You know, this is crazy. I a small shop, and I go out of my way to make sure that I'm using the newest version of RedHat at all times. except for one 6.2 machine that's on my TODO list..:) It's not like you have to pay for the new versions or anything. We do as a sign of support, and those free hats.
As for shops with lots of systems, ie labs etc. NFS and NIS make most of this irrelevant. switch to remote GDM's and then you only have one machine to upgrade. Besides, a year of free support is pretty good.
This also seems to run in line with developments in the community. New kernel every couple of years, new GLIBC, etc etc...thing that make maintaing older versions a pain in the ass. I imagine that most of the errata will last for a few years. Most od their package dependencies are >= 8.0 not = 8.1 They may stop supporting 8.0 directly, but most of the 8.x packages will continue to work.
-jj-
Re:The authors of the article didn't bother to RTF
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
I'm alright with them stripping out the formatting of the data, but If they are leving in the "context" of the data, that is great. What I would like to see is something similar to XForms where where you can only write a document according to a schema. Sort of like a template. This would be a great boon to so many industries. Some of the articles I have read hint or imply that this is what MS is doing, but I haven't found any real proof. If someone has some then please post it.
Are you on crack? R&D gives a company direction, when its current projects are finished. R&D is where all of those new features and ideas come from. Some of it may be seing what youe competitors are doing, and other parts might come from trying to reshap your produts to use new technologies to better meet your customer's needs. Hell, R&D even provides motivation for the staff by giving them something new and exicting to work on.
Did I miss something? Why is the Ghost in the shell so highly rated among Anime fans? Is it because there is some much other crap out there, or is it the beautiful backgrounds? 'Cause I've never really found the plot to be that outstanding. Akira good plot, sorta made you think. GIS didn't really do that for me..
we pass so much information around between different systems. And use that data for multiple purposes that XML saves us huge amounts of work/time/money.
For example: We move court cases around internally at a court on pc, e-filing systems, and document management as well as case management and docketing. At the same time that same document heads out over the net to the public web site where it is displayed on a web site, used to poulate databases, notify the state police...etc etc etc. The average document/court case is viewed at least 15 different ways by 8 different systems in the span of 10 min. Most pf the system are out of our control, with ever changing data requirements. We just edit the XSLT and move on. No need to recompile and redistribute code. It's great! Add in the need to generate reports off the exact same data, and it gets even better. Our standing rule is that if a peice of data or protocal has a good chance of changing or being reused in a different way, we go with XML for it. For quick and dirty one time things, generally not.
FYI, There have been a few studies in the recent past, resulting in "cures" for dyslexia. These studies went on the idea that dyslexia is actually an auditory problem. The inability to differentiate between the b and d sounds etc. Kids new that they existed, but never trully "heard" the difference. So what they did was play tapes of the sounds V E R Y , V E R Y slowly, so that the differences between sounds was clear. This had an amazingly good effect on the children, and caused most if not all signs of their dyslexia to disappear.
I disagree that CS grad are useless, although I'm sure it boils down to school and person, but I have found that people with a "good" CS degree can recognize the class a problem belongs to and provide a quicker solution than non-CS folks. All those data structures and alogo's that were learned do serve the purpose of providing a general direction to look in for a solution. I'm surrounded by engineering and philosophy graduates, who tend to flail a bit when encountering a problem space for the first time. But the CS folks tend to have a more intuition for a solution.
I agree with the other statments though that the more important things are to be familiar with the API's and Lib, not just the language.
Medellin was the first place I ever went, where I got a good feeling of what an arms race is like. The site of 5 motorcycles driveing down the steet with 2 ppl on each one. One facing to the back, and 1 out of ten carrying a 50 cal browning, eveyone else smaller automatic weapons. And yet they were getting their asses kicked by the cartels. Bombs etc...a wondowerful place completely destroyed. And now it's even worse with most people packed into the cities, because they are being slaughtered in the countryside. Whole towns[10k ppl] disapearing in the middle of the night. anyway...
