When is someone going to offer a Linux PDA designed for engineers instead of the marketing department?
There is already a plethora of PDAs for accountants and salespeople, but the niche for engineers remains largely unfilled. What a perfect spot for Linux! Give us something that will do the math, do the analysis, hook up to networks, and crunch the data without costing us $5,000.
Our group is very interested in a PDA network analyzer that can compete with the Flukes. Yet every damn PDA comes out as a clone of Palm. Get a clue folks... even the Palms aren't selling!!
It seems to me that a Linux-based PDA with appropriate interfaces (10/100 ethernet would be perfect) would find several niche markets. Out of the several Linux PDAs (and our firm has a couple of them) this Sharp is the ONLY one which has any useable connetivity. I wonder if the OS (based on Lineo's) is up to the challenge.
Of course, it has taken them a decade or so. One of the most annoying things to those of us who install (or re-install) MS software is that they NEVER update their cd's. A client could buy a brand new CD of NT4 and it would be virtually identical to the CD sold in 1995. Then the approximately gazillion security patches would have to be applied... every time you changed something.
This latest offering isn't much different than business as usual for MS in that patches to their software are offered but no changes to the products they are now shipping is contemplated.
Contrast this with the Linux/BSD communities where a completely new environment is produced every few months with older security holes patched for you.
with the "backdoor" that Ashcroft feels is so important? Now that the US Government has so blatantly advertised its intent to try to get encryption standards with a "key" that can be known to a government agency, why would anyone "upgrade" to such a system? It's not like the ones we use now don't work.
Had the US Government been doing the things that it, itself, recommended back in 1991 to better secure airports, the terrorists would have had no chance to hijack the aircraft in the first place. Corporate (airlines) interests fought those to a standstill, however. Now they blather about a backdoor in encryption systems as if that would fix the problems they, themselves, ignored
In the 70s a sign went up on I-90 leading out of town: "Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights". Some 35,000 people including mechanics, technicians, engineers, and managers were laid off from just one company (Boeing) and many of them moved away. Housing prices plummeted; you could get a house for the $25 it cost to file a Quit-Claim deed and take over someone's payments.
Boeing survived *because* they laid off workers in a time of severe business downturn. The survived to hire back people to fill those 35,000 jobs and more besides. The Seattle area diversified and became less dependent on one company for its economic well-being.
Increasing benefits to laid-off workers will only cause more workers - who would have kept their jobs under different rules - to be laid off. If business declines, companies must adjust to the new business. Or fail.
This has nothing to do with greedy shareholders demanding more profits. Take a look at the economy, Jon, and you will see that there are no profits out there right now for most companies. It has to do with survival of the company.
Uh oh, no more time to preach to Katz... the clue train is coming and he doesn't want to miss it again.
An extension of this argument could be made to say that the Germans lost WWII when they invaded Poland (or even when they planned it). Trying to pin the result of something that lasted some 6 years upon one single event seems futile to me. Perhaps your point should be that wars are won or lost more on mistakes made rather than on brilliant strategy but this is also debatable.
Your subsequent points that technology prolonged the war is also somewhat flawed; the invention of the nuclear bomb pretty clearly ended the war as far as Japan was concerned and if that is not technology then the meaning of the term has evolved beyond recognition.
Also, your contention that the US depends upon "American citizen agents" is incorrect. During my several years as a covert officer for CIA there were few such animals (including naturalized citizens). There were many American citizen controllers of foreign citizen agents, but an American citizen agent is a laughable notion to a foreign intelligence officer.
That technical intelligence assets are "totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas" is specious on the face of the statement. If recon photos show construction activity at a site inside a hostile area, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict increased activity. Any predictive ability is more than "totally incapable".
American intelligence has moved beyond human assets for better or for worse largely because they are so difficult to recruit and run. And their information is always suspect. I always said that what the Agency needed was a "capitalist movement". The religion of communism clearly provided the Soviet Union with a cadre of dedicated foreign nationals who put the Soviet interests above any national interests.
Of course, by the 50s and 60s these assets were getting long in the tooth (or dead) and the clear advances in creature comforts of Western societies over those in the SB made it difficult to recruit foreigners or even to retain their own controllers. Then, of course, there were the stupid agent management decisions.
Alan Turing's contributions to crypto are widely recognized by most who had to work in that field (which would be any intelligence officer). What a terrible waste of a fine mind. His contributions to computer crypto largely made it possible for intelligence (certainly American intelligence) to operate so effectively around the world.
we can buy full distributions of Linux (SuSE, usually) and pass the costs ($79... whoopee) on to our clients. Most of the installations are servers (and most of *those* are Samba and email servers) and each and every one of them saves the client a minimum of $800. Even the NAT servers save money because we usually install those on older boxen often using floppy-disk distros. No upgrades to win98, etc to gain "connection sharing".
The difference in costs over win98 and Linux are nothing compared to the difference between win2k/NT and Linux; and the client gets vasty superior operability for his(her) money.
