Note the media size they're talking about: 2mm square by 0.4mm thick. That's teeny. So for everyone fretting about biting your nails and losing your data, each finger could probably contain multiple backups of its own data (or better yet, copies of all of the other fingers' data).
I evaluate business plans for a living, so this should be right up my alley.
I've never done a business plan so I'm interested in this. But it seems to me any given company's business plan would be heavily tailored to it. Really, the business plan is the expression of the combination of a company's product idea, values, marketing strategy, assessment of risk, etc. Wouldn't any open-source starting point be generic to the point of useless? Sorta like:
/* This business plan is provided AS IS blah blah blah... */ void main() { create_idea(); assess_market(); strategize(); /* now you fill in the actual code */ profit(); }
Hmmm, I'm not sure many people would be too keen on posting their accounting information, myself and my little company included. Companies generally keep things like financials and compensation packages pretty well protected unless they're forced to reveal it (usually to the Government e.g. in an audit).
However, posting accounting techniques or accounting lessons learned would be a terrific idea.
I'll start with one that took us a few years to grasp: when doing business with the Federal Government, don't try to religiously stick to your projected overhead rate. Instead, make a reasonable guess with your projected budget, and if overhead-type costs come up, go ahead and spend on them. At the end of the year you can adjust your overhead rate to meet your actual costs, and go back and seek reimbursement from the Government if you've underbilled. You'll be audited at the end of the contract anyway to square up your overhead expenditures, so as long as the things you spent on were reasonable, you don't have to fret about staying within your original projections. And remember, FAR section 31.205 tells you exactly what constitutes reimburseable overhead expenses.
The principles and concepts taught in any decent Computer Science undergrad program were just as valid and relevant 50 years ago as they are today as, they will be 50 years from now.
I'm no Computer Scientist so feel free to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about... but it seems to me that CS has undergone a few major paradigm shifts in the past 50 years, including the "recent" shift from functional programming to object-oriented.
Yeah I know you said CS is not about programming and I heartily agree, but the conceptual leaps involved in making such shifts come from theory, not from practice. Practice goes through contortions to follow theory; look at the Linux kernel source for an example of object-oriented concepts in a non-object-oriented language.
I use a Sony Clie PEG-N760C (hope I'm remembering that right). It was state-of-the art a couple of years ago and back then it cost me about $250. I've read e-texts on it using small antialiased fonts and it looks pretty good.
Bonus: built-in MP3 player. I know that's nothing special today but back then it was fairly unusual for PalmOS devices.
I like w3schools--it's great for quick reference lookups, but particularly for CSS I found it to be rather shallow. You need to understand the nuances of some things, particularly placement and inheritance, and w3schools just doesn't do it justice. Furthermore, IIRC they don't give any clue as to which CSS definitions are apropos to which elements.
That said, I still like w3schools and find it to be pretty useful when I need a quick refresher.
That's Xeno's paradox, but just like Achilles' journey, you still end up with something that is finite in extent. It seems more precise to say the universe is finite but has no boundary.
I started running DNS at home when all I had was a desktop PC and a dialup PPP connection. To tell the truth, I forget exactly why I felt it necessary to start running it, but now that there are (ahem) considerably more than one computer in the house, DNS is indispensible. You asked about benefits?
Only have to maintain one set of name tables, not N copies of a hosts file (even with two machines it gets annoying)
Makes internal DHCP a lot easier for about the same reason
Can carve out your own section of a (resolvable) domain if e.g. you work from home and want to send professional email through your ISP without everything going out as...@comcast.net.
Feeling of control? Makes it very easy to change or assign multiple names to the same host to better indicate its function? (e.g. host named "squid" and "proxy" as well as its actual hostname)
I installed on Debian 1.2 back in the day and it was pretty trivial. Did it more recently on OpenBSD 3.2 and still trivial. The only thing you have to do, unless you want to actually learn the gory details of BIND, is to start with a skeleton zone/reverse-lookup file and fill it out from there. As I recall, Debian's was very easy to modify.
In similar vein I also recommend running squid locally and surfing through it. Yes I know your browser is so au courant and caches everything but squid presents a consistent, persistent(ish) cache in case you need to serve multiple browsers.
Hmmm, I recall reading another Slashdot article about a guy who, among other things, shows how to defeat several popular steganography packages. I'm certainly no expert. I just wonder how useful steganography can ultimately be. There just doesn't seem to be enough entropy in English (or any other language) text to serve as a useful medium for hiding stuff.
...when all I really wanted to do was burn a bunch of files to a CD-RW. Would drag-and-drop really be harder or less powerful or more inconvenient to use than the command line?
Ah, to have the energy of a student once again. Eventually you get tired---I got tired of it at some point and decided that having stuff work today was more important than having stuff work optimally, to my unique exacting specifications, or whatever.
You make the same calculation with money, believe me, and nobody's cheaper than I am. At some point you get frustrated enough that stuff doesn't work and you snap, nevermore to roll your own when you can just buy your way out.
This is why eventually we'll all give in to time, fatigue, the realization that life is passing by... and we'll all switch to OSX.
It would be interesting to virtualize the machine down to the IP level. You could run separate instances of routed (or whatever) in each virtualized machine's space, then have a router cloud-in-a-box. Now you can play games like changing the data or error rate on certain links, bring routers up or down, etc.
Yes, I know you could use NISTnet but this would allow you to do other things. Besides, with a virtualized machine you get (?) more assurance that things are correct down to the Nth level.