There is a problem with laws designed to disallow actions as opposed to specific items. Ambiguity and interpretation of those laws is up to the athority, and their interpretaion could be different than some one's elses. Most laws are written this way, but most of legal code are spent trying to decide on a standard interpretation. Banning an item, allows you to include a wider area of possible uses than an explicit law on uses , and a clearer interpretation than an even more vauge law on intentions.
That's actually kind of interesting in the fact that Linux and Windows have the exact opposite of problems. Linux Desktop sucks (but getting better) and Windows as a Server sux (but getting better).
I hope we find some third area where MS can't compete, Other wise we won't really be able to tell the difference between MS and Linux.
In the Illinois court system, I actually see more WP Than Word.:) However, I think the issue isn't so much about program as it is about a standard. Word can still read WP files and viseversa. I think the PDF standard is much more likely to stick around than a product that can't keep up with competing features from another product. If XDoc is better, ie. it has features that PDF doesn't than I imagine it could have good chance, but PDF has been in place long enough and complete enough that It will be very difficult to stampout.
I think this is just a bit of an over reaction. MS is a little late in this area. PDF is very well established as a standard. Adobe and the rest of the world are much more cognizant of how MS handles competition. They will b much more prepared then netscape was. Finally, they also have the US legal system to deal with. PDF is the legal standard for e-filing of cases and motions. The entire US legal system from parking tickets to antitrust filings, if filied electronicaly is filied using PDF,TIFF and a touch of XML. I develop products in this area, and it is hard enough to get these folks online, much less change their minds to use yet another standard. Last week I had a discussion with various courts about how to get just this kind of stuff onto microfilm. The courts won't move, and the businesses will stay close to what the courts use for official documents. I really don't think PDF is going anywhere. Through in XML-FO and FOP and things get even more firm.
I have found that companies with a strict dress code are more concerended with power structures and and authority. They tend to be very hierarchical, to the point of being top heavy. They also tend to be very un-dynamic. They fear change. I understand the importance of putting up a good front to people, but the support staff has other problems to worry about.
My current employer has no dress code, I have to work in pajamas before just to check. They didn't care. When I first walked in to interview, I was announced as "Hey, there is some guy here in a tie."
The management and marketing people dress well. Thgey have to grease palm and all of that stuff, so it makes since. But when we [developer] have to go along there is no dress code other than showered and covered, yes this was because of a certain incedent. I think the bosses like to have the long haired guy in the back of the room to call on every now and again to answer technical questions. Too me it seems to add a bit of weight to the answer.
I think the reason that they are switching over is probably due to the trend in emerging foriegn markets. Peru being a prime example. Countries are starting to enact legislation that requires any government procurments of software to only be for software that uses an open file format. Due to the long term storage problems.
This tied to the fact that US sales are going to slow down or are already, due to the complete inundation of PC, they need new markets, and unless they use an open format they won't be able to get them. I'd be panicked Linux and Java eroding their server market. Governments are eroding their Office market. They only way they can grow is add value.
Finally I'll be able to get my own dixie flatline equivilent for hacking into the kremlin, or better yet, my own Linus contstruct, for hacking kernel code. Possibly even my own Lessig construct for defending myself fom the MPAA. Cowboy Neal contruct anyone...? The possibilites are just endless.
I think the key to this whole thing is the fact that they feel that if they can produce a car cheap enough, they can penetrate China and the 3rd world economies, where currently no one can afford a car..They want to sell billions more at a reduced price raising their overall profit in a currently stagnat market.
I'm tired of variety! Some days, I come to work, and I just want the damn thing to work. I'd like the perfect background, and themes. All the menu options would be well thought out, and in the right spot etc. I realize that this will never happen, but I get really tired of having everything non-standard and haveing to recreate my desktop whenever a new version comes out. There is sooo much choise out there that it takes forever to become educated in enough different areas to trully be able to function most effectivly. Just let the community reach some sort of consensus on what is the best in an area an include in a distro. I used to follow hardware (workded for a white box computer store) every day. But it just got old. I just want the phreak'n thing to work,have a little eyecandy, and some best of breed apps so that I can get on with my job. Where I have 10 zillion other dicisions to make regarding HW/SW etc.
