There are thousands of companies using Samba in place of Winxxx servers - the Samba website is a good place to start looking for links. It would be very surprising to find that your users saw any difference other than increased performance and reliability if you replaced the server with Samba on a suitable OS.
".... Could this extend to other things, like, for example, running a web page that a EU citizen can view? Could I be pulled into German court because I have a page which glorifies Hitler, even though this is permissable in the US?...."
There's something akin to that already going on on this side of the pond with the Data Protection legislation in the UK and Europe. My company has to file a return for all personal data we store which allows an 'individual' to be indentified. It's believed that a single email address is enough to do that. This is a damn nuisance, but livable with UNTIL it gets exported - say by an email or web page. If that page is viewable outside the area which is considered to protect individual data in line with European legislation I commit a CRIMINAL offence by permitting it to happen. FYI the USA is explicitly named as having insufficient data protection legislation. So, if one way or another I accidentally make that mistake, the goons are ready for me. Sigh, what a wonderful world.....
No they don't! A badly written example of the Vector class might require 15 different versions of the class, but numerous texts on C++ (including Stroustrup) show how to implement those as wrapper classes which optimise away to zero code size at compile time, simply putting type-changing interfaces on Vector of pointer-to-void.
Right - the UK government wants to switch off all the analogue broadcasting by 2010 and yet terrestrial digital broadcasting has less than 2 million subscribers? Don't make me laugh. They only want to do this to be able to auction the spectrum for more billions from greedy speculators. But look what happened to the last lot to bid megabucks for spectrum - Vodafone has its stock price lose more in one day than any company in history last week, BT nearly goes bust - and NOBODY is using GPRS a year after the auction. The phone companies will remember this experience with gritted teeth.
The politicians will switch off the analogue in 2010 just after the Palace of Westminster has been buzzed by flying pigs, navigating by the light of a blue moon!
Viable on the desktop for whom? It's getting there for some classes of users, but only some can/will use it because the applications or services they need still aren't available. As just one class of user - a small business that evicted Windows 4 years ago now - I still can't do my company's accounts on Linux. The other infuriating lack is the inability of Linux to integrate faxing with printing. Don't tell me how to do it, I KNOW how to bodge it. The problem is that Linux doesn't. A proper fax API so that everything automatically becomes fax aware when it enumerates printers remains important. The hard bit in printing to fax, especially fax/merge for sending out price lists to customers is the API for injecting the recipient number. Solve those two problems and one more class of user can pick up Linux and run with it.
Has anyone managed to get a port of LTSP running on this thing? At the prices it would make an expensive but amusing X terminal and I'm sure the port of Linux won't be far behind... and when they *really* have to slash the price it would save me having to cobble X terms together by dismantling old PCs, take out the hard drive, cut the fan lead in the PSU and so on.
I'm sure that many of the posters here suggesting teach-this or teach-that mean well, but most seem to me to be missing the point. You don't start teaching a class or course without an objective, unless you are naive or dumb. The first two things you have to know with any class are a) what do they know when they come in and b) what should they know when they leave. Ok, for this group we have a fair idea of what they know coming in (but all the same, it helps to know if they are CS grads, MIT professors or high school dropouts:) ).
So the next thing is the outcome you want. Why are they being taught? Whose idea was it? Is it just for information, or are they supposed to be able to DO something with this new knowledge they are supposed to be acquiring? Is it just a general awareness class or what? If you don't know that, you haven't a chance in hell of getting it right.
Once that's known you can figure out what you want to introduce them to. There are some materials you might care to use free for download from http://www.linuxtraining.co.uk if that helps you with some training notes.
As someone who makes part of his living from Unix and Linux training (the former for 25 years, the latter for 5 years) I'll happily share my experiences of introducing Microsofties to things like the command line and the intricacies of Linux.
They will be impressed by networked X - I save that for the last couple of hours, since people typically remember most about the last thing they saw and you want to leave a good impression.
The filesystem won't be hard for them, neither will NFS. They will keep asking about domain authentication, but I'd steer clear of NIS:)
The most important thing I can say is that they will HATE HATE HATE anything command-line oriented. The fastest way to lose them is to start harping on about it. The really bright ones will pick that up for themselves later, but for the introduction, use something like SWAT for Samba admin - webmin will do that and most other things too. I can't emphasise that enough, it's based on real-life experience.
The rest of the class plan you will have to pick when you know what you are trying to get them to do when they leave.
Finally, don't try to teach too much. Two days is VERY limited, the best you are likely to do is get them interested and reduce the fear level. To get people through even basic stuff like LPI 101 and 102 is around ten days of classroom and exercise sessions. In two days they can only get a taster. If you haven't taught in this kind of situation before, you will be astonished how little can be covered in two days from a standing start:(
They may have broken the law? In what jurisdiction?