How much money have we saved using Linux. I'd hate to have to calculate it but it must be in the tens of thousands!!
would be system admins and network technicians at least once a week. Most of them come from our local community college which is a Windows school (and buys nothing from the community, btw). Our first question is always the same: "Name three operating systems NOT made by Microsoft". You would be amazed how many wanna-bees fail.
to evaluate the unit as a field service diagnosis tool. Since we spend a lot of time trying to fix broken networks which are populated mostly by MS operating systems, it would be nice to be able to carry a PDA that we can just plug into the LAN with the sorts of tools Linux has available for diagnosis.
Unfortunately, there is no way currently to connect ethernet to the Agenda. As soon as there is we will implement it and evaluate further.
In the meantime, the Agenda is about as good as any PDA for the standard PDA functions.
and if you want PDA applications then you would do fine with this ($249) unit. Scheduling, calendaring, notes and contact lists work very well (I have a Visor and can switch between them with no problem).
However we really wanted the Agenda to test its Linux compatibility (very nice, actually) and as a future replacement for Linux-based laptops as a network analysis tool.
Our engineers travel to many sites over the course of a day and we frequently have to go back to the car to get our laptops to make checks on their LAN. The Agenda, which does not (yet) have a PCMCIA attachment, runs a good enough Linux to do that; at least eventually.
The IPAQ would be a good choice for us but it's expensive, unfriendly to battery life, and if we buy in the USA we donate to MS.
If you want a real Linux on a PDA now at a reasonable price with good standard apps and the likelihood of future expandibility try the Agenda.
Nice of Taco to jump in here.... just what we need TWO reviews in one (and no chance for Katz to respond since he doesn't have the POWER).
I saw Tomb Raider last night and enjoyed it. Not only did *I* enjoy it, but my wife, my 18-yr-old son, our two friends (in their 30s) and their three sons (12 down to 5). Nope.. it wasn't Dr. Zhivago but it was fun. Even watching Lara's boobs sway when she ran was fun.
Katz was right on with this movie... it's meant as fun and not great cinema. Taco needs to learn to keep his finger off that button.
and my company specializes in replacing windows servers with Linux servers. In the past six months we have:
1. Maintained one school district running all Linux... costs them $400 a month (3 servers);
2. Installed a RAID Linux file server in a small lawyer's office... 2x30GB turnkey for $1200 hardware included;
3. Replaced a winNT3.51 file server for another attorney, converting all his files... $700 using his box/cpu;
4. Installed DNS/DHCP/Mail server running Linux for a local ISP using an old dual-PPro board they had laying around... cost $250;
5. Three NAT servers for small businesses using Squid proxies... converted from old 486 machines for $200 each;
6. 4 Lineo NAT boxes (the Moreton Bay units) for clients running fiber from the local PUD... cost about $400 each to the clients installed (running VPNs);
7. NAT/Squid for local governmental agency which finally got ADSL to work... another conversion for about $300;
That's seven installations from one SuSE 7.1 box plus the Lineos through May from one, 2-man shop in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Everyone counts the big boys... but it's the grass-roots where the revolution is taking place.
for writing their damn web sites to the MSIE specs. I can't tell you now many sites don't work on Konquerer or Netscape (which I normally use on my desktop) and I have to go to MSIE in order to make the components work.
So they bought into the MS vision of how their web sites should look, and now MS has weaseled their way into a position to steal their users.
Maybe more of them will write to the standards now.
misses what is lining up for the future. After reading his rants for a few years, and spending the next decade pretty much trying to ignore him, I'm certainly not surprised that he is clueless when it comes to the future of "broadband" access.
That future is fiber and fiber is, as you read this, being spread around counties in at least one state (Washington) by public-owned utility districts (PUDs). Within 3 years at least one rural county (Grant County) will have every building that is connected to the electrical grid also connected to fiber. Enough bandwidth to run telephone (VoIP), Internet, Cable Television (now *there* is a switch), and probably more.
Two small towns in this county are already pretty much wired up to fiber with customers choosing amongst several local ISPs for their bandwidth. In fact, anyone can be an ISP if they are willing to pay for the bandwidth out (via the fiber, naturally) themselves.
Of the three entities capable of stretching their existing infrastructure to accomodate fast 'net access (telephone companies, cable companies and electrical power distribution companies), the last one is the one almost completely ignored by the "popular media" and, not surprisingly, Dvorak.
It is likely to be the dark-horse in this race. Dvorak will probably claim to have predicted it
This idea has been around for a long time...
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Flywheel UPS
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· Score: 2
Back in the 1970s when I was working aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer (http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.h tm) (hunting manganese nodules; wink wink) the control system for the heavy lift mechanism was based on 16vdc CMOS technology. The voltage spikes aboard a 50,000 ton ship with 4480 volt mains could be truly extraordinary and to eliminate these spikes we had a flywheel-type UPS.
This UPS wasn't really used as a UPS because a loss of power would affect more than just the control system (the hydraulic systems ran off of pumps which were operated by electric motors) but it sure ironed out the spikes nicely.
