I hold a clear distinction between business and personal life and I ask that any employer do also. Personal life is none of their business unless I invite them, and my business does not interfere with my personal life again, unless invited.
Any company that I apply for is invited to check anything about me that is a matter of public record:
* Criminal history * Miltray service
Things beyond that leave a bad taste in my mouth and a bad impression of the company. I'll submit to a drug test if necessary but I don't like it for the reason mentioned above.
Most companies retain a "90 day testing time" so that they can can you easily if they see any bad habits or bad work. That is completely reasonable and anything they need to learn they can learn in that period.
If credit report checks become common and accepted what will the company do next?
* Lie detector tests? * DNA tests? * Request to screen your wife so they know that
your personal life will not interfere with
their business? * Submit a list of all your purchaes to them to
see if you are in a risky situation? * Report to them all the medications that you are
on so they can decide if you have any mental
issues?
For God's sake, companies are now requiring applicants take a personality test when applying for minimum wage jobs! Hell, I had to answer the classic empathy test question when applying to work at Blockbuster when I was unemployed. That is friggen' sleazy -- it is worse stereotyping by hiring based on race and is not acceptable for any place that I would like to work at.
The big thing is that if the employer would require a credit check and judge you based on your personal life how far would they go beyond that? Can you trust them? Can you dedicate years of your life in employment under their watchful eye?
If they won't budge on the credit report issue at all I would tell them to shove it -- especially at a smaller company -- in that case you know that it wasn't a new business grad that had a bright idea and implemented a stupid policy at a big comapny -- you know that the COO or CEO is a real control freak and can't rely on his underling's judgement about his employees.
A similar case was a long time ago their was an airplane manufacturer who also offered plain service. The US government didn't like where this was going and feared too much market power in air transport by this company which would be bad for air mail -- so they split them up.
That company was Boeing and the company that split off was United. Imagine where we would be today if Boing had the massive market power of both air service and airliners. They would have completely squahed all of their competitors.
This was grossly summarized, but the point is the same as the ALCOA story -- companies should not be allowed to get too vertical or else they will use that market power to subvert the entire industry. Over and over again throughout history the US government split up large corporation for getting to vertical and using market power in one industry to squash another one.
This all seemed to have ended in the late 80s after the Japanese keiretsus kicked some American corporation's asses because they were far more vertical. The US corporations screamed "murder" and weeped to the governemnt. Ever since, it seems, the govt' has had no problem with corporations getting massive and eating entire markets.
The ideology seems to be "who cares if the domestic market gets screwed by unfair pricing and lack of competition, the US will be able to compete on a global level".
This is why, I beleive, the govt' has done little over the likes of MS and the RIAA and allowed such jaw-droppers and the reunification of the Standard Oil company (Exxon and Mobil), the approaching reunification of Ma Bell (SBC, Verizon and ATT pratically now own telecomunications and they are getting larger).
As for MS, the verticalization that I see as the *most* scary is MSN + Windows + Xbox. I can see MS using Windows to subvert all other ISPs and making everyone use MSN on their hardware, the Xbox in the not too distant future. But who cares if MS owns the entire US, they'll own the rest of the world also and that can only be good for the US, right?
Mandrake 8.1 beta (I think) showed pictures of the developers and office during the install process.
From what the pictures showed they looked like a small outfit with nothing really fancy -- it looked like an older office, the chairs looked comfy but reasonable and the computers also looked average.
It would be a big shame to loose Mandrake. They have several developers that work full-time on open source projects and nothing else -- in other words they contribute solely to the projects and nothing value-added for Mandrake.
For instance, looking through the kernel ChangeLogs Mandrake recently added a lot to the network drivers' mii interfaces so that mii-tool would work properly with more network cards. Little things like this make a big difference but no one ever notices. ...
> The new betas are really pretty speedy and also > smaller than the 6.x release versions. . ..they > started fresh and the result is a faster, leaner > browser.
I said the exact same thing about Mozilla somwhere around tree years ago when they were at milestone 18. It wasn't too long after that that the cute little monster went on a eating binge devouring entire operating systems worth of code bloating it into the great white whale of a browser that is it now.
You are 100% correct and I should have clairified when I had made that statment. For independent ISPs it is a completely different ball game because you are paying full business prices for bandwidth (T-1s).
What I had done my report on and what I was commenting on was broadband providers who are also NAPs or own backbone (ATT, Verizon, etc). In that case extra bandwidth costs them almost nothing and peering between backbone network is often a wash.
As for smaller independant ISPs as you mentioned above they tend to get screwed on both ends -- by the NAPs and backbone providers and by the customers who expect they compete with the bigger broadband providers.
Hmm, the FCC seems to be allowing just about every merger under the sun. ..why might they have not allowed this one?
Perhaps it is becuase the miltary is under a very heavy satellite bandwidth crunch and they would not like having fewer competitors in contract bidding wars?
Anyone care to plot directway's "FAP" bandwidth drop against overseas miltary activity?:)
> As long as T1's and T3's cost the price they do, > _someone_ has to bear that. The customer > complains it shouldnt be them it should be the > ISP. But why is that exactly?
All this hype that has is circling around about 10% of the users sucking up 80% of the bandwidth and thus killing broadband companies and causing the price to rise is complete and utter bullshit.
I did an economic report on the broadband industry (I would gladly post if if I had more bandwidth) and the problem is *not* that too much bandwith is being consumed, but that *not enough people have signed up for braodband thus negating the economies of scale the broadband companies projected*!!!
The marginal cost of extra bandwith is miniscule compared to the capital cost of the equipment deployed for broadband. ATT, Verizon, etc all own the backbone and have a *lot* of dark fiber they could utilize at any moment if the demand were there (the cost of a T-1 is *only* expensive to businesses because they have to pay *extra for a balanced line specifically for them* -- and their business is a much further away from the hubs then a broadband router). The problem is that *demand is not there* and the users that they do have have to offset the capital costs that they sank.
