Actually, Xerox was trying to sell off their Star technology for more than 6 months before Apple came along and offered them some money for it. It was offered to about a dozen other companies that I know of, since I was with one of them. We were given a demo of the Star about a week before Apple, but computers weren't our line of work.
You can find the details in several of the books written about silicon valley, the best details are in book titled something like "How Xerox created and then lost the PC revolution". Apple offered them about 2 million dollars, and 175,000 shares of apple stock. Then they also grabbed a handful of engineers, which was not a nice thing, but typical in the valley. Two years later after the Mac came out, that stock made the research division of PARC the most profitable unit inside of Xerox for the year.
So you can trash this myth, apple didn't steal the Star design, they bought it entirely, for a tiny bit of money and stock.
You are right in claiming/. is nothing more than a news site. That is part of why I read it, because the topics are of great interest to me. When something happens in the geek world, I want to know about it and I look here. I don't read Salon or Wired because they don't target my needs. Rob and Hemos (and cowboy Neal) are the editors, they select only the stories they think are of interest to nerds, hence their motto.
But there is journalism inside of slashdot, it is contained in the poster's comments. Not all of them, but enough to make me scroll through the list. I like the moderation system now in place. If I set my filter to 3 or higher, I can quickly read some good, well thought out posts. If I leave it at 1, I can often pick up bits of important information that adds to the context of the original story.
I am no longer surprised to see well written postings adding some extremely detailed information. I come to expect it in maybe half of the stories on/. And that is what I consider to be journalism. Someone with some knowledge of a topic adding to the story, so we can all read it and become more knowledgeable.
The flames and trolls can be ignored easily enough, they don't really detract from/., and I can't see any way to eliminate them without driving away all the good stuff as well. Rob and Hemos see that as well, and have gone to great lengths to improve the site without driving anybody away. I hope the andoverNet people also realise that, and weren't lying to Rob when they bought the place.
There is even a quote in the wired story saying that this will probably change when user protests reach hurricane level. Expect that to happen within a few days.
Yahoo suits have to react in the next day or two. If not, users of geocities who post material that is truly dear to them will start yanking their sites as fast as they can. What will remain will be a bunch of useless wannabe pages, and various picts of grandchildren and dogs.
They shot themselves in the head with this one, lets sit back and watch the power of online communities smack them back into a proper line of thinking. Is anyone else getting a little tired of watching these reactions to bone-headed moves, since we know the outcome will always be to the advantage of the mass of offended people.
I could see this coming for a long time,/. has the content that the suits drool over.
I hope that Rob and Hemos have gotten some share of Andover, so that when Andover makes a ton of money off of/. and all the spinoffs they create, they get rich as well.
And wear a tie from time to time, it scares the suits into thinking you will become the head of marketing and their future boss. Makes them appreciate you.
Sorry about that characterization of all teen hackers as snot-nosed. I had just had a conversation about script-kiddies and some related problems out on a firewall, so the image had stuck in my mind.
My parents generation never coded, but my friends all do, and most of them have kids. And those kids are doing everything they can to be different from their parents, including doing things like coding for micro~1.oft platforms because it drives their parents crazier than listening to Marlyn Manson music or wearing trenchcoats. I kid you not.
As for job hunting, there was a discussion here a few days ago on geek jobs. The work world is tough, and just because you can code doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door. You have to know a bunch of other stuff, having a degree, any degree, will help. Go re-read all that advice and see if it helps you get out of homedepot and into a good job. Good luck with it, I remember getting out into the world with my degree in hand and being rejected over and over because I was only 19, the recruiters couldn't understand I started college at age 15.
The service level agreement is for no more than 15 minutes per year of unscheduled downtime for the mission critical services running on a mix of NT and solaris.
There are 4 NT clusters designed and installed by micro~1.oft engineers for maximum reliability, they run a service critical to a bunch of components on a large network. But the NT clusters BSoD at least once per month, and there is nothing the micro~1.oft engineers can do to force automatic reboots or have stateful failover. So each time there is a BSoD, the customer support lines start to light up. That gets noticed by the bean counters who have not approved the next phase of the project until micro~1.oft gets their act together, but it is only a few $10 millions. The attitude of the M$ sales people is astounding, they just don't seem to care about $30 million.
The solaris machines have uptimes of 47 or 49 weeks, with the next scheduled downtime for august of 2000. Never one service outage in almost one year. I expect one of the sparc stations to have a hardware problem before the end of the two years.
There is almost a complete second set of the critical equipment in a stockroom next door, so that any hardware failure can be recovered in 15 minutes or less.
Thats what I get paid lots for! And if I could get a nice stable open source NT box, I would be happy, and *nix bigotries would be forgotten.
Actually, a *nix bigot and before that, a VMS bigot and before that, an assembly language bigot
If NT (a spoiled step-child of VMS) were to get improved, I would be very happy. I have to work with it on a regular basis, and the BSoD keeps me from getting performance bonuses for 99.997% availability someone wrote into a contract I have to support. I get the bonuses for every solaris box installed, tho.
So micro~1.oft releases all of the NT source code under the M$GPL, giving everyone a chance to play Linus.
Imagine you are a snot-nosed teenage programmer. You know you are good, very good, and you have already done some clever hackish things. Now you have decided to make a name for yourself, and you have a choice, hack linux or hack nt.