Much as wannabe-president Tony Blair might like it, it's still my belief that US federal law carries little weight in the islands that go to make up the United Kingdom. And given that the strongest opponent of an international criminal court is the US (for fear of ex-presidents being accused of war crimes in countries like Cambodia), I think the guys from Matta can probably rest easy in their beds.
We laugh at the CIA in a country that has real things to fear - I speak of the loathing and dread inspired by the arch-demons that infest subversive anarchist organisations such as the League of Morris Dancers and the Women's Institute.
Spot on! Some of the posts here say stuff like "I am not a radio engineer" - well I am (or was) before picking up software as a better paid and more interesting job. UWB is, as many have said, just a variant on spread-spectrum transmission. It isn't spectacularly new and - I'll bet real money - will eventually disappoint. There is no free lunch. Claude Shannon at Bell Labs did the basic theoretical work: you either either burn spectrum or use power to get the data through. Each has its up and down side. If everyone pumps the bandwidth side, you are forced into a power race, so UWB works until somebody else starts the same game. It has been used for years, especially in clandestine communications. The theory is well understood and this stuff REALLY isn't new at all.
We love old 486/Pentium boxes here! Our firewall runs on freesco
and thanks to the LTSP project, we have equipped everyone's desktop with a low-cost X terminal. There is a write-up of what we have done for anyone who cares. The beauty is that we have incredibly low cost-of-ownership, don't care if anyone breaks in and steals the stuff and it is totally silent in operation. The biggest complaint in the office now is the noise of the damn clock ticking. It has been a wonderful experience, they don't break down, you can boot one up from anybody's desk and get your own desktop... send me as many as you have got!!
I think the regulation in the US isn't that much different from in the UK (from where I speak). The limit here is based on ERP, effective radiated power.
The low-power cards pump out around a couple of hundred milliwatts. You can plug them into hi-gain antennae, in which case the ERP in the direction of the beam is increased. Increase that above a certain limit (depends on your Government's regulations) and you go outside the permitted level. Alternatively you can use an amplifier and a lower-gain antenna. Whether you get X decibels of gain from the antenna or the amplifier really doesn't matter, it's the peak energy density coming out that counts.
If you can't remember the math, it may help to know that decibels add: 10dB from the antenna plus 10dB from the amp = 20dB of gain. Decibels are based on logarithms base 10. 3dB = factor of 2 gain, 10dB = factor of 10, 20dB = factor of 100, 30dB = factor of 1000. 200mW into a 20dB antenna is theoretically equivalent to 20W into an omnidirectional atenna (but we call 'em aerials over here, at least if you are as old as I am).
In reality, you would never get the theoretical power, because feeder and mismatch losses in the connectors can easily lose you several dB, much more if you are careless. 10dB loss in connector and feeder would be no surprise. 2.4GHz is where you start to need plumbing and wires get more and more tricky to work with.
I read most of the mixed comments on this page and then thought once, twice before replying. But I'lll still say this. For those who think that Unix is nowadays just part of the woodwork, something so obvious that anyone could have dreamed it up - and that the idea that somehow being 'a personality' is a bad thing - wow, how much you have missed. I was around in the days when Unix was a revelation of clear thinking, when it stood out amongst the products of lesser minds and buck-chasers. The work that was done by Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Plauger and many others who they worked beside has fundamentally changed the way that we view things. We owe those far-sighted thinkers a huge vote of thanks, even if their names won't be at the forefront of everyone's mind. To everyone who thinks 'I could have done that if only if...' I laugh in their faces. Bell Labs' research group (CSRG) pulled together some of the best thinkers of this century. I was one or two times lucky enough to meet most of them. You are dealing there with intellects that stand out the same way that an Olympic athlete does. We are lucky to be able to build on their thinking and exploit their ideas.
In a world where mediocrity rules it's more important than ever to recognise and acclaim brilliance. Whether they might or might not be flawed human beings, who cares? The legacy lives on and we are the richer for it. We are lucky that there were people with the vision and the determination to make it real.
SuSe *is* hugely popular in Germany. Though many Americans will find it hard to believe, SuSE is approximately as big as Red Hat, and if I remember the figures correctly, substantially more solvent on a month-on-month basis. Linux overall is a significant force in the German market and it would not suprise me at all to find that this is the first bit of Microsoft to start to panic. Most German IS managers are technologists and are consequently still capable of deciding what to buy on rational grounds rather than just following `the market'. Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telekom are huge users of Linux. Market penetration in the rest of Europe is patchy - strong in Scandinavia, lamentable in the UK - but we know that IBM see Germany as the first likely market to reject Microsoft at the server end, and in part that is why their recent Linux-focused ads have come out.
That said, I am still surprised to see this weak and tacky ad - I bet someone will get a very nasty phone call from Redmond soon - but it doesn't surprise me to see the jitters set in at Microsoft Germany first of all, that would be the natural place.
