The digital recording act isn't what the big change here is, its the concept of "space-shifting" a digital work. It depends how tightly the ruling was worded if it could be interpreted to mean any digital data.
Comes down to largely if the court said "digitally encoded music [video?]" or if they said digital content or other more generic thing.
This is interesting. If you stick a copy of, say, Winblows 98 on your Hotline server, and I pull a copy off an install it in my computer, how's that not "space-shifting" the digital work too?
I haven't read the actual text of the ruling, but this seems to be in quite a spot for blowing the concept of copyrighting in general out of the water, to a more "give it to anyone, but don't sell it to anyone" mentality.
Personally I think that's a more reasonable interpretation of the concept of a copyright anyway... don't limit who can use something, limit who can profit from its use. Of course in this case distributing the copy is still illegal, but being in posession of said copy isn't.
Maybe we'll start to see some intelligence re: software patents one of these days. Or worse these "business practice" patents.
I wonder if this means they'll spend some time working on RTOS extensions for the Linux kernel. They've said all along that you need a RTOS for high-end multimedia, Be has said the same thing, if in different words.
Any kernel guru's know how much it'd change the compatibility of the Linux kernel if a more RTOS-type scheduler were present in the kernel instead of the stock one? I remember seeing a while back a group that was working on a replacement for the scheduler to provide better networking performance, how about multimedia performance?
It seems that high-bandwidth multimedia is where the convergence technologies (gak, marketingspeak!) are going. Lots of places are modifying Linux to allow the sort of real-time operations that are needed for such high-bandwidth data processing (Tivo or Replay, whichever is the one using Linux says they made changes to the LinuxPPC kernel to make it more realtime). I don't keep up with the 2.3 kernel discussions, but has this been talked about? It would seem to me that part of the redesign for even better SMP performance should be a look at the needs of a real-time scheduler so Linux can be used in a stock form to provide the sort of eye-popping multimedia demonstrations we see on BeOS, the old Amiga's (for their time), and to some extend modern workstations like SGI's. (Although SGI seems to be a more brute-force approach, largely based on their hardware architecture)
I think it'd be cool if Amiga approached the consumer market with a Linux-cored operating system with a non-X gui. X is awfully resource intensive for a consumer OS where a defined break between the GUI server and application clients are not needed. It'd be cool to see that GUI working with a linux kernel that made Linux THE platform for high-bandwidth multimedia applications.
It'd also be cool to see those extensions work under X for people who want that added power.
Wishful thinking? Probably. But I'm still curious about the RTOS issues with the Linux kernel.
Re:Unionization is the only way to get ahead.
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Home Sweet Sweatshop
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· Score: 5
That's B.S.!
A union would do nothing but make things worse. There are an enormous number of open positions in IT-related fields all over the country. If you don't like working in that sort of an environment, don't take the job!
Take something else. There are pleanty of people who love working in that sort of a creative, energetic environment. If your choice of employer doesn't fit your chosen lifestyle, its your choice of employer that's the problem, not the employer's way of doing business. This isn't the same as being a assembly line worker in a one-industry town where you have no choices.
If the pace of change and expectations of working environments in the IT industry don't mesh with anyone's ideas, they should rethink the field they're going into, or find a place that works for them. Don't expect the industry to change. The fact that there are so many jobs paying six figures to people too young to even rent a car is attributable to the fact that there is just energy and committment among those people. You can have the cooshy fourty hour a week job, or the fast-paced six figure job where you do nearly everything under the sun at any given point. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think, if anything, the greater problem is the number of companies that DON'T provide that sort of a working environment, and wonder why they can't hire people. There's been a lot of bitching this year here in Connecticut about "brain drain" and why companies here in state can't find technical workers. A local rag had an article this week saying that companies weren't looking in the right places, using highschool students and inner city kids as examples of untapped skill markets. They were completely off base though. Its a piece of cake to find a worker, but companies that don't realize the level of benefits that they need to give to their employees won't keep them.
When a worker slaves 40-50 hours a week at a mediocre pay sees that they could be working 60 hours a week, for more money in an environment where blowing off steam is expected through vicious games of parking-lot street hockey, pinball, beers in the fridge, or rides on the company yacht, there's not much reason for them to stay, particularly given the fact that the most easily available people for those positions are typically young men and women without families and a lot of ability to pick up and move.
A union won't change that. A union would slow the pace of innovation, hurt the pay scales (since unions have a tendancy to even out pay scales -- you'll no longer be payed $40k more than your next door cube mate on account of your greater skills...), and hurt the ability for companies to change and move quickly in the market.
Unions are a plague in this country... they've served no useful purpose since work environments stopped being dangerous, and in most industries where they exist, they serve to line the pockets of the union leaders and keep underqualified and incompetant workers employed.
If you're in IT, you don't need a union to protect your rights, you just need your feet. Walk out the door, the place across the street will probably give you 20% more anyway. The only workers unions will help will be the ones who overstate their qualifications and experience anyway.