You know linux is a good tight small system, but *nix has been around for 30 years. It reeks of something your parents spent their time coding, and they talk about how great the 70's were, and they still listen to disco music.
You know NT is on 10 times as many machines as linux, it is modern and is full of bugs waiting to be fixed.
So you decide to tackle some existing problem in NT.
You grab something; disk drivers, cpu scheduling, networking code, it doesn't matter. You have before you a steaming pile of the worst spaghetti code ever inflicted on a programmer. You dive in, undaunted by the repulsive use of gotos in the middle of object libraries, and start hacking away. You set up a web site to chronicle your progress, with mailing lists and an FTP site.
Since you are good, and everything you do is an improvement, you soon have people flocking to your site, and hundreds of testers using your code or adding their own improvements. You make it modular, streamlined, commented clearly, and it is good.
Micro~1.oft takes your code and puts it back into their codebase, and it makes release NT2000-M2.
Now you have the job offers streaming in, and the big bad company in redmond is offering you stock options to join.
And within two years, NT is as stable as linux, thanks to 50,000 new programmers throwing their time and skill into the code. So consumers have a choice, micro~1.oft or RedHat or Slackware NT, each comes with a different GUI or several.
And Bill Gates is no longer worth $90Billion, just $20Billion, and still has 75% of the market.
I like your post, too bad I can't give it a couple of point to boost it to the top of the list.
As for your concern with the high concentration of land taps in the francophone area, I think I know the answer. There is(was?) a project sponsored by the french government using alcatel to pull a big fiber from the mediteranean down around the west of africa to supply the francophone countries with cheaper telecoms. This may actually be part of the ring, since it is being built in sections as funding happens.
If the french government gets their tetes out of their culs, they would see the internet is a great tool for expanding the use of the french language. Some of the far-right french politicians have actually found a large french speaking/writing/posting community on the internet, and they have become the loudest supporters of the internet in france. And there was just a linux expo in paris. tres cool!
>I see your email address is at *.uk. >One of the main self-justifications >for British imperialism
Actually, I'm Irish, so if you want comments on british imperialism, that's an entirely different highly flamable topic. But not a/. topic, I don't think/. has the storage space if I were to rant on:-)
>Sorry, but when you say "education," >to me it sounds a lot like "western culture."
I don't agree. I think the africans are quite capable of using the technology for their own ends, and education is one of the highest priorities around.
There is also a great desire among the already educated population to end the isolation of africa as a "savage continent". Western culture is not the only one on this planet, india and the middle east are also big influences on africa as well. This is where the internet shines, it eliminates the physical separation, leaving only cultural and educational separation to overcome.
>"perhaps distributing vitamins with folate to >pregnant African women would be a better way of >spending the money."
Yes, in the short term it would be a better way of spending the money, but in the long term the women would still not be better off. Money needs to be distributed to a wide variety of programs to improve the conditions of humans, in africa and everywhere else on this planet. There is no one simple cause to make miracles, there are thousands of them which make improvements. And this cable is just one of the improvements which will help people all across africa, mostly indirectly.
I was reacting to the kneejerk reactions of "pearls to pigs" and "racist slashdot morons", who don't understand that all of africa is not jungle huts and savages and famines, but is a collection of 50 nations with a wide variety of economic conditions.
I am heartened to see many other slashdotters reacting to the morons in the same way, with careful posts full of information and understanding.
The plans for this cable have been around for a few years, I wonder if they are hitting the public relations circuit to build up some investor confidence.
If you look at the website (which hasn't been updated in more than 2 years), they were hoping to be mostly done by now. Why has the BBC suddenly picked up on this project?
on a slightly different subject......
I can't believe some of the shameful comments by/.ers about spending the money on other projects before spending on technology. What africa needs is a better telecoms infrastructure, to help developing nations leapfrog from a mostly 19th century poverty to a 21st century stable economy.
This cable is not going to bring 2Gbit/sec web browsing to every hut on the continent. It is going to carry mostly voice circuits, with the intention of bringing the cost of voice calls WAY, WAY down. It will also carry some internet traffic, which will bring cheaper bandwidth and hopefully spawn a bunch of small ISPs in each country. It is an evolution of telecoms in the area, not a renaissance.
The idea that everyone on the continent lives in huts is ridiculous, there is a large middle-class population in every one of the politically stable countries, and oil wealth does get distributed with some glitches. I also take offense that all the problems of the continent have to be fixed before they get internet access. The internet and all the related technologies are possibly the best hopes for getting education into an educationally starved area. Shame on the hypocrites who drool over the latest adsl/cable offerings in their own neighborhoods, but would complain when others have a chance to get the same thing.
The cable is being laid undersea for two reasons, cost and security. The cheapest place to lay a cable is in the seabed, because you don't have to negotiate with hundreds of mostly corrupt entities for right-of-way passage for the cable. And since most of it is hidden under the seabed, disgruntled terrorist factions cannot attack it easily. In a politically unstable climate like some parts of central and eastern africa, this is the only way to get reliable telecoms into the area. There are already dozens of cables around the african coast, some are coax, but this one will have the capacity of all the others together.
The article in the DM&G refers to a different project, from asia to the US via SA and west africa. There was an article in the SA Star a few months ago about this cable as well.