Americans are not computer educated and have no need for broadband in general. Furthermore, there is no way to generate demand for broadband until broadband is widely used (for instance, to make high-quality video availible over the Internet the companies have to have a lot of users, but there won't be a lot of high-bandwith users until high-quality video is avaiable).
Furthermore, due to the FCC deregulation causing media keiretsus, the broadband companies will not offer any service to boost demand due to conflicts of interest. For instance, Verizon could *easily* offer long-distance toll-free telephone over DSL, but this would cause the substitution effect against their own telephone service with very little income effect becuase there is little demand for broadband.
Face it, this bullshit about 10% of the users costing broadband companies too much is just that -- bullshit. If it were really an issue they could implement token bucket weighted fair queueing and everything would be fixed. It is an attempt to convince their inelastic consumers that they are hurting and need more $$ from them. It is so they can suck up consumer surplus from their inelestic consumers by introducing a-la-carte pricing while avoiding backlash by spreading this myth.
The broadband companies are hurting very much, but it has *nothing* to do with people downloading too much -- it is completely due to the fact that the number of people that have signed up are *nowhere* near their projections thus they are trying to offset their capital costs by sucking $$ out of their faithful customers.
If you need evidence of this bandwidth myth, just look at South Korea -- they have 20Mbit connections to their homes chepaer then we do and they don't have bandwidth issues. What they did as opposed to us is that the government boosted demand before broadband rollout by offering computer education virtually free to the entire country -- thus the demand was high enough to offset capital costs at the introduction and because everyone had broadband they could create apps for broadband causing more demand for broadband (and the self-feeding cycle continues).
We never met that critical demand mass here.
In summary, don't listen to the bandwidth crap. It is marketing hype to calm the masses before they start introducing by-the-megabyte pricing to suck up consumer surplus (the people who use the most bandwith are the least likely to completely drop broadband, afterall). All of this is worse then the stupid 'viral' GPL marketing crap that MS put out and now everyone seems to quote.
If I upset you, mod me to hell. If you want to discuss make a good argument.
> response lag can range up to the.5 to 1 sec > range! (So I've heard from users, but can't > personally verify.)
Geosynchronous satellites are 22,000 miles away from the earth and light travels at 186,000 miles per second. ..you do the math (more like 1/4 sec: +237ms to normal delay).
I've done networking at a delployed location where IP had to hop two satellites (full duplex). The lag was noticeable but not as horrid as one may assume -- with a decent proxy server it was definately bearable.
Interestingly, browsers act very very different with that much lag. IE sucked ass and Mozilla wasn't much better. This was one situation where Opera really shined. Seriously, browsing the web with Opera with that much lag was an order of magnitude better then any other browser I tried.
Now that I'm back on a cable modem I've returned to Galeon, however if anyone has a situation where lag is a big factor try Opera -- you will be impressed with the difference!
I agree. That is why I set my distributed.net client to work on the OGR-25 project exclusively.
OGR-25 has some really cool potential and will be helpful to the world if solved. Basically it is a project to find the "Optimal Goloumb Ruler of 25 marks" -- which basically means trying to find a ruler with the least number of marks that can measure the most distances. It's a number theory problem.
For instance, if you have a ruler with a mark at one inch and one at three inches, one can measure 1", 2", 3" and 4" objects only using those two marks.
The applications of this principle are numerous. One that comes to mind is the optimal antenna that has the least number of of parts (aka smallest) that can transmit and recieve the largest bandwidth (range). Very cool.
Its like my dad. ..he worked as a datacomm manager for 25 years and through that time worked on some amazing systems (for their periods: the 1401, Sytem/360, etc).
To this day he does all of his taxes with a pencil and accounting paper and when my mother bought him a calculator in the early 80s it collected dust as he said, "What do I need a calculator for? I have the most powerful calculator in the world on the top of my head!"
Just because it is one driver does not imply that it is the least common denominator (it could be but is most likely not):
pseudo code:
switch (PCIID)
case nv300:
do really cool nv300 optimized stuff;
case nv200:
do neato nv200 magic;
case nv100:
do nv100 specific things;
default:
tell user to go buy a Radeon
Re:Wine's maturity as a product isn't quite enough
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 2
> Wine has come light-years since I first used it
LOL. ..I still remember the days when the only program that worked reliably under Wine was notepad and I had fun running exceed on a windows machine, smb mounting its filesystem and then xhosting notepad back on to itself:).
Wine is not perfect, but it has come a light-years and frankly amazes me how much it can do!
BTW I've found that the latest CVS from the wine project (make sure to use --enable-opengl) tends to be more stable, faster and runs more programs then WineX CVS. The only exception to this is any game that *only* uses DirectX. In that case WineX wins by a large margin.
As for the previous complaints about Office2000, IE6 not working, I have yet to have any luck with either of those (I don't have a need for either; it is just amusing to play with wine). ..*but* Office97 and IE 5.5 work superbly and I don't see a massive feature difference (other then pretty stuff) to warrant the need for O2k. ..but then, too, I don't use office (AbiWord rocks!).
They ported gtk (gdk) directly to DirectFB do that you can run all gnome apps natively on their new graphical system *as well as* an X server so that you can run all the backwards-compatible stuff.
Did I also mention that DirectFB supports *real* transparency natively?
Check it out: www.directfb.org
Re:Disk buffers & memory subsystem updated??
on
New Linux 2.5 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> would be to tag certain processes so that they > will never be moved into swap for disk buffers
I beleive that this is what the sticky bit was intended for. Before I go about explaining what it is and how to use it, does anyone know if Linux actually *honors* the sticky bit or does it just have it for compatibility?