Stereotypes apart, my experience of Germany is that engineering excellence gets a much higher priority that in most of the rest of the world. Unix and Linux are the natural choice when your workforce is intelligent and educated.
I just wish I could get more of their beer in the UK. Anyone reading this able to export Weissbier and Weisswurst please? Forget the pretzels, I can get them here.
Mike
I found myself having to switch from development into management about 15 years ago. It is without doubt the most unpleasant experience I recollect in my professional life - you go from being a good technician to lousy manager with the click of fingers. The mind sets needed to manage well are completely different - development calls for intense concentration over long periods, whilst management is all about dealing with hundreds of small issues, each with no clear priority. And don't forget your team: one of the principal jobs of a manager is to listen to unfocused staff whining - if they are having problems in their personal life, this will often come out as half-thought through complaints about the project, the environment or their responsibilities. You will have to watch for the emergence of petty politics and try to stamp on it, try to motivate the team.... the list is endless. Just because Dilbert pokes fun at bad management, doesn't meant that good management is impossible, but it doesn't come about by accident. Becoming a good technician takes aptitude and years of learning and practise. Ditto becoming a good manager.
A good technician reads widely and tries to learn from his or her peers. Ditto a good manager.
If it takes 5 years to make the grade as a competent technician, how long will it take to become a good manager? These are VERY difficult organisational issues to grapple with, because whilst you can usually find a good technician if you look hard enough, good managers are much rarer creatures.
And if you think it will take 20% of your time to manage four other staff, you fall at the first hurdle. General management textbooks will tell you that the limit for even the best managers is to handle about 6 or 7 direct reports (i.e. staff you are directly responsible for). Given that that occupies 100% of a good manager, how much time will four direct reports absorb from a beginner?
Still, if I knew all the answers, I wouldn't be sat here reading Slashdot on a Sunday, I'd be in the Caribbean by now, retired, drinking rum punches instead!
I have to disagree with some of this... absolutely true that BCPL was a pretty nasty language, and it was without doubt the ancestor of C, which cleaned it up nicely. I rember picking up a copy of it from Colin Whitby-Strevens at Warwick University in 1977. Anyone remember the DEC RK05 disk? BCPL was not much fun, though its expression orientedness was intriguing.
During the 70s Pascal became a popular programming language in *some* academic circles, but the systems-oriented people latched onto Unix and C pretty quickly. Wirth himself admitted that he disigned Pascal as a teaching language rather than a programming language and it really showed. C on the other hand, was written by people who knew operating systems - although it was Ritchie's work, it was written so that the early Unix kernel, previously written in assembler mostly by Thompson, could be written in a high level language instead. Having a real task to do, not just demonstrate language features, it *had* to be useful and effective from a systems programmer's point of view. I agree with Kernighan - it's still a very good small language.
It is VERY worth while to dig up a copy of Kernighan's critique of Pascal "Why Pascal is not my favourite programming language", written circa 1982 if memory serves me well.
It's long been my belief that the real reason for the success of C was the emergence of the IBM PC in the early 80s. It was essential on those things at the time to talk directly to the video card, hook interrupts and so on - just the sort of stuff that was near-impossible in Pascal and almost trivial in C. Good quality C compilers rapidly became available and since C code could be made largely portable between Unix and the IBM PC, thanks to the stdio library, C became the 'language of choice' for serious systems developers. What strangled Pascal was the lack of separate compilation and poor support in terms of libraries, whilst C's libraries grew and grew.
At the end of the day, C was fit for purpose (as was Pascal, but its purpose was very limited) - and since what most people wanted to do was what C let them do, it won hands-down. Pascal could only be used on single-person projects. C allowed a team to work. No contest.
From a personal perspective, Pascal was also unpleasant to use. Its bondage-and-domination type system was fine for undergraduates who needed a safety-rope, but if you needed to close to the metal it just got in your way at every step. No initialised data - everything done in assignments... aaagh. Kernighan's paper says it all!
We are one of a few who are probably managing to make money from websites on a shoestring budget, but even so it takes real investment.
About three years ago I decided that I wanted to build a directory of training services in the UK. There were several reasons for this: I wanted to sell my own training and was finding it hard to break into the market, I wanted a demonstrator project of (at the time) leading edge technology and also, hell, I just wanted to to do it. So I and my colleagues built TrainingPages. Unlike other content-oriented sites we don't maintain the content - the training companies do, by signing-up and editing their own stuff. The idea for that was honed by looking at few of the lonely-hearts sites. That makes maintenance a half-an-hour-a-month job for us.
To win in the market we had to be comprehensive and we didn't dare charge - so the site has always been free to sign up. As a result it has consistently accumulated content and is now probably the UK's leading directory of its kind. By being free it has frozen out some high-funded competition, including a vast attempt by British Telecom (the equivalent of AT&T) to come into the market and eat us alive. However, they just couldn't compete with free so they gave up after six months. For us, since the training companies do the maintenance, the only cost is our bandwidth and we can justify that on the spinoff we get on our consulting - when we go to see a customer on a sales pitch and they say "what have you done" we just have to point to TrainingPages and they go "oh, yeah, right, OK".
