I wholeheartedly agree with the person who submitted this story. I sometimes conduct job interviews for my company, and when I have a stack of 200 resumes to go through one of the first things I look at is the spelling and grammar.
It never ceases to amaze me how many errors people put right on their resumes. The message I get is that if they can't give some attention to the detail s on their resume, how are we to expect them to pay attention to the details of their job?
I also use my PDA, which unfortunately *still* will not sync properly with my Linux computer. I have an older Handspring visor (Palm OS), and tried every linux-based sync program that I could find including gnome-pilot, jpilot, kpilot, etc. None of them get it right every time.
With Gnome-Pilot and Evolution it seemed to be working, until evey so often it woudl freak out and create thousands of blank appointments which I could either A. Delete one at a time with the stylus or B. Hard reset my PDA and delete *everything*. Well that was not going to work for me, so I abandoned Evolution and gnome-pilot for jpilot.
Jpilot seemed to be exactly what I was looking for - smaller footprint, pretty easy to use, etc. But after a couple of weeks of use it stopped transferring new appointments and todos to and from the Palm. I even tried deleting the ~/.jpilot directory and re-syncing everything but the problem remained.
Now I'm on to kpilot which seems to work ok, but for some reason has no MAL conduit, so I can't sync AvantGo unless I use one of the other two. The other problem with this one is that I use Gnome and it's very KDE-centric (eg, only syncs with Kontact, etc)
I wish Palm would come out with a good linux client that didn't delete or duplicate records. I think next time I upgrade my computer I'll get a Mac and just be done with it.
Get a Handspring Visor (or Palm Pilot) and portable keyboard off eBay. I picked up a new Visor Platinum for $22 a few weeks back. Keyboards are available around the $25-30 range.
The great thing about the older visors is they are cheap and run on AAA batteries, with battery life of 3-6 weeks depending on how much you use em.
Many have criticized newspapers who charge for online access, saying it will never work, etc. On the other extreme you have websites that are "supported" by endless annoying popup and flash ads, or by making you look at the ad before getting to the page you wanted.
Some people don't mind paying for quality content that is useful to them. WSJ has realized this and tapped into a good market.
Pity that Debian is losing market share, etc. The package management system is hands down the best of all the linux distros out there. Fedora is catching up quick though, with it's Yum/apt support. I used Debian for a while before switching to Fedora. I made the switch because of the slooooooooooooow release cycle and out of date packages.
I have to agree here - our sales department all uses Fedora Core 3 via thin client terminals, and we tried acroread, xpdf, and ggv for PDF files. Our users need to be able to open, print, and email PDF files everyday. Not all of these PDF files are formatted ideally, eg, the person who created the PDF just scanned the whole image in as an image, and not text, hence you get these 3-5 mb files.
XPDF - works reasonably fast for small PDF files, but was choking several times a day. At best it would only clog up the print queues, at worst it would eat up ALL my cpu cycles and bring the server to a crawl.
GGV - hardly worth mentioning. Opened less files than XPDF.
acroread - ugly GUI, but only crashes or stops print queue once a day. WAY better performance than either xpdf or ggv.
I for one welcome our new PDF-reading overlords. Can't wait to install 7.0, hopefully will give better performance than the old version.
News (about Google) for nerds, stuff (about Google) that matters . ..
Slashdotters seem to get a collective hard-on every time Google blows it's nose.
Viable replacement for Vonage business plan?
on
Build Your Own PBX
·
· Score: 1
Some of you have mentioned the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I am one of those rare slashdotters who lives with a woman.
Anywho, my wife runs a small internet-based home business selling maternity and baby items. She currently uses the Vonage business plan which includes unlimited long distance and a fax line. We also have a toll-free number so the total works out to around $65.00 a month.
Would it be more cost-effective to set up an asterisk server instead (assuming that I already have the hardware lying around)? If so, which providers can sell us service and port our numbers over to their system?
I can second this. We use LTSP at work, and all my reps are on workstations with 64mb RAM and pentium II processors. The workstations cost us $3.00 each - we bought them at an auction from a hospital that closed down. Our server handles 16 or 17 reps at the same time, all using Gnome desktop and various apps such as Open Office, Evolution, etc.
Another neat feature is that you can set it up so the teacher can VNC into individual student desktops to monitor or show them how to do something.
I wish OSX would support GUI sessions for concurrent users, either via VNC or something similar to XDMCP. I would replace our Linux LTSP server with OSX in a heartbeat if we could do it the thin-client way, but alas, I don't think Apple would ever do that. Not good for the bottom line, I"m afraid.
I should have quantified this statement - when we started using FC3, it had lots of features that RHEL4 didn't have. RHEL4 finally came out several months (maybe a year?) later with these features.