One word -- Reiserfs4. If it gets adopted it will revolutionize data storage -- the filesyetem is a database -- and Hans Reiser had this idea long before MS started touting the integration of SQL server into everything.
>correct me if I'm wrong, but diesel is such a >non-combustable material that you can store it > in drums in your home.
Many Americans store diesel fuel in their homes already. What do you think home heating oil is?
You ever notice that diesel at the pump is colored pink? The reason for that is so that when trucks stop at weigh stations the state cops can check to make sure that they are using "tax-paid-for" pump-diesel rather then the virtually tax-less home heating oil in their trucks!
You want to get great gas mileage at an insanely low price? Get a diesel car and put a pump on your home heating oil tank in the basement -- fill the car with your home heating oil which is vastly cheaper then diesel.
The main reasons that I can think of that diesel never really kicked off in the US for passenger cars is:
1) Diesel gels when it gets cold out -- thus you must plug a diesel car into an electrical outlet when it is cold out to keep the diesel from geling.
2) Diesel engines are noisy (newer technology fixes this, though).
3) Diesel engines are dirty (again, newer technology fixes this)
4) Diesel engines lack horsepower but have massive amounts of torque (quick off-the-line acceleration but lacking in 'high speed passing'). Fix for this is turbo-diesel but for some odd reason they were rarely sold in passenger cars.
Early 80s seemed to be the 'diesel age' for passenger cars -- one could buy the venerable VW Rabbit diesel, many of the GM H-body cars in diesel, the Suburban in diesel -- just to name a few. I have not seen a new diesel passenger car in the US for many years.
If they sold a decent turbo-diesel passenger car in the US (preferably the new direct-injected type) I would buy one. Anyone know of any? I can't think of any. . .
OK, I am a video encoding newb and that completely kills everything that I have read and reasoned about DivX. Would anyone care to elaborate?
As I understood it, DivX uses the *avi file format* which was developed my Microsoft and is simply a method of packaging the video and audio streams.
As it was explained to me, any audio any video stream (whether it be mp3, ogg or mpeg1 or mpeg2, etc) can be packaged into the avi file format and the fact that it is an avi does not imply a specific audio or video encoding (like choosing paper or plastic at the grocery store -- neither imply what is in the bags).
In this case, I thought the actual video and audio codecs they developed by the DivX people where as only the avi file format was Microsoft's and that DivX 5 was mpeg4.
Since we're on the topic and how I thought it all worked has been thrown to the wind, I might as well ask the question (which I may now have the wrong impression to also). ..Is there any relation at all between DivX and the Circuit City DIVX?
Anyone care to elaborate for this now confused soul?
> If a company spends billions of dollars wiring up
> a cable infostructure, why do customers and the
> govt. think they have the right to tell the
> company how they can use that bandwidth
Because not every joe can run wires on the poles. Telecommunications is far from a scenario of perfect competition because the government picks and chooses who can run wires on the poles.
This was done after the initial burst of telephone popularity caused a messy nest of wires over the streets of cities as company after company ran thier own wires.
Two companies is a oligarchy, not true competition. If there were many companies all with their own wires on the poles there would be an excellent argument for deregulation. As it stands there is not enough competition to keep things in check.
Have you noticed that whenever Verizon hikes their DSL prices that ATT hikes their Broadband immediately afterwards (and vica-versa)?
Take a look at economic models of only two large competitors in an industry versus many competitors -- they are very different.
I've worked for a few telephony companies in my time. ..two that stick out succinctly in regards to Linux are Priority Call (makers of Oryx) and Boston Communications (do the pre-paid calling back-end to most large cell carriers).
Priority Call (http://www.prioritycall.com) makes an uber-trunk-switch that does all types of cool stuff from one-number-anywhere to pre-paid calling to massive e-mailed voice-mail to web voicemail -- it is the swiss army knife of telephony (thier main competitor, BTW is Comverse). Priority Call has sold switches to the likes of Bell Atlantic and a lot of Mexican and South American cell vendors).
Anyway, their systems were passive-backplane PIIs (at the time) with Dialogic (owned by Intel) ISA-bus switch boards (Dialogic boards also have thier own bus to interconnect them to aide the ISA bus) and Mylex RAID controllers runnning 9 Seagate Cheetahs. They used SCO OpenServer because SCO was just about the only telephony OS 'back in the day' and it was pretty stable. As a side note they also legally used a fair amount of OSS in Oryx, including a hacked-up apache and ncurses.
SCO OpenServer, though, has not been actively developed on for a *long* time and not only does it show its age, but frankly it is just about the worst OS I have ever worked on (I don't mean to flame you OpenServer-lovers out there). Support was a bitch. Bug-fixing was a bitch becuase SCO was not longer developing OpenServer not to mention that later versions of OpenServer were hacks to old ones in attempt to add new features without the proper architecture. As much as I want to flame I'll leave my beef with OpenServer at that.
Needless to say the limitations of OpenServer were apparent and they found that *it does not scale* well at all. Thus, they moves their home-brew proprietary Oryx database to Tru64 using rack-mounted Alphaserver DS10s and kept OpenServer for the fron-end and switching to keep migration smooth (Comverse, BTW, uses Tru64 on Alphas -- which this whole push by HP to move to HPUX is going to really piss off a lot of telephony companies). For massive installs they used Sun Netra T-1s in a customer-specific manner.
Later, they finally realized that not only did OpenServer SUCK, but it was *expensive* too ($500 a copy). Thus they started to port to Linux and wrapped it into one massive migration strategy that included new hardware (Compact-PCI).
