Actually, the latest Ubuntu beta ("Drake") works very nicely on my ThinkPad T41, even when running off a bootable CD. Sound works; the display shows the max res; even the built-in wireless somewhat works, though wireless encryption still seems to be an issue.
As a soon-to-be-newly-minted MBA at a pretty decent program, I'll second QuantumG's thoughts, and add some more for the "MBAs suck" crowd:
I agree that there now seems to be a glut of MBA programs out there on the marketplace. I pass at least four or five signs advertising such driving along I-85 in the Southeast. However, a lot of them (especially the ones from the for-profit tech-ed places) do not seem to be taken that seriously at all. Even with the ones that actually pass accrediation muster, the job marketplace has sifted out the degrees into different tiers. So the marketplace at least has its own ideas for determining a high-quality degree from a good-quality one from a no-quality one. Whether the marketplace actually has the right choices is an exercise left to the reader, but at least it's good information to have when considering what kinds and which programs to apply for.
My decision to go out and grab an MBA was realizing, after my third dot-com-related layoff in one year (the annus horribilis of 2001), that the business types seemed to be able to quickly land elsewhere, whereas us techies had to scrape and claw for work. That, and what seemed like a huge threat of offshoring in 2002.
I do have some quick advice for you techies out there thinking about the MBA path: if you're interested in simply moving up the corporate ladder where you are, consider a local (and accredited by AACSB!) program and/or one that focuses on engineering or technology management (Duke has a great MEM program). If, however, you're intent on switching career paths (say, from technology to marketing, finance or management consulting), then try to get four or five good solid years of work experience with a nice "trajectory", score at least a 700 on the GMAT, and apply to as many of the top fulltime programs that you think you can get into.
It might be worth pointing out that TechieGold is still around. As it always was, it's simply an Internet storefront for the "job shops" that are under the umbrella of Stride & Associates, including my personal favorite (in the sarcastic sense), Atlantis Partners.
I met with an AP recruiter once after answering a TechieGold ad that looked attractive. Whether or not it's actually true, it looked as if the recruiting office's business model was based on hiring young, aggressive recruiters for commision-only compensation. It showed when the recruiter that interviewing me was trying to get me to commit upfront to taking whatever TechieGold could find for me (within my parameters) before consulting her database for acronym matches. I don't remember exactly why, but I seem to remember the recruiter steering me away from the specific job I had applied for. Hmmm...
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently asked some "what if"-type questions in response to speculation that Delta might file for a Chapter 11 reorg by the end of the year. I thought it kind of interesting when juxtaposed against their $25M proposal for RFID-bagtag thing.
And I gotta say, it was pretty surreal to watch the Atlanta crowd cheering for the "Big Unit". 'Course, some might argue that they had to have someone to cheer for. The game was so dull that I didn't even realize RJ was gunning for the perfect game until I overheard some of my coworkers mentioning it in the bottom of the 7th.
... given that the website content of MSN 1.0 prominently featured what was then a relatively unknown animation technology called Splash from a company called FutureWave (circa 1996 or so). Macromedia subsequently bought FutureWave, then renamed the product as Shockwave Flash.
I can't say I'm too terribly surprised, though; the tour application that comes with WinXP was developed in Flash, and was one of the few media files that came with the OS that needed a third-party application. Someone in Redmond had to be saying "if only we had something like this..."
... for USA use, anyway, and for one simple reason: they both support, to varying degrees, shortest-distance travel directions (as opposed to the quickest-time default).
I've done some experimentation with both sites, primarily concentrating on their shortest-distance (SD) paradigms. Here are a few observations:
AOL MapQuest (MQ) can only do SD up to a 60-mile distance, while AOL MapPoint (MP, formerly MapBlast) can at least fake SD for considerably longer distances, and is pretty darn accurate up to 100 miles.
Even with distances as short as 10 miles, MQ can give a SD route that winds up being longer than what MP generates for the same points A and B.
OTOH, MQ directions tend to be a bit more reliable. I've seen a lot of streets named "local drive" in MP-generated maps. These streets wind up being apartment or shopping center cut-throughs, or worse, blocked-off alleyways.
And more often than not, an SD route generated from MP using the "LineDrive" paradigm winds up being totally different than the route using the more traditional paradigm.
As far as the graphical look of the map itself, I prefer MP since it makes getting the right-sized map easier than MQ, and their map elements seem to be crisper than MQ.
