Can anyone tell me something about the wireless devices which may be used in restaurants, for taking orders, billing etc. Are there specialized devices for this application, or could one use a Palm with Bluetooth?
Starting with UNESCO, which for many years has distributed a free library package called CDS/ISIS, the United Nations is actively promoting the use of free software, especially its free software portal.
For my company, we wanted redundancy, but felt that it was a waste to have two providers with one unused. Therefore, I set up two firewalls. One of them is the default gateway for our LAN, and the other runs a Squid proxy. All our Web surfing through Squid goes via cable, while the other traffic goes via DSL. If the DSL fails, we can switch the default gateway with DHCP (just use a low lease time, or do it manually), and if the cable fails, (as it does often) we just switch off the proxy and surf direct. Works fine for us with NAT and IP chains. --
Paul Gillingwater
OK, let's get the Geek qualifications out the way first. Writing code since 1973, Perl, C, PHP, etc. RHCE certified. Security Analyst. Internet guru. Started New Zealand's first commercial ISP in 1989. Released open source code since 1986.
Now on to education. BA Management. BS Computer Science. And an MBA (no emphasis, but Marketing is more my focus than Finance.) I've started three businesses, have worked for three multinationals (Philips, HP, Reuters) and even worked for the United Nations for 8 years, building secure Internet infrastructure. I now own and run a small business, doing consulting and building web sites for fun and profit (http://www.lanifex.com) in Vienna, Austria.
What have I learned from my MBA? Well, lots of great stuff. Finance of course. Marketing, especially Global focus. Strategy, analysis, HR, communications, etc. And from all this stuff, I've distilled three things that matter:
Life-long learning is an attitude.
Start learning, and never stop. It doesn't really matter whether you study for an MBA, or Origami, but keep learning. You'll improve your own life, and that of the people around you.
It's the people that matter.
When you do a classroom MBA (which I did) you make a lot of great contacts. These are the people who will help you in future business. Cherish them.
It's not all in books
You can learn some theory from the books, but the best way to learn is by trying things, and see what works for you. Leadership is innate, although you can learn a few tricks.
Bottom line: if you're willing to put in the effort, an MBA is certainly a good thing to acquire for geeks, or even non-geeks. But remember it's the journey that matters, and what you learn and how you change along the way, and not the certificate at the end. Never, ever stop learning, until the Harrower calls time -- and even then, you might learn something new! --
Paul Gillingwater
For me, one of the biggest issues is lack of security in the client. It's too easy to download a SWF file with WGET, and decompile it to see what the programmer intended. Of course it's possible to use HTTPS to secure the session, but there seems to be a serious lack of a crypto API or even hooks to allow one to easily be written.
Some sites are really only possible with Flash, for example my company developed a game for Cornetto Soft (it's in German, but you don't need it to play the game) which accesses a database on the server side. Such games are incredibly difficult to develop with DHTML. We tested this with Netscape and IE, and I can confirm it works with Linux too. We even made a pure HTML version for those who use Lynx! --
Paul Gillingwater
I had a bad experience with a recently acquired DVD (Arnie's "Sixth Day") which refuses to play in my Sony "Region-free" player. Apparently the scripting language on the DVD now checks to see if the player is Region-free (i.e., region 0) then refuses to play. More info here.
There's apparently a workaround, but in my case I just played it on my laptop, which connected to the TV via S-VHS connection, and found the results just as good. --
Paul Gillingwater
Your lack of understanding of the way the UN works is unfortunate. The UN is an inter-government body, which is made up of official representatives chosen by the (mostly) elected officials of every State. What's more, when a nation Signs and Ratifies a treaty, it is promising within a certain time frame to make its own laws that are compatible with, and express the intent of, that Treaty.
What the UN _doesn't_ do is make laws for countries. It can be argued that certain UN treaties which are widely accepted and enforced by national governments have the effect of international law, but it is incorrect to suggest that the UN in any way violates the sovreignty of any country, EXCEPT when this is decided by the Security Council -- which is made up from member governments anyway.
