I agree with this 100%. I keep getting job offers that are double or more what I'm making now, but you simply can't buy the benefits of working in a job you enjoy with people you like, creative freedom, interesting projects, and where you feel like an important part of the team.
I'll admit it: I once took a job that paid double, worked there for two years until I was so burned out I could barely spell my name, then went back to the job I'm in now. There's a huge value to personal satisfaction in your job. Don't be too hasty to place the highest value on money.
If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, would it matter if you were making 20% more or 60% more? Nope. Live life. Seriously.
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and be paid. Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because they already know where you live (from the cable company), and what you are interested in (from Google searches), and who you talk to (from GTalk/GMail).
All good points. However, Neilsen already has sort of an "in" with TV demographics, and almost everyone knows of "Neilsen ratings," so you've got a brand awareness there. People who make TV have been conditioned to take Neilsen ratings as gospel. People who watch TV, the same. If someone calls and says they're from the Neilsen ratings people, a lot more people will stay on the phone with them than if someone calls and says they're from Google. I mean, Google is cool and all, and people know about it, but talking to Google doesn't say "this will affect the future of what I get to see on TV" like talking to Neilsen does. It's a perception that may or may not be accurate, but sometimes perception is everything. Plus, at this time (well, as far as I know - heh), Google has no way to tie in my Gmail/Searches to my TV watching.
Now. Will Google start out partnering with Neilsen (or other such company) and then take over later? One thing that Google is good at is building partnerships with companies that do one thing, if not "well" precisely, at least better than Google at that time. Or, will they just go ahead and buy up such a company? They seem to be pretty good at strategic purchases as well.
I'll absolutely grant you, though, that if I could log in to my TV with my Gmail/Adsense/Adwords login so that Google COULD use that data, it would most likely revolutionize TV advertising as we know it.
No, Google will cut a deal with every network to customize their ad spots for every viewer. For a small cut of their ad revenues, Google will handle all customization costs, hardware and software. The networks will all go along because the customized ads will be so much more profitable that it would make no sense for any network to refuse.
Sure, it's just a "what if," but if Google hasn't thought of this already, they should. It's a nearly perfect extrapolation from AdSense: contextual advertising for television.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information and, like Cringely supposes, only show Alzheimers drug ads to seniors and their children, and only show beer ads to people over 21.
If Google does go in this direction, I can only hope that ads will be rotated in the manner of AdWords ads. I.E: Only the ads that interest people will be shown, or shown more often. I love to watch well-done commercials, and most of them are so poorly scripted that they A) don't convince me to buy and B) are just plain boring.
I don't know that this is going to happen, or if it's even feasible, but it sure is fun to think about.
What's the point of modding your case if it doesn't involve power tools and the risk of damage to expensive components?!
Oh come now. What about all the poor unfortunates with no access to nor knowledge of power tools? What of the non-geek guys trying to impress the geek grrrls? The poor fools that everyone laughs at during lan parties with their Micron Windows ME PC's from Costco?
The poseurs. Will no one think of the poseurs?
Truly, this is a fine day for wannabes everywhere.
And make sure you don't go to far concerning those off-hours or you will lose your job (working late on my project:).
Or, get a job where your boss is an ex-GNU-software and embedded systems consultant whose philosophy is "Always give back to the community whenever possible."
There are actually a few companies out there who support open source and are supportive of their people working on it in their spare time, even if those companies aren't themselves in the software business.
How have you raised your Open Source projects public profile (particularly if it isn't something that is of general use), and how have you gone about obtaining funding to help take care of those annoying little costs that creep up along the way?
Okay, I have a tiny open source project that no one's ever heard of, but I've been working on it for a few years and have tried various things.
Two parts to this, I guess. One, starting out, requiring a link back (or just asking for one) ends up with a bunch of sites promoting your work. This can raise the public profile of your project, because all the people who see the link and think the app is cool come running over to your project page. There are other ways to do it, of course. (submit to Slashdot anyone?) There's also Freshmeat and other free software directories to get the word out.
I'm really sad to say that the problem with funding, as I see it, is that a lot of the time, the funding just isn't out there unless you have something big and in wide use, like an O/S, or a popular server (Apache, Sendmail, MySQL), or something that is tending toward apps that would be used in a business environment. Also, a really really useful app where an equivalent doesn't exist has the potential to attract funding as well.
You can solicit donations, but my experience is, most of the people who are going to use the application in a serious commercial environment or to help them make a profit donate zip. People who will be using it for personal use and can't afford to donate often donate a couple of bucks. People who demand free technical support because they don't wanna read the manual RIGHT NOW DAMMIT don't generally donate anything either.
Donations aren't generally a good business model.
(Unless you can get tax exempt status...but I digress.)
Really, it seems that one needs a sales manager or an evangelist -- someone who really enjoys going out and *selling* the project. Not in the sense of "buy this software," but in the sense of, "Hey, Mr. Corporation/Investment entity -- if you invest in this it'll be really cool and people will love you and your stock will go up to the heavens! Yay!"
But most of us just want to sit around and code -- the sales thing just isn't attractive. One option I've explored is finding a salesy kind of person I can trust, and asking them to take on that kind of thing for a split of the "take." That has worked pretty well on a small scale, so I'm pursuing it more. If you're a coder who is also salesy, so are extremely lucky and talented. If not, find a buddy and make them do the evangelization.
In the meantime, get a day job and work on your project in your off hours. That's all the funding I've needed so far.:-)
I want to know more about its general feel! I want to know more about what I might not like! I want to know more than "There are parts that need to be polished, but ignore my last sentance"!
The general feel is kind of like the author is a friend or a family member writing you a letter about stuff. Like the review says, "Hey, dude, you gotta check this out" kind of thing. It just sort of makes you feel like you know the guy, even though of course you don't. Like you might have hung out together in high school, then lost touch.
