The top engineers don't get dumped, they leave. If you have the choice between staying with a sinking ship, with uncertain job prospects after a merger, and say going to work for Apple, which has more job security and stability at the moment, what would you do?
If the Cubs win it all in 2012, THEN the Mayans may be on to something...
The Pittsburgh Pirates are an example of a badly run team and franchise. The Cubs are on a whole new level. They've had some really good teams, but yet, no Worlds Series in 100+ years. Even the two newest franchises in the National League have not only been to a Worlds Series, they've won it!/ducks
I put OS 10.4-Server (10-Client version) on a Mac Mini back in 2006 and continued to pick up used mac minis for less than $200 each to play around with Xgrid. Eventually I moved the server over to an old dual core PowerMac G4 tower and used all the Mac Minis as render nodes, but it was a fun little project and worked extremely well for rendering blender, compressor, and Final Cut projects. I even put screamernet II on them for lightwave rendering as well. I had about $4500 invested in the project, the price of a decent Macpro, and had a distributed rendering grid.
With the release of some tools like Xgrid Lite, there wasn't the need to go with the full blown Server version of OSX in OS 10.5 or 10.6. Everything I needed could be downloaded with the xserve remote admin kit and a default install of OSX.
But for the year or more I used the Mac Mini as a home server, it worked extremely well. It just sat on the bookshelf and frankly I just ignored it 90% of the time because it did exactly what it needed. I'd log in every month or so to do updates, etc. But it was pretty much turn on and forget. Plus it didn't suck down as much power as the PowerMac. Something I learned once I moved out of an apartment with the utilities included and into my house.
Exactly. I've seen more Pre's than I have Android phone in the wild. Of course, that's 2 more Pre's to the 0 Android phones I've actually seen out in public use. We've been big into mobile development the past six months. We've been throughly testing with the iPhone first, blackberry second because those are the two most common devices we see. Occationally we see someone with a WIndows Mobile device and we're trying to get our mobile website to work with IE Mobile 6.1. (However it does work with Opera Mini on Windows Mobile). Nokia 8XX, it works, although the browser tries to act like the full version. I've tested our site on more LG and Samsung phones than I have Android phones.
Now that may change with the Droid. Around here, Verizon has more customers and frankly a better network.
What will REALLY change the market is when everybody in the US deploys the SAME 4G technology. Then handset manufactures won't have to support Verizon and then the rest of the world with GSM with different models of phones. I suspect we'll see the iPhone 4G available on your choice of ATT, Sprint, or Verizon. That's if Verizon will allow a phone on their network with their crippled Vcast crap.
Maybe Mozilla needs a mod-store. You know, charge $99 to developers and take 30% of the fees, in exchange for verifying that plug-ins won't do harm to the system. Could be a revenue stream for both the plug-in authors as well as the mozilla foundation considering they're partnership with google looks shaky in light of chrome. If you try to install an unsigned plug-in, it gives you about 15 dialog warning boxes you have to click thru in order to do it.
You know kinda like apple, oh, but wait, that would be "evil" right?
Seriously, that's what we did when creating our mobile ordering platform. Everything is in HTML with vanilla javascript for things like form validation. Then we created a mobile style sheet without graphics, other than a thumbnail of the logo, and it works on every mobile browser we've tried. iPhone, Blackberrys, Samsungs, Windows Mobile, Pre, various LG phones we've tried. Everything. Even over GPRS/Edge the pages load snappy.
I just finished reading a paper by an ex-vp at Motorola about why QoS is never going to work from a technical perspective. From a legal/political one....hmmm, hey John, I'll have those notes for you sometime tomorrow.
That's why, when you mail your paper/patent application, you print off a second copy, stick in another envelope and mail it to your self. Then you take the sealed envelope with the postmark and put in a safe deposit box. That postmark is proof of a date.
BB - been out in the wild, I see lots of users every day, it's a proven and reliable system. And frankly I hear very few complaints from blackberry users. (other than the Pearl & original storm).
Android - I have yet to see someone with one in the wild. Granted I live in an area not well serviced by T-Mobile, but the fact remains, I have yet to see ONE in use in the wild.
