I'm in Montana. This is a huge problem for us. So I've got 3 words for you: Rural Telephone Cooperative. Our local coop is 3 Rivers, ( www.3rivers.net ), and they really suck. To their credit, they face some challenging problems, however their stunningly craptacular customer service has no excuse. Here's some of the challenges we face to give you an idea:
An Internet T1, the best service we can get, costs $1200/month. Our other choice is 512k DSL for $100/month.
We need to do point-to-point T1's to the nearest major city. Well, that city happens to not be serviced by the coop, they actually have Qwest for a local loop. So we have to cross local loop carriers and it also happens to cross a LATA. So a point-to-point T1 can cost up to $2900/month.
We're doing a major construction project 5 miles beyond the end of the phone line. We'd really like to tie that into the main project via fiber. The local telco wants to charge us $600,000+ for that plus they'll make us pay monthly for the service on top of it. For those of you not familiar with infrastructure costs, that's about 6 - 7 times what it should be.
E911 service? Nope, don't have it.
rural telephone coops are exempted from the access regulations in the 1996 act that would let a CLEC move in
Well, the blurb for this article is confusing 2 different things - ODF's relevance and Microsoft's dominance. I'll put on my IT Director hat and toss in my $.02.
There's some big News To Me in this article and I wish the open source community would do a better job of informing the rest of the world of this crap. This article mentions that Microsoft's OOXML format can't be implemented by other vendors. What?!?!? That's News To Me. I'm sure the article is right, but frankly, I don't keep my nose to grindstone enough to follow this kind of religious news any more and it's the first time I've heard MS restricts who can implement this file format. It also says it's an import-only format that's basically junk. Really? I didn't know that and I just assumed that the format was reasonable and worked. Can the rest of the world's new organizations please make a big deal out of those facts?
OOXML is crap and ODF works. That's important and I didn't know it.
Now, let's look at Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace. I guarantee you that every IT Director in the world is figuring out how to get OpenOffice in the door and figuring out what role it can play. When I look at my budget for the year I want eradicate any line item having to do with licensing. Realistic? No. Can we cut back on things? Hell yeah. We don't need every PC in this company having a copy of MS Office. For us, Outlook is a bitch, but the Exchange web client is pretty good. Visio and Project are tough ones, but not everyone uses it. Some people have custom integration with Excel, but those people are also a minority. Oh, and there's the religious thing with using free software, that's nice to me and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
So when you look at the landscape, the single biggest obstacle appears to be document formats.
And really, I know that's not even much of a concern. We already rely on the MS document formats as being the default. Maybe if ODF is so good we should consider switching our default formats now. Maybe that should be the first step in our migration. I could care less who came up with the document standard as long as the documents open and do what I expect them to do.
I gotta say, I always take this kind of stuff with a grain of salt. As an IT manager (director, or whatever the hell you want to call it) I've got a little perspective on it.
There's quite a few projects that we arguably start (probably even close to the figures quoted) that we don't finish. They're not failures, often I (me, not the department or project managers) had no intention of completing them anyway. Here's why some don't get done:
1. I can't get it past the budget process. There's a time and place to pick your battles. Maybe throwing HR's new whiz-bang software project under the bus to make the operations manager's project swim along is worth it. It doesn't mean HR's project is a failure.
2. We start a project to investigate a new technology. Hey - sometimes (dare I say most of the time?) the new stuff doesn't work as advertised. Sure, we've got an older 802.11b network running side-by-side our 802.11g. We looked at ripping it out and starting to get into the 802.11n, but it's not worth it right now. But the exposure to 802.11n was worth it. We'll revisit it next year (when Cisco gets an n product.)
3. The "nice to do" list also creates some "failures". Boy, right now we need a strong asset tracking system. Well, screw it. We can track the licenses on paper as we've been doing. We've got more important things to worry about.
However, the shit that needs to get done, gets done. That new accounting system? Hell yeah we're going to get that right.
Yup. People overdesigning their drive systems are likely first time sys admins. There's a time and a place for complicated drive mechanisms and your porn collection is not one of them. I'd just do software RAID 1 with a possible backup to an external USB hard drive. NAS devices are cheap and interesting too.
Ask the Wine developers. I'm sure there's hundreds of examples of issues.
One thing to do would be to compare the msys headers with the wine headers. msys only contains publically documented interfaces, wine contains everything that's actually required.
First, whatever you think of money right now will likely change when you get a real job. If a thousand dollars is a lot right now, it'll be just a short-term loss after you graduate.
So here's what I'll suggest.. I'm sure people will hate this idea, but I did something similar and it worked out well. This is a gamble, I wouldn't do it myself, but you're young and can easily get over a loss.
