that is causing ComDex to decline. It's a combination of things. The computing world is so diverse now that no single event could even begin to cover it all. That, combined with the simple fact that innovation has moved away from the MS and PC platforms means that we now have to choose where we go based on our special needs and interests.
In the 90s the PC world was pretty simple but in 2002 just the PDAs alone could form a convention! Add to that the special needs of data center people (another convention there, for sure), various server-based architectures, and engineering/scientific types and you have three "shows" where before Comdex tried to fill all these niches (or the niches didn't even exist).
And then there are all the former Comdex exhibitors who no longer exist. The disappearance of VC capital to fund the extravagant give-aways for products that were less than vaporware has taken a lot of the fuel from the Comdex fire. Not to mention all the employees who now work in the fast-food business.
The only way Comdex can survive is by creating their own "specialty events" (which, to give them credit, they tried to do). The most successful show I ever attended had several well-attended pavilions with like-minded exhibitors grouped together. So if you were interested in PDAs then Visor and Palm and others were close together. The last show I went to had too much diversity, no organization, and little coherance. They sold space to anyone who wanted to exhibit, from massage chairs to toys to automobile dealers.
I think that unless Comdex can find their way back to the core of technology they are history.
Our business is located in Moses Lake, Washington... about 150 miles east of Seattle and 1/2 way between the Puget Sound area and Spokane, the largest city around. I commonly get the quick-beep indication of busy circuite and often have to redial 5 or 6 times to get out. This is on the AT&T network in a town of about 15,000 in an extended area of no more than 40,000. We don't expect much infrastructure living here but it's nice to know we're no worse off than the big population centers on the east and west coasts.
If you want to determine if your government is going to protect you against mistakes of this sort in the future, one course of investigation would be to use the Chief Executive's name as a search item. Finding that GWB had appointed the head of Prodigene to an international comission doesn't prove that the US government is less likely to protect you in these matters, but it does indicate that the politicians in charge of the government are very probably on the receiving end of monies from the most likely perpitrators.
The next step would be to use your representatives or your State Governor as a seach item in combination with the other items. At the end, you might have a pretty good picture of where you stand vis-a-vis these genetic pharmaceutical companies.
Generally it's only at the server level, although we've installed a few workstations on a "try it to see if they'll like it" basis. Servers are generally a no-brainer unless they are running some server-side MS-specific utilities.
We've found that, when asked, virtually every Developer will claim that their application will not run if Linux is the file server. In all but one case they were dead wrong. (The one case was an application that ran on FoxPro on the server.) Most applications have no clue what OS the files are stored under and couldn't care less.
The downside to switching clients to Linux has generally been a reduction in our income from that client. One client even uses the "mail" feature of Outlook (mailing contacts and appointments to other members of the group) which generally sucked until we installed a nice Dell server which we loaded with SuSE Linux. Just like Exchange but without the costs. Also, unfortunately, without the headaches because they now call us for help only about twice a year!
From almost any standpoint you can mention (original cost, administration costs, utilization of platform, etc.) Linux comes out ahead. There's even damn little training!
Try it on a few workgroups at a time and see for yourself.
Our company admins computer networks for scores of companies, school districts and government agencies; often as a backstop for an on-staff semi-technical person who handles the day-to-day stuff (adding users, etc.). We've always thought that our job was to support them so that their computers make they're more efficient and their work more productive. If someone is competent at WP5.1 and Lotus 2.4 and the applications run fine and the data is safe, why force them to change? Just to make the IT job easier?
We'd love to move people to Linux and OpenOffice but we face the same issues: people don't want to change and they don't want to lose their macros. So we support them and the applications and utilities *they* choose.
We learn Oracle for those who use Oracle, and we learn MSSQL for those who use that. We support NT file server, Linux file servers and MAC OS-X file servers depending on which systems the clients and their workers want. We have clients that use Corel Office. We have clients that use MS Office. We even have clients that use DOS workstations and Novell 3.1 to access data running on DB-4!
We think that a focus on the user is better than a focus on the technology. Sometimes users are forced to upgrade to a newer OS (often because of changes in some core application and reduction in support for the older versions... many of which worked just fine) but we never demand that our customers change unless it's for *their* good, not ours.
One of the benefits of computers is the ability to solve a problem with iteration rather than trying to come up with a classic "equation" and solve it. When I first entered the job market I had a trusty Pickett N4ES slide rule (and an N600-ES pocket slide rule) and had to first explain a problem with an equation and then solve the equation (from the "inside out" which was why HP calculators with RPG were so popular with engineers when they first came out versus the TI models... but I digress).
