First of; I make my living buying discarded computer stuff and reselling it. A lot of this stuff is broken and gets trashed. When I do have time I tend to strip the stepper motors out of disk drives and printers as well as the printer guides for CNC / robotics stuff. UPS batteries are an excellent power supply. However mostly I use discarded equipment to put a working system together again which can be used for all kinds of things: If you are handy with linux you can make excellent routers; web servers, media servers, a TIVO, CNC control equipment out of the oldest stuff.
we had the Linux general store in Atlanta which opened in the late nineties (98-99). It was opened by a great guy; but the only people that visited were the local pierced freaks from GA tech and me. And like me we'd get one Suse (redhat whatever...) CD and put it on a bunch of discarded PCs. Guess what: The store didn't make it! In todays environment as a small business I don't think you can compete with $200 PCs at wallmart with Lindows pre-loaded or on the side of the equation with the IBMs of the world. The one niche I do see for significant growth in the Linux marketspace is as a consulting firm for small businesses. You do NOT need to spend $30 a square foot on retail space to do that! (Or whatever you pay for retail in Canada; but I can assure you professional looking retail is more expensive than professional looking mixed warehouse/office space. And for you entrpeneurs out there: you can start such a business really cheap!
What is soo wrong with them asking the government of Mass to keep open the choice to use other OS's than Linux? Being a BSD / Linux user as well as a Mac OS9 / OSX and Several flavors of windows user (You can throw in BeOS as well) I have something good to say (As well as something bad) about each of them. What elected jerk is going to make a law deciding that an agency should use a specific piece of software regardless of the requirements of the job. This is one of the reasons why government needs to be shrunk. (I ahve never seen a politician propose that seriously though...)
You have a steady paycheck and are complaining about what your reward is? It is the STEADY paycheck. Otherwise go contracting and start worrying about what to do once this gig is finished. As someone with unsteady income and two children in private school I must tell you: STEADy is nice sometimes
If you work on the ISP side you should be able to throttle bursts of bandwidth with the consent of your users. Should they decline to be throttled then you should be able to charge. Why aren't you throttleing bandwidth right now. A thousandfold increase in bandwidth use should raise suspicions unless the iste was mentioned on slashdot;-)
I've done something similar in a mixed environemnt. The way we set it up is to use java for GUI and logic development and then run a profiler against it and go native on those functions that needed it. These functions would be compiled into a library. (You'd be amazed how little of your code you need to optimize for huge performance gains!) If I had to do it again I would do the same thing except I would use python as the 'main, relatively slow, easy to code and maintain' language.
I am currently working on an artificial life program using Opengl in Python. I actually started out in C. However the program became too complex; too many switch and case routines etc... Beyond all that (And I know how to do this in C with good use of structs) the nice thing in OOP is the fact that you can easily scope your variables. Having worked inteams of programmers this is a godsend.
Another issue is the use of good case tools. Like the gentleman who wrote the original article said: he basically knows small to medium sized business programs. I come from a background of fairly complex systems. The use of case based tools if only for documentation is invaluable in those cases. I do agree that C++ is an ugly language. I recommend that the author looks at OO Pascal (Delphi, FPK) or if he needs to be more platform independent Python or Ruby. Those last two languages are extremely popular with their users for good reason.
One more issue; I am not sure after reading the article if the author understands OOP in the sense that he understands the philosophy behind it. Bruce Eckel's books do a very good job at going into that aspect of OOP. Also OOP predates GUI's big time. They have nothing to do with each other besides the fact that developing a GUI using OOP is a lot easier than in straight C. (Trust me; I've spend a long time developing GUIs out of staright C and using classes is just a lot easier.
The problem with OOP is one of bloat. However unless you do embedded systems that same bloat is very much offset by modern machines. Frankly it is a lot cheaper to buy a new server than to have a bunch of programmers tweak code.
