I agree about the legal reasons why the U.S. Postal Service is not going away. For example, federal law often requires that you communicate via U.S. Mail in your dealings with the government (such as, e.g., your income tax -- last year was the first year that they allowed you to send your income tax return via FedEx or UPS, though it had to be at the IRS on tax day, a postmark wouldn't work). Similarly, federal credit card laws require you to communicate disputes via paper mail in order to preserve your rights, and 33 cents for a 1st class letter is a lot cheaper than $5 or so for UPS or FedEx.
On the other hand, if you don't get bulk advertising via U.S. Mail, you must be a hermit who never orders anything via mail order! For example, my mailbox was stuffed this afternoon when I checked it -- and after I discarded all the bulk advertising, there was one (1) single letter left in the mailbox -- a bill.
And since I'm paranoid about paying my bills via electronic transfer, that's another reason to keep the U.S. Postal Service around!
a) How do endusers receive EMAIL? Hint: look at my EMAIL address. Also check out http://www.airnews.net for how they recieve news (and possibly EMAIL).
b) How does the enduser get support? There's lots of places to get support. Your local computer store, for example, is happy to provide support (for a price!).
c) how do I handle routes and stuff? Well, you're right -- your Internet service provider has to provide you with your gateway and IP address. See UUNET for an example of how this works in practice (UUNET does provide some services, but you have to run or find your own EMAIL etc. providers).
All in all, though, I don't have much sympathy for those who would regulate cable Internet access. I'm posting this via my cable modem, and I never even SEE that @home site, use their EMAIL server, or use their news server. If they did not have that revenue from their home page, they'd have to hike my rates -- or else I'd have to pay two bills (one for my cable network, one for my ISP) that would add up to more than my current bill. Dollars and cents -- cable companies are in business to make money, and if they make less from one source, they have to raise rates on the network service to compensate.
One last thing: These cable companies are NOT computer geniuses. My cable modem is provided by @Home, and is run by people who don't know much about what they're doing. Asking them to add even more complexity to a network they don't fully understand in the first place is NOT going to help the quality of my cable network service.
And the roads are too crowded and narrow in Sunnyvale to ride a bicycle. If you're a mountain biker you can maybe brave the potholes and ramp the sidewalks, but that's pretty dangerous.
Hey guy, I own a farm in the hills of Louisiana, so I can sympathize (grin). But the jobs available were just TOO boring! I mean, I could be making the same amount of money back home as I'm making in Phoenix, and it'd go a lot farther, but that would be writing accounting software in *COBOL*. (Not that there's anything wrong with COBOL for accounting software, but you must admit that it's not the most thrilling of environments).
Actually, I have more hiking opportunities available here in Phoenix than I had back home (if you don't watch your step back home, somebody will shoot you for trespassing on their back 40). So I'm pretty happy as far as that goes. The city itself is pretty forgettable (miles and miles of ticky-tacky taco-bell houses with beige stucco and tile roofs, interspersed with huge Motorola and Intel foundaries and various warehouses for Insight and etc.), but I'm not much of a "city scene" type anyhow. And the cable modem ROCKS! And we have Fry's. What else does a geek need!?
Cheapest place to live has to be Mississippi. The question is, do you want to live there? Not unless you like hunting, fishing, monster trucks, red necks, and shotguns in rear windows. A liking for chewing tobacco can help too (grin).
Really, the biggest problem with going with a really cheap place like that is one of job diversity. I lived in Louisiana for quite some years (same thing as Mississippi, except with better food, grin), and while I had no problem finding a job, they were all pretty much the same -- specialty software for local conditions (e.g., school administration software to handle Louisiana state laws, accounting software to handle Mississippi rules regarding contractors doing business with the state, etc.), or if you were more of a consultant than developer, you got to install lots of Windows NT LAN's. That gets boring after a while, unless you LIKE wearing suits (because you have to spend a lot of time in meetings with government bureaucrats and businessmen).
I'd suggest going to one of the larger cities that have a reasonable cost of living but are not in the Silicon Valley. It's even better if there's recreation nearby. Atlanta is ok in the Southeast, though the Blue Ridge park is a bit far if you're an outdoors type and there's a few too many "suits" for my tastes. Phoenix, where I live now, has a lot of mountain preserves if you like hiking, plus a national forest (no trees in it though, it's desert!) for longer hikes and water sports (well, there is a river through it, though the dams stop all the water before it gets to Phoenix). Raleigh-Durham? Better have at least a MSCS, it's more of a think-tank type environment than a Silicon Valley-ish startup type environment. Dallas? You can make lots of money in Dallas, but it must be the most boring city on the planet. Dallas is so boring that half of Dallas crosses the border into Louisiana on the weekends to visit the gambling casinos and eat Louisiana food. Austin is great, lots of jobs, lots of outdoors activities nearby, a really rockin' music scene. San Antonio is nice too, though not as much variety in high-tech jobs, and not the same kind of music scene as Austin (still has a good variety though).
Somebody mentioned Jacksonville, Florida. While that's reasonable if you like the beach, it's otherwise a quite forgettable city, and while hurricanes usually diverge northward or southward, it IS on the coast, and hurricanes usually do hit within a few hundred miles of Jacksonville on a regular basis.
Anyhow, I think I managed to insult everybody here (especially Yankees up north, who are probably furious that I didn't mention their favorite ice-shrouded corrupt dirty expensive city in the Rust Belt!), so I'll go now:-).
RTP has a totally different focus and image from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has leading-edge entrepeneurs, while RTP has leading-edge scientists. Why does that make a difference? Well, if you're a new computer company and you want the best case designers for your new computer, you want to be in the Silicon Valley. If, on the other hand, you want the best computer scientists to design a leading-edge mathematical encryption algorithm, you may be able to get away with being in RTP.
The biggest difference is in the realm of venture capital. Note that VA Research got lots of venture capital from Silicon Valley based firms, while Red Hat's venture capital all had to come from outside the state of North Carolina. If your business plan calls for venture capital, Silicon Valley makes sense in those terms alone.
As for why I'm not in RTP -- I'm in Phoenix, Arizona! Think of it as Sandberg's Chicago re-incarnated in the desert....