Our company had a contract to maintain a local governmental network that was, to say the least, convoluted. Designed and implemented by a "talented amateur" who had subsequently left for greener pastures, this network worked well but was a collection of NT, win98, win95 and Unix (HPUX) with sister agencies and their networks thrown into the mix.
When we took the system over there was no map of the network's topography and our people undertook to trace it. Since the LAN extends over 70 miles in one direction (and over microwave) and 35 miles in two others (over landlines) we didn't feel right about expending their money simply driving around to find routers. Instead, when we were on a job in the area, we'd look for the routers, bridges, switches and hubs and put them into a map we kept at the office.
One router, however, defied our attempts to locate it. It was a Cisco and connected a couple of the legs of the wide-area part of their LAN but we never had the time to just go trace wires down to find it.
This outfit fired us last year and has been sifting through networking firms trying to find someone who could make the lan their "talented amateur" left them work right (they never could stand to have the LAN go down even for a moment).
As far as I know the router is still missing. Maybe it's behind a wall. LOL
Steve Jobs has never been famous for paying attention to the desires of even a substantial minority of his users. Anyone remember the Newton; killed off by Jobs just about the time PDAs started to take off?
My suggestion is to start an open-source project on sourceforge. The best part is that if it works on OSX it will almost certainly work on Linux.
Hmm... do ya suppose that OSX may migrate frustrated Mac people to Linux?
There are several movements afoot to provide fiber to rural homes; but not by the telephone companies. The movements are largely being undertaken by Public Utility Districts (PUDs).
In Washington State the mostly-agricultural Grant County has over 7,000 miles of fiber laid by the Grant County PUD (http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/default2.htm). This system, when it's completed, will connect every home, farm, and business to the fiber network and allow the users to select from a among a group of competing ISPs for their email and bandwidth. Local ISPs can also sign on for their bandwidth out to the 'net.
The 1-year-old project originated when the PUD engineers lobbied for a remote-meter-reading system and escalated when someone suggested that they could just as well provide high-bandwidth using fiber.
GCPUD is farther along than most but it's far from alone. Several other Public Utility Districts in the State are following close behind them. However, there are some pitfalls: a few legislators, supported by the telephone companies, are fighting it with legislation prohibiting the PUDs from providing Internet access.
How ironic that rural America, long ignored by the large ISPs (AOL doesn't even have a local phone number in this county), telephone companies and cable/DSL providers, will be among the first to get bandwidth connections that will be the envy of the country.
While few of you highly skilled techies are likely to spontaneously become Asian or Native American overnight, you are certain to grow older. (Or die, of course.) Look around and count the number of employees over 50 (or even 40) you work with. Now count the number of years you have left until you are old enough to be considered outdated. (Oh, I know... you are going to always keep your skills up to date... yeah, right.) Unions aren't perfect, but they stick up for all the workers not just the super-talented ones. They negotiate for the older workers who bring with them a history of why things are done the way they are as well as the worker who was injured in an accident and is disabled.
I can hear you say, "but discrimination on the basis of age or disability is illegal." Only if you can prove it. If you are in a union, you know you at least have someone who will be on your side when your company decides 35 is too old to be a good programmer.
Dang... I didn't Know I Wasn't Supposed to Like it
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Antitrust
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· Score: 1
Where did Jon Katz come from? I hear him on PBS and I see him on Slashdot and he almost never says anything remotely accurate. Yet the media seems ready to adopt him as the geek spokesman. Would you (Slashdot) kindly stop perpetuating this shit?
My wife and I and our teenaged son all went to see this movie. Two of us are geeks; all of us liked the movie. Real *nix commands (perhaps not exactly used in the correct way but real *nix commands nevertheless), reference to open-source, a software CEO as the bad guy and a guy nicknamed "Stinky" in the plot. What geek hasn't worked with someone who thinks showering is a low priority?
For once Hollywood came close. I give the movie 3 out of 4 stars and both reviews 1 out of 400 stars.
Twentyfive years ago my employer (a corporation which had divisions in several cities) sent me to Mexico as a temporary member of a new management team. Up until then I had been an engineer but since they knew I spoke Spanish they asked me to take the job even though I had never done production management (or any management, for that matter). The temporary job was to last for six months during which I was to select and train a Mexican replacement.
Four months into the job (during which I had tripled production over the previous idiots who had been managing that place) they told me that my old job had been "eliminated" and I should just stay there. Since my wife had a good job back home and we owned a nice house on a good bass fishing lake, I didn't take this well.
I reacted two ways. First of all I sent out resumes. Then I made sure that everyone I talked to in the Company heard the story. Since I had traveled to many Divisions in order to secure orders/parts for the Mexican Division, I had made quite a few new contacts. Soon the managers in these Divisions found their personnel reluctant to take temporary jobs outside their area.
Two weeks after being told my job was eliminated, I received a telephone call from them saying it was all a mistake and I had my old job back. I promoted my foreman to Production Manager and returned home in the six months time period.