I tried running four instances of UML on a 2400XP+ machine and it's usable, though not necessarily for 100Mb/s traffic. Doesn't give you much in the way of network depth though. Tried four instances of VMware+NetBSD on a P-III/500 and it's painful. Am currently struggling with Xen now, but I'm ready to try a userland VM instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Note the media size they're talking about: 2mm square by 0.4mm thick. That's teeny. So for everyone fretting about biting your nails and losing your data, each finger could probably contain multiple backups of its own data (or better yet, copies of all of the other fingers' data).
It means you can say "You want fries with that?" in another language.
I've never done a business plan so I'm interested in this. But it seems to me any given company's business plan would be heavily tailored to it. Really, the business plan is the expression of the combination of a company's product idea, values, marketing strategy, assessment of risk, etc. Wouldn't any open-source starting point be generic to the point of useless? Sorta like:
Hmmm, I'm not sure many people would be too keen on posting their accounting information, myself and my little company included. Companies generally keep things like financials and compensation packages pretty well protected unless they're forced to reveal it (usually to the Government e.g. in an audit).
However, posting accounting techniques or accounting lessons learned would be a terrific idea.
I'll start with one that took us a few years to grasp: when doing business with the Federal Government, don't try to religiously stick to your projected overhead rate. Instead, make a reasonable guess with your projected budget, and if overhead-type costs come up, go ahead and spend on them. At the end of the year you can adjust your overhead rate to meet your actual costs, and go back and seek reimbursement from the Government if you've underbilled. You'll be audited at the end of the contract anyway to square up your overhead expenditures, so as long as the things you spent on were reasonable, you don't have to fret about staying within your original projections. And remember, FAR section 31.205 tells you exactly what constitutes reimburseable overhead expenses.
Unlike plumbing though, most computer jobs can be offshored. Better dust off that Plumber's Apprentice training manual...
I'm no Computer Scientist so feel free to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about... but it seems to me that CS has undergone a few major paradigm shifts in the past 50 years, including the "recent" shift from functional programming to object-oriented.
Yeah I know you said CS is not about programming and I heartily agree, but the conceptual leaps involved in making such shifts come from theory, not from practice. Practice goes through contortions to follow theory; look at the Linux kernel source for an example of object-oriented concepts in a non-object-oriented language.
I use a Sony Clie PEG-N760C (hope I'm remembering that right). It was state-of-the art a couple of years ago and back then it cost me about $250. I've read e-texts on it using small antialiased fonts and it looks pretty good.
Bonus: built-in MP3 player. I know that's nothing special today but back then it was fairly unusual for PalmOS devices.
I like w3schools--it's great for quick reference lookups, but particularly for CSS I found it to be rather shallow. You need to understand the nuances of some things, particularly placement and inheritance, and w3schools just doesn't do it justice. Furthermore, IIRC they don't give any clue as to which CSS definitions are apropos to which elements.
That said, I still like w3schools and find it to be pretty useful when I need a quick refresher.
That's Xeno's paradox, but just like Achilles' journey, you still end up with something that is finite in extent. It seems more precise to say the universe is finite but has no boundary.
I started running DNS at home when all I had was a desktop PC and a dialup PPP connection. To tell the truth, I forget exactly why I felt it necessary to start running it, but now that there are (ahem) considerably more than one computer in the house, DNS is indispensible. You asked about benefits?
I installed on Debian 1.2 back in the day and it was pretty trivial. Did it more recently on OpenBSD 3.2 and still trivial. The only thing you have to do, unless you want to actually learn the gory details of BIND, is to start with a skeleton zone/reverse-lookup file and fill it out from there. As I recall, Debian's was very easy to modify.
In similar vein I also recommend running squid locally and surfing through it. Yes I know your browser is so au courant and caches everything but squid presents a consistent, persistent(ish) cache in case you need to serve multiple browsers.
Hmmm, I recall reading another Slashdot article about a guy who, among other things, shows how to defeat several popular steganography packages. I'm certainly no expert. I just wonder how useful steganography can ultimately be. There just doesn't seem to be enough entropy in English (or any other language) text to serve as a useful medium for hiding stuff.
I dunno... I hear what you're saying, and the CLI gives you the power to do exactly what you want---er, tell the thing to do...
But I got fed up about the Nth time I had to figure out
...when all I really wanted to do was burn a bunch of files to a CD-RW. Would drag-and-drop really be harder or less powerful or more inconvenient to use than the command line?
"Come for the wifi, stay for the game!"
Better get a hardened laptop to use for a shield just in case Barry Bonds has another bang-up season.
Ah, to have the energy of a student once again. Eventually you get tired---I got tired of it at some point and decided that having stuff work today was more important than having stuff work optimally, to my unique exacting specifications, or whatever.
You make the same calculation with money, believe me, and nobody's cheaper than I am. At some point you get frustrated enough that stuff doesn't work and you snap, nevermore to roll your own when you can just buy your way out.
This is why eventually we'll all give in to time, fatigue, the realization that life is passing by... and we'll all switch to OSX.
It would be interesting to virtualize the machine down to the IP level. You could run separate instances of routed (or whatever) in each virtualized machine's space, then have a router cloud-in-a-box. Now you can play games like changing the data or error rate on certain links, bring routers up or down, etc.
Yes, I know you could use NISTnet but this would allow you to do other things. Besides, with a virtualized machine you get (?) more assurance that things are correct down to the Nth level.
I tried running four instances of UML on a 2400XP+ machine and it's usable, though not necessarily for 100Mb/s traffic. Doesn't give you much in the way of network depth though. Tried four instances of VMware+NetBSD on a P-III/500 and it's painful. Am currently struggling with Xen now, but I'm ready to try a userland VM instead.