It's already more expensive to do business in the Silicon Valley than in any other place in the world, but there's a reason people still start up new businesses there. Sure, labor is expensive, as is rent. But the access to other Silicon Valley vendors has a dollar value too, as does the easy access to a huge labor pool of highly-trained workers and easy access to the venture capitalists.
The "upkeep" for Linux can be so much more expensive than NT?
bull****.
My brother is NT-certified. He installs high-end NT hardware to monitor custom-built RTU's (real-time control units) that control things like oil pipelines and utility transmission lines. They do not take chances with these things, they use Compaq servers with NT pre-installed (thus avoiding the biggest problem with NT stability, buggy device drivers).
Yet every week a server crashes. For an oil pipeline, thousands of dollars worth of oil can flow through the pipeline, unmonitored, unbilled, while NT reboots and rebuilds its filesystem. Sometimes they even have to fly someone out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to get NT back running.
Point: If reliability is $$$, NT ain't it.
Meanwhile, our Linux servers just run. And run. And run. It was a pain to get some of the services going (NIS in particular was painful), but once they're going, they just run.
Workstations are even easier. I just installed Red Hat 6.0 straight off the disk, told it to use NIS for passwords, and voila. Then NFS-mount/usr/local and/home, and voila again. Every workstation is identical (DHCP-configured Ethernet), if one goes down a user can go to his neighbor's and log in and be right where he expects to be, and I can slide in an identical workstation and he can log in and be back at work, with his icons and etc. all where he left them. Where is the "upkeep so expensive" here? Takes fifteen minutes to install Red Hat 6.0, another five minutes max to set up the NFS mounts? Then I can use 'ssh' to install OS software updates on all the workstations with one command, while all local updates go into/usr/local and are thus immediately available? So where's the "so much more expensive than NT" here?!
Werner Von Braun was a former Nazi, for cryin' out loud, and had been in charge of slave labor while in charge of the V2 rocket program. You really think he spent too much time worrying about the feelings of his astronauts?
On the other hand, he was just the man to get the U.S. to the moon. Think about it. When you want something done, do you want Mr. Rogers to be in charge? The job required somebody ruthless, and Werner was the man for the job.
Apparently their biggest concern was hardware support. I am posting this from FreeBSD right now so I'm obviously no anti-FreeBSD bigot, but FreeBSD is very much aimed at the server market, not the home market -- sound support is minimal, the range of hardware devices supported is much smaller than Linux, and folks like Creative and Real are supporting Linux with their latest and greatest software and hardware, not FreeBSD. Given that the Amiga has always been about graphics and sound, choosing an OS that doesn't support any sound card made after 1998 doesn't make sense...
The biggest bloat in Linux is userland, not the kernel. This may be where Amiga Inc. can innovate. Who knows, they might even use userland stuff from FreeBSD to avoid the licensing hassles...
The nifty thing about AmigaOS (and BeOS, for that matter) was the fast message-based IPC mechanism. I suppose they could hack that into the Linux kernel to get them the speed they would need to compete with BeOS, or even hack MkLinux to get them that, but it's not a matter of just taking the normal Linux kernel and plunking it in place. At least if they want "classic" Amiga programs to be re-compilable on this architecture without running like crap. Sockets just won't get it. I've been doing a lot of work with sockets lately, and they're too bloody slow for the kind of IPC work that BeOS and AmigaOS-Classic do. But maybe they're just dumping the whole Amiga project and going to become just Yet Another Linux Distribution. Maybe this is how Gateway is going to maintain their relationship with Microsoft while jumping on the Linux bandwagon, i.e., by taking this defunct brand name they bought for near nothing and attaching it to their new Linux line. SIgh.
1) Your boss is an ex-used-car salesman who believes that anything can be fixed if he only yells and verbally abuses people a little harder.
2) You can no longer give status reports to your boss because he is always "in a meeting" or "has other appointments".
3) Because of the above, your boss has no idea what you do.
4) Paycheck bounces. (I have always made it clear that if my paycheck bounces, that is the end of my employement with that company).
5) Your co-workers are all worthless syncophants who were hired because they were college buddies of your boss, and you end up doing their work because they are incompetent. (I have had a co-worker like this, but both myself and my other co-workers who had to cover for him when deadline came and he disappeared raised hell and got him canned -- note that this only works when the top technical people are working together as a team and can gang up on the boss).
Basically, my no-nos are: verbal abuse (I don't do it, I don't tolerate it, if you have a problem tell me but I don't accept yelling or abusive language), lack of communication (if I have a problem I expect to be able to talk with my co-workers and manager about it, and vice-versa, don't give me any of this talking-behind-my-back bullshit), and of course not being paid! I've had good luck for the past four years in that my managers have been pretty cool (well, Will a couple of years back was a stubborn old bull and we fussed at each other a lot, but we damn well respected each other -- in fact, we're going out to lunch tomorrow afternoon).
Anyhow. There are good employers and managers who at least are supportive out there (may not agree with you, but they at least don't try to cut you down). It's a hard search, but worthwhile when you find it. And a note to employers -- that's how you keep me (or any good hacker) around for a while too. I was being seriously underpaid in one job that I worked for three years, but I kept working there because I liked the people I was working with, the working environment was hectic but the people I worked with were great people, and I liked the respect that I had from my co-workers and from the company's clients. If I had to deal with people verbally abusing me all day long, toady employees with nothing better to do than back-stab, and enforced long hours, I would have walked out the door within a month, not after three years. Oh -- the BRU guys are great too (grin). It's great to be back programming neat stuff.
Nice work, if you can get it. To be fair you should also note that contracting has its downsides -- you have to be a little more socially aware than the typical hacker (the old word of mouth biz for getting your next contract, as well as being able to interact with essentially a new set of strangers every few months), there is typically some downtime between contracts (with resulting stress), there are no benefits (for true contract work, as vs. being an employee of a contracting firm), and the tax stuff is murder.
Which isn't to say that contracting is not great, just that roses have thorns too.
BeOS is nice, but it's not a server platform. It seems to me more like the Amiga done right. For the children out there who know of the Amiga only as some dusty box in their father's closet, it was the first mass-produced consumer microcomputer sold in the United States with a message-passing microkernel and multi-tasking operating system, ten years before Be... except Commodore didn't know they had a graphics workstation rather than a game machine on their hands, couldn't figure out how to market it, never got the OS completed, and went belly up eventually.
