I started my professional programming career in 1999 by doing y2k conversion on an s/390. Millions of lines of COBOL. All my friends at college had the cool jobs of C++ GUI's and Java web apps. Even the professors laughed at me when I told them what I was doing. Do you know strange it is to work on code that was last updated 9 years before you were born.
In all seriousness...
I can understand why COBOL is still popular now. From my experience, most major companies made a big technology leap a long time ago, investing millions in massive mainframes to run the company. These systems are still held up and run by their aging staff. (I was 17, the next youngest programmer was 50+). These systems get so massive and complex, "modernizing" is just another word for rewriting.
I suppose 20 years down the road, we'll all be complaining about legacy java systems. 50 years down the road, legacy ruby systems.
At my current job, we decided to get a PRI for voice communications. I know computers very well, but when it comes to phones, I don't know much. I've punched down lines in a large shop environment, but that's about it.
Our office is located in an old steel mill, which now houses multiple companies. The demarc is located in another building. To get the PRI from the demarc to our office, our copper does the following:
Travels via 25 pair 100 yards from the demarc to the abandoned guard shack
Punches down to on old, skrew-down type block
Travels via 25 pair underground to another block in our neighbor's office.
Disappears from site and miraculously shows up on the other side of office, about 100ft away.
Travels through the rafters to our Asterisk box.
We later found a hanging punch block the ceiling of our office. This happened to be the connecting point that we could never find, so had an extra 200ft of copper running for now reason.
This may not sound two bad, but for my boss and I, who have never really done any type of wiring work, we think we did reasonable well. Especially since the wiring job for the building was a mix of wiring from the 50's and a local wiring company's 'on the cheap' job. It only took us about 3 days and we managed to knock out another company's T1 with our tone out tool.
Seems funny that this happened closely after Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman... A Pro-War politician is outed, so we needed more fear to further the cause.
I didn't see it mentions many places, but maybe I wasn't looking very hard.
A friend of mine worked for Campus Security at Kent. Her and some friends had a "Campus Security Sucks!" type group on Facebook. They had a party one night, all off of the clock and they were all fired for inapropriate behavior. (Someone who wasn't invited complained and got them in trouble). Part of the evidence used against them was their Facebook group. All of them were fired.
I had a close friend at CMU that worked on both of their robots. I got to visit them twice and see their production. H1lander wasn't there the second time because it had a transmission failure. They had to take it to the dealer. Can you imagine an H2 which is completely gutted, loaded with computers and has no steering wheel because it steers itself and having to take it to the dealer.
Also, both CMU robotos ran some form of linux with a all of the hardware donated by Intel. I believe they had a 2TB RAID for storage, a hand full of itaniums and bunch of Pentium M's to run their systems. I didn't get the full specs because my friend is an EE, but the numbers he gave me were pretty astonishing. And it was all donated.
If you only come into a new software solution at the implementation phase, you are in trouble!
Most people do not know what it takes when it comes to business software. An example: my former company wanted a time card solution for our hourly employees. The management shopped around and picked a solution. They gave the company a large monetary advance. We were then brought in to evaluate the time line for implementing the solution. Half way through the meeting, we found that MS SQL Server 2000 was required, which we didn't have. Licensing for MS SQL at that scale is rediculous, we dropped the price to management and they immediately scrapped the project.
If we would have been in the initial meetings, the company wouldn't have lost the money it spent.
The lesson: you have to stop stupid decisions when they are thought, not when they are expressed.
If you apt.sources file is fairly stock, then just change every reference of "hoary" to "breezy"...
Then, just run sudo apt-get update, followed by sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. This takes a while, but once it is done, reboot to the new kernel and you are at breezy.
A friend of mine was on the CMU team. One of this years robots was in last years competition. Of course they made enhancements to the robot, but the biggest problem they had with it was that they rolled the robot 3 days before the competition. They were pushing the robot to the limits on a test track and went too far, according to my friend. He said they would have faired much better, but when a Hummer filled with computers rolls over, you are bound to have some problems.