The WHOIS database isn't useful for anything these days anyway. I registered several domains a few weeks ago at register.com. None of them shows up in WHOIS. So there isn't any way any more to reliably determine technical contacts for a domain, or any other information. Frankly, I'm kind of glad, because I get a TON of junk mail from domains I've registered at Internic.
That said, does anyone know of ANY way to reliably tell if a domain has been registered now? WHOIS doesn't tell you, you can't just do an nslookup, etc. Could the boneheads... er... powers that be have not thought of this problem? I seem to have no way of knowing if a domain is registered without going to a website of one of the registrars and hoping their info is accurate.
Seems this multiple-registrars thing has made stuff more complex, not simpler like you'd expect any intelligent group of people to do. Its B.S. that I can no longer reliably get information about who to contact in a domain, and that said data isn't 100% public domain.
Re:Dallas Semiconductor has TINI
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uCsimm News
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I wish I had some moderator points, I'd up your post. This device is MUCH more interesting than the ucSimm or whatever they're calling it.
Similar capabilities, much faster, less than 1/3 the cost. If I was going to spend the $$$ on an embedded unit like that, this is the one I'd probably pick.
Geek Union != solution
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GEEK Unions?
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· Score: 2
A geek union wouldn't solve anything.
It won't help the writer of this essay from being laughed at or teased by high-school students -- and if that's happening, I doubt its the result of being a geek, but more the result of the way he's presenting himself to people.
It won't help in jobs. Unions help only when a workforce is in a position to be exploited by management. Once that situation is resolved, they just serve to foster mediocracy, by making it difficult for companies to fire incompetant workers.
There are more open positions in IT than you can shake a stick at. If you're not happy with your job, just take another. You'll probably get a 20% raise in the process. Kind of hard to bitch to a union about that. "Oh no, my job is so hard, they're paying me six figures and expecting me to be there past five... what oh what can I do? I don't want to quit my job and make twenty grand more at the place across the street!"
A union would prevent one person from making more than another person on account of their skills, since unions typically work to smooth out differences like that so their incompetant members are still kept employed at a good salary.
The only problem I see in the IT field is that so many introverted people end up in it and may be unwilling to speak up or take a stand on issues at their job, and they'll get walked upon. More so than with any other field, today's IT workers can speak their mind with their feet as they walk out the door.
The news stories covering the PSX2 issue a few months ago said that although the Playstation II is going to be manufactured overseas, Toshiba (who makes the Emotion Engine chip used in it that's actually the part that was covered by the export restriction) is building the chip in a plant in the U.S. I guess you can't sell a restricted part to a company in a non-restricted country if that part ends up in a unit that can be sold to a restricted country. My understanding was that Sony would've had to:
1) not sell Playstation II's or other units using that chip to any restricted nations (places like China, Iran, Iraq, and suprisingly Isreal...)
and
2) Provide documentation to that effect to the U.S. Government.
There was crap with waiting times on sales and things like that too, which would've caused supply chain problems where Sony would've ordered a batch of chips and the waiting time and paperwork would've made it difficult to predict when they'd actually get the shipment.
There actually are prototype devices for doing precisely that. I remember seeing one on Good Morning America a few months ago. They detect abnormal rhythms and can defibrulate (now, that's misspelled!) and aparently they've tested models that can report the emergency, for people with known risk of sudden heart failure.
The moral of this story is, keep a copy of everything you've got. Harvard gave this guy back his data, but certainly didn't have to.
When you put data on a server that's not yours, you're assuming that there's reliable hardware and the ISP is doing regular backups. From experience, those are both assumptions that aren't good to make. Harddrives are cheap, CD-Burners are cheap. Keep a copy of your site. Even if it was four gig of data, that's five, maybe six CD's. Its not like all of it changes all the time.
Hell even if it IS your server, you should always keep copies of the data separate from your backups and the server. The government has been known to inappropriately seize servers at ISP's and things like that.
I'm glad to see someone from Netscape speaking up in this. There's a lot of bad words flying around in spite of the great job everyone involved is doing. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. The milestone releases are fairly stable, even if a lot of the features are disabled. Even daily CVS pulls tend to work, although anyone thinking they want to try should be warned that at least the Linux build has system requirements (that I never did track down) that aren't picked up by the configure script. I've had good luck with clean RedHat 5.2 installs with the most recent Gnome.
Mozilla is an extremely complicated piece of software, but not unmanageably so. My guess is most of the people who say its too complicated to jump into haven't been trained in development on such a large scale. (Trained in that its really not something so easily picked up on the fly... good team programming skills tend to be taught IMHO)
But there is a LOT that people who can't jump in and contribute patches can do. Any bonehead can easily pull a tree and build it, at least under Unix. Follow the directions on the site, but in a nutshell this is all it takes, once you're logged into the cvs server:
cvs -z3 checkout mozilla/client.mk cd mozilla gmake -f client.mk
Not too hard huh? The new configure/client.mk stuff they've got in there handles keeping the tree in sync (most of the time), and handling the configure and build process.
