I think the real message behind this is that a lot of civil servants are true chicken shits!
As a friend of mine who worked for the city once remarked: "I knew my days were limited when (1) I realised that one could get fired for trying to accomplish something and failing and that (2) it was ok to sit on one's butt for years and never do a thing."
So, when you end up with hoards of well qualified intelligent people all trying to hide in the strawberry patch so to speak, then the picture snaps into better focus. Microsoft doesn't have to do a thing. Most government employees are quite content to waste millions of tax payers money as long as they can avoid making a decision they might be held accountable for.
Well - I had a couple of them and found OpenBSD is broken on the AHA1542 SCSI cards, broken on the AHA2842 32bit VL bus SCSI cards and these old boxen won't run big IDE drives.
Mandrake doesn't run at all on them and I don't feel like putting up redhat which will run just fine.
So I gave up and gave in to progress and spent $100 bux and picked up a pair of 200Mhz machines with 64MB ram. These run just fine thank you. My only mistake was not buying 4 of those machines!!!
My point is that high quality pentium class machines are so cheap there is zero reason to use those old 386's and 486's. I have some to give away for free if anyone is interested. Alas, it is sad but they really are at the end of their useful life.
I've been suggesting the development of a "partition Dataset" concept for quite a while now. Basically this maps the directories and files into a single file. You can think of it as an application specific chroot, with the idea that the loopback is application specific.
The time has come where we really need this and your post illustrates very clearly why we need to get this done ASAP. Linux is almsot ready for the desktop and the idiots out there are going to wreak havock with any security we might try to build into systems.
The weakest link is the end user and we really need to design systems that are so tight that even they have trouble f*ing them up.
Thank god form people like kevin . If it weren't for people like him there would be no security at all. But it seems that the US has a propensity to shoot the messenger.
After reading some of the assinine remarks about how Metnick is such a horrible criminal it just makes me want to vomit. Correct me if I'm wrong - but it seems to me that Metnick never revealed any confidential information to anyone and that at least _some_ of the confidential information he was accused of reading was opensourced before his sentance was over.
Contrast this to the clearly vicious and insane antics by the sprint employees who clearly have revield confidential informaion and the injustice makes one want to vomit.
If you can prove what you say, read up on your criminal law and demand the police file charges.
This is funny. Since any potential terrorists know they can't use their cell phones, the cops won't be able to use their high tech electronic survelance and locating equipment!!! haha.
Actually, Kananakis is Bear country. There are lots of Grizzly bears. I suspect the bears will effect a rather good security blanket against any protesters in fact. So get this picture. The cops will be hampered because they can't use electronic location methods but the Bears will be in fine form because they can sniff 'em out! haha.
Another point is the cops are so paranoid now that the Calgary Unix Users Group CUUG had to move the regular monthly meeting away from the downtown library because apparently we geeks are a security risk.
Oh, and no telecomunication services are to be changed either... which means that even though Telus has sent rather nasty announcments to the effect that our xDSL services are to be cancelled or switched over as of the end of June - apparently they won't hook up new services. Alas, methinks the idiot factor is getting rather high.
Yup, find a new job. That is correct. Would a physician work for a chief physician who knew no medicine, or an engineer for a chief engineer who knew no engineering?
It is a recipe for disaster and they will turn on the developers whenever it suits them. Knowing this gives you time to find new shoes so to speak.
Just learn to say no! "NO" I do not want your job nor your money: "NO", I want to work in a professional shop that appreciates technical people.
In closing I use to hear this bullshit idea (always from non-technical people) 20+ years ago. Without exception it was a DISASTER that they created.
Who pays for the bandwidth requited to server this many requests and how is the delivery organised? Does it come generally from one major server farm plugged into the backbone or is it distributed?
As a consultant with more than 20 years experiance one might say I've been around a bit.
My career as also been quite interesting in that I've worked both in engineering departments as weill as oil exporation departments. As a programmer this leaves me an exception to the rule.
My observation is that of the chief geologists that I knew or worked for, ever one without an exception was very professional and well regarded by those who worked for them or with them. Without an exception they were damn good geologists too.
Of the engineers that I worked for, again without an exception, they were very professional and without an exception they were very good engineers. I can say the same of the geophysists I know.
On the other hand, the programming mangers have in many cases been rather awful! One manager ran a department where people were afraid to talk to each other. This company at the time use to have everyone log off the mini when one of their accounting programs ran and the reason was so that the accounting program would not run out of "shared library entries". This had been going on for more than a year before I started my contract. They never fixed the problem because no-one knew how and the reason IMHO that they didn't know how was because no one talked to anyone. The patch would have taken about 15 minutes to fix. BTW - that manager ended up becoming a VP of information technology in a major oil company whos name begins with "M".
I say he was probably a rather bad manager over there too.
Another manager I know - He supervised me when I was in my 20's for about 4 months before he quit - was SO BAD that he did not know that floating point fields are not good for accounting. He did not even know the BASICS of CS. Of course - most of the programmers in that shop knew dick all about number types too and couldn't debug their way out of a paper bag. As above so below.
Another manager (VP this time) didn't know the difference between an algorithm and a logrithm.
