who drove the Exxon Valdez into Bligh Reef... it was a fully licensed, apparently sober, third mate who was qualified according to the US Coast Guard to be in charge of that ship in those waters. The job of guiding the ship from the pilot station to the exit of Prince William Sound at Cape Hinchinbrook should have been a no-brainer but the 3rd mate couldn't manage it despite having been told by a watchstander that the buoy marking the channel was on the wrong side of the ship.
I don't know why everyone assumes that the Captain was responsible for this; Exxon required him to submit a plethora of reports as soon as the pilot disembarked and he went down to his cabin to do it. He was never convicted of any criminal activity or found guilty of any liability. The USCG officers who claimed they could smell alcohol on the Captain's breath were in an environment similar to standing with their noses up your gas tank filler opening; millions of gallons of volatile vapors making it so difficult to breathe that some crew members put Scott Air Packs on to get to the bridge.
Statements like this are like declaring that your father is responsible for your car accident just because he is, after all, your father.
Sure... no one has ever thought of it, but we'd count it as one of the three. These questions don't get them a job, they just get their resume read. What we're after is evidence that candidates have exposed themselves to a broad range of IT subjects. Far too many simply tell us they can "run every program Microsoft ever made".
We wouldn't count helping working to further non-profits goals as competing. But as an example, one recent resume listed a ten year period of being "Chief Executive Officer" of an entity with a name during which period he also worked at several companies doing the exact same things.
If we hire someone as a consultant, we don't want them out there trying to further their own business while a paycheck from us supports them. But if you are doing weekend work for non-profits (or even open-source) we support that as a contribution to the community.
Anyone who contacts my firm (consulting, networking, administration) for a job gets asked one question right off the bat. This question eliminates lots of cookie-cutter certified newbies.
"Name 3 operating systems NOT made by Microsoft."
If candidates mention Cisco's IOS, Linux or any of the Unixes they get asked to send in a resume.
We are not very interested in certifications. Our experience with certified people has been mixed, but generally if they had good experience that was more important than any certs they had.
We also round file resumes which indicate that the candidate worked at his own business while also working for someone else. Especially if they mention doing the same things. We sure don't want our own employees out there competing with us on their weekends.
802.11 works ok as a LAN...
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because the packets are all carried locally so no one has to pay for the connectivity to the rest of the Internet. The article talks about cool things like live cams on beaches and as long as few people are interested in sending packets anywhere else, this free system will (mostly) work.
However, in my experience most users want 'Net access and from reading most posts on/. most users want lots of access for free. What this article barely touches on is who provides the connectivity to the mainland or Asia? Who provides the IP space? Unless you NAT, the IP addresses for a large network like this might grow into would cost a lot of money. Who pays for the email server? For that matter, who pays for the $800 access points?
Do the people using this system expect the founder to maintain it forever for no money? What happens when he no longer can (or want to)?
DSL and other broadband companies are going bankrupt all over the country because they cannot afford to provide a t1 to every user for $35 a month and still pay for their outbound traffic and maintenance. How the hell will this completely free system support its infrastructure?
You whiners have sat here and watched DSL providers compete themselves into bankruptcy because no one can afford to give you the bandwidth you think you deserve for $30/month, and now you bitch because someone has capped bandwidth. Well, duh. Apparently none of you can add. No ISP can afford to buy bandwidth and then sell it at a loss. It's simple economics. The only way we'll see unlimited bandwidth is within city-wide (or county-wide) networks where the infrastructure is paid for by the taxpayer and the media content (television, music, radio, etc) comes from a head-end located on the LAN.
Expect (and deserve) bandwidth caps on anything going out onto the WAN. Or expect to pay through the nose for your Morpheus habit.
One of the reasons for using Linux is its versatility. If manufacturers want a Linux device to take off, they need to put some of that versatility into it. USB, Ethernet, and a standard expansion port would have made a big difference in the success of the Agenda.
in searching for your own name. If Google returns your own name accurately (as it does mine), then there is little use registering yourname.com because people can find you as easily using Google. This is the telling point in his argument; an example that is not commercialized that underscores his point.
Of course, the search engines aren't the only reason for the drop in registration, but they play a part... and perhaps a very important part.