With the introduction of the HP-35 calculator (the "electronic slide rule") we could solve problems by just crunching the numbers at our desks. With the availability of programmable calculators (HP-67/97 and HP-41 - both of which I still use... but then I still use the slide rules too) we could program them to iterate through problems.
Not as elegant, certainly. But lots more efficient. And I'm sure that most of us have lost some of our old abilities to "see" problems in math... and perhaps some students never really learn that. But the jobs still get done and the tools still keep making it easier. I'm thinking about a Beowulf cluster for our office, actually.
The most disturbing line in this article for me...
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PKWare Zips to Growth
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· Score: 4, Insightful
was, "The investors who bought the company.... bolstered the top management team." In light of some of the recent commentaries by Robert X. Cringely (like this one , the decision to usie"professional managers" in a software company may be the kiss of death. Too many of these suits have a "vision" of short-term gain versus long-term profitability. PKware is not a public company, of course, and doesn't necessarily follow Cringely's model (which is to increase stock prices, sell out, and haul ass for the next vict... er, company). But, if there is an IPO in the near future, watch out!
It was also interesting to learn that a drunk techie CEO who let his programmers follow their own interests still managed to have a profitable company. Remind me to hang out with strippers more often.
are bandwidth usage and copyright legalities. Taking the last issue first, as an (admittedly reluctant) ISP, we don't have the financial resources to fight RIAA and MPAA over the alleged copyright violations of our users. No small ISP does, and few large ones do (or would be willing to fight them off even if they had the funds). We don't get daily demands to disconnect users for alleged copyright violations, but we do get them weekly and following up takes our time and costs us money. When it gets to the point where we'd have to hire employees to handle the load we would either have to raise our prices (and our margins are razor thin now to compete) or implement the exact policy we see here.
Taking the bandwidth issue, most ISPs have separate accounts available for people who wish to "serve" files. In the days of dial-up most people didn't have the bandwidth for serving files or the static IP required to get to them. This is no longer true. P2P made a static IP irrelevant; people found you through a central registry of users and broadband gave you enough bandwidth to move packets fast enough to make the file exchanges possible. Suddenly the ISPs, which normally have to pay for bandwidth both ways, were faced with much higher charges for *their* links to the 'net.
If you think that P2P doesn't greatly increase bandwidth usage you haven't seen the MRTG graphs I have. When we did the engineering for 3 providers we could watch the effect of one user making available a popular new movie (like "Harry Potter"). It was dramatic! Bandwidth would often jump to the caps and stay there for hours at a time, drop down and then jump back.
An ISP buys bandwidth at a set guarenteed rate with the proviso that short bursts of usage above that rate wouldn't be charged for unless it lasts for longer than a minimum (agreed upon) amount of time. P2P changed this so that suddenly ISPs were faced with uplink bills of twice their usual amount!
Look at it from their point of view. How would you like it if you offered a room for rent and discovered that the new occupant was doubling your power, water and garbage bills? My guess is that you'd toss them out on their ear or make them pay for the excess. ISPs are in that position regarding bandwidth.
The combination of the litigation exposure plus the bandwidth costs will make every ISP look closely at making the same changes that this one has. They won't have much choice unless something else changes the equation.
Since I only visit Moscow to visit them I relied on their information which is obviously out of date. I'll pass on the information on to them about the options that should be available to them since they live very close to the University. It's always nice to be corrected with useful information.:)
Yeah, Moscow, Idaho. He's a brilliant chem engineer out of the UofI (which is there in Moscow) and I'm trying to recruit him to work for my company. In one of the major university towns (two major universities - UofI and WSU within 10 miles of each other) and all they get is crappy dial-up at $25 a month, some 2.4ghz wireless and, apparently, cable. If there is a major Idaho push towards connectivity they haven't heard about it.
Clipper ship sailors used to talk about roving "press gangs" who would round up all able-bodied men they could catch and force them to serve as crew aboard a sailing ship. The term for this was "shanghaied". How appropriate that ICANN has announced, from Shanghai, that they have shanghaied the Internet.
Our company has been using (and buying) SuSE distributions for years now and we were pretty happy with it until they got to 8.0 when so many things were broken/changed that we couldn't use it any longer as a server OS. The big changes were the loss of the ability to edit the configuration files; especially in regards to selecting which services start during boot. It proved almost impossible, for instance, to keep portmap from starting without mucking about in the bowels of the boot sequence. It seemed to us that 8.0 was aimed squarely at the desktop market and its functionality as a server was reduced.
Since most of our installs are servers, we stopped buying the 5 or 6 copies of the distribution we normally buy and instead went back to using the single copy of 7.3 we had laying around the lab.