The managment of another major oil company whos name starts with "S" and rythms with Hell tried to develop a production accounting system in "basic". The version of basic they were using supported only 16 bit integers and you could not write a callable function. It was a very primative basic. They failed. I remember that project specifically because these people came over to OUR SHOP to see what we were doing (we were doing some rather terrific things - through no fault of our management) and I told the *hell people before they started that if they tried to develop in BASIC that they would fail. They failed. My opinion is they were idiots to try. Nobody in their right mind would do this. The management should be FIRED for this because the MANAGMENT should know better!!!
Then there was another major oil company who's name began with a "G". This company was offereed a turn key application for a system completely loaded with data that they wanted. They paid 1/4 million for the data. Well, their management decided that they should hire a consulting group to build a "better" system. A year later they had spent more money on their consultants than the system we offered and they had not written one line of code.
In all cases - it was bad managment. Really bad managment and somehow the twits got away with this level of incompetance.
Interesting... I know of zero bad chief geologist or chief engineers or chief geophysists for that matter. Yet I can string out a list of bad programming managers as long as my arm. These are people who don't even know the BASICS of the profession. It is no wonder they can't hire and retain competant programmers. The good ones leave in frustration!
As a case in point - in any shop ask whether they have built and documented a library of software functions. Is there a resource person in place to help new programmers become familiar with it? If not - then the programmers who generally are already reclusive and hate to document (many hate to read) will each re-invent the wheel every time they do something. Since searching and sorting are 2 of the MAIN FUNCTIONS of any system, over time these primadonnas will develope 10's or even 100's of variants of usually really bad implementations of poorly chosen algorithms.
Any programmer who develops yet another sort routine on company time is an example of this. But if a programmer does this then why pray tell doesn't his/her manager know about this and hold him/her accountable? It still comes down to the managment.
I have heard it said that a manager doesn't need to know how to do - he needs to know how to manage people who know how to do. Well - this is bullshit. Imagine a chief engineer who doesn't know his engineering. Imagine a chief physician who doesn't know his medicine. Where did these stupid ideas come from? A programming manager has to know his programming and he needs to know his machine internals too. If he doesn't then he is not even in a position to be able to evaluate the productivity of the people hired to do the development work. Furthermore he certainly would not be in a position to know when his development people are about to undertake a real blunder.
There will always be incompetant programmers around. The real problem is when incompetant management gives them the green light and then wonders later why nothing works right.
If one applies this idea to software companies then one would have to conclude that a company run by an ex soda salesman isn't likely going to be able to develop good software. If a major software company has to shut down development for 2 months so that people can be "trained" to develop tight software then you know for a fact the management was incometant from the outset because the problem should never have developed in the first place.
One thing I did learn rather early on as a consultant is that there are good managers and good shops. I chose not to work for the bad ones. There is still a LOT of work around for good people.
How about a rack full of dual processor anthlons? Oh - that is not one computer? Oh - sorry - you draw the boundries where you want but when all machines are running the same 3-D geophysical migration it seems to me that they are one machine.
I'm not impressed. I'll bet that the anthlon rack will compute circles around that cray and cost far less. Not only this, individual units can be pulled and fixed or replaced rather easily.
I'm reading down further at the comments about comparing the stinky desktop PC to a "super computer" and I have to chuckle at the ignorance. The company I'm thinking of that put the anthlon rack in place for the 3-D migrations had an Alexis (sp) then about 100 sparc's networked. As one of the bigger geophysical processing shops in Calgary and Houston I rather think that they know what they are doing.
In general I do NOT agree with patents as they apply to software. The biggest issue I have is that patents are suppose to apply to "inovative" idea embodied into a machine or something one can build or employ - as in the case of a chemical process.
Most software patents are issued for rather trivial things and it becomes a landmine that smaller devlopers cannot afford to litigate.
Notwithstanding my sentiments towards patents, I would like your email and phone number so that I can use your services (for hire - I have attorneys in 2 countries now and am looking for US representation as well)
As far as patents on GPL software, as I understand it there is NOTHING that precludes this and in fact perhaps it is a good idea. Is there anything that would preclude "our side" patenting some features in the open source software we develope and use so that closed source shops are prevented from taking our technology? I can think of a couple innovations that _might_ qualify and I'd be happy to set up a patent so that opensource people can use them for free while close source shops can't use them!!!
You are not entirely correct that the act of viewing a web page does not result in profit to the copyright holder.
The telecommunications industry about 2 years ago was enjoying "convergence" with conventional content creators. The reason for this convergance (Ie share swapping) is that the combined organisation would be able to increase its subscriber base and hense make more money. Thus they very much did and do benefit from the viewing of web pages.
AOL is a perfect example of this. Probably more than 90% of the content that AOL delivers to its subscriber base is derived from the backbone. TO this, AOL adds a little icing to the cake so to speak and attracts 33 million odd customers. AOL gains a revenue stream of about $20 x 33 million through this process.
If there is nothing to be gained from viewing a copyrighted page then where would AOL be today if any ISP in the world could simply grab the AOL content and deliver it in competition to AOL?
The bottom line is that if you are in a position to actually deliver the content you own, then you can make money from it. Everyone else subsidises the delivery system.
I agree that ISP's save money by caching content. This increases the numebr of people that can be served per page fetch. They could probably save even more money if they blocked some unpopular websites because these will have low views per page fetched ratios.