The "In the US" part is important, because the Sinclair ?QL? was being sold in Europe with much the same feature set, except it had some kind of weird tape-ish type drives instead of "real" drives and had chicklet keys (Sir Clive did not believe in having a real keyboard!). Linus attributes much of his interest in computers to hacking on his uncle's QL while a child.
How about the war against the American consumer? We are swiftly becoming a country run "by business, for business", and to hell with the consumer. Legislation everywhere is removing consumer's rights to sue corporations who defraud them (see http://www.gemhound.com for an example of such a corporation), while removing regulatory oversight over those very same corporations. Take the moving industry, for example. Since the Interstate Commerce Commission (which regulated it) was abolished in 1995, movers have had a field day, blatantly violating the law in full knowledge that for the most part it's more expensive to sue them for that fraudulent $3,000 that they held your furniture hostage for, than it is to pay the $3,000 in the first place.
It's like the claims that we have full employment. I drive down main street Guadalupe at 7am in the morning and see the Hispanic men standing on the streetcorners, hoping someone will stop and hire them to work in the fields. Tell these men that we have full employment. Yeah, right. The government uses fraudulent statistics (those men aren't unemployed, because they aren't registered at the unemployment office!) in order to keep the populance fat and happy and unconcerned... and gosh, you know what? It's working!
Big business got the shit scared out of them in the 60's, and bought up all major media sources in response so that we will never get balanced reporting again. Think of that, next time you see talk about the "worker shortage" and "historic low unemployment". Think about those men standing on the street corner, and how the government and the big-business-owned media has rendered them invisible.
Can you get that 'first job' if you take that last vacation in college? If I look at the ads in the newspaper, or look at what recruiters post to the USENET, all of the ads say "experience required". Can you get a job in today's computer industry if you're not a 4.0 student (hackers rarely are, too much time programming neat hacks late at nite!) and you haven't taken internships or otherwise worked during your "vacations"?
Open Source offers another avenue -- work on a cool project, get a reputation, get money thrown at you. Still, it doesn't seem to me that college kids can be too sanguine about getting a job if they're going to "slack" during the summers the way our parents did.
At the time Berkeley had sold all commercial rights to BSD Unix to BSDI and thereby gotten embroiled in a lawsuit with USL (Unix System Laboratories), the semi-autonomous AT&T division (sold to Novell sometime in that time period) which owned the rights to Unix. In addition, a Republican administration in California was busily dismantling their educational system with yearly budget cuts for all public universities, to the point where UCB barely had the money to engage in normal instructional and research activities, much less stuff like PostGres or BSD. And finally Sun had dumped BSD-inspired SunOS in favor of the "merged BSD/SysV" that they had spent much money working on with USL, which was released as System V.4 for mere mortals and as Solaris for Sun customers and which looked suspiciously like System V.3 with a BSD compatibility bag slapped on the side (I know, I know, there were considerable kernel improvements between V.3 and V.4, but from an API standpoint V.4 was much closer to V.3 than to BSD). Given the politics, BSD obviously would not have been a good place for Sun to dump source code upon at that time, despite Sun's close connections to UCB (hey, Bill Joy wrote 'vi' while he was a grad student there, for cryin out loud!).
The FSSTD also states that all configuration information will be placed under/etc. I submit that the XF86Config file is a configuration file and does not belong in the off-the-wall place that SuSE sticks it (I don't recall where exactly they stuck it, but at least in 5.3 it wasn't in/etc). I submit that the linkes in/etc/rc.d on a Red Hat system are configuration information. The actual scripts can live in/sbin/rc.init or wherever they want to, but my system knows what stuff to start up at boot time by looking at those links. The FSSTD says that I should be able to restore my entire configuration by restoring/etc. But with SuSE, I have to restore/sbin/rc.d also.
Not that Red Hat is totally free of such idiocy. For example, print configuration information is stored in little files in/var/spool/lp/ (where is the name of the printer), which also breaks that rule. And name server files are stored in/var/named, which again breaks that rule. SuSE's blatant disregard of the FSSTD is not why I don't use SuSE, it's more a case of personal distaste for the licensing terms on YaST.
SuSE is now quite a bit better than back then. sendmail.cf in SuSE, for example, is now well documented and easier to hack than Red Hat's configuration (it was VERY easy to add an alias to myself so that everything coming out of my home machine had a return address of "e_l_green@hotmail.com", for example, even though I was logged in as "eric@england.local.net"). I still don't run SuSE on a regular basis, but that's because of their, err, "unique" take on the FSSTD (putting configuration files some place other than under/etc) and because of YaST being non-free software (under the Open Source Definition). Regarding OpenBSD -- very nice. Very clean. Very "transparent", meaning that even the install is just a shell script that can be interrupted and examined if you want to see what's going on or do things by hand. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software for it pre-packaged or in 'ports', and driver support is not great. After fiddling around trying to get apsfilter to run so that I could get decent printouts, I caved and installed FreeBSD. FreeBSD looks good so far, but it appears they have "Linux Symdrome" -- i.e., putting "user-friendly" front-ends on the install and config tool that are not "transparent" in nature (everything is acting on a text file, but you have to do some digging around to figure out WHICH text file -- shades of Red Hat's 'printtool'!). Still, it has a ton of 'ports', lots of 'packages', and drivers for all of my hardware (though I had to swap out the ES1371-based sound card I had in my machine for an old AWE-64 Value that was in my Windows box). My only real problem is getting a real office suite working on it. So far I've had no luck getting Applix to work (even though I used 'brandelf' to brand all its binaries as Linux). Next I'll try WordPerfect, which will at least import all of my old Applix documents, but I use Applix Graphics to develop the headers on my web pages and stuff (very easy, lots of clip-art, point'n'click), and that'd be hard to replace.
Hmm? Netscape doesn't work on FreeBSD? Funny, I downloaded the FreeBSD version from ftp.netscape.com and it worked fine.
My only software problem with FreeBSD is getting Applix to work. Applix is the only Linux commercial application I run that does not seem to have a FreeBSD version. Well, RealPlay too... v3 is kinda old...