Do that. Run it. If it craps out, fire up gdb, so a stack dump and figure out where it crapped out. You might not be able to figure out exactly why, but a stack dump and a description of what you're doing goes a long way towards having other people know what happened. Bugzilla is a nice system -- its very easy to submit bugs and search for current ones. If you can't find the one you posted, then stick it there. E-mail a patch if you think you know what was wrong. No one is gonna yell at you if its not.
Personally, I've done a lot of builds, spent a lot of time tracking down wierd dependancies on the four Linux systems I've had bad luck building it on. I'd like to think some of that work has helped, I've noticed the issues slowly being fixed, so I think they have. Just testing it is a big help by anyone.
I've thought about jumping in and helping, but it IS complex. And with the necko code being switched in, and some of the other big branches that have been dumped into the tree lately, I can't figure out which end is up right now...:)
If you haven't seen Mozilla yet, its worth the download of one of the milestone builds. The page rendering is SO much better than any other browser I've seen. It just looks fantastic, and is FAST even with all the debugging code in there.
I hope AOL doesn't make a real mistake and end this when its making such progress!
1) NT tends to not handle high loads as gracefully as Linux. Linux/Apache tend to slow to a crawl under high loads, but I've never managed to crash the server. I've done that a bunch of times under NT (usually when running SQL server and IIS on the same machine... but running various combinations of Oracle, Sybase or MySQL with Apache under Linux doesn't seem to cause a problem...)
2) I've found the most unreliable NT servers are the ones that people have been hacking around on, tweaking, etc. Vanilla NT with everything else carefully installed seems fairly stable. Mind you, I'd never run a serious application on one, but you CAN get them working reliably. Its harder to keep non-administrators (ie, clueless management) from messing around on NT servers than Linux servers. (I once built a sandbox system that ran a clone of the system in a chroot'ed sandbox with the logins on the first six vc's pointing at it, with one on nine pointing to the real system -- I guessed that the owner of the company I was working for at the time was monkeying around in the system and that's why Linux kept crashing. After doing that, the sandboxed system kept flaking out, but the production one stayed up!)
3) Buggy COM objects and ISAPI objects are prone to crashing various parts of NT, like IIS and for whatever reason, causing bluescreens. Lots of sites use not-so-stable third party COM objects and ISAPI's and from experience, it can be a real bitch to figure out whats causing the server to crap out under high loads in that case. The last major website I built using NT, I ended up rewriting all the COM objects we'd bought in Java so I had source and could fix the bugs that were my fault.:)
4) Slashdot isn't all that reliable. I have problems with it all the time. (Connection refused, partial pages, broken HTML, extra blank stories, etc...)
#4 isn't a flame at slashdot -- god knows I spend enough time on here commenting on things and reading the site. Slashdot is amazingly stable for the way its architected (running on a single server, no redundancy at the server level or the hardware level, etc...) I wouldn't run a high traffic site I was paid to build like that, but they're doing great for bootstrapping the site themselves.
This "electronic paper" is not the same stuff as the "digital ink" and "e-ink" that has been talked about for a few years. This is a non-interactive technology, and has nothing really to do with computers per se.
Its basically rewritable paper. You can "print" an image onto it with a machine like a printer that can change the orientation of the ink "bubbles". The idea behind it is feeding it like normal paper through the "electronic paper printer". Then if you want to erase it or write over it, just send it through the printer again.
Personally I don't see the use for it. Paper is cheap, you can't accidently wipe it out, and its awfully hard for someone to change what's on it. I'd be worried about someone noterizing something printed on the stuff and having someone else able to change it after that point.
I think the electronic ink systems that are being worked on by a couple of companies in the Boston area (and I'm sure others) that use an electronic ink on a bit-addressable paper-like surface to be able to dynamically alter the content of the page like in an electronic book is far more useful, if not at the very least for power consumtion. (ie, once the image on the page is changed to the next page, you don't need any more power to keep it there)
I'm sure the PARC development can be used that way too, but from other things I've read on it, that's not Xerox's intent with it or 3M's.
This whole thing is silly.
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RMS Responds
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A few comments by Bob Metcalf starting this whole argument, and because he's the "father of ethernet" everyone assume's his comments are worth getting worked up over. The thing to keep in mind is that he's the "father of ethernet" which doesn't translate to meaning anything were OS's are concerned. That's like getting upset when Bill Gates says that Porsche doesn't know how to build real cars on the expertise of owning a few. I mean, come on!
I've read a couple of interesting books on Xerox's PARC facility (where Bob Metcalf designed Ethernet) -- including currently reading one called Dealers of Lightening which mentions him several times in some detail. Not once was he mentioned in relation to the development of software systems, he was a hardware guy, and in the case of Dealers of Lightening, he wasn't exactly spoken that highly of from a technical standpoint.
So what if he thinks Linux is a passing fad. I think baggy pants with boxers hanging out is a passing fad too, but I'm no fashion expert and don't pretend to be. Just because I don't wear them doesn't mean I'm an expert on why they're not perfectly good to wear.
