Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
I have always been interested in dvorak but in addition to the retraining time you have to figure out how to use vi all over again. The keys in vi are positioned where they are for a reason such as the hjkl cursor movement keys. They become scattered all over with dvorak. How does one deal with this?
You forget the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson in Dayton Ohio. Wonderful place. They have the only remaining XB-70 Valkyrie there! HUGE and amazing airplane. As well as thousands of other exhibits.
You imply that this release has something to do with NT for Alpha. I doubt that it does. Linux was able to go 64 bit on many platforms comparatively easily but it took MS years. They probably had to redo very nearly the whole thing. So I think in this case it is probably quite fair to say MS finally caught up with Linux.
This is very discouraging news. I have a T-1 card and it works great. I have had a couple reports of echo from people using the T-1 but nothing reproduceable. From my overall positive experience with the T-1 card and my own single port FXS cards I thought Digium was making good stuff but the TDM seems to be confounding them. If this new TDM does not work this customer is definitely not going to be willing to spring for a T-1 card and a channel bank so I will have to eat that cost if they are even willing to give me another couple of weeks to get that hardware in and installed. If not then I expect this customer will also want a refund on their system which means I will lose thousands more not to mention a great deal of labor on the install.:(
I have been doing just this very thing for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, it is NOT as easy as it would first seem. You really need a huge amount of capital to make this work.
I tried to self-bootstrap an asterisk based telco as my PRIMARY business supplimented with general Linux consulting with more than just $6k in the bank.
Here are some of the difficulties I have run into (and solved, but like I said, it has been a long, hard, expensive road):
1. The technology is COMPLICATED. This means inherently less reliable and big learning curve.
2. Asterisk is still unstable (even the stable version). A bug due to a completely untested patch added to the latest stable made me look like an idiot in front of a customer.
3. Standards are lacking. Asterisk often does not support all of the features of many voip phones. What do I tell a customer when there are buttons on their phones that don't do anything?
4. Asterisk has no billing system built in. Not a fault of asterisk but you can count on having to write your own. There are no existing open sources systems because they are everyones bread and butter. Nobody is giving theirs up so you can use it to compete against them.
5. Asterisk has no nice end user interface. Again, no real fault of asterisk but you can count on investing in LOTS of developer time. Asterisk configuration is complicated and to make an extensive interface is bound to be very costly.
6. I have had some bad luck with hardware from Digium. I am willing to chalk that up to bad luck. But the support from Digium is just unusable. I have left a dozen phone messages. Never once got a call back. I had to RMA a part that failed in production after just a few days of use. Yes, we tested the phone system etc and it all looked good. Then a daughterboard on the TDM400P (4 port FXO card) started causing the whole card to fail intermittantly. It took a lot of head scratching and days of calling digium, waiting on hold, eventually ending up in their voicemail box, leaving a message, and waiting for callbacks which never came to actually track down the cause of this intermittant problem. I originally started talking to them on Dec 17 regarding this. They suggested that the card was sharing interrupts and this was the reason it did not play well. On the 21st they said they had seen this problem before. On the 28th they admitted it was a hardware design flaw and offer to RMA the card. Why did they tell me to check shared interrupts then and waste a week of my time? I don't know. Around this time we find out that unloading the driver and reloading it would temporarily fix it but this had to be done on average twice a day. Note that the system is now in production. Worst possible case. So they are going to ship me a new card and I can send back the old card while we keep rebooting the system/reloading the driver on average twice a day. On the 29th very early in the AM I replied to their email with all of the info they need to ship me a new card and I expressed an extreme sense of urgency hoping the card would be overnighted the same day. On the 30th they emailed me an RMA number. I was told I could expect tracking info any minute. A couple days go by with no word from Digium. On January 4th I get an email telling me the card is on backorder! They expect more cards in on the 6th. So I on the 6th I email them to check if it had been shipped because I still had no tracking info and no card had arrived. This has all been interspersed with many phonecalls which were never returned btw. I am only citing emails because I have a record of them. On or about the 10th I call to see what the status is. The shipping personis not available but the operator promises he will call me back the same day wth some info. No phone call. On the 11th (yesterday, as I write this) I call again and explain I did not get a phone call. They are very apologetic and put me on hold while they look into it. After a few minutes I am informed that the card was never shipped! They promis
My idea was to implement some algorithm on a cheap microcontroller, connect it to a cheap LCD, add a crystal and a battery and sink the whole works into epoxy. Not pretty but cheap and durable. I'm sure that can be done for less than $10.
