The first time I thought it was a parody, but it's really an insightful look at Internationalization, cross-platform build environments, and other things important to free software. I didn't RTFB that was reviewed, but I hope it goes into these important topics as well. I think this emphasis on coding standards that value the less visible aspects of software such as build environments, internationalization, etc is one of the big advantages of open source.
... why don't you fork it and make your own successful distro. (serious advice - the knoppix guy did just this - and included components not found in standard Debian distros)
Personally, I very much approve of the stability of Debian Stable for environments where I get up-to-date security patches, but no frivolous cutsie upgrades that break stuff. I don't believe there's a more stable Linux distro out there.
(do doubt everyone else'll point out you can use Testing or Unstable if you enjoy that kind of stuff, so I won't repeat that part)
More likely...
1) Leader resigns
2) Developers don't agree on future features, etc.
3) Of dozen forks most never launch but 2-3 really shine (perhaps think
- (a) knoppix/gentoo
- (b) a gentoo focused on binary distros
- (c) a gentoo focused on source hacking
)
4) One of those guys leaves, leaving room for newer and cooler forks.
Miguel wrote:
"the easy-to-build functionality of a web
page (XAML) and the advanced graphics and rendering
of Avalon."
It's worth checking out what became of MIT project that started with the same grant that created the W3C. Curl did a very good job at blending the eas of HTML with advanced graphics and rendering.
For example, check out the raytracing example here where a HTML-like page has embedded ray-traced graphics seemlessly embedded in the page.
The orginal article wrote "Learning more and more languages"
A working knowledge of the local language where much of the outsourcing is going couldn't hurt. Yes, I know most of India's IT shops speak english as their primary language, but I suspect farmers in southern california are at an advantage if they speak Spanish too. Knowledge of whatever is spoken in Bejing or Bangalore is valuable in corporate IT today.
And the parent article wrote.
"An RHCE is worth more than a Linux+ because its a damn site harder."
If the original question was "moving up the ladder". More detail-oriented certs may give you a stronger base at the bottom of the ladder; but to move up, you need management skills, not "how to read the manual of another router" classes.
I think most managers up the ladder are generalists, not specialists.
An interesting comparable for Google. Also quiet about most of their infrastructure; but they do answer some questions such as electricity bills, budget, etc...
How much electricity they use - "the 2nd largest user of electrical power in Maryland.... yearly electrical bill is more than $21 million. " How big in # of people and budget - "if... considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies."
Wonder how google ranks in those metrics - and we may get a good ballpark feel of how much data they can store and process.
If only it used IMAP instead of POP, you wouldn't need Gmail's search features.
Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html
which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).
I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.
Redhat's little red button thingy is nice; and I've got my debian system to "apt-get update; apt-get -s upgrade" in a cron job to "spy" on how up-to-date that software is.
If I used Windows, or all sorts of windows apps, I'd want them to spy on me to see if my latest security patches were up-to-date. I think your average windows luser will _want_ to know when he needs an upgrade of certain software.
Spyware I fear most is that that actually does spying - i.e. steal credit card number, passwords, keystroke-loggers by-employers-who-don't-keep-the-records-safe-so passwords-get-stolen-from-their-logs, etc
Places I've been, it's taken Oracle Support *days* to get systems up and running - and at as often as not, the in-house DBA or database programmers who worked around the problem _before_ Oracle Support came through.
ROI calculations are easy, though. If your website might be down for 18 hours while your in-house support guy finishes sleeping, wakes up, and reconfigures BIND; and your web site makes $1000/hour; and the chance of this happening is 10% each year; it's very easy to translate to dollars.
How much business do you lose in those 30-seconds?
I think more.com's died because they overdesigned their "zero-downtime incase California sinks in an earthquake, so let's have our database mirror'd around the world"; rather than think through the (modest) implications of a couple hours downtime.
How often have you guys seen positive ROI on a support contract?
I think as an organization gets larger, ROI analysis would suggest that they're better of managing the risks themselves -- just like at some scale it can be worth it to be self-insured in some things.
Many of these support contracts are really just the "Circuit City Extended Waranty" of the corporate world.
You can (technologically, perhaps not legally) always rip the DVD to HD before your trip.
Your battery life will be much improved watching the video from hard drive. Also if you recompress the video to something smaller (say, VCD-like) your CPU won't have to do as much work playing it back either.
Slashdot
Slashdot has mentioned others. 1GB today isn't really worth any more today than the few MB was when HotMail started.