Three months later I accepted a new job from one of the companies to which I had sent resumes. The new job paid twice the salary and offered many more benefits. When the Chief Engineer learned I was leaving he said, "you are prostituting yourself".
"No, John" I replied, "we all prostitute ourselves... I'm simply changing pimps."
As a partner in a networking business and administrator for several school districts and ISP's, I can say that we use all of them (including the new MAC OS-X). They all have their uses and their pitfalls but if you are careful and pay attention to details and don't try to do too much on one box, any of them will work.
The school districts which are rural and poor like it when we put Linux to use because of the money they save in original costs and then in admin costs. A mail server and squid server in one farming community nearby have been working continuously for two years; only going down for power problems which lasted longer than the UPS.
This same school district has a brand new computer center in the elementary school with Apple iMACS for workstations and a G4 running OS-X as a server. Runs great.
There are three NT boxes running Novell for their administration and grade accounting.
An ISP uses an NT4 server for their client accounting and authentication and another NT4 server for web-based email. They all run fine but they all run only one thing. The same ISP has a Linux box for an IRC server and a freeBSD box to host backup services for that IRC network.
In our office we use an Alpha Multia as a firewall, Linux on a dual Pentium Pro 200 as our file server (Samba). I have a KVM switch to go between a WIN98 desktop and a Linux desktop. I just installed Linux (SuSE) on an old Fujitsu laptop my wife gave me when we bought her new HP (running Win98). A (now former) partner uses win2k on his desktop and in his new job as IS director.
We have a MicroVax 3400 we got in trade that we want to put BSD on just for kicks.
Essentially, we don't impose our ideas of what works onto our clients. We give them what they want on a platform they don't have to retrain everyone on. If they need to retrain anyway, then we can move them to a more suitable platform (assuming the one they are on isn't).
The only problem I had with win2k is that it wouldn't see the 3com 3c503 NIC on the older desktop box I tried to put it on so I had to shift to win98 since I didn't have another NIC handy.
I have no problems with Linux or BSD and we plan to experiment with a port of OpenMail to see how that works with Outlook. We are also experimenting with locally-hosted ASPs in an effort to help clients with the cross-platform problems.
Be nimble and be of service to your clients and use the best OS for their needs and you will hardly go wrong.
Funny then that Transvirtual has a web page showing screen shots of the iPaq running PocketLinux at
http://www.transvirtual.com/pocketlinux.htm)
And if the iPaq can't run Pocket Linux, why are there downloadables for both the Helios and the iPaq versions available on http://www.pocketlinux.com?
This, plus an article in the September issue of Linux Journal ("Compaq's Approach to Linux in your Hand") make me think that the iPaq can, indeed, run Linux.
Dvorak rated the internet as a fad not too many years ago. He (and ZDNet in general) ignored Linux until recently (and they STILL don't understand it). He's stated, at one time or another, that everything was dead and that everything was hot.
Dvorak is the computer world's version of a tabloid psychic. Make a zillion predictions and one or two of them is bound to be on target. Nevermind about the rest; people forget.
My school district has a dozen Linux computers. In a year it will probably have 100 Linux computers (especially with the new pricing of Win2k). Web designers need to understand that if they want maximum exposure, they need to design their pages for the greatest number of browsers. This nonsense of "looks best with netscape 4.6" or "best viewed under Windows Explorer" is insane.
On the bright side, the recent litigation launched by advocates of the blind for access to web pages may be good news for the Linux community as well. Lynx is already a popular tool for the blind and I've noticed that even some Linux web sites do not provide alternate links to their graphical ones.
In short, in the scramble to have the whizziest web page, the designers have lost track of the fact that there are others who deserve access.
However, even though I have to kill -9 Netscape a couple times a week, I still prefer it to a Win platform.
Let me try to give you my take on your question on two levels:
Level 1:
The most important facet to a man/woman romantic relationship is their compatability; to really connect with someone of the opposite sex. My wife and I met 26 years ago because her parents had two dirt-bikes parked in their driveway two blocks from where I lived (when I wasn't out on engineering assignments). I stopped, knocked on the door, found out one was hers, and we spent an entire summer riding the trails near our houses when I was home.
We went fishing, talked, packed picnics, visited islands and found out we liked each other... not long afterwards we found out we loved each other. We remain best friends - and lovers - today.
Level 2:
No one can guarentee that the person they choose as a life-partner will make it all the way. You could decide that this gal is too much of a risk, meet and marry a health nut, and find out that she has leukemia at age 27. Or you could have kids with another woman who carries some nasty gene; or find out that you do.
Life isn't fair, and married life is more unfair than most.
My advice to you (and it's worth every nickel you're paying for it) is to follow up with this woman and find out if she can be your best friend. If you share your life with your best friend, you'll find the strength to handle whatever comes in the future.
The simple fact that she shared her MS with you tells me that she is interested in you, and that she's honest and forthright. She is now wondering how you will react to her honesty.