Looking at the Paris photos reminds me of the scene in "Pirates of SiliValley" where Apple is at the first WCCF, put on by local curmudgeon Jim Warren. The booths lined with curtains, basic tables and chairs and some simple signs. Its also where BillyG first went to try and talk to Jobs, and was completely ignored.
Why do I feel like linux (and OSS) is poised to be the Next Great Thing?
I wish I could have been there.
The AC
Re:personal connections always count
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
·
· Score: 2
I was just going over my resume and realised that all but two jobs were the results of personal contacts that directed me to the job.
In almost every case I learned about the job from a friend or a co-worker or a family member or a recruiter I knew personally.
The two jobs I took completely blind were both hell, and neither of them lasted more than 2 months. But each of them introduced me into a new crowd of people who got me follow-on jobs.
And if you can make friends with a recruiter who has a big list of jobs, you can just sit in her office some afternoon (bring chocolate:-), and browse through all the best jobs. Then you can say "I can do this one" and off you go to the interview.
You have the programming skills, but you haven't yet learned how to deal with all the other aspects of working. Devote yourself to developing some skills hacking the work-sphere, and you will find your professional life much easier.
I have been working as a contract employee for a great many years now. I started in a permanent job right out of school, which was nice and comfortable, but eventually I got burned out and followed my friends into the contracting world. The first couple of contracts I thought were nice, they paid better and I had some freedom at the end of the contracts to take a long vacation and spend the money.
But after a while I realised the best contracts were eluding me, the contracts that started at $75/hour and went way higher (last job was $2500/day). So I got to be friends with a recruiter and used her as a mentor to learn what other recruiters were looking for.
Recruiters only put up a candidate for key jobs after they personally know that person and have a successfully placed them at least once. The good recruiters have a reputation to keep up, especially with the high-paying clients, so they will never take a risk on those jobs. One bad placement and the phone never rings again, so its better not to place someone if you don't have them.
There are recruiters who don't care about the client or you, and I have been burned by a couple of those. Getting to know the recruiter will help you avoid bad situations. It takes an investment of your time and energy to search out the good recruiters and get them interested in you. Its the difference between an OK job and a fantastic job (and $10-$50/hour more:-)
If I were a recruiter right now, I would have dismissed you as an inexperienced geek without any proper job skills. Sure you can program, but that is only about 50% of what it takes to be a good employee. You have to know how to fit into a company, how to deal with human resources, how to charm the MIS department to get more RAM, how to create weekly status reports for the project lead without being asked. If you know all that, the client will ask (beg!) for you to come back for another contract when you finish your current job. That is what a recruiter is looking for.
The GLM was a research prototype of a modular, slotted mac. There was a movement inside of Apple to create a slightly more open mac, a little bit cheaper, and to merge the best of the ][ line with the mac. The GLM was a small box which became the ][GS, a machine aimed at the K-12 market. The ][GS was an amazing machine, carefully crafted by the hardware hackers of 87-88. Unfortunately it didn't fit in with the philosophy of the time, and the development of GS tools and support was underfunded until the project died.
The best bits of the GLM became a project known as Reno, the mac with slots (the MacII).
And I've still got my Kim-1 and Syn-1 boards, but I haven't powered them up in years
My email account is not obfuscated, but it is a tripwire for spam. I haven't received a thing from this spammer. My account has been active for a few months now.
Methinks this is just a prank to dig at the slashdot community. Lets not let that happen. Just ignore them and eventually they will go away, or get a little maturity.
First, DIVX is dead! Second, MP3 on hard drives is legal and the RIAA lawyers were sent scurrying away with their tails between their legs.
Once again, the courts are starting to show they can make the right decisions when they know about the underlying technologies. The RIAA were just trying to be greedy and kill an emerging technology because it might break their monopolistic stranglehold on the market. The court seems to have seen through that lie, and saw that the RIO allows only single copies to be made at a time.
Notice they cleverly sidestepped the issue of the legality of MP3s, so the battle with the RIAA will go on until no more lawyers will touch the case or the RIAA are all thrown into prison.
I like the DIVX quote about how all consumers liked it, but no retailers or music studios supported it. I thought nobody supported it, and the only people who bought the players were pressured into it by the Circuit City sales droids (commissions were twice for DIVX than for DVD alone).
And the DIVX silver allowing unlimited playing turns out not to be unlimited, but will stop playing in 2001.
So many of these posts are concerned about echelon picking up every little bit of data going around on the net. It is probably true the NSA can monitor all traffic at various international chokepoints, as well as a large percentage of phone conversations. They keep logs of suspicious activity, while dumping the content and most of the innocuous stuff immediately. Chances are most slashdotters and everyone else doesn't make it past the first level of filters, but I would bet a copy of this discussion makes it to someone's desk for analysis(buy me a pint, J) and a good laugh.
What worries the ones who are paid to worry about things like this is directed surveillance. If the echelon filters pick up something and it gets you onto a watch list, then any messages from/to you get collected and analyzed by a human. At that point they can determine whether you are just some snot-nosed college brat using PGP for fun or whether you should be monitored more closely.
The watch lists can probably number around 100,000 to 300,000 targets, with AI-like knowledge engines flagging only the most interesting changes to the watch list for humans to review. I understand there is a much fought over pecking order within the ranks of echelon/NSA analysts to get their filter to be on one of the higher tier alerts when they think their project is important. Each target gets a dossier opened on them and stored in a big case management database [remember INSLAW?], with various bits of info and analysis added as necessary.
