ICANN may be an international body, but much of their authority came courtesy of the US government. It would take a major consensus from virtually all ISP's (in the US and the rest of the world as well) to allow a different body to take control of DNS. Since ICANN's authority came via the US government, theoretically it can be taken away as well. Given the way ICANN operates, that may not be a Bad Thing. It might be nice to have a "do-over" with ICANN and try and get it right this time.
Of course, if Jon Postel hadn't passed on far before his time, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
One interesting point in the article: the GAO rep said that domain name registration had fallen from about $50 to $10 due to ICANN. Check me if I'm wrong here, but I very clearly remember that when NSI started charging for domain names (I also still remember when they were free) they charged $35/year. Not $50. And that's still the price from them today (though they offer longer-term discounts) - other registrars are free to charge what they want and generally undercut NSI.
Well, I already have one - but the perfect PDA would combine elements from that and all the other ones I've used, namely:
- The ability to easily sync to Mac, Windows, or Linux (like Palms can).
- Much longer battery life, like 20 hours or so worth at full blast. Only low-end B&W Palms even come close to that.
- Easy-to-use media features (PocketPCs do media well).
- A speaker as good as the iPaq's or better.
- Grafitti strokes built-in to the recognizer (I retrained my Zaurus, but it's still not as good/easy as Grafitti).
- A nicer Address Book that has a better list view. I'm sure it's being worked on.
- Ditto something I noted in one of the reviews - the date book doesn't allow one-touch new appointments. Again, I expect it's being fixed in Zaurus.
- I'd like to see a PDA that could be a USB master, allowing me to use standard peripherals. I know it's a power drain, so having to use an extra battery pack or A/C would be OK for that.
- Finally, I'd lake the hardware to be sufficiently rugged that I can just throw it in a bag and not worry about it. All PDA's nowadays need somewhat delicate handling.
That's a very good point to make. What "inspired" RMS to found the FSF and start work on the GNU system was the move towards proprietary software and tools. In the earlier days when he was starting out there was no real "free vs. non-free" divide - most software for anything other than personal computers was provided with sources, and even a lot of PC software existed in that form. There were some closed, proprietary programs, but that wasn't necessarily the norm.
It's well possible that Linux could have been built entirely using non-GNU tools. It's just not the choice that they made way back when. GNU isn't the be-all of free software, just the standard carrier and the most public face.
RMS serves a valuable role in advancing both Free and the more restrictive Open Source movements. He represents an ideal of how things should be. But spending his energy on battling over the "Linux vs. GNU/Linux" name is a waste of his time, a waste of his abilities, and a waste of his voice.
Whatever it's called, it's still an OS that uses a GPL'd kernel, mainly GPL'd tools, and a GPL'd GUI with a hefty amount of GPL's software. And that advances RMS' overall goal pretty darned well.
Most folks seem to agree with the basic premise that without the GNU toolset, there would be no Linux. But given that the HURD has been coming "real soon now" for around a decade or so, without Linux there would be no GNU system, either. Linux isn't about politics for the most part. It's about a technically superior OS that relies on being Free to help it be the best it can be. Free Software is both a technical and a political cause. Software is better when it's Free, but there are two separate reasons why it's better. Only one is the political side that the FSF stands squarely behind.
The people who package the Linux kernel with the GNU system and all the other tools and goodness to produce a distro are free to call it whatever they want. Some call it GNU/Linux, some call it Linux. Whatever. Some use only Free code in their distro, some use non-Free, and the marketplace of users can use whatever they want. Nowadays, of course, much of the code in a distro has no direct connection to GNU anyhow (Xfree86 and KDE aren't the GNU system, and that's where a ton of code lies). But that's besides the point, I guess.
Of course, all the BSD's use pretty much the whole GNU system as well, and you don't see him whining about calling them GNU/BSD. This is yet another reason why I think RMS is, deep down inside, just being pissy about Linus' kernel having become the kernel of choice instead of the masses' waiting for HURD.
If RMS and the FSF want to use the name so badly, build an "official" FSF GNU/Linux distro. Heck, save time - use Debian.
The G3 is a nice, lower-power chip at a decent speed. It's probably a better choice for an ultraportable than the G4 would be. And with the upgrade to a Radeon, it's now capable of taking advantage of Quartz Extreme (though not optimized, it now meets the spec). 700 MHz is a respectable speedbump - which we all knew would come soon after the PBG4 was bumped to 800 MHz. Personally, the only thing I'd like to see is the ability to support a little higher res (maybe 1152x870 or something like it) on the 14" model, but it's a nice upgrade anyways.
A lot of folks squawk about the iBook's lacking a Cardbus slot, but I don't see it as a problem. The most common additions you'll see via Cardbus are Ethernet, modems, and wireless cards - these already have 'em, plus a Firewire port as well.
This makes a heck of a nice little reasonably-priced Unix box, really. I've owned both the old toilet seat model and the newer iceBook model, and they're darn near bulletproof.
I went to college in the mid '80s. Attended for a couple of years. Dropped out, and went to work in a computer store. Knocked around for a few years and tried to learn the trade at various jobs. Ultimately, in '92 I was working for a computer reseller when one of my clients (I was an Apple SE working on publishing) poached me away to become their sysadmin.
Over the next six years, I learned a lot about administration, taught myself a lot, and ran a pretty good shop. We went from about 20 employees at the time to around 100 all together, and I had to scale up accordingly. Eventually, I burned out of that particular life (I'm still on excellent terms with them and my successor is also a/. regular and a good friend of mine), and was able to get an opportunity to move into more of a management role with a larger company. That's where I'm at today.
The reason I say "YMMV", is because I got a lot of lucky breaks in addition to working my tail off to get to a point where my lack of a degree isn't that important anymore. That said, I'd still like to get one someday, just for the sake of having done so. There are going to be points and moments in your career where that piece of paper will open doors that might otherwise stay shut. I've gotten to a pretty good place myself, but I might have been able to avoid some of the scrambling around otherwise. I'll never know for sure.