My only real gripe with FreeBSD is that it's not as clean and "transparent" as OpenBSD. It's starting to look as cluttered as Linux.
I think part of VA's point is that they've hired a few device driver writers over the past six months. Penguin is not yet to the point where they can support their own brace of device driver authors, but I'm sure they'll hire a few as they grow.
I don't think you're quite aware of how tiny these companies were only a year ago... only a year ago, VA Research probably was doing about the same amount of business that Penguin is doing today, and Penguin today can barely cover overhead if the amount of money listed in the article is correct (the hardware business is *EXPENSIVE*, it's not like the software business where you buy disks for $3 and sell them for $50, if you're making 30% gross profit off of a hardware sale you're doing good). So until recently, Linux hardware vendors just weren't in a position to actually write drivers. Sure, they donated video cards and such to device driver authors (e.g. the Neomagic driver for laptops came about because a vendor loaned the author a laptop to write it on), but paying a $50K/year or more salary to a device driver author when you're barely making overhead (forget about any real profit!) just isn't feasible.
As for the *BSD's, I like them. The problem is that they don't support most high-end hardware. For example, where is the RAID controller support for FreeBSD? There was a guy where I recommended FreeBSD to him because it'd handle files bigger than 2 gigabytes (sorry Linus, but 2 gigabytes is too small in today's world), but he couldn't use it because he could not find a hardware RAID controller that worked with it.
Actually, my favorite *BSD at the moment is OpenBSD. *EXTREMELY* clean "classic" BSD. Heck, even their install program is just a shell script, that you can stop in the middle and look at and restart and do the steps by hand even if you so desire. Classic Unix, the way it was in the old days. Makes you pine for the days when Linux was similarly small and uncluttered and straightforward. Unfortunately, the moment you try to get a modern GUI running on OpenBSD you immediately learn the reason for part of the clutter of modern Linux systems -- there's just a ton of graphics libraries and such needed by modern software. Just building 'ghostscript' pulled in over a half dozen other packages...
My FreeBSD 3.2 should be here soon. Tim installed it on a machine in the lab and it rocked on a machine with only 16 megabytes of RAM even when running resource-hungry KDE. Linux dies under KDE if you try running it with less than 32 megabytes of RAM (and it really prefers more than 32 megs, 64 for best performance). It'll be interesting to compare it with OpenBSD, I think OpenBSD will prove out to be much cleaner, but FreeBSD will probably end up being more practical due to the larger number of packages and ports available for it, as well as much faster on the x86 platform (of course OpenBSD is much faster on other platforms, since FreeBSD doesn't support any other platforms yet!). If the *BSD's had been available at the time Linus was looking for a low-cost Unix clone, I know we'd all be running FreeBSD today. It wasn't, and we aren't, but that doesn't make it a bad OS, just one without enough hardware support to make it feasible for the big file servers where its fast speed and support for large files would be great.
If I have a complaint, I damn well say it, straight forward and up front. I don't go waffling around behind the "Anonymous Coward" apparition slamming a man's livelihood.
I'm no apologist for VA Research and frankly don't even like most of their product line (with the exception of their 4U rack, which might look a bit dated but which is a solid piece of engineering). But that doesn't change a thing. To accuse me of a VA love fest is just typical sleazy conduct by somebody embarrassed about being called down for his sleazy behavior.
If you have a complaint, say it. Otherwise I, and anybody else here with any sense, will assume (probably correctly) that you work for a competitor of VA trying to slime them from behind the veil of anonymity in the sort of sleazy behavior that typifies Microsoft, not Linux. 'Nuff said.
I have no personal reason to love VA (hint: I don't work for them, have never recieved a dime from them, and am no longer in the Linux hardware world), but I do think that Chris had a valid point. Seems to be plenty of "Anonymous Cowards" posting testimonials of praise about Penguin and slamming VA here. And frankly, I think it's kind of sleazy. Not to mention unnecessary -- Penguin has done a very good job of moving from $0 to $1M within a year's time, thanks to choosing a name uniquely suited to the Linux market, aggressive marketing, and product that meets a demand (Linux). And none of that requires sleaze.
For those who complain that one or the other is late with shipments, etc., one problem with being that size is that the supply chain is a b****. Especially when you outgrow what a Tech Data or Ingram Micro can give you, but you aren't big enough to buy things in quantity 1,000 directly from the manufacturer. I can attest from personal experience that it's easy to chunk machines out the door lickety-split all day long -- as long as you have the parts. VA and Penguin have an advantage in that they're next door to many distributors' warehouses, but supply side still can't be a picnic.
I resisted the Palm Pilot for literally years. "A waste of time", I said to myself. After all, in the past I've used Daytimers, rolodexes, and every other possible 'personal organization tool' and ended up leaving it at home because it was too bulky, too clumsy, and myself just too disorganized (grin). The only thing I really made use of was yellow post-it notes, which cluttered my office like multi-colored snowflakes, drifting hither and fro and eventually being thrown away when I got around to sifting through them and couldn't decode my cryptic notes on them.
When a bunch of **** started happening and I was driving myself nuts trying to keep track of everything, I said "what the heck, let me try it". Well, I did. It does what it's supposed to do -- it sits on its little belt clip and works as an address book, postit-note tablet, to-do list, and calendar. There are Daytimers this compact, but they're clumsier to use -- e.g., you have to manually move your to-do list from day to day, and re-write it when you remove enough items from it to make it worthwhile, whereas the Palm does that automatically (if you so select!). Same deal with the address book.
I also found an unexpected bonus: my checkbook is balanced now for the first time in literally years. I found a little program which solves the one big problem of Quicken and other such "personal finance" packages, which is -- you can't carry your computer with you to the store or ATM!
I played a game or two on it once, but why? Usually it just sits there, waiting for when it's needed. Which is just what it's supposed to do. After all, as Monty Python said, "You never know when to expect the Spanish Inquisition!".
And oh -- my office no longer is buried under drifts of yellow Post-It notes. Now, printouts are another matter (grin).