I've seen more Pre's than I have Android based phones. I know there are more on the way, but with Verizon, I can't help but thinking "Now with Verizon Android Vcast. It's android, only with half the features disabled and runs three times as slow".
I'm beginning to think that Android is going to become the desktop linux of the cell phone world. We'll hear about it being the new "year of the android", but meanwhile most people will continue to go out and buy iPhones. Especially if the iPhone 4G operates on multiple carriers.
(Yes I have an iPhone and love the phone. Not so much in love with ATT)
In other works, Timeshare 2.0. Funny is I remember the old timers talking about that when I started in IT 15 years ago and exactly how well it worked then....and I've come to the conclusion it work just about as well now. The Cloud sounds like a great idea. I have friends who work at a company that switched to a thin-client/cloud system. It's great, until the network switch or router for a floor goes wonky. Then all of a sudden you have 200 employees dead in the water unable to do anything productive. At least before when the nets went down, they had local installs of the applications and usually could do SOMETHING productive.
Mainframes aren't going away. Not if your business is processing credit cards because virtualization is not PCI-Compliant. (We can debate the rules and how stupid they are, but as it stands right now those are the rules). Neither is any "cloud" services. When we looked, none of them could give us in writing that their services were Level-1 audited and certified compliant. Now, if you're a Level 2 - 4 merchant, not a big deal. But if you're a level 1 merchant and processing enough transaction, the extra.3 -.5% per transaction for not being compliant can cost real money...enough to buy a mainframe and still save money.
It would have to run our software because everything is run off of in house gift/loyality cards and we wrote this application to bridge the POS and gateway, along with a custom splash screen, etc. This way, when the customer gets their card swiped at the registered it automatically logs in their system after they've registered.
The main difference would be with digital music (the market), you can purchase MP3's from a number of online stores inlcuding Amazon.com. Apple + itunes + ipod/iPhone may dominate that market with their platform, but they are not forbidding other manufactures and distributers from creating their own digital media players + store + digital music. So while Apple is dominate, they aren't doing anything to stop others from entering the market place. If you want, you're free to source MP3 players from china, put your sticker on it, write your own store software, and offer music for download in Ogg format if you wanted.
In the case of Mainframes, there aren't a lot of venders left. Fifteen years ago I could go get competitive bids from DEC, Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM. I'm probably forgetting a couple, but usually we'd get bids from DEC, SUN, SGI, & IBM. Usually it would come down between Sun and IBM depending if your shop was going to run Oracle or DB2.
Recently we went to look replacing an aged DB/400 system. Granted, we were unlikely to move away from IBM, but we had to at least look around. The options were basically Sun, IBM, and HP. Sun was openly for sale with no buyer at the time which left HP & IBM. That's it in the mainframe market. (And even then both systems were really just a rack containing a cluster of Linux servers). There is no DEC. There is no SGI. And no there is no SUN.
Currently we have an old white box server with FreeBSD set up as a gateway/proxy. It's about 5 years old and we've not done anything to it in 3 years, but it's cheap commodity hardware and it has a 600W powersupply that sucks down a lot of juice. We wrote our own software that gives people wireless access for 3 hours when they buy a drink (coffee shop). We're talking a 400Mhz AMD K6-2 with 256mb of Ram.
We'd like to put that software onto a router and have been looking at Single Board Computers, but have yet to find anything that we like. All it has to run is Linux/BSD with an AMP stack.
Anyone have a recommendation that would be low power. I've looked at beagleboard and wall wart, but really we need 3 Ethernet ports and a wireless card.
Actually, that's saved our rears a couple times as we run ZFS on our development machine (freeBSD) and have accidentally over written files. Being able to recover the old ones saved at least a day's worth of work once.
As someone who has had a lot of experience with both, I switched to BSD in 1999. Back then the main reason was Ports. Needed to install MySQL:/usr/bin/ports/databases/mysql/ make && install. Then go grab a cup of coffee come back and it would fetch everything it needed, compile, and run. Or you could fetch a pre-compiled binary via pkg_add -r mysql. Hell, the first few version of PostgreSQL I used, the only way I could get the damn thing to work was to use BSD ports. The best you had with Linux was RPM and that was dependancy hell at times.