The type of degree isn't as important to a sysadmin, I think, so long as you take some classes in your field (or possibly a Comp Sci minor). In fact, I like liberal arts majors as useful to the sysadmin. You don't learn too much specific to your field, but that's what training and certs are for. What you do learn is how to study, how to think critically, and how to deal with other people. Though I didn't graduate, those are the things I remember most fondly about my college career. i definitely think it's worthwhile. As some of the other posters here have siad, you can always hold down a job while you work your way through school as well. And what you learn in college may even make you change your mind about your choice of careers. You won't know for sure unless you go, however.
The Internet is strictly a technical medium, with no inherent bias, filter, or viewpoint. As a result, all "news" has the potential to be more opinion than news, and there's no inherent correction for bias.
Take a look at the US for example, arguably the most tech-savvy nation of sophisticated media viewers on the planet. How many people do you personally know who take everything they read "on the web" as pure unvarnished gospel? How many people beileve the e-mailed virus hoaxes, chain letters, and Nigerian 419 scams?
A lot more than you'd hope, that's how many. And that's here in the US, where supposedly they'd know better. They don't.
Now take this human tendency to believe what's written, and take it to a repressive or technologically unsphisticated country that normally only sees the news their government wants them to see. Give them satellite dishes, but with channels that present events in the same fashion, agreeing with the prevalent viewpoint. Give them a media that exists at the sufferance of their host government, where if they stray too far from the party line they'll be shut down and possibly jailed. Give them no incentive to look at two sides of a story.
And then teach the citizens that do have access to more sophisticated and independent news your point of view so thoroughly that they assume that anything outside of that narrow viewpoint they subscribe to is just lies, distortion, and propaganda.
Watch what happens. We're even seeing it to a lesser degree here in the US - witness the rise of Fox News, the Washington Times, and all the specialty news presenters that have sprung up. People are not inclined to listen to viewpoints outside of their own worldview if viewpoints that correspond to it exist. Liberals think the media is too conservative. Conservatives are convinced the media is liberal. Both would rather get news from sources that tell them that their view is correct, and ignore the other side.
And we wonder how people can't see through the obvious (to us) bias on Al-Jazeera?
It's a similar problem here. It has nothing to do with the Internet per se, other than to say that it's easier than ever to confine your information sources to those that agree with you in the first place. What can we do about it? Very little, I'm sorry to say. The Internet is what it is, and humans seem to be by and large tribal in nature. I used to think that eventually all nations would be relatively harmonious, learing to live together as people from different traditions, religions, and cultures in the pursuit of happiness and prosperity together. But people don't seem to want it, and politicians won't let it happen even if the people did want it.
That's actually pretty interesting. If 32MB RAM has to be ON the video card, a lot of machines that run OS X 10.1.x just fine are SOL when it comes to taking advantage of Quartz Extreme. But if the relevant spec is a fairly modern 2x AGP video card, and it's allowed to steal memory via the AGP bus, then that's not so much of a problem. But until last week, the state-of-the-art TiBook (for instance) had an ATI Radeon Mobility with only 16MB onboard RAM.
I know - I have one. It'll suck if Quartz Extreme won't take advantage of my TiBook.
Problem is, a lot of the businesses that have folded up over the last couple of years have been heavily tech-dependent (e-commerce companies and such) - when the shakeout came, IT jobs were disproportionately affected. In a way, it's been the opposite of previous recessions, where the jobs lost were at the high end of the food chain. Since the normal pattern over time is for economies and businesses to grow, ultimately jobs will be added, but at a more reasonable clip than happened in the bubble. That doesn't help a lot if you're out of work today, though.
After all, they're called bubbles at least partly because they pop at some point.
If all you need is a fast single-user system, or a machine that performs a specialized task, IDE is fine and good. The drives are fast and huge for little money, and the caches are big enough to obfuscate some of the bottlenecks. TiVo uses IDE drives, even - as do most of the specialized NAS servers out there.
If you run a multi-user computer, high-end server, or a system where hardware reliability is at a premium, SCSI is still the way to go, though - but you pay a premium for it. Features like command queueing and disconnect/reconnect are really helpful when running a server that has to manage a heavy load, or a complex multi-user application. And the best RAID systems are still SCSI-based.
Allow me to try and answer some of the things you don't get about these boxen:
TiBook: 1. 800 MHz (with 256k of L2 and 1 MB of L3) is pretty zippy. I have a TiBook 667 now, and I'm quite happy with the speed. Portables will always be a step or two behind desktops in the speed department, and desktop Macs top out at 1 GHz (albeit x2). I don't know about the portable P4, but generally a P4 seems to be slower than the equivalent P3, though the clock speeds scale higher for the P4. In real-world stuff, the 800 MHz TiBook should be competitive, if not spectacular.
2. Don't count on a significant change to the form factor anytime soon. The screen is a good size, people generally love the form factor, and the biggest concerns (lack of combo drive, no DVI out) have been addressed (the combo drive's been available for a while). The nudged up the screen resolution, too. I think Apple figures that a big hard drive, multiple video out options, Firewire, built-in 802.11b, and 1 Cardbus slot are enough for a laptop, and I'm inclined to agree. Most Wintel multi-bay systems are that way to accomodate either your choice of removable media or an extra battery - Apple gives you a combo drive for removable media and higher battery life than the standard Wintel to begin with. It would be nice to have a bay but it really isn't all that big a deal for most customers.
3. Yes. I'm guessing that The Radeon 7500 is pin-compatible with the older version, hence that instead of nVidia. Less work revving the motherboard.
eMac: 1. Why not? It's edu-only (for now), so when/if it goes to the rest of the channel it'll probably be just another iMac.
2. Cost & durability. CRTs are still a lot cheaper at the low end.
I'm not so sure that's a dumb idea right now. Apple is pimping the flat-screen iMac like mad to the "rest of us", so limiting the market of the new one is a potentially good way to keep demand high for the more expensive, "cooler" iMac while they still quietly sell the old iMac (remember, they kept a model hanging around at the low end) for a while. Also, since Apple almost always has supply constraints on new models for a while, the eMac can stick to it's intended channel for now.
Not coincidentally, it's the season where edu purchasing for the coming year starts to ramp up - so dedicating the supply to education for now is probably a Good Thing.
If I had to prognosticate further, I'd say to expect a flat-panel iMac speed bump around MWNY, followed by the quiet dropping of the old iMac and the eMac moving into general availability at the low end. Because in the longer run, streamlining their low-end models does make sense.