They have killed off the only real market they had and due to lack of parts they won't be able to penetrate the market they want. Retail channels will no longer order Visors and cannot order Treos. Customers who bought Visors (like me) will remember this when they finally knock on our doors to sell Treos.
Anyone who buys a Visor now is crazy if he/she thinks that Handspring will still be around for support.
We switched to SuSE at version 4.0 of RH (the one that broke glibc) and have never looked back. That was some 4 or 5 years ago. SuSE is not as pricey as RH - and we *always* buy a new set of disks, books, and registration for our customers - and it is the easiest install IMHO.
I am still installing routinely on 500mb drives and 16mb of RAM using machines thrown out by other clients. These make dandy firewalls and printer servers plus I have one P133 running my mp3 box and doing my file serving.
SuSE rocks... just did an install on a Dell server using ext2 for boot and ext3 for files... dual 18gb ultra scsi, dual P933, hot swap drives and power supplies and 1mb of ram. I think he paid about $2k for it. Gonna replace his ancient NT4 box and no one will ever notice!!! Gotta love it!
I cannot imagine 2-meter wavelength being referred to as "very long". They may be using signals in the 140mHz range (VHF) to communicate with submarines but the signals are certainly not penetrating the deep ocean.
Last I heard (and it's been a while, I admit) the USN was communicating (one-way) to submerged submarines using a wavelength of about 6000 meters (50kHz) from a million-watt transmitter near Arlington, Washington (Jim Creek). This station was located in a valley in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains that faced WSW and the antennas were strung from one ridge across to the other.
When you drove up to the station you had to park with your bumper against a grounded barricade so that the car wouldn't act as a capacitor and build up a charge which would be discharged (through you!) when you tried to open your car door.
Yes, absolutely! Ham radio operators have done moonbounce and many of them routinely communicate via satellite (transmitting to a satellite and receiving signals from someone else transmitting to a satellite - "hamsat"). There are also RF amplifier designs that would surely overwhelm (or at least degrade) your signals. Anyone with technical knowledge of RF and some skills at putting a system together could DOS you. Of course, these signals could be traced so that the DOS could not last very long without serious risk to the perpetrator.
IS THERE A RISK OF DECIPHERING COMMAND CODES?
Again, yes. In order to decipher these codes all a one has to do is locate in the vicinity of your physical command center, buy (or build) a receiver capable of detecting the frequencies you use, and put up an antenna (under the guise of amateur radio if necessary). Now they can sniff your uplink and downlink. Once you have access to both of these it's only a matter of time and intelligence before they determine your data structure.
IS PHYSICAL SECURITY ENOUGH?
No. Information within a company can be likened to a conspiracy and no conspiracy is ever safe. Someone, at some time, will see their own self-interest as higher priority than the group's interest. A perfect example of this is CIA's Project Jennifer (the Hughes Glomar Explorer). The newsworthiness of the project overwhelmed some of the participants with a sense of their own self-interest and they told news agencies.
Someone at your facility has probably already told someone else NOT at your facility enough details to allow them to do your system harm, if they wished.
SHOULD THIS INFORMATION BE ENCRYPTED?
Yes, absolutely! What's more, it should be encrypted under a method that will allow the key to be changed on a regular basis.
Given the expense of losing control of a satellite, the costs of security would be a pittance in comparison. Given what you've told us about the signals security at your facility, I imagine that the physical security and network security (does anyone have a modem in their desktop so they can work from home?) is likewise not very good. I would recommend a thorough analysis of all of these.
However, the iBook is a different matter. I can see how an engineer would be interested in one of those. Unix on a small, relatively potent laptop with lots of I/O for network use (firewire, ethernet, USB), decent battery life (5 hours or so), and reasonably priced. So I would definitely consider an iBook running OS-X (but with 256mb of RAM.. the 128mb is too puny).
Perhaps my attitude is not that uncommon, given that most reports of "engineers switching in droves" were based on watching engineeers who were away from their office (at trade shows) using laptops. But no one is moving me away from Linux!
I use Linux on my desktop for 99% of my job (and it will be 100% when we get a Citrix box running). I use Linux on a laptop for 100% of my field work. We had a loaner MAC with OS-X on it to look at last summer and we all liked it fine... but no one switched to it. We set up a VNC so I could get a MAC desktop on my KDE desktop... that was kinda cool. But when it came time to return the MAC no one cried... we just packed it up and hauled it away.