What might you not like? Well, you might not like that kind of friendliness. The stories are emotional in many ways. Depending on your point of view, you might see them as overly sentimental or even maudlin. I didn't, but I know a few cynical folks to whom any indication of emotion is automatically sneered at. It's not a technical book. It's more of a glimpse into one person's life. If you don't care for personal glimpses, you might not like it.
Dunno. I've watched some episodes of Star Trek, and even enjoyed them, but I had no idea who Wil Wheaton was until I once read his Slashdot interview. I just enjoy his writing, and this book contains some of the best.
What else would you want to know?
The illustrations are cool too.
Heheh.
Loved it - what else can I say.
on
Dancing Barefoot
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at Dancing Barefoot as well. If you've read Wheaton's blog at all, you may be familiar with his funny, often self-deprecating, and above all, honest writing style. Sometimes, his blog entries are brief one-liners, but other times, they are quite courageous and emotional stories that really draw you in.
Even if you don't want to be drawn in.
Of course, I wasn't all that drawn in, you know, 'cause I'm a bad ass.
No, really.
And I didn't get choked up at ALL reading any of it, especially the one about his Aunt Val's house.
I did NOT.
Shut up.
Where was I? Oh yeah.
Dancing Barefoot takes some stories that were previously on the blog, and adds to them, finishes them -- puts some more polish on the edges, and presents something that is incredibly human, touching, and even grand.
This book is worth reading just for the Saga of Spongebob VegasPants alone. Even if you're a long-time blog reader, I can almost guarantee there is some stuff you haven't seen yet.
There are still places that hire based on demonstrable skills
Where? I'm sure a good answer to this question will be moderated +50 if possible. Or are you just presuming that there must be such places?
The last three places I've worked including where I'm currently working. The attitude at all three companies was actually somewhat suspicious of degreed people without experience due to a lot of previous hires who were lost without the answers in the back of the textbook.
Now, I'm not saying that all people with degrees are useless, so please don't flame me over that. Rather, in our experience and the experience of the last few employers I've had, degrees and/or certifications simply were not as good predictors of work performance on an actual job as were skills and experience.
When was the last time you looked for a job in the computer industry, without a degree, and got one?
Coming up on a year, actually. Well after the dot-com bust.
Have you actually tried what you propose, and succeeded? If so, I'm sure it'd be helpful if you can relate how your new employer picked your resume out of a thousand essentially random ones.
Yes. And it's a lot of work, I will say that. How the employers pick them, I can't really tell, but it has happened. I do as much research as I can on the company, the job, the requirements, etc as I can. For each job in my resume, I pick and choose those accomplishments or skills required for that job which specifically relate to what they're asking for on this job. If possible, I call the company or their HR department or even go down there and try to talk to the receptionist or the secretary or the HR clerk or someone in that department and ask them how they like working there, what kind of environment it is -- get as much information as I can. Sometimes it's not much, of course, but you might be surprised at what tidbits you can get from the person who answers the phone. If they're only hiring people they know, maybe you can get to be someone they know. I've even dropped email to someone whose personal web page indicated they worked for the company and said, "Hey, sorry to bother you but you say on your web page that you work for BlahCo. I was thinking about applying for X. I don't suppose you could give me some information about whether I should bother or not?"
They don't say "the job market is competetive" for no reason. It is a competition. It can be a lot like a beauty contest: maybe the one who wins isn't the most talented, but the one who worked the judges the best. Maybe the one who gets the job isn't the most skilled, but the one who had a resume that said "I am exactly the one you want for this exact position because of X."
As I said: it's targeted marketing. You have a skill, this company is in need of said skill. But you have to let them know why they should take you instead of the bazillion other people. It's like saying why you should buy a Nissan instead of a Ford, or a Coke instead of a Pepsi. The more you know about the company's attitude and culture and what kinds of people they do hire, the more you can show how you are that kind of person.
Where you run into problems is sometimes when HR is really separate from tech and puts their own set of sorting requirements for the resumes in there. You're right that some companies will absolutely go "No degree. No interview," and toss the resume. I'm not disputing that by any means. All I said was, "there are still places that hire based on demonstrable skills."
And there are. I've worked for 'em and many of my friends (non-degreed) work for others. I'm not even saying this is a majority of companies: only saying that they do exist.
I seriously doubt he'd even get an interview today, much less on-the-job experience, without an engineering major of some sort
Um...no. There are still places that hire based on demonstrable skills (URLs with your work, downloads of your code, CD's, etc) and really couldn't care less about a degree.
Part of the problem is, people don't know how to apply and demonstrate how their skills are relevant to the job at hand. It's one common resume, copied 100 or so times, and blasted out to wherever.
If more people would sit down, look at the job(s) they're applying for, and make an attempt to target their resume toward that particual job as they would target a marketing campaign, I think they'd have better luck.
It's ALL the more important to be competetive in your job search when the job market's like this. But just because people aren't beating down your door doesn't mean there aren't jobs out there that you can find if you look hard enough.
I guess this means that Linux is finally ready for 'The Enterprise.'
Urge... to... KILL... rising.
For that, you should surely be PUNished.
"Slashvertisements" was brilliant, though.
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 2
Coming so soon on the heels of the controversial subscription policy, the Slashvertisement story was a really well done April Fools gag. It was built up to ahead of time, they disabled anonymous posting -- Good Lord, that was some funny shit! And the people who fell for it!
Okay, maybe they could have gotten more mileage out of the Slashvertisements thing if they hadn't posted links to other AF gags, but on the whole, making all the stories part of April Fools while not commenting one way or another with smileys or "It's funny laugh" left the readers to decide whether any of it was real or not.