What I'm afraid of with United Linux is that SuSE will have moved their own distribution (which I liked to call "The Lego Set of Operating Systems") from an all-purpose distro (at a great price: $79) to a desktop-only solution. The UL distro will be moved in (at a significantly higher price point) to fill the server niche. Thus we will have to buy two distributions from SuSE (a la RedHat) whereas before one did everything. (And yes, I know they had a $39.95 "personal" edition but that always looked to me to be the loss-leader for ads that brought people into the store to turn them for the higher value product.)
This makes me nervous. Our comapany's future depends on the solidity of the distribution we choose. Our competitiveness rests on our ability to buy the OS at prices that put our MS rivals out of the bidding. I am not comfortable with distributions that tinker with what I thought was a winning recipe.
Our move to SuSE was away from RH during the glibc debacle (version 4 or 5 of RH, I forget now). Our move away from SuSE (to Debian, perhaps) might be imminent. It will all depend on how they price this new United Linux offering and what it offers our customers.
Our techs install software for clients on a daily basis and I've often wondered whether it makes some difference who actually clicks to accept the EULAs. In our case we are not employees of the companies which actually bought this software, but are paid to install it by the purchasers. So what is *their* legal liability to a EULA if *I* click on "ok" to some incredibly stupid EULA? Who exactly is being put to a liability here (assuming a EULA actually incurs some liability at all, that is)?
I think that if a company needed to wriggle out from under an overly-restrictive EULA they could certainly use the defense: "None of our people clicked on that agreement... it was a contractor and he didn't have the authority to bind us to a legal contract."
with a Linux box acting as the router/NAT gateway (as usual). When nothing worked we made the call to the "help desk".
Phone tech: "Go to 'start/settings...".
Me (interrupting): "Whoa there... we are using a Linux computer as the router."
Long pause. I told him that his DSL modem didn't indicate that there was a connection.
Long pause, then "I don't think the modem works with any operating system other than Windows. Don't you have a computer with Windows there you can connect to the modem?"
Me: "Don't you have a real system administrator there somewhere I can talk to?"
Phone tech in a bright voice: "Yes we do.. just a minute."
He connected me to a clueful admin and we had the system up and running 5 minutes later.
The first one I attended was for an introduction of Frontpage along with NT4. Very posh circumstances in Bellevue with catered food (this was back in the "good ol' days). The demonstrations were slick beyond belief, done by smart, attractive people who did amazing things simply and easily. They gave us CDs with NT server, SQL server, Frontpage and NT workstation (all time-limited) and I was impressed enough to try them all.
Oddly enough, nothing worked as well for me as it did for those smart, attractive demonstrators. Perhaps I wasn't smart (or attractive) enough but it seens more likely to me that the demonstrations were carefully staged to only show the best side of the product and hide any flaws.
Of course, most presentations are like this... but this one sticks in my mind as a stark example. I've warned all our people to view all such "dog and pony shows" with a good deal of skepticism... but this goes double for those done by MS, in my opinion. What you see may not be what you get.
I could upload my mind at bedtime, have a nice restful night's sleep, and download it fresh in the morning. Finally, a cure for laying awake trying to figure out why the network isn't as fast as it should be.
It would be difficult to underestimate....
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Car Digital Assistant
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· Score: 3, Funny
The amount of computing power present in my 1984 VW Rabbit Diesel (which I bought brand new in 1984). There is the PDA in my pocket and my cell phone in a holder velcro-ed to the louvres just left of the instruments.
For more computing power there is the iBook on the passenger seat and the Linux P120 in a case on the back seat (for network analysis). Then, of course, the Casio watch on my wrist.
Oh yeah... and a slide rule on the dash just in case. Talk about powah!!!
Is how MS, the company that by virtue of its failure to recognize the security issues in the Exchange/Outlook/Outlook express situation literally caused the recent massive outbreaks of viruses, trojans, worms, etc. can look the rest of the world in the eye and claim to have a plan to solve all the problems with security. These security holes weren't accidental; they were caused by MS coders implementing an inherantly insecure idea. It was insecurity by design. What would make the rest of us believe that anything else they do wouldn't be just as outrageously flawed?
for the verb form "were" being correct in this sentence. The word "if" in the sentence invokes (in most languages) the subjunctive tense which in English (but not in most languages) just happens to share the same spelling as the plural past tense of the verb "to be".
To illustrate, if we simply remove the word "if" from the beginning of the sentence, "There was more on earth..." it becomes grammatically correct. Even adding your "collective noun" to the sentence doesn't change it: "There was more intelligent life on earth." is still more correct (and readable) than, "There were more intelligent life on earth."