Not sure if any of the marketing folks at Red Hat are reading this but here's my $0.02:
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
Try out the 'Gartoon' theme if you use Gnome2 - it's got some real nice looking, cartoony vector graphics. Looks great from 16 x 16, to infinity and beyond!
Mr. Buck tried to take the cost of a box without Windows installed, and compare it to a box that does have windows installed.
What he forgot to mention is that any serious business trying to get some work done "the Microsoft way" must own a copy of MS office for each computer in their workspace. So for a small business who can't afford huge site licenses, that's going to add another $379.00 to the cost of each workstation. Even if the bundled windoze works out to only $20 a machine, you are still out $400 per worksation just to open and read your doc and xls files.
Another consideration is that in the Windoze world, you pretty much have to have a full-blown installation for each user. Yes, I know you can do thin-clients with windows too, but there isn't an easy and inexpensive way to do this for small businesses.
Also take into account that once a business reaches a certain size they are going to need dedicated backup servers, mail server, exchange server, etc. All this stuff costs $$$ to implement, and is usually more expensive than the linux alternative.
We run a small business and power our entire sales and support department on LTSP-based thin-client terminals. The cost of each workstation? Well let's do the math:
* Pentium II computers, bought from an auction, by the pallet. About $3.00 per workstation. * 17" CRT monitor - brand new $89.00 * Fedora Core Linux - FREE as in freedom AND as in beer. w00t! * OpenOffice - Free.
I am not going to include the cost of my time as a sysadmin, because I'm going to get paid to do my job whether the end-users are on windows or linux. I probably spend less time troubleshooting things now that we are using linux so ostensibly the cost of tech support is *less* but I don't have the empirical evidence to back it up.
The server running LTSP has 4 gigs of memory and a Pentium 4 processor and handles up to 20 users quite nicely without even getting close to dipping into the swap file. They are all running web browser, Open Office, and Evolution pretty much all day long. I expect that this particular server could support up to 30-35 users before we saw a big performance hit. This server cost less than $2000 to configure.
My LTSP workstations are so cheap they are nearly disposable. Oh, dropped your computer on the floor? Power supply burned out? Let me pull another one out of storage, plug it in, and off you go. Try that with your windows boxen.
Yes, I'm aware that you can put openoffice on a windows box and use that, but why would you do that when OO, Firefox, and Evolution are available for linux?
The only groups that I would *not* recommend this solution to would be companies that use and depend on a lot of doc and xls files that are heavily formatted and full of macros. Open Office still can't quite render all.doc files perfectly, but that is hardly the fault of the developers. They have done a great job reverse-engineering the format as best they can so that it renders well in OO.
All in all, Linux is easier to use, and less expensive but to really find that out you have to take more into account than just the difference between an off-the-shelf computer from IBM or Dell, and the similar no-os computer.
The house might have already been constructed, and it's a real PITA to run Cat5 cable down into existing walls, especially if they are stuffed with insulation material.
I was fortunate enough that I could run the cables down the same wires where my coaxial runs were made, so was able to install dual-jack plates with coax and cat5 in nearly every room.
He may not want to go to the trouble of crawling through the piles of insulation fiber in his attic, or may not have the money to pay someone else to do so. Or maybe the attic isn't accessible because he has vaulted ceilings. In any case it's not always as easy as you think to get wires inside your walls without tearing everything apart.
Cause GnuCash is hard to use, that's why! Yes, you and I understand that the double-entry accounting system is the proper way to do things but try explaining that to my wife who is in charge of paying the bills each month, with online billpay through Quicken no less.
The problem Intuit has run into is that their software reached its full-featured peak around 1999 or 2000, after that there really wasn't anywhere for them to go. What do you do when your software has all the features the end-user needs, and works well enough for most people?
With open source software, once a project has reached maturity, it can be left alone and become a useful tool for years and years afterwards. Take for example something like vi/vim - it does everything a text editor should do. But the developers who work on it do not have anxious shareholders knocking at the door wanting to see never-ending growth and profits.
Hence Intuit has to force the customers to upgrade to squeeze out more profits.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone can donate some bandwidth and server space to mirror the wiki, pictures, and video for these guys, please join the IRC channel:
irc.freenode.net
#interdictor-tech
Actually if there was a Hare Krishna in the audience, he'd be passing out flowers and collecting donations for the open source temple.
I wholeheartedly agree with the person who submitted this story. I sometimes conduct job interviews for my company, and when I have a stack of 200 resumes to go through one of the first things I look at is the spelling and grammar.
It never ceases to amaze me how many errors people put right on their resumes. The message I get is that if they can't give some attention to the detail s on their resume, how are we to expect them to pay attention to the details of their job?