Furthermore, the UN has no independent powers of enforcement, except for those specifically authorized by the Security Council, through Peace Keeping operations, which consist of national government troops (not UN troops.)
My point is that the UN can't force any law on the USA, except and unless the USA joins and ratifies the treaty, and then passes enabling legislation to enforce the laws in their own land. What a treaty does is seek to find the level of law which is internationally acceptable to the majority of countries. Examples of where the USA has chosen to ignore treaties (even after ratifying them) include the Kyoto accord and parts of the WTO (GATT.) The USA will always pursue its own economic self interest--without exception.
--
Paul Gillingwater
It's great here in Europe. We work hard, sure (12 hour days are typical for me in my start-up), however we're also going to take at least 6 week's holiday per year. And more if I need it, plus unlimited sick days (of course, as a shareholder it's in my own interest not to get sick.)
One way to avoid getting sick is not work so much, and take long holidays! I find that two weeks holiday is just not enough time to unwind. You need around a month to really recharge all the creative juices.:-) --
Paul Gillingwater
I'm amazed no one has commented on the giant (at least 50 feet high) Penguin painted onto the side of a building near the corner of 42nd and Broadway, in NYC. It's just around the corner from one of the biggest Internet cafes in the world. There's no question it's Tux, and it's from IBM.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Increasing use of Cryptography on the Internet
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 2
A good start would be for Hemos & Co. to set up SSL on their servers, so that those who wish to increase the encrypted traffic on the Internet could do so by reading Slashdot over a secure(ish) link.
Furthermore, rather than using Geoshitties, you could support a great little Web-Mail provider called ZKey.Com, who provide free mail and other services over SSL as standard.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Am I the only XML-using developer who is annoyed at the XML wannabes that insist on using HTML entities for Latin characters when the XML standard (and therefore, most parsers) clearly mandates using Unicode?
Perhaps someone more clueful than I can suggest how I can parse this (in Perl) without having to translate the HTML entities back to Unicode first? --
Paul Gillingwater
Re:$299 Car MP$ Player: Aiwa CDC-MP3
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Nope. My Mk I Empeg has an FM tuner with RDS support. RDS means you can receive traffic bulletins from any station that sends them. No AM though, but I don't need to listen to Talk Radio.
The $1199 price for the Empeg is justified by the components, the build quality and the added-value you get from your CD collection. Think about it -- with a 40 Gb upper limit, you can MP3 encode *all* of your collection (and your S.O.'s as well), and play tracks which normally never get heard. Most people with 6xCD changers listen to the same six CDs for weeks before changing, and tend to skip over albums which contain only one or two "good" tracks. With the Empeg, you can choose to sequence _only_ the good tracks, and with the random option, you hear parts of your collection that you'd never normally choose. This represents an economic value-added to your existing CD investments, because you're increasing your utilization by reducing opportunity costs.
Furthermore, I can download free upgrades for my Empeg (firmware and PC loader) anytime. Now that they've been bought by the company that makes the RIO, you can bet that the economies of large-scale manufacturing and improved access to the components market will bring the price down, while adding neat new features. Look for a top model to come out next year for less than $999.
Disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge about the Empeg -- I'm just a satisfied customer.
And a post-script for audiophiles -- the Empeg has some great options for shaping the sound. Here's a quote from their home page:
On the audio side, a Philips in-car DSP deals with the DAC and provides digital loudness, bass, treble, balance and fader for the four outputs. It also gives a 20 band fully parametric equaliser which can be arranged as stereo 10-band or quad 5-band. The final stage is provided by Burr Brown pre-amps. --
Paul Gillingwater
As a happy owner of an Empeg in-car MP3 player since more than a year, I have to defend its value to me.
The emptool, which is used for synchronization, has been open sourced with the GNU Public License.
The new player has Serial RS232, USB and Ethernet connections, which makes it real easy to link to. I even have the DB9 in my car, in case I want to hook it up to my laptop or GPS.
It runs Linux, and is extensible, so you can write your own projects.
The Staff are very helpful and friendly, and have built a strong community of users through their mailing lists and BBS.