First, try to make some money. Make it in a safe way. Invest in a growth mutual fund with a strong performance record. Try to shoot for 10% in earnings. Maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be 20%. Go for a no-load fund, don't pay brokerage fees. Maybe one of those popular real estate stocks would work as well.
Next, be prepared to lose it all. You can get over it if you're willing to play a little game with credit cards. Take out a huge cash advance on one card and immediately transfer it to a 0% card.
Dumb idea? It saved me $3000 when I did it based on what I would have had to pay in interest and financing fees on a loan.
We don't like you. You don't play well with the other children on the playground. We think you're mean and we're not going to let you play dodgeball with us at recess.
Besides that, your products are pretty awful. The only redeeming quality of Caldera Linux was that it was based on RedHat. That made it really easy to completely dump your distribution and go to RedHat when you guys got out of the Linux game. Your OpenServer product is the the most god awful piece of crap ever sold. It's so painful to work on that I'd rather just gouge out my eyes with a spoon.
I offer this topic so all threads on it can be put below:
What does Sun need to do to succeed?
From what I've seen in my past 12 years in IT, Sun has been about 80% on the money. They've succeeded in some wonderful areas and are one of the few companies that can still churn out their CPU architectures despite the best efforts of Motorola, Intel, and AMD to put them out of business. They've developed Java which has been a success as well as OS components like NFS.
Despite all that, the company has really screwed up. I don't think they did a good job advocating Java or buying the mindshare of the development community. Most sys admins would still rather use Linux and all the cool toys it comes with compared to Solaris. Sun is just cool enough that you want to use it, but you'd never recommend it to your friends.
I'll throw out the first salvo: the best thing for Sun at this point would be for Schwartz to step down at the same time. McNealy was a likable guy and he cast Sun in a good light (no pun intended.) Schwartz seems to backpeddle and tends to alienate communities that genuinely want to help the company succeed.
I thought their choices were pretty good, but they completely screwed up with the reasoning behind the selections. Here's my take on it:
1. Software engineer Congratulations, no one really knows what you do. As a software engineer you have carte blanche to fuck off. Don't like what you're working on? Tell your employer it'll take two years and 10 people to accomplish. No one will know the difference. Just remember, 10 minutes of inspiration gets more accomplished than a strong work ethic.
2. College professor Congratulations, you figured out how to never leave college. Rather than figuring out how the real world operates you get to tell future generations how you wished it worked. It's the only job in the world where you can bang 18 year-olds for the rest of your life and simply be called 'eccentric'.
3. Financial advisor Congratulations, you figured out how to be a criminal that gets a salary. Because, hey, no one really goes to jail for white collar crimes. Scraping a few pennies worth of commission from every trade is not only legal, it's expected. The best part: the only qualifications are you need is the ability to use Excel and wear a shit-eating grin. It's possibly the only job in the world where someone else will take a fall for your dirty deeds. Think Enron.
4. Human resource management Congratulations, you're so good at covering your ass a company has hired you to cover theirs. When most people get frustrated at work they put their head down and mutter obscenities. Instead, you have the opportunity to fire the asshole who pissed you off. Furthermore, if you don't like your benefit package you can create your own.
5. Physician's assistant Congratulations, you found a cover for being an escort. We all know you bought the nurse's outfit first and found the job second. Working bankers' hours gives you the ability to pursue more lucrative opportunities on the side.
6. Market research analyst Congratulations, you figured out how to remove the stress and anxiety from marketing leaving you with pool parties and martinis. As an analyst, you get to try new products and impress your friends with the latest in cell phone technology. The best part: you'll still make plenty of money to pursue your coke habit.
7. Computer IT analyst Congratulations, you figured out how to get a lucrative job in the IT market without any technical knowledge. As a translator between real people and the geeks you'll be revered by both. The real people will invite you to after work parties and give you an escape from nerddom. The geeks will be so thankful you've removed human interaction from their job they may let you play with their dual-core superpiplined hyperthreaded 64-bit processors.
8. Real estate appraiser Congratulations, you've discovered the single career more criminal than financial advisor. You have more angles than a protractor. Not only do you get kickbacks, you have a waiting line. As if banks, insurers, and developers weren't enough, now you have every government agency on the Gulf Coast wanting to give you money for a job they've already done. Just remember, banks have to report every transaction over $10,000.
9. Pharmacist Congratulations, you're a licensed drug dealer. You're college buddies are now serving mandatory minimums for selling a few tabs of acid at a Widespread show. Meanwhile, you're doling out Valium and Vicodin on a daily basis to the doctors' wives. If the people making the drugs have a stock symbol, it can't be that bad, right?
