There are certainly still jobs out there. The problem with the tech job market is that three years ago it was saturated by people who probably couldn't write HTML for prize money, let alone actually code any real projects or admin anything. If you're a competent, flexible programmer or admin, you might have to look for a job a bit longer than in 1999, but they're out there.
Well, I've been thinking about sending one to my ex-boss. Actually, based on my bosses reaction to my quitting, he was quite sad to see me go. I think if some things had been more obvious to him during my tenure that I might have stayed around. They stuff on here really gets at a lot of my gripes. Having the cool projects dropped so that I could fix things that other people messed up was never fun, but always seemed to happen. I was hired as a developer, but pretty much did nothing but system administration (which I have experience in, but hate). I felt like all of my time was sucked into meetings and showing everyone else how to do their jobs that my flow never even got started. Ugh.
Haven't read either of these books, but if I was going to send this to my boss, I would prefer it to be in his language, not mine.
Some of those things can be nice (especially free soda), but also I sometimes get annoyed when people try to make the workplace too fun. Frisbee time guys! No thanks, I'd rather not play frisbee and go home 20 minutes earlier. I would much rather have interesting work than play time in the middle of the day to try to make me forget how much my work actually sucks.
Well, though it stands for GiNaC is Not a CAS (Computer Algebre System). GiNaC, which is a library for advanced symbolic calculations certainly would make a fine backend for a CAS. It's a pretty powerful tool wainging for an interface.
Aside from the technical merit or lack there of in the case of Opera, it certainly doesn't have the chunk that Konq and Mozially have. You have to remember that the three biggest distros are SuSE, Mandrake and Redhat and on the former two KDE is the default desktop. I've seen many statistics that indicate that SuSE and Mandrake together have over 50% of the Linux market, especially on desktops.
I think it is safe to assume that most KDE users make some use of Konq. On the other hand, I don't think Opera is not a part of the major distros, and certainly is not the default browser for any Linux distro. Most people use defaults. I really doubt that Opera is used by anything more than 10% of Linux users.
And these communities tend to support Open Source and aren't terribly fond of ads. That alone is enough for most users to shy away from Opera, in addition to there being no large compelling reasons to use it.
Opera is a nice browser, but I really doesn't offer a feature set that's enough to make most users go to the trouble (and annoyance) of using it.
Great. Spoken like someone who's never written a line of code.
It's because people are different. I don't want to program in C or a variety of other things. Dealing with the OpenOffice code would just be a pain in the butt. Sure, great if other people want to, but I'm not going to work on it.
I know I'm ranting here, but it's about time for people to stop complaining about what volunteers do with their spare time.
If you want to see things improve, start working on the projects. Don't complain about what you want others to do. If all the people that complain would start working on OSS, then we would have a dozen great office suites.
Cooperation is great, but a post like this just indicates that you haven't looked into the details (nor have most users). GTK/Gnome, KDE/Qt and OpenOffice are all very different conceptually. Take a look at the projects (code) and you will see this. Everyone thinks that they are doing it the best way, and probably given their motivations, they are.
I've never heard of a project where the ratio of code to developers was such that they were always touching the same things at once. Sure it happens infrequently, but not enough to really worry about it. It seems that OSS projects tend to be a few people working really hard on a lot of code. i.e. 50,000 lines of code in 100 files and 5 developers.
It sounds like you may need to make your projects more atomic if you're having problems like this. Make classes (or whatever organazational unit that you're using) smaller and put less in files. Finalize APIs for components to work together and tell people not to touch what itsn't theirs.
Assign a maintainer to each portion of your code and make it such that if others want to change that, they have to send patches to the maintainer.
There are lots of ways around this, they just require better organazation than Ok, everybody make everything work!
Yes, I do this for some database applications (interactive SQL through CGI). I normally use Konq for this and I think it's the best on Linux. Netscape was horrible at this, but recent Mozilla builds have been better.
He's a Redhat user and that's all that really needs to be said. He's very correct that upgrading KDE is difficult on Redhat. Redhat (except for Bero) really doesn't care about KDE at all and tends to have horrible, horrible packages available. Redhat 7.2 came with KDE 2.2.1 and a half!!! It wasn't a released version! They took the code from CVS and packaged it without labeling it as "non-stable". Then when the stable versions do finally come out, Redhat doesn't get around to packaging them (again, not Bero's fault since that's not his job) until they've been out for a month. And even then they often aren't released for the last stable release of Redhat. When RH 7.1 was their latest release (I had to use Redhat at work.) they only released KDE updates for 7.2 beta! That's crazy!