The company was just bought by Sonic Blue (formerly S3) and will therefore join the RIO family of products.
My model has 10 Gb of a laptop-spec hard drive, (resistant to vibration/impact) which means hundreds of hours of my favourite music, nicely organized into categories or just at random.
The head unit is removeable within 1 second, and can then be used (with the remote control) as a useful component in a standard home HiFi system, and as a great anti-theft option.
Warranty works -- I dropped my unit, breaking the display (great graphic visualizations BTW!) and they fixed it and returned it within a few days.
Bottom line is, this unit deserves its place on the top-10 list of Geek toys, and has all the functionality I need in a music system. Plus the bragging rights for saying your car runs Linux is also extremely valuable...:-) --
Paul Gillingwater
Well, I've just started a small open-source software company, and we need programmers with PHP/TCL/ACS/Midgard/LAMP/Oracle/Perl/LDAP/XML/Java/SQL skills.
Based in Vienna, Austria--however language is not a problem as we mostly use English, and so do our customers, and will help the right person to get a visa. Salaries are not great, but you'll have fun, and get plenty of benefits and holidays if you're willing to work with the team.
See out site: http://www.lanifex.com and drop me an e-mail at paul@lanifex.com if you're interested. --
Paul Gillingwater
I've done little with Java (I'm more of a C/Perl/PHP type.) One thing that put me off writing a Java app for Windows is that I couldn't find anything about how a Java application could play nice with Windows in the same way that a MFC C/C++ application can.
For example, if I wanted to code a Java applet that *didn't* depend upon a Web browser running, and was able to minimize itself down to the task bar (or even hide itself if necessary) while running in the background, which Java API can I use? Furthermore, if we do strive for browser independence, how can we download the huge JVM necessary (unless we used Microsoft's JVM) across a 56k modem without the user getting annoyed at the time taken.
Note that I've read through SWING, but it seems too abstracted to handle these requirements, which would seem to apply to Linux WMs like KDE/Gnome as well. The DesktopManager public interface has an iconify.Frame method, but it doesn't seem to go far enough for closer MS Windows integration.
Getting back on-topic -- I love Linux, but feel SWING needs to expose more methods from KDE/Gnome. --
Paul Gillingwater
As the originator of this topic, I can confirm that most of our clients do not have a valid IN-ADDR ARPA response, as we are running a split horizon DNS. I'll ask my DNS guy to set up a generic response, and see what happens.
Thanks to everyone for their constructive response. It's looking like NetBIOS-NS "Name Query" probes are being sent by IIS servers that want to log a name in the access log.
This isn't a new discovery, as I discovered here and here. From a security point of view, it's noise that could be masking an attack from the Network.vbs worm.
--
Paul Gillingwater
I wrote an Opinion piece on the great Windows 2000 versus Linux debate a couple of months ago. Basically, for those who don't want to follow the link, I said that Microsoft has for the first time in its existence actually released an operating system. Everything that preceded W2K (with the possible exception of SCO Xenix, to which Microsoft made a significant contribution) has been a hack upon a bogosity upon a program loader--albeit, one that captured the market needs, and which has been wildly successful.
As someone who has worked professionally with computer operating systems since 1978, I have
seen that there are certain fundamental requirements within data center operations for stability, security, reliability, manageability flexibility and maintainability. In fact, the key word here is "ability"-- and without those abilities, IT professionals are prevented from delivering a high standard of service to end-users. For the first time, Microsoft has really come out with a product that meets those needs, and for that I applaud them.
Fore more, follow the link.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Sony's Vaio line of laptops with the embedded cameras (such as my PCG C1) have a feature similar to this known as "Cybercode", which is a 2D bar code, which can be used for starting programs, opening documents, or even opening URLs as links to Web sites.