Around 5 years ago I was looking for a way to have a secure-id sort of solution without having to buy the proprietary software and hardware without any success. I even looked into building my own (I know a little about microcontrollers for the hardware device portion) but was not able to come up with any suitable algorithm. It seems like the security of our Linux systems and other systems which require authentication could really benefit from something like this.
Reminds me of Nullsoft's WASTE which didn't interest me much back when it came out but I am becomming more and more curious as time goes on. I wonder if someone could integrate it with GAIM.
It is because of things like this that we need technology like I2P and Freenet more than ever. Freenet seems to be stuck in a morass and making no progress but I2P is useful now and would have prevented Indymedia's servers from being taken down.
I have had great success with the VIA EPIA line of single board computers. They are plenty fast enough for the vast majority of todays computing needs, even servers. Firewall, mail server, file server, you name it. For the home or small or even medium sized office these things are great. I have some from Solar PC. They are serving as cheap and simple workstations for word processing and web browsing as well as firewalls and virus/spam filter appliances.
Just because it's "open source" (as opposed to "Open Source") as in "you can read the source" doesn't mean it's Free. And that may be all they do: let you read the source. If they don't use the GPL or BSD or some other well known FOSS license I doubt this will really help them all that much. If they come up with their own license (which a company as big as Sun is wont to do) it will probably be quite complicated and your average hacker won't understand it.
Run Linux at home and run your own personal mail server, web server, etc on it. That's how I got into Linux. It will teach you more faster than any official training.
Asking them to not only go with Linux but Debian also (one of the lesser known and lesser commercially supported distro's) is probably asking quite a lot of them. You could make a much better case for getting RedHat in there and would have a higher chance of success. Perhaps in a few years once they are cool with Linux you could introduce them to Debian. Baby steps...
Stewart, you seem to be the only person who has trouble figuring out how to get involved in freenet.:) I found the lists, the IRC channel, etc. fairly easily.
Yes a lot of the clients are browsers but they always talk to the server via http so the language on the back-end could be anything. Java doesn't have any particular advantage in that respect. When Java first came out applets were the big deal because they could run in any browser on any platform and that is where the cross-platform ability of java came into play. Because you never knew what sort of machine your applet might be downloaded to. Unfortunately nobody could get Java in the browser right due to bugs and failure to follow any real standard so they downplay that now and nobody really uses applets anymore. All of the excitement is about java on the server side but that is just where you don't need cross-platform ability so much because the code always runs on the same machine.
So I am still left wondering why Java is popular on the server side of things and rarely if ever used for client side applications. Whatever happened to the office suite in Java that Sun was working on years ago?
There may be lots of java projects listed on sourceforge but I can't say I have ever downloaded and used any of them except freenet and i2p and they both have their share of java-induced problems. I regularly download software from sourceforge and other open source project sites but it is almost always C or python or perl or something. Are there any java killer apps? I've heard jakarta and tomcat and jboss are popular but they would seem to be rather niche applications, I've certainly never had a use for them nor do I know anyone who uses them although I occasionally see someone on/. or elsewhere mention them. It would seem that java is mainly used server-side. Why is that? For what reason is it not desireable for client applications? I have my own ideas but I would like to know what others think.
The reason most people don't get the advertised mileage is because they goose it at most every opportunity and race up to the light and then get on the brakes. More sensible driving patterns will get better mileage. I like the hybrid cars because they provide real time feedback both in text and graphics as to your mileage and fuel consumption. I wish conventional cars would do this also.
Doesn't this imply that they never backup their system because that would make it crash? And if they do make backups why not just hand over one of those?
Of course the real answer is that they just don't want anyone to have that information.
Hah...one more comment: I sent email to all of the above email addresses and Bart's email bounced revealing the real address he has all of his mail forwarded to:
bart@wexlervideo.com
So I just thought I would let you all know about it so you can send your comments there also since his @debateshow.com addy does not work.:)
Also, with a little googling I came up with the following. Feel free to give ol' "Bart" here a call to express your dissatisfaction with how they conduct their business.
Bart Coleman Producer - The Debate Show (323) 957-7601 tel bart@debateshow.com
Following are email addresses of various "handlers" who will sucker you in and keep you in the dark. Might want to cc them all on any comments you have for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always been interested in dvorak but in addition to the retraining time you have to figure out how to use vi all over again. The keys in vi are positioned where they are for a reason such as the hjkl cursor movement keys. They become scattered all over with dvorak. How does one deal with this?
You forget the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson in Dayton Ohio. Wonderful place. They have the only remaining XB-70 Valkyrie there! HUGE and amazing airplane. As well as thousands of other exhibits.
...to blow!!!