Do not let this one get away without finding out more about yourselves as a couple. She sounds like she's worth some effort.
Slashdot Mirror
When is someone going to offer a Linux PDA designed for engineers instead of the marketing department?
There is already a plethora of PDAs for accountants and salespeople, but the niche for engineers remains largely unfilled. What a perfect spot for Linux! Give us something that will do the math, do the analysis, hook up to networks, and crunch the data without costing us $5,000.
Our group is very interested in a PDA network analyzer that can compete with the Flukes. Yet every damn PDA comes out as a clone of Palm. Get a clue folks... even the Palms aren't selling!!
It seems to me that a Linux-based PDA with appropriate interfaces (10/100 ethernet would be perfect) would find several niche markets. Out of the several Linux PDAs (and our firm has a couple of them) this Sharp is the ONLY one which has any useable connetivity. I wonder if the OS (based on Lineo's) is up to the challenge.
Of course, it has taken them a decade or so. One of the most annoying things to those of us who install (or re-install) MS software is that they NEVER update their cd's. A client could buy a brand new CD of NT4 and it would be virtually identical to the CD sold in 1995. Then the approximately gazillion security patches would have to be applied... every time you changed something.
This latest offering isn't much different than business as usual for MS in that patches to their software are offered but no changes to the products they are now shipping is contemplated.
Contrast this with the Linux/BSD communities where a completely new environment is produced every few months with older security holes patched for you.
with the "backdoor" that Ashcroft feels is so important? Now that the US Government has so blatantly advertised its intent to try to get encryption standards with a "key" that can be known to a government agency, why would anyone "upgrade" to such a system? It's not like the ones we use now don't work.
Had the US Government been doing the things that it, itself, recommended back in 1991 to better secure airports, the terrorists would have had no chance to hijack the aircraft in the first place. Corporate (airlines) interests fought those to a standstill, however. Now they blather about a backdoor in encryption systems as if that would fix the problems they, themselves, ignored
In the 70s a sign went up on I-90 leading out of town: "Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights". Some 35,000 people including mechanics, technicians, engineers, and managers were laid off from just one company (Boeing) and many of them moved away. Housing prices plummeted; you could get a house for the $25 it cost to file a Quit-Claim deed and take over someone's payments.
Boeing survived *because* they laid off workers in a time of severe business downturn. The survived to hire back people to fill those 35,000 jobs and more besides. The Seattle area diversified and became less dependent on one company for its economic well-being.
Increasing benefits to laid-off workers will only cause more workers - who would have kept their jobs under different rules - to be laid off. If business declines, companies must adjust to the new business. Or fail.
This has nothing to do with greedy shareholders demanding more profits. Take a look at the economy, Jon, and you will see that there are no profits out there right now for most companies. It has to do with survival of the company.
Uh oh, no more time to preach to Katz... the clue train is coming and he doesn't want to miss it again.
An extension of this argument could be made to say that the Germans lost WWII when they invaded Poland (or even when they planned it). Trying to pin the result of something that lasted some 6 years upon one single event seems futile to me. Perhaps your point should be that wars are won or lost more on mistakes made rather than on brilliant strategy but this is also debatable.
Your subsequent points that technology prolonged the war is also somewhat flawed; the invention of the nuclear bomb pretty clearly ended the war as far as Japan was concerned and if that is not technology then the meaning of the term has evolved beyond recognition.
Also, your contention that the US depends upon "American citizen agents" is incorrect. During my several years as a covert officer for CIA there were few such animals (including naturalized citizens). There were many American citizen controllers of foreign citizen agents, but an American citizen agent is a laughable notion to a foreign intelligence officer.
That technical intelligence assets are "totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas" is specious on the face of the statement. If recon photos show construction activity at a site inside a hostile area, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict increased activity. Any predictive ability is more than "totally incapable".
American intelligence has moved beyond human assets for better or for worse largely because they are so difficult to recruit and run. And their information is always suspect. I always said that what the Agency needed was a "capitalist movement". The religion of communism clearly provided the Soviet Union with a cadre of dedicated foreign nationals who put the Soviet interests above any national interests.
Of course, by the 50s and 60s these assets were getting long in the tooth (or dead) and the clear advances in creature comforts of Western societies over those in the SB made it difficult to recruit foreigners or even to retain their own controllers. Then, of course, there were the stupid agent management decisions.
Alan Turing's contributions to crypto are widely recognized by most who had to work in that field (which would be any intelligence officer). What a terrible waste of a fine mind. His contributions to computer crypto largely made it possible for intelligence (certainly American intelligence) to operate so effectively around the world.
we can buy full distributions of Linux (SuSE, usually) and pass the costs ($79... whoopee) on to our clients. Most of the installations are servers (and most of *those* are Samba and email servers) and each and every one of them saves the client a minimum of $800. Even the NAT servers save money because we usually install those on older boxen often using floppy-disk distros. No upgrades to win98, etc to gain "connection sharing".
