Well, that's not surprising if you use an ADMINISTRATOR to do the job a developer should be doing. I wonder what the Windows counterpart was? When did you last see a sysadmin implementing a 'new business requirement'? Should you?
In other news, fish were discovered to be poor bicyclists.
Pressure is a BIG issue. Chemistry changes at pressure, reactions go differently.
Divers going below about 90 feet (30 metres) breathing air suffer nitrogen narcosis as dissolved nitrogen in the nerves cause an effect akin to drunkenness or partial anaesthesia.
Because the human breathing response is driven by the absolute partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, not its ratio to oxygen, deep diving means breathing much more air than is needed simply to flush out the apparent elevated level of co2 in the blood - the physiology is tricked by the pressure. Anyone practising emergency surfacing from a deep dive is astonished that they don't need to breath as they rise - you continuously exhale as the gas in the lungs expands (I was taught to sing on the way up) and the breathing response isn't triggered because the detected co2 level keeps falling.
Now this may not affect squid much, it's hard to believe that there are no pressure effects on the chemistry underpinning their biology.
It's not just about web-based delivery, though Google's eye may be on that ball. A server farm delivering Open Office through a compressive technology like NX would be within Google's capability and, if it caught on, would make them Masters of the Universe (TM).
That would be VERY scary to Microsoft, not to mention a whole bunch of other players in the market. NX delivers a pretty good desktop experience (if you aren't a game player) in around 5KB/s of bandwidth. If that were guaranteed virus-free, with backed-up storage for a modest monthly subscription - like a Hotmail or Yahoo but doing your computing not just your email - I know a lot of people who would sigh with relief, happily accept a lightweight thin client and throw out that hideous, malware-ridden fat-client piece of junk in the corner that they never understood and rarely worked properly.
Sometimes I despair of Slashdot, and then to restore my faith a thoughtful and clearly written reply like this turns up. Well done.
Note that the post doesn't say that there is no problem but (IMHO) cuts to the quick of what was the wrong approach to dealing with it.
I happen from time to time to mix with young Muslims in the UK. The level of their anger with Bush and Blair makes the prevalent hatred of Microsoft seem bland by comparison. Note that it doesn't matter whether these guys are right or wrong, it gives the tiny crazy minority the motivation to act.
The crash is in the Windows version. 'You have the source' is not helpful to the customer who wants to know how long it will take to fix. As a long-time C/C++ programmer I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and tell my customer that I can give an estimate of time-to-fix - the 'use the source' argument is fine only if you have unbounded time.
Interestingly - and something of a parable for those contemplating Open Source development - for for good or ill, your choice, I'm involved with a project that chose to use wxwidgets.
Most of it mostly worked. Dire development environment when contrasted with, say, Visual Basic or Delphi, but maybe that can be traded-off against the zero licensing cost. However, having found a show-stopping bug that nobody will respond to when posted to the relevant mailing lists and the potential of unbounded time whilst trying to debug it for ourselves... serious problems for the customer.
The dialogue goes like this "Why didn't you use Delphi - we know that works?"
"Well this costs less"
"But it doesn't work. How much will it cost to fix it?"
"Er, we don't know. We can charge you $XXX per day to investigate but we have no idea how long it will take us to stop it crashing if you type ALT into a select box and nobody on the alleged support mailing lists replies to us"
If you look at http://cutterproject.co.uk/Casestudies/orwell_cost _benefit.php it shows exactly how a single high school saves 40,000 pounds a year (approximately), or $70,000. It's not rocket science; the biggest saving is in staff costs by not needing more technician support.
Interestingly, licence fees are only a moderate part of it.
Some of the biggest savings (I've seen the unpublished report) are in maintenance and support. ICT technicians in schools are one of the most significant parts of the cost. Hardware and software costs spread over a number of years, but a salary is a recurring item. You REALLY get the attention of the head teacher if you are able to replace an 'unproductive' technician with a real live teacher instead.
If a school goes thin-client and recycles its existing PCs using Linux Terminal Server code, the case study I know of has dropped its technician hours from twelve hours a day to almost zero. That is very big money over a year, although not great news for the technician.
For a case study with costings (in fact it was used to illustrate the lead story in the Times Educational Supplement print edition), Orwell High School in Felixstowe is hard to beat. Then again I would say that, wouldn't I, since I was involved in implementing it. Their savings amount to very much more than the modest 20% to 40% mentioned in the TES article. The case study is at http://cutterproject.co.uk/Casestudies/orwell_cost _benefit.php. The school has costed its savings at 40,000 pounds (UK) per year - or in the region of US$70,000 I guess.