Happy Birthday and thanks for a unique site...
on
Slashdot Turns 5
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· Score: 5, Informative
Oh sure... it's not so unique any more but that's because you guys turned back all the code for the site to the community so there are Slashdot clones all over the place. When I first stumbled across/. it was truly unique. It was the first interactive site I found that gave Linux users a place to come to for news about an OS that back then was pretty much unheard of. And then, miracle of the Web, we could even add to the articles!!!
"Unheard of in 1997?" you ask. Let me give you an example. In 1997 my daughter was a sophomore at the local community college. In a computer course she was given an assignment to write a report on an operating system that was not made by Microsoft.
Since I was her Dad... and I had used Linux since 1993, she wrote her report on Linux and I helped her. She did a great job but only received a B. The instructor wrote across her paper, "marked down because Linux is a nonexistent system". The instructor thought she had meant to write the report about Unix and got the name wrong!
So if we've been pushy here on our forum we have good reason. Even now the rest of the media pretty much doesn't understand the Linux movement. They don't understand the "support" issue (I suppose hiring competent people is too much to ask). They don't understand the technical issues (two MS programmers were once given credit for "inventing" symbolic links). And, they don't understand the social issues (we're a community, dammit!).
I am proud to be a Linux advocate and a/. user. And I want Slashdot to know it. Happy birthday.
Seriously, I had people tell me that they wouldn't need any "systems administrators" because it was "just like Windows". Heck... anyone could administer it. This was from a middle school principal. Who last year paid our company several thousand dollars to set up his Win2K middle school lab so that his students couldn't fsck it up.
Wow... what a great series of responses to my original post. I've come a long way in the past 24 hours, baby.:P
First of all, let me add another like: the fonts. Reading small fonts on the iBook using MSIE was easier than reading larger fonts on Galeon on an LCD! Putting them next to each other really showed the difference. I was shocked! Linux has GOT to get better fonts!!
Now for my changes:
1. Tabbed browsing. Hey, it works and it's easy to slip in and out of it. The only downside is the reduced screen size of the browser window but the (much) better fonts make up for it. More than make up for it.
2. Multiple desktops are a reality. I downloaded the trial version of CodeTek (only two desktops allowed... $20 for the full version). Installation was easy even for a MAC newbie and it works. I'll try space from sourcefourge next.
3. Modifier keys. I'm gonna try 'em as soon as I figure out how to do it. I don't mind (well, not very much anyway) the pad; it's the single button that got to me. If there is a way to fix that then I'll give it a go.
Some replies go much farther than I ever intend to go (remapping the keyboard, for instance). I'm just an engineer and although I can manage a few different spoken languages, I almost never have to write in them. But I agree that in Windows some things are trivial and seem unduly difficult in other OSes. Still, MAC OS-X is new and things change and get added to it.
Also, thanks for the links to GPL products for MACs. Just what I need... more things to go learn about. LOL/. people are truly amazing.
Ok... normally I use SuSE Linux with Gnome for everything. But we do schools and schools do MACs so here I am with OS-X on my (messy) desk. Right next to me is my LCD monitor which can show me my Linux GUI or my Windows GUI. I can compare all of them with little effort.
What do I like about OS-X?
1. I like the size and convenience of the iBook. It has Unix on it and that makes it useful for me to carry to clients' sites and check out their network. Normally I carry a Linux laptop for this but the P-120 laptop (my wife's old machine) is too slow for a useful GUI.
2. I like the GUI. Heck, I was laying in bed the other night playing games on this thing and it was damn fun. (Well, fun for me, my wife was annoyed at the bleeps and whistles... sheesh.)
3, I like that it's Unix... BSD rocks (although I generally prefer Linux).
What do I not like???
1. Yeah, the mouse. One button. I like to surf using new windows for links and then close 'em down to go back for more links. A single-button mouse doesn't do this and it's a pain in the butt to carry a mouse with me.
2. One desktop. Damn! How can I work with only one desktop? On my Linux box I have 4 desktops; one for email/calendar (Ximian Evolution), one for web browsers, and two for misc apps I pull up (Open Office, GAIM, etc.). How anyone can do useful work without having multiple desktops (accessible with alt-F keys) is beyond me. Is there a way to do this on the MAC. I dunno yet.
3. The keyboard on this iBook bounces... some letters in words appear twice in a row. This annoys me. Although, to be frank, it might be just my untrained fingers on a new keyboard.
Generally, however, I like the iBook and I like OS-X. I would recommend this product to any client as long as the apps they need are available. But I'm not switching yet.