The fact of the matter is that people hate change. People complained about how Linux companies weren't doing so well not to mention that run-of-the-mill support people FEAR UNIX and the migration from the OpenServer database to the Tru64 was painful (had to re-do all the flow-chart-like step-by-step hold-my-hand this-is-how-to-use-unix cutsheets for some people) My manager at the time (and the best manager I have ever had) sold Linux -- simply stated, "who cares if the Linux companies go under -- what is better security then HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS!). During the port, though, Linux had a few limitations that slowed the deployment:
1) OpenServer is such a hacked beast that porting to Linux from it was non-trivial.
2) Dialogic (the heart of the telecomm industry) did not make Linux drivers at the time. Thus they decided to move to NMS (Dialogic competitor) cards that did support Linux as well as Compact PCI.
3) At the time Linux did not support hot-plug PCI which was one of the design specs and the main reason for moving to Compact PCI.
4) Not even NMS would ship source-code drivers -- only compiled modules. THIS IS A BIG THING as one can only run stock RedHat kernels or specific versions they support or else you'll get unresolved symbols or flakiness in the drivers. Face it, the stock RedHat kernel is *not* meant for telephony. Not only that, but the whole security argument of having the source code to the OS is negated because if NMS for some odd reason decided to stop developing Linux drivers then the company would be stuck with one version of Linux forever.
In the end it was not Linux's limitations that killed the migration but the fact that they rolled the whole migration into the massive hardware/software roll-over and when hard economic times hit and the person who spear-headed the project left, those that hate change won and the whole project was scrapped (some people think it is better to live with what you know versus venturing into the unknown, right?)
In summary, the things that I think would help adotion of Linux in the telecomm world are:
1) Above all else, open-source NMS or Dialogic drivers. People fear Linux companyies instability too much and if their vendor decided to stop supporting Linux it would screw them.
-OR-
2) A company come about that makes hard-core telecomm-grade switch boards with open source drivers that gives Dialogic a run for its money. I'm not talking about the "internet phone jack" guys, I'm talking about boards that can handle dozens on trunks (read T-1s). Dialogic used to be the main reason for companies not adopting Linux because they basically own the PC-based telephony market and they used to ONLY speak NT and SCO and trust me, as much as I hate to say it NT is better then OpenServer from a support and development point of view (although OpenServer is more stable then NT).
3) Keep moving forward with Linux on the desktop. Most people to this day *fear* UNIX and if Linux can be made common and user-friedly the managment types (and support types) that fear change will be less reluctant to let the engineers use Linux. It sounds convoluted, but this is how MS did it. Linux on the desktop indirectly helps all those who want to convince managment to use Linux a LOT as it shows that support costs will not be as high as it is 'user-friendly' and they can hire monkey support cheap.
4) Linux clustering. Linux NEEDS good high-availibility open-source clustering. No matter how good your hardware is you can not get the telecomm "five nines" of uptime with one computer! A good first move would be a good filesystem that supports mutiple hosts sharing one fibre channel array.
Why do telephony companies migrate to NT/2000?
1) Tru64 is dead thanks to HP.
2) People are starting to fear that Solaris will go the way of Tru64 and future migrations are *very* expensive.
3) People fear UNIX and support costs are high due to this fear (need more geeky support people).
4) Dialogic only used to speak OpenServer and NT (I don't know if it is the same any more). NT is by far the lesser of the two evils in development and support (not reliability).
4) Managment fears Linux companies instability because they are thinking in the 'old school' support issue -- if a vendor goes under and you can't buy support your company is screwed. Please, educate them that HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS is teh best security. And please coerce NMS or Dialogic to make open-source drivers as their proprietary drivers negate the last argument!!!
As for Boston Communications, I did support for them and they used NT. That was one of the worst nightmares I have ever experienced. Try remotely managing hundreds of telecomm nodes all over the country over 56K frame-relay links using Remotely Possible (PC Anywhere clone). Not to mention the BSODs and managment blaming you when they could not report "five nines" to the carriers and thus had to pay them mucho $$.
It seems that the Korean companies have reached what the Japanese companies had in the 80s -- in the 70s it used to be cheap "Jap Junk" and Japanese products were truly that cheap and that poorly made. Then in the 80s they started kicking out higher quality stuff at a slightly higher price and now they make world-class products.
Korean products in the 80s were cheap and absolute junk. Remeber the early Hyundais? Same with the electronics industry -- Samsung used to make cheap but not-so-great products. Now they are the leader in the pack for LCDs! They make the LCD panels for the best in the business:
* Dell monitors * Apple monitors
and their own line (higher models) kicks some butt.
From what I have read, Samsung is able to produce the LCDs themselves fairly cheaply but the most expensive parts are the integrated circuits they have to get from Japan to make the LCDs run, do interpolation and handle analog input.
What I *wish* they would do is sell a stripped-down model with the quality Samsung LCD panel and *no* analog inputs (just DVI), *no* interpolation and otherwise minimal electronics from Japan. My computer is more then powerful enough to handle software scaling in the very few instances I need it and if I use DVI I have no use for paying for all the electronics for analog also.
The probelm is their damn marketing departments. They assume that anyone who wants a quality picture will want all the bells and whistles also and thus only encorporate all the junk into their higher priced models. Also, they assume that anyone who is "l33t" enough to use DVI is also willing to pay a premium even though the DVI electronics is cheaper then the analog->digital circuitry.
Please, for the love of God, make a LCD with a quality screen and skimpy on the bells and whistles! I would definately buy one. Until that day comes, however, I will just wait.
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I hold a clear distinction between business and personal life and I ask that any employer do also. Personal life is none of their business unless I invite them, and my business does not interfere with my personal life again, unless invited.
Any company that I apply for is invited to check anything about me that is a matter of public record:
* Criminal history
* Miltray service
Things beyond that leave a bad taste in my mouth and a bad impression of the company. I'll submit to a drug test if necessary but I don't like it for the reason mentioned above.