Overall, I found this to be quite the amusing day, and a somewhat welcome relief from normal, day-to-day... um... stuff.:-)
No, no, they've already worked out a deal with Piro-san on that. It's been pretty hush-hush, but I understand they offered him half of the profits on the new proprietary, closed-source version of Debian that's coming out soon.
Oh...better keep that "closed-source" thing hush-hush, tho'. I don't think the Debian folks are ready to publicize that yet.:-)
It's about time. As usual, Debian shows the great leadership that we have all come to expect from the project. The addition of a r00tk1t is yet another brilliant aid to remote administration, and well worth waiting for. RedHat and other so-called "commercial" distributions will, one can only hope, wake up soon and attempt to emulate Debian's ground-breaking innovation in this area, in order to gain market share in the vastly untapped script kiddie market.
I also understand that Debian will be adopting a new motto for the project: "Relax: we understand j00".
Ahh, the joys of April 1 on Slashdot: where the stories ARE the trolls! Nice one guys. heheh
I do have to feel sorry for Hemos, though: hopefully his spam filter is on full-blast to catch the flak from this story. Wonder how he's going to pay CmdrTaco back? Perhaps with a story about selling Karma points with CmdrTaco's email address as the contact?:-)
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that it's often easy to forget that everyone hasn't been using Linux, vi, and command-line tools as I have. I do a lot of work with public school teachers and other "non-computer-literate" people, and while I do try to remember what it was like to start out, sometimes I forget that what I think is obvious, other people have just never had the chance to learn. In fact, I'm often shocked by the fact that many people have "grown up" with Windows or Mac and don't even know that a command prompt exists.
Still, while some people aren't good at explaining things in terms that a newbie can understand, others are. It's the same way with teachers of anything, though, so let's not lump this in with Linux/Unix/BSD* etc. I had many math teachers who made things sound so horribly complicated and uninteresting I just couldn't get it. Then I had one teach me enough Algebra/Trig to get an A in Calculus and 1st year Physics in about 3 hours. I remember thinking, "That's it? Why the hell didn't they say so???"
Partly, too, there is a prestige aspect to this. Sadly, some people's teaching style is all about showing off how wonderfully smart they are and showing how woefully stupid the student is. No, this isn't everyone, but I do seem to encounter a lot of people who feel that if you can't use vi, then you are just hopelessly dumb.
Maybe the gurus need to think more about what the goal is. Is the goal to make it so that other "ordinary" people can use Linux, or so that we can all be some kind of honored clique who, together, are just so much cooler than everyone else? Once the goal is declared, act accordingly: simple as that.:-)
I know, because all my sites come up in the top ten in searches for my topics. Obviously, this is a search engine of excrutiatingly good taste and refinement, and one which everyone should use.
Of course, the Google results seem to be more relevant (Teoma's search brought up an obscure page on my site as an "Expert link"), and Teoma has been known to blatantly ignore the robot exclusion standard (I remember tons of accesses from it on sites I had tried to exclude from spidering). Despite the wonderful increases in traffic that Teoma may give me, I think I'll stick with Google for now.
When I started getting spam (not from Amazon) to an email address I *only* use with Amazon, I couldn't believe it. Unfortunately, all it's done is make it so that I don't believe anyone's privacy policy anymore. After all, if Amazon can just all of a sudden decide to sell my info, so can anyone else. I pretty much use a different email address everywhere I sign up for anything now. That way, if they do the same thing, ~blip~ Right into Procmail it goes.
It's just another chilling reminder that any kind of contract isn't worth much more than the paper (the screen) it's printed on if someone with a lot of money wants to break it and some little person like me doesn't have the resources to fight it.
Thanks, Amazon, for adding to the restoral of my faith in humanity.
I had high hopes for the new RedHat. Finally, they were getting something similar to apt-get for easy upgrades/installs. Unfortunately, updating via up2date and RHN broke
some things (such as up2date itself and rpm) the first time I ran it. Due to an incompatibility in the rpm database format, when I reinstalled RH7 from CD, I then had to go and get the rpm source and compile it manually in order to install anything else.
I attempted to log in for web support as a registered user to ask if there were a workaround for this incompatibility, but when attempting to register the product it said "This product is already registered" and when attempting to fill out the support form, it never could figure out my product ID, so I had an empty select box and no way to request support. I tried off and on for about a week to submit a support request, but to no avail.
Apparently, if their web support request form doesn't work, you're somewhat out of luck, and I find this a bit disturbing. I wouldn't mind waiting awhile for an email response if there were an email address available in lieu of the form.
On the whole, I have never, ever, had nearly the problems with Debian's apt-get update/upgrade/install as I had with RedHat's up2date and the RHN, I'm sorry to say. I had really high hopes for it, and I will say that RH7 is a huge improvement over RH6. (Nice job, guys!) but while I got around these problems all right, I'm afraid for the new users who might run into these sorts of problems and be unable to fix them.
The moral of the story: you still need to know how to compile source (at the least) to be really safe.:-)
Any mistakes are mine...but this is how I read
it...
--
These are not benchmarks in all reality... I have only did some simple enough tests but some things have surprised me and I would
like to give you a look at them.:-)
Well, this is a little more rigorous than that which happened on the mailing list the other day... the idea is to measure the
performance of various filesystems, which, nevertheless, are very important: XFS and ReiserFS have journaling, and XFS has
advanced characteristics like ACLs, extended attributes, etc. That is to say, this "comparison" takes into account a single aspect of
the filesystems, but there are many other important aspects to take into account when you choose one.
To begin, I have done these tests with RedHat 7.1 with the installer modified by SGI for directly installing XFS 1.0 for Linux, with
the kernel and all the tools to date. I have recompiled the kernel in order to have support for ReiserFS without DEBUG activated
(which makes it very slow).
