Microsoft is necessarily biased in favor of their own products. Windows Magazine and Slashdot are also necessarily biased toward what they're set up to cover. That's kind of their purpose in life. In my opinion, it is unreasonable for someone to expect that either Windows Magazine or Linux Journal would be, in some sense, "fair" or "unbiased" from the perspective of those involved in the events reported by them. What is more interesting, at least to me, is the potential for bias in more general media
A long time ago (as I recall, I was advocating the use of OS/2 2.1) conspiracy theories (and accusations) abounded concerning the coverage of OS/2 in the general computer-oriented printed media (at that time, mostly Byte and PC Magazine). Although I thought it was kind of fishy that Computer Shopper stopped running lists of the best selling application software after a couple of months of Excel for OS/2 outselling Excel for Windows (by something like 2:1) I saw no real evidence of a conspiracy among the more general computing media.
The real problem was not the lack of journalistic integrity of the writers or editors, but what could be described as laziness. The general computing media are supposed to cover all significant developments in microcomputing and they did a pretty good job of that. Unfortunately, many places had a tendency to define everything Microsoft did as significant and other developments, many of which had the potential for having an even more profound effect on computing, as necessarily less so.
I suppose there's even some justification for that. After all, when a company that dominates their chosen markets the way that Microsoft does, the tendency is for their news to be significant and for news from other companies to be less so. But still, markets change and, sure as death and taxes, sooner or later Microsoft will lose its dominance, maybe even through death and/or taxes.
The moral of the story is obvious: If you want your stuff to be reported as significant,, you need to make it easy for it to be reported. I suppose this is what a well-organized PR effort does for you: It makes it easy for journalists to pay attention to what you're doing.
Is there some reason they had to hack pppd just because they are covering 400000 sq km? I don't see other ISPs hacking pppd.
That's because most ISP's have enough funding to purchase access equipment rather than rolling their own. For what it's worth, I hacked pppd similarly for Brokersys about four years ago. For a while, there all our dial-ins were on custom-built Linux-based terminal servers. I did all the pppd hacking in a couple of weeks. The idle timer took longer, but worked better than the one in the Ascend Maxen we use now.
However, I decided that as soon as we could get funding for such things that it was better to buy someone else's solution. The issues involved were the desire to purchase ISDN PRI's for the telephone service along with the desire to offer ISDN dial-in access to customers along with the realization that I had better things to do than maintain a really crufty pppd hack.
It also turns out that, if your revenue level supports it, you can get really good financing deals from the equipment manufacturers. For the last three years, Cisco's been trying to convince us to lease some AS-5200's, which we probably will never do as we're deemphasizing the dial-in stuff.
I haven't found writing console apps any more difficult under Windows than it is under Linux. Writing GUI apps is as difficult or as easy as the underlying toolkit makes it. You don't have use MFC under windows, anymore than you have to use raw xlib calls under linux.
Except that MFC calls are supposed to hide all the complexity of the Windows equivalent of Xlib (and Xaw) calls from the programmer. There are class libraries that are available for X (Qt vs GTK flamewar, anyone?) and they are all better done than MFC. (Well, I hope they are, anyway. While I can imagine someone setting out to make a worse class library than MFC, I'd like to think that nobody would.)
Unfortunately, MFC is the standard for Windows programming. If you're doing Windows programming and you're not using MFC, then the suits complain. If you're strong enough to resist the suits, then you could already be running Linux.
Windows GUI programming is not nearly as nasty without MFC (which I found entirely unpleasant with its arbitrary and arcane rules concerning things like the messages that need be handled) but for most shops Windows programming means MFC programming just like it means using Microsoft C++ or Visual BASIC
As for the IDE's, well, back in the 1970's, an article titled "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" said that real programmers are happy with an 027 keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer. The way I see it, XEmacs blows the heck out of a keypunch, C is at least as good ad FORTRAN IV, and I can afford plenty of beer. At least with makefiles and command-line compilers, I don't have to worry about my project files getting munged because somebody decided to update the IDE.
Dinosaur Neil Wrote: Actually, we already have exploited it in a similar way; back in the 80's post Ma-Bell breakup, a then little known startup long distance company called "Sprint" decided to build a fiber-optic network from scratch, rather than rely on Ma-Bell's extant noisy copper wires. Initially, things were looking expensive and complicated due to old (and mostly irrelevant) government regulation dictating where they could lay their glass "wires", but eventually they overcame this by running their fiber along existing railway lines (in some complex but less expensive lease deal with the railrods) because the railroads already had all the requisite permissions.
Oh, using railroad right of way for telecommunications wiring goes back as far as the railroad does. That's even farther back than the Morse telegraph, 160 years and more. (Started in England, or so I believe.)
Abour SPRINT, the story that I've heard is that SPRINT stands for Southern Pacific Railway INTernal communications. According to that story, the guys at SPRR decided that their long-distance telephone bills were too high. Since they were already leasing their right-of-way to various fiber optic companies (most long-distance carriers don't own very much of their actual long-distance connectivity--they lease it from various fiber and microwave companies) they decided to run their own fiber and install their own equipment. They wound up with so much capacity that they, bolstered by then by the court decision allowing MCI to sell long distance to end users, decided to follow MCI's lead and sell long distance services directly to end users.
I suppose that most./ers are in one big city or another, so it doesn't look to them like this is something we'd want to do in the USA, but there's a lot of little towns out there that can't get decent Internet access because a high-speed feed from the nearest POP costs more than that town can support, economically. Long-distance wireless links are one possibility. The other possibility, since an awful lot of these town have train tracks running through them, is to lease right-of-way from the railroad and run your own fiber.
The problem there is to find small-town ISP wannabees that have enough savvy to know how to do that. I've got the savvy, but my ISP is something like 4 miles from SPRINT's Houston POP.
For on-the-train use, you'd use wireless, of course.
Dman33 wrote: I seem to be questioning whether it is up to code or not. Does anyone have a good idea as to what it takes to be up to code for running Cat-5 in a residential home? I would hate to go to sell the house and have to tear out all of the ethernet!
I'm not someone who would know, (a local builder or cabling contractor would have the straight skinny or you might contact the permit issuers in whatever principality you live in,) but my guess would be that low-voltage (telephone, LAN, burglar alarm, and whatnot) cabling is not regulated when it is installed in private residences. It is my understanding that, at least around here (Houston, TX) you need to use plenum cable in commercial buildings, but I've never heard anything about the regulation of networking cable in a private home. In any case, it is the general contractor's job to make sure that the house will pass inspection.
The difference between plenum cable and PVC jacketed cable is that plenum cable doesn't give off as much toxic smoke when it burns as PVC cable does when it burns. That means that it's safer to use plenum cable in the plenums (plena? the area between the suspended ceiling and the actual roof) in commercial buildings which are usually used as warm air return for the air conditioning. Since air in a plenum is conditioned and distributed throughout the building, toxic smoke in there is to be avoided.
If it's your house, you may want to specify that the cable in plenum cable. I certainly would, but then I'm widely known as an odd individual.