The company I work for is putting [some state]'s circut court data online. We handle about 13k searches per day, only 8 counties are up so far. We have used tomcat exclusively with great results. At our current peak during the day we have about 1000 hits per hour on a little over 1 million court cases. Obviously this isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but tomcat has been quite solid. This thing that we have found to be the best feature so far are the tools that are available for working with tomcat. OptimizeIt suite, Netbeans, Ant. There are RPMs out there that set up tomcat4 as a service runinning under a non-root user, and vastly improving setup.
And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.
When the quality of MS's products is considered in conjunction with this statement, a lot can be said for the quality of Waterloo's CS courses...
Developer time costs $20-40 an hour. Ha, now I know you've never done real programming. Developer wages start maybe at $30/hr (not $20), up to $100/hr at spots. Thats just wages, not benefits, taxes all that stuff. If you have no experience in big projects, don't talk.
Um some of us don't work on the cost or in Big cities...For my area I get paid quite well, and I'm most definatly in the 20 - 40 range. Unless I'm being pimped out to do consulting...then it's 100/hr for the company.
we use xfree to display remote vmware sessions running on our linux server, so that we can test on different windows platforms. All of our devlopment machines are windows, but we don't want to mess them up by running our code on them you know..:)
I just really cool to beusing a windows session, being run on vmware on a linux box being displayed useing X on cygwin...You end up always working with the sense that everything is going to blow up at any instant..
We just wish Xwin would interface with the windows WM instead of providing it's own desktop like StarOffice..:)
evolution is a desktop?!?
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
"A Linux-based open-source program called Evolution looks pretty much like a standard Windows desktop. StarOffice and OpenOffice provide most key features offered by Microsoft Office, including a word processor, spreadsheet, and mail program."
Is this guy confused or what? Makes me put a lot of faith in his understanding of the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this is crazy. I a small shop, and I go out of my way to make sure that I'm using the newest version of RedHat at all times. except for one 6.2 machine that's on my TODO list..:) It's not like you have to pay for the new versions or anything. We do as a sign of support, and those free hats.
As for shops with lots of systems, ie labs etc. NFS and NIS make most of this irrelevant. switch to remote GDM's and then you only have one machine to upgrade. Besides, a year of free support is pretty good.
This also seems to run in line with developments in the community. New kernel every couple of years, new GLIBC, etc etc...thing that make maintaing older versions a pain in the ass. I imagine that most of the errata will last for a few years. Most od their package dependencies are >= 8.0 not = 8.1 They may stop supporting 8.0 directly, but most of the 8.x packages will continue to work.
-jj-
I'm alright with them stripping out the formatting of the data, but If they are leving in the "context" of the data, that is great. What I would like to see is something similar to XForms where where you can only write a document according to a schema. Sort of like a template. This would be a great boon to so many industries. Some of the articles I have read hint or imply that this is what MS is doing, but I haven't found any real proof. If someone has some then please post it.
Are you on crack? R&D gives a company direction, when its current projects are finished. R&D is where all of those new features and ideas come from. Some of it may be seing what youe competitors are doing, and other parts might come from trying to reshap your produts to use new technologies to better meet your customer's needs. Hell, R&D even provides motivation for the staff by giving them something new and exicting to work on.
-jj-
Did I miss something? Why is the Ghost in the shell so highly rated among Anime fans? Is it because there is some much other crap out there, or is it the beautiful backgrounds? 'Cause I've never really found the plot to be that outstanding. Akira good plot, sorta made you think. GIS didn't really do that for me..
-jj-
amen brother (or sister)
we pass so much information around between different systems. And use that data for multiple purposes that XML saves us huge amounts of work/time/money.
For example: We move court cases around internally at a court on pc, e-filing systems, and document management as well as case management and docketing. At the same time that same document heads out over the net to the public web site where it is displayed on a web site, used to poulate databases, notify the state police...etc etc etc. The average document/court case is viewed at least 15 different ways by 8 different systems in the span of 10 min. Most pf the system are out of our control, with ever changing data requirements. We just edit the XSLT and move on. No need to recompile and redistribute code. It's great! Add in the need to generate reports off the exact same data, and it gets even better. Our standing rule is that if a peice of data or protocal has a good chance of changing or being reused in a different way, we go with XML for it. For quick and dirty one time things, generally not.