Just to preach the common trend, I would suggest Ubuntu for the distro. The base desktop install is exactly what you would need. You get Firefox, Evolution, Gaim and OpenOffice.org. It's a no hassle install, it's Debian and you can get support for it if you want. I wouldn't suggest holding off on Ubuntu until their next release, because it's pretty slick and comes out in about 2 months.
Also, you can get free CD's from them. Just request 100 or so and have them shipped to where ever that organization is. Technically you only need one, but you can give them out to the students if they like it. It comes with a livecd, so they don't have to destroy their home PC.
I've made it a small time business. Actually, it's more of an bit more pocket money.
If you can get a couple of people, they end up dumping spyware on their computer and destroying everything about once every 3-4 months. If you change $80-$100 a rebuild (ghost, format, drop data, return).
You have a couple of those, and maybe some website creation on the side, and you have nice little side income, not taxed.
I have a friend that has to ship his computer from home to school and back all the time. He insures the delivery and very carefully packs up the PC. So far, UPS has destroyed the PC 4 times. In one case, they cracked the CPU (don't know how).
What this means is that they paid for a new PC about every 6 months for the guy. That's a round-about way to do PC repair.
So, the guys at Redhat, Ximian, etc... don't make money? You can make money off of open source software, you just don't make it off of the code itself.
Even if you are a OSS developer, it does not mean you work for a company that writes OSS. This guy's letter is, well, to quote him: "It's idiocy". You can't assume that a company is just going to buy/get software for their needs. A lot of companies house their own developers write custom code for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, god, no!!!
I started my professional programming career in 1999 by doing y2k conversion on an s/390. Millions of lines of COBOL. All my friends at college had the cool jobs of C++ GUI's and Java web apps. Even the professors laughed at me when I told them what I was doing. Do you know strange it is to work on code that was last updated 9 years before you were born.
In all seriousness...
I can understand why COBOL is still popular now. From my experience, most major companies made a big technology leap a long time ago, investing millions in massive mainframes to run the company. These systems are still held up and run by their aging staff. (I was 17, the next youngest programmer was 50+). These systems get so massive and complex, "modernizing" is just another word for rewriting.
I suppose 20 years down the road, we'll all be complaining about legacy java systems. 50 years down the road, legacy ruby systems.
Our office is located in an old steel mill, which now houses multiple companies. The demarc is located in another building. To get the PRI from the demarc to our office, our copper does the following:
We later found a hanging punch block the ceiling of our office. This happened to be the connecting point that we could never find, so had an extra 200ft of copper running for now reason.
This may not sound two bad, but for my boss and I, who have never really done any type of wiring work, we think we did reasonable well. Especially since the wiring job for the building was a mix of wiring from the 50's and a local wiring company's 'on the cheap' job. It only took us about 3 days and we managed to knock out another company's T1 with our tone out tool.
I don't know about this article. The author wasn't able to completely fill his desktop with icons.
Will it be done in squiggle vision?
At least give props the man who wrote that... John Cleese
a tion.htm
http://www.stephaniemiller.com/declarationofrevoc
Seems funny that this happened closely after Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman... A Pro-War politician is outed, so we needed more fear to further the cause.
I didn't see it mentions many places, but maybe I wasn't looking very hard.
A friend of mine worked for Campus Security at Kent. Her and some friends had a "Campus Security Sucks!" type group on Facebook. They had a party one night, all off of the clock and they were all fired for inapropriate behavior. (Someone who wasn't invited complained and got them in trouble). Part of the evidence used against them was their Facebook group. All of them were fired.
I've found that a majority of stabbings have been commited using knives, therefore knives should be illegal.
I had a close friend at CMU that worked on both of their robots. I got to visit them twice and see their production. H1lander wasn't there the second time because it had a transmission failure. They had to take it to the dealer. Can you imagine an H2 which is completely gutted, loaded with computers and has no steering wheel because it steers itself and having to take it to the dealer.
