Since insert traffic far outstrips querying traffic, I'd have to make an educated guess that he's talking about some audit/logging application. Either that or something with heavy read caching.
The ping time would probably be pretty good, considering I can ping servers all over the planet with good response and that almost invariably takes the data through at least one satellite somewhere... so it would be the same except it would be DEDICATED traffic instead of shared with a bunch of spam and porn!
Ummm, not really.
In the best case, you're near the equator:
Geosynchronous orbit ~ 35,786,000m above sea level Speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s Travel time to sat: ~.12s Travel time up and back: ~.25s
Real world ping times on sat based IP connections rarely break 500ms.
There is very little commodity internet traffic going through satellites. Hooray for fiber.
I think the first of the major pricing blunders was buy.com who, back in the day, put up a 19" Hitachi CRT monitor for somewhere around half price. Many ordered, few if any got their monitors, however there was a class action suit and we won. I got a check for $50 out of it. So, for what its worth, there is *some* history of the customer being right in cases like these.
If ISPs could find some way to limit each accounts number of outgoing messages, or charge per outgoing message over, say, 500 messages a day, this would probably be much less of a problem.
At the core of this problem is the Accountability Void, and the temptation that carries with it. When you look at the lengths that (some) ISPs and watchdogs go to block (much to libertarian chagrin) kiddie porn and other potentially offensive material, its clear that solving the spam problem is NOT about technical feasibility. If there was impetus there would be a solution. The problem is that the ISP can say "we dont send it, we dont receive it, its not our problem," the spammer can say "I send it, but I use fake accounts that get closed in 6 hours, so I don't have to take responsibility for it" and, for the most part, the receiver says "I received this, but theres really not much I can do about it." I describe this phenomenon as an "Accountability Void." No one is responsible for spam.
Until there is an accountability structure in place, either legislative, technical, or economic, spam will go on. One of these days, AOL or some other "big enough" player is going to do something that will "change everything" like demand digital signatures, or some other method that fills the accountability void and spam will cease to be a problem.
I get the feeling that computer science will be relegated to a tech college degree. Most work in the field is for entry level programmers and desktop support, neither which need more than a 2 year degree.
Well part of this problem is that Computer Science means different things to different people. I went to CMU, where CS is somewhat respected. My major was Information & Decision Systems, which is, for all intents and purposes the CMU equivalent of the aforementioned BCIS degree, when compared to a CMU CS degree. However, coming out of my degree, I have found that I quite easily know much more about the "science of computing" than many CS majors from less rigorous schools.
Unfortunately I think the time has come to draw the line between computer "scientists" and computer "programmers," just like there is a line between "physicists" and "engineers." It wasn't until I guess about 6 years ago that you could earn a CS degree at CMU that wasn't a double major Math/CS, and to be honest, I think thats the way it should be. Programming is an art, no doubt, but I suspect just as there are "people who speak english" and then there are "writers," there are always going to be "people who can write VB" and "people who could program in any language."
Unfortunately, at this point it time, its very hard for employers to tell who is who, and even to assess their own needs. If you were to ask any employer "do you want some IS grad who hacks VB" or "do you want a CS grad who could really write in any language," they're going to opt for the CS guy, who will subsequently be bored out of his wits writing VB code.
I suspect that soon, and by soon I mean in the next 5 years or so, a real dichotomy is going to emerge in the business world (its already there in academia) between "blue-collar programmers" and "white-collar programmers." Blue collar programming will be taught at tech schools and perhaps 4 year CS degress can refocus their energies on the "science of computing." The business side of the dot-com pipe-dream has already crashed and burned, and now unfortunately it might be time for the rank and file's dreams to meet the same fate.
I was an MS Intern several years ago. (And was a MacPhile and OSS proponent the whole time.) It was probably the single best work experience I've ever had. And that's even after I mention that my boss and I clashed at every turn and I ultimately got a "no hire" recommendation, pretty much blacklisting me from ever working there again. You can hate the way they do business, or their FUD marketing or whatever you want, but at the end of the day, working there is like being an endowed researcher at the coolest, most well-funded university on earth, where they only let in the uber-smart. It was easily the highest concentration of smart people I've ever had the pleasure of being around. If someone had handed me a crystal ball and told me the shit the economy was about to become I would have kissed some serious ass and made sure I got an offer there.
Just find an employer who understands that your vast experience should be enough to master any new interresting field. IMHO you just need to run into the right employer, not the right additional skills.
Five years ago, that would have been good advice. The problem is that now employers don't have to train folks. I have a fairly diverse background including everything from EE type jobs in the embedded sector to MIS jobs with few technical requirements and everything in between. Many employers went through a downsizing in the last two years, and now they are loathed to pick up "General talent." Despite my wide range of experience and obvious skill inventory, I was passed up for people who had 5 straight years of development experience with a single technology because the employers I talked to couldn't justify hiring general talent anymore. If they were going to make the expenditure to hire someone it had to fill an immediate need.