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I agree about the legal reasons why the U.S. Postal Service is not going away. For example, federal law often requires that you communicate via U.S. Mail in your dealings with the government (such as, e.g., your income tax -- last year was the first year that they allowed you to send your income tax return via FedEx or UPS, though it had to be at the IRS on tax day, a postmark wouldn't work). Similarly, federal credit card laws require you to communicate disputes via paper mail in order to preserve your rights, and 33 cents for a 1st class letter is a lot cheaper than $5 or so for UPS or FedEx.
On the other hand, if you don't get bulk advertising via U.S. Mail, you must be a hermit who never orders anything via mail order! For example, my mailbox was stuffed this afternoon when I checked it -- and after I discarded all the bulk advertising, there was one (1) single letter left in the mailbox -- a bill.
And since I'm paranoid about paying my bills via electronic transfer, that's another reason to keep the U.S. Postal Service around!
-E
a) How do endusers receive EMAIL? Hint: look at my EMAIL address. Also check out http://www.airnews.net for how they recieve news (and possibly EMAIL).
b) How does the enduser get support? There's lots of places to get support. Your local computer store, for example, is happy to provide support (for a price!).
c) how do I handle routes and stuff? Well, you're right -- your Internet service provider has to provide you with your gateway and IP address. See UUNET for an example of how this works in practice (UUNET does provide some services, but you have to run or find your own EMAIL etc. providers).
All in all, though, I don't have much sympathy for those who would regulate cable Internet access. I'm posting this via my cable modem, and I never even SEE that @home site, use their EMAIL server, or use their news server. If they did not have that revenue from their home page, they'd have to hike my rates -- or else I'd have to pay two bills (one for my cable network, one for my ISP) that would add up to more than my current bill. Dollars and cents -- cable companies are in business to make money, and if they make less from one source, they have to raise rates on the network service to compensate.
One last thing: These cable companies are NOT computer geniuses. My cable modem is provided by @Home, and is run by people who don't know much about what they're doing. Asking them to add even more complexity to a network they don't fully understand in the first place is NOT going to help the quality of my cable network service.
-E
And the roads are too crowded and narrow in Sunnyvale to ride a bicycle. If you're a mountain biker you can maybe brave the potholes and ramp the sidewalks, but that's pretty dangerous.
Hey guy, I own a farm in the hills of Louisiana, so I can sympathize (grin). But the jobs available were just TOO boring! I mean, I could be making the same amount of money back home as I'm making in Phoenix, and it'd go a lot farther, but that would be writing accounting software in *COBOL*. (Not that there's anything wrong with COBOL for accounting software, but you must admit that it's not the most thrilling of environments).
Actually, I have more hiking opportunities available here in Phoenix than I had back home (if you don't watch your step back home, somebody will shoot you for trespassing on their back 40). So I'm pretty happy as far as that goes. The city itself is pretty forgettable (miles and miles of ticky-tacky taco-bell houses with beige stucco and tile roofs, interspersed with huge Motorola and Intel foundaries and various warehouses for Insight and etc.), but I'm not much of a "city scene" type anyhow. And the cable modem ROCKS! And we have Fry's. What else does a geek need!?
-E
Cheapest place to live has to be Mississippi. The question is, do you want to live there? Not unless you like hunting, fishing, monster trucks, red necks, and shotguns in rear windows. A liking for chewing tobacco can help too (grin).
:-).
Really, the biggest problem with going with a really cheap place like that is one of job diversity. I lived in Louisiana for quite some years (same thing as Mississippi, except with better food, grin), and while I had no problem finding a job, they were all pretty much the same -- specialty software for local conditions (e.g., school administration software to handle Louisiana state laws, accounting software to handle Mississippi rules regarding contractors doing business with the state, etc.), or if you were more of a consultant than developer, you got to install lots of Windows NT LAN's. That gets boring after a while, unless you LIKE wearing suits (because you have to spend a lot of time in meetings with government bureaucrats and businessmen).
I'd suggest going to one of the larger cities that have a reasonable cost of living but are not in the Silicon Valley. It's even better if there's recreation nearby. Atlanta is ok in the Southeast, though the Blue Ridge park is a bit far if you're an outdoors type and there's a few too many "suits" for my tastes. Phoenix, where I live now, has a lot of mountain preserves if you like hiking, plus a national forest (no trees in it though, it's desert!) for longer hikes and water sports (well, there is a river through it, though the dams stop all the water before it gets to Phoenix). Raleigh-Durham? Better have at least a MSCS, it's more of a think-tank type environment than a Silicon Valley-ish startup type environment. Dallas? You can make lots of money in Dallas, but it must be the most boring city on the planet. Dallas is so boring that half of Dallas crosses the border into Louisiana on the weekends to visit the gambling casinos and eat Louisiana food. Austin is great, lots of jobs, lots of outdoors activities nearby, a really rockin' music scene. San Antonio is nice too, though not as much variety in high-tech jobs, and not the same kind of music scene as Austin (still has a good variety though).
Somebody mentioned Jacksonville, Florida. While that's reasonable if you like the beach, it's otherwise a quite forgettable city, and while hurricanes usually diverge northward or southward, it IS on the coast, and hurricanes usually do hit within a few hundred miles of Jacksonville on a regular basis.
Anyhow, I think I managed to insult everybody here (especially Yankees up north, who are probably furious that I didn't mention their favorite ice-shrouded corrupt dirty expensive city in the Rust Belt!), so I'll go now
-E
You know if you're a redneck if ....
-E
RTP has a totally different focus and image from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has leading-edge entrepeneurs, while RTP has leading-edge scientists. Why does that make a difference? Well, if you're a new computer company and you want the best case designers for your new computer, you want to be in the Silicon Valley. If, on the other hand, you want the best computer scientists to design a leading-edge mathematical encryption algorithm, you may be able to get away with being in RTP.
The biggest difference is in the realm of venture capital. Note that VA Research got lots of venture capital from Silicon Valley based firms, while Red Hat's venture capital all had to come from outside the state of North Carolina. If your business plan calls for venture capital, Silicon Valley makes sense in those terms alone.
As for why I'm not in RTP -- I'm in Phoenix, Arizona! Think of it as Sandberg's Chicago re-incarnated in the desert....