Slashdot Mirror
that is causing ComDex to decline. It's a combination of things. The computing world is so diverse now that no single event could even begin to cover it all. That, combined with the simple fact that innovation has moved away from the MS and PC platforms means that we now have to choose where we go based on our special needs and interests.
In the 90s the PC world was pretty simple but in 2002 just the PDAs alone could form a convention! Add to that the special needs of data center people (another convention there, for sure), various server-based architectures, and engineering/scientific types and you have three "shows" where before Comdex tried to fill all these niches (or the niches didn't even exist).
And then there are all the former Comdex exhibitors who no longer exist. The disappearance of VC capital to fund the extravagant give-aways for products that were less than vaporware has taken a lot of the fuel from the Comdex fire. Not to mention all the employees who now work in the fast-food business.
The only way Comdex can survive is by creating their own "specialty events" (which, to give them credit, they tried to do). The most successful show I ever attended had several well-attended pavilions with like-minded exhibitors grouped together. So if you were interested in PDAs then Visor and Palm and others were close together. The last show I went to had too much diversity, no organization, and little coherance. They sold space to anyone who wanted to exhibit, from massage chairs to toys to automobile dealers.
I think that unless Comdex can find their way back to the core of technology they are history.
Our business is located in Moses Lake, Washington... about 150 miles east of Seattle and 1/2 way between the Puget Sound area and Spokane, the largest city around. I commonly get the quick-beep indication of busy circuite and often have to redial 5 or 6 times to get out. This is on the AT&T network in a town of about 15,000 in an extended area of no more than 40,000. We don't expect much infrastructure living here but it's nice to know we're no worse off than the big population centers on the east and west coasts.
If you want to determine if your government is going to protect you against mistakes of this sort in the future, one course of investigation would be to use the Chief Executive's name as a search item. Finding that GWB had appointed the head of Prodigene to an international comission doesn't prove that the US government is less likely to protect you in these matters, but it does indicate that the politicians in charge of the government are very probably on the receiving end of monies from the most likely perpitrators.
The next step would be to use your representatives or your State Governor as a seach item in combination with the other items. At the end, you might have a pretty good picture of where you stand vis-a-vis these genetic pharmaceutical companies.
That, to me, would make sense.
Generally it's only at the server level, although we've installed a few workstations on a "try it to see if they'll like it" basis. Servers are generally a no-brainer unless they are running some server-side MS-specific utilities.
We've found that, when asked, virtually every Developer will claim that their application will not run if Linux is the file server. In all but one case they were dead wrong. (The one case was an application that ran on FoxPro on the server.) Most applications have no clue what OS the files are stored under and couldn't care less.
The downside to switching clients to Linux has generally been a reduction in our income from that client. One client even uses the "mail" feature of Outlook (mailing contacts and appointments to other members of the group) which generally sucked until we installed a nice Dell server which we loaded with SuSE Linux. Just like Exchange but without the costs. Also, unfortunately, without the headaches because they now call us for help only about twice a year!
From almost any standpoint you can mention (original cost, administration costs, utilization of platform, etc.) Linux comes out ahead. There's even damn little training!
Try it on a few workgroups at a time and see for yourself.
Our company admins computer networks for scores of companies, school districts and government agencies; often as a backstop for an on-staff semi-technical person who handles the day-to-day stuff (adding users, etc.). We've always thought that our job was to support them so that their computers make they're more efficient and their work more productive. If someone is competent at WP5.1 and Lotus 2.4 and the applications run fine and the data is safe, why force them to change? Just to make the IT job easier?
We'd love to move people to Linux and OpenOffice but we face the same issues: people don't want to change and they don't want to lose their macros. So we support them and the applications and utilities *they* choose.
We learn Oracle for those who use Oracle, and we learn MSSQL for those who use that. We support NT file server, Linux file servers and MAC OS-X file servers depending on which systems the clients and their workers want. We have clients that use Corel Office. We have clients that use MS Office. We even have clients that use DOS workstations and Novell 3.1 to access data running on DB-4!
We think that a focus on the user is better than a focus on the technology. Sometimes users are forced to upgrade to a newer OS (often because of changes in some core application and reduction in support for the older versions... many of which worked just fine) but we never demand that our customers change unless it's for *their* good, not ours.
One of the benefits of computers is the ability to solve a problem with iteration rather than trying to come up with a classic "equation" and solve it. When I first entered the job market I had a trusty Pickett N4ES slide rule (and an N600-ES pocket slide rule) and had to first explain a problem with an equation and then solve the equation (from the "inside out" which was why HP calculators with RPG were so popular with engineers when they first came out versus the TI models... but I digress).