We introduced the idea of a service fee, paying for sort-to-the-top of searches, the ability to add your company's logo to the listings and a couple of other things. For a year, nobody wanted to know. Now we get almost daily calls from people wanting to sign up for that service - we NEVER call or try to sell it. The site has moved into month-on-month profit and in about another year will have recouped its development cost and really be in profit. My guess is that fully costed, we were initially out of pocket by about USD $150K, but of course since it was done on the cheap and when we didn't have fee-paying work, the real opportunity cost was probably nearer USD $30K.
We are now doing pretty much the same model with the Geographic Search Engine Somewherenear. Again, it's worth the effort just for the publicity and consultancy that it brings in, but this time around we got lucky and hit the WAP wave - it took a day to WAP it up (see the writeup at our website). By being one of the first on the block with WAP content that is actually useful, we have got loads of press and followup that we would never have got any other way. The pinnacle was getting an interview on BBC Breakfast TV (it's still running on the World Service) and consequently lots of interest in our development services and also serious enquiries about licensing the search engine and mapping code.
Overall, I'd say that there some important lessons. Figure out how the site can be a benefit even if it never makes money. Then do it right anyhow. Pick the meanest, cut-to-the-bone cost profile that you possibly can. Starve the other bastards out by doing everything that they think they can get a penny for by doing your bit for nothing. Exploit the fact that you are free and starving to get as much publicity as possible; journalists are more sympathetic if you don't have megabuck dotcom backing but sound as if you have thought it through instead, they like quirky. Sit back, wait, and if the public DO decide your site is worthwhile, layer in a few value-adds that your serious users will pay for - if your cost model really is cut-to-the-bone then you will start to turn a profit anyhow. Eventually if you are smart you will figure a way to make proper money from it, but don't get greedy and those billion dollar valuations were always way off. On the web, there are few barriers to entry. It's always easy to undercut someone with high costs, so start there don't get forced there. Do good stuff and the world WILL follow. Aim to get rich slow, if at all, and don't be disappointed if retirement in luxury doesn't follow within months. The respect of your peers is worth a ton of money in the bank unless you are deranged. Hell, how much beer CAN a man drink?
Wow, I never thought we were cool - but thanks to Jacco for saying so. If anyone wants to pick up the php3 templates we use on the site, I've packed them into a gzipped tar archive and put them on the site at this location - they will extract into the current directory, so be careful where you unpack them. They aren't a lot of use by themselves except as a source of ideas, but please feel free to explore them - and let me know if you spot any errors! The server will lie and tell you the archive is in text/plain format; just click on `save as' and then unzip it in the normal way. It's only about 9K.
Mike
Drinkable American Beer (veering off topic)
on
Linux Beer Hike 2000
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· Score: 1
I was in Minneapolis and then Philadelphia in January and discovered to my delight that Sam Adams seems to be available on tap in lots of bars in the States these days. Speaking as someone who takes his beer seriously, I would say that's a good start. I really can't manage to get the Bud/Coors/Schlitz (sp?) stuff down my throat, it's not what I would call a real beer. Can't say I'm a big fan of Corona either, but on a very hot day at a ball game it would be acceptable. Of course over here, we drink the stuff at cellar temperature and I find that beer chilled to US temperatures is already off on a losing streak....
I hate, loathe and despise the scumbags at NSI and would bore you with my own horror story if it was anything new.
However - a breath of fresh air for once. The.uk domain is run by Nominet (www.nic.uk) and their processes have so far been excellent. You pay an up-front fee to become a member - I don't remember the amount, it's a few hundred USD, then you can do everything with PGP-signed emails and registration of a new domain currently runs at UK pounds 5 or about USD $8. They are a not-for-profit organisation and even by telephone are very helpful. Domain registration turns around in about 15 seconds in my experience.
I suggest that the US people lobby to have NSI thrown out and control passed to Nominet. They have done an excellent job.
I have no association with them other than using them for domain registration myself.
Timothy Taylor's Landlord is undoubtedly the best beer in Britain (it just won CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) first prize again, so that's not only my bigoted opinion.
I used to say it was the best in the world - but then I spent a year living in Munich and got to know the head brewer for Paulaner who educated me. Now I reckon it's probably the second-best beer in the world... there's not an eclipse promised next year, but instead I could offer to arrange a trip around the brewery and I doubt if after a couple of hours in there anyone would know whether it was day, night, eclipse or hatstand. Keighley, where they brew the stuff, is only about 10 miles from the best curry in Europe - Bradford.
So, how about a beer-and-curry-hike next summer?
Any takers?