When such pointless dribble turns into attacks on other people, its really going to far. Everyone needs to get a grip. If Linux Torvalds came out and said he thought Linux wasn't going to work in the long run, lets get worked up. He knows what he's talking about. Bob Metcalf doesn't.
And quit picking on other people too! Blad slashdotters, no cookies for you.
Out of curiousity, how much does BeOS usually cost?
It seems that unless BeOS is pretty cheap, it would be worth paying the extra $100 or so to get a (admittedly cheap) PC on top of it! I wonder if you can take Be off it, install it on a more robust machine, and stick Linux on the iToaster to use as a firewall or gateway machine...
I LOVE my Ginsu knives. Bought a set five years ago, they're still the best knives I've got. And they really will replace broken ones, no questions asked. (They didn't ask why the broken one I sent them was coated in tar and broken in three pieces);)
My ActiveHome kit has been really useful to.
They're both good deals. Neither are all that special though.
I still occasionally use my HP 48 as a remote -- much more useful after snipping the resistor that limits its range though.
Things you can do with an X10 unit:
1) Hook up a voice modem, and be able to shut things off from other places. Very handy when you leave your coffee pot on. 2) Use a daemon to monitor the X10 signals, now you can control your PC from the X10 remote. Handy for making it play back messages you got with #1. I also have a channel that will make it tell me if I've got new e-mail, and bring my network up and down off the internet. 3) Use your stereo as an alarm clock, as you said. 4) Detect rings with #1 and after a certain time at night, turn on a few lights at 15% brightness so you don't kill yourself trying to get to the phone 5) Turn AC on/off, especially useful if you hook a temperature sensor to the PC
Those are all things I've used my ActiveHome set for. I also have four high-flow fans taken from an old Sun 350 that the computer will turn on via an X10 module when any of the computers in that cabinet sees (via the lm78's) that the temperature is rising in the systems. That's better done with a relay control unit off the parallel port, but the one I built has a short in it and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.
The computer that the X10 stuff is running on (an old 586/133 AMD which also handles voicemail, Squid cache, mail server, and runs a secure server for accessing voicemail messages over the net) also has a handly little unit I built that has four buttons and four LEDs on it that can be monitored and controlled via a daemon I wrote. One LED blinks when I've got new e-mail, one for new voicemail.
There's other useful X10 modules too. The ActiveHome kit came with a motion sensor, which I've got mounted on the first floor and can work as an alarm sensor, and also just lets the computer know I'm home. I walk in and it dials up to the net and collects all my e-mail, under the assumption that I'm going to want to know what I've got.
So most of that would be handy in a geek sort of way even in a small apartment. For the most part I don't use any of the X10 stuff to simply control lights or something when I don't want to get up.
I'd say the odds of this "deal" disappearing at midnight are virtually 0. Every other "deal" I've bought from there (like the ActiveHome kits) ALWAYS said the deal expired that day.
Even if it does, the deal will be back next week.
Is slashdot getting kickbacks from these? I'm confused why this story appeared again if they're not. The "deal" was available the day it appeared before, and was never gone in between. It'll almost surely still be there tommorrow and for weeks to come. I hope Rob and company are getting SOMETHING from this.:)
They weren't letting people try it when I walked by, they were just giving a chat about it. I didn't think to stick around and see if they were demoing it.
Anyone else here go to PC Expo and find it as much of a disappointment as I? Not much new or interesting things there this year.
Compaq was demoing a (I believe) 8 system dual-processor Beowulf cluster. I didn't get a good look at it, as I was drooling over the Alpha mainframes.:)
I think I spotted one or two other companies demonstrating Beowulf clusters, and I remember spotting POV running on what looked like Linux above a stack of a half-dozen machines in one of the booths (might've been Compaq's) which I assume was showing the clustering too.
Corel... er... HCC... er... rebel.com had the Netwinder RM there, which was cool too... They're not doing a very good job differentiating themselves from Corel, sitting in the middle of Corel's booth.:)
Saw it today... Nice little booth that Alpha Processor had there.
More interesting IMHO was the dual 750mhz system they had running Linux. 8mb L2 cache ram on those suckers. They didn't seem to have any example of how fast it was, but it was impressive. I'm not sure why they were demoing the 1gig Alpha but didn't go all out and show a dual 1ghz system. Maybe a motherboard issue? Anyone know for sure?
More impressive was some of the serious hardware that Compaq was showing, but the people they had there seemed clueless about which worked with Linux and which didn't.
I was really disappointed at the Linux Pavilion though, seemed like half-baked attempts at doing something both by RedHat and Caldera. Liked what I saw at Cygnus's booth though. Liked that the BRU folks were actually giving away knickknacks, unlike practically everyone else there.
Anyone going to PC Expo -- take a gander at the 64" HDTV at the Panasonic booth. Hmmmm... I want one.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The digital recording act isn't what the big change here is, its the concept of "space-shifting" a digital work. It depends how tightly the ruling was worded if it could be interpreted to mean any digital data.