With the introduction of the HP-35 calculator (the "electronic slide rule") we could solve problems by just crunching the numbers at our desks. With the availability of programmable calculators (HP-67/97 and HP-41 - both of which I still use... but then I still use the slide rules too) we could program them to iterate through problems.
Not as elegant, certainly. But lots more efficient. And I'm sure that most of us have lost some of our old abilities to "see" problems in math... and perhaps some students never really learn that. But the jobs still get done and the tools still keep making it easier. I'm thinking about a Beowulf cluster for our office, actually.
was, "The investors who bought the company.... bolstered the top management team." In light of some of the recent commentaries by Robert X. Cringely (like this one , the decision to usie"professional managers" in a software company may be the kiss of death. Too many of these suits have a "vision" of short-term gain versus long-term profitability. PKware is not a public company, of course, and doesn't necessarily follow Cringely's model (which is to increase stock prices, sell out, and haul ass for the next vict... er, company). But, if there is an IPO in the near future, watch out!
It was also interesting to learn that a drunk techie CEO who let his programmers follow their own interests still managed to have a profitable company. Remind me to hang out with strippers more often.
are bandwidth usage and copyright legalities. Taking the last issue first, as an (admittedly reluctant) ISP, we don't have the financial resources to fight RIAA and MPAA over the alleged copyright violations of our users. No small ISP does, and few large ones do (or would be willing to fight them off even if they had the funds). We don't get daily demands to disconnect users for alleged copyright violations, but we do get them weekly and following up takes our time and costs us money. When it gets to the point where we'd have to hire employees to handle the load we would either have to raise our prices (and our margins are razor thin now to compete) or implement the exact policy we see here.
Taking the bandwidth issue, most ISPs have separate accounts available for people who wish to "serve" files. In the days of dial-up most people didn't have the bandwidth for serving files or the static IP required to get to them. This is no longer true. P2P made a static IP irrelevant; people found you through a central registry of users and broadband gave you enough bandwidth to move packets fast enough to make the file exchanges possible. Suddenly the ISPs, which normally have to pay for bandwidth both ways, were faced with much higher charges for *their* links to the 'net.
If you think that P2P doesn't greatly increase bandwidth usage you haven't seen the MRTG graphs I have. When we did the engineering for 3 providers we could watch the effect of one user making available a popular new movie (like "Harry Potter"). It was dramatic! Bandwidth would often jump to the caps and stay there for hours at a time, drop down and then jump back.
An ISP buys bandwidth at a set guarenteed rate with the proviso that short bursts of usage above that rate wouldn't be charged for unless it lasts for longer than a minimum (agreed upon) amount of time. P2P changed this so that suddenly ISPs were faced with uplink bills of twice their usual amount!
Look at it from their point of view. How would you like it if you offered a room for rent and discovered that the new occupant was doubling your power, water and garbage bills? My guess is that you'd toss them out on their ear or make them pay for the excess. ISPs are in that position regarding bandwidth.
The combination of the litigation exposure plus the bandwidth costs will make every ISP look closely at making the same changes that this one has. They won't have much choice unless something else changes the equation.
Since I only visit Moscow to visit them I relied on their information which is obviously out of date. I'll pass on the information on to them about the options that should be available to them since they live very close to the University. It's always nice to be corrected with useful information. :)
Yeah, Moscow, Idaho. He's a brilliant chem engineer out of the UofI (which is there in Moscow) and I'm trying to recruit him to work for my company. In one of the major university towns (two major universities - UofI and WSU within 10 miles of each other) and all they get is crappy dial-up at $25 a month, some 2.4ghz wireless and, apparently, cable. If there is a major Idaho push towards connectivity they haven't heard about it.
Add a section to your employee policy document that prohibits using whatever he's using and then fire his ass when he ignores it.
Clipper ship sailors used to talk about roving "press gangs" who would round up all able-bodied men they could catch and force them to serve as crew aboard a sailing ship. The term for this was "shanghaied". How appropriate that ICANN has announced, from Shanghai, that they have shanghaied the Internet.
Our company has been using (and buying) SuSE distributions for years now and we were pretty happy with it until they got to 8.0 when so many things were broken/changed that we couldn't use it any longer as a server OS. The big changes were the loss of the ability to edit the configuration files; especially in regards to selecting which services start during boot. It proved almost impossible, for instance, to keep portmap from starting without mucking about in the bowels of the boot sequence. It seemed to us that 8.0 was aimed squarely at the desktop market and its functionality as a server was reduced.
Since most of our installs are servers, we stopped buying the 5 or 6 copies of the distribution we normally buy and instead went back to using the single copy of 7.3 we had laying around the lab.