-E
It's already more expensive to do business in the Silicon Valley than in any other place in the world, but there's a reason people still start up new businesses there. Sure, labor is expensive, as is rent. But the access to other Silicon Valley vendors has a dollar value too, as does the easy access to a huge labor pool of highly-trained workers and easy access to the venture capitalists.
The "upkeep" for Linux can be so much more expensive than NT?
/usr/local and /home, and voila again. Every workstation is identical (DHCP-configured Ethernet), if one goes down a user can go to his neighbor's and log in and be right where he expects to be, and I can slide in an identical workstation and he can log in and be back at work, with his icons and etc. all where he left them. Where is the "upkeep so expensive" here? Takes fifteen minutes to install Red Hat 6.0, another five minutes max to set up the NFS mounts? Then I can use 'ssh' to install OS software updates on all the workstations with one command, while all local updates go into /usr/local and are thus immediately available? So where's the "so much more expensive than NT" here?!
bull****.
My brother is NT-certified. He installs high-end NT hardware to monitor custom-built RTU's (real-time control units) that control things like oil pipelines and utility transmission lines. They do not take chances with these things, they use Compaq servers with NT pre-installed (thus avoiding the biggest problem with NT stability, buggy device drivers).
Yet every week a server crashes. For an oil pipeline, thousands of dollars worth of oil can flow through the pipeline, unmonitored, unbilled, while NT reboots and rebuilds its filesystem. Sometimes they even have to fly someone out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to get NT back running.
Point: If reliability is $$$, NT ain't it.
Meanwhile, our Linux servers just run. And run. And run. It was a pain to get some of the services going (NIS in particular was painful), but once they're going, they just run.
Workstations are even easier. I just installed Red Hat 6.0 straight off the disk, told it to use NIS for passwords, and voila. Then NFS-mount
-E
Werner Von Braun was a former Nazi, for cryin' out loud, and had been in charge of slave labor while in charge of the V2 rocket program. You really think he spent too much time worrying about the feelings of his astronauts?
On the other hand, he was just the man to get the U.S. to the moon. Think about it. When you want something done, do you want Mr. Rogers to be in charge? The job required somebody ruthless, and Werner was the man for the job.
-E
Apparently their biggest concern was hardware support. I am posting this from FreeBSD right now so I'm obviously no anti-FreeBSD bigot, but FreeBSD is very much aimed at the server market, not the home market -- sound support is minimal, the range of hardware devices supported is much smaller than Linux, and folks like Creative and Real are supporting Linux with their latest and greatest software and hardware, not FreeBSD. Given that the Amiga has always been about graphics and sound, choosing an OS that doesn't support any sound card made after 1998 doesn't make sense...
The biggest bloat in Linux is userland, not the kernel. This may be where Amiga Inc. can innovate. Who knows, they might even use userland stuff from FreeBSD to avoid the licensing hassles...
-E
The nifty thing about AmigaOS (and BeOS, for that matter) was the fast message-based IPC mechanism. I suppose they could hack that into the Linux kernel to get them the speed they would need to compete with BeOS, or even hack MkLinux to get them that, but it's not a matter of just taking the normal Linux kernel and plunking it in place. At least if they want "classic" Amiga programs to be re-compilable on this architecture without running like crap.
Sockets just won't get it. I've been doing a lot of work with sockets lately, and they're too bloody slow for the kind of IPC work that BeOS and AmigaOS-Classic do.
But maybe they're just dumping the whole Amiga project and going to become just Yet Another Linux Distribution. Maybe this is how Gateway is going to maintain their relationship with Microsoft while jumping on the Linux bandwagon, i.e., by taking this defunct brand name they bought for near nothing and attaching it to their new Linux line. SIgh.
Rules for when to leave:
1) Your boss is an ex-used-car salesman who believes that anything can be fixed if he only yells and verbally abuses people a little harder.
2) You can no longer give status reports to your boss because he is always "in a meeting" or "has other appointments".
3) Because of the above, your boss has no idea what you do.
4) Paycheck bounces. (I have always made it clear that if my paycheck bounces, that is the end of my employement with that company).
5) Your co-workers are all worthless syncophants who were hired because they were college buddies of your boss, and you end up doing their work because they are incompetent. (I have had a co-worker like this, but both myself and my other co-workers who had to cover for him when deadline came and he disappeared raised hell and got him canned -- note that this only works when the top technical people are working together as a team and can gang up on the boss).
Basically, my no-nos are: verbal abuse (I don't do it, I don't tolerate it, if you have a problem tell me but I don't accept yelling or abusive language), lack of communication (if I have a problem I expect to be able to talk with my co-workers and manager about it, and vice-versa, don't give me any of this talking-behind-my-back bullshit), and of course not being paid! I've had good luck for the past four years in that my managers have been pretty cool (well, Will a couple of years back was a stubborn old bull and we fussed at each other a lot, but we damn well respected each other -- in fact, we're going out to lunch tomorrow afternoon).
Anyhow. There are good employers and managers who at least are supportive out there (may not agree with you, but they at least don't try to cut you down). It's a hard search, but worthwhile when you find it. And a note to employers -- that's how you keep me (or any good hacker) around for a while too. I was being seriously underpaid in one job that I worked for three years, but I kept working there because I liked the people I was working with, the working environment was hectic but the people I worked with were great people, and I liked the respect that I had from my co-workers and from the company's clients. If I had to deal with people verbally abusing me all day long, toady employees with nothing better to do than back-stab, and enforced long hours, I would have walked out the door within a month, not after three years.
Oh -- the BRU guys are great too (grin). It's great to be back programming neat stuff.
-E
Nice work, if you can get it. To be fair you should also note that contracting has its downsides -- you have to be a little more socially aware than the typical hacker (the old word of mouth biz for getting your next contract, as well as being able to interact with essentially a new set of strangers every few months), there is typically some downtime between contracts (with resulting stress), there are no benefits (for true contract work, as vs. being an employee of a contracting firm), and the tax stuff is murder.
Which isn't to say that contracting is not great, just that roses have thorns too.
-E
BeOS is nice, but it's not a server platform. It seems to me more like the Amiga done right. For the children out there who know of the Amiga only as some dusty box in their father's closet, it was the first mass-produced consumer microcomputer sold in the United States with a message-passing microkernel and multi-tasking operating system, ten years before Be... except Commodore didn't know they had a graphics workstation rather than a game machine on their hands, couldn't figure out how to market it, never got the OS completed, and went belly up eventually.