Also, back in the day it had a better tcp/ip stack and was generally more stable as a server platform and decent SMP support. And frankly it was far easier to support than "linux" was back in the day because there was a single FreeBSD, not umpteen different flavors.
Today it has ZFS and Dtrace from solaris ported over. I know ZFS hasn't made it into Linux as of yet, not sure about DTrace. But both are handy tools.
Currently we're deployed 100% on FreeBSD for our web, mail, and database servers running PostgreSQL. But that has more to do with using Pair Networks than any other single factor. They've been 100% FreeBSD and consistently in the top 10 in terms of uptime according to netcraft.
For the past 10 years, I've found FreeBSD to be a stable, secure server operating system that doesn't take a lot of system resources to run. It seems like Linux takes about 256MB of ram these days in most default configs to run a web server whereas our BSD machines were using closer to 150MB for the core OS. And was both systems running Apache 2.
I have both OS 10.6 and Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, which I can boot into Windows 7 through bootcamp or Parallels. So does it count that I have both on one machine?
Re:netcraft didn't confirm but Perl is dying
on
Perl 5.11.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
We must REALLY be behind the times like it's 1999. Because a lot of our stuff is not only written in Perl, but deployed on FreeBSD too!
Most of our stuff was in PHP and usually what the public sees in the terms of our control panel and shopping cart system is PHP. But behind the scenes, it's all perl. All our billing scripts, maintenance scripts, log parsing scripts, reporting scripts, and API are all Perl. Anything that needs extensive regex is Perl. Granted, most of those scripts I've built probably 10 - 12 years ago, but they still do their jobs and do them well why change?
We've been looking into datamart for long-term storage and analytics and the one we're close to selecting turned out to have no PHP support at all (well supposedly ODBC works), but Perl had not 1, but 2 modules in CPAN to connect and work with the database. And thanks to that it turned out to be faster in loading batch jobs than PHP/ODBC.
Recently we'd been using a PHP based CMS that while popular is slow. The content is mostly static, but the pages needed to load faster. We switched to a Perl based CMS with flatfile databases that load in less than 2 seconds vs. 12 seconds for the PHP/MySQL based CMS.
So, in other words, the 12.1" Powerbook I have setting on the shelf that sells for around $350 on craigslist retroactively count as a netbook? Or does the fact that it has a DVD-Rom drive and is.1" larger than 12" disqualify it?
If I'm going to be learning a new programming language, I prefer the books. As other people have said, you can highlight, make notes etc.. However, for reference, I'm really liking the digital versions I can get off the iTunes store for $5 a piece. I've been doing some hacking around in Perl the past couple weeks building some back end tools. Which is something I've not done in a while and the reference library I had were all Perl 4. So I downloaded a couple of the Perl books from the app store and have found them to be great to work with as a quick reference, especially if I know exactly what I'm looking for with the search function.
And while some may say, "You can use the internet for all that." Well I live out in the country and don't have internet at my house other than my iPhone for checking email. So having an offline reference I can go to quickly is nice.
But in my experience I've never really seen many people use Ubuntu in the server capacity, they tend to use Debain if they are deploying on a server. Still, I love the fact that there is DTrace and ZFS in FreeBSD. Hopefully with some improvements in FreeBSD 8. We're still running FreeBSD 6.3 around here on our production machines. But improved ZFS support would make a case to upgrade.
Because everyone else in the industry is using H.264. If you want your materials to play nice with others hardware, software, etc. you'd better damn well be using H.264.
Generally, the cost of the H.264 license is covered by the software/hardware purchased by the consumer, whether it's a business or personal use. It's licensed by Adobe/Apple/Google/whomever when you buy or use their encoder. I don't have to pay a licensing fee for every video I create in H.264.
I've tested Theora on a few occasions. Everytime, H.264 has beat it in terms of quality for file size plus I can send an H.264 file to anyone else in the industry and I guarantee it will play for them. And today, I can put it out on the web and be pretty much guaranteed that just about everyone can view it.
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The top engineers don't get dumped, they leave. If you have the choice between staying with a sinking ship, with uncertain job prospects after a merger, and say going to work for Apple, which has more job security and stability at the moment, what would you do?