QuantumHack wrote: The second, which is FAR more important, is the leverage of the Internet savvy,/.-reading, computer-programming, gizmo-hacking crowd into amateur radio. A new mode of Ham Radio operating, the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) ties HF, VHF, UHF, and microwave radio, satellites, the Internet, Palm Pilots, GPS, real-time mapping, and nomadness into one juggernaut of technology. Interested? Check out www.aprs.net and www.tapr.org
Ummmm, no. Look, I suppose (at 35) that you can call me an "old geezer" because I've got an Amateur Extra class license (KA8KPN) which I got in '81 so I wouldn't have to remember any of the stupid HF sub-band edges. Those were the days of 20 WPM CW requirements and the whole nine yards. I've watched the rise of the "let's turn ham radio into wireless networking" brigade in amateur radio and wondered about all those people who don't seem to have a freaking clue about why some people become radio amateurs, and others don't.
Amateur radio is not and, furthermore, will never be about technology. Not primarily. Many people who are interested in ham radio are those that are interested, not in the technology of radio, but in using radio to find out about the differing cultures spread all over the world even where the Internet doesn't reach. Others are interested in the challenge involved in radio communications over long distances or through other difficulty. The gadgeteers (of which Mr. QuantumHack certainly appears to be one) are actually a small minority in the hobby.
In short, the "Internet savvy,/.-reading, computer-programming gizmo-hacking crowd" looks at ham radio---and yawns. The OC3 they've got coming in to their office is a lot sexier than amateur packet radio will ever be. Not when a "9600 baud" packet radio link (the highest in current use) typically gets about a 20 CPS throughput and the setup required costs considerably more than the cost of the equipment required to do 11 MB/s wireless networking which, incidentally, doesn't require a license or much of anything else.
If you're interested in moving data, then DSL or cable modems allow you to do that at higher speed and you don't have to pass a test, or wait for a license, or cut any trees down to make way for Microwaves. You just set up your server and go. No need to involve radio in it.
You know, ham radio is a lot like hiking. People who hike are interested in hiking, not travelling from place to place with a maximum of efficiency. They're interested in the challenge of getting places far off the beaten track and the interesting scenery they'll see on the way.
The people to whom Mr. QuantumHack's vision of amateur radio might appeal are not interested in a leisurely stroll through the backwoods of communications technology, which is just where that vision puts them.
Not that a lunar repeater is necessarily a good idea, but this "juggernaut of technology" is just as dumb in a different way.
There is a time for everything and the time for free software to call the tune is coming.
Black Parrot Wrote:
Truly, it warms my heart to sign up for a mailing list or call up a newsgroup, and see people asking again and again: "Can I run Freeciv on Windows?" "Can I run LyX on Windows?" "Can I run the Bubble Load Monitor on Windows?"
You so totally miss the point. The particular programs don't matter because programs are ephemeral. Program systems, (that is, two or more programs with a common purpose which requires that they can read each other's data,) on the other hand are durable.
That means that it is the ownership of the file formats and protocols that is important. Making non-upwardly-compatable changes to a file format or protocol is one way to own a standard. However, if you do that, you run the risk of running off your customers, who ultimately decide wither a solution succeeds or fails.
As long as the people developing free software focus on solving problems, then the individual applications will eventually fall in line as it becomes important to interoperate with the software that provides solutions instead of software that is changed in large part to meet revenue forecasts.
In other words, don't look for Windows users who want LyX. Instead, you should look for Windows users insisting that Word be able to import LyX files. Once you've got that, then you own a standard and, if you play that situation right, Microsoft has lost most of the tremendous advantage given to them by virtue of being able to alter, at whim, the Word file format.
My reading of the question is this: "When can we have Microsoft making changes to suit our code instead of having Microsoft force us to make changes in our code to suit theirs?"
The answer, of course, is "eventually". Look, an ISV's development effort is about making changes for change's sake so that their customers can justify paying you again for what they just bought last year. Free software is about acheiving a solution and then using that solution for as long as it's appropriate. So, it is only natural for a company like Microsoft to propose change after change after change, hardly any of which is useful. The sheer volume of changes makes it necessary for competitors to follow along.
The free software community, on the other hand, figures out in advance what is needed to accomplish whatever tasks are at hand. The focus on the solution means that while the free software community proposes fewer changes, in the long run those changes are more likely to be useful and, therefore, to be adopted.
So, Microsoft and Novell will lead the dance for a while, but don't worry. There is a time for everything and the time for free software to call the tune is coming. Just keep running what works for you and the rest will just happen.
Many cable companies already use a digital signal. I don't know how compatible that signal is with the HDTV programming however.
I don't know what other cable companies use, but around here Warner Cable is using MPEG-3, like the satellite companies. While higher resolution is possible with MPEG, it's not at all compatable with any of the HDTV standards (and there are a BUNCH of those.)
I suppose that one could get one of those receiverless HDTV's (at roughly 10 times the cost of a decent NTSC television with receiver) and use it to display HDTV resolution stuff transmitted over the satellites or cable, but the real point of the matter is this:
sacdelta also wrote:
Signal quality is essential to HDTV. The advantage of a digital signal is that if you receive it, you get pretty much perfect reception. With an analog signal, you get more static as you lose reception quality. With a digital signal it is pretty much all or nothing.
This is why I don't have digital cable any more. By the time they'd repaired the cable enough to receive any digital cable, our analog cable reception (digital cable transmits all of the old analog cable channels using an analog signal) was simply fabulous Sometimes, we'd get hit by line noise and it would absolutely wipe out all of the digital channels. Turn to one of the analog channels and there wouldn't be enough static to notice. (If it wasn't a P5, it was certainly a P4.99.)
When I think of all of the times that I've watched P3 or worse analog signals, I'd have to say that HDTV over terrestrial broadcast channels is a really incredibly stupid idea. It can't possibly work. (Think of how many people you know with perfect off-air reception. I don't know any except for W4KFC who does ATV so has all these marvelous antennae.) The fundamental characteristic of NTSC television signals is robustness and HDTV throws that away in favor of benefits that few truly appreciate. (Who, after all, wants to see Jay Leno's makeup flaws? Does that help you understand the monologue?)
HDTV may be the thing to send over cable or satellite (although I think there already is broader acceptance of MPEG over those media and others as well) but for terrestrial broadcast, it's not the best choice.
Las should be changed such that an idea shouldn't be patentable if it can be derived by using existing practices for their designated purpose.
Also, the patent office should be made aware that there a 6 billion people on the planet who could all have a similar idea when granting patents.
You see an incredible amount of nonsense every time the topic of patents come up. This nonsense is, I believe, based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose of patents, and the process of getting a patent.
Now, I can't match the gentleman with 14 patents (I only have the one and it's still pending so I may not even have that) but anyone who's ever filed a patent knows that the first paragraph is nonsense because the law already forbids granting patents on inventions that are "obvious" to someone "skilled in the art". The only problem, and I don't think that it really is a problem, is that the definition of "obviousness" isn't, well, obvious. In particular, what may be obvious to an inventor is not necessarily obvious to the rest of the universe.
As for 6 billion potential inventors, well, that's not something that is all that important to the patent office, and here's why: patents are not about monopolies, patents are about disclosure. When you are granted a patent, you have proven to the patent office that your invention has not been invented before, that it satisfies a real need, that it's not an obvious modification of an existing invention, and that you have described it well enough so that anyone who knows generally what you know could build one.
The limited monopoly that you get is the bait they use to get you to tell the world how you did it. If everyone in the world comes up with the same idea simultaneously, then disclosure is obviously not needed and the patent could probably be challenged on those grounds.
Knowing that the disclosure is the important thing also leads you to a realization of how to do the patent equivalent of the GPL. To do that is simple and doesn't cost anything: You simply publish your invention in sufficient detail that someone who knows how to do what you know how to do can duplicate it. (Perhaps the FSF could create a mechanism for the publication of free inventions to reduce the effects of software patents.)
