I've been to several conferences in the past few years and have noticed a huge reduction in the amount and quality of conference swag. In the heydays of 1998 and 1999, you could come away with enough clothes to last you all year without washing (about 5 or 6 t-shirts), but nowadays you'd practically have to kill some booth babe to score a pen or mousepad.
This guy says Novell is giving away t-shirts again? Does this foreshadow a return to the heady days of the dotcom boom? Buy tech stocks, folks, it looks like we've got ourselves an upswing in the making!
Actually, it shows a very important split in the Linux distro world that began to emerge back around 2001 when RedHat developed its certification system and Debian started to catch on in earnest. On the RedHat side we have a group of distros dedicated to making Linux easier for the user to use, more powerful for the admins to admin, and more up to date for the up-to-daters to update. On the Debian side you have people focused on making distributions that are not encumbered by IP violations.
As Debian makes itself more and more a closed system (by restricting itself from outside sources) and RedHat shows itself to be a more reliable distribution vendor (by releasing very modern operating system versions), it remains to be seen whether the Linux ecosystem can allow for two completely dichotomous memes to exist and flourish.
Those are really out of focus. Thank god Hubble is getting decommissioned. If this is the best that current, in-use telescopes can deliver, I eagerly anticipate their replacement.
I look at the landscape and wonder when a distribution that takes a pragmatic look at Linux stability like Debian does without the associated religious zealotry will come into being.
It is an amazing thing to see the focus on stability and completeness in Debian. I deride the distro in jest, but it is a sign of good thinking that they don't declare a stable release every other weekend like some other distros.
However, the zeal to make Debian a "Free" distro is hampering it, causing the maintainers to shun obviously useful and necessary utilities because of the flavor of its license.
I wonder how long it will take for Debian to fork between the GNU-like religious faction and the pragmatists.
With its stable releases already years behind the curve (still using 2.4 kernel!), Debian shows off again how it is willing to buck the trend of newer and better by demanding that functionality be *taken out* of the distribution.
Luckily for Debian, its main competitor, Gentoo, just lost its leader and so the mass migration away from the dated distro will most likely be stemmed before it can begin.
Meanwhile, businesses serious about Linux are still using Redhat Fedora as their OS.
About 4000 years ago, not too long after the world was created, God looked down at the people and was a little disappointed. They were mostly doing their own thing and not paying much attention to doing God's will (they played a lot of D&D and listened to rock music mostly). Among the people was a family headed up by Noah that was trying to be good and follow God's laws.
So God said to Himself, "Well, it looks like all of humanity except for this Noah cat seems to be completely fucked up. I think I'll just wipe everyone out and start over." That wasn't the end of it, he then proceeded to test Noah's faith by giving him boils and killing off most of his flocks (not that bad, most everything died later anyway).
Then God said to Noah, "You go and build an Arky Arky." And Noah said to God, "WTF is an Arky Arky?" To which God replied, "Build a big ass wooden box and paint it black. If anyone asks you what you're doing, tell them to fuck off because they had their chance to please me and they blew it. I'm only saving you and your family Noah."
So Noah, realizing that he was dealing with a kind and merciful God, went ahead chopping down trees and eating his lunch and going to the lavatry. He built a big-ass wooden box using only his forearms as measuring devices and '3' as the value of pi when calculating circular arcs for the corners so that no one accidentally stubbed their toe on anything sharp.
This was important because God then said to Noah, "Take your kids, Ham, Shemp, and Japheth, and their wives and your wife and a shitload of animals with you on the Ark."
"A shitload, huh? Is that the offical term?" "Okay, okay. Take 2 of every animal except for animals not found in this area. Oh, and for some animals take 7. You'll probably get hungry later."
So Noah went and gathered up all known animals because we all know that at that time the great Diaspora hadn't happened yet and some animals hadn't appeared in far away places that couldn't possibly have been reachable from the Mideast.