But that is probably irrelevant.
If the ISP (1) accounted for and (2) remitted part of the money saved back to the copyright holders I really would not have any problem with caching. As it stands the vast majority of copyright holders never gave a right to make copies to any ISP's. I for one specifically did NOT give this right to AOL.
It may interest you tat Akamai does recieve revenue from the content they make available to the ISP community. On the other hand, if YOU put up a popular website I suspect you will go broke trying to support it. It is not a personal attack.. it is mearly an observation of a sad state of affairs.
I have no problem with Google making a copy of all the copyrighted material on the net. This is a legitimate use. Google's purpose is not to deprive people of revenues they have a right to.
The caching proxy down at your local ISP however has the sole purpose of depriving their uplinks of revenues. These revenues derive from the (re)transmission of the copyrighted materials from source to the consumer.
If the ISP remitted something to the copyright holders then I would have no problem with this caching. But copyright holders, lacking clout, don't get paid.
Your local commercial radio station remits money every time they play a song on the air. Suppose they "cached" all the songs and only paid for those they received? This would be analogous to what the ISP does in their caching proxies.
Suppose the artist got paid 2 cents everytime someone downloaded the song - from his/her UPLINK.
Suppose the UPLINK got paid 2.2 cents by the backbone.
The BACKBONE operators already charge when they deliver the content via the POP's. So it would seem to me that the end user is already doing the paying and somewhere in the middle the money collected is pouring into a sink hole instead of a fair portion of it being remitted by the artists who own the copyrights.
There is certain amount of truth to this. Perhaps part of the reason is that in the 60's young people were faced with the draft and being persecuted by any cop on the planet for (1) having long hair or (2) listing to the wrong music.
Young people then had to learn to fight for their rights. Young people today are being panzies. Its a different kind of flower child.
When it comes to accessing copyrighted materials on-line please remember this. You _did_ pay your ISP for access to the net. Your ISP _did_ pay their upstream - typically a large telco. Ususally the large Telco also _did_ pay the backbone operator for access to the copyrighted materials on the backbone.
The problem is that most content providers connect through an ISP or a large Telco and neither of these groups pay the people who own the content they wish to distribute.
There would be little issue with copyright infringment if the people who held the copyrights were being paid. P2P file transfer is perhaps one form of abuse of copyright.
A seond form of copyright abuse is a carrier paying one group of people for access to copyrighted materials while they simultaneously refuse to pay another group for access because the second group (the actual copyright holders) have less market clout.
A third form of abuse is when ISP's dump copyrighted materials into their caching proxies. Since the ISP does not hold the copyright they literally do not have the right to duplicate it in caching proxies.
The bottom line IMHO is that content creators deserve to be paid regardless who they are and this means as a for instance that since I PAID my ISP for access to slashdot.org and my ISP in turn PAID my TELCO for access to slashdot.org that this chain should continue all the way back to the slashdot people and they ALSO should be PAID when their uplinks seek to access the content in the slashdot servers. Does everyone agree?
At 10.75% which is a rather decent interest rate these days each $40 cash in supports almost $1800 in debt. Therefore you will get enough revenue from about 28 customers to cover the financing on that $50,000 investment and it will be paid off in 5 years.
That is quite reasonable actually because I would think that a $50,000 router can support more than 28 customers... this is especially so because my P90 OpenBSD router can support more than 28 machines and it cost me under $100 bux to build it.
While on the subject... my OpenBSD router can fill a 100baseT pipe that can be interfaced to fiber via an Allied Telesyn AT-MC103SC media converter. I'll sell all ppl want at say $3650 CDN and they will drive 75KM. The 15KM verson costs about $700.
Now - overhead fiber cable costs CDN$1.25 per foot or about $4,000 per km and this is for 6 conductor.
This means that one can run say a 10km segment of his own fiber at a cost of under $50,000 bux total. I have not added anything for poles because they are already there and paid for by present services. But if you want to add then in then you'll need about 300 of them at $325 cdn per pole (25' x 7" top) so that adds about say $100,000 to the project. Add another $50,000 for installation but since I could personally put this in within 2 weeks with a crew of 3 and a pole truck this is very generous. Therefore at worst a 10km segment costs $200,000 to build.
This is 100mbits/sec... or about 2/3 of a T3 which runs at 155mb/sec. My Telco quotes me $50,000 per month for such a line.
Now the bottom line of all this is as follows.
If I locate my servers in the US then my Telco will pay $50,000 per month to American interests to pull those packets into their system for their customers and then they will happy ship them around in their system at their cost for delivery to their end users. BUT - if I ask for a direct connection to their system then they want to bill their total capital cost each and every month.
Yes it costs money to get packets from a server to the end user. But it shouldn't be the people who run the servers that pay. It has to be the end users who pay because they after all are the consumers.
The way it stands now, people who run servers are expected to pay and at usary rates as well.
ha!! I'll wager the new M$ system will not support any Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD or other *nix servers.
I'll wager that the protocols supported will be patented just so they can be different. By analogy: An oval wheel on a properly designed axis will rotate and with enuf design you might be able to balence the sukker too.
The idea being that if you can replace all round wheels with patented oval ones then the masses will flock to your new invention and the round wheels will die off before anyone notices that the oval ones were a stupid idea to begin with - at which point you re-introduce the round wheel idea (call it innovative) and you have preserved the monopoly.