As long as the anti-software-patent crowd focuses on the monopoly granted by patents, nothing will change because nobody involved with patent policy has much concern about the monopoly. However, talking about the disclosure aspect and how disclosure of software inventions will happen even in the absence of patents, might get the powers that be to consider a policy change.
dselect sucks and Debian remains the hardest to install of the major Linux distros. Maybe this is by design. Linux 31337ism. *sigh*
So don't use it!
I personally love dselect. It's text-oriented so I don't have to worry about having X installed if I want to install X (which I had happen with RedHat once) and although it's a little clunky, it's not all that that hard to use.
Oh, and your mileage will absolutely vary WRT to how hard it is to install. I can have Debian installed and running in less than an hour on most computers. Yes, it asks you questions that you may not know how to answer. However, knowning how to answer questions like that is why I get paid the big bucks.
By "server room power supply vendor" I meant "the company we bought the *huge* server-room power-supply conditioner / UPS from". Sure, it's supposed to take care of things, and there must be some kind of warranty, but 1) you'd have to get them to pay up, and for a multi-million dollar claim there's gonna be serious paperwork, to say the least, 2) then you have to find the hardware, and you can't just buy a Starfire at CompUSA, 3) you have to rebuild the whole cluster
This is, in a word, stupid. If you have to worry about power problems destroying your power conditioner, then you've bought the wrong power conditioner. The setups I've seen (and I run a wimpy one-lung little ISP so I don't have any of that kind of serious hardware, oh and if you go, be sure to check out our y2k policy it's at the bottom of the page) the only danger the power system can be to the protected computer is if a power pole is driven through it by a tornado or something.
From my perspective, either what you've got works, or it doesn't. If it works, then you've got no reason to go off-line, and every reason not to. If it doesn't work, then you shouldn't be up at all if you're afraid of the risks because the risks tonight aren't going to be any greater than the risks any other night.
Tomorrow, on the other hand, is a different story. Think about it: 90% of all the cops of the face of the earth will be sleeping off the 36 hours of duty they have tonight, but why would anybody worry? After all it's not Y2K.
[Now you can] have a bewolf cluster linked by radio.
Well, you could before. The codeless technician class, which gave access to all legal amateur frequencies above 30 MHz, has been around for at least five years. The new part is the simplification of the license structure and the complete elimination of the 13 and 20 WPM code tests.
Unfortunately, since amateur packet radio is among the most inefficient digital communication modes known to man, such a cluster would be frustratingly slow. All the really cool stuff, at least with wireless networking, is taking place in the license-free bands because license-free is cheaper and you don't have to answer questions about Ohm's law to get access to them.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on/. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...
Dual-boot to Windows? No, I've actually never done that. I think my computer at the house still has boot manager on it and will dual-boot OS/2, but not Windows. My computer at my day job runs Windows-95 and only Windows-95, (it's a Compaq Presario) but I've got an X server and CRT running on it, and four or so servers on which I to play Quake, so why would I need to dual-boot?
I've been both the boss and the worker, and I've been screwed both ways and I, therefore, have a strong opinion about methods of compensation.
Whether or not someone gets paid hourly or on salary should depend upon whether or not the work that they do can be measured by the hour. For development work, I would never pay by the hour because at the end of the development process, what you want to wind up with is a pile of source code, not a pile of hours. You have to trust your employees to pace themselves through a project so as to produce the most work in least time. For those jobs that require the employee to put in a certain amount of time, like answering tech support calls, paying by the hour is appropriate because the work product for that job is a collection of hours in which tech support is available.
On the other hand, if a boss is dumb enough to enforce a minimum overtime policy on his developers, as one of my bosses once did, (we were required to work 60 hours per week at no increase in pay,) then an hourly rate, with overtime ("comp time" being unlawful in Texas at that time) and all the trimmings, is probably required by law. You should consult with an attorney specializing in employment issues in that case. IANAL, but it is my understanding that you can run afowl of minimum wage laws if your workers work by the hour, but aren't paid by the hour. I have been told by Texas Workforce Commission people that the category of "exempt" employee is not determined by what the company says, but by how they treat the employee.
One other thing, if you are going to pay salaries, then it's probably not a good idea to require timesheets. I had a job that required timesheets from their exempt employees so that they could bill the customers for contract work. In that case, it is probably better to have at least some time-based component to encourage timely and accurate recordkeeping.
Recently, a question was asked of/. about the effects of the RSA algorithm's patent expiring next year. The point was made (and I'm expanding upon this and paraphrasing the actual question that was asked) that most companies issue whole rafts of strategically-timed patents to extend their legal monopolies beyond the 17 years.
Also, as it happens, I was investigating the interoperability of GnuPG with PGP and, therefore, had the occasion to download the latest free PGP (6.5.1, it appears) and that software does indeed recommend an algorithm other than RSA. This is one that, presumably, was patented well after RSA was or is patent pending now.
I have an interest, I've been waiting for The Patent to expire so that I can run certain pieces of software, and I was unsatisfied with the answers I saw on/., so I ask you: What will be the effect of the expiration of the RSA patent. In particular, are the people who currently license PGP going to be successful in moving people to a new algorithm? They seemed bound to try.
Some years back, someone pointed out the real difference between CISC and RISC processors: If it was released after the 68000, it was RISC. Otherwise, it was CISC.
While that is an oversimplification, it looks an awful lot like truth, sometimes. For years, processor manufacturers have touted their new "RISC" processors even though those "reduced" instruction sets might have more instructions than the 8086.
Of course, the real hallmarks of a RISC processors are the load-store architecture, the large general-purpose register sets, and the uniform instruction size, but even those aren't sufficient to give a significant performance advantage to a computer based upon the RISC architecture. In fact, various benchmarks provide evidence that CISC vs RISC has very little effect on the performance of the computer.
So, where did the RISC vs CISC distinction come from, and why do RISC processors have a reputation of being faster, all other things being equal, than CISC processors? The answer has to do with what is now the prehistory of microcomputing. Back in the dim dawn of history (early 70's) microprocessors were for embedded systems. They were, therefore, designed to minimize part count and that meant optimizing the program space. The early embedded systems were programmed universally in assembly language and programmers typically used various tricks to use space very efficiently because space was more at a premium than time.
The complexity of those early embedded systems processors was mostly focused on reducing instruction count and instruction size as much as possible. "Bit mining" while it is still around today, was a way of life for the early microprocessor programmers, and the processor manufacturers built processors to facilitate that effort.
However, in the middle of the 70's, some people started putting these processors into general-purpose computers, and the microcomputer market became significant. That drew the attention of some processor designers who wanted to add some of the advanced performance-enhancing features, like caching and pipelining, from minicomputers and mainframes, to the micros.
The only problem was that the largest scale of integration available in the 70's was a few thousand transistors. When you've got 4000 transistors in your whole processor, you're going to need to trim unnecessary functionality away from the whole processor if you want to add an on-processor cache that's of some use to somebody. Hence the desire for a reduced instruction set.
Originally, the idea was to take those transistors that would otherwise go into complex instructions and put them into performance-enhancing features. The loss of memory efficiency was not a problem because they were intended to be put into fairly large, fairly capable, and fairly expensive computers.
Of course, now the processor designers have silicon budgets of millions of transistors, and the amount taken up by the instruction set is relatively tiny. That means that, in the 20 or so years since RISC processors were first envisioned, the instruction sets of the so-called RISC processors have gotten far more complex and the CISC processors have gotten essentially all of the performance-enhancing features of the RISC processors such that there is no real difference between them any more. Moore's law has made the distinction obsolete.