All that said, hang in there. There are employers out there who still see the value of the "engineer brain." Just dont hold your breath waiting for them to find you. Also, unless you have a major objection to it, focus your energy on smaller companies. Companies with 5 or 6 people can much more readily see the benefits of having a swissarmy knife instead of a T40 Torx wrench, whereas a big company sees that it has a bunch of Torx bolts to unscrew.
For waht its worth I was unemployed for a year before finding my current job. If you have a job now you may want to consider trying to find a way to be happy in it rather than moving on.
What's the catch? How did the industry let this happen? I wont say that people arent already doign this with DirecTiVos and outboard PCs but this seems like it would be really scary for networks and other "anti-copying" people. And how long until someone hacks this thing to allow DVD copying? Then it will really be some technology to watch... At any rate this may just be my next toy:)
This depends on you and your values.
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The bottom line here is that it all depends on how important it is to you. I recently spent a very long time unemployed and searching and at a certain point I had to ask myself how important finding a job that had various perks or rights associated with them. At one point I interviewed with a bank that wanted, not only to make me dress up in a suit, but they wanted to take my piss on a regular basis to make sure I wasn't smoking weed on the weekends. I decided that was too much; that I'd rather be unemployed than have to deal with those two conditions. When a job came along that respected my privacy, I took it, and while I'm kind of disappointed that I have to wear khakis and a polo shirt every day instead of shorts or jeans or whatever, it wasnt worth turning down this job. I'll bet that there are folks out there for whom it would be worth it to turn down a job, because their personal comfort or style is worth more to them than mine is to me. As jobs become increasingly scarce, those who can afford to hold out for jeans and t-shirt workplaces will shrink, but lets not kid ourselves; this is about what that particular aspect of work is worth to you.
Let's just avoid this whole "corporate america is screwing us" rhetoric and remember that you can always quit and look for a job that will let you wear jeans IF its worth that much to you.
I can't speak to what software runs on phone switches, but I can speak as a user at the "medium sized company" level, and as a user I can say that the industry seems to work primarily with embedded boxes for telecom. When you want a switch you buy a switch, and it does what it does. Whether that switch runs linux or SunOS or VxWorks or some proprietary OS is pretty much irrelevant to you if it functions for you in its capacity as a switch. If linux is being used as the basis for phone switching equipment, people probably wouldn't know, unless they had some contact at the company who developed the switch. This is a traditionally very embedded market, where name recognition of an OS like "Windows" or "linux" or whatever is irrelevant to the function of the device. Telecom can be thought of as the ultimate high availability application. In all my dealings with telephone switches, nothing ever crashed or needed to be rebooted. EVER. Even when installing new hardware. This kind of high availability doesn't readily lend itself to traditionally end-user oriented operating systems. I suspect the reason linux isnt perceived as penetrating the telecom sector is because its not, and if it were, it wouldn't matter because people who set up and managed the switches, by and large, dont give a shit how it works, just that it works, that it works all the time and never stops working.:) If your job is to turn a nut, does it really matter if you use a wrench, pliers or your fingers as long as the nut gets turned?
There has been mention here that OGG is too intensive to decode on a little embedded device, and setting up a server to transcode to MP3 as a way around this. While this all well and good, I was wondering if anyone knows of a solution that plays uncompressed streams. For instance decode the ogg on the server and stream it as a WAV to the player. I often find myself being in posession of weird audio formats (like Shorten, high resolution WAV files, and AC3 wavs for example), and the only common thread to play them all would be an uncompressed stream. Now in terms of horsepower, this should be a no brainer: what could be easier than bit blitting from ethernet to a DAC or S/PDIF port? In terms of bandwidth, we're talking 500KBytes/sec for 96Khz/24bit Stereo, which could easily be sustained by any ethernet network (OK I guess 2MBit Wi-Fi would be a problem, but...)
The impression that I get is that nothing really supports WAV playing which seems really moronic. If someone could prove me wrong I would be thrilled to hear it.
I wanted to get up and write this because after 30 minutes of reading other peoples comments, I didn't see anything else up here that really approximated what I had to say. Forgive me if this is inadvertently a "me too" post.
I am in this "tech-savvy" audience of which Moby speaks. Hell, I even used to like his music. I have disagreed with his politics from day one, but that has nothing to do with the music as far as I'm concerned, and has even less to do with what I'm saying here.
When MP3's first hit the scene, and by that I mean FTP servers and Windows shares when I was in college, when it took real time to encode these things, and when WinPlay would suck down 80% or a P75, and a P90 was a balls out speed demon, I was like "Sweet dude! I get to totally download this music, and I don't have to, like, pay for it and stuff. It doesn't matter because I'm just a college student, I'm gonna start a dot.com company, make a bajillion dollars and then I'll buy every CD on earth and support all my favorite artists." I was exactly was the record companies think everyone is.