You can print your own codes, and assign them to special functions on your laptop. Quite useful (but I never use it.) -- Paul Gillingwater
Actually, this has been discussed before on Slashdot. The United Nations University has a 10-year project to develop a Universal Networking Language, which is intended to provide an intermediate translation "universal language" to assist with machine-assisted translation between different languages on the Internet. No doubt/.ers will prefer to learn the UNL -- kind of like a verbal EMACS, I guess, and similarly elitist.:-) -- Paul Gillingwater
Not strictly routable, but close. NetBEUI can be moved between Token Ring segments using the Source Route Bridging mechanism. I work for an organisation that has over 3,000 nodes on a single LAN with one router, which although it suffers from a high degree of broadcast traffic, is generally quite stable. -- Paul Gillingwater
For those of us who have been working with Perl a long time, but like the idea of a strong Web content management system, there is an alternative to learning Python. Midgard is a powerful open-source Web content management system that combines MySQL and Apache with the scripting power of PHP3. Definitely worth checking out, if you can get through the challenging installation. (As a hint, try using the Monster RPM under Linux, it's much easier.) -- Paul Gillingwater
Students of law may recognize the oft-cited case of Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co. In this case, Henry Ford tried to sell cars at or below cost, because he saw the duty of his corporation as essentially philanthropic, i.e., he was more concerned about the social effects, rather than his duty to his minority shareholders, in this case the Dodge Brothers (who later set up in competition to him.)
It seems to me that Ford shareholders have the grounds for a class-action suit, as this action, although of benefit to the employees (and therefore highly taxable in many countries), would seem to offer little or no benefit to the shareholders who own the business.
On the technology side, I applaud any initiative that helps to develop infrastructure in developing countries, but wonder if Ford will exercise a chilling effect over free speech if its Acceptable Usage Policy is mandated over the PCs it provides. Also, I wonder if Linux is an option?;-) -- Paul Gillingwater
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone tell me something about the wireless devices which may be used in restaurants, for taking orders, billing etc. Are there specialized devices for this application, or could one use a Palm with Bluetooth?
Starting with UNESCO, which for many years has distributed a free library package called CDS/ISIS, the United Nations is actively promoting the use of free software, especially its free software portal.
For my company, we wanted redundancy, but felt that it was a waste to have two providers with one unused. Therefore, I set up two firewalls. One of them is the default gateway for our LAN, and the other runs a Squid proxy. All our Web surfing through Squid goes via cable, while the other traffic goes via DSL. If the DSL fails, we can switch the default gateway with DHCP (just use a low lease time, or do it manually), and if the cable fails, (as it does often) we just switch off the proxy and surf direct. Works fine for us with NAT and IP chains.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Now on to education. BA Management. BS Computer Science. And an MBA (no emphasis, but Marketing is more my focus than Finance.) I've started three businesses, have worked for three multinationals (Philips, HP, Reuters) and even worked for the United Nations for 8 years, building secure Internet infrastructure. I now own and run a small business, doing consulting and building web sites for fun and profit (http://www.lanifex.com) in Vienna, Austria.
What have I learned from my MBA? Well, lots of great stuff. Finance of course. Marketing, especially Global focus. Strategy, analysis, HR, communications, etc. And from all this stuff, I've distilled three things that matter:
- Life-long learning is an attitude.
- It's the people that matter.
- It's not all in books
Bottom line: if you're willing to put in the effort, an MBA is certainly a good thing to acquire for geeks, or even non-geeks. But remember it's the journey that matters, and what you learn and how you change along the way, and not the certificate at the end. Never, ever stop learning, until the Harrower calls time -- and even then, you might learn something new!Start learning, and never stop. It doesn't really matter whether you study for an MBA, or Origami, but keep learning. You'll improve your own life, and that of the people around you.
When you do a classroom MBA (which I did) you make a lot of great contacts. These are the people who will help you in future business. Cherish them.
You can learn some theory from the books, but the best way to learn is by trying things, and see what works for you. Leadership is innate, although you can learn a few tricks.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Some sites are really only possible with Flash, for example my company developed a game for Cornetto Soft (it's in German, but you don't need it to play the game) which accesses a database on the server side. Such games are incredibly difficult to develop with DHTML. We tested this with Netscape and IE, and I can confirm it works with Linux too. We even made a pure HTML version for those who use Lynx!