10. Psychologist Congratulations, you found a way to get paid for kissing ass. This whole career was developed by a genius who figured out there was money to be made by telling codependents everything they wanted to hear. You have that special knack for convincing people their friends are wrong when they 'Get over it.'
Don't think of voice recognition on computers - that's so 1990's.
First off, I think patents like this are evil, and though I haven't read the details I suspect it's written broadly.
This patent applies to telephony and devices that haven't been invented yet. How slick would it be to integrate your browser on your cell phone with Google's services? Think about the integration with Asterisk you could do. You could have Google provide driving directions based on your spoken input. Want a picture of your favorite porn star? Say the name into Google and you could send a pic to your PDA.
The problem right now is speech recognition. Nuance is the best game in town and they're damn expensive. What Google (and the world!) needs is an open source speech recognition engine. (We're talking engines, not those cute, cuddly Naturally Speaking-like toys.) Then you can build server side apps relying on voice - say build it into every Asterisk server, into Vonage's network, etc. Those servers receive the voice requests and make the search query over the Internet to Google using a custom API. Google returns the result to them and they figure out what to do. This makes the infrastructure overhead negligible for Google and puts the burden of application development on others.
There's more you can do than just boycott RIAA labels. Here's some ideas:
1. Write your congressman - you can even do it via email. Follow this link for a really simple way to do that. Will they listen? If enough of you complain they will. (Don't be negative and say democracy doesn't work.)
2. When you talk to your friends, let them know this is going on. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't know about this issue. The more people you tell, the more this becomes an issue.
3. This stuff is making the mainstream news. When you see this issue come up in a newspaper, write a letter to the editor about it. More people read letters to the editor than articles in the paper. Tell people the ideas in this message to get them to not support RIAA.
4. Complain on artist websites and give artists bad press. Not planning on buying the latest Bruce Springsteen CD? Why don't you write him and tell him you're not doing it because he's on a RIAA label. Big artists are not "victims" of decisions by their labels.
5. Buy indie labels and let people know you're buying indie labels.
6. Buy a t-shirt about this. Here's some to choose from: #1, #2, and #3
Your other alternative is to not give a fuck like everyone else. Everyone has to have their issue and maybe this one isn't yours. Hopefully I've given you some ideas for getting involved about something though.
Years ago I realized I had terrible luck with stocks. I learned all kinds of stuff like P/E ratios, etc, etc. But more than anything, I just had bad luck. Well, it's been quite a few years since I've invested directly in a stock. I had some cash laying around in a money market and decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy some Google stock - mostly because I really believe in what they do. Well, that was when the stock was at $390 (60x earnings... ow) Therefore I'm certain you can all blame me for the recent performance.
All the comments I read in this thread are dead on. I'm going to add some things that weren't suggested and elaborate on some others:
1) The best thing you can do to ensure call quality is to start with good phones. I've used a bunch of them and so far I like the Polycom's the best. The SoundPoint IP 301 (2-line) and 601's (6-line) are great quality with a nice price point. I'm sure the Cisco's are great too. Sipura's are a nice price point as well and have some good features. Use ATA's only where absolutely necessary.
2) Remember that modems and fax lines might be a bit of a hassle.
3) If you don't need Power over Ethernet you can save some $$$. The side effect is no phones in a power outage and more cords to deal with.
4) If your internal infrastructure doesn't have enough data cables you'll want to get phones with integrated switches.
5) I'd suggest going with a SIP based system. Cisco's MGCP seems to be falling out of favor and you have a lot more choices with SIP.
6) Having said that, I love Asterisk. It works great. Asterisk @ Home is the best way to get up and running.
7) Is call accounting a high priority? If so, you may need to carefully evaluate that before proceeding.
8) Are you connecting multiple sites? IP trunks are the way to go.
9) Provision your inbound/outbound via normal PSTN trunks. Either single-line (1FB's) pots lines or a T1. If you want inbound caller ID and other good stuff, I'd go with PRI's. Or, set up tie trunks to your existing system.
10) Don't rule out a traditional TDM solution. Some of the basic switches on the market these days are incredibly cheap. Mitel's are one such example.
11) Outline the features you need in a phone/system before installing it. Some things, such as shared (bridged) line appearances are incredibly difficult in VOIP systems.
Well, one thing that comes to mind are two different major telco's I deal with. I have a great working relationship with both of the companies. (I'll give you a hint, one starts with a "V" and the other with a "Q".) I've done things with both of these companies you should never be able to get away with. I'm not doing it illegally - I could get permission from the folks who actually want the work done. However, neither of these carriers asks for enough identifying information to be useful. We have backchannel phone numbers into God-Knows-Who call centers. If we need a line to be moved, we just provide addresses and phone numbers. Once in a while we'll get hassled a bit, but it's just a matter of giving a line of BS to get past them.