Aside from that, I have to say that I have done all these tests on a hard drive quicker than that which I used for that comment on the
mailing list (it runs about 12.5 MB/s according to hdparm-t). All the tests were done on the same machine, with the same system,
the same kernel, and they were done on the same hard drive on the same partition. The only thing that has changed has been the
filesystem: my intention was basically to test XFS and compare it with ReiserFS, but I have added Ext 2 FS and Fat 32 as
examples (though some will say that I'm cruel to include Fat 32;-). I have used the 'time' command to measure the execution
time of the commands, and the times that show up in the tables are the average of the times obtained in three experiments. I have
fixed the "real" time elapsed during execution, and you have to take into account that the machine was in single-user mode so that it
was for all practical purposes not doing anything more than execute my commands.
First test: writing, reading, and deletion of a relatively large file (256 MB). The commands used were these (omitting 'time' which
was used with all the commands):
* dd if=/dev/zero of=./prova bs=1 M count=256
* dd if=./prova of=/dev/null bs=1 M count=256
* rm-f./prova
Second test: this was based on the source code of kernel 2.4.4. I had downloaded the tar.gz and had uncompressed it in order to
work with only the tar (of more than 100 MB) without adding the implications of gzip. The commands used were these (again,
omitting 'time'):
* cp linux-2.4.4.tar prova.tar
* tar xf prova.tar
* rm-f prova.tar
* rm-rf linux
Conclusions: I was surprised by the speed of XFS because in the first test that I did (a single experiment) it didn't seem so quick.
For writing, reading, and deletion of big files (sequentially), it seems that this is the one that runs better. Although ReiserFS didn't do
badly, I was hoping that it would beat XFS. In this test, my attention was called to something else: all but Fat32 lagged more in
reading than in writing? Can anyone explain that? Something related to/dev/null and/dev/zero???
As far as the tests with the kernel source code, copying the.tar gave somewhat strange results: at first sight, the fastest was XFS, later
Ext2FS, later ReiserFS, and finally (what a surprise]:-) FAT32. But this is looking as the averages. There is another curious thing
(which I didn't put in the table): in this test, the variance using ReiserFS was very large, oscillating between 16.94 and 63.48
seconds. I cannot explain that. I repeated this test six times instead of three, and it didn't stabilize. Executing three out of three times
(I had a script prepared for doing this, and I ran it twice) the first copy lagged some 20 seconds, the second some 60 and the third
about 30. This happened to me twice. Poltergeist?
The extraction of the.tar (which implies reading a large file mixed with the creation of a large tree with many files) was slow with
FAT32, while XFS behaved much better, and ReiserFS and regular Ext2FS (they both lagged about the same). If in the previous
test my attention was called to the enormous variance in the time of copying large files with ReiserFS, here my attention was called
to the consistency of the results of XFS (identical in all three experiments). Not that this is a promotion of XFS, but this is the
impression the tests have left me with. O:-)
>> couple of 20-gig hard drives, throw Linux with Apache, Sendmail (or Qmail), Radius
> Only use Linux if you're comfortable securing it - if not you'll be owned in no time flat. If you want to run UNIX servers your best bet is OpenBSD
Good point. For a Linux distro, Debian seems to be nice and lightweight for servers, but you really need to keep up with updates on ANY O/S, *BSD included since you might be running, e.g. BIND. Subscribe to BugTraq, CERT, and whatever else you can find and hope you can install the fixes before then. There are also some hardened Linuxes out there, with StackGuard protection of all programs and so forth.
Okay, OpenBSD "out of the box" is more secure than RedHat and some other Linux distros out of the box. Happy?:-)
The main question I have is, how do you enforce your GPL or other Open Source licensed product? Certainly, you can go to the offending party, and say, "You are in violation of the license agreement," but if they don't comply, what can you do? What are the damages? If I GPL my software, I can't very well go to court and say "You are stealing my property and costing me money" and thus sue for money lost since, after all, the GPL means anyone can copy it without paying. Without a ton of money to begin with, I can't do anything at all about people violating the licence even if there were monetary damages. So, I'd like an attorney's opinion on what tack you should take when trying to enforce GPL/Artistic/BSD or other Open Source licenses in a way that would be effective.
Not knowing anything about Australia and telco
costs and so forth, I can't really comment about that. (So why are you posting??)
In the U.S., though, I've worked for an ISP who goes into a lot of little towns where there is no (or little) ISP service. They usually start out with 12 phone lines, which in US dollars is about $300 a month, and a frame-relay 56K connection back to the main ISP which is another couple hundred dollars a month, an Ascend Max 4000 or Portmaster III which you can get on eBay for not too much.
Webserver/mail server/DNS server? Heck, get a couple of lower end Celerons with, say, 128 megs of ram, a couple of 20-gig hard drives, throw Linux with Apache, Sendmail (or Qmail), Radius of some sort (I rather like FreeRadius) and BIND on them, and Ka-boom: instant servers.
Generally, what they do is say to the town: something like, you guarantee us X number of users, and we will bring Internet service to this town. Many times, the people will sign up (and pay!) for service before the ISP even gets out there, thus making it more or less a sure thing for the ISP (and for the users, since if they don't get enough people, the ISP gives the money back).
The big ISP's pretty much ignore smaller communities, so there is still a very large untapped market (at least in the US) for Internet service to small towns or rural areas. You can actually get quite a lot of users online before you have to get more phone lines and higher bandwidth, as well.
So, to sum up: minimum needed to be an ISP in a smaller town:
Internet connection, at least 56K Frame relay,
or higher.
At least 12 phone lines.