So, I finally switched from Redhat to SuSE about a year and a half ago and haven't looked back. Upgrading in SuSE involves running YaST2 and choosing to upgrade KDE. Or alternatively downloading a handful of RPMs and installing them in 10 minutes.
And I also think this guy didn't give Konq a fair trial. He used the most up to date, including betas of everything else, but used Konq from a few months ago even though there is a later stable release and two new beta versions. Why is this a story? Are we supposed to give him points for trying to write a good review?
Ok, am I the first person who read this and though "big endian"? Funny, ha, ha. Ok, so Sun is contracting a big Indian company to make sure that Gnome performs better on thier big endian hardware.
Note: I work for Sun, but I don't speak for them in any way whatsoever.....
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.
Hmm. I haven't used Solaris in a while, but as I recall, they don't distribute gcc/g++, but instead use an in house compiler. Most KDE development seems to revolve around GCC 2.95 (g++) right now, so it may be a problem that Sun's compiler won't compile KDE whereas it will compile Gnome. (Mostly a random guess.) Of course you can use both KDE and gcc on Solaris, but they don't come with it.
People, please, for the love of all things good, stop calling Solaris Linux (this is about the third time I've seen that on this topic). Solaris is not Linux! Solaris is not a variety of Linux. Solaris development is not Linux development. Making Solaris easier to use does not make Linux easier to use.
Am I being clear?
Note, I don't have a problem with Solaris or Linux, but they aren't the same operating system.
Yeah, as was mentioned, Apache isn't under BSD licenses.
Also, if you are the copyright holder you can do whatever you want to. IBM could give code to a GPL project and still maintain a proprietary version. Think TrollTech, Mozilla, theKompany, StarOffice, etc.
Right now Wine is kind of getting screwed by Lindows. Lindows is doing a lot of work (i.e. money) from standing on the shoulders of the Wine developers and not giving it back to the community. That sucks for everyone--except those that want to sell Lindows.
No, I don't think many people would switch. Maybe only a few million. But, I think you would start to see AOL-OS coming from OEMs and I think people would buy it. I don't think the average AOL user is going to reinstall their operating system no matter how much AOL dumbs it down. And plus, it'll never happen, it's leverage man.
AOL won't really use Linux, just like they don't really use Mozilla, but it will give them something to hold over Microsoft. "If you don't intergrate us into Windows, we'll stop using it and take a few million users with us." Microsoft isn't stupid enough to let that happen. If there's one thing they're good at it's preserving their monopoly and they'll do what it takes to keep AOL from switching to Linux.
I think it's hard for some of us to sit down and and learn our own GUI tools. I've actually had my boss (who I convinced to switch from Windows to Linux about 3 months ago) show me a couple of things in KDE that I wasn't aware of because the thing I use most in KDE is Konsole.
His eyes get generally glazed over when I do something like:
$> rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i ^xf`
...which actually came up today in reinstalling X. And I've done quite a few nastier things.
I think that it would do Linux users--especially Linux evangelists--well to learn our own GUI tools so that when our non-geek friends ask us for help we can give them something that's meaningful to them.
I think the problem with all of the Linux folks here griping about MS porting office to Linux is that they're already Linux users. Let's think about evangelism guys! Maybe you don't care if Linux has office, but what about your boss? And what about his boss?
We're the people who obviously don't mind not having MS-Office. We already work without it!
You're right, we don't care. I won't use Office if it is ported to Linux, but I'd love to see more people switch to using Linux and if a port of MS Office to Linux will get people to switch I'm all for it.
This certainly would help break MS's monopoly--as would them having to document their file formats. A version of office for Linux would be what a lot of people have been waiting for to switch to Linux.
XOSL is really pretty old. Since the GRUB homepage still says that it hasn't been released yet, I wasn't adventurous enough to try it about two years ago.
XOSL won't load your kernel. You still need a Linux boot loader to do that. So, no, XOSL isn't an alternative to Lilo and Grub. I tried it a long time ago hoping to oust Lilo.
Thier website still says:
XOSL is known to support
[...]
Linux (with Lilo)
Easy, you just treat the RAM as one big cache. When your cache pages become dirty you write them back to permanent storage. Matter of fact, this already happens, just on a much smaller scale with current disk caches.
Since a hard drive is idle much more than it is active, for almost all applications you'll have plenty of time to write things back and keep them concurrent with advantages of a seek time in nanoseconds.