There is something really pleasing in seeing five classroms of 30 or so kids each sit down and use a Linux desktop as the most natural thing in the world.
I worked in air freight for several years, and they do the same thing. All the airlines had their cold call reps, with their 36-24-36D figures and buttons that refused to stay done up. We usually got two visits out of them until contract renewal came up the next year.
BAD LUCK! Where I worked, they used to send in eye-candy with chests way bigger than their butts, though I guess a lot goes down to personal taste. Sad to say, it works in most cases though.
Now this sounds cool - I wonder how long it would take to patent the encryption used in a particular stealth virus and then be able to sue the AV companies for using it in their tools, as well as threaten them with the DMCA act into the bargain?
Sigh - if only there were all the hours in the day to do this kind of thing.
You are wasting your time because you are deploying rational argument in a management environment. These are incompatible concepts.
Managers do not reach decision-making levels in large organisations by listening to rational arguments. They get there through a host of means including but not limited to back-covering, buck-passing, palm-greasing and politics-playing.
Whenever presented with an argument their first reaction will be to do the updside/downside caculation, which goes roughly "If my name is on this and it goes right, how much kudos do I get vs if it goes wrong, do I get the blame"? Nobody to whom the blame sticks progresses up the pole.
If they choose GNU/Linux and it goes right, there will be some bottom-line benefit. A million people will claim that the small bottom-line effect was not due to the choice of GNU/Linux but better outsourcing, maintenance contracts, management or whatever it was that THEY are responsible for.
If there is a single significant failure, EVERYONE will point to the hapless decision-maker and say "See, told you so, this free software is crap and there is the idiot who selected it, no wonder we fsked-up / lost money / had downtime.
Now, put yourself in the position of the person you are arguing with. You are pressing the wrong buttons.
IF however you can pass the blame AND save money, there is a slim chance of getting the argument through, but trust me, the argument will revolve 80% around blame and 20% around cheaper/better/whatever.
Who is your principal software maintenance company (can't see the parent post whilst replying). Was it IBM? IF you can get them to guarantee to support the software and carry the blame, you have solved one of the blockers. Problem is, they only support RedHat and SuSE/Novell.
Unsupported Debian? Forget it, it is a waste of time. Appeals to rationality, quality, goodness of fit are not the issue. Should some remarkable turnaround occur and (say) EDS suddenly announce support for Debian you have the slimmest of chances, but if EDS or whomever aren't already involved in big contracts in your outfit, the supply-chain people will find reasons not to start negotiations with them (risk again) instead of sticking with the existing known supplier (much less 'risk').
Your only hope is to find a friend in the maintainer/supplier and convince those people first. Then they take your manager person out to dinner/golf and start telling him/her why Linux is so good for your business and that might stand a chance of winning.
You don't like what I have said above? Your choice, but I do this stuff for a living. I know the reality.
Years ago I was getting interested in ham radio and had to go take my morse code test. It was all rather disorganised and informal - I sat in the radio communications room of a large British coastal radio installation while someone went and dug out the test books.
There was a telegrapher in there with headphones on transcribing Morse Code at about 100 wpm onto a mechanical typewriter. She looked at me and pushed one of the earpieces to one side and introduced herself. We had a conversation about why I was there, the weather, radio and and other stuff. All the time she was - and I couldn't believe it - simultaneously transcribing 100 wpm 5-letter groups onto the typewriter. I asked if it was unusual - she said no, all the operators did it. They would type and talk at the same time, never looking at the keyboard.
A few years later I learned to touch-type. I found that I could program AND talk to management people at the same time. The stuff I was doing and the stuff they were talking about live in different bits of your head and don't overlap.
It was the BEST ten hour course I EVER took. I still do it now, I can write stuff and talk on the phone simultaneously as long as one of them is a brainless activity.
Probably the biggest single payback of anything I did.
It was widely rumoured that in the mid-to-late seventies some of the geostationary TV satellites got hijacked for various purposes. By 'widely rumoured' I mean that my ham radio boozing buddies talked about it quite a lot and several of them were broadcast technicians who used satellite up and downlinks at work. I have no first hand proof but they alleged that early geostationary satellites were simple transponders - if you pushed stuff up on the uplink frequency with the right amount of power and in the right direction it came back on the downlink. A popular trick was to slip a signal just to the side of the audio subcarrier at a modest level and then use it to send data or chat to friends. That is not easy to spot unless you look hard at the downlink spectrum.