In the event we need something strange done, we have reps we work with. If we asked for some info on the account, such as a SSN, I wouldn't be surprised if the reps would quietly provide it.
So, don't give your SSN to utilities folks. Your electric company doesn't need it.
I've been doing some side work for a small reseller. We're using MySQL on the low-end product.. fortunately I did some testing with Postgres last month and realized it would work equally well.
Looks like on Tuesday we'll begin the formal switch to Postgres. I have no sympathy for any company forming a partnership with SCO.
In 1997 I was senior at the University of Michigan and we completed an entire RFP that JPL (I think, or perhaps NASA in general) had out on this mission.
Being the only EE in the class, it fell to me to design the complete communications system for it.
I wish I had an electronic document of the whole thing, it makes for fascinating reading. I just pulled it out of my closet to compare notes after reading about the mission. Our RFP weighs in at 175+ pages.
Our proposal is very close on several key design elements. We proposed a 452kg spacecraft - damn close to the final weight. I see that the actual mission calls for a 2.1m dish, which is close the 2m dish I proposed using a total of 82W DC (including transponders, SSPA, etc). We designed the mission using a Delta rocket to lower the cost and achieve a decent altitude.
We figured a total of 200MB of compressed science data would need to be transmitted back to complete the objectives at the time. They don't seem to have changed much, so that means a minimum data rate of 514bps is required to transmit the data to one DSN over 6 months. Using two 34 dishes of the DSN gets an average rate of about 900bps.
In other words, I'm thrilled our original design has held up. We actually proposed a NSTAR ion engine rather than LTG's, but it's great NASA went with the LTG. You get a shitload more power, and that's awesome. Especially considering they missed the launch window for an ion engine.
Well, you can do the opposite as well - run IE on Linux using Wine and have the rendering done via Gecko. Here's Jacek's screenshots of that: http://www.lo3.wroc.pl/~jcaban/wine-ie/
No, that wouldn't work at all since anyone could just manually add the key. Identifying the key is a perfectly valid way of doing it and likely won't change at this point. (The fact that it did change back in June was merely the consequence of it being on the to-do list for two years.)
Anyway, this check was specifically added to prevent Wine from downloading Windows applications. The key here is people who use Wine may already have a legal version of Windows and therefore Microsoft is deliberately tying applications to their operating system.
Applications tied to operating systems? Isn't that an antitrust violation? The answer lies somewhere in the age-old question: at what point does a Windows "enhancement" become an application?
The only reason it still works is because Wine just went through some massive changes with regard to configuration. The WGA check works by checking for specific registry keys that Wine uses. The new configuration moved those keys from HKLM to HKCU. It's just a matter of time before they change the check they use. The position of Alexandre is that we're not going to play the insane game of working around their workarounds.
The good news is, there's not much reason any more to need the WGA. We've got a new DCOM and MSI framework that makes those two downloads largely irrelevant. Jacek Caban is hard at work integrating a Gecko engine into Wine as part the MSHTML.DLL (usually referred to as "Internet Explorer" on Windows.) So native Windows DLL's are falling by the wayside.
Of course, Microsoft got so much bad press over the WGA check that I wonder if they'd tempt it all again. Last time it raised the ire of eWeek and PC Magazine, so I imagine the next round will just be more bad press. Headline: "Giant software company continues to squash open source software"
obPlug: Wine is slated for a beta release in a little over a month.
Bring a tub of legos. Not the fancy stuff, just simple rectangular blocks. Before the presentation, prep the foundation of a house using the blocks. Then during the presentation, pass the house around with the tub of blocks and ask everyone to add something to it until you have a simple house-like structure.
When you're done, point out that everyone working together can produce something. Usually it takes someone with some inspiration to start it. The community built the rest. When you're done, you can clearly see the work involved. Someone else could look at it and make a copy or disassemble it to see the individual blocks that make it up.
That's source code.
While you're passing around the legos, show >> EYE CANDY . Show some awesome 3D stuff, show a web browser, OpenOffice, Word running under Wine, etc. All the common stuff they would expect a computer to be. (DON'T SHOW SOURCE CODE - EYES WILL GLAZE OVER.)
Bonus points for showing off the corporate Intranet. The big challenge is always breaking the mindset of, "Open source is great, but it can't work here."