Then I started to get out of the mainstream crap that I had been listening to, and get into ambient techno (No, I have no interest in debating the definition of ambient or other sub-genres of electronica) which was really undergoing a lot of positive development at the time through the work of groups like the Orb, Space Time Continuum, FSOL, etc -- many of the early astralwerks artists. These guys were fringe enough that I couldn't realistically find that music on MP3 for a variety of reasons. I rarely attended concerts, and when I did, I often felt disappointed that the live performances weren't faithful reproductions of the studio works. I even extolled the virtue of FSOL's rejection of the entire concept of live performance to my friends and cohorts.
Over time, my musical interests shifted from electronica to a more organic brand of music, much of which emanated from the legacy of the Grateful Dead and Phish, and which subsequently became categorized as "jam rock" and the artists became known as "jam bands." I came to appreciate live music as a return to the notion of music as performance art where the value became in the actual, specific performance itself. I feel that this is a concept that was only natural in the world of classical music, and a concept from which much of pop music is not implicitly cognizant of.
Many of these bands condone open, legal, high quality (as well as MP3 based) swapping of concert tapes. I'll refrain from making this post a big ad for the eTree, but I wanted to come out and reveal my position on the 'MP3's and file sharing implies lower record sales.' I don't know if I'm the only one, but there are a ton of bands out there that give away the right to experience, through a recording, a unique performance. I am currently embracing those bands, and to be honest, it keeps me busy. I already have well over a hundred hours of brand new music that I still haven't even had time to listen to. It was all free, and my posession of it is legal and condoned by the bands. I now support musicians by going to concerts.
I used to buy $200 worth of CDs a week, and sell a lot of it later second hand, because that was the only way I could expand my horizons. If I were in that phase of my life now as opposed to then, I would probably be downloading MP3s. I found a great way to expand my horizons for free, and now I spend virtually nothing on CDs, ever. To be totally honest, if a musician isn't willing to make some effort to let me in on what they've got to say, then I usually suspect that the sad reality is that they don't have much to say or they don't care if I hear it. If they don't care, why should I?
And that's the bottom line of this post: I wanted to outline a demographic who get their musical kicks for free and don't give a crap about Moby, Eminem, or Britney. This is a demographic that makes bands rich through touring, which is ultimately performance. My crowd supports musicians through ticket sales (which has a corporate demon all its own, which is another story.) But I don't buy CDs, and I don't "steal" from artists who don't invite me to, and I'm sick of listening to artists and record companies whine.
That's my story. I'm not sayin' you should buy into it, but I a great example of one reason why CD sales might be lower. I used to buy a lot of CDs, and now I don't. And that's why.
I, for one, would love to see how many Athlons it takes to stomp Deeper Blue. (or whatever the current monolithic champion is) Guesses? Guessing this would be an interesting lottery/raffle idea.:)
The proper procedure for dealing with Celine Dion non-CDs in particular is to color in the entire CD with the marker. This not only defeats the copy protection but prevents the CD from ever being played in any player, which is what's best for society anyway.
My subject line said it all: I'm with Barr on this one. I favor better tools over more politically correct tools. I don't misunderstand Stallman, I just don't agree with him. And if I have to pay for a good piece of software or give up access to its source, but its the best tool for the job, well, then that's what I'll do. I'd like to know what kind of car Stallman drives, because the modern automobile hasn't reasonably fit the definition of open source since the birth of Electronic Fuel Injection, but you don't see a bunch of zealots driving around in carbeurated cars just because auto-makers don't release the source for their ECUs. I'm getting long winded here: the short version is like I said above: I don't misunderstand Stallman, I just don't agree with him.
This would be a good idea, if it would have the net effect of making him go away, but it wont. The whole reason we're discussing this issue in the first place is because he (and several others like him) are so tenacious to begin with. I think stallman is an annoying, petty weener, but I appreciate his work and his cause. But even if everyone in the world dropped everything and started calling it GNU/Linux, that will just free him up to complain about the next transgression of the Stallman philosophy by the Linux-using public. Hell, he's already started with this BitKeeper issue. I think the fight is half the fun for Stallman, and sadly the rest of us are a part of that, wether we like it or not, and no matter how many towels we throw in, at the end of the day all we'll have is RMS standing on a pile of towels ranting and raving that we should throw in some more.
I'll try to ignore the fact that Stallman is obviously whoring for credit here and try to be intelligent.
