slowly getting there but it;'s not there "just yet" Let's be sensible....
Agreed. I've even had Linux running on a Sun Ultra Enterprise server, but it certainly doesn't make as good use of it as Solaris does. It'll get there in time, but it's not there yet.
Of course it's possible! It'll mean a reworking of X font handling mechanisms, and it'll certainly be a lot of work, but it definitely *is* possible.
You may think it's a trap, but through sheer coincindence, I genuinely did have the source, and genuinely did accidentally delete it this morning. Sigh.
I accidentally deleted by copy of the decyption code this morning. Arse! Does anyone have a pointer as to where it's available?
It is probably the best example we have of why US export restrictions are bad for US businesses, and more importantly (at least for those of us in the UK), it's an example of why the UK shouldn't adopt similar export restrictions, something I'm increasingly worried that our government will try and do.
For some reason I've always hated hack (and later, nethack). I've loved pretty much every other game of the genre: rogue, larn, moria, angband, even omega (although it was a bit too slow and too buggy for my tastes). Somehow, though, {,net}hack just never felt right...
I have the source somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it out. From what I remember, though, it's not freely distributable. Other than that, you may want to check out zangband. It's an enhancement of angband, which in itself is an enhanced version of moria, a rogue-like game. Yes, it has graphics if you want them, but I always compile it without them. Nothing like the good-old text based interface. More details at http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. However, MS abused a monopoly position to try and put their competitors (Digital Research, among others) out of business. It's the monopoly position that makes the difference. They're behaving in a means that is not in the public interest, and the only way to stop them is through the laws set up to prevent it. That's what this (and the DoJ case) is all about.