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I'm in Montana. This is a huge problem for us. So I've got 3 words for you: Rural Telephone Cooperative. Our local coop is 3 Rivers, ( www.3rivers.net ), and they really suck. To their credit, they face some challenging problems, however their stunningly craptacular customer service has no excuse. Here's some of the challenges we face to give you an idea:
Well, the blurb for this article is confusing 2 different things - ODF's relevance and Microsoft's dominance. I'll put on my IT Director hat and toss in my $.02.
There's some big News To Me in this article and I wish the open source community would do a better job of informing the rest of the world of this crap. This article mentions that Microsoft's OOXML format can't be implemented by other vendors. What?!?!? That's News To Me. I'm sure the article is right, but frankly, I don't keep my nose to grindstone enough to follow this kind of religious news any more and it's the first time I've heard MS restricts who can implement this file format. It also says it's an import-only format that's basically junk. Really? I didn't know that and I just assumed that the format was reasonable and worked. Can the rest of the world's new organizations please make a big deal out of those facts?
OOXML is crap and ODF works. That's important and I didn't know it.
Now, let's look at Microsoft's dominance in the marketplace. I guarantee you that every IT Director in the world is figuring out how to get OpenOffice in the door and figuring out what role it can play. When I look at my budget for the year I want eradicate any line item having to do with licensing. Realistic? No. Can we cut back on things? Hell yeah. We don't need every PC in this company having a copy of MS Office. For us, Outlook is a bitch, but the Exchange web client is pretty good. Visio and Project are tough ones, but not everyone uses it. Some people have custom integration with Excel, but those people are also a minority. Oh, and there's the religious thing with using free software, that's nice to me and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
So when you look at the landscape, the single biggest obstacle appears to be document formats.
And really, I know that's not even much of a concern. We already rely on the MS document formats as being the default. Maybe if ODF is so good we should consider switching our default formats now. Maybe that should be the first step in our migration. I could care less who came up with the document standard as long as the documents open and do what I expect them to do.
I gotta say, I always take this kind of stuff with a grain of salt. As an IT manager (director, or whatever the hell you want to call it) I've got a little perspective on it.
There's quite a few projects that we arguably start (probably even close to the figures quoted) that we don't finish. They're not failures, often I (me, not the department or project managers) had no intention of completing them anyway. Here's why some don't get done:
1. I can't get it past the budget process. There's a time and place to pick your battles. Maybe throwing HR's new whiz-bang software project under the bus to make the operations manager's project swim along is worth it. It doesn't mean HR's project is a failure.
2. We start a project to investigate a new technology. Hey - sometimes (dare I say most of the time?) the new stuff doesn't work as advertised. Sure, we've got an older 802.11b network running side-by-side our 802.11g. We looked at ripping it out and starting to get into the 802.11n, but it's not worth it right now. But the exposure to 802.11n was worth it. We'll revisit it next year (when Cisco gets an n product.)
3. The "nice to do" list also creates some "failures". Boy, right now we need a strong asset tracking system. Well, screw it. We can track the licenses on paper as we've been doing. We've got more important things to worry about.
However, the shit that needs to get done, gets done. That new accounting system? Hell yeah we're going to get that right.
Yup. People overdesigning their drive systems are likely first time sys admins. There's a time and a place for complicated drive mechanisms and your porn collection is not one of them. I'd just do software RAID 1 with a possible backup to an external USB hard drive. NAS devices are cheap and interesting too.
Ask the Wine developers. I'm sure there's hundreds of examples of issues.
One thing to do would be to compare the msys headers with the wine headers. msys only contains publically documented interfaces, wine contains everything that's actually required.
First, whatever you think of money right now will likely change when you get a real job. If a thousand dollars is a lot right now, it'll be just a short-term loss after you graduate.
So here's what I'll suggest.. I'm sure people will hate this idea, but I did something similar and it worked out well. This is a gamble, I wouldn't do it myself, but you're young and can easily get over a loss.
First, try to make some money. Make it in a safe way. Invest in a growth mutual fund with a strong performance record. Try to shoot for 10% in earnings. Maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be 20%. Go for a no-load fund, don't pay brokerage fees. Maybe one of those popular real estate stocks would work as well.
Next, be prepared to lose it all. You can get over it if you're willing to play a little game with credit cards. Take out a huge cash advance on one card and immediately transfer it to a 0% card.
Dumb idea? It saved me $3000 when I did it based on what I would have had to pay in interest and financing fees on a loan.
Dear SCO:
We don't like you. You don't play well with the other children on the playground. We think you're mean and we're not going to let you play dodgeball with us at recess.