Once Noah was done doing all these jobs, he pulled up the door to the Ark and sealed everyone in for a long passage. God, for His part, started rain. It should be noted that until this story occured, rain didn't exist. The plants were watered by a very light mist that arose every morning.
And the rain started, and it continued raining for 40 days and 40 nights. The windows on the ark were sealed too, so it must have smelled really nice inside.
After 40 days, Noah's kids started complaining about the elephants and rhinos crapping all over the place and decided to open a window. They cracked one of the windows open and saw that they were surrounded by water on all sides. An eagle also took the opportunity to get the fuck out of there. The eagle never returned. It's thought he went over the mountain and married a nice girl eagle on the other side.
Later, the kids decided that they'd send a pigeon out to survey the area because pigeons always fly home. It flew off and came back with a branch from an olive tree. Apparently, the water was everywhere but only a few feet deep.
Next thing they know, they crash onto Mount Arafat and everyone slowly disembarked into their new home, just like their old home.
God realized that maybe killing everyone and everything with water was a pretty shitty thing to do and made a covenant with Noah that He wouldn't do it again. Next time the world would end with fire. To seal the deal, He made a nice rainbow and everyone who saw it automatically realized how good God was and stuff.
From these four families (Noah and his three sons), all of us are derived. Following our family tree back up, we can all trace our lineage back to one of these four families.
It's true that it's been a year since iTunes set up shop with low-priced music for the masses, but it still isn't really for the "masses".
More succinctly, it is for those people who have decided to buy into the Apple technology merry-go-round that have full access to the iTunes repositories. With a full-fledged DRM system in place and restrictions on copying the music data, iTunes isn't really all that it's cracked up to be. Useful to some, for sure, but useless for those among us who are trying to find ways of acquiring musical samples to "try out" various musical bands.
The lack of signal strength was causing some severe crashes here and there. It's good to have both NLS and GlideSlope back up to working levels, because without them it's virtually impossible to let the system auto-handle itself (requires extensive manual control to get it to work correctly when those two utilities are down).
Good work to Apple, and don't let it happen again!
As much as Linux is near and dear to Robbins' heart (and our own), it just doesn't pay like an industry job does, much less what a major player like Microsoft or IBM or Apple could pay.
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
Battlefield confusion when the commander dies? Their own death? A commander in chief willing to sacrifice American lives for a people who would be better off left to their own devices?
This article goes right to the heart of my query. Rather, the existence of this article does so. Is a geek one who revels in technology and the pursuit of coolness in new technology? Or is a geek someone who is wrapped up in figuring out how technology will be used inherently for evil purposes?
I like to think of geeks as the happy lot who wander the streets of Akihabara mesmerized by all the glitz and blinkenlights of the latest and greatest devices.
The article demonstrates a new strain of geeks which seems to revel in stymieng the technological process by handicapping it at every turn.
I imagine that any geek can encompass both forms, but I have a feeling that lately it is the boys who cry wolf that are taking over geekdom.
It's all fun and games until one hits Earth
on
The Lyrids Are Coming!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It makes a little more sense to me to search for our "LEV meteor/asteroid" in these known meteor shower zones. A rogue asteroid hitting the earth would require the overcoming of astronomical odds on par with hitting an incoming missile with an interceptory missile. Since we know and can track these meteor showers, I imagine that scanning the areas in which the space debris exists is the first place we ought to be looking for life-ending rocks.
MP3 is not a lousy codec. Rather, it is one of the best that we've got. It is supported on all platforms unlike proprietary codecs such as WMV and QuickTime. It is more recognizable to the general public than the Open Source zealot's codec of choice, Ogg.
If anything, it was a very good decision to encode all data on the MP3.com site as MP3 rather than something which no one had ever heard of (no matter how much technically better it may be) such as FLAC.
I watched the launch of the Soyuz spacecraft on CNN yesterday. It was an amazing experience to sit there and watch as men were being blasted into space. What was more amazing, though, was the confidence I had that they would make it to the ISS in one piece.