If the Cubs win it all in 2012, THEN the Mayans may be on to something...
The Pittsburgh Pirates are an example of a badly run team and franchise. The Cubs are on a whole new level. They've had some really good teams, but yet, no Worlds Series in 100+ years. Even the two newest franchises in the National League have not only been to a Worlds Series, they've won it! /ducks
I put OS 10.4-Server (10-Client version) on a Mac Mini back in 2006 and continued to pick up used mac minis for less than $200 each to play around with Xgrid. Eventually I moved the server over to an old dual core PowerMac G4 tower and used all the Mac Minis as render nodes, but it was a fun little project and worked extremely well for rendering blender, compressor, and Final Cut projects. I even put screamernet II on them for lightwave rendering as well. I had about $4500 invested in the project, the price of a decent Macpro, and had a distributed rendering grid.
With the release of some tools like Xgrid Lite, there wasn't the need to go with the full blown Server version of OSX in OS 10.5 or 10.6. Everything I needed could be downloaded with the xserve remote admin kit and a default install of OSX.
But for the year or more I used the Mac Mini as a home server, it worked extremely well. It just sat on the bookshelf and frankly I just ignored it 90% of the time because it did exactly what it needed. I'd log in every month or so to do updates, etc. But it was pretty much turn on and forget. Plus it didn't suck down as much power as the PowerMac. Something I learned once I moved out of an apartment with the utilities included and into my house.
Exactly. I've seen more Pre's than I have Android phone in the wild. Of course, that's 2 more Pre's to the 0 Android phones I've actually seen out in public use. We've been big into mobile development the past six months. We've been throughly testing with the iPhone first, blackberry second because those are the two most common devices we see. Occationally we see someone with a WIndows Mobile device and we're trying to get our mobile website to work with IE Mobile 6.1. (However it does work with Opera Mini on Windows Mobile). Nokia 8XX, it works, although the browser tries to act like the full version. I've tested our site on more LG and Samsung phones than I have Android phones.
Now that may change with the Droid. Around here, Verizon has more customers and frankly a better network.
What will REALLY change the market is when everybody in the US deploys the SAME 4G technology. Then handset manufactures won't have to support Verizon and then the rest of the world with GSM with different models of phones. I suspect we'll see the iPhone 4G available on your choice of ATT, Sprint, or Verizon. That's if Verizon will allow a phone on their network with their crippled Vcast crap.
More profit per unit, perhaps, but does e-books bring in more revenue than their paper counter parts?
Maybe Mozilla needs a mod-store. You know, charge $99 to developers and take 30% of the fees, in exchange for verifying that plug-ins won't do harm to the system. Could be a revenue stream for both the plug-in authors as well as the mozilla foundation considering they're partnership with google looks shaky in light of chrome. If you try to install an unsigned plug-in, it gives you about 15 dialog warning boxes you have to click thru in order to do it.
You know kinda like apple, oh, but wait, that would be "evil" right?
Seriously, that's what we did when creating our mobile ordering platform. Everything is in HTML with vanilla javascript for things like form validation. Then we created a mobile style sheet without graphics, other than a thumbnail of the logo, and it works on every mobile browser we've tried. iPhone, Blackberrys, Samsungs, Windows Mobile, Pre, various LG phones we've tried. Everything. Even over GPRS/Edge the pages load snappy.
I just finished reading a paper by an ex-vp at Motorola about why QoS is never going to work from a technical perspective. From a legal/political one....hmmm, hey John, I'll have those notes for you sometime tomorrow.
That's why, when you mail your paper/patent application, you print off a second copy, stick in another envelope and mail it to your self. Then you take the sealed envelope with the postmark and put in a safe deposit box. That postmark is proof of a date.
BB - been out in the wild, I see lots of users every day, it's a proven and reliable system. And frankly I hear very few complaints from blackberry users. (other than the Pearl & original storm).
Android - I have yet to see someone with one in the wild. Granted I live in an area not well serviced by T-Mobile, but the fact remains, I have yet to see ONE in use in the wild.