I always thought that "linux" was Finnish for "Gnu"! Words in another language aren't necessarily close to the English equivalent.
On the same note I thought that "OpenBSD" was a synonym for "Gnu". At least I'm pretty sure that "OpenBSD" is a synonym for "Linux" because they are mostly the same. Only the kernel really seems to be different - all the tools that I use are the same... such as "vi" and "less" and "more" and of course the old workhorse "gcc" which is used to create _everything_.
Well, you Aussies are getting what you are willing to put up with IMHO. Telstra is your company and its your country and if you don't want to allow yourselves access to modern telecomunications for WHATEVER reasons then we in North America don't really give a shit.
Look, Telstra pays for connectivity to the North American backbone so as to obtain content which Telstra can then deliver to Aussies. At the same time Aussies create content and make this available via webservers. However Aussies will find that it is cheaper to locate their servers in the US.
Of course its cheaper. Telstra pays US interests to get access to this content but they refuse to pay Australian interests to provide the same service. This drives up the cost of access to the internet for Australians.
Telstra _could_ just run a fiber over to a local aussie webserver. Telstra is already willing to pay for the movement of North American packets through the Telstra system. This is rather obvious. Telstra pays a North American interest for access to the packets, then moves them into Australia and then finally delivers them to the ISP's that connect via Telstra or directly to their own customers.
So, If Telstra is willing to pay for the cost of shipping North American packets about, then why is Telstra unwilling to do the same for Australian packets? Instead Telstra expects the Aussie webmaster to pay exhorbitant fees. This puts the Kibosh so to speak on Australia content creation.
Instead of Telstra being able to pull a chunk of fiber to a local webserver, Telstra ends up laying subsea cables over to North America to get content because the TELSTRA billing for a webserver is prohibitive. Apparently American interests are not willing to play these games and they just tell Telstra to fork over the cash or go elsewhere for access to the content on the backbone.
So, if Australians don't like this then I will suggest that you figure out how to get Telstra to offer a fair deal to Aussie webmasters.
If you can figure out how to do this then all of us North American webmasters will jump the puddle so to speak and locate our servers in the land of Oz. This will provide a real boone to the Aussie economy I would think and perhaps drive up your Dollar and create some jobs for you blokes. Not only this - it would mean that Aussies get premier access to the net and Telstra would be in the position to tell the Americans to fork over the cash for access to the content on the Aussie backbone.
You see, the first country to clean up this wholefully unfair situation can really benefit.
Finally, if you expect the webmaster to pay for the surfing public's access to his content, then you have to realise that he's got no other choice than to fill that pipe full of a LOT of advertising that in general the surfing public probably doesn't want. Not only this, the crud in the HTML will count towards the limits that you Aussies are bitching about.
The bottom line is that the webmaster is providing a service when he gives his uplink access to his server and he deserves to be PAID.
Up until now in general webmasters have not had enough clout and the consequence is quite predictable... Aussies find it cheaper to locate their servers in North America and then Aussies wonder why they get bandwidth caps.
Of course... Aussies put up with 25 cent charges to ring a local number. It would seem to North Americans that there are a number of things that the Aussies have got upside down. Oh for the land down under!
Well, maybe his problemn was using XP as the host o/s. I have been running VMware for almost 3 years now and this is on a red hat 6.1 host o/s. It runs great. I've benchmarked the performance and what I see is this. In CPU intensive applications there is very little penalty to pay... I get about 90%.
On I/O intensive applications it is far more variable and this is to be expected because all I/O is handed off to the Linux I/O subsystem and accordingly you get the benefits that *nix confers in this area minus the overhead that an emulated hard drive imposes. This can be either good or bad but it is nice to see a 1GB NT partition sitting in a few hundred MB's.
In video you pay a penalty. I can run NT 4.0 either full screen or in an X-window. Really - the performance is quite acceptable and this is on a basic ATI Rage card. Next step is going to dual Matrox cards and I'll know better when I put them in the machine.
What I'd really like to know is how VMware handles the "cpu idle" process. This is the process that gobbles up any unused CPU cycles. I see the VMware load and the NT machine is reporting reasonable figures. In a Virtual Machine you want to grab all unused cycles and hand them over to the host O/S and let its idle process gobble them up. But this would "steal" them from the guest O/S's idle process.
The caveat is that in a lap top you really want to stop the processor instead of burning the battery to run the idle process. So maybe there is some trick here that I'd like to know about.
I have run into some problems. M$ multimedia didn't work in VMware - lord knows why - but M$ also (as typical) did have their error messages rong because they say the file format is not supported when in fact the exact same clip plays in Windoze media player on the NT box but under VMare the exact same player says the file format is bad.
All in all I think VMware is great and well worth the money.
I didn't think vmware would run under windows 98. And ya - there are lots of dough heads who buy dual processors and then put windows 9x on them. hahaha.
If course there are lots of dough heads who put windoze 9x on other computers too.
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I think the real message behind this is that a lot of civil servants are true chicken shits!
As a friend of mine who worked for the city once remarked: "I knew my days were limited when (1) I realised that one could get fired for trying to accomplish something and failing and that (2) it was ok to sit on one's butt for years and never do a thing."