My work habits are sloppy enough to need the four desktops KDE gives me (or more if I wish) and I much prefer the KDE desktop to the OS-X version. Maybe when I can justify paying the $800 (and up) for a iMAC versus the $500 for a comparable PC, or when I can give up the clear path to hardware upgrades, or when more of the cool network tools one gets with a Linux distro appear on the MAC I'll switch. But I don't see that happening soon.
Our firm sells "solutions" to small businesses and smaller government agencies and rural school districts. We are agressively pushing Linux in roles of file servers, routers, web servers and mail servers and, where we can, as desktop workstations.
The servers work well... in fact they work so well we are wondering whether our push in that direction has been a good idea from an economic standpoint. Clients who called us weekly with MS servers now call us maybe 4 times a year; usually for problems unassociated with the servers but the workstations. I actually called on a client to ask them if they still liked us since we hadn't heard from them for months. "There wasn't anything wrong", was the response.
Workstations are more problematic. We find, over and over, that clients are using some critical application that only runs on MS. This is seldom MS Office, but more often specialized software aimed at, for instance, attorneys, mortgage companies, real estate assessors, agricultural businesses, etc. We can almost always put common files on a Linux box, but it's much more difficult to run these critical applications on Linux desktops.
We are now looking at Citrix for a solution to this problem but it doesn't come cheap and can, in fact, negate much of the advantages of using Linux on the desktop in the first place.
So, from our point of view, it's not MS Office or any lack of support (our clients rely on us for support for all their platforms anyway) but it's the individual job-specific applications that present the biggest hurdle to putting Linux on the business desk.
Quickbooks on the Web looked very cool on one of my Engineer's browser... until *I* tried it. I run Linux with Netscape and I got redirected to a page that told me I was running the wrong version of MSIE and that their "Web Based" accounting package only works on Win95, Win98, Win2K, ME, and XP. So much for the convenience of using your accounting package from anyplace in the world. Cross off Quickbooks from this list... because they require MSIE 5.0 or better they render themselves out of the running
"Umm... as a distributor/sales, you would never use spectrum analyzers, digital scopes or ATE; you buy your products and if they break, send 'em back under warranty. To do otherwise is folly."
Ummm... nope. What if you have a wireless network running nicely and someone comes into the area and installs a node right next to you with antennas pointing right at your node? How do you track them? After all, even if it's 2.4gHz spectrum, deliberate and milicious interferance is still against the law.
You *could* use a spectrum analyzer... or you could make creative use of directional antennas and the abilities of some off-the-shelf equipment to do site surveys.
At some point in the last ten years we quit paying attention to the technology and started thinking only about the score. Which big outfit would get bigger. Somewhere along the line the nuts and bolts of this industry got sidetracked. Marlon and his Odessa Office Equipment business (housed in an old warehouse in town across from the local restaurant) kept an eye on the basics: give customers a service that works and charge them a fair price for it.
Marlon isn't a Linux/Unix guru, but his workshop is that of a "hands on" guy; littered with parts, antenna wires, soldering irons and tools. No spectrum analyzers, digital scopes, or automated test beds... Marlon uses the built-in site survey capabilities of some wireless radios to do 75% of what that equipment would do at 1% of the cost.
This sort of "can do" thinking is why I think that the spirit of America shines brightest in its small towns and rural areas and not in the corporate hallways. Marlon learned enough about microwave systems to be able to design workable wireless networks (and DSL systems too, although the article doesn't speak to that), sell them, install them, connect them, and keep them working. My guess is that Paul Allen couldn't do any one of those things.
Marlon probably wouldn't last a week in a corporate environment (if they'd hire him at all), but he can do something none of them can: Marlon can make money off DSL and wireless networks. Partly because Paul Allen and his ilk don't think the small towns are worth the bother.
the difference between Chapter 11 bankruptcy (where the court holds off the creditors while you submit a plan and work towards paying everything off and becoming profitable) and "going dark"???
but if you want to play your mp3's through a stereo there are cheaper ways to do it... using Linux of course.
