"Oh? You hate your job? Why didn't you say so. There's a support group for that. It's called everyone and they meet at the bar."
But seriously.. I work at a ski resort. I've got about 40 days of skiing in so far. So while you might have been sitting at your desk working on Thursday morning, I was busting through 2 feet of powder in Vail's China Bowl. How can I hate a job like this?
We'll now refer to Rob by his Native American name - "Dead Man Walking".
Congrats Rob! Are you planning a webcast? Is it going to be in Tuliptown?
And your best man is probably gonna want a list of strippers in the area:
http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypResults.py?stp=y&stx=24 02 7281&city=Holland&state=MI&country=us&slt=42.78749 8&sln=-86.108902&cs=4
I suppose I should have qualified that statement with what prompted it. You're right, Christmas can be a great day to ski - it's the least crowded day on the slopes during the holidays.
But today I took 4 runs: On the first chair mom and daughter were complaining they didn't know where dad was. And they didn't know when he was going to stop skiing or where to meet him. On the second chair I met a guy who didn't want to ski with his family because they weren't skiing the tougher terrain. And on the fourth chair I went up with a mother and her son. In that family its a tradition to ski on Christmas - except the rest of the family was in Breckenridge.
So I guess what prompted me to write that was all the people who try to do this wonderful family vacation and spend time with each other - and then don't. To each their own, I'm sure those folks had a great day.
I'm in the same boat - I work at Copper Mtn in Colorado doing telecom/datacom/misc IS stuff. I've always wondered what kind of a freak family gets together to ski on Christmas, but there seems to be enough to fill all of our lodging.
I heard Little Cottonwood canyon got dumped on, how's the snow? What resort are you at?
After the electrician has run the phone, see if you can use that as a pull line for your cat5. I'd actually try to make the electrician run cat5e, it's pretty much the standard now for voice too. If he won't, just use his the cat3 or whatever he pulls to pull your runs. Then I'd consider doing 3 runs instead of two, that way you can use one for voice lines.
Might you want to run co-ax to every room too? I find that's pretty useful to have.
Perhaps speaker cable too?
What kind of terminations are you going to do? That's always an interesting question. I'd just get some quad modular plates and do one insert for phone, one for data, and leave the other two with blank knockouts for future use. Personally I love Krone products, but they're a hell of a lot more expensive than normal 110
jacks/patch panels.
Electricians and building contractors differ wildly in how they'll run the cable. If there's conduit in the wall going to jam boxes make sure you pull some jet line (or other thin string) through the conduit when you make your runs. Later it'll be a snap to pull in the fiber. Even if you pull the fiber now you'll probably want to not terminate it (unless you're capable of doing it yourself.) And also for cost you'll want to weigh the advantages/disadvantages of multimode vs singlemode.
If there's no conduit, perhaps they've just drilled holes in the studs and ran it through, I'd suggest getting some thin flexible smurf tube to lay in. It'll be a lot more work, but the advantage is you'll have a pathway through which you can later add more cable.
My suggestion would be to not lay in fiber now, but have a method for easily adding it later.
I work for a company that operates some large hotel operations. In the past year we've opened approximately 6 major buildings comprised of 400+ units. We custom designed a composite cable that has 2 strands of multimode, 2 co-ax, and 2 cat5e. We had our contractors lay about 6 of those cables in each unit (1 - 3 bedrooms + kitchen, etc) plus a feed back to riser closets. A few years ago we thought it would be overkill, now we're wondering if we should have included more.
There's a web site out there - www.compgeeks.com. They have slightly used laptops (came off corporate lease) that might be a few years old. While I haven't bought a laptop from them I have bought other things - by the way, their customer server SUCKS. They've messed up a few of my orders, overcharged me for other things, and it's taken forever to get situations remedied. However, they are cheap and they do have stuff you won't find too many other places.