I've seen more Pre's than I have Android based phones. I know there are more on the way, but with Verizon, I can't help but thinking "Now with Verizon Android Vcast. It's android, only with half the features disabled and runs three times as slow".
I'm beginning to think that Android is going to become the desktop linux of the cell phone world. We'll hear about it being the new "year of the android", but meanwhile most people will continue to go out and buy iPhones. Especially if the iPhone 4G operates on multiple carriers.
(Yes I have an iPhone and love the phone. Not so much in love with ATT)
In other works, Timeshare 2.0. Funny is I remember the old timers talking about that when I started in IT 15 years ago and exactly how well it worked then....and I've come to the conclusion it work just about as well now. The Cloud sounds like a great idea. I have friends who work at a company that switched to a thin-client/cloud system. It's great, until the network switch or router for a floor goes wonky. Then all of a sudden you have 200 employees dead in the water unable to do anything productive. At least before when the nets went down, they had local installs of the applications and usually could do SOMETHING productive.
Mainframes aren't going away. Not if your business is processing credit cards because virtualization is not PCI-Compliant. (We can debate the rules and how stupid they are, but as it stands right now those are the rules). Neither is any "cloud" services. When we looked, none of them could give us in writing that their services were Level-1 audited and certified compliant. Now, if you're a Level 2 - 4 merchant, not a big deal. But if you're a level 1 merchant and processing enough transaction, the extra .3 - .5% per transaction for not being compliant can cost real money...enough to buy a mainframe and still save money.
It would have to run our software because everything is run off of in house gift/loyality cards and we wrote this application to bridge the POS and gateway, along with a custom splash screen, etc. This way, when the customer gets their card swiped at the registered it automatically logs in their system after they've registered.
The main difference would be with digital music (the market), you can purchase MP3's from a number of online stores inlcuding Amazon.com. Apple + itunes + ipod/iPhone may dominate that market with their platform, but they are not forbidding other manufactures and distributers from creating their own digital media players + store + digital music. So while Apple is dominate, they aren't doing anything to stop others from entering the market place. If you want, you're free to source MP3 players from china, put your sticker on it, write your own store software, and offer music for download in Ogg format if you wanted.
In the case of Mainframes, there aren't a lot of venders left. Fifteen years ago I could go get competitive bids from DEC, Sun, SGI, HP, and IBM. I'm probably forgetting a couple, but usually we'd get bids from DEC, SUN, SGI, & IBM. Usually it would come down between Sun and IBM depending if your shop was going to run Oracle or DB2.
Recently we went to look replacing an aged DB/400 system. Granted, we were unlikely to move away from IBM, but we had to at least look around. The options were basically Sun, IBM, and HP. Sun was openly for sale with no buyer at the time which left HP & IBM. That's it in the mainframe market. (And even then both systems were really just a rack containing a cluster of Linux servers). There is no DEC. There is no SGI. And no there is no SUN.
Currently we have an old white box server with FreeBSD set up as a gateway/proxy. It's about 5 years old and we've not done anything to it in 3 years, but it's cheap commodity hardware and it has a 600W powersupply that sucks down a lot of juice. We wrote our own software that gives people wireless access for 3 hours when they buy a drink (coffee shop). We're talking a 400Mhz AMD K6-2 with 256mb of Ram.
We'd like to put that software onto a router and have been looking at Single Board Computers, but have yet to find anything that we like. All it has to run is Linux/BSD with an AMP stack.
Anyone have a recommendation that would be low power. I've looked at beagleboard and wall wart, but really we need 3 Ethernet ports and a wireless card.
Actually, that's saved our rears a couple times as we run ZFS on our development machine (freeBSD) and have accidentally over written files. Being able to recover the old ones saved at least a day's worth of work once.
As someone who has had a lot of experience with both, I switched to BSD in 1999. Back then the main reason was Ports. Needed to install MySQL: /usr/bin/ports/databases/mysql/ make && install. Then go grab a cup of coffee come back and it would fetch everything it needed, compile, and run. Or you could fetch a pre-compiled binary via pkg_add -r mysql. Hell, the first few version of PostgreSQL I used, the only way I could get the damn thing to work was to use BSD ports. The best you had with Linux was RPM and that was dependancy hell at times.