Oh - FYI, Macs are still only available from "authorized dealers", it's just that CompUSA and Apple themselves are on that list now, along with more mail-order folks than before. Don't be surprised if some eMacs leak into the channel early from some of them.
Anyone want to buy my TiBook 667? (Actually, I still like it just fine - but boy, is that DVI out sweet!)
Programming is a job. Plain and simple. And subject to the laws of supply and demand.
So if you've got guru-level skills at a programming specialty that is very much in demand and difficult to master, you will make outrageous dollars. If you are a hack VB programmer who can manage to not screw up an Access custom report too badly, you may find work, but you won't be making the big bucks and you may be the first one over the side when the waves come. Everyone else is in between. That's all there is to it.
Maybe I phrased it a little bit wrong up top. Programming is best described as a skilled trade. However, there are different specialties and skill levels within the trade. Think of auto mechanics. For every person who can diagnose a problem with your foreign exotic sportscar just by listening to the engine, there's a dozen who will never do more than oil changes - and they leave greasy palmprints on your dash.
For some people programming is a job. For the really good ones, it's a career.
As for me, I sucked at programming, so I became a net admin.
I just bought one of these last week.
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TiVo Series 2 Review
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· Score: 5, Interesting
And it rocks. I got it figuring my wife could get good use out of it (we have a child coming in a couple of months, and she'll be staying home with him), and so far it's been well worth it. It's already making TV easier for both of us, and grabbing all her favorites. I'll switch it over to use Ethernet as soon as I get 3.0 updated (from what I'm reading, it should update itself within a month or so), and I may add a second hard drive as well so we can do more long-term archiving.
Do I have a few quibbles with it so far? Yes. But not too many. Dual tuners would be ideal, so we could avoid recording conflicts (She wants Friends, I want Smackdown - she wins!), and S-Video out would be cool, too. It's too bad only DirecTiVo offers dual tuners. It's also prone to artifacting in any mode lower-quality than Best, and even then sometimes it'll do it. I also wish I could set Season Pass Manager to automatically grab the episode that's rebroadcast at the odd hour - Food TV shows (like Iron Chef) are the best example of this. When there's an episode being shown at 10 PM and then being rebroadcast at 2 AM, I wish it'd default to grabbing the 2AM show. Things like that would minimize conflicts.
The only other thing that I dislike about it is that I had to give money to Best Buy to get it - between their copy-protection support and the way they've mishandled the GeForce 4 pricing issue I really hate them.
But the ultimate purpose in buying this was to make my wife's life a little easier when she's home with the baby, and it's definitely going to do that. This way, she can watch all the things she wants to, and do it when the baby gives her some free time.
Most of the sites mentioned (like Ars, Anand, Tom's, and so forth) are targeted towards the "enthusiast" market. They're the people who go out and but new motherboards, video cards, and so on, and they tweak constantly. You don't see too many reviews of actual, brand-name computers on those sites unless they are doing something truly unique.
Laptops, for the most part, appeal to two groups of users - corporate shops and students (granted plenty of exceptions). Enthusiasts don't seem to buy as many laptops, probably because of the performance compromises virtually all laptops make. You can't readily upgrade anything on the typical laptop except for RAM, HD space, and Cardbus devices. There's no CPU swapping, no video card upgrades, and overclocking is kind of pointless on a laptop (though I had a PowerBook 3400c once that I overclocked from 240 to 270 MHz).
What coverage there is of laptops has usually been in the "mainstream" print publications like PC Magazine, but they don't even go there too often.
When it's a situation like yours, with multiple co-workers getting laptops, usually it's a pretty simple answer - your IT department will give you a Dell, Compaq, IBM, or Toshiba and tells you to love it. At least you guys get to pick!
As for our shop - Compaq Evo N600c laptops. They're pretty slick. As for me (IRL), I use a TiBook 667 as my main computer at home, and it's most wonderful indeed.
I pulled that price for the Athlon 950 from Chip Merchant (I've used them before, and though they're not always the cheapest, they have a good rep and have always taken care of me well). I didn't expect they'd be the cheapest, but they're typically about what the average Internet merchant sells for on most products.
For comparison shoppers: An Athlon 950 from Newegg is $58 as of a few minutes ago. The most expensive two Athlons are the MP2000 and the XP2100+ - currently at $270 and $260, respectively for retail box kits. Pretty close to the $300 high-water mark I mentioned. The 2200+ isn't listed yet, but I believe they stuck it just over $300 in pricing.
For comparison's sake, Newegg sells the top two P4 Northwood processors (2.2 and 2.4) for $410 and $541, respectively - but all their other processors are well under $300. I've never used Newegg, but I've heard they're pretty good.
For the most part, when I buy barebones systems I like to buy the best combo I can afford - my most recent one was a few weeks ago and consisted of an Asus P4B-266, a P4 1.6A (good bang for the buck and OC-friendly), a good ATA100 drive, and a 256MB stick of DDR. I bought a decent case and then added a GeForce 2MX card and such that I already had.
When processors cost $300 and up on average, having a budget processor line was important. Now that a lower-end Athlon processor (the Socket A 950) is all the way down around $70, it's more worth while for AMD to just produce Athlon series chips in the 32-bit world. Heck, the top-of-the-line processors are generally right around the $300 that used to be an average selling price!
Fewer chip lines=more efficient production=lower costs=lower prices on balance.
Intel's pretty much done the same thing, except they've all but killed the P3 in favor of the Celeron at the low end.
Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there," Schreyer said.
Subtext: Geez. If only those darned Americans would restrict speech even further and cooperate with the rest of the world, we wouldn't have to sue them here in Germany...
But they only try to ban web pages about sex and how to decrypt DVDs. Why don't they get with the program and ban more stuff!
The iPod should theoretically be able to use whatever the highest-capacity 1.8" hard drive out there is (currently the 10GB it has available now).
Most other portable devices use 2.5" laptop-type hard drives - the 1.8" is still a relatively new design, and pricier than the 2.5" mechanisms (though dropping fast). Assuming the Nomad uses a 2.5" disk, you could wedge a 48 or 60GB disk into it, provided it doesn't need the super-slim drives.