The "In the US" part is important, because the Sinclair ?QL? was being sold in Europe with much the same feature set, except it had some kind of weird tape-ish type drives instead of "real" drives and had chicklet keys (Sir Clive did not believe in having a real keyboard!). Linus attributes much of his interest in computers to hacking on his uncle's QL while a child.
-E
How about the war against the American consumer? We are swiftly becoming a country run "by business, for business", and to hell with the consumer. Legislation everywhere is removing consumer's rights to sue corporations who defraud them (see http://www.gemhound.com for an example of such a corporation), while removing regulatory oversight over those very same corporations. Take the moving industry, for example. Since the Interstate Commerce Commission (which regulated it) was abolished in 1995, movers have had a field day, blatantly violating the law in full knowledge that for the most part it's more expensive to sue them for that fraudulent $3,000 that they held your furniture hostage for, than it is to pay the $3,000 in the first place.
It's like the claims that we have full employment. I drive down main street Guadalupe at 7am in the morning and see the Hispanic men standing on the streetcorners, hoping someone will stop and hire them to work in the fields. Tell these men that we have full employment. Yeah, right. The government uses fraudulent statistics (those men aren't unemployed, because they aren't registered at the unemployment office!) in order to keep the populance fat and happy and unconcerned... and gosh, you know what? It's working!
Big business got the shit scared out of them in the 60's, and bought up all major media sources in response so that we will never get balanced reporting again. Think of that, next time you see talk about the "worker shortage" and "historic low unemployment". Think about those men standing on the street corner, and how the government and the big-business-owned media has rendered them invisible.
--E
Can you get that 'first job' if you take that last vacation in college? If I look at the ads in the newspaper, or look at what recruiters post to the USENET, all of the ads say "experience required". Can you get a job in today's computer industry if you're not a 4.0 student (hackers rarely are, too much time programming neat hacks late at nite!) and you haven't taken internships or otherwise worked during your "vacations"?
Open Source offers another avenue -- work on a cool project, get a reputation, get money thrown at you. Still, it doesn't seem to me that college kids can be too sanguine about getting a job if they're going to "slack" during the summers the way our parents did.
At the time Berkeley had sold all commercial rights to BSD Unix to BSDI and thereby gotten embroiled in a lawsuit with USL (Unix System Laboratories), the semi-autonomous AT&T division (sold to Novell sometime in that time period) which owned the rights to Unix. In addition, a Republican administration in California was busily dismantling their educational system with yearly budget cuts for all public universities, to the point where UCB barely had the money to engage in normal instructional and research activities, much less stuff like PostGres or BSD. And finally Sun had dumped BSD-inspired SunOS in favor of the "merged BSD/SysV" that they had spent much money working on with USL, which was released as System V.4 for mere mortals and as Solaris for Sun customers and which looked suspiciously like System V.3 with a BSD compatibility bag slapped on the side (I know, I know, there were considerable kernel improvements between V.3 and V.4, but from an API standpoint V.4 was much closer to V.3 than to BSD). Given the politics, BSD obviously would not have been a good place for Sun to dump source code upon at that time, despite Sun's close connections to UCB (hey, Bill Joy wrote 'vi' while he was a grad student there, for cryin out loud!).
-E
The FSSTD also states that all configuration information will be placed under /etc. I submit that the XF86Config file is a configuration file and does not belong in the off-the-wall place that SuSE sticks it (I don't recall where exactly they stuck it, but at least in 5.3 it wasn't in /etc). I submit that the linkes in /etc/rc.d on a Red Hat system are configuration information. The actual scripts can live in /sbin/rc.init or wherever they want to, but my system knows what stuff to start up at boot time by looking at those links. The FSSTD says that I should be able to restore my entire configuration by restoring /etc. But with SuSE, I have to restore /sbin/rc.d also.
/var/spool/lp/ (where is the name of the printer), which also breaks that rule. And name server files are stored in /var/named, which again breaks that rule. SuSE's blatant disregard of the FSSTD is not why I don't use SuSE, it's more a case of personal distaste for the licensing terms on YaST.
Not that Red Hat is totally free of such idiocy. For example, print configuration information is stored in little files in
-- Eric
SuSE is now quite a bit better than back then. sendmail.cf in SuSE, for example, is now well documented and easier to hack than Red Hat's configuration (it was VERY easy to add an alias to myself so that everything coming out of my home machine had a return address of "e_l_green@hotmail.com", for example, even though I was logged in as "eric@england.local.net"). I still don't run SuSE on a regular basis, but that's because of their, err, "unique" take on the FSSTD (putting configuration files some place other than under /etc) and because of YaST being non-free software (under the Open Source Definition).
Regarding OpenBSD -- very nice. Very clean. Very "transparent", meaning that even the install is just a shell script that can be interrupted and examined if you want to see what's going on or do things by hand. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software for it pre-packaged or in 'ports', and driver support is not great. After fiddling around trying to get apsfilter to run so that I could get decent printouts, I caved and installed FreeBSD.
FreeBSD looks good so far, but it appears they have "Linux Symdrome" -- i.e., putting "user-friendly" front-ends on the install and config tool that are not "transparent" in nature (everything is acting on a text file, but you have to do some digging around to figure out WHICH text file -- shades of Red Hat's 'printtool'!). Still, it has a ton of 'ports', lots of 'packages', and drivers for all of my hardware (though I had to swap out the ES1371-based sound card I had in my machine for an old AWE-64 Value that was in my Windows box). My only real problem is getting a real office suite working on it. So far I've had no luck getting Applix to work (even though I used 'brandelf' to brand all its binaries as Linux). Next I'll try WordPerfect, which will at least import all of my old Applix documents, but I use Applix Graphics to develop the headers on my web pages and stuff (very easy, lots of clip-art, point'n'click), and that'd be hard to replace.
-E
Hmm? Netscape doesn't work on FreeBSD? Funny, I downloaded the FreeBSD version from ftp.netscape.com and it worked fine.