Comes down to largely if the court said "digitally encoded music [video?]" or if they said digital content or other more generic thing.
This is interesting. If you stick a copy of, say, Winblows 98 on your Hotline server, and I pull a copy off an install it in my computer, how's that not "space-shifting" the digital work too?
I haven't read the actual text of the ruling, but this seems to be in quite a spot for blowing the concept of copyrighting in general out of the water, to a more "give it to anyone, but don't sell it to anyone" mentality.
Personally I think that's a more reasonable interpretation of the concept of a copyright anyway... don't limit who can use something, limit who can profit from its use. Of course in this case distributing the copy is still illegal, but being in posession of said copy isn't.
Maybe we'll start to see some intelligence re: software patents one of these days. Or worse these "business practice" patents.
I wonder if this means they'll spend some time working on RTOS extensions for the Linux kernel. They've said all along that you need a RTOS for high-end multimedia, Be has said the same thing, if in different words.
Any kernel guru's know how much it'd change the compatibility of the Linux kernel if a more RTOS-type scheduler were present in the kernel instead of the stock one? I remember seeing a while back a group that was working on a replacement for the scheduler to provide better networking performance, how about multimedia performance?
It seems that high-bandwidth multimedia is where the convergence technologies (gak, marketingspeak!) are going. Lots of places are modifying Linux to allow the sort of real-time operations that are needed for such high-bandwidth data processing (Tivo or Replay, whichever is the one using Linux says they made changes to the LinuxPPC kernel to make it more realtime). I don't keep up with the 2.3 kernel discussions, but has this been talked about? It would seem to me that part of the redesign for even better SMP performance should be a look at the needs of a real-time scheduler so Linux can be used in a stock form to provide the sort of eye-popping multimedia demonstrations we see on BeOS, the old Amiga's (for their time), and to some extend modern workstations like SGI's. (Although SGI seems to be a more brute-force approach, largely based on their hardware architecture)
I think it'd be cool if Amiga approached the consumer market with a Linux-cored operating system with a non-X gui. X is awfully resource intensive for a consumer OS where a defined break between the GUI server and application clients are not needed. It'd be cool to see that GUI working with a linux kernel that made Linux THE platform for high-bandwidth multimedia applications.
It'd also be cool to see those extensions work under X for people who want that added power.
Wishful thinking? Probably. But I'm still curious about the RTOS issues with the Linux kernel.
That's B.S.!
A union would do nothing but make things worse. There are an enormous number of open positions in IT-related fields all over the country. If you don't like working in that sort of an environment, don't take the job!
Take something else. There are pleanty of people who love working in that sort of a creative, energetic environment. If your choice of employer doesn't fit your chosen lifestyle, its your choice of employer that's the problem, not the employer's way of doing business. This isn't the same as being a assembly line worker in a one-industry town where you have no choices.
If the pace of change and expectations of working environments in the IT industry don't mesh with anyone's ideas, they should rethink the field they're going into, or find a place that works for them. Don't expect the industry to change. The fact that there are so many jobs paying six figures to people too young to even rent a car is attributable to the fact that there is just energy and committment among those people. You can have the cooshy fourty hour a week job, or the fast-paced six figure job where you do nearly everything under the sun at any given point. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think, if anything, the greater problem is the number of companies that DON'T provide that sort of a working environment, and wonder why they can't hire people. There's been a lot of bitching this year here in Connecticut about "brain drain" and why companies here in state can't find technical workers. A local rag had an article this week saying that companies weren't looking in the right places, using highschool students and inner city kids as examples of untapped skill markets. They were completely off base though. Its a piece of cake to find a worker, but companies that don't realize the level of benefits that they need to give to their employees won't keep them.
When a worker slaves 40-50 hours a week at a mediocre pay sees that they could be working 60 hours a week, for more money in an environment where blowing off steam is expected through vicious games of parking-lot street hockey, pinball, beers in the fridge, or rides on the company yacht, there's not much reason for them to stay, particularly given the fact that the most easily available people for those positions are typically young men and women without families and a lot of ability to pick up and move.
A union won't change that. A union would slow the pace of innovation, hurt the pay scales (since unions have a tendancy to even out pay scales -- you'll no longer be payed $40k more than your next door cube mate on account of your greater skills...), and hurt the ability for companies to change and move quickly in the market.
Unions are a plague in this country... they've served no useful purpose since work environments stopped being dangerous, and in most industries where they exist, they serve to line the pockets of the union leaders and keep underqualified and incompetant workers employed.
If you're in IT, you don't need a union to protect your rights, you just need your feet. Walk out the door, the place across the street will probably give you 20% more anyway. The only workers unions will help will be the ones who overstate their qualifications and experience anyway.
The WHOIS database isn't useful for anything these days anyway. I registered several domains a few weeks ago at register.com. None of them shows up in WHOIS. So there isn't any way any more to reliably determine technical contacts for a domain, or any other information. Frankly, I'm kind of glad, because I get a TON of junk mail from domains I've registered at Internic.