So, when you end up with hoards of well qualified intelligent people all trying to hide in the strawberry patch so to speak, then the picture snaps into better focus. Microsoft doesn't have to do a thing. Most government employees are quite content to waste millions of tax payers money as long as they can avoid making a decision they might be held accountable for.
Right - demand for i486's is low.
Well - I had a couple of them and found OpenBSD is broken on the AHA1542 SCSI cards, broken on the AHA2842 32bit VL bus SCSI cards and these old boxen won't run big IDE drives.
Mandrake doesn't run at all on them and I don't feel like putting up redhat which will run just fine.
So I gave up and gave in to progress and spent $100 bux and picked up a pair of 200Mhz machines with 64MB ram. These run just fine thank you. My only mistake was not buying 4 of those machines!!!
My point is that high quality pentium class machines are so cheap there is zero reason to use those old 386's and 486's. I have some to give away for free if anyone is interested. Alas, it is sad but they really are at the end of their useful life.
I've been suggesting the development of a "partition Dataset" concept for quite a while now. Basically this maps the directories and files into a single file. You can think of it as an application specific chroot, with the idea that the loopback is application specific.
The time has come where we really need this and your post illustrates very clearly why we need to get this done ASAP. Linux is almsot ready for the desktop and the idiots out there are going to wreak havock with any security we might try to build into systems.
The weakest link is the end user and we really need to design systems that are so tight that even they have trouble f*ing them up.
Thank god form people like kevin . If it weren't for people like him there would be no security at all. But it seems that the US has a propensity to shoot the messenger.
After reading some of the assinine remarks about how Metnick is such a horrible criminal it just makes me want to vomit. Correct me if I'm wrong - but it seems to me that Metnick never revealed any confidential information to anyone and that at least _some_ of the confidential information he was accused of reading was opensourced before his sentance was over.
Contrast this to the clearly vicious and insane antics by the sprint employees who clearly have revield confidential informaion and the injustice makes one want to vomit.
If you can prove what you say, read up on your criminal law and demand the police file charges.
This is funny. Since any potential terrorists know they can't use their cell phones, the cops won't be able to use their high tech electronic survelance and locating equipment!!! haha.
Actually, Kananakis is Bear country. There are lots of Grizzly bears. I suspect the bears will effect a rather good security blanket against any protesters in fact. So get this picture. The cops will be hampered because they can't use electronic location methods but the Bears will be in fine form because they can sniff 'em out! haha.
Another point is the cops are so paranoid now that the Calgary Unix Users Group CUUG had to move the regular monthly meeting away from the downtown library because apparently we geeks are a security risk.
Oh, and no telecomunication services are to be changed either... which means that even though Telus has sent rather nasty announcments to the effect that our xDSL services are to be cancelled or switched over as of the end of June - apparently they won't hook up new services. Alas, methinks the idiot factor is getting rather high.
Yup, find a new job. That is correct. Would a physician work for a chief physician who knew no medicine, or an engineer for a chief engineer who knew no engineering?
It is a recipe for disaster and they will turn on the developers whenever it suits them. Knowing this gives you time to find new shoes so to speak.
Just learn to say no! "NO" I do not want your job nor your money: "NO", I want to work in a professional shop that appreciates technical people.
In closing I use to hear this bullshit idea (always from non-technical people) 20+ years ago. Without exception it was a DISASTER that they created.
Who pays for the bandwidth requited to server this many requests and how is the delivery organised? Does it come generally from one major server farm plugged into the backbone or is it distributed?
As a consultant with more than 20 years experiance one might say I've been around a bit.
My career as also been quite interesting in that I've worked both in engineering departments as weill as oil exporation departments. As a programmer this leaves me an exception to the rule.
My observation is that of the chief geologists that I knew or worked for, ever one without an exception was very professional and well regarded by those who worked for them or with them. Without an exception they were damn good geologists too.
Of the engineers that I worked for, again without an exception, they were very professional and without an exception they were very good engineers. I can say the same of the geophysists I know.
On the other hand, the programming mangers have in many cases been rather awful! One manager ran a department where people were afraid to talk to each other. This company at the time use to have everyone log off the mini when one of their accounting programs ran and the reason was so that the accounting program would not run out of "shared library entries". This had been going on for more than a year before I started my contract. They never fixed the problem because no-one knew how and the reason IMHO that they didn't know how was because no one talked to anyone. The patch would have taken about 15 minutes to fix. BTW - that manager ended up becoming a VP of information technology in a major oil company whos name begins with "M".
I say he was probably a rather bad manager over there too.
Another manager I know - He supervised me when I was in my 20's for about 4 months before he quit - was SO BAD that he did not know that floating point fields are not good for accounting. He did not even know the BASICS of CS. Of course - most of the programmers in that shop knew dick all about number types too and couldn't debug their way out of a paper bag. As above so below.
Another manager (VP this time) didn't know the difference between an algorithm and a logrithm.
The managment of another major oil company whos name starts with "S" and rythms with Hell tried to develop a production accounting system in "basic". The version of basic they were using supported only 16 bit integers and you could not write a callable function. It was a very primative basic. They failed. I remember that project specifically because these people came over to OUR SHOP to see what we were doing (we were doing some rather terrific things - through no fault of our management) and I told the *hell people before they started that if they tried to develop in BASIC that they would fail. They failed. My opinion is they were idiots to try. Nobody in their right mind would do this. The management should be FIRED for this because the MANAGMENT should know better!!!