I have just under two days' music ripped on my TiBook - it takes up 3.5GB (mostly at 160k, some of it's at 192k). If and when I got an iPod, it'd have to be a 10GB model if I wanted to have any serious room left on it.
But, given that we're talking about $500 worth of scratch for it, I'll pass for now. $500 can buy a _lot_ of diapers, and that'll be a much better use of the money for us in a couple of months!
-iPod is way smaller. -iPod software (iTunes) rocks. -The iPod is a pretty rugged little box. -Proven to be extensible. -Works as a standard IEEE 1394 external disk.
Reasons the Nomad rules over the iPod:
-Holds 20Gb of MP3 data (as opposed to iPod's 5 or 10GB). -You can add a second battery and double the life to 22 hours. The iPod only is good for 10 or so. -Safe assumption - the Nomad works better with Windows, no 3rd party software needed. No Linux drivers for either. -Both USB _and_ 1394 on board. Hopefully the port isn't some kind of funky "almost-standard" version.
Reasons the Nomad may kind of suck anyways:
-Size. Why make it look like a CD player if it relies on a hard drive? -Ruggedness - every Nomad I've seen yet has been kind of flimsy. Until proven otherwise, I'll assume this one is, too. - It uses a Sound Blaster for "enhanced MP3 encoding". Requiring an add-on product for best results is lame. Though I guess to some a Mac is an add-on product for an iPod...
Western ISP's generally have peering arrangements - because the traffic between them is more symmetrical. It's still not free - it's just that they absorb the costs themselves instead of writing checks to one another that wash out. Anyplace where the demands are asymmetrical, there will be money paid from the smaller ISP to the larger one for the interconnection. Duh.
If and when Africa as a continent has resources that are compelling destinations for Western internet users, then the traffic loads will balance and the ISP's will come to arrangements where they peer with them instead of just billing them. Right now (at least according to my inbox), the biggest thing the African continent contributes to the Internet as a whole is "419" e-mails.
It's not a Western conspiracy to keep Africa subjugated. It's just math, folks. When two parties have roughly equal assets, they will work out a deal to trade with one another. When one has all the assets, the one without pays. Are you willing to subsidize another continent by having another buck or two tacked on to your cablemodem bill? They'd probably do better by deregulating their national telecom providers and cooperating with one another.
Nothing is stopping African nations from interconnecting and peering with one another, as the article kind of points out. If they rely on Western ISP's to interconnect with each other, they'll pay for the privilege.
The whole point of this article is that the head of Kenya's ISP association wants a handout. Not gonna happen.
Actually, assuming it's real, it's holding up pretty well so far. The C64 was one heck of a versatile machine. A friend of mine used to use them as a controller for his house back in the '80s - he wired up an expansion bus for them, wrote his own OS, and had it interfaced to a ham radio for control functions (delivered via DTMF).
Now that I think back on it, he probably single-handedly kept the C64 hardware market alive a few extra years. Because every three months or so, all the stresses would blow out the C64 power supply, and it was generally easier for him to just buy another one than it would have been to fix it.
My wife and I are expecting our first child in about three months. It'll be a couple of years before we have to worry about the wandering problem, but I, for one, am willing to give this product a long, serious look when that time comes. In fact, I had talked (half-jokingly) with a friend of mine about building something similar a few years ago.
Why am I interested? It's not that I need to know where he'll be 24/7. It's not because I want to track him as a teenager. It's because children disappear just often enough that it's something I'll worry about in the back of my mind until the day he leaves for college. And a device like this is something that might help prevent that from happening. I really see it as something where, if I used it, it would be during the toddler years - when he could wander off on his own in a flash without thinking twice about it. I'm more worried about his getting lost than I am about someone snatching him, and the odds are much better that he'll get harmlessly lost. But it's still a nice way to let child's first watch increase his mom and dad's comfort level.
Start putting them in adult watches, and then I'll worry about privacy issues. When my child is old enough to be aware of privacy, it's time to give him a regular watch.
When I loaded the story to read it, it had a Gateway ad in the middle of the story. Go figure.
More seriously, this is an example as to why virtually all PC-only vendors are screwed in the long run (and why I won't buy Dell stock, no matter how well they do). Everybody in the PC industry builds commodity hardware, running an OS they don't control, and tries to compete based on marketing and lowest-cost production. Thanks to things like Microsoft's OEM contracts, there's just no room to go anywhere else. Dell's success is strictly based on execution and volume - they bring nothing else to the table, really. Same with Gateway, and all the other commodity vendors.
So if the MS monopoly is ever broken, it'll be at the hands of companies that have an investment in their own technology, and their own R&D. Perhaps companies that have access to non-Wintel technology (Compaq/HP, though they killed Alpha, IBM, Apple) will be able to take a stab at it. Right now, though, nobody but Microsoft really matters in the desktop supply chain.
Manufacturing outsourcing happens everywhere, not just in tech. Sure, electronics is a big business (that's why the Flextronics of the world do so well), and laptops are particularly ripe for outsourced manufacture, but other industries have products made for them.
The best comparable example I can give is the auto industry. Many car makers have alliances with one another - erstwhile competitors make each other's cars, sometimes in a straight re-badging, other times in a joint assembly line. here's a few "for instances":
Toyota jointly owns a plant with GM. It makes both the Toyota Corolla and the Chevy Prism. They're the same car with different trim. One factory, one car, two companies. Joint ownership.
Honda had no SUV on the boards when the SUV craze struck America, so they came up with the Honda Passport. It's an Isuzu Rodeo with a Honda badge. It's made in Isuzu's factory, and sold by Honda. A straight outsourcing deal.
Ford owns a great deal of Mazda (I'm not sure if they have full control or not). The Escort and Protege were identical - and the Mazda Navajo was just a Ford Explorer Sport. This is an example of two interlocked companies filling out their line together.
When tech manufacture is outsourced, the brand-name company can worry about the design, the feature set, and all the marketing. The manufacturer can worry about actually doing what's possible, and squeezing every possible cent of cost out of the build process. The marketing company then doesn't have to worry about owning expensive factories that depreciate, and the manufacturer can concentrate on building better, faster, and cheaper - with a variety of customers and products that avoids idle plants and workers as best as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
ICANN may be an international body, but much of their authority came courtesy of the US government. It would take a major consensus from virtually all ISP's (in the US and the rest of the world as well) to allow a different body to take control of DNS. Since ICANN's authority came via the US government, theoretically it can be taken away as well. Given the way ICANN operates, that may not be a Bad Thing. It might be nice to have a "do-over" with ICANN and try and get it right this time.