But when I send out map URLs, I have no choice but to go with MQ, since MP seems to require one of those horked-up.NET session IDs in their URL before you can do anything useful.
Things should get even more interesting once MQ starts installing more of their Linux-based clusters, as well as if/when either site starts taking advantage of SVG for map graphics.
From the time my parents got me one for Christmas ('82 or '83) as an "educational tool" to my selling it off to one of my college dormmates (who subsequently left it in the dorm during Thanksgiving break '87 or '88, where it was promptly stolen), my C64 provided me with a lot of entertainment, but more importantly, it gave me the know-how to tinker within the digital realm, and helped to shape me into the software developer I am today.
Some random notes... so many memories, so few hertz (as in the whopping 1 MHz 6502 CPU):
Beach-Head
At the time it was published (mid-80s), it was easily the most graphically complex game out there, and it was an FPS way before Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. But what I remember most about this game is the copy protection scheme it used.
The diskette had certain sectors that would contain "in-between" pits, where the reading would change almost at random. Since my diskette drive (the size of a shoebox, mind you) didn't know how to generate those types of sectors, I instead whipped out my disassembler (which I hand-typed the binary code for from COMPUTE! magazine, and thank the Lord for the checksum-based editor they provided in an earlier issue), examined the disk-loading code, and figured out where the disk was checking the "in-between" sectors.
Then I used another COMPUTE! utility to make a replica of the original diskette, then wrote out one or two strategically-placed binary codes to redirect the disk loader, and voila! Perfect backup! And on the way, I learned how to do assembler, which helped me tremendously when I took an 8088-based assembly class in college.
Unfortunately, I never could quite figure out what the subLOGIC Flight Simulator did in terms of copy protection. 'course, I loved the program so much that I declared myself as a pre-aerospace engineering major my first year in college (before I took FORTRAN and figured out I needed to be a computer eng. major).
And I never got around to figuring out how to copy the code in those ROM cartridges.
BASIC program slowdowns
One of the (few) things I enjoyed about programming in Commodore BASIC was the ease of creating music with simple POKE commands directed at the built-in music synthesizer (can you say "ADSR envelope"?).
Unfortunately, the music would seem to get slower and slower the further that the BASIC interpreter got into the program. Since I depended on the computer to accompany me playing either trumpet or the brandy glasses (you know, where you fill 'em up with water and then rub the rims in a circular fashion, making a flute-like sound), it became quite annoying to have to tweak each individual sustain value just to have a musical piece that kept a steady downbeat.
DiY hardware repair
One summer, in a not-very-well-air-conditioned rental I had while co-oping, my computer's text characters started changing into garbage. I suspected that the video chip (VIC) was at fault, I brought it to a local computer repair shop, who told me that it would be a minimum $100 to repair it. Dismayed, I grabbed an electronic parts catalog from work, and found the chip for $23. Taking a chance, I ordered it. Amazingly enough, the replacement fixed the problem.
Other random thoughts
300 baud modem (or 0.3 Kbps as you young whippersnappers might say), whose only purpose was to enable me to brag about chatting online with my best friend from across town; IM waaay before IM was cool.
Back when I tried to manually track down spammers (before it became more effective to simply filter out spams), I looked up the registry info for one of the domains from which I received one of those post-once, submit-everywhere re'sume' services (you know which ones I'm talking about). Turns out the domain was registered to a postal box in Athens, Georgia. While this could have been anyone, I can't help but think that this was a Net-savvy University of Georgia student needing cash for tuition or rent...
That's from an old, old Mad magazine! Late '70s timeframe.
It was one of those "floppy vinyls" you could tear out of the magazine and play on a turntable. The song would start out with this "Super Spectacular Day" song, which was all cheery "Until...", then the needle would take one of six possible paths, each of which described some kind of personal catastrophe.
While I've been sorely tempted to wall off anything coming from the Pacific Rim or Latin America, it seems that there are two more constructive ways (OK, maybe only one:) to proceed:
1. Multilingual spam report generator. Seems as if there's already an autogenerator (which is probably English-centric). Why not add multilingual support to it, or build a new one? You don't have to add every language, just the major ones that affect spam traffic (Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and French and Japanese for good measure).
2. Enable open relay autoprobing for certain incoming SMTP requests. This may be slightly more problematic, but it'd be nice if I was to configure my MTA of choice to test the sender IP of an incoming messagefor an open relay hole. The check would only occur if the IP address was determined to be within the range for a certain group of countries. This might be a feasible solution for those who either can't or don't wish to subscribe to an RBL.