Last year, when I wanted to play music in my computer room, I took an old 486/DX120, installed a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, found a cheap 20gb HD, scrounged an old 36X CD player, installed SuSE Linux, and sat it in the corner. Then I trotted down to Goodwill and found a nice Kenwood 75 watt-per-channel stereo amplifier for $29.95 and a pair of bookshelf speakers for $7.95. I then drove over to the Radio Shack store and bought an adapter that allows the audio out from the SB16 to go to the L/R inputs of the amp.
So, for about $120 I have a complete Linux system with 20gb of music on it. I run it from an rlogin session running mp3blaster but, because it also runs Apache, I can set it up to broadcast music to every computer in the house. And the price INCLUDES the amplifier and speakers!!!
But wait, it gets better. For that same $120 I can also export an X11 session to listen to internet radio and control it on any X/box. Plus I can set up SMB and NFS shares to allow the machine to be used as a file server AND music server!!!
Want more? Okay... I can also export a Gnutella and/or Napster client and download music from the 'net. Or do it via a news client and the usenet.
As a bonus, I can ssh into my firewall, rlogin to the mp3 box, and wake my kids up in time for school from 1,000 miles away!! (I recommend rap for this.)
The only thing I haven't done yet is make it into a CD burner; I do that on my wife's machine (under, I'm afraid, Windoze). But still, with a little bit of scrounging almost any Linux geek can come up with the same (or better) system for the same (or lower) money.
The best part is that I'm the first guy on my block to have my kids yell at me, "Dad, will you turn that damn music down?"
From the 2 booths at the "Linux Hatchery" (take a left at the shiatzu chairs and continue to the end of nowhere) to the lack of big names (IBM, Oracle, Sun, Sharp) to the ham-handed "security" policies (they kept kicking people out of the Hilton area and making them stand outside for 30 minutes to hear keynotes) to the lack of attendees (just walk right onto a shuttle bus at 4:15pm on opening day), this Comdex sucked. When the biggest "new thing" was the Handspring Treo and the number of companies offering massage chairs and pain therapy outnumber Linux/Unix booths 10 to 1, it's time to give up on Comdex. Apparently all the *nix people already did.
That's what "contingency" means... that the pay is contingent upon winning. Of course, show me a lawyer who'll take a contingency case against an open source developer and I'll show you a lawyer who graduated "summa cum duh" from his law school.
Just what the world needs. I get at least one application every day from "web developers" who want to tap into that vast market for web pages out there. Each and every one has done at least one web page. Some have done two or three. They can all use Frontpage but none of them can read their HTML, few have heard of XML, and they all pronounce Linux "lie-nix".
I know a phone tech who wants $36,000 a year cuz he is "really a web developer". He'd be better off learning what DNS means.
I think the answer to poverty is not quick-and-easy training in some buzz-word technology or how to use some piece of software. I think that the groups involved in leadership of minority groups have to take some responsibility for their own community failings and start to drive their kids towards real, thorough (that means "hard work") education.
Ask the vendor to modify the SLA to specifically cover the contingency of exploits and how they will be dealt with. Your vendor might try to claim that the 99.9999 uptime would cover this, but I'd counter that a server which is up but exploited is useless.
Long ago on a 32 foot cruising sailboat....
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somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in the confining spaces of a sailboat 32 feet long and 10 feet wide, there was a 3-year-old red-headed girl. This little girl had to herself a bed approximately 2 feet wide and 5.5 feet long. At the foot of the bed was a bookcase whcih contained all the children's books in the knwn universe and from them she learned a love of reading.
But a little red-headed girl does not live by books alone... she needed toys. Toys to make houses, cabins, cottages, kitchens, bedrooms, villages, cars, motorcycles, boats (not many boats, actually), flying machines of unimaginable proportions, castles, dungeons... in short, everything. Where oh where would this little red-headed girl find the room to take along so many toys on such a small sailboat for such a long journey?
Well boys and girls, behind the pillow where her head rested every night was a door; and behind that door was a tiny cupboard; and in that cupboard, resting in the dark where no one else could see (and only she could find it) was the only toy a 3-year-old red-headed girl needed for a 5-year-long journey around the Pacific Ocean on a 32-foot sailboat.
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who drove the Exxon Valdez into Bligh Reef... it was a fully licensed, apparently sober, third mate who was qualified according to the US Coast Guard to be in charge of that ship in those waters. The job of guiding the ship from the pilot station to the exit of Prince William Sound at Cape Hinchinbrook should have been a no-brainer but the 3rd mate couldn't manage it despite having been told by a watchstander that the buoy marking the channel was on the wrong side of the ship.