Especially offensive here is this "free Linux" vs "non-free Linux" based on firmware for drivers. I admit that this is an issue, and even respect that its one that is really important, but if the community allows Linux to be splintered like that to the point where we have to start excluding mainstream hardware because something doesn't measure up to the "Stallman yardstick-of-freedom" wont we just be hurting the very cause we purport to embrace? Wouldn't it be better to approach the problem from the other side? This appears to be Stallman's recurring pathology. Instead of finding a way for him to accept more people, concepts and things he tries to come up with a way to force more people, concepts, and things accept him, by taking the moral high ground. It just doesn't work like that; at least not for long. The person who never makes any sacrifices or concessions for their friends is a lonely man indeed. I hesitate to say this but it seems like RMS can't see the forest for the trees.
If the goal here is really to eliminate the "Slashdot Effect" a much more effective solution would be to set up a network of load-balanced caching proxies on geographically distributed fat pipes.
Some will argue that this is in essence what a P2P network is, but why not do it right, using technology we already have that everyone can use(squid.)
Other users' comments regarding the cumulative effects of NAT on P2P networks are incredibly apropos.
But realistically, theres nothing I love more than when the story submitter posts a link to a Google cached version of the content he's posting. We're an agressive bunch and that calls for aggressive measures:)
This comment is based on my personal experience. YMMV, of course, but I strongly believe that if college is in reach (as it is for most people these days, at one level or another) that you should go. There are a couple of reasons for this, and I'll spell them out by responding to their counterpoints.
Some people suggest that you can just go to college later in life. While it is technically possible to attend college later in life, the concept of college, unless it is one specifically geared at "continuing education," is engineered around the age bracket that most of its students fall in (18-23.) People who return to college later in life (as my Mother did) have a harder time adapting their experience back into a frame of reference built around a certain age group. College is undoubtedly harder the older you are, because the older you are, the further from the target demographic you are, and you will extract less value as a result. A college education, academically speaking, builds analytical skills and brings your cognition to a higher level. No matter what you study you will have a better understanding of the world from what you learn there. College, for most, is a place to grow, not only academically, but socially. When I came out of high school, I had a whole lot to learn about interacting with my fellow man, and college helped me learn that. I am a much better person thanks to college.
The next argument that people make is that techies make enough money with certifications that college is irrelevant. The truth of that matter is that not having a degree is a serious handicap in terms of career advancement. You will be shutting yourself out of a lot of opportunities if you choose to go into life without a degree. That's not to say there are no success stories for people without degrees, but that someone without a degree is going to have to work twice as hard to earn respect, twice as hard to advance their careers into the large salary range, and will be pretty much ruled out from the upper echelon of income unless they are a very fortunate entrepreneur.
Another thing people often assume is that you have to study in your chosen field in college. Not true. In fact, in Europe it is more common than not for someone to do something in the work place that is completely unrelated to what they studied in college. This highlights my earlier point about the non-academic learning that takes place in college.
Going to college at a young age is also a unique opportunity to exist in an environment where you can engage in "experience for its own sake." Which is a fancy way of saying that at no other time in your life is it going to be acceptable to prioritize activities like binge drinking every other day, experimenting with drugs, falling in love, protesting something, or generally doing whatever you damn well please while attending a few classes along the way. What I can remember of my college days, I will remember and cherish forever. I made some lifelong friends, participated in unique but virtually pointless activities, learned the sweet smell of success and the agony of defeat, all in four years.
And a final point to note is that if SysAdminning is really what you want to do, you can do it just as well with a degree as you could without one, and with one, you're likely to be a better asset, enjoy more opportunities for advancement, and be a more well-rounded person overall than if you don't. And never forget: Time is the currency of your life, and once you spend it you can never have it back, so make the most of it. Go to college.:)
The bottom line here is that, if like the article says, there is nothing in the ToS that guarantees that this wont happen (I start to twitch if I actually read ToS or EULA documents) then I'd say you're at the mercy of the owner of the servers that you use. When I load slashdot, it gives me slashdot content. When I send mail through my ISPs SMTP servers, it adds a header. While the co-opting aspect of this is disturbing, the bottom line is that if you don't like it, run your own NNTP server, or simply use Google Groups or any other alternative news service that delivers what you want, in the way you want it. A lot of people seem to think that Roadrunner is going to get in trouble for this. I just don't see that happenning. I can't even conceive of a way that this could be illegal. But I'm not a lawyer;)
When you think about how it must feel to watch your family legacy so completely turned on its head, I am shocked that, given that he would make a public statement at all, that this one was quite restrained. Typically if someone is going to cross that line and get invovled, there tends to be a lot of emotional momentum. I suspect this is why, during the Compaq/DEC merger, there wasn't much talk at all outside business issues. It is a shame to see that the concept of family business has taken another hit, but Packard is obviously a mature adult, something that we're not exposed to often enough. [troll] Think about other vocal members of the tech community? Does anyone really consider Stallman a muture adult?[/troll]
Slashdot Mirror
> Wow...I've never seen someone actually have a nervous breakdown in the middle of a Slashdot post before.
You must not come here often.