1) I'm doing encoding on Mahler's Symphony No. 9 because I'd like to have a copy at work too (without leaving my CD up here). The idea is that even though I'm using lossy compression to not be able to notice it. Also, classical is much more demanding on an encoder so I thought it would be a better test. I also feel compelled to point out that CDs are a lossy format. Heck, why record anything, you're always losing data.;-)
2) I'm listening through pretty high end headphones, Sony MDR-V600 ($120 at Best Buy), so sometimes I can notice things that others can't.
3) Yes, I'm sure I'm using the current version of Ogg. I'm on the devel mailing list (I'm planning on adding Ogg support to the MP3 Tagging software that I wrote, QTagger.) and saw the annoucement come out and installed the RPMs this morning. I upgraded from Beta 4 which came with Redhat 7.1.
So what are the differences?
*) The sound on Ogg files sounds clunky as it changes bitrates. This was especially noticeable on the recording I was compressing since it was originally analog and had a constant (though slight) background hiss. The noticeable changes in what should be a constant sound were quite distracting.
*)To Ogg's credit, they don't have as noticeably the fluttery sound of compression artifacts that you sometimes notice in MP3s. Lame is a nice encoder though, so with the -h switch these normally aren't too bad. I don't hear them at all in 192 KB/s MP3s, which I reencoded all of my classical in today. I use 128KB/s for rock and jazz. It would be interesting to go back and repeat my test with something idiomatic from those genres.
*)I thought Lame's VBR did sounded better than Ogg Vorbis and they seem to be similar schemes. There was a noticeable squeaking sound in the background on the MP3, but it was still clearer than the Ogg file.
For summary, since I'm listening on pretty hi-fi stuff, I can hear all of the little background-ish type things. I prefer these to be constant as opposed to variable. If there's analog hiss, it should sound uniform across the recording.
I'll repeat, I'm glad Ogg's around and I hope it improves, but I'm just not ready to switch yet.
I'd love to use Ogg Vorbis and be a good little Free Software guy, but I tried using it this morning and was disappointed.
I compared an Ogg (uning the encoder that came out today) file with a 128KB/s mp3 and a medium quality VBR mp3 (both made with Lame) and I just didn't think the Ogg file was quite there. I was using the same file for all of the tests (Mahler's 9th Symphony).
Also, on my Athlon 900 Oggenc went at 0.6x encoding speed. I usually get 5-8x with 128KB/s mp3s.
I ended up settling on going a little bigger and using a 192KB/s MP3, which I'd say is still the best option.
Best wishes to the Ogg Vorbis team. I hope that I can eventually ditch my mp3s.
Does anyone else find it funny that the address for the main researcher is a Hotmail address?
I can just see his subject lines:
Confused about your supposition on the nature of superconductors
Get out of debt now
Want Happiness?
Hot teens waiting for you
Do you have a copy of refrence 19 from your July paper on hand
Get your degree now!
No, no. You see "int" and "longint" are too standards compliant. They'd of course come up with something that didn't work quite as well but made it such that no other compiler could compile the code to compute their profits. Maybe "eInt" or ".int" or .
This article would lead you to believe that Quantum computing will provide a linear speed up to most algorithms. In fact only a very limited set of algorightms actually benefit from Quantum Paralellism. Peter Shor's algorithm for fatoring large numbers is significant not becasue it's terribly useful, but because at the time it was the only thing useful that had yet been devised for a quantum computer. Quantum computers are massively parallel, but because of some of the tricky laws of quantum mechanics, you can only read one result from the parrallel computation (The whole bit about observation causing wave functions to collapse.).
If you're really wantining to read more on Quantum Computing and Quantum Mechanics in general check out the Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation (David Deutch and Artur Ekert have done some really significant stuff) and read In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribben.
I'm currently doing research in a subset of quantum algorithms (and have worked as a research assistant in another area of quantum mechanics). They're pretty cool, but you shouldn't get your hopes up for them making the latest kernal hack run faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, though it stands for GiNaC is Not a CAS (Computer Algebre System). GiNaC, which is a library for advanced symbolic calculations certainly would make a fine backend for a CAS. It's a pretty powerful tool wainging for an interface.
I think it is safe to assume that most KDE users make some use of Konq. On the other hand, I don't think Opera is not a part of the major distros, and certainly is not the default browser for any Linux distro. Most people use defaults. I really doubt that Opera is used by anything more than 10% of Linux users.
And these communities tend to support Open Source and aren't terribly fond of ads. That alone is enough for most users to shy away from Opera, in addition to there being no large compelling reasons to use it.