Of course, if Jon Postel hadn't passed on far before his time, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
One interesting point in the article: the GAO rep said that domain name registration had fallen from about $50 to $10 due to ICANN. Check me if I'm wrong here, but I very clearly remember that when NSI started charging for domain names (I also still remember when they were free) they charged $35/year. Not $50. And that's still the price from them today (though they offer longer-term discounts) - other registrars are free to charge what they want and generally undercut NSI.
Well, I already have one - but the perfect PDA would combine elements from that and all the other ones I've used, namely:
- The ability to easily sync to Mac, Windows, or Linux (like Palms can).
- Much longer battery life, like 20 hours or so worth at full blast. Only low-end B&W Palms even come close to that.
- Easy-to-use media features (PocketPCs do media well).
- A speaker as good as the iPaq's or better.
- Grafitti strokes built-in to the recognizer (I retrained my Zaurus, but it's still not as good/easy as Grafitti).
- A nicer Address Book that has a better list view. I'm sure it's being worked on.
- Ditto something I noted in one of the reviews - the date book doesn't allow one-touch new appointments. Again, I expect it's being fixed in Zaurus.
- I'd like to see a PDA that could be a USB master, allowing me to use standard peripherals. I know it's a power drain, so having to use an extra battery pack or A/C would be OK for that.
- Finally, I'd lake the hardware to be sufficiently rugged that I can just throw it in a bag and not worry about it. All PDA's nowadays need somewhat delicate handling.
That's a very good point to make. What "inspired" RMS to found the FSF and start work on the GNU system was the move towards proprietary software and tools. In the earlier days when he was starting out there was no real "free vs. non-free" divide - most software for anything other than personal computers was provided with sources, and even a lot of PC software existed in that form. There were some closed, proprietary programs, but that wasn't necessarily the norm.
It's well possible that Linux could have been built entirely using non-GNU tools. It's just not the choice that they made way back when. GNU isn't the be-all of free software, just the standard carrier and the most public face.
RMS serves a valuable role in advancing both Free and the more restrictive Open Source movements. He represents an ideal of how things should be. But spending his energy on battling over the "Linux vs. GNU/Linux" name is a waste of his time, a waste of his abilities, and a waste of his voice.
Whatever it's called, it's still an OS that uses a GPL'd kernel, mainly GPL'd tools, and a GPL'd GUI with a hefty amount of GPL's software. And that advances RMS' overall goal pretty darned well.
I know! Let's just call it "GPLIX"!
Most folks seem to agree with the basic premise that without the GNU toolset, there would be no Linux. But given that the HURD has been coming "real soon now" for around a decade or so, without Linux there would be no GNU system, either. Linux isn't about politics for the most part. It's about a technically superior OS that relies on being Free to help it be the best it can be. Free Software is both a technical and a political cause. Software is better when it's Free, but there are two separate reasons why it's better. Only one is the political side that the FSF stands squarely behind.
The people who package the Linux kernel with the GNU system and all the other tools and goodness to produce a distro are free to call it whatever they want. Some call it GNU/Linux, some call it Linux. Whatever. Some use only Free code in their distro, some use non-Free, and the marketplace of users can use whatever they want. Nowadays, of course, much of the code in a distro has no direct connection to GNU anyhow (Xfree86 and KDE aren't the GNU system, and that's where a ton of code lies). But that's besides the point, I guess.
Of course, all the BSD's use pretty much the whole GNU system as well, and you don't see him whining about calling them GNU/BSD. This is yet another reason why I think RMS is, deep down inside, just being pissy about Linus' kernel having become the kernel of choice instead of the masses' waiting for HURD.
If RMS and the FSF want to use the name so badly, build an "official" FSF GNU/Linux distro. Heck, save time - use Debian.
The G3 is a nice, lower-power chip at a decent speed. It's probably a better choice for an ultraportable than the G4 would be. And with the upgrade to a Radeon, it's now capable of taking advantage of Quartz Extreme (though not optimized, it now meets the spec). 700 MHz is a respectable speedbump - which we all knew would come soon after the PBG4 was bumped to 800 MHz. Personally, the only thing I'd like to see is the ability to support a little higher res (maybe 1152x870 or something like it) on the 14" model, but it's a nice upgrade anyways.
A lot of folks squawk about the iBook's lacking a Cardbus slot, but I don't see it as a problem. The most common additions you'll see via Cardbus are Ethernet, modems, and wireless cards - these already have 'em, plus a Firewire port as well.
This makes a heck of a nice little reasonably-priced Unix box, really. I've owned both the old toilet seat model and the newer iceBook model, and they're darn near bulletproof.
I went to college in the mid '80s. Attended for a couple of years. Dropped out, and went to work in a computer store. Knocked around for a few years and tried to learn the trade at various jobs. Ultimately, in '92 I was working for a computer reseller when one of my clients (I was an Apple SE working on publishing) poached me away to become their sysadmin.
/. regular and a good friend of mine), and was able to get an opportunity to move into more of a management role with a larger company. That's where I'm at today.
Over the next six years, I learned a lot about administration, taught myself a lot, and ran a pretty good shop. We went from about 20 employees at the time to around 100 all together, and I had to scale up accordingly. Eventually, I burned out of that particular life (I'm still on excellent terms with them and my successor is also a
The reason I say "YMMV", is because I got a lot of lucky breaks in addition to working my tail off to get to a point where my lack of a degree isn't that important anymore. That said, I'd still like to get one someday, just for the sake of having done so. There are going to be points and moments in your career where that piece of paper will open doors that might otherwise stay shut. I've gotten to a pretty good place myself, but I might have been able to avoid some of the scrambling around otherwise. I'll never know for sure.