Dialup server (e.g. Ascend Max 4000/Portmaster III, or linux box with multi-line modem cards)
Web/DNS/Mail/Radius authentication server
Celeron 400, 128 meg Ram, 20 GB drive to start
out. You can make these separate servers, but
I've seen people run up to 500 virtual apache
domains and about 10,000 email boxes on the
same machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this 100%. I keep getting job offers that are double or more what I'm making now, but you simply can't buy the benefits of working in a job you enjoy with people you like, creative freedom, interesting projects, and where you feel like an important part of the team.
I'll admit it: I once took a job that paid double, worked there for two years until I was so burned out I could barely spell my name, then went back to the job I'm in now. There's a huge value to personal satisfaction in your job. Don't be too hasty to place the highest value on money.
If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, would it matter if you were making 20% more or 60% more? Nope. Live life. Seriously.
Neilsen familys need to volenterr, and be paid. Google can give *actual real* dmeographic infromatio, because they already know where you live (from the cable company), and what you are interested in (from Google searches), and who you talk to (from GTalk/GMail).
All good points. However, Neilsen already has sort of an "in" with TV demographics, and almost everyone knows of "Neilsen ratings," so you've got a brand awareness there. People who make TV have been conditioned to take Neilsen ratings as gospel. People who watch TV, the same. If someone calls and says they're from the Neilsen ratings people, a lot more people will stay on the phone with them than if someone calls and says they're from Google. I mean, Google is cool and all, and people know about it, but talking to Google doesn't say "this will affect the future of what I get to see on TV" like talking to Neilsen does. It's a perception that may or may not be accurate, but sometimes perception is everything. Plus, at this time (well, as far as I know - heh), Google has no way to tie in my Gmail/Searches to my TV watching.
Now. Will Google start out partnering with Neilsen (or other such company) and then take over later? One thing that Google is good at is building partnerships with companies that do one thing, if not "well" precisely, at least better than Google at that time. Or, will they just go ahead and buy up such a company? They seem to be pretty good at strategic purchases as well.
I'll absolutely grant you, though, that if I could log in to my TV with my Gmail/Adsense/Adwords login so that Google COULD use that data, it would most likely revolutionize TV advertising as we know it.
Sure, it's just a "what if," but if Google hasn't thought of this already, they should. It's a nearly perfect extrapolation from AdSense: contextual advertising for television.
If they could also get in bed with the media metrics folks, like Nielsen, they'll be able to tie in the demographic information and, like Cringely supposes, only show Alzheimers drug ads to seniors and their children, and only show beer ads to people over 21.
If Google does go in this direction, I can only hope that ads will be rotated in the manner of AdWords ads. I.E: Only the ads that interest people will be shown, or shown more often. I love to watch well-done commercials, and most of them are so poorly scripted that they A) don't convince me to buy and B) are just plain boring.
I don't know that this is going to happen, or if it's even feasible, but it sure is fun to think about.
The poseurs. Will no one think of the poseurs?
Truly, this is a fine day for wannabes everywhere.
And make sure you don't go to far concerning those off-hours or you will lose your job (working late on my project :).
:-)
Or, get a job where your boss is an ex-GNU-software and embedded systems consultant whose philosophy is "Always give back to the community whenever possible."
There are actually a few companies out there who support open source and are supportive of their people working on it in their spare time, even if those companies aren't themselves in the software business.
Not many...
But a few.
I GOT MINE!!! HAHAHA!
Um. Sorry. Don't know where that came from.
How have you raised your Open Source projects public profile (particularly if it isn't something that is of general use), and how have you gone about obtaining funding to help take care of those annoying little costs that creep up along the way?
:-)
Okay, I have a tiny open source project that no one's ever heard of, but I've been working on it for a few years and have tried various things.
Two parts to this, I guess. One, starting out, requiring a link back (or just asking for one) ends up with a bunch of sites promoting your work. This can raise the public profile of your project, because all the people who see the link and think the app is cool come running over to your project page. There are other ways to do it, of course. (submit to Slashdot anyone?) There's also Freshmeat and other free software directories to get the word out.
I'm really sad to say that the problem with funding, as I see it, is that a lot of the time, the funding just isn't out there unless you have something big and in wide use, like an O/S, or a popular server (Apache, Sendmail, MySQL), or something that is tending toward apps that would be used in a business environment. Also, a really really useful app where an equivalent doesn't exist has the potential to attract funding as well.
You can solicit donations, but my experience is, most of the people who are going to use the application in a serious commercial environment or to help them make a profit donate zip. People who will be using it for personal use and can't afford to donate often donate a couple of bucks. People who demand free technical support because they don't wanna read the manual RIGHT NOW DAMMIT don't generally donate anything either.
Donations aren't generally a good business model.
(Unless you can get tax exempt status...but I digress.)
Really, it seems that one needs a sales manager or an evangelist -- someone who really enjoys going out and *selling* the project. Not in the sense of "buy this software," but in the sense of, "Hey, Mr. Corporation/Investment entity -- if you invest in this it'll be really cool and people will love you and your stock will go up to the heavens! Yay!"
But most of us just want to sit around and code -- the sales thing just isn't attractive. One option I've explored is finding a salesy kind of person I can trust, and asking them to take on that kind of thing for a split of the "take." That has worked pretty well on a small scale, so I'm pursuing it more. If you're a coder who is also salesy, so are extremely lucky and talented. If not, find a buddy and make them do the evangelization.
In the meantime, get a day job and work on your project in your off hours. That's all the funding I've needed so far.
I want to know more about its general feel! I want to know more about what I might not like! I want to know more than "There are parts that need to be polished, but ignore my last sentance"!
The general feel is kind of like the author is a friend or a family member writing you a letter about stuff. Like the review says, "Hey, dude, you gotta check this out" kind of thing. It just sort of makes you feel like you know the guy, even though of course you don't. Like you might have hung out together in high school, then lost touch.