--
Paul Gillingwater
There's apparently a workaround, but in my case I just played it on my laptop, which connected to the TV via S-VHS connection, and found the results just as good.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Furthermore, the UN has no independent powers of enforcement, except for those specifically authorized by the Security Council, through Peace Keeping operations, which consist of national government troops (not UN troops.)
My point is that the UN can't force any law on the USA, except and unless the USA joins and ratifies the treaty, and then passes enabling legislation to enforce the laws in their own land. What a treaty does is seek to find the level of law which is internationally acceptable to the majority of countries. Examples of where the USA has chosen to ignore treaties (even after ratifying them) include the Kyoto accord and parts of the WTO (GATT.) The USA will always pursue its own economic self interest--without exception.
--
Paul Gillingwater
One way to avoid getting sick is not work so much, and take long holidays! I find that two weeks holiday is just not enough time to unwind. You need around a month to really recharge all the creative juices. :-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
I'm amazed no one has commented on the giant (at least 50 feet high) Penguin painted onto the side of a building near the corner of 42nd and Broadway, in NYC. It's just around the corner from one of the biggest Internet cafes in the world. There's no question it's Tux, and it's from IBM.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Furthermore, rather than using Geoshitties, you could support a great little Web-Mail provider called ZKey.Com, who provide free mail and other services over SSL as standard.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Not in my lifetime. Nor anyone else's. This sounds like the same mistake that Bill Gates made.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Perhaps someone more clueful than I can suggest how I can parse this (in Perl) without having to translate the HTML entities back to Unicode first?
--
Paul Gillingwater
The $1199 price for the Empeg is justified by the components, the build quality and the added-value you get from your CD collection. Think about it -- with a 40 Gb upper limit, you can MP3 encode *all* of your collection (and your S.O.'s as well), and play tracks which normally never get heard. Most people with 6xCD changers listen to the same six CDs for weeks before changing, and tend to skip over albums which contain only one or two "good" tracks. With the Empeg, you can choose to sequence _only_ the good tracks, and with the random option, you hear parts of your collection that you'd never normally choose. This represents an economic value-added to your existing CD investments, because you're increasing your utilization by reducing opportunity costs.
Furthermore, I can download free upgrades for my Empeg (firmware and PC loader) anytime. Now that they've been bought by the company that makes the RIO, you can bet that the economies of large-scale manufacturing and improved access to the components market will bring the price down, while adding neat new features. Look for a top model to come out next year for less than $999.
Disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge about the Empeg -- I'm just a satisfied customer.
And a post-script for audiophiles -- the Empeg has some great options for shaping the sound. Here's a quote from their home page:
On the audio side, a Philips in-car DSP deals with the DAC and provides digital loudness, bass, treble, balance and fader for the four outputs. It also gives a 20 band fully parametric equaliser which can be arranged as stereo 10-band or quad 5-band. The final stage is provided by Burr Brown pre-amps.
--
Paul Gillingwater
- The emptool, which is used for synchronization, has been open sourced with the GNU Public License.
- The new player has Serial RS232, USB and Ethernet connections, which makes it real easy to link to. I even have the DB9 in my car, in case I want to hook it up to my laptop or GPS.
- It runs Linux, and is extensible, so you can write your own projects.
- The Staff are very helpful and friendly, and have built a strong community of users through their mailing lists and BBS.
- The company was just bought by Sonic Blue (formerly S3) and will therefore join the RIO family of products.
- My model has 10 Gb of a laptop-spec hard drive, (resistant to vibration/impact) which means hundreds of hours of my favourite music, nicely organized into categories or just at random.
- The head unit is removeable within 1 second, and can then be used (with the remote control) as a useful component in a standard home HiFi system, and as a great anti-theft option.
- Warranty works -- I dropped my unit, breaking the display (great graphic visualizations BTW!) and they fixed it and returned it within a few days.