The type of degree isn't as important to a sysadmin, I think, so long as you take some classes in your field (or possibly a Comp Sci minor). In fact, I like liberal arts majors as useful to the sysadmin. You don't learn too much specific to your field, but that's what training and certs are for. What you do learn is how to study, how to think critically, and how to deal with other people. Though I didn't graduate, those are the things I remember most fondly about my college career. i definitely think it's worthwhile. As some of the other posters here have siad, you can always hold down a job while you work your way through school as well. And what you learn in college may even make you change your mind about your choice of careers. You won't know for sure unless you go, however.
The Internet is strictly a technical medium, with no inherent bias, filter, or viewpoint. As a result, all "news" has the potential to be more opinion than news, and there's no inherent correction for bias.
Take a look at the US for example, arguably the most tech-savvy nation of sophisticated media viewers on the planet. How many people do you personally know who take everything they read "on the web" as pure unvarnished gospel? How many people beileve the e-mailed virus hoaxes, chain letters, and Nigerian 419 scams?
A lot more than you'd hope, that's how many. And that's here in the US, where supposedly they'd know better. They don't.
Now take this human tendency to believe what's written, and take it to a repressive or technologically unsphisticated country that normally only sees the news their government wants them to see. Give them satellite dishes, but with channels that present events in the same fashion, agreeing with the prevalent viewpoint. Give them a media that exists at the sufferance of their host government, where if they stray too far from the party line they'll be shut down and possibly jailed. Give them no incentive to look at two sides of a story.
And then teach the citizens that do have access to more sophisticated and independent news your point of view so thoroughly that they assume that anything outside of that narrow viewpoint they subscribe to is just lies, distortion, and propaganda.
Watch what happens. We're even seeing it to a lesser degree here in the US - witness the rise of Fox News, the Washington Times, and all the specialty news presenters that have sprung up. People are not inclined to listen to viewpoints outside of their own worldview if viewpoints that correspond to it exist. Liberals think the media is too conservative. Conservatives are convinced the media is liberal. Both would rather get news from sources that tell them that their view is correct, and ignore the other side.
And we wonder how people can't see through the obvious (to us) bias on Al-Jazeera?
It's a similar problem here. It has nothing to do with the Internet per se, other than to say that it's easier than ever to confine your information sources to those that agree with you in the first place. What can we do about it? Very little, I'm sorry to say. The Internet is what it is, and humans seem to be by and large tribal in nature. I used to think that eventually all nations would be relatively harmonious, learing to live together as people from different traditions, religions, and cultures in the pursuit of happiness and prosperity together. But people don't seem to want it, and politicians won't let it happen even if the people did want it.
The human race is screwed.
That's actually pretty interesting. If 32MB RAM has to be ON the video card, a lot of machines that run OS X 10.1.x just fine are SOL when it comes to taking advantage of Quartz Extreme. But if the relevant spec is a fairly modern 2x AGP video card, and it's allowed to steal memory via the AGP bus, then that's not so much of a problem. But until last week, the state-of-the-art TiBook (for instance) had an ATI Radeon Mobility with only 16MB onboard RAM.
I know - I have one. It'll suck if Quartz Extreme won't take advantage of my TiBook.
Problem is, a lot of the businesses that have folded up over the last couple of years have been heavily tech-dependent (e-commerce companies and such) - when the shakeout came, IT jobs were disproportionately affected. In a way, it's been the opposite of previous recessions, where the jobs lost were at the high end of the food chain. Since the normal pattern over time is for economies and businesses to grow, ultimately jobs will be added, but at a more reasonable clip than happened in the bubble. That doesn't help a lot if you're out of work today, though.
After all, they're called bubbles at least partly because they pop at some point.
If all you need is a fast single-user system, or a machine that performs a specialized task, IDE is fine and good. The drives are fast and huge for little money, and the caches are big enough to obfuscate some of the bottlenecks. TiVo uses IDE drives, even - as do most of the specialized NAS servers out there.
If you run a multi-user computer, high-end server, or a system where hardware reliability is at a premium, SCSI is still the way to go, though - but you pay a premium for it. Features like command queueing and disconnect/reconnect are really helpful when running a server that has to manage a heavy load, or a complex multi-user application. And the best RAID systems are still SCSI-based.
But if you are running a server box that runs some sort of brain-damaged inefficient server or client OS, IDE is more than enough for you.
Allow me to try and answer some of the things you don't get about these boxen:
TiBook:
1. 800 MHz (with 256k of L2 and 1 MB of L3) is pretty zippy. I have a TiBook 667 now, and I'm quite happy with the speed. Portables will always be a step or two behind desktops in the speed department, and desktop Macs top out at 1 GHz (albeit x2). I don't know about the portable P4, but generally a P4 seems to be slower than the equivalent P3, though the clock speeds scale higher for the P4. In real-world stuff, the 800 MHz TiBook should be competitive, if not spectacular.
2. Don't count on a significant change to the form factor anytime soon. The screen is a good size, people generally love the form factor, and the biggest concerns (lack of combo drive, no DVI out) have been addressed (the combo drive's been available for a while). The nudged up the screen resolution, too. I think Apple figures that a big hard drive, multiple video out options, Firewire, built-in 802.11b, and 1 Cardbus slot are enough for a laptop, and I'm inclined to agree. Most Wintel multi-bay systems are that way to accomodate either your choice of removable media or an extra battery - Apple gives you a combo drive for removable media and higher battery life than the standard Wintel to begin with. It would be nice to have a bay but it really isn't all that big a deal for most customers.
3. Yes. I'm guessing that The Radeon 7500 is pin-compatible with the older version, hence that instead of nVidia. Less work revving the motherboard.
eMac:
1. Why not? It's edu-only (for now), so when/if it goes to the rest of the channel it'll probably be just another iMac.
2. Cost & durability. CRTs are still a lot cheaper at the low end.
I'm not so sure that's a dumb idea right now. Apple is pimping the flat-screen iMac like mad to the "rest of us", so limiting the market of the new one is a potentially good way to keep demand high for the more expensive, "cooler" iMac while they still quietly sell the old iMac (remember, they kept a model hanging around at the low end) for a while. Also, since Apple almost always has supply constraints on new models for a while, the eMac can stick to it's intended channel for now.
Not coincidentally, it's the season where edu purchasing for the coming year starts to ramp up - so dedicating the supply to education for now is probably a Good Thing.