Americans may have been the first to the moon, but the modern-day Russian space agency is leaps and bounds ahead of NASA when it comes to operational safety. Currently the entire Space Shuttle fleet is grounded and it is unknown when they can launch again. The International space community is completely relying on the Russians to take and bring back astronauts.
Despite the vaunted NASA space program, they are completely helpless now while the much maligned Russians are doing the heavy lifting.
As everyone else around here attests to, CVS is the obvious choice.
But my question is what kind of company is it that can't afford to pay for business software? As this kind of thing can be deducted from taxes, it makes a lot of sense to let the company pay for the software and enjoy the tax relief.
Even if the company is just you, it would be better to let the corporation pay for it and not pay full price on the software out of your salary.
Charge your next customer a little more and use the difference to pay for some software. Of course it makes sense to use free software whenever possible, but I can't imagine agreeing to being taken advantage of by a company like you are describing.
If an employer is already willing to overlook the obvious benefits of hiring locally, do you think he can be convinced otherwise.
1) Location. The programmer is nearby and likely in the same time zone making questions easier to ask and schedules easier to sync.
2) Language. While most Indian programmers speak English, they speak it with a heavy accent that is difficult enough to understand, even more so over the phone. Local programmers most likely speak with the same English dialect as the program manager
3) Labor laws. America has some of the most lax labor laws in the Western world. "Fire at will" laws allow employers to get rid of dysfunctional employees at the drop of a hat instead of having to deal with heavy government restrictions like in France and Sweden.
4) Guaranteed ownership of ideas. Local programmers are much less prone to simply taking their employer's ideas and reselling them to the next bidder. Foreign companies with vast distances between them and their hiring companies sometimes decide that because they wrote the software that they have the right to redistribute it. Lax foreign IP laws and (lack of) enforcement do nothing to discourage this kind piracy.
But in the end it is the hiring manager's decision. If he wants to go ahead and make the decision to forego all the benefits above in exchange for maybe 100,000 a year cost reduction, then there really isn't much you can do to stop him.
I don't mean to be crass, but Linux installation is the one and only segment of Linux documentation that is clear and complete. If you weren't bright enough to install Linux, perhaps it isn't for you.
An operating system is complex and it's silly to think that any simpleton could make it work without any understanding. Not even Apple makes that kind of promise to its users.
If the telephone line is not plugged in, there should be no dial tone available for the modem. It should not result in the modem being undetectable.
If PJ's experience with Knoppix is really as she says, there seems to be a serious problem with Linux (at least Knoppix).
Hopefully this kind of focus on improving Linux documentation will result in something tangible. ESR had his say a few months ago, now PJ has hers. There seems to be a very large movement of newbies demanding better docs. Let's all hope that the wizards among us hear them and provide us all with better information than we've got now.
The most impressive thing about the Mac world is that Apple puts so much effort into building a complete software environment for their customers. With (compared to the Windows world) 3rd party software houses effectively shunning Apple because of the lack of users (again comparatively speaking), Apple would no doubt be dead if not for Apple's heavy investment in writing these pro-level tools that have become absolutely essential to the media cartels.
However, I wonder how long Apple can continue with such heavy investment in this excellent software. The return on investment of this kind of thing can't be that great considering the low low price of the software. Granted, it moves Mac G5 boxes, but I wonder if the markup on the Apple hardware can compensate for the loss leading of the Apple software.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to several conferences in the past few years and have noticed a huge reduction in the amount and quality of conference swag. In the heydays of 1998 and 1999, you could come away with enough clothes to last you all year without washing (about 5 or 6 t-shirts), but nowadays you'd practically have to kill some booth babe to score a pen or mousepad.
This guy says Novell is giving away t-shirts again? Does this foreshadow a return to the heady days of the dotcom boom? Buy tech stocks, folks, it looks like we've got ourselves an upswing in the making!