The difference in costs over win98 and Linux are nothing compared to the difference between win2k/NT and Linux; and the client gets vasty superior operability for his(her) money.
How much money have we saved using Linux. I'd hate to have to calculate it but it must be in the tens of thousands!!
would be system admins and network technicians at least once a week. Most of them come from our local community college which is a Windows school (and buys nothing from the community, btw). Our first question is always the same: "Name three operating systems NOT made by Microsoft". You would be amazed how many wanna-bees fail.
to evaluate the unit as a field service diagnosis tool. Since we spend a lot of time trying to fix broken networks which are populated mostly by MS operating systems, it would be nice to be able to carry a PDA that we can just plug into the LAN with the sorts of tools Linux has available for diagnosis.
Unfortunately, there is no way currently to connect ethernet to the Agenda. As soon as there is we will implement it and evaluate further.
In the meantime, the Agenda is about as good as any PDA for the standard PDA functions.
and if you want PDA applications then you would do fine with this ($249) unit. Scheduling, calendaring, notes and contact lists work very well (I have a Visor and can switch between them with no problem).
However we really wanted the Agenda to test its Linux compatibility (very nice, actually) and as a future replacement for Linux-based laptops as a network analysis tool.
Our engineers travel to many sites over the course of a day and we frequently have to go back to the car to get our laptops to make checks on their LAN. The Agenda, which does not (yet) have a PCMCIA attachment, runs a good enough Linux to do that; at least eventually.
The IPAQ would be a good choice for us but it's expensive, unfriendly to battery life, and if we buy in the USA we donate to MS.
If you want a real Linux on a PDA now at a reasonable price with good standard apps and the likelihood of future expandibility try the Agenda.
Nice of Taco to jump in here.... just what we need TWO reviews in one (and no chance for Katz to respond since he doesn't have the POWER).
I saw Tomb Raider last night and enjoyed it. Not only did *I* enjoy it, but my wife, my 18-yr-old son, our two friends (in their 30s) and their three sons (12 down to 5). Nope.. it wasn't Dr. Zhivago but it was fun. Even watching Lara's boobs sway when she ran was fun.
Katz was right on with this movie... it's meant as fun and not great cinema. Taco needs to learn to keep his finger off that button.
and my company specializes in replacing windows servers with Linux servers. In the past six months we have:
1. Maintained one school district running all Linux... costs them $400 a month (3 servers);
2. Installed a RAID Linux file server in a small lawyer's office... 2x30GB turnkey for $1200 hardware included;
3. Replaced a winNT3.51 file server for another attorney, converting all his files... $700 using his box/cpu;
4. Installed DNS/DHCP/Mail server running Linux for a local ISP using an old dual-PPro board they had laying around... cost $250;
5. Three NAT servers for small businesses using Squid proxies... converted from old 486 machines for $200 each;
6. 4 Lineo NAT boxes (the Moreton Bay units) for clients running fiber from the local PUD... cost about $400 each to the clients installed (running VPNs);
7. NAT/Squid for local governmental agency which finally got ADSL to work... another conversion for about $300;
That's seven installations from one SuSE 7.1 box plus the Lineos through May from one, 2-man shop in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Everyone counts the big boys... but it's the grass-roots where the revolution is taking place.
for writing their damn web sites to the MSIE specs. I can't tell you now many sites don't work on Konquerer or Netscape (which I normally use on my desktop) and I have to go to MSIE in order to make the components work.
So they bought into the MS vision of how their web sites should look, and now MS has weaseled their way into a position to steal their users.
Maybe more of them will write to the standards now.
misses what is lining up for the future. After reading his rants for a few years, and spending the next decade pretty much trying to ignore him, I'm certainly not surprised that he is clueless when it comes to the future of "broadband" access.
That future is fiber and fiber is, as you read this, being spread around counties in at least one state (Washington) by public-owned utility districts (PUDs). Within 3 years at least one rural county (Grant County) will have every building that is connected to the electrical grid also connected to fiber. Enough bandwidth to run telephone (VoIP), Internet, Cable Television (now *there* is a switch), and probably more.
Two small towns in this county are already pretty much wired up to fiber with customers choosing amongst several local ISPs for their bandwidth. In fact, anyone can be an ISP if they are willing to pay for the bandwidth out (via the fiber, naturally) themselves.
Of the three entities capable of stretching their existing infrastructure to accomodate fast 'net access (telephone companies, cable companies and electrical power distribution companies), the last one is the one almost completely ignored by the "popular media" and, not surprisingly, Dvorak.
It is likely to be the dark-horse in this race. Dvorak will probably claim to have predicted it
Back in the 1970s when I was working aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer (http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.h tm) (hunting manganese nodules; wink wink) the control system for the heavy lift mechanism was based on 16vdc CMOS technology. The voltage spikes aboard a 50,000 ton ship with 4480 volt mains could be truly extraordinary and to eliminate these spikes we had a flywheel-type UPS.
This UPS wasn't really used as a UPS because a loss of power would affect more than just the control system (the hydraulic systems ran off of pumps which were operated by electric motors) but it sure ironed out the spikes nicely.