Directed surveillance of embassies, terrorist communication channels, high ranking political types, and business leaders is the highest tier of alerts, producing reports of activity every day. Lesser tiers cover suspected drug activity, crackpot political fringe groups, key players in telecoms operators and military suppliers, and business and entertainment movers and shakers.
On the back end, post-event analysis of collected material can often reveal a bunch of information to analysts and law enforcement liasons, giving them all kinds of leads. [did anyone notice how the gay navyman on AOL just happened to have the exact same name as a convicted terrorist? coincidence, or the result of a very deep analysis of stored material?]
I'm too lazy to log out to AC, I figure someone [them!] grabs the/. logs on a regular basis and use the IP address to match AC postings to possible accounts. C-taco and Hemos have never stated they dump the logs on a regular basis or never back them up, so AC is a bit of a farce if it ever comes down to serious law enforcement action.
the AntiCypher
P.S. I especially like the people who go through tons of iterations just to hide something, is what you do so important that it needs hiding?
With just three weeks to go to my purchase of two digital cameras, this is another big plus in their column if they do announce linux drivers. I do too much work in linux, so not having to switch to micros~1 just to import pics then transfer them to ext2fs for processing would be nice.
A question for/.ers, which is the best of the recent crop of mega-pixel cameras for the following two features:
time between two pictures (I would like to snap 8 to 10 shots rapidly like a high-end 35mm with autodrive)
manual override of all features (I need to do some specific things like long exposures or a specific focus waiting for an event)
If I have to go out and buy some professional quality camera it will put a big dent in my savings for the summer, so I'm looking at some off the shelf things like this, especially if I can control it from linux.
There was a discussion on/. last week about a company claiming exobits/sec across power lines. They were roundly denounced as charlatains, and I'm pretty sure that press release was a hoax or a marketing dweeb was doing too much cocaine.
But this is the real thing, a nice incremental jump in leading edge telecoms. Granted, you won't be getting one of these thing in your living room in the next few years, but maybe in a decade you will see this level of technology pumping bits around fibered cities like Palo Alto.
We are only two orders of magnitude from exabit speeds. tera=10**12, peta=10**15, exa=10**18. Get to work!:-)
Remember the "New Coke" fiasco years ago? Where a big stupid corporation did one of two things
underestimated the buyer loyalty to a certain taste
or
pulled a great free advertising stunt with the new/old coke uproar which filled the news for months on end
I personally believe it was the first followed quickly by the second, coke did something stupid which upset their fan base, then capitalized on the media attention for free advertising.
I expect WB is in the middle of the same thing. They underestimated the power of their fan base and the internet, but they will capitalize on the media uproar and will air the show later this summer to the best ratings Buffy has ever had. If they are smart, they will make it a directors cut with extra clever dialog and gore filled scenes.
I have noticed a tendancy among some of my friends to ascribe all kinds of mysticism and secrets to the experiments of Tesla and other great experimenters/hackers.
Tesla systematically did a lot of early work on AC power and the functioning of coils and capacitors and tuned circuits. Since he was the first to carefully research and document some of the properties of AC tuned circuits and magnetism, he made up his own words as he went along. When an EE goes back and reads his original notes and patent filings, modern concepts just leap off the page. Since Tesla's time, the words used to identify concepts and units of measurements (reactance, inductance, Hertz, Ohms, Farads, Amperes) have been codified by the scientific and engineering communities.
So when a modern EE looks at Tesla's work, it is pretty straight forward, but when someone not directly schooled in electronics looks at Tesla's work, they see magic. I know someone who has searched the web using Tesla's words, and not finding any modern engineering books using those same words assumes Tesla is being forgotten or written out of the history books. It is not true, just the words have been changed to honor the great hackers of yesteryear.
Two of the biggest corrections to be made are Tesla's discovery of "cold light", which is now called fluorescent light, and his lack of understanding of the additive effects of surface eddy currents on extremely large coils which caused his graphs to show "negative energy" or free energy. Makes the conspiracy nuts go crazy that Tesla found free energy and cold light sources but they don't exist today.
Some of the people whose names we use all the time: Nikola Tesla == Magnetic density James Watt == Electrical power Alessandro Volta == Electromotive force Andre Ampere == Current Michael Faraday == Electrical capacitance Heinrich Herz == Frequency of periodic phenomena
When I'm old I expect to see the Torvalds == unit of bug-free code, and the CmdrTaco == unit of flamage:-)
the AntiCypher [whoa, I received 8.3 kiloTacos today:-]
There are cheap bandpass filters available for electric companies to install on feeder transformers (2.2KV to 12KV) to pass RF signals.
Electric companies are installing these all over the place, and installing Automatic Meter Reading meters whenever possible. It saves on sending out meter readers every month or two. My meter is one of those, kinda cool, with a little LCD readout. I miss the spinning disks, tho.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Xerox was trying to sell off their Star technology for more than 6 months before Apple came along and offered them some money for it. It was offered to about a dozen other companies that I know of, since I was with one of them. We were given a demo of the Star about a week before Apple, but computers weren't our line of work.