That said, does anyone know of ANY way to reliably tell if a domain has been registered now? WHOIS doesn't tell you, you can't just do an nslookup, etc. Could the boneheads... er... powers that be have not thought of this problem? I seem to have no way of knowing if a domain is registered without going to a website of one of the registrars and hoping their info is accurate.
Seems this multiple-registrars thing has made stuff more complex, not simpler like you'd expect any intelligent group of people to do. Its B.S. that I can no longer reliably get information about who to contact in a domain, and that said data isn't 100% public domain.
I wish I had some moderator points, I'd up your post. This device is MUCH more interesting than the ucSimm or whatever they're calling it.
Similar capabilities, much faster, less than 1/3 the cost. If I was going to spend the $$$ on an embedded unit like that, this is the one I'd probably pick.
A geek union wouldn't solve anything.
It won't help the writer of this essay from being laughed at or teased by high-school students -- and if that's happening, I doubt its the result of being a geek, but more the result of the way he's presenting himself to people.
It won't help in jobs. Unions help only when a workforce is in a position to be exploited by management. Once that situation is resolved, they just serve to foster mediocracy, by making it difficult for companies to fire incompetant workers.
There are more open positions in IT than you can shake a stick at. If you're not happy with your job, just take another. You'll probably get a 20% raise in the process. Kind of hard to bitch to a union about that. "Oh no, my job is so hard, they're paying me six figures and expecting me to be there past five... what oh what can I do? I don't want to quit my job and make twenty grand more at the place across the street!"
A union would prevent one person from making more than another person on account of their skills, since unions typically work to smooth out differences like that so their incompetant members are still kept employed at a good salary.
The only problem I see in the IT field is that so many introverted people end up in it and may be unwilling to speak up or take a stand on issues at their job, and they'll get walked upon. More so than with any other field, today's IT workers can speak their mind with their feet as they walk out the door.
The news stories covering the PSX2 issue a few months ago said that although the Playstation II is going to be manufactured overseas, Toshiba (who makes the Emotion Engine chip used in it that's actually the part that was covered by the export restriction) is building the chip in a plant in the U.S. I guess you can't sell a restricted part to a company in a non-restricted country if that part ends up in a unit that can be sold to a restricted country. My understanding was that Sony would've had to:
1) not sell Playstation II's or other units using that chip to any restricted nations (places like China, Iran, Iraq, and suprisingly Isreal...)
and
2) Provide documentation to that effect to the U.S. Government.
There was crap with waiting times on sales and things like that too, which would've caused supply chain problems where Sony would've ordered a batch of chips and the waiting time and paperwork would've made it difficult to predict when they'd actually get the shipment.
Most penguin species prefer fairly temperate weather.
There actually are prototype devices for doing precisely that. I remember seeing one on Good Morning America a few months ago. They detect abnormal rhythms and can defibrulate (now, that's misspelled!) and aparently they've tested models that can report the emergency, for people with known risk of sudden heart failure.
Oh my...
/dev/strap...
I'm not sure whats worse, that Slashdot is turning to cheesy sex humor, or that I'm finding some of it so damn funny...
Could be nice though, if I had a daughter, she's get one, and I'd definately take away world and group access to
The moral of this story is, keep a copy of everything you've got. Harvard gave this guy back his data, but certainly didn't have to.
When you put data on a server that's not yours, you're assuming that there's reliable hardware and the ISP is doing regular backups. From experience, those are both assumptions that aren't good to make. Harddrives are cheap, CD-Burners are cheap. Keep a copy of your site. Even if it was four gig of data, that's five, maybe six CD's. Its not like all of it changes all the time.
Hell even if it IS your server, you should always keep copies of the data separate from your backups and the server. The government has been known to inappropriately seize servers at ISP's and things like that.
I'm glad to see someone from Netscape speaking up in this. There's a lot of bad words flying around in spite of the great job everyone involved is doing. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. The milestone releases are fairly stable, even if a lot of the features are disabled. Even daily CVS pulls tend to work, although anyone thinking they want to try should be warned that at least the Linux build has system requirements (that I never did track down) that aren't picked up by the configure script. I've had good luck with clean RedHat 5.2 installs with the most recent Gnome.
:)
Mozilla is an extremely complicated piece of software, but not unmanageably so. My guess is most of the people who say its too complicated to jump into haven't been trained in development on such a large scale. (Trained in that its really not something so easily picked up on the fly... good team programming skills tend to be taught IMHO)
But there is a LOT that people who can't jump in and contribute patches can do. Any bonehead can easily pull a tree and build it, at least under Unix. Follow the directions on the site, but in a nutshell this is all it takes, once you're logged into the cvs server:
cvs -z3 checkout mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
gmake -f client.mk
Not too hard huh? The new configure/client.mk stuff they've got in there handles keeping the tree in sync (most of the time), and handling the configure and build process.