I also use my PDA, which unfortunately *still* will not sync properly with my Linux computer. I have an older Handspring visor (Palm OS), and tried every linux-based sync program that I could find including gnome-pilot, jpilot, kpilot, etc. None of them get it right every time.
With Gnome-Pilot and Evolution it seemed to be working, until evey so often it woudl freak out and create thousands of blank appointments which I could either A. Delete one at a time with the stylus or B. Hard reset my PDA and delete *everything*. Well that was not going to work for me, so I abandoned Evolution and gnome-pilot for jpilot.
Jpilot seemed to be exactly what I was looking for - smaller footprint, pretty easy to use, etc. But after a couple of weeks of use it stopped transferring new appointments and todos to and from the Palm. I even tried deleting the ~/.jpilot directory and re-syncing everything but the problem remained.
Now I'm on to kpilot which seems to work ok, but for some reason has no MAL conduit, so I can't sync AvantGo unless I use one of the other two. The other problem with this one is that I use Gnome and it's very KDE-centric (eg, only syncs with Kontact, etc)
I wish Palm would come out with a good linux client that didn't delete or duplicate records. I think next time I upgrade my computer I'll get a Mac and just be done with it.
Get a Handspring Visor (or Palm Pilot) and portable keyboard off eBay. I picked up a new Visor Platinum for $22 a few weeks back. Keyboards are available around the $25-30 range.
The great thing about the older visors is they are cheap and run on AAA batteries, with battery life of 3-6 weeks depending on how much you use em.
Could she not have run to the neighbor's house and borrowed a phone?
Kudos to WSJ for making it work.
Many have criticized newspapers who charge for online access, saying it will never work, etc. On the other extreme you have websites that are "supported" by endless annoying popup and flash ads, or by making you look at the ad before getting to the page you wanted.
Some people don't mind paying for quality content that is useful to them. WSJ has realized this and tapped into a good market.
SCOTTY - (conspiratorially) And how long will it really take you?
GEORDI - (puzzled) An hour.
SCOTTY - (shocked) Ye didna tell him how long it was really going to take you?
GEORDI - (irritated) Of course I did.
SCOTTY - Oh... Laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want them to think of you as a miracle worker!
Pity that Debian is losing market share, etc. The package management system is hands down the best of all the linux distros out there. Fedora is catching up quick though, with it's Yum/apt support. I used Debian for a while before switching to Fedora. I made the switch because of the slooooooooooooow release cycle and out of date packages.
Ok, slightly OT but can someone please explain to me the difference between a 'trekker' and 'trekkie'?
I have to agree here - our sales department all uses Fedora Core 3 via thin client terminals, and we tried acroread, xpdf, and ggv for PDF files. Our users need to be able to open, print, and email PDF files everyday. Not all of these PDF files are formatted ideally, eg, the person who created the PDF just scanned the whole image in as an image, and not text, hence you get these 3-5 mb files.
XPDF - works reasonably fast for small PDF files, but was choking several times a day. At best it would only clog up the print queues, at worst it would eat up ALL my cpu cycles and bring the server to a crawl.
GGV - hardly worth mentioning. Opened less files than XPDF.
acroread - ugly GUI, but only crashes or stops print queue once a day. WAY better performance than either xpdf or ggv.
I for one welcome our new PDF-reading overlords. Can't wait to install 7.0, hopefully will give better performance than the old version.
Nice troll. I give it an 8
News (about Google) for nerds, stuff (about Google) that matters . . .
Slashdotters seem to get a collective hard-on every time Google blows it's nose.
Some of you have mentioned the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I am one of those rare slashdotters who lives with a woman.
Anywho, my wife runs a small internet-based home business selling maternity and baby items. She currently uses the Vonage business plan which includes unlimited long distance and a fax line. We also have a toll-free number so the total works out to around $65.00 a month.
Would it be more cost-effective to set up an asterisk server instead (assuming that I already have the hardware lying around)? If so, which providers can sell us service and port our numbers over to their system?
I can second this. We use LTSP at work, and all my reps are on workstations with 64mb RAM and pentium II processors. The workstations cost us $3.00 each - we bought them at an auction from a hospital that closed down. Our server handles 16 or 17 reps at the same time, all using Gnome desktop and various apps such as Open Office, Evolution, etc.
Another neat feature is that you can set it up so the teacher can VNC into individual student desktops to monitor or show them how to do something.
I wish OSX would support GUI sessions for concurrent users, either via VNC or something similar to XDMCP. I would replace our Linux LTSP server with OSX in a heartbeat if we could do it the thin-client way, but alas, I don't think Apple would ever do that. Not good for the bottom line, I"m afraid.