What might you not like? Well, you might not like that kind of friendliness. The stories are emotional in many ways. Depending on your point of view, you might see them as overly sentimental or even maudlin. I didn't, but I know a few cynical folks to whom any indication of emotion is automatically sneered at. It's not a technical book. It's more of a glimpse into one person's life. If you don't care for personal glimpses, you might not like it.
Dunno. I've watched some episodes of Star Trek, and even enjoyed them, but I had no idea who Wil Wheaton was until I once read his Slashdot interview. I just enjoy his writing, and this book contains some of the best.
What else would you want to know?
The illustrations are cool too.
Heheh.
I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at Dancing Barefoot as well. If you've read Wheaton's blog at all, you may be familiar with his funny, often self-deprecating, and above all, honest writing style. Sometimes, his blog entries are brief one-liners, but other times, they are quite courageous and emotional stories that really draw you in.
Even if you don't want to be drawn in.
Of course, I wasn't all that drawn in, you know, 'cause I'm a bad ass.
No, really.
And I didn't get choked up at ALL reading any of it, especially the one about his Aunt Val's house.
I did NOT.
Shut up.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Dancing Barefoot takes some stories that were previously on the blog, and adds to them, finishes them -- puts some more polish on the edges, and presents something that is incredibly human, touching, and even grand.
This book is worth reading just for the Saga of Spongebob VegasPants alone. Even if you're a long-time blog reader, I can almost guarantee there is some stuff you haven't seen yet.
The last three places I've worked including where I'm currently working. The attitude at all three companies was actually somewhat suspicious of degreed people without experience due to a lot of previous hires who were lost without the answers in the back of the textbook.
Now, I'm not saying that all people with degrees are useless, so please don't flame me over that. Rather, in our experience and the experience of the last few employers I've had, degrees and/or certifications simply were not as good predictors of work performance on an actual job as were skills and experience.
Coming up on a year, actually. Well after the dot-com bust.
Yes. And it's a lot of work, I will say that. How the employers pick them, I can't really tell, but it has happened. I do as much research as I can on the company, the job, the requirements, etc as I can. For each job in my resume, I pick and choose those accomplishments or skills required for that job which specifically relate to what they're asking for on this job. If possible, I call the company or their HR department or even go down there and try to talk to the receptionist or the secretary or the HR clerk or someone in that department and ask them how they like working there, what kind of environment it is -- get as much information as I can. Sometimes it's not much, of course, but you might be surprised at what tidbits you can get from the person who answers the phone. If they're only hiring people they know, maybe you can get to be someone they know. I've even dropped email to someone whose personal web page indicated they worked for the company and said, "Hey, sorry to bother you but you say on your web page that you work for BlahCo. I was thinking about applying for X. I don't suppose you could give me some information about whether I should bother or not?"
They don't say "the job market is competetive" for no reason. It is a competition. It can be a lot like a beauty contest: maybe the one who wins isn't the most talented, but the one who worked the judges the best. Maybe the one who gets the job isn't the most skilled, but the one who had a resume that said "I am exactly the one you want for this exact position because of X."
As I said: it's targeted marketing. You have a skill, this company is in need of said skill. But you have to let them know why they should take you instead of the bazillion other people. It's like saying why you should buy a Nissan instead of a Ford, or a Coke instead of a Pepsi. The more you know about the company's attitude and culture and what kinds of people they do hire, the more you can show how you are that kind of person.
Where you run into problems is sometimes when HR is really separate from tech and puts their own set of sorting requirements for the resumes in there. You're right that some companies will absolutely go "No degree. No interview," and toss the resume. I'm not disputing that by any means. All I said was, "there are still places that hire based on demonstrable skills."
And there are. I've worked for 'em and many of my friends (non-degreed) work for others. I'm not even saying this is a majority of companies: only saying that they do exist.
I seriously doubt he'd even get an interview today, much less on-the-job experience, without an engineering major of some sort
Um...no. There are still places that hire based on demonstrable skills (URLs with your work, downloads of your code, CD's, etc) and really couldn't care less about a degree.
Part of the problem is, people don't know how to apply and demonstrate how their skills are relevant to the job at hand. It's one common resume, copied 100 or so times, and blasted out to wherever.
If more people would sit down, look at the job(s) they're applying for, and make an attempt to target their resume toward that particual job as they would target a marketing campaign, I think they'd have better luck.
It's ALL the more important to be competetive in your job search when the job market's like this. But just because people aren't beating down your door doesn't mean there aren't jobs out there that you can find if you look hard enough.
I guess this means that Linux is finally ready for 'The Enterprise.'
Urge
For that, you should surely be PUNished.
Coming so soon on the heels of the controversial subscription policy, the Slashvertisement story was a really well done April Fools gag. It was built up to ahead of time, they disabled anonymous posting -- Good Lord, that was some funny shit! And the people who fell for it!
... um ... stuff. :-)
Okay, maybe they could have gotten more mileage out of the Slashvertisements thing if they hadn't posted links to other AF gags, but on the whole, making all the stories part of April Fools while not commenting one way or another with smileys or "It's funny laugh" left the readers to decide whether any of it was real or not.
Overall, I found this to be quite the amusing day, and a somewhat welcome relief from normal, day-to-day
Way to go, guys!
No, no, they've already worked out a deal with Piro-san on that. It's been pretty hush-hush, but I understand they offered him half of the profits on the new proprietary, closed-source version of Debian that's coming out soon.
:-)
Oh...better keep that "closed-source" thing hush-hush, tho'. I don't think the Debian folks are ready to publicize that yet.