Besides that, your products are pretty awful. The only redeeming quality of Caldera Linux was that it was based on RedHat. That made it really easy to completely dump your distribution and go to RedHat when you guys got out of the Linux game. Your OpenServer product is the the most god awful piece of crap ever sold. It's so painful to work on that I'd rather just gouge out my eyes with a spoon.
Please just go away.
I offer this topic so all threads on it can be put below:
From what I've seen in my past 12 years in IT, Sun has been about 80% on the money. They've succeeded in some wonderful areas and are one of the few companies that can still churn out their CPU architectures despite the best efforts of Motorola, Intel, and AMD to put them out of business. They've developed Java which has been a success as well as OS components like NFS.
Despite all that, the company has really screwed up. I don't think they did a good job advocating Java or buying the mindshare of the development community. Most sys admins would still rather use Linux and all the cool toys it comes with compared to Solaris. Sun is just cool enough that you want to use it, but you'd never recommend it to your friends.
I'll throw out the first salvo: the best thing for Sun at this point would be for Schwartz to step down at the same time. McNealy was a likable guy and he cast Sun in a good light (no pun intended.) Schwartz seems to backpeddle and tends to alienate communities that genuinely want to help the company succeed.
I've been wanting to know about this for years! Please, someone share your knowledge of writing grants and potential sources.
Step #1 seems to be getting non-profit org status (probably meaning a 501c3 filing). Step #2 is to start the begging process.
Personally, I'd like to get some $$$ for the Wine project. I want to apply to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I thought their choices were pretty good, but they completely screwed up with the reasoning behind the selections. Here's my take on it:
1. Software engineer
Congratulations, no one really knows what you do. As a software engineer you have carte blanche to fuck off. Don't like what you're working on? Tell your employer it'll take two years and 10 people to accomplish. No one will know the difference. Just remember, 10 minutes of inspiration gets more accomplished than a strong work ethic.
2. College professor
Congratulations, you figured out how to never leave college. Rather than figuring out how the real world operates you get to tell future generations how you wished it worked. It's the only job in the world where you can bang 18 year-olds for the rest of your life and simply be called 'eccentric'.
3. Financial advisor
Congratulations, you figured out how to be a criminal that gets a salary. Because, hey, no one really goes to jail for white collar crimes. Scraping a few pennies worth of commission from every trade is not only legal, it's expected. The best part: the only qualifications are you need is the ability to use Excel and wear a shit-eating grin. It's possibly the only job in the world where someone else will take a fall for your dirty deeds. Think Enron.
4. Human resource management
Congratulations, you're so good at covering your ass a company has hired you to cover theirs. When most people get frustrated at work they put their head down and mutter obscenities. Instead, you have the opportunity to fire the asshole who pissed you off. Furthermore, if you don't like your benefit package you can create your own.
5. Physician's assistant
Congratulations, you found a cover for being an escort. We all know you bought the nurse's outfit first and found the job second. Working bankers' hours gives you the ability to pursue more lucrative opportunities on the side.
6. Market research analyst
Congratulations, you figured out how to remove the stress and anxiety from marketing leaving you with pool parties and martinis. As an analyst, you get to try new products and impress your friends with the latest in cell phone technology. The best part: you'll still make plenty of money to pursue your coke habit.
7. Computer IT analyst
Congratulations, you figured out how to get a lucrative job in the IT market without any technical knowledge. As a translator between real people and the geeks you'll be revered by both. The real people will invite you to after work parties and give you an escape from nerddom. The geeks will be so thankful you've removed human interaction from their job they may let you play with their dual-core superpiplined hyperthreaded 64-bit processors.
8. Real estate appraiser
Congratulations, you've discovered the single career more criminal than financial advisor. You have more angles than a protractor. Not only do you get kickbacks, you have a waiting line. As if banks, insurers, and developers weren't enough, now you have every government agency on the Gulf Coast wanting to give you money for a job they've already done. Just remember, banks have to report every transaction over $10,000.
9. Pharmacist
Congratulations, you're a licensed drug dealer. You're college buddies are now serving mandatory minimums for selling a few tabs of acid at a Widespread show. Meanwhile, you're doling out Valium and Vicodin on a daily basis to the doctors' wives. If the people making the drugs have a stock symbol, it can't be that bad, right?
10. Psychologist
Congratulations, you found a way to get paid for kissing ass. This whole career was developed by a genius who figured out there was money to be made by telling codependents everything they wanted to hear. You have that special knack for convincing people their friends are wrong when they 'Get over it.'
Don't think of voice recognition on computers - that's so 1990's.
First off, I think patents like this are evil, and though I haven't read the details I suspect it's written broadly.