I should have quantified this statement - when we started using FC3, it had lots of features that RHEL4 didn't have. RHEL4 finally came out several months (maybe a year?) later with these features.
Not sure if any of the marketing folks at Red Hat are reading this but here's my $0.02:
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
Come on now CowboyNeal, Cmdrtaco - don't you guys have even a bit of integrity? This is just a shameless money-making plug for this guy's site. Bleh.
It seems you can't read slashdot without coming across at least one of these pseudo-advertisements everyday.
Try out the 'Gartoon' theme if you use Gnome2 - it's got some real nice looking, cartoony vector graphics. Looks great from 16 x 16, to infinity and beyond!
Mr. Buck tried to take the cost of a box without Windows installed, and compare it to a box that does have windows installed.
.doc files perfectly, but that is hardly the fault of the developers. They have done a great job reverse-engineering the format as best they can so that it renders well in OO.
What he forgot to mention is that any serious business trying to get some work done "the Microsoft way" must own a copy of MS office for each computer in their workspace. So for a small business who can't afford huge site licenses, that's going to add another $379.00 to the cost of each workstation. Even if the bundled windoze works out to only $20 a machine, you are still out $400 per worksation just to open and read your doc and xls files.
Another consideration is that in the Windoze world, you pretty much have to have a full-blown installation for each user. Yes, I know you can do thin-clients with windows too, but there isn't an easy and inexpensive way to do this for small businesses.
Also take into account that once a business reaches a certain size they are going to need dedicated backup servers, mail server, exchange server, etc. All this stuff costs $$$ to implement, and is usually more expensive than the linux alternative.
We run a small business and power our entire sales and support department on LTSP-based thin-client terminals. The cost of each workstation? Well let's do the math:
* Pentium II computers, bought from an auction, by the pallet. About $3.00 per workstation.
* 17" CRT monitor - brand new $89.00
* Fedora Core Linux - FREE as in freedom AND as in beer. w00t!
* OpenOffice - Free.
I am not going to include the cost of my time as a sysadmin, because I'm going to get paid to do my job whether the end-users are on windows or linux. I probably spend less time troubleshooting things now that we are using linux so ostensibly the cost of tech support is *less* but I don't have the empirical evidence to back it up.
The server running LTSP has 4 gigs of memory and a Pentium 4 processor and handles up to 20 users quite nicely without even getting close to dipping into the swap file. They are all running web browser, Open Office, and Evolution pretty much all day long. I expect that this particular server could support up to 30-35 users before we saw a big performance hit. This server cost less than $2000 to configure.
My LTSP workstations are so cheap they are nearly disposable. Oh, dropped your computer on the floor? Power supply burned out? Let me pull another one out of storage, plug it in, and off you go. Try that with your windows boxen.
Yes, I'm aware that you can put openoffice on a windows box and use that, but why would you do that when OO, Firefox, and Evolution are available for linux?
The only groups that I would *not* recommend this solution to would be companies that use and depend on a lot of doc and xls files that are heavily formatted and full of macros. Open Office still can't quite render all
All in all, Linux is easier to use, and less expensive but to really find that out you have to take more into account than just the difference between an off-the-shelf computer from IBM or Dell, and the similar no-os computer.
Yes, but do they *enforce* their group policy. How can you make a companywide ban on removable media? Preposterous.
The house might have already been constructed, and it's a real PITA to run Cat5 cable down into existing walls, especially if they are stuffed with insulation material.
I was fortunate enough that I could run the cables down the same wires where my coaxial runs were made, so was able to install dual-jack plates with coax and cat5 in nearly every room.
He may not want to go to the trouble of crawling through the piles of insulation fiber in his attic, or may not have the money to pay someone else to do so. Or maybe the attic isn't accessible because he has vaulted ceilings. In any case it's not always as easy as you think to get wires inside your walls without tearing everything apart.
Any repetitive motion that you make with your hands can cause repetitive stress injury. Let the fapping jokes ensue. . . .
All kidding aside - why is this news? You can get RSI from video games, playing violin, playing tennis, computer keyboard, etc.
Cause GnuCash is hard to use, that's why! Yes, you and I understand that the double-entry accounting system is the proper way to do things but try explaining that to my wife who is in charge of paying the bills each month, with online billpay through Quicken no less. The problem Intuit has run into is that their software reached its full-featured peak around 1999 or 2000, after that there really wasn't anywhere for them to go. What do you do when your software has all the features the end-user needs, and works well enough for most people? With open source software, once a project has reached maturity, it can be left alone and become a useful tool for years and years afterwards. Take for example something like vi/vim - it does everything a text editor should do. But the developers who work on it do not have anxious shareholders knocking at the door wanting to see never-ending growth and profits. Hence Intuit has to force the customers to upgrade to squeeze out more profits.