You imply that this release has something to do with NT for Alpha. I doubt that it does. Linux was able to go 64 bit on many platforms comparatively easily but it took MS years. They probably had to redo very nearly the whole thing. So I think in this case it is probably quite fair to say MS finally caught up with Linux.
> Let me ask you, when someone comes up to you and says "I work at Microsoft" , what is your first reaction?
I am reminded of this:
"Please don't tell my parents I work for Microsoft. They still think I'm a bartender in a gay brothel."
- Usenet
This is very discouraging news. I have a T-1 card and it works great. I have had a couple reports of echo from people using the T-1 but nothing reproduceable. From my overall positive experience with the T-1 card and my own single port FXS cards I thought Digium was making good stuff but the TDM seems to be confounding them. If this new TDM does not work this customer is definitely not going to be willing to spring for a T-1 card and a channel bank so I will have to eat that cost if they are even willing to give me another couple of weeks to get that hardware in and installed. If not then I expect this customer will also want a refund on their system which means I will lose thousands more not to mention a great deal of labor on the install. :(
I have been doing just this very thing for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, it is NOT as easy as it would first seem. You really need a huge amount of capital to make this work.
I tried to self-bootstrap an asterisk based telco as my PRIMARY business supplimented with general Linux consulting with more than just $6k in the bank.
Here are some of the difficulties I have run into (and solved, but like I said, it has been a long, hard, expensive road):
1. The technology is COMPLICATED. This means inherently less reliable and big learning curve.
2. Asterisk is still unstable (even the stable version). A bug due to a completely untested patch added to the latest stable made me look like an idiot in front of a customer.
3. Standards are lacking. Asterisk often does not support all of the features of many voip phones. What do I tell a customer when there are buttons on their phones that don't do anything?
4. Asterisk has no billing system built in. Not a fault of asterisk but you can count on having to write your own. There are no existing open sources systems because they are everyones bread and butter. Nobody is giving theirs up so you can use it to compete against them.
5. Asterisk has no nice end user interface. Again, no real fault of asterisk but you can count on investing in LOTS of developer time. Asterisk configuration is complicated and to make an extensive interface is bound to be very costly.
6. I have had some bad luck with hardware from Digium. I am willing to chalk that up to bad luck. But the support from Digium is just unusable. I have left a dozen phone messages. Never once got a call back. I had to RMA a part that failed in production after just a few days of use. Yes, we tested the phone system etc and it all looked good. Then a daughterboard on the TDM400P (4 port FXO card) started causing the whole card to fail intermittantly. It took a lot of head scratching and days of calling digium, waiting on hold, eventually ending up in their voicemail box, leaving a message, and waiting for callbacks which never came to actually track down the cause of this intermittant problem. I originally started talking to them on Dec 17 regarding this. They suggested that the card was sharing interrupts and this was the reason it did not play well. On the 21st they said they had seen this problem before. On the 28th they admitted it was a hardware design flaw and offer to RMA the card. Why did they tell me to check shared interrupts then and waste a week of my time? I don't know. Around this time we find out that unloading the driver and reloading it would temporarily fix it but this had to be done on average twice a day. Note that the system is now in production. Worst possible case. So they are going to ship me a new card and I can send back the old card while we keep rebooting the system/reloading the driver on average twice a day. On the 29th very early in the AM I replied to their email with all of the info they need to ship me a new card and I expressed an extreme sense of urgency hoping the card would be overnighted the same day. On the 30th they emailed me an RMA number. I was told I could expect tracking info any minute. A couple days go by with no word from Digium. On January 4th I get an email telling me the card is on backorder! They expect more cards in on the 6th. So I on the 6th I email them to check if it had been shipped because I still had no tracking info and no card had arrived. This has all been interspersed with many phonecalls which were never returned btw. I am only citing emails because I have a record of them. On or about the 10th I call to see what the status is. The shipping personis not available but the operator promises he will call me back the same day wth some info. No phone call. On the 11th (yesterday, as I write this) I call again and explain I did not get a phone call. They are very apologetic and put me on hold while they look into it. After a few minutes I am informed that the card was never shipped! They promis
My idea was to implement some algorithm on a cheap microcontroller, connect it to a cheap LCD, add a crystal and a battery and sink the whole works into epoxy. Not pretty but cheap and durable. I'm sure that can be done for less than $10.
Around 5 years ago I was looking for a way to have a secure-id sort of solution without having to buy the proprietary software and hardware without any success. I even looked into building my own (I know a little about microcontrollers for the hardware device portion) but was not able to come up with any suitable algorithm. It seems like the security of our Linux systems and other systems which require authentication could really benefit from something like this.