Since insert traffic far outstrips querying traffic, I'd have to make an educated guess that he's talking about some audit/logging application. Either that or something with heavy read caching.
The ping time would probably be pretty good, considering I can ping servers all over the planet with good response and that almost invariably takes the data through at least one satellite somewhere... so it would be the same except it would be DEDICATED traffic instead of shared with a bunch of spam and porn!
Ummm, not really.
In the best case, you're near the equator:
Geosynchronous orbit ~ 35,786,000m above sea level
Speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s
Travel time to sat: ~.12s
Travel time up and back: ~.25s
Real world ping times on sat based IP connections rarely break 500ms.
There is very little commodity internet traffic going through satellites. Hooray for fiber.
I think the first of the major pricing blunders was buy.com who, back in the day, put up a 19" Hitachi CRT monitor for somewhere around half price. Many ordered, few if any got their monitors, however there was a class action suit and we won. I got a check for $50 out of it. So, for what its worth, there is *some* history of the customer being right in cases like these.
If ISPs could find some way to limit each accounts number of outgoing messages, or charge per outgoing message over, say, 500 messages a day, this would probably be much less of a problem.
At the core of this problem is the Accountability Void, and the temptation that carries with it. When you look at the lengths that (some) ISPs and watchdogs go to block (much to libertarian chagrin) kiddie porn and other potentially offensive material, its clear that solving the spam problem is NOT about technical feasibility. If there was impetus there would be a solution. The problem is that the ISP can say "we dont send it, we dont receive it, its not our problem," the spammer can say "I send it, but I use fake accounts that get closed in 6 hours, so I don't have to take responsibility for it" and, for the most part, the receiver says "I received this, but theres really not much I can do about it." I describe this phenomenon as an "Accountability Void." No one is responsible for spam.
Until there is an accountability structure in place, either legislative, technical, or economic, spam will go on. One of these days, AOL or some other "big enough" player is going to do something that will "change everything" like demand digital signatures, or some other method that fills the accountability void and spam will cease to be a problem.
I get the feeling that computer science will be relegated to a tech college degree. Most work in the field is for entry level programmers and desktop support, neither which need more than a 2 year degree.
Well part of this problem is that Computer Science means different things to different people. I went to CMU, where CS is somewhat respected. My major was Information & Decision Systems, which is, for all intents and purposes the CMU equivalent of the aforementioned BCIS degree, when compared to a CMU CS degree. However, coming out of my degree, I have found that I quite easily know much more about the "science of computing" than many CS majors from less rigorous schools.
Unfortunately I think the time has come to draw the line between computer "scientists" and computer "programmers," just like there is a line between "physicists" and "engineers." It wasn't until I guess about 6 years ago that you could earn a CS degree at CMU that wasn't a double major Math/CS, and to be honest, I think thats the way it should be. Programming is an art, no doubt, but I suspect just as there are "people who speak english" and then there are "writers," there are always going to be "people who can write VB" and "people who could program in any language."
Unfortunately, at this point it time, its very hard for employers to tell who is who, and even to assess their own needs. If you were to ask any employer "do you want some IS grad who hacks VB" or "do you want a CS grad who could really write in any language," they're going to opt for the CS guy, who will subsequently be bored out of his wits writing VB code.
I suspect that soon, and by soon I mean in the next 5 years or so, a real dichotomy is going to emerge in the business world (its already there in academia) between "blue-collar programmers" and "white-collar programmers." Blue collar programming will be taught at tech schools and perhaps 4 year CS degress can refocus their energies on the "science of computing." The business side of the dot-com pipe-dream has already crashed and burned, and now unfortunately it might be time for the rank and file's dreams to meet the same fate.
I was an MS Intern several years ago. (And was a MacPhile and OSS proponent the whole time.) It was probably the single best work experience I've ever had. And that's even after I mention that my boss and I clashed at every turn and I ultimately got a "no hire" recommendation, pretty much blacklisting me from ever working there again. You can hate the way they do business, or their FUD marketing or whatever you want, but at the end of the day, working there is like being an endowed researcher at the coolest, most well-funded university on earth, where they only let in the uber-smart. It was easily the highest concentration of smart people I've ever had the pleasure of being around. If someone had handed me a crystal ball and told me the shit the economy was about to become I would have kissed some serious ass and made sure I got an offer there.
Wait a second! You have a sales department that asks questions that require thinking? Get the hell outta here!
Could someone write a Mathematica program to do DiVX encoding and get free clustering from this product? mmmmm.... movies...
Just find an employer who understands that your vast experience should be enough to master any new interresting field. IMHO you just need to run into the right employer, not the right additional skills.
Five years ago, that would have been good advice. The problem is that now employers don't have to train folks. I have a fairly diverse background including everything from EE type jobs in the embedded sector to MIS jobs with few technical requirements and everything in between. Many employers went through a downsizing in the last two years, and now they are loathed to pick up "General talent." Despite my wide range of experience and obvious skill inventory, I was passed up for people who had 5 straight years of development experience with a single technology because the employers I talked to couldn't justify hiring general talent anymore. If they were going to make the expenditure to hire someone it had to fill an immediate need.