I'm not a professional engineer, but my father was. I'm not eligible because I do programming instead of engineering, and there is no programming equivalent in Texas (at least not yet) to the professional engineering license.
Many of the comments I have read indicate that some people are confusing a Professional Engineering license with some other sort of "professional" certification like a MSCE or CNE. The two are very different sorts of animal. Once you fulfill the requirements to become a professional engineer and actually get the license, your state (assuming you're in the USA) recognizes that you are an engineer and you are allowed to do a number of things that non-engineers aren't allowed to do. The PE exam is for engineers very much like the bar exam is for lawyers
So, should you become a professional engineer? Maybe. You should take the EIT (engineer in training) exam while you can still remember all your courses---especially the ones in the fields that aren't your speciality. It doesn't really cost you anything and can make your life easier down the road.
Once you get the practical experience (you need to have worked under for a PE for a while in order to be eligible to take the PE exam) then you can consider whether or not it would be worthwhile for you to take the PE exam. It might be worthwhile for an electrical engineer to become a PE if he wanted to become a consulting engineer and especially if he wanted to design equipment that was to be itself certified by some agency like UL.
Sorry, but as General Patent and Technology counsel for Unisys the people that keep him in business are the shareholders and he's serving them well. The purpose of a business is to make money, after all, and maxinmize the way that happens. If they thought that "being there for the customers" would make them more money, they'd do it.
First off, your message implies that you're the "General and Patent Technology counsel for Unisys" so I think you should have used the Preview function to review your message before posting.
Now, it's time for a little "Business 101": Businesses run on money and, unless you're doing an offering, which plays by different rules, money does not come from stockholders or from potential stockholders. Instead, money goes to stockholders in the form of dividends when a company is profitable.
Where, then, does the money come from? Why, from the customers of course! In order for a business to remain in business, it is necessary for that business to convince their customers that they should give them money. Therefore, in the final analysis, "being there for the customers" is the only consideration of any importance for a business in the long term.
It seems likely to me that, like many large companies, Unisys has forgotten this simple fact. Focusing on the stock price is done for the benefit of the stockholders, (chief among them being the officers and directors who are mostly paid in stock and, therefore, can be counted on to make sure that the stock prices remain high if that is at all possible,) not the company itself.
One other thing it is important to realize is who Unisys's customers are. They are not the users of various graphics programs. They are the licensees of the patents. It is not necessarily in the best interests of Unisys's current licensees to give licenses away to anyone.
Of course, if real alternatives exist, there is no point in complaining about Unisys. Switch to PNG, if you have a mind to! What bothers me, as the owner of an ISP, is the possibility that Unisys might come down on me for something one of my customers have on their Web site. It is not within my power to control my customers.
Of course, neither of those sites is particularly busy and I'm more proud of the management utilities than the sites themselves, but that's par for this course.
The thing I did learn was that using perl and CGI is quite clumsy for this sort of thing. I eventually switched to PHP3 because everything goes together much faster. I don't know what it does to the performance, but since both sites are being served from the world's slowest Web server hardware (the database server is a 486dx2-80 and the database server has the HNBA website on it but the C Bookstore Web server is the 5x86-120 that I use for most of the four dozen or so domains that I host) and performance is not that big an issue, I'm not all that worried. It'd be nice if it got some hits, though.
displague wrote: Everyone can use and benefit from Free Software. Once there is enough of it, there will not be a need (or desire?) for proprietary software. I believe that this premise is false on its face. Yes, everyone who runs a computer can and should benefit from Free Software, but not everyone wants all the hassles of running a computer. If you make certain changes to Microsoft's plan you get programs that can run on quite limited "information appliances" that are a lot easier to set up and use than computers can be. While that may not be what you want, it's what they want, so someone can make money from it. That appeals to people who don't understand what the big deal behind free software is. I'm not talking about leaving some people out of the equation, I'm talking about offering them something that they need and want and can't currently get, even from free software.
I also find your assertion that there is no need for proprietary software to be very close to a true statement, but not quite there. While the most popular applications will likely be produced as free software, it is unlikely that all applications that anyone could want would be released as free software. Speaking as someone who writes applications for embedded systems, I doubt that you'll find, say, a freeware microwave oven controller. What would be the point?
I think they must be trying to appeal to folks who find software expensive. Do any of us have that problem?...Thought not
Actually, they're trying to maintain their stranglehold on a customer base that is full of people who are beginning to notice that they are being forced to pay to upgrade their software every couple of years. (All software vendors force their customers to do this in order to maintain the revenue stream which keeps stock prices high.) Microsoft's target audience in this scheme surely isn't the "free software community," (not that there necessarily is such a thing---a debate I am unwilling to enter into here,) because we all caught on to that fact some time ago.
In actual fact, I think "renting" software is a good idea for the great masses of people who are either unable or unwilling to be their own computer experts. For my part, I expect the days of the computer as a mass-market item are numbered. Leasing software and other data services from a provider can conceivably result in higher quality and lower cost because the provider won't have to stuff feature after feature into the software (to justify charging for the upgrade) and will be able to release upgrades as incremental changes rather than as an all-or-nothing shot which has to be mind-bogglingly complex in order to handle all potential cases.
displague also said:
Besides - I don't want Big Brother, or Uncle Bill, snooping in on my data... (or selling for that matter)
Well, there certainly is a trust issue. However, there are ways of boosting the customers' trust in the company. The business plan I have floating around for a business similar to this deals with the trust factor directly. It's all in the marketing and should be easy to sell to the vast majority of computer users.
As a matter of fact, I think that the only question about the success of this scheme is not whether or not someone can do it, but whether or not Microsoft can stop writing the bloatware they need to write to make money "selling" software and focus on delivering high-quality stable software that will produce the most profits when you "rent" software. The "million monkey" approach is definitely the wrong way to write software to rent. My own opinion is that Microsoft doesn't write bloatware because that's what's needed to succeed in the current market. Instead, I think Microsoft has succeeded in the current market because they happen to be good at writing bloatware which is what it takes to succeed.
The times, they are a changin', and to throughly mix a metaphor, can the 500-pound-gorilla change its spots? Time will tell, but I doubt it.
How to get a merchant account
on
R.I.P. Linuxbox
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· Score: 1
mfroot wrote:
Hey, I was just wondering... How do you go about being able to accept credit cards? Do you have to buy a special hardware solution, or is there another way? Anyway I was planning on offering some cheap web hosting and pop email accounts as soon as I get a DSL line, and just wanted to know.
Getting paid is a pain in the neck no matter what you do. I've owned an ISP for coming up on four years, now, and I don't have any trouble getting paid (for service---consulting is another matter) because I don't treat any customer as special and everyone pays in advance. (Even Fortune 500 companies: I get a check from Paramount every year, before they get the service.)
In order to process credit cards, you need two things: a merchant account and some means of processing the charges. If you've never done this before, you'll likely have some trouble getting the merchant account so you might have to deal with a company that specializes in giving merchant accounts to "high risk" ventures. (That's you, until you've got a track record, and maybe even then. We'll be terminating our relationship with our current bank because they won't set up a merchant account with us despite our nearly four-year record.) The one we used is a company called Cardservice, International. Their discount rate (the amount of money they withold when they put charges in your account) is slightly outrageous and their "lease to own" deal on equipment is VERY bad (to the tune of about five times what the terminal is worth.) However, they'll take just about anybody.