Reminds me of
Nullsoft's WASTE which didn't interest me much back when it came out but I am becomming more and more curious as time goes on. I wonder if someone could integrate it with GAIM.
Wietse Venema seems to think SPF is a broken idea. Domainkeys does not seem to have this problem.
It is because of things like this that we need technology like I2P and Freenet more than ever. Freenet seems to be stuck in a morass and making no progress but I2P is useful now and would have prevented Indymedia's servers from being taken down.
I have had great success with the VIA EPIA line of single board computers. They are plenty fast enough for the vast majority of todays computing needs, even servers. Firewall, mail server, file server, you name it. For the home or small or even medium sized office these things are great. I have some from Solar PC. They are serving as cheap and simple workstations for word processing and web browsing as well as firewalls and virus/spam filter appliances.
...because it must be twice as secure!
1. A of people have already read and understood the GPL.
2. The GPL was written specifically to be understable by hackers according to RMS himself.
3. The goal is to get people to work on the software so it should be made as easy as possible. The "that' s your problem" attitude is not conducive.
Just because it's "open source" (as opposed to "Open Source") as in "you can read the source" doesn't mean it's Free. And that may be all they do: let you read the source. If they don't use the GPL or BSD or some other well known FOSS license I doubt this will really help them all that much. If they come up with their own license (which a company as big as Sun is wont to do) it will probably be quite complicated and your average hacker won't understand it.
Run Linux at home and run your own personal mail server, web server, etc on it. That's how I got into Linux. It will teach you more faster than any official training.
Asking them to not only go with Linux but Debian also (one of the lesser known and lesser commercially supported distro's) is probably asking quite a lot of them. You could make a much better case for getting RedHat in there and would have a higher chance of success. Perhaps in a few years once they are cool with Linux you could introduce them to Debian. Baby steps...
No, it does not hinder SPF. Sender ID is SPF+MS's hacks. You are still free to use SPF by itself.
Stewart, you seem to be the only person who has trouble figuring out how to get involved in freenet. :) I found the lists, the IRC channel, etc. fairly easily.
Yes a lot of the clients are browsers but they always talk to the server via http so the language on the back-end could be anything. Java doesn't have any particular advantage in that respect. When Java first came out applets were the big deal because they could run in any browser on any platform and that is where the cross-platform ability of java came into play. Because you never knew what sort of machine your applet might be downloaded to. Unfortunately nobody could get Java in the browser right due to bugs and failure to follow any real standard so they downplay that now and nobody really uses applets anymore. All of the excitement is about java on the server side but that is just where you don't need cross-platform ability so much because the code always runs on the same machine.
So I am still left wondering why Java is popular on the server side of things and rarely if ever used for client side applications. Whatever happened to the office suite in Java that Sun was working on years ago?
There may be lots of java projects listed on sourceforge but I can't say I have ever downloaded and used any of them except freenet and i2p and they both have their share of java-induced problems. I regularly download software from sourceforge and other open source project sites but it is almost always C or python or perl or something. Are there any java killer apps? I've heard jakarta and tomcat and jboss are popular but they would seem to be rather niche applications, I've certainly never had a use for them nor do I know anyone who uses them although I occasionally see someone on /. or elsewhere mention them. It would seem that java is mainly used server-side. Why is that? For what reason is it not desireable for client applications? I have my own ideas but I would like to know what others think.
The reason most people don't get the advertised mileage is because they goose it at most every opportunity and race up to the light and then get on the brakes. More sensible driving patterns will get better mileage. I like the hybrid cars because they provide real time feedback both in text and graphics as to your mileage and fuel consumption. I wish conventional cars would do this also.
Doesn't this imply that they never backup their system because that would make it crash? And if they do make backups why not just hand over one of those?
Of course the real answer is that they just don't want anyone to have that information.
Hah...one more comment: I sent email to all of the above email addresses and Bart's email bounced revealing the real address he has all of his mail forwarded to:
:)
bart@wexlervideo.com
So I just thought I would let you all know about it so you can send your comments there also since his @debateshow.com addy does not work.
Also, with a little googling I came up with the following. Feel free to give ol' "Bart" here a call to express your dissatisfaction with how they conduct their business.
@ debateshow.comt eshow.com
Bart Coleman
Producer - The Debate Show
(323) 957-7601 tel
bart@debateshow.com
Following are email addresses of various "handlers" who will sucker you in and keep you in the dark. Might want to cc them all on any comments you have for them.
jeff@debateshow.com
erika@debateshow.com
gary
wendy@debateshow.com
lauren@deba
bart@debateshow.com