This patent applies to telephony and devices that haven't been invented yet. How slick would it be to integrate your browser on your cell phone with Google's services? Think about the integration with Asterisk you could do. You could have Google provide driving directions based on your spoken input. Want a picture of your favorite porn star? Say the name into Google and you could send a pic to your PDA.
The problem right now is speech recognition. Nuance is the best game in town and they're damn expensive. What Google (and the world!) needs is an open source speech recognition engine. (We're talking engines, not those cute, cuddly Naturally Speaking-like toys.) Then you can build server side apps relying on voice - say build it into every Asterisk server, into Vonage's network, etc. Those servers receive the voice requests and make the search query over the Internet to Google using a custom API. Google returns the result to them and they figure out what to do. This makes the infrastructure overhead negligible for Google and puts the burden of application development on others.
There's more you can do than just boycott RIAA labels. Here's some ideas:
1. Write your congressman - you can even do it via email. Follow this link for a really simple way to do that. Will they listen? If enough of you complain they will. (Don't be negative and say democracy doesn't work.)
2. When you talk to your friends, let them know this is going on. Believe it or not, a lot of people don't know about this issue. The more people you tell, the more this becomes an issue.
3. This stuff is making the mainstream news. When you see this issue come up in a newspaper, write a letter to the editor about it. More people read letters to the editor than articles in the paper. Tell people the ideas in this message to get them to not support RIAA.
4. Complain on artist websites and give artists bad press. Not planning on buying the latest Bruce Springsteen CD? Why don't you write him and tell him you're not doing it because he's on a RIAA label. Big artists are not "victims" of decisions by their labels.
5. Buy indie labels and let people know you're buying indie labels.
6. Buy a t-shirt about this. Here's some to choose from:
#1, #2, and #3
Your other alternative is to not give a fuck like everyone else. Everyone has to have their issue and maybe this one isn't yours. Hopefully I've given you some ideas for getting involved about something though.
Here's some details from this week's Wine Weekly News regarding Wine's involvement:o m%20Law%20Center%20Update
http://www.winehq.com/?issue=310#Software%20Freed
Years ago I realized I had terrible luck with stocks. I learned all kinds of stuff like P/E ratios, etc, etc. But more than anything, I just had bad luck. Well, it's been quite a few years since I've invested directly in a stock. I had some cash laying around in a money market and decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy some Google stock - mostly because I really believe in what they do. Well, that was when the stock was at $390 (60x earnings... ow) Therefore I'm certain you can all blame me for the recent performance.
All the comments I read in this thread are dead on. I'm going to add some things that weren't suggested and elaborate on some others:
1) The best thing you can do to ensure call quality is to start with good phones. I've used a bunch of them and so far I like the Polycom's the best. The SoundPoint IP 301 (2-line) and 601's (6-line) are great quality with a nice price point. I'm sure the Cisco's are great too. Sipura's are a nice price point as well and have some good features. Use ATA's only where absolutely necessary.
2) Remember that modems and fax lines might be a bit of a hassle.
3) If you don't need Power over Ethernet you can save some $$$. The side effect is no phones in a power outage and more cords to deal with.
4) If your internal infrastructure doesn't have enough data cables you'll want to get phones with integrated switches.
5) I'd suggest going with a SIP based system. Cisco's MGCP seems to be falling out of favor and you have a lot more choices with SIP.
6) Having said that, I love Asterisk. It works great. Asterisk @ Home is the best way to get up and running.
7) Is call accounting a high priority? If so, you may need to carefully evaluate that before proceeding.
8) Are you connecting multiple sites? IP trunks are the way to go.
9) Provision your inbound/outbound via normal PSTN trunks. Either single-line (1FB's) pots lines or a T1. If you want inbound caller ID and other good stuff, I'd go with PRI's. Or, set up tie trunks to your existing system.
10) Don't rule out a traditional TDM solution. Some of the basic switches on the market these days are incredibly cheap. Mitel's are one such example.
11) Outline the features you need in a phone/system before installing it. Some things, such as shared (bridged) line appearances are incredibly difficult in VOIP systems.
Well, one thing that comes to mind are two different major telco's I deal with. I have a great working relationship with both of the companies. (I'll give you a hint, one starts with a "V" and the other with a "Q".) I've done things with both of these companies you should never be able to get away with. I'm not doing it illegally - I could get permission from the folks who actually want the work done. However, neither of these carriers asks for enough identifying information to be useful. We have backchannel phone numbers into God-Knows-Who call centers. If we need a line to be moved, we just provide addresses and phone numbers. Once in a while we'll get hassled a bit, but it's just a matter of giving a line of BS to get past them.
In the event we need something strange done, we have reps we work with. If we asked for some info on the account, such as a SSN, I wouldn't be surprised if the reps would quietly provide it.