I don't know why everyone assumes that the Captain was responsible for this; Exxon required him to submit a plethora of reports as soon as the pilot disembarked and he went down to his cabin to do it. He was never convicted of any criminal activity or found guilty of any liability. The USCG officers who claimed they could smell alcohol on the Captain's breath were in an environment similar to standing with their noses up your gas tank filler opening; millions of gallons of volatile vapors making it so difficult to breathe that some crew members put Scott Air Packs on to get to the bridge.
Statements like this are like declaring that your father is responsible for your car accident just because he is, after all, your father.
Sure... no one has ever thought of it, but we'd count it as one of the three. These questions don't get them a job, they just get their resume read. What we're after is evidence that candidates have exposed themselves to a broad range of IT subjects. Far too many simply tell us they can "run every program Microsoft ever made".
We wouldn't count helping working to further non-profits goals as competing. But as an example, one recent resume listed a ten year period of being "Chief Executive Officer" of an entity with a name during which period he also worked at several companies doing the exact same things.
If we hire someone as a consultant, we don't want them out there trying to further their own business while a paycheck from us supports them. But if you are doing weekend work for non-profits (or even open-source) we support that as a contribution to the community.
Anyone who contacts my firm (consulting, networking, administration) for a job gets asked one question right off the bat. This question eliminates lots of cookie-cutter certified newbies.
"Name 3 operating systems NOT made by Microsoft."
If candidates mention Cisco's IOS, Linux or any of the Unixes they get asked to send in a resume.
We are not very interested in certifications. Our experience with certified people has been mixed, but generally if they had good experience that was more important than any certs they had.
We also round file resumes which indicate that the candidate worked at his own business while also working for someone else. Especially if they mention doing the same things. We sure don't want our own employees out there competing with us on their weekends.
because the packets are all carried locally so no one has to pay for the connectivity to the rest of the Internet. The article talks about cool things like live cams on beaches and as long as few people are interested in sending packets anywhere else, this free system will (mostly) work.
/. most users want lots of access for free. What this article barely touches on is who provides the connectivity to the mainland or Asia? Who provides the IP space? Unless you NAT, the IP addresses for a large network like this might grow into would cost a lot of money. Who pays for the email server? For that matter, who pays for the $800 access points?
However, in my experience most users want 'Net access and from reading most posts on
Do the people using this system expect the founder to maintain it forever for no money? What happens when he no longer can (or want to)?
DSL and other broadband companies are going bankrupt all over the country because they cannot afford to provide a t1 to every user for $35 a month and still pay for their outbound traffic and maintenance. How the hell will this completely free system support its infrastructure?
You whiners have sat here and watched DSL providers compete themselves into bankruptcy because no one can afford to give you the bandwidth you think you deserve for $30/month, and now you bitch because someone has capped bandwidth. Well, duh. Apparently none of you can add. No ISP can afford to buy bandwidth and then sell it at a loss. It's simple economics. The only way we'll see unlimited bandwidth is within city-wide (or county-wide) networks where the infrastructure is paid for by the taxpayer and the media content (television, music, radio, etc) comes from a head-end located on the LAN.
Expect (and deserve) bandwidth caps on anything going out onto the WAN. Or expect to pay through the nose for your Morpheus habit.
One of the reasons for using Linux is its versatility. If manufacturers want a Linux device to take off, they need to put some of that versatility into it. USB, Ethernet, and a standard expansion port would have made a big difference in the success of the Agenda.
in searching for your own name. If Google returns your own name accurately (as it does mine), then there is little use registering yourname.com because people can find you as easily using Google. This is the telling point in his argument; an example that is not commercialized that underscores his point.
Of course, the search engines aren't the only reason for the drop in registration, but they play a part... and perhaps a very important part.
They have killed off the only real market they had and due to lack of parts they won't be able to penetrate the market they want. Retail channels will no longer order Visors and cannot order Treos. Customers who bought Visors (like me) will remember this when they finally knock on our doors to sell Treos.
Anyone who buys a Visor now is crazy if he/she thinks that Handspring will still be around for support.