All that said, hang in there. There are employers out there who still see the value of the "engineer brain." Just dont hold your breath waiting for them to find you. Also, unless you have a major objection to it, focus your energy on smaller companies. Companies with 5 or 6 people can much more readily see the benefits of having a swissarmy knife instead of a T40 Torx wrench, whereas a big company sees that it has a bunch of Torx bolts to unscrew.
For waht its worth I was unemployed for a year before finding my current job. If you have a job now you may want to consider trying to find a way to be happy in it rather than moving on.
What's the catch? How did the industry let this happen? I wont say that people arent already doign this with DirecTiVos and outboard PCs but this seems like it would be really scary for networks and other "anti-copying" people. And how long until someone hacks this thing to allow DVD copying? Then it will really be some technology to watch... At any rate this may just be my next toy :)
The bottom line here is that it all depends on how important it is to you. I recently spent a very long time unemployed and searching and at a certain point I had to ask myself how important finding a job that had various perks or rights associated with them. At one point I interviewed with a bank that wanted, not only to make me dress up in a suit, but they wanted to take my piss on a regular basis to make sure I wasn't smoking weed on the weekends. I decided that was too much; that I'd rather be unemployed than have to deal with those two conditions. When a job came along that respected my privacy, I took it, and while I'm kind of disappointed that I have to wear khakis and a polo shirt every day instead of shorts or jeans or whatever, it wasnt worth turning down this job. I'll bet that there are folks out there for whom it would be worth it to turn down a job, because their personal comfort or style is worth more to them than mine is to me. As jobs become increasingly scarce, those who can afford to hold out for jeans and t-shirt workplaces will shrink, but lets not kid ourselves; this is about what that particular aspect of work is worth to you.
Let's just avoid this whole "corporate america is screwing us" rhetoric and remember that you can always quit and look for a job that will let you wear jeans IF its worth that much to you.
I can't speak to what software runs on phone switches, but I can speak as a user at the "medium sized company" level, and as a user I can say that the industry seems to work primarily with embedded boxes for telecom. When you want a switch you buy a switch, and it does what it does. Whether that switch runs linux or SunOS or VxWorks or some proprietary OS is pretty much irrelevant to you if it functions for you in its capacity as a switch. If linux is being used as the basis for phone switching equipment, people probably wouldn't know, unless they had some contact at the company who developed the switch. This is a traditionally very embedded market, where name recognition of an OS like "Windows" or "linux" or whatever is irrelevant to the function of the device. Telecom can be thought of as the ultimate high availability application. In all my dealings with telephone switches, nothing ever crashed or needed to be rebooted. EVER. Even when installing new hardware. This kind of high availability doesn't readily lend itself to traditionally end-user oriented operating systems. I suspect the reason linux isnt perceived as penetrating the telecom sector is because its not, and if it were, it wouldn't matter because people who set up and managed the switches, by and large, dont give a shit how it works, just that it works, that it works all the time and never stops working. :) If your job is to turn a nut, does it really matter if you use a wrench, pliers or your fingers as long as the nut gets turned?
There has been mention here that OGG is too intensive to decode on a little embedded device, and setting up a server to transcode to MP3 as a way around this. While this all well and good, I was wondering if anyone knows of a solution that plays uncompressed streams. For instance decode the ogg on the server and stream it as a WAV to the player. I often find myself being in posession of weird audio formats (like Shorten, high resolution WAV files, and AC3 wavs for example), and the only common thread to play them all would be an uncompressed stream. Now in terms of horsepower, this should be a no brainer: what could be easier than bit blitting from ethernet to a DAC or S/PDIF port? In terms of bandwidth, we're talking 500KBytes/sec for 96Khz/24bit Stereo, which could easily be sustained by any ethernet network (OK I guess 2MBit Wi-Fi would be a problem, but...)
The impression that I get is that nothing really supports WAV playing which seems really moronic. If someone could prove me wrong I would be thrilled to hear it.
I wanted to get up and write this because after 30 minutes of reading other peoples comments, I didn't see anything else up here that really approximated what I had to say. Forgive me if this is inadvertently a "me too" post.
I am in this "tech-savvy" audience of which Moby speaks. Hell, I even used to like his music. I have disagreed with his politics from day one, but that has nothing to do with the music as far as I'm concerned, and has even less to do with what I'm saying here.
When MP3's first hit the scene, and by that I mean FTP servers and Windows shares when I was in college, when it took real time to encode these things, and when WinPlay would suck down 80% or a P75, and a P90 was a balls out speed demon, I was like "Sweet dude! I get to totally download this music, and I don't have to, like, pay for it and stuff. It doesn't matter because I'm just a college student, I'm gonna start a dot.com company, make a bajillion dollars and then I'll buy every CD on earth and support all my favorite artists." I was exactly was the record companies think everyone is.