In fact, I think I'll give it a trial run this afternoon...........
Slashdot Mirror
There are thousands of companies using Samba in place of Winxxx servers - the Samba website is a good place to start looking for links. It would be very surprising to find that your users saw any difference other than increased performance and reliability if you replaced the server with Samba on a suitable OS.
".... Could this extend to other things, like, for example, running a web page that a EU citizen can view? Could I be pulled into German court because I have a page which glorifies Hitler, even though this is permissable in the US? ...."
.....
There's something akin to that already going on on this side of the pond with the Data Protection legislation in the UK and Europe. My company has to file a return for all personal data we store which allows an 'individual' to be indentified. It's believed that a single email address is enough to do that. This is a damn nuisance, but livable with UNTIL it gets exported - say by an email or web page. If that page is viewable outside the area which is considered to protect individual data in line with European legislation I commit a CRIMINAL offence by permitting it to happen. FYI the USA is explicitly named as having insufficient data protection legislation. So, if one way or another I accidentally make that mistake, the goons are ready for me. Sigh, what a wonderful world
No they don't! A badly written example of the Vector class might require 15 different versions of the class, but numerous texts on C++ (including Stroustrup) show how to implement those as wrapper classes which optimise away to zero code size at compile time, simply putting type-changing interfaces on Vector of pointer-to-void.
Right - the UK government wants to switch off all the analogue broadcasting by 2010 and yet terrestrial digital broadcasting has less than 2 million subscribers? Don't make me laugh. They only want to do this to be able to auction the spectrum for more billions from greedy speculators. But look what happened to the last lot to bid megabucks for spectrum - Vodafone has its stock price lose more in one day than any company in history last week, BT nearly goes bust - and NOBODY is using GPRS a year after the auction. The phone companies will remember this experience with gritted teeth.
The politicians will switch off the analogue in 2010 just after the Palace of Westminster has been buzzed by flying pigs, navigating by the light of a blue moon!
Viable on the desktop for whom? It's getting there for some classes of users, but only some can/will use it because the applications or services they need still aren't available. As just one class of user - a small business that evicted Windows 4 years ago now - I still can't do my company's accounts on Linux. The other infuriating lack is the inability of Linux to integrate faxing with printing. Don't tell me how to do it, I KNOW how to bodge it. The problem is that Linux doesn't. A proper fax API so that everything automatically becomes fax aware when it enumerates printers remains important. The hard bit in printing to fax, especially fax/merge for sending out price lists to customers is the API for injecting the recipient number. Solve those two problems and one more class of user can pick up Linux and run with it.
Has anyone managed to get a port of LTSP running on this thing? At the prices it would make an expensive but amusing X terminal and I'm sure the port of Linux won't be far behind ... and when they *really* have to slash the price it would save me having to cobble X terms together by dismantling old PCs, take out the hard drive, cut the fan lead in the PSU and so on.
:)
Just a thought
I'm sure that many of the posters here suggesting teach-this or teach-that mean well, but most seem to me to be missing the point. You don't start teaching a class or course without an objective, unless you are naive or dumb. The first two things you have to know with any class are a) what do they know when they come in and b) what should they know when they leave. Ok, for this group we have a fair idea of what they know coming in (but all the same, it helps to know if they are CS grads, MIT professors or high school dropouts :) ).
:)
:(
So the next thing is the outcome you want. Why are they being taught? Whose idea was it? Is it just for information, or are they supposed to be able to DO something with this new knowledge they are supposed to be acquiring? Is it just a general awareness class or what? If you don't know that, you haven't a chance in hell of getting it right.
Once that's known you can figure out what you want to introduce them to. There are some materials you might care to use free for download from http://www.linuxtraining.co.uk if that helps you with some training notes.
As someone who makes part of his living from Unix and Linux training (the former for 25 years, the latter for 5 years) I'll happily share my experiences of introducing Microsofties to things like the command line and the intricacies of Linux.
They will be impressed by networked X - I save that for the last couple of hours, since people typically remember most about the last thing they saw and you want to leave a good impression.
The filesystem won't be hard for them, neither will NFS. They will keep asking about domain authentication, but I'd steer clear of NIS
The most important thing I can say is that they will HATE HATE HATE anything command-line oriented. The fastest way to lose them is to start harping on about it. The really bright ones will pick that up for themselves later, but for the introduction, use something like SWAT for Samba admin - webmin will do that and most other things too. I can't emphasise that enough, it's based on real-life experience.
The rest of the class plan you will have to pick when you know what you are trying to get them to do when they leave.
Finally, don't try to teach too much. Two days is VERY limited, the best you are likely to do is get them interested and reduce the fear level. To get people through even basic stuff like LPI 101 and 102 is around ten days of classroom and exercise sessions. In two days they can only get a taster. If you haven't taught in this kind of situation before, you will be astonished how little can be covered in two days from a standing start
Best of luck!