Also, both CMU robotos ran some form of linux with a all of the hardware donated by Intel. I believe they had a 2TB RAID for storage, a hand full of itaniums and bunch of Pentium M's to run their systems. I didn't get the full specs because my friend is an EE, but the numbers he gave me were pretty astonishing. And it was all donated.
MySpace!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Headphones can be loud.
Knives can be sharp.
Cars can go fast.
You've been warned!
If you only come into a new software solution at the implementation phase, you are in trouble!
Most people do not know what it takes when it comes to business software. An example: my former company wanted a time card solution for our hourly employees. The management shopped around and picked a solution. They gave the company a large monetary advance. We were then brought in to evaluate the time line for implementing the solution. Half way through the meeting, we found that MS SQL Server 2000 was required, which we didn't have. Licensing for MS SQL at that scale is rediculous, we dropped the price to management and they immediately scrapped the project.
If we would have been in the initial meetings, the company wouldn't have lost the money it spent.
The lesson: you have to stop stupid decisions when they are thought, not when they are expressed.
If you apt.sources file is fairly stock, then just change every reference of "hoary" to "breezy"...
Then, just run sudo apt-get update, followed by sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. This takes a while, but once it is done, reboot to the new kernel and you are at breezy.
A friend of mine was on the CMU team. One of this years robots was in last years competition. Of course they made enhancements to the robot, but the biggest problem they had with it was that they rolled the robot 3 days before the competition. They were pushing the robot to the limits on a test track and went too far, according to my friend. He said they would have faired much better, but when a Hummer filled with computers rolls over, you are bound to have some problems.
I'm just pumped about this release because I bring my SGI O2 back to life. It will be my first full 64-bit OS!
It's also a nice change from the highly insecure (or just a pain to make secure) IRIX to the locked down goodness of OpenBSD.
I believe an Octane port is in the mix as well... How nice would that be for me.
Gnome, since 2.0 has been based on Glib/GTK+ 2.0, which is a full OO architecture built on C.
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/
The last batch I got had free shipping
Just to preach the common trend, I would suggest Ubuntu for the distro. The base desktop install is exactly what you would need. You get Firefox, Evolution, Gaim and OpenOffice.org. It's a no hassle install, it's Debian and you can get support for it if you want. I wouldn't suggest holding off on Ubuntu until their next release, because it's pretty slick and comes out in about 2 months.
Also, you can get free CD's from them. Just request 100 or so and have them shipped to where ever that organization is. Technically you only need one, but you can give them out to the students if they like it. It comes with a livecd, so they don't have to destroy their home PC.
I've made it a small time business. Actually, it's more of an bit more pocket money.
If you can get a couple of people, they end up dumping spyware on their computer and destroying everything about once every 3-4 months. If you change $80-$100 a rebuild (ghost, format, drop data, return).
You have a couple of those, and maybe some website creation on the side, and you have nice little side income, not taxed.
Net Friedman (of Ximian) fame, just blogged about his experiences with an alternative voice recognition application.
Check it out here
I think the number one question we would all liked asked is... can you run linux on it?
I have a friend that has to ship his computer from home to school and back all the time. He insures the delivery and very carefully packs up the PC. So far, UPS has destroyed the PC 4 times. In one case, they cracked the CPU (don't know how).
What this means is that they paid for a new PC about every 6 months for the guy. That's a round-about way to do PC repair.
This stories so old it could vote!
(In the U.S. that is...)
So, the guys at Redhat, Ximian, etc... don't make money? You can make money off of open source software, you just don't make it off of the code itself.
Even if you are a OSS developer, it does not mean you work for a company that writes OSS. This guy's letter is, well, to quote him: "It's idiocy". You can't assume that a company is just going to buy/get software for their needs. A lot of companies house their own developers write custom code for them.
Sorry, just ranting.
Are you allowed to rant about using proper English when you use the word "stupider"?