Then there was another major oil company who's name began with a "G". This company was offereed a turn key application for a system completely loaded with data that they wanted. They paid 1/4 million for the data. Well, their management decided that they should hire a consulting group to build a "better" system. A year later they had spent more money on their consultants than the system we offered and they had not written one line of code.
In all cases - it was bad managment. Really bad managment and somehow the twits got away with this level of incompetance.
Interesting... I know of zero bad chief geologist or chief engineers or chief geophysists for that matter. Yet I can string out a list of bad programming managers as long as my arm. These are people who don't even know the BASICS of the profession. It is no wonder they can't hire and retain competant programmers. The good ones leave in frustration!
As a case in point - in any shop ask whether they have built and documented a library of software functions. Is there a resource person in place to help new programmers become familiar with it? If not - then the programmers who generally are already reclusive and hate to document (many hate to read) will each re-invent the wheel every time they do something. Since searching and sorting are 2 of the MAIN FUNCTIONS of any system, over time these primadonnas will develope 10's or even 100's of variants of usually really bad implementations of poorly chosen algorithms.
Any programmer who develops yet another sort routine on company time is an example of this. But if a programmer does this then why pray tell doesn't his/her manager know about this and hold him/her accountable? It still comes down to the managment.
I have heard it said that a manager doesn't need to know how to do - he needs to know how to manage people who know how to do. Well - this is bullshit. Imagine a chief engineer who doesn't know his engineering. Imagine a chief physician who doesn't know his medicine. Where did these stupid ideas come from? A programming manager has to know his programming and he needs to know his machine internals too. If he doesn't then he is not even in a position to be able to evaluate the productivity of the people hired to do the development work. Furthermore he certainly would not be in a position to know when his development people are about to undertake a real blunder.
There will always be incompetant programmers around. The real problem is when incompetant management gives them the green light and then wonders later why nothing works right.
If one applies this idea to software companies then one would have to conclude that a company run by an ex soda salesman isn't likely going to be able to develop good software. If a major software company has to shut down development for 2 months so that people can be "trained" to develop tight software then you know for a fact the management was incometant from the outset because the problem should never have developed in the first place.
One thing I did learn rather early on as a consultant is that there are good managers and good shops. I chose not to work for the bad ones. There is still a LOT of work around for good people.
How about a rack full of dual processor anthlons? Oh - that is not one computer? Oh - sorry - you draw the boundries where you want but when all machines are running the same 3-D geophysical migration it seems to me that they are one machine.
I'm not impressed. I'll bet that the anthlon rack will compute circles around that cray and cost far less. Not only this, individual units can be pulled and fixed or replaced rather easily.
I'm reading down further at the comments about comparing the stinky desktop PC to a "super computer" and I have to chuckle at the ignorance. The company I'm thinking of that put the anthlon rack in place for the 3-D migrations had an Alexis (sp) then about 100 sparc's networked. As one of the bigger geophysical processing shops in Calgary and Houston I rather think that they know what they are doing.
email address is bad. Unknown recipent.
Please eamil me at terr-at-terralogic-dot-net.
thanx.
In general I do NOT agree with patents as they apply to software. The biggest issue I have is that patents are suppose to apply to "inovative" idea embodied into a machine or something one can build or employ - as in the case of a chemical process.
Most software patents are issued for rather trivial things and it becomes a landmine that smaller devlopers cannot afford to litigate.
Notwithstanding my sentiments towards patents, I would like your email and phone number so that I can use your services (for hire - I have attorneys in 2 countries now and am looking for US representation as well)
As far as patents on GPL software, as I understand it there is NOTHING that precludes this and in fact perhaps it is a good idea. Is there anything that would preclude "our side" patenting some features in the open source software we develope and use so that closed source shops are prevented from taking our technology? I can think of a couple innovations that _might_ qualify and I'd be happy to set up a patent so that opensource people can use them for free while close source shops can't use them!!!
You are not entirely correct that the act of viewing a web page does not result in profit to the copyright holder.
The telecommunications industry about 2 years ago was enjoying "convergence" with conventional content creators. The reason for this convergance (Ie share swapping) is that the combined organisation would be able to increase its subscriber base and hense make more money. Thus they very much did and do benefit from the viewing of web pages.
AOL is a perfect example of this. Probably more than 90% of the content that AOL delivers to its subscriber base is derived from the backbone. TO this, AOL adds a little icing to the cake so to speak and attracts 33 million odd customers. AOL gains a revenue stream of about $20 x 33 million through this process.
If there is nothing to be gained from viewing a copyrighted page then where would AOL be today if any ISP in the world could simply grab the AOL content and deliver it in competition to AOL?
The bottom line is that if you are in a position to actually deliver the content you own, then you can make money from it. Everyone else subsidises the delivery system.
I agree that ISP's save money by caching content. This increases the numebr of people that can be served per page fetch. They could probably save even more money if they blocked some unpopular websites because these will have low views per page fetched ratios.
But that is probably irrelevant.