I think that perl sucks. I did a quick poll here at the office and the only people that like Perl are People that do NOT come from a 'traditional' programming background. Typically a webmaster, sysadmin etc... These are people that need something quick and dirty. The day they'll ask me to maintain PerlCode I'm quitting!
BullShit; Hard science fiction IS Hard Science.
on
Darwin's Radio
·
· Score: 1
Hard science fiction is NOT hard science fiction if it violates the currently accepted laws of physics. The fact that many people use the term wrongly is NOT the issure here. (This is the reason the term was invented in the first place). The fact that they are works of fiction as far as the story goes does not give them the liberty to go against accepted physical laws. If hard science fiction were soft I'd be reading Stephen King or fantasy novels...
Just put out and then you can take your pick from Geeks, Alpha males, jocks, losers winners etc... Why any woman would have to read a book on how to attract men is still beyond me. Hajo
It's that simple and not mentioned anywhere in the article. OpenBSD hasn't had a security patch in the last year after its rigorous auditing. Hajo PS: http://www.openbsd.org/ "Sending Kiddies to/dev/null since 1995"
No programmer likes to do documentation. I hate it myself. However it is a crucial step in order to upgrade the product after more than one iteration. I get typically called in after budgets (Time and monney) are gone way over. It gets very hard to get productive if There is no documentation. Now don't get me wrong: I don't need a lot! Get me a Use case scenario, an UML diagram and a list of all functions, procedures and types; what they do and what values are expected in return and I'm set. The other extreme from no documentation at all that I've run into is the one where people ran over budget because all they did was document! I've run only into this once and it was much easier to remedy than no documentation at all.
Guess that's why I left the Netherlands and now live in the US. You'd get me for about a day and a half for that kind of money and short commitment. (Longer projects drop the price though...) Hey; I have a family to maintain while I work on neat stuff in my free time. Hajo
Slashdot Mirror
First of; I make my living buying discarded computer stuff and reselling it. A lot of this stuff is broken and gets trashed. When I do have time I tend to strip the stepper motors out of disk drives and printers as well as the printer guides for CNC / robotics stuff. UPS batteries are an excellent power supply.
However mostly I use discarded equipment to put a working system together again which can be used for all kinds of things: If you are handy with linux you can make excellent routers; web servers, media servers, a TIVO, CNC control equipment out of the oldest stuff.
we had the Linux general store in Atlanta which opened in the late nineties (98-99). It was opened by a great guy; but the only people that visited were the local pierced freaks from GA tech and me. And like me we'd get one Suse (redhat whatever...) CD and put it on a bunch of discarded PCs. Guess what: The store didn't make it!
In todays environment as a small business I don't think you can compete with $200 PCs at wallmart with Lindows pre-loaded or on the side of the equation with the IBMs of the world.
The one niche I do see for significant growth in the Linux marketspace is as a consulting firm for small businesses. You do NOT need to spend $30 a square foot on retail space to do that! (Or whatever you pay for retail in Canada; but I can assure you professional looking retail is more expensive than professional looking mixed warehouse/office space.
And for you entrpeneurs out there: you can start such a business really cheap!
What is soo wrong with them asking the government of Mass to keep open the choice to use other OS's than Linux? Being a BSD / Linux user as well as a Mac OS9 / OSX and Several flavors of windows user (You can throw in BeOS as well) I have something good to say (As well as something bad) about each of them. What elected jerk is going to make a law deciding that an agency should use a specific piece of software regardless of the requirements of the job.
This is one of the reasons why government needs to be shrunk. (I ahve never seen a politician propose that seriously though...)
You have a steady paycheck and are complaining about what your reward is? It is the STEADY paycheck. Otherwise go contracting and start worrying about what to do once this gig is finished.
As someone with unsteady income and two children in private school I must tell you: STEADy is nice sometimes
If you work on the ISP side you should be able to throttle bursts of bandwidth with the consent of your users. Should they decline to be throttled then you should be able to charge. Why aren't you throttleing bandwidth right now. A thousandfold increase in bandwidth use should raise suspicions unless the iste was mentioned on slashdot ;-)
I've done something similar in a mixed environemnt. The way we set it up is to use java for GUI and logic development and then run a profiler against it and go native on those functions that needed it. These functions would be compiled into a library. (You'd be amazed how little of your code you need to optimize for huge performance gains!)