Personally I bought a Dell Latitude years ago used and it's been one of the coolest little laptops I've ever had. It was only a P133, but the screen was beautiful, ran Linux like a champ, and had a good battery life. If I was looking to buy I'd find a Dell laptop, used, for about $400. I bet it would rock for a development platform on the go.
I spent 3 years evangelizing Linux and getting
it installed on a lot of desktops. Is it worth
switching? I'd say yes for any small-medium
sized company. For any large company it's
simply not worth it.
Large companies have large turnover rates and
need to hire people and quickly get them up to
speed. Large companies also don't notice the
extra cost of licensing. I see tens of thousands
of dollars thrown away each day on stupid
expenditures - why would software licensing
matter? Plus, large companies tend to sign
contracts with companies like Dell and Compaq
for all their desktops - the OS is already there.
Yeah, I used Linux exclusively for 4 years as my
desktop. It's still my OS of choice at home.
But at work.. well, we have the MS thing going
so that's what I use. And you know what? It's
not that bad. It works, I can get my work done.
I used to have to do programming, and Linux worked
well for that. Now I simply use a bunch of
canned applications that are peripheral to my job.
Windows works ok for that.
Now, if you really think you want to go install
Linux on a bunch of secretaries desktops, here's
what you need to plan:
do you need to access any Windows
applications? Will you need to? Perhaps you
need a server running VMWare with apps on it?
Will your users want to use floppy drives?
Have you figured out an easy way for them to do
that?
Are you going with thin clients or full
blown PC's? Frankly, if I was rolling out Linux
I'd just get rid of the hard drive. Not much
reason for it.
plan, plan, and plan even more. users hate
it when you need to solve problems on the fly.
Yeah, but gleaning any information from the
BIOS is a crap shoot. Lots of BIOS's are
buggy about reporting, undocumented/underdocumented on calls, and
generally unreliable. Most manufacturers seem
barely test their boards before kicking them out
the door. They figure if they can do the handoff
to the OS then good enough. And troubleshooting
this stuff is a frustrating.
When I was in school I worked at the UMich
Space Physics Lab. I also took a grad level
Aerospace design course that was writing a
paper (er.. book) in response to a JPL RFP for
a Pluto mission.
We found out a lot of interesting things. Probably the most relative to this article is that we did it all with a $200 million budget
cap - including the launch vehicle
(Delta II - which had just suffered 2 explosions in Motorola launches).
If I remember correctly we figured a minimum mission time of 6 years to Pluto and a max of 18 with the optimal being around 14 or so. The launch date had to be before 2005 I think too. Anyway, Pluto's atmosphere is going to collapse in something like 2015 and if we don't get there before then it makes it nearly impossible to be able to do a lot of the main science objectives.
Also interesting is that our data rate using a 2.5m antenna and receiving on the deep space network (before the upgrades of the last few years) would have been about 240bps. Bits.. not kilobits. It would have taken about 9 months collect 2GB (bits or bytes... I forget what it was..)
Logitech makes a product called "Cordless
Desktop" that's awesome. It isn't IR like
most of the rest of the crap - it's radio
frequency. So you can bury the receiver
behind your desk and type from across the
room.
It's all done in hardware, so there's no
special windows drivers needed and works
great with Linux. They sell the cordless
mouse separately, but IMNSHO the best part
is the keyboard.
Other niceties: the mouse is 3 button, the
keyboard has a nice feel, and the batteries
last about 4 - 5 months for me.
Next to the 25W amp and equalizer that fits
in a 5.25" bay, it's the coolest hardware I
have.
Up until a few months ago I was doing some sys admin work. At the time I was pretty happy with the way I set up systems, and I still think they were reasonably secure. However, articles like this have convinced me the best way to have peace of mind is to set up OpenBSD firewalls.
Is Linux more secure than other operating systems? Yes. Is it easy to shoot yourself in the foot and make the system easy to exploit? Definitely. There's an excellent article over at Security Focus that every Linux sys admin must read.