This might all be speculation or not - I'd love to know. Maybe it's an urban legend.
I seem to remember that the Motorola 6800 had an opcode that was named 'HCF' (Halt and Catch Fire). It would lock up the processor and make the I/O pins cycle hi/lo as fast as possible. The only way out was to power-cycle it. Or is that just a bad dream I had way back in '77?
Become a plumber. At least over here, with the government now aiming to get 50% of all school leavers earning a 'University' degree, there's a near-catastrophic lack of manually skilled people. Here's a paraphrased quote from a 'Daily Telegraph' letter of some six months back:
Man rings plumber and asks when he can attend for urgent repairs.
"Well, I could be there in around four or five days depending"
"How much do you charge?"
"80 pounds an hour"
"WHAT THE F*CK!! I'm a lawyer and I can't charge fees like that"
It's expensivce at present because people are willing to pay it.
I don't think it will be long before we end up with a model where enterprising pub and cafe owners figure that at about 25/month (dollars, pounds whatever) for an ADSL link they can give their customers semi-free wifi access and compete for the road warrior trade.
They won't be able to make it unmetered, but the likely scenario is where you buy a coffee and get given a voucher for 1MB/15 minutes access... my guess is that the hotspot market will migrate to that kind of thing with a few years and just about anywhwere public will have some kind of modest-cost wifi access.
And to round out this thought - I suspect safety features like airbags have the perverse effect of increasing the accident rate, since drivers believe they will be OK no matter how poorly they drive. (No facts to back this up...hey, it's/.! )
In the same spirit (not backup, can't be bothered to use Google) I'm sure there is an accident researcher somewhere who demonstrated that a great way to reduce accident rates is to put a sharpened steel spike in the middle of the steering wheel. You crash, you die. Guaranteed. Rapidly reduces the number of people a) who speed and crash, b) who might have been tempted to risk it.
Morse is an aural language? Tell that to all the people who learned it to signal from ship to ship on an Aldis lamp! Not that I could EVER read lights, I have to hear the sounds to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's not surprising if you use an ADMINISTRATOR to do the job a developer should be doing. I wonder what the Windows counterpart was? When did you last see a sysadmin implementing a 'new business requirement'? Should you?
In other news, fish were discovered to be poor bicyclists.
Pressure is a BIG issue. Chemistry changes at pressure, reactions go differently.
Divers going below about 90 feet (30 metres) breathing air suffer nitrogen narcosis as dissolved nitrogen in the nerves cause an effect akin to drunkenness or partial anaesthesia.
Because the human breathing response is driven by the absolute partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, not its ratio to oxygen, deep diving means breathing much more air than is needed simply to flush out the apparent elevated level of co2 in the blood - the physiology is tricked by the pressure. Anyone practising emergency surfacing from a deep dive is astonished that they don't need to breath as they rise - you continuously exhale as the gas in the lungs expands (I was taught to sing on the way up) and the breathing response isn't triggered because the detected co2 level keeps falling.
Now this may not affect squid much, it's hard to believe that there are no pressure effects on the chemistry underpinning their biology.
It's not just about web-based delivery, though Google's eye may be on that ball. A server farm delivering Open Office through a compressive technology like NX would be within Google's capability and, if it caught on, would make them Masters of the Universe (TM).
That would be VERY scary to Microsoft, not to mention a whole bunch of other players in the market. NX delivers a pretty good desktop experience (if you aren't a game player) in around 5KB/s of bandwidth. If that were guaranteed virus-free, with backed-up storage for a modest monthly subscription - like a Hotmail or Yahoo but doing your computing not just your email - I know a lot of people who would sigh with relief, happily accept a lightweight thin client and throw out that hideous, malware-ridden fat-client piece of junk in the corner that they never understood and rarely worked properly.
Sometimes I despair of Slashdot, and then to restore my faith a thoughtful and clearly written reply like this turns up. Well done.
Note that the post doesn't say that there is no problem but (IMHO) cuts to the quick of what was the wrong approach to dealing with it.
I happen from time to time to mix with young Muslims in the UK. The level of their anger with Bush and Blair makes the prevalent hatred of Microsoft seem bland by comparison. Note that it doesn't matter whether these guys are right or wrong, it gives the tiny crazy minority the motivation to act.
The crash is in the Windows version. 'You have the source' is not helpful to the customer who wants to know how long it will take to fix. As a long-time C/C++ programmer I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and tell my customer that I can give an estimate of time-to-fix - the 'use the source' argument is fine only if you have unbounded time.