The only real news here is that you don't see more companies offering reasonable disk space for their hosting and email in the day of the $79 200GB hard drive.
We don't need a consensus. If RedHat has the means to support backports and the customers who want them, more power to them. If Debian Stable picks only the security patches and has an audience who likes that, awesome.
People seem to think of forking as bad. I think of it as "market research" -- whichever distro has the "best" philosophy will get the most users and/or customers (not necessarily the same thing - hense "best" was in quotes).
Didn't you mean "add about 30%". At least that way you'll have some room to negotiate down.
If SW engineers had a little more self respect (I don't see elevator repairment saying they'll want 30% less than typical union rates), we wouldn't have plumetting waged. However it seems we have a little supply/demand problem in SW right now - but is having all of us trying to out-bid each other for the few jobs not being outsourced a good idea; or will the bidding war indeed end at minimun wage.
I'd say find some more specialized area-of-expertise in software (say, embeeded SW, or User Interface Design, or Beowulf cluster supercomputing), and sell that specialized, non-commodity and hard-to-outsource skill for a respectable salary.
And a nice Siggraph presentation of some of the capabilities of BMRT.
Interestingly, BMRT was free as in $$$ but not as in Free Software. This was one of the first software packages where I first recognized how big this distinction is. (A free as in Free Software program probably would have continued on as people may have coded around some of the disputed intellectual property - a free as in $$$ program was possible to kill with the carrot and stick of a lawsuit and buyout opportunity)
For those who don't remember, BMRT was a really cool RenderMan based renderer that Pixar had some sort of love/hate relationship with. IIRC, they used it, yet they sued the company. At the end nVidia bought them, though it wasn't clear why at the time.
A good related article can be found at fool.com "...what could either be a profitable new market niche or a spectacular new scam: open source insurance..."
IMHO if it were $250/yr contributing to a legal defense fund, I'd go for it.
OTOH, If it's $250/yr to fund payouts, perhaps I should start looking if I have any IP in Linux that I can collect royalties on.:-)
At any rate, I hope one of your offerings is $250 for a legal-defense fund to fight such lawsuits instead to pay for them to go away.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct link for GNU internationalization coding standards is here.
It's A 380K Tar file! with over 2000 lines of C code.
The first time I thought it was a parody, but it's really an insightful look at Internationalization, cross-platform build environments, and other things important to free software. I didn't RTFB that was reviewed, but I hope it goes into these important topics as well. I think this emphasis on coding standards that value the less visible aspects of software such as build environments, internationalization, etc is one of the big advantages of open source.
Personally, I very much approve of the stability of Debian Stable for environments where I get up-to-date security patches, but no frivolous cutsie upgrades that break stuff. I don't believe there's a more stable Linux distro out there.
(do doubt everyone else'll point out you can use Testing or Unstable if you enjoy that kind of stuff, so I won't repeat that part)
More likely...
1) Leader resigns
2) Developers don't agree on future features, etc.
3) Of dozen forks most never launch but 2-3 really shine (perhaps think
- (a) knoppix/gentoo
- (b) a gentoo focused on binary distros
- (c) a gentoo focused on source hacking
)
4) One of those guys leaves, leaving room for newer and cooler forks.
It's worth checking out what became of MIT project that started with the same grant that created the W3C. Curl did a very good job at blending the eas of HTML with advanced graphics and rendering.
For example, check out the raytracing example here where a HTML-like page has embedded ray-traced graphics seemlessly embedded in the page.
A working knowledge of the local language where much of the outsourcing is going couldn't hurt. Yes, I know most of India's IT shops speak english as their primary language, but I suspect farmers in southern california are at an advantage if they speak Spanish too. Knowledge of whatever is spoken in Bejing or Bangalore is valuable in corporate IT today.
And the parent article wrote. "An RHCE is worth more than a Linux+ because its a damn site harder."
If the original question was "moving up the ladder". More detail-oriented certs may give you a stronger base at the bottom of the ladder; but to move up, you need management skills, not "how to read the manual of another router" classes.
I think most managers up the ladder are generalists, not specialists.
(Or should that have been linked here?)
How much electricity they use ... yearly electrical bill is more than $21 million. "
... considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies."
- "the 2nd largest user of electrical power in Maryland.
How big in # of people and budget
- "if
Wonder how google ranks in those metrics - and we may get a good ballpark feel of how much data they can store and process.
I think this jpeg group should go talk to EV1. They probably have some clients serving jpegs, and seem to have money to burn for claims like this.