Of course if there were no users, user accounts, or traffic on the wire I'd feel even better.
I moved out here to Summit County, Colorado this past winter. This place makes Silicon Valley look like a housing mecca.
Don't get me wrong, the benefits are great. Within 10 minutes of my house are 4 world class ski resorts (Keystone, Copper, A Basin, Breck) and Vail, Beaver Creek, and Winter Park are about a half hour away.
But try to buy any property here and you'll find yourself staring at an unpayable mortgage. $250,000 might get you a two bedroom condo. (But don't forget the additional monthly condo fees.)
Now, keep in mind that Silicon Valley, Manhattan and all other wonderful high rent districts have actual jobs that pay beaucoup bucks. All we have here is a seasonal tourist industry that relies on skiing in the winter and golf in the summer. They just opened an Internet Cafe in Breckenridge, that's about it for high tech jobs. (I'd be shocked if I could find a Linux user up here.) I'd love to find a tech job, but I'll settle for my hourly wage at the ski resort.
That's the price I pay to ski a hundred some days of the year and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
After working with a company that specialized in SCO and Linux installations, I've found there are a lot of areas where it would be nice to have better interoperability.
We were told a few years ago Unixware was the way of the future and the OpenServer lines would be completely phased out. In reality Unixware really only comes into play on the high-end. There's too much overhead with Unixware to justify using it for small server tasks that SCO is typically used for. Will we continue to see Openserver on the low-end? If it continues to be around, will we see integration with Linux like support in each for the other's filesystems? Will we see other products like VisionFS or Taratella ported to Linux? (Not that I'd use VisionFS, Samba is much better). What about the SCO Skunkware stuff? In the past a SCO server was virtually unusable without all of the unsupported GNU utilities, will they continue to be left out of the installation process and unsupported? Even necessary items like gzip?
And what about desktops.. I heard a laughable claim a few years ago about OpenServer products wanting to take over the desktop. Will you replace the horrid window manager with something like GNOME or KDE? Will you contribute any drivers to OSS projects like XFree86 or even the Linux kernel?
While the finding of fact greatly increases the change of a lawsuit against Microsoft getting damages awarded, most of us (including small companies) could never afford to do such a thing. However, class action suits were designed for such instances. Do you feel there will be class action suits against Microsoft and how will they affect Slashdot readers? What is the precedent for such action in monopoly cases?
Linus has promised shorter development times between new kernel series.
What I want to know is do you think this will be hard on you and how do you think you'll handle it?
Currently you maintain 2.0 and 2.2, if Linus' plan holds you may be maintaining 2.4 by the end of the year. Keeping 3 kernels and their drivers up to date will be hard task, what happens next year if it becomes 4 kernels? But at the same time there is a huge install base of 2.x machines that need support.
In the PC world "specifications" and protocols have been owned by companies since the inception.
On the Internet, RFC's mandate protocols and code evolution determines how things will work.
These two methods are completely at odds with each other. The reason we have an open Internet today is because these standards have been open and easily accessible.
We shouldn't just accept open protocols, we should demand them.
I've had an E*Trade account for a while (yes I know better, but once upon a time E*Trade was the only/cheapest game in town). Anyway, if you want to get in on an IPO here's how it works:
Open an account. Put money in it.
Now, it helps to have traded on E*Trade before because it will presumably give you a better chance of getting in an IPO - however if you got a letter your experience should not matter. If you didn't get a letter, don't open an account and daytrade to get experience. That will probably just look worse. (Flipping on IPO's will ban you from future ones.)
Once the account is open you need to hang out in their "IPO Center" and keep looking at the "Current Offerings.". Red Hat will appear on there at some point. That means you can fill out a form stating the intention of wanting to get in on the IPO.
At that point presumably if you got a letter you will automatically get approved. Otherwise, E*Trade will use things like your current acct. balance, past trade activity, and the amount of shares you want to buy versus the total left to determine if you can get in.