It's about time. As usual, Debian shows the great leadership that we have all come to expect from the project. The addition of a r00tk1t is yet another brilliant aid to remote administration, and well worth waiting for. RedHat and other so-called "commercial" distributions will, one can only hope, wake up soon and attempt to emulate Debian's ground-breaking innovation in this area, in order to gain market share in the vastly untapped script kiddie market.
I also understand that Debian will be adopting a new motto for the project: "Relax: we understand j00".
Ahh, the joys of April 1 on Slashdot: where the stories ARE the trolls! Nice one guys. heheh
:-)
I do have to feel sorry for Hemos, though: hopefully his spam filter is on full-blast to catch the flak from this story. Wonder how he's going to pay CmdrTaco back? Perhaps with a story about selling Karma points with CmdrTaco's email address as the contact?
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that it's often easy to forget that everyone hasn't been using Linux, vi, and command-line tools as I have. I do a lot of work with public school teachers and other "non-computer-literate" people, and while I do try to remember what it was like to start out, sometimes I forget that what I think is obvious, other people have just never had the chance to learn. In fact, I'm often shocked by the fact that many people have "grown up" with Windows or Mac and don't even know that a command prompt exists.
:-)
Still, while some people aren't good at explaining things in terms that a newbie can understand, others are. It's the same way with teachers of anything, though, so let's not lump this in with Linux/Unix/BSD* etc. I had many math teachers who made things sound so horribly complicated and uninteresting I just couldn't get it. Then I had one teach me enough Algebra/Trig to get an A in Calculus and 1st year Physics in about 3 hours. I remember thinking, "That's it? Why the hell didn't they say so???"
Partly, too, there is a prestige aspect to this. Sadly, some people's teaching style is all about showing off how wonderfully smart they are and showing how woefully stupid the student is. No, this isn't everyone, but I do seem to encounter a lot of people who feel that if you can't use vi, then you are just hopelessly dumb.
Maybe the gurus need to think more about what the goal is. Is the goal to make it so that other "ordinary" people can use Linux, or so that we can all be some kind of honored clique who, together, are just so much cooler than everyone else? Once the goal is declared, act accordingly: simple as that.
I know, because all my sites come up in the top ten in searches for my topics. Obviously, this is a search engine of excrutiatingly good taste and refinement, and one which everyone should use.
Of course, the Google results seem to be more relevant (Teoma's search brought up an obscure page on my site as an "Expert link"), and Teoma has been known to blatantly ignore the robot exclusion standard (I remember tons of accesses from it on sites I had tried to exclude from spidering). Despite the wonderful increases in traffic that Teoma may give me, I think I'll stick with Google for now.
When I started getting spam (not from Amazon) to an email address I *only* use with Amazon, I couldn't believe it. Unfortunately, all it's done is make it so that I don't believe anyone's privacy policy anymore. After all, if Amazon can just all of a sudden decide to sell my info, so can anyone else. I pretty much use a different email address everywhere I sign up for anything now. That way, if they do the same thing, ~blip~ Right into Procmail it goes.
It's just another chilling reminder that any kind of contract isn't worth much more than the paper (the screen) it's printed on if someone with a lot of money wants to break it and some little person like me doesn't have the resources to fight it.
Thanks, Amazon, for adding to the restoral of my faith in humanity.
I had high hopes for the new RedHat. Finally, they were getting something similar to apt-get for easy upgrades/installs. Unfortunately, updating via up2date and RHN broke some things (such as up2date itself and rpm) the first time I ran it. Due to an incompatibility in the rpm database format, when I reinstalled RH7 from CD, I then had to go and get the rpm source and compile it manually in order to install anything else.
:-)
I attempted to log in for web support as a registered user to ask if there were a workaround for this incompatibility, but when attempting to register the product it said "This product is already registered" and when attempting to fill out the support form, it never could figure out my product ID, so I had an empty select box and no way to request support. I tried off and on for about a week to submit a support request, but to no avail.
Apparently, if their web support request form doesn't work, you're somewhat out of luck, and I find this a bit disturbing. I wouldn't mind waiting awhile for an email response if there were an email address available in lieu of the form.
On the whole, I have never, ever, had nearly the problems with Debian's apt-get update/upgrade/install as I had with RedHat's up2date and the RHN, I'm sorry to say. I had really high hopes for it, and I will say that RH7 is a huge improvement over RH6. (Nice job, guys!) but while I got around these problems all right, I'm afraid for the new users who might run into these sorts of problems and be unable to fix them. The moral of the story: you still need to know how to compile source (at the least) to be really safe.
Any mistakes are mine...but this is how I read
.tar Extract .tar Delete.tar Delete tree
/dev/null and /dev/zero???
.tar gave somewhat strange results: at first sight, the fastest was XFS, later
.tar (which implies reading a large file mixed with the creation of a large tree with many files) was slow with
;-)
it...
--
These are not benchmarks in all reality... I have only did some simple enough tests but some things have surprised me and I would
like to give you a look at them.:-)
Well, this is a little more rigorous than that which happened on the mailing list the other day... the idea is to measure the
performance of various filesystems, which, nevertheless, are very important: XFS and ReiserFS have journaling, and XFS has
advanced characteristics like ACLs, extended attributes, etc. That is to say, this "comparison" takes into account a single aspect of
the filesystems, but there are many other important aspects to take into account when you choose one.
To begin, I have done these tests with RedHat 7.1 with the installer modified by SGI for directly installing XFS 1.0 for Linux, with
the kernel and all the tools to date. I have recompiled the kernel in order to have support for ReiserFS without DEBUG activated
(which makes it very slow).