So, don't give your SSN to utilities folks. Your electric company doesn't need it.
I've been doing some side work for a small reseller. We're using MySQL on the low-end product.. fortunately I did some testing with Postgres last month and realized it would work equally well.
Looks like on Tuesday we'll begin the formal switch to Postgres. I have no sympathy for any company forming a partnership with SCO.
In 1997 I was senior at the University of Michigan and we completed an entire RFP that JPL (I think, or perhaps NASA in general) had out on this mission.
Being the only EE in the class, it fell to me to design the complete communications system for it.
I wish I had an electronic document of the whole thing, it makes for fascinating reading. I just pulled it out of my closet to compare notes after reading about the mission. Our RFP weighs in at 175+ pages.
Our proposal is very close on several key design elements. We proposed a 452kg spacecraft - damn close to the final weight. I see that the actual mission calls for a 2.1m dish, which is close the 2m dish I proposed using a total of 82W DC (including transponders, SSPA, etc). We designed the mission using a Delta rocket to lower the cost and achieve a decent altitude.
We figured a total of 200MB of compressed science data would need to be transmitted back to complete the objectives at the time. They don't seem to have changed much, so that means a minimum data rate of 514bps is required to transmit the data to one DSN over 6 months. Using two 34 dishes of the DSN gets an average rate of about 900bps.
In other words, I'm thrilled our original design has held up. We actually proposed a NSTAR ion engine rather than LTG's, but it's great NASA went with the LTG. You get a shitload more power, and that's awesome. Especially considering they missed the launch window for an ion engine.
Well, you can do the opposite as well - run IE on Linux using Wine and have the rendering done via Gecko. Here's Jacek's screenshots of that:
http://www.lo3.wroc.pl/~jcaban/wine-ie/
No, that wouldn't work at all since anyone could just manually add the key. Identifying the key is a perfectly valid way of doing it and likely won't change at this point. (The fact that it did change back in June was merely the consequence of it being on the to-do list for two years.)
Anyway, this check was specifically added to prevent Wine from downloading Windows applications. The key here is people who use Wine may already have a legal version of Windows and therefore Microsoft is deliberately tying applications to their operating system.
Applications tied to operating systems? Isn't that an antitrust violation? The answer lies somewhere in the age-old question: at what point does a Windows "enhancement" become an application?
The only reason it still works is because Wine just went through some massive changes with regard to configuration. The WGA check works by checking for specific registry keys that Wine uses. The new configuration moved those keys from HKLM to HKCU. It's just a matter of time before they change the check they use. The position of Alexandre is that we're not going to play the insane game of working around their workarounds.
The good news is, there's not much reason any more to need the WGA. We've got a new DCOM and MSI framework that makes those two downloads largely irrelevant. Jacek Caban is hard at work integrating a Gecko engine into Wine as part the MSHTML.DLL (usually referred to as "Internet Explorer" on Windows.) So native Windows DLL's are falling by the wayside.
Of course, Microsoft got so much bad press over the WGA check that I wonder if they'd tempt it all again. Last time it raised the ire of eWeek and PC Magazine, so I imagine the next round will just be more bad press. Headline: "Giant software company continues to squash open source software"
obPlug: Wine is slated for a beta release in a little over a month.
When it comes to eavesdropping, I prefer my method of butt sets on 66 blocks. It doesn't require as much thought.
I meant to add, bring some CD's with a bootable distro to take home. Maybe someone will actually try it out! The revolution is proceeding on schedule.
Along similar lines to some things mentioned..
Bring a tub of legos. Not the fancy stuff, just simple rectangular blocks. Before the presentation, prep the foundation of a house using the blocks. Then during the presentation, pass the house around with the tub of blocks and ask everyone to add something to it until you have a simple house-like structure.
When you're done, point out that everyone working together can produce something. Usually it takes someone with some inspiration to start it. The community built the rest. When you're done, you can clearly see the work involved. Someone else could look at it and make a copy or disassemble it to see the individual blocks that make it up.
That's source code.
While you're passing around the legos, show >> EYE CANDY . Show some awesome 3D stuff, show a web browser, OpenOffice, Word running under Wine, etc. All the common stuff they would expect a computer to be. (DON'T SHOW SOURCE CODE - EYES WILL GLAZE OVER.)
Bonus points for showing off the corporate Intranet. The big challenge is always breaking the mindset of, "Open source is great, but it can't work here."
Playing with legos is fun.
That could just be an issue with fonts. You might want to try downloading more TTF fonts from here:
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
If it's going off the page it could also be a problem with one of the controls. It's hard to say which one based on your description.