You cannot margin your current account to place an order for an IPO. This is to cover E*Trade's butt.
E*Trade sucks. Open an acct with Datek for normal trading.
You know, usually I like reading Katz's writing. He often makes valid social commentaries. Usually his articles at least give you something to think about.
This one seems just a tad too childish. Yeah Jon, we can all appreciate the throwback to a 60's sit-ins and an uprising of the people. But face it, todays society just isn't like that. Often police will be at or near a theater and contrary to the article they don't feel bad about escorting a whining 13 year-old out the door.
Jon, you left out these other options:
Call in a bomb threat, rush in the movie.
Use a fake id.
Get in a wheelchair, claim to be with the Make a Wish Foundation.
Microsoft certainly has a legitimate concern when it comes to attracting developers. Let's take a common scenario: your average Genius Hacker gets a brilliant idea for an application/utility/tool that no one else has written yet.
Assuming he can scrape together the money to get himself a good Windows development environment (a few boxes running both 95 and NT, various Microsoft developer products - Visual C++, etc) he then has to face:
- working on a platform with a somewhat obtuse API and dealing with it's inconsistencies. At the same time he can make his job MUCH easier by using Microsoft's wonderful classes, thereby tying his soul forever a Windows platform. - but because he's developing on Windows he'll immediately have access to millions of PC users, right? Well, in actuality no. The costs for getting "certified" to run under Windows and getting a PC distributor to give him a chance are pretty slim. - and most importantly, once the product is developed he needs to stave off Microsoft from developing a competing product. Microsoft has gone from sucking up companies to taking "embracing and extending" to an all new level. Let's take this weeks headlines - Microsoft Messenger not only supports ICQ and AIM, but Microsoft's own messaging protocol. What a shocker! While it was once viable to start a company with the hopes of being bought out by MS, now they can play 500 lb gorilla and simply overwhelm the distribution channels any small developer could hope to use.
Compare that to developing on Linux: - free development environment - you no longer have to "hack" your program to accept the OS's limitations - you can actually contact other developers with patches to make their code work properly - multiple toolkits are available - including those that also support Windows - friendly distribution channels
Unfortunately you won't be able to take as many coffee breaks when coding - the OS won't crash during compiling/debugging.
A while ago I needed to do some crazy stuff like this. I put some pieces together that actually worked fairly well.
I used a Multitech 5600 ZDXV voice modem. I highly recommend Multitech's if for no reason other than their no-hassle/no-RMA return policy and 10 year warranty.
Then I used vgetty to handle answering the phone, recording stuff, and decoding DTMF tones.
It all works, make sure you have ALL the vgetty patches. Maybe join the vgetty mail list. If you don't like hacking scripts and crap together you won't enjoy setting this up. vgetty is HIGHLY undocumented.
I had a friend I grew up with who was exceptionally brilliant. He learned to read at a very young age - much of it self taught. As a result he had a very unique reading style and it was really, really fast. He could practically look at a page for a second and then recite large parts of it back (note the "recite" part - he could read it, but comprehension was another issue).
Anyway, early in high school I asked him how he read. From what I gathered, when he looked at a page he didn't see individual words - he saw large blocks of them. When I tried doing what I thought he was doing I noticed it made a huge difference. Instead of reading individual words I read complete prepositional phrases all at once. So in a sentence like "I walked over the hill to the store to return Windows" it reads fast if you break it into "I walked over_the_hill to_the_store to_return_Windows".
I never got as good as my friend - I pretty much have to stop at prepositional phrases. He reads complete sentences all at once. (It must also have something to do with picking out the verb and focusing on it, but I've never been able to figure that out...)
I was somewhat interested in this a while back. What I would suggest doing is:
Read the Bootdisk HOWTO. Read the section on how the "Pros" do it.
Use an existing installation to create a boot and a root disk. Keep experimenting with this boot/root disk combo until you learn the init process pretty well.