If I had to prognosticate further, I'd say to expect a flat-panel iMac speed bump around MWNY, followed by the quiet dropping of the old iMac and the eMac moving into general availability at the low end. Because in the longer run, streamlining their low-end models does make sense.
Oh - FYI, Macs are still only available from "authorized dealers", it's just that CompUSA and Apple themselves are on that list now, along with more mail-order folks than before. Don't be surprised if some eMacs leak into the channel early from some of them.
Anyone want to buy my TiBook 667?
(Actually, I still like it just fine - but boy, is that DVI out sweet!)
Programming is a job. Plain and simple. And subject to the laws of supply and demand.
So if you've got guru-level skills at a programming specialty that is very much in demand and difficult to master, you will make outrageous dollars. If you are a hack VB programmer who can manage to not screw up an Access custom report too badly, you may find work, but you won't be making the big bucks and you may be the first one over the side when the waves come. Everyone else is in between. That's all there is to it.
Maybe I phrased it a little bit wrong up top. Programming is best described as a skilled trade. However, there are different specialties and skill levels within the trade. Think of auto mechanics. For every person who can diagnose a problem with your foreign exotic sportscar just by listening to the engine, there's a dozen who will never do more than oil changes - and they leave greasy palmprints on your dash.
For some people programming is a job. For the really good ones, it's a career.
As for me, I sucked at programming, so I became a net admin.
And it rocks. I got it figuring my wife could get good use out of it (we have a child coming in a couple of months, and she'll be staying home with him), and so far it's been well worth it. It's already making TV easier for both of us, and grabbing all her favorites. I'll switch it over to use Ethernet as soon as I get 3.0 updated (from what I'm reading, it should update itself within a month or so), and I may add a second hard drive as well so we can do more long-term archiving.
Do I have a few quibbles with it so far? Yes. But not too many. Dual tuners would be ideal, so we could avoid recording conflicts (She wants Friends, I want Smackdown - she wins!), and S-Video out would be cool, too. It's too bad only DirecTiVo offers dual tuners. It's also prone to artifacting in any mode lower-quality than Best, and even then sometimes it'll do it. I also wish I could set Season Pass Manager to automatically grab the episode that's rebroadcast at the odd hour - Food TV shows (like Iron Chef) are the best example of this. When there's an episode being shown at 10 PM and then being rebroadcast at 2 AM, I wish it'd default to grabbing the 2AM show. Things like that would minimize conflicts.
The only other thing that I dislike about it is that I had to give money to Best Buy to get it - between their copy-protection support and the way they've mishandled the GeForce 4 pricing issue I really hate them.
But the ultimate purpose in buying this was to make my wife's life a little easier when she's home with the baby, and it's definitely going to do that. This way, she can watch all the things she wants to, and do it when the baby gives her some free time.
Most of the sites mentioned (like Ars, Anand, Tom's, and so forth) are targeted towards the "enthusiast" market. They're the people who go out and but new motherboards, video cards, and so on, and they tweak constantly. You don't see too many reviews of actual, brand-name computers on those sites unless they are doing something truly unique.
Laptops, for the most part, appeal to two groups of users - corporate shops and students (granted plenty of exceptions). Enthusiasts don't seem to buy as many laptops, probably because of the performance compromises virtually all laptops make. You can't readily upgrade anything on the typical laptop except for RAM, HD space, and Cardbus devices. There's no CPU swapping, no video card upgrades, and overclocking is kind of pointless on a laptop (though I had a PowerBook 3400c once that I overclocked from 240 to 270 MHz).
What coverage there is of laptops has usually been in the "mainstream" print publications like PC Magazine, but they don't even go there too often.
When it's a situation like yours, with multiple co-workers getting laptops, usually it's a pretty simple answer - your IT department will give you a Dell, Compaq, IBM, or Toshiba and tells you to love it. At least you guys get to pick!
As for our shop - Compaq Evo N600c laptops. They're pretty slick. As for me (IRL), I use a TiBook 667 as my main computer at home, and it's most wonderful indeed.
I pulled that price for the Athlon 950 from Chip Merchant (I've used them before, and though they're not always the cheapest, they have a good rep and have always taken care of me well). I didn't expect they'd be the cheapest, but they're typically about what the average Internet merchant sells for on most products.
For comparison shoppers:
An Athlon 950 from Newegg is $58 as of a few minutes ago.
The most expensive two Athlons are the MP2000 and the XP2100+ - currently at $270 and $260, respectively for retail box kits. Pretty close to the $300 high-water mark I mentioned. The 2200+ isn't listed yet, but I believe they stuck it just over $300 in pricing.
For comparison's sake, Newegg sells the top two P4 Northwood processors (2.2 and 2.4) for $410 and $541, respectively - but all their other processors are well under $300. I've never used Newegg, but I've heard they're pretty good.
For the most part, when I buy barebones systems I like to buy the best combo I can afford - my most recent one was a few weeks ago and consisted of an Asus P4B-266, a P4 1.6A (good bang for the buck and OC-friendly), a good ATA100 drive, and a 256MB stick of DDR. I bought a decent case and then added a GeForce 2MX card and such that I already had.
When processors cost $300 and up on average, having a budget processor line was important. Now that a lower-end Athlon processor (the Socket A 950) is all the way down around $70, it's more worth while for AMD to just produce Athlon series chips in the 32-bit world. Heck, the top-of-the-line processors are generally right around the $300 that used to be an average selling price!
Fewer chip lines=more efficient production=lower costs=lower prices on balance.
Intel's pretty much done the same thing, except they've all but killed the P3 in favor of the Celeron at the low end.
Subtext: Geez. If only those darned Americans would restrict speech even further and cooperate with the rest of the world, we wouldn't have to sue them here in Germany...
But they only try to ban web pages about sex and how to decrypt DVDs. Why don't they get with the program and ban more stuff!
The iPod should theoretically be able to use whatever the highest-capacity 1.8" hard drive out there is (currently the 10GB it has available now).
Most other portable devices use 2.5" laptop-type hard drives - the 1.8" is still a relatively new design, and pricier than the 2.5" mechanisms (though dropping fast). Assuming the Nomad uses a 2.5" disk, you could wedge a 48 or 60GB disk into it, provided it doesn't need the super-slim drives.