Interestingly - and something of a parable for those contemplating Open Source development - for for good or ill, your choice, I'm involved with a project that chose to use wxwidgets.
... serious problems for the customer.
Most of it mostly worked. Dire development environment when contrasted with, say, Visual Basic or Delphi, but maybe that can be traded-off against the zero licensing cost. However, having found a show-stopping bug that nobody will respond to when posted to the relevant mailing lists and the potential of unbounded time whilst trying to debug it for ourselves
The dialogue goes like this "Why didn't you use Delphi - we know that works?"
"Well this costs less"
"But it doesn't work. How much will it cost to fix it?"
"Er, we don't know. We can charge you $XXX per day to investigate but we have no idea how long it will take us to stop it crashing if you type ALT into a select box and nobody on the alleged support mailing lists replies to us"
"*#!@?"
If you look at http://cutterproject.co.uk/Casestudies/orwell_cost _benefit.php
it shows exactly how a single high school saves 40,000 pounds a year (approximately), or $70,000. It's not rocket science; the biggest saving is in staff costs by not needing more technician support.
Interestingly, licence fees are only a moderate part of it.
I wrote a reply to this in Morse.
And the lameness filter threw it out.
Rats.
Some of the biggest savings (I've seen the unpublished report) are in maintenance and support. ICT technicians in schools are one of the most significant parts of the cost. Hardware and software costs spread over a number of years, but a salary is a recurring item. You REALLY get the attention of the head teacher if you are able to replace an 'unproductive' technician with a real live teacher instead.
If a school goes thin-client and recycles its existing PCs using Linux Terminal Server code, the case study I know of has dropped its technician hours from twelve hours a day to almost zero. That is very big money over a year, although not great news for the technician.
For a case study with costings (in fact it was used to illustrate the lead story in the Times Educational Supplement print edition), Orwell High School in Felixstowe is hard to beat. Then again I would say that, wouldn't I, since I was involved in implementing it. Their savings amount to very much more than the modest 20% to 40% mentioned in the TES article. The case study is att _benefit.php.
http://cutterproject.co.uk/Casestudies/orwell_cos
The school has costed its savings at 40,000 pounds (UK) per year - or in the region of US$70,000 I guess.
There is something really pleasing in seeing five classroms of 30 or so kids each sit down and use a Linux desktop as the most natural thing in the world.
BAD LUCK! Where I worked, they used to send in eye-candy with chests way bigger than their butts, though I guess a lot goes down to personal taste. Sad to say, it works in most cases though.
Now this sounds cool - I wonder how long it would take to patent the encryption used in a particular stealth virus and then be able to sue the AV companies for using it in their tools, as well as threaten them with the DMCA act into the bargain?
Sigh - if only there were all the hours in the day to do this kind of thing.
Minor correction. I am 99% certain that the concept of a radio licence was abolished some years ago. The domestic BBC is funded from the TV licence.
The BBC World Service is, I believe, funded by the UK Foreign Office via a grant and is somewhat different.
You are wasting your time because you are deploying rational argument in a management environment. These are incompatible concepts.
Managers do not reach decision-making levels in large organisations by listening to rational arguments. They get there through a host of means including but not limited to back-covering, buck-passing, palm-greasing and politics-playing.
Whenever presented with an argument their first reaction will be to do the updside/downside caculation, which goes roughly "If my name is on this and it goes right, how much kudos do I get vs if it goes wrong, do I get the blame"? Nobody to whom the blame sticks progresses up the pole.
If they choose GNU/Linux and it goes right, there will be some bottom-line benefit. A million people will claim that the small bottom-line effect was not due to the choice of GNU/Linux but better outsourcing, maintenance contracts, management or whatever it was that THEY are responsible for.
If there is a single significant failure, EVERYONE will point to the hapless decision-maker and say "See, told you so, this free software is crap and there is the idiot who selected it, no wonder we fsked-up / lost money / had downtime.
Now, put yourself in the position of the person you are arguing with. You are pressing the wrong buttons.
IF however you can pass the blame AND save money, there is a slim chance of getting the argument through, but trust me, the argument will revolve 80% around blame and 20% around cheaper/better/whatever.
Who is your principal software maintenance company (can't see the parent post whilst replying). Was it IBM? IF you can get them to guarantee to support the software and carry the blame, you have solved one of the blockers. Problem is, they only support RedHat and SuSE/Novell.