To process the cards, you'll need some kind of equipment or software. Depending on how you want to do this, you can get either one and it'll work. A terminal is somewhat cheaper than Linux software (from Hell's Kitchen Systems---check their ads in Linux Journal and Sysadmin) but is vastly less convenient for you to use. If you decide to go with a terminal, you're best bet is to look in your local yellow pages for used office equipment places who will likely have terminals for reasonable prices. The vendors of the equipment or software may even know who to talk to if you want a merchant account. (I would if I was one of them, but I'm not.)
One thing you should remember is this: Always get a signature. If there is a dispute (and there will be disputes) you win if you have a valid signature. You lose if you don't. (We always cave when we get the "blue envelope" so this is hearsay, but it comes from a source that I tend to believe.)
Not everything on your redhat box is editable from the command line. Try managing your RPM database by hand. Whups, it's a berkeley db database, ain't it?
Which is why I don't use RedHat. I use Debian, which can be managed entirely through telnet sessions including working with package dependancies and whatnot. The lack of text-mode tools to handle packages in anything other than a rudimentary way is too much to give up.
Myself, I'm wondering how to run regedit from a W2K telnet session. Is there any way to get it, or any version of NT, to boot into a text console so that I can run it to recover from registry disasters?
You know, I've installed NT (v4.0, I believe) on my NT computer as many times as I've installed Linux on the computer I'm currently using, but the reasons were different: I had to reinstall NT (approximately two hours after I initially installed it) because it didn't like my network card settings and kept crashing before I could do anything about it. I reinstalled Linux (approximately two years after I originally installed it) because it was the simplest way I could come up with to upgrade from an ancient Slackware to Debian.
Also, all this talk about remote management tools is funny. I do the administration at my place of business. All the equipment purchased by my company for my use is at my house, but all the work is done at the office. I don't even have a key to that office any more. It just doesn't matter. Of course, as one of the owners, I will have a key at some point in the future, but the current lack doesn't stop the bulk of my work.
Slashdot Mirror
A long time ago (as I recall, I was advocating the use of OS/2 2.1) conspiracy theories (and accusations) abounded concerning the coverage of OS/2 in the general computer-oriented printed media (at that time, mostly Byte and PC Magazine). Although I thought it was kind of fishy that Computer Shopper stopped running lists of the best selling application software after a couple of months of Excel for OS/2 outselling Excel for Windows (by something like 2:1) I saw no real evidence of a conspiracy among the more general computing media.
The real problem was not the lack of journalistic integrity of the writers or editors, but what could be described as laziness. The general computing media are supposed to cover all significant developments in microcomputing and they did a pretty good job of that. Unfortunately, many places had a tendency to define everything Microsoft did as significant and other developments, many of which had the potential for having an even more profound effect on computing, as necessarily less so.
I suppose there's even some justification for that. After all, when a company that dominates their chosen markets the way that Microsoft does, the tendency is for their news to be significant and for news from other companies to be less so. But still, markets change and, sure as death and taxes, sooner or later Microsoft will lose its dominance, maybe even through death and/or taxes.
The moral of the story is obvious: If you want your stuff to be reported as significant,, you need to make it easy for it to be reported. I suppose this is what a well-organized PR effort does for you: It makes it easy for journalists to pay attention to what you're doing.
That's because most ISP's have enough funding to purchase access equipment rather than rolling their own. For what it's worth, I hacked pppd similarly for Brokersys about four years ago. For a while, there all our dial-ins were on custom-built Linux-based terminal servers. I did all the pppd hacking in a couple of weeks. The idle timer took longer, but worked better than the one in the Ascend Maxen we use now.
However, I decided that as soon as we could get funding for such things that it was better to buy someone else's solution. The issues involved were the desire to purchase ISDN PRI's for the telephone service along with the desire to offer ISDN dial-in access to customers along with the realization that I had better things to do than maintain a really crufty pppd hack.
It also turns out that, if your revenue level supports it, you can get really good financing deals from the equipment manufacturers. For the last three years, Cisco's been trying to convince us to lease some AS-5200's, which we probably will never do as we're deemphasizing the dial-in stuff.
Except that MFC calls are supposed to hide all the complexity of the Windows equivalent of Xlib (and Xaw) calls from the programmer. There are class libraries that are available for X (Qt vs GTK flamewar, anyone?) and they are all better done than MFC. (Well, I hope they are, anyway. While I can imagine someone setting out to make a worse class library than MFC, I'd like to think that nobody would.)
Unfortunately, MFC is the standard for Windows programming. If you're doing Windows programming and you're not using MFC, then the suits complain. If you're strong enough to resist the suits, then you could already be running Linux.
Windows GUI programming is not nearly as nasty without MFC (which I found entirely unpleasant with its arbitrary and arcane rules concerning things like the messages that need be handled) but for most shops Windows programming means MFC programming just like it means using Microsoft C++ or Visual BASIC
As for the IDE's, well, back in the 1970's, an article titled "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" said that real programmers are happy with an 027 keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer. The way I see it, XEmacs blows the heck out of a keypunch, C is at least as good ad FORTRAN IV, and I can afford plenty of beer. At least with makefiles and command-line compilers, I don't have to worry about my project files getting munged because somebody decided to update the IDE.
One opinion, worth what you paid for it.
Sit back and smugly giggle at the people who didn't think you could do that in under 30 seconds
Okay, now, get it to email a list of the deleted files to the administrator and make your system do all that every morning at 3.
That's actually closer to what I use the command-line (actually shells and scripts) for.
Actually, we already have exploited it in a similar way; back in the 80's post Ma-Bell breakup, a then little known startup long distance company called "Sprint" decided to build a fiber-optic network from scratch, rather than rely on Ma-Bell's extant noisy copper wires. Initially, things were looking expensive and complicated due to old (and mostly irrelevant) government regulation dictating where they could lay their glass "wires", but eventually they overcame this by running their fiber along existing railway lines (in some complex but less expensive lease deal with the railrods) because the railroads already had all the requisite permissions.
Oh, using railroad right of way for telecommunications wiring goes back as far as the railroad does. That's even farther back than the Morse telegraph, 160 years and more. (Started in England, or so I believe.)
Abour SPRINT, the story that I've heard is that SPRINT stands for Southern Pacific Railway INTernal communications. According to that story, the guys at SPRR decided that their long-distance telephone bills were too high. Since they were already leasing their right-of-way to various fiber optic companies (most long-distance carriers don't own very much of their actual long-distance connectivity--they lease it from various fiber and microwave companies) they decided to run their own fiber and install their own equipment. They wound up with so much capacity that they, bolstered by then by the court decision allowing MCI to sell long distance to end users, decided to follow MCI's lead and sell long distance services directly to end users.
I suppose that most ./ers are in one big city or another, so it doesn't look to them like this is something we'd want to do in the USA, but there's a lot of little towns out there that can't get decent Internet access because a high-speed feed from the nearest POP costs more than that town can support, economically. Long-distance wireless links are one possibility. The other possibility, since an awful lot of these town have train tracks running through them, is to lease right-of-way from the railroad and run your own fiber.
The problem there is to find small-town ISP wannabees that have enough savvy to know how to do that. I've got the savvy, but my ISP is something like 4 miles from SPRINT's Houston POP.
For on-the-train use, you'd use wireless, of course.