Then I started to get out of the mainstream crap that I had been listening to, and get into ambient techno (No, I have no interest in debating the definition of ambient or other sub-genres of electronica) which was really undergoing a lot of positive development at the time through the work of groups like the Orb, Space Time Continuum, FSOL, etc -- many of the early astralwerks artists. These guys were fringe enough that I couldn't realistically find that music on MP3 for a variety of reasons. I rarely attended concerts, and when I did, I often felt disappointed that the live performances weren't faithful reproductions of the studio works. I even extolled the virtue of FSOL's rejection of the entire concept of live performance to my friends and cohorts.
Over time, my musical interests shifted from electronica to a more organic brand of music, much of which emanated from the legacy of the Grateful Dead and Phish, and which subsequently became categorized as "jam rock" and the artists became known as "jam bands." I came to appreciate live music as a return to the notion of music as performance art where the value became in the actual, specific performance itself. I feel that this is a concept that was only natural in the world of classical music, and a concept from which much of pop music is not implicitly cognizant of.
Many of these bands condone open, legal, high quality (as well as MP3 based) swapping of concert tapes. I'll refrain from making this post a big ad for the eTree, but I wanted to come out and reveal my position on the 'MP3's and file sharing implies lower record sales.' I don't know if I'm the only one, but there are a ton of bands out there that give away the right to experience, through a recording, a unique performance. I am currently embracing those bands, and to be honest, it keeps me busy. I already have well over a hundred hours of brand new music that I still haven't even had time to listen to. It was all free, and my posession of it is legal and condoned by the bands. I now support musicians by going to concerts.
I used to buy $200 worth of CDs a week, and sell a lot of it later second hand, because that was the only way I could expand my horizons. If I were in that phase of my life now as opposed to then, I would probably be downloading MP3s. I found a great way to expand my horizons for free, and now I spend virtually nothing on CDs, ever. To be totally honest, if a musician isn't willing to make some effort to let me in on what they've got to say, then I usually suspect that the sad reality is that they don't have much to say or they don't care if I hear it. If they don't care, why should I?
And that's the bottom line of this post: I wanted to outline a demographic who get their musical kicks for free and don't give a crap about Moby, Eminem, or Britney. This is a demographic that makes bands rich through touring, which is ultimately performance. My crowd supports musicians through ticket sales (which has a corporate demon all its own, which is another story.) But I don't buy CDs, and I don't "steal" from artists who don't invite me to, and I'm sick of listening to artists and record companies whine.
That's my story. I'm not sayin' you should buy into it, but I a great example of one reason why CD sales might be lower. I used to buy a lot of CDs, and now I don't. And that's why.
I, for one, would love to see how many Athlons it takes to stomp Deeper Blue. (or whatever the current monolithic champion is) Guesses? Guessing this would be an interesting lottery/raffle idea. :)
The proper procedure for dealing with Celine Dion non-CDs in particular is to color in the entire CD with the marker. This not only defeats the copy protection but prevents the CD from ever being played in any player, which is what's best for society anyway.
My subject line said it all: I'm with Barr on this one. I favor better tools over more politically correct tools. I don't misunderstand Stallman, I just don't agree with him. And if I have to pay for a good piece of software or give up access to its source, but its the best tool for the job, well, then that's what I'll do. I'd like to know what kind of car Stallman drives, because the modern automobile hasn't reasonably fit the definition of open source since the birth of Electronic Fuel Injection, but you don't see a bunch of zealots driving around in carbeurated cars just because auto-makers don't release the source for their ECUs. I'm getting long winded here: the short version is like I said above: I don't misunderstand Stallman, I just don't agree with him.
This would be a good idea, if it would have the net effect of making him go away, but it wont. The whole reason we're discussing this issue in the first place is because he (and several others like him) are so tenacious to begin with. I think stallman is an annoying, petty weener, but I appreciate his work and his cause. But even if everyone in the world dropped everything and started calling it GNU/Linux, that will just free him up to complain about the next transgression of the Stallman philosophy by the Linux-using public. Hell, he's already started with this BitKeeper issue. I think the fight is half the fun for Stallman, and sadly the rest of us are a part of that, wether we like it or not, and no matter how many towels we throw in, at the end of the day all we'll have is RMS standing on a pile of towels ranting and raving that we should throw in some more.
I'll try to ignore the fact that Stallman is obviously whoring for credit here and try to be intelligent.