If the ISP (1) accounted for and (2) remitted part of the money saved back to the copyright holders I really would not have any problem with caching. As it stands the vast majority of copyright holders never gave a right to make copies to any ISP's. I for one specifically did NOT give this right to AOL.
It may interest you tat Akamai does recieve revenue from the content they make available to the ISP community. On the other hand, if YOU put up a popular website I suspect you will go broke trying to support it. It is not a personal attack.. it is mearly an observation of a sad state of affairs.
I have no problem with Google making a copy of all the copyrighted material on the net. This is a legitimate use. Google's purpose is not to deprive people of revenues they have a right to.
The caching proxy down at your local ISP however has the sole purpose of depriving their uplinks of revenues. These revenues derive from the (re)transmission of the copyrighted materials from source to the consumer.
If the ISP remitted something to the copyright holders then I would have no problem with this caching. But copyright holders, lacking clout, don't get paid.
Your local commercial radio station remits money every time they play a song on the air. Suppose they "cached" all the songs and only paid for those they received? This would be analogous to what the ISP does in their caching proxies.
Here is my 2 cents worth.
Suppose the artist got paid 2 cents everytime someone downloaded the song - from his/her UPLINK.
Suppose the UPLINK got paid 2.2 cents by the backbone.
The BACKBONE operators already charge when they deliver the content via the POP's. So it would seem to me that the end user is already doing the paying and somewhere in the middle the money collected is pouring into a sink hole instead of a fair portion of it being remitted by the artists who own the copyrights.
There is certain amount of truth to this. Perhaps part of the reason is that in the 60's young people were faced with the draft and being persecuted by any cop on the planet for (1) having long hair or (2) listing to the wrong music.
Young people then had to learn to fight for their rights. Young people today are being panzies. Its a different kind of flower child.
When it comes to accessing copyrighted materials on-line please remember this. You _did_ pay your ISP for access to the net. Your ISP _did_ pay their upstream - typically a large telco. Ususally the large Telco also _did_ pay the backbone operator for access to the copyrighted materials on the backbone.
The problem is that most content providers connect through an ISP or a large Telco and neither of these groups pay the people who own the content they wish to distribute.
There would be little issue with copyright infringment if the people who held the copyrights were being paid. P2P file transfer is perhaps one form of abuse of copyright.
A seond form of copyright abuse is a carrier paying one group of people for access to copyrighted materials while they simultaneously refuse to pay another group for access because the second group (the actual copyright holders) have less market clout.
A third form of abuse is when ISP's dump copyrighted materials into their caching proxies. Since the ISP does not hold the copyright they literally do not have the right to duplicate it in caching proxies.
The bottom line IMHO is that content creators deserve to be paid regardless who they are and this means as a for instance that since I PAID my ISP for access to slashdot.org and my ISP in turn PAID my TELCO for access to slashdot.org that this chain should continue all the way back to the slashdot people and they ALSO should be PAID when their uplinks seek to access the content in the slashdot servers. Does everyone agree?
There is a TON of dark fibre available. If you can't get access to the last mile then your backbone may not be worth very much.
nslookup is telling me the domain does not exist.
If you've got a "new" mac then it has freeBSD in it and you should be able to set it up as a network printer.
At 10.75% which is a rather decent interest rate these days each $40 cash in supports almost $1800 in debt. Therefore you will get enough revenue from about 28 customers to cover the financing on that $50,000 investment and it will be paid off in 5 years.
That is quite reasonable actually because I would think that a $50,000 router can support more than 28 customers... this is especially so because my P90 OpenBSD router can support more than 28 machines and it cost me under $100 bux to build it.
While on the subject... my OpenBSD router can fill a 100baseT pipe that can be interfaced to fiber via an Allied Telesyn AT-MC103SC media converter. I'll sell all ppl want at say $3650 CDN and they will drive 75KM. The 15KM verson costs about $700.
Now - overhead fiber cable costs CDN$1.25 per foot or about $4,000 per km and this is for 6 conductor.
This means that one can run say a 10km segment of his own fiber at a cost of under $50,000 bux total. I have not added anything for poles because they are already there and paid for by present services. But if you want to add then in then you'll need about 300 of them at $325 cdn per pole (25' x 7" top) so that adds about say $100,000 to the project. Add another $50,000 for installation but since I could personally put this in within 2 weeks with a crew of 3 and a pole truck this is very generous. Therefore at worst a 10km segment costs $200,000 to build.
This is 100mbits/sec... or about 2/3 of a T3 which runs at 155mb/sec. My Telco quotes me $50,000 per month for such a line.
Now the bottom line of all this is as follows.
If I locate my servers in the US then my Telco will pay $50,000 per month to American interests to pull those packets into their system for their customers and then they will happy ship them around in their system at their cost for delivery to their end users. BUT - if I ask for a direct connection to their system then they want to bill their total capital cost each and every month.
Yes it costs money to get packets from a server to the end user. But it shouldn't be the people who run the servers that pay. It has to be the end users who pay because they after all are the consumers.
The way it stands now, people who run servers are expected to pay and at usary rates as well.
ha!! I'll wager the new M$ system will not support any Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD or other *nix servers.
I'll wager that the protocols supported will be patented just so they can be different. By analogy: An oval wheel on a properly designed axis will rotate and with enuf design you might be able to balence the sukker too.