I seem to be questioning whether it is up to code or not. Does anyone have a good idea as to what it takes to be up to code for running Cat-5 in a residential home? I would hate to go to sell the house and have to tear out all of the ethernet!
I'm not someone who would know, (a local builder or cabling contractor would have the straight skinny or you might contact the permit issuers in whatever principality you live in,) but my guess would be that low-voltage (telephone, LAN, burglar alarm, and whatnot) cabling is not regulated when it is installed in private residences. It is my understanding that, at least around here (Houston, TX) you need to use plenum cable in commercial buildings, but I've never heard anything about the regulation of networking cable in a private home. In any case, it is the general contractor's job to make sure that the house will pass inspection.
The difference between plenum cable and PVC jacketed cable is that plenum cable doesn't give off as much toxic smoke when it burns as PVC cable does when it burns. That means that it's safer to use plenum cable in the plenums (plena? the area between the suspended ceiling and the actual roof) in commercial buildings which are usually used as warm air return for the air conditioning. Since air in a plenum is conditioned and distributed throughout the building, toxic smoke in there is to be avoided.
If it's your house, you may want to specify that the cable in plenum cable. I certainly would, but then I'm widely known as an odd individual.
The second, which is FAR more important, is the leverage of the Internet savvy,
Ummmm, no.
Look, I suppose (at 35) that you can call me an "old geezer" because I've got an Amateur Extra class license (KA8KPN) which I got in '81 so I wouldn't have to remember any of the stupid HF sub-band edges. Those were the days of 20 WPM CW requirements and the whole nine yards. I've watched the rise of the "let's turn ham radio into wireless networking" brigade in amateur radio and wondered about all those people who don't seem to have a freaking clue about why some people become radio amateurs, and others don't.
Amateur radio is not and, furthermore, will never be about technology. Not primarily. Many people who are interested in ham radio are those that are interested, not in the technology of radio, but in using radio to find out about the differing cultures spread all over the world even where the Internet doesn't reach. Others are interested in the challenge involved in radio communications over long distances or through other difficulty. The gadgeteers (of which Mr. QuantumHack certainly appears to be one) are actually a small minority in the hobby.
In short, the "Internet savvy, /.-reading, computer-programming gizmo-hacking crowd" looks at ham radio---and yawns. The OC3 they've got coming in to their office is a lot sexier than amateur packet radio will ever be. Not when a "9600 baud" packet radio link (the highest in current use) typically gets about a 20 CPS throughput and the setup required costs considerably more than the cost of the equipment required to do 11 MB/s wireless networking which, incidentally, doesn't require a license or much of anything else.
If you're interested in moving data, then DSL or cable modems allow you to do that at higher speed and you don't have to pass a test, or wait for a license, or cut any trees down to make way for Microwaves. You just set up your server and go. No need to involve radio in it.
You know, ham radio is a lot like hiking. People who hike are interested in hiking, not travelling from place to place with a maximum of efficiency. They're interested in the challenge of getting places far off the beaten track and the interesting scenery they'll see on the way.
The people to whom Mr. QuantumHack's vision of amateur radio might appeal are not interested in a leisurely stroll through the backwoods of communications technology, which is just where that vision puts them.
Not that a lunar repeater is necessarily a good idea, but this "juggernaut of technology" is just as dumb in a different way.
Black Parrot Wrote:
You so totally miss the point. The particular programs don't matter because programs are ephemeral. Program systems, (that is, two or more programs with a common purpose which requires that they can read each other's data,) on the other hand are durable.
That means that it is the ownership of the file formats and protocols that is important. Making non-upwardly-compatable changes to a file format or protocol is one way to own a standard. However, if you do that, you run the risk of running off your customers, who ultimately decide wither a solution succeeds or fails.
As long as the people developing free software focus on solving problems, then the individual applications will eventually fall in line as it becomes important to interoperate with the software that provides solutions instead of software that is changed in large part to meet revenue forecasts.
In other words, don't look for Windows users who want LyX. Instead, you should look for Windows users insisting that Word be able to import LyX files. Once you've got that, then you own a standard and, if you play that situation right, Microsoft has lost most of the tremendous advantage given to them by virtue of being able to alter, at whim, the Word file format.
The answer, of course, is "eventually". Look, an ISV's development effort is about making changes for change's sake so that their customers can justify paying you again for what they just bought last year. Free software is about acheiving a solution and then using that solution for as long as it's appropriate. So, it is only natural for a company like Microsoft to propose change after change after change, hardly any of which is useful. The sheer volume of changes makes it necessary for competitors to follow along.
The free software community, on the other hand, figures out in advance what is needed to accomplish whatever tasks are at hand. The focus on the solution means that while the free software community proposes fewer changes, in the long run those changes are more likely to be useful and, therefore, to be adopted.
So, Microsoft and Novell will lead the dance for a while, but don't worry. There is a time for everything and the time for free software to call the tune is coming. Just keep running what works for you and the rest will just happen.
Many cable companies already use a digital signal. I don't know how compatible that signal is with the HDTV programming however.
I don't know what other cable companies use, but around here Warner Cable is using MPEG-3, like the satellite companies. While higher resolution is possible with MPEG, it's not at all compatable with any of the HDTV standards (and there are a BUNCH of those.)
I suppose that one could get one of those receiverless HDTV's (at roughly 10 times the cost of a decent NTSC television with receiver) and use it to display HDTV resolution stuff transmitted over the satellites or cable, but the real point of the matter is this:
sacdelta also wrote:
Signal quality is essential to HDTV. The advantage of a digital signal is that if you receive it, you get pretty much perfect reception. With an analog signal, you get more static as you lose reception quality. With a digital signal it is pretty much all or nothing.
This is why I don't have digital cable any more. By the time they'd repaired the cable enough to receive any digital cable, our analog cable reception (digital cable transmits all of the old analog cable channels using an analog signal) was simply fabulous Sometimes, we'd get hit by line noise and it would absolutely wipe out all of the digital channels. Turn to one of the analog channels and there wouldn't be enough static to notice. (If it wasn't a P5, it was certainly a P4.99.)
When I think of all of the times that I've watched P3 or worse analog signals, I'd have to say that HDTV over terrestrial broadcast channels is a really incredibly stupid idea. It can't possibly work. (Think of how many people you know with perfect off-air reception. I don't know any except for W4KFC who does ATV so has all these marvelous antennae.) The fundamental characteristic of NTSC television signals is robustness and HDTV throws that away in favor of benefits that few truly appreciate. (Who, after all, wants to see Jay Leno's makeup flaws? Does that help you understand the monologue?)
HDTV may be the thing to send over cable or satellite (although I think there already is broader acceptance of MPEG over those media and others as well) but for terrestrial broadcast, it's not the best choice.
Now, I can't match the gentleman with 14 patents (I only have the one and it's still pending so I may not even have that) but anyone who's ever filed a patent knows that the first paragraph is nonsense because the law already forbids granting patents on inventions that are "obvious" to someone "skilled in the art". The only problem, and I don't think that it really is a problem, is that the definition of "obviousness" isn't, well, obvious. In particular, what may be obvious to an inventor is not necessarily obvious to the rest of the universe.
As for 6 billion potential inventors, well, that's not something that is all that important to the patent office, and here's why: patents are not about monopolies, patents are about disclosure. When you are granted a patent, you have proven to the patent office that your invention has not been invented before, that it satisfies a real need, that it's not an obvious modification of an existing invention, and that you have described it well enough so that anyone who knows generally what you know could build one.