Most companies retain a "90 day testing time" so that they can can you easily if they see any bad habits or bad work. That is completely reasonable and anything they need to learn they can learn in that period.
If credit report checks become common and accepted what will the company do next?
* Lie detector tests?
* DNA tests?
* Request to screen your wife so they know that
your personal life will not interfere with
their business?
* Submit a list of all your purchaes to them to
see if you are in a risky situation?
* Report to them all the medications that you are
on so they can decide if you have any mental
issues?
For God's sake, companies are now requiring applicants take a personality test when applying for minimum wage jobs! Hell, I had to answer the classic empathy test question when applying to work at Blockbuster when I was unemployed. That is friggen' sleazy -- it is worse stereotyping by hiring based on race and is not acceptable for any place that I would like to work at.
The big thing is that if the employer would require a credit check and judge you based on your personal life how far would they go beyond that? Can you trust them? Can you dedicate years of your life in employment under their watchful eye?
If they won't budge on the credit report issue at all I would tell them to shove it -- especially at a smaller company -- in that case you know that it wasn't a new business grad that had a bright idea and implemented a stupid policy at a big comapny -- you know that the COO or CEO is a real control freak and can't rely on his underling's judgement about his employees.
A similar case was a long time ago their was an airplane manufacturer who also offered plain service. The US government didn't like where this was going and feared too much market power in air transport by this company which would be bad for air mail -- so they split them up.
That company was Boeing and the company that split off was United. Imagine where we would be today if Boing had the massive market power of both air service and airliners. They would have completely squahed all of their competitors.
This was grossly summarized, but the point is the same as the ALCOA story -- companies should not be allowed to get too vertical or else they will use that market power to subvert the entire industry. Over and over again throughout history the US government split up large corporation for getting to vertical and using market power in one industry to squash another one.
This all seemed to have ended in the late 80s after the Japanese keiretsus kicked some American corporation's asses because they were far more vertical. The US corporations screamed "murder" and weeped to the governemnt. Ever since, it seems, the govt' has had no problem with corporations getting massive and eating entire markets.
The ideology seems to be "who cares if the domestic market gets screwed by unfair pricing and lack of competition, the US will be able to compete on a global level".
This is why, I beleive, the govt' has done little over the likes of MS and the RIAA and allowed such jaw-droppers and the reunification of the Standard Oil company (Exxon and Mobil), the approaching reunification of Ma Bell (SBC, Verizon and ATT pratically now own telecomunications and they are getting larger).
As for MS, the verticalization that I see as the *most* scary is MSN + Windows + Xbox. I can see MS using Windows to subvert all other ISPs and making everyone use MSN on their hardware, the Xbox in the not too distant future. But who cares if MS owns the entire US, they'll own the rest of the world also and that can only be good for the US, right?
This is globalization.
Mandrake 8.1 beta (I think) showed pictures of the developers and office during the install process.
..
From what the pictures showed they looked like a small outfit with nothing really fancy -- it looked like an older office, the chairs looked comfy but reasonable and the computers also looked average.
It would be a big shame to loose Mandrake. They have several developers that work full-time on open source projects and nothing else -- in other words they contribute solely to the projects and nothing value-added for Mandrake.
For instance, looking through the kernel ChangeLogs Mandrake recently added a lot to the network drivers' mii interfaces so that mii-tool would work properly with more network cards. Little things like this make a big difference but no one ever notices. .
> The new betas are really pretty speedy and also .they
> smaller than the 6.x release versions. . .
> started fresh and the result is a faster, leaner > browser.
I said the exact same thing about Mozilla somwhere around tree years ago when they were at milestone 18. It wasn't too long after that that the cute little monster went on a eating binge devouring entire operating systems worth of code bloating it into the great white whale of a browser that is it now.
You are 100% correct and I should have clairified when I had made that statment. For independent ISPs it is a completely different ball game because you are paying full business prices for bandwidth (T-1s).
What I had done my report on and what I was commenting on was broadband providers who are also NAPs or own backbone (ATT, Verizon, etc). In that case extra bandwidth costs them almost nothing and peering between backbone network is often a wash.
As for smaller independant ISPs as you mentioned above they tend to get screwed on both ends -- by the NAPs and backbone providers and by the customers who expect they compete with the bigger broadband providers.
Thank you for your informed comment.
Hmm, the FCC seems to be allowing just about every merger under the sun. .
Perhaps it is becuase the miltary is under a very heavy satellite bandwidth crunch and they would not like having fewer competitors in contract bidding wars?
Anyone care to plot directway's "FAP" bandwidth drop against overseas miltary activity?
> As long as T1's and T3's cost the price they do,
> _someone_ has to bear that. The customer
> complains it shouldnt be them it should be the
> ISP. But why is that exactly?
All this hype that has is circling around about 10% of the users sucking up 80% of the bandwidth and thus killing broadband companies and causing the price to rise is complete and utter bullshit.
I did an economic report on the broadband industry (I would gladly post if if I had more bandwidth) and the problem is *not* that too much bandwith is being consumed, but that *not enough people have signed up for braodband thus negating the economies of scale the broadband companies projected*!!!
The marginal cost of extra bandwith is miniscule compared to the capital cost of the equipment deployed for broadband. ATT, Verizon, etc all own the backbone and have a *lot* of dark fiber they could utilize at any moment if the demand were there (the cost of a T-1 is *only* expensive to businesses because they have to pay *extra for a balanced line specifically for them* -- and their business is a much further away from the hubs then a broadband router). The problem is that *demand is not there* and the users that they do have have to offset the capital costs that they sank.
Americans are not computer educated and have no need for broadband in general. Furthermore, there is no way to generate demand for broadband until broadband is widely used (for instance, to make high-quality video availible over the Internet the companies have to have a lot of users, but there won't be a lot of high-bandwith users until high-quality video is avaiable).