My only software problem with FreeBSD is getting Applix to work. Applix is the only Linux commercial application I run that does not seem to have a FreeBSD version. Well, RealPlay too... v3 is kinda old...
My only real gripe with FreeBSD is that it's not as clean and "transparent" as OpenBSD. It's starting to look as cluttered as Linux.
-E
I think part of VA's point is that they've hired a few device driver writers over the past six months. Penguin is not yet to the point where they can support their own brace of device driver authors, but I'm sure they'll hire a few as they grow.
I don't think you're quite aware of how tiny these companies were only a year ago... only a year ago, VA Research probably was doing about the same amount of business that Penguin is doing today, and Penguin today can barely cover overhead if the amount of money listed in the article is correct (the hardware business is *EXPENSIVE*, it's not like the software business where you buy disks for $3 and sell them for $50, if you're making 30% gross profit off of a hardware sale you're doing good). So until recently, Linux hardware vendors just weren't in a position to actually write drivers. Sure, they donated video cards and such to device driver authors (e.g. the Neomagic driver for laptops came about because a vendor loaned the author a laptop to write it on), but paying a $50K/year or more salary to a device driver author when you're barely making overhead (forget about any real profit!) just isn't feasible.
As for the *BSD's, I like them. The problem is that they don't support most high-end hardware. For example, where is the RAID controller support for FreeBSD? There was a guy where I recommended FreeBSD to him because it'd handle files bigger than 2 gigabytes (sorry Linus, but 2 gigabytes is too small in today's world), but he couldn't use it because he could not find a hardware RAID controller that worked with it.
Actually, my favorite *BSD at the moment is OpenBSD. *EXTREMELY* clean "classic" BSD. Heck, even their install program is just a shell script, that you can stop in the middle and look at and restart and do the steps by hand even if you so desire. Classic Unix, the way it was in the old days. Makes you pine for the days when Linux was similarly small and uncluttered and straightforward. Unfortunately, the moment you try to get a modern GUI running on OpenBSD you immediately learn the reason for part of the clutter of modern Linux systems -- there's just a ton of graphics libraries and such needed by modern software. Just building 'ghostscript' pulled in over a half dozen other packages...
My FreeBSD 3.2 should be here soon. Tim installed it on a machine in the lab and it rocked on a machine with only 16 megabytes of RAM even when running resource-hungry KDE. Linux dies under KDE if you try running it with less than 32 megabytes of RAM (and it really prefers more than 32 megs, 64 for best performance). It'll be interesting to compare it with OpenBSD, I think OpenBSD will prove out to be much cleaner, but FreeBSD will probably end up being more practical due to the larger number of packages and ports available for it, as well as much faster on the x86 platform (of course OpenBSD is much faster on other platforms, since FreeBSD doesn't support any other platforms yet!). If the *BSD's had been available at the time Linus was looking for a low-cost Unix clone, I know we'd all be running FreeBSD today. It wasn't, and we aren't, but that doesn't make it a bad OS, just one without enough hardware support to make it feasible for the big file servers where its fast speed and support for large files would be great.
-E
If I have a complaint, I damn well say it, straight forward and up front. I don't go waffling around behind the "Anonymous Coward" apparition slamming a man's livelihood.
I'm no apologist for VA Research and frankly don't even like most of their product line (with the exception of their 4U rack, which might look a bit dated but which is a solid piece of engineering). But that doesn't change a thing. To accuse me of a VA love fest is just typical sleazy conduct by somebody embarrassed about being called down for his sleazy behavior.
If you have a complaint, say it. Otherwise I, and anybody else here with any sense, will assume (probably correctly) that you work for a competitor of VA trying to slime them from behind the veil of anonymity in the sort of sleazy behavior that typifies Microsoft, not Linux. 'Nuff said.
-E
I have no personal reason to love VA (hint: I don't work for them, have never recieved a dime from them, and am no longer in the Linux hardware world), but I do think that Chris had a valid point. Seems to be plenty of "Anonymous Cowards" posting testimonials of praise about Penguin and slamming VA here. And frankly, I think it's kind of sleazy. Not to mention unnecessary -- Penguin has done a very good job of moving from $0 to $1M within a year's time, thanks to choosing a name uniquely suited to the Linux market, aggressive marketing, and product that meets a demand (Linux). And none of that requires sleaze.
For those who complain that one or the other is late with shipments, etc., one problem with being that size is that the supply chain is a b****. Especially when you outgrow what a Tech Data or Ingram Micro can give you, but you aren't big enough to buy things in quantity 1,000 directly from the manufacturer. I can attest from personal experience that it's easy to chunk machines out the door lickety-split all day long -- as long as you have the parts. VA and Penguin have an advantage in that they're next door to many distributors' warehouses, but supply side still can't be a picnic.
-E
My story:
I resisted the Palm Pilot for literally years. "A waste of time", I said to myself. After all, in the past I've used Daytimers, rolodexes, and every other possible 'personal organization tool' and ended up leaving it at home because it was too bulky, too clumsy, and myself just too disorganized (grin). The only thing I really made use of was yellow post-it notes, which cluttered my office like multi-colored snowflakes, drifting hither and fro and eventually being thrown away when I got around to sifting through them and couldn't decode my cryptic notes on them.
When a bunch of **** started happening and I was driving myself nuts trying to keep track of everything, I said "what the heck, let me try it". Well, I did. It does what it's supposed to do -- it sits on its little belt clip and works as an address book, postit-note tablet, to-do list, and calendar. There are Daytimers this compact, but they're clumsier to use -- e.g., you have to manually move your to-do list from day to day, and re-write it when you remove enough items from it to make it worthwhile, whereas the Palm does that automatically (if you so select!). Same deal with the address book.
I also found an unexpected bonus: my checkbook is balanced now for the first time in literally years. I found a little program which solves the one big problem of Quicken and other such "personal finance" packages, which is -- you can't carry your computer with you to the store or ATM!
I played a game or two on it once, but why? Usually it just sits there, waiting for when it's needed. Which is just what it's supposed to do. After all, as Monty Python said, "You never know when to expect the Spanish Inquisition!".
And oh -- my office no longer is buried under drifts of yellow Post-It notes. Now, printouts are another matter (grin).
-E