You can find the details in several of the books written about silicon valley, the best details are in book titled something like "How Xerox created and then lost the PC revolution". Apple offered them about 2 million dollars, and 175,000 shares of apple stock. Then they also grabbed a handful of engineers, which was not a nice thing, but typical in the valley. Two years later after the Mac came out, that stock made the research division of PARC the most profitable unit inside of Xerox for the year.
So you can trash this myth, apple didn't steal the Star design, they bought it entirely, for a tiny bit of money and stock.
the AC
You are right in claiming /. is nothing more than a news site. That is part of why I read it, because the topics are of great interest to me. When something happens in the geek world, I want to know about it and I look here. I don't read Salon or Wired because they don't target my needs. Rob and Hemos (and cowboy Neal) are the editors, they select only the stories they think are of interest to nerds, hence their motto.
/. And that is what I consider to be journalism. Someone with some knowledge of a topic adding to the story, so we can all read it and become more knowledgeable.
/., and I can't see any way to eliminate them without driving away all the good stuff as well. Rob and Hemos see that as well, and have gone to great lengths to improve the site without driving anybody away. I hope the andoverNet people also realise that, and weren't lying to Rob when they bought the place.
But there is journalism inside of slashdot, it is contained in the poster's comments. Not all of them, but enough to make me scroll through the list. I like the moderation system now in place. If I set my filter to 3 or higher, I can quickly read some good, well thought out posts. If I leave it at 1, I can often pick up bits of important information that adds to the context of the original story.
I am no longer surprised to see well written postings adding some extremely detailed information. I come to expect it in maybe half of the stories on
The flames and trolls can be ignored easily enough, they don't really detract from
the AC
This is slightly newer news...
:-)
Rasterman has been in the cube next to Mandrake for a few weeks now. Can't wait to see what excellent hackish software comes out of VA now
the AC
There is even a quote in the wired story saying that this will probably change when user protests reach hurricane level. Expect that to happen within a few days.
Yahoo suits have to react in the next day or two. If not, users of geocities who post material that is truly dear to them will start yanking their sites as fast as they can. What will remain will be a bunch of useless wannabe pages, and various picts of grandchildren and dogs.
They shot themselves in the head with this one, lets sit back and watch the power of online communities smack them back into a proper line of thinking. Is anyone else getting a little tired of watching these reactions to bone-headed moves, since we know the outcome will always be to the advantage of the mass of offended people.
the AC
Congratulations.
/. has the content that the suits drool over.
/. and all the spinoffs they create, they get rich as well.
I could see this coming for a long time,
I hope that Rob and Hemos have gotten some share of Andover, so that when Andover makes a ton of money off of
And wear a tie from time to time, it scares the suits into thinking you will become the head of marketing and their future boss. Makes them appreciate you.
the AC
Sorry about that characterization of all teen hackers as snot-nosed. I had just had a conversation about script-kiddies and some related problems out on a firewall, so the image had stuck in my mind.
My parents generation never coded, but my friends all do, and most of them have kids. And those kids are doing everything they can to be different from their parents, including doing things like coding for micro~1.oft platforms because it drives their parents crazier than listening to Marlyn Manson music or wearing trenchcoats. I kid you not.
As for job hunting, there was a discussion here a few days ago on geek jobs. The work world is tough, and just because you can code doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door. You have to know a bunch of other stuff, having a degree, any degree, will help. Go re-read all that advice and see if it helps you get out of homedepot and into a good job. Good luck with it, I remember getting out into the world with my degree in hand and being rejected over and over because I was only 19, the recruiters couldn't understand I started college at age 15.
The service level agreement is for no more than 15 minutes per year of unscheduled downtime for the mission critical services running on a mix of NT and solaris.
There are 4 NT clusters designed and installed by micro~1.oft engineers for maximum reliability, they run a service critical to a bunch of components on a large network. But the NT clusters BSoD at least once per month, and there is nothing the micro~1.oft engineers can do to force automatic reboots or have stateful failover. So each time there is a BSoD, the customer support lines start to light up. That gets noticed by the bean counters who have not approved the next phase of the project until micro~1.oft gets their act together, but it is only a few $10 millions. The attitude of the M$ sales people is astounding, they just don't seem to care about $30 million.
The solaris machines have uptimes of 47 or 49 weeks, with the next scheduled downtime for august of 2000. Never one service outage in almost one year. I expect one of the sparc stations to have a hardware problem before the end of the two years.
There is almost a complete second set of the critical equipment in a stockroom next door, so that any hardware failure can be recovered in 15 minutes or less.
Thats what I get paid lots for! And if I could get a nice stable open source NT box, I would be happy, and *nix bigotries would be forgotten.
Actually, a *nix bigot
and before that, a VMS bigot
and before that, an assembly language bigot
If NT (a spoiled step-child of VMS) were to get improved, I would be very happy. I have to work with it on a regular basis, and the BSoD keeps me from getting performance bonuses for 99.997% availability someone wrote into a contract I have to support. I get the bonuses for every solaris box installed, tho.
The AC
*shudder*
So micro~1.oft releases all of the NT source code under the M$GPL, giving everyone a chance to play Linus.
Imagine you are a snot-nosed teenage programmer. You know you are good, very good, and you have already done some clever hackish things. Now you have decided to make a name for yourself, and you have a choice, hack linux or hack nt.
You know linux is a good tight small system, but *nix has been around for 30 years. It reeks of something your parents spent their time coding, and they talk about how great the 70's were, and they still listen to disco music.