Bottom line is, this unit deserves its place on the top-10 list of Geek toys, and has all the functionality I need in a music system. Plus the bragging rights for saying your car runs Linux is also extremely valuable...--
Paul Gillingwater
Based in Vienna, Austria--however language is not a problem as we mostly use English, and so do our customers, and will help the right person to get a visa. Salaries are not great, but you'll have fun, and get plenty of benefits and holidays if you're willing to work with the team.
See out site: http://www.lanifex.com and drop me an e-mail at paul@lanifex.com if you're interested.
--
Paul Gillingwater
For example, if I wanted to code a Java applet that *didn't* depend upon a Web browser running, and was able to minimize itself down to the task bar (or even hide itself if necessary) while running in the background, which Java API can I use? Furthermore, if we do strive for browser independence, how can we download the huge JVM necessary (unless we used Microsoft's JVM) across a 56k modem without the user getting annoyed at the time taken.
Note that I've read through SWING, but it seems too abstracted to handle these requirements, which would seem to apply to Linux WMs like KDE/Gnome as well. The DesktopManager public interface has an iconify.Frame method, but it doesn't seem to go far enough for closer MS Windows integration.
Getting back on-topic -- I love Linux, but feel SWING needs to expose more methods from KDE/Gnome.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Thanks to everyone for their constructive response. It's looking like NetBIOS-NS "Name Query" probes are being sent by IIS servers that want to log a name in the access log.
This isn't a new discovery, as I discovered here and here. From a security point of view, it's noise that could be masking an attack from the Network.vbs worm.
--
Paul Gillingwater
I wrote an Opinion piece on the great Windows 2000 versus Linux debate a couple of months ago. Basically, for those who don't want to follow the link, I said that Microsoft has for the first time in its existence actually released an operating system. Everything that preceded W2K (with the possible exception of SCO Xenix, to which Microsoft made a significant contribution) has been a hack upon a bogosity upon a program loader--albeit, one that captured the market needs, and which has been wildly successful. As someone who has worked professionally with computer operating systems since 1978, I have seen that there are certain fundamental requirements within data center operations for stability, security, reliability, manageability flexibility and maintainability. In fact, the key word here is "ability"-- and without those abilities, IT professionals are prevented from delivering a high standard of service to end-users. For the first time, Microsoft has really come out with a product that meets those needs, and for that I applaud them. Fore more, follow the link.
--
Paul Gillingwater
You can print your own codes, and assign them to special functions on your laptop. Quite useful (but I never use it.)
--
Paul Gillingwater
As discussed before on Slashdot, the United Nations University has a 10-year project to develop a Universal Networking Language.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Actually, this has been discussed before on Slashdot. The United Nations University has a 10-year project to develop a Universal Networking Language, which is intended to provide an intermediate translation "universal language" to assist with machine-assisted translation between different languages on the Internet. No doubt /.ers will prefer to learn the UNL -- kind of like a verbal EMACS, I guess, and similarly elitist. :-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
Not strictly routable, but close. NetBEUI can be moved between Token Ring segments using the Source Route Bridging mechanism. I work for an organisation that has over 3,000 nodes on a single LAN with one router, which although it suffers from a high degree of broadcast traffic, is generally quite stable.
--
Paul Gillingwater
For those of us who have been working with Perl a long time, but like the idea of a strong Web content management system, there is an alternative to learning Python. Midgard is a powerful open-source Web content management system that combines MySQL and Apache with the scripting power of PHP3. Definitely worth checking out, if you can get through the challenging installation. (As a hint, try using the Monster RPM under Linux, it's much easier.)
--
Paul Gillingwater
It seems to me that Ford shareholders have the grounds for a class-action suit, as this action, although of benefit to the employees (and therefore highly taxable in many countries), would seem to offer little or no benefit to the shareholders who own the business.
On the technology side, I applaud any initiative that helps to develop infrastructure in developing countries, but wonder if Ford will exercise a chilling effect over free speech if its Acceptable Usage Policy is mandated over the PCs it provides. Also, I wonder if Linux is an option? ;-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
And if you want B5 in anamorphic widescreen on DVD, don't forget to sign the petition!
--
Paul Gillingwater