What I'm afraid of with United Linux is that SuSE will have moved their own distribution (which I liked to call "The Lego Set of Operating Systems") from an all-purpose distro (at a great price: $79) to a desktop-only solution. The UL distro will be moved in (at a significantly higher price point) to fill the server niche. Thus we will have to buy two distributions from SuSE (a la RedHat) whereas before one did everything. (And yes, I know they had a $39.95 "personal" edition but that always looked to me to be the loss-leader for ads that brought people into the store to turn them for the higher value product.)
This makes me nervous. Our comapany's future depends on the solidity of the distribution we choose. Our competitiveness rests on our ability to buy the OS at prices that put our MS rivals out of the bidding. I am not comfortable with distributions that tinker with what I thought was a winning recipe.
Our move to SuSE was away from RH during the glibc debacle (version 4 or 5 of RH, I forget now). Our move away from SuSE (to Debian, perhaps) might be imminent. It will all depend on how they price this new United Linux offering and what it offers our customers.
Our techs install software for clients on a daily basis and I've often wondered whether it makes some difference who actually clicks to accept the EULAs. In our case we are not employees of the companies which actually bought this software, but are paid to install it by the purchasers. So what is *their* legal liability to a EULA if *I* click on "ok" to some incredibly stupid EULA? Who exactly is being put to a liability here (assuming a EULA actually incurs some liability at all, that is)?
I think that if a company needed to wriggle out from under an overly-restrictive EULA they could certainly use the defense: "None of our people clicked on that agreement... it was a contractor and he didn't have the authority to bind us to a legal contract."
with a Linux box acting as the router/NAT gateway (as usual). When nothing worked we made the call to the "help desk".
Phone tech: "Go to 'start/settings...".
Me (interrupting): "Whoa there... we are using a Linux computer as the router."
Long pause. I told him that his DSL modem didn't indicate that there was a connection.
Long pause, then "I don't think the modem works with any operating system other than Windows. Don't you have a computer with Windows there you can connect to the modem?"
Me: "Don't you have a real system administrator there somewhere I can talk to?"
Phone tech in a bright voice: "Yes we do.. just a minute."
He connected me to a clueful admin and we had the system up and running 5 minutes later.
The first one I attended was for an introduction of Frontpage along with NT4. Very posh circumstances in Bellevue with catered food (this was back in the "good ol' days). The demonstrations were slick beyond belief, done by smart, attractive people who did amazing things simply and easily. They gave us CDs with NT server, SQL server, Frontpage and NT workstation (all time-limited) and I was impressed enough to try them all.
Oddly enough, nothing worked as well for me as it did for those smart, attractive demonstrators. Perhaps I wasn't smart (or attractive) enough but it seens more likely to me that the demonstrations were carefully staged to only show the best side of the product and hide any flaws.
Of course, most presentations are like this... but this one sticks in my mind as a stark example. I've warned all our people to view all such "dog and pony shows" with a good deal of skepticism... but this goes double for those done by MS, in my opinion. What you see may not be what you get.
I could upload my mind at bedtime, have a nice restful night's sleep, and download it fresh in the morning. Finally, a cure for laying awake trying to figure out why the network isn't as fast as it should be.
The amount of computing power present in my 1984 VW Rabbit Diesel (which I bought brand new in 1984). There is the PDA in my pocket and my cell phone in a holder velcro-ed to the louvres just left of the instruments.
For more computing power there is the iBook on the passenger seat and the Linux P120 in a case on the back seat (for network analysis). Then, of course, the Casio watch on my wrist.
Oh yeah... and a slide rule on the dash just in case. Talk about powah!!!
Is how MS, the company that by virtue of its failure to recognize the security issues in the Exchange/Outlook/Outlook express situation literally caused the recent massive outbreaks of viruses, trojans, worms, etc. can look the rest of the world in the eye and claim to have a plan to solve all the problems with security. These security holes weren't accidental; they were caused by MS coders implementing an inherantly insecure idea. It was insecurity by design. What would make the rest of us believe that anything else they do wouldn't be just as outrageously flawed?
for the verb form "were" being correct in this sentence. The word "if" in the sentence invokes (in most languages) the subjunctive tense which in English (but not in most languages) just happens to share the same spelling as the plural past tense of the verb "to be".
To illustrate, if we simply remove the word "if" from the beginning of the sentence, "There was more on earth..." it becomes grammatically correct. Even adding your "collective noun" to the sentence doesn't change it: "There was more intelligent life on earth." is still more correct (and readable) than, "There were more intelligent life on earth."
Oh sure... it's not so unique any more but that's because you guys turned back all the code for the site to the community so there are Slashdot clones all over the place. When I first stumbled across /. it was truly unique. It was the first interactive site I found that gave Linux users a place to come to for news about an OS that back then was pretty much unheard of. And then, miracle of the Web, we could even add to the articles!!!