The limited monopoly that you get is the bait they use to get you to tell the world how you did it. If everyone in the world comes up with the same idea simultaneously, then disclosure is obviously not needed and the patent could probably be challenged on those grounds.
Knowing that the disclosure is the important thing also leads you to a realization of how to do the patent equivalent of the GPL. To do that is simple and doesn't cost anything: You simply publish your invention in sufficient detail that someone who knows how to do what you know how to do can duplicate it. (Perhaps the FSF could create a mechanism for the publication of free inventions to reduce the effects of software patents.)
As long as the anti-software-patent crowd focuses on the monopoly granted by patents, nothing will change because nobody involved with patent policy has much concern about the monopoly. However, talking about the disclosure aspect and how disclosure of software inventions will happen even in the absence of patents, might get the powers that be to consider a policy change.
I personally love dselect. It's text-oriented so I don't have to worry about having X installed if I want to install X (which I had happen with RedHat once) and although it's a little clunky, it's not all that that hard to use.
Oh, and your mileage will absolutely vary WRT to how hard it is to install. I can have Debian installed and running in less than an hour on most computers. Yes, it asks you questions that you may not know how to answer. However, knowning how to answer questions like that is why I get paid the big bucks.
From my perspective, either what you've got works, or it doesn't. If it works, then you've got no reason to go off-line, and every reason not to. If it doesn't work, then you shouldn't be up at all if you're afraid of the risks because the risks tonight aren't going to be any greater than the risks any other night.
Tomorrow, on the other hand, is a different story. Think about it: 90% of all the cops of the face of the earth will be sleeping off the 36 hours of duty they have tonight, but why would anybody worry? After all it's not Y2K.
Unfortunately, since amateur packet radio is among the most inefficient digital communication modes known to man, such a cluster would be frustratingly slow. All the really cool stuff, at least with wireless networking, is taking place in the license-free bands because license-free is cheaper and you don't have to answer questions about Ohm's law to get access to them.
For more information about wireless networking, you can start at The wireless field test at Old Colorado City communications/ or you can go to the Wireless LAN/MAN Modem Product Directory.
Wireless networks are the way of the future, it's just that Ham Radio isn't the way to get there.
Jonathan Guthrie, KA8KPN, Amateur Extra class (now grandfathered) since 1980.
Dual-boot to Windows? No, I've actually never done that. I think my computer at the house still has boot manager on it and will dual-boot OS/2, but not Windows. My computer at my day job runs Windows-95 and only Windows-95, (it's a Compaq Presario) but I've got an X server and CRT running on it, and four or so servers on which I to play Quake, so why would I need to dual-boot?
Whether or not someone gets paid hourly or on salary should depend upon whether or not the work that they do can be measured by the hour. For development work, I would never pay by the hour because at the end of the development process, what you want to wind up with is a pile of source code, not a pile of hours. You have to trust your employees to pace themselves through a project so as to produce the most work in least time. For those jobs that require the employee to put in a certain amount of time, like answering tech support calls, paying by the hour is appropriate because the work product for that job is a collection of hours in which tech support is available.
On the other hand, if a boss is dumb enough to enforce a minimum overtime policy on his developers, as one of my bosses once did, (we were required to work 60 hours per week at no increase in pay,) then an hourly rate, with overtime ("comp time" being unlawful in Texas at that time) and all the trimmings, is probably required by law. You should consult with an attorney specializing in employment issues in that case. IANAL, but it is my understanding that you can run afowl of minimum wage laws if your workers work by the hour, but aren't paid by the hour. I have been told by Texas Workforce Commission people that the category of "exempt" employee is not determined by what the company says, but by how they treat the employee.
One other thing, if you are going to pay salaries, then it's probably not a good idea to require timesheets. I had a job that required timesheets from their exempt employees so that they could bill the customers for contract work. In that case, it is probably better to have at least some time-based component to encourage timely and accurate recordkeeping.
Also, as it happens, I was investigating the interoperability of GnuPG with PGP and, therefore, had the occasion to download the latest free PGP (6.5.1, it appears) and that software does indeed recommend an algorithm other than RSA. This is one that, presumably, was patented well after RSA was or is patent pending now.
I have an interest, I've been waiting for The Patent to expire so that I can run certain pieces of software, and I was unsatisfied with the answers I saw on /., so I ask you: What will be the effect of the expiration of the RSA patent. In particular, are the people who currently license PGP going to be successful in moving people to a new algorithm? They seemed bound to try.
While that is an oversimplification, it looks an awful lot like truth, sometimes. For years, processor manufacturers have touted their new "RISC" processors even though those "reduced" instruction sets might have more instructions than the 8086.
Of course, the real hallmarks of a RISC processors are the load-store architecture, the large general-purpose register sets, and the uniform instruction size, but even those aren't sufficient to give a significant performance advantage to a computer based upon the RISC architecture. In fact, various benchmarks provide evidence that CISC vs RISC has very little effect on the performance of the computer.
So, where did the RISC vs CISC distinction come from, and why do RISC processors have a reputation of being faster, all other things being equal, than CISC processors? The answer has to do with what is now the prehistory of microcomputing. Back in the dim dawn of history (early 70's) microprocessors were for embedded systems. They were, therefore, designed to minimize part count and that meant optimizing the program space. The early embedded systems were programmed universally in assembly language and programmers typically used various tricks to use space very efficiently because space was more at a premium than time.
The complexity of those early embedded systems processors was mostly focused on reducing instruction count and instruction size as much as possible. "Bit mining" while it is still around today, was a way of life for the early microprocessor programmers, and the processor manufacturers built processors to facilitate that effort.
However, in the middle of the 70's, some people started putting these processors into general-purpose computers, and the microcomputer market became significant. That drew the attention of some processor designers who wanted to add some of the advanced performance-enhancing features, like caching and pipelining, from minicomputers and mainframes, to the micros.
The only problem was that the largest scale of integration available in the 70's was a few thousand transistors. When you've got 4000 transistors in your whole processor, you're going to need to trim unnecessary functionality away from the whole processor if you want to add an on-processor cache that's of some use to somebody. Hence the desire for a reduced instruction set.
Originally, the idea was to take those transistors that would otherwise go into complex instructions and put them into performance-enhancing features. The loss of memory efficiency was not a problem because they were intended to be put into fairly large, fairly capable, and fairly expensive computers.
Of course, now the processor designers have silicon budgets of millions of transistors, and the amount taken up by the instruction set is relatively tiny. That means that, in the 20 or so years since RISC processors were first envisioned, the instruction sets of the so-called RISC processors have gotten far more complex and the CISC processors have gotten essentially all of the performance-enhancing features of the RISC processors such that there is no real difference between them any more. Moore's law has made the distinction obsolete.
Many of the comments I have read indicate that some people are confusing a Professional Engineering license with some other sort of "professional" certification like a MSCE or CNE. The two are very different sorts of animal. Once you fulfill the requirements to become a professional engineer and actually get the license, your state (assuming you're in the USA) recognizes that you are an engineer and you are allowed to do a number of things that non-engineers aren't allowed to do. The PE exam is for engineers very much like the bar exam is for lawyers
So, should you become a professional engineer? Maybe. You should take the EIT (engineer in training) exam while you can still remember all your courses---especially the ones in the fields that aren't your speciality. It doesn't really cost you anything and can make your life easier down the road.