Opera is a nice browser, but I really doesn't offer a feature set that's enough to make most users go to the trouble (and annoyance) of using it.
It's because people are different. I don't want to program in C or a variety of other things. Dealing with the OpenOffice code would just be a pain in the butt. Sure, great if other people want to, but I'm not going to work on it.
I know I'm ranting here, but it's about time for people to stop complaining about what volunteers do with their spare time.
If you want to see things improve, start working on the projects. Don't complain about what you want others to do. If all the people that complain would start working on OSS, then we would have a dozen great office suites.
Cooperation is great, but a post like this just indicates that you haven't looked into the details (nor have most users). GTK/Gnome, KDE/Qt and OpenOffice are all very different conceptually. Take a look at the projects (code) and you will see this. Everyone thinks that they are doing it the best way, and probably given their motivations, they are.
It sounds like you may need to make your projects more atomic if you're having problems like this. Make classes (or whatever organazational unit that you're using) smaller and put less in files. Finalize APIs for components to work together and tell people not to touch what itsn't theirs.
Assign a maintainer to each portion of your code and make it such that if others want to change that, they have to send patches to the maintainer.
There are lots of ways around this, they just require better organazation than Ok, everybody make everything work!
Yes, I do this for some database applications (interactive SQL through CGI). I normally use Konq for this and I think it's the best on Linux. Netscape was horrible at this, but recent Mozilla builds have been better.
So, I finally switched from Redhat to SuSE about a year and a half ago and haven't looked back. Upgrading in SuSE involves running YaST2 and choosing to upgrade KDE. Or alternatively downloading a handful of RPMs and installing them in 10 minutes.
And I also think this guy didn't give Konq a fair trial. He used the most up to date, including betas of everything else, but used Konq from a few months ago even though there is a later stable release and two new beta versions. Why is this a story? Are we supposed to give him points for trying to write a good review?
Enough of that.
There was some discussion about this on the internal Linux mail alias, and IIRC, the consensus had something to do with C++ not being a "standardized" language.
Hmm. I haven't used Solaris in a while, but as I recall, they don't distribute gcc/g++, but instead use an in house compiler. Most KDE development seems to revolve around GCC 2.95 (g++) right now, so it may be a problem that Sun's compiler won't compile KDE whereas it will compile Gnome. (Mostly a random guess.) Of course you can use both KDE and gcc on Solaris, but they don't come with it.
Am I being clear?
Note, I don't have a problem with Solaris or Linux, but they aren't the same operating system.
Yeah, as was mentioned, Apache isn't under BSD licenses.
Also, if you are the copyright holder you can do whatever you want to. IBM could give code to a GPL project and still maintain a proprietary version. Think TrollTech, Mozilla, theKompany, StarOffice, etc.
Right now Wine is kind of getting screwed by Lindows. Lindows is doing a lot of work (i.e. money) from standing on the shoulders of the Wine developers and not giving it back to the community. That sucks for everyone--except those that want to sell Lindows.
No, I don't think many people would switch. Maybe only a few million. But, I think you would start to see AOL-OS coming from OEMs and I think people would buy it. I don't think the average AOL user is going to reinstall their operating system no matter how much AOL dumbs it down. And plus, it'll never happen, it's leverage man.
AOL won't really use Linux, just like they don't really use Mozilla, but it will give them something to hold over Microsoft. "If you don't intergrate us into Windows, we'll stop using it and take a few million users with us." Microsoft isn't stupid enough to let that happen. If there's one thing they're good at it's preserving their monopoly and they'll do what it takes to keep AOL from switching to Linux.
His eyes get generally glazed over when I do something like:
$> rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i ^xf`
...which actually came up today in reinstalling X. And I've done quite a few nastier things.
I think that it would do Linux users--especially Linux evangelists--well to learn our own GUI tools so that when our non-geek friends ask us for help we can give them something that's meaningful to them.
We're the people who obviously don't mind not having MS-Office. We already work without it!
You're right, we don't care. I won't use Office if it is ported to Linux, but I'd love to see more people switch to using Linux and if a port of MS Office to Linux will get people to switch I'm all for it.
This certainly would help break MS's monopoly--as would them having to document their file formats. A version of office for Linux would be what a lot of people have been waiting for to switch to Linux.
XOSL is really pretty old. Since the GRUB homepage still says that it hasn't been released yet, I wasn't adventurous enough to try it about two years ago.
XOSL won't load your kernel. You still need a Linux boot loader to do that. So, no, XOSL isn't an alternative to Lilo and Grub. I tried it a long time ago hoping to oust Lilo.