Actually, it shows a very important split in the Linux distro world that began to emerge back around 2001 when RedHat developed its certification system and Debian started to catch on in earnest. On the RedHat side we have a group of distros dedicated to making Linux easier for the user to use, more powerful for the admins to admin, and more up to date for the up-to-daters to update. On the Debian side you have people focused on making distributions that are not encumbered by IP violations.
As Debian makes itself more and more a closed system (by restricting itself from outside sources) and RedHat shows itself to be a more reliable distribution vendor (by releasing very modern operating system versions), it remains to be seen whether the Linux ecosystem can allow for two completely dichotomous memes to exist and flourish.
Those are really out of focus. Thank god Hubble is getting decommissioned. If this is the best that current, in-use telescopes can deliver, I eagerly anticipate their replacement.
Replying to my own post.
I look at the landscape and wonder when a distribution that takes a pragmatic look at Linux stability like Debian does without the associated religious zealotry will come into being.
It is an amazing thing to see the focus on stability and completeness in Debian. I deride the distro in jest, but it is a sign of good thinking that they don't declare a stable release every other weekend like some other distros.
However, the zeal to make Debian a "Free" distro is hampering it, causing the maintainers to shun obviously useful and necessary utilities because of the flavor of its license.
I wonder how long it will take for Debian to fork between the GNU-like religious faction and the pragmatists.
With its stable releases already years behind the curve (still using 2.4 kernel!), Debian shows off again how it is willing to buck the trend of newer and better by demanding that functionality be *taken out* of the distribution.
Luckily for Debian, its main competitor, Gentoo, just lost its leader and so the mass migration away from the dated distro will most likely be stemmed before it can begin.
Meanwhile, businesses serious about Linux are still using Redhat Fedora as their OS.
About 4000 years ago, not too long after the world was created, God looked down at the people and was a little disappointed. They were mostly doing their own thing and not paying much attention to doing God's will (they played a lot of D&D and listened to rock music mostly). Among the people was a family headed up by Noah that was trying to be good and follow God's laws.
So God said to Himself, "Well, it looks like all of humanity except for this Noah cat seems to be completely fucked up. I think I'll just wipe everyone out and start over." That wasn't the end of it, he then proceeded to test Noah's faith by giving him boils and killing off most of his flocks (not that bad, most everything died later anyway).
Then God said to Noah, "You go and build an Arky Arky." And Noah said to God, "WTF is an Arky Arky?" To which God replied, "Build a big ass wooden box and paint it black. If anyone asks you what you're doing, tell them to fuck off because they had their chance to please me and they blew it. I'm only saving you and your family Noah."
So Noah, realizing that he was dealing with a kind and merciful God, went ahead chopping down trees and eating his lunch and going to the lavatry. He built a big-ass wooden box using only his forearms as measuring devices and '3' as the value of pi when calculating circular arcs for the corners so that no one accidentally stubbed their toe on anything sharp.
This was important because God then said to Noah, "Take your kids, Ham, Shemp, and Japheth, and their wives and your wife and a shitload of animals with you on the Ark."
"A shitload, huh? Is that the offical term?"
"Okay, okay. Take 2 of every animal except for animals not found in this area. Oh, and for some animals take 7. You'll probably get hungry later."
So Noah went and gathered up all known animals because we all know that at that time the great Diaspora hadn't happened yet and some animals hadn't appeared in far away places that couldn't possibly have been reachable from the Mideast.
Once Noah was done doing all these jobs, he pulled up the door to the Ark and sealed everyone in for a long passage. God, for His part, started rain. It should be noted that until this story occured, rain didn't exist. The plants were watered by a very light mist that arose every morning.
And the rain started, and it continued raining for 40 days and 40 nights. The windows on the ark were sealed too, so it must have smelled really nice inside.