Then switch over to another partition on your system - hopefully by this point it will be easy since you could just be building your boot/root disks on it from the beginning - by the time you add the lilo entry to boot that partition you should have all your bugs ironed out.
A couple of years ago I worked on a project when JPL had a call for proposals for sending a probe out there. Really interesting stuff and a lot of design challenges.
One of the mission drivers was to get the probe out there before 2018 or so. At that point Pluto is going to swing out far enough that it's atmosphere of ammonia (or some other nasty gas) is going to collapse back into a solid. Right now we're relatively lucky in that Pluto is at it's closest point in it's orbit - a measly 30 AU's or so. Basically at the end of the report we wrote up we said that a probe has to launch by 2005 or it gets REALLY hard to get it out there in time.
Anyway, two facts compell me to think it has to be a planet (note: either of these by themselves is not enough since they occur in other places in the solar system) 1) it has an atmosphere, 2) it has a moon (or are there two now?) None of the other objects out there or in the Kuiper Belt are known to exhibit those qualities.
Yesterday Tom of Toms Hardware had a little editorial and he ranted a bit about AMD's problem getting the K6-3 out the door. Pretty interesting.
Even more interesting was something a saw a while ago about AMD development. It seems the people working on the K7 are not the same people who worked on the K6. The K6 was developed by the NexGen guys AMD bought out. However, the NexGen guys have already moved on and are working on what will presumably be called the K8. Of course that will be competing in the Merced world, god only knows what that will be like.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh? You hate your job? Why didn't you say so. There's a support group for that. It's called everyone and they meet at the bar."
But seriously.. I work at a ski resort. I've got about 40 days of skiing in so far. So while you might have been sitting at your desk working on Thursday morning, I was busting through 2 feet of powder in Vail's China Bowl. How can I hate a job like this?
We'll now refer to Rob by his Native American name - "Dead Man Walking".
Congrats Rob! Are you planning a webcast? Is it going to be in Tuliptown?
And your best man is probably gonna want a list of strippers in the area:
http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypResults.py?stp=y&stx=2
I suppose I should have qualified that statement with what prompted it. You're right, Christmas can be a great day to ski - it's the least crowded day on the slopes during the holidays.
But today I took 4 runs: On the first chair mom and daughter were complaining they didn't know where dad was. And they didn't know when he was going to stop skiing or where to meet him. On the second chair I met a guy who didn't want to ski with his family because they weren't skiing the tougher terrain. And on the fourth chair I went up with a mother and her son. In that family its a tradition to ski on Christmas - except the rest of the family was in Breckenridge.
So I guess what prompted me to write that was all the people who try to do this wonderful family vacation and spend time with each other - and then don't. To each their own, I'm sure those folks had a great day.
I'm in the same boat - I work at Copper Mtn in Colorado doing telecom/datacom/misc IS stuff. I've always wondered what kind of a freak family gets together to ski on Christmas, but there seems to be enough to fill all of our lodging.
I heard Little Cottonwood canyon got dumped on, how's the snow? What resort are you at?
PS. Wanna trade comp passes?
Just a couple of random thoughts:
jacks/patch panels.
If there's no conduit, perhaps they've just drilled holes in the studs and ran it through, I'd suggest getting some thin flexible smurf tube to lay in. It'll be a lot more work, but the advantage is you'll have a pathway through which you can later add more cable.
My suggestion would be to not lay in fiber now, but have a method for easily adding it later.
I work for a company that operates some large hotel operations. In the past year we've opened approximately 6 major buildings comprised of 400+ units. We custom designed a composite cable that has 2 strands of multimode, 2 co-ax, and 2 cat5e. We had our contractors lay about 6 of those cables in each unit (1 - 3 bedrooms + kitchen, etc) plus a feed back to riser closets. A few years ago we thought it would be overkill, now we're wondering if we should have included more.