Thier website still says:
XOSL is known to support
[...]
Linux (with Lilo)
Easy, you just treat the RAM as one big cache. When your cache pages become dirty you write them back to permanent storage. Matter of fact, this already happens, just on a much smaller scale with current disk caches.
Since a hard drive is idle much more than it is active, for almost all applications you'll have plenty of time to write things back and keep them concurrent with advantages of a seek time in nanoseconds.
For all of the replies to this:
;-)
1) I'm doing encoding on Mahler's Symphony No. 9 because I'd like to have a copy at work too (without leaving my CD up here). The idea is that even though I'm using lossy compression to not be able to notice it. Also, classical is much more demanding on an encoder so I thought it would be a better test. I also feel compelled to point out that CDs are a lossy format. Heck, why record anything, you're always losing data.
2) I'm listening through pretty high end headphones, Sony MDR-V600 ($120 at Best Buy), so sometimes I can notice things that others can't.
3) Yes, I'm sure I'm using the current version of Ogg. I'm on the devel mailing list (I'm planning on adding Ogg support to the MP3 Tagging software that I wrote, QTagger.) and saw the annoucement come out and installed the RPMs this morning. I upgraded from Beta 4 which came with Redhat 7.1.
So what are the differences?
*) The sound on Ogg files sounds clunky as it changes bitrates. This was especially noticeable on the recording I was compressing since it was originally analog and had a constant (though slight) background hiss. The noticeable changes in what should be a constant sound were quite distracting.
*)To Ogg's credit, they don't have as noticeably the fluttery sound of compression artifacts that you sometimes notice in MP3s. Lame is a nice encoder though, so with the -h switch these normally aren't too bad. I don't hear them at all in 192 KB/s MP3s, which I reencoded all of my classical in today. I use 128KB/s for rock and jazz. It would be interesting to go back and repeat my test with something idiomatic from those genres.
*)I thought Lame's VBR did sounded better than Ogg Vorbis and they seem to be similar schemes. There was a noticeable squeaking sound in the background on the MP3, but it was still clearer than the Ogg file.
For summary, since I'm listening on pretty hi-fi stuff, I can hear all of the little background-ish type things. I prefer these to be constant as opposed to variable. If there's analog hiss, it should sound uniform across the recording.
I'll repeat, I'm glad Ogg's around and I hope it improves, but I'm just not ready to switch yet.
I'd love to use Ogg Vorbis and be a good little Free Software guy, but I tried using it this morning and was disappointed.
I compared an Ogg (uning the encoder that came out today) file with a 128KB/s mp3 and a medium quality VBR mp3 (both made with Lame) and I just didn't think the Ogg file was quite there. I was using the same file for all of the tests (Mahler's 9th Symphony).
Also, on my Athlon 900 Oggenc went at 0.6x encoding speed. I usually get 5-8x with 128KB/s mp3s.
I ended up settling on going a little bigger and using a 192KB/s MP3, which I'd say is still the best option.
Best wishes to the Ogg Vorbis team. I hope that I can eventually ditch my mp3s.
Does anyone else find it funny that the address for the main researcher is a Hotmail address?
I can just see his subject lines:
Confused about your supposition on the nature of superconductors
Get out of debt now
Want Happiness?
Hot teens waiting for you
Do you have a copy of refrence 19 from your July paper on hand
Get your degree now!
Yikes.
err... actually this changed about 3 years ago. peta.org is now PETA's site. http://www.mtd.com/tasty/ is the one you mentioned.
No, no. You see "int" and "longint" are too standards compliant. They'd of course come up with something that didn't work quite as well but made it such that no other compiler could compile the code to compute their profits. Maybe "eInt" or ".int" or .
This article would lead you to believe that Quantum computing will provide a linear speed up to most algorithms. In fact only a very limited set of algorightms actually benefit from Quantum Paralellism. Peter Shor's algorithm for fatoring large numbers is significant not becasue it's terribly useful, but because at the time it was the only thing useful that had yet been devised for a quantum computer. Quantum computers are massively parallel, but because of some of the tricky laws of quantum mechanics, you can only read one result from the parrallel computation (The whole bit about observation causing wave functions to collapse.).
If you're really wantining to read more on Quantum Computing and Quantum Mechanics in general check out the Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation (David Deutch and Artur Ekert have done some really significant stuff) and read In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribben.
I'm currently doing research in a subset of quantum algorithms (and have worked as a research assistant in another area of quantum mechanics). They're pretty cool, but you shouldn't get your hopes up for them making the latest kernal hack run faster.