There must be great rejoicing in Redmond today.
We switched to SuSE at version 4.0 of RH (the one that broke glibc) and have never looked back. That was some 4 or 5 years ago. SuSE is not as pricey as RH - and we *always* buy a new set of disks, books, and registration for our customers - and it is the easiest install IMHO.
I am still installing routinely on 500mb drives and 16mb of RAM using machines thrown out by other clients. These make dandy firewalls and printer servers plus I have one P133 running my mp3 box and doing my file serving.
SuSE rocks... just did an install on a Dell server using ext2 for boot and ext3 for files... dual 18gb ultra scsi, dual P933, hot swap drives and power supplies and 1mb of ram. I think he paid about $2k for it. Gonna replace his ancient NT4 box and no one will ever notice!!! Gotta love it!
to=lnxteam@microsoft.com,ctladdr= (500/100), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=esmtp, relay=mail4.microsoft.com. [131.107.3.122], stat=Sent (2.6.0 Queued mail for delivery)
So, at least it hasn't bounced... perhaps there is more truth to this story that we thought.
I cannot imagine 2-meter wavelength being referred to as "very long". They may be using signals in the 140mHz range (VHF) to communicate with submarines but the signals are certainly not penetrating the deep ocean.
Last I heard (and it's been a while, I admit) the USN was communicating (one-way) to submerged submarines using a wavelength of about 6000 meters (50kHz) from a million-watt transmitter near Arlington, Washington (Jim Creek). This station was located in a valley in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains that faced WSW and the antennas were strung from one ridge across to the other.
When you drove up to the station you had to park with your bumper against a grounded barricade so that the car wouldn't act as a capacitor and build up a charge which would be discharged (through you!) when you tried to open your car door.
IS THERE A RISK OF DOS?
Yes, absolutely! Ham radio operators have done moonbounce and many of them routinely communicate via satellite (transmitting to a satellite and receiving signals from someone else transmitting to a satellite - "hamsat"). There are also RF amplifier designs that would surely overwhelm (or at least degrade) your signals. Anyone with technical knowledge of RF and some skills at putting a system together could DOS you. Of course, these signals could be traced so that the DOS could not last very long without serious risk to the perpetrator.
IS THERE A RISK OF DECIPHERING COMMAND CODES?
Again, yes. In order to decipher these codes all a one has to do is locate in the vicinity of your physical command center, buy (or build) a receiver capable of detecting the frequencies you use, and put up an antenna (under the guise of amateur radio if necessary). Now they can sniff your uplink and downlink. Once you have access to both of these it's only a matter of time and intelligence before they determine your data structure.
IS PHYSICAL SECURITY ENOUGH?
No. Information within a company can be likened to a conspiracy and no conspiracy is ever safe. Someone, at some time, will see their own self-interest as higher priority than the group's interest. A perfect example of this is CIA's Project Jennifer (the Hughes Glomar Explorer). The newsworthiness of the project overwhelmed some of the participants with a sense of their own self-interest and they told news agencies.
Someone at your facility has probably already told someone else NOT at your facility enough details to allow them to do your system harm, if they wished.
SHOULD THIS INFORMATION BE ENCRYPTED?
Yes, absolutely! What's more, it should be encrypted under a method that will allow the key to be changed on a regular basis.
Given the expense of losing control of a satellite, the costs of security would be a pittance in comparison. Given what you've told us about the signals security at your facility, I imagine that the physical security and network security (does anyone have a modem in their desktop so they can work from home?) is likewise not very good. I would recommend a thorough analysis of all of these.
However, the iBook is a different matter. I can see how an engineer would be interested in one of those. Unix on a small, relatively potent laptop with lots of I/O for network use (firewire, ethernet, USB), decent battery life (5 hours or so), and reasonably priced. So I would definitely consider an iBook running OS-X (but with 256mb of RAM.. the 128mb is too puny).
Perhaps my attitude is not that uncommon, given that most reports of "engineers switching in droves" were based on watching engineeers who were away from their office (at trade shows) using laptops. But no one is moving me away from Linux!
I use Linux on my desktop for 99% of my job (and it will be 100% when we get a Citrix box running). I use Linux on a laptop for 100% of my field work. We had a loaner MAC with OS-X on it to look at last summer and we all liked it fine... but no one switched to it. We set up a VNC so I could get a MAC desktop on my KDE desktop... that was kinda cool. But when it came time to return the MAC no one cried... we just packed it up and hauled it away.