Re:Miracle...or another sign of End Of Days
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Red Hat now uses a farm of specially-tweaked FTP servers that handle only anonymous postings. Less overhead means more users allowed. Or something like that.
If you go to Atlanta Geek's home page, someone has been tracking the number of job postings for various cities around the USA, with data taken from ComputerJobs.com. If this is reflective of the actual IT market (when in fact it's also reflective of third-party recruiter activity), it would appear that most cities have lost 20% of their jobs in the past month, but Boston! They've leaked 30%!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the latest Ubuntu beta ("Drake") works very nicely on my ThinkPad T41, even when running off a bootable CD. Sound works; the display shows the max res; even the built-in wireless somewhat works, though wireless encryption still seems to be an issue.
As a soon-to-be-newly-minted MBA at a pretty decent program, I'll second QuantumG's thoughts, and add some more for the "MBAs suck" crowd:
I agree that there now seems to be a glut of MBA programs out there on the marketplace. I pass at least four or five signs advertising such driving along I-85 in the Southeast. However, a lot of them (especially the ones from the for-profit tech-ed places) do not seem to be taken that seriously at all. Even with the ones that actually pass accrediation muster, the job marketplace has sifted out the degrees into different tiers. So the marketplace at least has its own ideas for determining a high-quality degree from a good-quality one from a no-quality one. Whether the marketplace actually has the right choices is an exercise left to the reader, but at least it's good information to have when considering what kinds and which programs to apply for.
My decision to go out and grab an MBA was realizing, after my third dot-com-related layoff in one year (the annus horribilis of 2001), that the business types seemed to be able to quickly land elsewhere, whereas us techies had to scrape and claw for work. That, and what seemed like a huge threat of offshoring in 2002.
I do have some quick advice for you techies out there thinking about the MBA path: if you're interested in simply moving up the corporate ladder where you are, consider a local (and accredited by AACSB!) program and/or one that focuses on engineering or technology management (Duke has a great MEM program). If, however, you're intent on switching career paths (say, from technology to marketing, finance or management consulting), then try to get four or five good solid years of work experience with a nice "trajectory", score at least a 700 on the GMAT, and apply to as many of the top fulltime programs that you think you can get into.
And it's a specific unit of eBay (i.e., PayPal) that is acquiring the VeriSign payment gateway business.
for the annual Linux Beer Hike!
At least the Berkeley-related link is.
Watch it, buddy. You just insulted Alan Cox (and me).
It might be worth pointing out that TechieGold is still around. As it always was, it's simply an Internet storefront for the "job shops" that are under the umbrella of Stride & Associates, including my personal favorite (in the sarcastic sense), Atlantis Partners.
I met with an AP recruiter once after answering a TechieGold ad that looked attractive. Whether or not it's actually true, it looked as if the recruiting office's business model was based on hiring young, aggressive recruiters for commision-only compensation. It showed when the recruiter that interviewing me was trying to get me to commit upfront to taking whatever TechieGold could find for me (within my parameters) before consulting her database for acronym matches. I don't remember exactly why, but I seem to remember the recruiter steering me away from the specific job I had applied for. Hmmm ...
So the official press release is lying about SA acquiring Danga?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently asked some "what if"-type questions in response to speculation that Delta might file for a Chapter 11 reorg by the end of the year. I thought it kind of interesting when juxtaposed against their $25M proposal for RFID-bagtag thing.
And I gotta say, it was pretty surreal to watch the Atlanta crowd cheering for the "Big Unit". 'Course, some might argue that they had to have someone to cheer for. The game was so dull that I didn't even realize RJ was gunning for the perfect game until I overheard some of my coworkers mentioning it in the bottom of the 7th.
a decent mascot for the Sawfish window manager.
... given that the website content of MSN 1.0 prominently featured what was then a relatively unknown animation technology called Splash from a company called FutureWave (circa 1996 or so). Macromedia subsequently bought FutureWave, then renamed the product as Shockwave Flash.
..."
I can't say I'm too terribly surprised, though; the tour application that comes with WinXP was developed in Flash, and was one of the few media files that came with the OS that needed a third-party application. Someone in Redmond had to be saying "if only we had something like this
the business-guy-sticking-his-tongue-out image that I saw when their home page loaded. I mean, come on, it just looks silly. Really.