Also, back in the day it had a better tcp/ip stack and was generally more stable as a server platform and decent SMP support. And frankly it was far easier to support than "linux" was back in the day because there was a single FreeBSD, not umpteen different flavors.
Today it has ZFS and Dtrace from solaris ported over. I know ZFS hasn't made it into Linux as of yet, not sure about DTrace. But both are handy tools.
Currently we're deployed 100% on FreeBSD for our web, mail, and database servers running PostgreSQL. But that has more to do with using Pair Networks than any other single factor. They've been 100% FreeBSD and consistently in the top 10 in terms of uptime according to netcraft.
For the past 10 years, I've found FreeBSD to be a stable, secure server operating system that doesn't take a lot of system resources to run. It seems like Linux takes about 256MB of ram these days in most default configs to run a web server whereas our BSD machines were using closer to 150MB for the core OS. And was both systems running Apache 2.
Because BSD has had this since the 1990's, it's call Ports....
I have both OS 10.6 and Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro, which I can boot into Windows 7 through bootcamp or Parallels. So does it count that I have both on one machine?
We must REALLY be behind the times like it's 1999. Because a lot of our stuff is not only written in Perl, but deployed on FreeBSD too!
Most of our stuff was in PHP and usually what the public sees in the terms of our control panel and shopping cart system is PHP. But behind the scenes, it's all perl. All our billing scripts, maintenance scripts, log parsing scripts, reporting scripts, and API are all Perl. Anything that needs extensive regex is Perl. Granted, most of those scripts I've built probably 10 - 12 years ago, but they still do their jobs and do them well why change?
We've been looking into datamart for long-term storage and analytics and the one we're close to selecting turned out to have no PHP support at all (well supposedly ODBC works), but Perl had not 1, but 2 modules in CPAN to connect and work with the database. And thanks to that it turned out to be faster in loading batch jobs than PHP/ODBC.
Recently we'd been using a PHP based CMS that while popular is slow. The content is mostly static, but the pages needed to load faster. We switched to a Perl based CMS with flatfile databases that load in less than 2 seconds vs. 12 seconds for the PHP/MySQL based CMS.
So, in other words, the 12.1" Powerbook I have setting on the shelf that sells for around $350 on craigslist retroactively count as a netbook? Or does the fact that it has a DVD-Rom drive and is .1" larger than 12" disqualify it?
I've heard this same thing about Desktop Linux for the past decade too....hasn't happened yet...
If I'm going to be learning a new programming language, I prefer the books. As other people have said, you can highlight, make notes etc.. However, for reference, I'm really liking the digital versions I can get off the iTunes store for $5 a piece. I've been doing some hacking around in Perl the past couple weeks building some back end tools. Which is something I've not done in a while and the reference library I had were all Perl 4. So I downloaded a couple of the Perl books from the app store and have found them to be great to work with as a quick reference, especially if I know exactly what I'm looking for with the search function.
And while some may say, "You can use the internet for all that." Well I live out in the country and don't have internet at my house other than my iPhone for checking email. So having an offline reference I can go to quickly is nice.
But in my experience I've never really seen many people use Ubuntu in the server capacity, they tend to use Debain if they are deploying on a server. Still, I love the fact that there is DTrace and ZFS in FreeBSD. Hopefully with some improvements in FreeBSD 8. We're still running FreeBSD 6.3 around here on our production machines. But improved ZFS support would make a case to upgrade.
Because everyone else in the industry is using H.264. If you want your materials to play nice with others hardware, software, etc. you'd better damn well be using H.264.
Generally, the cost of the H.264 license is covered by the software/hardware purchased by the consumer, whether it's a business or personal use. It's licensed by Adobe/Apple/Google/whomever when you buy or use their encoder. I don't have to pay a licensing fee for every video I create in H.264.
I've tested Theora on a few occasions. Everytime, H.264 has beat it in terms of quality for file size plus I can send an H.264 file to anyone else in the industry and I guarantee it will play for them. And today, I can put it out on the web and be pretty much guaranteed that just about everyone can view it.
Not so much with Theora.