The idea being that if you can replace all round wheels with patented oval ones then the masses will flock to your new invention and the round wheels will die off before anyone notices that the oval ones were a stupid idea to begin with - at which point you re-introduce the round wheel idea (call it innovative) and you have preserved the monopoly.
I always thought that "linux" was Finnish for "Gnu"! Words in another language aren't necessarily close to the English equivalent.
On the same note I thought that "OpenBSD" was a synonym for "Gnu". At least I'm pretty sure that "OpenBSD" is a synonym for "Linux" because they are mostly the same. Only the kernel really seems to be different - all the tools that I use are the same... such as "vi" and "less" and "more" and of course the old workhorse "gcc" which is used to create _everything_.
What a long paragraph.
Well, you Aussies are getting what you are willing to put up with IMHO. Telstra is your company and its your country and if you don't want to allow yourselves access to modern telecomunications for WHATEVER reasons then we in North America don't really give a shit.
Look, Telstra pays for connectivity to the North American backbone so as to obtain content which Telstra can then deliver to Aussies. At the same time Aussies create content and make this available via webservers. However Aussies will find that it is cheaper to locate their servers in the US.
Of course its cheaper. Telstra pays US interests to get access to this content but they refuse to pay Australian interests to provide the same service. This drives up the cost of access to the internet for Australians.
Telstra _could_ just run a fiber over to a local aussie webserver. Telstra is already willing to pay for the movement of North American packets through the Telstra system. This is rather obvious. Telstra pays a North American interest for access to the packets, then moves them into Australia and then finally delivers them to the ISP's that connect via Telstra or directly to their own customers.
So, If Telstra is willing to pay for the cost of shipping North American packets about, then why is Telstra unwilling to do the same for Australian packets? Instead Telstra expects the Aussie webmaster to pay exhorbitant fees. This puts the Kibosh so to speak on Australia content creation.
Instead of Telstra being able to pull a chunk of fiber to a local webserver, Telstra ends up laying subsea cables over to North America to get content because the TELSTRA billing for a webserver is prohibitive. Apparently American interests are not willing to play these games and they just tell Telstra to fork over the cash or go elsewhere for access to the content on the backbone.
So, if Australians don't like this then I will suggest that you figure out how to get Telstra to offer a fair deal to Aussie webmasters.
If you can figure out how to do this then all of us North American webmasters will jump the puddle so to speak and locate our servers in the land of Oz. This will provide a real boone to the Aussie economy I would think and perhaps drive up your Dollar and create some jobs for you blokes. Not only this - it would mean that Aussies get premier access to the net and Telstra would be in the position to tell the Americans to fork over the cash for access to the content on the Aussie backbone.
You see, the first country to clean up this wholefully unfair situation can really benefit.
Finally, if you expect the webmaster to pay for the surfing public's access to his content, then you have to realise that he's got no other choice than to fill that pipe full of a LOT of advertising that in general the surfing public probably doesn't want. Not only this, the crud in the HTML will count towards the limits that you Aussies are bitching about.
The bottom line is that the webmaster is providing a service when he gives his uplink access to his server and he deserves to be PAID.
Up until now in general webmasters have not had enough clout and the consequence is quite predictable... Aussies find it cheaper to locate their servers in North America and then Aussies wonder why they get bandwidth caps.
Of course... Aussies put up with 25 cent charges to ring a local number. It would seem to North Americans that there are a number of things that the Aussies have got upside down. Oh for the land down under!
Well, maybe his problemn was using XP as the host o/s. I have been running VMware for almost 3 years now and this is on a red hat 6.1 host o/s. It runs great. I've benchmarked the performance and what I see is this. In CPU intensive applications there is very little penalty to pay... I get about 90%.
On I/O intensive applications it is far more variable and this is to be expected because all I/O is handed off to the Linux I/O subsystem and accordingly you get the benefits that *nix confers in this area minus the overhead that an emulated hard drive imposes. This can be either good or bad but it is nice to see a 1GB NT partition sitting in a few hundred MB's.
In video you pay a penalty. I can run NT 4.0 either full screen or in an X-window. Really - the performance is quite acceptable and this is on a basic ATI Rage card. Next step is going to dual Matrox cards and I'll know better when I put them in the machine.
What I'd really like to know is how VMware handles the "cpu idle" process. This is the process that gobbles up any unused CPU cycles. I see the VMware load and the NT machine is reporting reasonable figures. In a Virtual Machine you want to grab all unused cycles and hand them over to the host O/S and let its idle process gobble them up. But this would "steal" them from the guest O/S's idle process.
The caveat is that in a lap top you really want to stop the processor instead of burning the battery to run the idle process. So maybe there is some trick here that I'd like to know about.
I have run into some problems. M$ multimedia didn't work in VMware - lord knows why - but M$ also (as typical) did have their error messages rong because they say the file format is not supported when in fact the exact same clip plays in Windoze media player on the NT box but under VMare the exact same player says the file format is bad.
All in all I think VMware is great and well worth the money.
I didn't think vmware would run under windows 98. And ya - there are lots of dough heads who buy dual processors and then put windows 9x on them. hahaha.
If course there are lots of dough heads who put windoze 9x on other computers too.