Do that. Run it. If it craps out, fire up gdb, so a stack dump and figure out where it crapped out. You might not be able to figure out exactly why, but a stack dump and a description of what you're doing goes a long way towards having other people know what happened. Bugzilla is a nice system -- its very easy to submit bugs and search for current ones. If you can't find the one you posted, then stick it there. E-mail a patch if you think you know what was wrong. No one is gonna yell at you if its not.
Personally, I've done a lot of builds, spent a lot of time tracking down wierd dependancies on the four Linux systems I've had bad luck building it on. I'd like to think some of that work has helped, I've noticed the issues slowly being fixed, so I think they have. Just testing it is a big help by anyone.
I've thought about jumping in and helping, but it IS complex. And with the necko code being switched in, and some of the other big branches that have been dumped into the tree lately, I can't figure out which end is up right now...
If you haven't seen Mozilla yet, its worth the download of one of the milestone builds. The page rendering is SO much better than any other browser I've seen. It just looks fantastic, and is FAST even with all the debugging code in there.
I hope AOL doesn't make a real mistake and end this when its making such progress!
Well a few points:
:)
1) NT tends to not handle high loads as gracefully as Linux. Linux/Apache tend to slow to a crawl under high loads, but I've never managed to crash the server. I've done that a bunch of times under NT (usually when running SQL server and IIS on the same machine... but running various combinations of Oracle, Sybase or MySQL with Apache under Linux doesn't seem to cause a problem...)
2) I've found the most unreliable NT servers are the ones that people have been hacking around on, tweaking, etc. Vanilla NT with everything else carefully installed seems fairly stable. Mind you, I'd never run a serious application on one, but you CAN get them working reliably. Its harder to keep non-administrators (ie, clueless management) from messing around on NT servers than Linux servers. (I once built a sandbox system that ran a clone of the system in a chroot'ed sandbox with the logins on the first six vc's pointing at it, with one on nine pointing to the real system -- I guessed that the owner of the company I was working for at the time was monkeying around in the system and that's why Linux kept crashing. After doing that, the sandboxed system kept flaking out, but the production one stayed up!)
3) Buggy COM objects and ISAPI objects are prone to crashing various parts of NT, like IIS and for whatever reason, causing bluescreens. Lots of sites use not-so-stable third party COM objects and ISAPI's and from experience, it can be a real bitch to figure out whats causing the server to crap out under high loads in that case. The last major website I built using NT, I ended up rewriting all the COM objects we'd bought in Java so I had source and could fix the bugs that were my fault.
4) Slashdot isn't all that reliable. I have problems with it all the time. (Connection refused, partial pages, broken HTML, extra blank stories, etc...)
#4 isn't a flame at slashdot -- god knows I spend enough time on here commenting on things and reading the site. Slashdot is amazingly stable for the way its architected (running on a single server, no redundancy at the server level or the hardware level, etc...) I wouldn't run a high traffic site I was paid to build like that, but they're doing great for bootstrapping the site themselves.
This "electronic paper" is not the same stuff as the "digital ink" and "e-ink" that has been talked about for a few years. This is a non-interactive technology, and has nothing really to do with computers per se.
Its basically rewritable paper. You can "print" an image onto it with a machine like a printer that can change the orientation of the ink "bubbles". The idea behind it is feeding it like normal paper through the "electronic paper printer". Then if you want to erase it or write over it, just send it through the printer again.
Personally I don't see the use for it. Paper is cheap, you can't accidently wipe it out, and its awfully hard for someone to change what's on it. I'd be worried about someone noterizing something printed on the stuff and having someone else able to change it after that point.
I think the electronic ink systems that are being worked on by a couple of companies in the Boston area (and I'm sure others) that use an electronic ink on a bit-addressable paper-like surface to be able to dynamically alter the content of the page like in an electronic book is far more useful, if not at the very least for power consumtion. (ie, once the image on the page is changed to the next page, you don't need any more power to keep it there)
I'm sure the PARC development can be used that way too, but from other things I've read on it, that's not Xerox's intent with it or 3M's.
A few comments by Bob Metcalf starting this whole argument, and because he's the "father of ethernet" everyone assume's his comments are worth getting worked up over. The thing to keep in mind is that he's the "father of ethernet" which doesn't translate to meaning anything were OS's are concerned. That's like getting upset when Bill Gates says that Porsche doesn't know how to build real cars on the expertise of owning a few. I mean, come on!
I've read a couple of interesting books on Xerox's PARC facility (where Bob Metcalf designed Ethernet) -- including currently reading one called Dealers of Lightening which mentions him several times in some detail. Not once was he mentioned in relation to the development of software systems, he was a hardware guy, and in the case of Dealers of Lightening, he wasn't exactly spoken that highly of from a technical standpoint.
So what if he thinks Linux is a passing fad. I think baggy pants with boxers hanging out is a passing fad too, but I'm no fashion expert and don't pretend to be. Just because I don't wear them doesn't mean I'm an expert on why they're not perfectly good to wear.
When such pointless dribble turns into attacks on other people, its really going to far. Everyone needs to get a grip. If Linux Torvalds came out and said he thought Linux wasn't going to work in the long run, lets get worked up. He knows what he's talking about. Bob Metcalf doesn't.