... for USA use, anyway, and for one simple reason: they both support, to varying degrees, shortest-distance travel directions (as opposed to the quickest-time default).
I've done some experimentation with both sites, primarily concentrating on their shortest-distance (SD) paradigms. Here are a few observations:
HTH ...
Some random notes
Beach-Head
At the time it was published (mid-80s), it was easily the most graphically complex game out there, and it was an FPS way before Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. But what I remember most about this game is the copy protection scheme it used.
The diskette had certain sectors that would contain "in-between" pits, where the reading would change almost at random. Since my diskette drive (the size of a shoebox, mind you) didn't know how to generate those types of sectors, I instead whipped out my disassembler (which I hand-typed the binary code for from COMPUTE! magazine, and thank the Lord for the checksum-based editor they provided in an earlier issue), examined the disk-loading code, and figured out where the disk was checking the "in-between" sectors.
Then I used another COMPUTE! utility to make a replica of the original diskette, then wrote out one or two strategically-placed binary codes to redirect the disk loader, and voila! Perfect backup! And on the way, I learned how to do assembler, which helped me tremendously when I took an 8088-based assembly class in college.
Unfortunately, I never could quite figure out what the subLOGIC Flight Simulator did in terms of copy protection. 'course, I loved the program so much that I declared myself as a pre-aerospace engineering major my first year in college (before I took FORTRAN and figured out I needed to be a computer eng. major).
And I never got around to figuring out how to copy the code in those ROM cartridges.
BASIC program slowdowns
One of the (few) things I enjoyed about programming in Commodore BASIC was the ease of creating music with simple POKE commands directed at the built-in music synthesizer (can you say "ADSR envelope"?).
Unfortunately, the music would seem to get slower and slower the further that the BASIC interpreter got into the program. Since I depended on the computer to accompany me playing either trumpet or the brandy glasses (you know, where you fill 'em up with water and then rub the rims in a circular fashion, making a flute-like sound), it became quite annoying to have to tweak each individual sustain value just to have a musical piece that kept a steady downbeat.
DiY hardware repair
One summer, in a not-very-well-air-conditioned rental I had while co-oping, my computer's text characters started changing into garbage. I suspected that the video chip (VIC) was at fault, I brought it to a local computer repair shop, who told me that it would be a minimum $100 to repair it. Dismayed, I grabbed an electronic parts catalog from work, and found the chip for $23. Taking a chance, I ordered it. Amazingly enough, the replacement fixed the problem.
Other random thoughts
Back when I tried to manually track down spammers (before it became more effective to simply filter out spams), I looked up the registry info for one of the domains from which I received one of those post-once, submit-everywhere re'sume' services (you know which ones I'm talking about). Turns out the domain was registered to a postal box in Athens, Georgia. While this could have been anyone, I can't help but think that this was a Net-savvy University of Georgia student needing cash for tuition or rent ...
That's from an old, old Mad magazine! Late '70s timeframe.
...", then the needle would take one of six possible paths, each of which described some kind of personal catastrophe.
It was one of those "floppy vinyls" you could tear out of the magazine and play on a turntable. The song would start out with this "Super Spectacular Day" song, which was all cheery "Until
While I've been sorely tempted to wall off anything coming from the Pacific Rim or Latin America, it seems that there are two more constructive ways (OK, maybe only one :) to proceed:
1. Multilingual spam report generator. Seems as if there's already an autogenerator (which is probably English-centric). Why not add multilingual support to it, or build a new one? You don't have to add every language, just the major ones that affect spam traffic (Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and French and Japanese for good measure).
2. Enable open relay autoprobing for certain incoming SMTP requests. This may be slightly more problematic, but it'd be nice if I was to configure my MTA of choice to test the sender IP of an incoming messagefor an open relay hole. The check would only occur if the IP address was determined to be within the range for a certain group of countries. This might be a feasible solution for those who either can't or don't wish to subscribe to an RBL.
Actually, Red Hat now uses a farm of specially-tweaked FTP servers that handle only anonymous postings. Less overhead means more users allowed. Or something like that.
If you go to Atlanta Geek's home page, someone has been tracking the number of job postings for various cities around the USA, with data taken from ComputerJobs.com. If this is reflective of the actual IT market (when in fact it's also reflective of third-party recruiter activity), it would appear that most cities have lost 20% of their jobs in the past month, but Boston! They've leaked 30%!