Since 1990 IMAP had a "search unseen" feature (See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1176.html which enabled clients to easily broaden and narrow searches easily (see Pine for a good implementation).
I currently have about 1GB across a few IMAP folders at my ISP; and can search the hole think quickly and efficiently using '90's technology.
I don't see the big deal.
If I used Windows, or all sorts of windows apps, I'd want them to spy on me to see if my latest security patches were up-to-date. I think your average windows luser will _want_ to know when he needs an upgrade of certain software.
Spyware I fear most is that that actually does spying - i.e. steal credit card number, passwords, keystroke-loggers by-employers-who-don't-keep-the-records-safe-so passwords-get-stolen-from-their-logs, etc
Both a rhetorical question, and genuine curiosity.
ROI calculations are easy, though. If your website might be down for 18 hours while your in-house support guy finishes sleeping, wakes up, and reconfigures BIND; and your web site makes $1000/hour; and the chance of this happening is 10% each year; it's very easy to translate to dollars.
How much business do you lose in those 30-seconds?
I think more .com's died because they overdesigned their "zero-downtime incase California sinks in an earthquake, so let's have our database mirror'd around the world"; rather than think through the (modest) implications of a couple hours downtime.
How often have you guys seen positive ROI on a support contract?
I think as an organization gets larger, ROI analysis would suggest that they're better of managing the risks themselves -- just like at some scale it can be worth it to be self-insured in some things.
Many of these support contracts are really just the "Circuit City Extended Waranty" of the corporate world.
YMMV - Your mileage may vary. Some systems (200MHz Dell Inspiron 6000 from 1998 or 1999) had a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder (from LuxSonor).
More recently, I think both MPEG1 and MPEG2 is done mostly in software w/ MMX&SSE.
However MPEG1's 1/4 size and less complex algorithm probably makes it less CPU intensive. Buy as I said , YMMV.
It's easy to test, though. Just bring up the task manager and watch the CPU levels decoding MPEG-1 at VCD size vs MPEG-2 at DVD size.
Whichever uses less CPU should last longer (not to mention needing less reads from the disk).
Your battery life will be much improved watching the video from hard drive. Also if you recompress the video to something smaller (say, VCD-like) your CPU won't have to do as much work playing it back either.
Or will they remove that component so they don't have to simulate it.
The only real news here is that you don't see more companies offering reasonable disk space for their hosting and email in the day of the $79 200GB hard drive.
> Hey! Do you work for AT&T as well?
Actually, it sounds more like Coca Cola... "...the assassination of 14 union leaders, half of which worked at various Coca-Cola plants...
People seem to think of forking as bad. I think of it as "market research" -- whichever distro has the "best" philosophy will get the most users and/or customers (not necessarily the same thing - hense "best" was in quotes).
Yeah (I'm the grandparent post)... Salary.com suggests a higher salary than I make to. I should have looked first.
Didn't you mean "add about 30%". At least that way you'll have some room to negotiate down.
If SW engineers had a little more self respect (I don't see elevator repairment saying they'll want 30% less than typical union rates), we wouldn't have plumetting waged. However it seems we have a little supply/demand problem in SW right now - but is having all of us trying to out-bid each other for the few jobs not being outsourced a good idea; or will the bidding war indeed end at minimun wage.
I'd say find some more specialized area-of-expertise in software (say, embeeded SW, or User Interface Design, or Beowulf cluster supercomputing), and sell that specialized, non-commodity and hard-to-outsource skill for a respectable salary.
Interestingly, BMRT was free as in $$$ but not as in Free Software. This was one of the first software packages where I first recognized how big this distinction is. (A free as in Free Software program probably would have continued on as people may have coded around some of the disputed intellectual property - a free as in $$$ program was possible to kill with the carrot and stick of a lawsuit and buyout opportunity)
For those who don't remember, BMRT was a really cool RenderMan based renderer that Pixar had some sort of love/hate relationship with. IIRC, they used it, yet they sued the company. At the end nVidia bought them, though it wasn't clear why at the time.
"...what could either be a profitable new market niche or a spectacular new scam: open source insurance..."
IMHO if it were $250/yr contributing to a legal defense fund, I'd go for it.
OTOH, If it's $250/yr to fund payouts, perhaps I should start looking if I have any IP in Linux that I can collect royalties on. :-)
At any rate, I hope one of your offerings is $250 for a legal-defense fund to fight such lawsuits instead to pay for them to go away.