Unsupported Debian? Forget it, it is a waste of time. Appeals to rationality, quality, goodness of fit are not the issue. Should some remarkable turnaround occur and (say) EDS suddenly announce support for Debian you have the slimmest of chances, but if EDS or whomever aren't already involved in big contracts in your outfit, the supply-chain people will find reasons not to start negotiations with them (risk again) instead of sticking with the existing known supplier (much less 'risk').
Your only hope is to find a friend in the maintainer/supplier and convince those people first. Then they take your manager person out to dinner/golf and start telling him/her why Linux is so good for your business and that might stand a chance of winning.
You don't like what I have said above? Your choice, but I do this stuff for a living. I know the reality.
Should that be 'file your nails and nail your files'?
Years ago I was getting interested in ham radio and had to go take my morse code test. It was all rather disorganised and informal - I sat in the radio communications room of a large British coastal radio installation while someone went and dug out the test books.
There was a telegrapher in there with headphones on transcribing Morse Code at about 100 wpm onto a mechanical typewriter. She looked at me and pushed one of the earpieces to one side and introduced herself. We had a conversation about why I was there, the weather, radio and and other stuff. All the time she was - and I couldn't believe it - simultaneously transcribing 100 wpm 5-letter groups onto the typewriter. I asked if it was unusual - she said no, all the operators did it. They would type and talk at the same time, never looking at the keyboard.
A few years later I learned to touch-type. I found that I could program AND talk to management people at the same time. The stuff I was doing and the stuff they were talking about live in different bits of your head and don't overlap.
It was the BEST ten hour course I EVER took. I still do it now, I can write stuff and talk on the phone simultaneously as long as one of them is a brainless activity.
Probably the biggest single payback of anything I did.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
It was widely rumoured that in the mid-to-late seventies some of the geostationary TV satellites got hijacked for various purposes. By 'widely rumoured' I mean that my ham radio boozing buddies talked about it quite a lot and several of them were broadcast technicians who used satellite up and downlinks at work. I have no first hand proof but they alleged that early geostationary satellites were simple transponders - if you pushed stuff up on the uplink frequency with the right amount of power and in the right direction it came back on the downlink. A popular trick was to slip a signal just to the side of the audio subcarrier at a modest level and then use it to send data or chat to friends. That is not easy to spot unless you look hard at the downlink spectrum.
This might all be speculation or not - I'd love to know. Maybe it's an urban legend.
Who's on GMT at the moment? It's BST in the UK right now ... equatorial Africa perhaps ... ?
Ah but for how much longer? How long till Spanish becomes the majority langugage in some of the States?
$1.87 per gallon? You poor things. Why over here, it's as little as, er about $6.
I seem to remember that the Motorola 6800 had an opcode that was named 'HCF' (Halt and Catch Fire). It would lock up the processor and make the I/O pins cycle hi/lo as fast as possible. The only way out was to power-cycle it. Or is that just a bad dream I had way back in '77?
Become a plumber. At least over here, with the government now aiming to get 50% of all school leavers earning a 'University' degree, there's a near-catastrophic lack of manually skilled people. Here's a paraphrased quote from a 'Daily Telegraph' letter of some six months back:
Man rings plumber and asks when he can attend for urgent repairs.
"Well, I could be there in around four or five days depending"
"How much do you charge?"
"80 pounds an hour"
"WHAT THE F*CK!! I'm a lawyer and I can't charge fees like that"
"Neither could I when I was one".
It's expensivce at present because people are willing to pay it.
... my guess is that the hotspot market will migrate to that kind of thing with a few years and just about anywhwere public will have some kind of modest-cost wifi access.
I don't think it will be long before we end up with a model where enterprising pub and cafe owners figure that at about 25/month (dollars, pounds whatever) for an ADSL link they can give their customers semi-free wifi access and compete for the road warrior trade.
They won't be able to make it unmetered, but the likely scenario is where you buy a coffee and get given a voucher for 1MB/15 minutes access
In the same spirit (not backup, can't be bothered to use Google) I'm sure there is an accident researcher somewhere who demonstrated that a great way to reduce accident rates is to put a sharpened steel spike in the middle of the steering wheel. You crash, you die. Guaranteed. Rapidly reduces the number of people a) who speed and crash, b) who might have been tempted to risk it.
Morse is an aural language? Tell that to all the people who learned it to signal from ship to ship on an Aldis lamp! Not that I could EVER read lights, I have to hear the sounds to get it.