-jj-
FYI, There have been a few studies in the recent past, resulting in "cures" for dyslexia. These studies went on the idea that dyslexia is actually an auditory problem. The inability to differentiate between the b and d sounds etc. Kids new that they existed, but never trully "heard" the difference. So what they did was play tapes of the sounds V E R Y , V E R Y slowly, so that the differences between sounds was clear. This had an amazingly good effect on the children, and caused most if not all signs of their dyslexia to disappear.
-jj-
I disagree that CS grad are useless, although I'm sure it boils down to school and person, but I have found that people with a "good" CS degree can recognize the class a problem belongs to and provide a quicker solution than non-CS folks. All those data structures and alogo's that were learned do serve the purpose of providing a general direction to look in for a solution. I'm surrounded by engineering and philosophy graduates, who tend to flail a bit when encountering a problem space for the first time. But the CS folks tend to have a more intuition for a solution.
I agree with the other statments though that the more important things are to be familiar with the API's and Lib, not just the language.
-jj-
Don't you have to have one first?
-jj-
Medellin was the first place I ever went, where I got a good feeling of what an arms race is like. The site of 5 motorcycles driveing down the steet with 2 ppl on each one. One facing to the back, and 1 out of ten carrying a 50 cal browning, eveyone else smaller automatic weapons. And yet they were getting their asses kicked by the cartels. Bombs etc...a wondowerful place completely destroyed. And now it's even worse with most people packed into the cities, because they are being slaughtered in the countryside. Whole towns[10k ppl] disapearing in the middle of the night. anyway...
There is a problem with laws designed to disallow actions as opposed to specific items. Ambiguity and interpretation of those laws is up to the athority, and their interpretaion could be different than some one's elses. Most laws are written this way, but most of legal code are spent trying to decide on a standard interpretation. Banning an item, allows you to include a wider area of possible uses than an explicit law on uses , and a clearer interpretation than an even more vauge law on intentions.
Our bonuses got cut in half(ish), but I also got a nice set of penguin beer steins. Atleast I know they still care. :)
That's actually kind of interesting in the fact that Linux and Windows have the exact opposite of problems. Linux Desktop sucks (but getting better) and Windows as a Server sux (but getting better).
I hope we find some third area where MS can't compete, Other wise we won't really be able to tell the difference between MS and Linux.
-jj-
In the Illinois court system, I actually see more WP :) However, I think the issue isn't so much about program as it is about a standard. Word can still read WP files and viseversa. I think the PDF standard is much more likely to stick around than a product that can't keep up with competing features from another product. If XDoc is better, ie. it has features that PDF doesn't than I imagine it could have good chance, but PDF has been in place long enough and complete enough that It will be very difficult to stampout.
Than Word.
-jj-
I think this is just a bit of an over reaction. MS is a little late in this area. PDF is very well established as a standard. Adobe and the rest of the world are much more cognizant of how MS handles competition. They will b much more prepared then netscape was. Finally, they also have the US legal system to deal with. PDF is the legal standard for e-filing of cases and motions. The entire US legal system from parking tickets to antitrust filings, if filied electronicaly is filied using PDF,TIFF and a touch of XML. I develop products in this area, and it is hard enough to get these folks online, much less change their minds to use yet another standard. Last week I had a discussion with various courts about how to get just this kind of stuff onto microfilm. The courts won't move, and the businesses will stay close to what the courts use for official documents. I really don't think PDF is going anywhere. Through in XML-FO and FOP and things get even more firm.
-jj-
I have found that companies with a strict dress code are more concerended with power structures and and authority. They tend to be very hierarchical, to the point of being top heavy. They also tend to be very un-dynamic. They fear change. I understand the importance of putting up a good front to people, but the support staff has other problems to worry about.
My current employer has no dress code, I have to work in pajamas before just to check. They didn't care. When I first walked in to interview, I was announced as "Hey, there is some guy here in a tie."