There's a web site out there - www.compgeeks.com. They have slightly used laptops (came off corporate lease) that might be a few years old. While I haven't bought a laptop from them I have bought other things - by the way, their customer server SUCKS. They've messed up a few of my orders, overcharged me for other things, and it's taken forever to get situations remedied. However, they are cheap and they do have stuff you won't find too many other places.
Personally I bought a Dell Latitude years ago used and it's been one of the coolest little laptops I've ever had. It was only a P133, but the screen was beautiful, ran Linux like a champ, and had a good battery life. If I was looking to buy I'd find a Dell laptop, used, for about $400. I bet it would rock for a development platform on the go.
-brian.
I spent 3 years evangelizing Linux and getting it installed on a lot of desktops. Is it worth switching? I'd say yes for any small-medium sized company. For any large company it's simply not worth it.
Large companies have large turnover rates and need to hire people and quickly get them up to speed. Large companies also don't notice the extra cost of licensing. I see tens of thousands of dollars thrown away each day on stupid expenditures - why would software licensing matter? Plus, large companies tend to sign contracts with companies like Dell and Compaq for all their desktops - the OS is already there.
Yeah, I used Linux exclusively for 4 years as my desktop. It's still my OS of choice at home. But at work.. well, we have the MS thing going so that's what I use. And you know what? It's not that bad. It works, I can get my work done. I used to have to do programming, and Linux worked well for that. Now I simply use a bunch of canned applications that are peripheral to my job. Windows works ok for that.
Now, if you really think you want to go install Linux on a bunch of secretaries desktops, here's what you need to plan:
Good luck.
Yeah, but gleaning any information from the
BIOS is a crap shoot. Lots of BIOS's are
buggy about reporting, undocumented/underdocumented on calls, and
generally unreliable. Most manufacturers seem
barely test their boards before kicking them out
the door. They figure if they can do the handoff
to the OS then good enough. And troubleshooting
this stuff is a frustrating.
When I was in school I worked at the UMich Space Physics Lab. I also took a grad level Aerospace design course that was writing a paper (er.. book) in response to a JPL RFP for a Pluto mission.
We found out a lot of interesting things. Probably the most relative to this article is that we did it all with a $200 million budget cap - including the launch vehicle (Delta II - which had just suffered 2 explosions in Motorola launches).
If I remember correctly we figured a minimum mission time of 6 years to Pluto and a max of 18 with the optimal being around 14 or so. The launch date had to be before 2005 I think too. Anyway, Pluto's atmosphere is going to collapse in something like 2015 and if we don't get there before then it makes it nearly impossible to be able to do a lot of the main science objectives.
Also interesting is that our data rate using a 2.5m antenna and receiving on the deep space network (before the upgrades of the last few years) would have been about 240bps. Bits.. not kilobits. It would have taken about 9 months collect 2GB (bits or bytes... I forget what it was..)
It's all done in hardware, so there's no special windows drivers needed and works great with Linux. They sell the cordless mouse separately, but IMNSHO the best part is the keyboard.
Other niceties: the mouse is 3 button, the keyboard has a nice feel, and the batteries last about 4 - 5 months for me.
Next to the 25W amp and equalizer that fits in a 5.25" bay, it's the coolest hardware I have.
Up until a few months ago I was doing some sys admin work. At the time I was pretty happy with the way I set up systems, and I still think they were reasonably secure. However, articles like this have convinced me the best way to have peace of mind is to set up OpenBSD firewalls.
Is Linux more secure than other operating systems? Yes. Is it easy to shoot yourself in the foot and make the system easy to exploit? Definitely. There's an excellent article over at Security Focus that every Linux sys admin must read.
Of course if there were no users, user accounts, or traffic on the wire I'd feel even better.
I moved out here to Summit County, Colorado this past winter. This place makes Silicon Valley look like a housing mecca.