Furthermore, due to the FCC deregulation causing media keiretsus, the broadband companies will not offer any service to boost demand due to conflicts of interest. For instance, Verizon could *easily* offer long-distance toll-free telephone over DSL, but this would cause the substitution effect against their own telephone service with very little income effect becuase there is little demand for broadband.
Face it, this bullshit about 10% of the users costing broadband companies too much is just that -- bullshit. If it were really an issue they could implement token bucket weighted fair queueing and everything would be fixed. It is an attempt to convince their inelastic consumers that they are hurting and need more $$ from them. It is so they can suck up consumer surplus from their inelestic consumers by introducing a-la-carte pricing while avoiding backlash by spreading this myth.
The broadband companies are hurting very much, but it has *nothing* to do with people downloading too much -- it is completely due to the fact that the number of people that have signed up are *nowhere* near their projections thus they are trying to offset their capital costs by sucking $$ out of their faithful customers.
If you need evidence of this bandwidth myth, just look at South Korea -- they have 20Mbit connections to their homes chepaer then we do and they don't have bandwidth issues. What they did as opposed to us is that the government boosted demand before broadband rollout by offering computer education virtually free to the entire country -- thus the demand was high enough to offset capital costs at the introduction and because everyone had broadband they could create apps for broadband causing more demand for broadband (and the self-feeding cycle continues).
We never met that critical demand mass here.
In summary, don't listen to the bandwidth crap. It is marketing hype to calm the masses before they start introducing by-the-megabyte pricing to suck up consumer surplus (the people who use the most bandwith are the least likely to completely drop broadband, afterall). All of this is worse then the stupid 'viral' GPL marketing crap that MS put out and now everyone seems to quote.
If I upset you, mod me to hell. If you want to discuss make a good argument.
> response lag can range up to the .5 to 1 sec
.you do the math (more like 1/4 sec: +237ms to normal delay).
> range! (So I've heard from users, but can't
> personally verify.)
Geosynchronous satellites are 22,000 miles away from the earth and light travels at 186,000 miles per second. .
I've done networking at a delployed location where IP had to hop two satellites (full duplex). The lag was noticeable but not as horrid as one may assume -- with a decent proxy server it was definately bearable.
Interestingly, browsers act very very different with that much lag. IE sucked ass and Mozilla wasn't much better. This was one situation where Opera really shined. Seriously, browsing the web with Opera with that much lag was an order of magnitude better then any other browser I tried.
Now that I'm back on a cable modem I've returned to Galeon, however if anyone has a situation where lag is a big factor try Opera -- you will be impressed with the difference!
I agree. That is why I set my distributed.net client to work on the OGR-25 project exclusively.
OGR-25 has some really cool potential and will be helpful to the world if solved. Basically it is a project to find the "Optimal Goloumb Ruler of 25 marks" -- which basically means trying to find a ruler with the least number of marks that can measure the most distances. It's a number theory problem.
For instance, if you have a ruler with a mark at one inch and one at three inches, one can measure 1", 2", 3" and 4" objects only using those two marks.
The applications of this principle are numerous. One that comes to mind is the optimal antenna that has the least number of of parts (aka smallest) that can transmit and recieve the largest bandwidth (range). Very cool.
Its like my dad. . .he worked as a datacomm manager for 25 years and through that time worked on some amazing systems (for their periods: the 1401, Sytem/360, etc).
:).
To this day he does all of his taxes with a pencil and accounting paper and when my mother bought him a calculator in the early 80s it collected dust as he said, "What do I need a calculator for? I have the most powerful calculator in the world on the top of my head!"
He says that today about PCs
Just because it is one driver does not imply that it is the least common denominator (it could be but is most likely not):
pseudo code:
switch (PCIID)
case nv300:
do really cool nv300 optimized stuff;
case nv200:
do neato nv200 magic;
case nv100:
do nv100 specific things;
default:
tell user to go buy a Radeon
> Wine has come light-years since I first used it
.I still remember the days when the only program that worked reliably under Wine was notepad and I had fun running exceed on a windows machine, smb mounting its filesystem and then xhosting notepad back on to itself :).
LOL. .
Wine is not perfect, but it has come a light-years and frankly amazes me how much it can do!
BTW I've found that the latest CVS from the wine project (make sure to use --enable-opengl) tends to be more stable, faster and runs more programs then WineX CVS. The only exception to this is any game that *only* uses DirectX. In that case WineX wins by a large margin.
.*but* Office97 and IE 5.5 work superbly and I don't see a massive feature difference (other then pretty stuff) to warrant the need for O2k. . .but then, too, I don't use office (AbiWord rocks!).
As for the previous complaints about Office2000, IE6 not working, I have yet to have any luck with either of those (I don't have a need for either; it is just amusing to play with wine). .
The guys over at DirectFB seem to have it down:
They ported gtk (gdk) directly to DirectFB do that you can run all gnome apps natively on their new graphical system *as well as* an X server so that you can run all the backwards-compatible stuff.
Did I also mention that DirectFB supports *real* transparency natively?
Check it out: www.directfb.org
> would be to tag certain processes so that they
> will never be moved into swap for disk buffers
I beleive that this is what the sticky bit was intended for. Before I go about explaining what it is and how to use it, does anyone know if Linux actually *honors* the sticky bit or does it just have it for compatibility?
One word -- Reiserfs4. If it gets adopted it will revolutionize data storage -- the filesyetem is a database -- and Hans Reiser had this idea long before MS started touting the integration of SQL server into everything.
LOL. . .or for really big systems:
1) Tape
2) Compressed RAID5
3) RAID5
4) RAID10
5) RAID0
6) Ramdrive/buffer cache
7) RAM
8) L3 off-die cache
9) L2 on-die
10) L1 on-die
11) CPU registers
Slowest to fastest; cheapest to most expansive.