Mike
Much as wannabe-president Tony Blair might like it, it's still my belief that US federal law carries little weight in the islands that go to make up the United Kingdom. And given that the strongest opponent of an international criminal court is the US (for fear of ex-presidents being accused of war crimes in countries like Cambodia), I think the guys from Matta can probably rest easy in their beds.
We laugh at the CIA in a country that has real things to fear - I speak of the loathing and dread inspired by the arch-demons that infest subversive anarchist organisations such as the League of Morris Dancers and the Women's Institute.
Spot on! Some of the posts here say stuff like "I am not a radio engineer" - well I am (or was) before picking up software as a better paid and more interesting job. UWB is, as many have said, just a variant on spread-spectrum transmission. It isn't spectacularly new and - I'll bet real money - will eventually disappoint. There is no free lunch. Claude Shannon at Bell Labs did the basic theoretical work: you either either burn spectrum or use power to get the data through. Each has its up and down side. If everyone pumps the bandwidth side, you are forced into a power race, so UWB works until somebody else starts the same game. It has been used for years, especially in clandestine communications. The theory is well understood and this stuff REALLY isn't new at all.
We love old 486/Pentium boxes here! Our firewall runs on freesco and thanks to the LTSP project, we have equipped everyone's desktop with a low-cost X terminal. There is a write-up of what we have done for anyone who cares. The beauty is that we have incredibly low cost-of-ownership, don't care if anyone breaks in and steals the stuff and it is totally silent in operation. The biggest complaint in the office now is the noise of the damn clock ticking. It has been a wonderful experience, they don't break down, you can boot one up from anybody's desk and get your own desktop ... send me as many as you have got!!
The low-power cards pump out around a couple of hundred milliwatts. You can plug them into hi-gain antennae, in which case the ERP in the direction of the beam is increased. Increase that above a certain limit (depends on your Government's regulations) and you go outside the permitted level. Alternatively you can use an amplifier and a lower-gain antenna. Whether you get X decibels of gain from the antenna or the amplifier really doesn't matter, it's the peak energy density coming out that counts.
If you can't remember the math, it may help to know that decibels add: 10dB from the antenna plus 10dB from the amp = 20dB of gain. Decibels are based on logarithms base 10. 3dB = factor of 2 gain, 10dB = factor of 10, 20dB = factor of 100, 30dB = factor of 1000. 200mW into a 20dB antenna is theoretically equivalent to 20W into an omnidirectional atenna (but we call 'em aerials over here, at least if you are as old as I am).
In reality, you would never get the theoretical power, because feeder and mismatch losses in the connectors can easily lose you several dB, much more if you are careless. 10dB loss in connector and feeder would be no surprise. 2.4GHz is where you start to need plumbing and wires get more and more tricky to work with.
I read most of the mixed comments on this page and then thought once, twice before replying. But I'lll still say this. For those who think that Unix is nowadays just part of the woodwork, something so obvious that anyone could have dreamed it up - and that the idea that somehow being 'a personality' is a bad thing - wow, how much you have missed. I was around in the days when Unix was a revelation of clear thinking, when it stood out amongst the products of lesser minds and buck-chasers. The work that was done by Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Plauger and many others who they worked beside has fundamentally changed the way that we view things. We owe those far-sighted thinkers a huge vote of thanks, even if their names won't be at the forefront of everyone's mind. To everyone who thinks 'I could have done that if only if ...' I laugh in their faces. Bell Labs' research group (CSRG) pulled together some of the best thinkers of this century. I was one or two times lucky enough to meet most of them. You are dealing there with intellects that stand out the same way that an Olympic athlete does. We are lucky to be able to build on their thinking and exploit their ideas.
In a world where mediocrity rules it's more important than ever to recognise and acclaim brilliance. Whether they might or might not be flawed human beings, who cares? The legacy lives on and we are the richer for it. We are lucky that there were people with the vision and the determination to make it real.