Aside from that, I have to say that I have done all these tests on a hard drive quicker than that which I used for that comment on the
mailing list (it runs about 12.5 MB/s according to hdparm-t). All the tests were done on the same machine, with the same system,
the same kernel, and they were done on the same hard drive on the same partition. The only thing that has changed has been the
filesystem: my intention was basically to test XFS and compare it with ReiserFS, but I have added Ext 2 FS and Fat 32 as
examples (though some will say that I'm cruel to include Fat 32;-). I have used the 'time' command to measure the execution
time of the commands, and the times that show up in the tables are the average of the times obtained in three experiments. I have
fixed the "real" time elapsed during execution, and you have to take into account that the machine was in single-user mode so that it
was for all practical purposes not doing anything more than execute my commands.
First test: writing, reading, and deletion of a relatively large file (256 MB). The commands used were these (omitting 'time' which
was used with all the commands):
* dd if=/dev/zero of=./prova bs=1 M count=256
* dd if=./prova of=/dev/null bs=1 M count=256
* rm-f./prova
And the times were these (in seconds):
FS Writing Reading Deletion
ReiserFS 18.5 23.41 0.4
Ext 2 FS 20.3 21.38 0.57
XFS 16.32 19.42 0.26
FAT 32 43.65 27.98 1.59
Second test: this was based on the source code of kernel 2.4.4. I had downloaded the tar.gz and had uncompressed it in order to
work with only the tar (of more than 100 MB) without adding the implications of gzip. The commands used were these (again,
omitting 'time'):
* cp linux-2.4.4.tar prova.tar
* tar xf prova.tar
* rm-f prova.tar
* rm-rf linux
And the times were these (in seconds):
FS Copy
ReiserFS 38.48 58.44 0.45 10.09
Ext 2 FS 21.31 59.19 2.88 11.12
XFS 16.21 35.44 0.18 21.96
FAT 32 39.76 134.19 1.2 6.7
Conclusions: I was surprised by the speed of XFS because in the first test that I did (a single experiment) it didn't seem so quick.
For writing, reading, and deletion of big files (sequentially), it seems that this is the one that runs better. Although ReiserFS didn't do
badly, I was hoping that it would beat XFS. In this test, my attention was called to something else: all but Fat32 lagged more in
reading than in writing? Can anyone explain that? Something related to
As far as the tests with the kernel source code, copying the
Ext2FS, later ReiserFS, and finally (what a surprise]:-) FAT32. But this is looking as the averages. There is another curious thing
(which I didn't put in the table): in this test, the variance using ReiserFS was very large, oscillating between 16.94 and 63.48
seconds. I cannot explain that. I repeated this test six times instead of three, and it didn't stabilize. Executing three out of three times
(I had a script prepared for doing this, and I ran it twice) the first copy lagged some 20 seconds, the second some 60 and the third
about 30. This happened to me twice. Poltergeist?
The extraction of the
FAT32, while XFS behaved much better, and ReiserFS and regular Ext2FS (they both lagged about the same). If in the previous
test my attention was called to the enormous variance in the time of copying large files with ReiserFS, here my attention was called
to the consistency of the results of XFS (identical in all three experiments). Not that this is a promotion of XFS, but this is the
impression the tests have left me with. O:-)
Any comments are welcome
Good point. For a Linux distro, Debian seems to be nice and lightweight for servers, but you really need to keep up with updates on ANY O/S, *BSD included since you might be running, e.g. BIND. Subscribe to BugTraq, CERT, and whatever else you can find and hope you can install the fixes before then. There are also some hardened Linuxes out there, with StackGuard protection of all programs and so forth.
Okay, OpenBSD "out of the box" is more secure than RedHat and some other Linux distros out of the box. Happy?
The main question I have is, how do you enforce your GPL or other Open Source licensed product? Certainly, you can go to the offending party, and say, "You are in violation of the license agreement," but if they don't comply, what can you do? What are the damages? If I GPL my software, I can't very well go to court and say "You are stealing my property and costing me money" and thus sue for money lost since, after all, the GPL means anyone can copy it without paying. Without a ton of money to begin with, I can't do anything at all about people violating the licence even if there were monetary damages. So, I'd like an attorney's opinion on what tack you should take when trying to enforce GPL/Artistic/BSD or other Open Source licenses in a way that would be effective.
In the U.S., though, I've worked for an ISP who goes into a lot of little towns where there is no (or little) ISP service. They usually start out with 12 phone lines, which in US dollars is about $300 a month, and a frame-relay 56K connection back to the main ISP which is another couple hundred dollars a month, an Ascend Max 4000 or Portmaster III which you can get on eBay for not too much.
Webserver/mail server/DNS server? Heck, get a couple of lower end Celerons with, say, 128 megs of ram, a couple of 20-gig hard drives, throw Linux with Apache, Sendmail (or Qmail), Radius of some sort (I rather like FreeRadius) and BIND on them, and Ka-boom: instant servers.
Generally, what they do is say to the town: something like, you guarantee us X number of users, and we will bring Internet service to this town. Many times, the people will sign up (and pay!) for service before the ISP even gets out there, thus making it more or less a sure thing for the ISP (and for the users, since if they don't get enough people, the ISP gives the money back).
The big ISP's pretty much ignore smaller communities, so there is still a very large untapped market (at least in the US) for Internet service to small towns or rural areas. You can actually get quite a lot of users online before you have to get more phone lines and higher bandwidth, as well.
So, to sum up: minimum needed to be an ISP in a smaller town:
- Internet connection, at least 56K Frame relay,
or higher.
- At least 12 phone lines.
- Dialup server (e.g. Ascend Max 4000/Portmaster III, or linux box with multi-line modem cards)
- Web/DNS/Mail/Radius authentication server
Celeron 400, 128 meg Ram, 20 GB drive to start
out. You can make these separate servers, but
I've seen people run up to 500 virtual apache
domains and about 10,000 email boxes on the
same machine.
- Ability to remain calm under all customer calls.
That's my 2 cents.