After 40 days, Noah's kids started complaining about the elephants and rhinos crapping all over the place and decided to open a window. They cracked one of the windows open and saw that they were surrounded by water on all sides. An eagle also took the opportunity to get the fuck out of there. The eagle never returned. It's thought he went over the mountain and married a nice girl eagle on the other side.
Later, the kids decided that they'd send a pigeon out to survey the area because pigeons always fly home. It flew off and came back with a branch from an olive tree. Apparently, the water was everywhere but only a few feet deep.
Next thing they know, they crash onto Mount Arafat and everyone slowly disembarked into their new home, just like their old home.
God realized that maybe killing everyone and everything with water was a pretty shitty thing to do and made a covenant with Noah that He wouldn't do it again. Next time the world would end with fire. To seal the deal, He made a nice rainbow and everyone who saw it automatically realized how good God was and stuff.
From these four families (Noah and his three sons), all of us are derived. Following our family tree back up, we can all trace our lineage back to one of these four families.
Praise the Lord!
Kangaroos in Australia? Did they just swim there?
I'd rather read an arkful of Chick tracts than be force-fed this kind of tripe from CNN.
It's true that it's been a year since iTunes set up shop with low-priced music for the masses, but it still isn't really for the "masses".
More succinctly, it is for those people who have decided to buy into the Apple technology merry-go-round that have full access to the iTunes repositories. With a full-fledged DRM system in place and restrictions on copying the music data, iTunes isn't really all that it's cracked up to be. Useful to some, for sure, but useless for those among us who are trying to find ways of acquiring musical samples to "try out" various musical bands.
The lack of signal strength was causing some severe crashes here and there. It's good to have both NLS and GlideSlope back up to working levels, because without them it's virtually impossible to let the system auto-handle itself (requires extensive manual control to get it to work correctly when those two utilities are down).
Good work to Apple, and don't let it happen again!
That's probably not so far from the truth.
As much as Linux is near and dear to Robbins' heart (and our own), it just doesn't pay like an industry job does, much less what a major player like Microsoft or IBM or Apple could pay.
We'd all like to be doing what we love to do, but sometimes we learn to grow by doing what makes us more money and ultimately more leisure time to spend with friends and family.
Battlefield confusion when the commander dies? Their own death? A commander in chief willing to sacrifice American lives for a people who would be better off left to their own devices?
This article goes right to the heart of my query. Rather, the existence of this article does so. Is a geek one who revels in technology and the pursuit of coolness in new technology? Or is a geek someone who is wrapped up in figuring out how technology will be used inherently for evil purposes?
I like to think of geeks as the happy lot who wander the streets of Akihabara mesmerized by all the glitz and blinkenlights of the latest and greatest devices.
The article demonstrates a new strain of geeks which seems to revel in stymieng the technological process by handicapping it at every turn.
I imagine that any geek can encompass both forms, but I have a feeling that lately it is the boys who cry wolf that are taking over geekdom.
It makes a little more sense to me to search for our "LEV meteor/asteroid" in these known meteor shower zones. A rogue asteroid hitting the earth would require the overcoming of astronomical odds on par with hitting an incoming missile with an interceptory missile. Since we know and can track these meteor showers, I imagine that scanning the areas in which the space debris exists is the first place we ought to be looking for life-ending rocks.
MP3 is not a lousy codec. Rather, it is one of the best that we've got. It is supported on all platforms unlike proprietary codecs such as WMV and QuickTime. It is more recognizable to the general public than the Open Source zealot's codec of choice, Ogg.
If anything, it was a very good decision to encode all data on the MP3.com site as MP3 rather than something which no one had ever heard of (no matter how much technically better it may be) such as FLAC.
While most of the music loaded up there was utter crap, the few gems that were hidden among the dross really made the service worth it.
I'm glad someone was able to save the data, this will definitely make retrieving the files easier for everyone.
I watched the launch of the Soyuz spacecraft on CNN yesterday. It was an amazing experience to sit there and watch as men were being blasted into space. What was more amazing, though, was the confidence I had that they would make it to the ISS in one piece.