SuSe *is* hugely popular in Germany. Though many Americans will find it hard to believe, SuSE is approximately as big as Red Hat, and if I remember the figures correctly, substantially more solvent on a month-on-month basis. Linux overall is a significant force in the German market and it would not suprise me at all to find that this is the first bit of Microsoft to start to panic. Most German IS managers are technologists and are consequently still capable of deciding what to buy on rational grounds rather than just following `the market'. Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telekom are huge users of Linux. Market penetration in the rest of Europe is patchy - strong in Scandinavia, lamentable in the UK - but we know that IBM see Germany as the first likely market to reject Microsoft at the server end, and in part that is why their recent Linux-focused ads have come out. That said, I am still surprised to see this weak and tacky ad - I bet someone will get a very nasty phone call from Redmond soon - but it doesn't surprise me to see the jitters set in at Microsoft Germany first of all, that would be the natural place. Stereotypes apart, my experience of Germany is that engineering excellence gets a much higher priority that in most of the rest of the world. Unix and Linux are the natural choice when your workforce is intelligent and educated. I just wish I could get more of their beer in the UK. Anyone reading this able to export Weissbier and Weisswurst please? Forget the pretzels, I can get them here. Mike
I found myself having to switch from development into management about 15 years ago. It is without doubt the most unpleasant experience I recollect in my professional life - you go from being a good technician to lousy manager with the click of fingers. The mind sets needed to manage well are completely different - development calls for intense concentration over long periods, whilst management is all about dealing with hundreds of small issues, each with no clear priority. And don't forget your team: one of the principal jobs of a manager is to listen to unfocused staff whining - if they are having problems in their personal life, this will often come out as half-thought through complaints about the project, the environment or their responsibilities. You will have to watch for the emergence of petty politics and try to stamp on it, try to motivate the team .... the list is endless. Just because Dilbert pokes fun at bad management, doesn't meant that good management is impossible, but it doesn't come about by accident. Becoming a good technician takes aptitude and years of learning and practise. Ditto becoming a good manager.
A good technician reads widely and tries to learn from his or her peers. Ditto a good manager.
If it takes 5 years to make the grade as a competent technician, how long will it take to become a good manager? These are VERY difficult organisational issues to grapple with, because whilst you can usually find a good technician if you look hard enough, good managers are much rarer creatures.
And if you think it will take 20% of your time to manage four other staff, you fall at the first hurdle. General management textbooks will tell you that the limit for even the best managers is to handle about 6 or 7 direct reports (i.e. staff you are directly responsible for). Given that that occupies 100% of a good manager, how much time will four direct reports absorb from a beginner?
Still, if I knew all the answers, I wouldn't be sat here reading Slashdot on a Sunday, I'd be in the Caribbean by now, retired, drinking rum punches instead!
I have to disagree with some of this ... absolutely true that BCPL was a pretty nasty language, and it was without doubt the ancestor of C, which cleaned it up nicely. I rember picking up a copy of it from Colin Whitby-Strevens at Warwick University in 1977. Anyone remember the DEC RK05 disk? BCPL was not much fun, though its expression orientedness was intriguing.
... aaagh. Kernighan's paper says it all!
During the 70s Pascal became a popular programming language in *some* academic circles, but the systems-oriented people latched onto Unix and C pretty quickly. Wirth himself admitted that he disigned Pascal as a teaching language rather than a programming language and it really showed. C on the other hand, was written by people who knew operating systems - although it was Ritchie's work, it was written so that the early Unix kernel, previously written in assembler mostly by Thompson, could be written in a high level language instead. Having a real task to do, not just demonstrate language features, it *had* to be useful and effective from a systems programmer's point of view. I agree with Kernighan - it's still a very good small language.
It is VERY worth while to dig up a copy of Kernighan's critique of Pascal "Why Pascal is not my favourite programming language", written circa 1982 if memory serves me well.
It's long been my belief that the real reason for the success of C was the emergence of the IBM PC in the early 80s. It was essential on those things at the time to talk directly to the video card, hook interrupts and so on - just the sort of stuff that was near-impossible in Pascal and almost trivial in C. Good quality C compilers rapidly became available and since C code could be made largely portable between Unix and the IBM PC, thanks to the stdio library, C became the 'language of choice' for serious systems developers. What strangled Pascal was the lack of separate compilation and poor support in terms of libraries, whilst C's libraries grew and grew.
At the end of the day, C was fit for purpose (as was Pascal, but its purpose was very limited) - and since what most people wanted to do was what C let them do, it won hands-down. Pascal could only be used on single-person projects. C allowed a team to work. No contest.
From a personal perspective, Pascal was also unpleasant to use. Its bondage-and-domination type system was fine for undergraduates who needed a safety-rope, but if you needed to close to the metal it just got in your way at every step. No initialised data - everything done in assignments
Mike
so it takes real investment.
About three years ago I decided that I wanted to build a directory of training services in the UK. There
were several reasons for this: I wanted to sell my own training and was finding it hard to break into the
market, I wanted a demonstrator project of (at the time) leading edge technology and also, hell, I just
wanted to to do it. So I and my colleagues built TrainingPages. Unlike other content-oriented sites we don't
maintain the content - the training companies do, by signing-up and editing their own stuff. The idea
for that was honed by looking at few of the lonely-hearts sites. That makes maintenance a
half-an-hour-a-month job for us.
To win in the market we had to be comprehensive and we didn't dare charge - so the site has always been
free to sign up. As a result it has consistently accumulated content and is now probably the UK's leading
directory of its kind.