You know NT is on 10 times as many machines as linux, it is modern and is full of bugs waiting to be fixed.
So you decide to tackle some existing problem in NT.
You grab something; disk drivers, cpu scheduling, networking code, it doesn't matter. You have before you a steaming pile of the worst spaghetti code ever inflicted on a programmer. You dive in, undaunted by the repulsive use of gotos in the middle of object libraries, and start hacking away. You set up a web site to chronicle your progress, with mailing lists and an FTP site.
Since you are good, and everything you do is an improvement, you soon have people flocking to your site, and hundreds of testers using your code or adding their own improvements. You make it modular, streamlined, commented clearly, and it is good.
Micro~1.oft takes your code and puts it back into their codebase, and it makes release NT2000-M2.
Now you have the job offers streaming in, and the big bad company in redmond is offering you stock options to join.
And within two years, NT is as stable as linux, thanks to 50,000 new programmers throwing their time and skill into the code. So consumers have a choice, micro~1.oft or RedHat or Slackware NT, each comes with a different GUI or several.
And Bill Gates is no longer worth $90Billion, just $20Billion, and still has 75% of the market.
*shudder*
the AC
I like your post, too bad I can't give it a couple of point to boost it to the top of the list.
As for your concern with the high concentration of land taps in the francophone area, I think I know the answer. There is(was?) a project sponsored by the french government using alcatel to pull a big fiber from the mediteranean down around the west of africa to supply the francophone countries with cheaper telecoms. This may actually be part of the ring, since it is being built in sections as funding happens.
If the french government gets their tetes out of their culs, they would see the internet is a great tool for expanding the use of the french language. Some of the far-right french politicians have actually found a large french speaking/writing/posting community on the internet, and they have become the loudest supporters of the internet in france. And there was just a linux expo in paris. tres cool!
the AC
To start with
/. topic, I don't think /. has the storage space if I were to rant on :-)
>I see your email address is at *.uk.
>One of the main self-justifications
>for British imperialism
Actually, I'm Irish, so if you want comments on british imperialism, that's an entirely different highly flamable topic. But not a
>Sorry, but when you say "education,"
>to me it sounds a lot like "western culture."
I don't agree. I think the africans are quite capable of using the technology for their own ends, and education is one of the highest priorities around.
There is also a great desire among the already educated population to end the isolation of africa as a "savage continent". Western culture is not the only one on this planet, india and the middle east are also big influences on africa as well. This is where the internet shines, it eliminates the physical separation, leaving only cultural and educational separation to overcome.
>"perhaps distributing vitamins with folate to
>pregnant African women would be a better way of >spending the money."
Yes, in the short term it would be a better way of spending the money, but in the long term the women would still not be better off. Money needs to be distributed to a wide variety of programs to improve the conditions of humans, in africa and everywhere else on this planet. There is no one simple cause to make miracles, there are thousands of them which make improvements. And this cable is just one of the improvements which will help people all across africa, mostly indirectly.
I was reacting to the kneejerk reactions of "pearls to pigs" and "racist slashdot morons", who don't understand that all of africa is not jungle huts and savages and famines, but is a collection of 50 nations with a wide variety of economic conditions.
I am heartened to see many other slashdotters reacting to the morons in the same way, with careful posts full of information and understanding.
the AC
The plans for this cable have been around for a few years, I wonder if they are hitting the public relations circuit to build up some investor confidence.
/.ers about spending the money on other projects before spending on technology. What africa needs is a better telecoms infrastructure, to help developing nations leapfrog from a mostly 19th century poverty to a 21st century stable economy.
If you look at the website (which hasn't been updated in more than 2 years), they were hoping to be mostly done by now. Why has the BBC suddenly picked up on this project?
on a slightly different subject......
I can't believe some of the shameful comments by
This cable is not going to bring 2Gbit/sec web browsing to every hut on the continent. It is going to carry mostly voice circuits, with the intention of bringing the cost of voice calls WAY, WAY down. It will also carry some internet traffic, which will bring cheaper bandwidth and hopefully spawn a bunch of small ISPs in each country. It is an evolution of telecoms in the area, not a renaissance.
The idea that everyone on the continent lives in huts is ridiculous, there is a large middle-class population in every one of the politically stable countries, and oil wealth does get distributed with some glitches. I also take offense that all the problems of the continent have to be fixed before they get internet access. The internet and all the related technologies are possibly the best hopes for getting education into an educationally starved area. Shame on the hypocrites who drool over the latest adsl/cable offerings in their own neighborhoods, but would complain when others have a chance to get the same thing.
The cable is being laid undersea for two reasons, cost and security. The cheapest place to lay a cable is in the seabed, because you don't have to negotiate with hundreds of mostly corrupt entities for right-of-way passage for the cable. And since most of it is hidden under the seabed, disgruntled terrorist factions cannot attack it easily. In a politically unstable climate like some parts of central and eastern africa, this is the only way to get reliable telecoms into the area. There are already dozens of cables around the african coast, some are coax, but this one will have the capacity of all the others together.