Don't get me wrong, the benefits are great. Within 10 minutes of my house are 4 world class ski resorts (Keystone, Copper, A Basin, Breck) and Vail, Beaver Creek, and Winter Park are about a half hour away.
But try to buy any property here and you'll find yourself staring at an unpayable mortgage. $250,000 might get you a two bedroom condo. (But don't forget the additional monthly condo fees.)
Now, keep in mind that Silicon Valley, Manhattan and all other wonderful high rent districts have actual jobs that pay beaucoup bucks. All we have here is a seasonal tourist industry that relies on skiing in the winter and golf in the summer. They just opened an Internet Cafe in Breckenridge, that's about it for high tech jobs. (I'd be shocked if I could find a Linux user up here.) I'd love to find a tech job, but I'll settle for my hourly wage at the ski resort.
That's the price I pay to ski a hundred some days of the year and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
We were told a few years ago Unixware was the way of the future and the OpenServer lines would be completely phased out. In reality Unixware really only comes into play on the high-end. There's too much overhead with Unixware to justify using it for small server tasks that SCO is typically used for. Will we continue to see Openserver on the low-end? If it continues to be around, will we see integration with Linux like support in each for the other's filesystems? Will we see other products like VisionFS or Taratella ported to Linux? (Not that I'd use VisionFS, Samba is much better). What about the SCO Skunkware stuff? In the past a SCO server was virtually unusable without all of the unsupported GNU utilities, will they continue to be left out of the installation process and unsupported? Even necessary items like gzip?
And what about desktops.. I heard a laughable claim a few years ago about OpenServer products wanting to take over the desktop. Will you replace the horrid window manager with something like GNOME or KDE? Will you contribute any drivers to OSS projects like XFree86 or even the Linux kernel?
While the finding of fact greatly increases the
change of a lawsuit against Microsoft getting
damages awarded, most of us (including small
companies) could never afford to do such a thing.
However, class action suits were designed for
such instances. Do you feel there will be class
action suits against Microsoft and how will they
affect Slashdot readers? What is the precedent
for such action in monopoly cases?
Linus has promised shorter development times between new kernel series.
What I want to know is do you think this will be hard on you and how do you think you'll handle it?
Currently you maintain 2.0 and 2.2, if Linus' plan holds you may be maintaining 2.4 by the end of the year. Keeping 3 kernels and their drivers up to date will be hard task, what happens next year if it becomes 4 kernels? But at the same time there is a huge install base of 2.x machines that need support.
In the PC world "specifications" and protocols have been owned by companies since the inception.
On the Internet, RFC's mandate protocols and code evolution determines how things will work.
These two methods are completely at odds with each other. The reason we have an open Internet today is because these standards have been open and easily accessible.
We shouldn't just accept open protocols, we should demand them.
I've had an E*Trade account for a while (yes I know better, but once upon a time E*Trade was the only/cheapest game in town). Anyway, if you want to get in on an IPO here's how it works:
E*Trade sucks. Open an acct with Datek for normal trading.
You know, usually I like reading Katz's writing. He often makes valid social commentaries. Usually his articles at least give you something to think about.
This one seems just a tad too childish. Yeah Jon, we can all appreciate the throwback to a 60's sit-ins and an uprising of the people. But face it, todays society just isn't like that. Often police will be at or near a theater and contrary to the article they don't feel bad about escorting a whining 13 year-old out the door.
Jon, you left out these other options:
Microsoft certainly has a legitimate concern when it comes to attracting developers. Let's take a common scenario: your average Genius Hacker gets a brilliant idea for an application/utility/tool that no one else has written yet.
Assuming he can scrape together the money to get himself a good Windows development environment (a few boxes running both 95 and NT, various Microsoft developer products - Visual C++, etc) he then has to face:
- working on a platform with a somewhat obtuse API and dealing with it's inconsistencies. At the same time he can make his job MUCH easier by using Microsoft's wonderful classes, thereby tying his soul forever a Windows platform.