Especially offensive here is this "free Linux" vs "non-free Linux" based on firmware for drivers. I admit that this is an issue, and even respect that its one that is really important, but if the community allows Linux to be splintered like that to the point where we have to start excluding mainstream hardware because something doesn't measure up to the "Stallman yardstick-of-freedom" wont we just be hurting the very cause we purport to embrace? Wouldn't it be better to approach the problem from the other side? This appears to be Stallman's recurring pathology. Instead of finding a way for him to accept more people, concepts and things he tries to come up with a way to force more people, concepts, and things accept him, by taking the moral high ground. It just doesn't work like that; at least not for long. The person who never makes any sacrifices or concessions for their friends is a lonely man indeed. I hesitate to say this but it seems like RMS can't see the forest for the trees.
If the goal here is really to eliminate the "Slashdot Effect" a much more effective solution would be to set up a network of load-balanced caching proxies on geographically distributed fat pipes.
:)
Some will argue that this is in essence what a P2P network is, but why not do it right, using technology we already have that everyone can use(squid.)
Other users' comments regarding the cumulative effects of NAT on P2P networks are incredibly apropos.
But realistically, theres nothing I love more than when the story submitter posts a link to a Google cached version of the content he's posting. We're an agressive bunch and that calls for aggressive measures
This comment is based on my personal experience. YMMV, of course, but I strongly believe that if college is in reach (as it is for most people these days, at one level or another) that you should go. There are a couple of reasons for this, and I'll spell them out by responding to their counterpoints.
:)
Some people suggest that you can just go to college later in life. While it is technically possible to attend college later in life, the concept of college, unless it is one specifically geared at "continuing education," is engineered around the age bracket that most of its students fall in (18-23.) People who return to college later in life (as my Mother did) have a harder time adapting their experience back into a frame of reference built around a certain age group. College is undoubtedly harder the older you are, because the older you are, the further from the target demographic you are, and you will extract less value as a result. A college education, academically speaking, builds analytical skills and brings your cognition to a higher level. No matter what you study you will have a better understanding of the world from what you learn there. College, for most, is a place to grow, not only academically, but socially. When I came out of high school, I had a whole lot to learn about interacting with my fellow man, and college helped me learn that. I am a much better person thanks to college.
The next argument that people make is that techies make enough money with certifications that college is irrelevant. The truth of that matter is that not having a degree is a serious handicap in terms of career advancement. You will be shutting yourself out of a lot of opportunities if you choose to go into life without a degree. That's not to say there are no success stories for people without degrees, but that someone without a degree is going to have to work twice as hard to earn respect, twice as hard to advance their careers into the large salary range, and will be pretty much ruled out from the upper echelon of income unless they are a very fortunate entrepreneur.
Another thing people often assume is that you have to study in your chosen field in college. Not true. In fact, in Europe it is more common than not for someone to do something in the work place that is completely unrelated to what they studied in college. This highlights my earlier point about the non-academic learning that takes place in college.
Going to college at a young age is also a unique opportunity to exist in an environment where you can engage in "experience for its own sake." Which is a fancy way of saying that at no other time in your life is it going to be acceptable to prioritize activities like binge drinking every other day, experimenting with drugs, falling in love, protesting something, or generally doing whatever you damn well please while attending a few classes along the way. What I can remember of my college days, I will remember and cherish forever. I made some lifelong friends, participated in unique but virtually pointless activities, learned the sweet smell of success and the agony of defeat, all in four years.
And a final point to note is that if SysAdminning is really what you want to do, you can do it just as well with a degree as you could without one, and with one, you're likely to be a better asset, enjoy more opportunities for advancement, and be a more well-rounded person overall than if you don't. And never forget: Time is the currency of your life, and once you spend it you can never have it back, so make the most of it. Go to college.
The bottom line here is that, if like the article says, there is nothing in the ToS that guarantees that this wont happen (I start to twitch if I actually read ToS or EULA documents) then I'd say you're at the mercy of the owner of the servers that you use. When I load slashdot, it gives me slashdot content. When I send mail through my ISPs SMTP servers, it adds a header. While the co-opting aspect of this is disturbing, the bottom line is that if you don't like it, run your own NNTP server, or simply use Google Groups or any other alternative news service that delivers what you want, in the way you want it. A lot of people seem to think that Roadrunner is going to get in trouble for this. I just don't see that happenning. I can't even conceive of a way that this could be illegal. But I'm not a lawyer ;)
Yes. Certainly more mature than you, anyway.
:-P
I'm rubber, you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.
When you think about how it must feel to watch your family legacy so completely turned on its head, I am shocked that, given that he would make a public statement at all, that this one was quite restrained. Typically if someone is going to cross that line and get invovled, there tends to be a lot of emotional momentum. I suspect this is why, during the Compaq/DEC merger, there wasn't much talk at all outside business issues. It is a shame to see that the concept of family business has taken another hit, but Packard is obviously a mature adult, something that we're not exposed to often enough. [troll] Think about other vocal members of the tech community? Does anyone really consider Stallman a muture adult?[/troll]