By being free it has frozen out some high-funded competition, including a vast attempt by British Telecom
(the equivalent of AT&T) to come into the market and eat us alive. However, they just couldn't compete
with free so they gave up after six months. For us, since the training companies do the maintenance, the
only cost is our bandwidth and we can justify that on the spinoff we get on our consulting - when we go to
see a customer on a sales pitch and they say "what have you done" we just have to point to TrainingPages
and they go "oh, yeah, right, OK".
We introduced the idea of a service fee, paying for sort-to-the-top of searches, the ability to add your
company's logo to the listings and a couple of other things. For a year, nobody wanted to know. Now we get
almost daily calls from people wanting to sign up for that service - we NEVER call or try to sell it. The
site has moved into month-on-month profit and in about another year will have recouped its development
cost and really be in profit. My guess is that fully costed, we were initially out of pocket by about USD
$150K, but of course since it was done on the cheap and when we didn't have fee-paying work, the real
opportunity cost was probably nearer USD $30K.
We are now doing pretty much the same model with the Geographic Search Engine Somewherenear. Again, it's worth the effort just for the publicity and
consultancy that it brings in, but this time around we got lucky and hit the WAP wave - it took a day to
WAP it up (see the writeup at
our website). By being one of the first on
the block with WAP content that is actually useful, we have got loads of press and followup that we would
never have got any other way. The pinnacle was getting an interview on BBC Breakfast TV (it's still
running on the World Service) and consequently lots of interest in our development services and also
serious enquiries about licensing the search engine and mapping code.
Overall, I'd say that there some important lessons. Figure out how the site can be a benefit even if it
never makes money. Then do it right anyhow. Pick the meanest, cut-to-the-bone cost profile that you
possibly can. Starve the other bastards out by doing everything that they think they can get a penny for
by doing your bit for nothing. Exploit the fact that you are free and starving to get as much
publicity as possible; journalists are more sympathetic if you don't have megabuck dotcom backing but
sound as if you have thought it through instead, they like quirky. Sit back, wait, and if the public DO
decide your site is worthwhile, layer in a few value-adds that your serious users will pay for - if your
cost model really is cut-to-the-bone then you will start to turn a profit anyhow. Eventually if you are
smart you will figure a way to make proper money from it, but don't get greedy and those billion dollar
valuations were always way off. On the web, there are few barriers to entry. It's always easy to undercut
someone with high costs, so start there don't get forced there. Do good stuff and the world WILL follow.
Aim to get rich slow, if at all, and don't be disappointed if retirement in luxury doesn't follow within
months. The respect of your peers is worth a ton of money in the bank unless you are deranged. Hell, how
much beer CAN a man drink?
Wow, I never thought we were cool - but thanks to Jacco for saying so. If anyone wants to pick up the php3 templates we use on the site, I've packed them into a gzipped tar archive and put them on the site at this location - they will extract into the current directory, so be careful where you unpack them. They aren't a lot of use by themselves except as a source of ideas, but please feel free to explore them - and let me know if you spot any errors! The server will lie and tell you the archive is in text/plain format; just click on `save as' and then unzip it in the normal way. It's only about 9K.
Mike
I was in Minneapolis and then Philadelphia in ....
January and discovered to my delight that Sam Adams seems to be available on tap in lots of bars in the States these days. Speaking as someone who
takes his beer seriously, I would say that's a good start. I really can't manage to get the Bud/Coors/Schlitz (sp?) stuff down my throat, it's not what I would call a real beer. Can't say I'm a big fan of Corona either, but on a very hot day at a ball game it would be acceptable. Of course over here, we drink the stuff at cellar temperature and I find that beer chilled to US temperatures is already off on a losing streak
I hate, loathe and despise the scumbags at NSI and would bore you with my own horror story if it was anything new.
.uk domain is run by Nominet (www.nic.uk) and their processes have so far been excellent. You pay an up-front fee to become a member - I don't remember the amount, it's a few hundred USD, then you can do everything with PGP-signed emails and registration of a new domain currently runs at UK pounds 5 or about USD $8. They are a not-for-profit organisation and even by telephone are very helpful. Domain registration turns around in about 15 seconds in my experience.
However - a breath of fresh air for once. The
I suggest that the US people lobby to have NSI thrown out and control passed to Nominet. They have done an excellent job.
I have no association with them other than using them for domain registration myself.
Timothy Taylor's Landlord is undoubtedly the best beer in Britain (it just won CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) first prize again, so that's not only my bigoted opinion.
... there's not an eclipse promised next year, but instead I could offer to arrange a trip around the brewery and I doubt if after a couple of hours in there anyone would know whether it was day, night, eclipse or hatstand. Keighley, where they brew the stuff, is only about 10 miles from the best curry in Europe - Bradford.
...........
I used to say it was the best in the world - but then I spent a year living in Munich and got to know the head brewer for Paulaner who educated me. Now I reckon it's probably the second-best beer in the world
So, how about a beer-and-curry-hike next summer?
Any takers?
In fact, I think I'll give it a trial run this afternoon