The article in the DM&G refers to a different project, from asia to the US via SA and west africa. There was an article in the SA Star a few months ago about this cable as well.
the AC
Looking at the Paris photos reminds me of the scene in "Pirates of SiliValley" where Apple is at the first WCCF, put on by local curmudgeon Jim Warren. The booths lined with curtains, basic tables and chairs and some simple signs. Its also where BillyG first went to try and talk to Jobs, and was completely ignored.
Why do I feel like linux (and OSS) is poised to be the Next Great Thing?
I wish I could have been there.
The AC
I was just going over my resume and realised that all but two jobs were the results of personal contacts that directed me to the job.
In almost every case I learned about the job from a friend or a co-worker or a family member or a recruiter I knew personally.
The two jobs I took completely blind were both hell, and neither of them lasted more than 2 months. But each of them introduced me into a new crowd of people who got me follow-on jobs.
And if you can make friends with a recruiter who has a big list of jobs, you can just sit in her office some afternoon (bring chocolate:-), and browse through all the best jobs. Then you can say "I can do this one" and off you go to the interview.
You have the programming skills, but you haven't yet learned how to deal with all the other aspects of working. Devote yourself to developing some skills hacking the work-sphere, and you will find your professional life much easier.
:-)
I have been working as a contract employee for a great many years now. I started in a permanent job right out of school, which was nice and comfortable, but eventually I got burned out and followed my friends into the contracting world. The first couple of contracts I thought were nice, they paid better and I had some freedom at the end of the contracts to take a long vacation and spend the money.
But after a while I realised the best contracts were eluding me, the contracts that started at $75/hour and went way higher (last job was $2500/day). So I got to be friends with a recruiter and used her as a mentor to learn what other recruiters were looking for.
Recruiters only put up a candidate for key jobs after they personally know that person and have a successfully placed them at least once. The good recruiters have a reputation to keep up, especially with the high-paying clients, so they will never take a risk on those jobs. One bad placement and the phone never rings again, so its better not to place someone if you don't have them.
There are recruiters who don't care about the client or you, and I have been burned by a couple of those. Getting to know the recruiter will help you avoid bad situations. It takes an investment of your time and energy to search out the good recruiters and get them interested in you. Its the difference between an OK job and a fantastic job (and $10-$50/hour more
If I were a recruiter right now, I would have dismissed you as an inexperienced geek without any proper job skills. Sure you can program, but that is only about 50% of what it takes to be a good employee. You have to know how to fit into a company, how to deal with human resources, how to charm the MIS department to get more RAM, how to create weekly status reports for the project lead without being asked. If you know all that, the client will ask (beg!) for you to come back for another contract when you finish your current job. That is what a recruiter is looking for.
been there, done that
the AntiCypher
Ahhh, that brings back memories.
The GLM was a research prototype of a modular, slotted mac. There was a movement inside of Apple to create a slightly more open mac, a little bit cheaper, and to merge the best of the ][ line with the mac. The GLM was a small box which became the ][GS, a machine aimed at the K-12 market. The ][GS was an amazing machine, carefully crafted by the hardware hackers of 87-88. Unfortunately it didn't fit in with the philosophy of the time, and the development of GS tools and support was underfunded until the project died.
The best bits of the GLM became a project known as Reno, the mac with slots (the MacII).
And I've still got my Kim-1 and Syn-1 boards, but I haven't powered them up in years
the AntiCypher
My email account is not obfuscated, but it is a tripwire for spam. I haven't received a thing from this spammer. My account has been active for a few months now.
Methinks this is just a prank to dig at the slashdot community. Lets not let that happen. Just ignore them and eventually they will go away, or get a little maturity.
the AntiCypher
First, DIVX is dead!
/.
Second, MP3 on hard drives is legal and the RIAA lawyers were sent scurrying away with their tails between their legs.
Once again, the courts are starting to show they can make the right decisions when they know about the underlying technologies. The RIAA were just trying to be greedy and kill an emerging technology because it might break their monopolistic stranglehold on the market. The court seems to have seen through that lie, and saw that the RIO allows only single copies to be made at a time.
Notice they cleverly sidestepped the issue of the legality of MP3s, so the battle with the RIAA will go on until no more lawyers will touch the case or the RIAA are all thrown into prison.
I like the DIVX quote about how all consumers liked it, but no retailers or music studios supported it. I thought nobody supported it, and the only people who bought the players were pressured into it by the Circuit City sales droids (commissions were twice for DIVX than for DVD alone).
And the DIVX silver allowing unlimited playing turns out not to be unlimited, but will stop playing in 2001.
Too much good news in one day from
the AntiCypher
... get a good grip, we're going for a ride!
great line by Tom Waits. He's gone on tour again, and is better than ever.
the AntiCypher
So many of these posts are concerned about echelon picking up every little bit of data going around on the net. It is probably true the NSA can monitor all traffic at various international chokepoints, as well as a large percentage of phone conversations. They keep logs of suspicious activity, while dumping the content and most of the innocuous stuff immediately. Chances are most slashdotters and everyone else doesn't make it past the first level of filters, but I would bet a copy of this discussion makes it to someone's desk for analysis(buy me a pint, J) and a good laugh.
/. logs on a regular basis and use the IP address to match AC postings to possible accounts. C-taco and Hemos have never stated they dump the logs on a regular basis or never back them up, so AC is a bit of a farce if it ever comes down to serious law enforcement action.