/. user. And I want Slashdot to know it. Happy birthday.
:)
"Unheard of in 1997?" you ask. Let me give you an example. In 1997 my daughter was a sophomore at the local community college. In a computer course she was given an assignment to write a report on an operating system that was not made by Microsoft.
Since I was her Dad... and I had used Linux since 1993, she wrote her report on Linux and I helped her. She did a great job but only received a B. The instructor wrote across her paper, "marked down because Linux is a nonexistent system". The instructor thought she had meant to write the report about Unix and got the name wrong!
So if we've been pushy here on our forum we have good reason. Even now the rest of the media pretty much doesn't understand the Linux movement. They don't understand the "support" issue (I suppose hiring competent people is too much to ask). They don't understand the technical issues (two MS programmers were once given credit for "inventing" symbolic links). And, they don't understand the social issues (we're a community, dammit!).
I am proud to be a Linux advocate and a
And thanks.
A change of 5 degrees F is a change of 2.78 degrees Celsius, not 15 degrees C.
:P
So if your average temperature in the winter is -15F and it went down to -20F your temperature would be 2.78 degrees less than it was before.
A good place for this is http://www.convert-me.com since, apparently, Canadian schools aren't any better than American schools for science.
Seriously, I had people tell me that they wouldn't need any "systems administrators" because it was "just like Windows". Heck... anyone could administer it. This was from a middle school principal. Who last year paid our company several thousand dollars to set up his Win2K middle school lab so that his students couldn't fsck it up.
Wow... what a great series of responses to my original post. I've come a long way in the past 24 hours, baby. :P
/. people are truly amazing.
First of all, let me add another like: the fonts. Reading small fonts on the iBook using MSIE was easier than reading larger fonts on Galeon on an LCD! Putting them next to each other really showed the difference. I was shocked! Linux has GOT to get better fonts!!
Now for my changes:
1. Tabbed browsing. Hey, it works and it's easy to slip in and out of it. The only downside is the reduced screen size of the browser window but the (much) better fonts make up for it. More than make up for it.
2. Multiple desktops are a reality. I downloaded the trial version of CodeTek (only two desktops allowed... $20 for the full version). Installation was easy even for a MAC newbie and it works. I'll try space from sourcefourge next.
3. Modifier keys. I'm gonna try 'em as soon as I figure out how to do it. I don't mind (well, not very much anyway) the pad; it's the single button that got to me. If there is a way to fix that then I'll give it a go.
Some replies go much farther than I ever intend to go (remapping the keyboard, for instance). I'm just an engineer and although I can manage a few different spoken languages, I almost never have to write in them. But I agree that in Windows some things are trivial and seem unduly difficult in other OSes. Still, MAC OS-X is new and things change and get added to it.
Also, thanks for the links to GPL products for MACs. Just what I need... more things to go learn about. LOL
Thanks again for a remarkable series of posts.
Ok... normally I use SuSE Linux with Gnome for everything. But we do schools and schools do MACs so here I am with OS-X on my (messy) desk. Right next to me is my LCD monitor which can show me my Linux GUI or my Windows GUI. I can compare all of them with little effort.
What do I like about OS-X?
1. I like the size and convenience of the iBook. It has Unix on it and that makes it useful for me to carry to clients' sites and check out their network. Normally I carry a Linux laptop for this but the P-120 laptop (my wife's old machine) is too slow for a useful GUI.
2. I like the GUI. Heck, I was laying in bed the other night playing games on this thing and it was damn fun. (Well, fun for me, my wife was annoyed at the bleeps and whistles... sheesh.)
3, I like that it's Unix... BSD rocks (although I generally prefer Linux).
What do I not like???
1. Yeah, the mouse. One button. I like to surf using new windows for links and then close 'em down to go back for more links. A single-button mouse doesn't do this and it's a pain in the butt to carry a mouse with me.
2. One desktop. Damn! How can I work with only one desktop? On my Linux box I have 4 desktops; one for email/calendar (Ximian Evolution), one for web browsers, and two for misc apps I pull up (Open Office, GAIM, etc.). How anyone can do useful work without having multiple desktops (accessible with alt-F keys) is beyond me. Is there a way to do this on the MAC. I dunno yet.
3. The keyboard on this iBook bounces... some letters in words appear twice in a row. This annoys me. Although, to be frank, it might be just my untrained fingers on a new keyboard.
Generally, however, I like the iBook and I like OS-X. I would recommend this product to any client as long as the apps they need are available. But I'm not switching yet.