If I had to do it again I would do the same thing except I would use python as the 'main, relatively slow, easy to code and maintain' language.
Hajo
I am currently working on an artificial life program using Opengl in Python. I actually started out in C. However the program became too complex; too many switch and case routines etc... Beyond all that (And I know how to do this in C with good use of structs) the nice thing in OOP is the fact that you can easily scope your variables. Having worked inteams of programmers this is a godsend. Another issue is the use of good case tools. Like the gentleman who wrote the original article said: he basically knows small to medium sized business programs. I come from a background of fairly complex systems. The use of case based tools if only for documentation is invaluable in those cases. I do agree that C++ is an ugly language. I recommend that the author looks at OO Pascal (Delphi, FPK) or if he needs to be more platform independent Python or Ruby. Those last two languages are extremely popular with their users for good reason. One more issue; I am not sure after reading the article if the author understands OOP in the sense that he understands the philosophy behind it. Bruce Eckel's books do a very good job at going into that aspect of OOP. Also OOP predates GUI's big time. They have nothing to do with each other besides the fact that developing a GUI using OOP is a lot easier than in straight C. (Trust me; I've spend a long time developing GUIs out of staright C and using classes is just a lot easier. The problem with OOP is one of bloat. However unless you do embedded systems that same bloat is very much offset by modern machines. Frankly it is a lot cheaper to buy a new server than to have a bunch of programmers tweak code.
Exodus is a good hosting company. Congrats. Does /. have a cage?
Neil Stephenson for: "In the beginning was the command line". (Cryptonomicon was neat too.)
Nope: #44 is the first beowulf
It'd be waste to use these for echelon. DSP's are much cheaper and better for that kind of stuff...
Hajo
I think that perl sucks. I did a quick poll here at the office and the only people that like Perl are People that do NOT come from a 'traditional' programming background. Typically a webmaster, sysadmin etc... These are people that need something quick and dirty.
The day they'll ask me to maintain PerlCode I'm quitting!
Hard science fiction is NOT hard science fiction if it violates the currently accepted laws of physics. The fact that many people use the term wrongly is NOT the issure here. (This is the reason the term was invented in the first place). The fact that they are works of fiction as far as the story goes does not give them the liberty to go against accepted physical laws. If hard science fiction were soft I'd be reading Stephen King or fantasy novels...
Hajo
Just put out and then you can take your pick from Geeks, Alpha males, jocks, losers winners etc... Why any woman would have to read a book on how to attract men is still beyond me. Hajo
It's that simple and not mentioned anywhere in the article.
/dev/null since 1995"
OpenBSD hasn't had a security patch in the last year after its rigorous auditing.
Hajo
PS: http://www.openbsd.org/
"Sending Kiddies to
It's that simple and not mentioned anywhere in the article. OpenBSD hasn't had a security patch in the last year after its rigorous auditing. Hajo PS: http://www.openbsd.org/ "Sending Kiddies to /dev/null since 1995"
No programmer likes to do documentation. I hate it myself. However it is a crucial step in order to upgrade the product after more than one iteration.
I get typically called in after budgets (Time and monney) are gone way over. It gets very hard to get productive if There is no documentation. Now don't get me wrong: I don't need a lot! Get me a Use case scenario, an UML diagram and a list of all functions, procedures and types; what they do and what values are expected in return and I'm set.
The other extreme from no documentation at all that I've run into is the one where people ran over budget because all they did was document! I've run only into this once and it was much easier to remedy than no documentation at all.
Guess that's why I left the Netherlands and now live in the US. You'd get me for about a day and a half for that kind of money and short commitment. (Longer projects drop the price though...)
Hey; I have a family to maintain while I work on neat stuff in my free time.
Hajo