What worries the ones who are paid to worry about things like this is directed surveillance. If the echelon filters pick up something and it gets you onto a watch list, then any messages from/to you get collected and analyzed by a human. At that point they can determine whether you are just some snot-nosed college brat using PGP for fun or whether you should be monitored more closely.
The watch lists can probably number around 100,000 to 300,000 targets, with AI-like knowledge engines flagging only the most interesting changes to the watch list for humans to review. I understand there is a much fought over pecking order within the ranks of echelon/NSA analysts to get their filter to be on one of the higher tier alerts when they think their project is important. Each target gets a dossier opened on them and stored in a big case management database [remember INSLAW?], with various bits of info and analysis added as necessary.
Directed surveillance of embassies, terrorist communication channels, high ranking political types, and business leaders is the highest tier of alerts, producing reports of activity every day. Lesser tiers cover suspected drug activity, crackpot political fringe groups, key players in telecoms operators and military suppliers, and business and entertainment movers and shakers.
On the back end, post-event analysis of collected material can often reveal a bunch of information to analysts and law enforcement liasons, giving them all kinds of leads. [did anyone notice how the gay navyman on AOL just happened to have the exact same name as a convicted terrorist? coincidence, or the result of a very deep analysis of stored material?]
I'm too lazy to log out to AC, I figure someone [them!] grabs the
the AntiCypher
P.S. I especially like the people who go through tons of iterations just to hide something, is what you do so important that it needs hiding?
With just three weeks to go to my purchase of two digital cameras, this is another big plus in their column if they do announce linux drivers. I do too much work in linux, so not having to switch to micros~1 just to import pics then transfer them to ext2fs for processing would be nice.
/.ers, which is the best of the recent crop of mega-pixel cameras for the following two features:
A question for
time between two pictures (I would like to snap 8 to 10 shots rapidly like a high-end 35mm with autodrive)
manual override of all features (I need to do some specific things like long exposures or a specific focus waiting for an event)
If I have to go out and buy some professional quality camera it will put a big dent in my savings for the summer, so I'm looking at some off the shelf things like this, especially if I can control it from linux.
the AntiCypher
There was a discussion on /. last week about a company claiming exobits/sec across power lines. They were roundly denounced as charlatains, and I'm pretty sure that press release was a hoax or a marketing dweeb was doing too much cocaine.
:-)
But this is the real thing, a nice incremental jump in leading edge telecoms. Granted, you won't be getting one of these thing in your living room in the next few years, but maybe in a decade you will see this level of technology pumping bits around fibered cities like Palo Alto.
We are only two orders of magnitude from exabit speeds. tera=10**12, peta=10**15, exa=10**18. Get to work!
the AntiCypher
Remember the "New Coke" fiasco years ago? Where a big stupid corporation did one of two things
underestimated the buyer loyalty to a certain taste
or
pulled a great free advertising stunt with the new/old coke uproar which filled the news for months on end
I personally believe it was the first followed quickly by the second, coke did something stupid which upset their fan base, then capitalized on the media attention for free advertising.
I expect WB is in the middle of the same thing. They underestimated the power of their fan base and the internet, but they will capitalize on the media uproar and will air the show later this summer to the best ratings Buffy has ever had. If they are smart, they will make it a directors cut with extra clever dialog and gore filled scenes.
Is Jon on the WB payroll?
the AntiCypher
I have noticed a tendancy among some of my friends to ascribe all kinds of mysticism and secrets to the experiments of Tesla and other great experimenters/hackers.
:-)
:-]
Tesla systematically did a lot of early work on AC power and the functioning of coils and capacitors and tuned circuits. Since he was the first to carefully research and document some of the properties of AC tuned circuits and magnetism, he made up his own words as he went along. When an EE goes back and reads his original notes and patent filings, modern concepts just leap off the page. Since Tesla's time, the words used to identify concepts and units of measurements (reactance, inductance, Hertz, Ohms, Farads, Amperes) have been codified by the scientific and engineering communities.
So when a modern EE looks at Tesla's work, it is pretty straight forward, but when someone not directly schooled in electronics looks at Tesla's work, they see magic. I know someone who has searched the web using Tesla's words, and not finding any modern engineering books using those same words assumes Tesla is being forgotten or written out of the history books. It is not true, just the words have been changed to honor the great hackers of yesteryear.
Two of the biggest corrections to be made are Tesla's discovery of "cold light", which is now called fluorescent light, and his lack of understanding of the additive effects of surface eddy currents on extremely large coils which caused his graphs to show "negative energy" or free energy. Makes the conspiracy nuts go crazy that Tesla found free energy and cold light sources but they don't exist today.
Some of the people whose names we use all the time:
Nikola Tesla == Magnetic density
James Watt == Electrical power
Alessandro Volta == Electromotive force
Andre Ampere == Current
Michael Faraday == Electrical capacitance
Heinrich Herz == Frequency of periodic phenomena
When I'm old I expect to see the Torvalds == unit of bug-free code, and the CmdrTaco == unit of flamage
the AntiCypher
[whoa, I received 8.3 kiloTacos today
There are cheap bandpass filters available for electric companies to install on feeder transformers (2.2KV to 12KV) to pass RF signals.
Electric companies are installing these all over the place, and installing Automatic Meter Reading meters whenever possible. It saves on sending out meter readers every month or two. My meter is one of those, kinda cool, with a little LCD readout. I miss the spinning disks, tho.