Americans may have been the first to the moon, but the modern-day Russian space agency is leaps and bounds ahead of NASA when it comes to operational safety. Currently the entire Space Shuttle fleet is grounded and it is unknown when they can launch again. The International space community is completely relying on the Russians to take and bring back astronauts.
Despite the vaunted NASA space program, they are completely helpless now while the much maligned Russians are doing the heavy lifting.
Their "insurance" is many times more expensive than SCO's licensing fees.
As everyone else around here attests to, CVS is the obvious choice.
But my question is what kind of company is it that can't afford to pay for business software? As this kind of thing can be deducted from taxes, it makes a lot of sense to let the company pay for the software and enjoy the tax relief.
Even if the company is just you, it would be better to let the corporation pay for it and not pay full price on the software out of your salary.
Charge your next customer a little more and use the difference to pay for some software. Of course it makes sense to use free software whenever possible, but I can't imagine agreeing to being taken advantage of by a company like you are describing.
If an employer is already willing to overlook the obvious benefits of hiring locally, do you think he can be convinced otherwise.
1) Location. The programmer is nearby and likely in the same time zone making questions easier to ask and schedules easier to sync.
2) Language. While most Indian programmers speak English, they speak it with a heavy accent that is difficult enough to understand, even more so over the phone. Local programmers most likely speak with the same English dialect as the program manager
3) Labor laws. America has some of the most lax labor laws in the Western world. "Fire at will" laws allow employers to get rid of dysfunctional employees at the drop of a hat instead of having to deal with heavy government restrictions like in France and Sweden.
4) Guaranteed ownership of ideas. Local programmers are much less prone to simply taking their employer's ideas and reselling them to the next bidder. Foreign companies with vast distances between them and their hiring companies sometimes decide that because they wrote the software that they have the right to redistribute it. Lax foreign IP laws and (lack of) enforcement do nothing to discourage this kind piracy.
But in the end it is the hiring manager's decision. If he wants to go ahead and make the decision to forego all the benefits above in exchange for maybe 100,000 a year cost reduction, then there really isn't much you can do to stop him.
I don't mean to be crass, but Linux installation is the one and only segment of Linux documentation that is clear and complete. If you weren't bright enough to install Linux, perhaps it isn't for you.
An operating system is complex and it's silly to think that any simpleton could make it work without any understanding. Not even Apple makes that kind of promise to its users.
If the telephone line is not plugged in, there should be no dial tone available for the modem. It should not result in the modem being undetectable.
If PJ's experience with Knoppix is really as she says, there seems to be a serious problem with Linux (at least Knoppix).
Hopefully this kind of focus on improving Linux documentation will result in something tangible. ESR had his say a few months ago, now PJ has hers. There seems to be a very large movement of newbies demanding better docs. Let's all hope that the wizards among us hear them and provide us all with better information than we've got now.
The most impressive thing about the Mac world is that Apple puts so much effort into building a complete software environment for their customers. With (compared to the Windows world) 3rd party software houses effectively shunning Apple because of the lack of users (again comparatively speaking), Apple would no doubt be dead if not for Apple's heavy investment in writing these pro-level tools that have become absolutely essential to the media cartels.
However, I wonder how long Apple can continue with such heavy investment in this excellent software. The return on investment of this kind of thing can't be that great considering the low low price of the software. Granted, it moves Mac G5 boxes, but I wonder if the markup on the Apple hardware can compensate for the loss leading of the Apple software.
Approx 15,000USD to the testing company, about the same to Sun for the license (negotiated between Sun and Java licensee).
All that money so you can have the words "Java compatible" and a little coffee cup on your product.
Ironic how an activity started my lawyers winds up facing the threat of becoming illegal.
Maybe not so ironic?
I thought the Apple experience was related to having a solid, well-functioning OS and a very friendly user interface.
Little did I know that it was actually about having hardware limitations put upon me.
Learn something new everyday!