Our company had a contract to maintain a local governmental network that was, to say the least, convoluted. Designed and implemented by a "talented amateur" who had subsequently left for greener pastures, this network worked well but was a collection of NT, win98, win95 and Unix (HPUX) with sister agencies and their networks thrown into the mix.
When we took the system over there was no map of the network's topography and our people undertook to trace it. Since the LAN extends over 70 miles in one direction (and over microwave) and 35 miles in two others (over landlines) we didn't feel right about expending their money simply driving around to find routers. Instead, when we were on a job in the area, we'd look for the routers, bridges, switches and hubs and put them into a map we kept at the office.
One router, however, defied our attempts to locate it. It was a Cisco and connected a couple of the legs of the wide-area part of their LAN but we never had the time to just go trace wires down to find it.
This outfit fired us last year and has been sifting through networking firms trying to find someone who could make the lan their "talented amateur" left them work right (they never could stand to have the LAN go down even for a moment).
As far as I know the router is still missing. Maybe it's behind a wall. LOL
Steve Jobs has never been famous for paying attention to the desires of even a substantial minority of his users. Anyone remember the Newton; killed off by Jobs just about the time PDAs started to take off?
My suggestion is to start an open-source project on sourceforge. The best part is that if it works on OSX it will almost certainly work on Linux.
Hmm... do ya suppose that OSX may migrate frustrated Mac people to Linux?
There are several movements afoot to provide fiber to rural homes; but not by the telephone companies. The movements are largely being undertaken by Public Utility Districts (PUDs).
In Washington State the mostly-agricultural Grant County has over 7,000 miles of fiber laid by the Grant County PUD (http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/default2.htm). This system, when it's completed, will connect every home, farm, and business to the fiber network and allow the users to select from a among a group of competing ISPs for their email and bandwidth. Local ISPs can also sign on for their bandwidth out to the 'net.
The 1-year-old project originated when the PUD engineers lobbied for a remote-meter-reading system and escalated when someone suggested that they could just as well provide high-bandwidth using fiber.
GCPUD is farther along than most but it's far from alone. Several other Public Utility Districts in the State are following close behind them. However, there are some pitfalls: a few legislators, supported by the telephone companies, are fighting it with legislation prohibiting the PUDs from providing Internet access.
How ironic that rural America, long ignored by the large ISPs (AOL doesn't even have a local phone number in this county), telephone companies and cable/DSL providers, will be among the first to get bandwidth connections that will be the envy of the country.
While few of you highly skilled techies are likely to spontaneously become Asian or Native American overnight, you are certain to grow older. (Or die, of course.) Look around and count the number of employees over 50 (or even 40) you work with. Now count the number of years you have left until you are old enough to be considered outdated. (Oh, I know... you are going to always keep your skills up to date... yeah, right.) Unions aren't perfect, but they stick up for all the workers not just the super-talented ones. They negotiate for the older workers who bring with them a history of why things are done the way they are as well as the worker who was injured in an accident and is disabled.
I can hear you say, "but discrimination on the basis of age or disability is illegal." Only if you can prove it. If you are in a union, you know you at least have someone who will be on your side when your company decides 35 is too old to be a good programmer.
Where did Jon Katz come from? I hear him on PBS and I see him on Slashdot and he almost never says anything remotely accurate. Yet the media seems ready to adopt him as the geek spokesman. Would you (Slashdot) kindly stop perpetuating this shit?
My wife and I and our teenaged son all went to see this movie. Two of us are geeks; all of us liked the movie. Real *nix commands (perhaps not exactly used in the correct way but real *nix commands nevertheless), reference to open-source, a software CEO as the bad guy and a guy nicknamed "Stinky" in the plot. What geek hasn't worked with someone who thinks showering is a low priority?
For once Hollywood came close. I give the movie 3 out of 4 stars and both reviews 1 out of 400 stars.
Twentyfive years ago my employer (a corporation which had divisions in several cities) sent me to Mexico as a temporary member of a new management team. Up until then I had been an engineer but since they knew I spoke Spanish they asked me to take the job even though I had never done production management (or any management, for that matter). The temporary job was to last for six months during which I was to select and train a Mexican replacement.
Four months into the job (during which I had tripled production over the previous idiots who had been managing that place) they told me that my old job had been "eliminated" and I should just stay there. Since my wife had a good job back home and we owned a nice house on a good bass fishing lake, I didn't take this well.
I reacted two ways. First of all I sent out resumes. Then I made sure that everyone I talked to in the Company heard the story. Since I had traveled to many Divisions in order to secure orders/parts for the Mexican Division, I had made quite a few new contacts. Soon the managers in these Divisions found their personnel reluctant to take temporary jobs outside their area.
Two weeks after being told my job was eliminated, I received a telephone call from them saying it was all a mistake and I had my old job back. I promoted my foreman to Production Manager and returned home in the six months time period.