- but because he's developing on Windows he'll immediately have access to millions of PC users, right? Well, in actuality no. The costs for getting "certified" to run under Windows and getting a PC distributor to give him a chance are pretty slim.
- and most importantly, once the product is developed he needs to stave off Microsoft from developing a competing product. Microsoft has gone from sucking up companies to taking "embracing and extending" to an all new level. Let's take this weeks headlines - Microsoft Messenger not only supports ICQ and AIM, but Microsoft's own messaging protocol. What a shocker! While it was once viable to start a company with the hopes of being bought out by MS, now they can play 500 lb gorilla and simply overwhelm the distribution channels any small developer could hope to use.
Compare that to developing on Linux:
- free development environment
- you no longer have to "hack" your program to accept the OS's limitations - you can actually contact other developers with patches to make their code work properly
- multiple toolkits are available - including those that also support Windows
- friendly distribution channels
Unfortunately you won't be able to take as many coffee breaks when coding - the OS won't crash during compiling/debugging.
A while ago I needed to do some crazy stuff like this. I put some pieces together that actually worked fairly well.
I used a Multitech 5600 ZDXV voice modem. I
highly recommend Multitech's if for no reason
other than their no-hassle/no-RMA return policy
and 10 year warranty.
Then I used vgetty to handle answering the phone,
recording stuff, and decoding DTMF tones.
It all works, make sure you have ALL the vgetty
patches. Maybe join the vgetty mail list. If
you don't like hacking scripts and crap together
you won't enjoy setting this up. vgetty is
HIGHLY undocumented.
I had a friend I grew up with who was exceptionally brilliant. He learned to read at a very young age - much of it self taught. As a result he had a very unique reading style and it was really, really fast. He could practically look at a page for a second and then recite large parts of it back (note the "recite" part - he could read it, but comprehension was another issue).
Anyway, early in high school I asked him how he read. From what I gathered, when he looked at a page he didn't see individual words - he saw large blocks of them. When I tried doing what I thought he was doing I noticed it made a huge difference. Instead of reading individual words I read complete prepositional phrases all at once. So in a sentence like "I walked over the hill to the store to return Windows" it reads fast if you break it into "I walked over_the_hill to_the_store to_return_Windows".
I never got as good as my friend - I pretty much have to stop at prepositional phrases. He reads complete sentences all at once. (It must also have something to do with picking out the verb and focusing on it, but I've never been able to figure that out...)
Spend $2000 on some decent computer (PPC, i386).
Put it together if you want to feel good about
yourself.
Take the other $3000 and plan a trip around the
world.
A couple of years ago I worked on a project when JPL had a call for proposals for sending a probe out there. Really interesting stuff and a lot of design challenges.
One of the mission drivers was to get the probe out there before 2018 or so. At that point Pluto is going to swing out far enough that it's atmosphere of ammonia (or some other nasty gas) is going to collapse back into a solid. Right now we're relatively lucky in that Pluto is at it's closest point in it's orbit - a measly 30 AU's or so. Basically at the end of the report we wrote up we said that a probe has to launch by 2005 or it gets REALLY hard to get it out there in time.
Anyway, two facts compell me to think it has to be a planet (note: either of these by themselves is not enough since they occur in other places in the solar system) 1) it has an atmosphere, 2) it has a moon (or are there two now?) None of the other objects out there or in the Kuiper Belt are known to exhibit those qualities.
Yesterday Tom of Toms Hardware had a little editorial and he ranted a bit about AMD's problem getting the K6-3 out the door. Pretty interesting.
Even more interesting was something a saw a while ago about AMD development. It seems the people working on the K7 are not the same people who worked on the K6. The K6 was developed by the NexGen guys AMD bought out. However, the NexGen guys have already moved on and are working on what will presumably be called the K8. Of course that will be competing in the Merced world, god only knows what that will be like.