My work habits are sloppy enough to need the four desktops KDE gives me (or more if I wish) and I much prefer the KDE desktop to the OS-X version. Maybe when I can justify paying the $800 (and up) for a iMAC versus the $500 for a comparable PC, or when I can give up the clear path to hardware upgrades, or when more of the cool network tools one gets with a Linux distro appear on the MAC I'll switch. But I don't see that happening soon.
Our firm sells "solutions" to small businesses and smaller government agencies and rural school districts. We are agressively pushing Linux in roles of file servers, routers, web servers and mail servers and, where we can, as desktop workstations.
The servers work well... in fact they work so well we are wondering whether our push in that direction has been a good idea from an economic standpoint. Clients who called us weekly with MS servers now call us maybe 4 times a year; usually for problems unassociated with the servers but the workstations. I actually called on a client to ask them if they still liked us since we hadn't heard from them for months. "There wasn't anything wrong", was the response.
Workstations are more problematic. We find, over and over, that clients are using some critical application that only runs on MS. This is seldom MS Office, but more often specialized software aimed at, for instance, attorneys, mortgage companies, real estate assessors, agricultural businesses, etc. We can almost always put common files on a Linux box, but it's much more difficult to run these critical applications on Linux desktops.
We are now looking at Citrix for a solution to this problem but it doesn't come cheap and can, in fact, negate much of the advantages of using Linux on the desktop in the first place.
So, from our point of view, it's not MS Office or any lack of support (our clients rely on us for support for all their platforms anyway) but it's the individual job-specific applications that present the biggest hurdle to putting Linux on the business desk.
Quickbooks on the Web looked very cool on one of my Engineer's browser... until *I* tried it. I run Linux with Netscape and I got redirected to a page that told me I was running the wrong version of MSIE and that their "Web Based" accounting package only works on Win95, Win98, Win2K, ME, and XP. So much for the convenience of using your accounting package from anyplace in the world. Cross off Quickbooks from this list... because they require MSIE 5.0 or better they render themselves out of the running
"Umm... as a distributor/sales, you would never use spectrum analyzers, digital scopes or ATE; you buy your products and if they break, send 'em back under warranty. To do otherwise is folly."
Ummm... nope. What if you have a wireless network running nicely and someone comes into the area and installs a node right next to you with antennas pointing right at your node? How do you track them? After all, even if it's 2.4gHz spectrum, deliberate and milicious interferance is still against the law.
You *could* use a spectrum analyzer... or you could make creative use of directional antennas and the abilities of some off-the-shelf equipment to do site surveys.
At some point in the last ten years we quit paying attention to the technology and started thinking only about the score. Which big outfit would get bigger. Somewhere along the line the nuts and bolts of this industry got sidetracked. Marlon and his Odessa Office Equipment business (housed in an old warehouse in town across from the local restaurant) kept an eye on the basics: give customers a service that works and charge them a fair price for it.
Marlon isn't a Linux/Unix guru, but his workshop is that of a "hands on" guy; littered with parts, antenna wires, soldering irons and tools. No spectrum analyzers, digital scopes, or automated test beds... Marlon uses the built-in site survey capabilities of some wireless radios to do 75% of what that equipment would do at 1% of the cost.
This sort of "can do" thinking is why I think that the spirit of America shines brightest in its small towns and rural areas and not in the corporate hallways. Marlon learned enough about microwave systems to be able to design workable wireless networks (and DSL systems too, although the article doesn't speak to that), sell them, install them, connect them, and keep them working. My guess is that Paul Allen couldn't do any one of those things.
Marlon probably wouldn't last a week in a corporate environment (if they'd hire him at all), but he can do something none of them can: Marlon can make money off DSL and wireless networks. Partly because Paul Allen and his ilk don't think the small towns are worth the bother.
the difference between Chapter 11 bankruptcy (where the court holds off the creditors while you submit a plan and work towards paying everything off and becoming profitable) and "going dark"???
No wonder so many dot.coms went tits-up
but if you want to play your mp3's through a stereo there are cheaper ways to do it... using Linux of course.