The management and marketing people dress well. Thgey have to grease palm and all of that stuff, so it makes since. But when we [developer] have to go along there is no dress code other than showered and covered, yes this was because of a certain incedent. I think the bosses like to have the long haired guy in the back of the room to call on every now and again to answer technical questions. Too me it seems to add a bit of weight to the answer.
just my $1.28
-jj-
I think the reason that they are switching over is probably due to the trend in emerging foriegn markets. Peru being a prime example. Countries are starting to enact legislation that requires any government procurments of software to only be for software that uses an open file format. Due to the long term storage problems.
This tied to the fact that US sales are going to slow down or are already, due to the complete inundation of PC, they need new markets, and unless they use an open format they won't be able to get them. I'd be panicked Linux and Java eroding their server market. Governments are eroding their Office market. They only way they can grow is add value.
Finally I'll be able to get my own dixie flatline equivilent for hacking into the kremlin, or better yet, my own Linus contstruct, for hacking kernel code. Possibly even my own Lessig construct for defending myself fom the MPAA. Cowboy Neal contruct anyone...? The possibilites are just endless.
BSOD Blue Socks of Death
I think the key to this whole thing is the fact that they feel that if they can produce a car cheap enough, they can penetrate China and the 3rd world economies, where currently no one can afford a car..They want to sell billions more at a reduced price raising their overall profit in a currently stagnat market.
I'm tired of variety! Some days, I come to work, and I just want the damn thing to work. I'd like the perfect background, and themes. All the menu options would be well thought out, and in the right spot etc. I realize that this will never happen, but I get really tired of having everything non-standard and haveing to recreate my desktop whenever a new version comes out. There is sooo much choise out there that it takes forever to become educated in enough different areas to trully be able to function most effectivly. Just let the community reach some sort of consensus on what is the best in an area an include in a distro. I used to follow hardware (workded for a white box computer store) every day. But it just got old. I just want the phreak'n thing to work,have a little eyecandy, and some best of breed apps so that I can get on with my job. Where I have 10 zillion other dicisions to make regarding HW/SW etc.
-jj-
The company I work for is putting [some state]'s circut court data online. We handle about 13k searches per day, only 8 counties are up so far. We have used tomcat exclusively with great results. At our current peak during the day we have about 1000 hits per hour on a little over 1 million court cases. Obviously this isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but tomcat has been quite solid. This thing that we have found to be the best feature so far are the tools that are available for working with tomcat. OptimizeIt suite, Netbeans, Ant. There are RPMs out there that set up tomcat4 as a service runinning under a non-root user, and vastly improving setup.
We love it,
-jj-
It's not rated one of the top Canadian universities year after year [uwaterloo.ca] for behaving like a community college
You all have more than one college up there?
And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.
When the quality of MS's products is considered in conjunction with this statement, a lot can be said for the quality of Waterloo's CS courses...
Developer time costs $20-40 an hour. Ha, now I know you've never done real programming. Developer wages start maybe at $30/hr (not $20), up to $100/hr at spots. Thats just wages, not benefits, taxes all that stuff. If you have no experience in big projects, don't talk.
Um some of us don't work on the cost or in Big cities...For my area I get paid quite well, and I'm most definatly in the 20 - 40 range. Unless I'm being pimped out to do consulting...then it's 100/hr for the company.
just a thought.
we use xfree to display remote vmware sessions running on our linux server, so that we can test on different windows platforms. All of our devlopment machines are windows, but we don't want to mess them up by running our code on them you know..:)
I just really cool to beusing a windows session, being run on vmware on a linux box being displayed useing X on cygwin...You end up always working with the sense that everything is going to blow up at any instant..
We just wish Xwin would interface with the windows WM instead of providing it's own desktop like StarOffice..:)
"A Linux-based open-source program called Evolution looks pretty much like a standard Windows desktop. StarOffice and OpenOffice provide most key features offered by Microsoft Office, including a word processor, spreadsheet, and mail program."
Is this guy confused or what?
Makes me put a lot of faith in his understanding of the industry.
-jj-