Once you get the practical experience (you need to have worked under for a PE for a while in order to be eligible to take the PE exam) then you can consider whether or not it would be worthwhile for you to take the PE exam. It might be worthwhile for an electrical engineer to become a PE if he wanted to become a consulting engineer and especially if he wanted to design equipment that was to be itself certified by some agency like UL.
First off, your message implies that you're the "General and Patent Technology counsel for Unisys" so I think you should have used the Preview function to review your message before posting.
Now, it's time for a little "Business 101": Businesses run on money and, unless you're doing an offering, which plays by different rules, money does not come from stockholders or from potential stockholders. Instead, money goes to stockholders in the form of dividends when a company is profitable.
Where, then, does the money come from? Why, from the customers of course! In order for a business to remain in business, it is necessary for that business to convince their customers that they should give them money. Therefore, in the final analysis, "being there for the customers" is the only consideration of any importance for a business in the long term.
It seems likely to me that, like many large companies, Unisys has forgotten this simple fact. Focusing on the stock price is done for the benefit of the stockholders, (chief among them being the officers and directors who are mostly paid in stock and, therefore, can be counted on to make sure that the stock prices remain high if that is at all possible,) not the company itself.
One other thing it is important to realize is who Unisys's customers are. They are not the users of various graphics programs. They are the licensees of the patents. It is not necessarily in the best interests of Unisys's current licensees to give licenses away to anyone.
Of course, if real alternatives exist, there is no point in complaining about Unisys. Switch to PNG, if you have a mind to! What bothers me, as the owner of an ISP, is the possibility that Unisys might come down on me for something one of my customers have on their Web site. It is not within my power to control my customers.
Of course, neither of those sites is particularly busy and I'm more proud of the management utilities than the sites themselves, but that's par for this course.
The thing I did learn was that using perl and CGI is quite clumsy for this sort of thing. I eventually switched to PHP3 because everything goes together much faster. I don't know what it does to the performance, but since both sites are being served from the world's slowest Web server hardware (the database server is a 486dx2-80 and the database server has the HNBA website on it but the C Bookstore Web server is the 5x86-120 that I use for most of the four dozen or so domains that I host) and performance is not that big an issue, I'm not all that worried. It'd be nice if it got some hits, though.
Everyone can use and benefit from Free Software. Once there is enough of it, there will not be a need (or desire?) for proprietary software. I believe that this premise is false on its face. Yes, everyone who runs a computer can and should benefit from Free Software, but not everyone wants all the hassles of running a computer. If you make certain changes to Microsoft's plan you get programs that can run on quite limited "information appliances" that are a lot easier to set up and use than computers can be. While that may not be what you want, it's what they want, so someone can make money from it. That appeals to people who don't understand what the big deal behind free software is. I'm not talking about leaving some people out of the equation, I'm talking about offering them something that they need and want and can't currently get, even from free software.
I also find your assertion that there is no need for proprietary software to be very close to a true statement, but not quite there. While the most popular applications will likely be produced as free software, it is unlikely that all applications that anyone could want would be released as free software. Speaking as someone who writes applications for embedded systems, I doubt that you'll find, say, a freeware microwave oven controller. What would be the point?
Actually, they're trying to maintain their stranglehold on a customer base that is full of people who are beginning to notice that they are being forced to pay to upgrade their software every couple of years. (All software vendors force their customers to do this in order to maintain the revenue stream which keeps stock prices high.) Microsoft's target audience in this scheme surely isn't the "free software community," (not that there necessarily is such a thing---a debate I am unwilling to enter into here,) because we all caught on to that fact some time ago.
In actual fact, I think "renting" software is a good idea for the great masses of people who are either unable or unwilling to be their own computer experts. For my part, I expect the days of the computer as a mass-market item are numbered. Leasing software and other data services from a provider can conceivably result in higher quality and lower cost because the provider won't have to stuff feature after feature into the software (to justify charging for the upgrade) and will be able to release upgrades as incremental changes rather than as an all-or-nothing shot which has to be mind-bogglingly complex in order to handle all potential cases.
displague also said:
Well, there certainly is a trust issue. However, there are ways of boosting the customers' trust in the company. The business plan I have floating around for a business similar to this deals with the trust factor directly. It's all in the marketing and should be easy to sell to the vast majority of computer users.As a matter of fact, I think that the only question about the success of this scheme is not whether or not someone can do it, but whether or not Microsoft can stop writing the bloatware they need to write to make money "selling" software and focus on delivering high-quality stable software that will produce the most profits when you "rent" software. The "million monkey" approach is definitely the wrong way to write software to rent. My own opinion is that Microsoft doesn't write bloatware because that's what's needed to succeed in the current market. Instead, I think Microsoft has succeeded in the current market because they happen to be good at writing bloatware which is what it takes to succeed.
The times, they are a changin', and to throughly mix a metaphor, can the 500-pound-gorilla change its spots? Time will tell, but I doubt it.
Getting paid is a pain in the neck no matter what you do. I've owned an ISP for coming up on four years, now, and I don't have any trouble getting paid (for service---consulting is another matter) because I don't treat any customer as special and everyone pays in advance. (Even Fortune 500 companies: I get a check from Paramount every year, before they get the service.)
In order to process credit cards, you need two things: a merchant account and some means of processing the charges. If you've never done this before, you'll likely have some trouble getting the merchant account so you might have to deal with a company that specializes in giving merchant accounts to "high risk" ventures. (That's you, until you've got a track record, and maybe even then. We'll be terminating our relationship with our current bank because they won't set up a merchant account with us despite our nearly four-year record.) The one we used is a company called Cardservice, International. Their discount rate (the amount of money they withold when they put charges in your account) is slightly outrageous and their "lease to own" deal on equipment is VERY bad (to the tune of about five times what the terminal is worth.) However, they'll take just about anybody.
To process the cards, you'll need some kind of equipment or software. Depending on how you want to do this, you can get either one and it'll work. A terminal is somewhat cheaper than Linux software (from Hell's Kitchen Systems---check their ads in Linux Journal and Sysadmin) but is vastly less convenient for you to use. If you decide to go with a terminal, you're best bet is to look in your local yellow pages for used office equipment places who will likely have terminals for reasonable prices. The vendors of the equipment or software may even know who to talk to if you want a merchant account. (I would if I was one of them, but I'm not.)
One thing you should remember is this: Always get a signature. If there is a dispute (and there will be disputes) you win if you have a valid signature. You lose if you don't. (We always cave when we get the "blue envelope" so this is hearsay, but it comes from a source that I tend to believe.)
Which is why I don't use RedHat. I use Debian, which can be managed entirely through telnet sessions including working with package dependancies and whatnot. The lack of text-mode tools to handle packages in anything other than a rudimentary way is too much to give up.
Myself, I'm wondering how to run regedit from a W2K telnet session. Is there any way to get it, or any version of NT, to boot into a text console so that I can run it to recover from registry disasters?
You know, I've installed NT (v4.0, I believe) on my NT computer as many times as I've installed Linux on the computer I'm currently using, but the reasons were different: I had to reinstall NT (approximately two hours after I initially installed it) because it didn't like my network card settings and kept crashing before I could do anything about it. I reinstalled Linux (approximately two years after I originally installed it) because it was the simplest way I could come up with to upgrade from an ancient Slackware to Debian.
Also, all this talk about remote management tools is funny. I do the administration at my place of business. All the equipment purchased by my company for my use is at my house, but all the work is done at the office. I don't even have a key to that office any more. It just doesn't matter. Of course, as one of the owners, I will have a key at some point in the future, but the current lack doesn't stop the bulk of my work.