Three months later I accepted a new job from one of the companies to which I had sent resumes. The new job paid twice the salary and offered many more benefits. When the Chief Engineer learned I was leaving he said, "you are prostituting yourself".
"No, John" I replied, "we all prostitute ourselves... I'm simply changing pimps."
As a partner in a networking business and administrator for several school districts and ISP's, I can say that we use all of them (including the new MAC OS-X). They all have their uses and their pitfalls but if you are careful and pay attention to details and don't try to do too much on one box, any of them will work.
The school districts which are rural and poor like it when we put Linux to use because of the money they save in original costs and then in admin costs. A mail server and squid server in one farming community nearby have been working continuously for two years; only going down for power problems which lasted longer than the UPS.
This same school district has a brand new computer center in the elementary school with Apple iMACS for workstations and a G4 running OS-X as a server. Runs great.
There are three NT boxes running Novell for their administration and grade accounting.
An ISP uses an NT4 server for their client accounting and authentication and another NT4 server for web-based email. They all run fine but they all run only one thing. The same ISP has a Linux box for an IRC server and a freeBSD box to host backup services for that IRC network.
In our office we use an Alpha Multia as a firewall, Linux on a dual Pentium Pro 200 as our file server (Samba). I have a KVM switch to go between a WIN98 desktop and a Linux desktop. I just installed Linux (SuSE) on an old Fujitsu laptop my wife gave me when we bought her new HP (running Win98). A (now former) partner uses win2k on his desktop and in his new job as IS director.
We have a MicroVax 3400 we got in trade that we want to put BSD on just for kicks.
Essentially, we don't impose our ideas of what works onto our clients. We give them what they want on a platform they don't have to retrain everyone on. If they need to retrain anyway, then we can move them to a more suitable platform (assuming the one they are on isn't).
The only problem I had with win2k is that it wouldn't see the 3com 3c503 NIC on the older desktop box I tried to put it on so I had to shift to win98 since I didn't have another NIC handy.
I have no problems with Linux or BSD and we plan to experiment with a port of OpenMail to see how that works with Outlook. We are also experimenting with locally-hosted ASPs in an effort to help clients with the cross-platform problems.
Be nimble and be of service to your clients and use the best OS for their needs and you will hardly go wrong.
Funny then that Transvirtual has a web page showing screen shots of the iPaq running PocketLinux at
http://www.transvirtual.com/pocketlinux.htm)
And if the iPaq can't run Pocket Linux, why are there downloadables for both the Helios and the iPaq versions available on http://www.pocketlinux.com?
This, plus an article in the September issue of Linux Journal ("Compaq's Approach to Linux in your Hand") make me think that the iPaq can, indeed, run Linux.
Dvorak rated the internet as a fad not too many years ago. He (and ZDNet in general) ignored Linux until recently (and they STILL don't understand it). He's stated, at one time or another, that everything was dead and that everything was hot.
Dvorak is the computer world's version of a tabloid psychic. Make a zillion predictions and one or two of them is bound to be on target. Nevermind about the rest; people forget.
My school district has a dozen Linux computers. In a year it will probably have 100 Linux computers (especially with the new pricing of Win2k). Web designers need to understand that if they want maximum exposure, they need to design their pages for the greatest number of browsers. This nonsense of "looks best with netscape 4.6" or "best viewed under Windows Explorer" is insane.
On the bright side, the recent litigation launched by advocates of the blind for access to web pages may be good news for the Linux community as well. Lynx is already a popular tool for the blind and I've noticed that even some Linux web sites do not provide alternate links to their graphical ones.
In short, in the scramble to have the whizziest web page, the designers have lost track of the fact that there are others who deserve access.
However, even though I have to kill -9 Netscape a couple times a week, I still prefer it to a Win platform.
Let me try to give you my take on your question on two levels:
Level 1:
The most important facet to a man/woman romantic relationship is their compatability; to really connect with someone of the opposite sex. My wife and I met 26 years ago because her parents had two dirt-bikes parked in their driveway two blocks from where I lived (when I wasn't out on engineering assignments). I stopped, knocked on the door, found out one was hers, and we spent an entire summer riding the trails near our houses when I was home.
We went fishing, talked, packed picnics, visited islands and found out we liked each other... not long afterwards we found out we loved each other. We remain best friends - and lovers - today.
Level 2:
No one can guarentee that the person they choose as a life-partner will make it all the way. You could decide that this gal is too much of a risk, meet and marry a health nut, and find out that she has leukemia at age 27. Or you could have kids with another woman who carries some nasty gene; or find out that you do.
Life isn't fair, and married life is more unfair than most.
My advice to you (and it's worth every nickel you're paying for it) is to follow up with this woman and find out if she can be your best friend. If you share your life with your best friend, you'll find the strength to handle whatever comes in the future.
The simple fact that she shared her MS with you tells me that she is interested in you, and that she's honest and forthright. She is now wondering how you will react to her honesty.
Do not let this one get away without finding out more about yourselves as a couple. She sounds like she's worth some effort.