>correct me if I'm wrong, but diesel is such a
>non-combustable material that you can store it
> in drums in your home.
Many Americans store diesel fuel in their homes already. What do you think home heating oil is?
You ever notice that diesel at the pump is colored pink? The reason for that is so that when trucks stop at weigh stations the state cops can check to make sure that they are using "tax-paid-for" pump-diesel rather then the virtually tax-less home heating oil in their trucks!
You want to get great gas mileage at an insanely low price? Get a diesel car and put a pump on your home heating oil tank in the basement -- fill the car with your home heating oil which is vastly cheaper then diesel.
The main reasons that I can think of that diesel never really kicked off in the US for passenger cars is:
1) Diesel gels when it gets cold out -- thus you must plug a diesel car into an electrical outlet when it is cold out to keep the diesel from geling.
2) Diesel engines are noisy (newer technology fixes this, though).
3) Diesel engines are dirty (again, newer technology fixes this)
4) Diesel engines lack horsepower but have massive amounts of torque (quick off-the-line acceleration but lacking in 'high speed passing'). Fix for this is turbo-diesel but for some odd reason they were rarely sold in passenger cars.
Early 80s seemed to be the 'diesel age' for passenger cars -- one could buy the venerable VW Rabbit diesel, many of the GM H-body cars in diesel, the Suburban in diesel -- just to name a few. I have not seen a new diesel passenger car in the US for many years.
If they sold a decent turbo-diesel passenger car in the US (preferably the new direct-injected type) I would buy one. Anyone know of any? I can't think of any. . .
OK, I am a video encoding newb and that completely kills everything that I have read and reasoned about DivX. Would anyone care to elaborate?
.Is there any relation at all between DivX and the Circuit City DIVX?
As I understood it, DivX uses the *avi file format* which was developed my Microsoft and is simply a method of packaging the video and audio streams.
As it was explained to me, any audio any video stream (whether it be mp3, ogg or mpeg1 or mpeg2, etc) can be packaged into the avi file format and the fact that it is an avi does not imply a specific audio or video encoding (like choosing paper or plastic at the grocery store -- neither imply what is in the bags).
In this case, I thought the actual video and audio codecs they developed by the DivX people where as only the avi file format was Microsoft's and that DivX 5 was mpeg4.
Since we're on the topic and how I thought it all worked has been thrown to the wind, I might as well ask the question (which I may now have the wrong impression to also). .
Anyone care to elaborate for this now confused soul?
See the news section in the URL below to see what they are talking about:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/
> If a company spends billions of dollars wiring up > a cable infostructure, why do customers and the > govt. think they have the right to tell the > company how they can use that bandwidth Because not every joe can run wires on the poles. Telecommunications is far from a scenario of perfect competition because the government picks and chooses who can run wires on the poles. This was done after the initial burst of telephone popularity caused a messy nest of wires over the streets of cities as company after company ran thier own wires. Two companies is a oligarchy, not true competition. If there were many companies all with their own wires on the poles there would be an excellent argument for deregulation. As it stands there is not enough competition to keep things in check. Have you noticed that whenever Verizon hikes their DSL prices that ATT hikes their Broadband immediately afterwards (and vica-versa)? Take a look at economic models of only two large competitors in an industry versus many competitors -- they are very different.
Thanks for the info. . .the only Comverse equipment that I had seen (and this was a few years ago) was DEC servers, switches and hubs.
:).
BTW I never mentioned Nortel -- it was Bell Atlantic -- and Priority Call is a carrier grade company, albeit smaller then Comverse.
Thankfully I was never a part of the seemingly bitter contract battles between Priority Call and Comverse
That is, assuming that you have your local DNS server (if you have one) set to override the TTLs stored with the A records.
I've worked for a few telephony companies in my time. . .two that stick out succinctly in regards to Linux are Priority Call (makers of Oryx) and Boston Communications (do the pre-paid calling back-end to most large cell carriers).
Priority Call (http://www.prioritycall.com) makes an uber-trunk-switch that does all types of cool stuff from one-number-anywhere to pre-paid calling to massive e-mailed voice-mail to web voicemail -- it is the swiss army knife of telephony (thier main competitor, BTW is Comverse). Priority Call has sold switches to the likes of Bell Atlantic and a lot of Mexican and South American cell vendors).
Anyway, their systems were passive-backplane PIIs (at the time) with Dialogic (owned by Intel) ISA-bus switch boards (Dialogic boards also have thier own bus to interconnect them to aide the ISA bus) and Mylex RAID controllers runnning 9 Seagate Cheetahs. They used SCO OpenServer because SCO was just about the only telephony OS 'back in the day' and it was pretty stable. As a side note they also legally used a fair amount of OSS in Oryx, including a hacked-up apache and ncurses.
SCO OpenServer, though, has not been actively developed on for a *long* time and not only does it show its age, but frankly it is just about the worst OS I have ever worked on (I don't mean to flame you OpenServer-lovers out there). Support was a bitch. Bug-fixing was a bitch becuase SCO was not longer developing OpenServer not to mention that later versions of OpenServer were hacks to old ones in attempt to add new features without the proper architecture. As much as I want to flame I'll leave my beef with OpenServer at that.
Needless to say the limitations of OpenServer were apparent and they found that *it does not scale* well at all. Thus, they moves their home-brew proprietary Oryx database to Tru64 using rack-mounted Alphaserver DS10s and kept OpenServer for the fron-end and switching to keep migration smooth (Comverse, BTW, uses Tru64 on Alphas -- which this whole push by HP to move to HPUX is going to really piss off a lot of telephony companies). For massive installs they used Sun Netra T-1s in a customer-specific manner.