Last year, when I wanted to play music in my computer room, I took an old 486/DX120, installed a SoundBlaster 16 card in it, put an old 3com 3c503 NIC into it, found a cheap 20gb HD, scrounged an old 36X CD player, installed SuSE Linux, and sat it in the corner. Then I trotted down to Goodwill and found a nice Kenwood 75 watt-per-channel stereo amplifier for $29.95 and a pair of bookshelf speakers for $7.95. I then drove over to the Radio Shack store and bought an adapter that allows the audio out from the SB16 to go to the L/R inputs of the amp.
So, for about $120 I have a complete Linux system with 20gb of music on it. I run it from an rlogin session running mp3blaster but, because it also runs Apache, I can set it up to broadcast music to every computer in the house. And the price INCLUDES the amplifier and speakers!!!
But wait, it gets better. For that same $120 I can also export an X11 session to listen to internet radio and control it on any X/box. Plus I can set up SMB and NFS shares to allow the machine to be used as a file server AND music server!!!
Want more? Okay... I can also export a Gnutella and/or Napster client and download music from the 'net. Or do it via a news client and the usenet.
As a bonus, I can ssh into my firewall, rlogin to the mp3 box, and wake my kids up in time for school from 1,000 miles away!! (I recommend rap for this.)
The only thing I haven't done yet is make it into a CD burner; I do that on my wife's machine (under, I'm afraid, Windoze). But still, with a little bit of scrounging almost any Linux geek can come up with the same (or better) system for the same (or lower) money.
The best part is that I'm the first guy on my block to have my kids yell at me, "Dad, will you turn that damn music down?"
From the 2 booths at the "Linux Hatchery" (take a left at the shiatzu chairs and continue to the end of nowhere) to the lack of big names (IBM, Oracle, Sun, Sharp) to the ham-handed "security" policies (they kept kicking people out of the Hilton area and making them stand outside for 30 minutes to hear keynotes) to the lack of attendees (just walk right onto a shuttle bus at 4:15pm on opening day), this Comdex sucked. When the biggest "new thing" was the Handspring Treo and the number of companies offering massage chairs and pain therapy outnumber Linux/Unix booths 10 to 1, it's time to give up on Comdex. Apparently all the *nix people already did.
That's what "contingency" means... that the pay is contingent upon winning. Of course, show me a lawyer who'll take a contingency case against an open source developer and I'll show you a lawyer who graduated "summa cum duh" from his law school.
Just what the world needs. I get at least one application every day from "web developers" who want to tap into that vast market for web pages out there. Each and every one has done at least one web page. Some have done two or three. They can all use Frontpage but none of them can read their HTML, few have heard of XML, and they all pronounce Linux "lie-nix".
I know a phone tech who wants $36,000 a year cuz he is "really a web developer". He'd be better off learning what DNS means.
I think the answer to poverty is not quick-and-easy training in some buzz-word technology or how to use some piece of software. I think that the groups involved in leadership of minority groups have to take some responsibility for their own community failings and start to drive their kids towards real, thorough (that means "hard work") education.
Ask the vendor to modify the SLA to specifically cover the contingency of exploits and how they will be dealt with. Your vendor might try to claim that the 99.9999 uptime would cover this, but I'd counter that a server which is up but exploited is useless.
somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in the confining spaces of a sailboat 32 feet long and 10 feet wide, there was a 3-year-old red-headed girl. This little girl had to herself a bed approximately 2 feet wide and 5.5 feet long. At the foot of the bed was a bookcase whcih contained all the children's books in the knwn universe and from them she learned a love of reading.
But a little red-headed girl does not live by books alone... she needed toys. Toys to make houses, cabins, cottages, kitchens, bedrooms, villages, cars, motorcycles, boats (not many boats, actually), flying machines of unimaginable proportions, castles, dungeons... in short, everything. Where oh where would this little red-headed girl find the room to take along so many toys on such a small sailboat for such a long journey?
Well boys and girls, behind the pillow where her head rested every night was a door; and behind that door was a tiny cupboard; and in that cupboard, resting in the dark where no one else could see (and only she could find it) was the only toy a 3-year-old red-headed girl needed for a 5-year-long journey around the Pacific Ocean on a 32-foot sailboat.
Legos.
And she lived happily ever after.