And quit picking on other people too! Blad slashdotters, no cookies for you.
Out of curiousity, how much does BeOS usually cost?
It seems that unless BeOS is pretty cheap, it would be worth paying the extra $100 or so to get a (admittedly cheap) PC on top of it! I wonder if you can take Be off it, install it on a more robust machine, and stick Linux on the iToaster to use as a firewall or gateway machine...
I LOVE my Ginsu knives. Bought a set five years ago, they're still the best knives I've got. And they really will replace broken ones, no questions asked. (They didn't ask why the broken one I sent them was coated in tar and broken in three pieces) ;)
My ActiveHome kit has been really useful to.
They're both good deals. Neither are all that special though.
I still occasionally use my HP 48 as a remote -- much more useful after snipping the resistor that limits its range though.
Things you can do with an X10 unit:
1) Hook up a voice modem, and be able to shut things off from other places. Very handy when you leave your coffee pot on.
2) Use a daemon to monitor the X10 signals, now you can control your PC from the X10 remote. Handy for making it play back messages you got with #1. I also have a channel that will make it tell me if I've got new e-mail, and bring my network up and down off the internet.
3) Use your stereo as an alarm clock, as you said.
4) Detect rings with #1 and after a certain time at night, turn on a few lights at 15% brightness so you don't kill yourself trying to get to the phone
5) Turn AC on/off, especially useful if you hook a temperature sensor to the PC
Those are all things I've used my ActiveHome set for. I also have four high-flow fans taken from an old Sun 350 that the computer will turn on via an X10 module when any of the computers in that cabinet sees (via the lm78's) that the temperature is rising in the systems. That's better done with a relay control unit off the parallel port, but the one I built has a short in it and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.
The computer that the X10 stuff is running on (an old 586/133 AMD which also handles voicemail, Squid cache, mail server, and runs a secure server for accessing voicemail messages over the net) also has a handly little unit I built that has four buttons and four LEDs on it that can be monitored and controlled via a daemon I wrote. One LED blinks when I've got new e-mail, one for new voicemail.
There's other useful X10 modules too. The ActiveHome kit came with a motion sensor, which I've got mounted on the first floor and can work as an alarm sensor, and also just lets the computer know I'm home. I walk in and it dials up to the net and collects all my e-mail, under the assumption that I'm going to want to know what I've got.
So most of that would be handy in a geek sort of way even in a small apartment. For the most part I don't use any of the X10 stuff to simply control lights or something when I don't want to get up.
QUICK HURRY!
AMAZINGLY ENOUGH THEY'VE EXTENDED THE OFFER! I BET THIS TIME THEY REALLY MEAN MIDNIGHT ON THE 24TH!!!!!
BUY NOW!!!
;)
I'd say the odds of this "deal" disappearing at midnight are virtually 0. Every other "deal" I've bought from there (like the ActiveHome kits) ALWAYS said the deal expired that day.
:)
Even if it does, the deal will be back next week.
Is slashdot getting kickbacks from these? I'm confused why this story appeared again if they're not. The "deal" was available the day it appeared before, and was never gone in between. It'll almost surely still be there tommorrow and for weeks to come. I hope Rob and company are getting SOMETHING from this.
The thing they were showing didn't look like that. It had the same high-tech sort of cheesy look, but that's not it. Maybe its more advanced now?
They weren't letting people try it when I walked by, they were just giving a chat about it. I didn't think to stick around and see if they were demoing it.
Anyone else here go to PC Expo and find it as much of a disappointment as I? Not much new or interesting things there this year.
Compaq was demoing a (I believe) 8 system dual-processor Beowulf cluster. I didn't get a good look at it, as I was drooling over the Alpha mainframes. :)
:)
I think I spotted one or two other companies demonstrating Beowulf clusters, and I remember spotting POV running on what looked like Linux above a stack of a half-dozen machines in one of the booths (might've been Compaq's) which I assume was showing the clustering too.
Corel... er... HCC... er... rebel.com had the Netwinder RM there, which was cool too... They're not doing a very good job differentiating themselves from Corel, sitting in the middle of Corel's booth.
Saw it today... Nice little booth that Alpha Processor had there.
:)
More interesting IMHO was the dual 750mhz system they had running Linux. 8mb L2 cache ram on those suckers. They didn't seem to have any example of how fast it was, but it was impressive. I'm not sure why they were demoing the 1gig Alpha but didn't go all out and show a dual 1ghz system. Maybe a motherboard issue? Anyone know for sure?
More impressive was some of the serious hardware that Compaq was showing, but the people they had there seemed clueless about which worked with Linux and which didn't.
I was really disappointed at the Linux Pavilion though, seemed like half-baked attempts at doing something both by RedHat and Caldera. Liked what I saw at Cygnus's booth though. Liked that the BRU folks were actually giving away knickknacks, unlike practically everyone else there.
Anyone going to PC Expo -- take a gander at the 64" HDTV at the Panasonic booth. Hmmmm... I want one.