Later, they finally realized that not only did OpenServer SUCK, but it was *expensive* too ($500 a copy). Thus they started to port to Linux and wrapped it into one massive migration strategy that included new hardware (Compact-PCI).
The fact of the matter is that people hate change. People complained about how Linux companies weren't doing so well not to mention that run-of-the-mill support people FEAR UNIX and the migration from the OpenServer database to the Tru64 was painful (had to re-do all the flow-chart-like step-by-step hold-my-hand this-is-how-to-use-unix cutsheets for some people)
My manager at the time (and the best manager I have ever had) sold Linux -- simply stated, "who cares if the Linux companies go under -- what is better security then HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS!). During the port, though, Linux had a few limitations that slowed the deployment:
1) OpenServer is such a hacked beast that porting to Linux from it was non-trivial.
2) Dialogic (the heart of the telecomm industry) did not make Linux drivers at the time. Thus they decided to move to NMS (Dialogic competitor) cards
that did support Linux as well as Compact PCI.
3) At the time Linux did not support hot-plug PCI which was one of the design specs and the main reason for moving to Compact PCI.
4) Not even NMS would ship source-code drivers -- only compiled modules. THIS IS A BIG THING as one can only run stock RedHat kernels or specific versions they support or else you'll get unresolved symbols or flakiness in the drivers. Face it, the stock RedHat kernel is *not* meant for telephony. Not only that, but the whole security argument of having the source code to the OS is negated because if NMS for some odd reason decided to stop developing Linux drivers then the company would be stuck with one version of Linux forever.
In the end it was not Linux's limitations that killed the migration but the fact that they rolled the whole migration into the massive hardware/software roll-over and when hard economic times hit and the person who spear-headed the project left, those that hate change won and the whole project was scrapped (some people think it is better to live with what you know versus venturing into the unknown, right?)
In summary, the things that I think would help adotion of Linux in the telecomm world are:
1) Above all else, open-source NMS or Dialogic drivers. People fear Linux companyies instability too much and if their vendor decided to stop supporting Linux it would screw them.
-OR-
2) A company come about that makes hard-core telecomm-grade switch boards with open source drivers that gives Dialogic a run for its money. I'm not talking about the "internet phone jack" guys, I'm talking about boards that can handle dozens on trunks (read T-1s). Dialogic used to be the main reason for companies not adopting Linux because they basically own the PC-based telephony market and they used to ONLY speak NT and SCO and trust me, as much as I hate to say it NT is better then OpenServer from a support and development point of view (although OpenServer is more stable then NT).
3) Keep moving forward with Linux on the desktop. Most people to this day *fear* UNIX and if Linux can be made common and user-friedly the managment types (and support types) that fear change will be less reluctant to let the engineers use Linux. It sounds convoluted, but this is how MS did it. Linux on the desktop indirectly helps all those who want to convince managment to use Linux a LOT as it shows that support costs will not be as high
as it is 'user-friendly' and they can hire monkey support cheap.
4) Linux clustering. Linux NEEDS good high-availibility open-source clustering. No matter how good your hardware is you can not get the telecomm "five nines" of uptime with one computer! A good first move would be a good filesystem that supports mutiple hosts sharing one fibre channel array.
Why do telephony companies migrate to NT/2000?
1) Tru64 is dead thanks to HP.
2) People are starting to fear that Solaris will go the way of Tru64 and future migrations are *very* expensive.
3) People fear UNIX and support costs are high due to this fear (need more geeky support people).
4) Dialogic only used to speak OpenServer and NT (I don't know if it is the same any more). NT is by far the lesser of the two evils in development and support (not reliability).
4) Managment fears Linux companies instability because they are thinking in the 'old school' support issue -- if a vendor goes under and you can't buy support your company is screwed. Please, educate them that HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS is teh best security. And please coerce NMS or Dialogic to make open-source drivers as their proprietary drivers negate the last argument!!!
As for Boston Communications, I did support for them and they used NT. That was one of the worst nightmares I have ever experienced. Try remotely managing hundreds of telecomm nodes all over the country over 56K frame-relay links using Remotely Possible (PC Anywhere clone). Not to mention the BSODs and managment blaming you when they could not report "five nines" to the carriers and thus had to pay them mucho $$.
It seems that the Korean companies have reached what the Japanese companies had in the 80s -- in the 70s it used to be cheap "Jap Junk" and Japanese products were truly that cheap and that poorly made. Then in the 80s they started kicking out higher quality stuff at a slightly higher price and now they make world-class products.
Korean products in the 80s were cheap and absolute junk. Remeber the early Hyundais? Same with the electronics industry -- Samsung used to make cheap but not-so-great products. Now they are the leader in the pack for LCDs! They make the LCD panels for the best in the business:
* Dell monitors
* Apple monitors
and their own line (higher models) kicks some butt.
From what I have read, Samsung is able to produce the LCDs themselves fairly cheaply but the most expensive parts are the integrated circuits they have to get from Japan to make the LCDs run, do interpolation and handle analog input.
What I *wish* they would do is sell a stripped-down model with the quality Samsung LCD panel and *no* analog inputs (just DVI), *no* interpolation and otherwise minimal electronics from Japan. My computer is more then powerful enough to handle software scaling in the very few instances I need it and if I use DVI I have no use for paying for all the electronics for analog also.
The probelm is their damn marketing departments. They assume that anyone who wants a quality picture will want all the bells and whistles also and thus only encorporate all the junk into their higher priced models. Also, they assume that anyone who is "l33t" enough to use DVI is also willing to pay a premium even though the DVI electronics is cheaper then the analog->digital circuitry.
Please, for the love of God, make a LCD with a quality screen and skimpy on the bells and whistles! I would definately buy one. Until that day comes, however, I will just wait.