I have just under two days' music ripped on my TiBook - it takes up 3.5GB (mostly at 160k, some of it's at 192k). If and when I got an iPod, it'd have to be a 10GB model if I wanted to have any serious room left on it.
But, given that we're talking about $500 worth of scratch for it, I'll pass for now. $500 can buy a _lot_ of diapers, and that'll be a much better use of the money for us in a couple of months!
Reasons the iPod rules over the Nomad:
-iPod is way smaller.
-iPod software (iTunes) rocks.
-The iPod is a pretty rugged little box.
-Proven to be extensible.
-Works as a standard IEEE 1394 external disk.
Reasons the Nomad rules over the iPod:
-Holds 20Gb of MP3 data (as opposed to iPod's 5 or 10GB).
-You can add a second battery and double the life to 22 hours. The iPod only is good for 10 or so.
-Safe assumption - the Nomad works better with Windows, no 3rd party software needed. No Linux drivers for either.
-Both USB _and_ 1394 on board. Hopefully the port isn't some kind of funky "almost-standard" version.
Reasons the Nomad may kind of suck anyways:
-Size. Why make it look like a CD player if it relies on a hard drive?
-Ruggedness - every Nomad I've seen yet has been kind of flimsy. Until proven otherwise, I'll assume this one is, too.
- It uses a Sound Blaster for "enhanced MP3 encoding". Requiring an add-on product for best results is lame. Though I guess to some a Mac is an add-on product for an iPod...
Western ISP's generally have peering arrangements - because the traffic between them is more symmetrical. It's still not free - it's just that they absorb the costs themselves instead of writing checks to one another that wash out. Anyplace where the demands are asymmetrical, there will be money paid from the smaller ISP to the larger one for the interconnection. Duh.
If and when Africa as a continent has resources that are compelling destinations for Western internet users, then the traffic loads will balance and the ISP's will come to arrangements where they peer with them instead of just billing them. Right now (at least according to my inbox), the biggest thing the African continent contributes to the Internet as a whole is "419" e-mails.
It's not a Western conspiracy to keep Africa subjugated. It's just math, folks. When two parties have roughly equal assets, they will work out a deal to trade with one another. When one has all the assets, the one without pays. Are you willing to subsidize another continent by having another buck or two tacked on to your cablemodem bill? They'd probably do better by deregulating their national telecom providers and cooperating with one another.
Nothing is stopping African nations from interconnecting and peering with one another, as the article kind of points out. If they rely on Western ISP's to interconnect with each other, they'll pay for the privilege.
The whole point of this article is that the head of Kenya's ISP association wants a handout. Not gonna happen.
No, really.
Actually, assuming it's real, it's holding up pretty well so far. The C64 was one heck of a versatile machine. A friend of mine used to use them as a controller for his house back in the '80s - he wired up an expansion bus for them, wrote his own OS, and had it interfaced to a ham radio for control functions (delivered via DTMF).
Now that I think back on it, he probably single-handedly kept the C64 hardware market alive a few extra years. Because every three months or so, all the stresses would blow out the C64 power supply, and it was generally easier for him to just buy another one than it would have been to fix it.
My wife and I are expecting our first child in about three months. It'll be a couple of years before we have to worry about the wandering problem, but I, for one, am willing to give this product a long, serious look when that time comes. In fact, I had talked (half-jokingly) with a friend of mine about building something similar a few years ago.
Why am I interested? It's not that I need to know where he'll be 24/7. It's not because I want to track him as a teenager. It's because children disappear just often enough that it's something I'll worry about in the back of my mind until the day he leaves for college. And a device like this is something that might help prevent that from happening. I really see it as something where, if I used it, it would be during the toddler years - when he could wander off on his own in a flash without thinking twice about it. I'm more worried about his getting lost than I am about someone snatching him, and the odds are much better that he'll get harmlessly lost. But it's still a nice way to let child's first watch increase his mom and dad's comfort level.
Start putting them in adult watches, and then I'll worry about privacy issues. When my child is old enough to be aware of privacy, it's time to give him a regular watch.
When I loaded the story to read it, it had a Gateway ad in the middle of the story. Go figure.
More seriously, this is an example as to why virtually all PC-only vendors are screwed in the long run (and why I won't buy Dell stock, no matter how well they do). Everybody in the PC industry builds commodity hardware, running an OS they don't control, and tries to compete based on marketing and lowest-cost production. Thanks to things like Microsoft's OEM contracts, there's just no room to go anywhere else. Dell's success is strictly based on execution and volume - they bring nothing else to the table, really. Same with Gateway, and all the other commodity vendors.
So if the MS monopoly is ever broken, it'll be at the hands of companies that have an investment in their own technology, and their own R&D. Perhaps companies that have access to non-Wintel technology (Compaq/HP, though they killed Alpha, IBM, Apple) will be able to take a stab at it. Right now, though, nobody but Microsoft really matters in the desktop supply chain.
Manufacturing outsourcing happens everywhere, not just in tech. Sure, electronics is a big business (that's why the Flextronics of the world do so well), and laptops are particularly ripe for outsourced manufacture, but other industries have products made for them.
The best comparable example I can give is the auto industry. Many car makers have alliances with one another - erstwhile competitors make each other's cars, sometimes in a straight re-badging, other times in a joint assembly line. here's a few "for instances":
Toyota jointly owns a plant with GM. It makes both the Toyota Corolla and the Chevy Prism. They're the same car with different trim. One factory, one car, two companies. Joint ownership.
Honda had no SUV on the boards when the SUV craze struck America, so they came up with the Honda Passport. It's an Isuzu Rodeo with a Honda badge. It's made in Isuzu's factory, and sold by Honda. A straight outsourcing deal.
Ford owns a great deal of Mazda (I'm not sure if they have full control or not). The Escort and Protege were identical - and the Mazda Navajo was just a Ford Explorer Sport. This is an example of two interlocked companies filling out their line together.
When tech manufacture is outsourced, the brand-name company can worry about the design, the feature set, and all the marketing. The manufacturer can worry about actually doing what's possible, and squeezing every possible cent of cost out of the build process. The marketing company then doesn't have to worry about owning expensive factories that depreciate, and the manufacturer can concentrate on building better, faster, and cheaper - with a variety of customers and products that avoids idle plants and workers as best as possible.